Time Nomads

by James Axler

  The Trader spoke. "I don't much care for playing games, Carson. We got food. Got water. Got the ammo, and you got the jack for all of that. We don't have the gas, and time's wasting. You keep telling us it's coming. It don't come."

  There was rising irritation in the Trader's words. Ryan knew from their morning conference, before this meeting, that he was becoming seriously concerned, that Carson was getting some sort of plan into operation that might win him the invaluable war wags. Guards had been doubled, and every man and woman had been warned about keeping alert.

  "Why not go away and then get back here in… in a week, Trader," Baron Carson suggested. "Man sits on his ass too long he suffers from piles. Go out hunting someplace. There's that redoubt the Indians talk about, isn't there, Ferryman?"

  "Many Wolves Canyon?"

  "That's the one."

  Ryan knew the suggestion of a redoubt was the one thing that would switch the Trader aside from his purpose.

  "Redoubt? If it's there, then how come you haven't opened it up?"

  Carson stood up, smiling past him. "A fine good morning, Sharona. Come join us."

  Ryan hadn't set an eye on her since their lovemaking.

  Today she wore an elegant dress in a soft green velvet that reached just below the knee. The black leather belt was fastened with an ornate golden letter G. Her hair was loose and flowed down either side of her perfect, heart-shaped face. She smiled at everyone in the room.

  "Did I hear someone talking about that old ghost fortress in the mountains?"

  The Trader nodded formally to her. "That's right. Just asked the baron how come you hadn't cleared it out if you know it's really there."

  She sat on a chair held for her by one of the armed guards. "Oh, I believe it's there, but it's in the Blood of Christ mountains, stronghold of the Indians. Ferryman here has a good map, don't you? You could let the Trader have it."

  Ryan looked sideways at the Trader, seeing the gleam in his eyes, the set of his head, the squaring of his shoulders. The gas was almost forgotten. What mattered now was the chance to find and explore a new, lost redoubt.

  "How far?"

  The baron looked at the Trader. "Still worried about the gas? Guess we can advance you a few gallons, can't we, Ferryman? And I'm sure and certain that the shipment'll be here anytime soon. Take five days break. Do your people good to be on the road again. When you get back here, I'm positive the gasoline'll be flowing like milk and honey in Canaan."

  Despite his eagerness, the Trader hadn't earned his reputation by sticking his head into a noose. As soon as they got back to War Wag One he sent Beulah Webb over to talk to Ferryman and check out the map showing the route to the supposed hidden redoubt in the Sangre de Cristo range. And he joined with J.B. and Ryan to discuss this unexpected new development in the game. "He shitting us?" he asked. Ryan shook his head. "Don't see what he wins. The gas is coming or it isn't. Either way, why send us off on a fool's chase?"

  J.B. had taken off his glasses and was polishing them on a strip of cotton, holding them to the light and peering through them. He took his time before replying.

  "Only two things. Baron's straight, so we go check out the redoubt. Come back and get the gas. Or he's a misfire. No redoubt. Way of setting up some kind of ambush on us."

  The Trader lighted one of the cigars he relished, offering one to the Armorer, who shook his head.

  "It's about trust," the Trader said. "We got men and an overkill blaster capacity with the wags. No way he'll front us out of them, though he's got some good weaponry and a strong ville." He was almost thinking out loud, rather than talking directly to J.B. and to Ryan.

  Beulah appeared, carrying a hand-drawn map. She saw that the three men were in conference, and turned on her heel.

  "So far, there's been nothing to show he's a misfire. I figure the white lion hunt was for real. Never seen so much disappointment in a man. So if we go off and find the redoubt, for better or worse, when we come back we'll mebbe trust him all the way. Mebbe we will… mebbe."

  Ryan saw the way the older man's tactical brain was moving. "And that'll be the time to be triple-guarded, Trader."

  "That's an ace on the line, Ryan."

  A little after dawn on the following morning, War Wags One and Two rumbled out through the gates of Towse ville and rolled steadily northeast toward the Sangre de Cristo. The rising sun had colored the jagged peaks, turning the patches of fresh snow into pools of crimson blood.

  Chapter Twenty

  THEY CROSSED the wooden bridge again, but this time the four-man patrol stood back and simply waved them by.

  The map showed a main highway to the north, with a cutoff east on a narrower road near an old settlement called Questa. Beulah had found all that on her ancient Rand McNally Road Atlas and Vacation Guide.

  "Red River Ski Area, up this little red line," she said, pointing it out to Ryan.

  There was no point in showing the Trader, who found reading and writing about as easy as juggling a handful of eggs.

  Ryan looked at the scuffed, faded print, angling it to catch the morning sunlight that came in through the open-roof ob-slit.

  "Hey! What's that say?" he asked, pointing to some pale green lettering—Carson Nat'l Forest.

  "One of the national recreational areas," Beulah said. Then the significance of the name struck her as well. "Oh, Land O'Goshen! Named after the Baron of Towse himself."

  "But that map's a century old," Ryan said wonderingly. "How can it be named after Alias Carson? He wasn't even born."

  It was Matt, the relief driver of War Wag One, traveling with them for the morning to gain more experience, who supplied the answer. His collection of comics covered all kinds of superheroes, but he also had a small number of fragile Western mags.

  "Kit Carson," he suggested, overhearing the conversation. "Real famous cowboy and Indian fighter. Mainly around these parts. More'n likely that forest was named after him."

  Ryan felt vaguely disappointed at such a mundane explanation.

  For the first few miles it was obvious that the two-lane blacktop had been well traveled. But gradually the going got tougher.

  The saturation use of missiles by all the countries involved in the brief but terminal Third World War had caused devastation far beyond anything that the military tacticians and logistical experts had ever predicted. Even in the "worst worst" scenario, there'd been forecasts of some kind of eventual rebuilding of society through minimum levels of survival.

  But nobody had taken into account the way that the land itself would react to the total assault.

  Hundreds of thousands of square miles of what had been the United States of America had vanished into the oceans. Low-lying areas had become measureless lagoons or lakes. Mountains had crumbled and new peaks had thrust skyward. The land had rippled as though it were soft and liquid. What had changed across the face of the continent had changed forever.

  The earth tremors had affected the northern parts of what had been New Mexico, diverting rivers and turning highways into ribbons of broken, corrugated stone.

  Hun was at the driving controls of War Wag One, her ob-shield open. A current of fresh air washed through the stuffy interior of the huge vehicle. Their speed had been slowing down ever since they crossed the deep gorge. Nobody really knew how fast a war wag could go under ideal circumstances, mainly because they never encountered anything remotely resembling ideal circumstances.

  Ryan had known Hun to push them up over fifty miles an hour, when they'd been fleeing a forest inferno started by some suicidal muties near old Wyoming. A more normal kind of average speed was a whole lot closer to twenty-five.

  Immediately north of Towse they'd gotten up to thirty-eight miles per hour. Beyond the wooden bridge that had dropped to the mid-twenties and a few miles farther Hun had eased back into third gear and slowed to around fifteen.

  "Getting worse, Trader," she reported, her voice crackling over the intercom.

  "Bring it to a walk," he rep
lied. "I'm going up top for a look. Ryan?"

  "Yo?"

  "Come up."

  It was a warm, sticky kind of a day, with the clouds obscuring the sun. Above the mountains on their right they could see the dense shape of a dark storm.

  The war wag rattled and heaved as Hun pushed down to a lower gear. Behind them, linked by rad-com, War Wag Two also slowed, keeping station around two hundred yards behind. It was far enough to avoid an ambush, but near enough to provide emergency assistance for War Wag One if needed.

  Ahead of them the two men could see what had worried Hunaker.

  "Switchback time," Ryan said.

  The relatively level pavement disappeared a quarter mile ahead of them and was replaced by an undulating series of dips and bumps, some of them twenty feet high. At the bottom of the nearest hollow they could both make out the glint of water, which probably meant swampy ground.

  "Won't get over some of them," the Trader mused. "Don't relish getting us stuck in this kind of place. Towse is the nearest ville, and I guess there's plenty of locals that'd welcome some killing."

  In their conversations with Ferryman and some of the sec-men, the recurrent theme was the danger from hostile Indians who were the scattered survivors of Carson's massacre at the old pueblo.

  Ryan stood up, waist-high out of the top of the wag, and braced himself against the pitching and jolting.

  He tried to make out what the ground was like on either side of the ruined highway, deciding that it could be passable.

  The Trader called down to Beulah, trying to find out how much farther before they were due to turn off toward the mountains.

  "Close. Any sign of Questa?"

  Both the Trader and Ryan peered ahead. The Trader had a battered pair of Zeiss glasses, and he called down for Hun to stop while he checked the vicinity.

  The engine ticked over quietly. Ryan spotted a lone coyote, head and tail down, scurrying along a shallow ridge a half mile to the west. Apart from that, there was no sign of life anywhere. Not even a buzzard circling optimistically overhead.

  "See anything?"

  The Trader shook his head and lowered the binoculars. "Nothing. If there was a town there once, it sure ain't there now. Can't see no sign of any road going east, neither."

  "Want me to go on?" Hun asked. "Left or right?"

  "Right's clearer," Ryan said.

  "Must've been like this in the old frontier days of the Conestoga wagons," J.B. said a couple of hours later.

  "Ox-drawn, weren't they?" Ryan asked, coughing as he swallowed dust.

  The trail was so rough that most of the two crews had gotten out of the wags after the Trader had given them permission. They preferred to walk rather than ride in the sickly, sweltering metal boxes that the war wags had become. Speed had dropped to a little less than a steady walking pace.

  "Mostly oxen. Some mules. Not many horses. Funny. Most old vids show horses pulling their canvas-topped wags."

  J.B. had tugged his fedora down low over his eyes and knotted a scarf around his mouth and nose to make breathing easier.

  "You told me once that a lot of the cowmen were black, didn't you? Never see that on the old vids, neither."

  The wags were now going due east, with the lowering sun at their backs. The Trader was sitting out on top of War Wag One, his head bare, smoke curling from his cigar. He looked completely relaxed.

  "Look at the old bastard," Lex said, panting and sweating along with J.B. and Ryan. "Like the baron of the whole fucking world."

  "If he wanted to be, I guess he could," July said quietly, joining them. "I never met anyone like the Trader."

  "You never will," Ryan said.

  It took them two whole days to cover the miles into the foothills of the mountains. Beulah was delighted to find that the rough map that Ferryman had given her was accurate. It had showed the breakup of the highway as well as the point where the forest began to encroach toward the road. If there'd been trees in close a few miles farther back, the journey would have come to a sudden halt. As it was, the war wags were able to move back onto the ribbon of highway. The seismic devastation lower down on the plain wasn't repeated in the hills, and they picked up toward ten miles an hour.

  It was early in the morning of their third day that the first Indian was spotted. He was a lone man, ragged-trousered, bare-chested and clutching what J.B. swore was a nineteenth-century Springfield carbine. He stood for a few moments in the clear sight of the waking camp, on a steep slope above a rushing stream of clean water. By the time that the nearest guard had shouted a warning and begun to draw a bead on the intruder, the Indian had vanished again.

  "Best go to yellow," was Trader's comment.

  The finest scout on either war wag was a rear gunner in One, named Garcia. He had once kept a camp-fire crew entertained for an hour while he tried to explain the mix of grandparents that had resulted in his dark skin, blond hair and eyes so dark that they almost disappeared in their sockets. Ryan couldn't remember that complex web of relationships, but he did recall that there was a bit of Crow Indian in there someplace. Garcia had joined them on a previous expedition south of the Grandee.

  Now he was out front, kneeling in the middle of the track, the noon sun pouring his black shadow tight around him. J. B. Dix and Ryan stood a few paces behind him. The Trader had sent them out to try to check if anyone had been using the old lost highway through the woods.

  Garcia finally stood up and looked around. He grinned at Ryan, flashing his solitary gold tooth. "Look empty to you, amigo?"

  Ryan had some skill at tracking, but the dusty, leaf-covered stretch of road didn't share its secrets with him.

  "Sure does."

  "Las apariencias engañan."

  "How's that, Garcia? You know I don't speak that Mex stuff."

  "You must not decide how good a book is by just looking at her cover, amigo. This road, she tells many stories to me."

  "Wags?" J.B. asked. That was the big question. Carson had said the redoubt hadn't been visited by anyone from the ville, that it was just local tales. If there were wheel marks, then he'd likely been lying to them.

  "No. No wags. Not since the long winters, far as I can see."

  "Horses?" Ryan asked.

  "Ponies, off trail. Shoeless, so you wouldn't ride 'em on this hard pavement less'n you had to. Ponies. Mebbe Apache."

  "Apaches? This far north?" Ryan couldn't conceal his surprise.

  "Sure. Nothing like a holocaust to change the hunting grounds. Lots of the plains people got chilled. An Apache, he live in the canyons. Now they moved ways north. The warrior we seen looked Apache to me. Mebbe wrong. But I know one thing, Ryan."

  "What?"

  "Less my guess wrong, we see them again, before long."

  Finally the trail simply ran out, as all trails eventually do, the track stopping at the bottom of a sixty-foot cliff. There was a clearing in the trees with an open flank to the north and dense forest to the south. Double patrols were set on the southern side, some a quarter mile into the woods, and another line about a hundred and fifty yards from the wags. If they were attacked, then it would surely come from the trees.

  The Trader called J.B. and Ryan, this time asking Beulah to join the discussion.

  "Map's still about right," she said. "Shows this place as where the main track vanishes. From here you have to walk on for around four miles. Kind of steep, I figure. But the scale's not always consistent. Could be more. Doubt it'll be less."

  "Best split up and take a foot party. No more than a dozen, well armed."

  The Trader looked at both J.B. and Ryan, and they grinned back at him. The two young men had ridden long enough with the Trader to have a shrewd guess at what he was going to say next.

  When there was the most remote scent of an undiscovered redoubt, the Trader tended to get his priorities a little scrambled. Though he was now well into middle age, he became like an enthusiastic young cub.

  Today was no different.

  Th
ey were in an unknown and potentially very hostile environment, which called for him to remain with the wags and delegate the patrol to either J.B. or Ryan.

  Or to both of them.

  "I'll lead with Ryan. J.B., you stay in command here."

  "What a surprise, Trader." Beulah smiled. She'd already been long enough with the pair of war wags to predict how the Trader might react when he was within walking distance of a redoubt.

  They scrambled up the steep path, with Garcia on point. The Trader and Ryan were at the front of the supporting group of nine men and women, with Otis bringing up the rear.

  They found the entrance to the lost redoubt about thirty seconds before the Apaches found them.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  THERE WERE SIGNS of a massive earth slip. It looked as if there'd once been a well-maintained blacktop leading directly across country from the main road toward Raton and the Colrada line, but the land had reared up and swallowed it whole. Now they stood near the last few yards of that road, which ended in a sharp drop down a sheer cliff. At the other end, twisted and buckled, were the remnants of a pair of dark green vanadium steel sec-doors.

  "Doesn't look very promising," Peachy said, rubbing a tentative hand over his sprouting beard.

  The arrow hit him through the wrist, pinning it to his neck, and Peachy went down with a bubbling yelp of shock and pain. Ryan had a moment to see that the feathers on the arrow flights were notched from a gray goose. Then the boy was kicking in the dirt, and the air around them was humming with more missiles.

  A spear buried its point in the sandy earth just in front of Ryan as he drew his pistol, missing him by less than a foot.

  "Inside!" the Trader yelled. "Bring the wounded!"

  Apart from Peachy, whose lifeblood was seeping out of him, other members of the patrol had taken hits. Garcia was cursing in Spanish as he tried to pull a shaft out of his shoulder. Janine, a radio operator from War Wag Two, had taken an arrow in her left arm, just above the elbow. Instead of panicking and trying to pull it out, ripping the muscle away on the barbed tip, she calmly knelt and snapped the narrow shaft, pulling the jagged point clear without harming herself.