JAMES AXLER

 

A COLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON • PARIS • AMSTERDAM • STOCKHOLM • HAMBURG

ATHENS • MILAN • TOKYO • SYDNEY

This is for MH who made me believe in the reality of the deus ex machina.

With thanks and the best of friendship.

First edition September 1986 ISBN 0-373-62502—

Copyright © 1986 by Worldwide Library. Philippine copyright 1986. Australian copyright 1986.

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Eton Mills, Ontario, Canada MSB 3K9.

All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and al! the incidents are pure invention.

The Worldwide Library trademark, consisting of the words GOLD EAGLE and the portrayal of an eagle, and the Worldwide trademark, consisting of the word WORLDWIDE in which the letter “O” is represented by a depiction of a globe, are trademarks of Worldwide Library.

Printed in Canada

 

Table of Contents

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue

Chapter One

^ »

RYAN CAWDOR BLINKED, wincing as he tried to sit up. The lights still glowed in the patterned metal plates set in the floor and ceiling. The armored glass walls were pale blue streaked with gray. Instinctively his hand fell to the smooth butt of the SIG-Sauer P-226 9 mm pistol on his hip.

There was the now-familiar feeling of nausea as he backed against the wall, shaking his head to clear the cobwebs of the mat-trans jump. Only a frozen moment ago he and his colleagues had been facing death in the Darks, the mountainous region that had once been called Montana. Now they were…?

“Where the firestorm are we?” he muttered.

It was their fifth jump within an hour. Each one had been accompanied by a gut-wrenching sickness and a whirling in the brain, as if every single particle of tissue was being dissolved and spun through a suction pump.

Ryan couldn’t even begin to think how the complex machines might work. Probably nobody now alive had any ideas. All of that came from before the war.

 

NEARLY A HUNDRED YEARS had passed since Doomsday—high noon on the twentieth day of January in the year of our Lord 2001. The last day of our Lord. The missiles rose and the skies darkened. The death toll was countless and humanity stood on the brink of extinction. But there were survivors. There will always be survivors.

From the caves and mines and shelters, they emerged to find a changed world where a nuclear winter raged for nearly a generation. But again there were survivors. And they bred and their children bred.

Three generations and close to a hundred years passed. Most of the United States was changed. Deserts in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico became fiery nuke hot spots where storms carrying rain of undiluted acid howled in from the Gulf. Most of California had slipped unprotesting into the seething Pacific. Volcanoes and earthquakes had changed the maps forever.

Except that there weren’t any maps.

On the East Coast, the big cities crumbled in the endless rain. From the lawless elements rose a new breed of leader, barons who ran their own fiefdoms like medieval lords, paying armies of mercenaries to protect and expand their borders.

In the middle of the country, known as the Deathlands, civilization was reduced to several scattered communities linked by a frail network of poor roads. Along these roads came the merchants, trading in food or supplies or medicine or blasters, and roving bands of freakish muties that set ambushes and raped and killed. And, on occasion, indulged their taste for human flesh.

Best known of the merchants was the man called the Trader. And the most respected, was his first lieutenant, Ryan Cawdor.

 

RYAN SAT STILL, fighting to steady his breathing. Sweating, he wiped his face, his fingers touching the patch over his left eye. Then he traced the long, puckered scar that ran down the right side of his face, then tugged at the corner of his narrow mouth.

His mouth was dry and he licked his lips. His first firefight back East had occurred when he was twelve. That was nineteen years ago. A skinny kid with a mop of curly black hair, hefting a battered Armalite. For the first time, killing a man. Funny how you remembered the first. Remembered the first man you killed. First woman you made love to.

Both times Ryan had been twelve. On a trip into the Appalachians he’d met a web-fingered mutie and blew half his guts away, spilling the loops of greasy intestines into the man’s lap. First woman had been a mulatto whore in a bawdy house near Butcher’s Creek.

What brought all that back? “Yeah,” he whispered, to himself. “Mouth gets dry and your hands get wet. Mebbe should be the other way round.”

Hearing a low groan, he looked to one side of the chamber. It was Finnegan. Fat, jolly Finn, with a red stain drying to brown on his hip, where Hennings had bled on him as Finn hauled his friend to safety. Henn lay still, his breathing ragged and harsh, blood still oozing from the ax-cut along his thigh. Hunaker was corning around. She was on her hands and knees, fiercely shaking her head, forcing the clinging darkness from her mind. She sensed Ryan watching her and looked up at him, running her hand through her cropped green hair.

“Hurts like a bastard, don’t it, Ryan? Like a fuckin’ bastard.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

Okie, the tall, good-looking blaster, heaved herself to her feet in a single, fluid movement, cradling her M-16A1 autocarbine, its eleven-inch barrel like a material extension of her own sullen aggression. Ryan noticed that her wounded shoulder had nearly stopped bleeding.

On the other side of the chamber, J.B. Dix wiped the back of his neck. His eyes blinked twice behind wire-rimmed glasses, and he coughed, clearing his throat.

“Not so bad, this time.” J.B. was a man of few words.

Next to him, Krysty Wroth stirred. For her, the passage had been worse than usual, and she was doubled over, coughing and retching dryly. Her long red hair, brighter than fire, tumbled to the floor, seeming to move with its own sentient life. Ryan watched her, still prey to his own warring emotions. The girl they’d rescued from muties only a few short weeks ago had managed to affect him as no other woman ever had. With her dazzling green eyes and wonderful body, Krysty had attracted every man on the war wagon. It had seemed utterly logical that she and Ryan should make love.

But only in the last couple of hours had the realization dawned on him that the girl was a mutie. Under extreme stress she could produce a burst of violent muscular energy that was awesome. He still hadn’t sorted out how he felt about falling in love with a mutie.

“How’s Doc?” he asked, moving unsteadily across the hexagonal room, stooping by the hunched figure of the old man.

Doc was huddled over, his hands clasped between his legs. His cracked boots were smeared with drying mud, and dirt was smeared across the shoulders of his faded frock coat. His battered stovepipe hat was at his side, its crown dented. Tangled gray hair spilled over narrow shoulders. As Ryan nudged him with the toe of his boot, Doc stirred and moaned, his mouth sagging open, showing his peculiarly perfect teeth.

“C’mon, Doc,” Ryan said. “Let’s find out where you’ve taken us this time.”

“Time, my dear sir,” spluttered the old man. “Time is present and also past and, perhaps, even present in the future. Is that where we’ve jumped?”

“Where?” asked J.B. standing beside Ryan.

“Where what?” replied Doc.

“Leave him be,” said Krysty, pulling herself up, straightening her hair. “Poor old bastard’s never all here.”

The truth was that Doc was never quite anywhere. They’d rescued him some days earlier from a tortured thralldom in a township called Mocsin, southeast of the Darks. The boss of the town had been Jordan Teague, whose corpse now lay somewhere among the smoldering ruins of Mocsin. Ryan and the others had narrowly escaped the enmity of Teague’s head sec man, Cort Strasser. Strasser had been Doc’s prime tormentor and had used his malign ingenuity to constantly fashion new humiliations for the old-timer.

There was something uncanny about Doc. Despite his frequent ravings and long silences, he seemed to have arcane knowledge of the past. Even the far past, before the wars. But his brain had been so addled by Strasser’s cruelty that coherent thought seemed beyond him. Ryan doubted that Doc would ever return to what men called normal.

“Everyone ready? Henn, how’s the leg?”

“Not bad, Ryan. I got me another if’n this one buys the farm.”

“One leg less to piss down,” sniggered Finnegan, ducking Henn’s attempt to knock his head off with a roundhouse right.

“The shoulder, Okie?” Ryan asked.

“Stiffening. Never saw what hit me. Arrow, mebbe? I’m fine. We goin’ out?”

Ryan moved toward the heavy door to the gateway, but J.B. stopped him. “Best check the weapons. Sooner’s better’n later.”

J.B. had been the armorer to the Trader for more than nine years, joining the Trader’s group about a year after Ryan Cawdor. Despite his mild, almost scholarly appearance, J.B. Dix knew more about armaments than anyone alive. When the world exploded in 2001, every single industrial center vanished in a nuclear cloud. Since then, the manufacture of guns had virtually ceased. But all over the country were hidden stockpiles that had been packed with the requisite tools of war nearly a century ago. And J.B. Dix knew about all of them.

For a couple of minutes the chamber echoed with the clicking of bolts and the testing of springs. Ejected cartridges rattled brassily on the metal floor as the group tested the action of their handguns and rifles.

Ryan drew his panga from its scabbard, felt the honed edge with his thumb, nodded his approval and slid the eighteen-inch blade back out of sight.

Krysty removed her three slim, leaf-bladed throwing knives from the bandolier across her chest, flicking them casually from hand to hand, finding the points of balance.

Only Doc had no weapon. He dusted off his tall hat and attempted to brush his frock coat clean.

“Ready?” said Ryan, getting nods of approval all around. “Then let’s go.”

The door opened smoothly with the hiss of an air lock. As he led his group into the adjoining room, Ryan heard the faint sound of a distant siren and stopped to listen, but it faded out.

Rectangular and roughly five paces long by three wide, the room was similar to those that he’d seen in other gateways in other redoubts. There was a plastic table on one side and four shelves on the other and nothing else in the room except a polished copper bowl on the table. Hunaker picked the bowl up and peered inside.

“Nothin’. Mebbe somethin’ dried at the bottom. Brown crust like blood.”

She banged it back down, and it rang like a temple bell, the noise surprisingly loud. Ryan glared at her, and she tried an apologetic half smile. With Hun that was better than nothing.

The far door was shut. If this was like the other redoubts they’d briefly explored, the room beyond would be the main control site for the matter-transmitter complex. Ryan drew his handgun, the weight of the fifteen-shot SIG-Sauer comforting. Around him, the others readied themselves. That was one of the good things about the Trader’s training: nobody needed to be told what to do in this sort of situation. You got your finger on the trigger, nerves stretched tight, eyes moving. It was a time when mistakes got made and men died.

One of the things that Ryan liked about the P-226 was its safety. The pistol fired when you pulled the trigger. Not before. Not when you dropped it. He remembered Brecht, the bearded tail gunner from War Wag Two, dropping his old Beretta 92. That was enough to set it off and the bullet hit Karen Mutter, the oldest woman aboard any of the war wags, in her left buttock. Her scream could have shattered crystal at a half mile.

She had been among the dead at Mocsin.

The door opened on a greased track, and Ryan Cawdor stepped through the doorway. It was just like the others. Consoles of whirring instruments, lights flashing red and blue and green. Banks of comps with tape loops that jittered on as they had for a hundred years. It was a great tribute to the technical skill of the engineers before the Chill that these things still functioned after a century of neglect.

He sniffed the air, trying to catch some clue that might prepare him for what lay behind the massive door to the gateway. His limited experience told him it should open on a corridor that was part of a fortress built like some of the stockpiles that they’d found in the last few years.

He flicked on the rad counter in his lapel. It cheeped and muttered quietly, but there was nothing of the fearful crackling that would indicate a hot spot.

“Clean,” said J.B., rubbing a finger along the top of one of the consoles, showing it to Ryan.

“Don’t spill any dirty blood, Hennings,” warned Finnegan, chuckling at his own joke. The tall black limping along at the rear of the party didn’t bother to reply.

To the right of the polished metal door was a green lever set at the single word Closed. Cautiously Ryan eased the lever upward toward the word Open.

There was a whisper of gears meshing, and the door began to move sideways. As soon as it had opened a couple of inches, Ryan stopped it. Very carefully he put his good eye to the gap, looking both ways. Sniffing again.

“Anythin’?” asked Okie.

“No. Blank wall. But…I think…seems like I can smell food.”

“Food?” Finnegan quickly repeated.

“Yeah, it smells like meat cooking, but it’s very faint, maybe from some days ago.”

The rad counter was silent, surprising Ryan. What kind of place was this, he wondered, that had virtually no radiation? Had to be a place where there’d been no fighting. Or where they’d used some low-yield weapons with short half-lives.

“Any idea where the fuck we are, Doc?” he asked, leaving the door barely open.

“Not a clue, my dear fellow. Trouble with these jumps. All the control instructions long gone. They took care that the redoubts held nothing, in case any Russkies came sauntering along. All coded and tucked away. All gone?”

“Russkies?” said Krysty Wroth. “Back in Harmony, my Uncle Tyas McNann used to talk to Peter Maritza, about Russkies.”

“Russians,” J.B. said. “Used to call ‘em reds, ‘cause they killed so many people. Huge land out west of us beyond where the coast all fell in. Mean bastards—so the old books I read kept sayin’ about ‘em.”

“I’m openin’ the door.” Ryan pushed the lever all the way up, and the door slid open, revealing a blank wall and a narrow corridor running in either direction as far as they could see. Not that they could see very far; the passage was gently curved, its ends out of sight.

Joining Ryan, they entered the corridor, fanning out with guns ready. He tasted the air again, still catching the elusive but undeniable scent of cooking.

“I can smell it, too,” whispered Finnegan. “Good meat stew and fresh bread. That way,” he said, pointing to the left.

“Best go that way,” said Hennings. “Fat little tub ain’t never wrong ‘bout food. He’d ride the tongue of the mouth of hell for a mug of broth.”

“Left it is,” agreed Ryan, leading them off, his bootheels ringing uncomfortably loudly on the stone floor.

This redoubt was different from the others they’d seen. There were no rooms opening off the main corridor, just a long bare passage with a high domed ceiling. At its zenith, lights were deeply recessed behind thick glass. The walls were a restful cream color, unmarked by the passage of the hundred years or so since the place was built.

“See any tracks, Hun?” Ryan asked, after walking a couple of hundred paces.

The girl knelt, placing a hand on the stone, lowering her head until the stubble of her green hair brushed the floor. The others watched. Hunaker was probably the best scout in the group; the Trader had often complimented her about it.

“It’s cleaned,” she said. “Swept in the last few days by a buggy with fat, soft tires. There’s a layer of rubber down here that’s real old, like someone’s been drivin’ the buggy for fuckin’ years. No prints.”

Ryan led on, every fifty paces or so noticing a slit in the ceiling. Finally he stopped and stared up at one. “Looks like a heavy-armor shield. Drops down to seal off a section.”

“Spotted the mini vid cameras?” asked J.B. He pointed with the muzzle of his Steyr 5.6 to a tiny glass bead on a thin metal stem protruding from the wall where it curved sharply into the ceiling.

“Linked to a sonic pickup, I guess,” he continued. “Been watchin’ us since we left the gateway. Watchin’ us now.”

“Not now,” said Okie, hugging her beloved M-16A1 carbine against her hip, with the stock collapsed, and ripping off a short burst at the camera. Half a dozen 5.56 mm rounds spat from the eleven-inch barrel and exploded into the concrete, pulverizing the little camera. The spent rounds screamed and bounced along the corridor.

“That’s brilliant,” said Krysty. “Real brilliant.”

“Keep your lip sewn up or—” the tall blaster began, turning angrily toward the other girl. But Ryan stepped between them.

“Enough.”

“Sure. Take that slut’s part, Ryan. Look after your bawdy-house hooker.”

“I said enough, Okie. There’s eight of us here. Either we watch each other’s backs or we can all be dead. It’s not a fuckin’ game, lady.”

“Mr. Cawdor!” shouted Doc, pointing with a tremulous finger down the corridor.

It was as he’d guessed. The passage was split into sections, each separated by retractable armor-plated bulkheads. One of them was dropping from the ceiling like an executioner’s ax, bisecting the corridor. Before any of them could move, it settled solidly in place on the floor with a metallic clang.

“Bastard!” spat Ryan, spinning around to see precisely what he’d expected. Twenty paces or so in front of them, another door was falling, inexorably sealing them to an exitless part of the complex. And it looked as if the bulkheads were made of some vanadium alloy that would resist their plastic explosives and grenades.

“No bombs,” pleaded J.B., looking quickly around the group. “The concussion could kill us.”

There was a dreadful moment of tension. Everyone in the party except Krysty and Doc had often put their lives on the line. On the war wags, ambushes and traps were part of everyday life. The best chance of escape was almost always in the first paralyzing breaths. Everyone knew that.

Now all of them moved and turned like caged animals, fingers white on triggers, eyes raking the walls and floor and ceiling for some hint of an escape route. But the only marks that sullied the smooth whiteness were the pockmarks where Okie had wasted the vid camera.

It was a frenetic ballet of nerves. Knowing that everyone was riding the knife edge, Ryan called for calm. “Easy. Easy. Whoever it is, they’ve got us cold.”

A voice reverberated from a hidden speaker, so distorted that it was difficult to tell whether it was male or female, young or old. But the message was clear.

“All dressed up to kill… but look who’s goin’ to die. Guns down, slow and easy. Hands up on heads. You have ten seconds, then I let the gas in. It’ll kill you in less’n half a minute.”

Ryan spotted another camera near the top of the bulkhead in front of them and guessed the speaker was linked to it. Which, he realized, was a useless bit of information.

“Quickly!” the voice barked, changing then, frighteningly, to a childish whisper. “Do it. Game’s done. Ally, ally oxen free. Ally, ally oxen free.”

Ryan put his guns on the stone floor and placed his hands on his head. The others followed.

 

Chapter Two

« ^ »

AFTER THE NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST of 2001, Russia ceased to exist. The U.S.S.R. vanished overnight and, in sixty searing minutes, the purging flames of the brief war that ended all wars destroyed every single Russian city and industrial complex. Every armaments factory and missile base, every port and bridge, was nuked. The destruction was total.

In places—particularly the farthest recesses of the north and east in the devastated Kamchatka Peninsula, in Siberia and the parts of old Russia near North America—the nuclear winter lingered just as in other regions of the globe, the leaden skies and bitter cold had reigned for a generation.

To survive in temperatures that rarely rose above five degrees required a brutal adaptation. The trees of the taiga were destroyed; only a few stunted, mutated pines were left in millions of acres. Most of the wildlife had succumbed as an almost universal death spread across the North. What animal life survived became mutated like the trees.

And the children of the people who survived, many of them were born mutated like the animals.

The peasants in the Russian hamlet of Ozhbarchik knew little of living. What they understood was how to barely exist. They understood how to maintain the breath in their scrawny bodies on a diet of dried fish and the occasional lucky find of the carcass of a small mammal that the wolves had abandoned. Beyond that, there was watery milk from the village’s four rack-boned cows, and an endless diet of potatoes, turnips and other root vegetables. One of the peasants owned a few chickens, and once every few weeks found a tiny egg among the rotting straw.

In these tumbledown hovels, which were scattered along a shallow valley about fifty miles from the sea, there lived thirty-seven men, nineteen women and four children. Only one of the villagers, a man, was older than thirty-five. The grubbing lives of the people of Ozhbarchik were brutish and short.

One of the children of the village, a young boy had the rheumy-eyed, vacant stare and slobbering, sagging mouth of a congenital idiot. His right hand had no thumb, and on his left hand were crammed eleven shrunken, residual digits. Beneath the torn cloth and stinking furs he had two separate and distinct sets of genitalia. One set was male.

One was not.

The group of men surrounding him weren’t familiar. A few of them were large men and rode horses, but most of them were small and were astride squat, shaggy ponies. All of them wore layers of fur over their bodies and heavy fur hats halfway over their slanted eyes. Most had rifles slung across their shoulders. Behind them was a train of a dozen pack horses carrying bigger guns and food.

The boy smiled and nodded. Strangers were rare in Ozhbarchik. Strangers meant happiness; he knew that. Sometimes there was music and dancing; he liked that, liked to caper with his ponderous steps, his head swinging low, his hands pawing the air like a mutie polar bear. When he danced like that, his mother and father laughed.

It was good.

The man leading the party of riders was tall, close to six feet. His eyes were almond shaped, with golden irises. His mouth was thick lipped and kindly. Around his forehead he wore a band of beaten silver with a large ruby at its center. His name was Uchitel, and he was nicknamed the Teacher because he was almost the only one in the band who was literate. But that wasn’t what made him the leader.

“Boy,” he called.

“Yes, master,” replied the boy, as he’d been taught, bowing, low.

“This is Ozhbarchik?”

“Yes, master.”

“There is food here?”

“Yes, master.”

Uchitel nodded. “It is good to see such politeness in one so young. Surely the fathers here teach their children well.” The lad grinned, shuffling his booted feet in the powdery snow. “They will welcome strangers and will give us food and wine, will they not?”

“Give, master?” The boy was puzzled. They didn’t “give” anything to anyone. They sold or traded or bartered. There was little enough for them.

“Yes, boy. Give us all food? Do you not understand that?”

Despite his idiocy, the lad knew when something was wrong. The smile disappeared from his face as he backed slowly away. “We do not give food, master. No food to give. Poor.”

Uchitel turned in his saddle, nodding sagely to the group’s incendiary expert, Pyeka, the Baker—the baker of men.

“This spark of sunlight says that his people are poor, Pyeka.”

“It is sad to be poor, Uchitel.”

“It is truly sad to be poor.” To the retreating boy, he said, “Are all poor in your village?”

The stranger’s face hadn’t changed. There was no anger in the voice, no scowl to the wide mouth. The strange yellow eyes remained fathomless, inscrutable. But something was different. The young boy was so terrified that his bowels loosened and he fouled himself.

“He doesn’t answer you, Uchitel,” called Bochka, the Barrel, a fat man on an equally fat horse.

“No. He must be taught a lesson in manners, after, all. But what of these poor? Can we help them seek a road from their poverty?”

The man was making a joke. The boy saw that, because many of the men were laughing. But he hadn’t heard him say anything funny. He felt dimly that he ought to go and warn his father and mother about these strangers. But his feet seemed frozen to the ground.

It was the lean figure of Zmeya, the Snake, who answered. “There is one sure cure for the poor, Uchitel.”

He reached inside his furs and drew out an oiled pistol—a 9 mm Makarov PM, manufactured in the hundreds of thousands in many state factories before the long winter began. It was a compact, handy automatic with a double-action trigger. The band had discovered a cache of them in a concrete bunker seven months before, and Uchitel had insisted that every member take one. Before that they’d had a variety of Stechkins, TT-33s, Radoms and Walther PPKs. Uchitel saw the value of them all carrying the same handgun, though each still carried his own favorite rifle or machine pistol or carbine.

The boy’s eyes opened wider and he began to snivel. Some of the villagers had guns, but the weapons were old and battered, mended with baling wire. He’d never seen anything like this glittering, polished pistol. The slim man tossed it upward so that the dim sun was reflected in the silver stars on each side of the crosshatched butt.

Several of the horsemen drew their guns, laughing as the lad fell to his knees. The front of his breeches was now marked with urine; he’d completely lost control.

Out in the open, among the low scrub of the tundra, the cracks of the handguns sounded surprisingly flat and unmenacing. The first bullet hit the kneeling boy through the right shoulder, knocking him over. Blood gushed from his ragged clothes, staining the snow. A second shot tore through his left thigh, exiting and taking with it a chunk of muscle the size of a man’s fist. Blood poured from this gaping wound and the boy screamed, a thin and feeble sound in the wind-washed wasteland.

“He is still poor, Uchitel,” yelled Krisa, the Rat, a tiny man with eyes as red as glowing coals. Krisa took careful aim, steadying his right hand with his left, then squeezed the trigger twice.

The first bullet tore into the boy’s chest, snapping ribs, exploding the lungs into tatters of torn tissue, sending bright arterial crimson spurting from the gaping mouth. The boy’s yelping ceased, and he made a desperate attempt to escape. But the wound in his leg unbalanced him and he fell.

By falling, he put the diminutive Kris off his aim. He had intended to shoot the dying boy again through the center of the chest. But the 9 mm round smashed into the lad’s face, breaking his lower jaw and tearing it away on the left so that it hung, hideously lopsided, the row of jagged and broken teeth spilling out with the impact. Continuing, the lead sliced through the boy’s tongue and the roof of his mouth, digging deep into the dark caverns of his brain.

The boy kicked in the snow like a rabbit with a broken spine. Watching, the horsemen cheered and laughed; a couple of them made wagers on how long the poor rabbit would last. After fifteen or twenty seconds the corpse lay still, looking oddly shrunken, its blood staining the snow.

Uchitel stood in the stirrups, waved a gloved fist and shouted above the eternal wind, “He is poor no more, my brothers and sisters. Let us go now to his filthy hamlet of Ozhbarchik and help them all to escape from poverty.”

As he heeled his black stallion forward, he heard the group laughing. Uchitel smiled, relishing their happiness. In a harsh world, it was good to give pleasure.

The boy’s corpse soon stopped bleeding and the wind began to cover it with snow. But not enough to hide it from the scavengers who came creeping from secret places to rend the flesh from the bone.

 

UCHITEL KNEW that somewhere far to the west of them was a range of mountains, including several volcanoes, and beyond that the ruins of what had been a fine city that he had once visited. Called Yakutsk, it was near the left bank of the Lena River and had been home to over one hundred thousand people. Intercontinental ballistic missile bases near it had sealed its fate in 2001, and the Americans had used “clean” missiles against it, which slaughtered human beings but left buildings more or less intact. But the change in the climate over the next four generations had made a ruins of the city. Uchitel had been there three times, once when he was only fourteen, then twice in his twenties. There he had found old books and had taught himself the skills that allowed him to lead the guerrillas.

He knew how the land had changed. Lakes had appeared and drained. Mountains had sunk and valleys risen. And in many places there were new smoldering volcanoes.

He sniffed the heavy, ugly smell of sulfur that hung in the air. The wind carried the pale yellow tint of the chemical, fouling the high Arctic, making breathing extremely unpleasant.

Angrily he tugged his thick scarf over his mouth and pulled down his fur cap so that only his amber eyes faced the gusting snow. The boy couldn’t have been more than a few minutes walk from his home, he judged; these groveling mutant curs in the wilderness never went farther than a mile from their houses. Rarely did you hear of anyone journeying any distance. There might be a merchant, but to catch one alone was as rare as a day without ice. They traveled in armed convoys and there would be little to bring them this far from anything resembling civilization.

In a tavern a hundred miles southwest, a merchant had whispered disturbing news to Uchitel—news that the man had tried at first to sell.

“How much for word of a hunt?” he’d asked, his greasy head to one side, his little eyes blinking with greed.

Uchitel had asked him why he should pay for such news.

“Because of who is the hunter and who is the hunted.” was the reply.

Sitting on his horse, waiting while the stragglers in the band crossed the trackless terrain, Uchitel smiled beneath his scarf at the memory of the plump merchant. To prompt the little man, the tall chieftain had taken his left hand in both of his.

Squeezing.

Squeezing until the merchant whimpered and sweat burst from his temples.

Squeezing until blood came around the sides of the purpling fingernails and the man wept to his mother’s grave for Uchitel to stop.

Squeezing until his own knuckles grew white with the effort. And the trader told his tale in a stammering rush of tears.

And still squeezing until every finger bone was cracked and splintered, one against the other. Then pushing the crippled man to the floor among the straw and spilled wine and vomit.

“Much farther, Uchitel?” asked Urach, the Doctor, reining his pony alongside Uchitel’s. Urach was the only other man in the party who could read and write. But his nickname—it should have been Surgeon—came from his skill with knives.

“No,” Uchitel replied, annoyed at having his reverie interrupted. The fat little trader had given him news of a hunt. News that Uchitel had found most unwelcome.

Though the sun appeared intermittently, most of the day was bleak, with flurries of snow reducing visibility. It was bad, but they had all seen much worse. Occasionally a freak tornado came screaming from the north. The wind would be so strong that it would lift a man and his horse together and send them crashing to their death a mile away. Uchitel recalled being in a township to the south when such a storm arose. The buildings, tethered to bedrock with cables of spun metal, held safe. But one of the group, having drunk too much wine, was caught out in the open. The wind destroyed him, splinters of razored ice flaying the clothes from his flesh, then the flesh from his bones.

To the left, Uchitel spotted movement, white against white. He reached for the Kalashnikov AKM .62 mm, then saw that the bear was moving away from them in a lumbering, unhurried gait. It could be on its own, or it could be one of a large pack of bears whose tracks they’d spotted a day earlier.

Zmeya saw the first of the little houses, which were so flat in the snow that they were almost invisible. “There,” he said, pointing ahead and a little to the left.

Uchitel grinned wolfishly. Night wasn’t far off. It would be good to have somewhere to shelter against the lethal drop in temperature. Already he could feel the extra bite in the wind. He lowered the scarf from his nose and mouth, his breath pluming out around him like a bridal veil. Within seconds there was the familiar feeling of his nostril hair freezing, the moisture becoming ice.

Uchitel’s band carried enough provisions for a couple of weeks. There was generally the chance of shooting some fresh meat. But best of all was finding a community that would support them for a night or two. Some villages grudgingly consented. Most had to be persuaded. The last time they’d visited Ozhbarchik, more than a year back, there had been trouble and a knifing. Uchitel felt that this time their methods of persuasion might have to be particularly harsh.

At that moment, remembering the words of the little merchant, he rose in his horned saddle, peering into the snow spume behind them.

There was nothing to be seen.

Nothing, for the time being.

 

Chapter Three

« ^ »

WITH THE HISS of compressed air, the massive doorway immediately ahead of them began to rise slowly, clearing the corridor. They remained standing still, hands on top of their heads.

“Good,” said the disembodied voice from the speaker. “Very good indeed. The Keeper spares you. A sign of anger, and you would have all been cleansed.”

None of the eight needed it spelled out. “Cleansed” was just another word for killed or iced or wasted or chilled or blasted or sent to buy the farm.

“You ain’t muties?”

It sounded like a question, so Ryan answered it. “No, we’re not muties.”

“Them women got funny hair. Ain’t natural. Green and red. They muties?”

Ryan thought about Krysty. She didn’t really look like a mutie at all, despite what he knew of her hidden powers.

“No, none of us is a mutie.”

The crackly voice resumed again. “The Keeper says he wants to know how you got in here?”

“Long story,” said J.B. Dix.

“Got time. Keeper’s got all the time in the world.”

“Can we put our hands down?” asked Ryan.

“No. Yes. Yes, the Keeper says yes. Nobody never got in this redoubt. Never in a hundred, never in a thousand, never in a million years. Keeper don’t allow it. Doors sealed tight as a bat’s ass. No alarms on the outside. Just from the gateway. That how you got in?”

Ryan glanced sideways at J.B. It was a bad situation. The thin, tinny voice sounded crazy. That didn’t alter the fact he had them cold. The forces controlling the redoubt would have access to all kinds of sophisticated weaponry. They needed only to shut that bulkhead again and pump in the nerve gas and they’d be dead in seconds. Better to play along.

“Yeah. We come from the Darks. Don’t rightly know how or why.”

A cackle of laughter. “Not even the Keeper knows ‘bout the gateways. You jumped… where from?”

“The Darks. Used to be called Montana. What else do you want to know?”

“Keeper wants to know everythin’, friend. Keeper does know everythin’, friend. You say you didn’t know where you was comin’?”

“Yeah. Where are we?”

“In good time, friend. Keeper has the redoubt in his charge. Keep it safe. Let no man enter with hate in his heart. You got hate?”

Ryan shook his head. “No. We come in friendship.”

Around him he could feel the tension of the others. None of them was very good at waiting.

“Surely shall the lion lay down with the lamb. I have to search the books for word on what to do. Keeper has to take care. Move not, friends. Leave your blasters on the floor. I’ll watch. So wait.”

“Let’s run for it,” whispered Okie. She was just behind Ryan.

“Where?” retorted J.B. “Pass that door, and there’ll be another.”

“Can’t just fuckin’ wait for the bullet,” said Hennings, moving to the side of the passageway and sitting, back against the wall.

“Who do you figure this Keeper is? Some warlord? A baron?”

J.B. shook his head at Ryan’s question. “Could be. Sounds old.” Lowering his voice, he added, “And crazy as all hell.”

They put their guns in a pile and waited, mostly in silence, for about fifteen minutes. Eventually all of them except Okie joined Henn on the floor of the corridor.

“The Keeper has considered. You are people of peace? With, hearts full of contrite?”

Ryan didn’t know what “contrite” meant, but he nodded anyway. Seemed the best answer. “Yeah.”

“You are hungered?”

“Yeah.” Finnegan got the answer in first.

“Come forward. Leave your weapons of destruction. You will not need them while under the protection of the Keeper.”

“Can’t wait to meet him,” muttered Hunaker, standing and stretching like a big cat.

Hennings went to retrieve the radio, but the voice from the loudspeaker snapped, “No! Leave that. There is no need to communicate with the chill beyond these walls. None.”

“Can hardly reach War Wag One, anyway. Range is only ‘bout fifteen miles. Could be way farther off than that.” Hennings put the radio back with the blasters and grenades.

Ryan led them through the circular corridor, past several doors in the roof. The smell of cooked food became stronger. Intermittently they passed beneath a tiny, silent vid camera.

“This goddamn place goes on forever,” moaned Okie, kicking a wall. Sparks flew from the steel tips of her combat boots.

“Doc? You got any ideas where we might be?” asked Ryan.

Since they’d emerged from the gateway, the old man had been strangely quiet, stalking along, the antiquated hat perched on top of the bony skull. The business of the trap and the creaking voice with its orders hardly seemed to have bothered him at all. Now he started at Ryan’s question.

“What was that, my dear Mr. Cawdor? I fear that my thoughts were elsewhere.”

“Any idea where we are?”

“In a redoubt, sir.”

“We fuckin’ know that,” sighed Hunaker.

“It is a place of some size, unless I miss my guess. My memory is clouded—After a jump, I have always been a touch… there were so many.”

“How many?”

“Many stockpiles and also many redoubts. Indeed, in places of the blessed land where it was thought attacks might be concentrated, I recall they built some redoubts that were also stockpiles. Perhaps this is such a place.”

They’d been walking, by Ryan’s calculation, for nearly fifteen minutes, covering more than a mile at their brisk pace.

When they reached a steel barrier, blocking their progress, they stood and stared at it. Finally Ryan stepped forward and looked into the nearest camera,

“I am becoming tired of this. We are all hungry and thirsty and in need of rest. We come in peace. We have laid down our weapons, yet still you treat us like an invadin’ enemy.”

Even as he spoke, he realized that he had unconsciously slipped into the same form of address as the person behind the screens.

“The Keeper has never seen the like,” came the reply, crackling and wheezing. Either the sound reproduction was poor or a decrepit old man was talking. Or both.

“Then let us see this Keeper. Let us talk to him. We are few. This redoubt must hold hundreds of armed men.”

A burst of laughter spluttered from the loudspeaker, followed by silence.

J.B. moved closer to Ryan, and whispered, “Could use the plasex and run for that gateway.”

“Yeah. Get the fuck out of this fireblasted place. Let’s…”

He was interrupted by the door ahead of them beginning to slide slowly upward, revealing the legs, then bodies, then heads of three people standing facing them.

“I’ll eat my bastard blaster,” whispered Okie, shaking her black hair in disbelief.

Two women and a man were spread across the corridor, two paces apart, each holding a gun. Ryan sized them up, trying to hide his bewilderment. He’d expected to see the cream of the redoubt’s guards: a squad of uniformed sec men, helmeted and masked, each with a gleaming laser rifle or sonic stunner.

The man at the center of the trio stood a scant five feet tall, Ryan guessed. He was dressed in a bizarre assortment of rags and tawdry finery: a jacket that bore sparkling sequins, leather breeches that were hacked off raggedly above the scrawny knees, and a woman’s high-heeled boot on the right foot and a stained shoe of blue canvas on the left. Numerous medals on scraps of iridescent ribbons, jingled from his left breast. A bandolier that crossed his chest contained an extraordinary range of ammunition. Even at a snatched glance Ryan could make out six or seven different calibers.

It was tough to estimate his age. He was so stooped and bent that he might have been ninety. His long white beard was stained amber, seemingly with nicotine, and strands of orange and green ribbons were plaited through it. His hair was streaked silver and gray, and straggled to his shoulders. His face was in shadow, but it was possible to make out a narrow mouth, a hooked nose and deeply set eyes beneath beetling brows.

On the right was a woman of a similar age and garb. Her jacket and leather breeches were so dirty that their original color was indeterminable. She wore a cap, pulled to one side and decorated with cheap glass brooches. She was grinning, showing a picket fence of broken and chipped teeth.

Ryan finally rested his eyes on the other woman. Close to six feet tall, she had natural poise and elegance. Her hair was a tumbling mane of bright gold over a red satin blouse. Her belt had an ornate silver buckle. Her skirt was pale maroon suede—it ended well above the knee—and her legs were encased in high boots of polished crimson leather, the high heels ornamented with tiny silver spurs that tinkled softly as she moved. A pearl-handled pistol hung at her right hip.

Her eyes were a deep summer blue, gazing frankly at Ryan and each of the others in turn. The touch of her eyes was like a caress across Ryan’s cheek, and he was astonished at the girl’s power. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen.

All three of the strangers carried the same weapon and held them with the casual ease of professionals. Yet there was something about them that gave Ryan pause. Their ease was studied, almost as if they’d mastered it from a picture in a book. Real killers had a constant tension to them; they never relaxed.

“Heckler & Koch silenced sub-MG,” whispered J.B., at Ryan’s elbow.

But Ryan had already recognized the guns. He’d seen odd examples in uncovered stockpiles. The model was the MP-5 SD-2. Loaded, they weighed nearly seven pounds. Not that accurate over any distance, but twenty paces away, as they were now, the trio of guns would rip them apart.

“Greetings from the Keeper of this redoubt, strangers,” croaked the old man. “Never have there been such outsiders here.”

Ryan was utterly confused. Where were the sentinels? The platoons of armed sec men? Who was this dotard with the two ill-matched women?

“Thank you. Are we welcome here?”

“We think so. The Keeper thinks you are. What are your names?”

“I’m Ryan Cawdor. This is J.B. Dix.” The Armorer took off his crumpled fedora and nodded. “Hennings and Finnegan. Lady with the green hair is called Hunaker, and the lady with the red hair’s Krysty Wroth. Tall one’s Okie.”

“What of him?” The barrel of the machine gun swung toward Doc, who was lurking at the rear of the group.

“Name’s Doc Tanner. Dr. Theophilus Tanner. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, sir,” he said, bowing deeply, swinging his tall hat behind him. “And you, ladies.”

Ryan was thunderstruck. “Tanner? Theophilus Tanner! You said you didn’t know your fuckin’ name, Doc! How in the…?”

The old man shuffled his feet in embarrassment, like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He grinned expansively and shrugged. “Guess a door sprang open that I’d thought had closed forever. Just came, like that.”

“Theophilus,” said Krysty. “What kind of a name is that, Doc?”

“My name, madam. A poor thing, perchance, but mine own.” He backed away, mumbling to himself. “How could I have forgotten it? How could I?”

“Day of surprises,” said J.B.

If Doc’s memory had really returned, then there were many questions that Ryan wanted to ask him. But that would have to wait until later.

“You had best come. That is the invite of the Keeper. There is food.”

“Our blasters?” asked Okie.

“Later, my pretty little chick. All things later. First come and eat. There is enough.”

For the first time, the old woman spoke, laughing in a bubbling snigger like air rising through molasses. “Oh, but there’s plenty for us all for eternity.” She seemed likely to choke on her own merriment. “Eternity, or even fuckin’ longer!”

The stunted old man made sure his “guests” went ahead of him. The two women stayed behind them on either side, and he stayed right at the back, calling out instructions.

“This place is bigger’n most villes,” said Ryan, walking beside Krysty. They walked another nine or ten minutes, moving into a part of the redoubt with side rooms, all with closed doors. Twice they reached junctions, taking first the left fork, and later the right.

“Any ideas, Doc Tanner?” Ryan asked, glancing back over his shoulder.

“Just Doc does fine. No. Biggest I’ve ever seen. I figure there’s maybe a stockpile linked. I confess that I have never heard of such a monstrous Gormenghastian pile.”

“Got to be hundreds running it,” suggested Krysty, but Doc shook his head.

“I beg to differ, Miss Wroth. They were designed to last millennia with no supervision. A child could manage one of these once everything was set and functioning. I recall the malfunction rate was markedly below one percent of one percent of one percent.”

Ahead there was yet another barrier.

“Halt. The Keeper commands obedience. Beyond that portal is food and rest for the weary traveler. Not that we’ve ever had a traveler before, weary or not.”

“We can take ‘em,” whispered Finnegan. “We all got knives. Krysty’s got the three throwers. Take ‘em all easy as fartin’.”

“They’ll take half of us. Not good enough,” said J.B.

Ryan watched the doddering old man aim a small black remote control device at the top of the closed door. It was obviously a simple sonic switch that activated the opening lock.

“Move forward and enter the demesne of the Keeper of the redoubt.”

They stepped through, beneath another raised barrier, and found themselves in a great mall of another century. The floor was a patterned mosaic of soft tiles. At the center of the mall, which was two hundred paces long by a hundred wide, was a glittering fountain shaped from curves of polished metal, with water burbling and chirruping from level to level. And on every side were stores. But stores of a kind that none of them had ever seen even in their wildest dreams.

Ryan looked around, his jaw sagging, his single eye dazzled wherever he stared.

“Blessed Judas Iscariot,” he heard Doc whisper. “We’ve chron-jumped.”

But the words meant nothing to Ryan, and he forgot them in the bewildering sights all about them.

“I’ll fuck a dead stickie,” said Hunaker in amazement.

“The Keeper will allow you to reconnoiter the parameters of the redoubt once you have eaten.”

“This must take an army,” said Hennings.

The old man cackled. “You think so, black man?”

“We told you our names,” said Ryan. “How ‘bout yours?”

“This my wife, Rachel,” said the old man, pointing to the old woman, who curtsied. “And this is my other wife, Lori. She don’t say much. Bein’ a dummy, that’s why.”

“And where are the others?” asked Krysty.

“Others? Ain’t none. We’re everybody.” He and the old woman giggled.

“Then, where’s…who…?” Ryan was lost for words.

The old man had a coughing fit, and it was some seconds before he could speak clearly. He wiped some drooling spittle from his beard. “Me? I’m Quint the Keeper, young man. The Keeper of the redoubt, and my word is law, and the law is death.”

 

Chapter Four

« ^ »

THE BLIND, MEWING CREATURE tied naked to the bed bore little resemblance to a human being.

Once it had been a farmer named Ivan Ivanovich. It had struggled broken-nailed for a pitiful existence in cruel fields of poisonous soil. It had been married to a wife who had died of a bleeding illness eight years back, leaving three squabbling children. Two of them were mutants, with grotesque facial disfigurements. One had a third, soft pineal eye, exposed and raw, weeping constantly in the center of his forehead.

Now there was only darkness.

Not the comfortable darkness of a cold night, with an iron stove glowing with heat and he and his family huddled together under blankets all in one huge bed.

“Not day… not night,” he mumbled through his broken teeth. But Ivan Ivanovich couldn’t hear his own words, because a sharp file had been thrust into his ears, bursting the delicate eardrums.

There had been no warning. Just the shaggy men, with some devilish women among them, looming out of the driven snow and the fading light. All with guns slung across their shoulders—real guns, not the battered muskets and old bolt-action rifles that the folk of Ozhbarchik could muster.

This band of guerrillas had visited them before. That time the butchers had stolen food and killed a villager who tried to resist them. This time, it seemed, the murderers were bent on killing all the villagers.

Most of the thirty-seven men of Ozhbarchik had fallen in a bloody hail of lead, massacred by the laughing strangers. The nineteen women and three surviving children were seized and held in several of the scattered huts. The cows were each shot with a single bullet through the skull. Ivan’s two chickens were chased and caught with much merriment, decapitated, then thrown into a cauldron simmering over an open fire.

Ivan Ivanovich had been the chieftain of Ozhbarchik. His ownership of the pair of fowl had conferred that dubious honor on him. Now he was paying a monstrous price for that honor.

Before his eardrums were pierced, Ivan Ivanovich had heard the leader of the band, named Uchitel, ordering his followers to take what they wanted, roast the animals, eat their fill. He had warned his people to watch for concealed weapons. “A man may dine, yet feel his tripes spilled in his lap,” he’d shouted.

There had been screaming; high, thin sounds, as the raiders took their pleasure with the women of the village; Ivan’s sister had been taken in front of his eyes by three men at once, with others jostling in a queue behind, their breeches unlaced, and erect, hugely swollen penises thrusting ready.

He’d watched a man fail in his efforts to sodomize a woman then take out his anger by slitting her throat from ear to ear, cursing the dying woman as her blood fountained across his boots.

A huge woman with coarse skin had punched Ivan to the floor, holding him there with a muddied boot, while two other women cut away his clothes with their narrow-bladed knives. They had not been gentle, and his skin was streaming from a dozen shallow slashes from their weapons. They had mocked him as they took and bound him to the rude frame of his own bed, hands and feet pulled painfully apart in a great X. Blood trickled from beneath his broken nails from the tightness of the rawhide cords that bit into the skin at ankle and wrist.

He’d been conscious of the horrors all about him. One of his children had been butchered for refusing to use his tender mouth to pleasure a skinny killer. He’d smelled the scent of a huge fire outside and knew that some of the huts were being used for fuel to roast the slaughtered cattle. Gradually the screaming had died down. None of them had come to hurt him.

Not then. Not at first.

After an hour or so, the leader came to the bed and stared down at him. He wore a long coat made from the skin of a white bear, trimmed with soft sable. His eyes were a curious golden color, his mouth warm and friendly. Around his temples was a band of silver, a ruby at its center.

“This stinking hovel makes me want to vomit, old man. My good brothers and sisters may become sickened from being here. But we shall not stay long.”

And he smiled down at Ivan Ivanovich. That was before the pain and the blackness, when Ivan still had a name and knew who he was.

The brutish woman came then, when everyone else was outside. The others called her Bizabraznia, the ugly one. Through the open door Ivan saw the bright flames as they danced and flared, caught the rich taste of the cooking meat, heard the devilish laughter. By then he supposed that everyone in the village was dead.

Bizabraznia, grimacing and farting, lowered her bulk to the side of the bed. He could smell her sour breath, the taint of kvass. The raiders had quickly found the kegs of the sour beer.

“The men enjoy their fucking, little grandfather,” she said, reaching out with her broad hand and touching him beneath the chin. He tried to pull away, but the cords held him helpless. She smiled at his efforts, chided him.

Her fingers ran through his straggly beard and the gray hair matted with sweat on his chest. Lower and lower she touched him, bringing her face nearer to his. The little eyes, buried in fat like a suckling pig’s, came nearer. Her lips opened and she kissed him, the stubble on her cheeks and chin scraping against his flesh.

For a second, he tried again to resist her foulness, but she gripped his shrunken penis, whispering, “Kiss me sweet, brother, else I’ll tug this off your belly easy as wringing a chick’s neck. Real sweet kiss, like you and your good wife relish.”

Her lips pressed to his, and he fought to respond, closing his eyes against the vileness. Her hand caressed him, rousing him. Her mouth tasted of the stolen food that once belonged to the good people of Ozhbarchik.

She reclined, releasing him, fumbling with her leather breeches, dropping them over her pallid, wrinkled thighs. Bizabraznia belched, putting a hand to her mouth in mock politeness.

“Schchi da kasha pishchna nasha,” she laughed.

“The only food is cabbage soup and gruel.” Somehow the child’s verse was a foul obscenity on her chapped lips, and he nearly threw up. Again he restrained himself, knowing that this monstrous harridan would kill him if he didn’t please her.

The woman heaved herself up and squatted over his thighs, grinning, trying to bring him to erection. “Not much for you, is there? Not in the way of a man, eh? There’s a good… Something’s stirring, I swear. Not much of a fucking worm, but better than… ah.”

The ultimate nightmare was that she succeeded. Despite everything that had passed, Ivan Ivanovich became more roused than he had for many impotent years. He thrust up against her, grinding his hips against her muscular buttocks. She reached a gasping climax, accompanied by the cheers of the dozen or so bandits that had come in from the bitterly cold night to watch the show.

Bizabraznia heaved herself off him, depriving him of the small pleasure of his own orgasm, sitting down again with a disgusting sucking sound.

“Please…” he said.

Her eyes narrowed and she slapped him brutally across the face, nearly knocking him unconscious. He could taste his own blood from a cut lip.

“ ‘Please,’ ” she mocked. “I use you. That’s all, you little shit. Honor, for him, isn’t it, brothers?” Her appeal brought a chorus of agreement from the men. “If there’s time after Uchitel’s done with you, grandfather, I might come again and use you some more.”

When the leader returned to the hut, the others crept out like beaten curs. Ivan Ivanovich looked up from eyes made puffy with weeping, seeing the great fire from the ruby on Uchitel’s silver headband seeming to fill the room. Now that the others were gone, the fear was greater.

“Is there silver in this dung heap, old man?” His voice was courteous, not rough like the rest of the raiders’. “I see you’ve been hurt.” He touched the cuts across Ivan’s chest and thighs where the blood had dried. “Tell me about any gold or silver. Or guns. Or more food. Tell me, old man. Come, sing me a song that will make me smile, and you can go free and live.”

Ivan’s mouth opened and a single word crept out. “Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.”

“I am not a common bandit. I have the art of reading and writing, old man. I have books. Books from before the great winter. I have books that show where the towns stood, with pictures of the clothes that men and women wore. Do you hear me? Open your eyes.”

The voice snapped at Ivan Ivanovich. It touched the dark places of his mind with a shudder.

Past and present ebbed and flowed.

It was a dream and soon he’d wake. He’d be warm against the rutting body of the little Yevgenia. Despite the cleft palate and the skin ailment that made her face like the scaly back of a fish, she could come closest to stirring him. The memory of the pain was only a shade of the blackness. He’d wake and it would all be done. Even the man Uchitel who…

“Wake up and look at me. Use your eyes.” To Ivan, the words were senseless, as was the laugh that followed them. “I tell you I have books and I can read them. Even a book that tells me how to speak with the Americans across the ice river east of here. Think of that. But I talk and you listen. Now you must talk and Uchitel will listen.”

“What?”

“The gold and the silver you have hidden. A book of old times, far before the long winter, tells that peasants—filth like you—hoard riches. You pretend to be poor. But you are not. What of that?”

Ivan Ivanovich was delirious, hardly knowing how he forced out a reply. Everything was blurred and shimmering, like objects seen through the glowing beat above a stove.

“Nothing.”

“No?”

“Nyet, nyet, nyet.”

Uchitel smiled then and stood up. “You will meet Pechal.”

“Sorrow?”

“Yes, sorrow. He is well named, grandfather. He takes his only pleasure from torture. You will speak with him.”

“But I swear, I know nothing, sir. Please, my lord. Nothing. By Saint Gregory I swear it.”

“Swear by all the saints you want. Only the truth about your secret stores will spare your life.”

Uchitel didn’t truly believe that such a stinking hamlet as Ozhbarchik could possibly have anything worth hiding. But his men liked to dream. Sometimes they had actually discovered little caches of arms or a few antique coins of worthless copper.

The voice at Ivan’s elbow was gentle, like the voice of a clerk politely requesting information. “Shall I ask him for his secrets, Uchitel?”

“Yes, Pechal. I’ll wait and watch.”

Pechal’s appearance fitted his voice. He wore gray furs, with matching gauntlets and hood. Most of the band were bearded; he was as clean shaven as Uchitel himself. Pechal, the Sorrow, had pale soft cheeks and a rosebud of a mouth that was permanently pursed in disapproval of the world and its evil. He resembled a priest who had spent all his life in a closed seminary, speaking only of good works and following the pathways of the Lord.

Ivan stared up at him, seeing all of this. Pechal leaned over him, and the old man saw the eyes.

They were like chips of wind-washed agate frozen in the eternal ice of the farthest north.

“Tell me now and all will be well.”

“Nyet. There is nothing. Please. On my wife’s grave, I swear, nothing.”

It began.

Gradually Ivan Ivanovich disappeared within the pain of the probing and cutting and rending of his body.

Pechal crooned to him constantly, like a father keeping a baby amused while he bathed it in warm water. At first Ivan’s pain had been a light, fluttering thing, like touching a hot iron momentarily or feeling the prick of a needle that hurt a moment, then ceased.

“Tell Pechal of your hoard, grandfather. This is nothing to you. Ah, that made you start, didn’t it?”

With a slow delicacy, Pechal forced the point of a knife down beneath a toenail, down to the quick, slowly thrusting and scraping until it seemed to Ivan Ivanovich that the marrow of his bones was being rubbed raw.

“You have your hearing, your sight, your voice. Even this.” He touched Ivan’s limp penis with the cold edge of a dagger. “You can keep them all, old man. Tell Pechal everything and live.”

Nothing.

Pechal lit a tallow candle with a match. Then Ivan felt scorching heat on the inside of his elbows, then behind his knees in the soft crinkled flesh. Ivan smelled his own flesh burning. His body tensing upward, he pulled at the cords so hard that they cut into his bloodied, swollen skin.

From, outside came the smell of roasting meat and loud, bellowing laughter. Pechal stopped for a moment and stood, stretching his arms. “It is tiring, this asking of questions, is it not?” he asked the old man, “Spare us both and answer me.”

Uchitel was drinking from an earthenware mug of ryabinovka, a fiery vodka flavored with ashberries. Muttering something to Pechal, he rose and walked out, leaving the door open so that light from the fires outside the hut capered across the walls.

“I believe you, grandfather,” whispered the torturer. “But if I relent, then Uchitel will flay the skin from my living body. I have seen him do it.”

Ivan Ivanovich slipped painfully into madness. The agony deepened until he lost touch with it. Pechal pressed hard against Ivan’s eyes with the balls of his thumbs, making the old man scream.

“Your eyes pain you. I can stop them hurting. Here.”

From a shelf on the far side of the stove, he took a carved box of black powder that Ivanovich used for his ancient musket. Holding the lids open, he piled a neat little heap on each eye. The powder felt gritty, like having specks of sand in his eyes.

“Now?”

“Mercy,” sobbed Ivan Ivanovich. He might as well have begged the north wind or the layers of ice that were forming over the corpses of his friends.

He heard, actually heard the sizzle of his own eyes burning when the guerrilla touched the candle flame to the black powder. His nostrils were filled with the stench.

When Pechal burst his eardrums, Ivan felt only the stabbing pain. The lack of sound was somehow a relief, as though it was the start of a complete sensory withdrawal from the pain. Cutting the tendons in his jaw, burning his nipples, slicing his genitals from his body, leaving only the weeping, raw wound—none of that registered with the poor creature that had been Ivan Ivanovich. Day and night, hot and cold were gone. After that, it was over.

He still breathed. His heart still pounded desperately. But his mind was dead. His head rocked from side to side and a toneless, faint whimpering sound was all that came from his peeled lips. Uchitel returned and stood alongside Pechal, looking down emotionlessly at the old man’s naked, ravaged body. His cold yellow eyes registered the blood, the raised blisters, the scorched eye sockets, the dreadful mute evidence of the castration.

“You have taken him too far, too fast, Pechal,” he said, quietly. “Now he will tell us nothing.”

“Da, I fear that’s true.”

Uchitel shook his head. “The meat is nearly cooked, and all the animals are butchered and jointed. We can sleep here tonight and move on in the morning.”

“Why not stay here for a week or so? The snows are passing. Every time we move, it is farther north, farther east. Soon we shall be at the sea.”

“Yes, Pechal. Soon we shall be at the sea. If your whining continues, then I shall pin you out on the ice for the white bears to feed on.”

“But…”

The tall, lean man shook his head. “You should learn to hold your tongue, my brother Sorrow, or I will rip it from its roots. You know why we move on.”

“What the merchant told you?”

“Yes. Now, take this offal out and slit its throat. I am tired, Pechal.”

“Did…?”

“What? You are making me weary, brother.”

Despite the chilling note of warning, the other man continued. “Did he say where they were? Or how far behind us?”

For a moment, Uchitel stared at him in silence, oblivious of the dying man on the bed behind him.

“Pechal… the merchant said he had heard that there was a band of militia hunting us down.”

“But did he say where?”

“They were bastard whores’ sons, spawned in middens, from the port of Magadan, where, they say, there are houses and many stores and mongrel codsuckers who sit with their thumbs buried in their own asses while they send their puppies on horseback to hunt down men such as you and I, my brother. He said that they had heard we robbed and plundered and raped and burned and slaughtered. His very words, from what I recall of his blubbering. This so-called government that believes in some party…”

He spat out the two words as if they soiled his lips. Pechal nodded. “And they will chase us down. Then we shall kill them.” He clenched his hand, soft as a woman’s, yet with long, curved nails of horn. “Fool.”

“What?”

“You are a fool. These will not be puking peasants like this old shit here on the bed. They will have good guns. No. It is best that we run.”

Bizabraznia came staggering in, beer running down her chins, over her open blouse, trickling across her huge, veined breasts. In one hand she held a great smoking haunch of meat, the outside charred and black, blood leaking from its center.

She sniggered at Ivan Ivanovich. “Can I have some sport with him?”

“No. Pechal will cut his neck open outside, and then I can get some sleep. We must all sleep. We have a dawn start tomorrow.”

“Then we run from these militia boys, eh?” Uchitel nodded. “Aye. Lead them far enough, and they’ll give up the chase. Then we can return to our hunting grounds once more.”

“Where do we run?” asked Urach, standing in the doorway.

“That way,” replied Uchitel, pointing east.

“There is nothing there but the frozen sea.”

He smiled. “We shall cross it where the strait is narrowest, no more than ninety kilometers wide.”

“To the other side?” said Urach, wonderingly.

“Yes, brother. On the morrow we head for America.”

 

Chapter Five

« ^ »

COULD FUCKIN’ STAY HERE forever,” said Hunaker on their third day in the huge redoubt.

It was more than just a redoubt. J.B. Dix and Ryan Cawdor had twice revisited the gateway, making sure of the route in case they needed it. They had also drawn a plan of the labyrinthine, rambling corridors, readying themselves for any eventuality. Near the gateway, high on a wall, they’d seen a small notice like the one they’d seen in the redoubt in the Darks: Entry Absolutely Forbidden To All But B12 Cleared Personnel. Mat-Trans.

The red paint was as bright as if it had only been lettered a day ago.

The place, with its incorporated stockpile, was the biggest building that Ryan Cawdor had ever laid eyes on. It was bigger by far than any ville he’d seen, vastly more imposing than any barony out East. The stockpile alone was more than a mile in length and a quarter-mile in breadth, with a maze of interconnecting passages and storerooms, reminding him of pictures he’d once seen in some old, crumbling mags from before the Chill.

It reminded him of what had once been called a “shopping mall.”

During the three days, Ryan ordered his party to station themselves anywhere they could in the redoubt. Quint and his wives, Rachel and Lori, kept mainly to themselves, eating in their own quarters.

Ryan’s group had their own dormitory: a long room with forty beds, each with a locker. There were showers and latrine facilities, a dining room and a kitchen, with all the plates and pots and cutlery they could need. It was obvious that the place had been designed as a post-holocaust living-space for a couple of hundred people. The air-conditioning kept everything free from dust and dirt.

Most of the complex was open to them, though Quint warned them against trying to force open any locked doors.

“Keeper wouldn’t like that,” he’d quavered.

Their relationship was odd. Quint and his women, who went everywhere with their Heckler & Koch sub-MGs, made no objection when Ryan and his party retrieved their weapons. If they’d wanted, they could have iced the Keeper and both his wives. Okie and Finnegan wanted to do this, but Ryan and J.B. opposed them.

“No reason. They don’t seem a threat. Watch ‘em carefully. Could be useful.” As ever, the Armorer was brief and to the point.

As far as they could determine, there were only two entrances to the redoubt. One was a huge vanadium-steel doorway like the one back in the Darks, but without a manual control on the inside. Ryan believed it had never been opened since the long winter. It possessed no windows or ob slits anywhere.

One important thing happened during those three days.

J.B. Dix managed to find out where the redoubt was. After what Doc had said to them about complexes containing both a stockpile and a redoubt having been built in strategic locations, it wasn’t too much of a surprise.

Near a small exit was a room that held some charts. Conn, the navigator whom they’d left in charge of War Wag One, would have given his right arm for them. They were the best-preserved maps that any of them had ever seen. Though they were frail and tended to crack when they were unfolded, their colors were unfaded. Since Quint wasn’t around, J.B. took several and stuffed them in his pack.

One map, which was pinned to a corkboard, showed the area around the redoubt in considerable detail, and Ryan and J.B. studied it with interest.

“Alaska,” said the Armorer.

“Yeah,” agreed Ryan. “That’s where Fairbanks was. And Anchorage. That’s the strait. Heard some talk years ago that it was all frozen over here. The winter never moved after the Chill. And there, on the left side, a few miles west…”

“Russia,” said J.B., nodding.

“Close,” said Ryan.

 

MEMBERS OF THE GROUP spent time in ways that interested them, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs or threes.

Ryan was with J.B. a lot, and with Krysty Wroth the rest of the time. In the hectic days since they’d first made love, it seemed as if an eternity had come and gone. Now, at last, they found some hours to be alone together.

There was a whole suite of rooms filled with weights, rowing equipment, a small swimming pool, exercise cycles and a whirlpool bath with the name Jacuzzi on it. Green metal lockers held clothes, towels, leotards, trunks and wraps. Krysty peeled off her stained overalls and pulled on a tight red leotard with white flashes down the arms. Ryan smiled at her enthusiasm.

“Get stripped for action,” she called, sitting astride the white saddle of a stationary bike, tucking her bare feet under the straps and beginning to pedal.

The temperature throughout the redoubt and stockpile was sixty degrees. Monitors on a small console in the living quarters showed that outside it was an average of minus forty during the day and minus ninety during the night. A driving northerly wind that sometimes exceeded a hundred miles an hour made it likely that an unprotected human would freeze to death within minutes. Even with the best thermals on, at night or when the wind rose, life would be precarious after more than a couple of hours in the open.

Ryan peeled off his favorite long coat, with its white fur trim, and put it carefully on the padded floor. The SIG-Sauer P-226 9 mm and the three spare ammo packs followed; then the LAPA 5.56 mm and the heavy steel panga, its eighteen-inch blade sheathed in soft, oiled leather. Finally he took his white scarf of fine silk from around his neck and put it neatly by the weapons. It made a soft clunking sound. Hearing the noise, Krysty looked curiously at him.

“What’s in that, Ryan?”

“In the scarf?”

“Yeah.”

“Couple of bits of lead.”

She paused in her frantic pedaling. “What’s that for, Ryan?”

He shook his head. “Mebbe one day I’ll tell you. Mebbe one day I’ll show you.”

He peeled his coveralls and his thermal vest and pants, laying them by the weapons. Stripped, he was aware of his own stink.

“Fireblast!” he exclaimed.

“What?”

“I smell like a stickie’s armpit. Got to have a bath and clean up. Never noticed it.”

“Use that bath. Looks good. There’s instructions on the side.”

“Pity those that can’t read,” he said, moving to the large oval tub. Krysty watched him, admiring the lean body, with the ridged walls of muscles across the stomach, the tightness of the thighs and the hardness of the chest and shoulders.

“You need a shave as well,” she said.

“Mebbe later.”

“You know that Quint can’t read.”

“What?” he straightened up, unable to hide his surprise. “He’s the Keeper.”

“Yeah.” She stopped pedaling and leaned forward, breathing hard. “This bastard machine’s not up to some real action. It’s fallin’ apart.”

“Not that amazin’, love. It must be as old as everythin’ else in this redoubt.”

Following the printed instructions, Ryan turned on the Jacuzzi and started filling it with hot water. “You sure Quint can’t read?” he asked.

“Certain.”

“How?”

“He told me.”

“When?”

“Turn that tap farther. The water’s not coming fast enough.”

Ryan did as she suggested. As he knelt, he was aware of Krysty moving behind him. He didn’t turn his head, knowing that she was on his blind side.

There was the breath of material falling softly to the floor. She leaned over him, her long rich crimson hair brushing against his nakedness, caressing him with infinitely soft movements. The touch was enough to arouse him, and she giggled in his ear, reaching over his shoulder with a long arm, her fingers rubbing his chest.

“Krysty,” Ryan closed his good eye for a moment, relishing the contact. He swallowed hard, fighting to control his breathing.

“Yeah?”

“When did Quint say he couldn’t read?”

“Yesterday. He took me to see that door to the outside. Said there was a whole mess of fuckin’ wicked mutie dwarfs out there. That’s what he said. They wait. Been waitin’ for a hundred years. He talked about being the Keeper. Said that everythin’ he knew, he’d learned from his father, who was Keeper before him.”

The bath was three-quarters full. The woman knelt behind Ryan, her arms around him, her breasts pressed against his muscular back so that he could feel her hard nipples. She was holding him with one hand, rubbing slowly up and down while, with her other hand, she traced the delicate lace of scars across his shoulders. And all the time her sentient hair was stroking him.

“His father?”

“Yeah, Ryan. Keeper before him. And his father’s father was Keeper before that.”

“But why’s there only three of ‘em left? The muties get ‘em?”

“Didn’t say. Ryan?”

There was a change in her voice, and he finally turned around to look into her face, feeling for a split second as if he might drown in the green depths of her eyes.

“What, Krysty?”

“Muties, Ryan.”

He nodded. “I’m not goin’ to fuck around, Krysty, and pretend I don’t know what you mean. I do know.”

She sat back, drawing her long legs up, folding her arms around them, resting her chin on her knees. Her marvelous hair tumbled across her shoulders, coyly covering her breasts.

“Now’s the time for this, Ryan. We’ve known each other a short while. We made love—or we fucked. I thought it was makin’ love. You?”

“Yeah, Krysty. I didn’t think we were fuckin’. I thought we…”

“That’s good. Now, you know I’m a mutie.”

“Not—” But she interrupted him.

“Turn off the tap, or we’ll flood the bastard redoubt in hot water.”

“There. Look, there’s somethin’ funny about your hair. Like it moves some.”

“Some. My mother was Mother Sonja, and the good and bad things about me come from her. She had the power, Ryan. Real power. Gave some to me—some by birthing me, some by teaching me.”

“Was she…a mutie?”

“More than me. She could make her hair grow long and lift things with it. I saw her do it when I was little. She got older and didn’t or couldn’t do it anymore. My hair moves a little. Mainly when I’m happy or when I’m…” She grinned suddenly, lifting her face, dazzling him with her beauty. “I guess you noticed that, Ryan. And my hair hurts when it’s pulled or caught. Or cut.”

“That all?”

The washer on one of the taps in the whirlpool bath had rotted, and the water dripped steadily. Ryan watched it, conscious that he was beginning to feel cold.

“No. You know that I’ve escaped twice with my wrists tied?”

“And you damn near broke the handle on the main door to the redoubt in the Darks.”

“Yeah, I did. That’s kind of a mutation. But it’s more what I meant by Mother Sonja’s teaching me things. She taught me how to do that.”

“What?”

She looked down again. “It’s a sort of focusing, a concentrating on how I feel. It’s hard and it tires me some. I call on the Earth Mother, and she comes to help me.”

“Just how strong are you?” asked Ryan, still naked, standing and moving around the exercise room, conscious that his erection had vanished and that his penis now slapped limply against his thigh as he walked.

“I don’t know. I tried all I could on that door. Our lives were in danger. The effort nearly killed me. I nearly puked my guts up.”

In one corner, stacked on a chrome steel rack, there was a bar and a pile of weights. Ryan removed the collars and slid on some of the heavy discs, then replaced the collars and tightened the butterfly screws.

“There are now one hundred and fifty pounds on each side. I figure it’s about my top. Can you lift that?”

“Not now.” She rose and moved gracefully toward him. Her body was in marvelous condition, like a top fighter.

“But, if you called…on the Earth Mother, could you then?”

“Yes.” There wasn’t a hint of doubt in her voice as she looked at the equivalent of the weight of two grown men on the smooth bar. “But you first, Ryan. Press that above your head and…”

“And what?”

“Do it and see.”

“I don’t usually lift things with my cock sticking out like this,” he muttered, stooping in front of the weights.

“Hanging out, Ryan,” she corrected, with a wicked smile.

Ryan waited, gathering his concentration, flexing his fingers around the cool metal. He closed his eye, focusing all his energy on lifting the bar. Six deep, slow breaths, then the explosive whoosh of effort. Feeling the strain at the small of his back and across his chest and shoulders, he lifted the bar from the rack. Ryan Cawdor didn’t look that heavily muscled, but his wiry body was in excellent condition. A man didn’t get to ride and fight with the Trader for ten years by being soft and flabby.

“Very good,” she said, clapping as the weights rose slowly but steadily to chest level, then with an extra boost, above Ryan’s head. The tendons in his arms stood out like cords as he held it there, his face suffused with blood. He managed a wink at the girl before he lowered the bar to the floor with a thump.

“Now you,” he panted.

“Give me a minute to ready myself.”

Krysty began to take deep breaths, her breasts rising and falling as Ryan watched with interest. Her legs were slightly apart, the triangle of brilliant scarlet pubic hair masking her sex. The muscles across the front of her thighs rippled and danced, and he could see the fluttering of her stomach. Her eyes were closed, and her lips moved. In the silence he heard her whisper.

“Now, Mother of Earth, give me, I beg, the power to do that which is right. Let me render no evil. Give your daughter the power, the power, the power…” she chanted, the sound barely carrying to Ryan, three paces away. He stared at her face, seeing it transformed into a mask of carved bone, the planes of her cheeks shifted by an almost unbearable tension.

Krysty stepped to the bar and bent in front of it, her tumbling hair hiding the weights for a moment. She gripped the bar with both hands and then straightened, hefting it above her head in a single, flowing motion.

Ryan’s jaw dropped. He’d seen some amazing sights before, but nothing to compare with the way the three-hundred-pound set of weights floated up. There was no other word for it. Nor did the girl show any strain now that the deed was done. She held it above her head, her eyes half-open, her mouth sagging, a thread of spittle hanging from the corner of her lips, almost as if she’d fallen into a trance.

“Thanks, Earth Mother,” she whispered, then let the weights fall to the floor with a great crash. She staggered and nearly fell, putting her hand to her forehead. But before he could help her, she had straightened, smiling.

“Krysty, are…?”

“I’m fine. Bit tired. Always am. Shouldn’t have done that. Showing off is not what the power’s for.”

“It looked like it was no heavier than a fistful of air.”

“Yeah.”

“How much… heavier could you have lifted?”

She shook her head. “The power of the Earth Mother isn’t like that. It’s what I want. If there were a buggy turned over on top of you, I could maybe lift it, maybe not.”

They stood in silence, looking at each other. Krysty spoke first, eyes locked to Ryan’s face.

“There. Now you know what sort of mutie I am.”

“Yeah. Now I know. But I think I knew before.”

“Now what?”

He stepped close, lowering his head to kiss her softly on the lips, tasting her sweat, putting his arms around her, feeling the way she shuddered with the raw tension. Her breasts pushed insistently against his chest, and her hair rustled on his skin.

“Now I want to get in that fuckin’ big bath and make love to you for the rest of the day,” said Ryan.

“It doesn’t matter, me bein’ a mutie?”

“Not unless you use your Earth Mother power when I’m inside you and crush me to pulp.”

“Don’t joke about it, Ryan.”

“Sorry.”

She kissed him again, her tongue snaking over his teeth. Her right hand crept down over his stomach, touching the curling tendrils of hair.

His response was instantaneous.

“That’s nice,” she whispered. “Stickin’ out, not hangin’ out.”

Krysty led Ryan to the whirlpool bath. The water was still hot, and she pressed a violet-colored button to mix in some scented foam, making the exercise room smell like a meadow in summer. A square black button made the water churn and swirl. Great cascades of bubbles burst all around Ryan as he lowered himself cautiously into the bath.

“Nice?” she asked.

“Not bad,” he replied, offering a hand to help her step in beside him. There was a ledge around the side of the bath and they sat together on it, the water only a few inches over their laps.

Krysty, her back to him, lowered herself carefully into the water while he caressed her from behind. “Oh, yes. Yes, Ryan, that’s great. Not too fast.”

Ryan reached around, feeling her nipples move against his palm. His right hand delved lower and deeper, under the water, between her parted thighs, found the tiny bud of flesh that nestled there. Rolling it between his finger and thumb, he enjoyed hearing the girl moan. It became swollen and she leaned her head back, half turning and nipping at the skin of his shoulder, drawing a ruby bead of blood.

Gasping she removed his hand from between her legs, then gripped his rigid penis and quickly guided it into her body.

Krysty had extraordinary control over all her muscles, tightening herself about him, squeezing his penis, bringing him toward a raging orgasm.

Though he tried to hold back for her, the girl’s skill was too much for Ryan, and he felt himself bursting inside her. But he stayed hard long enough for her to ride him to her own climax.

All around them the scented water continued to bubble noisily. Still sitting on his lap, Krysty kissed him tenderly on the cheek. “Good. Thanks, Ryan.”

“It was real good.” He paused. “Krysty… Oh, fireblast! Thanks.”

After a while they made love once again in the whirlpool bath, then finally got out, dripping water everywhere.

“Should get some clean clothes, Ryan,” she suggested.

“Yeah. Tomorrow let’s go to the store and find us some.”

They dressed in their old gear, making sure their weapons were in place. Krysty, ready before him, looked around the big exercise room, taking in the equipment and the mirrors. The bath was loudly draining.

“Look.”

“What is it?”

“The fuckin’ spyin’ old bastard.” She stooped to pick up a length of ragged green ribbon from the floor near the door.

The kind of ribbon that Quint, the Keeper of the redoubt, wore braided in his straggly gray beard.

 

Chapter Six

« ^ »

HOW DO THE WOLVES survive, Uchitel?” asked Bochka, the Barrel, astride the largest horse in the party.

“They eat the weak.”

“If there are no weak, brother?”

Uchitel peered through the gap between his hood and the scarf around his nose and mouth. “Then they eat each other, Bochka.” Raising his voice so the others could hear him, he added, “And if we fall on evil times and must devour each other, I take the leader’s right of roasting Bochka all for myself.”

A ripple of laughter ran back along the column until it vanished in the murk of wind-blown snow. Since the raiders had left Ozhbarchik two days back, the weather had been deteriorating. Three times Uchitel had ordered emergency shelters to be dug in the packed snow; they used the long-bladed saws that they carried for just such a purpose. It took less than five minutes to throw up a wall of large snow bricks six feet high to protect them all from the lethal wind. During the rare calms, Uchitel had gazed back, trying to spot any sign of pursuit. Away to the north, he could make out the smoke-tipped cone of one of the many new volcanoes that had appeared at the time of the wars. The snow around it was tinted gold from the sulfur fumes, and there was no sign of any living thing in all that dreadful wilderness. Nothing except the huge mutated white bears that occasionally loomed from the blizzard, threatening the column.

The bears…and the wolves—lean gray shapes with slavering jaws and thrusting muzzles, slinking at the corners of a man’s vision. Several times over the years they had lost men to the wolves. It was one of the reasons that everyone feared becoming a straggler.

Only the day before a man had gotten left behind. It had happened to Nul, a quiet, gray-haired man whose nickname was Zero because it often seemed as though he wasn’t there. His pony had stumbled over a twisted piece of metal; it was a large mortar shell with tail fins intact, a relic of the missile testing that had once occurred in that area, which was just across the frozen expanse of the Bering Strait from North America. A deep gash in the pony’s right foreleg had exposed the tendons, making the pony limp badly. Nul knew the rules as well as anyone. Move slower than the group, and you stayed behind. But there was always a chance of catching up. A man riding alone moved farther and faster than a party.

There was always a chance of catching up again. All he’d have to do was stay alive.

 

“FUCKING BASTARD! Cocksucking shit-swallowing bastard fucker!”

Nul punched the stumbling pony on the side of the head, making it stagger and nearly fall again. Blood was drying on the streaked flanks where he’d lashed the pony with the buckle end of his belt. He’d hoped that by now he’d be rejoining the band. But the shaggy animal seemed to go slower and slower. Now darkness was less than an hour off, and the band was at least five kilometers ahead. If Uchitel persisted with his plan to cross the ice and invade what had once been America, they could begin crossing the strait in less than a week, maybe in only four or five days. At this rate, Nul figured he’d be more than a day behind by the time they reached the strait.

It was time to stop, build a shelter and get a fire going. Their pyrotabs were often the difference between living and dying. Once lit, one of them would generate enough heat to burn brightly for three hours. Nul had about forty of them in his saddlebags.

That should be enough. If he didn’t catch up with the others before they crossed the ice, then he might as well kiss the barrel of the 9 mm Makarov goodbye.

 

URACH SQUATTED BY HIS LEADER in the lee of the big snow wall. The flames of the fires fought bravely against the swirling sleet. From beyond the circle of light, they heard the keening of the wolves.

“Feedin’ on Nul?” he said.

“That’s the cry of hunger. When that stops, then maybe they will have found Nul.”

“Britva will lose toes after falling through that pool this morning.”

“He can use his own razor. It’ll teach the imbecile a lesson. Trying to gallop when there is no trail! There may even be live mines this close to the ocean. I have read how they sowed these hills. MZDs and AKSs all over the place.”

“What if the Americans are waiting for us, Uchitel? Then…?”

The reply was a silent smile.

“You think there is no danger?” asked Urach, holding out his hands to the flames.

“I know there is no danger. If they were a powerful country, do you not think they would have overrun this land by now?”

“I suppose…”

“Of course. Brother, go and fetch me some of that fine meat we took from that dung heap of a village. I am hungered.” Then, as Urach was leaving, Uchitel added, “The Communists have gone from this country, Urach. And the Fascists have gone from over there.” He pointed to the east. “They have lost, as they always will. Only we remain. As we always will.” And he began to laugh.

 

THE PONY WAS GROWING weaker rather than stronger. It was impossible to ride it, and Nul plodded alongside, cursing in an endless monotone. Like Uchitel, he carried a Kalashnikov AKM and every couple of hours he was forced to fire off a short burst to chase a pack of wolves away.

But they returned, circling closer, bellies low to the ground, their gray-white coats melding with the sulfur-stained ice.

The snow had eased, and the wind had also died down. At least he was no longer in immediate danger of freezing to death. The middle-aged man trudged relentlessly eastward, his face set to the ground, one foot following the other, trailing the rest of the party. Every step left him a little farther behind.

Apart from checking the endlessly weaving pattern of the wolves, Nul never looked back.

 

HIGH CLIFFS stood like jagged teeth above the packed gray-green ice of the Bering Strait. The sea was covered in a dense mist, overlaid with volcanic fumes. The air was heavy and caught at the back of the throat, producing coughs and reddened eyes.

Somewhere beyond them was what had once been called Alaska. Now it had no name at all.

In the year 2000, half a million people had been scattered over the six hundred thousand square miles of this inhospitable land. Now there were less than a couple of thousand people in the whole barren waste. To Uchitel and his band, the country that lay hidden in the acrid fog was the promised land, containing legendary treasures and riches. The books all said so.

“We go that way, Narodniki,” shouted Uchitel, waving his Kalashnikov above his head like a crusader’s sword.

There was a bellow of support from the men and women at his heels, the Narodniki.

Uchitel had found the name in the ruins of what had been the central library of the Communist Party amid the wreckage of nuked Yakutsk. He had come across a passage about the populist movement in old Russia. Over two hundred years before, in the late eighteen hundreds, there were terrorist and guerrilla organizations with names like Black Repartition, and Land and Liberty. But the parent of them all was the Narodniki.

It was a name that came to mean terror and blood, a name that appealed to the dark side of Uchitel’s nature, which truly had no light side.

“We camp here in the cleft of the rocks that will keep us from the worst of the wind.” Above him there was a deafening crack of thunder that made some of the ponies rear and whinny. There was a searing glow of deepest purple from chem clouds that raced hundreds of miles high.

“And tomorrow?” asked Bizabraznia, lashing at her horse with a whip of braided wires.

“Down there, and across into the land of the brave and the home of many, many dead.”

 

NUL WAS FEELING HAPPIER. The pony’s fetlock was mending, and in the last twenty-four hours he’d made better time than he had for days. A biting fog had come down from the direction of the icy sea, making progress difficult, but from the fog’s salty taste, he guessed that he couldn’t be too far off.

The dried beef was lasting well. In one of the huts in Ozhbarchik he’d found some delicious golubtsy and had taken enough to last him weeks. The thought of the food safely wrapped in his bag made him hungry, and he reached in, taking one of the cabbage rolls stuffed with fried turnip, biting voraciously into it. The jolting of the pony made him choke on a mouthful. Cursing at the animal, tugging brutally at the reins, he brought it to a dead stop.

“Better,” he said, his voice muffled by the food. The fog had drifted away to the south, and visibility was unusually good. He stood in the stirrups, wondering whether he might make out the rest of the Narodniki.

 

UCHITEL URGED his stallion on. The sea cliffs of Alaska were towering ahead of them, snow tipped, only a hundred paces away. Birds resembling gray gulls, but with a vastly larger wingspan, circled and wheeled from their eyries, their echoing cries like the moaning of long-drowned sailors.

Behind him in single file, came twenty-eight men and women, their horses advancing through the crumpled sheets of jagged ice, watching for the softer contours and crystalline outcrops that might hide gaps in the surface and for hidden crevasses through which a man and horse might easily slide, vanishing completely and irrevocably into the sucking waters.

For the hundredth time that day, Uchitel turned in his saddle, feeling a crick in his neck from continually looking back. Once they were across, they would be safe. He had never heard any legend or read any account of any Russian crossing this narrow shifting neck of ice. If it were true that they were being pursued, then the land ahead of them promised safety.

 

NUL RAISED THE LAST MOUTHFUL of the golubtsy to his lips.

Then he was lying on his back in the trampled snow, staring blankly up at the dull sky.

There had been no sense of time passing. No sense of falling.

No pain.

The only feeling was shock; a sensation that someone had managed to creep up unseen and strike him in the middle of the chest with a huge mallet. He was aware that his feet were kicking and twitching. It felt odd, as though his feet belonged to someone else. With gloves that seemed to be filled with iron, Nul carefully touched the numb center where the hammerblow had come.

He suddenly felt very cold.

A full fourteen hundred paces to the southwest, the tall sniper lowered the Samozaridnyia Vintovka Dragunova rifle. The rimmed 7.62 mm bullet had done its work. Through the PSO-1 telescopic sight he’d seen it rip explosively into the target’s chest. The man wasn’t going to move very far with a wound like that.

“Good shooting, Corporal Solomentsov. An extra ration of food this month from the grateful party.”

The speaker was about thirty, with a long, drooping mustache that hid a pockmarked chin. He stood five inches below six feet and wore a gray uniform of thick material, with long boots of tanned hide. Removing his high fur cap, which bore a single silver circle at the front, he revealed a totally bald head.

“Thank you, Major Zimyanin,” said Solomentsov, giving a click of his heels and a sharp bow.

“Holster the Dragunuv rifle, Corporal. You know what ice can do to the sight. Last time you left it uncovered the frost cracked the bulb of the reticle lamp.”

“Yes, Major,” the corporal replied, taking the long gun and pulling a cloth shroud over the neat sight.

“And send Tracker Aliev to me.”

The tracker was less than five feet tall, with the slanted eyes that revealed his heritage. He had the waddling gait of a Mongolian who’d spent most of his life astride a barrel-chested pony. A thick woolen scarf was wrapped about the lower part of his olive-skinned face.

“Aliev, do they still move on toward the sea? Be sure.”

The rest of the hundred-strong militia unit kept well clear of the tracker. Some of them crossed themselves when they went near him. His skill at scenting the enemy was so developed that there were those who said he was a witch. As he approached the head of the column, past the depression where Solomentsov had knelt to fire, he unwound his scarf. Though Major Zimyanin had seen him many times, he still fought hard to restrain a shudder.

The nukes used by the Americans in this part of once-mighty Russia had been awesome in their power. Aliev came from a family that had always lived near the Kamchatka Peninsula, and his face was the stigma of his background.

Most of the lower jaw was missing. Where the nose should have been, there was only a large hole fringed with damp pink tissue like rotting lace. The mouth gaped, with a few yellowed teeth left jutting crookedly from the upper jaw. Aliev had no way of closing his mouth, and all food had to be sucked into his gullet.

Across the dark cavern of his nasal orifice, Aliev had a veil of crumpled skin as thin as the wing of a moth. It moved raggedly in and out in time with his raucous breathing. To stand close was to inhale the odors from the entrance of hell, as Aliev only accepted meat that was rotting and crawling with larvae. He would bury his snout in it and devour it ravenously and noisily.

Now he dropped to his hands and knees, closing his eyes, laying his nose to the snow, sniffing. The others watched from a distance, each man holding the muzzle of his horse to quiet it.

Then, as he had a thousand times, Zimyanin wished that he could be transferred to a militia unit far, far to the west. There they had petroleum in some quantity and trucks. He knew because he had seen pictures of them. Soon, he was told, his cavalry would be given trucks. He had heard it several times from his superiors in the last three years. If the party told you something was true, then it was.

“Well?”

The face turned to him, and he nearly vomited at the nauseous panting, sniffing noise that Aliev made in his eagerness.

The brutish head nodded.

Aliev was a wonderful tracker, but he had drawbacks. Apart from the horrific look of the man, he could neither speak nor read or write, which made communication difficult and taught others to avoid unnecessary questions.

“The same ones? Yes. How many days gone? Five? Four? Four. Good.” He gestured with a gloved hand for the creature to return to his place in the patrol.

Four days journey ahead of them, twenty-eight men and women seemed to be preparing to cross the strait and move into what had been America. Zimyanin’s heart thrilled in his chest. He knew that no unit of the party’s militia had ever been this close to the enemy’s land. They could not refuse him promotion if he… But this was leaping a wall before he had even mounted his horse. Nobody would applaud the singer just for clearing his throat.

But to catch and destroy the band of slaughtering butchers ahead would be so good. He had been trailing Uchitel and his marauders for weeks now, even closing in at times. But if they crossed the ice river, then his band of militia might be seen. Perhaps a camp for a day?

Perhaps the body of the man they’d just shot would yield a clue, Zimyanin’s head was becoming cold so he replaced his fur cap and walked thoughtfully toward his horse. There was much to think about.

 

CONFUSED, NUL PULLED OFF his gauntlets and again felt the numb patch in the middle of his chest. He felt chilled, but his fingers encountered a sticky wet warmth. Disbelievingly, he painfully held his hand in front of his eyes. It was dripping with blood, as though it had been thrust into the belly of a slaughtered beast,

“Is this…?” But his words faded.

As he lay on his side, his eyes caught the great lake of crimson growing around him. The numbness was sliding away and there was a dull ache. He touched himself again, and his fingers could feel the brittle sharpness of shattered ribs.

He could dimly make out a group of people. At least a mile away, they were mere dots against the blurring whiteness. “Uchitel…?” he said. It was good that friends came to watch you. Even that heartless bastard Uchitel. He’d come back for him.

 

UCHITEL’S HORSE galloped off the jagged edges of the sea ice onto the wind-swept boulders of the beach. “I claim the old land of America in the name of the Narodniki. In the name of Uchitel,” shouted the rider.

Some seventy miles away, Nul lay still, eyes closed, locked into the mystery of his own passing.

 

Chapter Seven

« ^ »

RYAN AND J.B. Dix were poring over a hand-drawn map of the redoubt and stockpile done on six separate sheets of paper, each one showing two different levels. The complexity of the place was staggering. It had more than seventy miles of interconnecting corridors and passages, with stairs and elevators between levels. The gateway was down on the fourth level, with the only viable exit to the bleak outside six levels below that.

Though the group had done a great deal of exploring, there were still considerable areas left where no one had been able to go.

“There be dragons,” said Doc Tanner, coming up behind Ryan and J.B. and pointing with a scrawny finger at a blank area on the map.

“Dragons. What the fuck are they?” asked Ryan, straightening up from the table.

“Fire-breathing mutie lizards is the best explanation that I can offer, sir.”

Behind the old man, J.B. raised his eyes to the ceiling and shook his head. Since they’d been in the redoubt, Ryan had suspected more than once that Doc’s sanity was returning. But often his behavior wasn’t very encouraging.

“You never been up here before, Doc?”

“Never that I recall. But I fear that some of my brain cells have somehow become displaced. I can no longer remember all I might.”

“Got to go, Ryan,” said J.B., walking briskly to the door. “See you, Doc.”

The door hissed shut. Ryan folded the maps and tucked them into an inside pocket of his coat. “Fireblast! We’ve been here six days. Could stay here the rest of our lives if we wanted.”

“But do you want?”

“Don’t know. Good place.”

“Is it really, my dear Mr. Cawdor? If I may be frank with you, I confess that I have my doubts.”

“Why?”

Doc moved closer to Ryan, his boots creaking. He half smiled, showing his oddly perfect set of gleaming teeth. His voice was its usual deep, rich tone.

“This redoubt raises so many questions in my poor, fuddled mind. Why only three survivors after a hundred years? And such an odd trio. Quint, Rachel and the dumb child, Lori. He is the Keeper. That’s a hereditary position, and such positions bestow power without responsibility.”

“You know he doesn’t read, Doc?”

“Yes.” The stovepipe hat dipped forward as Doc stared down at the floor. “Where are the others? He knows how to keep this place functioning by ritual and by rote. That is all.”

“That’s nothin’. Most of the Trader’s men couldn’t read or write. But if you showed them somethin’, they could do it. It’s the way War Wag One was run.”

Doc nodded. “And yet… so many closed doors, are there not, my dear young friend.”

“Yes. We’ve tried to spring ‘em but they’ve got good sec locks on ‘em. If we blow ‘em, then Quint would hear it. What do you reckon’s behind ‘em?”

“More of the past? More of the future? Surely, precious little of the present. I do not know, Mr. Cawdor.”

“Mebbe we should find out. But I tell you, Doc… I’m blocked to the back teeth with this place. This afternoon I’m goin’ to get out and see some sky.”

“There are muties aplenty.”

“I know, but I’ve got security,” he said, patting his guns.

“Cawdor,” mused Doc, laying a forefinger alongside his thin nose. “Why does that name produce a distant and tiny murmur of a muffled bell?”

Ryan stared at him with his good eye. Unconsciously his hand strayed up to the livid scar that ran down his chillingly pale blue right eye, then moved down to tug at his lip on the same side.

“What…some legend of a great and powerful baron out East, beyond the Blue Ridges. Twin sons and a dreadful feud that ended… How did it end, Mr. Cawdor?” Showing a sudden ferocious glint of intelligence, Doc’s eyes were bright and piercing as a mewed hawk’s. For the first time since he’d known Doc Tanner, Ryan realized that the old man had once been a grim force to reckon with.

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talkin’ about, Doc. Your legend doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

“If it doesn’t have… doesn’t have…? Upon my soul, but it’s gone again. What were we talking about?”

“The gateways, whether you’d found any clue how to work the bastard things.”

Doc shook his head. “I fear not. I have discussed the matter with Mr. Quint, who tells me that the Keeper never knew about the gateway. Said that Special Ops MT ran them. I asked him what that meant and he didn’t have any idea at all. The man is simply a gibbering parrot with no brain of his own.”

“So we have a choice—stay here in Alaska, try and find transport back to Deathlands or risk the gateway again.”

“Man gives birth astride a grave, Mr. Cawdor. What choice is that?”

Doc turned on his heel and quickly walked out, heading back toward their quarters. Ryan watched him, then decided that some food might be a good idea. He knew that eventually he had to get outside, away from the concrete walls and strip lights or risk losing part of his own sanity.

 

“YUMMY, YUMMY, it’s the best for your tummy.”

Finnegan threw the empty package on the table. The pizza it had contained was already cooking in one of the gray microwaves along the kitchen wall.

“Momma Maria says it’s the best America makes,” he continued, examining the bright wrapping, on which a stout, beaming, garishly made-up elderly woman held a skillet with a huge pizza on it while a brace of wide-eyed bambinos looked on hungrily.

Hunaker was waiting for her double beanburger to finish. “Free for fiber-fighters—Double discount vouchers at your local grocery,” it said on the package, and in much smaller print, “Subject to availability. Offer closes June 1, 2001.”

“By the time their offer closed, the whole world had closed as well,” Hunaker observed.

All of them had taken advantage of the unbelievable range of clothes and supplies to dress and equip themselves better. But most of them had also kept some of their old gear. Doc kept his hat, frock coat and battered boots, but gave up his faded cream shirt for a new one in faded denim. Ryan kept his long coat, but took some new thermals, dark gray breeches, a brown shirt and a new pair of combat boots with high lacings to replace the old pair with a bite from a rabid mongrel on the right toe.

Finnegan and Hennings each picked similar outfits: high-necked jumpers in dark blue, with matching pants and black combat boots with steel toe caps. Okie kept her coveralls, choosing a sweater in light green for over the top. She also took a pair of low-heeled tan leather riding boots with the name Tony Lama inside.

Hunaker picked an exotic blouse in black satin with a pattern of leaves in green that matched her hair, gray cord trousers and gray ankle boots.

J.B. changed only his pants, which had been torn in a fight in the Darks. He searched the echoing hangar of the clothes store until he found a pair as nearly identical as possible.

Krysty found a new pair of coveralls, in her usual khaki. One problem they had was that clothes in unsealed or inadequately sealed boxes tended to fray and fall apart within hours of being worn. A pair of black leather trousers that Hennings had donned began to disintegrate almost instantly, resembling midnight lace within minutes after the air attacked them.

Krysty’s one indulgence was in footwear. Lori went with her, tottering on her absurd high-heeled, thigh-length boots, the silver spurs jingling behind her. She took Krysty by the arm and led her to a section labeled Fashion & Working Boots—Top Names.

There they found row upon row of large white cardboard boxes arranged by size and by maker: Tex Robin, Dave Little, Henry Leopold, Larry Mahan and, the one she liked best, J. E. Turnipseede.

Miming her enthusiasm, Lori pulled down box after box, ripping out the contents of each to reveal a cascade of dazzling colors, and patterns and leathers. Lori rummaged through the piles, looking for one she thought Krysty might like. Her first choice had a heel nearly as high as her own boots, and Krysty waved them away, smiling and trying to make the mute girl understand that she would fall over in them.

“Those,” she said, pointing to a pair in dark blue leather that had silver falcons with spread wings on the front. The tips of the pointed toes, finished in sharp, chiseled silver, seemed like lethal weapons. The heels were no higher than ordinary combat boots, and like the pair that Okie had chosen, Krysty’s boots were made by someone called Tony Lama. As Krysty bent to try them on, her scarlet hair spread out in a brilliant wave over the dark calfskin of the boots. Then she stood up, feeling the snugness of the fit.

“They’re just wonderful, Lori. Thanks a lot.”

A shadow crossed the girl’s face, as though someone had walked over her grave, but it vanished so quickly that Krysty wondered if she’d imagined it. But she knew that she hadn’t.

 

“RIPENED IN THE SUN of Kansas and sweetened by the rain of Kansas,” said Finnegan, tearing open a waxed pack of breakfast cereal. “What the fuck is Kansas?”

“It was a place, stupe,” replied J.B. Dix. “In the east of Deathlands.”

Ryan grinned. It was a little after noon and he was preparing to leave the redoubt. He’d hinted to the doddering Quint that he was thinking about it, and the old man had thrown a fit, spraying spittle as he gesticulated angrily.

“Keeper says not go. Those as goes is dead. Those as stays is the lucky ones. Don’t try it. Many gone over the years, says the Keeper. Only us left. Lori got to have us a babe. Be next Keeper. Not Rachel, she’s too fuckin’ old for babes.”

Cawdor hadn’t argued with him. There was no point in rocking the boat. He and J.B. had discussed it and agreed that they should move on soon. In the redoubt the only thing you got was soft.

 

HUN, OKIE AND HENNINGS had become fascinated with some ancient vid and audio equipment they’d found in one of the cavernous stores. There were collections of films and TV programs as well as thousands of comp discs. Ryan had discovered similar stocks in other warehouses, but nothing on this massive scale. They could have played them for ten years and never have heard or seen the same thing twice,

Hun had taken a liking to a record called Robert Zimmerman Meets Again with the Boys from the Band, It seemed to be some sort of reunion concert from the year 2000, in some long-gone ville called Hibbing, Minnesota. She kept on playing it through a pocket quad with lightweight cans.

Okie watched endless programs on one of the TVs and was amazed by the amount of violence. A series based on a unit of sec men was her favorite and she bored the others with her enthusiasm.

“Listen, this little bastard called Belker is the greatest blaster you ever seen. Bites the shit out of the scum. But he don’t kill as many as he should, probably to make him seem weak an interestin’. He’s got some real old guns—thirty-eights and Magnums.” She turned suddenly and pointed at Ryan. “Do you feel lucky, punk?” she said, laughing hysterically.

Nobody else laughed. Nobody else understood what on the blasted earth she was laughing at.

 

DOC WALKED WITH RYAN down through the levels toward the exit. Not sharing an interest with the others in the old techno toys, Ryan contented himself with finding a library of crumbling paperback books—more than he had seen in his life, all gathered in one large room, with ladders to the high shelves and a balcony.

“Had you the time, my dear Ryan,” said Doc, “then you would find the answer to every riddle known to man in this one library.”

“The secret of who you are and how come you know so much about what happened before the Chill?”

“I like to speak to a man who likes to speak his mind. Indeed I do, sir. I would often tell Wilbur that.”

“Wilbur? Who’s Wilbur?”

Doc looked puzzled. “I have no recollection, I fear. Did I say Wilbur? Ah well… As to my past, Ryan, I fear it must remain locked away awhile longer.”

“But one day, huh?”

“Perhaps, my dear Mr. Cawdor. Perhaps. Ah, here comes the delightful Miss Lori, teetering along so prettily. It is peculiar, don’t you think, that she is so much younger than Quint and the harridan? An enigma shrouded in mystery, that.”

The girl looked dazzlingly pretty to Ryan, her long golden hair tied back with a strand of emerald ribbon. Her red satin blouse had a small rip across the right breast, showing a tantalizing amount of flesh. Her short suede skirt clung tightly to her thighs, heightening her femininity. On her right hip was the bolstered pearl-handled Walther PPK, apparently chambered for a .22 cartridge. Not much of a stopper unless you were very good with it.

“Hi,” said Ryan, receiving a broad smile from the girl, and a nod.

“Leave you two young people together, I think,” said Doc, grinning and bowing formally from the waist to Lori, walking off before Ryan could say anything.

“I’m goin’ out,” said Ryan.

Her head shook so violently that he feared she might have a fit.

“Yeah, want to see some outside. Seen enough inside for a while. You comin’?”

Again a shake of her head. She took his arm and tried to pull him back into the center of the redoubt.

“No, lady, I’m goin’. You stay. That’s fine.”

She kept her grip on his arm but made no further effort to check him. He walked along with her at his side, conscious of her attractiveness; wearing heels, she topped him by a couple of inches.

Ryan felt himself becoming aroused. Time was he’d have just laid her down in the passage and done it to her—without a single pang of conscience or regret. A woman asked for it with Ryan Cawdor, and a woman got it. Simple as icin’ a stickie.

They descended the winding stairs level by level until they reached the tenth floor, which was near the bottom of the complex. At the base of the staircase, there was a pair of heavy steel doors, firmly locked. Ryan paused, wondering what the Keeper wanted to shut off in there.

“What’s in there, Lori?”

Her face tightened with concentration. She put both hands to her cheek and closed her eyes, miming sleep.

“Beds? You come and sleep down here?”

Lori shook her head sadly. Then she bit her lip, trying again. She pointed to the doors and clutched her chest, rolled her eyes and sank slowly and gracefully to the floor, where she lay still, one leg bent beneath her. Not quite understanding the meaning of the pantomime, Ryan noticed that the girl wore no panties beneath the red suede skirt, and that her pubic hair was naturally as gold as her head.

“They…they’re dead in there? Sleeping? Dead?”

She sat up with a radiant smile, then folded her arms around herself and shuddered.

“Frozen? Fireblast, you mean that there’s folk in there, frozen and dead?”

She stood up, looking at him, mouth trembling open, almost as if she was about to talk. But the moment passed, and she turned and ran down a lateral corridor until all he heard was the tinkling of her spurs.

He stood for some seconds, looking at the great doors, wondering if the secret of the lost generations of the redoubt lay behind them. But whatever the secret was, he decided that it didn’t much interest him. What he wanted was some fresh air.

He and J.B. had worked out the controls on a previous visit. The exit code was displayed on a green liquid panel. It was three digits. As soon as you pressed the Ready button, a return code appeared, three digits plus a letter to complete the sequence. Ryan touched the button that turned on the display panel. It showed 9.2.9. and the return code, 5.9.6. followed by the letter H.

The secondary entrance to the redoubt slid soundlessly open.

Ryan’s nostrils were immediately filled with the stench of sulfur. Outside, sleet and snow whirled across a flat paved area about fifty paces square. In the stockpile they’d found dozens of snow buggies with tracks that enabled them to go over any kind of terrain. But for this brief excursion, Ryan had chosen to go on foot.

Repeating to himself, “Five, nine, six, H,” he stepped through the door and watched it close behind him.

The landscape was as bleak as anything he’d ever seen. The redoubt was set into the side of a mountain. A long trail wound toward a steep valley below. There was no sign of vegetation anywhere.

He wore his thermals, with a thick sweater and his trusty long coat. The LAPA 5.56 mm was on his right hip, the steel panga on the left. The SIG-Sauer was holstered under the coat.

There were jagged peaks all around, vanishing into the murk, all of them layered with snow. The cold was intense, making him think that the rumors of the persisting nuclear winter were true. The sky was a sallow color, streaked like bile, showing occasional flashes of silver brightness from the chem debris that still permeated the heavens. Far off to the west, Ryan could make out a tall mountain with a smear of orange smoke trailing from it, indicating an active volcano.

For an instant, the ground vibrated beneath his feet from a minor earth tremor. Ryan steadied himself, rubbing his right eye to clear the irritation from the ocher clouds.

Squinting with his good eye, he spotted movement on the far side of the valley beneath an overhang of gray rock. It looked like a pair of huge bears, their coats of dirty white marked with yellow mud. As he watched them, they turned toward him.

Although the bears showed no sign of becoming a threat, Ryan drew the LAPA, holding it at the ready. They were probably a good half mile away as the mutie gulls flew, probably five miles by the shortest trail. Ironically, the two animals probably saved his life. Without them he wouldn’t have drawn his gun.

The attackers came from above and behind. They dropped on top of Ryan and sent him crashing to the icy ground. He scrabbled to his feet, but just as he was upright again, one of them hit him behind the knees and he went flying to one side. But even as he fell, he snapped off a burst from his LAPA, the stream of lead stitching two of the five diminutive muties. They went spinning away, mouths open with screams, blood and intestines spilling from their torn stomachs.

As Ryan hit the ground, his gun struck rock with a solid cracking noise. His elbow and shoulder were jarred by the fall, but he was quickly up on one knee, steadying the gun at the three remaining dwarfs, who were shrouded in furs so that only their slit-eyes showed. One had obscenely long monkey arms that trailed in the snow as he moved. Another seemed to have a residual third leg sprouting from his left thigh. Ryan assumed that they were men, though there was no evidence either way. All three carried long spears tipped with barbed ivory points. Communicating with one another in grunts, they pointed at their two dying comrades and stamped their feet on the rocky ground in obvious rage.

“Come on, you little fuckers,” said Ryan, holding his gun steady.

One of them waved his spear, shuffling nearer to the lone man. Still keeping them covered, Ryan slowly rose glancing around in case more muties were sneaking up behind him.

He held his fire as long as he could, though not out of any foolish milksop ideas of mercy or kindness. It was always good to know as much as possible about your enemies. Anyone not a friend was always an enemy. If Alaska was filled with these bloodthirsty muties, then it was as well to know what their weapons were. Did they have only spears?

They came closer, hissing menacingly, thrusting their wooden lances forward.

“Close enough,” said Ryan, tightening his finger on the trigger.

There was a metallic grating sound, and nothing else happened. The fall had jammed the LAPA.

“Fireblast and shit!” snarled Ryan.

 

Chapter Eight

« ^ »

I hear that grim tyrant approaching,

That cruel and remorseless old foe,

And I lift up me glass in his honor,

Take a drink with bold Rosin the Beau.

 

The lyrics floated over the bare rocks, reaching the ears of the Russian guerrillas. The words made no sense at all to them. Had they understood them, they would still have been baffled, for the song came from distant antiquity. It dated centuries before the nukes fell from the skies, bringing the long darkness to all the world.

Zmeya came snaking back from the ridge, his clothes stained a dull green from the lichen that clung stubbornly to the lee of the boulders. He scurried to where Uchitel stood, holding his stallion quiet.

“One man alone, a trapper laying lines below the ice of a stream. Shall I kill him?”

“He is the first American. I would see him myself.” Uchitel turned to the rest of the band. “Mount up, brothers and sisters. Let us to war.”

The trapper, Jorgen Smith, was thirty-three years old and lived in a hamlet a few miles inland. His wife had been killed two years earlier by a pack of mutie wolves. They had had no children. Now he was content to venture out each morning—if the wind wasn’t blowing to flay the skin off a man—and lay his traps for the beaver that still lived in the streams that ran fast and clean toward the sea. The water was saved from freezing only by the warm slopes of the live volcanos where the streams began.

Kneeling in the snow, he sang to himself as he worked, fighting the loneliness and isolation. His battered Remington M-700 sporting rifle was at his side in its sheath of caribou skin. The gun, a family heirloom, showed the scars of a hundred years of constant use. It fired 7 mm cartridges of which the community now had less than one hundred rounds left. Soon they would either have to barter for more, or rechamber the rifle. The Garand-type ejector—a spring-loaded plunger tucked in the bolt face—had broken in Jorgen’s father’s time, and a manual ejector had been rigged up by an itinerant blacksmith who visited each hamlet in the far northwest every two or three years.

“Remember me to one who lives there, for once she was a true love of mine,” he sang.

Tying thin strips of rawhide, Smith fumbled with a stubborn knot, considering risking the removal of his gloves. He’d already lost his thumb and two fingers from his left hand by getting them wet and frozen the day he’d tried to rescue Jenny from the wolves.

He caught a glimmer of movement out of the corner of his eye where his goggles were cracked. Quickly pushing them up on his forehead, Jorgen reached for his rifle, dropping the trapping lines in the snow.

On the ridge behind him, silhouetted against the pallid sky, there was a man on a horse: a huge black stallion, much bigger than the little ponies that most folks ride. A gun of a design that Jorgen Smith could not identify, was slung across the man’s shoulders.

The stranger was joined by a second rider, then a third and fourth, then more than Jorgen could count.

Holding his Remington, he stood up, waiting as they approached. To see so many strangers was something utterly beyond his experience. They could only be traders, with their goods on the pack horses at the rear of the column. But with their guns, they looked very threatening. Perhaps they were worried about muties. Guns were what kept muties away from the scattered villages.

 

Uchitel halted his stallion a dozen steps from the man, staring at him curiously, disappointed in a strange way that this American looked so like the wretched peasants on the Russian side of the Bering Strait. He wore torn and ragged furs, and boots that seemed to be no more than strips of cloth and leather wrapped around his feet.

“Hi, there,” called Smith. “You tradin’? I’ve got some skins.”

“What does he say, Uchitel? Should I kill him?”

“No, Pechal. Wait. I have a book that teaches how to talk to these Americans. It is here.” Fumbling in his saddlebag, he pulled out a dog-eared volume.

On the front cover it said: “Convenient conversations for the traveler for any eventuality.” It was written by G. Duluoz and offered easy translations from the Russian tongue to the American and vice versa in seventy different social causes, with full index. It was published by Strafford Books in 1925.

 

Trying to be casual, Jorgen hooked his rifle so that it lay cradled in his arms, pointing in the general direction of the tall man with the kindly smile and the odd-colored eyes. Something was real wrong.

“You want directions somewhere? Are you lost? Where you from?” His finger touched the Remington’s slim trigger, a three-inch nail that had been used to replace the original trigger when it had rusted through.

Uchitel ignored him, flicking through the pages until he found what he wanted. Holding the book in his right hand, he raised his voice so that the rest of the Narodniki could hear and admire. As he was about to begin, he heard a snigger.

“Perhaps, Krisa, I shall give you some cause for laughter in a while. You can laugh as your rat’s belly is slit and filled with pyrotabs, then set on fire.”

“I am sorry, Uchitel,” whispered Krisa, blinking his narrow little red eyes in sudden gut-twisting fear.

“Who the fuck are you guys?” asked Jorgen Smith. “I don’t know none of you.”

To Uchitel, the man’s accent was barbaric and grating, yet Uchitel still tried to communicate. “Good morning. Can you direct me us them to the house or mansion? We are awaited.”

Jorgen’s eyes opened wide with bewilderment. “What the fuck are you talkin’ ‘bout? You a fuckin’ crowd of stupe muties?”

Uchitel tried again. He could feel a pulse beating at the corner of his right eye, which meant he was at risk of losing his temper. This imbecile was trying to make him look like a fool in front of everyone.

“We are—” he paused, deciding to use the Russian name “—Narodniki.” He turned the pages with clumsy haste, his eyes brightening as he found what he wanted. “I he she it we they want wants food.”

“Food! You crook-talkin’ bastards want our food?”

Something was going wrong. Uchitel could sense it. He blinked, trying to clear the reddish mist that clouded his vision. The man facing them was waving his rifle in a way that was clearly threatening. They could all see that.

Stena, nicknamed the Wall because he was six feet tall and five feet wide, heeled his horse forward to the side of Uchitel. “The dog threatens us. Let me kill him, Uchitel?”

“Nyet. Wait.”

“Get the fuck out, you snowsuckin’ bastards! Go piss up an ice rope.”

 

Jorgen put the Remington to his shoulder and aimed at the man who’d been doing the talking. Stena saw the move and kicked his heels into the flanks of his big bay mare and, yelping his delight, drew the 9 mm Makarov pistol from his belt.

Jorgen Smith’s old gun barked first, the 7 mm bullet hitting the big Russian in the right shoulder. Stena fell from his saddle, landing with a great crash on his back in the snow.

Jorgen grinned at his success, frantically struggling with the makeshift manual ejector on the ancient Remington. A few yards away, Uchitel stood in the stirrups and yelled a command to his band.

“Do not shoot! Nyet! He is mine.”

During his foraging through the ruins of Yakutsk, Uchitel had found a glass case among the rubble of some public building. A card had said that the item within the case had been used by Comrade General Denisov in his valiant fight against the forces of capitalism and fascism during the first months of 1919.

Now it hung from the pommel of Uchitel’s saddle, a long cavalry sword with a slightly curved blade, angled and weighted for a downward thrust from horseback. The hilt was padded with rotting maroon velvet tied with fine gold wire that had long frayed through. The ferrule was brass, the guard and knuckle bow, silver. An indentation on the back of the flat blade was engraved with hunting scenes. From the tip to the dog-head pommel, the sword was only two inches short of four feet.

As Jorgen prepared another round, Uchitel drew the saber from its leather sheath, feeling the cold hilt against his palm. Hearing the stamping of hooves, the American looked up at the last moment and parried the lethal down cut of the glittering sword with his rifle. Uchitel put so much force into the blow that it smashed clean through the stock of the rifle a couple of inches behind the finger guard, cutting Smith in the right shoulder. He dropped the splintered remains of the Remington, clapping his left hand to the bleeding wound.

“You done me, you bastard,” he yelped plaintively, standing still and feeling his doom approach.

Uchitel swung the saber again. It sliced through the fur hood, skin, flesh and muscle, through the cervical vertebrae of Jorgen’s neck, clean out the other side. For a long second, the corpse stood upright, head balanced precariously in place. Then the head rolled and toppled, bouncing on the stones to the cheers of the Narodniki. Blood gushed high in the cold air, the body slumping slowly to its knees, then folding on its side and lying still.

Uchitel wiped the blade of the saber on a handful of his stallion’s mane, sheathing the sword once more.

“So die all who oppose the Narodniki,” he called, pleased with his triumph.

“Not a bullet wasted,” said Barkhat in his soft, gentle voice.

“One was wasted on me!” roared Stena, still holding his wounded shoulder.

“Is it bad, brother?” asked Uchitel. “Will you stay to seek poor Nul, wherever he might be?”

“No, brother, I ride on with you. Let us take more of these soft Americans.”

“We shall take the entire land, brother,” laughed Uchitel. He felt good. If this was the best this nation could do, then there was no need to fear.

Before they moved eastward, Uchitel carefully folded and put away the phrase book. It had been disappointing not to be able to use it more, but these peasants were such lackbrain weaklings that communication was hardly needed.

One last sentence caught his eye, and he spoke it carefully to the blood-sodden corpse, lying decapitated in the snow beside the gurgling brook.

“Much thanks for your help, sir,” he said, trying to follow the phonetic pronunciation. “Here is a nickel for your trouble.”

Uchitel heeled his black stallion eastward, and was followed by the others deeper into the bleakness of what had been Alaska.

 

Chapter Nine

« ^ »

RYAN PARRIED THE FIRST spear thrust, but cut his left hand on the white bone point. Grabbing the end of the shaft, he pulled hard, swinging the dwarf mutie to one side, knocking the second attacker off balance. With odds of three to one, he knew that he had to do something fast. The longer it went, the shorter his odds became.

He dropped the useless, jammed gun and tried to draw the steel machete from its sheath, but the muties were too close for that. And if he tried to go for the SIG-Sauer beneath his coat, they’d take him for sure. He had to buy himself a little time and space.

Holding the barbed end of the spear, Ryan screamed mightily and launched himself toward the creature holding the other end of the spear. The mutie slipped on the ice and nearly fell, loosening his hold on the spear. Ryan tried to wrench it from his grasp, but the gloved fingers clawed on to it. The muties had been expecting Ryan to keep away from them, and had been taken by surprise, but now the other two closed in again.

“Bastard!” spat Ryan, dodging a thrust aimed at his ribs from the mutie on the left, then moved a few steps toward the top of the track.

Knowing that the only way to fight close combat was bare-handed, he dropped his gloves. The hilt of the panga slipped into his fingers and he drew the blade, waving it in front of him in a singing curtain of death.

“Come on, now,” he invited, waving the three muties toward him with his bleeding left hand.

Making little grunts and whistles, they seemed to be speaking to each other. Their slit eyes flicking nervously to him and then back, they spread into a half-circle about fifteen feet away from him. Above all, Ryan didn’t want any of them sneaking behind him. Best defense was a good offense, he decided.

They had the advantage of reach with the long spears. If he let them keep him away, they’d kill him in the end, no doubt about that. Ryan watched them, noticing that the mutie to the left seemed crippled and moved slower and more clumsily than the other two.

He feinted to the right, making them back away from the whirling steel. Immediately he darted low and fast to the left, feeling the clunk of the blade cutting into flesh and bone. He’d hit the mutie just above the knee, parrying a spear thrust with his left hand. The little fur-clad figure toppled sideways, dropping its spear to the ice. The others hesitated, seeing their comrade down and done for.

Ryan didn’t hesitate at all.

He slashed at the mutie’s exposed shoulder and neck with the panga and simultaneously retrieved the wooden spear with his free hand. Blood jetted and the creature screamed, the furs falling back from its face. Ryan winced at the horror of the mutations in the dwarf’s skull. It was squashed vertically so that the forehead rested squarely on the buried eyes. The distance between brows and chin couldn’t have been more than three inches. There was also evidence of an appalling skin disease that had left the face raw and weeping, with crusts of small pustules nesting around the eyes, nose and mouth.

All of that registered in a splinter of frozen time as the machete descended, nearly beheading the mutie in a single blow.

Ryan turned away from the twitching corpse. He tossed the spear in the air, catching it in his right hand, and transferred the bloodied blade to his left.

The two surviving muties seemed torn between aggression and flight. Ryan solved the dilemma for them.

Reaching behind him like an athlete throwing a javelin, he hurled the clumsy spear with all his power at the nearest of the attackers. The sharp ivory point pierced the sealskin belt that the mutie wore about its sagging midriff, emerging with shreds of crimson flesh and gristle, slightly to the left of the spine. The creature lurched back, squeaking in a tiny, feeble voice, like a mouse with a broken leg.

Ryan saw that the mutie was done for. It had fallen on its side and was rolling back and forth, the long shaft of the spear scraping against ice and stones. Even in death, the mutie’s gloved hands were clasped around the wood.

The last mutie—the one with the third, residual leg—was backing away, reaching under his furs with his left hand. Ryan watched him carefully, suspecting some kind of blaster. But all he pulled out was a tiny whistle of bone.

Before he could raise it to his lips, bringing who knows how many reinforcements,, Ryan hurled himself toward the little figure. The gleaming ivory tip of the spear darted at him, but he parried with a ferocious cut of the panga, snapping the spear in half, the point falling to the ice and skittering away.

The mutie raised his hands to try to save himself from the death cut, but Ryan wasn’t going to postpone the execution. Bone crunched as the steel blade smashed through the mutie’s fur-clad right wrist, severing the hand so that it dropped like a furry animal. Blood gushed out, warm and salty, into Ryan’s face, nearly blinding him. But he quickly wiped his eye clear, cutting again at the blurred figure before him.

The machete penetrated the mutie’s shoulder almost to the breast. Ryan pushed at the creature’s face, knocking him down. Putting a boot on its throat, he jerked the blood-slick metal clear, then jammed it through the fur hood where he guessed the mouth should be. He heard teeth splinter and felt the shock run clear up his arm as the tip of the panga penetrated through the back of the mutie’s neck into the frozen earth.

For a moment he left it there, the thonged hilt sodden with fresh blood. He straightened up, looking around to make sure no more muties were around the entrance to the redoubt. The wind still howled and snow flurries obscured the view. He suddenly remembered the two monstrous white bears that he’d seen a few minutes ago and decided that it might be safer inside.

He pulled the panga clear of the dead mutie’s skull, wiped it on the creature’s fur jacket, and slipped it back into its sheath. He saw the LAPA lying on the stones, a dusting of snow already building up around it. With a shrug he left it there and turned back to the door, punching in the return code of 5.9.6., then the H.

Nothing happened for a breath-stopping moment, then the vanadium steel swung open and Ryan returned to the warmth and security of the redoubt.

Back in their living quarters, the first person he saw was J.B. The Armorer looked impassively at Ryan’s torn and blood-soaked clothes and came as close as he ever did to a smile.

“Fresh air good, Ryan?” he asked.

“I’ve had better,” Ryan replied.

 

PREDICTABLY, IT WAS J.B. Dix who discovered the museum of arms and armaments.

“I can smell guns,” he said. “Followed the scent of oil and steel and lead and grease and brass. Found it up on top level. Even got ob slits. See for miles.”

“See what?” Ryan asked.

“Nothin’. Snow. Couple of volcanoes north and east. Sky full of chem clouds and general nuke shit. Lot of yellow, from the smokies, I guess. Come an’ see it.”

Ryan grunted in reply, but didn’t move, continuing to eat in silence, oblivious to the rest of the group. Something peculiar was happening in the redoubt. Three of the microwaves had already stopped working. Several of the sealed clothes stores that Quint had allowed them to open were showing signs of rapid deterioration, with garments becoming frayed and actually rotting. The water-purifying plant in their dormitory had started to malfunction, sometimes providing a thin green scummy liquid that smelled of death. Ryan had talked about this with J.B. only the night before, and they’d agreed that the redoubt and stockpile had been sealed against outsiders for so many years that their presence had upset the delicate balance of the machinery. Quint was obviously aware of it and kept asking them when they were going to leave. Yet, oddly, some of them got the feeling that he didn’t want them to go.

They finished their evening meal, chucking the disposable plates and cutlery down the garbage chute. Finn paused by the sliding panel for a moment, listening.

“Fuckin’ funny noises down there. Like rocks grindin’ against each other.”

With J.B. leading the way, they left the dining room and headed for the armaments museum, marking their progress on their own maps. From ingrained caution, they paused at every turn of the corridor. They saw no sign of Quint, Rachel or Lori as they advanced quietly up to the top of the stockpile.

“Here,” J.B. said, putting his hand against an illuminated rectangle set flush in the wall to the right of a door. The door slid silently open, revealing a foyer. On the wall there was a sign.

“Do not touch exhibits. Ammo filed beneath under cross-refs,” read Krysty.

“Look there,” said Ryan, pointing to another sign, hand painted, not neatly printed like the other one.

It’s nice to come, if you’ve got your pass.

But if you don’t we’ll bust your ass.

The double doors at the far side of the foyer had small circles of glass set in their tops. Ryan pushed them open, stopping so suddenly that Hennings walked into him.

“Fireblast!”

“What the… Oh, fuckin’…”

The museum stretched out ahead of them, dim lights brightening in the large hall as sensors detected their presence. It wasn’t the array of weapons that caught everyone’s eyes. It was what was nailed to the floor just in front of them.

All of them recognized it as the mummified corpse of a young child. Either it had been assembled by a crazed and skilful surgeon, or it was one of the worst mutations that any of them had ever seen. Despite the dried, leathery skin, it was possible to make out scars from what had once been suppurating sores all over the body. The umbilical cord dangled like a knotted brown string, and a shrunken penis revealed the original sex of the child. Though it looked to be only a few weeks old, it had a full set of needle-sharp teeth, and its fingernails were long and curved like claws. Ryan counted nine fingers on the right hand. The left hand sprouted from near the shoulder. It looked like a little paddle of lacy skin and had at least a dozen fingers on it. The legs were less than three inches in length, ending in toes that lacked nails.

At the shoulders there were the stubs of what looked like the wings of a prehistoric flying reptile. The crucified baby had two heads, one with only a residual stump of a skull, hardly visible in the shadows. The ribs were appallingly distorted, running more from top to bottom than from side to side, and the pelvis was strangely tilted, obscenely large for the rest of the torso.

A long thin dagger with a hilt of twisted silver wire was pushed through the crossed feet. A second blade pinned the right hand. A third was pressed through the scrawny throat. Blood darkened the tiles all around the body. Hunaker touched it with the toe of her new tan boots, watching it crumble to powder.

“Been here for years. Mebbe twenty or more. Could be plenty more.”

There was a message that had apparently been scrawled with a finger, using blood that was still warm and fresh. The words misspelled and the letters clumsy, it was difficult to read, but clearly a warning:

“Kep oute for ewer ore dy.” It was signed, “The Keper.”

“You said Quint couldn’t read or write,” Ryan said to Krysty.

“Yeah. No reason to lie, was there?”

Ryan shook his head. “Guess not. So, if he’s as fuckin’ old as he looks, an’ he’s the Keeper… who was the Keeper who wrote this?”

J.B. pushed past him. “Who cares, friend? Let’s go look at some guns.”

And what guns they were.

Some of them were at least three hundred years old, looking frail and dusty inside cases of Plexiglas. The party split up to wander around, and the huge room echoed with their cries of amazement at the wonders. Ryan walked with Krysty and J.B.

It wasn’t just a boggling array of blasters. There were all kinds of daggers and swords and axes. Many of the guns had descriptive cards under them. One card read, “Pair English flintlock night pistols, circa 1712, made in England by James Freeman. Screw-barrel guns fired buckshot instead of conventional ball, making it easier to hit a target at night, hence their name.”

“What kind of range would that have, J.B.?” asked Ryan.

“I guess about twenty feet on a good day, or night,” replied the Armorer, and moved on to explore on his own.

In the next case was a delicate sword with a blade that tapered to a needle point. Krysty put her arm on Ryan’s, squeezing against him. “When do we go, lover?” she asked.

“Soon. Mebbe tomorrow. Day after for sure. Sword like that wouldn’t be worth mutie shit in a firefight.”

The card read, “English small sword, officer’s. Circa 1765, steel hilt, with colichemarde blade. Grip bound in silver wire. Pierced pommel and guard. Blade length, thirty-two inches.”

“Look at the length of this mother, J.B.,” yelled Okie, her face pressed against a case across the hall. The long dark hair in her ponytail swung back and forth with her excitement. Dix joined her, reading slowly from the card.

“Model eighteen-forty-two rifle-musket. Fired the seven-forty grain Minié ball. Sights up to…up to nine hundred yards.”

“Over a fuckin’ half mile,” gasped Okie. “That right, J.B.?”

“I’d back it up to about eighty yards.”

“Look at the barrel on it,” said Ryan, joining them. “Must be over five feet long.”

“Couldn’t get that inside your coat,” grinned Krysty.

“Wouldn’t want to.”

“You goin’ to change that LAPA now?” asked J.B. “On through there, under that arch, is an armory of modern stuff. Get somethin’ new.”

“What?”

J.B.’s sallow face warmed with a smile, and his eyes twinkled behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “Go see. I saw somethin’ you might like.”

Ryan walked quickly away, hearing the click of Krysty’s dark blue cowboy boots following. He slowed down and waited for her, passing Finnegan and Hennings, immaculate in their matching blue jumpers.

“How’s the hand, Ryan?” asked the fat man.

He inspected it. A little dried blood was crusted around the cut from the mutie’s spear tip, but it looked clean. Ryan knew that out east there were villages of “dirties” who lived in mud huts and used poison on their arrows. The Trader had told him about them.

“Better, thanks, Finn.”

On either side, rows of cases were stacked one above the other. He knew that J.B. Dix had a few precious booklets and pages torn from mags that showed some blasters from before the Chill. Now those blasters were in front of him and he read the names on the cards.

“Colt. Remington. Walker. Sharps, Smith & Wesson, Winchester, Le Mat, Luger, Catling, Maxim, Walther, Browning, Kalashnikov, Thompson, Mannlicher, Schmeisser, Uzi, Mauser, T6-karev, Webley, Deringer and Deringer, Tranter.” His voice faded in wonder at this staggering array of arms. “J.B. could stay here all his days, Krysty. This is what his life is all about. Blasters in all shapes and sizes. Look at ‘em. Just look.”

He never even noticed the tiny vid camera hidden in the shadows near the ceiling, its tiny lens darting from side to side, following the movements of the group.

Just as they’d raided the clothes stores, so everyone took their pickings from the section of the museum beyond the arch, where there were rows and rows of greased and oiled blasters in all sizes and shapes and calibers; grenades and bombs and mines and rockets; bayonets and gren launchers; strangling wires and bazookas; machine guns and poison pistols.

Hunaker replaced the broad-bladed dagger that she’d broken fighting the Sioux in the Darks; barely a week earlier, it seemed like a dozen lifetimes. On J.B.’s recommendation, she took a 9 mm Ingram submachine gun that pared everything down to the minimum. Despite its small size, the light bolt action gave it a staggering rate of fire close to fifteen hundred rounds per minute. The card said it was the model 12. She also took a supply of the stick mags.

Okie kept her M-16A1 carbine with the collapsed stock, adding to it an IMI Mini-Uzi submachine gun. It weighed just over six pounds and was less than fifteen inches in length.

Krysty liked the clean, silvered finish on a Heckler & Koch P-7A 13 pistol, which fired a 9 mm bullet out of a thirteen-round magazine. Because of the large number of rounds it held, there was a special insulating block in front of the trigger to absorb heat from the gas that retarded the slide opening. J.B. nodded his approval of her choice.

Finnegan and Hennings both went for the fifteen-round model 92 Beretta pistol with frame-mounted safety, firing a 9 mm round.

They both liked a whole rack of dull gray Heckler & Koch submachine guns with built-in silencers and fifty-round drum magazines; they fired single, triple or continuous bursts of 9 mm bullets. The card said it was a development of the famous HK-54A2 model of the 1990s.

Ryan watched J.B., strolling around the rooms of new guns, hands behind his back, lips moving as though he was silently praying. But he wasn’t. He was simply comparing the various qualities of the blasters ranged all around him.

“Can’t do much better than what I’ve got,” he finally said, watching the others carry armfuls of ammo down to their dormitory.

He pulled out his Steyr AUG 5.6 mm. “Nice Browning Hi-Power over there. Might take a Mini-Uzi like Okie got. Useful if we meet a mess of muties. And a new knife or two. Mebbe stock up on grens, huh?”

There was a polite cough from behind. The men spun, each dropping instinctively into a fighter’s crouch.

“My apologies, gentlemen, if I caused a shimmer of nervousness to trickle through your bodies.”

“Just fuck off, Doc,” said J.B., relaxing, pushing back the brim of his crumpled fedora, fumbling in his pocket for one of his favored cheroots.

“I have taken the liberty of arming myself, if you have no objection, so I can be less of a weight for you to bear on our little jaunts.”

“Jaunts?” exclaimed Ryan. “What kind a blasters you got?”

“An uncle of mine, a dear, sweet man, once owned a handgun of some rarity. A weapon for the connoisseur. Also, in the right hands, one to blast off the balls of a demented stickie, if I may be excused a lapse into the vernacular.”

“You may, Doc. You fuckin’ may,” said Ryan, smiling.

“I have taken this to aid me in my striding over the difficult terrain we seem to encounter.”

He held a long ebony walking stick in his right hand. As he tossed it in the air and caught it, the glittering silver pommel was revealed. It was a beautiful carving of the head of some ferocious animal with great teeth and a mane of hair.

“Handsome, Doc,” said J.B. admiringly.

“More than that, my dear Mr. Dix. Voilà!” With a twist of the hand he loosened the head, drawing out a snaking rapier of polished steel from within the ebony shell. “From the plant of elegance, I pluck the flower of mortality.”

“What about a blaster, Doc? Nice sword, though.”

“Grudging praise from you, Mr. Dix, is better than the most fulsome flattery from the lips of lesser mortals. Yes, as I said, I believe…” He paused, looking confused. “Did I mention the handgun that an uncle…?”

“Yeah,” said Ryan. “Go on.”

“I saw it. Here it is.” He pulled a massive blaster from the front of his frock coat.

“It’s a double-barrel cannon, Doc!” exclaimed J.B. “Le Mat, ain’t it? Heard of ‘em. Never thought I’d see one.”

Ryan extended a hand for the pistol, nearly dropping it, surprised by the weight. Doc Tanner also handed him the card that had been in the showcase.

It read, “A nine-chambered percussion revolver designed by Dr. Jean Alexandre Francois Le Mat of New Orleans in 1856, being granted U.S. Patent 15925. Manufactured in Louisiana by Pierre Beau-regard, later to fight as General for the Confederate States Army at Manassas and Shiloh. This model of a .36 caliber. The unusual element of a Le Mat pistol is that it also has a second, central, smooth-bore barrel, to take a .63-caliber scattergun round. The nose of the hammer is manually adjustable.”

“Big muzzle, looks about eighteen bore,” said J.B. Dix, holding the heavy blaster. “Could be good. Got ammo for it, Doc?”

“Ample, Mr. Dix, thank you. I shall take it down to our quarters. Are we to try the gateway or do we go for the great outdoors?”

“You haven’t found nothin’ to help operate that fireblasted gateway, Doc?” asked Ryan.

“Only what I knew already.”

There it was again, the peculiar suggestion that Doc Tanner had somehow been around these redoubts before the Chill. Which was clearly impossible. That was a hundred years ago. Doc might be a muddled old fool most of the time, but he wasn’t that old. You could lay an ace on the line about that.

“So how do you know that, Doc?” asked Ryan, seeing the same question on J.B.’s lips.

“I’m not too—” He stopped speaking, looking up beyond Ryan’s head into the dark shadows that clung to the corners of the high room beyond one of the narrow ob slits. “There is a vid camera up there, moving to watch us. I fear that the Keeper will know we have intruded into his sanctum sanctorum.”

“His what?” asked J.B., his face creasing with irritation.

“Guess Doc means we’ve pissed in Quint’s best pot,” said Ryan. “We should go.”

“Doc, you go. Take as much ammo as you can carry. Tell the others to keep to the dorm. Ryan, come with me. Somethin’ you’ve got to see.”

Doc bolstered his Le Mat and shuffled off, the tip of his sword stick rapping on the floor. Ryan followed J.B. through a smaller arch into yet another gallery of weapons.

There it was, complete with ammo of all sorts, including rounds of tracer. And a thin booklet giving a full account of the gun and how to strip and service it.

“In the big fire,” said Ryan, whistling his surprise. “That’s for me! What about the others?”

“No time,” replied J.B. “They got what they got. You take this. I’ll carry as much ammo as I can. Let’s go.”

It was a rectangle of metal with a night scope on the top and a pistol-grip butt and trigger on the bottom and was unlike any other weapon that Ryan had ever seen. The name was on the side, just below the sight. Heckler & Koch, Model G-12 recoilless rifle.

The outside of the book gave the main facts, and they were amazing. It fired single shot like any ordinary rifle. On continuous fire it worked at six hundred rounds per minute. But in three-shot bursts it fired at over two thousand rounds a minute: a staggering rate. The other innovation was that the 4.7 mm cartridges were caseless, which meant that he could carry a much greater supply of ammo than with a conventional weapon.

Flicking through the manual, Ryan’s eye was caught by several facts he wanted to study at greater leisure. But right now, with the vids recording his every move, it would be smart to leave. He snatched the gun—nearly dropping it because of the film of oil that still covered it—filled his coat pockets with mixed ammo and quickly followed the disappearing figure of J.B. Dix.

 

“THE BIG HUNK CALLED JOE just gotten himself iced,” said Okie through a mouthful of doughnut. She was watching yet another old police serial, Hill Street Blues.

Ryan was lying on his narrow bed, perusing the arms manual for his new gun, occasionally helping himself from a bag of multicolored sugary sweets called Jelly beans that Krysty had found.

Finn and Hennings were playing a noisy vid game called “Klingon Blasters.” Hun was stretched out on her bed, running her fingers through her green hair, listening to some music called soul on her cans.

Doc was lying on his own bed, eyes closed, chest moving regularly in sleep. J.B. was muttering to himself as he tried to persuade one of the microwaves to disgorge several cheese-filled portions of chicken breast.

“I’m the Klingon expert, you stupe,” yelped Finn, excitedly.

Henn walked away disgustedly. “Fuckin’ Klingons. Next time we’ll play for creds.”

“What’ll you spend it on?” asked Krysty, sitting by Ryan, brushing her long, flaming hair, allowing it to spread in fiery waves across her shoulders.

“A fifty-shot mag on this beauty, J.B.,” called Ryan, cradling his new toy.

“Doesn’t tumble like the five-fifty-six does. Won’t mebbe do the damage, but I figure it’s better for—well, look who we got here.”

Everyone turned, except Hun, who was deafened by her own music. Standing at the door was the Keeper, paying them a visit.

Quint was flanked by his two wives, Rachel grinning toothlessly on his left, Lori a couple of paces behind on the right. All three of them were holding their MP-5 SD-2 silenced submachine guns under their arms, in a casual, unthreatening way.

Ryan immediately began to feel concern. Not one of them actually had easy access to a loaded blaster. Indeed, Hun, eyes closed, humming away to herself, still hadn’t seen them.

His deep-set eyes were rheumy, red-rimmed and his straggly beard was stained with some sort of sticky oil, but Quint was nodding and smiling. He stopped about twenty paces from them.

“Keeper says greetings to our guests. First guests in a long day. Savin’ those as sleeps down below. Sleeps the long sleep as ordered by the Keeper, don’t they, my dear?” he asked Rachel, who nodded like a child’s doll.

“Glad you’ve come, Keeper Quint,” said Ryan, standing by his bed, signaling behind his back with his fingers, warning the others that he didn’t like the course things were taking—warning them to be as ready as they could without actually taking any provocative action.

“The Keeper comes and goes when he wishes. When are you goin’?” he snapped, the colored ribbons fluttering in his beard.

“Day after tomorrow,” replied Ryan.

“Eh?”

“He said they’re goin’ day after next, Quint,” said Rachel.

“Keeper says mebbe. Mebbe they will and mebbe they won’t.”

Ryan Cawdor’s eye was caught by the young girl, Lori. Standing just behind the old man, her husband, her mouth kept opening and closing, as though she was about to faint. In the quiet, Ryan heard her spurs tinkling.

“We go when we please, old man,” J.B. said.

“Don’t you speak to my brother like that, you glass-eyed shitter!” spat Rachel.

“Brother!” exclaimed Finnegan. “Thought he was your husband.”

“Ah, you clever fat prick, he is. Brother. Husband. I’m his wife.”

“Then…?” said Ryan, pointing to Lori.

“Oh, the dummy. She’s his daughter’s daughter. Don’t have the brains of a frozen piss hole.”

For a few moments everyone was silent, trying to assess the situation. Hun broke the stillness by getting up from her bed, starting to dance to the music. But she suddenly saw Quint and the others in their frozen tableau.

“What the fuck does…?” She pulled off the earphones, and they could all hear the shrill, tinny music.

“Keeper says you been wicked. Keeper says you been to see the place where death lives.”

His voice was becoming louder and more querulous, with spittle spraying from his lips, dangling in his beard. Ryan noticed that the knuckles of the old man’s right hand were whitening on the trigger of the Heckler & Koch. The sequins on his jacket shimmered in the overhead lights.

“Keeper says the law is set on them as breaks it. Keeper’s word runs like the law of maintenance. To venture without is to die. To break…”

There was no warning.

Lori suddenly moved, pushing past Quint, sending him staggering into Rachel, running toward Ryan, dropping her own gun. Mouth open. Talking.

Screaming!

“It’s trap! They kill! Kill ‘em, Ryan!”

The room exploded with violence.