by James Axler
Hours passed and the UCV survived a dozen more stingwing attacks before the winged muties finally gave up and the war wag rolled on through the growing jungle in relative peace. Colorful birds sang from the trees, and swarms of bees buzzed over fields of brightly colored flowers.
At noon, the companions shifted positions, Ryan taking the wheel and Krysty going to the back to eat some hundred-year-old military chicken chow mien right out of the Mylar envelope.
It was late afternoon before they found the outskirts of the city. The landscape was rough and irregular, and there was a lot of young corn growing in abundance, far too much of it to be anything but a cultivated field gone wild. Scattered among the plants were sagging wooden buildings, slowly returning to the earth from which they had been raised. Then a section of asphalt appeared through the grass, and a hundred feet later came a highway sign sticking out of a huckleberry bush, followed by more asphalt, loose piles of rubble. As they crested a low hill, the radar began to steadily tone as a predark city spread out in front of them.
Switching off the device, Krysty slowed their speed and proceeded carefully toward the ruins.
“Alas, Babylon,” Doc sighed.
Crumbling buildings extended in every direction, a few of them reduced to bare metal bones, the steel beams making cubist designs in the darkening sky. Most of the rooftops were covered with green moss, and several had small trees growing out of the windows.
“Looks pretty good,” Ryan said, drawing the SIG-Sauer.
“Not sure,” J.B. said, scrutinizing a plastic-coated map from his munitions bag. “There are a couple of cities near this area, but nothing marked as this big. Then again, whole continents shifted during skydark, so this could be a few miles out of place, or something from the next state. I’ll know for sure once we stop and I can use the sextant.”
Keeping to the main roads, Krysty drove the UCV through the suburban jungle, only twice having to use the fork to shift aside wrecked cars or trucks. There were a lot of potholes, but the depressions did little to jar the occupants of the eight-wheeled war wag.
The empty eyes of dark houses stared at the companions in passing, the yards tangles of brambles, cars in the driveways reduced to sagging lumps of corrosion, telephone poles tilting at crazy angles, dead power lines dangling like leafless vines. Only the small fiberglass satellite dishes perched on the occasional roof seemed undamaged, the receivers still patiently looking at the sky for encoded signals that would never come again.
The rotting houses changed to burned-out stores, and then decaying office buildings rose around the companions. Parking the armored vehicle in the middle of an intersection, Krysty made sure there was clearance on every side, and that she could see anything coming.
In every direction, dry leaves covered the cracked asphalt, cresting into small windblown mounds reaching three feet tall. Most of the store windows were gone, the glass broken a long time ago, either from looters or the weather. Both would have destroyed anything usable inside.
At the end of one street, a swinging sign marked the former location of a library, but now there was only flat ground marred with a few loose piles of broken bricks.
“Krysty and Jak, guard the wag,” Ryan said. “Everybody else with me. No solo exploring. We keep this tight! We need supplies. Food is the goal, so keep that in mind.”
Working the bolt on the aft door, Ryan waited for any reaction from his rad counter. When it remained silent, he opened the door a crack, his hand tight on the handle to slam it closed again. But there still was no reaction. Satisfied, he swung the armored slab aside and breathed in the cool evening air. There was a strong smell of plants, along with the reek of mildew, but that was pretty standard for eastern ruins.
Gathering in a loose group, the companions waited near the vehicle for something to attack, then nodded to Krysty and Jak inside the wag and headed off on foot. Behind them, they heard the door swing shut with a muffled boom, and then lock tight.
“Okay, we work in groups of two, with J.B. as the anchor,” Ryan directed. “Nobody goes anywhere alone. If you gotta piss, the other person holds it for you. Savvy?”
Nodding, the others started across the old pavement, the dried leaves crunching underfoot as if the companions were crossing a field of cornflakes. A soft breeze blew more leaves off the rooftops and stirred the few tattered curtains hanging in broken window frames. Ryan noticed some tiny movements near a gutter, but it was only some mice consuming a dead lizard.
Staying in a loose group, the companions moved across the intersection. Sitting on their bare-steel rims, the rubber tires eaten long ago, dozens of wags were parked along the side streets, a huge collection of them all mixed together at a crosswalk, grinning skeletons peering out from the dim interiors, one of them still wearing sunglasses and a backward baseball cap.
Staying a safe distance away, Ryan stood guard while J.B. went to a police car to check the door. It was closed, but unlocked, and he covered his mouth and nose before opening it wide. Waiting a few moments for the fresh air to circulate inside, he then checked the ragged clothing of the chilled officer behind the wheel. The ammunition in the desiccated corpse’s gunbelt was discolored, useless, the pistol missing. Typical. The whistle looked in good shape, and the handcuffs were perfect. Having no use for either, he passed them over.
Forcing open the trunk, Doc discovered a weapons rack holding a pump-action shotgun. The weapon was dull with age, the wooden stock deeply cracked. Checking under the floor mat, he found a lockbox and retrieved the keys hidden there to unlock the rack and free the weapon. The pump did not want to move, so Doc used a pocketknife to turn the screws and disassemble the blaster. Soon there fell out four 12-gauge cartridges, the red plastic firm, the brass bottom shiny and unblemished. Doc passed them over to the Armorer, and they were gratefully accepted.
“Funny to think of the ammo sitting there for a hundred years,” Mildred said, shifting her med kit to a more comfortable position. “How many people walked through these ruins, right past a baron’s fortune in ammo?”
“Can’t find what you don’t know exists,” J.B. said philosophically, tucking the cartridges into his munitions bag.
The rest of the wags were piled with luggage and cartons, toys and blankets, people fleeing the city with whatever possessions would fit into their vehicles. There might have been something usable buried deep among the goods, but the companions continued the recce for the time being.
Past the jumbled collision was a flatbed eighteen-wheeler that had crashed into the side of a hardware store. If there had been any bodies, they were gone by now, consumed by time, mice and insects. However, J.B. found a couple of road flares behind the front seat in fairly decent shape, and Jak unearthed the windfall of a full box of .38 bullets in the glove compartment, the plastic wrapping still sealed. If the driver had been carrying a blaster, it was nowhere in sight. Probably taken by looters too stupe to look for spare brass.
“Huzzah!” Doc cried, hauling a thermos out from under the seat and tucking it into his frock coat. The contents would be putrefied, if not mummified, but with some very careful washing, using a great deal of strong soap, the thermos could be safely salvaged.
Going to a cab, Mildred glanced through the windows at the desiccated driver and passenger. The dead man in the back was still holding a cell phone, the bearded driver resting a clawed hand on top of a box of doughnuts. The woman almost salivated at the sight. Doughnuts. The very word filled her mouth with sweet memories of gentler days.
Most of the stores nearby had their display windows smashed open, the interiors filled with leaves and rubbish. But even if they were intact, the companions would not have wasted time doing a recce on a tanning salon, weight-reduction clinic, ice-cream parlor, real-estate office or Madam Olga, the psychic adviser. However, across the street was a gun store.
With the 9 mm SIG-Sauer in hand, Ryan assumed the point position. The protective grille had been torn loose and, as expected, the interio
r was absolutely empty, the wall shelves and glass display cases containing only dust, packing and the stiff oily paper that most handguns were wrapped in as protection during shipment, nothing more. There was a small gun range in the rear, but the usual barrels of spent brass had been taken. Pity. A lot of folks knew how to make black powder, but not how to make the primer that went into the bottom of the brass to ignite the powder. More than once they had found a gun store or police station looted to the walls, but the precious brass left behind for them to scavenge and reload at a redoubt.
“Now, pray tell, what in the world is this?” Doc asked, arching an eyebrow. The tiny pyramid-shaped glass container was full of a bright red paint, but it was too small to cover anything larger than a blasterport. “A free sample of some kind?”
“No, that’s fingernail polish,” Mildred said, resting the blaster on her shoulder. “It’s something the women of my time used to put on their nails to make them look pretty.”
Quickly, Doc placed the container down as if it was rad hot. “I see,” he muttered. “Then I should assume that it was an accoutrement for, ahem, soiled doves?”
Soiled doves? “No, it was not for whores, or gaudy sluts,” Mildred replied, chuckling. “In spite of what your General Hooker might say on the matter. It’s just fingernail polish. Most of the women in my time used it daily. I did, too, on occasion.”
“Indeed,” Doc muttered, turning slightly red in his cheeks. “Then, pray tell, what is nail polish doing in a gun store?”
“It’s for the blasters,” J.B. replied, checking under the counter near the register. He found a clip for a handgun, but the weapon was gone. Ah well. “On older blasters you’d add a touch of red fingernail polish on the sight to help you aim.”
“But—”
“I know, the SIG ZKR, Colt and the rest have radium dots on the front blade. But before the gun manufacturers started putting those on, folks used nail polish.” J.B. paused. “Not the ancient stuff like your hogleg LeMat, that barely has any kind of a sight at all. I mean the blasters made from just before World War One to just after World War Two.”
“A narrow window of opportunity for such a curious oddity,” Doc noted, then surreptitiously slipped the bottle into his pocket. He had been darkening the front blade on the LeMat with spit and spent black powder, but it kept coming off. This polish idea seemed to have some real merit.
Leaving the store, the group started down the street, the UCV rumbling into motion and following along behind. Krysty was at the wheel, Jak in the gunnery seat, his Colt Python tucked into a blasterport searching for targets.
Pausing at a battered soda machine that had a bird nest on top, Ryan shot off the lock, then yanked open the buckled cover. All of the cans inside had burst apart over the decades; the few intact cans bulged dramatically from the gases trapped within. Ryan avoided even touching those. It was triple deadly stuff if you were feeb enough to try a sip. But something shiny caught his attention at the bottom, and he reached down to retrieve a couple of plastic bottles of mineral water, the contents still crystal clear.
“Eureka!” Doc chortled.
The next block of stores had been burned to cinders, only blackened timbers and bare concrete columns remaining of whatever had once been there. After that was a parking lot, now full of low bushes surrounding the squat white structure of a commercial drugstore.
With a squeal of brakes, Krysty parked the armored vehicle a safe distance from the building while Ryan and the others proceeded inside carefully. This was exactly the sort of place that stickies, and other muties, liked to hibernate inside, patiently waiting for norms to come to loot the goods on the shelves, only to become fresh meat for the slavering monstrosities.
Pausing at the shadowy entrance, Ryan started to say it was getting too dark to risk scavenging the place, when bright lights exploded from behind, filling the store with light to noontime clarity. Turning, Ryan raised a hand to shield his eye and vaguely saw the outline of Krysty waving from behind the dashboard, the four halogen headlights throwing out blue-white beams of blazing illumination.
The security gate was down and locked in place, but that trifle took J.B. only a few seconds to get through with his assortment of tools. Raising the gate dislodged a rain of dirt and dead bugs, and the dusty bell above the front door jingled merrily as they entered with weapons at the ready. The silence in the store was thick, the air tasted stale, with no hint of spoor or sweat, and there were no footprints on the linoleum flooring.
Weapons at the ready, Ryan and J.B. stayed near the front entrance while Mildred started moving among the moldy shelves, muttering curses and grabbing assorted items. Doc stayed close to the busy woman, the LeMat held in both hands, the hammer cocked and ready.
This kind of place was tailor made for the physician. What might look like crap to the others would prove to be life-saving meds in her trained hands. The first time Mildred looted an art-supply store, the companions thought she was crazy. But then she unearthed something called a box cutter that proved to be just as sharp as a scalpel and a hundred times keener than a knife or razor blade. Perfect for battlefield surgery. Next, she acquired some soft plastic tubing from a pet store to use for draining pus from wounds, and as breathing tubes for an unconscious patient. After that, anything the stocky woman requested, the other companions would get for her, no questions asked.
A few minutes later Mildred appeared pushing a shopping cart packed full of assorted items, one wheel loose and wobbling badly. “I don’t think this place has ever been looted!” she cried, beaming in delight. “I found bandages, aspirin, iodine, razor blades, a new bulb for my flashlight, even some superglue!”
“And what medical use does that have, if I may ask?” Doc queried.
“It closes small wounds without stitching,” she replied. “So there is no scar. Also good for adding to a Molotov cocktail to make napalm.”
“Does it? Exemplary, madam! Well done, indeed.”
“Yeah, good haul,” Ryan complimented her.
Leaving the drugstore, the companions piled the medical supplies into their vehicle and decided to call it a day. There were a lot of predators that only hunted at night, and it would be wise to get away from the concrete jungle of the ruins before they came out looking for prey.
Driving outside the ruins, Krysty chose a campsite along a babbling creek. There were some apple trees in bloom, the water read clean of rads and there was a lot of firewood available.
In short order, they had dinner simmering in a dented tin pot, beef stew from the MRE packs and some green leaves that Jak had collected stewing in a fry pan.
“What is it?” J.B. asked, sniffing. The smell was very familiar, but he could not quite recognize it. “Collard greens? Dandelions?”
“Kudzu,” Jak said laconically, using a green stick to stir the contents of the pan.
“I thought that was a weed,” he admonished with a frown.
“Is weed,” Jak replied, sprinkling some salt onto the fat leaves. “But eats good. Take off vine if want, but cooked is best.”
Incredibly, the kudzu was quite tasty and went rather well with the beef stew. After the meal, Doc washed the pots in the creek, with Mildred standing guard. Then everybody took seats around the crackling campfire, sipping plastic cups of instant coffee from the MRE packs, eating apples and listening to the sounds of the night.
“Now, about naming our new wag…” Doc started out of the blue.
“Do we have to name it, ya old coot?” Mildred inquired.
“What coot anyway?” Jak asked, interrupting a potential argument. “Some sorta mutie bug?”
Caught with a mouthful of apple, Krysty snorted a laugh and started to choke, then paused and spit out the unchewed food. She stood, her long hair flexing and moving against the breeze.
“Something wrong?” Ryan asked, lowering his cup, a hand going for the SIG-Sauer at his side.
“Yes. Everybody into the wag,” Krysty said quietly, her voice thick w
ith urgency. She drew the S&W and clicked back the hammer.
“Droids?” Jak asked, rising to his feet. The Colt Python was already in his hand. He strained to hear anything, but there were only the usual sounds of the night, nothing more.
“It’s not droids,” Krysty whispered, edging toward the armored vehicle.
There came a soft padding from the darkness as if a soft rain was falling on the thick grass. Then there came a telltale hoot, followed by another, then dozens more from every direction.
“Stickies!” Doc bellowed, rising to draw the LeMat and start firing at the inhuman shapes loping toward them through the starry night.
Chapter Seven
Leaving the burning bridge far behind, Roberto had the convoy stop on the crest of a small hill to bury their dead, then Jessica fired a charge of precious explosives to cause an avalanche and cover the graves with tons of shale and basalt. No animals or muties would ever feast on the crewmen of the trader. End of discussion.
Heading south, the war wags rumbled along the uneven ground, the big tires rising and falling like pistons in a steam engine. But inside, they were warm and comfortable. The battle had been fought, the prize won, the aced buried. Life continued.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor, and Shelly appeared at the entrance of the control room. Her hair a wild corona, the woman was dressed in the dark green of a healer, and slung over a shoulder was her med kit, embroidered with the mysterious word M*A*S*H, exactly like the bag belonging to her teacher, Mildred Wyeth.
“Just wanted to tell you that Jimmy will be okay,” Shelly said, looking over the others for any sign of injury. The crew sometimes hid their miseries from her, not out of foolishness or false bravado.
“Will he be able to walk?” Roberto asked, looking out the windshield. The convoy was heading for some predark ruins just past a big rad pit. Kathleen had a cache of diamonds hidden there in case of an emergency, and after their last couple of fights, he wanted every crystal possible stored away for the long journey east.