"Let us help you. Fireblast!" Ryan's temper was beginning to flare out of control. Rick's wallowing self-pity put them all in danger. If one of the many sec patrols saw them, they'd stop. Rick was in no shape to try to speak Russian to them, and that would be that for them all. "Get up or I'll hurt you."

"Kick a man when he's down, eh, Ryan? Come on, man. Leave me. We're in the bottom of the ninth. Seconds to the gun. Near the tape. One last free throw." He stopped and shook his head, the tiredness overwhelming him, the pettish anger gone. "Bend down, Ryan, and listen."

"What?"

"Bend down. Please, Ryan. Krysty?"

"Yeah?"

"Give us a minute, will you?"

"Sure." She walked a few steps away, looking up and down the tree-lined avenue, finding it almost unbelievable that this was Russia. This was Moscow. These houses had been homes in the year 2001, filled with families. Then the nukes had come, coughing out their neutron sleep. And the world had died. Behind her, Ryan had knelt in the dusty road, head down, listening to Rick Ginsberg.

"Go on, Ryan," the freezie whispered, breathing hoarsely.

"Gonna tell me why?"

"I'm sort of... ashamed."

Ryan couldn't hide his surprise. "Why? What have you?.."

"My sickness. When I'm real tired like now and I lose control of my muscles and... Hell's bells, Ryan! Can't you guess? I've shit myself. Couldn't help it. Gotta clean myself. Won't take that long. Find a house and look for me. I'll make it."

"If I had a handful of jack for every man and woman I know that shit themselves, I'd be the richest baron in the Deathlands. Sure. Go ahead, Rick. We'll wait for you up there."

"Don't tell Krysty."

"Sure."

But he told her anyway. Why not?

Major-Commissar Zimyanin wasn't the happiest of sec men. The message was unequivocal, signed in red ink with a scrawled, testy signature that had creased and nearly torn the paper: Marshal of Internal Security, Josef J. Siraksi, one of the top-ranking officers within the Party and a man tipped, when his turn came around and he lived long enough, for the supreme position of leader.

Request denied. Insufficient evidence of any security risk. Int-Sec forces will maintain normal holding and patrol patterns. If felt necessary, then descriptions of the three suspects (the word was heavily underlined) may be circulated on condition yellow. But no higher.

There was a postscript in the marshal's own hand. "Do not look for terrorists beneath every stone, Comrade Major-Commissar. Moscow is not the Kamchatka."

"Your advice is much appreciated, my dear sir, and I shall follow it to the letter," Zimyanin said, having first checked the phrase he wanted in his battered phrase book.

He made sure that the door was firmly closed between his office and that of Alicia Andreyinichna. Then he stood up, face tight with anger, and walked to the window to look out over the bleak prospect, toward the shapeless worm of the Moscow River. He pressed his lips to the glass, whispering his rage.

"May rad cancer rot them all. May their wives fuck pigs. May they fall with their asses bleeding fire. May their noses rot and..." That brought him to another idea. "Aliev," he murmured.

The tracker could hunt a flea through a sandstorm.

"I want Aliev on twenty-four-hour standby!" he shouted at the closed door, and heard the young woman's muffled squeak of assent.

He looked out the window again. "Get my wag ready from transport requisition. I'm tired of this stuffy office. I'm going out to taste the air and see what I can see."

Rick had recovered a little after a decent night's sleep. The twitching of the muscles in his arms and legs had eased, but he still complained of a pins-and-needles sensation in his fingers and toes. And as they ate sparingly of their shrinking food supplies, he was clearly having problems swallowing. Twice he gagged on the strips of dried meat, reaching for the canteen to wash the blockage out. He managed a weak smile.

"Sorry, guys. One of the problems with ALS is that it eventually hits all of your muscles. That includes the ones that do the swallowing for you." His voice was croaking, the words slightly slurred and stretched. Rick was also conscious of that. "Speaking gets tougher, too. Once I'm warmed up I shouldn't be so bad."

It would take some time for any of them to become warm. During the night the temperature had dropped sharply, and there was ice on the insides of the few unbroken windows in the house where they'd slept.

When Ryan looked out across the bleak suburbs of Moscow he saw a dusting of snow coating the surrounding roofs and chimneys. A small lake set among trees on the far side of the road was covered by a gray sheet of ice.

While Krysty and Rick sat talking quietly together, Ryan climbed up to the elegant staircase to the top floor of the house and found a small room that faced northeast. The door stuck and he had to set his shoulder to it. The lock snapped as it opened inward.

The corpse that lay on the narrow single bed had almost certainly been there for a hundred years. Untouched and undisturbed, the dry air within the room slowly turned the remains into a leathery, mummified length of brown sinews and pale bone.

Ryan wasn't particularly surprised or even particularly interested. There were millions of houses throughout Deathlands that had remained virtually undamaged by the nukings. The Russians had also been well supplied with neutron-type missiles, which slew the living, but left all structures standing. In his life Ryan had seen uncountable corpses like the one on the bed.

The room contained little: a table in one corner, with a wad of folded paper supporting a broken leg; a few dust-dry Russian paperback books that crumbled in Ryan's fingers when he tried to open them; a vase holding some fragile dried flowers; a wardrobe, door ajar, revealing the ragged remains of the dead person's clothes; and two pairs of boots on the floor. Ryan picked one up, trying to guess whether the corpse had been male or female, but the boots were of an indeterminate middle size. A single golden ring glistened in the gristly remains of the right ear, and a cheap metal digital watch circled the left wrist. The person had been wearing blue jeans and a shirt of some sort.

The skin had dried over the bones, tight, like stretched leather, and the skull lolled to the right, toward the door as if the body waited patiently for a visitor who was a little late.

On the floor on the far side of the bed was a white enamel bowl, stained and crusted, black around its bottom. Again, it was something Ryan Cawdor had seen many times before: a victim of neutron bombing, dying, guts torn, brain reeling, had crawled back to its lair to die. Retching, the victim had brought up blood and dark bile. He had been unable to eat, teeth loosened in bleeding gums; his sight had dimmed and his skin had erupted. The bodily functions all failed.

The empty round bottle of dark green glass clutched in the skeletal fingers and the water glass on the bedside table told their own story of a last and merciful release from the endless suffering.

Ryan looked out the window.

The ground sloped toward what Rick had said was the Moscow River. It marked the inner ring of the old city. Beyond that he could see a haze of smoke, and a variety of buildings looming through it. Ryan tried to open the window, managing only a couple of inches. But the fresh air cleared away the musty smell of old, dry death and replaced it with the scent of hundreds of wood fires as the citizens of the ville fought the last desperate troops of General Winter.

They left the security of the house and began to move slowly through the streets, making sure they were well wrapped in their furs. Everyone else out and about that morning was dressed the same.