by James Axler
“Any idea why?” Mildred asked.
Krysty shook her head. “No idea. Just like they weren’t there, one day.”
Mildred wondered if this was an ill omen, but there was no time to dwell on that as they prepared to head out.
Jak took the lead at Ryan’s behest. The albino was at home in the swamps, and knew them intimately. Any dangers that may lurk from the native wildlife and from the treacherous ground beneath their feet were known as second nature to the hunter.
Yet, as they progressed, Ryan became aware that Jak was moving with unease. When they stopped to rest, Ryan questioned Jak about that. The answer he got was unsettling.
“Feels weird. Not good, like something bad hangs over us…over all of this,” Jak added, sweeping his arm to indicate the swamp around them.
Ryan frowned, then looked at Krysty. Her doomie sense was usually a good indicator of when trouble was around the corner. He noticed that her sentient hair was waving in tendrils that suggested a sense of unease.
“I can feel it, but I don’t know what it is. It’s…it’s almost like an emptiness,” she began, groping for words. “It’s not the swamp or the animals—”
“Nothing wrong there, but no people,” Jak cut in. “Where are hunt parties?”
Ryan tried to get an angle on these feelings, translate them into something concrete. Whatever was causing the atmosphere was also responsible for the lack of human population. However he looked at it, there was no way it could be good; but beyond that, he had little notion at present of what that could mean.
“Just stay triple red. Be ready for anything,” was all that he could counsel. It wasn’t enough to keep him happy.
They continued on for over an hour, with nothing to break the monotony of the march until Jak suddenly halted.
“Swampies…coming straight for us.”
“What the fuck are swampies?” Coral asked.
“Met them before—muties that just won’t lie down and die,” Krysty snapped, drawing her Smith & Wesson.
“Can’t we skirt around them?” Mildred asked. Like Coral, she had no previous experience of the creatures.
J.B. shook his head. “Tricky fuckers. They’ve got good hunting instincts, and if the swamps are as deserted as we think, then they’ll sniff us out as the only fresh meat in town.”
“Great,” Mildred said dryly. “Just what we need.”
With their weapons drawn, they continued on their way. Coral was unarmed, so Jak gave her a couple of his leaf-bladed throwing knives to use for defense. “Though not much good with these fuckers,” he added less than helpfully. “Just use as last hope, and pray we blow the fuckers away.”
There was no chance they could avoid the swampies. The mutie creatures would have scented them and would be closing in; it was merely a matter of hoping that the hunters wouldn’t be able to surround and surprise them.
Slowly, they made their way through the swamps, every bird call, animal cry or sound of moving water holding the possibility of heralding attack. Their mouths dried, their nerves itched… The not knowing was the worst of it.
And yet, when the attack did come, it still took them by surprise.
Crossing a narrow strip of marshy grass that weaved an erratic path between two landmasses, surrounded on either side by rush-strewed waters, they could see clearly for several hundred yards in each direction, and felt relatively safe.
The one thing they didn’t expect was to see a half-dozen swampies emerge suddenly and shockingly from the water on either side of them, waves of stagnant, stinking swamp water sweeping over them, blinding the companions. The muties had to have been laying in wait, using their enhanced respiratory capacities to stay hidden.
The swampies were uncannily silent as they attacked, the only sounds being the movement of their limbs through water. The dwellers in the bayou had called them les morts vivants—the living dead—and indeed they closely resembled the voodoo zombies of legend. But these were very much alive and had only one thing on their minds: chilling their prey.
J.B. let fly with a burst of fire from the mini-Uzi, catching a thin, rangy man across the chest and shoulders, flinging him back into the water. But it wasn’t enough to chill him, and Coral screamed as he rose again. A well-aimed shot from Mildred’s ZKR through the forehead took him out. She figured that if they had enough strength to keep getting up, maybe they could be chilled like traditional zombies, with a shot through the head.
“Never thought all those late-night movies would turn out to be educational,” she muttered to herself as she took aim on a squat, fat woman who was wading purposefully through the water toward them.
The swampies were carrying machetes and knives rather than blasters—even the dumb muties had enough sense to know a water-logged blaster didn’t work—so the companions had some advantage. But the blinding wash of swamp water had given the muties valuable seconds in which to draw close.
Two of them zeroed in on Coral, one from each side of the path, realizing that she had no blaster. They were waxy, their skins covered in sores, and as they reached for her, she was frozen with fear. One was short and skinny, the other tall with a huge gut. Both had immense strength, and, taking one arm each, began to tug at her. She screamed from pain as much as fear. Their combined strength was ripping the muscles in her arms, pulling her shoulders out of their sockets. The knives plunged uselessly to the path.
There was little help for her. Krysty, Jak and Ryan were using their handblasters to fire on the swampies, trying to get them in the head each time, other shots proving little more than a delaying action. The swampies were on the path, grabbing at the companions, who kicked out, trying to stop them closing their vicelike grips about their arms and legs, dragging them into the water.
J.B. took the M-4000 from his back and let loose a load of barbed metal fléchettes that took out one swampie by severing the top half of his body almost cleanly from the bottom. Doc, too, had dealt with one swampie in this manner, using the LeMat’s shot chamber to equally lacerate a swampie who bore down. But the ancient percussion pistol had only one load of shot. Before Doc could reload, he had been dragged down by a swampie. The creature couldn’t wait to take a bite from him, and he felt its fetid breath as its head came toward him, the dull eyes showing nothing of its imminent triumph. The old man twisted his arm and wrist so that the LeMat was against the swampie’s temple, then loosed the ball round into its skull. The exit wound took half of the skull with the brain matter, splattering it with soft sounds into the waters beyond.
Coral was down, her arms useless. She screamed one last time as the swampie with the huge gut decided to end his tussle with his compatriot by using his machete to hack her in two. Her screams were drowned in her own blood as he hacked around her neck, chest and shoulders to try to cleave her in two. He was stopped only by a round from the M-4000 which reduced his own neck and shoulders to bloodied ribbons of flesh and splinters of bone. He was joined in oblivion by his compatriot, whose focus on his prey meant that he didn’t even see Krysty fire into the back of his head with her Smith & Wesson, the .38 slug exiting through an eye socket, draining his head of all gray matter.
The last echoes of the last shots rang out over the swamp. The companions stood, panting heavily, exhausted by the struggle. They were covered in blood that was both theirs, their opponents’ and Coral’s. The woman was chilled meat, and there had been little they could do in the battle to save her. The corpses of some of the swampies lay on the path, while others had sunk into the swamp, claimed by the waters from which they had sprung.
“Dark night, we didn’t repay her too well,” J.B. breathed heavily.
“If you can’t take care of yourself, you shouldn’t be out here,” Ryan said in reply, though his tone belied the words.
Pausing only to clean the blood from them as best as possible, and slipping the corpses into the water to cover their tracks for any other swampies, they continued on in subdued silence. What else was there to s
ay?
When the sun began to fall, they were still some distance from Lafayette and West Lowellton—farther than they could make in the daylight left. There had been no sign of any other life; nothing to suggest that the swampie hunt party had been little more than a bunch of rogue scavengers. The random nature of the confrontation did little to improve their collective mood.
They set watch for the night as they pitched camp. There was still that oppressive air hanging over the swamp, as though it were bereft of human life, and this was amplified by their anger and sorrow at the outcome of the battle.
It was a fitful night’s sleep for all. The following day they would reach West Lowellton and then they might have a better idea of just what was happening in the bayou.
* * *
Chapter Seven
“Far be it from me to be the one who wishes to cast a pall of gloom over the proceedings, but I have a feeling that all is not well… Indeed, there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.”
“Where the hell is Denmark?” J.B. queried, his brow furrowed.
“Forgive me, John Barrymore, I quote from an old, old play, something from the days before the nukecaust, and something that I forget you would have little or no knowledge of. It merely means that I feel a distinct chill in the air, and one that has little to do with the weather.” Doc smiled sadly, unable to suppress a little shiver as he spoke, almost as if to emphasize his point.
For now it was morning, and the sun blazed in a sky momentarily free of chem clouds or skittering rain, dappling through the leaves of the trees and swamp plants that grew taller and provided a canopy to the swamp. It was already warm, despite the fact that the sun had only been up for a couple of hours, and before midday it would be sweltering.
But, as Doc said, the chill had little to do with the weather. He and J.B. had drawn last watch, which had enabled them to get an unbroken rest before having to rise and stand guard over their companions. Ryan had wanted it that way. He knew that the old man had suffered more than the others from the depredations of the journey, and was in dire need of an uninterrupted sleep. J.B. was the obvious choice to stand sentry with Doc, and so the Armorer had lucked out and also gained an unbroken rest.
However, as the two men stood a little distance from the camp, watching the less nocturnal reptile, bird and mammal life of the swamp begin to stir and go about the business of staying alive, J.B. was regretting standing sentry with the scholar. The old man was inclined to go off on strange tangents, and say bizarre things, as his life had left his mind fragile and apt to wander from sense; yet there was nothing wrong with his intelligence, and a Doc Tanner in full possession of his faculties was a fearsomely intelligent and sharp man, with an ability to put his finger on the nub of any problem. Even if his words sometimes made that completely incomprehensible.
“If you’re saying what I think you’re saying, Doc, then I agree with you.”
“And what, pray tell, do you think I may be saying?” the old man asked with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.
“Doc, this isn’t the time to be funny,” J.B. muttered, not wanting their exchange overheard until he was sure he knew what Doc meant—as much to avoid his own embarrassment as anything else.
“Very well, John Barrymore, if you wish me to articulate in a more concise—and, indeed, a less verbose, though one would take umbrage at the very notion that one was as such—manner, then I shall. There is an air of gloom that hangs like a shroud over this swamp. It weighs down upon us, and has since we landed. It has nothing to do with the manner in which we arrived, and nothing to do with the chilling of our newfound companion, though, to be truthful, that was regrettable. No,” he emphasized with a wagging finger and a brief nod of the head, “it has nothing to do with our own experiences, though I would wager that they have not helped. It’s all around us. The creatures seem subdued and afraid, scuttling in shadows. Tell me, the last time we were in such a land, did we not fall prey to attack from hunting animals? Where are they now? And as for people… Swampies you would expect to be oblivious. They are little more that brainless muties who have only their basic motor functions. But where are the people? Not only have we seen nothing in the way of hunting parties, but we have seen little sign that there have been any around. Consider this—have we seen any signs of snares or traps? Have we seen any corpses or partial corpses that would indicate hunting? And those very creatures who have ignored us thus far, have they shown any sign of fear? No, sir, they have shown nothing. There is something very wrong and it ails my spirit as it ails theirs. I have nothing to prove this but a great sense of foreboding, but…” He trailed off, spreading his hands, palms up, and shrugged with a despairing inability to articulate his malaise.
J.B. had nothing to say to that. All the things that had been bothering him had been voiced by Doc. The lack of human habitation, or even signs of it, was something that was a temporary bonus. They were all exhausted, their journey from the redoubt being nothing but several days of constant, unrelenting hardship, so in many ways the lack of human opposition was some kind of respite. And yet, they knew from previous experience that this was an area of habitation, and so that very lack was also a sign that greater danger lay ahead. A greater danger into which they were marching, with no way of knowing what they might face.
“Doc, I reckon we’re all thinking this,” he said finally. “But we don’t really have much choice but to go on.”
Doc sighed. “My dear John Barrymore, I am only too well aware of this. And of the need for us to be ever more vigilant. But I am sorely worried by this one thing. If we have no knowledge of that for which we must be vigilant, how can we know that we have seen it? The dangers may not be apparent until we are already in the middle of them. For all we know—”
“We may be right now,” J.B. finished for him.
Doc merely nodded. There was nothing more to say, and their watch was broken by the sounds of the others stirring in the early morning, as the warmth of the sun penetrated the depths of the swamp.
Returning to the main camp, Doc and J.B. elected by unspoken mutual consent to say nothing of their conversation at this juncture. They were both pretty sure that it was little more than what everyone else had been thinking, particularly now that they had the time to stop and consider. Prior to this, the constant drive to get out of trouble and attain a degree of safety had driven all else from their minds. But to say something and spark an unease that may not otherwise be at the surface could cause frazzled nerve endings to become even more stretched and liable to snap.
Best to see what would happen.
Besides which, it seemed as though Doc and J.B. hadn’t been the only ones to voice their fears in the dark watches. There was a subdued atmosphere in the camp as they broke their fast on self-heats, taking advantage of the ease of the supplies rather than waste energy at this point by trying to hunt. The food tasted as foul as always, but it had nutrients, and although a rabbit or a lizard would have tasted better cooked over a naked flame, none had the inclination to waste precious energy on trying to hunt down enough to fill their hunger.
They drank the last of the bottled water, and supplies from their own canteens, knowing that now they would have to find nonbrackish water in the swamp. To counter the hardship of the past few days, they also swallowed salt tablets that Mildred distributed among them. There were few left after their trek through the desert, but she gambled on the hope that they wouldn’t be needing any for some time now that they were in the swamp.
The truth was that they were all being a little more reckless with their supplies than was usual. In a sense, it was as though they no longer—at least, at this moment—cared.
Each one of them ached in body and mind. Since their mat-trans jump had landed them in an airless redoubt, they had done little except battle elements and people. There had been no respite, no chance to recoup energies or to rest up. No one could remember the last time they had been able to sleep relatively peacefully, and each had
taken a battering in combat that hadn’t been given the chance to heal. The cuts they had received from the fisherfolk had also taken their toll. Mildred carried some antiseptic cream among her looted med supplies, but not enough to fully treat all the cuts on every one of the companions. Some had become infected, and not a single one of them wasn’t carrying at least a low-level fever and infection.
Their reflexes had been blunted, and although they had still been strong enough to battle and win against the swampies, it had been harder than, in truth, it should have been. How much longer could they go without some kind of proper rest? How many more firefights before their fatigued reflexes and responses let them down?
That knowledge, combined with the atmosphere that hung over the swamp, was like a cloud that they carried with them. There was little discussion over their unsavory meal, as none wished to be the one who spread despondency. And yet they all knew how each other was feeling.
None more so than Jak. When he had joined the companions, longer ago than he could think of, he had never expected to see his homeland again. And yet here he was: with a sense of impending danger that was weighing heavily on his shoulders.
When they had finished, they broke camp and set off in the direction of West Lowellton, on the edge of Lafayette, not knowing what they would find.
Despite their weariness—something that now seemed to infuse every bone and muscle—they stayed triple red on their trek. Yet there was nothing to give shape or substance to the feeling that hung over the swamp. It was an uneventful journey through the swamp, hacking past the swamp plants and the trees, treading carefully to avoid the patches of treacherous quicksand and the foot-rotting puddles of stale and stinking water, trying to keep on solid and dry ground.
They made rapid progress through the swamp, finding nothing to impede their progress, and before the sun had reached its height in the still-clear sky above them, blazing through the cover of the foliage to raise mists of humid swamp water that hung in the still air around them like wreaths, they found that they had reached the area where the swamp had been hacked back by the developers of the twentieth century, and man had sought to conquer the elements and colonize.