End Program

by James Axler

  “I don’t like being in a man’s debt,” Ryan finally added, breaking the silence. As he spoke, he switched his vision to infrared, scanning the figures above. They were alive—he had seen them move when he had arrived with Roma. In infrared, their bodies gave off heat. “So, if there’s anything my people can do—”

  “There is no debt to pay, Ryan Cawdor,” a male voice said, deep and resonant.

  It took Ryan a moment to pinpoint who had spoken, and he turned to face the man, holding up one hand up as if to shield his eyes and better see in the darkness. “I’m grateful for that. Can I ask why?”

  There was silence again, a long pause while Ryan waited. Finally, the resonant voice spoke again.

  “Humankind destroyed itself in a nuclear exchange one hundred years ago,” the voice said. “What little remains is barely enough to sustain the survivors. We in Progress plan to change that. We are working hard on a solution, or on multiple solutions, that will grant a reprieve for all that has been wrought on this once-great nation.”

  Memories of Judge Santee washed across Ryan’s mind, but he let it pass.

  “And the hardware in my eye?” Ryan asked. “Is that part of your solution?”

  Ryan waited once more while the room fell silent. Then a narrow spotlight came on, focusing solely on another figure, who had been waiting in the darkness. The man wore a gray robe with a headpiece that covered the forehead and back of his skull like a hood. Ryan automatically commanded his left eye to magnify, focusing on the man’s face. The headpiece looked to be made of plastic or metal, Ryan thought, while the man looked to be in middle age, with dark skin.

  “My name is Emil,” the man told Ryan. “I designed the hardware in your eye, along with my companions here—Una and Turing. What you are experiencing is an infinitesimal step toward the betterment of this world. Tiny steps are all we can expect at this moment, but that will change.”

  “You have an impressive setup here, Emil,” Ryan said. “I saw the dam out there. Krysty said you get your power from it.”

  “It takes a lot to power the future,” Emil told him. “We intend to make things perfect.”

  Ryan smiled. “Perfect’s a tall order.”

  “Rest assured, Mr. Cawdor—all we need is time,” Emil answered.

  Then the spotlight dimmed and the room was cast in darkness once more, the seven figures returned to shadows watching Ryan from above.

  “Thank you for your time,” Ryan said, dipping his head once, respectfully, before stepping back and returning to the elevator, where Roma stood waiting. A moment later, they were back in the lobby, making their way toward the exit, where the automated transport waited.

  Chapter Ten

  They were back in Hell. Their pilgrimage through the hellscape began again, picking up where it had left off.

  Ryan and his companions trekked across the ruined landscape, following a dirt road that was scored in the soil like a scab. The road nudged through overgrown fields of rapeseed and corn, an orchard full of skeletal trees—the apples withered and dead on their branches, poisoned by the toxins in the soil. Behind them, Progress soon became just a smear on the horizon, the smudge of white towers barely visible beside the winding silver snake of water. Ryan turned back occasionally, framing the ville in his sights and pulling up the magnification mode in his artificial eye. He would see the ville towers if he magnified the image, could make out the three-hundred-foot point where he had enjoyed an audience with the ruling cabal of the ville. How they had built such magnificent structures when all around them was devastated he could not imagine. It was a jewel amid the trash, a single diamond in the dirt.

  Up ahead there was little evidence of human life. No settlements, no buildings. Occasionally they would pass the foundations of something that looked like a building, but it had been razed to the ground so long ago that what remained looked like a floor plan carved into the dirt, more like a game of pick-up-sticks than a place a human could ever have lived.

  Ryan led the way, the SIG Sauer holstered back at his hip, the Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster held across his shoulders like an old days’ milkmaid’s rig. Beside him, Krysty walked along with a spring in her step, still dressed in the white clothes that she had acquired while in Progress, her old clothes folded neatly into a knapsack she had hooked over one shoulder along with her bearskin coat. She wouldn’t need a fur coat out here, not with the sun beating down on what was left of California.

  Doc and J.B. huddled along behind the couple, bickering about some point of geography until Mildred saw fit to pull them apart. Mildred was walking beside Ricky, swapping stories about his childhood on Monster Island, hers in twentieth-century Alabama, where her skin color was still an issue to some.

  “I don’t believe anyone would hate you because of that,” Ricky said with wide-eyed innocence.

  “Hate’s too clever a word,” Mildred mused. “It implies that the people who did it actually had the smarts to know what it was they were doing.”

  “Hate makes the world go ’round, Millie,” J.B. opined, overhearing their conversation during a lull in his own.

  Mildred shook her head. “I don’t believe that. Humankind’s meant for more than hate.”

  Doc turned back, his face an expression of sorrow. “Much as it pains me to admit,” he said, “it seems that the more I see of this world, the more I am inclined to agree with J.B.’s outlook. Hate fuels so much of this world, it is hard to ever see a time past it.”

  “And what about Progress?” Mildred asked, indicating the distant towers of the ville behind them. “They helped us when they didn’t have to, when they could have just left us all to die. You think hate is at the heart of their philosophy?”

  “They exist because of the damage wrought by man on his own home,” Doc said. “That ville grew up on a spot where man’s hate and fear made him bury a military time bomb, the redoubt waiting to be accessed. We only arrived there because of that fear, that distrust that destroyed the world and almost everyone in it.”

  “But we arrived and we got help,” Mildred argued. “I’d see that as a victory for humanity, wouldn’t you?”

  Behind the others, Jak tuned out the babble of debate and scanned the territory around them. He was a tracker by nature, attuned to changes in wind direction and intensity, to scents and sights and the mood of any environment he found himself in. He hadn’t liked the ville so much—it had been too built-up for him, all those paving slabs, balconies and verandas, all that artificiality slung down amid the natural. When he hadn’t been out scouting with Ricky, he had spent much of his time scouting on his own, or simply sitting down by the river where he could be closer to nature.

  Jak didn’t talk about those things. Heck, Jak didn’t talk about much of anything if he could help it. When he did speak, it was in fractured sentences, broken syntax.

  But Jak knew stuff; stuff that other people missed. He could focus his senses and get a feel for a place that other people wouldn’t detect. It wasn’t something he switched on and off, it simply was what Jak was. That’s why he made such a good point man and scout.

  Right now, he hung a little way back from the others, alert to his surroundings but also aware of the technological marvels that lay behind them back in Progress. A ville like that had weapons, Jak figured; that stood to reason. They might have shown kindness to the companions, but even a cannie showed kindness to a fella long enough to take a bite from him. Catching people unawares might just as well be the motto of the Deathlands, when it came down to it.

  Jak looked around furtively, scanning the emaciated trees that lined the left-hand side of the trail, the overgrown tangle of crops that ran along the right. The crops changed now and again, here rapeseed, there maize, but they all looked pretty much untended to, their once-neat rows ramshackle, spilling out and vying for space. Insects buzzed around,
birds too, pollinating and pecking at the seeds as was their wont. The birds were big predatory things that most likely preferred a diet of meat to seeds. That’s why there weren’t any smaller birds, Jak guessed—the big ones had eaten all the little ones long ago.

  This place had a smell to it; a smell of burned crops, like farms in the fall. But it wasn’t fall. Although the nukecaust had altered the Earth’s environment dramatically, shifting seasons and rewriting their effects, it was still clear to Jak that this place, wherever they were, was experiencing the start of summer. The leaves on the trees and bushes were a healthy green, the grass at their feet the same. But that smell, that scent of burning vegetation—that was wrong. The sun wasn’t intense enough to start fires yet, and Jak had spent the past two weeks in this place, he knew it was getting warmer not cooler.

  “Ryan,” Jak whispered. He was way back from the group now, thirty or forty paces at least, standing on his own on the dusty trail.

  Ryan and the others halted, turning to face Jak. Ricky, youngest and most impetuous of their number, was already drawing his blaster, the Webley Mk VI, whipping it out from its holster in a flash.

  “What is it, Jak?” Ryan asked.

  “Smoke,” Jak said, sniffing at the air. “That way.”

  Jak pointed and the companions looked in that direction, searching for a hint of the smoke he had detected. Ryan engaged the magnification in his artificial eye, scanning the horizon the way he used to do with his longblaster’s scope.

  “See anything?” J.B. asked from behind him. He had a pair of mini-binoculars up to his eyes now, retrieved from his satchel.

  “No...wait...yes,” Ryan said, watching the horizon. There was smoke there, dark wisps of it curling among the trees.

  “Want to take a closer look-see,” J.B. asked, “or should we get moving?”

  Ryan weighed the options for a moment. Keeping a wide berth until they were well clear of whatever was burning was probably the smart choice, but it left them open to whatever had caused it coming up behind them. Better to go look, not get too close mebbe, and assess what had happened. “We’ll take a look,” Ryan said, then added, raising his voice, “Everyone on triple red. Let’s not let anything sneak up on us from here on in.”

  Ricky began to argue. “We never let anyth—”

  Mildred silenced him with a look as she pulled her Czech-made ZKR 551 target pistol from the holster at her hip. “Ryan says stay alert,” she told him, “he means it. Got it?”

  Ricky nodded, chastised. “Got it.”

  The group trudged through the lemon grove to their right and made their way toward the source of the smoke. They trekked across overgrown fields, where crops had grown so tall they loomed well above Ryan’s head. The crops were some kind of cereal, narrow stalks a pleasing golden color, but they had grown so thick that they had become tangled, and in places the crops stood almost like a fence barring the companions’ way. Ryan and J.B. used their knives to hack their way through the densest parts, while Doc used his sword stick to do likewise.

  “Sure is a quick way to dull a knife,” J.B. lamented as he hacked through a plaited tangle of golden stalks.

  “We’ll sharpen them after,” Ryan replied, sweat glistening on his arms and forehead. It was proving harder going than he had anticipated.

  As the others pushed on through the wall of crop, Krysty halted, her head rotating slowly as if she was scenting the air. Mildred turned back, realizing that Krysty was already dropping behind them where she stood.

  “What is it?” Mildred asked.

  Krysty’s emerald eyes seemed almost to glow for a moment, as if they had caught a shaft of moonlight in darkness. Her hair had tensed around her head, coiling in on itself like a pit of venomous snakes.

  “Krysty?” Mildred prompted.

  “Danger.” Krysty uttered the word with a strain of emotion. “The field... The plants are on fire.”

  Mildred stared at Krysty for a moment, and only then did the full weight of her words sink in. “This field?” Mildred asked, her voice barely a whisper.

  Krysty nodded as her hair clung to her skull. “Yes. If we don’t do something, we’re all going to burn.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Krysty was a mutie, with an empathic connection to Gaia, goddess of the Earth. She could sense things that others couldn’t, draw on the wellspring of energy given to her by the Earth Mother. She also knew about flowers and plants like no one Mildred had ever met, but she was no gardener—this was more than that, an ability to almost “tune in” to the plant life around her, the way a person might have tuned in the frequency on an old transistor radio back in the day.

  By now, the others had stopped hacking at the tight-packed rows of corn, aware that the two women of the group were discussing something of import.

  “Krysty?” Ryan asked.

  “The field’s on fire,” Krysty said. “We have to move quickly or we’ll be caught up in it.”

  “Where?”

  Krysty pointed, ahead and to the left. “That way, small but building rapidly.”

  Doc licked his index finger and held it aloft. “The wind’s coming from that direction,” he stated after a moment’s consideration. “If there is fire, it will be moving this way.”

  Ryan peered in the direction Krysty had indicated, cursing the thick growth of corn that blocked his vision. He switched his robotic eye to infrared vision, gazed for a moment into the distance hoping he might be able to peer through the crop—but it was no good, all he saw was the same image painted in eerie, luminescent streaks. The eye would take some getting used to—and now wasn’t the time.

  At the same time, Ricky crouched and made a stirrup of his hands, which Jak stepped into to be lifted into the air until he could see—just barely—over the tops of the yellow corn.

  “Smoke,” Jak confirmed. “Corn like candles. People too.”

  It wasn’t much to go on—Jak’s explanations rarely were, with his abbreviated patois—but it painted a clear picture of what was happening: the tops of the corn were on fire, and fire spread.

  “They could be burning off the crops to clear the field of pests,” Doc proposed. “It is not unheard of.”

  “We’d never be that lucky,” J.B. griped, handing his binoculars up to Jak. “What do you see?”

  Jak used the binocs to scan the area more carefully. There was a farmhouse about a hundred yards away and almost directly ahead of them, and a barn towered nearby over to the right, its high roof gleaming in the sunlight. Several motorbikes in good condition were parked outside the farmhouse, with two riders waiting. The riders held burning torches. Jak related what he had seen to the others.

  “They don’t sound like farmers clearing the fields,” Mildred said ominously.

  “We’ll split up,” Ryan stated, nodding.

  “That barn would be a good spot to pick people off if you’re setting up an ambush,” J.B. proposed.

  Ryan stared at him querulously. “Us or them?” he asked.

  “Either,” J.B. replied. “Me and Doc’ll check it out.”

  “Carefully,” Doc added.

  With that, the two men moved off to the right, pushing their way through the overgrown stalks of corn. In a moment they had disappeared, the thick cornstalks closing behind them like a golden curtain.

  Jak and Ricky moved in the opposite direction, pushing onward via a circuitous route toward the farmhouse, granting the approaching fire a wide berth.

  That left Ryan with the two women. They would approach more cautiously, holding back a little and relying on Krysty’s strong connection to the natural life around her to steer them away from the fire as it spread.

  Ryan barged his way between the close-knit stalks, occasionally employing his panga to cut back the most tangled of the stalks. Krysty joined
him, producing her own hunting knife from a sheath to hack at the tangled stalks.

  Mildred had her blaster in her hand, scanning the field for signs of danger. The reality was that anyone could sneak up on the companions at any time while they were here in this field—the crop was so thick that they would not know they were being attacked until their assailants were almost upon them. Mildred was a crack shot. She trusted her wits and speed to at least give them a fighting chance if it happened.

  * * *

  CLOSE BY, J.B. and Doc made their own path toward the barn looming at the edge of the field. The barn was all but hidden by the thick curtain of gold, but its high roof could just be seen, a streak of red resting above the highest spokes of the crop. They found the easiest route they could, using their blades only occasionally to cut aside the most truculent of the golden crop. Dust flew all around, a haze of golden specks from the corn.

  “By the Three Kennedys, ’tis hard work this. How far do we have to go?” Doc asked. He sounded breathless.

  “Hundred fifty yards mebbe,” J.B. told him, using his combat knife to hack at another tangled spike of corn.

  “Slow going,” Doc muttered, shaking his head.

  “Tough terrain,” J.B. replied, tying a rag around his neck and pulling it up over his mouth and nostrils to help filter out the flying corn dust.

  Doc followed suit, wrapping his handkerchief over the lower part of his face.

  It wasn’t far now—they just had to keep ahead of the spreading flames.

  * * *

  JAK FOLLOWED A more circuitous route through the overgrown fields, with Ricky keeping up behind him. Jak was lithe and athletic, and his smaller frame was better suited to finding or creating gaps in the tangled, mutie crop.

  “You have any idea what’s ahead of us?” Ricky asked, keeping the volume of his voice down.

  Jak sniffed the air, searching left and right for his next pathway. “Death,” Jak replied grimly. One way or another, that’s always what smoke meant.