The boy howled and fell back.
He crouched panting on his hands and knees, head hung low, watching a dark puddle of blood gather on the pavement from a deep gash across his cheek.
“Whatcha wanta do that for?” he whimpered. “I wasn’t gonna hurt you.”
His tone was that of a wronged and rejected suitor.
“Now, where’s Saint Mary’s? Is that one of the hospitals?
How do I get there?”
Paul had backed to a safe distance and was covering the youth with the gun.
“Straight down Broadway… to the Boulevard… you’ll see it down that neighborhood.
About the fourth street, I think.”
The boy looked up, and Paul saw the extent of the gash.
It was deep and ragged, and the kid was crying.
“Get up!
You’re going to lead me there.”
Pain had blanketed the call of the craving.
The boy struggled to his feet, pressed a handkerchief against the wound, and with an angry glance at Paul, he set out down the road.
Paul followed ten yards behind.
“If you take me through any dermie traps, I’ll kill you.”
“There aren’t any traps,” the youth mumbled.
Paul snorted unbelief, but did not repeat the warning.
“What made you think I was another dermie?” he snapped.
“Because there’s no nonhypers in Galveston.
This is a hyper colony.
A nonhyper used to drift in occasionally, but the priests had the bridge dynamited.
The nonhypers upset the colony.
As long as there aren’t any around to smell, nobody causes any trouble.
During the day, there’s a guard out on the causeway, and if any hypers come looking for a place to stay, the guard ferries them across.
If nonhypers come, he tells them about the colony, and they go away.”
Paul groaned.
He had stumbled into a rat’s nest.
Was there no refuge from the gray curse?
Now he would have to move on.
It seemed a hopeless quest.
Maybe the old man he met on his way to Houston had arrived at the only possible hope for peace: submission to the plague.
But the thought sickened him somehow.
He would have to find some barren island, find a healthy mate, and go to live a savage existence apart from all traces of civilization.
“Didn’t the guard stop you at the bridge?” the boy asked. “He never came back today.
He must be still out there.”
Paul grunted “no” in a tone that warned against idle conversation.
He guessed what had happened.
The dermie guard had probably spotted some healthy wanderers; and instead of warning them away, he rowed across the drawbridge and set out to chase them.
His body probably lay along the highway somewhere, if the hypothetical wanderers were armed.
When they reached 23rd Street, a few blocks from the heart of the city, Paul hissed at the boy to stop.
He heard someone laugh.
Footsteps were wandering along the sidewalk, overhung by trees.
He whispered to the boy to take refuge behind a hedge.
They crouched in the shadows several yards apart while the voices drew nearer.
“Brother James had a nice tenor,” someone said softly. “But he sings his Latin with a western drawl.
It sounds… well… peculiar, to say the least.
Brother Johnis a stickler for pronunciation. He won’t let Fra James solo.
Says it gives a burlesque effect to the choir.