by James Axler
Jackson immediately dropped to its back in the dirt and offered its trainer its soft underbelly.
“That’s better,” Crecca said. He unclipped the chain from the choke collar and pointed at his heel.
The little stickie meekly obeyed.
Crecca shouldered his M-16, then stepped off the road and into the trees. The thick, rough-barked trunks were unevenly spaced. Some grew only inches apart while others were a double arm’s length from their closest neighbor. Blocked from sunlight, most of the lower branches had withered and fallen off. Around the base of each tree was a ring of rotting debris: a rat’s nest of dusty needles, twigs and small and large limbs. Some of these brush piles stood as high as Crecca’s waist.
By staying as close as possible to the trunks, he avoided most of the tinder-dry material. He was forced to advance at a snail’s pace, watching the placement of each step, occasionally toeing a rotted branch out of the way when he couldn’t safely see past it.
The nine carny chillers moved in a widely spaced line behind him. They followed his trail exactly, keeping close to the tree trunks, stepping in his steps. Because they were pros at both chilling and stalking, they made only the slightest rustling noise as they advanced; Crecca could hardly hear it over the thudding of his own pulse in his ears.
The carny master couldn’t see the road because of the wall of trees, but he knew that he had to be close to it—no more than thirty or forty feet away. He also knew that he had to be just about on top of Cawdor and the other ambushers…if they were really there.
As Crecca paused for a moment, his back pressed to a tree trunk, Jackson started acting nervous. The stickie wasn’t whimpering or mewling; it was making the softest of soft kissing sounds while gazing warily at the butt of the M-16. The expression on the little stickie’s face said it was trying hard to keep quiet but couldn’t.
Cawdor was near, all right.
Crecca turned around the trunk, holding the assault rifle at hip height, his finger inside the trigger guard, lightly resting on the trigger. As he brought down his right foot, something unseen crunched under his heel. With the weapon poised, he froze, scanning the row of trees in the gloom directly ahead. He saw nothing, and was about to make another jump forward when, not ten feet away, leaning against the base of a tree, he caught the shape of the scoped Steyr longblaster.
A hair-raising jolt of adrenaline coursed through his veins.
As Crecca opened his mouth, before he could get out a warning shout, a hand appeared from under the pile of debris, grabbed the sling and snatched the rifle away.
RYAN LAY BURROWED under a brush pile of his own making, with a peekaboo view of the empty road. From his position, he couldn’t see Krysty or any of the others on the opposite side. The heat under the debris was sweltering. Beads of sweat ran down his spine and trickled in rivulets over the sides of his rib cage. Dust mixed with body oils and perspiration had turned the backs of his hands ash-gray.
Ever since he and the others had taken cover, he had been counting the elapsed time in his head. He had figured it would take the chillers mebbe four minutes to close the quarter-mile gap if they were moving at a quick pace. And under the circumstances he couldn’t see them doing anything but double time to catch up. At that rate, they should have been in his sights more than two minutes ago. With every second that passed, his concern grew.
It wasn’t a sudden noise that first alerted him to the danger they were in. It was an awareness. A vague presence. A pressure. From behind. He had been counting on the dry deadfall to give them plenty of advance warning of an enemy approach from the rear. Listening hard, he could hear the rustle of branches not twenty feet away. The enemy was closing in, and there had been no alarm. He picked up a twig and flicked it at J.B. to get his attention. The Armorer immediately reached over and nudged Jak, who turned to look Ryan’s way. Doc looked at him, too, but his eyes were unfocused.
Ryan jerked a thumb toward the woods behind them. The gesture was urgent and emphatic. And to the companions the meaning was obvious.
They’d been foxed.
J.B.’s jaw dropped in disbelief, but he recovered at once, grimacing as he thumbed his wire-rimmed glasses back up the bridge of his nose. Ryan pointed across the road, toward Krysty and Mildred’s position. J.B. and Jak nodded in agreement. The ambush was scrapped. They had to rejoin their forces, and quickly.
Ryan gathered up his extra mags and tucked them inside his waistband. As he started to reach back to grab the Steyr, a branch cracked ten feet away. No way was he going to leave his precious sniper rifle behind. He caught hold of the longblaster by its shoulder sling and jerked it away from the tree, using his momentum to roll up onto his knees.
A fraction of a second later someone shouted, “Get ’em!” Then all the chillers were yelling as they crashed through the brush. Ryan brought up the SIG. He couldn’t make out any targets, but as gunshots barked and bullets thudded into the trunks all around him, he returned fire, spraying a line of 9 mm death in front of him at waist height.
Behind him, the rocking boom of J.B.’s scattergun was followed by the roar of Jak’s .357 Magnum blaster.
The yelling abruptly stopped. The attackers broke off their charge and took cover.
Ryan waved for Jak, J.B. and Doc to beat feet. He caught up to them as they reached the road. As they started to cross, three rousties appeared around the bend and, dropping to kneeling positions, opened fire on them.
“Go!” Ryan said as bullets whined overhead. “Go!”
He and the others returned fire on the run.
The roustie on the far right took a slug very low in the chest. From the way it blew him off his pins, it had to be one of Jak’s .357 Mags. It lifted and slammed the man onto his back. Screaming, kicking, he clawed at his guts as the companions dived into the cover of the trees.
Blasterfire from Krysty, Dean and Mildred sent the two survivors scurrying back around the bend.
Ryan cupped his hand and shouted to them, “Frog it!”
It was their signal for a full-out, fighting retreat, which meant the two groups would retreat by leapfrogging each other, one group defending the bend while the other ran up the straightaway to take up a firing position at the next turn.
They were already in high gear up the road by the time the chillers got themselves reorganized. As they withdrew, the companions used sparse blasterfire to keep the opposition back at least a hundred feet. They weren’t trying to make perfect shots. The gloom of the forest made pinpoint accuracy next to impossible. The idea was to stall the enemy until the companions could reach a place they could successfully defend. And they were trying to use up as little ammo as possible in getting there. J.B. didn’t shoot at all, but concentrated on keeping Doc moving uphill; there was no point in wasting his scattergun rounds on a long-distance delaying action.
As Ryan raced past Mildred, she knelt at the side of the road and fired her Czech-made target pistol from a braced stance. Her skillful potshotting brought a shrill yelp from the shadows far downslope. Then a wail filtered through the forest. She had nailed one of the chillers with a .38 slug. Nailed him good, from the racket he was making.
The flurry of answering gunshots echoed off the trees. As Ryan made for the next bend in the road, bullets spanged into the surrounding trunks and clipped off branches. The road above them continued to wind back and forth among the dark trunks. There was no choice but to keep on running until they reached the summit.
Which, he knew, couldn’t be far away now.
Then the opposition shooting slowed.
Two possibilities occurred to Ryan as he knelt, the SIG’s sights aimed downhill. Mebbe the chillers had realized that the running gun battle was burning up ammo that they were going to need when they caught up to their quarry. Or mebbe they had finally figured out that if the companions made the summit they might have a defensive position too strong to overcome no matter how much ammo they had.
When a moment later the shooting stopp
ed altogether, Ryan knew the chillers were concentrating on closing the distance before the companions could reach the high ground.
“Forget the frog!” he told Mildred, Dean, Leeloo and Krysty as they dashed past him. “Straight to the top! Triple fast!”
Ryan sent J.B., Doc and Jak up ahead of him. The albino grabbed Doc under one armpit and J.B. took the other. They half carried the old man as they ran.
After three more bends, the track straightened. Ryan could see the light breaking through the tops of the trees above them. The road rose even more steeply as it approached the summit. By the time he reached the edge of the tree line, Mildred, Krysty and Jak were on their bellies on the crown of the road, sighting their handblasters down the straight stretch. He moved past them and joined J.B. who was already doing a recce of the summit.
There was no hardsite for them to defend. The crest of the summit was rock, all right, but it was as flat as a pancake. The densely forested ridge bracketed the top of the road, which continued steeply down on the other side of the crest.
Words weren’t necessary between the two longtime trail buddies.
It was bad.
Bastard bad.
They both knew the chillers could filter through the ridgetop trees and flank them if they tried to make a stand on the summit.
“Get up!” Ryan told the others as he turned back from the table of rock. “We can’t stay here. We’ve got to keep running. Cross the summit and take the road down the other side.”
One hundred fifty feet below him, at the start of the straightaway he’d just climbed, four rousties tried to cross the road.
In a single, fluid movement, Ryan shouldered the Steyr, dropped the safety and snap fired.
The longblaster boomed like a cannon under the canopy of tree branches.
A heavy-caliber bullet skipped harmlessly off the road between the chillers, but the near miss made them throw themselves headfirst into the brush. And, Ryan thought, as he broke from the crest and ran after the others, it would give them something to worry about as they worked their way up through the trees.
As he sprinted down the descending road, he got his first glimpse of the little lake. From the high angle of view, it looked like a predark painting or advertisement—serene, pastoral, inviting.
What appeared to be steam or fog hung over part of its mirrorlike surface. With chillers at his back, Ryan had no time to examine the placid panorama more closely. He raced to catch up with his companions, who were already nearing the muddy shore.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Thick brown muck sucked at Mildred’s boot-soles as she struggled around the denuded perimeter of the lake. She couldn’t run through the mud; it was too deep. And trying to run made her boots sink in past her ankles, which slowed her even more. She wasn’t alone; the other companions had the same problem.
Inside the dead zone of the lake’s shoreline, the few remaining trees were long dead, barkless, bleached, eroded smooth. Like gigantic, stripped bones jutting from the wet earth.
What could have caused it? she wondered.
Something to do with the lake, obviously. Some localized toxicity or disaster perhaps springing from skydark. It occurred to her that the lake might be sitting over a volcanic vent. But there was no telltale aroma of sulfide. The smell was of intense biological decay. Not just swamp, though. Latrine. Abattoir.
She noted other scattered boot prints and the deep wheel tracks in the soft ground. Someone else had been here, and recently, she thought. So the place was probably safe enough.
While the other companions trudged slowly ahead, Mildred paused for breath. She turned and glanced up at the summit. She saw Ryan coming down the steep road in great strides, his longblaster in his hand. There was no sign of the chillers yet. She took the opportunity to lever open the cylinder of her ZKR 551 target revolver and dump out its two spent shells. She thumbed in a pair of live bullets, then snapped the cylinder shut. This done, she stuck her hand back in the bag pocket of her fatigue pants and counted the loose .38-caliber cartridges. There were eight left.
Mildred felt no wave of panic at this discovery. She wasn’t afraid of dying, and she wasn’t afraid of pain. She had already lived through both.
And through resurrection, thanks to Ryan and the companions.
Though she didn’t fancy dying again, she had hopes of a different kind of resurrection the next time.
Then she caught a flash of green out of the corner of her eye, out over the smooth surface of the lake, green that seemed to climb from water to sky. Even though she heard the crackle of the electrical discharge, she thought she had imagined it. She shook her head to clear it. Lightning didn’t travel in that direction. Not normal lightning, anyway. Perhaps the heat and the exertion were making her mind play tricks she thought.
But there were more flashes, much stronger ones. Even in broad daylight, they underlit the clouds of dense fog or mist that were rising like steam from the placid surface. The zapping sound of electricity was followed by a baritone rumble of thunder that she could feel in her guts.
“Did you see that?” she said to J.B., who had stopped twenty feet away with Doc at his side.
“Yeah, I saw it. Don’t understand it, but I saw it. What’s going on out there?”
Krysty, Dean, Leeloo and Jak had momentarily stopped, too, and were staring at the micro-weather system.
“It’s kind of pretty,” Leeloo remarked. “I like the green lights.”
“Look!” Jak said, pointing at the water under the cloud.
A strange sort of disturbance had appeared directly under it. A riffling on the water. A dark, churning circular patch about 150 feet wide, as if billions tiny fish were schooling. Or large predatory creatures below were herding them into a vast, panicked ball.
Something wasn’t right.
Something definitely wasn’t right.
“Everybody,” Mildred said urgently, waving her arms, “move back from the water.”
The others didn’t move. They all seemed mesmerized by the strange, localized electrical storm. All of them but Doc. The old man wasn’t even looking at the lake. He was staring fixedly at his own muddy boot tops and mumbling to himself.
Then a blast of withering heat sucked Mildred’s breath away as the low-hanging clouds began to surge toward them.
“Triple red!” Mildred cried over the fresh round of rolling thunder. “Triple red! Run!”
Still nobody moved.
Deep shadow swept over them as the clouds blocked the sun.
Cursing, Mildred slogged over to Leeloo and Dean, grabbed their arms and tried to pull them away from the shoreline.
Too late.
The snow came down slanting, driven sideways by the scorching wind.
The pale-yellow precipitation was the size of snowflakes, but it wasn’t snow, she realized at once. It was hard. More like tiny hail. Or bird shot. Hard enough to bounce a foot in the air as it hit the mud. The deluge of spores peppered Mildred’s plaited hair, head, face and shoulders. Instinctively she held her breath.
Dean and Leeloo went rigid under her hands. Though she used all of her strength, she couldn’t budge them. They seemed to weigh a thousand pounds each, their feet rooted to the earth. When Mildred took in the expressions on the children’s faces, she was horrorstruck. Their mouths hung down slack, their eyes open wide, the pupils hugely dilated.
There was something in the snow, she thought, or whatever the hell it was. Something bad.
Mildred knew if she was going to help Dean and Leeloo, if she was going to help any of her friends, she had to get clear of the downpour. She had to escape its effects and regroup. The deep mud sucked at her boots as she tried to run from the bank, which made her exert more energy and burn more of her limited air.
The cloud moved with her, tracking her.
And along with it came the pale snow.
Mildred looked back over her shoulder and through the blizzard saw Ryan coming, on the double. He had reac
hed the start of the shoreline and was hurling himself through the muck. She wanted to wave him off, but what with the thunder and the heavy downfall, he was still too far away for her to warn. And he was way too far away to help her.
She managed another few steps before her legs gave out. On her knees in the mud, with tears of rage running down her cheeks, her last thought before she inhaled was Oh, fuck!
Then she sucked down air.
And her brain melted.
AS RYAN CHARGED DOWN from the top of the road, he took in the desolation surrounding the tiny lake. He also saw the companions standing there on the bank. Doing the opposite of what they were supposed to be doing, which was running for hard cover. Instead, they were gawking.
Under the strange clouds forming over the small body of water, something twinkled, then flashes of green reflected in the lake’s mirror surface. Over the thuds of his footfalls, he heard the snap and crackle of lightning. A fraction of a second later, there was thunder.
Big-time thunder.
The unnatural was natural in Deathlands. The unexpected was to be expected. But this storm brewing in miniature caught Ryan completely off guard. The lightning was green and blindingly bright. It didn’t spear down from the clouds to the lake; it traveled upward, from the water to the billowing mist. The savage intensity of the electrical discharge filled him with dread. It appeared that he had done the last thing he had wanted to do: he had led his friends into something far worse than a box canyon.
“Nukin’ hell!” he swore, running faster.
As fast as he ran, he couldn’t beat the clouds. Blown by a jet wind from hell, they rushed from the lake to the land. Waves of pale yellow snow sheeted over the companions, who, except for Mildred, still didn’t move. The stocky black woman was trying to drag Dean and the little girl away from the shoreline. After a moment, she gave it up, and before Ryan could reach her, turned to run for the edge of the lower slope. The snowstorm engulfed her. For an instant, she disappeared behind a pale curtain. When the curtain shifted, she reappeared. Ryan saw her stagger and fall. She didn’t get up.