Chapter Fourteen

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AS HE MOVED FORWARD, Ryan felt the war wag judder to a halt, the engine out of gear, ticking over gently. On every side men and women had moved fast to their firefight positions, standing ready by the ob slits and weapon ports. But from the lack of urgency in Hun’s voice, there clearly was no immediate emergency.

“What is it, Hun?”

“Look out front. Never seen nothin’ like it. How ‘bout you, J.B.?”

They squeezed in either side of her, peering through the forward screen. Ryan rested his hand on Hun’s shoulder, conscious of the musky scent of her perspiration. He blinked his eye to rid himself of the sudden and unbidden image of Krysty, naked, moving beneath him.

“What is it?” he asked.

J.B., not one to waste words, simply shook his head. Hun pointed to the left, to the great jagged peaks of the Rockies jutting in toward them.

“Saw them first on this side. One or two. Feathers. Then this spooky kind of stuff.”

Ryan was puzzled. Not many men had been this far into the Darks. The recently lamented Kurt was one of only a handful who had penetrated deep into the rugged fastness and survived. So who had put up all the decorations?

They were made out of branches of trees that Ryan believed were called aspens. “Quakers” they’d named them. Poles had been hewn from the silvery-green wood, with its criss-crossing black scars, then tied into shapes like the tepees that some of the double-poor of Deathlands lived in.

There were three of them, stretched across the crumbling relic of a road. The one nearest the edge was covered in a sprouting bunch of feathers. Red and yellow and golden-brown; hundreds of them. And topping it was a narrow-bladed knife of rusting iron, its haft wrapped in strips of what looked like dried leather or skin.

The right-hand tripod was leaning to the front, set close against a cliff of moss-streaked stone. Melt from a glacier, farther up the mountain, came cascading across the road in milky turquoise torrents. Tufted pink flowers decorated the poles, some of the flowers dead, drooping and falling on the damp earth.

But it was the center set of branches that caught Ryan’s eye.

It was much the tallest, well over a tall man’s height, blocking the trail. Ribbons of material were festooned all over it, tied in place with rawhide thongs. Small metal stars of brass and copper dangled from the silks and satins, chiming against one another.

And on the top, held in place with circling strands of green wire was—“A human head,” said J.B.

The eyes had gone, and half the teeth were missing. The lower jaw dangled in a macabre leer, kept by a thread of gristle. There were still a few shreds of leathery skin clinging to the yellowed bone.

“What’s that on its forehead?” asked Hun.

“Bullet hole,” replied J.B.

“Looks like a warning,” said Ryan.

“Do we stop, or go on, or what?”

“We go on.”

War Wag One rolled forward again as Hun engaged the gears, driving straight for the center of the sets of aspen poles, crushing it beneath the heavy wheels. Ryan watched through the front screen, imagining he could hear the brittle crack as the skull was splintered, but through the armor he knew that was absurd.

In the next hour they came across three more sets of the weird signs. Both J.B. Dix and Ryan Cawdor stayed in the main control cabin, keeping the combat vehicle in a state of full fighting readiness with everyone on alert.

“How far?”

Hun threw the question over her shoulder. The trail ahead was becoming steeper, and the gauges showed a sharp temperature drop as night closed in on them.

Ryan eased the white scarf around his neck. “Not sure. All we can do is put together everything we know and add in Kurt’s ravings an’ what Krysty knew. Best map we have don’t show us much. But if there’s this Stockpile or Redoubt up there, then it’s close to a place called Many Glaciers. Near as we can figure.”

“We stoppin’ soon?” Hunaker asked.

“Yeah. Give it another ten, then pull on over. That looks like a meadow along that river. Trees far enough back to cut down an ambush.”

“What d’you think about those poles?” J.B. asked him, blowing out a perfect ring of smoke from the dark, evil-smelling cheroot.

“Warnin’. Some mutie religion trick. Maybe we’re on someone’s home turf. I’ve heard nothin’ on any townies movin’ up here.”

Within a few minutes the huge war wag had finally pulled over for the night, and the usual sentries had been posted. Supper was cooking, and around a fire most of the men and women in the team were making and mending—cleaning armaments and repairing clothes.

Unusually in the Deathlands, the water was good. Ryan walked down and sat down on a large boulder, riven by the frosts, and flicked pebbles into the river. Alongside the rocks were patches of creamy Indian paintbrush and splashes of golden vetch, absurdly rich, their colors still bright in the last shards of the evening sun. The sky was a sullen red, streaked with wind-torn clouds in gray and purple. Over the tops of the highest range of mountains there was the usual silver lace of lightning.

Ryan Cawdor was not a man given to endless agonizing and self-doubts. But on this beautiful evening he felt a rare sense of melancholy. Things were changing. The majority of his friends had been chilled within the past week, and now Trader’s race was damned near run. Whatever happened up in the topmost trails of the Darks, it would mean an ending of the old ways of life that had been his ways for over ten years.

“You look like a prickless mutie in a gaudy-house, Ryan.”

“Hi, Krysty. Guess Trader’s sickness has really gotten to me. He was almost like a father, if that don’t make me sound like a stupe.”

She sat down by him, stretching out her long legs, staring at her own reflection in the polished leather of her boots. “You don’t sound like a stupe. I’ve only known the Trader a short while, but he’s… somethin’ special.”

On the farther side of the valley, up a slope of rough scree, Ryan caught a flicker of movement. His rifle was still in the war wag, but his pistol flowed into his fingers without any conscious thought, only to be holstered again when he recognized the white blur as one of the hardy mountain goatlike creatures that thrived near the tree line in the Darks.

A bright blue bird with a spiky crest came to drink near them, dipping its beak into the water in delicate, jerky movements. The smell of cooking stew came on the breeze to them.

“Hungry?” Ryan asked, turning his head quickly, finding that Krysty was sitting closer than he’d thought. So close that their noses almost touched and her veil of crimson hair brushed lightly against his cheek.

Her green eyes drilled into his and she half opened her mouth, saying nothing. Despite the cool of the evening, Ryan was perspiring.

It was utterly inevitable that they should kiss. And having kissed should kiss again, and again. His hand was holding the back of her neck, and her hair seemed almost to caress his fingers. His tongue thrust between her parted lips, and her sharp teeth nipped him, so gently. His right hand slipped down the rough material of her overalls, finding the zipper, lowering it in a whisper of movement. He felt the warm swell of her breast as his palm cupped it, and the nipple harden like a tiny animal. Her own hands were delving under the long coat, but the wealth of guns and the panga hindered her from reaching and touching him.

“Ryan…” she panted. “Please, can…?”

“Where? In the war wag?”

“No!” Vehemently. “Not in there. Out here where you can breathe free. Over there, in those trees beyond the river.”

Caution, and the memory of those odd totemic warning signs, made him hesitate. But his desire overcame all resistance and he took her by the hand and they walked together, jumping a narrow brook, finding a space of cropped grass alongside a quiet pond. Trees hid them from the war wag, and the gathering darkness kept their secret.

It was too cold for them to strip, but she wriggled out of the overalls, and he pulled off the dark gray denim trousers, laying the LAPA ready to hand.

They were both desperate enough not to waste time on any preliminaries and he roiled on top while she guided him into her. Krysty moaned softly as Ryan penetrated her, thrusting, feeling her moistness and heat close around him. She locked her heels in the small of his back, drawing him deeper, pushing up with her hips at his steel-hard maleness.

They reached a juddering, simultaneous climax, and he lay down on her, his face buried in her neck, panting as if he had run a long distance race across broken ground. She touched him on the side of the face, kissing him with an infinite tenderness.

“That was so good, Ryan. So good that I’d like to do it again.”

The second time, later, in the velvet blackness of the forest, was slower. They explored each other’s body with fingers and lips, touching and arousing each other. Finally he lay back, the short grass prickling his buttocks as she straddled him, lowering herself teasingly slowly, so that the tip of his erect penis touched and entered and then withdrew. Until she smiled and enveloped him, throwing her head back as she pumped and rose and fell. The girl’s mouth opened and she sighed with the pleasure of their lovemaking, her teeth white as wind-washed bone in the twilight.

The second orgasm was without the hurry of the first, and for many minutes after they lay tangled in each other’s arms. The night’s cold stole over them and eventually they broke apart and pulled on their clothes.

“They’ll be lookin’ for us,” said Ryan.

“Not if they guess that we… Look, there, beyond that fallen tree.”

Ryan followed her finger, reaching for the pistol, then checking the movement. Some hundred paces away from them, only a smudge of light against the dark trees, he saw a man. Standing silently watching them.

“Who is he?”

“Looks like a mutie.” The man was old, and as Ryan’s eye adjusted to the night, he could make him out more clearly. Barely medium height, with silver-white hair tied in two long braids, each with a scrap of red ribbon knotting it at the end. He wore a robe of some kind of animal hide, and it was decorated with a staggeringly complex design in multihued threads and silks. His face was dark, the eyes hidden in the deep sockets.

In the hair was a single feather, white as fresh snow.

Even as they watched him, the old man moved back a couple of paces and then vanished among the pines behind him. It was done with great grace. Suddenly the space where he had been was empty.

“Goin’ after him?” asked Krysty.

“No. Could be a trap. Maybe he’s the one who put them signs up, warnin’ us to stay away.”

They moved fast, back to the safety of the war wag. Ryan’s hand never left the butt of the automatic. Nobody said anything about their absence, although Ryan caught Hunaker giving a sly wink to Samantha.

 

IN THE MORNING the Trader had gone.

The only person who had seen him leave was Abe, who had been on guard on the river side of the war wag. Everyone gathered around the lanky man as he reported to J.B. and Ryan Cawdor, just after dawn.

“No warnin’, but he was behind me. I turns and he pats me on the shoulder, like he did when you’d done somethin’ real good. Know what I mean? I says to him, like, how’s he doin’ and he says he’s never better.”

“What was he wearing?” asked J.B. “Usual. Carryin’ that old Armalite of his. Steppin’ good, not stooped like he’s been. No cough. Looks past me to the trees and the snow up beyond. Real cold. I seen his breath plumin’ out. Says he’s goin’ for a walk, and not to take on if he’s gone some time. That was about three, maybe four hours back.” Abe shook his head, the long flowing hair moving from side to side. “He sure looked pretty to me, up and walkin’ tall.”

“He say anythin’ at all, apart from that?”

“No, Ryan. But he did say there was a letter for you. Said he’d got a scribbler to write it weeks back when we was on the road to Mocsin.”

Ryan spun on his heel to go and look for the letter. But Abe coughed. “Yeah?”

“There’s one other thing, Ryan. But it’s kind of stupid.”

“Go on.”

Abe glanced away. “No, Mebbe in a while. I got to think on it some. Go read your note.” It didn’t take long.

It was on the steel table in the corner of the Trader’s cabin. The edges of the handmade paper were crinkled. The letter was stained with machine oil and what looked like ketchup smeared over the bottom half. Because of his own illiteracy, the Trader had been forced to get a writer to produce the note for him. Which may have led to its brevity and lack of emotion. Or it may just have been the way the Trader was.

“Hi Ryan,” it began.

If you’re reading this then it means I’m dead. This rad cancer’s been eating my guts for months and I know there’s no stopping it. So this is me saying goodbye and the best of luck. If it goes the way I hope, I’ll just walk away one night so don’t you blasted come after me. Please. That’s the Trader asking and not ordering, Ryan, old friend. We’ve been some places and done some good and bad things. Now it’s done. That’s all. I thank you for watching my back for so many years. You and J.B. watch for each other.

There was no signature.

So he’d done it. Ended his life in the same quietly efficient way he’d run it. Minutes later, as Ryan walked through the war wag, there were several of the women, and some of the men, red eyed. Samantha was weeping on the shoulder of Hennings. Rintoul was clicking his fingers in a nervous, abstracted way, and Finnegan’s usual good nature had vanished.

“Break this up,” called Ryan, making them jump and turn hostile faces his way. “Trader went as he wanted. Save your sorrow.”

Outside in the freshness of morning the rising sun was tipping the hills to the west, turning the snow to blood. Abe was sitting on the ground, nursing his own M-16 rifle, gazing out across the river toward the forest. Ryan hunkered alongside him.

“Tell me, Abe.”

“What?”

“You was goin’ to tell me. Somethin’ that Trader said or did. At the last?”

“No. Wasn’t like that, I told you all he said. Then he just walked off, over there.” He pointed with the muzzle of the gun.

“Then what?”

“I thought I saw somethin’ there. Just by that ridge of light rock, over toward where that pond lies.”

Ryan followed the man’s stubby finger, seeing that he was pointing in the general direction of where he and Krysty had made love the previous evening.

“This was before Trader went or after?”

“Like after. I seen him walkin’ away, and there was a good moon up, so he showed clear. I watched, and then I saw this thing up there, like it was waitin’ for the Trader. First I figured he…”

“A man?”

“I’m tellin’ ya, Ryan. I figured he might be one of the muties that done the feathers and skulls and stuff, so I get a bead on him, ready to ice him. Then I see the Trader lift a hand to him, and this old man lifts a hand back. They meet up and go under the trees and that’s all I see. No danger, so I don’t raise a warnin’ for everyone. Then, the Trader… he don’t come back.”

“Tell me about this man. This old man, you said. What was he like?”

“He had silver hair in braids, one on each side. And a long coat with some fancy patterns on it.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. I saw it through the scope in the moonlight, in his hair, the old man had a long white feather.”

NOBODY EVER SAW THE OLD MAN with the white feather in his hair. Nor was the Trader ever seen again.

 

Chapter Fifteen

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THE ROADS HIGH IN THE DARKS were as bad as anything any of them had ever seen. Bucketing ribbons of twisted concrete vanished into rivers and never came out again. Whole slabs of the hillsides had melted during earth tremors a century ago. They were looking for the remains of a township shown on their tattered maps as Babb, but the devastation was so total that they had little hope of finding it. Lakes had filled in where there should have been dry land, and tiny feeder streams had become howling torrents of angry melt water.

The greater the elevation, the slower their progress. The farther they went, the worse the weather became. The night skies clouded over and the fearsome chem clouds of nuclear detritus billowed about them, with incandescent bursts of flame searing the tops of the peaks. The great northerly winds came screeching in from the desert wastes that had once been the fruitful prairies of Canada. It took them four grindingly oppressive days to get close to the tree line, finding that great fires had raged through the pine forests, stripping the land, leaving the soil to be eroded to bare rock and ice. The dials in the war wag showed a daytime high of minus ten Celsius, with the night temperatures dropping fast to minus thirty. Add in the windchill factor and you had a land where a man would be dead within minutes if he didn’t have adequate thermal protection.

Ryan was dozing in his bunk when a particularly vicious jolt woke him. As he stood he was aware that they had stopped moving and the engine now ticked over in neutral. He was on his way to the control room before Ches started calling him over the intercom.

J.B. was there before him.

“End of the line,” he said.

Ryan looked out the front screen, seeing only gray ice and swirling snow. The road, if there was one there at all, was invisible.

“Not even the war wag can get us farther,” said Ches, leaning back in the padded seat. “The trail’s gotten way too narrow. Looks like one track in and the same one out. So there’s no point goin’ back and tryin’ some other way.”

“How far from where the Redoubt might be?” asked Ryan, biting his lip in impatient anger. To have come all this way and fail so near to their destination only added to the concern he already felt about their supplies, and Ryan was angry. Gas would be running low in about a week, and way up here in the Darks there wouldn’t be caches hidden away for them. The Trader had made sure that throughout the Deathlands there were plenty of such caches, buried deep and safe. But not this far north into the blighted country.

Cohn was hunched over his mapping table and he replied to Ryan’s question. “Way I see it… from what you said and the redhead said and most of all from what that poor bastard Kurt said, it should be ahead about a day’s climb. Someplace.”

“That’s a lot of hellfired help, Cohn. What the hell does ‘someplace’ mean?”

“Sorry, Ryan. Just that my map’s all worn and patched. Looks like ‘Grinning Glacier,’ best I can see. Steep trail over where a lake used to be. Who knows what’s there now?”

J.B. turned from the screen, “Time our feet earned their living, Ryan. Let’s go talk.”

 

TEN.

That was the final number for the party, reached after better than an hour of discussion. J.B. had wanted to keep it smaller, but Ryan had pushed for more to be included. And both of them wanted to come on the expedition, insisting that the other should remain in charge of the war wag.

In the end it was Cohn, the most experienced member of the unit, who was delegated to take command while Ryan and J.B. led the trek toward… Toward what?

Krysty had to come, and so, Ryan insisted, did Doc. Whatever there might be up behind the fog with teeth and claws, Doc seemed to know something about it. And something was all they had. The remainder of their team were Hunaker, Koll, Hennings, Abe, the man called Finnegan and a top blaster, Okie. She was a tall, silent girl whose skill with any firearm was legendary on the war wag.

Cohn’s orders were simple and explicit.

“Keep in radio contact. Twenty-four-hour watch on the emergency frequency. Four guards out, turn and turn about each hour. Full alert all the time. Keep her locked up tighter than a Baron’s cred chest.”

And then the most important part of it.

“If we’re back, then we’ll be here in four days. Call it a flat hundred hours. Unless you hear from us to abort this command, after one hundred hours precise, you push the boot to the floor and give her the gas and get out. From then on you’re on your own.”

“What about a relief party?” Cohn asked J.B. and Ryan.

“There won’t be one, you stupe bastard,” snarled Ryan. “Hundred hours and we’re not back, you go.”

“Where?”

“Watch my lips, Cohn,” interjected J.B. Dix. “We go. You stay. We come back in less’n a hundred hours, all fine. If not, then War Wag One is yours. And you’ll be low on gas and supplies, so get out fast. Now just nod your head if you understand.”

“Sure,” Cohn replied with a nod. “That’s fine. I’ll be here like you say. And if there’s problems, call it in.”

Each member of the team carried a pistol and rifle of their own choice. Each carried four grenades on the belts, a mix of incendiary, stun, implosion, high-ex, shrap, nerve gas and smoke. Each of them had a knife or edged weapon of his or her choosing, ranging from Krysty’s delicate throwing knives in her bandolier to Finnegan’s butcher’s cleaver that would take the head off a horse in one blow.

They carried enough food for five days, with a small supply of water-pure tabs. Ammunition supplied most of the weight to their packs, along with a radio operated by Henn. No spare clothes or sleeping gear. There was no room for that kind of comfort.

They agreed that the best time to leave was around dawn the next day. Koll was designated to take charge of Doc, whose mind still vacillated between extremes of brief clarity and long spells of catatonic madness. His only response when Ryan Cawdor told him that they were planning on going toward the hidden Redoubt was to smile and bow, his hat nearly falling off. Krysty had managed to sew some strong elasticized cord for him to use when they ventured outside into the gales. He’d refused any helmet or goggles like the others, saying that a scarf for his throat would suffice.

“Suffice” was the word he’d used. Now he just asked Ryan about the guard dog.

“What dog? You mean the fog, Doc?”

“No. I speak of the canine deterrent… Ah, what memories that word brings back to me, Mr. Cawdor.”

“What memories?”

A look of pain flitted across the aquiline features of the old man. “Sadly, that has escaped me, sir. But I believe there was something about a dog.”

That night Krysty came to Ryan in his bunk, and they managed, despite the tightness of the accommodation, to make slow, tender love three times before reveille finally woke them.

Farewells were short and formal. During the years that Ryan Cawdor had ridden with the Trader he had seen literally dozens of relationships formed and broken in the war wag. Many formed from loneliness and fear. Many broken by death.

Ryan noticed Hun taking a long time in quiet talk with a little girl called Sukie who had only joined War Wag One from Three a day or so before the fall of Mocsin as a relief gunner on the mortar.

For the rest it was mainly a quick shake of the hand and a muttered word. Ryan had once seen a scratchy antique vid about some Westerners in a fort. Or had it been a church? There they were taking last messages to families and loved ones. That didn’t arise in the Deathlands. Either your family and loved ones were on War Wag One or they weren’t anywhere.

“What’s the weather, Cohn?”

“Minus fifteen. Wind around fifty, from north, veering east. Some hail in it.”

Ryan rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “Sounds a fine day for a short walk in the Darks. Be seein’ you, Cohn.”

“Good luck, Ryan. Give the bastards broken teeth.” The two men shook hands and the main entry port slid open, letting in a flurry of snow and a biting wind. Ryan pulled up his goggles and exited with a jump, waving for the others to follow him. Ice crunched beneath his boots. While he waited he glanced down, seeing the mark on the right toe where a rabid dog had tried to bite his foot off. It had taken a 3-round burst from the LAPA to blow the mongrel away.

Between his feet, in a small hollow sheltered among some scattered pebbles, he noticed a tiny bunch of flowers. White petals, with a heart yellow as butter. Surviving in one of the least hospitable places on earth. For a reason that he couldn’t explain, the sight of the frail plant lifted his spirits.

He tucked the weighted silk scarf around his neck, trying to fill the chinks where the wind was thrusting icy water. He took a quick finger count to make sure the group was all there. Nine. With J.B. Dix bringing up the rear as ten.

After fifty paces Ryan turned around, bracing himself against the driving gale, squinting back at where he knew the war wag was. But it had already disappeared in the general whiteout. Without a compass he knew that they had absolutely no chance of ever finding it again.

The track was very rough, often barely visible, and the weather was worse than he had anticipated. But after a half hour they rounded the massive corner of an overhanging bluff and the wind dropped dramatically.

“Way Kurt called it, there’s a half day’s walk to get to where the fog was waitin’.”

“I am of the decided opinion that the fog will still be here and waiting for all comers, Mr. Cawdor,” said Doc. His cheeks were almost blue from the biting cold of the wind, yet beads of perspiration hung in the deep furrows of his cheeks, glistening in the stubble on his chin.

“You know that?” asked J.B.

“It is an axiom of some veracity that a good guard dog never sleeps. Cerberus was assuredly of the best, Mr. Dix.”

“Every piece cocked,” instructed Ryan. “Round under the pin. Fingers—”

“On triggers,” finished Okie, unsmiling. “We know that, Ryan.”

They went on.

The road, if that’s what it had once been, wound and twisted like a broken-backed adder, clinging to the edge of the ice-sheeted cliffs, a dizzy abyss plunging away to their left. At one bend Ryan held up a gloved fist, halting the party, waving them forward.

“What do you see?” asked Hennings, his dark skin pallid against the black fur hood.

“Down there,” replied Ryan, pointing to where the tumbling waters of a river in flood tore over gray boulders. Visible now and again through the gusted clouds of snow were the red and brown metal bones of several vehicles. Torn and twisted, spotted with ice and blown spume. It was impossible to make out what they might once have been, but there could have been three or four of them. One large rusting chunk of iron might have been the rear suspension members of a large truck.

“Someone didn’t make the turn,” said Finnegan.

“Dolfo Kaler,” suggested J.B. “Kurt talked about broken trucks an’ all. They’re what’s left of Kaler’s expedition after the Redoubt up here.”

“Which means the fog that has teeth and claws is around just a couple more corners,” said Krysty Wroth. She stood close against Ryan, shivering at the cold.

She was nearly right.

It was only one corner.

Waiting, quiet and immense. As Ryan cautiously waved the others forward to his side, the words of Doc came back to him. It was like some gigantic, patient guard dog. Crouched on the rutted surface of the track, among the snow-filled pits and hollows, it throbbed.

“There is Cerberus,” whispered Doc. Behind them the wind still howled and the air was still filled with needled chips of ice swirling from the leaden sky. But on this stretch the wind was gone, echoing behind them but not before. Here it was preternaturally quiet.

Ryan gazed at it, filled with an awe that came close to fear. In all his life he had never seen anything like it. The fog squatted on the road, at least the forward part of it did, and behind it rose vastly above them until it merged with the sky. It was impossible for Ryan to guess its height. Despite the wind all around them the fog did not move, beyond a gentle rocking, pulsing movement that seemed to be generated somewhere within its enormous bulk. It looked as though a light glowed somewhere within it, like some settlement glimpsed at a great distance through mist.

He took a few cautious steps toward it, and the swaying increased. The whole mass moved the equivalent paces toward him. Tendrils came creeping from its base, edging along the road in his direction. They stopped moving as he did.

Hunaker threw back her hood, ice gathering immediately on her short, green hair. “Let me waste this shit with my rifle!” she shouted.

Immediately the fog reacted, swooping with its sinuous fingers down toward them, sending them all scurrying quickly back along the trail, back toward the bend. The fog reached to within a few steps of where Hunaker had been standing, then seemed to gather itself together and resume its previous condition, swaying smugly within.

“If I might proffer a small suggestion, Miss Hunaker?” began Doc.

“What? How ‘bout, don’t make any fuckin’ noise or threaten it or even go close to it?”

“Those were my thoughts, dear lady. Those were indeed my thoughts.”

While it had been just Kurt’s ravings, or the mythic words of Krysty and Doc, it had not seemed as if it would be such a problem. Ryan had somehow thought that they’d walk through it or climb around it. Confident that once he saw it, assuming it really existed, it would just be a minor problem like hundreds of others, and with an easy solution. Now that he stood so close to it, he realized that this was in fact a form of primal force that functioned in ways that he had no idea about.

“Now what?” J.B. muttered.

Ryan unzipped his coat. Despite the ice and the bitter wind, he found that he was sweating freely. “Who knows,” he said angrily.

Dix widened the question. “Anyone? How about you, Doc? You know about this bitching thing?”

“Not to put too fine a point upon it, young man, I am as much in the dark as you. I believe this is here to keep malefactors away from the Redoubt and the gate.”

Ryan noted the word gate and filed it away as something to ask about later. If there got to be a later.

“We could try some grenades,” suggested Okie.

“Could do,” Ryan said. “Gotta think. No other trail. Not one that we could ever hope to find. It’s this or nothin’. And there’s no way under it. It hangs over the edge of that sheer cliff. There’s no way over it. So you want to know what I think? I think one of the Barons out east’s got him a chopper. If we just had that…”

“If we had a balloon we could float up and over it,” said Koll. “But we don’t.”

So they tried grenades.

High-ex and incendiary looked the best bets. No point in wasting shrap or nerve against a fog.

The hand bombs made a load of noise and some fire. The flames seemed muffled by the fog and the high-ex did nothing at all that anyone could make out. Some rocks and ice from high above them came rolling down, pattering on the road. The fog retreated about as far as a man could spit, then came back. Back toward them, stopping at the bend of the trail, becoming a huge wall, almost as if it had been cut clean with a giant’s cleaver.

Doc had sat down, drawn and pale, looking as though the confrontation with the fog had exhausted him. He felt Ryan’s eye on him and clambered up, pulling himself to a standing position with his hands on the rock face.

“My apologies, sir, but all the noise and fire has quite…” The eyes cleared as though a veil had been ripped from them. “Antimatter, Mr. Cawdor. I believe that might do the trick. Implode, and the foul fiend will be undone—it will separate from its source.”

J.B. banged one gloved fist into the other. “Implosion grenade. Turn that chiller inside out. Yeah. Koll?”

“What?”

“You got the implo?”

“Yeah. Couple.”

“Go hurl them into the middle of that bastard fog. Right in, far as you can throw.”

“Sure,” said Ryan. “You got about the best arm, Koll. Go close as you can, then get the heat out of there.”

Koll lowered his hood, wiping tiny gems of steel-gray ice from his long mustache. He unhooked the two implosion bombs, with their distinctive scarlet and blue bands around their dull tops.

“Chill it, Koll,” whispered Hunaker, patting him on the arm.

The towering mist, with the strange pale light throbbing at its center, had retreated once more until it hung precisely where they had first seen it, countless small tendrils creeping from its base as though tasting the air for the scent of an enemy.

Koll crouched like a runner readying for a sprint, a grenade in each fist. He drew in a number of deep breaths, composing himself. Ryan stood at his heels.

“Not too close, Koll. No dead heroes on War Wag One, remember.”

Koll nodded his blond head. Five more breaths, faster and more shallow. He powered himself up the trail, boots sending chips of stone and ice flying back into the watching group. For some seconds the fog showed no sign of awareness of the threat. Then it began to move.

Faster than before.

Koll skidded to a halt less than fifty steps from the nearest tentacle of the fog, looking up at its shimmering bulk for a second or two, as if he was hypnotized.

“Now!” yelled Ryan Cawdor at the top of his voice. Breaking the spell.

Koll lobbed the first of the implo bombs into the fog. For one sickening moment Ryan wondered if it would simply stick there, like a pebble in fresh dough, but it vanished deep within. The second one followed it, thrown with all Koll’s most desperate strength.

“Back,” said Doc calmly, speaking in a conversational tone to the eight others who stood near him. He led the way by shambling quickly around the bend of the trail, behind the rock wall.

“Koll!” shouted Ryan. “Get the…” but the words died in his throat and for a moment he closed his eye, turning away.

The fog had sensed the threat to its existence. The tendrils had shot from its base, faster than a shooter drawing his blaster. They slapped at Koll’s feet and legs, before he could take more than a half dozen steps toward safety.

Ryan was the last of the party to move with Doc out of sight, and he saw it all. As the first coiling arm of the fog touched Koll, sparks flew from the man’s flesh. Orange and blue fire sprayed out into the cold day as if from a welder’s torch. Koll dropped his rifle and screamed, rolling onto his back and kicking. For the briefest of moments he managed to break free from the caressing tendril.

One fell across him, not hard, but more flames spat from Koll’s body, at the top of his thighs, near the groin. He arched back, and the scream rose higher and higher. Smoke and the smell of burning filtered through the crackling air. The screams continued, thin and piercing, like a stallion’s at the gelding.

Another tendril lashed at Koll’s face and he raised his hands to take the impact, thrashing at the unknown power. Now there were a dozen or more of the thick gray tendrils enshrouding him, cording and swelling. Koll was lifted into the air by them, drawn toward the main expanse of the fog.

All this occurred within the eternity of seconds before the first of the implo grenades went off, followed a second later by the other. Ryan ducked away at the familiar hollow boom, bracing himself for the bizarre sucking feeling that came from the antimat bombs. He and the Trader had found a small supply of them years ago in a ravaged Redoubt close to the great swamps where once the Mississippi had rolled. Nobody, not even J.B. Dix, greatest of armorers, understood what they did. All that was obvious was that they caused an implosion and matter was pulled into a vacuum of limitless smallness.

Ryan looked back around the cliff immediately after the noise had faded. The fog was coiling and shredding as he watched. It seemed to be disappearing into frail towers that crumbled in on themselves. In less than a dozen heartbeats the dreadful monster had completely gone, leaving nothing but the cold wind and driven hail.

“Cerberus was a sentient creature, and designed precisely thus, Mr. Cawdor. Yet it was weak precisely where it needed to be strong. Now it is gone, my dear sir, and taking that poor fellow with it. Who cried so loud, did he not?”

Koll had disappeared with the double implosions. At least most of him had.

His right arm, two fingers missing, with the shoulder and neck and much of the right side of the lower skull, still lay in the middle of the mangled roadway. The survivors walked up the trail, pausing by the remains of the corpse. The missing fingers had been sliced away as though with a razor, and the rest of the torn flesh was cleanly severed. Both eyes were gone, as had the top of the nose. The jaw had been hewn through by an unimaginable force, and the flesh of the cheek and chin was laced with a pattern of tiny burns and scorch marks. The teeth were splintered to powder in the jaw.

Taking into account the massive injuries, there was very little blood.

“We goin’ to leave him here like this for the wolves and bears?” asked Sukie, trembling with shock.

“No. Can’t bury him. In the river, J.B.?”

“Best we can do.”

As gently as they could, the two men stooped and gathered up the remains of the man who had been one of the strongest of the crew of the war wag. Swinging the dismembered mass once and then heaving it as far out as they could into the singing void, they watched as it fell into the river and joined the waters that flowed from the glacier way up above them.

They stood mutely for several seconds. Ryan broke the spell by turning to lead them up the trail. Now that the fog had vanished, he noticed a peculiar thing. On their side of the barrier, the road was in terrible condition, puckered and scratched. A hundred paces or so higher up it was in perfect condition. Smooth and flat, unbroken by the century of neglect, untouched by weeds. It went straight for a while, then curved sharply to the right, as though it ran into the face of the cliff.

Neat, rectangular white stones lined the side of the road, marking off the edge of the ravine. There was even the remains of a white line painted down the center of the trail. The nine men and women walked slowly along, cautiously checking all around them. Ryan stopped when he heard Doc start to chuckle.

“What in the big fire’s so funny, Doc?”

“My apologies, sir, but the sight of us all stepping as if we walked upon the shells of eggs is risible. You see, the fog with its claws and its teeth will have kept everyone out for a hundred years. And those within are surely deceased. So where is the threat?”

“We’re in. Someone else might be in,” replied J.B. Dix.

“Only if they were watching and have followed us. And I doubt there are many people in this part of the Darks.”

“What about them feathers and the skull and all that stuff? ”asked Abe.

That silenced Doc’s laughter.

Though the wind kept howling about them, the ferocious cold of the past few days was gone, and none of them put up their hoods again. Doc kept one hand on his ancient hat. The air was notably fresher and Ryan noticed that none of them was sweating now, as they had been in the presence of the fog.

Okie strode forward to join Ryan at the front of the group. Her dark hair was tied back like Abe’s and she kept one hand always near the butt of her pistol. When she spoke her voice had a distinctive Eastern twang to it.

“What d’you figure we’ll find in this stockpile? Gas? Bombs? More guns?”

Ryan grinned. “Quien sabe?”

“What?”

“Means who knows. Picked it up from a Mex mutie down south. But whatever’s there has to be good to be guarded like that.”

“And nobody to stop us,” she said.

There was a faint hissing and a dull thunk. A gasp. Ryan spun on his heel in time to see Abe dropping to his knees, hands to his throat. His neck was pierced clean through with the shaft of an arrow, tipped with bright red feathers.

 

Chapter Sixteen

« ^ »

HENNINGS AND KRYSTY were first to the stricken man, while the others, weapons drawn, faced around, their blazing eyes seeking the enemy. But there was nobody to be seen. The cliffs towered above them, with pockets of snow scattered here and there. The road wound beneath them, and the sheer drop to the river was still at their other flank. Ahead, somewhere, was the mythical Redoubt.

“Where?” snapped Ryan.

J.B. pointed up and behind. “Arrow came from there. He’s behind us. Or they’re behind us.”

“How is he?” He moved to stand where Krysty cradled Abe in her arms. The shaft, with its barbed tip, still stuck through his throat at a grotesque angle, blood trickling from both sides. The shaft was made of some sort of aluminum compound. It was streaked crimson. The feathers were the same kind as they had seen on the warning totems.

Henn looked up. “Bad, Ryan. Bad.”

Abe was fighting for breath, fingers moving convulsively on Krysty’s sleeve. Her bright red hair framed his pale face. His eyes flickered, seeking Ryan, finding him.

“Doesn’t hurt…” he said, voice muffled with the blood that was now seeping through his lips. “But a blasted arrow, for nuke’s sake! Be funny—” he coughed a great gout of arterial scarlet “—funny if…”

Another shaft came slicing through the air, pinging off the road and vanishing over the edge into the gorge beyond. A third arrow came, striking a spark as it struck the stone, missing Krysty by a hand’s span.

“Got to move, Ryan,” J.B. barked. “They’ll pick us off.”

The rules of the war wag had always been simple. If you can save the wounded, then you do it. But if you can’t…

“Leave him,” Ryan said. “Sorry, Abe.”

If it had been some muties, especially stickies, then Ryan would have put a bullet through the man’s temple. It looked as if Abe was dying, but there was a chance the attackers might save him. Better than no chance at all.

“Go,” called Ryan, then strode ahead to lead the way in a zigzag, dodging run up the road.

Immediately the arrows came whispering after them, biting into the track. But by keeping moving and swerving, none of them was hit. Ryan risked a glance over his shoulder at a bend in the trail, seeing to his shock that there were about forty or fifty men after them, most with bows. Oddly, not a single one was carrying a rifle. If one of them had a light MG or even a machine pistol, they could have sprayed the road and wiped half of Ryan’s force away.

They appeared to be short, squat men, wearing what looked at a glance to be leather.

“We could hold ‘em here!” shouted J.B., pointing to where a fall of white rock had half closed the road.

“They might get above us. Keep goin’!”

Another hundred paces and the arrows were less frequent. And around another turn of the trail, there it was.

The trail widened to a huge plateau, wide enough for a dozen war wags to turn in comfort, with the stubby remains of a metal fence ringing it. And at the far end was a gate, made of gleaming metal, showing through peeling paint. All around, on posts, on the walls, and on the gate itself, were the faded, illegible remains of notices.

“That’s it.”

Ryan had seen enough Stockpiles in his time to be certain that this was what they were after.

The gate was corrugated metal, showing that it folded back. Okie was there first, reaching and tugging at the handle, polished by the years of tearing gales.

“Locked!” she cried.

Henn was there next, throwing his great strength to help her. But they failed to shift it. The man called Finnegan and J.B. were next, all heaving and straining at the door, trying to get it open. Hun and Krysty, her overalls sodden with Abe’s blood, arrived to help, but there was not enough room for them to get a grip.

Ryan brought up the rear, supporting Doc, whose legs had gone so that he sagged like a strawman, the breath rasping in his chest. Twice he had panted for Ryan to leave him, but Ryan was grateful for Doc’s tip regarding the fog and aimed to keep this source of good information as close to him as he could. Despite the madness, Doc knew things. Things buried deep, maybe, but things that might save them all.

“Here they come,” warned J.B., dropping to his knees and readying his favorite Steyr AUG 5.56 mm.

“Krysty,” Ryan called, “you and Henn keep tryin’ the door. Watch for Doc. The rest, let’s chill the bastards.”

With the Redoubt at their backs, the door towering sheer above them, there was no longer anywhere to run. Ryan’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a vulpine snarl of anger and hatred. He directed it at their enemy.

“Come on, you sons of hellsuckin’ bitches,” he hissed. “Dyin’ time’s arrived.”

The attackers had paused at the head of the trail, gathered in a group. His estimate had been about right. Looked like closer to fifty, all male. They had dark skins and their clothes were fringed and beaded in a way that recalled the mysterious stranger at the time the Trader had gone walking out into eternity. Some of them carried spears and some hatchets. Most had bows, either in their hands or slung across their shoulders.

“No blasters,” said Okie. “We can take ‘em all, easy as fartin’.”

“I figure them for Indians,” whispered J.B. “Some old tribe trapped up here, safe from raiders.”

“What are Indians?”

Ryan stopped as one of the squat figures started to run toward them, waving a long stick decorated with a double row of white and brown feathers. His mouth was open and he was yelling an inarticulate cry of rage. None of his fellows had moved, but stood watching him as he charged at the small group.

“Gone crazy,” said Hun.

Doc had collapsed as they reached the door, but he now pulled himself upright, peering over Ryan’s shoulder at the running figure.

“Upon my soul!” he exclaimed. “A warrior of the Sioux nation, eager to count coup upon us. How very… very… something or other.”

The man was a hundred paces away, the wind tugging at his long braided hair, ruffling the thongs that fringed his jacket and trousers. Still nobody opened fire, unable to believe such lunatic courage. Or stupidity.

The Indian was less than forty running steps from them when Okie leveled her M-16 and put a round through the middle of his face. The high-velocity bullet hit smack through the center of his nose, exiting in a straight line through the back of his head, blowing away a chunk of skull the size of a woman’s palm, blood and brains spraying out in the gale. He stopped as though he’d run into an invisible wall, legs flailing in front of him, his trunk flying through the air until he landed on his back. His arms kept twitching for several seconds.

“Stupe bastard,” said Okie, quietly, lowering the rifle.

The rest of the attackers gave a great roar of anger, but none of them tried to follow their dying comrade. As Ryan watched, they withdrew around the corner out of sight. “Now what?”

“We get the door open.”

“Won’t move,” said Henn. “Krysty tried. She… Look at the handle.”

The metal had become twisted and warped. Krysty leaned against the door, face white as the snow, her breathing irregular. She was aware of them all staring at her and managed a thin smile. “Can’t do… I tried. Used all I knew.”

Ryan blinked at the sight. To distort the metal of the lock like that took unbelievable strength. Then he remembered the way she had suddenly freed herself of her bonds when Strasser had held them prisoner. And he wondered about that amazing red hair that had seemed to move of its own volition. For the first time he realized that the girl had to be some kind of mutie. And he had made love to her…

“Without blasters they can’t get at us,” said Hunaker, squatting. “If we can’t get into this joint, then we’ll go back down. In the war wag and off safe as armor.”

“Not that easy,” interjected J.B. Dix.

Ryan agreed. “He’s right, Hun. Think about it some. There’s a lot of ‘em. We seen maybe fifty. Could be a hundred more. They know the Darks.”

“We can blast them away.”

“Not if you can’t see ‘em, Hun. Where are they now? Waitin’ for us? Up on the cliffs? Maybe they’re movin’ right now, right above us.”

“Night’s still some way off, Ryan,” she argued, reluctant to let it go. “We keep careful, we can get ready, then make a run for the war wag.”

It was possible. Perhaps the best plan they had. So they rested, snatching a quick meal and mouthful of water. Doc was in poor shape and he dropped asleep while they ate. Ryan and J.B. looked at the massive gate to the Stockpile, but there was no way in. Most of the other Stockpiles they had found were much smaller and the entrances yielded to small charges of dynamite. This was heavy-gauge metal that even high-explosive grenades were not going to dent.

About three-quarters of an hour had passed since they saw the last of the Indians.

Then two things happened at once.

Stones and boulders began to fall around them, rolled from much higher up, above the entrance door. And the Indians reappeared with what must have been the oldest piece of field artillery in all of Deathlands.

“What the…!” exclaimed Ryan.

“It’s a cannon!” gasped Doc. “The sort they used in the war between North and South, about two hundred and fifty years ago. Must have come from some museum.”

“Will it shoot?” asked Okie, taking a professional interest in it. “And what does it shoot?”

“Probably shoots a metal ball that might be filled with explosive. If it works, then we’re over the falls without a boat, folks.”

It worked. There was a vast plume of smoke from the bell-like mouth of the ancient piece, and they all ducked at the whistling sound as the shell came toward them. It struck the cliff about fifty paces to their left and twenty paces high, showering them with splinters of white rock.

“Let us get within,” yelled Doc.

“Sure. You open her up, Doc, and we’ll hold ‘em off with blasters.”

“Gettin’ ready again, Ryan,” said J.B., calm as ever.

“Let ‘em have it. Try and pick ‘em off around that gun,” ordered Ryan.

“They got the cover. We got nukeshit nothin’,” swore Okie as she fired her M-16 with rhythmic ease, the bullets skittering and ricocheting all around the heavy metal shield of the artillery piece. Two of the attackers threw up their arms and toppled over, but the rest withdrew around the bend in the trail to safety.

It was a standoff. But the odds were greatly against Ryan Cawdor and his friends. They had no cover at all. Nowhere to go. If the Indians could control the aim of their cannon they could blow them away. As he poured lead toward the big gun, it occurred to Ryan that their only hope was going to be a charge across the flat ground, under fire from the arrows. It was close to suicide, but it was all there was.

He felt a finger tap his shoulder. He spun around, nearly knocking Doc over with the barrel of his LAPA.

“Do you wish me to open the door?”

Grinning with his peculiarly perfect teeth, Doc stepped with a long, mincing stride to the side of the door and reached inside a small square panel set at shoulder height. “Shall we go in?”

Ryan’s reply was drowned by the boom of the field gun. This time the gunners had overcompensated and the massive ball, pitching low and bouncing, narrowly missed the far end of the great door.

“Next time they’ll get it right, Ryan,” said J.B.

He stopped at the sonorous grating that came from the top and bottom of the huge gateway into the Redoubt. For a second of frozen time nothing happened, then a dark slit appeared at the right edge, near where Doc was still pulling a lever inside the panel.

“Inside!” yelled Ryan, as soon as the crack was wide enough for them to slip through.

Henn went first, then Finnegan, struggling to squeeze into the darkness. Okie and Krysty were next. Hun waved at Ryan to go, but he gestured angrily with the stubby barrel of his gun and she ran in.

“Now us, Doc. You done real good.”

As soon as the old man released the control, the door stopped its movement. Behind them Ryan was aware of angry screams and shouts as the Indians saw their prey disappearing into the mountain. Doc vanished through the gap and Ryan followed him in, pausing to look back. He was shocked to see how many attackers there were now. Better than a hundred men, all racing toward them. He gave a quick burst that sent six or seven tumbling like disjointed dolls, blood bursting into the cold air and smoking on the ground from the scattered corpses.

“You can close it up, Doc, right?”

The yellowed eyes turned incuriously to him, veiled as though beeswax lay across them, and Ryan glimpsed the closeness of Doc’s insanity. But the threads held together a while longer.

“Indeed. There’s the panel.”

“How come them bastard mongrels didn’t get this open?” asked Krysty.

“Code, my dear titian girl. A simple three five two to enter and a two five three to shut her up tight again. Like so.” He waved his hand like a magician pulling off a particularly clever trick, although this particular audience did not know what a magician was.

Doc’s answer raised a whole mass of questions, but now was not the time. Ryan, with the door grinding tight shut behind him, had a chance to take in their surroundings. Of all the Stockpiles he had seen, this one was the largest and the strangest. Others had been what the name suggested: places where enormous, even staggering, quantities of food and supplies were stored. Like mighty warehouses, packed with… who knew what?

But this was different.

Dim lights came into hesitant flickering life and Ryan figured they had tripped some kind of beam, still active, perhaps of uranium, that switched on the electrics of the place.

Sometimes you found corpses. Mummified and dried, like the husks of cocoons after the butterfly’s gone. The air tasted familiar to him from breaking into similar establishments, sealed for a century. Dry and flat, with a hint of iron.

“There another way out of here, Doc?” asked J.B., reloading the Steyr.

“No.” There came a cackle of laughter that often signaled one of Doc’s period of craziness. “Not like you mean, Mr. Dix. Oh, dear me, no.”

“This ain’t like no Stockpile I ever seen,” muttered Hunaker, glancing around at the huge curved roof. The room was in fact an immense tunnel, the ribbed metal ceiling like a cylinder above them that curved away into a dense mass of largely empty shelving.

“That, ma’am, is because it is not a Stockpile. Oh, there were many of those, most still hidden beneath swamps or earth slips or hot spots. But this is a Redoubt. There are many of these also, but I do not believe many have ever been discovered. They would appear valueless to those who do not know.” He shook his head, the stringy hair bobbing about his scrawny shoulders. “And those who did know are so long gone.”

“Make sense, Doc. We’re trapped in here. If that’s the only door and those sons of bitches are waiting for us… then how do we get out? Are there food and arms in here?”

“No. Perhaps some water, but it will be brackish and foul. Perhaps some eater tablets. No arms. That is not the purpose of the Redoubt.”

“Then what is, Doc?” asked Ryan, hunching his shoulders against the oppressive feel of the place. Buried underground with nowhere to run was a bad feeling.

“This is the gateway to Hades, Mr. Cawdor. Look upon the wall where Cerberus himself stands watch. The gateway to the river to the deeps to the darks to the high mountain. All is dust…” And he turned away, tears streaming down his lined cheeks.

J.B. caught Ryan’s eye and shook his head. “Let it lie, friend. No more help there for a while.”

“We can’t go out,” Ryan said, “so we best go in.”

Hun took Doc’s arm, leading him along in the middle of the shrunken party. First Ryan, then Okie and Henn. The green-haired girl and the old man. Krysty and Finnegan. And J.B. Dix at the rear.

Eight of them, bearing the faint torch of the future, into the past.

 

RYAN LED THEM PAST the picture that had caught Doc’s gaze. Garishly painted with a crude skill like a comic book illustration, it showed a slavering black hound. Three heads grew out of a single corded neck, their jaws wide open, fire and blood gushing between yellow teeth. The eyes were crimson, the colors bright despite the creature’s age. Underneath, in an ornate Gothic script, was written the single word: “Cerberus.”

Apart from that one picture, the place was bare. Ryan had seen Stockpiles that had been ravaged, but they were always a total shambles with rotting food and torn containers everywhere. This was different. It was as if a team of men had carefully gone through the entire place, stripping everything off walls, removing every stick of furniture. Nothing remained.

Nothing beyond the stale, flat air and the echoing sound of their own boots.

The walls remained curved, with strips of corrugated steel supports running clear over the roof. Behind them Ryan heard the distant sound of a shell hitting the closed door, but he knew the door to be strong enough to withstand anything short of an antitank shell.

They headed inward, toward the bowels of the mountain. The tunnel that they followed ran straight for several hundred paces with about a dozen chambers opening off it. Each one was stripped bare. Some of the walls showed the faint marks where cabinets or desks had once stood against them.

Out of habit, Ryan flicked on the rad counter clipped to the inside of his long coat, by the lapel. It murmured and cheeped a little, with the background crackling it always gave out in the Deathlands. But nothing here to worry about.

Nobody spoke as they moved cautiously on. There was a deadliness in the Redoubt that oppressed the spirit. Doc was mumbling to himself, a quiet string of nonsense. Ryan wished to the bottom of his heart that the old man hadn’t lost so much of his mind under the tender care of Teague and Strasser. He was absolutely certain that Doc held the key to limitless secrets. How could he have known about the fog and Cerberus and the code to the door that had saved all their lives?

“Should I call in to Conn?” asked Henn. “If we go much hellfired deeper they won’t be able to hear it.”

Ryan shook his head at the suggestion. “No point, Henn. That door and this concrete will stop anything gettin’ out.”

The corridor reached a T-junction. It was a momentary temptation to split the party, but Ryan elected to keep together. Eight wasn’t a big enough group to divide and then hope to survive a firefight. Despite what Doc had said, there might be another entrance. Or the Indians might be able to force the main door, now that they had the added incentive of pursuing them inside.

He led them to the left, wandering along a snaking passage for some minutes until it ended abruptly in a rock-fall. It looked as if half the hill had come bursting in through the roof.

There was a doorway partly buried under the stone, and Ryan scrambled up to push it open. It moved back uneasily on warped hinges and he glimpsed light and some wooden pallets. “Somethin’ here,” he called.

“Old stores. Left behind,” said Doc.

Ryan beckoned for Krysty and J.B. to follow him, leaving the others immediately outside; there was no obvious danger of a fight, and they would give warning of any attackers. It was a corridor with a rounded ceiling, made of rows of stressed metal ribs. On the right were dozens of stacked boxes, with a few more piled loosely on the other side. At the farthest end he could see the red and silver of the sky, patched with purple chem clouds; the end of the cave was open to the world. Some of the boxes had been opened, and Ryan and J.B. began to investigate. Krysty walked to the opening, less than fifty paces away.

“Blasters,” said J.B., sitting on one of the containers, peering at a bizarre weapon by his feet. It was like a large pistol with a massive ammunition drum that had chambers for a dozen rounds.

“What the hell does that fire?” asked Ryan.

“Seen a pic of one. Colt M2-0-7,40 mm gren launcher. Twelve different grenades. Laser sight and high-low propulsion system. I might come back for it once we’ve scouted around.”

Ryan had taken a gun from its box, wiping the grease off on the sleeve of his long, fur-trimmed coat. “Nice. Close assault blaster, Heckler & Koch 12-gauge scattergun. Night scope and image intensifier. Be good ‘gainst stickies in the dark.” Reluctantly he laid it back in its box. “Yeah, might take some of these babies on the way out. If we get out.”

Krysty appeared cat-footed at his side, her hair reflecting the fiery brightness of the sky behind her. “Not gettin’ out that way. Land slip’s taken off the edge of the whole mountain. Clean as a knife. Drops clean down to the gorge, and that’s a long way. Not a hope.”

They turned away from the small Stockpile and rejoined the others in the corridor. Ryan told them briefly what they’d found and that there was no way out.

“I believe I had already mentioned that probability, Mr. Cawdor,” Doc said with a grin.

Ryan ignored him. “Let’s go.”

They retraced their steps, and Henn moaned about carrying the radio.

“If we ain’t usin’ it, then why in blazing shit am I humpin’ it on?”

Finnegan patted the tall black man on the backside. “Ice your asshole, Hennings. You got the radio and I got my big gut to carry.”

The other branch of the corridor went a couple of hundred paces, then forked like a sidewinder’s tongue. The lights had failed in the one end but burned brightly from the roof along to the right. “That way,” said Ryan, leading the others.

As they went, they checked off all the rooms, on the chance that one of them might contain some clue, some indication of what had happened in this place.

Hun picked up a torn piece of card tucked in behind one of the plastic doors. Holding it up to the light, she read the faint pencil lettering.

“Forty-Niners over the Dolphins, twenty-four to twenty-one,” she read. “Now what the scorch was that? Some kind of firefight casualties?”

She tucked the scrap of paper in a pocket of her overalls.

The corridor ended abruptly. A door of vanadium-type steel ran ceiling to floor, its surface polished and gleaming, throwing back their own reflections as if it mocked them. There was no sign of any lock or control, just smooth walls on either side.

“Try that other way. Where the lights had gone out,” suggested Hunaker.

Doc waved a careless hand. “Waste of time, my emerald-locked elfling. That corridor curls all the way around the Redoubt complex and returns behind that rockfall. There is nothing there.”

“Just how d’you know all this, Doc?” asked J.B. “Maybe this is the place and time to tell us.”

Doc’s cunning eyes turned to J.B. “This is a place and a time, sir. But not the time or the place. When that might be, I do not know. It is beyond my control.”

“You knew about the main door to the Redoubt. How about this one?” asked Ryan. Casually he allowed the barrel of his gun to move toward the old man.

Doc noted the gesture. “Ah, Mr. Cawdor…a threat. Over the years I have become overly familiar with threats.”

“The door?”

“It is the last door before the gate.”

Ryan closed his only eye, fighting for control. There were times when a great scarlet mist drenched his senses and an entirely insensate rage possessed him. There was the temptation to take this doddering imbecile with his antique clothes and rich baritone voice, take him and rip the seamed old face from the skull. Things were tough on Ryan now. The realization that Krysty Wroth was probably a mutie had already shaken him. He’d fallen in love with a mutie! Once this was over he would need to clear his mind on that one. But for now…

“Can you open the door, Doc?” in a voice calm as buttermilk.

“If I were within, then it would be a matter of the utmost simplicity.”

“Within what?” asked Finnegan.

“Inside the door, stupe,” hissed Henn.

“It cannot be opened from out here.”

Ryan looked at J.B. Suddenly both of them chorused, “Over, under or around.”

It had been one of the Trader’s pet sayings when confronted with a problem that could not be solved directly.

“Over’s impossible. Under, as well, without digging gear.”

“Go back and radio the war wag for help?” suggested Hunaker.

“What about goin’ in the side?” Ryan asked. “In that room there. Maybe the walls aren’t as thick. Worth a try.”

The room was a bare office with only a grease mark on one wall showing where someone had sat and leaned back against it.

The first high-ex bomb broke the outer layer of the walls, exposing hollow cavities of concrete and rusting iron rods. The room was perfect to contain and compound an explosion. More grenades opened up a great hole in the far wall, clean through to the other side.

The smoke and bitter fumes took some time to clear in that underground expanse of still air. Ryan and J.B. went first, checking that the main structure was not about to topple in on top of them.

“Looks good?”

“Yeah. I’ll call the—What was that?” Ryan’s acute hearing had caught the faint rumble of a distant explosion, hollow and metallic.

J.B. had heard it, too. “Main door?”

“Could be. If it is, we’d best find a good ambush spot. We’ll need it. Else those bastards can starve us out.”

The others joined them. “Hear that?” asked Krysty. “They’ve managed to blow the main door.”

“We’ll stand and fight,” ordered Ryan. “Only choice we got.”

Doc coughed. “If the gate is still functioning, then there is that option. The makers said it would last a thousand years. But others have made such a boast and been proven wrong.”

“What is this nukeshittin’ gate? Where is it?”

“It is the alternative way out of the Redoubt. And it lies through that hole.”

They all scrambled through successfully, though Finnegan managed to tear his sleeve on one of the jagged pieces of twisted metal. Inside, the rad counter on Ryan’s coat began to cheep and mutter to itself a little louder, indicating a marginally higher count of radiation. But it was not enough to worry them, and Ryan switched the device off.

It was like nothing any of them had ever seen. Great banks of dials and flickering lights, red, green and amber, with thousands of white switches. Circuits hummed and crackled, and loops of tape moved erratically in a row of machines. Occasionally they had found Stockpiles that held ranks of electrical machines that none of them could figure out. But this was something else.

“Through there,” said Doc, pointing with a bony forefinger past the consoles to a doorway.

Again Ryan led them through, into an anteroom. It had a polished table on one side and four empty shelves on the other. Beyond it was another door.

“The gate is there. In that next room. Are we ready for it? It is the gate of gates. From this point the hills will become more and more shallow, but the valleys will become more and more deep.”

“We lost him again,” said Hun. Once Doc’s mind began to wander like this, it might be hours before they got any sense out of him. By Ryan’s reckoning it would take the Indians about thirty minutes to track them down.

Ryan opened the far door, hand on the butt of his pistol. And faced yet another door, made of what looked like smoked glass. There was a neat panel by the side of the door with a variety of numbered and lettered buttons, some glowing brightly. Above it was a notice in angular maroon lettering.

Entry Absolutely Forbidden to All but B12 Cleared Personnel. Mat-trans.

“Matter transmitter,” said J.B. wonderingly, taking off his glasses and wiping them. “Damnedest thing. I’d heard they had somethin’ like this.”

“How does it work?” asked Krysty, running her fingers over the smooth glass of the door.

“Who knows? Chance is it doesn’t work at all. When the long chill came, they was workin’ on a lot of clever things like this. I read they were close to…”

Doc pushed past them all, sweeping open the door and bowing low. “Here be dragons, lords and ladies. Enter and leave.”

It was a chamber, six sided, all the walls of the same brown tinted glass. The floor was patterned with metallic disks, raised very slightly. The pattern was repeated in the ceiling. The opening of the door triggered some sort of mechanism and a few of the disks began to glow faintly in a seemingly random form. A faint mist appeared in the room, swirling and darting. Ryan drew a slow, deep breath, remembering the fog outside. Was this the same? Some deadly trap by long-dead hands—

Doc stepped in, beckoning them to follow. “Around and around the little wheel goes, and where it stops… Come in.”

Nothing more happened. The mist coiled about the cracked boots, rising no farther than the knees. More of the disks were gleaming with a silvery light, and Ryan could hear the faintest of humming sounds.

“Hell, why not?” he said, and stepped in, followed by all the others.

With a cackle of manic glee Doc immediately leaped and slammed the door shut so hard that the room vibrated.

“Off we go!” he yelped, voice rising to a banshee wail.

The hum rose to a whine. The lights flashed a pattern that dazzled and forced the intruders to close their eyes. Ryan was aware that the fog had thickened, climbing all about them, filling their lungs. He coughed, unable to breathe. There was a dreadful pressure in his ears. For a moment it felt as if a huge fist was reaching inside his head and squeezing his brain like a sponge.

His body grew light, and he knew that he was passing out.

Ryan’s last thought as he fought his way into unconsciousness was that he should have killed Doc days ago.

Even that was swallowed by an impenetrable blackness.

 

Chapter Seventeen

« ^ »

RYAN OPENED his eye.

There was a mild pain across his temples, like after a night of drinking home brew. His pulse was up and so was his breathing. He lay still, aware of a tingling sensation at the tips of toes and fingers. He lifted his hands and touched his face, feeling a faint numbness. And his black, curly hair bristled with static electricity. He closed his eye and opened it again, blinking up at a ceiling of patterned metal disks that glowed. A glow that was fading even as he looked up at it.

He tried to work out just how he felt. His stomach swirled as if he’d been riding War Wag One over the bumpiest road in all Deathlands. And his brain relayed the curious sensation of having been sucked into itself and then dragged through a vacuum before being rammed back into his skull.

But he lived.

Whatever that bastard machine was supposed to have done, it had failed. The trap had not been properly sprung. Maybe over the decades the gas or poison or whatever had lost its power. He thought again that he ought to kill Doc. Now, without any further hesitation.

“Ryan? You all… Mother, my head aches.”

Ryan sat up, looking around, seeing all his comrades either slumped unconscious or showing the first signs of recovering. Krysty blinked and sighed.

“How d’you feel?” he said.

She licked her lips, brushing a hand through the tumbling hair. “I’ve felt better. What was it? Death trap went wrong?”

“Don’t know. Doc knew about it, the old…”

“Where are we, Mr. Cawdor?”

Ryan drew the LAPA, finger on the trigger. “We’re still in the Redoubt and we’re all alive. Trick didn’t work, Doc.”

“Trick? Upon my soul, but it is no trick. And it did work.”

“What? Knocked us on our asses, that’s all.”

Doc was up, tottering, steadying himself with a hand on the streaked glass of the wall. Everyone was now back to some degree of awareness.

“What color were the walls of the gateway in the Redoubt, Mr. Cawdor?”

“Brown and…” Ryan’s jaw sagged a little. “Fireheat! These are green. They’ve changed.”

“No. We’ve changed. The gateway worked. We are no longer within the Redoubt in the Darks.”

That was enough to bring them all to their feet. J.B. doubled over and retched as though he was about to throw up, but nothing came.

“Not in the Darks no more?” he gasped, wiping a gloved hand over his mouth. “Where, then?”

“Ah…” The triumphant smile had vanished. “That is one of the many problems with the gateways. Not always reliable. Depends on destination setting.”

Whatever had happened while they were all out cold, Doc’s madness had deserted him and he spoke clearly and intelligently.

“They started here about a hundred years back, trying to transmit matter. They began with a pair of small metal balls. Light gray metal balls. They got them to travel a few centimeters. And they went on from there.”

While he listened, Ryan moved around the room. The walls were certainly a changed color and the air tasted different. Not flat and dead as in the Redoubt. Was all this possible? Had the fog been a luci-gas? Was this all some chem dream?

“They wanted to use it for military purposes. But the big war stopped that good. By then they’d set up a network of these Redoubts, each with gates. Send and receive, and some big mistakes. Horrible things did happen.”

He stopped as though his mind was lodging on unbearable memories. Ryan reached to open the door, but Doc waved a hand to stop him.

“Not yet. Nearly done. Gates can be set as this one was. But all codes are now lost, lost forever. So it’s a gamble where and when you get out.”

“But… some of these gates must have been destroyed in the fighting,” said Ryan. “What would have happened if the controls had been set for one of those? Then what?”

“Most in the wilderness areas were destroyed. As to your question, I suppose that possibility represents the final frontier!”

And he laughed.

“You crazy bastard,” spat Hun, moving toward him with her fist clenched.

“Leave him be,” ordered Ryan, stopping her.

“Let’s go see where we are.”

“I am obliged, Mr. Cawdor,” Doc said, relapsing once more into the archaic way of speaking. “Most of all I would dislike having to strike a lady. Next I would dislike being struck by one.”

The door opened easily.

Opened onto a room of the same scale as the one back at the Redoubt. Any of Ryan’s doubts were dispelled when he saw a table knocked over on its side and two of the shelves slipping lopsidedly. A long crack ran down the wall, deep enough to insert a hand.

In the next room, the consoles whirred and lights danced, but there was an undertone of grinding and Ryan could smell a frail scent of smoldering. Of a fire that slumbered somewhere within the machinery that surrounded them. He could see all eight of his group reflected in the smeared metal of the door that he knew would open on a blank passage. To the right of it there was a green lever in the down position, with the word Closed printed beneath it.

Ryan grasped the lever and pushed it up to the Open position. It moved easily, as though it swam in a greased slot. For a moment nothing happened, then the grinding of gears, and then the door began to slide back.

Everyone yelled at once.

The moment that the thin sheet of filthy water came gushing through the widening crack at the edge of the door, the shouting began. Water immediately flowed about their feet, carrying innumerable wriggling creatures with scaly skins and ferocious rows of tiny teeth.

“Shut it!” shouted J.B., but Ryan had already thrown the lever down again.

It seemed to take forever, but the door finally hissed shut, and the water stopped.

“It’s fuckin’ hot, Ryan,” said Henn, kicking with his boots at one of the reptiles that had fastened onto the sole of his boot.

“It came all the way from top to bottom.” Krysty’s shocked voice said it all. The Redoubt where they had finished up was under water. Maybe under shallow water, maybe under whole fathoms.

“There is a thirty-minute automatic reset on the gates,” said Doc. “If we make haste we should… should be back in the Redoubt in the Darks.”

They splashed through the filth of mud and water, crushing the seething life as they moved. There was a step into the actual trans-mat chamber and the slime had not penetrated it. They all stepped in, and J.B. reached to close the door.

“Hold on. If we’re goin’ to pass out,” said Ryan, “I guess it’s better if we sit down first.”

They sat in a ring, Krysty opposite Ryan. Their eyes met and he winked at her. He enjoyed the hint of a smile on her full lips. And she was a mutie!

The door closed and once again darkness clawed its way over Ryan’s mind, blanking it out.

The moment of wakening was less painful, the headache gone, but the feeling of disorientation was still as strong. It was as if every atom in his body had been juggled around and clumsily reassembled.

Ryan opened his eye.

The walls were brown glass. By the texture it looked armored. It was not possible to guess its thickness.

“Come on, people,” Ryan said. “Doc? You know how to reset this machine?”

“Yes, indeed, Mr. Cawdor. But I must repeat that it is a random element. All instructions and codes are gone these many, many years. I can alter the setting and then it will be in the laps of what gods we worship.”

“I worship this,” said Okie, holding up her M-16.

As he checked that everyone had recovered, Ryan wondered yet again about Doc’s range of knowledge. Lots of it could have come from some hoard of old books or vids. There was no other sensible explanation. But he knew so much. Spoke as if he’d been here before. Been here a hundred years ago!

They were back in the clean, antiseptic anteroom. Ryan tugged the door open, hearing the faint whisper of sound that told him that it was air locked.

He pulled harder and it swung open.

The master control room now held a dozen or more of the squat, muscular Indians.

Okie reacted fastest, and Ryan winced at the stream of bullets that burst past him, knocking down five or six of the attackers in a welter of blood.

“Don’t fire!” screamed Doc’s voice. “Damage anything and we’ll never jump again!”

Ryan reached for his heavy panga, drawing it from its stitched leather sheath, thrusting at the face of the nearest of the Indians. It cleaved through the open mouth, splintering teeth as it did so, and lodged itself in the cervical vertebrae at the back of the man’s neck. Blood gushed, hot and salt, into Ryan’s face, nearly blinding him. But the man was down and done, screams bubbling through the choking flood of scarlet.

Around him the most desperate battle raged. Okie used her gun like a club, smashing one man across the side of the head, kicking him hard in the groin as his hands went to grab her.

Henn and Finnegan had both drawn their knives, automatically fighting back to back, the steel of their blades making a deadly web that snared any of the Sioux who tried to get within it.

J.B. had his delicate knives, one in each hand, the thin blades opening up hideous gashes like lips in the stomach of the man attacking him. As the man reeled away, crying like a scalded kitten, Hun used her own broad-bladed dagger to slit his throat. Blood from the jugular pattered onto the concrete floor, making it slick and treacherous.

Krysty ducked and weaved against a taller Indian, her hair seeming to foam back and forth in the man’s face, blinding him. But she did not carry a long-bladed knife, and she was in desperate trouble. Meanwhile Ryan punched a grinning face, knocking it away from him, and raised the panga as he closed on Krysty’s attacker.

The impact jarred Ryan’s arm. But the steel was honed enough and weighted enough to hack clean through the skin and flesh and bone of the neck. The head, eyes staring, tongue moving, rolled and bounced among the fighters’ feet, while the body gradually slumped to the floor as though reluctant to submit to death.

“Thanks,” she panted, trying to back away to join Doc near the door through to the gateway.

“Anytime.”

Henn was staggering, blood streaming from a cut along the side of his thigh, with Finnegan holding off a pair of the Indians, each armed with a triangular ax.

“Make for the door!” Ryan yelled, going to help Finnegan cover Henn’s retreat. Hun got there first, stabbing the nearest of the attackers so hard that the steel snapped and she withdrew only the hilt, grinning at the shocked and puzzled expression on the bronzed face of the man she had just killed.

Doc, Krysty, Henn and Finnegan were through into the anteroom, watching anxiously as their friends still battled on. Nine or ten of the Indians were down, dying or dead. But four more had come in, two armed with bows and arrows.

“Back!” shouted Ryan again, pushing Hunaker in front of him, parrying a lunge from a feather-tipped spear, turning and spilling the man’s guts in loops of greasy intestine around his feet.

Okie stood, legs braced, to one side of the doorway, the M-16 steady in her hands, waiting a chance to open fire at the enemy without harming the electrical equipment in its serried banks.

J.B. followed Hun through, then Ryan was in the doorway, tapping Okie on the arm. At the far end of the control room, more of the Sioux came pouring in, screaming and shouting. An arrow hit the wall at Ryan’s side, and he snapped off a 3-round burst at the man who had loosed it. The rounds kicked the man onto his back, knocking others over with the violence of his dying.

Another arrow clipped Okie’s right shoulder, pinning her to the wall by the material of her jacket. “Bastard!” she hissed, reaching and snapping the shaft of the arrow, and throwing it contemptuously on the concrete. Then she ripped in half the man who had wounded her. His body jerked and danced, held up by the force of the bullets that stitched him apart. As she took her finger off the trigger he fell sideways, crashing into one of the consoles, where sparks flew and a siren began to howl deep in the recesses of the Redoubt.

“That screws it,” hissed Ryan, grabbing Okie and pulling her after him. There wasn’t time to close the intervening door. The rest of them were already in the glass-walled chamber, beckoning to Ryan.

More arrows sliced by them, one plucking at the hem of his coat. J.B. yelled for them all to get down. The armored door began to close the moment they were all inside.

Ryan was last. A final shaft missed his left elbow by a hairsbreadth, hitting the control panel to the gateway, splintering one of the numbered buttons, breaking the plastic cover, revealing all the mass of tangled multicolored wiring beneath. As the door closed, Ryan’s last glimpse of the Redoubt in the Darks was a worm of smoke inching from the damaged control.

An arrow pinged against the glass, but the thick plate held fast. The fog rose about them and the metal disks glowed brightly. Ryan felt himself being sucked into the maelstrom and fought against losing consciousness. But the physical disturbance was too severe, and the darkness swamped his mind.

 

RYAN OPENED HIS EYE.

As before, his seven comrades were lying all around him. J.B.’s glasses had become dislodged from his thin nose and lay on the floor. Finnegan was snoring, flat on his back, revealing a mouthful of teeth that overlapped and jostled one another like a view into an excavated graveyard. Hunaker was curled into a fetal ball, eyes blinking as she began to recover. Henn held his leg, the blood still trickling steadily from it. Okie was also bleeding, crimson rivulets threading from between her fingers as she clamped her hand over the superficial flesh wound in her shoulder. Her other hand held the M-16 tight. Krysty was sitting up, shaking her head to clear the mist from it. The front of her overalls was soaked with blood from the Indian that Ryan had decapitated.

Doc was groaning, with a small pool of yellow bile near his feet. As he sat up, he looked toward Ryan. “Upon my… I am becoming too old for this sort of foolishness, sir. Indeed I am.”

“If they wreck the Redoubt up in the Darks, then what if we tried to get back?”

“Not a wise idea, Mr. Cawdor. I will alter the setting so that the automatic return is negated. That is, if we should decide not to remain here.”

“Where is here, Doc?” grunted Hunaker, standing up.

The glass was a pale gray color, and as Ryan stood he noticed that there was a network of very fine cracks lacing the plate. He took a deep breath. The air smelled bad. He could taste the oily flavor of methane on his tongue, and some other, bitter chemical.

“Don’t like this. J.B., you come with me. Rest of you stay here. Doc, you’d best alter the control.”

“You do appreciate that I can change them so we don’t return, but I have no control over where we might eventually finish up?”

“Yeah. Just do it, Doc. Ready, J.B.?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

As soon as they left the trans-mat chamber, Ryan sensed something was wrong. Gravely wrong. The bitter flavor of the air was stronger and it was very warm. The door to the anteroom was already ajar. There was no furniture there at all, and the walls were marked with deep gouges and scratches, with smears of burned ash across the ceiling. The outer was also partly open, showing nothing but a great darkness.

“Don’t like it, Ryan,” said J.B.

“I know what you mean.”

Ryan moved to the door and peered out. The darkness was not total. The sky glowed an unimaginably deep red, with flashes of lightning scattered across it. But each bolt of lightning stayed in place for several seconds as though frozen there. Distant thunder rumbled. The land seemed flat and sandy, from what they could make out in the strip of light that spilled out through the open doorway.

On a sudden deadly impulse, Ryan flicked on the small geiger counter in his lapel. Immediately it began to crackle and click louder than he’d ever thought possible.

“It’s a hot spot!” said J.B.

“There’s enough milli-rads here to fry a war wag. Let’s go.”

As he turned, Ryan glimpsed something moving out in that seared desert. Something blasphemously huge, lumbering toward the remnants of the Redoubt. He hadn’t made out the shape of the entity, except that it had seemed in that single glimpse to have no true shape at all.

With the knowledge of that horror at his heels, Ryan pushed J.B. ahead of him, past the banks of machines, many silent and blind. He saw the others, gathered in the door of the chamber, and the look on his face propelled them into instant action. Guns sprang into hands.

“No. Just get out!”

“I’ve altered…” began Doc, but Ryan elbowed him aside, pulling the door and slamming it shut behind J.B. and himself.

The lights came on and the thick mist rose about their feet.

“Here we go,” said Krysty softly. “Where to this time?”

“Somewhere better,” Ryan began to say, but he felt the suction of his mind and the atoms and molecules of his body being displaced.

But even as the displacement occurred, and in spite of it, Ryan Cawdor knew with a profound and gratifying certainty that, in fact, they had already achieved, truly achieved, what he and Krysty had set out to do. They had broken from the bonds that were at the heart of the Deathlands, they had entered the forbidden places, deep into the Darks, and they had found… something, something other than their dreary experience in the Deathlands, something that by its very newness spelled hope for a different life, a different future.

That was what they had always yearned for, quested for, put their lives on the line for. Now Ryan and his woman and J.B. and their warrior allies and the strange character called Doc were free at last of the deadening reality of the Deathlands, free to live anew even if the new life was hazardous and unknown.

Through love and through death they had come this far, and they had seen so much, and now they would conquer—

And the darkness fell once more over them all.

 

Epilogue

« ^

RYAN opened his eye.

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