by James Axler
He hefted the Heckler & Koch over his shoulder and looked ahead. They were at the bottom end of a steep-sided valley, which had a stream running through the middle. It was nearly wide enough to be called a river, about nine feet across where they stood. As Ryan looked at the water a large salmon swam slowly and erratically past him, flopping over on its side, then straightening.
Jak was bending down a few yards away, hands cupped, ready to drink from the clear, sparkling water.
"No!"
Ryan's bellow of angry warning sent the dawn birds screeching from the pine trees; a flock of gulls rose in a screaming protest from the rocks at the end of the headland. The echoes rolled and boiled off the hills.
"What!" Jak spit, stumbling with shock, water spilling from his fingers.
"Come here," Ryan said. "Put a few drops of that water on my rad counter."
"What?"
"Do it."
The boy reached out a finger and allowed a single drop of the spring water to fall on the tiny button, which immediately went from the orange-red color to a dazzling, flaring scarlet.
"Holy shit!" Mildred breathed. "Do that mean what I think it do?"
Doc nodded. "It do."
Mildred was vehement. "We don't have a choice. We go farther along the coast or we go back toward the Viking village. We cannotstay here!"
"If we go upriver and over the mountain, we'll be there and gone fast," Krysty said. "We won't be exposed to the rad for that long."
Mildred turned to face Krysty, her hands on her hips. "You got any brains in that pretty head, lady? The count here at the edge of the lake's hot enough to fry a side of pork. What d'you think it'll be like higher up, where the radiation leak has to be stronger? While we're here jawing about it, the sickness is settling on us like fine ash from an erupting volcano."
Ryan nodded. "All right, all right! No point going farther. Must be close to the ville of those muties. Have to be back. Take the boat and keep close in to the shore. Hope to spot any pursuers before they're close enough to hit us."
"Then let's go," Mildred said.
Doc coughed. "One brief moment, if I may, Ryan?"
"What, Doc?"
"It seems likely there's been some slow seepage around here for some years. Witness the appalling mutations we witnessed in the attackers. But the illness that is now striking at the Viking people seems to me to indicate some new and drastic increase in the radiation potential. The water. The fish. My interest as a scientist prompts me to ask whether we might take a half hour and go a short way up the river to see what we shall see."
Ryan looked at the others. Mildred shook her head firmly. So did Jak. J.B. shrugged his shoulders.
Krysty looked behind her into the clean-smelling pine trees. "Half an hour can't hurt much. I'd like to know."
"Fine. We leave now. And we're back in the boat in precisely forty minutes. Anyone wants to stay here can. Mildred?"
She grinned. "I'm not letting that old goat boldly go where no scientist's gone before. But we don't touch or eat or drink anything."
* * *
It took less than fifteen minutes. A clear path meandered along the left-hand side of the river, which they followed. The water flowed through a gorge, and fresh scars along its flanks testified to recent earth falls. Mildred pointed them out to the others, commenting on the minor quake they'd all experienced.
"I assume that nuking during the war was so intense that it triggered movements of some of the less stable tectonic plates. You said that most of California had slid into the Pacific, Doc."
"Right."
"So, bearing in mind a lot of the nasties were buried underground, lead-lined vaults and all that so-called 'safety' bullshit, major tremors could open them up like a hot knife through butter."
"Mildred," Ryan said as he walked beside her on the trail, "I never read anything that told how rad sickness works. I mean, I know about what it does. The rash and puking and all that. But howdoes it do that? You can't see it or anything."
She paused. "Not my specialty, Ryan. But I guess I know a little. Gather around, students." Everyone stood closer. "You won't know much about negatively charged electrons, ions or free radical molecules, right? No, I thought not. Me neither. Radiation has alpha and beta particles and they have a charge of electricity. They screw up the electrons and molecules in the body. Send them ape-shit wild. I know that structural proteins, like collagen, get smashed around. The DNA... No, you wouldn't know that, either. The tiny cells can reproduce themselves perfectly in a healthy body. Radiation messes that up."
"The cell blueprint is ruined?" Doc asked. "Is that it?"
"Sure. And the cells that reproduce fastest are the ones that get hit first and hardest. Blood, of course. And skin and hair. So, you get leukemia and your skin starts falling off and goodbye hair. More serious mutations are slower to show, but just as deadly in the long run."
"Thanks, Mildred. I just... well, it's all way beyond me."
"Radiation kills, Ryan. That's all you need to know. A man who gets a bullet through the brain doesn't need to know all about high-energy physics or ballistics. Just that he's been shot and he's going to die."
"Time's passing," J.B. warned. "Should we be turning around for the boat?"
"Looks like path opens around corner there." Jak pointed.
"There and no farther," Ryan pronounced. "Then it's fast back."
"I just can't believe this place is so poisoned," Krysty said as they walked on. "Tall pines and the freshest stream you ever saw."
"No birds," Jak said.
It was true. Other than the chuckling sound of the small river, the morning was silent. The only life at all was a glittering coppery cockroach that ambled across the trail in front of them. J.B. raised a boot to crush it, but Mildred warned him not to touch it.
"Creatures like that'll inherit the earth. Radiation hardly slows them."
They rounded the corner, and everyone stopped. There wasn't the least doubt that they'd found the source of the massive rad poisoning.
There had been, fairly recently, a huge slippage of earth, and half the hillside had opened up like giant jaws. The tumbled remnants of several concrete buildings clung perilously to the jagged edge of the sheer cliff, two hundred feet above them. But the quake had done more than damage the buildings. It had also torn open great burial pits beneath them, spilling their secret load from the metal-walled, sealed caskets.
The whole slope, hundreds of feet across, down to the river, was a tangled mass of rusting drums and split plastic vats. Whatever they might once have held was now an unbelievable cocktail of hideous substances, mingled together, all leached through to the water. Into the soil. Into the lake beyond and into the food chain for the entire area.
"My God!" Mildred whispered. "It's like opening the curtains on Armageddon. It's worse. Much, much..." She turned to Ryan, her dark eyes wide in shock. "Now, fast! Down the hill and as far away as possible from this devil's brew."
She led the way back toward the lake, stumbling in her eagerness. Ryan was at her heels, the others following closely behind.
"But what is it?" he shouted. "What could be in those drums?"
"Lord alone knows," she panted over her shoulder. "The killers were so many. Radioactive iodine. Carbon 14."
"Uranium?"
"Sure. Strontium 90, radium 226, tritium, radon 222. That's a gas."
"Plutonium, Mildred?" Doc called, jogging along third in line.
"Of course. Oh, I'm losing breath. Can't breathe deep in case... Carbon 14, cesium 134 and 137. Anything! It's all around us."
She wasn't that far from the jagged edge of panic, stumbling and nearly falling into the river at a point where the path doglegged left.
"Slow it, Mildred!" Ryan said. After all the self-control that the freezie had shown since they thawed her, it was a shock to see the state she was in now. The discovery of the ruined rad storage site had freaked her out.
She turned and gripped him by the ar
m, fingers tightening like a screw trap. "Ryan, that badge in your shirt doesn't show us how bad this might be. The rem count could be massive. Hopefully the worst of the leakage is gone, seeped away when the earth first cracked. But it is appalling."
"Just take it careful. Break an ankle on this trail and it won't help."
"This was the great fear of my generation, you know."
"What?" Krysty asked, taking Mildred by the hand to help her over a steep patch of tumbled stone.
"Chernobyl."
"Your knob'll what?" Jak called, not quite hearing what she'd said.
"A place in Russia," she said, her breathing becoming steadier.
"Upon my soul, ma'am, but I remember that," Doc said. "And there were two more such accidents within a few years. Damnably similar. One was in... Pennsylvania, wasn't? Or Manitoba? And one in Europe. Near Lyons? Or Cardiff. I can't recall."
The beach opened before them, the expanse of the lake narrowed by the enclosing rocks of the headlands on either side.
Mildred had recovered, and climbed into the boat to sit on a thwart, hand pressed against her chest. "If ever I have a coronary," she said, "I'll have it now."
The others got in, and they pushed off, paddling quickly toward open water. Ryan noticed that the rad count had fallen back to red-orange. Still high, but below lethal.
As they rowed past the obscuring headland, they found themselves on top of two of the pursuing Viking dragon-ships.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Their escape had been discovered a little after dawn, and Jorund Thoraldson had immediately ordered out the long ships. He sent two vessels, under the command of Egil Skallagson, toward the west, while he led two more dragon-ships in an easterly direction.
"I had thought we would take you, outlanders," he said, once the small boat had been hauled alongside and the six companions were on the deck.
"And you were right," Ryan replied. "But there's something important we have to tell you about."
"No. Escape is treachery. The karl of Markland will not talk with traitors."
"You damned fool!" Doc exclaimed. "You and your people — every man jack of them — faces a slow and painful death within a matter of weeks unless you move your steading."
"Words, words, words. Like small pebbles rattling in a crab shell. I have said I will not talk. Perhaps when we return to Markland, before you all take the long road without turning, we might talk."
"The flying eagle for the one-eyed outlander," Sigurd said eagerly.
Jorund nodded. "For such treachery... perhaps. We shall see."
He gestured for the prisoners to be taken into the bow of his ship, where they were guarded by a couple of the younger warriors. There had been no attempt to search Ryan or any of the others, but their firearms had all been taken and placed in the stern. One of the guards was Erik Stonebiter.
"What's flying eagle?" Jak asked him.
"You would not wish to know."
"Tell us," the albino boy pressed.
"It is a way of slaying, only to be done by the karl himself. Because you have betrayed his wishes, he may kill your leader in that way."
"What fucking way?" Jak insisted. Ryan, sitting on the gently heaving deck beside the teenager, was beginning to wish he'd stop asking about the flying eagle.
The young Norseman blankly refused to face Jak and stared out across the lake, where the first tendrils of gray mist were already appearing. "It is a hard passing," he finally said.
Jorund had also spotted the threatening bank of fog and was urging his rowers on to greater efforts, beginning to beat out a rhythm with his sheathed sword on the bulwark of the vessel.
With Jak and the others still waiting, Erik Stonebiter eventually told them of the flying eagle. "If the karl wills it, urged by the wisewoman, then you may be bound crossways, wrists and ankles to a frame. The point of the knife will enter here." He touched himself under the short ribs, low on the right side of his chest. "It is thrust in and drawn deep, up to the top of the ribs' curve. Then down again and out on the opposite side. The shape is like that of an eagle, flying high against the sun."
J.B. had been particularly interested in the telling. "And that's it? Doesn't sound anything special to me."
"No. That is but the half of it. Once the chest is laid open, the karl steps in close and reaches within the cavity. He seizes the lungs in his fists and draws them slowly out. I have seen it. The lungs flutter and fill for many minutes."
"A hundred years sure hasn't made folks any sweeter," Mildred said quietly.
* * *
The fog closed in, thicker and more blinding than before. It surrounded the two dragon-ships in a cocoon of muffling damp. Jorund ordered the two vessels to make fast to each other to prevent their becoming separated and lost. The oars were shipped, and they drifted in silence. Lookouts were posted at stem and stern. Water lapped and chuckled against the wooden bows. The crew sat around, not talking, made uneasy by the shrouding mist.
Krysty huddled against Ryan for comfort and for warmth. "You figure we did right not to take them on in a firefight, lover?" she whispered.
He shrugged. "Moment like that, seeing them on top of us, you shoot or you don't. There's a good forty men, most with blasters, hid behind the wooden sides of their ships. With the rifles we could have done some serious chilling."
She smiled at him. "Sure. And so could they, huh? They had speed on the water, too. Rammed us. And that would have been the end of the book."
"That's the way I figured it, too." He wiped beads of moisture from her cold cheeks. "I hoped the baron might have listened about the rad leak."
"It'll chill everyone in the ville, won't it? Hot spot as red as that?"
"Sure. Mebbe we can get him to listen to us back at the ville. If the flying eagle don't get..."
"Doesn't," she corrected.
Ryan grinned and shook his head. "Sure. If the flying eagle doesn'tget us first."
A light offshore wind was blowing the two Norse long ships farther out onto the lake. Jorund refused to allow the oars to be used to bring them back closer to the invisible land, worried that they might run upon saw-toothed rocks that would rip the belly out of the vessels.
J.B. suggested to Ryan that they might risk a break for their boat, which was being towed behind the dragon-ship. "Grab the blasters. Cut the line. Be gone, out of sight, in a minute or less." It was tempting.
"Not a zero option situation," Ryan replied. "Some of us'd make it. Sure. But we'd leave a lot of blood behind us."
J.B. nodded. "Guess so."
As the afternoon wore on, Mildred was working herself into a righteous rage. "That blond hulk of total stupidity is sentencing every living thing in his village to certain, slow, painful death. And the pig-ignorant son of a bitch won't listen."
Ryan touched her on the arm. "Sure. But a man insists on putting the barrel of a Colt Magnum in his mouth and pulling the trigger, you'll likely get hurt if you try too hard to stop him."
"If we get to live long enough, we can try and get the word through someone like the young guy with the broken teeth," Krysty suggested.
Mildred sighed. "I suppose so. I wish we could have had a good bath real soon to try to wash off some of the surface radiation we must have picked up from that hell's caldron back there."
"Will the lake water not be severely contaminated as well?" Doc asked, his angular figure looming from the mist. He'd been standing and leaning on the side, peering into the afternoon gloom.
"I wouldn't want to drink much of it," Mildred agreed. "But it's barely tepid compared to that boiling river."
* * *
Unbelievably the fog was growing even thicker as the afternoon dragged by. When sitting on the cold wood of the bow, the friends could no longer see the ferocious head of the dragon with its blood-tipped teeth, only ten feet away. Ryan could just make out the boots of the lookout who perched there.
It had also become much colder.
Somewhere out in t
he murk a fish leaped, entering the water again with a slapping splash. Everyone on board jumped, startled.
Krysty stared out into the blank wall of fog, her eyes slightly closed, her head a little on one side. Ryan had been with her long enough to know something was happening.
"What?" he said, straining his own eyes. But it was impossible.
"I can hear... could be a big fish. Fog blurs the way I know things. But..." She stood up, like a questing hunter. "Gaia! Ryan, they're almost on top of..."
She was interrupted by a jolting crash as the first of the muties' boats rammed into them.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The rocking, shifting deck and the clinging, choking fog made combat lethally surreal. Blasters were of little use when a target more than ten feet away couldn't be seen. The wood quickly became slick with blood, and bodies jostled, screamed and fell to the deck.
Ryan held his 9 mm SIG-Sauer pistol in his left hand, grabbed from the stern in that first moment of the attack, his panga in his right. He blasted and hacked at anything that came within range that wasn't either a friend or one of the Vikings. Despite being a captive of the Norsemen, he had no doubt whatsoever that to be taken prisoner by the gibbering muties would be far, far worse.
Like so many similar battles that Ryan had lived through, this one was a series of desperate moments, strung together in a jerking, chaotic succession of half memories.
There was no doubt from the first seconds that the attackers had come from the same ville as the muties who had sneaked into Markland. They poured over the side of the Viking dragon-ship, one or two with primitive firearms, most of them hefting a weird variety of edged weapons.
The Norse defenders were taken badly by surprise. Many of them were hacked down to the boards before they had a chance to protect themselves.
It was no small guerrilla raid.
Ryan spotted at least four of the muties' boats, hooked with grapnels to the long ships, and he guessed there had to be one more on the far side of the second of Jorund's tethered vessels. As far as numbers went, it was impossible to make a guess. He knew only his own fights, isolated in the clutching hands of the fog.