Chapter Twenty-five

 

 

Ryan had taken over behind the wheel, picking his way slowly across the bleak land with the aid of some adequate low-beam lights. The moon had gone, slinking away behind a bank of thick cloud, leaving the trail difficult to navigate.

 

The original highway seemed to have almost totally disappeared, with only the occasional fairly level strip of pavement running for a couple of hundred yards, then doglegging off to either right or left.

 

The chem storm that they'd glimpsed ahead of them seemed to be moving slowly closer, with the lightning more frequent and the claps of thunder following more closely on its heels. The wind had risen, sighing dustily through the open windows of the cautiously advancing 4x4.

 

"Think we should stop?" Krysty asked, sitting on the far end of the spacious front seat, the occasional flashes bringing out the fiery reds and golds of her unique hair.

 

Ryan shook his head. "Haven't seen anything worth a spit for shelter for the rest of the night. Wag like this'll be strong enough to take any kind of weather. We get flash floods, then we just halt for a while until it subsides."

 

Doc had been sleeping in the back, snoring like a distant buzz saw. Now a bump from the front axle jerked him awake. "By the Three! I thought myself in the famed city of Eldorado, reclining upon a couch of beaten gold while dusky maidens fed me iced grapes." He wiped ineffectually at the dusty window. "Are we there?" he asked. "Then again, I think that I am not certain just where 'there' is. Or whether it is the same as 'here.' Or whether both are metaphysical concepts being far beyond the reach of most Cro-Magnon anthropoids."

 

His weird, typically muddled pronouncement silenced everyone, and for the next three or four miles nobody spoke.

 

 

 

THE FIRST HEAVY DROPS of rain puddled on the windshield, drumming on the reinforced roof of the wag.

 

"Here it comes," Mildred said, leaning forward, resting her arms on the back of Krysty's seat. "Least it might lay the dust and clean the air a little. Been too hot and too dry for too long for me."

 

"Yeah, me too," Krysty agreed.

 

The storm intensified. "Hey, Ryan! Think we should"

 

"Stop?" He eased off the gas and slipped the vehicle into Park, pulling on the brake and switching off the engine. "Yeah, I think we should stop."

 

The thunder was suddenly all around them, shaking the vehicle with its shocking force, and the lightning was so bright and constant that you could have read a book through it. Purple, pink and silver, in sheets and jagged daggers, it forked all around them, dropping the temperature by fifteen degrees and filling the air with the unforgettable stench of ozone.

 

And the rain came down in a pounding shroud, cutting visibility to less than ten feet. Ryan leaned forward and switched off the lights. "Might as well save the battery," he said. "Nothing to see out there."

 

 

 

THE WAG HAD BEEN BUILT to handle all sorts of rough, off-road terrain, but it wouldn't cope with suddenly slipping into a black hole in the highway or sliding off the gradient into some unseen foaming river.

 

The storm showed no signs of passing; indeed, it seemed to be still gathering strength. The wind was howling like a banshee, making the vehicle roll and rock from side to side, like an aspen in a hurricane. It felt as though some demonic forces were beneath it, trying to turn it over. Ryan could just make out a wide stream, inches deep, flowing beneath the wag, occasionally strong enough to move it a little. There seemed to be a sheer drop to the right, but he couldn't be certain.

 

The thunder was constant, the lightning slicing into the hills op both sides of the muddied trail.

 

And the rain sheeted down, in a ceaseless roar on the metal roof of the wag, streaming over the windows.

 

"Might as well try and get some sleep here," Ryan said. "We're going nowhere for a spell."

 

 

 

HE HAD BEEN in a dark dream, walking through a forest with no sunshine and a ceaseless drizzle of fine rain that soaked through the clothes and chilled the bones.

 

He blinked his good eye open, sitting upright for a moment, wondering what it was that had jerked him awake.

 

"Whoa," he whispered, glancing around in the dazzling bursts of lightning to make sure all the sec locks were snapped shut and everyone was fast asleep.

 

He checked the chron, seeing that it was a few minutes after one. He'd been asleep for less than a quarter hour, and the storm still raged all around them.

 

Nothing much seemed to be happening, and he readied himself to sleep again, trying to push back the prickling unease that had raised the short hairs at his nape.

 

He looked out of the windshield, wiping the driver's window, clearing away the cold condensation. The wag jerked a little, almost floating, with a recurrence of the same odd, insecure feeling of the wheels losing grip. And one side tilted slightly. Ryan peered out again, seeing that the 4x4 had definitely moved a good yard or more toward the drop on the right, away from the water-streaked face of the cliff on his side.

 

Even the worst wind and rain wouldn't do that to a massive six-seater like the 4x4unless the whole highway was actually crumbling under them.

 

He was leaning to the right, trying to puzzle out what was going on, when there was a particularly savage flash of lightning that burned into his retina, the thunder pounding simultaneously at his hearing.

 

And he glimpsed something from the corner of his good eye, something low down, barely showing above the roll bar, something so hideous and grotesque that he knew that it had to have been a trick of the storm.

 

It was a face, tiny and distorted, like a rubber carnival mask, with every feature stretched, warped and scarred. The tiny eyes burned toward him, red in the chem lightning. The mutie had matted, straggling hair like coils of steel wire, a snuffling hole where the nose should have been and a slit of a mouth with a triple row of serrated teeth showing over the curved lips.

 

It was holding the roll bar with its long horned claws curling over, actually scratching away the paint as Ryan watched, peeling it away in strips that revealed the brightness of bare metal.

 

He blinked in a moment of blackness, seeing the ghastly afterimage seared into his vision, waiting for another flash of lightning, which came a couple of seconds later.

 

The road in front of the wag was empty, and the strange movement had ceased.

 

"Fireblast! Hey, wake up, friends. Looks like we got some company."

 

Simultaneously a jagged rock the size of a man's fist flew from the blackness and starred the middle window on the left side of the wag. But Elmore and Albert hadn't stinted on their pride and joy, and had used good-quality sec glass. So the window crazed, but held firm, unbroken.

 

"What?" J.B. said, holding the Uzi, peering into the teeming darkness, unable to see any kind of target.

 

"Muties," Ryan ducked as another rock thudded into the side door panel. "Spotted one. Not like anything I ever saw before. Kind of a bit like swampies but smaller."

 

"Could be what they call muddies. Heard of them. Tiny, with faces like living evil. Never saw them, but I recall Trader said he'd come across them a couple of times in bayou regions."

 

The 4x4 was ringing as the attack intensified, and it suddenly lifted on one side and shifted sideways toward the invisible drop.

 

"Underneath us," Jak yelled.

 

There was a certain security in the partly armored wag, but it was a false safety. It wouldn't take long to tip the whole vehicle over the side. And the six occupants could easily be trapped and helpless.

 

Ryan made the decision. "Out and chill them," he shouted, flicking the sec lock and diving through the open door into the deafening, blinding storm. He landed awkwardly in the soft torrent of slippery mud, rolling over on his hip and shoulder, coming up into a crouch about a dozen feet from the wag, close to the steep cliff.

 

The lightning gave plenty of illumination to one of the most macabre sights that Ryan had ever seen.

 

The sodden earth all around the wag was a mass of scurrying figures, just like the one he'd glimpsed hanging on the roll bar at the front of the 4x4.

 

They were less than four feet tall, most of them naked, covered in dank, thick hair, with the most hideous faces, gibbering and gesticulating toward him with their clawed hands.

 

One of them was wearing a strange silver disk around its thick little neck, which caught the multicolored flashes of lightning in a bizarre way.

 

Even as he started shooting, a small part of Ryan's concentration had slipped to that ornament, wondering at the sharp tug of memory that was triggered by it, trying to recall where he'd seen it before.

 

But the chilling swamped all other thoughts.

 

The muddies started to howl as the occupants of the wag tumbled into the rain all around them, pouring death from a variety of blasters.

 

The diminutive bodies were torn apart under the concentrated hail of lead, spinning and tumbling, sliding along in the river of liquid dirt.

 

With Ryan, Jak and J.B. on one side of the 4x4, and the others on the far side, the only danger was getting caught in the cross fire.

 

"Hold it!" Ryan yelled, seeing that the surviving muties had broken and run for it, all clawing their way over the steep slope and vanishing down into the stygian darkness, leaving only their dead and a few of their dying.

 

"Anyone hurt?" Krysty shouted.

 

"Little fucks never got to us," Jak called, standing up, his white face streaked with mud, hair plastered to the sides of his narrow skull, eyes glowing a fiery red in the lightning.

 

"Glad we got to them," Ryan said, quickly reloading his blaster.

 

Krysty and J.B. quickly terminated the squealing survivors, with single shots to the nape, bringing a silence to the heart of the storm.

 

"We chase them?" Jak asked, reloading.

 

Ryan shook his head, sending a spray of rain from his matted hair. "No. Best thing is to try and get moving again." He stared up at the sky, blinking against the flaring lightning. "Pull her forward away from the edge, J.B., and we can get on. Take it slow and careful. Think it might be easing."

 

He went to drag some of the stocky corpses away from the highway, pulling a face at the horrific expressions on the distorted heads. The others had finished reloading and lent a hand, clearing a path from the front of the vehicle while J.B. wired it back into life again.

 

The wag had edged clean, and J.B. leaned out of the cracked window. "Ready when you are, friends."

 

Krysty opened the middle door and slid in, wincing at the amount of mud she was smearing on the plush upholstery. Mildred joined J.B. in the front, and Jak and Doc sat in the back of the vehicle.

 

Ryan hesitated a moment, worrying that something was nagging at his memory, something that he'd noticed in the beginning of the brief fight and then forgotten.

 

"No," he said to himself. Whatever it was, it was gone. So it probably hadn't been important. He opened the passenger's door and joined Krysty in the middle section of the wag.

 

"Ready?" J.B. asked, taking off his fedora and putting it on the seat at his side.

 

"Sure."

 

They began to inch forward. The rain had eased, and the thunder and lightning had become more sporadic. Ryan looked out through the unbroken glass, squinting at the pile of muddies' corpses, seeing something glinting brightly among the bodies in a purple-pink flash of chem lightning.

 

"Hold it." He opened the door and jumped quickly into the mud. He splashed through and stooped over one of the dead muties, lifting the silver ornament and chain from around its stubby, bristly neck.

 

J.B. had put on the brake, stopping the 4x4, and now everyone piled out again, gathering around Ryan, peering at the disk that he held in his hand.

 

"It seems to me that I have seen that pretty bauble at another place and in another time," Doc said.

 

"Me, too." Mildred looked carefully at the engraved disk. "I know what it is!"

 

Ryan nodded before she even said the name. "I knew I recognized it. It belongs to Straub."