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stretched, and when released, it sprang back into a tight coil.
Doc dropped the parasite in the dirt and with difficulty-it was tougher than
it looked-crushed it to a pulp under his heel.
He pushed the two halves of the glob back together and rolled them into the
doorless entry of a lean-to made of tattered, opaque plastic sheeting.
Turning back to the square, the sight of his dearest friends eagerly gorging
on the contaminated food made his skin crawl.
He hurried over to Krysty and tried to take her half-eaten meal
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away from her.
"It's full of parasites!" he said as she mightily resisted.
For his concern, Doc received a quick, hard punch in the solar plexus that
doubled him up and sent him staggering away.
As he gasped for breath, Krysty tore off another greasy chunk with her teeth
and poked it into her mouth with her fingertips.
Chastened and humiliated, Doc retreated to the scant shade along the front of
the blockhouse, where he could observe and absorb, and perhaps form a plan of
action. It appeared that his companions were suffering from some kind of
sudden-onset mass mental illness. They all presented the same symptoms, which
could have been caused by a shared trauma or by exposure to some infectious
agent. Doc knew he had to uncover the cause before he could come up with a
cure.
After the huge, if monotonous meal, everyone in the square except for Doc and
Jackson fell asleep where they lay. As it turned out, the only other creature
who wouldn't eat the awful stuff was the young stickie, which was most
curious. A picky stickie was something Doc had never seen nor heard tell of.
The naked mutie stood resolute guard over its snoring, red-coated master.
After a few minutes, Doc heard the sound of a wag approaching from the north,
apparently traveling a different route than the one he and the companions had
taken.
A battleship-gray Baja Bug rumbled over a rise and roared over to the square.
Like a pack of dogs, the sated diners stirred from their beds in the dirt.
They rose to their feet as the Bug stopped. Its doors opened and four men
piled out. Doc's attention was drawn and held by the driver, a tall thin man
in a tattered straw cowboy hat and scratched wraparound sunglasses. He wore
his dark hair in a long braid and had a snaggly goatee beard. His clothes were
ripped and filthy. His hands were filthy, too.
From the way the black cook prostrated himself in greeting the driver, Doc
assumed that he had to be the hammered-down
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ville's headman.
Doc was struck by the way the faces of the companions and chillers lit up in
his presence. Everyone seemed thoroughly delighted to see the man for no
reason that Doc could fathom.
As far as he knew, none of them knew him from Adam.
If Ryan beamed at the driver as if he were a lifelong hero, Mildred's response
was even more surprising, and unsettling.
The middle-aged black woman sidled up to the man in the cowboy hat and slipped
her arm around his lanky waist. She fawned on him in an overtly sexual way
that was absolutely contrary to her nature, as Doc thought he understood it.
The Dr.
Mildred Wyeth that he knew was a self-contained and self-sufficient human
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being, whose stoic and clinical reserve was the stuff of legend, and she never
fawned over anything or anyone.
While Doc pondered this development, the crowd moved away from the Baja Bug,
leaving it unguarded. With no one to stop him, the old man wandered over to
the driver's door and looked inside the open window. There were no keys in the
ignition. Keys weren't needed. The ignition had been pulled apart, leaving the
ends of two bare wires hanging under the dash.
Doc straightened and looked over the Bug's roof. Before anyone could stop him,
he knew he could easily slip behind the wheel, start it up and drive away. And
once he got rolling, he was free. Doc had the means to escape, but he made no
move to do so. He couldn't abandon his friends to whatever fate had in store.
No more than they could leave him when he was out of his mind.
The situation he faced was much more difficult, however. He couldn't simply
lasso the companions and tow them away. There were too many of them. And it
appeared from recent events that they would resist his intervention, and do so
with all their might. His predicament was colossal, yet he was determined to
succeed. From the middle of the square, the driver addressed the rapt crowd in
a soothing voice. "My name is Kerr," he said.
"I am baron here. Now that you have been fed and rested, there
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is work to be done. Most rewarding work, as you will soon discover. Follow
me."
The throng set off to the foot of the limestone slope. Everyone but Doc was
animated, even cheerful at the prospect.
Baron Kerr stopped at a wide gash in the rocky hillside, the entrance to a
natural tunnel. "Everything comes from the burning pool above us," he said.
"It is the wellspring of our existence here. Its flesh becomes our flesh, and
our flesh becomes its flesh. Our meaning and destinies are intertwined.
"Everything you will see inside the caves belongs to the pool.
It lives both inside and outside the mountain. Its miraculous filaments wind
through solid rock. Growing. Nourishing.
Enlightening."
From his academic experience at Harvard and Oxford, Doc guessed that they were
being treated to a stock speech that had been given many times before. The
baron was like an aged professor droning out the same lecture for decades.
Kerr's deadpan delivery didn't bother any of the others; on the contrary, they
hung on his every word and appeared eager for more.
Kerr removed his sunglasses and seated them firmly on the brim and crown of
his straw hat. It was then that Doc noticed the man's eyes were different
colors, one yellowish-brown, the other blue, which gave him a decidedly
deranged look as he waved his arm and led the flock into the huge grotto.
Jackson refused to enter the cave. No one tried to coax the stickie in. No one
seemed to care or notice his extreme agitation. Doc found it difficult to feel
sympathy for the creature, knowing full well its genetic predilection for
violence and bloodshed. Like the others, he wished the stickie would just go
away.
Inside the cave, what with the white limestone walls and the fissures in the
ceiling, there was plenty of light to see by. Water steadily trickled across
the floor; in the depressions it pooled ankle deep. Along the right-hand wall,
caught in a shaft of
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sunlight, was a stack of wooden implements. They reminded
Doc of flensing knives, the tools used in the whaling trade to carve blubber.
Only these had short handles. The outwardly curving, scimitar-like blades were
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sharpened on one edge.
"These are your tools," Baron Kerr said. "With them you will tend the bounty
of the pool. They are made of wood because the touch of metal taints the
bounty and makes it unfit to eat. Take one and come with me."
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