Read Online Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass by James Axler - Free Book Online

vengeance.”
    She felt her eyes fill with hot tears yet again. But this time, they were tears of gratitude.
    She smiled at them.
    “Thank you. Thank you all.”
    It’s not much, she knew. But it was a start.
    She could work with this!

----
    Chapter Five
    “Wait,” a voice called from the scrub oak. “Don’t shoot. I’m not one of them.”
    Mildred saw Ryan look at Krysty, who shrugged.
    The midafternoon mugginess hung heavy in the air of the little glade on the slope a few dozen yards above a gurgling brook. Red oak and hickory branches overhung the clearing, masking most of the direct sunlight. Mildred didn’t want to imagine what the afternoon would feel like without that shade.
    “Define ‘them,’” Ryan called back.
    “The coamers,” the unseen man said. “The albino grave robbers. The ones you’re looking for.”
    “Grave robbers, as young Ricky suggested,” Doc stated. “That adds a new dimension to our present difficulty.”
    “Dark night,” J.B. muttered. “It surely does.”
    The companions had been traveling single file along a game trail a couple miles southwest of their dig site, with Ryan in the lead and J.B. protecting their rear. They had just begun to fan out on entering the clearing when Jak’s warning birdcall brought them up short. They had immediately crouched or knelt, covering the brush-screen on the far side with their blasters.
    “Mebbe,” Ryan said. “How do you know so much about them?”
    “And how do you know what we’re looking for?” Mildred asked.
    “I’ve roamed these woods nigh onto thirty years. I seen many a thing come and go, some stranger than most. And I seen the ones the locals call ‘coamers.’ They come and go, too. Currently they seem to be coming.”
    J.B. grunted in interest.
    “Come out where we can get a better look at you,” Ryan commanded.
    “Don’t go shootin’ me, now.”
    “If we were going to, we would’ve by now,” J.B. said. “That brush won’t stop many bullets.”
    The branches rustled.
    What appeared from the vegetation was anything but threatening, at first glance: a man of smallish to middle size, middle-aged to old, walking tentatively on rather bowed legs left bare by ragged and dirty cargo shorts with bulging pockets. A coonskin cap covered the top of his head. Around his shoulders he wore a cape made of shaggy bark that gave the locally abundant shagbark oak its name. Beneath that was a linen shirt. His round face was fringed by a shock of black hair and a beard with brushstrokes of gray in it. His eyes suggested strong Asian ancestry, but his accent, unsurprisingly, was pure western Kentucky.
    He had his hands, clothed in shabby fingerless gloves, raised over his head to signal benign intentions, which was good, because he was clearly far from helpless: the butt of a late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century replica longblaster stuck up over his right shoulder, supported by a beadwork sling, and he wore both a Bowie knife with worn staghorn grips and a single-action, cap-and-ball revolver on either hip in cross-draw holsters, likewise beaded in colorful geometric patterns.
    “Osage Nation work,” Krysty said, nodding at the beaded accessories. “Nice.”
    “That’s right, ma’am,” he said. “I’m a local boy, but I been everywhere. Abe Tomoyama is my name. Abe to my friends, so you can call me that, long as you don’t chill me.”
    Ryan raised a hand. “Stand down, everybody,” he said. “Keep eyes skinned to all sides, in case the pale shadows decide to check us out.”
    “Don’t worry,” Abe stated, “yet. Them coamers don’t attack when the sun’s high in the sky. They only like to come out when it gets low. Like it’s fixin’ to right directly. Surely you noticed that?”
    “Surely we didn’t,” Mildred said sourly.
    “It does fit observable facts,” Doc said. “The few we have been able to observe.”
    “Reckon we need to talk,” Abe said. “Let’s find us a place to palaver. Say,