Chapter One

The recon wag’s wheelman let out a groan as, an instant too late, he caught sight of the tank trap on the road just ahead. A single glance told Giles that the crude slot hacked across the roadway was wide enough and deep enough to bury the wag’s front end past the axles. He slammed on his brakes, but it didn’t do any good. The wag was going way too fast. It skidded on the rotten tarmac and abruptly nosed over into the ditch. The crunching impact slammed Giles headfirst into the driver’s ob slit. As the starflash of concussion inside his skull faded, he opened his eyes. The world around him started to spin violently and his vision began to tunnel in. Gritting his teeth, Giles fought back the wave of dizziness and nausea. To black out now meant capture, and capture meant death.

Shifting the wag into reverse, he floored the accelerator. The wag’s rear drive wheels dug in, and it jerked back a foot or two out of the ditch, then something on the undercarriage hung up and the engine stalled. The wag crashed back down.

Giles punched the starter button and pumped the pedal, relieved when the engine instantly roared to life.

“Come on!” shouted the long haired man sitting in the front passenger’s seat beside him. “Move it!”

Blood bathed half of Jonathan’s face as he reloaded a fresh 30-round clip into his folding stock Ruger Mini-14. Before he could poke the muzzle back out the gun port, before Giles could get the transmission in reverse, a flurry of bullets rattled both sides of the wag. The wheelman and his front passenger ducked as a hail of armor-piercing slugs cut through the wag’s half-inch external steel sheathing like so much tissue paper. Hard points of light pierced the relative darkness of the wag’s interior, which, after a couple minutes of intense combat, was starting to look like the inside of a cheese grater.

“Shit, they nailed Billy!” Hammerman cried from the back seat. “Aw, he’s fucked up, big time.”

Giles still thought they had a chance. Grinding the gears, he jammed the wag in reverse, then came another burst of autofire and both back tires blew out. He tromped the gas anyway, sending bare hubs spinning, flat tires flapping, shredding apart, but the wag didn’t move at all. Through the ob slit, Giles saw two tall figures step in front of the ditch. They had M-60 machine guns; the belts of linked 7.62 mm ammo were dragging on the ground. As they took aim from the hip, he threw himself below the level of the dash.

The wag shuddered violently as a torrent of AP rounds thudded into its still howling engine. There was a horrible grinding noise, then a loud clank and the engine went suddenly dead. The machine gunners stopped firing. As the dust cleared, through his ob slit the wheelman could see more figures moving in. A glance through the rearview periscope told him there was nothing behind them but empty road.

“Where’s Shabazz?” he asked. “He was supposed to cover our asses!”

“Bastard double-crossed us,” Hammerman snarled.

A steel rifle butt clanged on the wag’s roof. “Out!” someone shouted at them.

When they made no move to exit, the voice said, “Get out of the wag right now, or we’ll set it on fire.”

Giles, Jonathan and Hammerman looked at one another. They knew it wasn’t an idle threat.

“We’re fucked,” Jonathan moaned. “Stone fucked.”

“I don’t wanna burn to death in here,” Giles said. He cracked open his door and, putting out his empty hands first, said, “Don’t shoot. I’m coming out. I got no blaster.”

As he exited the wag, he raised his arms high in the air.

Giles realized with a start that the odds against them had been much worse than he’d been led to believe. The bastards popped out from behind the boulders on either side of the road. There were forty or fifty of them, all ages, from stooped whitebeards to skinny kids no more than ten or twelve. As he looked from face to face, he noticed a striking similarity in their features: the squinty set of the eyes, the pattern baldness of the males over twenty. He also noticed that all of them, even the kids, were armed with a heavy-duty autoblaster. And there were five of the armor-chewing M-60 machine guns, carried by the biggest of the men. They wore homemade clothes, sewn from pieces of olive drab canvas, repaired many times with patches. Most of them had ratty canvas boots. Some of the younger kids were barefoot.

Giles figured there wasn’t much point in telling them that the recon wag meant no harm. His crew had been the ones to open fire first. He looked back over his shoulder, down the road, to the entrance to the pass below. Three of the inbred bastards lay there, sprawled facedown in the dirt. And Trader Shabazz was still nowhere in sight.

Jonathan and Hammerman got out of the destroyed wag, then, on the shouted order of one of the whitebeards, ducked back in and pulled Billy’s limp body from the rear seat and dumped it on the ground. Half his head had been shot away. After the corpse had been moved, the same geezer waved for them to step over and stand beside Giles.

“You come here to rob us,” the whitebeard told them, “and rape our women and girls.”

Giles couldn’t tell how old he was, but he looked like he still had plenty of muscle to him. His yellow-tinged, straggly white hair hung to his shoulders, and he was as bald as an egg on top. A plastic-sheathed badge hung on a leather thong around his neck. There was a color picture on it, too small to make out.

The wheelman looked over the clan’s prized clutch of stocky, waistless females. There was a sameness to them, not just in body shape but in features, as well. They looked like droolies: cross-eyed and slack mouthed. Most of them were pregnant, even the twelve-year-olds. Giles shuddered to think how young those cherries had been picked. As he looked over the men, he wondered which were the fathers, brothers, grandfathers.

Giles waved his hands. “No, you got us all wrong,” he protested. “We aren’t robbers or rapers. We’re just trying to find a way over the mountains. Thought the road here would get us to the other side.” He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. “The chilling down below was a mistake, and we’re real sorry about it. But I figure we’re even, since you killed our poor Billy there.”

“Don’t work that way,” the whitebeard said, spitting out a fibrous white gob he’d been chewing.

For the first time, Giles noticed that almost all of them, women included, were grinding their jaws, working away at big old cuds of their own.

“This here’s holy ground,” the whitebeard went on. “Been that way since skydark. And ever since, we Palmers been on watch in this gorge, doing our duty, guarding the Spirit in the Mist with our lives. When you come up the road in that wag, you violated a sacred place.”

The leader stepped a little closer, and Giles got a better look at the badge around his neck. The laminated plastic was badly discolored. It had to be pre-Apocalypse. At the top, big red letters said TOTCON, for Totality Concept, but which meant nothing to Giles. Under that was a name, Captain Paul Palmer. Giles squinted at the two-by-two-inch photo. The young man’s grim, narrow-eyed visage resembled to a remarkable degree the living, angry faces that surrounded him.

Giles realized he didn’t know shit about who these people were. And up until a few minutes ago, he wouldn’t have given a rusty fuck to find out. He’d believed the assessment of Levi Shabazz, that they were just a bunch of triple-dim savages who thought they could control a road the trader wanted unlimited access to. Shabazz had discounted the rumors down in Virtue Lake that the Palmer clan was very bad news. “Scumbags with no wags,” he’d said. “We’ll roll over them, just like we always do.”

Not quite, as it turned out.

“We guard and nourish the Spirit,” the whitebeard told Giles. “Spirit’s got to be watered with warm blood of trespassers.”

Giles didn’t like the sound of that, one bit. “Mebbe there’s something else the Spirit needs?” he asked. “Or something that you people need? We got access to blasters, gas, ammo. Looks like you could all use some new boots. Mebbe we can make a trade in return for your letting us go.”

Of course Giles was bargaining through his hat; as a simple wheelman, he had no authority to make deals with anybody. And knowing Shabazz, he figured the trader would rather keep the blasters and boots, and find new men to replace those he was about to lose.

“Spirit in the Mist gives us what we need,” the whitebeard said. “From the beginning, it has provided everything.”

Giles glanced sidelong at Jonathan and Hammerman and hoped to hell he didn’t look as scared as they did. It was time to get tough.

“Mess with us,” he growled at the clan leader, “and you got Trader Shabazz to deal with.”

The whitebeard seemed unimpressed.

“He’s a triple-mean coldheart,” Giles went on, with all the conviction he could muster. “And he’ll come back here in full force. Men, wags, blasters. He’ll skin you alive and leave the meat for the wild dogs. If you want to keep on doing whatever the fuck it is you’re doing here, you’d better think twice before you do us any more harm.”

“Your backup wag turned tail the minute we opened fire,” the whitebeard stated as he took a fresh chunk of white root from his trouser pocket, packed it into his cheek and began to chew it to pulp. “The crew’s watching us from just over there.”

Giles followed the leader’s pointing finger to the forested ridge line opposite.

“If there was a halfway good shot among them,” the whitebeard said, “I’d be killed dead by now. Don’t seem interested in saving you from the Spirit, nor in venging you, neither.”

When the wheelman caught the flash of sunlight on a lens, his heart sank. “Shabazz, you dirty, lying fucker,” he muttered.

“Bring along the dead one,” the whitebeard told two of the younger clansmen. “His blood’s still warm. He, too, will serve to fill the belly of the Spirit.”

The two men grabbed Billy by the heels and started to haul him up the road at a speedy clip. At blasterpoint, Giles, Jonathan and Hammerman were forced to follow the flopping, dead arms and ruined head as it bounced over the rutted pavement.

The narrow roadcut had been dynamited through granite bedrock. High above the sheer-sided channel were densely forested slopes, and above that, a blue sky streaked with thin white clouds. Those same clouds hid the mountain’s peak from view. With fifty blasters massed at their backs, there was no way to escape, nowhere to run.

Giles and the others marched uphill, walking into the gusts of frigid wind swirling down from the summit. After they’d climbed about a half mile, they saw a number of foot-wide quartzite rocks lined across the road ahead. They were neatly spaced, a border of some kind, laid out carefully by hand. A short distance beyond it, the road appeared to come to a dead end in a wall of granite. Behind them, the clan of savages had spread out from one side of the road to the other, their blasters at the ready.

The wheelman scanned the way ahead and saw no sign of any spirit. No mist to speak of, either. But he knew that didn’t mean much. Inbred for better than a century, probably born addicted to some kind of rad-blasted loco weed, these Palmers no doubt had their own peculiar way of seeing things. Perhaps the Spirit in the Mist was just a figment of their imaginations.

As they got closer to the line of rocks, Giles searched the pavement between that border and the spot where the road ended in the cliff face. There was nothing out of the ordinary: no pools of blood dried on the tarmac, no bone fragments scattered about. Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean anything, either. In a place as wild as this, there had to be scavengers that could easily carry off a man’s head or hindquarter.

The clanspeople herded them right up to the line of rocks before their leader signaled for a halt.

The whitebeard stepped over the barrier, raised his arms over his head and said in a booming voice, “Spirit of the Mist, awake!”

When Giles saw the first tendrils of fog appear out of nowhere, he thought it was some kind of trick, a hidden smoke bomb like he’d seen in a couple of traveling carny shows. A bomb with some kind of a voice-activated trigger. But this stuff didn’t act like any smoke he’d ever seen. It didn’t rise straight up in the air, as it should have; instead, it spread out sideways, then flowed down, billowing over the road like a mattress of liquid cotton.

“Palmer the Guardian,” the whitebeard went on, “offers up a sacrifice to you.”

At a signal from their leader, the two young clansmen picked up Billy’s body by wrists and feet and, with a mighty heave-ho, chucked it over the row of rocks and onto the road.

By this time, the fog had spread until it filled the roadway from shoulder to shoulder in a layer about three feet thick. Then, out of the central mass, a single, cautious feeler appeared. Like a python made of mist, the appendage extended itself, growing in length as it crept inch by inch over the road’s surface toward the still body. Giles took an involuntary step backward as, without warning, the cloud suddenly quadrupled in volume, surging in all directions, blocking out the dead end, the forested slope above it, even the sky.

It was close now, and it didn’t feel like fog. It wasn’t cool and wet inside the nostrils. It burned, like weak acid vapor, and it smelled of ozone. It didn’t look like fog, either. The interior of the cloud seemed to glow, pulsing with a dull yellowish light.

Then it began to snow.

Huge wet flakes materialized out of the front of the fog bank. It was crazy. Over Giles’s shoulder, the sky was piercingly blue, and the sun blazing hot on his back. The snowflakes melted as they lightly brushed his face and drifted onto the road. Something crackled and snapped deep in the fog’s belly. Electricity. It made the hairs on his arms prickle and stand up. And the ozone smell got even stronger.

Giles sensed movement behind him and as he turned, he saw the guardians had pulled well back. They still blocked the road, and their blasters were now raised and aimed. He was sure they were going to open fire.

He was wrong.

The fog tendril wrapped around Billy’s legs, then retracted. As it did so, it moved the corpse, scraping it across the pavement a good two feet. Giles watched in astonishment as in similar increments, his dead comrade was drawn inexorably into the cloud.

“Sweet meat,” Jonathan gasped.

For his own part, Giles felt like he was about to piss himself.

Then he saw the fog reach out for Hammerman. Before he could cry out a warning, an arm made of mist snaked out and brushed the man’s unprotected chest. When it touched him, there was a loud crack and a blue flash. Hammerman screamed as he went flying through the air. He landed with a thud, facedown on the tarmac. Then a wave of mist rushed out from under the edge of the main cloud, boiling over the roadway, boiling over Hammerman where he lay. As he, too, vanished, there was a louder crack and a brighter flash, and something warm and wet spattered Giles’s cheek. Automatically he reached up to wipe it away with his hand. When he looked down, his fingers were red and slick with blood.

Beside him, Jonathan spun to face the assembled blasters. All of the savages took aim at him, ready to thwart a panicked dash with bullets.

For a second, Giles thought Jonathan was going to run at them anyway. Before the man could move, the fog took him from behind. As it slithered around the front of his throat, Jonathan’s eyes went wild with fear and his mouth dropped open. It jerked him off his feet, snatching him into itself. From deep in the core of the fog bank, there came another crackling blue flash.

Giles turned on the clan leader and shouted, “Isn’t that enough?” One look at the man’s face and he knew it wasn’t. In that instant, he made up his mind. It was far better to die by bullets, by something you could understand, than to be eaten alive by some hellish freak of nature. Giles lowered his head and charged the line of savages.

Autofire rattled. Slugs sparked off the asphalt all around him, and Giles realized he was falling. He didn’t feel the pain until after he hit the ground. Then he felt it. He’d been shot in both shins; the long bones were shattered, his legs useless.

“You fucking bastards!” he howled, too racked by agony to do anything but curl up in a ball. “Why didn’t you just chill me?”

“Spirit prefers its meat still breathing,” the whitebeard said matter-of-factly.

The clammy mist swirled around Giles, and his world quickly faded to white. He couldn’t even see the asphalt right under his nose. He gasped, tasting acid in his throat and feeling its burn deep in his lungs. He was blind, alone and suffocating. The sensation of being slowly smothered touched some primal fear in him, and despite his injuries, galvanized him to move. Shattered legs and all, Giles clawed at the tarmac, dragging himself forward, hand over hand.

Right behind his head something sizzled angrily, like a big hunk of flesh dropped into a red-hot frying pan. Then the fog seized him in its powerful grip and began to pull on his wrists, ankles, head. It stretched his prostrate body in every direction at once, until the shoulder, neck and hip joints cracked, until the sinews snapped their tethers with bone and the flesh itself started to rip away.

Giles died an instant before the flash, with a screaming curse on his lips.

A curse for Levi Shabazz.

AS THE PIERCING SCREECH echoed down the mountain pass, Trader Shabazz watched the fog retreat in front of the cliff. The cottony mass got smaller and smaller, as if it were slipping down a mouse hole, and then it simply vanished. He lowered his telescope’s field of view and carefully scanned the roadway between the line of white rocks and the sheer granite wall. The mist had taken three of his men, apparently swallowing them whole; there wasn’t so much as a scrap of hide or hair left behind. He took the telescope from his eye. Except for the loss of the recon wag, which had been a regrettable but necessary sacrifice, Shabazz was pleased with the turn of events.

Up his nose, he had the scent of something big.

Something bigger than big.

Like the many other looters searching Deathlands for predark spoils, Shabazz and his crew made their living by ferreting out and then pillaging the secret stockpiles the long-dead government had laid down in anticipation of a nuclear holocaust. After a century of this kind of scavenging, most of the easy pickings were gone. The stockpiles whose access tunnels had been uncovered by the initial blast effects, and by subsequent earthquakes, chem rain and erosion, had already been hit hard. There was nothing left inside the concrete-walled storage areas but a litter of MRE wrappers and the remains of ancient campfires.

Though Shabazz had stumbled onto some fine hauls in the past—crates of unfired M-16s, bulk 5.56 mm ammo and grens, brand-new fatigue uniforms—he usually dealt in overpriced low-quality goods. More often than not, the blasters he sold were black-powder firearms, and the military clothing he stocked was secondhand and well-worn. Unless you were a triple stupe, before you put down your hard-earned jack for one of Shabazz’s blasters, you field-stripped and test fired it. Likewise, you not only tried on the clothing, but you checked it for bullet holes and creepy-crawlies.

When the going got thin, as it invariably did from time to time in Shabazz’s business, he wasn’t above liberating the inventories of his fellow traders, or of marauding isolated villes, looting them like they were nothing more than stockpiles. Which, of course, they were, in a manner of speaking, except that the folks living in them rarely agreed to give up what they had without a fight. That didn’t bother Shabazz one bit. In Deathlands, humans were commodities, too. There was always a good market for slaves, if they were strong or pretty.

In the ten years that Shabazz had been running the roads with his band of chillers, holding his operation together with a mixture of bullshit and brutality, he’d been looking for a way out of the hand-to-mouth existence, for the big score. Again, he wasn’t alone in this goal, which was shared by every other scrounger with a pickax and an empty belly.

In a place like Deathlands, where small, impoverished communities were isolated by hundreds of miles of desolate waste, wild rumors abounded. There were stories about rad-blasted monster bugs that crawled up your butt while you slept and ate you from the inside out. About plagues loose in the land that turned your eyes to goo and made blood spurt out your ears. And, of course, about incredible wealth, always tantalizingly out of reach. If you believed the latter tales, every mountain range had its own dazzling treasure of predark goods, socked away by the government. From personal experience searching for such troves, Shabazz figured ninety-nine percent of the talk was pure crap. It was the other one percent that interested him.

One of the oft-repeated stories concerned a glorious stockpile of stockpiles. Every ditchwater ville had its own version of the tale, embellished to fit its location, but the important details were always the same. Whether concealed in miles of limestone caves under a wide plain, or carved out of the belly of some tall mountain, this ultimate stockpile was a storage area as vast as a pre-Apocalypse mega-city. It had everything imaginable, from wags to blasters, from ammo to fuel, from canned food to warm clothing in amounts that boggled the mind. Powered by its own nuke reactor, its computerized control system could use the array of automated machine shops to recreate in mass quantities any manufactured item of the late twentieth century. From its similarly controlled cloning laboratories and hydroponic gardens, it could produce enough fresh food, both animal and vegetable, to feed a million people a day.

According to every version of the story, this biggest of stockpiles had been built by the government for one purpose: to jump-start the postholocaust rebuilding of America. For that reason, it had been named Spearpoint.

Levi Shabazz thought he’d finally found it.

Everything he’d seen so far supported Doc Tanner’s story about a ghost city hidden under the mountain, a story the old man had given up only after several days of torture. The unnatural and deadly fog was exactly as Tanner had described it. He’d called it “the Hound of Hell,” or some such crap, and claimed it had “claws and teeth.” As Tanner had said, the road that had been laboriously blasted through the mountainside led nowhere. Both of these elements fit the key details about Spearpoint that Shabazz had collected over the years. The old man had been right about the band of droolies guarding the road, too. The only thing the old fool didn’t describe was their defensive capabilities.

And now Shabazz had seen that for himself.

He was impressed.

The guardians had turned the uphill stretch of roadway into one long, grinding killzone. Because of the distance involved and the direction of the prevailing winds, Shabazz realized that the extremely nasty manner of chilling that he’d had in mind for them wouldn’t work.

Without major military wags, the kind with extra wide wheelbases, long undercarriages, high ground clearance, two-inch-thick, hardened-steel armor plate, maybe even tank tracks fore and aft, Shabazz knew there was no way he and his crew could penetrate past the vehicle traps or survive the onslaught of heavy-caliber machine-gun fire. In all of Deathlands, there was only one such land armada, and it belonged to a man he had locked horns with several times over matters of business. Each time, Shabazz had come out a big loser.

He shrugged off the rush of unpleasant memories, of burning wags and lost cargoes. Things had been different then, he told himself. Those violent encounters had come about by chance, and every time he had been surprised and outgunned. Never again. This time he had the weapons to do the job right, and his crew would be backed by reinforcements. This time he would do all the surprising and all the chilling.

Not a bad deal, he thought as he sucked at his teeth. Get rich and settle with Trader, all on the same fucking day.