The Witch Goddess

by Robert Adams

  Not only was the ground heaving and tossing like storm-roiled sea-waves, with trees crashing down or splitting asunder, but animals—wild beasts of all descriptions—still were terrifiedly crossing the track along the base of the cliffs, a brown-black airborne river of squeaking bats was issuing from at least two cave mouths somewhere on those cliff faces, and rocks and boulders were being torn loose to plunge down among the frightened agglomeration of men and animals.

  The sight of the falling rocks awoke a horrifying presentiment in Corbett's mind. As icy chills raced up and down his spine, setting his nape hairs to rising, prickling, he staggered over to the still-downed mule, disregarding the danger of its thrashing long enough to secure his transceiver from its place.

  "Vance! Sergeant Major Vance! This is Major Corbett, Sergeant Major, over!" Twice and part of a third time he had to repeat his transmission before the voice of the noncom acknowledged.

  The subordinate sounded a little breathless, panting, but relatively calm. "Sergeant… Sergeant Major Vance here, sir. Over."

  "Vance, don't interrupt, just hear what I say and do it, immediately! You and the rearguard get away from those cliffs. Ride if you can, run if you can't, but pass the word to get any men and especially pack animals that are still on that track off it, west of the line of small hills, as quickly as possible. Do it Vance! Out!"

  Then Corbett turned back to those immediately surrounding him. Braun's mule just then regained its feet, trembling like a leaf, its eyes rolling whitely, and Corbett quickly stepped over, grasped the dangling reins and secured them to a nearby bush, lest the animal take it into its head to bolt. A brief glance at Dr. Braun told Corbett's experienced eye that he was probably hurt, possibly badly hurt, but still alive and breathing, though unconscious.

  In the hollow ahead, Gumpner and a handful of his men were trying to either raise downed ponies or to quiet the few still on their feet and within reach.

  As the movements of the earth began to slack off a bit, Corbett went back to his own mount, stroked it while speaking soothing, meaningless words and, when it had calmed down a bit, superficially examined it for broken bones or injuries, then slowly, carefully guided it back onto its feet.

  With his arm through the reins, the officer continued to verbally soothe the big beast, while examining the saddle and the various items of equipment. The canteen was an utter loss, crushed by the mule's weight and holed by a sharp rock, but all the other pieces seemed to be intact and still usable, if somewhat scuffed. The rifle scabbard was scraped, with a buckle almost torn off, the stock was scored in places, but the action still operated smoothly and the sights showed no damage or misalignment.

  Aware that mules and all herd animals tended to be calmer in proximity to others of their kind, Corbett led his mule over to where he had hitched Braun's mount. It was just then that Erica came slowly limping out of the brush, her face and hands thorn-scored and dripping blood, her black hair in wild disarray and filled with leaves and twigs.

  "Where's that bastard of a mule I was riding, Jay? Have you seen the fucker?"

  He handed her the reins of Braun's mount. "Take this one, Doctor—Braun won't be using one soon, I'm afraid. Yours is dead. After it threw you, it went bonkers and Gumpner had to shoot it."

  "If he hadn't shot the misbegotten son of a bitch, I would've," Erica said grimly. "I couldn've easily been killed, blinded by those goddamn thorns."

  Corbett shook his head reprovingly. "Doctor, you can't fault dumb beasts for fearing earth tremors. Or men, either, for that matter."

  "But, damn it, Jay, I…" And the earth heaved again, ferociously, tripping her still-wobbly legs from under her.

  Both of the mules brayed their terror and reared, their big, steel-shod forehooves flailing. Corbett let drop the scabbarded rifle he had just removed from his own mount and, placing himself between the terror-stricken animals, took a tenacious grip on their headstalls and rode up and down with their rearings, using his weight to bring them down more quickly and his voice to calm them.

  Because of his preoccupation with the mounts and the fact that he and they were facing south, he did not see the calamity that in the mere blinking of an eye befell the bulk of the precious pack train and the men accompanying it. But he heard it. He heard and felt it, and he knew. Even before he turned to see, he knew.

  Sergeant Major Vance, obediently following Corbett's order, had himself ordered most of the rearguard off the track and well out from the cliffs. Then he and a few picked men, on half-maddened and barely controllable ponies, had galloped south along the track, trying desperately to see the other order carried out—getting the pack train off the track, away from the beetling line of cliffs and over the line of low hillocks to the west.

  But, due principally to the hysterical state of most of the riding and pack beasts, it was a nearly impossible task, and precious few men and animals were beyond the point of danger when the second massive series of shudders shook the rocky earth and, with a grinding-crashing roar, the entire line of cliffs buckled and tumbled down, burying men, beasts and loads beneath uncountable tons of shattered rock.

  Chapter Two

  "Oh, sweet Jesus," Corbett said softly, sadly, looking at the rocky mass grave the line of cliffs had so suddenly become. Where the two scientists—Arenstein and Braun—might and soon would .bewail the loss of the devices, books and metals, the officer could think just now only of his men, his dead men.

  He had known those men most of their lives, had trained and worked with them from their mid-teens, just as he had with their fathers, before them. He had ridden and marched and, occasionally, fought beside them; he had shared camp and fire and cookpot and hooch with them, heat and cold, danger and privation. He had long ago earned their warm love and their deep respect, both of which he had returned. And now they were dead, most of them, and he knew that he never again would even see their bodies.

  And a part of him harbored a deep hunger to be there with his command, to lie dead beside them under those chunks of rock, to be finally, fully dead at last, as he should have been centuries ago. Major James Hiram Corbett, USA, had been a deeply religious man; indeed, only paternal pressure and his appointment to the USMA at West Point had kept him out of a seminary and the ministry.

  He had retained his faith through the academy and through the service years, thereafter. He had remained religious up until the first time he had had to choose between a painful death and a transfer of his consciousness into a younger, vibrantly healthy body. And each succeeding transfer over the hundreds of years since that first one had chipped off a bit more of his original faith. But still there remained a flinty core of the edifice which once had been so grand and imposing, and that core still nagged him, troubled him on occasion.

  It troubled him now. "Dave Sternheimer, that pompous ass, throws fits every time someone forgets and brings up what the mutants call us—vampires; yet, that's precisely what we all are—unnatural creatures, maintained in our deathlessness by a godless perversion of science.

  "We all should rightly have died with the nation, the world that spawned us, and since we didn't, we have remorselessly levied a tribute of young men and women—living flesh and blood to sustain us—from every succeeding generation. Small wonder that normal folk and those mutants call us 'witches' and 'vampires,' for to this world we are the very monsters of antique legend. Minotaurs we are, and Kennedy Research Center the maze. How long, I wonder, before this world produces a Theseus to finally rid mankind of the murderous, unholy parasites we've become? Perhaps this Milo Morai, the mutant who has lived since before the War, will extirpate us, will one day cleanse the world of our sinful works and send our souls on to whatever hellish torments our misdeeds have earned us. Not even sweet, gentle Jesus could be expected to be merciful toward such a pack of selfish, merciless…"

  His mind came abruptly back to the present situation and to the knowledge that something was wrong, very wrong. He had assumed that the high-mounting dust from th
e collapse of the cliffs had been dimming the sun, but though that dust was subsiding, the light still grew steadily paler, and he cast his gaze to all quarters seeking a reason."

  Then that questing gaze was suddenly locked upon the northern horizon. There, looking close enough to reach out an arm and touch it, towered an immense, furiously roiling cloud of multihued smoke, steam and dust. Thick as any mountain, it stood, rising to a height of at least a full mile!

  "The volcano!" he whispered to himself in awe. "My God, my God, what have we, what have / wrought?"

  So rapt was Corbett that when Erica hobbled up again and touched his arm, he started. 'That… that thing is a volcano, Jay; I've seen them before, in Cuba. Do… do you think it's possible that… that our… ?"

  "Oh, yes, Doctor," he interrupted her, his voice savage. "It's our own, devil-spawned, twentieth-century witchery that's responsible for that… and, God forgive us, for that!" He waved his arm at the site of the deadly rockfall.

  "Of course!" She nodded quickly. "With his knowledge of geology, Braun should have expected this mess or something like it. Sternheimer will have a fit when he hears of it, of the loss of all those machines and devices, but we can still bring a crew up here, after we get back to Broomtown, and salvage the metals, most likely, even if nothing else. We— For the love of… !" She took a hasty step back, her hands raised defensively, instinctively, before her. "Jay! What's wrong with you? You… you look as if you… you're ready to… to kill someone!"

  "You and Braun and Dave Sternheimer and your goddam precious, priceless ancient relics! Doesn't it matter one damn bit to you, you harpy, that they're likely half a hundred dead men under those rocks—my men, good, loyal, decent men? Can't you realize that it was our larcenous selfishness that murdered not only those helpless folk up yonder where that volcano is now, but our own Broomtowners, as well?"

  As a soul-deep agony began to replace the killing light in his eyes, Erica's fear too ebbed and she felt it safe to shrug, saying, "Fortunes of war. You're a soldier, Jay, and so were they. You all take the same risks in that trade, don't you?"

  Before he could answer, Sergeant Gumpner mounted the knoll to salute and render a brief report. "Sir, one pony dead of a broken neck, three more had to be put down—with the axe, to save ammo; I had to shoot one round to save Trooper Jenkins's life from the doctor's mule, and that animal is dead, too. A couple of ponies were bitten by the mule, but not so badly they can't be ridden. Both Jenkins and Pruitt were knocked down and bruised, but neither is hurt. Your orders, sir?"

  The order did not come, for at that moment, the boiling column on the northern horizon was suddenly shot through with flames and objects glowing so brightly that it blinded one to look at them. And, within split seconds, came a sound so loud that the barely quieted beasts were set once more to rearing and screaming, while men clapped hands to their abused ears and writhed on the ground in pain. But as quickly as the unbearable noise came, it was gone.

  Corbett had just jumped up and grabbed the bridles of the two near-hysterical mules when he heard Erica shriek. A quick glance over his shoulder showed the battered, bloody-faced woman pointing mutely at the sky, through which a veritable host of dark somethings were hurtling out of the flame-riven column of gases from the volcano. In all directions they spread trailing plumes of smoke.

  The first to ground anywhere near Corbett bounced down onto the rocky rubble covering the pack train and his men. It struck and bounced, once, twice, then shattered into many chunks and pieces… pieces of dully glowing rock. Almost immediately, a strong wind commenced to blow up from the south, its passage ruffling the sere grasses, brush and trees. In nearby places where other superheated rocks had grounded, fires sprang up rapidly and, fanned by the sudden wind, became instant conflagrations, sending animals and ponies that had fled into the forested areas racing back onto the relatively open areas flanking the track.

  Erica limped again to Corbett's side. "Jay, I saw something very much like this happen in Cuba. It was about five hundred years ago, at the time of those worldwide seismic disturbances, the ones that ended by turning Florida and most of the Gulf Coast into swamps and sank so much of the East Coast. I know, therefore, what will happen now, and we've got to move fast if we mean to live through it."

  By radio and by voice—for the fine, falling ash and the consequent lessening of sunlight had made a twilight world of their surroundings—Corbett and Gumpner and a corporal who happened to own a fine, far-ranging tenor began to rally such men as had survived the hideous disaster, then led them all, with their mounts and such pack animals as were easily caught, to an area chosen by Erica. There, hard by the rockfall beneath which lay the bodies of their comrades, the men moved out in a wide arc, firing the brush.

  The slice of hell to the north was still sucking in cooler air from every direction and the swift-flowing wind currents had soon whipped the series of small blazes into a holocaust of truly monumental proportions. Northward and westward the fire raced, to join here and there those fires set by the first shower of hot rocks.

  From within the depths of those merciless flames came the agonized death screams of countless beasts, and a violent explosion a few hundred yards to the west told of the demise of one of the panicked pack mules with a load of munitions. Another pack animal—this one a largish pony—stumbled out of the blazing brush, obviously blinded and screaming like a lost soul, until Sergeant Gumpner ran to its side and ended its suffering with his short-handled, heavy-bladed and already bloodstained battle axe.

  Braun and the other wounded men and animals were very fortunate, for that one pony axed down by Gumpner near the rockfall was the beast on which had been packed the bulk of the expedition's medical supplies and drugs so that far more men lived through the terrible night than might otherwise have done so. It was likewise fortunate for them all that Erica included among her degrees an M.D.

  After she had set, bandaged and splinted Braun's leg and administered those medications available, she went on to clean and cover wounds and burns and handle broken bones for first the men, then the riding and pack animals. But she refused to attempt surgery on the two unconscious troopers obviously in need of such treatment.

  "Yes, Jay, I was and still am a very gifted surgeon, in my mind, that is; but good surgery is more than simple knowledge of procedures. The body must be trained as well, you see, and this one is not. I've not been in it long enough to even get to know it very well. And even were I in my original body—the one I was born in, I mean—under the existing conditions and with the available equipment, I very seriously doubt that I could help those two. Probably the kindest thing to be done is to have Gumpner put them down as he did that pony with its eyes burned out. But best to do it now, before they have a chance to come to and start to suffer again."

  But Corbett did not delegate the soul-wrenching task to his subordinates. He borrowed Gumpner's axe and did the two mercy killings himself, driving the backspike of the axe accurately and deeply into each wounded man's skull at the confluence with the spinal column.

  When Gumpner inquired as to burials, Corbett could only shake his head and sigh. "We lack even a single spade, and besides, the soil's too thin hereabouts for a real grave. No, Sergeant, strip them—clothing, too; we aren't out of this mess yet, not by a long shot, and we may have need of all their effects before we are—then get them farther up on top the landslide and try to cover them with rocks.

  "Have a detail get the gear off that pony and then butcher the carcass. Have another detail scrounge any pots or pans, then send some men out there to drag some of those charred treetrunks back here to cook the meat.

  "Corporal Cash," he said, turning to the junior noncom, he of the high-tenor voice, "take a head count—how many sound men, how many wounded, how many weapons and how much ammo for them, quantities and types of supplies or equipment left or salvageable, important items that are missing, that sort of thing. And find out how much water we have. It will have to be pooled and ratione
d tonight and maybe tomorrow."

  The night came down quickly, was long and unremittingly hellish, with neither moon nor stars visible, but the whole area lit by the dim and flaring glow of near and distant fires. Ash fine as dust continued to drift thickly down, occasionally interspersed with showers of glowing coals blown by the shifting winds from the blazing forests on the hillsides.

  The animals on the picket line had to be constantly tended. Every protectable inch of their hides had to be covered and their nostrils and eyes hooded with wet cloths. The humans too found it necessary to shield exposed skin surfaces from the corrosive, blistering ash, and to breathe through damp fabric. In the dearth of water, Corbett ordered that the animals' cloths, at least, be wetted down with their own and human urine.

  No one got any sleep, three of the wounded died, and it seemed to all that that endless night of fire and horror would never come to an end. But, like all nights, end it did, in a wan and hesitant dawning.

  "Were it feasible," Jay Corbett informed Erica, "I'd stay here at least another day, but we and the animals all must have water, and soon, and the map shows a sizable stream only a few klicks farther along this track. Except for Dr. Braun, for whom I'm having a horse litter made and rigged between my mule and that one that strayed in, last night, Gumpner has determined that all of the wounded left alive this morning are fully capable of sitting a pony. You've got Braun's mule and the rest of us will walk."

  She nodded understanding and approval, but said, "Fine, Jay, but before we do anything, we must radio Broomtown or the Center or both, let them know what's happened and have them on standby, ready to copter up and get Harry and the few loads left as soon as we're within range."

  He shook his head. "Impossible, Doctor. Even with booster units—which we no longer have—these saddle sets won't range much over twenty miles."