James Axler

 

A GOLD EAGLE BOOK

London Toronto New York Sydney

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 all the incidents are pure invention.

All rights reserved. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

First published in Great Britain 1989 by Gold Eagle

© Worldwide Library

Australian copyright

Philippine copyright

This edition

ISBN /8907

Made and printed in Great Britain

 

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
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six

 

The earth is all the home I have.

—W. E. Aytoun

A hand in the darkness and a smile in the noonday sun. As so often before and for always, this is for Liz with all of my love.

Chapter One

^ »

IT’S DEAD.”

Ryan Cawdor took the high-image intensifier away from his good eye, tucking it back into one of the pockets of his long, fur-trimmed coat.

“Nothing?” asked J.B. Dix, the Armorer.

“Nothing. From this high you can see for miles. Not a sign of life. When it’s cold like this there should be smoke. Folks got to keep warm. There’s wood enough around for ‘em.”

Across the steep valley the sun was sinking into a nest of tangled violet chem clouds. Ryan figured the temperature had to be already close to freezing. His breath plumed out ahead of him, and the skin on his stubbled cheeks felt tight. The slopes of the hills opposite from the cavern entrance were streaked with snow, and the small pools around the snaking lead-gray river were dulled with ice.

Running alongside the slow-moving water, Ryan had been able to make out the shattered remains of a two-lane blacktop, its edge eroded by a century of neglect.

Krysty Wroth’s hand rested on his arm. He glanced at the girl, smiling at her startling beauty, his eye almost dazzled by the bright crimson of her tumbling hair. “It’s Doc,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“When we came out of the gateway he was throwing up. Face like parchment. Lori took him back into the main redoubt entrance to sit him down.”

Ryan sucked on a tooth, looking to his left, where the original road to the concealed fortress had been destroyed—either by a landslip or the nuking that had devastated the entire length and breadth of the United States. Nearly a hundred years back.

In 2001.

A young boy stood on the rim of the sheer drop, head to one side as though he were listening to something. The bleak wind tugged at his long hair, blowing it across his face. His hair was whiter than the driven snow, his eyes red as polished rubies, set in sockets of honed ivory.

“You hear something, Jak?” Ryan asked.

“Thought I heard something howling, like a banshee back in the swamps.”

Jak Lauren hadn’t been with Ryan and his party for very long. They’d picked him up in the dank vastness of the Atchafalaya Swamp, in what had once been the state of Louisiana. His slight frame concealed a powerful, wiry strength. Ryan Cawdor, who was a good judge of such things, figured Jak as one of the most lethal hand-to-hand killers he’d ever seen.

Jak was fourteen years old.

J.B. Dix stepped to the edge of the cliff and joined the young albino. Squinting into the distance, concentrating, he said, “Could be a wolf.”

Krysty Wroth’s keen hearing enabled her to confirm J.B.’s guess. “Yeah. It’s a wolf. And there’s more of ‘em, a pack of around a dozen. Four, mebbe five miles northeast of here.”

“Where in fireblast are we, J.B.?” Ryan asked, hunching his shoulders.

The Armorer had a tiny folding comp-sextant in one of the capacious pockets of his dark gray leather coat, with its smart silky collar of black fur. He pulled it out and looked around, easing back the brim of his beloved fedora, and took the necessary sighting. He picked a crumpled chart and consulted it.

“Near as I can figure it, we look to have landed north of what they used to call New York State. And that river has to be the Mohawk.”

Ryan glanced both ways along what remained of the roadway. Each end had been sliced clean off. “That’s why the redoubt hasn’t been entered,” he guessed.

“Uncle Tyas McCann told me how the east and the northeast were hard-nuked,” Krysty said. “All the big cities and most power places. There’s lots of hot spots.”

“Check the rad count,” J.B. suggested. “Broke mine getting off Wizard Island.”

Ryan flicked back the lapel of his coat, moving the end of the weighted silk scarf out of the way. He pressed the On button of the rad counter and listened to the faint cheeping of the machine. The glowing scarlet arrow veered erratically across the scale, wavering uncomfortably into the orange sector.

“Warm,” he said.

“Closing in on hot,” Krysty observed.

“Too late to leave ‘fore dark,” Jak said, moving back from the rim. “Be night in less than an hour. Better wait and find a way down in the morning.”

Ryan wasn’t sure that it was going to be that easy to get off the sheer plateau. When you found a redoubt that hadn’t been entered since the long chill had begun, it meant it was hard to get at. Which generally meant it was also damned hard to get out of.

“Sure,” he agreed. “Krysty says Doc’s sick. We’ll all go back in and scout for some food. I saw a shelf of self-heats. Reckon its soy meat.” He grinned at the look of revulsion on J.B.’s face. “Know what you mean, friend,” he said. “Can’t say I like that tepid sludge myself. Let’s get in and close off the rad doors. We’ll make a clean start in the morning at first light.”

 

THE JUMP HAD NEARLY KILLED them all.

All over the Deathlands, which had once been the United States of America, there were a number of hidden fortresses. These redoubts had been known to Ryan Cawdor from his earliest days with the traveling guerrilla leader they called the Trader. But only in the past few weeks had Ryan learned of the other, secret uses of these redoubts.

Many of them concealed a small security fortress within the main complex, which was called a gateway.

The key to these installations had been Dr. Theophilus Tanner—Doc, a scrawny old man in tattered clothes who seemed to have come from the prenuke era. Doc’s brains had been scrambled by some horrific experiences, but every now and again he came out with pearls of arcane wisdom that puzzled and fascinated Ryan Cawdor. And the most bewildering concerned something called Project Cerberus.

Eventually Ryan and Krysty had stumbled upon the secret of Doc Tanner. Back in the late 1990s, only a few years before the civilized world vanished in the war that ended all wars, American and Russian scientists were working on ways of moving human beings through space and through time. In the United States this was Project Cerberus. In max-sec labs attempts were made to trawl a living person from the past. Many attempts were made, and some of the results were ghastly. But one succeeded.

Doctor Tanner was born in South Strafford, Vermont, on February 14, 1868. He married in 1891 and had been successfully time-trawled and brought forward, alive, to the fading end of the twentieth century. Doc proved so unstable and difficult that he was eventually sent forward on a chron-jump, this time ending up in the heart of the Deathlands. His mind constantly tottered on the brink of madness, with only the occasional shard of crystal-clear memory remaining.

But slowly things had improved. His memory had grown stronger, and he had been able to give Ryan information about Cerberus, about the gateways and how they could be set for mat-trans jumps.

But the secret of time travel was still locked somewhere in the back of Doc’s ravaged mind.

With his help the group had been able to make a number of mat-trans leaps, going from Alaska to Louisiana in the blink of an eye. But not all of the gateways remained undamaged. Doc had warned that their operation was completely unpredictable and that there remained the possibility they might jump to a gateway that was under a thousand feet of rock, or be drowned at the bottom of a California lagoon.

This last leap had brought that prediction frighteningly close.

The glass walls of the mat-trans chamber had been a deep red. The six friends had all entered the small room, sitting down on the floor of polished metal disks, readying themselves for the jump. All the references for controlling where the destination was had long been lost. All any of them knew was that the act of closing the gate-way’s inner door triggered the mechanism and sent them hurtling on a trip into the unknown.

 

RYAN HAD BEEN THE FIRST to recover consciousness, awakening with the familiar feeling that his brains had been splintered and put through a mixer, then hastily reassembled. His stomach churned and his eye pained him. For an instant everything felt like all the other mat-trans jumps.

He couldn’t breathe.

The air was agonizingly thin, and his lungs sucked frantically for oxygen that wasn’t there.

“Fireblast!” he tried to yell, but all that came out of his throat was a faint mewing, like that of a drowning kitten. None of the others showed any signs of coming around from the jump, but in the dim light Ryan could see that all of them were breathing fast and shallow.

The pattern of disks was different on the floor and on the ceiling, and the chamber seemed smaller than the others. The walls were dark blue glass, and only the dimmest light penetrated.

The moment Ryan Cawdor began his struggle to stand up, he knew this gateway was frighteningly different than the others. His body felt oddly light, and he stayed on hands and knees, gagging, a thin worm of yellow bile dangling from his open mouth.

“Got to…” he panted. “Got to fucking move from…”

He crawled over the outstretched legs of Lori Quint, snagging his pants on the tinkling silver spurs on her crimson boots. The effort of moving from one side of the chamber to the other made him pant as if he’d just sprinted a mile over a furrowed field. Ryan found himself swaying, almost floating, as if the gravity in the gateway had been reduced to near zero.

He fumbled for the handle of the door, his fingers clumsy. It seemed as if all sensation had gone from his body, and he staggered sideways, banging his shoulder hard on the wall. Ryan heard someone moaning and coughing behind him. His guess was Jak Lauren, but there wasn’t time to check.

The Heckler & Koch G-12 caseless automatic rifle dropped with a clatter, but he didn’t notice that it had fallen. After an infinity of effort, he managed to wrench the door open, revealing the familiar small room beyond it. The farther door was also open, and Ryan glimpsed flickering lights and comp-consoles turning and chattering to one another.

The gateways were triggered by the closing of the door, operating on a random principle. With the last of his fading power, he succeeded in slamming it shut once more. Gasping, his eyesight dimming, Ryan dropped to his knees, conscious even at that moment of the peculiar slowness of his fall. The chamber lights began to dance and glow again, and the blackness clawed its way across the front of his brain like a tendriled web.

When he’d come around, the sickness had been far worse than ever before. All of them—except Jak Lauren—had thrown up, and the chamber floor was awash with vomit. Oddly Ryan was the only one with any recollection of their stopover. And he hadn’t any idea of where they’d gone.

He tried to ask Doc. “Did Cerberus ever have any way-weird gateways?”

“I fear that my present intestinal incapacity renders that question difficult to respond to, my dear Ryan. Perhaps at some other time?”

“It was like I was floating, Doc. The air tasted thinned down like double repure water. Couldn’t breathe, and only just made it to mat-trans us. At least the air’s safe here.”

Doc looked puzzled. He shook his head, eyes squeezed tightly shut. “Floating, my dear Ryan? How can one float? And air that is thin! It’s truly the most arrant taradiddle I ever did hear.” For a moment Doc’s eyes opened, and Ryan saw the fierce intellect that still blazed. “Unless of course, they… There was some talk of a gateway that was to be built upon…”

He was interrupted by Lori rolling her head on his lap, tiny bubbles of yellow froth hanging on her lips. She moaned and reached for Doc’s hand, breaking the brief run of his concentration.

Ryan leaned down over the old man’s shoulders. “Come on, Doc.”

“What?”

“You were saying about what you thought the bastard gateway might have been.”

“I was?”

“You were.”

“By the three Kennedys, but my head feels as though some knave’s been dancing a polka inside it. I fear I can recall nothing of what I was saying. Do forgive me, Ryan.”

“Sure, Doc.”

It was something else to keep on the mental back burner. There’d been something about that dark blue gateway that had been like nothing on Earth.

“Like nothing on Earth,” Ryan muttered to himself.

 

THE MAIN POWER PLANT for the redoubt was only running at about half supply. From the cracks in the concrete walls it was obvious there’d been a lot of seismic movements from the nuking, and well over half of the lights in the fortress had malfunctioned. The heating was barely enough to hold off the chill outside.

Unlike some of the other redoubts that Ryan and his party had encountered, this one in upper New York State was in excellent condition, well preserved and swept clean. Most of the main storage areas were empty, as though there’d been sufficient warning to evacuate them.

While the others stayed together, recovering from the double mat-trans jump, Jak Lauren went off on his own, scavenging for food, weapons and anything that might be useful.

In the whole set of linked caverns, there were only a half-dozen sections that hadn’t been emptied. Some held self-heats, some clothes. Only one of them had been used for armaments.

Between them the six companions had a varied range of weapons.

Ryan Cawdor was delighted to come across an opened case of ammunition for his G-12. Since they all traveled light, he was beginning to worry whether he might actually run out of the unusual caseless ammo for the lightweight, fifty-shot gray blaster. He also found magazines of fifteen rounds of 9 mm bullets for the SIG-Sauer P-226 handgun that he’d carried for years on his hip. It was complemented by an eighteen-inch steel panga, honed to razor sharpness.

J.B. Dix picked up some ammunition for his mini-Uzi but couldn’t find anything for his handblaster, his trusty Steyr AUG 5.6 mm. Apart from his firearms, the Armorer was a walking arsenal. He still had some pieces of high-ex plas left, sewn into his clothes and hidden in his high-laced combat boots. There were a couple of thin-bladed flensing knives as well as the beautiful Tekna knife he’d found back in West Lowellton.

Krysty Wroth, in her knee-length fur coat, so deep black that it was almost blue, stocked up on bullets for her silvered Heckler & Koch P7A-13 handgun, slipping a couple of the 13-round mags into her pockets.

Lori scarcely ever used her blaster, a delicate little pearl-handled Walther PPK. Despite Ryan’s warnings that it was only a toy gun and that you needed more than a .22 to stop a man, the tall teenager clung stubbornly to her pretty pistol.

Jak Lauren went to the opposite extreme, hefting a massive satin finish .357 Magnum that looked absurdly huge in his small fist. But that didn’t stop him from making lethal use of the big blaster.

It wasn’t very surprising that Doc Tanner wasn’t able to find any ammunition for his own blaster, a gun that was almost as eccentric in appearance as the old man himself, and only a couple of years older. It was a twin-barreled Le Mat. The large barrel was bored out to take a single scattergun round, while the other barrel fired one of nine .36 caliber rounds. The Le Mat, providing it didn’t burst, could be utterly devastating. Doc also carried an ebony walking stick with a silver lion’s head on its top, which could be pulled apart to reveal a slim rapier blade.

In the depleted armory none of the six found themselves any new weapons.

The last guards who’d been on duty in the redoubt had left their blankets and bedding behind. The sheets had long rotted into dry flakes of powdery material, but the blankets remained, thick and dark brown, with the faded letters USFNY in one corner.

All of the group had finally recovered from the ordeal of the double jump. Doc was sleeping like a baby on a tattered mattress, one arm draped across Lori’s slender body. Jak was curled up under a pile of blankets, his mane of silky white hair drifting across the coarse material like windblown spume. J.B. slept on his side, fedora perched over his eyes, one hand gripping the butt of his blaster.

Ryan had dragged a couple of mattresses together, covering them with blankets. It was undoubtedly safe to sleep without posting a guard in the redoubt. They were almost certainly the first living creatures in the place for a hundred years.

“Warm enough, lover?”

Krysty nodded. She’d peeled off her khaki coveralls, folding them neatly at the bottom of their makeshift bed. Her cowboy boots stood alongside them. The overhead neon strips that still worked threw pallid light, glinting off the silver chiseled toes and silver leather falcons that ornamented the designer boots. The only thing that marred their elegance were the splashes of gray mud and the dappled, darker patches of dried blood around the heels and the sides of the soles.

Ryan took a chance on undressing, breaking one of his own cardinal rules. He’d slit the bottoms of his pants so that he could pull them off over his combat boots. Carefully he ranged his weapons alongside the makeshift bed.

Krysty lay on her left side, facing away from him, and he cuddled against her, spoon-fashion, feeling his swelling erection as it pressed snugly into the strong curve of her buttocks. For a moment she responded to the pressure, then half turned toward him.

“Sorry, lover,” she whispered. “I know it’s not the most original excuse, but I really do have a bastard of a headache from the jump.”

“Yeah. I guess I don’t feel at my steel-breaking best. The jumps get worse. I wish I knew where the fireblast we ended up on that one today. One of these days we’re going to end up reconstituted under a million tons of mountain.”

“Quick way to go,” she said. The idea made her start to giggle, making her body press harder against him, with the inevitable result.

Afterward, Krysty cradled him in her arms. “Ace cure for a headache, lover,” she whispered.

 

Chapter Two

« ^ »

IN ONE of the stone-walled rooms near the main entrance of the redoubt, they found a shelf filled with backpacks. At J.B.’s suggestion, everyone in the party took one, filling it with spare ammo and self-heats. Each of them also carried a couple of clear-plas cans of springwater, the kind that had a ring-pull opener. At some time a round button had been kicked under a metal cabinet. Jak Lauren picked it up and pinned it to the lapel of his ragged leather and canvas camouflage jacket. It was bright red and carried a picture of a helmet. The gold-lettered words said simply: Forty-Niners Go.

The 352 code opened the outer door, revealing a morning of bright sun bursting from a sky tinted purple. The chem cloud storm of the previous evening had vanished. The temperature was a few degrees above freezing. Far on the other side of the wooded valley, Krysty spotted a hunting bird, circling on a thermal, its great wings spread wide. Its wingspan looked to be about fifteen feet.

The bird was the first sign of life they’d seen since the jump.

The first problem to overcome was to find a way down from the redoubt. Inside the main door Lori had found a plan of the entire fortress, with its corridors lined in blue, the exit marked in orange. There was only the one exit shown.

Ryan checked both ends of the broken roadway. The drop was sheer for about forty feet, then he could make out the remains of tracks beaten through the scrub.

“That’s what’s kept the place clean,” he said. “Unless you had a rope launcher, you’d never get up that face. It’s smoother than… than Jak’s chin.”

“For an old man with only one eye, Ryan, you got a fucking big mouth.”

“Just a joke, son, just a joke.”

“See me laughing, Ryan?”

“When friends fall out, then their enemies make merry,” Doc said, pouring a little oil on the troubled waters.

There was an uneasy moment of stillness within the party, which was broken by the Armorer. “Need some fixed lines up here. Then we have to find a way of making sure nothing an’ nobody gets in while we’re away.”

Ryan stood a moment, looking out across the wilderness. “Anyone had any thoughts about where we’re going?”

“Let’s have a look around,” Krysty suggested. The wind was still strong, tugging at them as they stood on the broad ledge. She’d tied back her long crimson hair to keep it out of her eyes.

“You know anything ‘bout this place, Doc? Where we landed?”

“Upper New York, I believe you said, my dear fellow. Then that must be the Hudson. Or, perchance, the Mohawk River. Yes. I believe I have been here before. Hunting in the Adirondacks for deer. Ah, so delicate and pretty until the ball struck them. Then the eyes glazed o’er and the spirit fled.”

“We head west for a few days, we could meet up with what’s left of the Trader’s party,” J.B. said, scratching at the stubble that darkened his chin. “Cohn an’ Ches, Kathy, Loz an’ all the rest of ‘em in War Wag One. If’n they’re all still living.”

The idea attracted Ryan Cawdor. It seemed several lifetimes since he and the others had split off from the remnants of the Trader’s small army. Since then they’d suffered losses: Abe, Hunaker, Okie, Finnegan and Henn. Already there were so many dead and near forgotten. So many.

“How far from the ville where your brother rules as baron?” Krysty asked.

“Forget it,” Ryan snapped.

“Why?”

“Because that’s past. Then was then, but this is now.”

“Virginia is not too far from here, my dear Ryan,” Doc said. “A few days traveling if we could only lay our hands upon some suitable transport.”

“I don’t give a—” Ryan began, stopping as Krysty’s fingers tightened on his arm. “Why d’you…?”

“Because I know what you want, Ryan. I can feel it. Trust me. You have to go back to find your roots. To claim what is yours. You have to try.”

“Which direction is Virginia from here? The Shens were south of Newyork city. Must be south. Must be a good ways off.”

“Why don’t we just go look?” J.B. suggested. “I’d kind of like to meet your brother. Heard plenty ‘bout him the last few weeks.”

“And none of it good,” Jak added, grinning.

“Let us journey on,” Doc said. “Truly, like brothers in arms.”

 

JAK AND J.B. MANAGED to find a rope inside the redoubt, dark blue plaited plaslon that was strong enough to lower a war wag over the cliff. They secured it at the top, and each member of the group rappelled down, landing safely among the scattered conifers dotted with stately hemlocks. Once everyone was down, J.B. hooked the bottom of the rope on a jagged overhang of splintered granite.

“Be there for when we come back from where we’re going.” He looked intently at Ryan. “Into the Shens, I guess.”

Ryan didn’t answer him. He led the way down the narrow path, toward the river. The wind was not as forceful as they walked among the trees, and they could make out the sullen sound of the water as it rolled over great platters of gray stone.

As he picked out the trail among the loose scree, Ryan thought back to the boy he’d once been. He thought about the great sprawling mansion that lay at the core of the ville of Front Royal, down in the blue-muffled Shenandoahs, the endless waves of the Shens. And he thought of the man that he’d become.

Behind him, he heard Lori trip and stumble, cursing in her odd, flat little-girl voice. Doc soothed her. If only she’d throw away the ridiculous bright red thigh boots with the stiletto heels. He’d tried to persuade her to settle for combat boots, but the blond teenager had refused. And Doc hadn’t been any help. He’d merely grinned and commented how much he liked them.

“Upon my soul, Mr. Cawdor,” he’d said. “Surely a man must be permitted a little harmless deviancy, every now and again?”

The river grew closer, the sound of its rushing waters louder. The trees thinned out and the trail widened. Ryan stooped and examined the ground, seeing tracks that he recognized as elk, and the round pad marks of wolves. He knew from old books that in the olden times, before the long winters, wild animals had been limited to what had been called national parks. Bears and wolves lived only in the desolate high country, rarely seen by man. But since the nuking had decimated the population and destroyed every city, the creatures of the night had come back, growing bolder and often mutated into even more ferocious beasts than before.

The wolves were among the worst.

Something moved in the bushes to his right, and he leveled the G-12, finger tightening on the trigger. The gun was set on triple-burst, ready to cough out three rounds in a fraction of a second. His eye caught a slithery, gleaming animal, larger than an otter, scurrying across the damp boulders, making for the foaming edge of the Mohawk. It paused and stared directly at him, seemingly fearless. Its eyes were deep-set, glittering like bright emeralds, and its jaw hung open in a snarl of manic ferocity. Ryan held the rifle steady, ready to smear the creature into rags of bone and blood. But it turned its head contemptuously away and slipped silently into the water.

Only in the second it disappeared from sight did Ryan notice that the animal had six legs, tipped with claws like ivory daggers.

“If we could find a boat of some type, we could sail down to where the Mohawk meets the Hudson, just above Troy, and thence we could navigate clear to New York itself,” Doc said, joining Ryan on the shore of the river.

“If we could find a copter and get some gas for it, we could fly to Front Royal and never get our damned feet wet,” Ryan retorted.

They followed the water, heading south, picking their way along indistinct paths. Around noon Ryan called a halt for them to take a drink from the widening river and to open up a self-heat each. During the afternoon there was a rain shower that persisted, becoming a steady, dull drizzle that quickly soaked them all to the skin.

“Take us a year to reach Newyork if’n we don’t find us some transport,” J.B. said, looking up through the ceaseless rain to the west, where the sky was darkening. “Be night in an hour.”

“Wait!”

They all stopped to look at Krysty, who stood with an expression of concentration on her face. Her saturated hair clung to her shoulders like a fiery, frightened animal.

“What? ”Ryan asked.

“By Gaia, it’s smoke! I can smell woodsmoke.”

Ryan held his head up, ignoring the teeming rain that dripped over his face and ran behind the black patch that covered his ruined left eye. He sniffed at the air.

“Yeah, I can smell it, too. Wet weather keeps it low down. Can’t be more’n a mile off.”

“I will be liking getting warm,” Lori said, wiping a strand of sodden yellow hair from her face.

“Not just warm,” Jak said. “Fire means people. And in a place like this, people means boats.”

“People also means guards and mebbe some chilling to be done. So, step cautious.” Ryan led them on again, ever watchful.

 

IT WAS A RAGTAG COMMUNITY of double-poor muties. Mud huts, covered in rough branches, had been built around a hewn clearing at the edge of the Mohawk. A large fire of green wood smoldered in the middle of the huts, and a rusty iron caldron was suspended over it. From the smell that bubbled up from the pot, it was some kind of fish stew.

The villagers were all small, not one of them topping five feet. Most were heavily muscled and had shaggy hair that hung over low foreheads. Their jaws jutted out, and they seemed to communicate in a language that consisted mainly of grunts.

They wore jerkins and breeches of a sackcloth, dyed dark green and russet yellow. It was difficult to tell the sexes apart. While Ryan and the others watched from the shadows at the edge of the forest, one of them came to pass water only a few yards from them. Krysty, with her sensitive nose, could easily catch the rancid stench of sweat and grease from the mutie’s body. The sickle moon that swooped over the hills behind them also revealed to the watching six that the mutie was grotesquely sexually endowed.

J.B. caught Ryan’s hand, pointing urgently beyond the farthest of the tumbledown houses. Hauled up above the level of the river was a crude raft. It was from hewn logs, bound with creepers and was about eight feet square. A stump of mast at its center and a steering oak, hacked from a single long branch, were the only signs that it might be maneuverable.

Ryan leaned closer so that his mouth touched the Armorer’s ear. With muties, you never knew what kind of skill they might have. These primitives might be deaf, or they might hear as well as cave-born bats.

“Soon as they sleep,” he whispered.

J.B. nodded his agreement, then passed the message quietly to Krysty, to Jak, on to Lori and finally to Doc.

 

THE MOON HAD DISAPPEARED behind a bank of cloud so dense it seemed like a floating mountain. A storm was brewing, and the air crackled with ozone. Ryan could feel his hair standing on end with static electricity. The stew had been eaten by the muties, and the fire was dying to glowing embers. The valley was less cold than the upper slopes, outside the hidden redoubt, but there was a biting dampness that seemed to creep through the layers of fur and leather, seeping into the marrow of the bones.

Ryan hooked the G-12 to a loop on his belt and drew the pistol, feeling its familiar weight. 25.52 ounces, precisely. Back when they’d been with War Wag One, J.B. had shown him the crumpled, brittle field manual for the SIG-Sauer P-226, and he remembered all of the details about it.

“Let’s go, my friends,” he said quietly.

There’d been no sign of anyone out on patrol around the filthy little hamlet. Apart from the rafts, there wasn’t likely to be anything there worth stealing. With a wave of his hand, Ryan motioned for Jak Lauren to take the lead. Out of the six of them, the albino boy was probably the best at creepy-crawling. His bleached hair blazed like an incandescent beacon, making Jak easy to follow.

Ryan came second, with Krysty at his heels. Doc and Lori were together and J.B. brought up the rear, several safe paces behind to cover them in case of a sneak attack.

Against the rumbling backdrop of the fast-flowing river, it was hard to make out any other sounds. As they passed between the stinking hovels, Ryan heard a woman’s voice. She was singing a mournful dirge, soft and low, with no recognizable tune to it and no words at all. It was fortunate for them that the villagers didn’t seem to keep any dogs to warn of strangers. But their hamlet was so isolated that it was doubtful they even knew what human enemies were.

The raft had no sail, but there were a number of smoothed branches, each about ten feet long, that looked as if they were used to propel and guide the clumsy craft.

Jak turned, asking, “We go on this?”

“Yeah. Get ready to cut the rope. We’ll have to push her out into the flow, or we’ll beach on those rocks a few yards downstream.”

In fact, the raft was so firmly grounded that it took all six of them to heave it off the sloping beach of shingle. It sat so low that the Mohawk bubbled over its logs. With six of them on board, Ryan knew they were in for a wet journey. Only the rope held it, knotted around a frost-riven boulder, high up on the bank.

“Get on, and move slow an’ easy!” Ryan ordered, eyes raking the sleeping village for any threat.

“Keep to the center,” Doc urged, folding Lori Quint in his long arms.

“Right?” Jak called, crouching with one of his leaf-bladed throwing knives in his fist, waiting to slice the knotted creeper apart.

Ryan took up the mooring line, hung on to it with both hands and braced himself against the pull of the current. He kept the raft steady for the boy to run down and board it.

“Now,” he said, staring intently into the gloom, able to see only the splash of whiteness that was the boy’s hair.

There was the blur of movement as the knife whispered through the rope, and Ryan felt it go slack, so that all the weight was on him. But, as he watched, he saw a chunk of the night rise from behind the boulder and grapple with Jak.

“Fireblast!” Ryan yelled, helpless to assist the boy.

But Jak could look after himself. The mutie had grabbed at him, pulling him to the earth. It uttered ferocious grunting noises, its foul breath nearly choking him. Its stubby fingers ripped at his coat, groped for his eyes, trying to squeeze them from their soft sockets.

The albino still held the knife, its taped hilt snug in his fingers. Using his superior agility and strength, he was able to wriggle out from under the attacker, turning the creature on its back, digging his knee into the soft flesh of its groin. In pain and shock the air burst from the mutie’s lungs, a thin scream breaking the silence of the night.

The flesh of the mutie was coarse, almost reptilian, the skin like flaking scales to Jak’s touch. His first cut was deflected, the edge of the blade skittering off the side of the stump of a neck. Jak fended off a flailing fist with the side of his forearm, thrusting once more with the knife. As a weapon, it wasn’t ideally suited to hand-to-hand fighting, but against the weak and clumsy mutie it was more than enough.

He felt the blood gush out from the deep, narrow wound, steaming in the pallid light of the moon as it appeared from behind the clouds. Jak turned his wrist, like the experienced knife fighter he was, and drove the steel deeper into the mutie’s flesh so that the flow warmed his hand.

The body went limp under him, and he started to rise, pulling the throwing knife from the creature’s throat. But the mutie wasn’t done yet. In a convulsive spasm of dying rage, it reached up for him, fingers locking around the boy’s skinny neck, holding him there, the two locked together in a ghastly tableau.

“Chill him, Ryan!” Jak choked out, hacking at the scaly forearms of the mutie.

But Ryan was too busy struggling to hang on to the frayed end of the creeper that held the raft steady against the driving current. J.B. was in the center of the tossing, waterlogged craft, his pistol drawn, sighting along the barrel. But the movement of the tumbling waves threw off his aim, and he didn’t dare squeeze the trigger in case he shot Jak, unable to distinguish between the tangled bodies in the murky light.

The mutie was screeching, its blood spouting black and spattering on the damp stones all around.

“Help me!” Jak shouted hoarsely, trying and failing to break the mutie’s death grip.

“Cut the fingers,” Ryan yelled, head twisted as he tried to make out what was happening behind him.

“Can’t!” The screaming had stopped, but enough noise had been made to rouse a regiment of sleeping sec men.

Krysty saved the moment. Jumping surefooted, like a great panther, she landed on the loose stones, her hair breaking free from its binding and whirling around her head like a torrent of fire. She held her Heckler & Koch blaster in her right hand, the moonlight dancing off the mirrored finish of the barrel. In the blinking of an eye, the girl was alongside Jak and the dying mutie, stooping and placing the muzzle against its sagging mouth.

The crack of the 9 mm round was oddly muffled, almost inaudible against the pounding of the Mohawk. The back of the mutie’s skull burst apart as though someone had struck it from inside with a sixteen-pound sledge, the contents of the brainpan slopping in the dirt. The fingers convulsed and then relaxed their grip, allowing Jak to break away.

“Come on!” Ryan called, feeling his boots sliding in the wet pebbles that lined the cold waters of the river.

Krysty led the way, running toward the bobbing raft, holstering her pistol as she sprinted. Planting a kiss on Ryan’s cheek as she jumped across the gap, she landed on all fours on the moss-slick timbers, grabbing at the mast to steady herself.

“Double-hard bastard to chill,” Jak said as he came down the slope, panting like he’d run a desperate race. “Thanks, Krysty. Owe you one.”

“Let her go, Ryan,” J.B. said. “Be getting us company soon.”

The gap between the shore and the raft had been gradually widening, despite all of Ryan’s efforts. He dropped the rope and jumped for it, landing awkwardly on the edge, legs trailing in the icy water.

The raft began to move away from the shore ever so slowly, just as fifty or more muties came bursting over the top of the slope toward them.

 

Chapter Three

« ^ »

IF ANY OF THE STUPES had owned a blaster, then Ryan’s group would have taken some chillings. Even a couple of long-barreled Kentucky muskets would have picked them off like hogs on ice. Even bows and arrows, or straight spears would have been lethal at such close range, against helpless targets. Hanging on the slimy logs of the bobbing raft for their very lives, none of the six could even hold a blaster, let alone hope to hit anyone with one.

The muties hadn’t come prepared, and the only weapons they had were the stones from the narrow expanse of the beach.

At less than twenty paces, the jagged missiles were potentially lethal, but the rocking of the raft that prevented Ryan and his friends from wiping away the muties also made them difficult targets. Krysty caught a painful blow on the left elbow, and Doc was cut on the forehead, but most of the stones bounced harmlessly off the raft.

A whirling current made the cumbersome vessel pitch and spin, then it broke free and began to move faster down the Mohawk, away from the murderous muties. As the raft steadied, J.B. stood up with his mini-Uzi, balancing himself against Ryan.

“Want me to take some of the bastards out?” he asked. “Be easy.”

“No. Leave ‘em,” Ryan replied, peering behind them into the darkness. “Best take care when we come back to the gateway.”

“That’s too damned right,” Krysty agreed, rubbing at her damaged elbow.

The river gradually became wider, the raft floating sluggishly in its center. As it widened it also became calmer, with no hint of rapids. The banks were each a hundred paces away, leaving them safe from attack. The night wore on, and most of them managed to snatch a few hours’ sleep, though Ryan took the precaution of keeping one of them awake and on watch.

“Keep careful—keep alive,” had been one of the Trader’s rules of living.

Just before dawn they passed another of the squalid little riverside communities. From a distance it was hard to see, but Krysty, with her sharp eyesight, was certain that it wasn’t a nest of muties. Just double-poor folk dredging up an existence on the razor edge of poverty.

An arrow was fired from a screen of dull green pine trees, but it fell woefully short of the raft. On a narrow headland, daubed pink by the florid orange sunrise, the six were watched by a pack of hunting dogs, with slavering jaws and a crust of yellow froth around their long incisors.

Gradually the sky lightened. Around eight in the morning one of the limitless thousands of chunks of space debris, dating from the ill-founded Star Wars defense system, finally reentered the atmosphere of the Earth. It burned up in a dazzling display of green-and-red pyrotechnics, breaking up and melting as it ripped through the clouds in a fearsome explosion.

Doc Tanner took off his beloved stovepipe hat and wiped sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief, which was decorated with a swallow’s-eye design. His eyes dimmed as he rubbed absently at the dent in the crown of the hat. “There will always be that sort of memory. Millennia will come and go and still that damnable filth will boil in the spatial maelstrom, falling now and again to remind us of the futility of it all. Oh, if only…” The sentence, unfinished, trailed behind him like a maiden’s hand in the rolling water.

“Look,” Lori said, shading her eyes with one hand and pointing ahead of them with the other. “Road across water.”

“It’s called bridge,” Jak told her, balancing easily against the pitching of the raft. The vessel seemed even lower in the river now, the clear waves seeping over the front of the logs.

It was a place where the river narrowed, the banks closing in on either side, rising steeply to wooded bluffs. The bridge seemed to be made out of cables or ropes, strung like some dizzy spiderweb, dangling low in its center, barely thirty feet above the level of the surging Mohawk.

“And we got us company,” J.B. said, unslinging the mini-Uzi from his shoulder.

They could see small, dark figures silhouetted against the light violet of the sky, scurrying toward the middle of the bridge, swinging hand over hand like tiny malevolent insects. Unlike the muties from farther upstream, these wore long cowled robes that concealed their faces and most of their bodies.

“They got no blasters,” Jak said.

“Some got stones. And those two on the left have hunting bows,” Krysty exclaimed, pointing with the muzzle of her P7A-13 handgun.

The raft was swooping fast toward the bridge, pitching and rolling. Ryan squinted ahead, clutching his G-12 caseless, trying to estimate how severe the threat was. Getting involved in a firefight in these circumstances was highly hazardous. The enemy, if proved hostile, held all of the jack. To try to blow them off their vantage point would be difficult at best, and extremely costly in ammo at worst. Even an ace shot like Ryan Cawdor couldn’t guarantee wreaking much havoc from the unsteady platform of the waterlogged and rotating raft.

“Hold fire!” he yelled, hoping everyone could hear him above the pounding of the white-topped waves surrounding them.

“Be hard to chill ‘em,” Jak shouted from the front of the raft, where he crouched with his beloved Magnum, the spray washing over him.

“Doc! You an’ Lori take that steering oar and try to keep the bastard steady. Keep her going forward and hold her from circling.”

The girl and the old man staggered to the stern, Doc slipping and coming within an inch of toppling into the swollen waters. But they clawed a hold on the misshapen branch that trailed in the river, throwing their combined weight against it, gradually controlling the swinging of the clumsy craft. It was some improvement, but the chances of pulling off any accurate shooting were still dozens to one.

There were about thirty people on the fragile bridge, making it pitch and dip even lower.

Oddly none of them was showing any obvious signs of aggression toward Ryan and his group, no waving of fists or throwing of stones. The couple with bows simply held them, unstrung, in their hands.

J.B. glanced toward Ryan, the unspoken question clear on his face. He reached up and wiped spots of water off his wire-rimmed glasses, shaking his head in puzzlement.

“Why don’t they…?”

Ryan readied himself. “Mebbe they aren’t against us.”

Doc heard him above the sound of the river. “Wrong, my dear Ryan. Anyone who is not for us, must be against us.”

They were less than two hundred yards from the bridge.

One hundred yards.

“They’re going’t‘let us through,” Jak yelped, staring up at the hooded strangers.

“Mebbe,” Ryan muttered. It was true what Doc had shouted. In the ravaged world of Deathlands you had few friends. And a mess of enemies.

Twenty yards.

A fish leaped in the air off to the left, bursting in rainbow spray, taking everyone’s eyes for a crucial moment.

“We making…” began Lori, eyes wide with the tension of the second.

Dangling monkeylike from the center span of twisted cords, one of the silent watchers reached out as the raft floated directly beneath him—or her—and opened a hand, allowing something to drop. The object landed with a metallic thud on the logs, hitting the mast and wedging itself between two of the knotted creepers.

It was oval in shape, about the size of a man’s fist. The top was dull, steel glinting through a number of gouged scratches. There were scarlet and blue bands painted around it.

“Implo-gren!” J.B. shouted in a thin, cracking voice, shaken into dropping his normal laconic mask at the sight of the bomb.

It had been a similar implosion grenade that had broken through the creeping fog when Ryan had entered the first mat-trans gateway. Using some very basic experimental anti-grav material, the hand bombs created a sudden and extremely violent vacuum so that everything around the edge of the detonation was sucked into it. The displacement was more ferocious than with a conventional explosion. Very few of the implo-grens had been made, and it flashed through Ryan’s mind, even at that moment of maximum danger, to wonder how these isolated villagers had gotten hold of one.

The other thought that flooded into his brain was to try to recall what kind of fuses the grens had. Twelve seconds? Ten?

Five?

Doc and Lori were helpless, hanging onto the steering oar at the stern. J.B. was nearest, but the bulk of the mast obstructed him. Jak was the one with the fastest reflexes, but he was kneeling at the front of the raft, gun drawn, looking up at the monklike figures who hung on the bridge above them.

Krysty Wroth began to move. Despite having part-mutie sight and hearing, her reflexes were no faster than any normal person’s.

Which left it in Ryan Cawdor’s court.

As he started to dive for the implo-gren, he remembered about the fuse.

They were generally eight seconds.

 

Chapter Four

« ^ »

THE METAL WAS COLD, slippery with the waters of the Mohawk.

Ryan’s fingers closed on the gren, and he hefted it from the sodden logs, cocking his arm to throw it over the side of the raft. The rope bridge above them replaced a four-lane highway bridge that had crumbled in the first minutes of the nuking of 2001. Even now, a century later, some of the original stone and girders still lay in the river, just below the surface. At that moment the laden craft struck some relic of the ruined bridge, jarring into it with a sickening crunch.

The raft swung into a sullen half circle, throwing Ryan completely off guard. He stumbled, fighting for balance. He tried to dump the grenade over the side, but his fingers had locked over it as he fell. At the last moment he struggled to roll on his shoulder, but the slick cold wood betrayed his footing and he tumbled sideways. His shoulder thumped against the stump of the mast, and he half rolled on top of Krysty, who snatched at his coat to check him from falling over the side into the Mohawk. The implo-gren slipped from his hand, clattering under both their bodies.

The crowd on the spiderwork bridge gave a ragged cheer, waving their fists at the clumsy craft beneath them.

Ryan groped for the fallen grenade, feeling the raft hit again, with a jagged, splintering sound, holding it in the same place. Even as he touched the icy metal, his brain screamed to him that he was way too slow, that the eight seconds were up and gone. The metal would disintegrate and he would be sucked into the hissing vacuum and destroyed, along with everyone on the doomed raft.

He dropped the gren twice more, until he was finally able to grip it securely, sitting up and holding it in his right hand. Ryan was almost unable to believe their good fortune. Above him the cheers turned to screeching anger.

“It’s a fucking malfunk!” Jak yelled. “Lemme chill the monsters.”

“No. Let’s get out,” Ryan called. “Doc? Push us off with that steering oar.”

“Consider it done,” the old man replied.

“Throw it, lover,” Krysty said, face white with shock at their narrow escape.

“Sure.” He looked up at the horde of cowled figures hanging from the network of creepers and shouted, “Here, have the bastard back!”

Once, about eight years ago, Ryan had been with the Trader when they’d broken into a small redoubt, a long way west, in a valley of the Rockies. They’d found some old vids stashed away and a sealed battery player. Most of the tapes had rotted and crumbled, but they’d watched a few minutes of one of them. It had been a film of a football game. Ryan couldn’t recall the names of the teams or the players, but he still remembered the grace and power of the man who’d thrown the football, flexing his arm and letting it go, soaring upward and on.

He hefted the implo-gren and heaved it toward the watchers on the bridge, hoping to hit one of them and maybe even pitch him into the river. The raft was already starting to roll uncontrollably down the Mohawk, and it wasn’t worth wasting any ammo.

He watched the scarlet and blue bands revolving in the cool, damp air.

The sound of the grenade detonating was unmistakable: a muffled, inward, whooshing sort of noise, as the implosion sucked everything into itself. The gren had been at its highest point, hanging in the air only a few yards from the bridge, when the fuse finally worked.

The frail structure of knotted creepers disintegrated instantly, its strands spinning toward the whirling circle of air that had been the implo-gren. And the hooded figures were tugged with it, tumbling into screaming space, into the waiting river, which received them gratefully.

Ryan and his friends watched the destruction of their enemies with disbelief. The small bodies splashed into the fast-flowing water, most of them not even resurfacing, dragged down by their heavy robes.

Doc and Lori abandoned the steering, allowing the heavy raft to find its own direction and speed. All six of them stared behind at the spectacular results of the malfunctioned gren. On either side of the river they could see the dangling cords, snapped off short, that had held the bridge. But the whole center section had disappeared, floating past them in torn and fragmented sections.

Only one of the muties made it to the surface and tried to swim toward the raft. Its clothes were gone, and it resembled the muties they’d seen higher up the Mohawk—short arms and legs, and skin like a reptile. This one had no hair at all on its wrinkled skull, and they were shocked to see a vestigial third eye, staring wildly at them, in the center of its brutish, low forehead.

As it floundered along, closing in on the slow-moving raft, its lipless mouth stretched open and it screamed to them in a feeble voice.

“Elp, elp, elp, elp!”

Its fingers groped for the rough-hewn edge of the logs, near where Lori stood.

“I’m helped you,” the girl shouted, still trembling from the shock of their brush with death.

Before anyone else on the raft could move, the slender girl hefted one of the ten-foot-long branches that served as paddles, lifted it and brought it down on the bobbing face. The stump of wood pulped the man’s nose, splitting his lips, breaking off several of his teeth. Blood jetted, flooding his throat, making him choke. His hands slipped off the side of the raft and he bobbed away, a tendril of crimson trailing from his smashed face.

The last they saw of him was a hand clutching at the cold air.

 

BEFORE EVENING the Mohawk was joined by another, wider river, coming in from the north. Doc Tanner pronounced that it was the Hudson. Even Jak Lauren had heard of that name.

“Runs by Newyork?”

The old man sighed. “Time was it did, my snow-headed young colleague. But what remains of that great metropolis now I wonder?”

“When I was a kid, folks talked of it as a hot spot, full o’weeds,” Ryan said. “Only ghouls lived there, eating each other.”

Doc smiled. “Sounds much as it was back in my day, Ryan.”

The light was fading and an evening storm threatened. Ryan pointed toward a low spit of land, jutting out, with the shattered remnants of a building just visible at its end. Because of its length and narrowness it would be easy to defend against a sneak attack from the land side.

“Bring us in there if you can,” he called to Jak, who was manning the steering oar with Krysty.

The farther south they drifted, the slower and wider the river became, with none of the gushing rapids they’d encountered higher up, near the abandoned redoubt. The water was amazingly clear, with the rocks on its bottom looking close enough to reach down and touch, though a quick measurement with a length of cord and J.B.’s Tekna knife showed them a depth of about fifteen feet. Doc kept wondering at how unpolluted the Hudson appeared.

“Back when I knew it nobody would place a hand in the water, for fear the acids and chem filth would scorch it to the bone.”

The raft grounded with a soft crunch on the shingle, and they all leaped gratefully off it, stretching their legs. Jak tied the remnants of the mooring rope around a rusted girder that stuck vertically out of some crumbling concrete. The boy stooped and lapped at water from his cupped hands, wrinkling his nose.

“Tastes of salt,” he said.

“Salt?” Ryan queried. “Must be close to the sea. I haven’t seen the sea for…for too many long years. Is that right, Doc?”

“We must go down to the sea again, and do business in great waters,” the old man chanted. “The wonders of the Lord, my dear Ryan, is what we might all share, one day hence.”

“But are we close to the sea?” J.B. pressed.

Doc shook his head, the light wind disturbing his gray locks. He smiled and showed his peculiarly fine, strong set of teeth. “What is close, John Barrymore Dix? How when is up? How meretricious is now? Riddle me that, my friend.”

They dropped the question of how close they were to the sea. In fact, it was approximately one hundred and fifty miles from their stopping place to the open ocean beyond Manhattan.

Ryan set guards, giving everyone a two-hour duty during the time of darkness, and left the last watch for himself. The rest of the group huddled together in the open, eating from their self-heats, using the water from the Hudson for drinking despite the faint hint of salt it held.

“Be better in the trees for shelter?” J.B. suggested.

“We haven’t seen any sign of life for hours. Not since the crazies on that bridge.”

It was true what Krysty said. The banks of the Hudson seemed deserted. Ryan had been taking regular readings with his rad meter, but it hadn’t gone seriously across the orange and into the red. The land was warm, but no longer hot.

“Because we don’t see ‘em, it don’t mean they aren’t there,” he replied.

“Yeah,” the laconic Armorer said.

They stayed where they were.

It was a beautiful night, warmer than it had been farther north. The moon was untroubled by clouds, sailing above them, sharpening the edges of all the shadows.

Lori was on watch a little after three in the morning. When the stickies came, they beat the girl to the ground before she could give any warning.

 

Chapter Five

« ^ »

NOBODY KNEW a whole lot about stickles. They were found in small, vicious colonies, generally in parts of the Deathlands that had been particularly heavily nuked. Some said that the missiles that spawned the genetic horrors that were stickies also held some secret chromosomic deviator that accounted for the peculiar nightmare that they had become.

Some blamed grossly contaminated water supplies in a mysterious process that involved nitrates leached from the soil.

All that was truly known about stickies was that they were triple-crazy. They loved killing and ripping things apart. They liked the sight of blood. They also relished fires and explosions, taking some bizarre and perverse pleasure from staring into dancing flames.

Oddly stickies had only been known in the past twenty or so years. A three-hundred-and-fifty-pound showman named Gert Wolfram was credited with discovering stickies and putting a pair into his traveling freak show. Word was that Gert hadn’t lived too long after that.

Stickies had vulpine teeth and staring eyes, eyes that were utterly dead and devoid of emotion, like a basking shark. The main thing about stickies was that they had developed peculiar sucking pads on their webbed fingers, which enabled them to cling easily to smooth surfaces like flies. It was rumored that stickies could come at you across the ceiling, but that was generally discounted. But they could surely climb walls and hang on to windows.

In the entire Deathlands stickies were the only breed of muties that everyone would automatically kill on sight. It was possible to speak to them, but you had to shout and talk very slowly, as though they heard you through a strange kind of lip-reading. They had no ears.

Lori never heard them. Never saw them. She was sitting down, coat wrapped around her, slipping from an uneasy wakefulness into a half sleep. She was recalling the crazed days with her father. Her husband. Lover. Keeper. Quint. White beard to his stomach, stained amber with nicotine. Jacket spotted with sequins. The hooked nose and narrow, cruel mouth. And the violence.

In her dream, the girl was tied, naked and spread, to the metal frame of a bed, while Quint moved toward her, leering and dribbling, a polished chrome phallus in his hand, its tip studded with shards of broken glass smeared with blood. As Lori tried to scream, a hand clamped itself across her mouth.

She woke and tried to scream, but a hand had been clamped across her mouth.

Lori was held down, and the last thing she heard before a crashing blow delivered to the side of her head plunged her into darkness was a soft, bubbling laughter.

Ryan had agreed they could build a small fire to hold the night’s chill at bay, and it had been its ruby glow that had attracted the stickies, bringing nearly a dozen of them slinking from the darkness under the looming pine trees. They moved with a sinuous quiet, their bare, suckered feet making only the faintest slithering sound on the old stones.

It was Krysty Wroth’s special part-mutie senses that saved the friends from a swift and evil ending. Krysty didn’t have the true power of doom-seeing, but she had highly developed sight and hearing. In her sleep she caught the noise, like tiny lips kissing, of the advancing stickies.

Her green eyes flickered open, glancing beyond the glowing remains of their fire. She saw the skulking figures of the stickies, their eyes blinking, reflecting the flat color of the fire.

“Stickies! Wake up!” she yelled, reaching for her blaster and ripping off a couple of shots at the nearest of the muties, who were barely twenty paces from where she’d been sleeping.

Ryan, J.B. and Jak all came awake, guns magically in their hands. Doc Tanner took a while longer to reach the surface.

Like many such firefights, it lasted less than fifteen seconds.

Many muties had different body structures from norms, more primitive and brutish. They were, consequently, more difficult to put down—and keep down. Stickies were among the hardest of all to chill.

Krysty took out the first two, her 9 mm bullets punching holes clean through flesh and muscle at such close range. The stickies kicked over in a scrabbling, screaming tangle, their fall obstructing their following companions. Her next two rounds missed, then she hit a third mutie with two bullets, both in the belly, folding him over, vomiting blood.

Jak took out two more stickies with his Magnum, the huge handblaster coughing in the darkness, spitting fire and death. One of the two was up immediately, even though its left arm had been nearly severed at the shoulder by the big .357 round. The creature lurched on, screeching, eyes wide, its blood crimsoning its chest and legs. Jak took careful aim and put another bullet in the middle of its face, the skull disintegrating like a peach beneath a war wag.

J.B. held the mini-Uzi, chattering death, smearing the five stickies on the left of the attacking bunch, raking the barrel of the mean little gun backward and forward, using up the whole mag to make double-sure they were well chilled.

Ryan Cawdor was left with three of the stickies for himself.

Awakened by Krysty’s yell of warning, his hands went by automatic reflex to the rectangular shape of the Heckler & Koch G-12. He rolled on one side, kicking away the single blanket that had been his only protection against the night.

Because of the high cross-sectional density of the round, there was very little transverse drift. At such close range, set on triple burst, there was no sideways drift at all. Ryan squeezed the trigger, not needing the laser-enhanced night sight, able to pick his target with ease. The G-12 fired triple bursts at better than thirty rounds per second, the recoil feeling like a single round, barely registering.

The bullets from the blaster didn’t tumble at all, reducing their effect on human flesh, but the extreme velocity caused massive trauma in the area of the body surrounding the actual point of impact. Ryan gave each of his targets a single burst of three shots.

The tallest of them, suckered hands stretched out to grasp at the human prey, was hit in the groin, the three 4.7 mil rounds ripping the mutie apart, slicing into its pelvis, exploding the bones, angling upward and destroying the lower stomach. The stickie toppled sideways, fingers reaching for the wound, fumbling among the loops of greasy intestines that cascaded out of its body.

The next mutie had its hands in front of it, and the bullets pulped the fingers, chunks of flesh and bone flying into the homicidal creature’s face, blinding it. As it stumbled, the bullets stitched across its chest, driving splinters of torn ribs tumbling through the body, slicing the pumping heart into ribbons. Blood gouted and the stickie fell, dying, stumps of fingers opening and closing convulsively in its murderous death throes.

The last stickie seemed oblivious to the massacre of its fellows and still came on, mouth open in a silent scream. Ryan switched the aim of the G-12, pumping out a triple burst. Unfortunately Doc Tanner, who was just waking to the awareness of the attack, staggered to his knees and called out to Lori, distracting the mutie at the crucial millisecond that Ryan squeezed the trigger. The creature turned in midstride, launching itself at the old man, suckered fingers reaching greedily for his throat. The strength of a stickie’s grip was notorious. Ryan had personally seen a man pull a stickie’s hand off a friend’s face, bringing half the cheek and one eye with it.

The trio of bullets missed the stickie’s body, barely clipping the top of its legs, punching the creature off-balance. The snarling mutie fell, only a hand’s span from Doc Tanner. Though not normally a great fighting man, Doc calmly drew the rapier blade from his swordstick and thrust it into the stickie’s open mouth. The angle was perfect, the steel penetrating a foot and a half down its throat. Doc twisted his wrist like a master of the duel, opening the inside of his enemy’s neck. Blood spurted between the bared teeth, splattering across the pebbles. The stickie reached convulsively for Doc, its fingers failing to find a grip on the blood-slick steel.

“Move,” Jak ordered, leveling his pistol, waiting until the old man had withdrawn his sword and scrabbled out of the way. Then he put a booming bullet through the back of the dying mutie’s skull, kicking it into a jerking tangle of twitching limbs.

“All done?” Ryan asked, his voice sharpened by the sudden explosion of violence.

“I counted twelve in, and I counted twelve down,” J.B. replied, calmly holstering his mini-Uzi.

“Where’s Lori?” Doc asked, wiping the blade of his swordstick on the rags of the nearest of the stickies, then sheathing it once more. Stooping, he picked up his faded hat and jammed it on his head.

“There,” Krysty called, pointing along the narrow peninsula toward the looming forest.

Showing an unsuspected burst of speed, the old man darted like a disjointed crab to where they could now see the motionless figure of the young girl.

The others followed, Ryan and the Armorer taking a few moments to check that all of the dozen attackers were truly dead. With stickies you never could be too careful.

They were all chilled.

“Oh, my sweetest little darling,” Doc sobbed, bending and cradling the girl in his arms. His knee joints cracked as he knelt on the stones, pressing her head against his chest. “My sweet dove of innocence,” he moaned.

Having seen the way Lori Quint had ruthlessly butchered the drowning mutie after the incident with the implo-gren, Ryan Cawdor wasn’t too sure he agreed with the description of her as an innocent dove.

“She is slain,” Doc Tanner cried, his grief unrestrained. His head was thrown back, and he was howling like a tormented animal.

“She’s alive, Doc,” Krysty said, kneeling at his side.

“What?”

“Alive, Doc.”

“No.”

“Yes,” Jak said. “Tits move. Breathing. She’s alive.”

“Oh, thanks be to the Almighty! By the three Kennedys but it seems barely possible. After those vile monsters had…”

“Best let me take a look at her,” Krysty suggested.

“Look at? Oh, of course, my dear girl. Do look after the child.”

Krysty stared down at Lori. “Light’s no good. Ryan, carry her to the fire. Jak, get some wood from the trees there.”

“I know where to get wood,” he sniffed, insulted at the suggestion.

“Then do it,” she snapped. “She’s taken a hard knock on the temple. I can feel the lump. Move, Jak!”

It took several minutes before Lori began to show signs of recovering consciousness. The fire by then was blazing brightly, with the pine branches spitting and crackling. Jak and J.B. had gone to the end of the finger of land, watching carefully in case any more of the stickies were lurking there and waiting for a chance to attack. While Krysty worked with Lori, Ryan and Doc managed to shift the bloodied corpses of the muties, dragging them by the heels and allowing the force of the Hudson to roll them away into the night.

“Be in Newyork ‘fore us,” Ryan said.

But the old man was far more interested in getting back to the fire to see how Lori was progressing. His delight when she started to come around was touching. He knelt at her side, tears coursing down his wrinkled cheeks and through the gray stubble on his chin.

“What happens?” the girl mumbled, eyes blinking against the brightness of the blazing fire. “I dream and then…”

She shuddered, clutching at Krysty with white-knuckled hands.

“What was the dream?” Doc asked, holding one of her pale hands in both of his. “Tell me, my dearest child.”

“I dream of Keeper. And he is fucked with me. And hand on mouth… and…” She began to cry. Krysty nodded at Doc, who took her place, holding the girl half on his lap.

“It’s all done, lily of my heart. My dear deer. Your heart, dear hart, that pounds within your breast has…” He stopped rambling. “Some mutants came calling upon us, Lori. We exchanged a few words with them, and now they’ve gone away.”

“Where, Doc?” Lori asked.

“Away down river. I think it unlikely they will return to bother us again.”

“I think that’s right, Lori,” Ryan added. “Night swimming always was dangerous.”

 

THERE WAS A LIGHT MIST hanging on the face of the wide river, obscuring the dank forests on the farther, western shore, when they woke the next morning. A watery sun hung among citron clouds, giving a little heat in the shivering dawn.

They pushed the raft off and floated southward, none of them even glancing back at the desolate scene of the previous night’s slaughter.

 

Chapter Six

« ^ »

LORI QUINT RECOVERED WELL from the horror of the attack by the stickies. There was some scabbing and peeling of skin around her mouth from the pressure of the suckered fingers, but it was already healing. She and Doc were happy to be together at the rear of the ungainly craft, handling the long steering oar that kept them moving roughly in the center of the current.

It was a beautiful day. The early morning mist had faded away like the dew on a summer meadow.

Ryan had ridden rivers before, but most of them had been fast-flowing, broken with turbulent rapids, places where a moment’s relaxation could mean an instant chilling. The Hudson was different. Most of the time it was several hundred yards wide, rolling steadily toward the sea between wooded banks that showed little evidence of man.

For the first time in a long while, Ryan Cawdor actually felt he could lie back on the timbers and take it easy. The wood seemed to be drying out in the warm sun, and the craft was riding higher in the water.

“Those hills on the right used to be called the Cats-kills,” Doc shouted, lifting his voice against the sound of the river bubbling around the raft. “Folk took vacations there.”

“What were vacations, Doc?” Jak asked. The albino boy was sprawled on his back, shading his vulnerable eyes against the golden sunlight. He had peeled off both his camouflage canvas jerkin and the ragged fur vest that he wore beneath it. His skin was as white as paper, stretched tight over prominent ribs. Ryan, looking at Jak, thought at that moment that he barely looked his fourteen years, seeming more like an undernourished and skinny boy, on the threshold of his teens.

“Vacation, son?” the old man mused. “Time was folks would have laughed at you and thought you was joshing ‘em.”

“It’s a time out from killing,” J.B. said quietly, wiping spray off his spectacles.

“It’s when you can be with the person you want, and go where you want and do what you want,” Krysty suggested, smiling at Ryan.

“Can’t do better’n that,” Ryan agreed, venturing a rare smile at the girl.

“I know,” Lori called. “Doc tells me. It’s good time out of bad. Like a day Keeper doesn’t fucking up rectum.” She looked proudly at Doc, who shuffled his feet.

“Took me all this time’t‘stop the chit from saying something a deal worse than rectum.”

Jak wasn’t satisfied. “Tell us what vacation was, Doc.”

“Saltwater taffy, balloons, laughter, hot dogs, ribbons and bows, gingham and lace at collar and cuffs. Smell of frying and best scent and a lot of sweat. Did I mention laughter? Believe I did. Key ingredient in any vacation, laughter. Ice cream on a stick. Fiddler in the park. Fresh-baked apple pie with a spoon of cream on top. Kids, everywhere. Taxi-dancers. Jazz bands. Linked arms along the boardwalk. Hot lips together under the boardwalk. Talking of hopes for better days. Dreams. Laughter and dreams, Jak.”

The raft was silent at the litany from the long-dead, long-gone past, words that Ryan had only ever read. Doc’s head dropped on his chest, and he continued to speak, softer, his voice matching the stillness of the river.

“Emily and I had but one true vacation together. My work… I couldn’t… Had I but known what the future held. Ah, the future. We talked much of the future that summer’s day in ‘ninety-six. Rachel toddling bravely beside us, and young Jolyon on his blanket.”

A flock of what looked like pigeons flew from some sycamores on the eastern bank, the sun striking the bars of vermilion on their fluttering wings. The river was in a wide sweep to the right, flowing slowly and calmly. Doc’s voice became even quieter.

“I had friends among the Apaches of New Mexico Territory, and we visited them. They made us welcome. It was ten years to the very day that the old fox, Geronimo, surrendered to General Nelson Miles. Wonder what happened to…? Never looked after I’d been trawled on the chron-jump. Never thought to. The sun shone every day. The Apaches loved Rachel and Jolyon. Happiest time… laughter… Harriet Beecher Stowe died that summer, as I recall, and there was some news of prizes for scientists by the man who… dynamite… name’s gone. Emily joked I would win one of them, one day. Oh, God, but I was never so happy as on that vacation. That’s what it was, Jak,” he said, turning his face away so that none of them could see the tears.

 

AROUND NOON they passed through the shattered remains of what must once have been a sizable ville. Doc’s guess was a town called Kingston, but the effort of recalling so much of his distant past had wearied the old man, and he sat down for much of the time, trailing his bare feet over the stern, gazing at their jagged wake, locked in his own thoughts. Not even Lori could tug him back for several hours.

Ryan realized just how frail Doc Tanner’s hold on reality truly was.

 

“LET’S PULL HER IN,” Ryan said a little after two o’clock in the afternoon.

“Hours of daylight left,” J.B. protested, looking up at the sky, puzzled. “No storm threatening, so why stop?”

“A vacation,” Ryan said, grinning. “There’s a clearing to the left there. I can see a waterfall, white over the rocks. Good defense all around. Haven’t seen any muties. Let’s just stop, like Doc said, and rest up. We’ll start again at dawn.”

“Gaia, but that’s a wonderful idea, lover.” Krysty sighed and ran her fingers through her mane of scarlet hair so that it rippled against her skin like a wave of fire.

It was an idyllic place.

Ryan and Jak scouted the region around the landing place while J.B. held the mooring line ready for a swift flight. But they found no trace anywhere of any human footprints. Ryan checked the radiation count, taking a reading that dropped below the orange. Everything that he’d ever heard made him certain that the entire northeast industrial area had been nuked almost out of existence, leaving the place a throbbing hot spot that for a long time actually glowed at night, according to some of the older men and women at Front Royal ville.

The water that tumbled eighty or ninety feet from the lip of an escarpment was fresh and sweet without any kind of chem taste.

There were ample deadfall branches that would make an excellent fire—one with a glowing heat but very little smoke to attract any potential enemies.

Doc lay down on the gently sloping beach of soft white sand and instantly fell asleep. Lori sat beside him, plaiting a chaplet of tiny white and golden flowers that she’d found growing in an abundant profusion near the border of the forest.

Spruce, larch, white oaks and hickories dominated the sloping hillside above the beach, with tiny red squirrels and chipmunks darting fearlessly among them, showing no fright at the appearance of the humans.

“Coming, J.B.?” Krysty asked.

“Where?”

“There,” she responded, pointing toward the beckoning shade of the green forest.

“Why?”

“For the pleasure of it, J.B., like Doc said. It’s a vacation for us all. Rest and relax and stop your mind running on death.”

“I’m happy here, Krysty.”

The Armorer was sitting cross-legged in the sand, a few yards nearer the water than Doc and Lori. He had the mini-Uzi cradled in his lap, already halfway through fieldstripping it. His glasses caught the sun, and his fedora was pushed well back on his high, sallow forehead.

“Come on,” Ryan urged.

“When we chilled the stickles, I thought I heard something catching on the mechanism. Something didn’t sound right. The selective fire blowback’s my guess. I’ve got to check it out, Ryan. You know that.”

“Sure. Watch the boat.”

The Armorer nodded his agreement, bending happily to his task.

“Jak,” Krysty called.

“Yeah. You going to walk?”

“Want to come?”

The boy was still stripped to the waist, his boots off, breeches rolled above the knee. He was paddling in the shallows of the river, one of his lethal little throwing knives poised in his right hand.

“Fishing.”

“You’ll never get anything with a blade,” Ryan said disbelievingly.

“Want to bet?”

Ryan laughed. “I know better, kid.”

“Go pick flowers, One Eye. Have some fish grilled for you when you get back.”

“Sounds good.” Krysty smiled and hooked her arm through Ryan’s elbow. “Looks like you an’ me, lover.”

“Looks like it.” Ryan called across to J.B., “Be back ‘fore dark.”

The Armorer waved a casual hand.

Close together, hips touching as they walked, Ryan and Krysty made their way into the cool, scented gloom beneath the waiting trees.

“Herb the blacksmith, back in Harmony ville, knew lotsa old songs and verses,” Krysty said. “Told one ‘bout a lost path through the woods. How it was gone, but it was still there for those who had the eyes to see it.”

Ryan could see what had prompted her line of thought. The trees were well spaced, with daggers of golden sunlight thrusting through the top branches and dappling the floor of the forest. They could hear the light breeze as it tugged at the fresh green leaves that danced and swayed. The air tasted fresh and clean. Gradually they were leaving the rolling sound of the Hudson behind them.

They picked a path between the trunks, climbing up the slope.

“It’s a beautiful day, Ryan.”

“Good day for a vacation.”

“Look, down there.”

They stopped on a grassy knoll that thrust out between the trees, overhanging the beach, giving them a view clear across the river. From that height it shone and glittered like molten glass, barely moving. A little farther above them they could hear the thundering of the waterfall.

Far below them they could easily make out the twin shapes of Doc and Lori, lying close together on the beach, seemingly asleep.

“Oddest love match I ever saw,” Ryan said. “I know he’s not really two hundred and thirty years old, but he’s definitely around his middle sixties. And she’s still in her teens.”

“You disapproving, lover?” Krysty asked teasingly.

“No. Course not. I’m pleased the old goat’s so happy, and the girl couldn’t have found a nicer person than Doc. Specially after that double-crazy Keeper she lived with.”

“Look at J.B.”

Ryan, arm held loosely around Krysty’s slender waist, shaded his eye against the sunlight. The Armorer had laid his coat on the sand and was stooped over the stripped segments of his blasters, carefully wiping each one, using a tiny container of oil to grease them. J.B. was in his element, relishing the vacation in his own dedicated way.

“Jak looks like a little boy at play,” Ryan observed. “Not that he ever had any kind of childhood.”

The white hair blended with the sun-bright sand. As they watched, the lad flicked his wrist. There was a flash of silver from the thrown knife as it splashed into the river. Jak plunged his hand into the water, coming out with something that wriggled and glistened blue-green in his fist. As though he sensed that he was being watched, the boy whirled around, scanning the wall of the forest. He spotted the man and the woman far above him and waved the trout in triumph. Jak shouted something to them, but the words were whisked away on the soft westerly wind.

“Supper should be good, lover,” Krysty whispered. “Come on, let’s walk some more.” She waved to Jak, and then she and Ryan stepped back out of sight of their companion on the beach.

 

AS THEY MADE LOVE on a bank of light green moss, shaded from the sun, Ryan kept the G-12 at his side. This place was as near to an Eden as anything he’d come across in the Deathlands. But that didn’t mean that it was free from serpents.

The foaming stream that fed the waterfall was only a few yards from them, chattering over the rounded stones. A miniature wading bird, wings darted with vivid turquoise and crimson, hopped and picked its way through the water. A gold-throated woodpecker hammered away at a live oak behind them, the thin sound of its rapping beak echoing around the forest. A mutie raccoon, no more than four inches long, skittered over the fawn carpet of leaf mold, ignoring the lovemaking couple who watched it.

“Makes a change to see a mutie animal that’s gotten smaller,” Krysty said.

“I saw some bear tracks and what I guess is a bobcat,” Ryan said. “They looked a coupla weeks old. Mebbe more.”

“Gaia, but I hope you’re right!” Krysty exclaimed, pretending to push Ryan off her, looking around. “A bobcat on top of me as well as you would be too much.”

Ryan moaned in pleasure as the girl laughed. When he was deeply buried in her, she was able to do amazing things with her stomach muscles, lying quite still, yet somehow sucking and caressing him with rippling waves of pressure. He lowered his face to hers, kissing her gently on the lips, tasting sun and salt on her skin.

“I love you, Ryan Cawdor,” Krysty whispered. The tip of her tongue danced over his lips, probing between his parted teeth. She sighed as he thrust harder against her, feeling his swelling climax racing closer. She began to pant, raggedly and urgently showing the nearness of her own release.

“Not yet, not yet, not yet,” she chanted, head rolling back. The long coils of her burning hair seemed to rise, brushing Ryan’s cheeks and shoulders with an odd, sentient life of their own.

“I can’t… can’t…”

“Soon, lover, soon…yes! Now, you fierce bastard, now!”

They fought to a mutual orgasm, Ryan collapsing on top of her, feeling as though the core of his soul had been sucked out from his loins. He could feel her powerful muscles, fluttering uncontrollably with the power of her own ecstasy.

“Fireblast,” he exclaimed. “How d’you like them apples, lover?”

“I guess you don’t get many of them to the bushel, huh?”

Ryan rolled off her, wincing at the stickiness. “Where d’you get that expression from? Not many of them to the bushel!”

Krysty grinned at him with the sleepy, contented face of a cat that’s gotten the best of the cream. “Back in Harmony. Mother Sonja had a host of old sayings like that. Guess she never figured it’d be used for a real mind-blower like that.”

“Guess not.”

“Didn’t you have sayings like that, lover? Back in your own family.”

“Not that I recall.”

The smile slipped away, and she saw the tension come snapping back into his face, hardening the lines around his eye and mouth.

“Ryan?”

He stood up, turning away from her. She had a moment to admire the muscular slimness of his naked body, his back, arms and legs seamed with a multitude of old scars.

“Ryan? I’m sorry I touched a nerve.”

“Don’t signify, lover.” He moved to the edge of the water and dipped a toe in it, whistling at the cold. “Feels like meltwater.”

“Going to bathe?”

“Hell, why not? Come join me.”

She gasped at the shock of the icy stream as she crouched to wash herself. She leaped out suddenly, running on the cropped turf to try to get warm again. A raven, wings carrying the polished sheen of sunlight, floated over the treetops, catching her eye.

Krysty pulled on her silken bikini panties, adjusting them across her hips, easing the flimsy material from the cleft between her buttocks. She hoisted her trousers and tugged on the elegant western boots. The water had splashed her hair, and she ran her fingers through it, letting it float across her shoulders.

“Come out, lover. You’ll freeze, and the cold’s doing nothing for that…” She pointed at his shrunken genitals, giggling at him.

“It’ll warm up,” he said, some of the toughness easing from his face once more.

“Get dressed, Ryan. Then come and sit here by me. There’s another hour or more before we need be heading back to join the others.”

He got dressed, leaving his chest bare, relishing the feel of the sun on his skin. Ryan held up his brown shirt, shaking his head at the stain on it, which was nearly black.

“Poor Hennings,” he said.

“Seems years past. Can’t be more’n a few weeks since he bought the farm. One too many mornings…” Her voice trailed away.

“Mebbe we should settle on going west and try to find some of the Trader’s old crew.”

Krysty rested her hand on his bare shoulder, feeling the skin still chilled by the stream. “What about Virginia?”

“And the Shens?”

“Sure, lover. And the ville at Front Royal where someone’s the baron… someone who owes you a debt.”

Ryan breathed deeply so that his ribs became prominent against the skin of his chest. “It’s too many years. Like you said, Krysty. A thousand miles behind. Best leave it there.”

But he couldn’t hide the note of doubt in his voice. The girl lay stretched out on her back, hands behind her head, looking up at the harsh planes and angles of his face.

“You aren’t sure?”

“No. No, I’m not.”

“Talk about it.”

“You know the story. You heard it down in the swamps.”

“I want to hear it from you, Ryan. Now. Your story, your words. There’ll never be a better time.”

Ryan folded the bloodstained shirt and placed it on the grass, then lay down at the girl’s side.

Beginning to speak…

 

Chapter Seven

« ^ »

PLANT A BULLET anywhere in the domain of Front Royal ville and it’d grow a blaster. That’s what folks used to say. By the long winter! It was a good, rich land, Krysty. The biggest ville in all of Virginia. My father said he figured it might be the biggest in the whole of Deathlands. But I don’t know ‘bout that. The nukes came so thick the sky was black. But they were short half-life missiles, most of ‘em. My great-great-grandpa took what he saw and held it fast. Great-grandpa got more. Timber and water and grazing. Cattle and horses. Even a few hogs. Deep in the Shens there was sheltered hollows where the rad didn’t reach. Great-Grandpa Ryan built and stole and killed and kept.”

“You were named after him?” Krysty asked, not wanting to interrupt the flow of words from the man at her side. She felt that he wanted to talk it out, and like she’d said, now was the time and the place for it.

“Surely was. He had chill-cred, did Great-Grandpa Ryan. His son just held what there was. By then, around the mid of the century, there was some trouble from the Walkers and the Takers.”

Krysty nodded. “Heard my Uncle Tyas McCann speak of them. Said they was the descendants of the Levelers and the Diggers.”

“Never heard nothing ‘bout them.”

“Go on, lover.” She reached out to touch his left hand and felt a reassuring squeeze from Ryan.

“My father took it over around 2050. By then the power was established. There was a rising of the workers on the west side of the ville. Wanted rights to the land they worked. Father put it down. Lots of dead, gibbets on every hill from Nineveh to Oak Ridge.”

It had been a dreadful, awesome sight that struck fear into the hearts of every man, woman and child who worked for the Front Royal ville. The bodies hung there, tied with waxed cobbler’s twine that didn’t rot. The birds picked at the soft tissues of the faces first. The eyes and the lips went, then the cheeks and the tender flesh around the neck. As the slashing wind and rain tore the thin clothes away from the corpses, more of the weathered meat was revealed for the crows and the ravens to feast on.

Baron Titus Cawdor was a tall, broad-shouldered man with fierce eyes and a ready temper. He married the daughter of the baron of a neighboring ville, joining the families. He took over the other ville when his wife’s father—an excellent horseman—died in a mysterious riding accident. His wife, Lady Cynthia, was never physically strong, and after the birth of the third child—all boys—she sank into a decline and a wasting sickness, accompanied by a bloody flux that carried her off less than a year later. She was buried in the marble Cawdor family mausoleum.

Morgan Cawdor was the firstborn of the baron’s sons. Tall and as straight as a tree, he was everything that his father wished for. He could outride, run, wrestle, shoot or swim any of his fellows. He was kind where his father was cruel, considerate where the baron was a thin-lipped autocrat. Morgan took care to watch over his youngest brother, Ryan, protecting him from any danger.

And the main danger was the second of the Cawdor sons.

Harvey Cawdor.

“Harvey,” Ryan said, his voice cold and far away. “Two years younger than Morgan and two years older than me.”

“Why didn’t your father do something to check him?” Krysty asked.

“Harvey was my bane. He was wicked. Fireblast! But such a bitter, evil bastard!”

Harvey Cawdor was everything that his older brother was not and lacked every one of Morgan’s virtues. His sole strength was an overweening ambition, coupled to an iron will to garner what he believed to be his right. His mind was warped and twisted, dwelling in dark corridors that were rank with the lust for power.

“They told me that his birthing ruined him. He was breeched, they said. One leg trailed, like this…and his shoulder was hunched and crook’d up.”

Ryan limped around the clearing, his right leg dragging a deep furrow, gouged from the soft green moss. His right arm was lifted, and twisted, giving him the lopsided walk of a hunchback. Krysty watched him, face solemn.

“I recall an old tape we had in Harmony. An actor from Europe. The paper was torn and the name was gone, but there was a picture on the label of a warped, bent man, long black hair, and a chain of gold. It was a play about a baron from olden times. Most had been wiped by the pulse. But the start was left.”

Ryan dropped his shoulder, sighing as he sat down once more by Krysty’s side. “Was this baron like Harvey? Blood-eyed bastard?”

“Uncle Tyas McCann knew the play. He said this baron killed old men and children and married the wife of one of the men he killed. How he could smile and smile and still be a villain.”

“Harvey smiled like that. If’n he could find some puppy to blind or a kitten to drown and save and drown again, that was when he smiled a whole lot. I learned early, Krysty, that when brother Harvey smiled it was time for little Ryan to get the fuck out of his way.”

The sound of the waterfall seemed to be changing, matching the somber mood of Ryan’s tale. It no longer chuckled brightly over the stones. Now it seemed to whisper and mutter of dark plots and inductions dangerous. The afternoon was becoming colder.

Krysty shivered.

“What is it, lover? Want to go back to the others? I can smell woodsmoke. Jak must be getting his fish ready.”

“I’m okay, Ryan. Go on.”

“What happened to this crookback baron?” he asked.

“Got chilled.”

Ryan nodded. “Yeah. Be good if… Where was I?”

“Morgan and Harvey.”

She noticed that twice already, unconsciously, Ryan’s right hand had reached and touched the scar that seamed the side of his face, jagged from eye to mouth.

“Morgan and Harvey,” he repeated. “Morgan always tried to guard his back. Tried to warn our father against Harvey, but his mind was poisoned already and he refused to believe anything bad about him. One day Morgan went out in his hunting wag, with only one servant. It was found bombed out. Stickies did it. But they found boot tracks afterward.”

“And stickies don’t wear…”

“…boots. Right. The body was torn apart by the explosion. Not enough left to fill the long wooden box. I went and peeked. They put dirt in, Krysty, to make the weight. Dirt, for my fucking brother!”

“Ryan, love, if you don’t—”

“No!” he almost shouted. “No. I’ve got to talk this out with someone. Never had anyone before I could tell. If we go back there… to Front Royal, I want you to know everything about it.”

“Goon.”

“I tried to tell Father. But he was old, shaken by what was happening. He wouldn’t listen. But Harvey heard what I’d been saying and marked me for an early grave.”

“ ‘So wise, so young, will ne’er live long, it’s said.’ That’s from that play. Was your brother married then?”

“Morgan? Yes. Guenema was her name. A strange mutie girl. Eyes like jet. I liked her. I… I suppose I loved her. I was fourteen. Jak’s age.”

“What happened to her?”

“She disappeared. Nobody would talk about it. A great wall of fucking silence! They said she was carrying a child and she lived out in Deathlands. But…I doubt it. Harvey would have set his dogs on her trail.”

For a few moments there was silence between them, broken only by the hurtling water as it rushed over the lip of the falls. Krysty leaned back on an elbow, glancing behind them, noticing, at the edge of the trees beyond the clearing, a small cluster of jack-in-the-pulpits, the white spikes bravely erect in the green cup.

Harvey had made his play the day after Ryan’s fifteenth birthday. Using bribed and terrified servants he arranged for Ryan’s evening meal to be drugged. Then he and half a dozen of the ville’s sec men planned to take the sleeping boy. The body would then be weighted and dropped into the moat that circled the main house of Front Royal.

“Not all the servants were in Harvey’s pay, and not all loved him. An old armorer called Kenny Morse caught wind of the plan from a kitchen maid. I didn’t take the food, and I was ready for them.”

Even before Morgan’s murder Ryan Cawdor had begun to try to safeguard himself. Kenny Morse had stolen an old .45 Colt from the castle armory for him. Ryan cleaned and oiled it, and spent hours practicing until he could use it with expertise. He was instructed by the diminutive Morse, who risked at best a beating from the baron for breaking his orders that his youngest son was not to have a blaster.

That night Ryan was ready.

“I waited just inside the door of my room. A narrow crack showed me the corridor. It was gloomy. On his way out Morse had removed two of the light bulbs from their sockets. The ville had vast supplies of gas and generators for power. It was midnight when Harvey and his butchers came for me.”

The first two shots, booming out of the darkness, killed two of the sec men, warning Harvey and the others that their plan had failed and that Ryan was no lamb, waiting patiently for the slaughterer. The men went crashing back, blood springing from chest and throat, soaking through their trim uniforms.

Knowing that he must now take the offensive, Ryan jumped out, gun braced in both hands, firing twice at the nearest guard. The first round from the old blaster ripped through the upper arm as the man dived sideways, the second hitting him through the side of the face, taking away half of the back of his skull with the force of the impact.

Harvey snapped off two shots with his laser pistol, tracer bullets scything through the blackness and exploding off the wall by Ryan’s left shoulder.

“I called him the bastard killer he was. Screamed it, my voice breaking. I was so fucking angry that I’d have torn his face off his skull if’n I could have reached him. Another sec man was flat on the floor, blocking off the exit to the stairs. He was hiding behind the corpse of the second man I’d chilled.” Ryan’s voice dropped in remembrance of the charnel house scene of death and blood. “His arms and legs were still twitching and jerking.”

There was a burst of shooting from a battered Czech machine pistol, but Ryan was moving again, dodging back toward the open door of his turret bedroom. He snapped off another round, the shot flying high, screaming into the black pool of shadow at the top of the narrow staircase. The second round from the Colt caught the guard through the open mouth as he raised his head, peering to see where the boy had gone. It splintered his teeth and angled upward, burying itself in the brain, through the roof of the mouth.

“Harvey shouted to me, then. He’d seen the blaster and knew it held seven rounds. He yelped out that he knew I only had one left.”

“What’d you say?”

“Told him I had a spare mag. Didn’t, though. Morse only stole one mag for me. I’d fired six and had one left. The fucker was right.”

Krysty looked across at the blank, emotionless face of the man she loved. “No other way out? No other door? No window?”

“Fifty feet on stone. Courtyard under the window. You gotta realize, Krysty, that this ville was built way back ‘fore the long winter. Based on some kind of old castle.

Harvey would have some more sec men there, faster than goose shit off a shovel. There was only one way out—past my big brother.”

Ryan Cawdor was never a person, even at fifteen years of age, to hesitate when what was needed was instant action.

“I dived out and rolled. Lot of lead came my way, blowing chunks of rock off of the walls. I squeezed my last shot at Harvey, but he was hunkered down and it went high. Had me a real good knife. Fireblast! But I lost it in a firefight close by what used to be Kansas City.”

The dagger was made with the hoof of a stag for a hilt, and it fitted the palm of the hand like it had been made for it.

“I jumped the dead and the dying. They all figured I must have more ammo, or I was fucking crazy. My brother called me a bastard, and I called him a butcher. They were the last words we spoke.”

Harvey was taller and stronger than his younger brother, and he clawed out at him. He drew Ryan close, fingers digging into his flesh. The fifteen-year-old suddenly felt a streak of icy fire across his ribs, and Harvey laughed, breath rank in his face. The knife cut was long and painful, but not deep. The laughter ceased as Ryan managed to bring his own blade into play, slicing into Harvey’s upper arm, making him squeal in shock and pain.

“Another moment and I’d have butchered the gimp where he stood,” Ryan spit, fingers clenching as he relived the moments in that long corridor. “But there was another sec man there, and he came from behind and pulled me away.”

Krysty could catch the faint scent of fish roasting on the beach far below them. But she ignored it, wanting Ryan to finish the bleak tale—to finish it and to exorcise it from his mind.

“I chilled the guard with one thrust to the heart. I felt… a moment of being sorry. His name was George Cross. A good man but… He fell all in a piece, dead before his body hit the stone flags of the passage. But he delayed me for the second that cost me this,” Ryan said, touching the patch over his left eye. “And fucking nearly killed me.”

As he half turned, Ryan had seen Harvey lunging toward his face, his own eyes exultant with a feral grin of triumph. The younger boy had tried to parry the knife thrust, but was too slow.

“I saw it, Krysty! Saw the knife. I can see it to this day if I close my eye, see the point of his dagger, like a needle tipped with fire. It came direct into my eye.” He stopped and turned away from her, looking across the valley toward the sinking ball of the orange sun.

The knife had been well aimed. It slashed into the left eye so that the young Ryan Cawdor could hear the steel grating against the bone of the socket.

“No pain. Not a single bit of pain. It felt like hot water on my cheek, where the eye had burst open. No blood. Only a spot or two of blood. I nearly dropped my knife. Or it fell and I snatched it up… I don’t remember which. Harvey slashed at me again, went for my other eye. He missed by…you can see for yourself. Opened up half my face like a butcher with a lamb’s carcass. Then I bled. Fireblast! But I surely bled then, lover.”

Half-blind, terrified and in dreadful pain from the gash across his face, Ryan Cawdor lashed out at the smirking, triumphant face of his crippled brother. He dealt him a lucky punch in the middle of his hooked nose and felt it crumple under the blow like a crushed egg.

“I ran. Down and up and along passages. I was near death from the loss of blood, blinded. Someone helped me. Kenny Morse? I don’t know. Suddenly I was out of the house and across the moat. There was snow on my face, melting and running with the seeping crimson all over my neck and shirt. A howling wind blew through the pines on the far side of the valley away from the ville. And I was gone. Fifteen years old and I never went back. Never thought about going back. Not until now.” He sat up and pulled on his shirt and coat. The evening chill was rising from the Hudson, and the sun had nearly gone down. “I can smell fish cooking.”

“Want to go back? Go ‘fore dark?”

“Yeah.”

“Help me up, lover. Thanks. What happened back at Front Royal after you’d fled the place? That double-crazy Bochco said your father married again. And what about Harvey?”

“Not much to tell. Haven’t heard much fresh until down in the swamps there.”

There had been a purge. Harvey had convinced the ailing Baron Cawdor that his youngest son was a murderous renegade and he was named wolfshead so that every man’s hand was against him. Several servants believed loyal to Ryan and to Morgan’s memory were executed on the old gibbets. Kenny Morse was the first to go, shrieking defiance as his feet were kicked off the stool and he danced in the air.

Pecker Bochco had told them about the cobbles of the courtyard flowing inches deep in sticky blood that clotted and blocked the drains of the entire ville. He had also told Ryan and Krysty about the new Lady Cawdor.

She was a sluttish whore who had been used by Harvey, but whose strength of will and capacity for evil out-stripped the halting young man. She seduced Baron Cawdor, persuading the old man of her love for him. Ryan’s father, by now, was slipping fast into dementia, finding it hard to tell fact from dream.

Lady Rachel Cawdor was plump and beautiful and just eighteen years old. She fed opiates to the old man so that he slept, then ran light-footed along the winding corridors to the bedroom of Harvey Cawdor.

They found that Ryan’s father was more tenacious than they’d expected. He didn’t die, despite being poorly fed and treated harshly by the girl-bride. Harvey drew back from butchering the frail old man, but his mistress did not.

One night, under the guise of playing a game of love, she cajoled the baron into letting her tie his hands and feet to the corners of their great four-poster, using cords of silk. She whispered, as she pulled the knots tighter, of the pleasures she would give him once he was her helpless slave. The silk was as thin as cotton, yet as strong as wire, and had been tied so tight that it bit into his wrinkled skin and drew blood from beneath his blackened nails.

Baron Cawdor tried to call out, realizing at that last awful moment that her intention was murder. But Rachel laughed at him, mocking him, even as she knotted a gag around his mouth, muffling his cries for aid.

She told him of her contempt for him as she climbed, naked, astride his chest, gripping him with her heels as though he were a horse. She told him of her lust for his son and of their vile and perverse pleasures together. As she leaned over him her breasts brushed his cheeks, her nipples swollen with her ruthless enjoyment of what she was doing to him. Rachel picked up a large satin pillow, holding it as she wriggled up his body.

Rachel placed the pillow tenderly over his face, leaning all her weight on top of it, whispering as she did so of how Harvey had murdered Morgan and how he had planned to kill Ryan, but the brat had escaped.

She felt the struggles against the suffocating pressure becoming weaker until, with a final jerking convulsion, Baron Titus Cawdor went to join his ancestors.

 

RYAN AND KRYSTY picked their way down the twisting path through the woods, taking care as the light was fading fast.

“And they have a son?”

Ryan nodded. “That’s what I heard. Jabez Pendragon Cawdor. Must be around the same sort of age as Whitey down there.”

Krysty sniffed the air. “Gaia, but that fish makes my mouth water! You feeling hungry now, lover? After all your exercise?”

Ryan checked in midstride, turning to look at her, his face a pale blur in the half-light. The patch over his ruined eye seemed blacker than it usually did. He reached out and took Krysty by the hand.

“I’m sure.”

“What? That you’re hungry?”

Ryan didn’t smile. “No.”

“What, then?”

“That crazy old bastard Bochco. I’ve been thinking on the last thing he said.”

“What was that?”

Ryan’s voice was so quiet that the pounding waterfall nearly drowned it out. Even with her mutie hearing, Krysty could barely hear him.

“The crow shits where the eagle should roost. Return and claim what should be yours.”

“I remember.”

“It was a scar that had been healed, I thought, for twenty years. Now I know that I was wrong. Now I know where I’m going.”

“Where?” But she knew.

“I’m going home, lover. Home.”

They walked back to the beach and rejoined the others.