Chapter Eight

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DOC TANNER WAS STRAINING at his memory. “Front Royal’s in Virginia. There used to be a saying.”

“What?” Lori asked.

“Something about the state. They said it in the nineties. Nineteens, not eighteens.”

Jak Lauren was leaning against the short trunk of the mast, listening to the old man. “What did they say, Doc?”

“Ah, yes.” Confidently he said, “Virginia is for…” Then he lost the thread. “Virginia is for… for… I don’t rightly recall.”

Jak grinned. “Guess must have been Virginia is for killers.”

Doc nodded. “Quite possibly, my white-haired young companion. Quite possibly.”

Ryan had told them over the supper of fresh trout that he was determined to go on to Virginia.

“Chill brother?” Jak asked.

“Just might,” Ryan replied.

“See your home. I liked that,” Lori said, recovered now from the blow to her head.

Doc Tanner smiled at the news. “Sibling rivalry was always an overwhelming motivation, was it not, my dear Ryan?”

Ryan nodded, even though he had no idea what the old man was talking about.

Only J.B. didn’t say anything, busying himself with picking bits of fish from between his back teeth with a long, narrow bone. His eyes behind the round lenses of his spectacles gave nothing away.

“You don’t seem surprised,” Ryan said. “I know I sort of said I would before. But this is for real. I’ll go. Even if I go on my own, I’m going back to see my brother.”

“Hell, I knew that all along,” J.B. said.

 

DURING THE NEXT DAY, the Hudson River flowed ever more slowly and became wider, the banks shelving away a good quarter mile. As they rolled gently toward the sea, they saw more and more evidence of the devastation wrought by the century-old nuking of the northeast.

They passed the weed-softened remains of what Doc swore must have been a town he called Poughkeepsie. Jak Lauren, for some reason, found that name hilariously amusing, and he rolled around on the damp timbers, holding his sides, laughing uncontrollably. His merriment was contagious, and everyone on the raft began to laugh with him. Even J.B. cracked his cheeks at the sound of the name.

Doc cackled like a rusty hinge. “Guess it always was a funny name.”

About four hours later they found themselves drifting toward the wreck of what had once been a gigantic bridge. Ryan spotted it first.

He was standing on the right side of the unwieldy craft, urinating to leeward, shielding himself from the others as best he could. On the raft there was no time or space for any of the niceties of hygiene. As he pissed, it was carried away in a great amber arc, splashing into the flat surface of the river.

“Look at that!” he shouted.

Krysty glanced at him. “Terrific, lover. But what’ll you do for an encore?”

“You’re envious. But that’s—”

“Envious! Ryan Cawdor, you’ve got—” She broke off, seeing he was pointing around the long bend of the Hudson, far ahead of them.

The river narrowed a little, breaking over the massive piles of the bridge. Rusting girders dangled high above, with a network of thick metal rods holding crumbling chunks of stone.

A bent piece of metal, which looked as if it might once have been painted green, had the remains of some white lettering on it. Whi e PI ins was all that could be read.

It took all their strength, using the crudely cut branches, to steer the raft around the obstacles. They pushed at the stone piers and shoved away from the maze of fallen metal where the water pitched and foamed, creating strong eddies and currents.

Once they were past the toppled bridge, they were able to relax once more, allowing the slow-moving river to carry them along. Krysty stood at the front of the raft, balancing herself easily against the rhythmic pitching and rolling.

“Doc?”

“What is it?”

The wind tugged at her long hair so that it wrapped itself around her face. She paused, freeing herself, before she spoke again.

“I heard that these parts were filled with people before the big chilling.”

“That’s so, my dear. Thicker than bugs on a bumper was a current expression. Why do you ask now?” Almost immediately the old man answered his own question. “Ah. Because there is so little sign of human habitation on either bank of the Hudson. Is that not what prompted your question?”

“Yeah. That bridge…and a few ruins on the cliffs. That’s ‘bout all we’ve seen for hours. No people. Not since the stickies.”

Doc clambered to his feet, helped by a steadying hand from Lori. His knee joints cracked like miniature blasters. He rested an arm across Krysty’s shoulders, gazing rheumily at both sides of the river.

“You cannot possibly imagine the devastation wrought here. Nor, fortunately, can I. If one could have seen the megadeath scenario, then one would have gone stark mad upon the instant.”

For the last mile or so, perched high on the cliffs to the east, they had been able to see a few ruined buildings. They were eyeless wrecks, almost covered by the encroaching vegetation. Most were roofless, walls bleached to an unhealthy white by a hundred years of chem storms. One or two still showed traces of blackening and scorch marks along the upper edges of many of the empty windows.

Ryan joined Doc and Krysty and they glanced behind them, over the high ground to the west of the Hudson. The sun was already out of sight, and dark purple clouds were boiling up, showing the menace of ugly thunder-heads at their crests.

“Time to put in for the night. How far from Newyork, Doc?”

“From that sky, there is menace from the west. Perchance we should find shelter. I cannot recall the lie of the land hereabouts, Ryan, but I think we must be closing in on the metropolis. Yonkers is a name that seeps into my mind, though what it was I cannot recall.”

“What ‘bout Newyork?” called Jak, who had been dozing near the stern.

Doc hesitated before replying. “The wreckage from that toll bridge back yonder could have overturned our frail barque. The farther south we go along the Hudson, the more problems we shall encounter of that type. Before we reach New York we may need to desert the water for the land.”

J.B. also stood up, pushing his fedora back. “Maps show us around fifty miles to go. How far from there to Front Royal? You know, Ryan?”

“Always heard as a kid that Newyork was close to two fifty from the ville.”

The Armorer whistled softly, barely audible over the murmur of water bubbling around the front of the raft. “Two fifty. Need us a wag to get there. Never make that distance on foot.”

Ryan nodded. It was true. A small party of six people, however well armed and brave, would stand no chance at all in the Deathlands covering a great distance without transport. The Trader had traveled in a convoy of armored war wags, and even then they’d been ambushed and taken losses.

“I’m like to get off this boat,” Lori said, screwing up her face like a petulant child, which made everyone laugh at her.

“Let’s head in. There’s a kind of lagoon ahead on the right. Looks like the whole bank got blasted in. Rad count still shows th’edge of orange. Must have been hotter than fireblast around here.”

Doc sighed. “Too true, my dear Mr. Cawdor. Armageddon day must have taken the lives of half the good people around here within ten minutes of the first bomb. Half the survivors within forty-eight hours from injuries and wounds. Then, of every thousand men, women and children still breathing, perhaps one or two might live beyond the next three months.”

“Nuke winter took lots, Uncle Tyas McCann told me,” Krysty said.

“Indeed. Projections for that were not, I think, accurate. Many scientists said it would be winter for twenty years. After the bombs finished falling and there was a quiet between heaven and earth, the night and darkness and cold came. But within five years I think our climate was back to normal.”

“It’s still not like it was,” Ryan said. “Chem storms. Acid rain down south that can take the skin off a man in five minutes. Still places it hasn’t rained in fifty years. That’s normal?”

“Touché, my dear man. No, things were tipped too far for it ever to be what it was. But it is now as good as it will ever become.”

The six of them slowly steered their raft toward the bank. Jak, splashed in the face by Krysty, licked the spray. “Real salt now.”

“Hudson’s tidal here,” Doc said.

The raft grounded in shallow water, fifty feet or so from the bank.

By the time they’d managed to haul and wrestle the ungainly craft nearer to the bank, the threatening storm had closed in from the west. Thunder rumbled over the hills beyond the river, and jagged forks of lightning punched across the livid sky.

“Tie it up good and safe, Jak,” Ryan called, having to raise his voice above the noise of the racing storm. “Lotta rain upriver, and she could rise and rip the raft away.”

“Best find shelter quick,” J.B. urged. “Seen some buildings uphill a ways.”

Cedars, balsams and cottonwoods were mixed together on the gently sloping ground, with animal trails winding between them. The light was poor, but Ryan could make out that the spoor was mainly deer, overlaying something that might have been wolf.

Each of the six carried a backpack. Doc stooped beneath the weight of his, looking tired. The incessant rocking and pitching of the roughly bound logs over the past two days was enough to drain anyone’s strength.

Ryan led the way through a bright patch of red-orange flame azaleas, picking his way between the nodding shrubs, ducking beneath some of their twelve-foot-high flowers.

“Where did you…? Ah, I can see it, J.B. Below the ridge there.”

Ryan recognized the setup. There had been a house dug into the side of the hill, with enormously thick concrete foundations. Below it, facing the indistinct remains of a narrow road, had been a double garage with up-and-over doors. The nukes had totally removed the house, slicing off the top of the slope behind it like a gigantic cleaver. But the garage remained, set deep like a rectangular cave. Over the years, earth had fallen and been washed down around it, building up gray deposits where shrubs had rooted and even trees now grew. The actual garage was nearly filled with windblown leaves.

“Home, sweet is home,” Lori said, dropping her pack and squatting down on her haunches. “Keeper says that.”

“Good defense sightlines,” J.B. observed, sizing the place up. “Mudslide there left a narrow entrance. One person can guard it easy and watch down the hill. Get a fire going near the mouth of the garage. Yeah, Ryan, it looks good.”

 

THE FIRE SMOLDERED and smoked at first with the dampness of the wood they dragged in. The leaves inside were so dry that they flared and sparked like tinder, but they wouldn’t sustain a flame properly. Eventually, though, Jak persuaded the fire to brighten, and it cast its glowing light all around the cavernous building.

Doc and Lori swept the leaves together, brushing them with their hands and feet into a neat pile at the rear of the building. On the back wall, high up, they found a long shelf, hanging precariously by rusting iron brackets. There were a couple of plastic containers containing oxidized nails, screws and clips. Lori found a cup and wiped it clean, then asked Doc to read the bright green lettering on its side.

“It says ‘I Rode Colossus,’ whatever that means. The little picture looks like some sort of roller coaster,” Doc said, adding hastily, “and don’t ask me what that means, either, dear child.”

The six friends had only been inside the underground garage for about ten minutes when the threatening storm arrived on their bank of the Hudson.

There was a dazzling ripple of lightning, stabbing through the darkness, accompanied by a truly deafening crash of thunder. The sound was so loud that it seemed to echo inside their heads for several seconds afterward. More lightning followed, almost continuous, so that their own shadows danced, knife-edged, on the side wall of their refuge.

“Likely there’ll be rain,” J.B. said, peering out into the night. “Good job the raft’s well moored. Going to be a bad one.”

“Best open the self-heats,” Ryan suggested. “How many cans we got?”

The Armorer had the most at five, and Lori the least at two.

“Need some real food,” Lori said, sitting by the fire. “Saw deer tracks.”

Which reminded Ryan of the other spoor he thought he’d noticed as they hurried up the hill toward the garage. The G-12 in his right hand, he walked casually toward the low entrance, squinting around the earthslide that blocked off the outside. There was another rumble of thunder, very close, and vivid lightning, tinged purple. He could hear the hissing and pattering as the first drops of rain began to fall on the ruined path.

Ryan stared for several seconds, lips peeling back off his lips in a silent whistle. He turned to the others inside. “Hey! We got company.”

 

Chapter Nine

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THE NOTE OF WARNING in Ryan’s voice was enough to bring the others to his side, every one holding a cocked blaster.

“What is it?” Krysty asked, the first one to join him.

“Look for yourself.”

The girl took a cautious half step forward, bending so that she could see out under the lip of the roof where the garage doors had once hung.

“Gaia!” she exclaimed, straightening up. A fierce flash of lightning broke outside, making her green eyes glitter with a vulpine glow.

The others took advantage of more lightning to stare outside for themselves, seeing the company that Ryan had mentioned.

“They lovely,” Lori squeaked. “But they get wet and cold.”

Ryan’s only guess was that “they” were some sort of mutie bears. Most of the dangerous creatures around the Deathlands had mutated upward, or sideways, growing larger or more dangerous. But there were exceptions to that.

There were more than a dozen of the little creatures, sitting in a patient row in the teeming downpour, big round eyes fixed on the humans who had taken over their den. They looked about eighteen inches tall, with round potbellies. Their fur was a pale orange, like desert sand, and it clung to them, matted and sodden with the force of the chem storm. Their ears were pricked up in sharp points, and their stubby front paws were folded across their chests. None of them made a sound.

Ryan glanced all around, peering out both sides in case there were any other, more threatening creatures waiting beyond their refuge. But the rain brought visibility down to about thirty short paces.

The thunder was incessant, pounding at the brain, making coherent thought difficult. Ryan put down his Heckler & Koch, slipping his right hand onto the butt of the SIG-Sauer pistol.

“Where d’you…?” Krysty began.

“Can’t leave ‘em out there,” he replied. “See if’n I can…”

The rest of the sentence was lost in the rumble of the storm. Lightning was constant, making the night seem like it was floodlit. Ryan took a couple of cautious steps out of the garage, keeping his eyes fixed on the nearest of the little furry animals. He held out his left hand in a gesture he hoped would assure them of his kind intentions.

The big brown eyes followed every movement, growing wider and wider until it looked as if they might pop right out of their sockets. Not one of the animals moved as Ryan drew closer.

“Come on, come on,” he muttered. The rain was ferocious, lashing in from over the river valley, tearing at his face like thousands of fine wires. Ryan licked his lips, suddenly concerned that this might be an acid rain that would blister and peel his skin. Apart from a hint of salt, it tasted normal. His hair was quickly plastered to his skull, making his face seem leaner and more brutal. It trickled down inside the eye patch, and he shook his head to clear it.

The nearest of the mutated creatures was only five paces away from him. Though they were trembling, the fur quivering, they didn’t seem particularly frightened of the advancing man.

Ryan’s boots slopped in the loose mud that washed down from higher up the side of the wooded hill.

“Come here, out of the cold,” he whispered, bending and reaching out. His fingers touching the wet pelt, feeling its amazing softness. The animal made a thin, mewing sound, but it didn’t try to escape, and allowed the man to pick it up.

One by one he brought them into the relative warmth of the cavern. Eleven in all. They were placed gently in front of the glowing fire to dry out. The little animals didn’t try to struggle or run away, sitting where they were put, their round heads turning slowly and wonderingly to gaze at the six people. They seemed particularly fascinated by Krysty Wroth’s flaming red hair.

Ryan dried himself off, his shirt and pants steaming as he stood close to the warm fire. Lori picked up one of the creatures and cuddled it on her lap, whispering to it. The animal’s tiny paws touched her gently on the arm, and its eyes rolled wider and wider.

“Lovely and soft and such fat little guts,” she said.

“Fucking cute,” Jak said, grinning broadly at the row of animals, perched together, solemn-faced, like hairy, portly monks.

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “They dried out yet?”

Krysty stooped and touched one, stroking her fingers across the long fur. “Seems dry to me, Ryan. You ready for this?”

After they’d slit the throats of the cuddly little bears, they skinned them and roasted them over the fire.

The little creatures made real good eating.

 

Chapter Ten

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DOC TANNER BELCHED and rubbed his stomach. “I beg your pardon. Considering how small those little furry bastards were, they had meat as tough as buffalo.” He sat down on the beach, tugging at his right boot. He took it off and shook a handful of grit out of it, then pulled the cracked knee boot back on. The wind had risen, and it snatched his stovepipe hat off, sending it rolling along the sand at a fine pace.

“Why not let it be gone?” Lori asked. “It was old and smelling.”

“You think so, my dear dove of the north?”

“Sure.”

The others watched, amused, as Doc rose to his feet and set off after the hat, proceeding like a stately galleon under full sail. His coat, an uneasy mix of gray, brown and black furs, billowed about his shrunken shanks. His tangled hair skittered across his narrow shoulders.

“Is he really going to dump that hat?” Krysty asked. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Must be two hundred years old, that hat,” J.B. said.

“Like throwing away part of history,” Ryan added.

“Get another easy. Look him go,” Jak said, grinning.

The wind was teasing Doc, allowing him to get almost within reach of the black hat, then flipping it away so that it rolled on its battered brim, always just below his grasping fingers.

“Go, Doc!” Lori yelled, jumping up and down with excitement.

The hat spun into the lapping edge of the Hudson, subsiding, giving up its flight and allowing Doc Tanner to pluck it. The old man stood there for some moments in silent contemplation, holding the hat and turning it around and around, slowly, head bowed over it.

“He’s saying goodbye,” Krysty guessed.

All of them stopped what they were doing. Jak was beginning to untie the mooring rope. The river had risen a foot or more during the night, but the raft was still held securely. J.B. was putting the backpacks on the raft.

“Adieu, old companion!” Doc shouted, his voice loud and clear. Taking the stovepipe hat by the rim and running a hand caressingly over the dent in its crown, he spun it far out into the main stream of the Hudson, where it settled like a wing-broke raven, floating the right way up. The river took it, revolving in a stately manner, carrying it away, downstream to the south. They all watched it until it was only a small black blur against the deep blue-green of the water.

As Doc rejoined them, the other five gave him a round of applause and three rousing cheers. Doc’s cheeks cracked into a broad smile, showing his strong white teeth. He bowed in an old-fashioned, elegant manner.

“My dear, dear friends. How can I thank you for your generous reception of my cathartic act. That hat was too much a symbol of my past. My long, long past. And now I look forward.” He paused. “When I remember to, that is.”

 

HORDES OF PALE LILAC ASTERS thronged the sides of the river as they drifted south. The water was still as clear as crystal glass, and filled with fish of all shapes and sizes.

But after their feast on the small bears the previous night, none of the six felt hungry enough to try to catch any.

“Must be close to Newyork,” Ryan said to Doc. “Light’ll be going soon. It’s so wide here that we might have problems getting a place for the night. And the city’s rubble’s supposed to be double-bad. So they used to say.”

“I heard that in Mocsin,” the elderly scientist said. “The sec boss…” He shuddered.

Ryan pursed his lips in a silent whistle. “I know him. Strasser. Fireblast, but he was a bastard fitted for six feet of mold.”

He remembered the man well. It had been when he’d first met up with Doc Tanner. Strasser had been the sec boss in the ville of Mocsin. The ville of Jordan Teague, the baron. Strasser had always worn black, head to toe, and had a fringe of hair around a shaved skull. Thin was the word for Strasser. Thin body, thin face, thin eyes and lips. Lips that Ryan Cawdor had smashed to bloody pulp with a thrown blaster.

“He talked about New York. He’d been there. Traded there. Drugs and children. He said they were all ghouls, cannibals, night crawlers, blood tasters, dark watchers, death lovers.”

“From what I hear, Strasser was right for once,” J.B. said.

They passed another ruined bridge, its eastern section more or less complete. The shattered remnants of an old passenger wag hung poised on the brink, stuck there since the missiles had burned its driver to a crisp a century earlier. One day the rest of the bridge would rot through and the automobile would plummet down with it into the ever-patient Hudson.

A few minutes farther on the river narrowed down from more than two miles across to less than one. On their right the banks rose high in a series of wooded bluffs that Doc said he thought had once been called the Palisades of New Jersey.

Now, at last, on the left, the six companions began to witness the silent, twisted horror of total urban destruction.

No trees grew on the eastern bank of the Hudson, other than the occasional stunted ash or sycamore. Ryan’s rad counter began to cheep softly, the needle creeping inexorably through the orange and holding not far from the red that showed a dangerous hot spot.

The old Cross-Bronx Expressway vanished behind them, swallowed up in the pale gray mist that came drifting in from behind the bluffs. It wasn’t possible to make out anything still standing that even vaguely resembled a building. It was a rolling, melted sludge of concrete wilderness. Nothing remained higher than a tall man in that part of what had been the Bronx.

They could only see two kinds of botanical life amid the ruins: banks of nodding magenta fireweed, rising here and there far above the blasted sections of houses, shops and offices, and an ugly, rank weed—a sickly green color with a tough stem that twined around itself as though it sought suicide by strangulation. As the raft drifted toward the eastern shore, they could see more clearly. The weeds had serried bristles, like the skin of a hog, and they bore seedheads that were circular, letting poisonous yellow spores drift to the earth like malignant paratroopers.

“Earth Mother save us all,” Krysty whispered, face blanched with the horror of the vanished city. “Is nothing left?”

“Might be some of the big blocks standing. Central Manhattan was zapped, but a few scrapers were mebbe big enough. I seen vids of them, and they couldn’t have been leveled.” Ryan’s voice betrayed his own chilling doubt.

The desolation was so total.

Ryan thought he noticed an unnatural flurry of movement among the rancid weeds that crowded down to the very brink of the water, now only about fifty paces away from where the raft turned slowly on an eddy, moved by a long-submerged obstruction.

“Push it away!” he called urgently, taking one of the branches himself and poling off, trying to shift back to the center of the current.

“What d’you see?” Krysty panted, throwing all her weight against the steering oar at the stern of the raft.

“Nothing. Something. I don’t know.”

“I heard something. Heard it. Like someone laughing. But someone who didn’t have a proper mouth. Does that seem stupid?”

“No. Not down here it doesn’t.”

“Let’s shove off. Be dark soon,” J.B. said. “Fog, too.”

“Yeah. Doc says we’re only ‘bout twenty miles or so from open sea. Be good to make that.”

“Might be safer night,” Jak suggested, his unruly white hair tied back with a ragged length of red ribbon that Lori had given him.

“Could be,” the Armorer agreed. “Map shows river gets double-narrow. Could be chilled from either bank in good light.”

“So, we keep going?” Ryan called, and he got nods of agreement from everyone.

 

THE MIST BECAME THICKER, swallowing up the raft in gulps of sinuous gray damp. The long tendrils came in from their right, tasting of cold mud and still, brackish water. The fog had an unpleasant odor that seemed to linger on the tongue as you breathed.

“Where d’you figure we are now, Doc?” Ryan asked, glimpsing a teetering ruin through a sudden clearance of the darkening fog on their left.

Doc rose from where he’d been sitting with his arm around Lori. Pearls of moisture hung in his hair like a chaplet on the brow of a crazed monarch. But his voice was unusually calm and sane.

“Damnably hard to determine, Ryan. No visual clues. Around level with the north side of Central Park, perhaps? Once I sailed clear around Manhattan on a pleasure craft. The sun shone and cameras clicked and whirred. The great buildings like the Twin Towers stood proud and tall, their glass reflecting a thousand bursts of golden light. I felt like a Christian viewing the Eternal City.” He stopped speaking for a moment, lost in memory. “And now, it is the valley of the shadow of death. Hobgoblins and foul fiends have inherited the place. It is all despair.”

It still wasn’t full dark.

The fog seemed to carry its own peculiar light, glimmering like corpse candles in a gruesome mire. The river now flowed so slowly that it was hard to detect any movement at all. Once or twice they heard the shrill metallic calling of seabirds swooping above them. But they flew on with sheathed beaks, not bothering the six travelers.

Krysty told Ryan that she thought she could hear the steady thudding of a gas-powered generator, but the mist distorted noise and she wasn’t even able to tell which bank carried the sound.

At one point Ryan was certain he heard a dreadful, shrill, screaming laugh, definitely off the eastern bank, around where West Seventy-second once ran. But nobody else on the raft caught it, and he decided it must have only been his imagination.

“We still going south?” Jak asked a half hour or so later.

“Can’t easily tell,” Ryan replied. “I’ll go to the front and watch the water.”

Doc had fallen asleep, his head in Lori’s lap, and Ryan stepped carefully over the old man’s extended legs, nearly slipping on the treacherous logs. He lay on his right hip, face level with the leading edge of the raft, only a few inches above the dull water of the Hudson. Everyone was quiet, oppressed by the fog and the feeling of desolation all around them.

To his left, Ryan was sure he could make out a rippling noise, like the river lapping on stone. Unable to see either bank, it was impossible to have any idea of where they were in the treacherous currents as they shifted and changed.

The hand that erupted from the water and gripped his left wrist had no nails on its grotesquely long fingers, fingers that had five joints and were webbed halfway along their length. The skin was creased, hanging at the wrist in folds. The touch was cold and slippery, but as tight as a machine wrench.

The face emerging from behind the pincering hand was worse than anything from the deeps of a jolt-spawned nightmare. The jaw protruded eighteen inches beyond the gaping holes of the nostrils. There was no forehead, the naked bones of the skull angling back in pitted ridges. The ears were tiny, pinned flat to the side of the hairless head. The eyes were narrow, protected by blinking hoods of leathery tissue. Even in that insipid light, the eyes burned with a ferocious and demonic glare—less than a foot from Ryan’s own eyes.

And the clashing teeth! Row upon row of them, overlapping, sharp fangs that grated on yellow stumps farther back in that wolfish thrusting jaw. The breath was fetid, like an opened grave, and it nearly choked Ryan.

The creature had come up under the bow of the raft in total silence, its attack so stealthy that none of the others had even noticed that Ryan’s life was under a desperate threat.

With his left hand pinioned and lying on his right side, Ryan wasn’t able to get at either the blaster or the long panga.

The mutie grabbed at the logs with its other hand, bracing itself to lunge at Ryan with its fearsome jaw. Life was a bare handful of heartbeats.

Instead of pulling back, Ryan jabbed his head toward the monstrosity, butting it on the end of the snout with his own forehead. It was a jarring blow. The grip relaxed for a moment, and Ryan was able to throw himself to his side, freeing his right hand. He clawed across for the hilt of the panga, feeling it slide free from the sheath in a whisper of death.

Jak Lauren had spotted the struggling figures and yelled to the others. But help would be too little and too late. Salvation lay in the eighteen inches of honed steel.

The teeth were slashing in at him, and Ryan punched with the heel of his hand, feeling blood gush as the jagged fangs caught the side of his wrist. But the maneuver bought him another precious second, time to swing the panga. He tensed his arm and shoulder, putting all of his power and weight into the downswing.

Instead of aiming at the dripping skull, he slashed at the lean, muscular arm as it rested across the hewn timbers of the raft.

The impact powered clean to his shoulder, and he felt the panga hack through the flesh and bone, burying itself in the wood. The tight fingers on Ryan’s own wrist slackened, and he was able to roll free, tugging at the blade as he fell back.

The mutie gave a hissing, bubbling cry of pain, still trying with a manic ferocity of purpose to claw its way onto the raft. Its severed hand wriggled and jerked with an obscene life of its own. Even as Ryan looked at it, the clawing hand toppled over the edge and vanished into the Hudson.

“I’ve got it!” J.B. shouted, warning Ryan to drop down clear of his line of fire.

But Ryan Cawdor wasn’t about to do that. The sudden appearance of the horror had startled him, had frightened him. That didn’t happen very often, and the best way of shifting the memory of the chilling, paralyzing fear was to destroy the mutie with his own hands.

“Get down!” Krysty shrieked, appalled at the hideous monster that was now aboard their craft. Blood was coming from the stump of its wrist, but it oozed rather than gushed in sticky gobs of dull brown ichor.

Feeling carefully for balance on the shifting timbers, Ryan readied himself. Feinting at the creature’s legs, he altered his aim and cut at the other arm. But the mutie was lightning quick, dodging so that the steel skittered off its reptilian skin, leaving a small gash in the flesh.

“Don’t chill it,” Ryan snapped over his shoulder. “The fucker’s mine. Mine!”

Breath hissing from its snapping jaws, the mutie shuffled forward, its good hand clawing at Ryan. Once caught in that embrace, it would be too late for any of the others to save him.

Ryan ducked and slashed at the thing’s legs, barely nicking it below the knee. But his thrust checked the monster’s advance, giving another moment of breathing space.

“Shoot it, Ryan,” Doc Tanner called in a reedy, trembling voice.

But Ryan’s temper had been touched, a temper that he had fought to control most of his adult life.

“Come on you fucking lizard! Come on, you rad-mutated bastard. Come and eat this blade.” He beckoned to it with his left hand, watching for some sign of reaction, but the fishlike eyes remained blank and incurious. Even the amputation of one of its hands didn’t seem to have disturbed the mutie very much.

The fog was growing thicker.

The mutie slid closer, hand weaving, the elongated fingers opening and closing. Ryan flicked the heavy panga from hand to hand, feinting with the left and then the right. He was growing tired of the standoff.

“Fuck this,” he snarled, picking his moment to attack.

He fended off the snapping fingers and dealt a short, savage blow that hit the mutie across the side of the head. The broad blade of the panga gouged a chunk of bone from the upper jaw and snapped off a dozen teeth. Blood seeped from the wound, and the creature staggered back, arms flailing for balance. Ryan moved carefully after it, swinging the panga in a roundhouse blow that severed the end of the snuffling jaws, leaving oozing flesh and torn teeth.

“It’s going!” Lori whooped.

“One more,” Ryan grated. He tried a last cut at it, but he was short and the blade hissed harmlessly a couple of inches away from the mutie’s throat.

The creature seemed to fall off the front of the raft in slow motion, arms waving for balance. Its ruined jaw hung open, and a pale red slime trickled out. The eyes fixed Ryan Cawdor with a basilisk stare.

To his amazement, the creature spoke, even as it was in the act of falling. In a clear, calm voice it said, “Into the long dark.”

It didn’t make much of a splash as it went into the Hudson, the body vanishing under the water. Though they kept a careful watch for many minutes, none of them saw the mutie reappear.

The raft flowed slowly southward in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean.

 

Chapter Eleven

« ^ »

AROUND MIDNIGHT the fog cleared away, like a curtain drawn at the opening of a play, revealing the sharp moonlit vista on both banks.

The raft floated on, like some stately royal barge, with Jak Lauren able to keep it easily on course with the steering oar.

On the New Jersey shore they saw no signs of life among the waterlogged wharves and jetties of the old docks. It was obvious that the water level had risen since the old days, with less being taken out for power and industry. Now the surface lapped over the rotting concrete of the walls.

The skyline of Manhattan changed as they moved ever so slowly toward the tip of the island and upper New York harbor.

Now, at last, there was evidence that the lower parts of some of the scrapers had survived even the megadeath nuking of 2001. Doc strained his sight and his memory to try to identify some of the towering hulks that dotted the weed-wrapped wilderness of the city. But there were no landmarks, nothing to judge by. Two monoliths, each at least a hundred feet high, jostled each other close to the southern spur of the vanished metropolis.

“The Trade Center. Has to be. I flew into New York myself, and I would deduce the year must have been just before the second millennium. We circled over Manhattan, just above low cloud. I saw the flat roofs of those great towers jutting above the bank of stratus, and there were tiny people walking on them. I swear that it was one of the most bizarre hallucinations that I have ever suffered from.”

At that moment the moon vanished behind banks of sailing clouds, and the remnants of the city were plunged into darkness.

“Look!” Krysty cried. “Lights! I can see some lights.”

She pointed at the flattened debris, almost level with where Canal Street had once run. All five of the others were on their feet, peering into the blackness.

“I see ‘em,” Ryan said. “Like points of pins. A dozen or more.”

“Yeah. Flickering. More a hand’s spread to the right.” J.B. pointed.

“Like oil lamps,” Jak said. “Kind of a gold look to ‘em.”

Those tiny spots of lights, moving painfully among the rubble, touched every one of the six.

Doc Tanner dredged deep into his raddled memory for a suitable quote. Eventually he said, very quietly, “And whatever walked there, walked alone.”

After the attack of the amphibian mutie, no one on the raft felt much like sleeping. The dark water carried them along, now slower than walking, moving toward the dawn.

“What’s that?” Lori asked, breaking the predawn stillness.

A small island had loomed out of the opaline mists that hung toward the sea. And there was a building, partly ruined, that stood at its center, bleached to the palest of greens.

“Missile silo,” the Armorer said.

“Lookout post for Newyork,” Jak Lauren suggested.

“Pretty house, Doc?” was Lori’s guess.

“I think I know,” Krysty said. “I’ve seen vid pix from before the long winter. I think I know what it was.”

“More’n I do. My guess’d be along the lines of J.B.’s and Jak’s.” Ryan turned to Doc Tanner. “Come on. Tell us.”

“It was a statue. A great statue of a woman, holding a torch in her hand to light the path for the hordes of immigrants who flocked to the land of liberty.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “I disremember the words, but it carried a message. Something about bringing huddled masses from the old world to the new. I don’t… By the three Kennedys, but the wheel turns and turns again and again. He that is first shall surely be last. And the present one day will be the past.”

The sun was rising behind the tombstones of the skyscrapers of the city, painting the remnants of the statue with a soft pink light.

“Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair,” Doc Tanner said.

 

THE WIND HAD VEERED, strengthening with the dawning, raising whitecaps as it poured in from the southeast. It rushed through the gap that men before the long winter had called the Verrazano Narrows.

The current of the Hudson had weakened until it seemed the raft was held motionless, moving neither forward nor backward.

“We’ll never make it out to the open sea and down the coast on this heap of shit,” J.B. said.

“Best put in. There’s low land to the right.” Hanging on to the short mast for balance, Ryan stared out to where beaches broke the force of the waters. “Give it another half hour. Wind’ll mebbe fall.”

It would have been better if the fresh wind had continued to blow.

It didn’t just ease; it dropped away completely, leaving them bobbing, becalmed, riding a sequence of sullen, swelling waves.

The sun came up like burnished copper from a sky that showed red-purple from corner to corner. Ryan dipped a finger into the water, then spit the liquid out in disgust. The spun-glass clarity of the Hudson upriver was gone. There was the taste of salt, and iron, flat on the tongue. A bitter nitrate and oil flavored the water.

And they were beginning to see things on the water around the raft. Jak Lauren was the first to notice anything, spotting a jellyfish, its skin a leprous yellow spotted with green patches. Its tentacles trailed behind it for better than a hundred yards. Ryan shouted a warning to the albino boy not to touch the creature as it wallowed near them.

“Heard of a man out in the California lagoons who saw a trailing firefish like that. He touched it and died double-crazed. They said ‘fore he bought the farm he started’t’bite off his own fingers from the pain.”

Almost immediately after that they all clung to the raft as something immeasurably vast moved sinuously under them, just scraping the bottom of the logs with the top of its spine. Lori stuck her head over the side, trying to see what it had been, but the deeps had swallowed it.

They had heard gulls, shrieking and crying, all the way from Manhattan Island, sounding like demented souls condemned to fly the skies for eternity. Now the birds started to come closer, gathering above the raft, beginning to swoop toward the six friends.

It was Lori Quint who noticed them first. “The birds is coming,” she cried.

Doc glanced at her, as though he were about to correct her grammar, as he sometimes did. But she shouted again, “The birds is coming.” His face wrinkled, as though he were trying to recall something half-forgotten, but he shook his head and let it pass.

The threatening gulls had fifteen-foot wingspans and nine-inch beaks like hooked brass. But Jak pulled out his trusty .357 and blasted off at them. The boom of the handgun was flat and menacing in the open sea and loud enough to scare the birds away. One of their number was left behind, flapping its broken wing, bleeding, in the water fifty yards off. As the six watched its death throes, something came up from beneath it, with jaws as big as a dragline excavator, and sucked the gull down.

Krysty stood up, mopping sweat from her forehead. “Gaia! I’m starting to stink like a Texas gaudy whore at three in the morning. Gotta face it, Ryan, we’re stuck here. We have to start paddling this clumsy mother to that beach.”

She shaded her eyes with her hand, irritably pushing back the long hair that seemed to want to press against her face. Far ahead, just a blur on the horizon, her keen sight could make out something strange. It looked as if the land were creeping in, almost meeting in the middle. She couldn’t make out whether there was a gap there or not. Krysty called to Doc, drawing his attention to it.

“Should be the plainest of sailing out yonder. Nothing beyond the Narrows. If there’d been an offshore wind, I feared a little that we might be carried the whole way to France.”

By now they were all standing together in the center of the raft. During the time they’d been on their makeshift craft, they’d all learned caution, finding that a sudden movement to one side or the other would make it appallingly unstable.

“Lift me, lover,” Krysty said.

“What? Why do…? Ah, I get it. Give you height to look ahead.”

“Right. Bend down.”

Ryan stooped, dipping his head. Krysty, helped by J.B., swung a leg over his back and settled herself astride his neck, tightening her thighs. She tucked her legs under his arms, locking her boots in the middle of his back.

“Now,” she said.

Though the girl weighed in at a muscular 150 pounds, Ryan lifted her in the air without any noticeable effort. He steadied her with his hands on her legs and balanced himself against the pitching of the raft.

“Try and… Yeah, that’s…” Krysty then fell silent. Eventually she tapped Ryan on the head as a sign to let her down again.

“What d’you see?” he asked her.

There was a worried expression on the girl’s face. “Not good, friends,” she said. “Looks like there’s been some bastard great upheaval that’s blocked off most the water. Brought up the floor of the ocean, back in the long winter. This isn’t open sea no more, Doc.”

“What? You mean it’s a kind of lake? No way past for us?”

“Can’t see it. Look at the water around us now. It hardly moves and has a kind of skin on top, like a sort of scum.”

It was true.

Though the sea still rocked with an oily swell, they had totally lost any feeling of forward momentum. They were becalmed.

 

KRYSTY WAS SINGING QUIETLY to herself, her pure voice the only sound in the stillness.

“A maid again, I ne’er will be, Till peaches grow on a cherry tree.”

Doc smiled across at her. “I haven’t heard that tune in… I guess a coupla hundred years. There’s a damned odd thought. It’s lovely. You learn that from your kin back in… What was the ville called?”

“Harmony. Herb Lanning the blacksmith knew lots of real old songs. Way prechill. It was his son, Carl, who plucked my cherry. That’s when I learned the words.”

“Must have been a real good ville.”

Krysty smiled at the old man. “Yeah, it was. But all things change. That was why we… why we were moving on.”

“Your ville a good place, lover?” she asked Ryan.

“Seemed so, then. Until I saw the skull that was hid under the smiles.”

“Life’s a deal of hard traveling,” J.B. said sagely, surprising everyone. Homespun philosophy wasn’t normally what you heard from the Armorer.

Jak and Lori were working with the stern steering oar, slowly propelling the raft toward the western shore, now only a couple of miles away. It was backbreaking, soul-destroying work, and they’d found from painful experience that it could only be done in pairs. Any more and chaos followed with everyone knocking and pushing into everyone else.

It took them close to four hours to move roughly half the distance they needed to reach the land.

The waters around them had gotten more and more polluted. Dead fish and birds hung suspended, rotting and half-eaten, bones coated with a yellow grease. An hour back they’d poled past the corpse of a massive shark—a great white, at least fifty feet from porcine snout to the mangled tip of its tail. It hadn’t been dead long, and its flat little eye still rolled incuriously toward the rich violet sky.

“Jaws,” Doc muttered, enigmatic as ever.

The beach, sand dunes rolling back toward a line of low scrub, was now less than a half mile off. The sun had sunk well behind the hazy bulk of the land. In the last quarter mile they’d finally broken clear of the stickiest of the watery dreck, but the bitter labor had taken its toll.

Doc Tanner had collapsed, muttering feverishly about painted ships and painted oceans. Lori had fainted fifteen minutes later, slumping on the timbers, banging her head again. Despite her reserves of mutie strength, Krysty had given up, sitting down in a heap, her face white and drained. “Sorry, folks,” she said, hoarse with exhaustion. “I’ve paid all I can find. Got no more. Sorry.”

It had been left to Jak Lauren, with seemingly bottomless reserves of stamina in his slight body, J.B. and Ryan, to keep working on the clumsy steering paddle. Heaving it backward and forward, each stroke making the muscles of shoulder and spine scream in protest. Each stroke pushed the raft a scant couple of feet nearer to land.

Now the worst was over. Lori, Doc and Krysty had recovered a little, relishing the cooler breeze coming off the beach. Jak and the Armorer were at the oar.

Krysty smiled weakly at Ryan as they sat together. “I felt awful about stopping.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Could have used the power of the Earth Mother. But it…”

Ryan squeezed her hand. “No. I’ve seen you after you’ve done that. Not worth it. Only ‘bout another half hour and we can get off this bastard raft.”

“You know we were talking ‘bout Harmony? And your old ville?”

“Front Royal?”

“Yeah. If we get there and you kick Harvey Cawdor’s ass out of the land… what happens then?”

“Do I get to be the baron? Take over the line? Is that what you mean?”

“Course. Would you take it on? Give up all these mat-trans jumps? Give up all the killing? Settle? That’s why I left Harmony in the first place.”

Ryan looked around them. “We’ve talked ‘bout this before. I don’t know, lover. That’s the fucking truth. I just don’t know.”

“Want to spell me, Ryan?” J.B. called.

“Right. One minute.”

“Answer me, lover,” pressed Krysty. “I want to know what I’m getting into when we get down to the Shens and your ville.”

The jagged cut the mutie had inflicted on Ryan’s hand seemed to be healing. He picked at a small piece of rough skin around it, trying to sort out how he wanted to answer Krysty’s question.

“A baron holds his ville by his weapons and by fear. That’s always been the way of it. I don’t know if that’s the way I want to live, Krysty.”

“It can change.”

“You can never turn your back when you’re the baron. I was old enough and saw enough before I left Front Royal to know that. You never sit, unless you’ve got your back ‘gainst a wall. You never sleep long and easy. You never trust a smile, Krysty. You have too many enemies and no friends.”

With that he stood up and took the place of J.B. at the steering oar, leaving Krysty Wroth with her own thoughts.

A half hour later, with a grating sound, the raft beached on the New Jersey shore.

 

Chapter Twelve

« ^ »

THE RAD COUNT HAD SLIPPED well away from the dangerous hot spots of the red area, but it still lingered way over into the orange.

They left the raft, which had grounded on a mix of sand and shingle. They picked up their backpacks, checking weapons, leaving nothing behind, before striking off inland to camp for the night. Ryan led them only a mile into the dunes, not wanting to risk stumbling in the dusk over some double-poor mutie commune farther from the sea.

The evidence of heavy nuking was still to be seen everywhere. There was a great area of sharp-edged glass, twisted and warped into molten, lethal shapes. Ryan had never seen anything like it, but the Trader had told of seeing patches like it down in the deserts of Vada. It was where missiles had exploded in sand, the unbelievable temperatures fusing the mica into the lake of nuke glass.

Nothing grew taller than some stunted alders and willows, their trunks rotting and turning in on themselves. They camped for the night in a clearing on top of one of the sand dunes. They could watch for at least a quarter mile in any direction and not even Krysty could hear or see anything. The wind had turned once more, becoming a gentle breeze from the west. J.B. suggested they not risk a fire, and Ryan agreed with him. It was several degrees above freezing, with a clear sky that held no threat of rain.

Krysty moaned in her sleep, clutching at Ryan, her body trembling. She was so close against him that her scarlet hair, with its own mutated life, folded its tresses around his neck and upper arms, as though it, too, sought comfort.

In the morning he asked the girl what her dark dream had been, but she couldn’t recall much about it.

“I was cold. I remember that. Sitting on a ruined harbor on the edge of a gray sea with slick granite rocks that reached out into the water. I was huddled up without any protection. Waiting. I was waiting for something or somebody.”

“Me?”

She shook her head, stippled with the early morning moisture like tiny pearls amid an ocean of rubies. “No. Not you, lover. Can’t… It was the cold that was worst.”

They started off, moving westward, just after dawn. Until the blurred outline of the sun was nearly overhead, they saw absolutely nothing to indicate any life-form. Ryan was walking point, checking the soft earth for tracks and finding none, not even any tiny scuttling lizards around the exposed roots of the dwarf bushes.

“Where’s the nearest town to here?” Krysty asked. “What’s the map say, J.B.?”

The Armorer tutted through his teeth. “No map for this part. I recall Washington and Philly were around here. Don’t know where. Doc? You got any idea?”

The old man was marching along, wrapped in his own world, humming a song about following a drinking gourd. He turned at J.B.’s call.

“My deepest apologies, my dear Mr. Dix. I fear that I was traveling some byway of my own. Could you repeat the question?”

“Know any towns around here?”

“The city of Brotherly Love was… No. We are in a dull area for my memory. When I was born I learned in school of a march to the sea. The blue and gray. But towns…? I fear not.”

Ryan looked at the sky. “No sign of any chem storms. I know we’re headed in the right direction. We keep on westward, then south. Into the Shens. What kind of nukes they use round here, Doc?”

“All kinds. High yield. Low yield. Air-burst. Water-burst. Low-alt and high. Some neutron stuff.”

“Down near my ville, when I was a kid, most roads were passable. Never went that far north or east then. But I’m certain sure that a lot of the blacktops weren’t too wrecked.”

“That’d be neutron,” Krysty commented. “Take out life and leave things standing. The idea was you could come in and take over. Didn’t figure on doomsday and everyone gone everywhere.”

During the afternoon, they reached the ruins of a major highway, which blocked their path, coursing like a stone arrow from north to south. A couple of hundred yards to their right was a tumbled sign, hanging off its broken support. Jak trotted off, and Krysty followed him. They came back together.

“What’s it say?” Ryan asked.

“Garden State something. Begins with a P and an A, so it might be Parkway. Some roads was called that kind of name.” Krysty was seized with a coughing fit from the dust they’d kicked up. “Gaia! Could do with some fresh water.”

They crossed the wide six-lane highway and kept moving west.

During the next day and a half, they found the land was changing. The bleakness gradually eased away, being replaced by a greener, softer look. The arid sand was covered in clumps of coarse grass that slowly became gentler turf. Here and there they found small copses of live oak and sycamore. And there were flowers again.

Purple orchis jostled among clusters of delicate starry campions. Huge sundrops overshadowed tiny arrow-leaved violets. The six walked at a steady pace through fragrant meadows, past streams that ran east toward the sea.

They found a fine place to set up camp for the night near a clean stream that ran through a pool, which was like liquid crystal and fully ten feet deep with a rock bottom. Trees grew in abundance, but well spread, so that it would be hard for anyone to come at them unseen, not that they’d found any sign of human activity since they’d come ashore.

For supper they opened more of the self-heats, scraping out the spun-soya contents. The fire of tumbled branches was burning brightly, sending a crackling fount of red-gold sparks bursting into the cool night air.

Krysty got up, stretching herself like a tall, elegant cat. She walked the few paces to the pool, bending and putting her hand into it.

“Not too cold,” she said.

“You going in, lover?” Ryan asked.

“Tempting. Lori, you want to wash?”

“Why?”

Krysty laughed. “You kill me, kid. You wash because you get dirty. Right now it’s the time of month for me to need to keep extra clean.”

“When you get bleeding? Why is it dirty?”

The four men listened, interested in hearing what answer Krysty would give the younger girl.

“It’s… Gaia! If you don’t know why you need to wash, then mebbe you an’ me should talk some, Lori. Get your clothes off and come in the water with me, and I’ll tell you some facts of life. Your mother should have… No, forget that.” She turned to Ryan, face flushed in the firelight. “Wipe that grin off, you stupe ape! And stay here and let us get bathed without you ogling at us.”

“I shall sink,” Lori said. “Too afraid.”

Krysty smiled at her. “Never you mind. Looks shallow the upstream end of the pool. Come in there, and you’ll be fine.”

The two women went together, moving out of the circle of the fire. Doc Tanner broke the silence among the men. “Perhaps we might show courtesy by keeping our backs turned?”

“Yeah. Be decent,” Ryan agreed, shifting his position so that he looked away into the forest. J.B. was already facing in that direction. Jak was the only one still gazing toward the sheltered little pool of shadowy water.

“Young man,” Doc said sternly.

“Okay! All right f’you two. Got women. I don’t. Only done coupla times. Gaudies in Lafayette. Krysty an’ Lori are double-fuckable and you stop me looking.”

Ryan patted the teenage boy on the arm. “Most things a friend can take. But not my blaster. And not my woman. So turn your back.”

“But just wanna have—”

“Jak!” Ryan said threateningly. “Just do like I say.”

Grudgingly the albino did, his long white hair now released from the red ribbon. They could hear giggling and then a stifled squeal from Lori as she found that the water was colder than she’d expected. Then there was only the sound of splashing, which drowned out any conversation the two young women might be having.

Very slowly Doc Tanner turned his head, ignoring a glare from Ryan. “Hades! They look like a brace of white dolphins sporting together. My Lord, but it makes me feel young again. I recall Emily and I once, on a… But that’s yesterday and today’s today.”

Ryan also glanced behind. Lori was cautiously trying to push out of her depth, mouth open, blond hair trailing behind her. Krysty’s bright red locks seemed huddled together like a tight ball of flame. The brightness of the fire didn’t reach to the shadowy pool, and it was hard to make out more than the blurred outlines of the two slim bodies.

Krysty brought her hands together and threw a great ball of water in the air so that the orange light caught it as it burst into a million tiny sparks of fire. It fell and streaked over her face and body, funnelling into the valley between her breasts.

J.B. was honing the Tekna knife against the sole of his boot in a steady, preoccupied way. Jak stood and walked quickly to the edge of the trees, throwing a muttered few words over his shoulder.

“Going to scout some.”

“Take care, Jak. Watch for muties,” Ryan called, but the boy was gone, sulking off into the darkness.

 

“IT WAS MAGICAL, lover,” Krysty said between pants as she and Lori rejoined the men around the glowing embers of the fire. Both girls had faces that glowed, and their hair hung damply on their shoulders. Lori knelt in front of Doc Tanner and gave him a great hug and a kiss.

“I was in water, Doc! You see me?”

“No. I mean, yes, I did. Wonderful, my dear child. Wonderful.”

“Where’s Jak?” Krysty asked.

“Told him not to get his young meat heated by watching you two in the water.”

“Oh, Ryan!” Krysty exclaimed. “He’s one of us, isn’t he?”

“Doesn’t mean he can… Oh, fireblast!” Ryan felt confused and irritated. “Anyway, he went off to scout some. It’ll do him good and we can do with help. Food’s low, and we got to find us some transport.”

“Yeah, I guess so. The smell of burning wood’s so strong from our fire I couldn’t smell anything else even if it was fifty paces off.”

“Someone’s coming,” J.B. said with a quiet urgency, grabbing his mini-Uzi and diving away from the fire into a dip in the ground. Ryan snatched up the G-12, moving in the opposite direction, hitting cover even before the Armorer. Krysty, hair flying, was at his side, the H&K P7A-13 blaster in her hand. Lori stood, bewildered, by the fire, until Doc Tanner pulled her to the earth, protecting her with his own body.

The land was quiet.

Ryan squinted across the clearing, just able to see J.B. flattened behind a bank of blooming heather. The Armorer half turned, pointing among the trees to the west.

The logs smoldered and light gray ash trickled down onto the coals with a ceaseless, whispering sound. Ryan thought he caught the far-off noise of an owl hooting, but he couldn’t be certain.

Then he saw movement, something that flickered for a moment like a will-o’-the-wisp, visible only for a frozen heartbeat behind the trees. There was no moon, and whoever it was had the cunning to close in on them from behind the brightness of the fire, making it almost impossible for their eyes to adjust and see him properly.

“I see him,” Krysty whispered. “Flat-topped willow, right of fire. Crouched. Give me the G-12, and I can chill him.”

Ryan passed over the rectangular shape of the automatic rifle with its built-in image intensifier. “It’s on triple,” he hissed. “Won’t lift at this range. No recoil.”

The girl steadied the blaster against her shoulder, holding her breath, finger caressing the trigger.

When the attacker stood up, showing himself, his stark white hair was like a siren of light in the gloom. “Don’t shoot, Krysty! Found us a wag to ride!”

 

Chapter Thirteen

« ^ »

THE VEHICLE WAS just over a mile inland. Jak led them through the scattered trees of the forest, across a winding stream and onto a narrow path.

“Saw tracks. Boots. Must have used for water. Not far. Keep double-quiet.”

“Smoke,” Krysty whispered to Ryan. “Not from our fire. Meat cooking.”

They hadn’t got much farther before Ryan could also catch the scent of roasting meat, making him lick his lips in anticipation.

“There,” Jak said, pointing through the thinning trees, to where the amber glow of flames could be seen.

“How many you say?” Ryan asked.

“Saw five. Old man. Old woman. Younger man, girl and little boy, round eight or nine. The wag’s just behind fire.”

“Anyone on watch?” J.B. asked.

“Couldn’t tell. Didn’t want to wake ‘em by going close. Saw blasters. Old scattergun and coupla hand pistols. Wag’s armored.”

That was nothing new. It was difficult to find any kind of truck in the whole of Deathlands that hadn’t been turned into a sec wag. When even the brightness of day brought winking death, it was madness not to take some care.

As Ryan moved a few cautious steps closer, trying to make out if the camp was being patrolled, his boots crushed some small plants and the air was filled with the smell of wild garlic.

“I’ll go around with Krysty?” J.B. suggested. “Set chrons and go on a time count?”

Ryan nodded. Far as he could make out, the strangers hadn’t set a watch. That meant they must feel reasonably secure where they were. Which meant, in turn, that they should be easy meat for Ryan and the others to sneak up on and take.

“Go to the wag. Check it out. Could be someone in there. Doc, Lori ‘n me’ll take out the five by the fire. No chances. Like Trader used to say. Blast first and weep later. Better we chill them than they chill us.”

The G-12 was still set on triple burst. Jak had his satin finish Magnum cocked and ready. Lori carried her little .22 PPK. The blaster wasn’t any kind of a man-stopper, but the girl was good with it and it would slow folks down. Doc hefted the cavernous Le Mat. He’d got the hammer slotted for the single .63-caliber shotgun barrel.

Ryan glanced around at them, checking his luminous chron. “J.B. goes in three minutes twenty from now. All ready?” He got nods from everyone. “Move in closer. Careful.”

The sweep second hand crept slowly around the white dial. Ryan watched it, also trying to make out what sort of a wag they were going after. It was difficult to judge, as the vehicle was behind the fire, and partly obscured by some bushes, but it looked good. Could be an old Mercedes camper, or maybe even a Volvo body. It was clear that a lot of work had been done on it. Blaster ports had been cut on all sides, and there was evidence that some crude armoring had been welded on.

To Ryan’s experienced eye, the wag looked good. The tires seemed solid, and he couldn’t see much sign of rusting around the wheel hubs, which was always a giveaway of a wag in poor condition.

“Ten seconds… five…let’s go for it. Now!”

Ryan burst through the undergrowth, gun at hip, followed closely by Doc Tanner whooping in a high, cracked voice, and Lori screaming loud and shrill. J.B. came whooping out of the far side of the clearing, followed by Jak Lauren, long white hair streaming behind him, looking like an avenging angel of death and destruction.

Krysty was last, covering the boy as he sprinted to the wag, ripped open the driver’s door and disappeared inside.

There was no firefight. The five were jerked from sleep by the attackers and held at gunpoint before they were properly awake.

Jak’s recon had been accurate. Nobody was lurking inside the wag. There were just the five of them. The old man had a long straggling beard that reached to his belt. His gray-haired woman mumbled constantly and appeared to be slow-witted. The little boy was very frail, with a congenital birth defect—his hands sprouted like little paddles from the points of his narrow shoulders. His face was bright and alert, but they realized quickly the boy was also deaf.

Two other people—the lad’s parents—stood trembling together, eyes staring in shock at the strangers who’d come shrieking at them from the darkness. Meadsville stream had always been a safe site, away from any marauding muties or slaughtering stickies.

 

The boy’s father’s name was Renz Boydson, and his wife was called Mixy. Their son had been birthed as Boyd, but most times he was just called Boy. Renz’s father was Jorg, and his woman, who was no relation, answered to Valli.

Renz was a traveling repairman. He was good with tired old machines that seemed past their best: old washers and rad-trans equipment, as well as generators and wag engines. The big trailer that was hidden among the trees held a primitive lathe and a mass of tools he’d been collecting for years.

The Boydsons made a fair living, though they frequently had to run the gauntlet of hostiles or double-crazies around the eastern fringe of the heart of the Deathlands. It was the wag that gave them life, food and security. The chassis was off a Mercedes camper, with parts of a Volvo body grafted onto it. The engine was reliable and exceedingly powerful, but so heavy on gas that Renz had adapted the interior to hold five twenty-gallon cans.

The wag had once belonged to a stupe preacher, who’d got it from a woman trader who’d seen the light through his hellfire sermons.

Renz had got it from the preacher, whose corpse, cleaned of flesh, now rested at the bottom of an old quarry, eight miles from Flanders. A bullet from Renz’s Luger had been drilled through the center of his forehead.

Renz, hands in the air, glared at the strangers. His first waking thought had been muties, then he’d guessed that some other trader or traveler had followed them and run the ambush. But these six weren’t like anyone he’d ever met. Valli was weeping quietly at his elbow, and he snarled at her to shut up with her sniveling.

The leader was obviously the man with the patch over his left eye. He was tall and well built, wearing dark clothes and a long coat. He was hefting a blaster such as Renz had never seen. The second-in-command was the small man with the battered hat and the glinting glasses who carried a machine pistol.

“Keep quiet and give us no trouble, and you get to live some more,” the man with the eye patch said. “We want the wag. Nothing else.”

“Mebbe some stew,” the young boy said. He didn’t look much older than Boy, but he walked with a terrifying air of crazed menace. With hair like spun snow and eyes like the embers that glowed in the middle of the fire, the boy looked like something built by a mountain shaman for a midnight ritual.

One of the attackers was a dotard who looked even older than Jorg, and he was holding a handgun that had two barrels.

Renz looked at the two women. Despite the danger to them all, he felt himself stirring excitedly. The tall, slender blonde wore clothes that seemed designed to beg a man to take her. And the other, a few years older, had hair like living flames. Both women also had blasters, holding them with ease that only comes with experience and use.

The wind soughed through the branches of a grove of fragrant sassafras trees to the west, brightening the ashes of the fire, stirring dancing spurs of orange and yellow from the smoldering ends of the branches.

“Yer take wag and we’ll all done get chilled,” Renz said, addressing his words to the one-eyed man.

“You get to live. The keys in it, Jak?”

“Yeah. Juiced and ready’t‘go.”

“Start it up. No, I guess you’re right ‘bout that stew. Smells good. Krysty, you an’ Doc serve us out a bowl each.”

The meat was rancid, with a ragged lace of rotting gristle around each piece, but the turnip greens and sweet potatoes were fresh and good. Renz and his family sat together, guarded, watching with sullen resentment. Jorg had begun to moan at his son for letting them be taken so easily.

“Chillers come out the brush and take food and the wag. You sit there and don’t do nothing to stop them.”

“Shut the flap, you old ass-lapper. They got the blasters, ain’t they?”

“You ain’t worth doodlysquat, you little fucker!”

“Our food! Our wag!” Mixy groaned. “We got no food or nothing. What’s you going to do’t‘them? Tell me that.”

Renz didn’t know. His philosophy of life was very simple. If someone was more powerful than you, then you crawled, belly down. If you were stronger, then you beat the shit out of them. These six strangers turned his guts to water.

“Want us’t‘take the rest of the food?” Jak asked. “There’s some dried stuff an’ self-heats in the wag. Last us a coupla days.”

“No. Leave ‘em be. Get aboard. Start her up. Krysty and Lori, go with him. Doc, you too. Me and J.B.’ll watch ‘em here.”

“How about their blasters, Ryan? Better to take them with us?” Krysty pointed with the toe of her boot to the pile of pistols and shotguns by the fire, where Jak had left them.

“Leave them. Once we’re on the way an’ the doors are closed, it’d take more than them flea-flickers to harm us. Get moving.”

The albino boy led the way, followed by the girls and Doc Tanner. Ryan watched Renz and the rest of the family. Behind him, there was the deep roar of the wag engine as it kicked into life.

Jak clashed the gears, making the heavy vehicle lurch forward. It bumped into the stump of a tree with a rending crack. Both Ryan and J.B. glanced around to see what was happening.

It was all the old man needed to make his move.

He had a knife tied to the inside of his left forearm, and he pulled it out, launching himself at J.B. The old woman dropped to her knees with a piercing scream. Renz, reflexes honed Deathlands-sharp, dived for the scattergun with the sawed-off stock and barrel. His wife reached for the open razor she wore sheathed between her mottled breasts.

The little boy stood still.

Against double-poor stupes it might have worked. Against the Armorer and Ryan Cawdor it had about as much chance of success as trying to beat a prairie rattler for speed.

“Hit ‘em!” Ryan shouted, shooting from the hip at the white-haired old man. The burst of lead kicked him into a moaning heap and he rolled into the dying fire. Blood poured from the triple wound in the center of his chest, hissing onto the flames.

J.B. dodged sideways, firing the mini-Uzi one-handed, spraying the group of men and women as he moved. Thirty-two rounds of 9 mm ammo ripped out at a muzzle velocity of just over eleven hundred feet per second.

As the Armorer moved forward, his boots slipped on an empty can and he fell, finger still clamped on the trigger, more or less holding his aim.

Renz and his family were huddled together, and the burst of fire was tight and controlled.

Boy went dancing away, half the side of his head blown off, his paddling little hands groping at the empty air as he fell, dying.

Mixy was hit through the knee and went down screaming in a welter of blood and splintered bone. As she fell, several rounds stitched across her stomach, spilling her guts into the dirt so that they tangled around her feet in crimson-streaked gray coils and loops.

Valli caught five rounds, the lead lifting her clear off her bare feet and sending her seeping corpse smashing into the lower branches of a tumbled oak. A jagged branch went straight through her, piercing her rib cage, holding the woman’s kicking, jerking body several inches from the blood-sodden earth.

Amazingly, amid the carnage, Renz stood untouched. He had reached the pile of blasters, but Ryan’s G-12 was tracking in his direction.

“Feel lucky, stupe?” Ryan asked, his voice loud in the sudden quiet. To the side of the clearing the wag had stopped, stalling, engine ticking into silence. Krysty led the others out of the main door, guns ready.

But it was over.

“Don’t shoot me, you bastard. You chilled everyone in m’family. Even Boy.”

“It’s okay,” Ryan called out. “All right, J.B.?”

“Yeah. Didn’t figure on chilling the whole brood, though. Caught my foot.”

Ryan shook his head dismissively. The family had been stupid enough to try against armed men, just holding blades. He didn’t feel any sympathy for them. That’s the way it always was in the Deathlands.

The raggedy man stood and watched, face blank with shock. His whole family had been iced in the blinking of an eye, and it still hadn’t really registered. And now his wag was going to disappear forever. A great flow of tears suddenly began to course down Renz’s filthy cheeks.

“Take me with you.”

Ryan ignored him. “Back in the wag, everyone. Let’s move out.”

“Fuck you!”

The engine rumbled, gouts of blue-gray smoke hanging in the air, pierced by shafts of silver moonlight. Ryan gestured to J.B. to join the others, backing away slowly himself and keeping the blaster trained on the solitary man. The corpse dangling from the jagged end of the branch finally ceased twitching and hung still.

“Can’t make it on my own!” Renz stooped and picked up the sawed-off shotgun, lifting it to his face.

Ryan hesitated, considering chilling the man. But bullets were scarce.

He stepped backward until he was in the open doorway of the wag, never taking his eyes off the solitary figure. Renz was holding the scattergun, staring down at the twin barrels as though he couldn’t quite understand what they were.

“Get in, Ryan. I got him covered,” J.B. said from behind him.

“Bastards!” Renz shouted, his torn voice ringing harsh through the forest, clearly audible even inside the racketing box of the big wag. Ryan began to close the sliding door.

The clouds had drifted away from the moon, and the clearing was as brightly lit as a stage, Renz at its center. The gun was close to his open mouth, and his eyes were fixed on the door of the wag.

The explosion was muffled.

Even as the door slammed shut, the sec locks clicking into place, Ryan saw the top of the man’s head disintegrate in a great spray that looked as black as beads of jet in the moonlight.

“Did he…?” Krysty began, seeing Ryan nod the answer.

“Let’s go, Jak,” Ryan ordered, holding on as the vehicle began to grind its way westward.

 

Chapter Fourteen

« ^ »

THE WAG WAS BIG ENOUGH to carry all six comfortably, and each had a narrow bunk. The self-heats in the kitchen area of the wag lacked labels, which made meals an interesting lottery. Near the back, in its own partitioned closet, was a chem toilet. Generally the vehicle was scruffy and stank of old sweat, but during the first morning’s driving they bowled along with the blaster ports and roof vents open, all working together to sweep and clean the interior.

The half-breed truck seemed in good mechanical condition. They stopped about ten in the morning because the arrow in the temperature gauge was showing signs of veering into the red. But when Jak checked under the hood he found the reading was false. One of the pistons was worn, and the exhaust roared more loudly than it should have.

“Going’t‘be heavy on gas,” he said. “Good job’s cans in back.”

None of them knew it, but there was another hundred gallons of precious gas hidden away in the undergrowth near the five corpses.

 

IT WAS LATE in the afternoon when they reached the fast-flowing expanse of the Delaware River, looking to cross it near the ruined ville of Stockton. The dash of the wag held some fragile old maps, creased and crumpled, which were held together with brown bits of tape and frayed string.

The parts of the maps that would have shown the trails to Front Royal were missing, ragged edges taking them tantalizingly close to their proposed destination. Ryan pored over them at a small table near the open port, the others peering over his shoulder.

“North along the Delaware, toward Easton. Around Allentown and on to… Can’t read that name. Doc? Can you make it?”

“My eyes are not, frankly, as sharp as once they were, my dear Ryan. But I believe it must be the town of Harrisburg, and from thence to Gettysburg. By the three Kennedys and the one Lincoln, but there is a name to stir the cockles of memory. That we should be going there after—” He turned away quickly and went to sit down on his bunk, where Lori ran to comfort him.

“Then Frederick…” Ryan continued. “I recall that. The ville’s close to there.”

“We’ve got to cross the river first,” Krysty said quietly. “Looks wide from that map.”

“Lotta toll bridges built in the Shens,” Ryan said. “Trade or jack.”

“What’re we gonna do?” Jak asked, climbing back into the driver’s seat. “No jack. What trade?”

Ryan held up the Heckler & Koch. “I figure this is all the trade I need.”

Doc wiped his face with his swallow’s eye kerchief. “Least we don’t have ice to cross the Delaware like…like somebody or other did, but I disremember who.”

The highways weren’t in bad condition. The surface was cracked and deteriorated, but most of the way it was drivable. Every so often the road disappeared under an earthslip, or was washed out of the world by a swollen river.

Occasionally they’d pass by the tumbled ruins of a small hamlet. Most buildings were totally destroyed, though the central stone chimneys remained standing—fingers pointing upward like graveyard memorials. Now and again they’d come across one or two intact buildings, scorched clapboard rotting away. A doctor’s shingle would still be legible, or a rectangular crimson soft drink machine would squat outside the tumbled relic of a general store.

Grass and weeds had taken over most of the land, sometimes bursting through the tarmac of the highway. J.B. took over at the steering wheel from Jak as the day wore on. They stopped to refill the tank from one of the cans, standing in the soft afternoon heat under an azure sky.

They saw more birds, dipping and swooping over a mud hollow, feasting on the lazy clouds of tiny insects. A little way off to the right they could see the remains of a gas station. The building itself had completely vanished under tangling vines, but the metal-and-glass pumps remained, white and maroon paint peeling off in patches.

“Look,” Krysty said, pointing farther down the blacktop, where a single human figure stood shimmering in the heat.

“Trouble?” J.B. asked, hand dropping automatically to the butt of the mini-Uzi.

Ryan shaded his eye with his hand. “Road’s wide there. No brush close to it. Can’t be an ambush. Not one alone.”

As a precaution they closed some of the blaster ports, keeping careful watch through the others, and Ryan slid the roof vent across and bolted it. Because of the menace of stickies it wasn’t a good idea to give them any way to get at you. Ryan sat up front, riding shotgun with Jak.

J.B. had left the driver’s seat and taken up a position by the rear ob-slit.

“Take it slow, Jak,” Ryan warned. “Get ready to push the pedal through the metal.”

The young albino boy looked up at him, shaking his head. “Wanna tell me how’t‘wipe my ass, Grandad Ryan?”

“Cheeky bastard. Trouble with young kids now. Too much gall and not enough sand. Let’s go, Jak.”

The wall lurched forward as the teenager crashed it into gear, making everything in the sweating box of the main compartment rattle and fall.

“He moving?” Krysty asked.

“No. Still where he was. Can’t see any danger. Nobody else is there.”

“Could be a trap,” Doc Tanner suggested from the right side of the wag.

“Could be. One man isn’t about to take an armed wag.”

Ryan stared through the slit in the wired and armored glass of the windshield. As they moved steadily along the track, he was able to see the motionless stranger a little better.

It was a male, around average height, tending toward skinny. In the Deathlands you didn’t very often get to see anyone fat.

He was wearing a light gray coat that hung below his knees, the breeze tugging at its hem. His pants were also gray, tucked into brown laced-up work boots. His hair was cropped to a mousy stubble over prominent ears. His skull was long and narrow.

“Slow it down,” Ryan ordered. “Keep your eyes double-wide.”

He kept the automatic rifle trained on the man as the wag eased to a crawl. The face of the stranger was turned up, incurious, the eyes locking on Ryan’s eye. The expression didn’t alter. Ryan spotted the heavy old horse pistol that was jammed into the man’s wide belt. It looked as if it’d been used for everything from stirring stew to hammering in fence posts.

Lori was the only one who spoke, staring through her ob-slit at the stranger.

“He got a face like a sheep-killing dog,” she said.

J.B. watched through the back of the wag, calling to Ryan. “The crazy isn’t moving. Just stands there, looking at our dust.”

They kept moving and reached the river near evening as the sun was sinking behind the rolling hills that stretched as far west as the eye could see. After the chance encounter with the mysterious young man, Ryan had ordered them to keep the ob-slits half-shut and made sure the roof vent remained bolted.

There had been discontented muttering about the heat, mainly from Doc Tanner, but Ryan had been concerned that the low bushes seemed to be getting closer to the edge of the highway, making a sneak attack that much easier to mount.

The wag rolled over the top of a low rise, and Jak jammed on the brakes, bringing the vehicle to a shuddering halt.

“What’s…? Ah, I see it. Best get ready, friends. Looks like we might have us some trouble here.”

There was a battered pair of old Zeiss binoculars hanging from a hook at the side of the front passenger seat, and Ryan took them down. The focusing screw was stiff, the lenses not properly balanced, but he got enough visual information through one eyepiece to make out that the bridge across the Delaware was well guarded. At least a half-dozen figures were standing near it, looking up at the wag, which was poised on the crest of the hill. They were all carrying blasters, which looked to be long-barreled, single-action pieces.

“They seen us,” Ryan said calmly. “Shouldn’t worry us more’n a mosq-bite. We’ll play it this way.”

 

josiah shubert held up his hand, the thumb and seven fingers spread in a warning to the lumbering sec wag to slow down. The blaster ports were all closed, and the driver was hidden by the setting sun glaring off the reinforced glass.

“Whoa down, Renz!” he shouted.

Jak went carefully through the gears, foot holding the brake. His other foot hovered over the gas pedal, waiting for the order from Ryan Cawdor to move out.

Ryan had his visor down on the passenger side. J.B. was covering the rear. Krysty and Lori were on the right of the wag, Doc on the left. All waited, crouched, behind the ob-slits.

“Back early, Renz. Forget something, did ya?”

The wag was inching forward, Jak struggling to keep the powerful engine from stalling on him. As well as the leader of the group, there were six men, mostly on the driver’s side. One was by Ryan’s side window, picking his nose and carefully examining what he’d excavated. The last of the men lounged against a painted pole that rested on a pair of old barrels on either side of the rickety bridge.

“Roll it down and hand the jack,” Shubert ordered, his voice suddenly holding an edge of suspicion, an edge Ryan instantly recognized.

“Go.”

Jak stomped down, and the wag jerked forward, slowly starting to gather momentum. The albino had his Magnum resting in his lap, and he snatched it up. Shubert jumped for the running board and hauled himself up. He had a taped .32 in his hand, and jammed it in the narrow slit of the sec window.

“You ain’t Renz, ya mutie bastard! We’ll chill ya right—”

“Shut it,” Jak yelled, shooting the man through his open mouth. The bullet smashed a great chunk of bone out of the back of his head and kicked him into the dirt on the side of the road.

It was the only shot that anyone aboard the wag needed to fire. Ryan had been right in his summing-up of the blaster threat from the men. With their leader rolling, screaming and dying, none of them wanted to be dead heroes.

The armored radiator of the wag tore through the pole barrier, splitting it in two, one half wheeling high in the air and eventually splashing down near the edge of the muddied waters of the Delaware.

Ryan heard the thin sound of a ragged volley from the muskets, but as far as he could tell none of them struck the retreating wag.

“All okay?” he shouted, getting a chorus of positive replies.

The heavy tires thrummed on the planks of the bridge. Jak was still accelerating when Ryan leaned over and tapped him on the arm. “Slow down some, or we’ll be in the river.”

“Don’t worry,” the boy said, then grinned, eyes burning with crazed delight.

But he did slow down.

 

THE NEXT DAY they cut southward across the Blue Mountains, eventually picking up what remained of the old Interstate 78 and following it for fifteen or twenty miles as they came closer to Harrisburg and the Susquehanna River. The road was mainly in good shape, and they barreled along at a reasonable speed. They ran through a couple of heavy storms, rain streaming off the side of the highway, and gathering in deep rutted pools where the top surface had been eroded by a hundred winters and summers.

They saw very little evidence of any settlements near the road, though Krysty smelled smoke several times during the day.

It wasn’t until later the next morning that they encountered any people.

 

Chapter Fifteen

« ^ »

SOME LOVED NIGRAS and some wanted to chill all the nigras?”

Doc shook his head in exasperation at Lori’s question. “No, no, no. And I only used the word ‘nigra’ because that was the epithet that was current coinage back then. It is not a good word, my sweet little child. Not a good word at all.”

“Sorry, Doc. But I didn’t…”

“Gentlemen in the South kept blacks as slaves. Those north of the Mason-Dixon line, as it was known, believed that all men were created equal and should all be free.”

“Sounds right,” Ryan said.

“Man with the biggest blaster has the biggest hunk of the freedom,” J.B. commented, as cynical as ever.

Doc Tanner smiled sadly. “I fear your jaded view of life is too often correct. Certainly the Civil War ended that way.”

A young deer had appeared unexpectedly out of the brush in front of the wag at a point where the road was so rough that Jak had to crawl along in the lowest gear. The ports and ob-slits were open, and J.B. felled the beast with a single shot from his Steyr AUG handblaster.

By mutual agreement they stopped at the next safe site and built a fire. The deer was skinned, jointed and roasted.

It was a beautiful spot for a camp. A scattering of aspens, their tops shimmering silver, swayed in the northerly breeze. A stream bubbled nearby in a series of little falls and pools. The whole place was rich with a profusion of wildflowers: hedge nettle, sage and fringed phacelia in a mix of delicate colors and shapes. Lori had woven herself a necklet of white and lavender blossoms, letting them dangle between her breasts as she sat and licked smears of blood from the roasted haunch of the fawn.

Krysty had brought up the subject of the Civil War, knowing from her teachings as a child that they were coming into an area where some of the most intense fighting had occurred.

Doc had been delighted to share his reminiscences with her.

“Those names,” he said. “Shiloh and First Bull Run. Some called it Manassas. Stones River and Chickamauga. Chancellorsville and Antietam. The Wilderness and Spotsylvania. The sepia prints by Brady of untidy corpses along a picket fence. Even in Vermont, as a child, I saw men still dying of their wounds from those battles. And the generals. Names that tripped off the tongue like a litany of the gods of Olympus.”

“Tell us,” Krysty said. “Better than using a gateway as a time machine.”

Doc leaned back, picking at his strong teeth with a long thorn plucked from a dog brier.

“There was Grant, above all. Ulysses Grant. And Lee and Sherman and Hood and Nathan… I don’t recall his other name. But—”

“You ever meet any of ‘em, Doc?” J.B. asked. “What kind of blasters they favor?”

“I was only a child. Many died during the conflict and shortly after. But I did meet General Grant. And a sorry meeting it was.”

“Why?”

“You ask me why, Ryan, and I shall tell you. Indeed it will give me pleasure to tell you.”

Ryan spotted the beginning of the rambling repetition that indicated Doc’s memory wasn’t yet completely healed. And probably never would be.

“An uncle of mine, whose name escapes me, was one of the physicians attending General Grant during his terminal illness. I visited him on the very day that the great man finally lost his hold on the tenuous thread that bound him to his corporeal self. Once severed, he would be free to roam with the immortals in the fields of Elysium.”

“Who chilled him?” Jak asked, picking at the ends of a frayed length of meadow grass.

“A cancer that ravaged his mighty frame. His passing was truly a relief and a mercy after many long days of agony and anguish for all who loved him. It was a dullish sort of day, I recall. I was a lad of seventeen or so. He tried to sit and was staring out at the casement. I kept mouse-quiet in the corner of his chamber. He called out once and then fell back dead.”

“What did he say, Doc?” Ryan asked.

“He had a female companion. He said, very clearly to her, ‘It is raining, Anita Huffington,’ and then he passed away.”

Nobody spoke, and Doc stood, stretching his angular frame. Taking Lori by the hand, he said, “Now I think this innocent child and I will walk among the trees and flowers and commune with nature. We shall return within the hour.”

“Take care,” Ryan said, watching the old, old man go off, still holding the hand of the tall blond teenager.

 

“J.B. SAID THERE was another river and bridge coming?” Jak asked.

“Not far off. Cross it when we come to it, kid,” Ryan replied. “That’s a joke, Jak. Cross the bridge, when we come to it. It’s a joke.”

“Very nearly, lover.” Krysty smiled.

Krysty stood—balanced against the rocking of the vehicle—and proceeded to climb onto the support platform beneath the main roof vent. Then she lifted head and shoulders into the open air.

“Beautiful up here,” she called out. “You can see ahead for miles. Looks like the main highway’s been wasted ‘bout a mile on. But there’s an older, narrow road to the left.”

Jak acknowledged her warning, and four or five minutes later the wag swung off down a bumpy, dusty slope, swaying along the ancient track.

Krysty stayed up on top, her long hair streaming out behind her like a great veil of fire. The land was growing more hilly as they moved farther southwest, and swathes of conifers covered the rolling land.

About fifteen minutes later she shouted down to Jak to pull up. “And switch off the engine a while. I need quiet.”

Krysty jumped out through the sliding door at the side of the sec wag and stood in the furrowed dirt of the trail. The others, one by one, climbed out after her. Jak was last, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. Ryan joined Krysty, who stood staring intently down the road. Behind them the cooling engine clicked metallically in the stillness of the day.

Ryan was proud of his own keen sight and hearing, and he often tried to match Krysty’s mutie-enhanced skills. “What is it, lover?”

“Not sure.”

“Far off?”

She nodded, face rapt with concentration. “Yeah. Three, mebbe four miles on. Wind’s carrying it toward us.”

“What is it, Krysty?” J.B. asked.

“Couple of things. Quarter of an hour ago I’m certain I saw someone using binoculars. Caught the flash off glass. Then I saw nothing else, so I figured it could easy have been the sun off a fragment of broken glass in the undergrowth.”

It was a reasonable assumption. The whole of Deathlands was riddled with twisted metal, fallen stone and broken glass.

“But?” Ryan prompted.

“But now I smell oil and fire. Hot iron. Thought I heard shots. If you look a little to the left of where the road crosses the next ridge, near in line with that broken water tower leg…”

“Smoke,” said Jak, whose sight was nearly as keen as Krysty’s—when the light wasn’t too bright to affect his sensitive eyes.

Then Ryan could see it as well—a thin column, its top tinted crimson by the brazen ball of the sun. It was two or three hundred feet high, gradually dissipating near its peak as the wind tore it apart. It was difficult to be sure, but it looked to Ryan as if the smoke had that dark, oily quality that spoke of serious trouble.

“Back in the wag,” he ordered. “Close up the roof vent and drop the ob-slits. Don’t bolt them shut, but keep ready by them. Any of the blaster ports not covered by someone had best be locked.”

 

“THAT’S CLOSE ENOUGH, Jak. Hold her here, but keep her running.”

They were about a hundred paces away, and Ryan squinted through the narrow gap in the wired glass at what looked to be a battered truck. The tires were gone, burned to sticky black tar, and all the windows were broken. The piles of charred wood heaped at the bottom of the vehicle still smoked, sending gray coils skyward.

The metal of the wag was rusted deep orange, even around the wheel hubs, and it had settled into the earth.

“Been ambushed?” J.B. asked as the others crowded forward for a look at the wreck.

“Looks that way. Still a lot of smoke. Best wait a while before we go past it. Anyone could be waiting for us.”

They sat and watched, the smoke slowly clearing. There were no bodies visible, which could mean the attackers had taken them prisoner. Or it might mean the wreck held roasted corpses.

“Want me to move on?” Jak asked, sounding bored to the teeth with hanging around.

“Whoever did that can’t be far off. Don’t forget Krysty said she saw someone spy-watching us. So they know we’re here.”

There was something about the wrecked truck that somehow didn’t sit right with Ryan, something out of place that nagged away at the back of his mind. But he couldn’t quite grab hold of the doubt and examine it.

“Okay,” he said. “Slow and easy. Double-care, friends.”

Ryan saw the two figures first, torn and ragged, stumbling on the broken surface of the road. Their clothes were strips of blackened material and hung off their bodies. Their faces were smudged with dirt, oil and smoke, hair flattened against their heads. Their hands were empty.

“Stop, Ryan?” Jak asked, tongue flicking to lick his dry lips.

“Everyone looking? See anyone?”

The answers rattled in like machine-gun fire. Nobody could see anything threatening from their ob-slits.

“Stop,” he said. “Keep double-red alert. Nobody move or open anything.”

It was impossible to tell the sex of either of the people who had staggered to a halt in the center of the highway. They were both of average height and lightly built. As far as Ryan could see, neither had any obvious mutie defect.

As the wag stopped, both of them held up a hand, palm outward. Suddenly the one on the left collapsed like a doll, lying sprawled in the dirt.

“Survivors from an ambush?” Krysty said. “You going’t‘help ‘em, lover?”

“Pull alongside them,” Ryan ordered. “On my side.” He wound down the window a couple of inches. He realized that the person still standing was a woman. The other was a male.

“Help us, mister. Got ‘bushed by muties. Came out and blocked road. Set us alight ‘fore we could do anything.”

The eyes were deep cornflower blue, the voice hoarse and ragged. Beneath all the dirt and oil Ryan guessed she might have been a good-looking woman. Her body was lean and muscular. One firm breast protruded through a tear in her jerkin.

“Help, mister!” moaned the man on the ground, head half-turned to stare up at Ryan. “We’ll die if’n you don’t.”

“How d’you get out?” Ryan asked, still conscious of some incongruity about the wrecked wag nibbling at his gut.

“Luck, mister,” the woman replied. “There was a dozen of us. Tried to fight the dead-eyes in th’open. Too many of ‘em. Chilled most of us and took a coupla kids with ‘em. Me an’ Jem runned in the brush. They let us go.”

It made sense.

Ryan had lived long enough in the Deathlands to know that the one predictable thing about muties was that they were utterly unpredictable. And he’d seen enough ambushes to know the way death came grinning out of a clear sky. They could be telling the truth about what happened.

“You got blasters?”

The woman held her arms wide, spreading her legs in a parody of the classic sec-search position. The rags were so tattered and thin that he could clearly see she was naked underneath them—naked except for a wide leather belt.

“What d’you think, mister?” the woman said, seeing Ryan eye the man. Other than a similar wide belt, the man was visibly naked under the scorched shreds of clothing.

“What d’you want from us?” Ryan asked. “We can give you a coupla cans of self-heats. Some water. Mebbe old clothes. That do?”

“Take us with you.” The man clawed his way to his feet, helped by the woman. He stared wildly in both directions up and down the road. “The muties’ll get us if’n you leave us here.”

“We don’t have the room,” Ryan said.

“We can make room for the poor folk, lover,” Krysty said behind him.

“It would only be the merest Christian charity, Mr. Cawdor,” Doc added.

Ryan turned in the swivel seat. “You say ‘Christian,’ Doc? That’s not a word you hear an awful lot around Deathlands these days.”

“Indubitably so, my dear Ryan. But that is a sorry comment on how we live. Oh tempora and oh mores, indeed. If I may be forgiven the classical tag.”

Ryan ignored the ramblings. Looking back at the woman who seemed much the stronger of the pair, he said, “We can’t take you.” He didn’t apologize. Like Trader used to say, it was a sign of weakness.

“Please, mister. You can fuck me. Or fuck Jem here. Any of you can. Make you feel—”

“You want food and clothes?” Ryan said. “We don’t have the time.”

“No, mister. Just take us with you. Take us for a day, that’s all.” She was babbling, the words stumbling and jostling each other in her terror. If she was acting, she was very good.

“I told you. Drive on, Jak. So long, lady.”

The boy engaged one of the ten forward gears, and the truck began to creep ahead. The woman looked hopelessly at Ryan. He began to wind the window up once more.

“You going’t‘the Susqua? We can save you.”

Ryan didn’t answer her, though Jak glanced sideways at him.

“Be a trap there. They get strangers at the toll crossing.”

“Hold it,” Ryan said to Jak. “Best hear this.”

“We can save you. Me an’ Jem. Take us on and we can save you all from the chillers.” Ryan reached back and triggered the lever that opened the side door of the wag.

 

Chapter Sixteen

« ^ »

HER NAME WAS CHRISSY. Jem was her man. They’d been traveling west because they’d heard from some traders that there was a good life in the clean lands toward California. Then the muties had come and ended the dream.

Jem rested, falling instantly asleep under a gray blanket in a rear bunk. She told Ryan all about the squatters who controlled the crossing of the Susquehanna, how they tricked travelers and slaughtered them.

“They’re cannies, mister,” she whispered.

“What’re cannies?” Lori asked.

“Eat meat,” J.B. replied.

“We eat meat,” she replied.

The Armorer shook his head. “Not human meat, we don’t. But cannies do.”

“By the three Kennedys!” the girl exclaimed. “Double-nasty!”

“Yeah,” J.B. agreed.

“How do they work the trap?”

Chrissy looked at Ryan warily. “I tell you an’ you put us off?”

“No. Tell me. The truth.” There it was again, like a scab that couldn’t be picked. Something about the ambush didn’t sit right with him. But what was it?

“They got a lotta blasters. And the road’s blocked so you gotta stop. No way around. An’ they talk sweet and tell you to get down. Seem okay, but it ain’t. That’s how they does it.”

“When do they hit you?”

“Some kinda word they got. Like one’ll say casual that it’s bastard cold. That might be the word. You gotta watch ‘em. Only way is to step down and talk a whiles. Put ‘em off guard. Then you can hit ‘em.”

J.B. leaned forward. “What if they hit you first?”

The woman seemed caught off-balance. “They…they won’t. Not the way they do the chilling. Always same way.”

“How far’s the river?” Ryan asked.

“Coupla miles.”

“We’ll be ready.”

 

“RYAN,” JAK WARNED.

“I see ‘em.”

The road came winding down the side of a bluff. The original highway had vanished a couple of miles behind them, slipping away and leaving a jagged edge of concrete and tarmac. Jak had carefully steered the big wag down to the left, where deep ruts showed how other drivers had taken the same course. There’d been a shower of rain, earlier, and it had laid the dust.

Everyone took up their positions inside, blasters ready. They’d all been in on the firefight planning, all finally agreeing that Chrissy should lead them out and then try to let them know when it was best to make their play against the would-be chillers.

The woman and Jem, now recovered, waited immediately behind Jak and Ryan. They’d been offered fresh clothes, but both of them had insisted they’d wait until after the ambush.

“There’s around twenty,” Jak said, “and I can see a spiked pole ‘cross the track. Just this side of the bridge.”

At this point, just beyond the southern suburbs of what had once been Harrisburg, the Susquehanna was about a third of a mile wide, and looked like a glittering silver cobra winding through the gray-green land.

Ryan felt the familiar buildup of tension. When he’d been a very young and callow boy, he’d told a stone-faced shootist that he wished he didn’t get nervous. The man had looked at him for a moment without speaking, then he said, “You feel that way, means you got nerves. Means you care ‘bout getting chilled. Time comes you don’t feel that no more is the time you start to die. Might take days or weeks. But you’re deader’n a coonskin coat.”

Ryan Cawdor had never forgotten those words. Now his stomach was beginning to knot with the anticipation of shooting. Adrenaline was flowing fast, his mouth was dry, and the palms of his hands were slick with sweat. He wiped them on his pant legs.

If the two survivors of the massacre were telling the truth, the ground was going to get larded with several corpses in the next quarter hour.

“Take it slow and steady and pull her up when they tell you,” Ryan said.

Jak nodded, concentrating on steering the heavy wag through the bumps and wheel tracks that came together near the bridge.

“What they got?” J.B. asked from the back of the vehicle.

“Looks like a bunch of M-16s. Smith & Wesson handguns in belts. Can’t see any gren-launchers or heavy blasters,” Ryan told him.

“Best set your G-12 on continuous. Going’t‘be sharp down there,” the Armorer advised.

Ryan nodded. If the girl was telling the truth, then they should have a chance to start shooting and take the squatters by surprise. But if she was lying and they were being set up…

They were about a quarter mile off, Jak keeping the wag moving steadily in low gear. Jem was right behind him. Ryan thought he caught the faint sound of metal on metal, and he swung around and saw both Jem and Chrissy fiddling with their leather belts. Both of them grinned as he turned, keeping their fingers hooked inside, out of sight.

“Nice wag, this,” the man said, speaking quickly. “Volvo-Benz, ain’t it?”

“Yeah,” Jak said. “What was your truck…before the muties got at it?”

Ryan noticed a slight hesitation on Jem’s part, but he was concentrating on the bridge and the men ahead of them, who stood in a loose half ring, waving them to a halt. As he listened, Ryan was already reaching for the main door control lever.

“It was an old Nissan. Kind of beat-up, but it ran well.”

“Fucking right, Jem,” the woman agreed, leaning against the back of Ryan’s chair. She was so close to him that her breath stirred the long hairs at his nape. “Jem kept that better’n he kept me. Painted and polished it everyday.”

That was it!

The wag was easing to a stop, everyone ready to move to the exit to jump down. Ryan’s hand was on the door lever.

Without even looking around, he jabbed back and up with his left elbow, feeling it crack home on the side of Chrissy’s jaw. A stab of pain shot up his arm, but he ignored it. Dropping the Heckler & Koch from his lap, he drew the panga with his right hand. He turned in a fluid movement and sliced at Jem’s exposed throat.

“Trap!” Ryan yelled. “Chill ‘em all, outside!”

He was facing the back of the dimly lit sec wag and saw the expressions of shock and horror on his companions’ faces.

Jem was on the metal-ribbed floor, his left hand grabbing at the screaming lips of a gaping wound that opened up his neck. The carotid artery had been severed by the keen edge of the panga, and blood was flooding out in great pumping jets. His mouth was open, and he was trying to cry out.

Chrissy was also down, half on her side, struggling to get up. There was a purpling bruise on her left cheek, and a thread of crimson was worming from her nose and swollen lips. “You fucking…” she began.

What caught everyone’s eye was what the man and the woman wore on their right hands. Glinting in the poor light with a lethal sheen, the contraptions were made of smooth, dark leather, tight fitting. Each fingertip carried a sliver of curved steel, like a miniature razor, no more than three inches long and a half inch wide. Used together, they were a terrifying weapon. The open sections of their belts made it immediately obvious where the bizarre blades had come from.

From the moment that Ryan Cawdor lashed out at the woman with his elbow to the realization of how close he and Jak had come to losing their lives took no more than five beats of the heart.

J.B. broke the moment of stillness and shock. “Pour it on them,” he snapped. “Chill ‘em all. Every one of ‘em.”

Jak tugged the hand brake on, leaped from his seat and started to blast out of the side window with the Magnum.

Both girls eased back the blaster slits and began to fire into the waiting group of men. Then there was the cavernous boom of the Le Mat as Doc Tanner triggered the scattergun, vomiting lead into the faces of the nearest of the squatters.

Chrissy was scrabbling at the metal floor with the steel fingers, striking sparks in her insensate rage. Her eyes were wide open with the crazed lust to kill Ryan, who stood by his seat, staring down at her.

“Fuck you!” she grated. “How did you know? Heard us putting on the snickers?”

“No.”

“Then, how the…?”

“Goodbye,” Ryan said, drawing the SIG-Sauer P-226 and squeezing off a single round. The bullet hit Chrissy between the eyes, kicking her skull back against the floor of the wag with an echoing thud. Her head bounced once, then rolled to one side as she died.

It wasn’t much of a firefight—not from the point of view of the twenty or so squatters waiting outside for Jem and Chrissy to betray the strangers and deliver them into their tender hands. The ob-slits opened and the muzzles of blasters came peeking out, spitting fire and lead.

J.B.’s mini-Uzi and Ryan’s G-12 decided the battle almost before it had started. Thirty-two rounds of nine-millimeter stingers flew from the Armorer’s machine pistol. The Gewehr fired a burst that sounded like tearing silk.

The gang of assassins was ripped to pieces by the awesome firepower of the two blasters.

Ryan didn’t very often like firing the caseless automatic rifle on continuous burst, but he couldn’t take a chance that the squatters might be able to take out their tires and then burn the wag. It wasn’t fully protected like a proper war wag and was vulnerable to a concerted attack by determined men.

“Hold fire! Gimme a chill count. J.B.?”

“Seven certain, three or four more down.”

“Krysty?”

“Agreed with J.B., plus two close in by the wheels. Both head shot.”

“Lori?”

Immediately Ryan grimaced, knowing from previous experience what the girl’s reply would be. “A lot chilled. Serve the cannies right.” Lori couldn’t count all that well.

“Doc? How many your side?”

“Pistoled four or five with a single shotgun round, Ryan. Two dead, maybe three.”

The running total made it sound like at least a dozen of the squatters had been perma-chilled, allowing for the couple on Jak’s side of the big wag’s cab.

There was a burst of firing from Doc and Lori’s side, bullets pinging like heavy hail off the rough arma-plate. The defenders immediately started to reply, both blasters making light, flat sounds.

“Some running!” Jak yelled, frantically winding down his window to get a clear shot at the fleeing men.

“Leave ‘em!” Ryan ordered. “Save ammo. Let ‘em go.”

Ryan was ramming the twenty-five-round loaders into the magazine clip, feeding the nitrocellulose caseless rounds. J.B. had dropped the empty cartridge mag to the wag’s floor, plucking another from one of his infinitely capacious pockets and slotting it home with a satisfying click.

“One crawling away this side,” Krysty said. “Looks like a broken thigh. Shall I waste him or let him go, Ryan?”

“Let him be. Jak, get ready to move. Doc, you and Lori go and shift that spiked rail from ‘cross the road. Krysty, stay here and keep watch. Me and J.B.’ll get down first and check out the body count. Chill any that are still moving.”

“Check,” the Armorer said, drawing the small Tekna knife from its sheath on his belt.

“Ryan?” Krysty said.

“Yeah?”

“One thing?”

“What is it? Best get moving and over the river. Might be more of the squatters.”

“Sure. But how d’you know?”

“You hear them putting on finger knives?” Jak asked.

Ryan grinned, moving a half step toward Krysty, then wincing as his boots slithered in the sticky pool of the dead couple’s blood. “Better get this dreck cleared out ‘fore we cross the Susquehanna,” he said. “How did I know? It kept nibbling at me that there was something wrong ‘bout that burning truck. Then, just as we was coming to the bridge, the woman said something that brought it clear.”

“She was talking about how he looked after the wag,” Krysty remembered.

“Yeah. You saw it, burned out. Settled in the dirt up to the hubs and raw red rust everywhere, the fire still smoldering.”

Krysty looked puzzled. It was Jak who made the connection first. “Sure. Bastards! If’n fire only just burned, it’d be clean metal.”

Doc Tanner had been listening with great interest. “I see it now. The oxidation of the exposed metal was old. Days old. Weeks old.”

“Mebbe months old,” J.B, added. “Could have been pulling that butcher’s scam for fucking months. Survivors from the ambush. Get a lift. Then open the throats of the driver and shotgun and let in their mates. Easy as catching a legless mutie.”

“And the way it was sitting there,” Krysty said. “Now that you say it… Gaia! What a stupe I was. I can see it in my mind’s eye now, and it’s obvious it was a real old wreck, set by the track and fired with some brush. Drop of gas and oil and it smokes like a fresh killing ground.”

“And they’d have been eaten us!” Lori exclaimed, kicking out at the slumped corpse of the woman. “Cannies!”

“Right,” Ryan agreed. “Now you all know what you gotta do. Clean this wag and tidy up out there. Then we can move on again.”

It took only a half hour to finish off the wounded men and wash out the bloodied interior of the big wag. Then Jak cranked up the engine, and they rolled south toward the old Maryland state line.

 

Chapter Seventeen

« ^ »

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,

I wish I were a maid again.

A maid again, I ne’er can be,

‘Til…

“Can’t you hold this fireblasted wag steady on the road, Jak?”

“Sorry, Krysty. Tree felled and blocked us. Had to go around.”

It had taken them three days to get from the Susquehanna, across the northern angle of Maryland and into the edges of Virginia. The road had been appalling and the weather worse.

Twice they’d been hit by ferocious chem storms, as severe as anything Ryan or J.B. had ever encountered. The gales had come shrieking from the east, bringing a biting salt rain and hail that battered at the metal roof of the wag. Lightning lanced to earth all around them, filling the air with the dry taste of bitter ozone. The thunder was so loud that any conversation within the vehicle had to be shouted.

At the height of the storms Jak had stopped driving, unable to see more than a couple of feet ahead. Mud fell from the skies and streaked the armored glass, coating it with a thick layer of gray-orange slime.

In the evening of the third day, the wind shifted and ravened from the west. Ryan climbed down from the wag on the leeward side, finding to his dismay that his rad counter began to cheep a warning, the needle sliding into the red.

“Must have picked up some hot shit from beyond the Miss,” J.B. said when Ryan told him about it. “Some real glow spots that way. Better keep in and move on when we can.”

In one of the places where they lost the highway, they plowed through an old burial ground.

“Where the fuck’s this?” Jak shouted, his sweaty hair tangled around his face. It was early in the morning, and a thin slice of sullen sun glowered balefully over a low range of hills to the east of them.

As far as the eye could see, there were great rows of pale stones, most with carving on them and words that had been virtually obliterated by long years of wind, rain and chem storms. Doc Tanner offered to get down and take a look.

The door slid open, and the old man vanished into the hazy dawn. They watched him from the ob-slits, seeing his gaunt figure, stooped like a crow, picking his way among the headstones. He hesitated now and again, hunkering down to peer at the lettering. Once he looked back toward the wag.

“I’m getting out’t‘join him,” Ryan said. “Anyone coming?”

He was underwhelmed by the response. Suddenly everyone had something to do.

“Sorry, lover,” Krysty said. “This country’s too full of graves for me to want to go look at any more. You go.”

The wind was cold and fresh, biting at the skin across his cheeks. On all sides Ryan could see rolling hills, memories bringing back so much of his brief and long-gone childhood: round-topped mountains sprayed thick with pine forest, torn rags of fog lingering in some of the gentle valleys.

Doc was standing with his back turned to Ryan, his hand gently stroking the top of a gravestone. He glanced around at the sound of Ryan’s boots crunching on the gravel.

“Welcome to the place of old dying, my friend.”

Tears flowed down Doc’s furrowed cheeks, washing away the dust in rosy streaks over the silver stubble on his chin.

“Private Joshua Clement. First Minnesota. Fell on the second day of July in the year of 1863. Aged twenty and two years.”

“This from the old Civil War, Doc?”

“In my childhood this was possibly the best-known of all cemeteries. Here rest so many good fellows and young. There’s another stone there, tumbled in the long grass by time and nuking. Look at it, Ryan, and see how little has truly altered in two hundred and thirty years.”

Ryan stooped, cocking his head to read the worn letters. He read it out loud.

“ ‘Drummer Horatio Makem of the 20th Main Regiment. Born in Connaught and died here, aged eleven years and three months.’ ”

“Children, Ryan. Younger even than that bloodthirsty albino in the truck. So many died here. Oak Hill. The Peach Orchard and Little Round Top. Cemetery Ridge and the Devil’s Den. The wounded begging for death. A bullet in arm or leg, Mr. Cawdor, meant cold, blunt steel. The piles of severed limbs quite o’ertopped the tents where the surgeons labored.”

Ryan straightened and looked around at the quiet fields and hedgerows, their lines still visible among the tide of fresh vegetation. A wood pigeon was cooing softly in a grove of immensely tall sycamores near a narrow, meandering stream. It was a scene of perfect, idyllic peace.

“You say this was a big fight?”

“A big fight, Ryan?” Doc queried. “Oh, I think that I might say that. Some fifty thousand men and boys were killed or wounded in those three days in bright July. Five years before I was born. Fifty thousand lost, Ryan.”

“Who won? North or South?”

Doc Tanner scuffed at the ground where one of the tablets had toppled over. “General Lee hoped for the one great battle that would turn the tide for the South. This was to be it. Gettysburg. The high-water mark for the Confederate States of America. The war was not yet over, but now the die was cast and the count was against the South.”

Ryan glanced around, automatically checking for any possible danger, but the dawning was still quiet and peaceful.

“They didn’t know that their cause was lost,” Doc continued. “They rallied and came again and again into the storm of lead. One cried out to Lee that they would fight on until Hell itself froze over. And then they would go and fight the damned Yankees on the ice. But it was lost.”

“Gettysburg,” Ryan said, tasting the word on his cold lips. “Heard of it. Old books. So the Union came the way we did, from the north. And the Rebs… that the right name? Yeah, the Rebs came up from the south, yonder.”

Doc Tanner smiled gently. “You’d have guessed so, Ryan. Oddly it was just the opposite. Lee came to Gettysburg from the north, and General Meade from the south.

Old Snapping Turtle Meade. That’s what he was called. When I was a young tad of a boy and we played Rebs and Yankees, we’d all be our favorite generals. I was Jeb Stuart.”

There was no sign that morning of the madness that swam just beneath the surface of Doc Tanner’s shaken mind. He was logical and coherent, pointing out as best he could how the battle had swung backward and forward during the three days, using his silver-topped cane to indicate the hills and folds in the rolling ground around them.

“Thursday, November 19, four months after the battle, a lot of big men came here to dedicate this cemetery as a sort of national monument for the fallen.”

Unseen by either of them, Jak had left the wag and walked through the grass to stand behind them, hearing what Doc had been saying.

The boy began to speak, nervously at first, then with growing confidence.

“ ‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that…all men are created equal.’ ”

“Abe Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address!” Doc exclaimed. “How in tarnation d’you know that, my snow-headed young companion?”

“Pa taught me. Said his pa taught him and his pa before that. There’s lots more. Can’t recall it now. Bit ‘bout the world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. Meaning the men got chilled. And it ended with something about resolving that these dead shall not have died in vain. That…” The boy shook his head, the long white veil of hair swirling around his face in the dawn breeze. “Can’t…”

Doc Tanner took it over, his rich, deep voice filling all the morning, reaching to the far-off rivers and hills like an Old Testament prophet.

“ ‘That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ ”

It was a solemn and moving moment. Ryan glanced back and saw that Lori, J.B. and Krysty had all gotten out of the wag and were standing close together, listening to Doc’s recitation.

“If I was much given to crying,” Doc said, “I would shed tears now for the mindless and overweeningly stupid men who forgot those words of Lincoln. The men, now long dead, who took a dream and flung it into the abyss. The men who took the United States of America and turned it into the Deathlands. I could weep for it, my friends. Truly, I could weep.”