Motherlode Read Online Free

close, Ryan realized that wasn’t because he was drunk, as he’d first thought, but because the guy was lame.
    “I’m Coffin. Perhaps I can interest you in my wares?”
    “What are they?” Krysty asked.
    “Coffins!” he said proudly.
    “Not in the market,” Ryan replied. “Anyway, I don’t care much what happens to chills. Even my own. Especially my own, come to think.”
    “We’re not reckoning on dying here, any too soon,” J.B. stated.
    Unfazed, Coffin turned to Krysty. “What of you, ma’am? Surely you’re more concerned with the eventual repose of your mate.”
    “Why would I want to prevent my lover’s body from once more becoming one with Mother Gaia?” she asked.
    “Ah. You are cultists! Well, all are welcome here in Amity Springs. We have learned to be most tolerant of everyone, since the Dark Lady has come among us.”
    “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Well. About that—we hear she runs this ville.”
    Coffin cocked his head to one side, which made him look mostly as if he were trying to drain water surreptitiously out of one ear.
    “Well, she doesn’t exactly run Amity Springs,” he said. “And then again, she doesn’t exactly not .”
    “Great,” Mildred said. “Just our luck. The first person we meet is the village idiot.”
    “Can it, Mildred,” Ryan growled. “This Dark Lady’s the person we need to see. How do we get to the Library Lounge?”
    Coffin turned and flung out an arm. “It’s right before you, the grandest structure in all Amity Springs!”
    Ryan frowned. It was grander than most, he acknowledged: three broad stories with what looked like an attic beneath a pitched metal roof. A one-story annex winged off from one side. The front was painted white, well weathered, with lamps hanging from ornate black iron holders to either side of a large door with a lot of colored-glass inserts. A pair of life-size lions, probably concrete casts, incongruously flanked the entryway.
    It was impressive, in its way. It just didn’t look a lot less sorry-ass than the rest of the place.
    “Right,” he said to Coffin. “We’ll take it from here. Thanks.”
    “Don’t thank me,” he said. “I reckon you’ll be good for business.”
    Beside the door was a placard reading Welcome to the Library Lounge, Amity Springs’ Finest Entertainment Establishment. Beneath it was a smaller sign, neatly hand-lettered, that read Please Ring Bell for Admittance. Since that was five words more than most people in the Deathlands could read, fifteen if you counted both, Ryan reckoned that at least folks in the ville had more education than was common. Or at least liked to pretend as much.
    The bell in question was small, brass, and dangled from a bracket right over the sign. Ryan gave it a good ring.
    The door opened fast. An angry two-headed giant filled the doorway, holding a normal-looking man in the air with one hand.
    * * *
    “L EMME GO !” the captive yelled. He kicked his cracked and dusty cowboy boots frantically. The heels swung a good six inches off the bottom of the doorframe. The giant held him out at the length of one inhumanly long arm—holding him by a bunch of the back of his shirt, Krysty saw—so that he couldn’t kick the monster, by accident or design.
    Ricky Morales’s round olive face went ashy-pale, and he swung up his DeLisle carbine with the barrel fattened by its built-in noise suppressor.
    “Blaster down,” Ryan ordered sternly.
    Ricky turned wide black eyes to him. “But—”
    “You heard me.”
    J.B. stepped up beside the kid and gently pressed the barrel down with two fingers. Ricky didn’t resist. Perceiving in the crew’s newest member a fellow born tinkerer, with a shared love of weapons and fiendish booby traps, J.B. had taken the youth under his wing as more or less his protégé.
    For his part Ricky idolized the Armorer. Almost as much as he did Ryan.
    “I said let me go, you rad-blasted mutie!” the man screamed, spittle flying from his fury-reddened