by James Axler
Watching, Krysty turned to Ryan, pulling him a little closer. “It’s terrible,” she said. “I thought this place was safe.”
“So did I,” Ryan said, a mixture of emotions rushing through him.
Still holding aloft the bloodstained robe, the Regina continued. “Fear not. The attack was perpetrated outside the Home, in the mat-trans unit where daughters work. The violator who did this remains beyond our walls.
“We are hunting him down even now. A squadron of Melissas has been dispatched to end his reign of wickedness.”
“It’s like William all over again,” muttered a woman close to Ryan.
“Who is this violator?” cried a woman at the front of the crowd. All around, other people in the audience repeated the question.
“The violator’s name...” The Regina paused, waiting for the crowd to quiet. “The violator’s name is J. B. Dix!”
A roar went through the crowd. From somewhere close by, Ryan heard a man’s voice say, “I worked with him! That guy was always kinda off.”
“Me, too,” said another, this one a woman. “J.B. never wanted to contribute to the Home. He kept going off by himself.”
Ryan looked to where the voices were coming from and realized that more people were saying similar things about J.B. A wave of dissent was sweeping through the crowd—everyone seemed to know J.B. and everyone seemed to have had their suspicions.
“Ryan?” Krysty prompted, touching his arm.
Ryan saw the look of confusion on her face, illuminated by the flickering flames.
“Can it be true?” Krysty whispered. “You’ve known him longer than any of us. Could J.B....?”
Ryan fixed her grimly with his cold eye. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s true. I can feel it. That bastard’s going to ruin our Home.”
* * *
FIVE MELISSAS CLOSED in on the rock wall past the orchard. It was obvious that this was as far as a person could run in that direction; after that he or she would have to climb and it was a near-impossible task to scale that wall once it became vertical just above head height.
They moved almost silently, foot over foot, their white robes fluttering around them like mist. J.B. winced as they settled on the little indentation in the sheer rock wall where he had been hidden less than five minutes before. He had moved when he’d seen them approaching, using the cover of dusk to scramble out of the hole and under the dense cover of the tangled bushes. It seemed scant cover now, with five Melissas prowling the scene.
In the lead, raven-haired Nancy turned briefly, hissing something to her colleagues. They had him. Or so she thought.
J.B. hunkered down behind the tangled briars, the knife clutched tightly in his hand, his breathing shallow and silent. They were just feet away. All that they needed to do was to turn and they would have him. He watched as Nancy took the lead, sidling up to the wall by the bolthole, then moving like lightning to peer within. J.B. should have been there, but he wasn’t.
She moved on, meticulous and logical, checking each crevice in turn, backed by her sisters in sec. J.B. hunkered lower, holding his breath, recirculating the air in his throat, letting out only the faintest whisper of breath when he really had to.
Five minutes felt like a lifetime. The women checked every inch of that slate-gray outcropping, checked each hole twice over to be sure they hadn’t missed something in the last of the twilight. By the time they were done, it was dark—the kind of dark it only got in the mountains, when there weren’t even shadows, just blackness.
One of the women lit a torch made of plaited brambles. It burned slow with a sweet, musky scent that sat heavy on the air. J.B. watched the flickering flames from his hiding place in the bushes, cupping his hand over his glasses so that they wouldn’t reflect the brightness and give his position away.
It seemed to take forever, but finally the women moved on. J.B. watched as they passed his hiding place under the thick tangle of foliage. The closest stepped just eight feet from J.B.’s face; he watched her bare feet pass, their contours ever-changing shadows from the flickering torch.
“The violator must have gone up the mountain,” one of the women proposed. “It’s the only place left to run.”
“There’s nowhere to go from there,” another replied. J.B. recognized it as Adele’s husky voice. “Chances are a bear will get him, or a wolf.”
The women continued to discuss this as they moved out of earshot. J.B. just lay there in the dirt for a long, long time, watching the flaming torch retreat, turning from a burning ball to a tiny speck that winked in and out of existence as the search party moved through the trees.
So they figured him dead, or as good as. Maybe they were right, J.B. thought. He didn’t know this territory, and he’d heard about the mutie bear that had almost chilled Jak and his group. The only thing he could do was get back to what little protection the bolthole in the mountainside had given him and try to get some sleep, trusting that the Melissas wouldn’t come back until morning.
Slowly, J.B. crawled out from under the bushes and trudged back to the outcropping. He sank down into the crevice and pulled a tangle of bushes over the entrance, enough—he hoped—to hide him.
“Dark night,” J.B. muttered, sinking into the dirt, his body aching from Phyllida’s assault. “Dark fucking night.”
* * *
MORNING CAME WITH a shock of brightness, waking J.B. like an inquisitor’s lamp. He grunted as he placed the glasses on his nose. His side ached where Phyllida had attacked him, and what was more his gut was grumbling that he hadn’t eaten in twenty-something hours.
Ignore it, J.B. told himself.
He peered through the screen of brambles, searching the underbrush and the inclined plain that lay beyond. There was no one there, just a few early birds hopping around as they searched for grub. After batting the camouflaging bramble aside, J.B. used his arms to wrench himself up from the gap in the rocks and out into the dawn. The air smelled fresh.
J.B. pissed in the bushes, careful to cover the evidence with dirt. Then he made his way from the outcropping that had been his bed, using the sun to navigate, making his way west, away from Heaven Falls.
Two hours later J.B. hit a snag. The mountains had herded him in a southwesterly direction thanks to various impassable tracts of rock that ran vertical or at an acute angle that no man could climb. Now J.B. found himself in an alleyway between two towering rocks, at the end of which was a ravine that spanned seventy yards before the path restarted. Up close, the ravine looked bottomless.
“Hello?” J.B. called, cupping his hands and leaning toward the ground.
There was silence for a ten count before his voice finally echoed back to him, deeper and fuller.
Yeah, there was no passing this, not without climbing gear. Mebbe someone built a bridge somewhere, J.B. speculated. He turned and retraced his steps until the narrow corridor of rock opened up again, giving him new options to explore.
* * *
J.B. SPENT THE rest of the daylight exploring the mountains around Heaven Falls. He stayed alert to patrols, though he only saw one, and that was at such a distance that he could avoid it with ease. He was also careful not to stray too close to the walled settlement itself, checking his location by marking trees with his knife to create a kind of artificial border around the ville that he would not cross. He ate fruit and berries that he found in abundance on the trees and bushes, and washed and drank from a couple springs he came upon.
The day was cool but not unbearable, and it actually felt quite warm when he walked in the sunshine. J.B. followed a number of routes that fed into dead ends, either abruptly meeting a cliff wall or a drop that no human could survive. By 4:00 p.m. he had reached the conclusion that Heaven Falls was akin to an island, it was so remote. There was no easy way to leave the territory, or indeed to enter it, and short of
climbing gear he was pretty much stuck here.
“Well, that explains the need to get the mat-trans working,” J.B. muttered, peering out across a wide chasm at the next nearest section of the mountain range. The wind whistled through that chasm, and J.B. noticed the rad counter he wore on his lapel was flickering close to red, which meant that whatever lay beyond was a hot zone. Probably a nuke had landed here and blasted new holes in the mountains, which went some way to explaining why the region had become so cut off.
J.B. clambered back across a shallow incline of slate-gray rock and slipped down to the grass beneath, leaving the chasm behind him. He was trapped here, the same way he had felt trapped in the ville of Heaven Falls itself.
Safe for now, J.B. halted close to the bottom of the outcropping and sat, pulling on his boots until he could slip them off. Having removed his boots, J.B. wiggled his toes and then, still on the rock, lay back and felt the sun beating on his face. He lay there awhile, feeling the tiredness in his weary feet, letting the sun’s warmth soothe them.
As he lay there he went over all that had happened in his mind. A man called William had placed an explosive in the mat-trans with the intention of blowing it up. The mat-trans had only been working a few hours or days, having been brought back into operation by the Trai. The logical conclusion was that William didn’t want the Trai using it for whatever they had planned, which meant he’d known what they were planning.
“He was an engineer,” J.B. said aloud, letting the thought sink in. It was the only thing that made sense—only the people of the engineering squads were allowed to visit the redoubt, and very few people would even know that the redoubt was there.
“Mebbe the Melissas, too, but the Regina said they were only women, so William wasn’t sec.”
So William had been part of the engineering crew, perhaps providing some muscle where the women couldn’t move something. That made sense—for one, it explained how William had known what the mat-trans was going to be used for, and how he had come to form his objection.
Question was... What was the mat-trans being prepped for?
“Escape,” J.B. said automatically.
The Trai had really lucked out with this location. The soil was fertile and the land around the settlement was abundant with plant life, fruit and other consumables. Furthermore, they had livestock—they had either brought it with them or had bred it from what was living here when they’d arrived. J.B. could only speculate about that, but he guessed the Trai had begun as maybe three or four families that had taken to the mountains for safety. They had probably gotten here using climbing gear, or had possibly moved in before the fissures had opened up.
But their society was trapped now, as much as if they had been on a remote island in the middle of the ocean. They wanted out. Their leader spoke about bringing light to darkness, sending her people out to enlighten the Deathlands. That sounded an awful lot like invasion to J.B., and that worried him. Mebbe, he thought, that was what had worried Bomber William, too. Mebbe the guy hadn’t bought into the Regina’s rhetoric about shining beacons into the darkness. But why?
There was another question, a crucial one given the way this society was run. The Trai were obedient and loyal to the Regina, and at first glance that was because they were happy. Why not? They lived in paradise. But J.B. couldn’t help wondering if there was something more to it than that. The way Ryan had become disinterested in why William had blown up the mat-trans—that wasn’t like Ryan Cawdor, and J.B. had known Ryan for a lot of miles of road, all the way back to their days working with Trader. Ryan was a hard man, a stone-cold chiller when he had to be. Something wasn’t right.
J.B. pushed himself back up to a sitting position and reached for his boots. His first priority was survival, and the only way to do that was to go back to the place he knew—the hellscape beyond the tight mountain constraints of Heaven Falls. He would need gear to do that, either by crossing one of those ravines or risking the mat-trans for one jump, which meant he needed his weapons. And he needed his friends.
Boots on, J.B. stood and eyed the line of trees that dotted the slope leading back to Heaven Falls. He would have to break in and get his gear. Mebbe he could make Ryan and the others listen to him.
* * *
JAK WAS LYING naked in bed with Charm. Her shift had finished after lunch, and Jak had come home early. They had made love as the sun turned orange and sank low outside the open window, turning their conjoined shadow into a long, undulating black beast that stretched across the far wall of the bedroom. Now they sat in bed, the covers pulled across their legs, eating bread dripping with honey. The bread was freshly baked, part of Charm’s ration as a Melissa. It tasted good, the honey so sweet it made you wince to eat it.
“We looked for your friend,” Charm said as she licked honey the color of her hair from her lips. “Nancy thinks he probably fell into one of the great chasms, but there’s no sign of a body.”
“No body?” Jak repeated with concern.
“He’s violated the Regina’s love,” Charm assured Jak. “He won’t come back. If he does, we’ll execute him.”
Jak nodded. “Chillin’ good,” he said. It was what violators deserved, and Jak would be all too happy to pull the trigger. He ate the last bite of bread and honey, then turned to Charm and kissed her, the honey on their tongues mingling as they did. Chilling violators was good.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was past midnight when J.B. returned to Heaven Falls. Unseen, he had traveled by the scantest sliver of moonlight peeking between the clouds, picking his way in a long ellipse around the ville walls until he reached a steep, cliff-like incline of mountain that overlooked the ville itself. He had scaled that unforgiving slope, grazing the palms of both hands as he struggled for purchase on the sharp rocks. Then J.B. had followed a narrow trail that, at times, was no wider than the heel of his boot, walking as fast as he dared in places where only hardy gorse and mold could cling. The ville came into view below him, lifeless, asleep, the only signs of movement in the sentry post that dominated the tall gates and three or four torches burning among the fields. J.B. held his body low to help his balance, his arms outstretched like a wire walker, until he saw a space where he could drop down.
J.B. came down in a run, the kind caused by a slope that was too steep, the kind where you either ran or you rolled, dropping back into the settlement from just beyond the trees to the east. There was a chasm twenty feet beyond that, and J.B. could hear the disquieting rustles of creatures close by as he made his way from the open rocks to the cover of the trees.
No one stood guard. The Trai believed their home to be impregnable and, besides, there should be no one around to break in like this. He was the only one, and he was taking a heck of a risk coming back here after what he had done.
The only things out here besides trees were three beehives, man-made structures painted white and standing on four table legs, their occupants asleep. J.B. made his way past them toward the edge of the trees and the arable fields that lay beyond.
The narrow slice of moon granted just enough light to turn the world a muzzy gray. J.B. spent a long time waiting silently in the trees that backed onto the fields, watching those fields and the tiny wooden cabins that dotted the distance, assuring himself that no one was walking around or running an organized patrol. The place was quiet, the only noises coming from the skittering insects’ legs as they rummaged through the disturbed soil left by the farming.
He was still a long way from home. J.B. had been housed, along with Ryan, Doc and the others, in a row of widely spaced shacks over to the west. J.B. kept close to the tree cover, walking the line that divided Heaven Falls from the straight drop that ran all along the south.
Seven uneventful minutes later J.B. was within sight of the shacks. He made his way not to his cabin but to Ryan’s. It was the east-most and the easiest t
o access, and he needed Ryan’s backup now if he was going to survive here in a hostile ville.
Ryan’s shack was silent, the wooden exterior licked with silver moonlight. J.B. followed the dirt path past the trees and up to the stoop, always alert to danger. He took a moment to check the area close to the shack and saw Ryan’s tools where he had left them on the back stoop: a spade and a digging fork, tines caked with dirt. Then J.B. worked the catch on the back door in silence before slipping inside.
J.B. stood alone in the darkened interior of the shack, controlling his breathing. He was in the kitchen space, but like the shack he shared with Mildred and Ricky, that space opened up to the main living area, beyond which were the bedrooms.
* * *
KRYSTY WOKE WITH a gasp, going on full alert.
“Ryan,” she whispered.
“What is it?” Ryan asked, the drawl of sleep still in his whispered words.
“Someone’s here.”
“What?” Ryan asked. He was awake now. His time spent in the Deathlands had trained his body to wake up at the first hint of danger. He was reaching for something on the bedside cabinet, a pocketknife he had used to whittle wood when he had been working with the construction crew. The knife was three inches long, its handle barely long enough to fit in Ryan’s big paw. It would do.
Krysty looked at the door to the bedroom. The door was ajar, not fully pulled closed. A whisker of moonlight painted the frame and the door’s edge, casting a line where it stood open.
“Out there,” Krysty whispered, pushing the covers aside and placing one foot on the floor. She was naked, and the moonlight cutting through the drapes painted a silver sheen on her skin, tracing her outline in ghost white.
Ryan slipped from the bed, too, naked, padding across the room on silent feet. Krysty met him at the end of the bed and the two of them motioned to the door together.