Chapter Seven




Krysty matched, stride for stride, her black-haired lover's brutal pace. The path they were taking, at the base of the towering bedrock ridge, was an obstacle course of boulder outcrops in shades of dusty brown and ocher. Some of the rocks were big enough to hide a crouching man; most were mere ankle breakers. No screen of trees shielded them from the sun, and it would be hours, yet, before it sank into the west. The only things growing in the thin desert soil were scattered, stunted bushes and widely spaced clumps of needle grass.
To her left, sweeping all the way to the southern horizon, was a vast depression in the earth. Though she could see for tens of miles into the bowl scoured out by three thermonuclear warheads, Krysty couldn't see the far side of it. This was in part because of the sun's blinding glare off the thermoglass, which looked to her like a frozen, storm-tossed sea, but mostly because the blast crater's diameter was so enormous. At irregular intervals, individual pillars of smoke rose in the dead air, spiraling into the blue sky for thousands of feet. More than a century after the nuclear holocaust, Slakecity still burned. Isolated fires raged beneath the thermoglass skin, fueled by Gaia knew what, plumes of smoke steadily uncoiling from fractures and deep fissures in the surface.
Mildred had told her what this place had looked like before skydark. It was hard for Krysty to imagine a Great Salt Lake stretching off to the west, or a large city framed by a backdrop of hills. Mildred said there had been a huge temple with a gold statue atop it that could be seen for miles around. All that had once beenimmense lake, bracketing hills, glorious templewas gone, vaporized by the fury of man-made suns.
An unseen rock scraped against her ankle, then clattered noisily away. Krysty's attention snapped back to the ground and its hazards. Because of the accumulated stresses of an already long and dangerous day, because of the distance she had already walked, because of the unrelenting sun and heat, it was getting more and more difficult for her to maintain a triple-red level of alert.
Ryan turned his head at the sound the rock made. Seeing that she was okay, he half smiled and turned back without slowing.
Krysty knew he wasn't pushing himself and everyone else to exhaustion just because an angel-faced, seven-year-old girl had asked him to avenge her father's murder. Ryan was far too much of a pragmatist, and far too good a leader, to fall for something like that.
Sure, he had a personal score to settle with the cannie who had stolen his Steyr SSG-70. In Deathlands, a person's main blaster was like a strong right hand; it was the key to survival. It was something that was never willingly surrendered, and always retrieved, if possible.
And there was no forgetting the wounds suffered by his friends during the cannie attack. Krysty's own shoulder and neck throbbed agonizingly in time with her footfalls, a reminder of how close she had come to death. But payback, with interest, for that had already had been dished out in the form of the seventeen enemy they had left chilled in the willow thicket.
A need for more retribution wasn't the demon driving Ryan across the high plains. The one-eyed man wasn't consumed with anger; he was steely calm. He had heard of Moonboy's reputation as a "pure norm" ville, a place where Jak and Krysty were at risk of being summarily murdered, and yet he was resolved, as were Krysty and the rest of the companions, to take the risk and do what had to be done in order to hunt down and exterminate the remaining cannies.
Extermination was standard operating procedure with cannies.
Because of the way they could blend in and mingle with unsuspecting folk, like wolves among the sheep, they were far more dangerous than stickies, scalies or scabbies. The gaudy house bartender had served this particular bunch of flesh eaters without batting so much as an eyelash. They had walked unnoticed through the ville of Perdition and, equally unnoticed, had carried off another victim.
Krysty recalled, word for word, what her uncle Tyas McCann had taught her about them when she was young. You can always tell a cannie if you get nose to nose with one," he'd said. "Death hangs over them like stink gas in a bog. Trouble is, if you get close enough to whiff that brand of brimstone, it's too late to back away. Smell that smell, girl, and make no mistake, you've got to fight for your life, tooth and claw."
Tyas had passed on this information after a pair of suspected cannies had been caught red-handed at a slaughter scene in a cabin near their Harmony ville homestead. Subsequent events were forever burned into Krysty's memory. After having been beaten and kicked around by the townsfolk, the two suspects were dragged into the ville's square and staked out on the ground. The men had loudly protested then-innocence, and when it had come time for them to get fed they had refused the flatbread and water they were offered. Inside of three days, the pair had gone stark raving mad, eyes rolling, jaws snapping, foaming at the mouth, howling like dogs. Eventually, they swallowed their own tongues and their faces turned purple, then black. Choked to death by their chill frenzy.
To a cannie, Tyas had explained, the taste of human blood delivered a joltlike kick. If a cannie was without blood for too long, he or she went crazy. According to her uncle, that was the reason why, when they couldn't find victims, they chilled and ate each other.
Krysty's thoughts drifted back to the children. And as she remembered holding them in her arms, she felt a sudden, surprisingly painful pang of loss. Though her desire for babies of her own was strong, she had always suppressed the maternal urge. Unlike the world before skydark that Mildred and Doc had told her about, there was no way of increasing your odds in Deathlands. No amount of jack, or of blasterpower, could stack the deck in your favor. Even rich and powerful barons died prematurely and in the same wretched agonies as everybody else. Living a life on the edge of oblivion was a hard enough cross for an adult to bear, let alone a child.
In a flash of pure white light, an image formed in Krysty's consciousness. She saw a snake's flat, scaled head, twice as wide as the back of her hand, with eyes like bulging blood drops, and exposed fangs trailing thick strands of yellow poison. She immediately recognized the image for what it was, a premonition of impending danger. The gift of second sight was just part of the mutie inheritance handed down to her by her mother, Sonja, an inheritance that allowed her to tap into the all-powerful, feminine spiritual force of the planet. Shaking free of the startling vision, Krysty came to an abrupt stop.
Three yards from her right boot, it looked like just another flat rock.
Then the rock moved.
She let out a cry and took a giant step sideways, her hand automatically dropping to the butt of her revolver.
More than seven feet long, and at its widest point two feet around, there was nothing shy about this snake; it was both aggressive and predatory. It rapidly slithered closer to her, then coiled itself. A tail bigger around than her forearm reared up, amber-colored rattles shaking, as the mutie diamondback prepared to strike.
"Hold it!" Ryan shouted back to the others.
The column froze at his command.
"Oh my God!" Mildred exclaimed as she turned and saw, for thirty yards in all directions, the rocks beginning to uncoil. "They're everywhere!"
As if responding to some silent, instinctive call to attack, dozens upons dozens of rattlers, some of them easily forty-pounders, their backs as big as fire hoses, moved in for the kill.
Krysty unholstered her .38, but before she could aim and fire, the snake in front of her struck, fully two-thirds of its body length extended, its jaws gaping wide. She instinctively twisted to the side and the fangs missed the top of her thigh by less than an inch. With amazing speed, the huge rattler recoiled itself for a second strike, this time point-blank.
Krysty was tightening down on the revolver's trigger when Ryan called out a second warning.
"No blasters!" he said. "We don't want to give away our position. Follow me, I'm going to open up a path."
Krysty held her fire, but kept the snake in her sights and her finger on the trigger as Ryan drew his panga from its sheath. The blade slashed down in a tight arc and under the blade's keen edge, the rattler's head seemed to leap free of its neck. Spurting ten-foot jets of blood, the headless body went wild, thrashing and slapping the dirt.
Ryan grabbed Krysty by the arm and pulled her along after him. "This way!" he called to the others. No one questioned his choice of direction. There wasn't time for discussion. They all knew that standing still meant certain death.
Krysty followed his boulder-hopping, straight-line dash. Farther out on the plain, she could see more big rocks turning into big snakes, and the big snakes were sliding their way. Whatever path Ryan could clear with the eighteen-inch knife, it wasn't going to stay clear for long. The panga slashed down again and with a single stroke the one-eyed man hacked a snake cleanly in two. As they jumped the writhing halves and rushed on, Krysty saw Ryan shift the panga from right hand to left, just in time to flick out his wrist and catch another mutie rattler in midstrike. His left-handed slice chopped off half the snake's head, just in front of the eyes, cleaving its fangs and tongue as well.
Disarmed, its face gushing red, the rattler instantly recoiled and struck at Krysty's shin as she passed by. Forty pounds of muscle and bone slammed against the side of her boot and knocked her off balance. With a crash she landed on her hip on the rocks. When she looked up, still dazed by the impact, she stared into the wounded snake's eyes and saw the hate. Pure unreasoning hate. Blood mist puffed out in time with its breath as the mutilated rattler rewound itself, preparing to hit her harder.
Krysty jumped out of the way before it could strike. Ahead of her, Ryan growled a curse of "Fire-blast!" She closed the gap between them while he dealt with the three snakes that blocked their escape route. Forehand, backhand, forehand, the panga's blade screamed through the air, and, severed, out-sized viper heads hurtled off across the boulder field. For a quarter-mile across the desert, the companions ran full-out. Only when Ryan was sure there was nothing but real rocks for fifty yards around them did he signal a halt to their headlong flight. Gasping and drenched with sweat, the companions slumped to seats on boulders. It took several minutes for them to catch their breath enough to drink water.
Lowering his canteen, JJB. jabbed a thumb in the direction they had come and said, "Shame to waste all that good white meat."
Ill cook it up," Mildred told him, "if you go back and collect it."
J.B. shook his head. "Rather eat my own foot."

A HALF HOUR LATER, and another two miles into their trek, it began to rain. But not raindrops saturated with caustic chemicals.
It rained birdssmall, dead birds. A few at first, hurtling down, headfirst, with wings folded, dark brown blurs thudding into and bouncing limply off the rocks.
The drizzle became a shower, and then the shower became a deluge.
There was no cover for the companions. They shielded their heads with their arms, crouching as they were pelted by the hail of little corpses. The full downpour lasted only a few seconds. When it was over, thousands of unmoving bodies darkened the ground and the air was thick with tiny, shredded bits of feather.
The fluff made Mildred sneeze. "Better not touch them," she warned the others. "It's possible they could be carrying some kind of pathogen, a virus that might be contagious."
Undaunted, Krysty picked up one of the broken creatures. "Must've died triple quickit's still warm," she said, gently turning the bird in her hand. "No sign of any disease. Looks like they were all struck stone dead."
Overhead, the sky was blue, and the blue was endless.
"Where the blazes did they come from?" Mildred said. She shuddered as she brushed the feathers from her face and plaits.
Observing her discomfort, Doc said, "A person given to superstition might well consider it a sign from Yahweh himself. Similar to a rain of live toads or lambs' hearts, an omen of unspeakable evil."
Clearly disturbed by the unusual event, Mildred immediately snapped back, Is that the kind of unscientific crap the deans taught you at Oxford, Doc? Did you get your doctorate in Victorian nonsense?"
"I am afraid the idea of strange rains goes back a bit further than that, my dear"
"Question is, what chilled them?" J.B. interrupted, using the toe of his boot to spread out a small heap of bodies.
Before the discussion could go any further, Jak cut in. "Ahead, big danger," he told Ryan. "Feel rumble in feet."
When they were quiet, they could all feel the faint but unmistakable shaking of the earth.
Shall we proceed on the current course, my dear Ryan?" Doc asked. "Or is an alternate route in order?"
"Don't know what the rumble means," Ryan said. "Could be anything."
"Sure as hell isn't Amtrak," Mildred remarked.
"Until we find out what's going on," Cawdor told them, "let's take it nice and slow. Everybody up, now."
On triple red, they continued following the ridgeline, which began to bend gradually northward. Long before they caught sight of them, they felt the hot wind off the string of lakesfelt, smelled, tasted.
This brimstone was the real thing, giving off a rotten-egg stink that gagged and choked them. The closer they got to the source, the louder the rumbling noise became.
As the companions crested the top of a low rise, they were slammed by a wall of baking heat that forced them to shield their faces with their hands. Below, in a sunken area of the plain, acres upon acres of desert boiled and steamed. The mud-brown lakes were bodies of superheated liquid, erupting from deep in the earth along nukeblast-opened fault lines. Whole trees, uprooted, their upraised branches stripped of leaves and bark and mineralized to a dead white, swirled like drowning men in the violent whirlpools. For hundreds of yards around the lakeshores, there was nothing but peaked piles of sulfur crystals and orange patches of bacteria. Bacteria were the only living things that could survive the combination of high temperature and toxic gases.
In the center of the closest lake, the water's surface suddenly bulged up, then burst with a dull explosion that sent mud flying like shrapnel and a huge cloud of steam skyward. They all ducked and covered.
"There's your answer, Mildred," Ryan said after things had settled down. "Bubble of hot poison gas goes up. Way high, out of sight, the flock of birds flies right through it. Bang, no more birds."
"Dead in midair," J.B. agreed.
"Dead there, too," Dean added, pointing at the ground ten yards ahead.
It wasn't just birds who got done in by the mud-lake gases. Land creatures wandering a little bit closer to the shoreline had been felled by similar, sideways discharges. Dismantled skeletons of animals, large and small, lay scattered about. The bleached bones were scored with fang marks. Something big had been cleaning up after the dead. "This bad place," Jak muttered. "If we go around," J.B. said, "it's going to add five, mebbe six miles to the hike. Might be after dark by the time we make Moonboy."
The truth of the Armorer's words was obvious. If they circled the boiling lakes on the plains side, it would take them south, away from their goal instead of toward it.
"I figure we've already covered the distance the barman talked about," Ryan said. "Looks to me like there's a climbable gully over there. Let's follow it to the ridge summit, and have ourselves a look-see on the other side."
Even though the gully was passable, the climbing wasn't easy. The gully bottom was lined with heaps of loose, gravellike rock that had flaked off and fallen from the cliffs above, and the terrain got gradually steeper and steeper until the last thirty feet, which was straight up. The backbone of the ridge was made of crumbling spires of rock, and the clusters of spires were divided from one another every few hundred yards by uncrossable chasms and deep clefts, which was why the companions hadn't tried to travel along it the whole distance from Perdition. Following Ryan's lead, they carefully crept to the edge of the summit and looked over.
The barman had been telling the truth, at least in part. There was no way to miss Moonboy.
Some freak of geologic erosion had created a wide, protected nook in the promontory rock. Below them, the ville lay nestled in a roughly circular box canyon. Even though the actual paving had long since disintegrated, at a distance of one thousand yards Ryan and the others could still make out the mazelike layout of the predark development's streets. They could also see the gridwork of its building lots, though ninety-five per cent of the original dwellings had been reduced to rubble by the trinuke, by the elements and by legions of human scavengers. A few of the light poles stood upright, towering over the spreading shamble of huts and shacks. Because the backsides of some of the surviving three-story buildings faced them, most of Moonboy's main street was blocked from their view.
"Stay low," Ryan warned, "and keep your weapons down. We don't want sun flashing off our gun barrels."
They watched in silence for a few minutes, passing their three pairs of binocs back and forth. Nothing moved below.
"A ghost ville," Dean said.
"I don't see anything but recycled predark wreckage down there," Ryan stated.
"The scrounger might have made up the story about muties with strange chilling gear just to cadge a few drinks," Krysty suggested.
"Yeah, but a ville this size, this time of day should have people walking around," Ryan replied. "There's no sign of life."
At his suggestion, J.B. moved out to scout another angle of view, and he came back, quick. ' 'Better all have a look," J.B. said.
The companions followed him around the far side of the ridge's spires, and, from the new vantage point, got a view straight down the main drag. Something strange was going on there, all right. Something dark stuck up in the middle of the deserted street. They took turns looking at it through the rubber-armored binocs.
"A derrick, maybe," Mildred said. "Plenty tall. On eight wheels. Could be motor-driven."
"It's never seen a nuke attack, or a drop of acid rain, either," Dix said. "Metal looks new."
"Way over to the right," Krysty said. "Is that a war wag?"
Ryan accepted the binocs from her and framed the vehicle in its view field. Painted desert camou, with oversized, all-terrain tires, the squat wag had an enclosed, two-man driver compartment, but there was no armored rear passenger area for troops. "Not like any LAV I ever saw," he said.
What was behind the vehicle was even more interesting to him. On a big-wheeled flatbed trailer, connected to the wag by a tow hook, sat a streamlined black machine on skids.
"Mildred, what do you make of the thing it's towing? Looks like a helicopter," Ryan said.
After studying the object, she said, "Yes. It looks to me like a one-person helicopter."
"Predark flying machine designed for vertical takeoffs and landings," J.B. affirmed.
"Right, only it's all blackthere's no window for the pilot to see out of," Mildred went on. "And I've never seen a chopper with a rotor configuration like that. The tail rotor's ninety degrees off line and it's way too big, almost like a rear propeller. All those stubby things sticking out of the nose, that looks like a weapons cluster to me."
"Had to have been looted from a redoubt," J.B. said with confidence. "But what's it doing here?"
Ryan lowered the binocs. It was a good question.
The all-out nuclear exchange of 2001 had produced an electromagnetic pulse that had fried every computer chip and circuit board on the planet, save those buried deep in the fortified, radiation-shielded bunker complexes known as redoubts. Ryan knew that operational flying machines still existed in Deathlands. They'd seen them. But as far as he was concerned, travel by air was nothing more than a fable told by Dr. Mildred Wyeth. Assuming such a machine was found, and that it could be prepped and fueled, there was no safe way to learn how to fly it by trial and error. The only use it could serve was as an ornament in some baron's garden. Armageddon had turned humankind back into a species of flatlanders, of dirt crawlers.
There was a flurry of movement below as five figures in black stepped from the front of a predark structure on the left. They spread out and began to work on the upraised derrick. In a few seconds, they had lowered it, soundlessly, to a horizontal position. For what purpose, Ryan couldn't guess.
Krysty was the first to speak. "So the scrounger wasn't lying about them after all," she said. "Do you think he was telling the truth about Moonboy's norms, too? That they've all been chilled?"
"Either that or they ran away," Ryan answered, knowing the latter wasn't very likely.
"Sure don't look like muties to me," J.B. said, adjusting the focus ring on his binocs. "Look like norms in full battle armor. Remember that Hideyoshi and the other samurai warriors we come across a while back?"
"Yeah, but this gear is different," Mildred said.
"There's no horns on these helmets. The overlapping armor plates appear to be the same material as the helicopterthe same oily blackbut look at the way those guys are moving around. The stuff isn't stiff. It flexes with them like a second skin."
"What do you think, Doc?" Ryan asked. "Does it look like any of the whitecoat ultrasecret tech you've seen?"
Doc didn't reply.
Ryan saw the blank stare, the quivering lips, and realized at once that the old man was slipping away from reality. Doc had no power to control the fits of complete disorientation, which were the result of posttraumatic shock from the time leaps he had been forced to take. Leaps that had fractured his mind and broken his heart. In a second or two, he would either be talking aloud to his wife, Emily, and his beloved children, Rachel and Jolyon, at their dinner table, or arguing some unintelligible philosophy with a long-turned-to-dust academic crony.
"Come on, Doc," Ryan prodded.
The lights went back on behind Doc's eyes. He groaned, then shook his head to clear it.
Ryan repeated the question after the man had recovered his bearings. "The black armor, did you see it when you were captive to the whitecoats before skydark?"
The answer was disappointing.
"Sorry, Ryan, I've never seen anything like it."
"The way they're totally encased, helmets to boots," Mildred said, "it reminds me of the suits the NASA astronauts used to wear. They were pressurized for life support in space. Had their own, self-contained air and water supply, and sophisticated biometry and communication systems."
"Why would they be wearing something like that in Moonboy?" Krysty asked. "Nothing's wrong with the air around here."
"They'd be wearing it if they couldn't breathe our air or drink our water," Mildred said.
"We've never seen any people like that," Dean said.
"Never heard of anyone like that, either," J.B. added.
"Mildred, are you saying they might not be from Earth?" Ryan asked in astonishment.
"It is a possible explanation, however remote," the physician replied. "They could be extraterrestrials."
Fully recovered, Doc held up his hands. "My friends, I beg you to take a closer look. Whatever else they may be, these wayfarers are neither little nor green. And at this moment in time their point of origin, whether earthly or not, should be of less a concern to us than the potential threat they present. Have they weapons we cannot defeat?"
The one-eyed man smiled and nodded. "Our cannies might have their hands full trying to make dinner out these pilgrims."
"Can't count on the folks in armor doing the job for us," J.B. said. "What if the cannie bastards wait until dark to attack and then just get driven off? There's a whole lot of desert out there. We could lose them, Ryan."
"They're not going to wait."
"How do you know that?"
He pointed toward the entry road that led up from Highway 15. "I count four cannies, coming on the run."
As the companions watched, low-moving figures slipped around and through the rubble piles on the outskirts of the ville. The cannies split up, working themselves into position to attack Main Street. They crouched in plain view from the ridge top, their stationary heads and shoulders completely exposed to down-angled blasterfire.
They were challenging but not impossible targets.
Ryan gritted his teeth.
That was, if he'd still had a weapon that could reach out and touch somebody at one thousand yards.

Deathlands 49 - Shadow World
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