Free Baptism of Rage by James Axler

additional storage, containing almost all of the occupants’ possessions. Despite displaying mutie musculature, the two weary horses that pulled the vehicle looked to be struggling with the weight.
    Doc had taken the passenger seat beside the driver, a man in his middle fifties called Charles Torino, whose face was more scarred than the roof of his automobile. Mildred sat in the back, across from Doc, beside Mary Foster, checking the bandage that had been applied to the wound where her shoulder met her neck. A dark-haired woman in her late thirties, Mary was the woman who, along with her baby, had been snagged by the mutie wolf when the companions had first intervened. She was rocking the baby in her arms as Mildred dressed her wound, replacing the bandage.
    “Ryan and J.B. think I am crazy, do they not?” Doc said, breaking the silence inside the vehicle.
    Mildred looked up from her gentle work on the woman’s wounded neck. “No,” she replied, “don’t be silly.”
    Doc’s smile was genuine as he answered. “Do not try to kid an old man, Mildred. I have known you too long. And I know what I saw in their eyes. They think I am out of my mind.”
    “Well,” Mildred admitted, “no more than normal, I’m sure.”
    Doc looked ponderously out of the missing windshield for a moment before he continued. “How about you, Doctor?” he prompted. “Do you think this old fool is crazy?”
    Mildred cast a significant look at the other people in the automobile before she spoke. “Doc, I hardly think now’s the time to…” she began.
    “It may be false hope,” he told her, “but you understand what would happen if I did not pursue it. I would not have been able to live with myself knowing that this opportunity may be out there.”
    Mildred leaned forward and touched Doc’s shoulder reassuringly. “I know, Doc,” she said, “we all do. No one thinks you’re wrong or loopy. We just worry about you.”
    The driver, Charles Torino, spoke in his hoarse, strained voice then, looking over his shoulder through the headrests to take in Mildred as well as Doc. “You folks think this is a wild-goose chase?” he asked.
    Mildred shrugged. “I don’t know. It sounds pretty amazing. I guess we have doubts.”
    Charles nodded, peering back at his mutie horses to see that they were still on the right track. “I seen it happen,” he said. “Old guy come through our ville two months ago, decrepit, looked like Old Father Time hisself limping along on that bad foot of his. He come and told us about this young-making spring he heard about out east. Said he was going looking for it. Six weeks later he came back.”
    Mildred and Doc looked at the man, hanging on his every word.
    “He was just a kid,” Charles said in his strained voice. “I mean, mebbe twenty years old, I dunno. Still had the limp he come to the ville with all them weeks before, but he looked young. Real young.”
    “And it was the same man?” Mildred asked.
    Charles nodded. “I’d swear to you it was. Mary?”
    The younger woman holding the baby nodded solemnly. “Same eyes, same jawline,” she said. “S’funny, he looked kinda handsome as a young man.”
    “Yet he still had his limp,” Doc wondered.
    “Oh, the spring cured that, too,” Charles said with a throaty laugh. “Idiot was so busy dancing with joy he trod on a nail, went right through his boot. Put him pretty much back where he started at, I guess.”
    Doc and Mildred both laughed at that, too, feeling a curious sense of relief.
    “Me,” Charles continued, his eyes glazing over as he considered his words, “I’m hoping it can cure something a bit meaner than a broken foot.”
    Mildred peered at the man and gently asked what he meant.
    “I got me the black lung, miss,” Charles said with that throaty voice of his. “The big black crab inside me, making it a blamed chore to breathe.”
    Cancer, Mildred realized. The man was looking for a cure for cancer.
     
    R YAN WAS ACTING AS