by James Axler
Turning, the machine snapped its pinchers at the man, shattering the windshield of his motorcycle, the pinchers slamming closed only inches away from his chest.
Clawing for the sawed-off, Dunbar gave the Guardian both barrels, the double report echoing across the landscape and into the swamp. The maelstrom of soft-lead pellets blasted across the machine, deepening several of the dents and opening one like folding back a curtain. Briefly, the sec chief saw inside the machine, twinkling lights, nests of wiring, banks of electric motors and a complex array of plastic netting that pulsed with moving beams of light.
Without conscious thought, Dunbar aimed the sawed-off and pressed the trigger, then bitterly cursed as the empty weapon merely clicked.
Spinning around and around again, the Guardian then lurched away from the two men, one of its legs impotently dragging behind.
“Come back here, ya tin fuck,” Fenton growled, yanking out the spent magazine from the Browning to insert a fresh one from his ammo belt. Yanking back the arming bolt, he aimed and put two rounds into the departing machine, which only made it move faster toward the nearby trees.
“Stop wasting brass,” Dunbar said, reloading the Remington scattergun.
“No, I want it chilled,” Fenton snarled, firing six more times, the ricochets zinging off the domed hull to hit some rocks on the ground and throw off sparks.
“Lieutenant, I said enough!” Dunbar bellowed, using the whipcrack tone his father had taught both of the brothers at a very young age.
The furious sec man paused for only a moment. “Yes, sir,” he answered sullenly, lowering the smoking longblaster.
Just then, several stickies rose from the scum-covered water of the nearby swamp and began eagerly sloshing toward the muddy shore, hooting and waving their sucker-covered hands.
Instantly, the two sec men raised their weapons to fire, then holstered them, kicked the bikes into life and drove away, leaving the shambling stickies quickly behind.
“That machine was pretty badly damaged before we arrived,” Fenton said, a loose strip of his bandages fluttering in the wind. “That’s the only reason we got away so easy.”
“Agreed,” Dunbar said over the rumbling engine. “I’d guess that the outlanders have been this way and tangled with the Guardian first.”
“Pity it didn’t ace ’em,” Fenton muttered, then barked a laugh. “Come to think of it, mebbe it did, and the stickies dragged off the bodies for dinner!”
“If that’s the case, we’re well and truly nuked,” Dunbar replied. “Because neither of us is ever going to see the inside of Delta again unless we have the heads of the outlanders!”
Slowing his bike, Fenton cast a glance at the dark swampland to the south. The stickies still raced after the two men, waving their arms and hooting wildly. Shitfire, Fenton thought. Even if they somehow managed to find the bodies in there, the outlanders would be stripped of any flesh by now, the skulls featureless white bone with nothing on them that could be used for identification.
“Sons of bitches better be alive in Modine so I can ace ’em myself,” Fenton snarled, twisting the throttle of the big motorcycle to gun the engine and race ahead into the Stygian night.
AS THE COMPANIONS rode along the rusty railroad tracks, Mildred studied the nighttime sky above, relishing the brief respite from the usual heavy cover of polluted storm clouds. A crescent moon sat high amid a sea of the twinkling stars, the heavenly orb oddly obscured by a thin fog. The physician wasn’t sure if it was something in the sky or something around the moon itself.
Had the British ever built their mining base on Luna? she wondered. Were the astronauts still there, breeding and building, forging a new space-based civilization? Or had they perished after the last shipment of supplies? The history of humanity seemed to be equal parts incredible heroism and monumental stupidity. The yin and yang of life.
At least the companions were finally safe from those accursed wendigos.
There had been a predark bridge that extended over the southern swamp, the pylons thick with flowering vines that snapped at the horses and tried more than once to impale the companions with thorn-tipped roots.
Upon finally reaching the other side, J.B. had used half their remaining supply of ammunition to make a bomb powerful enough to blow the ancient structure in two. Which was good timing because as he finished, the stickies arrived in force, dozens of the horrid muties hooting insanely and waving their sucker-covered hands at the thought of a juicy feast of norms and horse flesh just waiting to be harvested.
The blast destroyed the bridge and sent the stickies hurtling away to land in a bubbling pool of toxic chems that melted the flesh off their bones. The resulting span between dry land and the ragged end of the bridge was a good hundred feet, so even if the wendigos were still after the companions, they would now need wings to continue the hunt. Nothing that walked was making it through that swamp alive.
Following the rusty tracks, the companions spent days traveling through abandoned farmlands. The houses, barns and silos had all crumbled back into the earth, the crops running wild, the fields of cotton, soybeans and clover mixing in a rather pleasing panorama of colors and smells.
“If it wasn’t for the stickies, this would make a good place to settle,” Ryan said, an unfamiliar touch of gentleness in his normally gruff voice. “You could build a small ville on that hilltop over there, see? It has an excellent view of the landscape, and climbing up that hill would make a ville hard to attack.”
“Yes, it would,” Krysty agreed, riding her horse a little closer.
“And nobody bother for years still think this mutie territory,” Jak said with a lopsided grin, then laughed. “First time stickies good for anything.”
“Think we’ll ever find Petrov and his boys?” J.B. asked.
“Don’t know,” Ryan said honestly. “But we’re heading east again, toward Modine, and we’re close to a redoubt.”
“We’re still not planning on a jump,” Mildred said, hugging the flaccid med kit to her chest.
“No, we’re safe from those wendigos,” the man growled. “But we can check inside the redoubt for supplies. If luck is with us…” He shrugged and kept riding onward.
“Not see anything like wendigos,” Jak stated, stropping a knife blade on a smooth rock. “Tough.”
“What’s that up ahead?” Krysty asked, craning her neck.
Slowing their mounts, the companions drew blasters and proceeded slowly, moving away from one another purely as a precaution. However, that proved to be unnecessary as over the next hillock was a small farming community. Scarcely more than a village, there was a truck stop surrounded by a dozen houses and a couple of grain silos.
“I don’t think this place has ever been looted,” Ryan said, loosening the reins for his horse. “The stickies must have kept everybody else away.”
“But not us,” Krysty added.
“No wonder intact,” Jak scoffed. “Nothing here worth anything.”
“Millie, think there might be an eye doctor here?” J.B. asked.
“There might be.” She smiled. “There just damn well might be!”
As the companions rode closer, they noticed the village was in poor shape, with most of the homes collapsing inward upon themselves. There were wags on the streets and telephone wires overhead, but the little town reeked of decay, the canvas awnings of the stores tattered, and the few intact windows were so thickly encrusted with grime they were a murky opaque in color, a nondescript shade of forgotten.
Checking for ammunition first, the companions discovered that the police station was burned to the ground, most likely from a lightning strike. Only a few scattered pieces of the foundation showed through the accumulated piles of dead leaves and dying ivy. The windows of the pawnshop were intact, but the roof had collapsed, and now a small jungle of wild plants grew amid the display cases.
On the street, the cars and trucks sat on their rims, the rubber tires long crumbled away. If there had b
een drivers behind the wheels, the bodies had also gone the way of all flesh, destroyed by time itself, instead of the savage hand of man.
“There’s nothing here to scav,” Ryan muttered, looking around the place. “We might as well continue on to the redoubt and see if we can find any supplies there.”
“Quiet,” Krysty snapped, pulling her rapid-fire from the gun boot. Just then, the woman jerked her head up and drew both blasters to fire at something moving fast in the sky overhead.
Chapter Fifteen
The night was warm, the rain long gone, and the breeze from the north, carrying the smell of the Cobalt Mountains, was rich and heavy with pine and distant snow.
Sitting inside the rim of a broken fountain, the Pig Iron Gang was cooking dinner over a campfire. The ancient granite reflected the waves of heat from the small fire, making them quite comfortable inside the basin. Above them, the smoke curled along the bronze statue of some predark sec man carrying a muzzle-loading longblaster and wearing a coonskin cap.
Looking over his roasted leg of dog, Petrov Cordalane blinked in surprise. “Say that again,” he ordered, tossing the partially eaten food over a shoulder and wiping his mouth clean on a sleeve.
“I can read it,” Thal said, shaking the journal in one big hand. “I cracked their code!”
Stretching for what seemed like miles around the gang were the crumbling ruins of the predark city of Modine. Great towers rose tilted into the cloudy sky, every window gone or splintered into a spiderweb of crazy cracks. Covering the streets and sidewalks was a thick layer of rubbish, most of it glass, but also a lot of rusting metal in the most amazing variety of shapes and sizes, along with a host of plastic things that nobody had any idea about whatsoever. The ancient rubble was yards deep in some areas, piled up against the charred buildings like windblown leaves. Different size wags were everywhere, ripe for the looting, the engines still intact and untouched. Some were colored like chunks of the rainbow, while others were huge and gray, massive machines of rusty armor, supporting a blaster so big it had to have taken two strong men to load in a brass. Tricycles and toilet seats, tea kettles and turbines, Modine was the richest predark city west of the Missy Sip. Hundreds of people had to have come every year to try to scavenge something of value. Only the presence of the wendigos kept most folks at bay, including those annoying barbs, but the Pig Iron Gang knew how to trick a wendy, and so had safe passage through the ruins. That made Modine the perfect hunting ground. All they had to do was grow a little moss, poison a few ponds, then wait for the feebs to arrive.
“What’s it say?” Rose asked, rubbing a slice of apple on her own roasted leg of dog meat.
“There’s a calendar in the front of the book,” Thal said, not answering her question. “Which was odd, because all of the other printed pages are gone, torn out, see?” He riffled the ragged edges of the missing pages. “So I started thinking, why keep this one page unless it was important somehow?”
“Paper is only important in the lav,” Rose replied.
“Anyway,” Thal continued, “underneath the calendar was the only thing in the book not in code, one sentence.” He waited. Nobody said anything. “‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’” Thal grinned. “It was us eating dog that made me think of it. Dog, that’s the key.”
“Has he been smoking any zoomers?” Petrov asked, glancing sideways.
“If so, he ain’t been sharing it with me,” Rose mumbled, her mouth full.
“Someone told me once that sentence has every letter in the alphabet,” Thal explained, feeling like he was trying to push a wet rope. “So I started exchanging letters with the garbled stuff, and nuke me, it suddenly made sense!”
“Okay, Thal, you’re the baron of all whitecoats, congrats.” Charlie sighed, placing aside his cup and lighting a cig. “So what’s it say?”
Angling the journal for some better light from the campfire, Thal pursed his lips, then haltingly began. “Greetings, my name is Mildred Wyeth, I am a physician and was cryogenically frozen in December 2000, only to awaken a hundred year later in Deathlands.”
“This was writ by someone who was frozen?” Petrov asked in a whisper, staring at the big man. “A freezie?”
“Guess so,” Thal said excitedly from behind the book. “Now listen up, you gleebs, here comes the good part.” The man cleared his throat. “I will be putting down my innermost thoughts on these pages, as honestly as I can, to help me sort out the…ah…transition from the past to this monstrous new world.”
“Blah, blah, blah, the freezie prefers the predark world to working for a living,” Petrov scoffed. “Probably too ugly to be a gaudy slut. Why should we give a damn about this drek?”
“…I will also be putting down any, and all, useful information that I know,” Thal went on, “from safe zones where a person can seek refuge, such as Two-Son ville in the NewMex desert south of the Great Salt, to villes to avoid like Rock ville east of the Ohio River. Also, how to spot a rad pit, how to kill the worst of the mutants—that’s old talk for muties—the formula for black powder and how to process it into the much more powerful gunpowder, basic chemistry, some electronics and all of my vast medical knowledge.”
“A phiz-zish-son. That be a healer?”
“Appears so.”
“Blind NORAD, and we left her by the waterfall for Big Joe to sell to the slavers!” Charlie growled, exhaling a long stream of smoke. “A predark healer! We could have gotten anything we wanted from a baron for her, any nuking thing we wanted!”
“I heard of a coldheart named Fitzwilly sold a healer slave to a trader for a war wag,” Rose added excitedly. “A whole damn war wag! Blaster, brass, juice and everything! Now he rolls under a different name, Broke-Neck Pete, and has barons kissing his arse for the things he brings in for trade.”
“You mean like the stuff we have here in Modine,” Petrov said very slowly, tasting each word. “The drek that’s piled yards deep for a mile in every direction.”
Licking her lips, Rose could only nod, while Charlie gave a long, low whistle. Wealth beyond their dreams lay about them piled in heaps, ripe for the taking, if they had a war wag to ferry the stuff to the East Coast barons, those were the richest. More brass and better food than they could ever hope to barter from the traders, and without the constant danger of the fragging slavers trying to toss the gang into their damn wooden cages.
“Does the book tell the location of her cryo-whatever unit?” Petrov asked eagerly, cracking his knuckles. “That must have been where she got that implo gren and these fancy blasters.”
“Not yet.” Thal sighed, closing the journal with a thump. “I’ve only done the one page, and that took me most of today. But there’s a map in the back of a place looks like a bomb shelter. A huge one, five stories deep, mebbe more.”
Petrov felt as if he had been hit with lightning. Jackpot! “Then stop yammering at me and get back to work,” Petrov commanded, with an imperial wave of the hand. “We’ll do the rest of the hunting and the cooking. Your job now is decoding that book, and nothing else.”
“No prob. Sure could do with a cig,” Thal said, his words thick with meaning. “That’d help a lot.”
Without a comment, Charlie removed the hand-rolled smoke from his mouth and passed it over.
Smiling, Thal took a long drag, then opened the journal and started counting letters again, flipping back and forth from one part of the journal to another.
“What do you think we’d find in that bomb shelter?” Rose asked, her fingers toying with the pretty sextant hanging between her breasts.
“Our future,” Petrov whispered, lost in thought, stirring the campfire with a green stick. Just then, the clouds parted to bath Modine in silvery moonlight as the hot embers rose in a swirling cloud to fly into the nighttime sky and disappear from sight.
THE SOUND of Krysty’s blaster was still ringing in their ears when a spear slammed into the ground among the companions, a scalp dangling from the wooden shaft as
decoration.
“Barbs!” Ryan cursed, hauling out the Marlin.
At the word, hundreds of people silently rose into view from every building in the little town. Each of them was dressed in simple buckskins and carried a long spear. Most of them wore bandoliers hung across their chests, the leather strips supporting blasters of every kind, wheelguns, autoloaders, derringers, zipguns and a couple that Ryan couldn’t identify. From their travels, the companions knew that the barbs didn’t use the blasters, only their deadly spears. They collected the weapons as trophies, to show their chills, the same way some coldhearts did ears or fingers.
Tense minutes passed while Ryan and the chief barb did nothing. With weapons in hand, neither moved or said a word as they faced each other. Slowly, the minutes crept by before the chief barb broke the imposing silence.
“You must leave,” the chief barb said in a deep and commanding voice. “With the destruction of the swamp bridge, the unstoppable Great Ones will be forced to make their nest here, in our holy place.”
Unstoppable…wendigos?
“Why not chill them?” Ryan replied simply.
“Impossible!” a female barb yelled. “Nothing can stop a Great One!”
“We done,” Jak stated with a shrug.
A low murmur of confusion swept through the huge crowd, and the chief barb looked hard at the albino teenager before nodding. “I hear truth in your voice,” the man said slowly. “Tell us how this was done, and you shall have safe passage through our lands for a day.”
“A month and a day,” Doc said.
Puzzled, the chief barb frowned.
“He means for a moon,” Mildred translated, nudging the old man with an elbow.
A moon and a day? The chief barb dismissed that with a wave of his hand. “No, you ask for too much!”
“We don’t know what to ask for,” Ryan said, controlling his temper, “since we don’t know the extent of your land.”