by James Axler
Though he was facing away from the foot-long mutie, Michael's astounding combat reflexes saved him from, at best, a nasty bite.
His right hand punched sideways, hitting the thing in midair, chopping it a few yards along the pebbles. It landed on its back, but wriggled over and propelled itself, not back to the safety of the river, but toward the kneeling man.
Mildred had her ZKR 551 drawn and cocked, and she sighted along the barrel of the Czech target revolver, glancing sideways toward Ryan, waiting for his word to put a .38 round through the malevolent monstrosity.
"No!" Michael called, uncoiling and standing with his legs a little apart, braced and ready for the attack. They could all hear a faint mewing sound, like a kitten being tortured, coming from the thing*s needled mouth.
Michael was wearing his sturdy knee-high hiking boots, and he waited until the mutie was within range of him. He kicked out once, sending the creature spinning along the shingle. He followed it, hesitating only for a second before bringing his heel down on it, crushing the small body into the stones. He turned away with an expression of disgust. "Skin must be like paper," he called. "It just burst open and rotted in front of me." He bent down. "Now there's just... like a sticky puddle of stinking grunge left."
"HOW'S THE TIME, DOC?"
The silver watch appeared from the fob pocket of his waistcoat. "Not too far off noon, my dear fellow. I was wondering whether it might be possible to find anything to eat hi this godforsaken place." He laughed. "I have never seen a place that was so literally forsaken by the Almighty."
J.B. looked around them. "I'd be double surprised if there was a creature here that we could safely eat, Doc. Think about that rat-fish that went for Michael."
"What's that?" Krysty was shading her eyes, looking farther down the valley to where the strange river made a sweeping curve from the left.
There was a cluster of buildings, looking to be wood-framed, like some kind of frontier ville.
It was one of the last things that Ryan had expected to see in this hostile wilderness of acid water and fog and ghastly nuke muties.
"Might be some folks there," he said doubtfully. "Could even be food, Doc."
There were no folks.
But there were other things.
Chapter Four
"Looks like there used to be a real blacktop running along here-" J.B. had dropped to a crouch and was peering at the ground "-before whatever blanked out the whole region."
"That a real ville?" Mildred asked, her right hand resting gently on the Armorer's arm.
"Looks like it." He straightened and wiped his spectacles, easing the scattergun across his shoulders. "We going to go in, Ryan?"
"Guess so. From what we've seen since we left the redoubt-I mean the gateway-I hate to think what kind of human muties might live there."
"Looks graveyard creepy, Dad."
"Looks don't hurt you, Dean."
ONE OF THE SUPPORTING posts had rotted through, leaving the sign hanging slantwise. The paint had faded and weathered away so that it could barely be read Welcome to Lonesome Gulch. The Famous Ghost Town of the Old West.
"We in the West?" Mildred asked. "This doesn't look like any part of the West that I ever saw."
Ryan shook his head. "Nothing makes much sense, does it? Still, we could find some shelter for the evening, then head back to the gateway and make another jump if there's nothing here worth staying for."
There was another sign a little farther on for a parking lot, a yellow arrow pointing to the right, where there was a large bare stretch of what might once have been tarmac but was now a meadow of rank grass and spiked weeds.
"There's something called a company store." Krysty pointed. "Says it's the first stop and the last stop on the visit. Get your ticket there for the ghost-town tour."
The weather was as good as it had been since the jump. The mist had lifted, though it still hung below the surrounding peaks, and a few threads of watery sunlight seeped through the leaden clouds.
Beyond the store they could all see a street of ramshackle buildings, some of them without roofs, some with collapsed walls. In the distance there was a rusting railroad engine that looked like it dated back well into the nineteenth century, and a few rotting wagons.
Doc was fascinated. "Upon my soul. This is uncommonly like a return to the days of my youth." He shook his head. "Though I would hazard a guess that this place has been reconstructed for the benefit of the tourist industry."
As they reached the first of the buildings, the store, Doc was proved correct.
Under fly-smeared glass, there was a notice that contained the history of Lonesome Gulch, explaining how a local historical society had been formed in the
mid-1900s to save and re-create the vanishing parts of the national heritage. Genuine buildings in various states of disrepair had been collected from all over the region and brought together, "so that our children, and their children's children might still be able to relish the romance and reality of the days of yore."
J.B. pushed the door of the store, ignoring the handwritten card that announced it was closed.
A bell gave a dusty tinkle, then fell off the wall, its bracket rusted through.
"I'll stay out and keep watch," Ryan said, leaning cautiously against the wall, half anticipating that the whole place would crumble into sawdust.
He turned quickly as he thought he saw something moving at the far end of the street, by the old locomotive. It moved in an odd way, part wriggling, part crawling, but he didn't react fast enough to be sure of what it was.
It certainly wasn't anything human.
The rest of them roamed through the shadowy interior of the store, which looked like it had been simply abandoned around the time of sky dark.
"Look at this." Michael had found a big display case near the rear of the building. "What are they?" He held up a number of small sacks.
"Tobacco?" Doc suggested.
"No." J.B. untied the whipcord around the top of one of the bags and tipped the contents into his palm. It was fine grains, as black as midnight. "Blasting powder," he s aid.
"Some candy here." Dean called to his father, standing just outside the front door. "Can I try some?"
Mildred joined him. The candy was in narrow sticks, thinner than a finger, about six inches long, wrapped in crinkling twists of cellophane paper. They were in different sections, each one described in old-fashioned golden lettering.
"Cinnamon and mint. Julep and spearmint. Saltwater taffy. Clove and apple. Banana and coconut. Brings back my childhood, this place. I see what you mean, Doc."
"Can I have some, Dad?"
"Let's look around the town first. Before the light starts to get worse."
"Can I go on my own?"
The boy was unbelievably eager, hopping from one foot to the other. Ryan smiled and ruffled Dean's shock of black hair. "I guess so. But don't go beyond the main street, and yell if you see anything. All right?"
"Sure." The boy ran off.
Ryan called after him. "Yell if you even think that you see anything!"
The group split up.
Ryan and Krysty crossed over the main street, stepping down off the uneven planking of the boardwalk. J.B. and Mildred stayed on the same side as the store. Michael and Doc strolled together along the rutted center of the street, pausing to investigate any building that looked particularly interesting to either of them.
"See that," Krysty said, pointing to a torn poster stuck inside one of the windows of the nearest buildings. "They were going to hold a pack-burro race a month or so after the long winters started. Just where in Deathlands are we?"
"Lonesome Gulch. Says this was a typical homestead from the late 1800s. Let's take a look."
It was a sodbuster's shotgun shack, with a single hallway and the rooms opening off to one side, a small parlor, then a bedroom with bunks, and finally a tiny kitchen with an iron stove and hand-pumped sink.
Everything was rotting, the surfaces
were all slightly moist, with a microscopic covering of mold.
"I'm amazed this place has stayed here as long as it has," Krysty commented. "All around's got the flat taste of death and decay. Why don't we go, lover?"
"Kind of interesting. Seems to me that the frontier villes in the old, old past weren't all that different to some of the frontier pestholes we see nowadays."
The next building, with a shingled roof that had managed to resist the hostile elements, had once been a combination dentist's and doctor's home. Krysty paused in the entrance, shuddering and putting a hand to her eyes. "Gaia!"
"What?"
"So much pain and misery here," she said, looking at a rusted pair of obstetric stirrups, standing in a corner like instruments of torture.
Ryan was examining some Victorian dental tools in a glass case, brushing away the dust with his fingers, wincing at the shape and size. He recognized some of them from his own infrequent visits to fangcarvers around Deathlands.
Doc stood with Michael a few yards farther up the grassy street, staring up at a building with an odd design of a protractor and a pair of compasses carved near the peak of the gable roof.
"A Masonic lodge," he said wonderingly. "First one of those that I've seen since being trawled to this dreadful future. Who would ever have thought that such a widely powerful organization could so simply vanish from the face of the earth."
Dean whooped to them, leaning out of the cab of the old locomotive. * 'You used to ride in one of these, Doc?"
"Indeed I did, my boy. Lynchburg to Danville was one of my favorite rides. And Durango up to Silver-ton, along the Animas. Smoke and cinders is what I remember best."
J.B. and Mildred had stepped into something labeled Carpenter's Shop and Morgue.
The walls were covered with a display of old tools, mostly disfigured with a patina of rust, their wooden handles long rotted away.
There was a coffin on two trestles, its chased brass handles tarnished and hidden under a layer of green verdigris. The lace around the edge of the pillow and the shroud had all yellowed and decayed.
Something rattled against the roof and both of than looked up, J.B.'s finger going to the trigger of the Uzi. But the sound wasn't repeated.
"Wouldn't mind spending some time around this place," the Armorer said.
He stood foursquare, stocky, staring up at an embroidered sampler, dated somewhere in the mid-1800s, and bearing a wobbly sewn signature of Esther Win-gate. "Man cometh forth like a flower and is cut down. He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not."
"Must be odd for Doc." Mildred ran a finger along the top of the coffin, wrinkling her face in disgust. "Everything feels kind of sticky."
J.B. was looking out of the window at the back of the single-story building, wiping the glass with his sleeve. "Yeah. Whole atmosphere is double freaked. The fog's coming back again, rolling up from the river."
Doc was in the offices of the Lonesome Gulch Courier, admiring the heavy printing press, while Michael looked at the crumbling remnants of earlier copies of the newspaper, tacked to the lath-and-plaster walls.
"Says here they had some real heavy snow in January 1895." The teenager turned to Doc. "That before your time, Doc?"
"I was a lad of twelve when the worst storms in the history of the United States struck the Eastern seaboard, in 1880. Four or five hundred people died in the hurricane winds and monstrous falls of snow. I
well remember, in Vermont where I was then dwelling, that there were banks of snow measured at fifty feet deep. Parlous times, young fellow."
Michael turned away. "Funny, you know, Doc."
"What?"
"Well, it's like Lonesome Gulch isn't a real place. The old papers talk about a holdup in the bank and a stabbing at the faro tables. Snow, a fire and stuff like that but none of it actually mentions where we are."
"Passing strange. But much about this region is a deal more than passing strange, Master Brother. Mistress Sister. Mistless twister. Blaster mother. Damnation! I recollect from my studies such foolish verbal confusion is known as 'aphasia.' An indication of some minor brain damage. Yet, that is clearly not true, is it?" He glowered back to where the teenager stood in the doorway of the print shop. "I said that- What are you looking at?"
Dean was leaning out of the starred glass of the side window of the old locomotive, imagining himself flying along steel rails at breathless speed, then his eyes were caught by something perched on the roof of the stagecoach barn, fifty yards farther up the main drag of Lonesome Gulch.
J.B. froze, turning away from the filthy window. Mildred had drawn her revolver, eyes turned up.
"What was that?" she whispered.
He touched a finger to his lips, catfooting toward the front door, blaster at the ready.
Ryan had opened the case and removed a fearsome pair of chromed forceps with jagged teeth, clicking them in his right hand as he lurched in toward Krysty, shoulder hunched to make him look more frightening-"Don't worry, my dear," he jeered. "This will hurt you far more than it will..." He stopped, putting the instruments silently on the oilcloth-covered couch.
Krysty had already drawn her Smith & Wesson 640, looking out into the street.
"What?" she mouthed.
Ryan shrugged. They'd both heard something, a disturbance in the air, a noise that might have been a cry. But it hadn't sounded like it came from the throat of any creature either of them had ever known.
And on the roof they could all hear a scraping, scratching, grating, like the points of sharp knives being drawn forcefully over the splintered top of an old table.
Moving with incredible lightness for such a big, powerful man, Ryan eased his way to the doorway and looked out.
"Fireblast!"
Chapter Five
Abe had spent some years of his life as one of the best gunners on War Wag One.
He'd also been wounded more often and more seriously than any man that he'd ever known. Or woman. Trader had been perfectly at ease with having female members of the war wags* crews.
Abe's past life was shrouded in mystery. Over the years he'd told so many different stories to so many different people that he'd honestly lost touch with the truth. But the best times had been riding with the Trader.
It meant that you got showed respect.
There wasn't a pesthole from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, where they didn't know the Trader, a grizzled man with a heart of granite and eyes of frozen jet. They knew him and they feared him. There wasn't a gaudy owner, slut or hired gun in Death-lands who wasn't aware of the reputation of the Trader with his hacking cough and his battered Armalite.
You were with the Trader, or you were against him. There were just the two options.
Abe had always been with him.
When Trader walked clear out of life, Abe had been the last person to see him, watching the rangy figure as it disappeared into the dark forest long months ago.
Ever since that bleak time, Abe had been consumed by a desperate desire to know what had happened to his old leader. Word all around Deathlands was that Trader was dead, died in some mystic ceremony with an Apache shaman; died when a woman of seventy summers, who'd been his latest lover, slit his throat when she found him in bed with both her daughter and granddaughter; died when he had faced down an eighteen-foot mutie grizzly somewhere in the Shens; died when he got bushed by a hundred screaming, blood-crazed stickies. Trader chilled ninety of them, but the last ten finally overwhelmed him and sent him off on that legendary last train to the coast.
But all the rumors agreed that he was gone.
Abe had started to come around to accepting that it had to be true.
Then the counterrumors began.
Trader was alive and running the biggest whorehouse in the world, somewhere around Hawaii or Cuba or Brazil, depending on which story you heard.
One of the most insidious and powerful rumors suggested that Trader headed an unh oly alliance; with the steel-eyed Magus, three-fifty
-pound Gert Wolfram and his traveling freakshow, Marsh Folsom, Jordan Teague and his black-clad sec boss from the nightmare ville of Mocsin, Cort Strasser, and planned to take over the whole of Deathlands.
Abe had decided that he couldn't sit around and wait for someone to come along with conclusive proof that Trader was alive or dead.
So he'd struck off alone on his quest.