by James Axler
Apart from being a highly respected doctor, she was also a fine shot with a pistol, winning the individual silver medal in the Olympic Games of 1996 in Atlanta—the last ever Olympic Games.
Now, in Deathlands, her expertise with a good blaster hadn't deserted her.
Mildred had been briefly in the lead, taking over the point position from J.B. while he paused to try to wipe his glasses clear of the interminable rain. She held the butt of her revolver steady, index finger tucked in close to the trigger.
Dean had moved in second, right on her heels, with Doc helping Christina over the rougher parts of the mud-slick trail. J.B. was next to last, with Jak bringing up the rear.
The stocky black woman was momentarily happy. She relished the kind of high-adrenaline excitement of going out at the front of a patrol, through dark forest, with the certain knowledge that there were some seriously evil people close by.
The hideously mutilated corpse that they'd found after it had drifted down the pike—worse than anything she'd even seen during her brief flirtation with forensic pathology—had warned Mildred what might be waiting for all of them when they finally emerged above the head of the valley.
Her experience of Deathlands was still very limited, but she'd already seen and heard sufficient to be ready for the deepest pits of human suffering.
Now they were closing on where J.B. had guessed the camp of the stickies must be. There'd been the shooting and screams, the familiar stink of burning oil.
Now the ceaseless rain.
As she picked her way carefully upward, Mildred pondered on the changes in the weather. In predark times there'd been spring, summer, fall and winter. You had good days in winter and even more often there were miserable ones in the best of summers.
But not like in Deathlands.
There were still the seasons, but now there might be a sweltering day in January in the northern plains, with snow by evening; thunder before midnight and rain by dawn; fog in the morning and then more snow, followed by baking sun.
A whole year's weather in a single day.
She guessed it must be something to do with the searing radiation that had ravaged the entire world and still lingered in certain hot spots. J.B. had told her about the acid rain, now less common than fifteen years ago, which could strip a man to bare bones in a couple of hours.
Mildred made a mental note to ask John about the great gales that he said he'd heard about from old-timers, winds that would scour paint off trucks and bark off trees.
Ahead of her, the trail was almost invisible. Dawn was in the air, and she'd already heard the beginnings of the birds' chorus. The rain was depressing, and it numbed all the senses.
You couldn't see so well, and there was a tendency to keep your head lowered, so that the icy drizzle didn't blind you. It also blurred the hearing.
Mildred didn't see or hear the running, sliding figure until it was almost on top of her. She heard the gasp from someone behind her, and the beginnings of a warning yell from Jak.
Then it was only a heartbeat away from being too late.
A massive shape appeared, black against the blackness, clothes glittering with rain, water tumbling off shoulders and off the halo of lighter hair. A knife was gripped in the right hand, raised like a terminal benediction for her.
The man's mouth opened as he saw her, only ten paces away from him, and a strangled scream of terror and rage burst from his throat.
Mildred's survival reflex took over.
Her right arm straightened like a lunging sword, her left hand coming up to grip the other wrist. Both her eyes stared straight along the steel barrel, the foresight aligned with the back, drilling at the indistinct shape of the attacker's face.
There was time for only one bullet.
At the exact second that Mildred squeezed the trigger, the figure lurched, feet going out from under it in the wash of mud and rain that lay heavy on the trail. But the .38 round did its job.
Instead of punching a steel-jacket hole through the middle of the man's face, smack between the eyes, it hit a half inch above the left eye and drove up at a slight angle, the heavy frontal bone of the skull distorting it so that the bullet started to tumble. It shredded nearly a quarter of the man's brain before slamming against the upper part of the head, lifting a splintered chunk of the skull like a saucer, the scalp and sodden hair still attached.
Before Mildred could snap off a second round, she was sent flying by the man's flailing legs. His heavy body whacked into her, knocking the breath from her lungs and making her drop the revolver.
She slid down into the next person in line, who was Dean. He whooped in shock and cannoned into Doc and Christina, both of whom went over in a shower of slimy mud.
Jak and J.B. had a second's warning and they stepped neatly off the trail, clinging to some overhanging branches to help keep their balance.
Mildred saw a knife blade in front of her eyes and she grabbed at an arm, trying to fend it off, conscious that she was part of a cascading procession of uncontrolled bodies.
They'd been very close to the level of the stickies' camp, maybe even a little above it. With the rain and the dark it was close to impossible to be certain.
Now, they might have fallen fifty feet or five hundred feet.
Someone was screaming, a horrific, strangled, gurgling cry, like an elderly woman being forcibly drowned. Mildred wondered, amid the confusion, whether the voice might belong to her.
With a jerk that rattled her teeth, the downward momentum stopped. Mildred opened her eyes, wiping a coating of mud from her face, and saw that they'd been halted by the rotting, moss-covered stump of an old tree at the edge of a small clearing. The first light from the eastern sky was breaking through, over the tops of the high mountains, making it possible to see what was happening.
Dean was a few yards away, already scrambling to his hands and knees, spitting dirt and cursing. Doc was just below her and a little to one side, still hanging on bravely to Christina with one hand and his silver-topped cane with the other. The woman was half on top of him, face buried in his coat, kicking at something that had trapped her legs.
It was the figure that had triggered the chaotic panic.
Mildred blinked at the dead man lying sprawled at her feet, most of his face blown away. All she could tell in that first stunned moment was that he was tall, with hair so sodden with mud and blood it was hard to tell it might once have been white. He wore the ragged remains of a dark suit.
Above her she could hear J.B. and Jak picking their way down the greasy path.
"You all right?" the Armorer called, keeping his voice low.
"Sure. Think so. Few bruises and a lot of mud." She paused. "And a corpse."
"You got him?" There was delight in J.B.'s voice.
Jak arrived on the edge of the clearing, steadying himself, his white hair flaring like a dazzling burst of fresh snow. "Never saw him. Just shot. No time. You did good."
Mildred sniffed, pleased to get praise from the teenager. "Yeah. But I don't know who he is. Had a knife, I think."
Doc was on his feet, helping Christina to rise. "By the three Kennedys! I have not had such a thrilling adventure since I last rode Colossus at the mountain of magic."
J.B. was stooping over the body. "Not a stickie."
Mildred joined him. "Oh, God! You don't think he's a friend of Ryan, escaping from up there?"
The voice came from the fringe of trees. "Don't worry, Mildred, His name's Joe-Bob, and he's no friend of mine. No loss to anyone."
Chapter Thirty-Seven
"CLEAN IN AND out. Neat hole in and not much bigger going out."
"Musket ball," Ryan said, kneeling beside the black woman. "Low velocity. Tends not to fragment or distort. What did it hit?"
Abe was flat on his back at a turn in the winding path. His face was deathly gray in the watery morning sunlight, and he kept trying to reach down and hold himself.
"Didn't hit my balls, Ryan. Tell you that for nothing."
"Shame. One thing you never use."
Mildred patted Abe on the shoulder. "Knew a patient once. Lawyer. Most evil, corrupt and unpleasant man I ever saw. Found he had a growth on the colon. When we operated and took it out we found it was benign. Not cancerous. We told his wife—they were just starting a messy divorce—and she shook her head. 'Typical,' she said. 'You find the one part of the bastard that isn't malignant and you remove it.' Get it?"
Abe nodded. "Yeah. When I hear a doc making jokes I figure it's to cover the bad news up."
"No. Might have chipped the crest of the ilium— that's your hipbone—on the way through. But I don't think it did. Some muscle damage to the transversus abdominis. That'll heal quickly. Not like tendons." She hesitated.
"Here it comes." The wounded man sighed, biting his lip at a sudden spasm of pain.
"No. Only question is what it might have done on the inside."
"Like what?"
"Shouldn't have harmed the central nervous system. Not that far to the side. You got no trouble with moving arms or legs or anything, have you, Abe?"
"Don't know about anything, Doc."
"I'm Mildred. He's Doc." She gestured with her elbow toward Doc Tanner.
"Sorry, Doc. Both Doc and Doc."
She was pressing on his naked stomach, watching his face for a reaction, and touching him gently around the dark hole that was now only leaking a small amount of bright blood.
"Not too painful?"
"Had worse."
"Near as I can guess, it might just have nicked the ascending colon. Part of your guts, Abe. Don't worry too much about it. I think there'd be some evidence if the bullet had struck you there. Close to your appendix."
"That bad?"
"Take out your appendix with a musket ball? Drastic method of surgery, I suppose. Not likely to lead to any problems."
"No?"
"Apart from an extra belly button."
WITH SO MANY of them to help, it proved much easier to carry Abe along. They made something that was a cross between a stretcher and a travois, dragging the wounded man on the smoother sections of trail and taking turns to carry him when the going became more difficult. By noon they'd reached a wider trail, with the ruined remains of buildings that indicated the area had once been some sort of park. There were rotting benches perched near what must have been a spectacular scenic observation post.
The rain had been blown away, and it was a glorious morning. Above them they could see the trail leading toward a notch between two of the peaks, a place that Christina said was called Bear Claw Ridge.
"Pa used to hunt over that way. Plenty of goats, years ago. Small kind of township up there. All ruined. Snowed up most of the winter."
Now that the two parties were once again reunited, the disabled woman seemed much happier. But she kept very close to Jak, and her whole body language demonstrated the depths of her hostility toward Ryan.
As they traveled steadily along, Ryan and Krysty were able to fill in the others on what had been happening, learning themselves of the discovery of the mutilated corpse in the river and of J.B. hearing the group of lepers on their way toward the stickies' camp.
Harold and Dorina kept more to themselves, as though they were shy at suddenly finding themselves among this group of combatwise travelers.
They kept turning and looking behind them, more often than the others. Harold realized that Ryan had noticed, and grinned sheepishly. "Guess it's like having a fly on your neck you can never swat. Worried about the stickies."
"We all are."
Very soon after dawn, when they had just gotten back together, the sky to the south had been smeared with a huge black, oil cloud, rising like a finger of doom from the ravine where the old Anasazi settlement was hidden. Gradually the freshening breeze tore at its tip, shredding it, dissolving the dark pillar of thick smoke, spreading it far away, toward the distant east.
It was after noon before they spotted any sign of pursuit.
Krysty had been standing at another of the places where a dented metal marker indicated there had been a scenic observation post, this time with an added informative, period flavor.
Doc read it out in his orotund voice. "It is a historical marker, placed here by the good auspices of the New Mexico Historical Society, financed by a gift from Jim and Carla Wright of Albuquerque on July 4, 1990. It recalls the site where Eider Marcus Howell of the eighteenth Episcopalian conference saw a vision of the golden city of Halcia. As a consequence, an attempt was made immediately to build the city but this sadly failed after only six weeks due to lack of water." He turned and grinned at his listeners. "Upon my soul, dearly beloved brothers and sisters, but I love historical markers."
Amid the laughter, Krysty moved forward and placed one dark blue Western boot on the metal marker. She shaded her green eyes with a hand and posed as if staring into a biblical wilderness. "I see no city of Halcia."
"What do you see?" Ryan asked.
She smiled at him, looking back down into the valley . The smile disappeared. "I see a bunch of bastard stickies coming after us, Strawhead Charlie leading them."
They all crowded to the edge of the drop, staring back among the tall stands of timber where Krysty's finger pointed.
Jak's sight was never that good in bright sunlight and he blinked, turning to his wife. "You see?"
"Sure. I make about fifteen."
J.B. nodded his agreement. "Same here. They're way back."
"And we're way slow," she snapped, face crumpling, near tears. "Don't forget you got a sick, gut-shot man to carry, as well as a crip like me to slow everyone down."
J.B. stared at her, the sun reflecting off his glasses, making it hard to see the expiession in his eyes. "For an intelligent woman, Christina, you sometimes talk a load of crap. From where they are now it'll take close on two hours to reach this spot. We got the firepower to think about holding them off. But that could bring some other kind of threat down on us. So, we move on. All of us. Not just some of us. But all of us."
RYAN AND J.B. DISCUSSED the possibility of one of them staying behind to hide among the trees with the Steyr rifle and pick off two or three of their pursuers, dishearten them. But there was a serious risk that a lone sniper might get himself isolated and surrounded in the forest.
If not by the stickies, maybe by some of the fleeing lepers that might still be around.
So they moved higher, toward the beckoning haven of Bear Claw Ridge.
They stopped at regular intervals so that all of the men took a spell on the travois. Once it collapsed as the bindings fell apart, spilling Abe onto the narrow trail.
He hardly moaned as they helped him back on, and Mildred knelt quickly by him, laying her palm on his forehead.
"Hot," she said. "Getting feverish. Could be bad." She looked up at Ryan.
"Be at the top in less than an hour. Put out a rifle to cover the trail and take a rest."
"He might have to take more than just a few minutes. Lot of time until dark. I think he's going to need a break well before then."
"Leave me," Abe said, licking his lips.
"Shut it."
The comment drew a ghost of a smile. "Fuck you, too, Ryan. Give me a drink of water and leave me with a blaster. I can keep them off awhile."
Ryan considered it. If he'd thought Abe was critically wounded he wouldn't have hesitated to take him up on the offer. But there still seemed a chance of him pulling through.
"No."
"You done it before."
"That was then and this is now."
"I made it then, Ryan."
"Just shut the fuck up, will you?"
Christina moved to crouch over Abe, carefully tilting her canteen to enable him to sip from it.
"Thanks, lady."
Chapter Thirty-Eight
RYAN'S GUESSTIMATE of how long it would take them to reach the crest and Bear Claw Ridge
didn't take the lepers into account.
There were six of them.
Ryan had taken up point himself, with Krysty at his elbow. She had stopped him with a hand on his arm.
"Something ahead, lover."
"What?"
"Not good."
"Close?
"Yeah."
Ryan held up his hand, stopping the straggling line behind him. He heard a sigh of relief from Harold as he laid down his end of the stretcher, and a muffled moan from Abe as he was jolted back to earth.
"Krysty feels something up ahead," he said quietly. "Near."
"Bad?" J.B. asked, the Uzi machine pistol cradled under his arm.
She shook her head. "Odd. Can't tell. There's a kind of feeling of a threat, but it's like, far off. No. Don't know."
"Come on." Ryan beckoned to J. B. Dix, and, automatically, to Jak Lauren, catching the glance from Christina and cursing himself under his breath.
"Back soon," the albino teenager said, but his wife turned away from him.
THE PATH WIDENED and became less distinct at the same time, opening onto the remains of an old two-lane blacktop. A century of frost and sun had combined with weeds and bushes to break it up, but its course was still clear.
Off to the left, they could still hear the stream that had been their constant companion for the past few days.
This high it hadn't gathered the momentum from runoff water to turn it into a roaring brown torrent. Here it was just a narrow, shallow stream of ice-cold, milky water that surged over rounded boulders and tumbled across eroded ledges of granite and sandstone.
The blacktop was spotted with animal droppings. J.B. identified one recent pile as being almost certainly grizzly.
"Think that was what Krysty saw?" Jak asked, glancing around.
"Not usually animals," Ryan replied, "but you just never know, kid."
Jak turned and glared at him, then grinned. "Have own kid soon."