by James Axler
The passage was around ten feet at its widest, so low that Ryan felt he had to stoop, oddly aware of the enormous weight of rock and earth hanging over him.
As his eye became accustomed to the gloom outside the control area, Ryan realized that there was a very faint glow visible away to his right.
"I think this place is totally open," he said, holding the SIG-Sauer at the ready. "Doesn't look like artificial light, and the smell of the air is stronger."
Doc's description hung in his mind. The taste was definitely metallic in origin.
One by one they followed him, all stooping, though the ceiling was just high enough for Doc, tallest at six feet three, to stand straight without bumping his head.
"Hi, ho," Mildred sang quietly. "Looks like we're all going off to work."
They didn't have far to go.
The light ahead grew steadily brighter, showing that the whole place had been hacked out of living rocks, also showing that the gateway seemed to be on its own, without the usual surrounding redoubt.
Ryan held up his hand as the rough-floored passage curved sharply to the right, almost in dogleg. "Hold it just a minute. Krysty?"
"Yeah."
"Feel anything?"
"No."
"Nothing? Must be some sort of life around."
Krysty pressed the tips of her fingers to her forehead. While she concentrated hard, Ryan became aware that the fiery sentient hair was curled tight around her head and neck, often a sign of potential danger.
"No." Krysty bit her lip. "Can't pick up anything at all. Not close by, anyway."
He nodded. "Best go see."
The tunnel simply ended in a roughly circular opening, with daylight beyond.
One of the oddities about jumping was that it screwed up time in a way that Ryan had never been able to work out. Sometimes you might jump in the middle of the night and you'd find that you'd arrived at the next redoubt in the middle of the afternoon.
Now his wristchron said that it was eleven minutes after nine in the morning.
"Think we might be near the sea," J.B. said. "Walls are wet and the air seems damp."
Ryan was first out of the passage, finding himself on a ledge of sculpted rock, barely ten feet wide. To his left there was a steep wall of granite, rising into a thick mist. To the right, the ledge became a trail, winding out of sight.
There were no doors and no sign of anything else that might have been a part of a bigger complex.
"Don't get it," Mildred said. "Anyone could just have walked in and smashed up the gateway. Nothing to stop them."
"Maybe it's so completely isolated that there isn't anyone here. Not even a passing mutie." Ryan bolstered the SIG-Sauer. "Fireblast!"
"What?" Krysty jumped at his loud exclamation.
"Mebbe this a triple-bad hot spot." He checked the tiny rad counter stitched into the sleeve of his coat.
But it showed only a placid, safe green.
J.B. also checked his, finding the same reading. "No hot spot."
"Where are we?" asked Dean. "Looks like the inside of a stickie's ass."
Everyone fell silent, looking around them.
There seemed to be a mist both above and below them, cutting off visibility. The air was cool and moist, the cliffs jagged and irregular, rising all around them. The more Ryan stared, the stranger it all looked. He couldn't find any trace of l ife anywhere, not even smears of moss or lichen on the boulders.
He scuffed his boots in the dirt, noticing that even the most ubiquitous plant in Deathlands was absent. The tiny multipetaled daisies, with their delicate yellow-and-white coloring, were found from Alaska to the Gulf.
But not here.
"Yeah, J.B.," he said. "Where are we?"
The Armorer fumbled in his pockets and pulled out the microsextant, squinting around the sky. "No sun," he said. "Still, find where light's brightest." After a couple of minutes he shook his head. "Can't get a reading at all. Might be something wrong with this." He put the miniature instrument back in his coat. "Try the compass and see if... Dark night!"
They all gathered around him, seeing that the needle on the magnetic compass was swinging wildly, from north to south, then revolving in a blur of speed, not settling for a moment at any particular point.
"Anomalies," Doc pronounced. "They are known to exist in certain places where the underlying strata contain high proportions of lodestone. Some kind of considerable electromagnetic disturbance."
Michael had walked to the edge and was peering cautiously over the brink. "Can't make out anything. Though... No. I thought I saw something flying through the fog, way below, but it vanished." He hesitated. "Something real big."
Mildred joined the teenager. "Looks to me like the valley of the shadow of death, doesn't it? The land that time forgot. Ultima Thule. End of all things."
There was a puddle of water by Ryan's boots and he stooped and dipped a finger in it, noticing that there was an oily, rainbow sheen on it. He touched his finger to his lips, immediately spitting the substance out
and rubbing his mouth. "Bitter! Tastes like Badwater, down in the heart of Dry Valley."
"Do you think there could have been some kind of chemical pollution here?" Mildred asked. "Not radiation. There was a lot of talk before I got to be ill and got frozen, talk that the Russkies had all sorts of nerve and chemical agents. Nobody knew if it was true. Been some used in the Middle East, in the eighties and nineties. This just looks like some ghastly leakage or spillage of some industrial poison."
"Ow!" Dean slapped at something. "Stung me on the cheek. Look, I got the fucker.' *
Nobody corrected his language, all of them looking at the bizarre insect that he held, trembling in the palm of his hand.
It was an inch and a half long, its narrow body a dull gold color. There were four sets of filmy gray wings, and its head had six separate eyes, like tiny orbs of polished copper. At the end of its tapering tail there was a sting, grossly out of proportion to its overall length.
"Like a scorpion," J.B. stated, examining it carefully. "Hooked and barbed."
Krysty peered at the boy's face, where a nasty lump was already swelling. "Keep an eye on that, Dean."
"Don't think it had much chance to squirt its poison in before I got it. Hurts like a bastard, though."
He tipped it off his hand onto the shale at his feet and crushed it under his heel.
"The whole atmosphere is redolent of despair." Doc looked around at the misty wasteland. "For once I
would like my voice heard on behalf of making a jump again immediately. I have not been an eager apostle for this, but-"
Ryan held up a hand. "Sorry, Doc. But there's something triple-weird here. That gateway looked like it had been thrown together. No redoubt. Open to anyone passing through. Now we can't find any way of even knowing where we are. So, I figure we should explore a little."
The old man shook his head. "I do see the gist of your thinking, my dear fellow. No doubt the rest of our little party agrees with you." He looked at the others. "Well, nobody disagrees with you. Come, then, let us leave this peak in Darien and venture into this slough of despond."
Ryan felt more uneasy than he had for a very long time. The short hairs at his nape were prickling.
But, apart from the undoubted dreariness of the region, there didn't seem any immediate danger.
"Let's go look," he said.
Chapter Three
"This air's so rotten it makes you feel tired." Krysty was second in their skirmish line, with Dean following close behind her. "It seems like a part of the planet that Gaia must've overlooked."
As usual, the rest of the group was strung out, with J.B. bringing up the rear, the 20-round, 9 mm Uzi held loosely in his hands.
By the time they'd descended about one hundred and fifty feet, they found themselves in one of the swirling banks of fog. It was puzzling the way the banks of cloud kept moving around them, as there wasn't a breath of wind.
The stones w
ere soft and crumbled beneath their feet, making progress unsteady and dangerous. At no point was the man-made track wider than a dozen feet, and there was no way of guessing the deeps that lay to their left. Dean had thrown a fist-size stone over and listened for its fall. But all they heard was what sounded like a human cry of pain, which wasn't repeated.
Once they were within the acrid mist, visibility was down to fifteen or twenty feet.
Ryan told everyone to close up and keep on triple-red alert, knowing from previous experience that muties loved to attack from the heart of fog or darkness.
There was still little or no sign of life around.
But Mildred pointed out that there were little tufts of sickly yellowish sedge growing in some of the cracks between the moldering stones.
The canyons were so deeply blighted that Ryan twice checked his rad counter, tapping it with his forefinger in case it was malfunctioning.
But it remained stubbornly in the safe, green level, showing no inclination to move toward yellow or orange, which meant there was no residual danger from the nuking.
J.B. was thinking along the same lines. "Nearest thing to a hot spot I ever saw," he called, his voice muffled and flattened by the damp fog.
The trail zigzagged sharply, the surface furrowed by rains and broken up by years of frosts. Ryan doubted that any sizable wag could ever have gotten up it. Now it would be totally impassable, except on foot.
There was a sudden swooping sound and all of them ducked, raising their blasters. Ryan stared up into the mist, aware only of something vast flying close by them, bringing with it the stench of rotted meat. The cloud was too thick to make out details, but Ryan had a momentary flash of a long leathery neck and an elongated reptilian head, with several sets of protruding, yellow teeth. It seemed to have a wingspan in excess of thirty feet, but it could have been distorted by the fog.
"What was that?" Krysty was standing upright again, facing the direction that the creature had taken. "Anyone able to see it properly?"
"Like a gator," Dean said, pointing his Browning vaguely into the slate sky.
"Flying alligator?" Mildred was perspiring, despite the dank chill in the air. "Seen most things, but-" "I confess that I caught only the merest glimpse of the creature," Doc said. "But it bore a more-than-passing resemblance to what the boy said."
There were more pools of the oily water, lying in hollows and crevices, all of it so alkaline and bitter that it was hopelessly undrinkable.
At one of the labrynthine turnings of the track there was the rotted stump of a vast tree, a good five yards in diameter. Since it was one of the first signs of anything approaching normal life, Michael stopped to look at it. He recoiled in disgust, his face screwed up.
"It's a mass of sort of maggots. But they're big as your thumb and like white jelly."
Ryan was having second and third thoughts about the wisdom of carrying on with the recce.
"MY CHRON'S STOPPED."
J.B.'s voice, from a little way behind him, brought Ryan to a halt. He checked his own chron, finding that the numbers had frozen, showing a time only a few minutes after their arrival in the open air.
"Must be that electromagnetic thing that Doc mentioned. Screws up direction and time."
They were in a particularly thick band of mist, and the figure of the old man was only a dimly seen silhouette. "If you relied on a real timepiece instead of those tinny and cheap jack digital bits of frippery, then you might care to know that we've been on this shifting, whispering trail for just over fifty-three minutes."
Doc was holding his silver half-hunter in his right hand, angling it to catch the poor light.
"How come his chron has that kind of pair of needles to tell the time?" asked Dean.
"They are called 'hands,' dear boy," Doc replied. "My pocket watch is a good deal older than I am, which is saying something. It is also a sight more reliable than my body or my brain. And vastly and un-arguably to be preferred against those 'wristchrons,' I believe."
He succeeded in making "wristchron" sound like something he'd just discovered on the sole of his boot after a morning stroll through a cow pasture.
Now they could catch the noise of running water, a sullen and deathly sound, less than a hundred feet below.
The height of the unseen peaks around, glimpsed briefly through the shifting banks of cloud, laid a leaden weight on everyone's heart, and there was none of the usual good-natured banter. The rocks underfoot were treacherous and slippery, taking full concentration to avoid a nasty fall.
Ryan began to notice more vegetation, though it was in keeping with the desolate place.
Stunted and mutated, it showed no recognizable signs of being a plant any of them could identify. The dominant color was gray-dark gray, with veins of sulfurous yellow running through it.
Most were bushes, though a stooped tree, crooked and broken, had occasionally found a foothold in among the crevices of the boulders, nourished by the poisonous water.
There was also more life.
Of sorts,
They saw no repeat of the monstrous creature floating low over their heads, though the fog occasionall y echoed to bizarre cries, yelps and screams.
Ryan spotted some kind of mutie...thing. It wasn't exactly an insect or a lizard or an animal, but it was a vile mix of all three. Though it had six stumpy, clawed legs, they propelled it in a peculiar scuttling, sideways movement. The head, with a fringe of spiky hairs, was narrow and fierce, turning to hiss at the seven intruders into its domain. From snout to the quivering tip of its barbed tail it was less than nine inches, the skin a set of overlapping, mottled scales. The eyes were an opaque crimson, standing out from the skull on stalks that enabled it to glare in every direction at once.
"I'll chill it," Dean said, leveling his heavy blaster, but his father knocked his arm down.
"Next time you do something as triple stupe as that, son, I'll put you on your back in the dirt!" The anger rode high in Ryan's voice, and his good eye stared intently into his son's face. "You hear me?"
"Sure, sure." Dean backed quickly away. "Keep the rad green, Dad. No harm."
"No harm!" Ryan felt the pulse throbbing hi the empty socket of his left eye, and he swallowed hard to control the red mist. "Little mutie bastard wasn't doin' us no harm. This is a shit-dangerous and fucking creepy place, Dean. I never saw anywhere like this. None of us did. Chrons don't run. Compass don't work. Sun doesn't fucking shine." The anger still burned in Ryan, but he could feel the blood leaving his temper. "We don't know what's out there, do we?"
"Sorry, Dad."
"Yeah. And I'm sorry I went off at you like a rogue gren launcher, Dean. But you pull the trigger on that Browning, and you could alert any living bastard within five miles that there's outlanders in their territory."
"See that now. Sorry."
"Never apologize, son. It's a sign of weakness." Mildred grinned at Ryan. "Not the best John Wayne impersonation in Deathlands, but the only one I got."
AT LAST THE TRACK BEGAN to level out.
It was lined with a kind of sagebrush, and decorated with gray-white berries that gave off a bitter dust if anyone brushed against them. They saw several more of the six-legged mutie creatures, but nothing that represented an obvious threat.
"There's the river." Krysty pointed to their left. "Gaia! It looks as inviting as everything else around here. Dismal isn't the word."
They stood in a row, all staring in silence at the slow-flowing water. Above them, the acidic layer of fog shifted in impenetrable coils, making it impossible to see anything more than a hundred feet high.
The river was forty to fifty feet wide, with a shelving beach on both sides. The rocks that protruded above the surface were greasy, looking as though they were composed of gray mud. The color of the water was an oily brown, but it was moving so unhurriedly that Ryan blinked, thinking he was a victim of a trick of the admittedly poor light.
"That river..." Doc began hesitantly. "I would swear
that it was going past us in slow motion. Or are my tired old eyes deceiving me?"
Michael stepped down, perfectly balanced, over the banks of shingle and knelt at the edge of the river. He reached out slowly and dipped a hand into the water, pulling it hastily out, shaking his fingers and wiping them quickly on his black parka.
"It's warm, it stings and it isn't water!" he shouted to them.
"What is it?"
"Kind of thicker than water. Consistency of very thin honey, or cooking oil."
Before any of them could even open their mouths to shout a warning, something darted from the oily liquid, propelling itself toward the oblivious teenager's throat. There was only a moment for a glimpse, but Ryan had the impression of a large rat with fins and webbed feet, or a furred fish with a body and head like a rodent.