by James Axler
Unexpectedly, the flare sputtered and died. Casting it away with a curse, J.B. rummaged for a replacement. A small stingwing streaked low across the still water, coming in at groin level. Dropping the flare, J.B. swung up the Uzi, knowing he was a nanosecond too slow, when the scattergun roared. The muzzle-blast pounded his eardrums and almost dislodged his glasses. But the stingwing was blown into its component parts, blood gobbets soaring everywhere.
“Thanks!” J.B. shouted, over the stuttering machine gun.
“Anytime!” Mildred replied, unleashing hot lead death.
Firing the SIG-Sauer nonstop until its clip was empty, Ryan holstered the blaster while he swung up the deadly panga. The wicked blade took the creatures apart, removing wings, legs and heads with ruthless efficiency. Pale blood splattered everywhere, and soon the man’s clothing was soaked. A gush of intestines caught him full in the face, blocking his sight. Fireblast! Taking a deep breath, Ryan threw himself into the shallow pool, the salty water stinging every cut and abrasion on his body. Rising from the water, rivulets streaming down his face, Ryan braced for a new attack, but the stingwings now arched around the man as if he were invisible.
“Get underwater!” Ryan yelled on impulse, sheathing the panga and quickly thumbing loose brass into the empty clip for the SIG-Sauer in case the ploy faded. “Do it now!”
Although they had no idea what he was planning, the others trusted the man with their lives, and Krysty went first, then Jak and Doc, closely followed by J.B. and finally Mildred. Surrounded by a screaming cloud of the deadly muties, Ryan tried to watch for an attack from every side, but the creatures were no longer interested in him. In fact, several of the winged muties landed brazenly on the dead horses and noisily began to feed once more, ripping away chunks of the warm flesh to reach the juicy morsels deeper inside.
Rising from the bloody water, the other companions shook their faces clear and watched for the next rush. But the stingwings were paying them no attention, almost as if the companions weren’t there.
“It’s the blood,” Krysty whispered in astonishment. “There’s so much of their blood in the water they can no longer smell us!”
“Not smell, not find,” Jak stated confidently, brushing back his sodden hair. “How long last?”
“Probably until the first time we sweat,” Mildred muttered, as if the volume of her voice could reveal their presence to the feasting creatures. “Only primates have isotonic traces of ammonia in their sweat. They must zero in on that.”
“Good,” Ryan grunted, and ducked under the water once more and came up sopping wet. “Then chill them all!” he growled, and started firing, carefully putting a single round into the gore-streaked heads.
Using blades only to minimize the noise, the companions slashed a bloody path of destruction through the feasting muties, until every one was gone, and the salt water swirled thickly with their life fluids.
“Any more?” J.B. asked, adjusting his glasses to scan the dunes on the horizon. The lenses were dripping with pale blood, his shirt and pants drenched to the skin.
“That last,” Jak stated with a somber note of pride, swishing his blades in the filthy pond to clean the steel.
“Thank Gaia,” Krysty added, her soaked hair flexing limply under the accumulated weight of the blood and gore. “We haven’t been this close to getting chilled since the Anthill!”
At the mention of the nightmarish military base, every body grimaced, then continued with their crude ablutions.
“Okay, anybody hurt?” Mildred demanded, looking over the assemblage. Everybody had been slashed a dozen times by the talons of the deadly little muties, but they all appeared to be only surface cuts, nothing deep or dangerous, and there was no telltale flow of red human blood.
“Fine, just low on brass,” Jak complained, emptying the spent brass cartridges from his blaster and thumbing five fresh rounds into the 6-shot cylinder. If the fight had gone on for only a few more minutes, they all would have ended up inside a stingwing, looking out.
“Alas, I have plenty of ammunition,” Doc rumbled, looking forlornly at his Civil War–era blaster. Black powder was dribbling out the side of the massive cylinder from the constant dunking. “But I fear my LeMat will not be useful until thoroughly cleaned and dried.”
“Can’t leave you naked. Here, take this,” Ryan said, passing over the SIG-Sauer and a handful of loose rounds.
Eagerly, Doc accepted the weapon and worked the slide, keeping a suspicious watch on the dead muties. If life had taught the time traveler anything, it was to always be prepared for betrayal.
Going over to her horse, Krysty used her knife to flick aside a couple of tattered stingwings and inspected the chewed remains of the beast. Sweetcheeks had been a fine horse, not particularly intelligent, but bridle-wise, trail-smart and very strong. The woman silently said a prayer to Gaia to treat her friend well in the next casement of existence. Death was merely a part of the cycle of life, neither the beginning nor the end.
Ryan finished reloading a spare clip for the longblaster, slung the weapon and reached into a pocket to withdraw a squat black object about the size and shape of a soup can. With a snap, he extended the antique Navy telescope to its full length and swept the horizon in every direction.
“Nothing coming our way yet,” Ryan told them, lowering the optical device and compacting it back down again. “But with this much blasterfire and fresh blood in the air, you can bet your nuking ass we’ll soon have lots of company. Tanglers, stickies, hellhounds, you name it.”
“Maybe even some of those big wendies we’ve heard about that have invaded the desert from the far north,” Krysty added grimly.
“Wendigos,” Mildred corrected. “They were just a myth in my time—Canadian folklore—but they’re sure as hell real enough now. The bastard things patrol along the border of the desert to attack anybody coming out.”
“Picking off the weak and tired,” J.B. said, tilting back his dripping-wet fedora. “Pretty smart.”
“Pretty deadly,” Ryan stated.
“And, alas, we shall be walking thirsty from this point onward,” Doc rumbled, scowling in displeasure at the sight of the ruined water bags draped over the saddle of his own deceased mare, Buttercup. Most, if not all, of their leather water bags had been savaged by the stingwings and torn to shreds, the precious contents soaked into the bastard mixture of sand and salt crystals. Their U.S. Army canteens were dented, but still intact. However, the adjective great hadn’t been a misnomer in conjunction with the dreaded noun salt. The scorched desert was large and arid.
“How far away from clean water are we?” Mildred asked, squeezing the excess brine from her beaded plaits. Hanging at her side, the canvas med bag sloshed and felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. All of her primitive medical supplies were safely sealed inside plastic bags, and the canvas satchel itself was waterproof. Which made it a perfect catch basin for the contents of the brackish pond.
“Tell you in a tick.” Using the minisextant hanging around his neck, J.B. checked the position of the sun and did some fast mental calculations.
“Any chance we’re near Two-Son ville?” Mildred asked hopefully, tilting the med bag to pour out volumes of excess water.
“No, that’s a thousand miles to the south. Unfortunately, we’re close to the eastern edge,” J.B. said glumly, tucking the sextant away again under his shirt. “So we’ve got about a gazillion little salt ponds like this straight ahead of us for a good forty miles before reaching Clearwater Springs.”
“Forty miles?” Jak frowned.
“As the stingwing flies,” J.B. added, trying to smile at the weak joke, but could see that his words had fallen hard on the others. Forty miles through the searing, nuke-blasted heart of the desert on foot. That was tantamount to a death sentence.
Sloshing through the bobbing swamp of bodies, Ryan climbed onto the muddy shore and stomped his combat boots to dislodge some sticky entrails. “Okay, take only the essentials,” he di
rected, tugging a water bag free from the pommel of his nameless stallion. “Water, food and brass. Leave everything else.”
“Even the cyclo?” Jak asked with a scowl.
Strapped to the rear of three of the horses were bulky objects securely wrapped in heavy canvas. The companions had journeyed long and far to find an undamaged library and recover an encyclopedia. That had been Doc’s idea to give the books to Front Royal in Virginia and help them with the rebuilding of civilization. Front Royal was one of the very few well-run baronies on the East Coast. The ville was still a long way from reclaiming predark technology. The encyclopedia could provide invaluable information.
“Indeed, it seems that we must, my young friend,” Doc muttered, drying the sword on a sleeve before sliding it back into the ebony stick. “For while knowledge is indeed power, in this particular case it is only a millstone about our all-too-frail necks.” The blade locked into place with a hard click.
High overhead, a lone vulture was starting to circle the killing field. The first of the scavengers to arrive.
“Might as well start walking,” Krysty stated, pulling a candle from her pocket and rubbing the wax with a finger before applying it to her lips. The old trick eased thirst and could help keep a person alive for a full extra day.
“I’ll fill a spare canteen with dirty water in case any more stingwings come hunting for us,” Mildred said, removing the cap and plunging the container into the reeking pool.
“A hellish perfume, indeed, madam,” Doc said, sniffing in disdain. “But then, it is always advisable to use a long spoon when supping with the devil.”
Washing as much gore as possible out of their hair and clothing, the companions then plunged some rags into the relatively clean mud along the banks, getting the cloths nicely damp before tying them over their heads as crude protection from the sun. Rummaging through the saddlebags, they took everything useful and left the rest of the supplies behind to start walking in a single file with Ryan in the lead.
Saving their strength, the companions didn’t talk as they marched through the shifting sand, each lost in his or her own private thoughts. They were fighters, survivors, victors in a hundred battles, but the Great Salt took its toll. In many villes, the name of the desert was a euphemism for death.
Slowly, the long miles passed under the monotonous trudge of their heavy boots. The sun beat down on the companions without mercy, and the hot air stole every drop of moisture from their parched mouths. Using more wax on their lips, the companions licked the sweat from their arms to help stave off dehydration and wondered if this was the day that they would die….
Chapter Two
“I said, out!” McGinty roared, throwing the outlander through the Heaven’s doorway.
Tumbling across the wooden porch, the man hit the brick street and his head cracked loudly on the stone-work. With a low groan, the outlander went limp, and the giggling children descended upon the unconscious norm to rifle his pockets and carry away anything small of value. The knife and shotgun holstered at his side they avoided like a rad pit. Stealing a weapon was a hanging offence in the ville, even for children.
“Anybody else wanna try to buy a drink with brass filled with dirt instead of powder?” McGinty snarled, tapping a lead pipe into his palm. But the challenge from the barkeep went unanswered in the tavern, and everybody studiously turned their attentions to drinking or gambling.
After a moment, McGinty grunted in satisfaction and went back behind the counter to continue serving drinks and swapping lies with the regular patrons.
“Should have aced the bastard and taken his boots,” Petrov Cordalane muttered, taking a sip of the shine in his cracked mug. Waste not, want not, his mother always used to say. A trader visiting Delta had suggested that his ancestors were probably Russkies. Born and raised in Deathlands, the man took that as an insult and slit the outlander’s throat with a broken bottle. Then Petrov took his belt knife and zipgun. It had been his first chilling, and the weight of the blade made him see the common sense of acing folks only for a profit.
Nowadays, Petrov owned two knives and a working handblaster called a Webley .44, with fifteen live rounds. His mother would have been pleased to see how far her son had gone from such a simple beginning. What his father thought about the matter Petrov neither knew nor cared.
“Boots and gun belt. That’s what I would have taken,” Rose DeSilva said with a sneer, chewing on a hard piece of waxy cheese rind.
The slim woman had yellowish-blond hair, the bouncy curls almost childlike. Rose was covered with scars and missing the pinkie on her left hand from tangling with a stickie in her teen years. The woman had aced the mutie with a rock, but it took her finger first. Afterward, Rose had left the stickie alive while she tied it to a tree, and built a huge stack of dry branches around the creature. The fire had lasted long into the night, and she still remembered the agonized hooting with great pleasure. The big crossbow hanging from the back of her chair had been carved from that same tree, her first crude arrows glued together with the sticky resin harvested from the aced mutie.
Drinking shine, Thal Dagstrom merely grunted in agreement. Whenever possible, the huge man preferred not to speak. A hulking giant, Thal was a good foot taller than anybody else in the tavern and heavily muscled to the point that some folks thought there had to be a little mutie blood in his veins. But nobody was stupe enough to ever ask. His entire body was bear-like, covered with thick black hair. Only his head was naturally bald. His hair had started thinning when Thal was a teenager. These days, he wore a black wool cap, no matter the temperature outside. A tiny Remington .22 automatic blaster was tucked into his rope belt, the worn silvery finish carefully blackened with a pumice stone. The clip held only four live rounds, two of them homemade varieties of unknown quality, but at his side hung a stout wood club, the tip bristling with rusty nails. In close quarters, it was a formidable chilling machine.
“Soft, the locals are soft,” Charlie Bernstein added, using a piece of bread to mop up the last vestiges of gravy from his bowl of gopher stew.
His appetite was legendary, and the angular face of the gaunt man showed the starvation of his childhood, but his arms were thickly cabled with muscle. His clothing seemed to be composed more of patches than original material, but the overall effect was a sort of camo pattern that allowed him to disappear in a forest. Even his boots were pieced together from an assortment of other shoes and such, mostly to hide the short nails sticking out of the toes. More than once, Charlie had kicked a man to death while hooting and laughing. For some reason, he enjoyed pain, giving and receiving, and sometimes, in the deep of the night, Charlie wondered if he was insane.
The big bore blaster holstered at his side was homemade, just a hunk of steel bathroom pipe reinforced with coils of iron wire. The wire was applied red-hot, and when it cooled, the coils tightened, reinforcing the old pipe enough for it to take the blast of a 12-gauge cartridge. The wooden stock was carved from an apple tree and bore the crude design of a naked woman, the notches along the top showing the number of chills he had done. The actual number was only half as many, but it still represented a lot of folks on board the last train west.
“Delta is an odd town, that’s for sure,” Petrov countered, taking out a worn deck of playing cards and beginning to shuffle. “But that’s why I like the place. Strange suits me fine.”
The rest of the crew could find no fault with that. Delta ville sat alongside the Whitewater River that flowed out of the Great Salt like a slashed artery of blue life. The muddy banks were lined with reeds, bam boo, flowering bushes and even a couple of stunted trees bearing tiny bitter-tasting apples. But the farther the river got from the desert, the more the greenery expanded until only a day’s ride away the plants spread across the landscape in a true forest of real trees, bushes and green grass. The ville did all of its hunting and farming out there, both groups accompanied by heavily armed squads of sec men as much-needed protection against the muties that li
ved in the trees and, sometimes, under the ground.
However, never in the history of the ville had a single mutie gotten past the front gate. The defensive wall around Delta was huge, made of rocks hauled out of the river by decades of slave labor, the mortar between the layers said to be liberally mixed with blood, sweat and tears. It was probably true, but old Baron Cranston had died a long time ago, and his wife, who’d succeeded him, hadn’t tolerated such brutality. Nor did her son. If you were caught stealing food, a person got twenty-five lashes at the post, every time, no favors or leniency. Rape a woman or a child and that got you beaten by the women in the ville with clubs, whipped by the men and then sent to the gallows—if you were still sucking air. The only crime that got a person sent to the wall was disobeying the orders of the baron. That put you in chains to work and labor on the ville wall, expanding the barrier, making it higher and thicker until a full moon had passed, then you were set free and tossed outside the ville gates. Alone and weaponless, the person would be easy prey for slavers or muties, but at least still alive.
Most of the old folks considered the baron too damn soft on coldhearts, especially those operating a salve trade out in the Boneyard, but they never said it out loud. Only Petrov Cordalane knew the truth of the matter, and since he lived in Delta, the man said nothing about it to anybody, not even his gang. Secrets held power.
Besides, Petrov had a good thing going here in Delta, and he wouldn’t ruin it. Heaven was the main tavern in the ville, boasting food, drinks, an actual working piano for Sunday, a gaudy house upstairs and a still out back. The local brew was made out of rotting fish guts, an acquired taste, to say the least, and it was also burned in lanterns to make light and to degrease machine parts. But the locals sang its praise, claiming that the river juice would cure all manner of ills, from the black cough to the shakes, along with a dozen other ailments that had once ravaged the world since skydark.