by James Axler
"It's a lucky thing we weren't out there on the glass when it hit." Krysty said.
"As if we didn't have enough to worry about." Mildred added.
Ryan didn't say anything, but at that moment he was thinking that if a person had to take the last train West, getting swallowed up by an earthquake was a whole lot better than taking a week or two to die of rad poisoning.
Shortly after the quake, a gaudily painted, gas-powered bus pulled into the camp. It stopped beside the churned-up dirt rectangle and began disgorging its passengers to the primal beat of a boom box. Dazed, the new arrivals staggered and fell down the steps, only to find themselves ringed by battlesuited troopers and pulse rifles. They watched in shock and disbelief as manacles were clapped on their wrists and ankles.
As the new slaves were bound, the bus driver, a giant of a man in a squashed canvas fedora, counted them off on the fingers of his false hand, this while three particularly scabrous-looking sluts danced and cavorted obscenely on the roof of the bus.
Downwind, the smell of grain alcohol coming off the wag was overpowering. From that and the state of the passengers, it was obvious what had happened.
"Big bastard got the poor bastards stoned and tricked them into coming here," J.B. observed.
"Those prancing scum have sold their fellow human beings to the invaders as if they were domestic animals," Doc said. "For that heinous act they should be flayed alive."
"Look closer, Doc," Mildred admonished him. "The driver and the sluts are slaves, too. They're wearing the silver bracelets, just like us. They're just trying to survive."
"Helplessness is a state of mind, madam," the ancient academic countered testily. "That is a lesson I learned a long, long time ago, under conditions of hardship and privation too painful to relate. Mildred, even in the most dire circumstances, we human beings have the power to make our own choices, to either live by our own rules or to embrace the rules of others. Look again at the slave catchers and tell me they are not enjoying themselves tremendously."
"He's got you there," J.B. said.
Mildred hated losing an argument with the old man, and rarely ever conceded defeat, but from her expression she knew he was right this time. Bracelets or not, the slave catchers needed chilling.
The companions watched the bus driver use a hand-powered pump to refill his fuel tanks from the tier of steel drums marked Baron Jolt. Once this was done, the big man climbed back in the wag, and he and his sluts drove back the way they'd come, disappearing in a spiral of dust.
"Off to collect another busload of fools," Krysty stated.
"Before they do," Doc said, "may God strike them dead. Or better still, afford me the opportunity."
A loud rumbling noise made them all look toward the massif. A pair of ore trucks appeared over the rise, rolled down the road and pulled off onto the plain near the domes. The companions watched the wags dump their cargos into the semitrailer's hopper. They had a much closer view of the operation this time and could see that the loads consisted of chunks of nukeglass and various other, seemingly unsorted debris. When both wags had been emptied, the troopers ordered the whole group of slaves to their feet.
"Walk ahead of the tracks," one of the troopers told them. "The road is clearly marked. If you step off the road, you will lose your hands and feet. If you fall behind, the trucks will crash you. It's eight miles to where you're going."
It was a stock speech, delivered without inflection. It could even have been a recording.
In response to the slowly advancing ore wags, the assembled slaves, companions included, began to move forward, and as they did so, they were funneled onto the road by bracketing phalanxes of troopers.
"Stay together," Ryan warned the others.
The mob that surrounded the companions was mostly made up of men, aged from their late teens to early sixties. There were a few women, too, and some of them carried small children. They all walked with stooped shoulders and lowered heads. Some cried brokenly into their hands; others stared blankly at their feet. Clearly, they knew enough about Slake City's singular, unnatural wonder to realize they were on a one-way trip.
"What's it like where they're taking us?" Dean asked his father.
"Don't know, son," Ryan said. "Never heard of anybody going out that far on the nukeglass and returning to tell about it."
"We're coming back."
"That's right. We're coming back. Keep that thought front and center in your head."
After the first gradual rise, the road began a slow descent as it wound towards the sunken epicenter of the twenty-mile-wide blast crater. The trailing ore trucks kept the slaves moving at a steady, five-mile-an-hour pace.
Even this late in the day, the heat and glare off the glass was tremendous. The landscape before them was completely devoid of life. There was no soil for plants to grow in. No standing water. There were no birds flying overhead. There was just glass.
Glass, glass and more glass.
The roadbed underfoot was a uniformly light shade of gray green because it had been etched for better traction. On either side of the roadway, the glass's coloration was irregular, and in some places it edged almost to black. In those spots, large shadowy objects lay entombed many feet down. Buried things, in some cases huge things, caused erratic humps and dips to appear in the surface. There were also great, yawning holes filled with fractured, room-sized sheets of glass. The road had to be diverted around these massive cave-ins. There were truly mad shapes on the surface, too, like breaking waves frozen in time, like floes of dirty icebergs, separated by banks of ground glass, blown by the wind into glittering heaps.
"We'd better cover our noses and mouths," Mildred said as she knotted a bandanna around her head. "We don't want to inhale or swallow any of that glass dust. Try to keep it out of your eyes."
The companions did as she suggested.
When the slaves moving alongside them saw what they were doing, they followed suit, tearing off strips of their clothing to protect themselves.
Even over the engine and wheel noise of the ore wags, Ryan could hear the crybaby sounds of splitting glass. Beneath his boots, the road surface was crazed with an interlacing of fine cracks caused by earth tremors and the weight of passing loaded trucks.
They trudged around a series of spires, maybe fifty feet tall, set along the perimeter of a wide rectangle. As the sun angle changed, Ryan could see dull orange monoliths inside the spires—encased by nukeglass were the rusting steel girders of a ruined skyscraper. Farther on, they came across a field of smaller spikes, perhaps one-tenth as high, created by the crystalline growth of some melted components. The elevated areas were few in comparison to the low spots, which ranged from small, star-shattered cave-ins a few feet wide to great sprawling bowls of glass blocks hundreds of yards across.
Evidence of recent human activity, the narrow holes hacked into the thermoglass by Slake City's scroungers, disappeared after they had walked less than a mile. The farther they went, the hotter it got. The crater's concavity seemed to focus and intensify the sun's rays. As they walked, the horizon line on all sides shrank away. Snowcapped mountain peaks were gradually blocked from view by the rim of the crater, until there was only sky and glass.
Three miles in by Ryan's reckoning, the first of the slaves collapsed. A man in his fifties with big overhang of pot belly and a wild shock of white hair suddenly clutched at his chest and dropped onto the roadway. He fell into a fit, his body twitching, his eyes rolled up in his head.
Everyone but Mildred stepped over or around him and kept on moving. She knelt and started to try to help the man, but J.B. grabbed her shoulder and pulled her away.
"There's nothing you can do for that one," he said. "We can't carry him. You can see he's not going to make it. We've got to keep going." He forcibly dragged the woman along with him.
They had only gone a dozen yards, when from behind, they heard the wheels of the first wag crunch over the body.
"Fuckers," Mildred said.
"Dirty fuckers."
She didn't look back.
Inside of another mile, two more people fell beneath the huge wheels. After the third fatality, the trucks stopped and the slaves were allowed to rest and were given a cup of warm water each. There was pushing and shoving in the water line. The companions stayed together and made sure they all got their rations.
"What's that?" Dean said, pointing at another entombed object on the side of the road. "Looks like gold."
The afternoon sun flashed off something buried under humped-up layers of glass. It was, in fact, gold. It was the gilded head and shoulders of an enormous statue with arms extended, its hairline melted down into its chin.
"That is all that is left of the Angel Moroni," Doc said, removing his neckerchief to mop his brow. "A great statue that used to adorn the east tower of the Mormon Tabernacle. The place of worship was completed in 1893, three years before I was time-trawled by whitecoats, before the life I should have lived, the death I should have died were stolen from me. I remember showing newspaper pictures of it to my beloved wife and my cherished children…" He suddenly choked and his voice trailed off.
With tears in his eyes and the sweat peeling down the sides of his face, he swept his arm wide, making the kerchief flutter as it took in the bleak panorama. "What consummate wickedness conceived this nightmare? What spavined pelvis birthed this abomination of God's beauty?" As Doc spoke, his voice changed. It grew deeper and more resonant, as if he were projecting his words to some larger audience only he could see.
Ryan looked from face to face. Doc wasn't the only one showing the effects of the forced march under skyrocketing temperatures. All of them were breathing hard under their bandannas, their foreheads flushed and slick. But there was something else, too. It was there, in their eyes, like a passing shadow. Not just simple exhaustion, but a growing sense of doom.
"I put it to you, my dear esteemed colleagues," Doc said in summation, "that here, at last, we come face to face with the hard and bitter fruit of our civilization's ignorance and arrogance."
No one could argue that.
No one tried.
When the downhill trek resumed, as they approached ground zero, the focal point of the nuke's blast, they were confronted with even wilder and more fanciful hellscapes. They circled immense frozen whirlpools of dirty glass. They looked down into the seemingly bottomless pits of crevasses, voids the nukes had drilled thousands of feet deep into the bedrock, which were then glazed over or backfilled with cascades of molten thermoglass.
As Ryan walked he tried to keep his mind focused and alert by paying attention to these bizarre details. It was difficult because he was light headed, having sweated out a lot more water than he'd taken in. Then he heard moaning sounds, more distinct and directional than before.
"There," Jak said, raising his pale arm to point ahead on the right, just off the road.
Ryan was treated to a strange sight. Five stickies lay marooned on a flat-topped spire of glass. Even from a distance, they didn't look human—a combination of their hairless skulls, their flat, black doll's eyes, their tiny nostrils centered in moist flab and their rows of yellow nail-point teeth. Ryan assumed the killer muties had panicked and tried to run, probably because the earthquake had frightened them. The attempt had cost them their sucker hands and feet. Then the plain of glass around them had collapsed, again probably due to the earthquake, leaving them stranded on the raised hourglass of a pinnacle. Because they had no hands or feet, they couldn't stand, let alone jump the required forty feet to safety. Forty feet over a deep chasm lined with huge chunks of broken glass.
Ryan had never heard stickies make noises like that. So desperate. So fearful. They certainly weren't the familiar, soft kissing sounds of a chiller pack on the hunt. While the slaves silently marched past them, the stickies moaned and waved their handless arms for help.
"As if we would, if we could," J.B. said.
The matter was settled by the rambling gait of the ore wags. The vibration caused the pillar to crack at its narrowest point, tipping the screaming stickies off into space. When they hit the razor-sharp edges of the blocks below and began to slide, they were sliced and diced, backs, fronts, thighs, faces, cut through the bone. Their screams suddenly stilled, they tumbled to the bottom of the chasm, leaving long, bloody smears on the glass.
Without shedding a single tear, the file of humanity struggled on.
After another quarter mile of descent, the lowest point in the crater came into view. Their final destination. Ground Zero. It was a pancake-flat depression, roughly circular, five hundred feet across and stippled with shallow dimples like the rind of a moldy orange.
In the light of the late afternoon sun, the glass looked more gray than green. To illuminate the area at night, it was ringed by a battery of klieg lights on tripods. In the center of the ring were three great holes in the glass; the holes swarmed with laborers going in and out. Parked beside the mine entrances were ore wags. They were being loaded by hand from crude carts on skids. From the edge of the ring of lights, battlesuited troopers stood guard with laser rifles. There was a large holding tank, presumably for water, which had its own guard. There were no sleeping or cooking facilities, but there were long, open-flame heaters to keep the workers from freezing to death after the sun went down. In some of the shallow depressions, bodies were curled up—whether sleeping or dead, it was impossible to tell.
The group of fresh slaves was met at the end of the road by troopers who forced them into a long single file. As they passed a checkpoint, under the muzzles of triblasters, they were given another cup of water to drink and a large plastic badge was pinned to their chests.
After the last badge was handed out, one of the troopers addressed the crowd in an over amplified voice. "When the badge glows green, you are in an area of glass worth mining, and the glow will be bright enough to work by. If you bring out ore that doesn't register bright enough green, you will get no water. If you don't fill your sledge to the top with ore, no water. If there are problems with quality or quantity, everyone assigned to that sledge pays the same price. No water."
Ryan looked down at his badge. It was already faintly glowing. There was no need to ask what that signified.
They were in a death zone.
"Bubblehead over there talked about giving us water," J.B. said, "but he didn't mention anything about food. I think that means we're on our own in that area."
"Might as well hang up a sign—Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here," Mildred said.
"We cannot abandon that!" Doc stated emphatically. "Standing at the gates of hell, it is our only shield."
The troopers started using their rifle butts to herd the milling slaves in the direction of the mine entrances. At a second checkpoint, the companions were each handed short-handled pickaxes and mesh bags for carrying ore. When all of the new slaves had been given tools, the guards retreated to the outside of the ring. There were no further instructions, and the slaves weren't forced underground at blasterpoint. Their captors knew that thirst would do that quickly enough.
Ryan and the others filtered over to one of the mine entrances. Beside the round hole was a cut-down oil drum with the words Baron Jolt stenciled on the side. Stuffed inside the drum was a man with matted gray hair. Obviously the victim of laser manacles, he had no hands or feet.
While the companions watched, a slave came out of the mine, walked up to the half drum, unzipped his fly, hauled out his wherewithal and proceeded to empty his bladder. The gray-haired man groaned in protest, raising his wrist stumps to keep the warm spray out of his eyes and mouth.
"Do you know who that is?" J.B. asked. "That's Baron Doyal himself. From baron to urinal, man, talk about a tough world!"
Ryan was already circling to the other side of the entrance, where a group of slaves squatted in front of a ten-foot-long propane burner that served as a nighttime heat source. They were using two-foot lengths of stiff wire to toast small, elongated objects over the open f
lames.
The objects had four stumpy little legs and long tails.
Rats.
One of the slaves who was watching the others cook, a big, dirty, bearded man with spiral brands on his forehead and cheeks, slipped in from behind and deftly snatched another's rat on a stick. There was a brief scuffle for the hot food, which its original owner quickly lost. He seemed in very bad shape and was far too weak to reclaim his meal. The stronger slave gleefully chomped down the well-browned rat, bones, crispy tail and all.
The robbed slave turned away from the barbecue and staggered back toward the mine entrance, presumably with the intent of chasing down another dinner.
Ryan did a double take as the man stumbled past. Though his face and hands covered with weeping rad sores, though he was missing hair in big patches and most of his teeth, there was no mistaking him.
"Colonel Gabhart?" Ryan said.
Chapter Ten
Dredda leaned her head forward and peered over the edge of the abyss. Striated nukeglass lined both sides of the yawning chasm. After a sheer drop of five hundred feet, the almost vertical walls began to curve together, like the folds of a glistening gray wound, one bulging over the other, forming a black crease of impenetrable shadow.
Below the crease, the bottom fell out.
Because of the way the walls overlapped, the maximum depth of the second level of the crevasse couldn't be accurately measured by overflight sonar; certainly it was in the thousands of feet, more than enough to keep scavenging animals from reaching Kira's corpse.
Their battlesuit helmets off, their stubble-shaved heads lowered, the ten surviving Level Four females clasped gauntlets in a mourning line along the verge of the Slake City precipice. Their dead comrade lay in a body bag at Dredda's feet.
As Dredda looked into the plummeting abyss, she flashed back to her father's state funeral, a miles-long procession with millions of mourners lined up to pay their last respects to the ornate armored coffin that was guarded by a full military escort—tanks, APC wags, combat troops and hovering gyro squadron. She realized that what she had felt as her father's body rolled past the CEOs' reviewing stand was nothing, absolutely nothing compared to the emotion she was feeling now. At the time, she actually believed that she had suffered a terrible, life shattering loss. At the time, she actually believed that she had loved her father more than she could ever love anyone. Now she knew that she had deluded herself in both cases.