Moon Fate

by James Axler

  Ryan nodded. "Yeah. You take care, too." He turned to J.B. "Later," he said.

  "Right."

  Harold and Dorina were standing near the door, holding hands and looking like a couple of orphans of the storm.

  "Good luck," Harold said. "If you want, I'll stay with you."

  "Thanks. But you go."

  "Pay off some more of the debt for me, Ryan."

  Huddled in a man's coat, Dorina looked, absurdly, even younger. If he hadn't known, Ryan would probably have taken her for eight years old.

  "Yeah," he said. "Even up the score if I can for you."

  There was no point in telling her that he hoped he wouldn't even have to pull the trigger on the stickies. That wasn't the idea of the plan at all.

  FINALLY THEY WERE all gone.

  Abe was still sunk deep into a blank coma, eyes closed, a thin line of saliva dribbling from the corner of his mouth. His respiration was way down, and his pulse had dropped so far it was difficult to register it at the pressure point in his wrist.

  Jak and Ryan had stood in the main entrance of the multiplex, watching the line of shadows move away into the setting sun, watching them until the last one had waved and vanished.

  The albino teenager turned away, looking at the squat building behind them. "Best check out all around," he said.

  Ryan took a deep breath, savoring the delicious scents of piñon and sagebrush that floated across the plateau of Bear Claw Ridge. The light was fading fast.

  "Wish we could meet them out here."

  Jak grinned. "Like old times, Ryan."

  "Sure. You and me, head-to-head, eye to eye. But we got to go inside and hide in the dark. Watch over Abe. And hope those stickie sons of bitches walk on by."

  BEAR CLAW RIDGE had never been a winter settle­ment. No, never at all.

  The blacktop generally became difficult in Septem­ber, with four-wheels able to pick a cautious way through. By October the red barrier came down and the route up was closed off.

  A few cross-country jocks would try to ski and climb up to the notch, but everything was shut and everyone had gone. Gradually it became a ghost town from autumn right through to late April or May.

  The thick walls of the Beacon Multiplex Cinema were well insulated, and a powerful generator kept it heated until the caretaker came in the spring to open up again. Like Telluride, not that far to the north, Bear Claw Ridge had its own film festival, specializ­ing in cult classics from the previous century and for­gotten directors.

  But it was a long drive, and the motel was archaic and uncomfortable. The planetary holocaust of Jan­uary, 2001, only completed the process of the little township's slow death.

  There was a ragged, brittle poster still clinging to a wall in the old lobby, high up in a corner. The last double bill of Beacon, at its largest screen in September of the year 2000: Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, playing in tandem with Dario Argento's early master­piece, L'ucello dalle piume di cristallo.

  In a dusty corner was a collection of discarded ticket stubs from the last day's performance, rustling like dried leaves in a graveyard. The interior was surpris­ingly undamaged, partly due to the extreme isolation of the place. Only the occasional hunter had passed by the ville during the drifting decades, while the sturdy construction of the cinema had kept it tight and solid.

  The smell of damp and urine permeated the inte­rior, as it did in any similar building anywhere in Deathlands. But many of the seats remained in the three auditoriums and the tattered silver rags of one of the screens still hung in place. The maroon flock pa­per dangled in baroque peeling strips, and a carving of a pair of peacocks glowered down from above the projection box.

  Ryan had seen pictures of movie houses in old books and magazines, had even seen flickering glimpses of them on the rare old vid. But this was the best preserved one he'd ever seen.

  "Shame we don't have popcorn and grape sodas," he said to Jak, who looked at him as though he'd sug­gested some delicacy from the planet Mercury.

  Abe was sleeping in the largest of the viewing rooms, beneath a tilted sign that proclaimed it as Screen One.

  "Catch us here and chilled," Jak said, glancing around the windowless box, with its single entrance and exit doors. Outside, the light was failing fast, and its filtered rays were barely penetrating the audito­rium.

  Ryan had to agree. "Have to move Abe out of here. There's a broken display counter in the main lobby. Get him behind that. I'll take that projection box. Got a trap out onto the roof. I checked it before everyone left."

  "Me?" Jak asked.

  "Where do you want to be?"

  The red eyes darted around the dimly lighted room. "Could be one stays Abe?"

  "Yeah, I'll go with that." Ryan bit at his lip, con­sidering the teenager's idea. "Look, Abe's my friend. My problem. My responsibility. You take that little room up there, Jak. And I'll stick down in the lobby with Abe."

  ABE DIDN'T MOVE a muscle as he was carried up the shallow stairs and out through the broken swing doors into the main access area of the multiplex cinema.

  Ryan lifted up the broken plastic counter and made a shelter with it, covering Abe and leaving himself enough room to slide in beside him. It was a good fire position with a fine range across the entrance to the main doors. He could see anyone coming into the Beacon either from outside or from the SkyHi Mall along the way.

  Jak vanished into the dark, through a concealed door and up a narrow flight of stairs into the little projection box, with its rusting and broken comp control equipment that had run the vid films for all three of the theaters in the complex.

  Ryan stood a moment, trying to guess what it must have been like to visit a picture palace in the old, pre-nuke days. He knew that movies had once been the great family attraction in the United States, but he wasn't altogether clear about when that had been. He thought it could have covered the last quarter of the twentieth century, but it might have been fifty years earlier than that. Information about social life before the blurring effect of the long winters was incredibly hard to come by.

  Doc was sometimes helpful, but his own sense of any time scale was so confused and erratic that he had once sworn to Ryan that he had actually seen the Apache war chief, Geronimo, driving in a gleaming Cadillac automobile.

  And Ryan knew that was ridiculous.

  He checked out Abe, but there didn't seem much change. If anything his breathing seemed to be a little more steady and his pulse was just a tad stronger. But he was still deeply unconscious, occasionally moan­ing and muttering something inaudible.

  On an impulse Ryan decided to go outside.

  He eased open the small door, calling out a warn­ing. "Me, Jak."

  "Okay."

  "Going out."

  "They coming?"

  "Don't know. Going to take a look and see if I can spot them."

  "Careful."

  "Sure." He pushed the door closed again, feeling it fit snugly into the padded wall.

  The main door moved at a touch, and he was out into the New Mexico night. The temperature had fallen sharply in the past half hour, and Ryan could see his own breath as it plumed around him. Unless it was bitterly cold, you could prevent that by blowing hard and taking shallow breaths in and out.

  There was a slice of moon sailing calmly behind banks of raggedy cloud. It reflected off the acres of broken glass along the frontage of the SkyHi Mall, making it seem to glow like a magical fortress.

  There was no sign of life, though Ryan caught the far-off sound of a pack of coyotes hunting its prey through the late evening.

  There was a narrow soft shoulder at the edge of the blacktop, and he walked there, feeling his boots sink­ing silently into the dirt, keeping the belt of conifers close to his left side. He had the rifle across his back, the SIG-Sauer drawn and ready in his right hand.

  Twice he stopped and crouched, squinting toward the point where the trail opened onto the overgrown highway. But there was no movement. Nothing broke the p
lane of the horizon.

  Halfway toward it, Ryan stopped, dropping to his knees.

  Something was there, keeping low, on the opposite side of the blacktop, about three hundred yards away from him. For several long minutes there wasn't a flicker of movement. But Ryan knew his instinct was right.

  There was a hunting owl behind him, passing over­head like a vengeful spirit, its fawn wing feathers tipped with silver. It floated toward the far side of the road, suddenly cutting up and away as it neared where Ryan had seen someone hide.

  It was enough.

  The stickies had arrived, and it was time to go back to the multiplex and hide.

  And wait.

  Chapter Forty-One

  IT WAS SO EASY to get back into the Beacon Cinema without alarming any of the stickies. The screen of the trees gave a perfect backdrop, and the soft shoulder swallowed up any sounds.

  Ryan paused for a moment by the doors, staring back into the gloom, trying the traditional hunter's trick of looking a little to the side of what you actu­ally want to see.

  But there was nothing moving out there.

  He'd carried out a full recce of the complex of ru­ined buildings, finding that there were a couple of back ways into the multiplex movie house—an emer­gency fire exit around the back that had probably doubled as a staff entrance, and a narrow broken window at the side away from the mall, in what had once been the rest rooms.

  There was a security bar inside the door, and Ryan had managed to jam it into place to keep it closed. A serious attack would easily shift the bar, but it would also make a terrific clatter and give plenty of warn­ing.

  Ryan took a last look through the smeared arma-glass, pausing as he thought he detected movement in the watery moonlight. But it didn't much matter now. The stickies were on their way and would reach Bear Claw Ridge in a matter of minutes.

  The one-eyed man opened the hidden door a cou­ple of inches. "Coming, Jak," he whispered.

  "Ready."

  He crossed the lobby, knelt and wriggled under the makeshift barricade, alongside the motionless figure of Abe, who stirred for a moment. "Recon the LMG action, Trader," he said in a clear voice.

  Ryan clenched his fist, ready to punch Abe out if he showed any signs of making further noise. But the man had slipped back deep into his own personal darkness.

  TIME PASSED.

  Every nerve strained, Ryan could almost hear time passing.

  As the night grew colder, the building began to shrink around him. Contractions of the tiniest frac­tions of inches in the concrete and the underpinning steel girders made faint sounds like a raw fingertip rubbing on the inside of a long-buried lead coffin.

  Every noise tugged at Ryan's attention. Each time it happened he listened harder, wondering if it could be a stickie trying to crawl in through the broken win­dow at the side of the building.

  He glanced down at his luminous wrist chron.

  It was just after eight o'clock.

  The wind was rising, and Ryan's keen hearing could catch the shuffling sound of dried leaves being whisked against the broken outer doors.

  Ten more minutes crept by.

  He wondered what was going through Charlie's mind, out there in the chill night.

  THE LEADER OF the stickies was less than a hundred paces away, crouched in the darkness at the edge of the forest, listening to the breeze as it stirred the branches above his head. His force was stretched out behind him, waiting for his next order.

  Charlie's mind was clear and calm, and he was humming a dissonant tune to himself. He reviewed his options and thought back over the past twenty-four hours.

  "Good and bad," he whispered. "Bad and good. Bad times. Good times. Bood and gad. Tad bimes and—" His face suddenly shifted and contorted into a mask of malevolent anger. "Fucking Ryan Caw­dor!"

  The man behind him caught the words and leaned closer. "What, Charlie?"

  "Nothing, Tony, nothing. Go back to sleep, will you?"

  "Not sleeping, Charlie." There was a note of panic in the stickie's voice, as though his heart had leaped for cover behind his ribs.

  "Sure, sure."

  From what Charlie had been able to piece together, it looked as though that triple-slut Marcie had been up to her old tricks again.

  At least she'd paid the final price.

  Charlie felt a passing tightness around his groin as he recalled some sweating, shuddering moments with Marcie.

  It must have been the woman who'd liberated Ryan from the kiva at the very time that the lepers had at­tacked. Charlie's first gut reaction had been that it had been a crowd of norms storming in on a rescue mis­sion.

  It had been a brief time of relief when he'd realized that it was nothing more threatening than a mob of stump-fingered lepers.

  But they'd been lucky, timing their strike for the middle of the night, when stickies were never at their best.

  Charlie grinned toothlessly in the darkness. Stick­ies were never at their best.

  Then there had been the fires and the explosions, beginning among the stores of black powder and lamp oil.

  The flames and thunderous booms had delighted the stickies, sending them capering wilding into the gunfire of the lepers. For a time it had been in the balance, and only Charlie and his Uzi had tipped the scale in his favor.

  But the encampment had been destroyed, many of the ancient buildings finally reduced to blackened heaps of shattered red brick.

  Charlie had ordered a few of the older men to stay with the surviving women and children, telling them to get everything ready to move to a new site while he took the rest of the stickie men with him on the ven­geance trail.

  "Clever fuckhead, Cawdor," he whispered, eyes raking the shapes of the small ville ahead of him.

  And he'd fallen for it, his mind clouded by the gib­bering antics of his followers, letting them go surging down the steep side of the valley where the river pounded and raged, watching them slide and fall. Only when one of the older stickies slipped into the torrent and was whirled screaming to his death did Charlie finally come to his senses.

  "No. They've gone up!" he yelled. "Gone higher up."

  The trail of the travois was the clue, the deep fur­rows along the damp mud, sometimes vanishing where Ryan and his companions had lifted their wounded man with them. Or wounded woman. Charlie didn't know which, and didn't care, either.

  Then it had been a question of plodding uphill. Stickies weren't great hikers, and Charlie had to keep on chivying them, kicking and cursing the stragglers. At times he'd only had a half dozen with him, then they all had to stop and wait for the rest to catch up. He knew he couldn't risk going up against the well-armed Ryan and his group unless he had all his power with him.

  Which meant around twenty in total.

  Now darkness had overtaken them all and he was stuck in the wilderness by the old blacktop, wonder­ing where Ryan had gone. His guess was that he'd probably be hiding among the buildings of the little ville, ready for an ambush.

  Or had he gone through, hoping to fool Charlie again? Was he even now making a cautious, slow es­cape down the trail on the far side? Charlie knew the region well, and he was aware of the escape route off the plateau. It was utterly hopeless in adverse weather, but walkable the rest of the year.

  Walkable, with care, even in the semidarkness of the night.

  "What we doin', Charlie?"

  "Shut your mouth, Tony. I'm thinking about it, aren't I?"

  He heard the man pass this information back down the line.

  "Boss Charlie's thinkin' about it."

  "Charlie's thinkin'."

  "Think."

  Running his fingers through the mane of bright yellow hair, Charlie suddenly stood.

  "Come on," he said. "Let's go and take us a good look."

  FROM HIS HIDING PLACE, Ryan could just see out through the doors, but the armored glass was so dirty and cracked that it was almost impossible to make out any details.

  However, he
saw the arrival of the stickies.

  A darting white figure, close by the doors, almost brushed against it with his shoulder. There and gone in a second.

  Ryan steadied the SIG-Sauer and eased back far­ther into the shelter.

  He heard feet moving inside the outer doors, then saw a suckered hand, deathly white in the moonlight, reaching around the edge of the inner doors ready to push them open.

  Ryan's finger tightened on the trigger.

  And Abe started to cry.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  J.B. WAS WALKING second, almost on the heels of Christina.

  Despite her disability, and the built-up surgical boot on her left foot, the woman was making a good pace. She limped along so fast that Doc and Harold, near the back of the group, had to keep on asking her to slow down.

  "You have some passing familiarity with this ter­rain, madam," the old man complained. "But it is utterly alien to us. And the silver beams of the night's huntress are somewhat nugatory for our purposes."

  "What the fuck's he on about?" Dorina asked, still clinging to Harold's chubby arm.

  Krysty answered her. "Doc means that there isn't much moonlight."

  "Why don't he say so? And when we goin' to take us a break?"

  J.B. held up a hand. "Everyone quiet. Krysty, you hear anything?"

  "Nothing. How long since we left Ryan?"

  The Armorer glanced at his wrist chron. "Just gone half-past eight."

  "More than an hour," Mildred said. "Surely something must've happened by now."

  J.B. nodded. "Figure the stickies must be around the ville by now."

  The black woman bent and rubbed at the muscles along the front of her thighs. "Funny how going downhill's sometimes worse than going up." She straightened. "Wonder if Abe's still alive."

  Krysty was staring back up along the trail, toward its invisible crest.

  "I can't tell," she said, her voice carrying a bitter, ragged note of desperation. "Mildred, I just can't tell."

  THE DOOR OPENED and a cold draft came crawling over the lobby floor, bringing dried leaves with it. They rustled up against Ryan's chest, sticking in Abe's hair.