“Yeah.” It was a light, eerie smear in the distant black land. No trees obscured it, and it had a curious liquid quality.
“Cherenkov radiation. During the Meltdown there were five trucks loaded with fuel rods they tried to get out. The state police turned them back somewhere north of here, so they drove them into the swamps. It makes a good landmark. Your bike’s somewhere beyond there.”
“Well, keep a sharp eye out for the spot. I want my saddlebags back.”
Keith discovered the hole in the fuel tank when they stopped for the bags. A dribble of alcohol was leaking out, one slow, steady drop at a time. The bullet along the underside of the truck had apparently sent a sliver of metal through the tank, and in the process screwed up the fuel gauge. Neither Keith nor Fletch could think of any way to fix it. “We should head east,” Keith suggested. “Get as far out of the Drift as we can before it dies.”
“Will the Mummers follow us into the Drift?”
Keith thought it over. “Yes.”
“Then New Jersey’s not good enough. We go north.”
The engine breathed its last at dawn. Keith let the truck glide to a halt in a stand of stunted pines just off the road.
They were both wearing their masks; they had switched off the recycler back at the saddlebag stop, in order to conserve fuel. Fletch hopped out, slid her rifle from its sheath in the saddlebags, and snapped, “Let’s get moving. You take the bags and I’ll lead. Don’t step in any patches of snow—we can’t afford to leave a trail.”
Keith shouldered the saddlebags and followed her down the road the way they had come for perhaps a quarter kilometer, and then up a slope on the opposite side from the abandoned truck. In places the ground crunched beneath his feet, and climbing the slope was hard work.
Keith’s muscles ached from the tension of driving. “I could use a week or two in bed,” he said. Not so much complaining as making an observation.
“We’ll rest at the top of the hill. Right now we’re exposed.”
The sun had climbed three fingers above the horizon and shone weakly through the clouds by the time they could rest. The sky was white and gray, almost colorless. The endless hills beneath were no more definite. The two fugitives huddled behind a tangle of thorny bushes, near a cluster of spruce trees whose needles had a distinctly brownish tinge. Half an hour passed.
“Here they come,” Fletch said. “Following our trail.” She peered through her binoculars, careful to keep them in shadow.
With a low growl, three four-wheel-drive vehicles swung into view. They sped down the roadway in close formation, coming to a halt by the abandoned tanker. Six dark figures leaped out and swarmed over the site. They moved quickly, alertly, keeping each other covered at all times. After ten minutes they returned to their vehicles and moved down the road at a much slower pace.
Fletch stood. “They go that way and we go this way,” she said with satisfaction. “Let’s go, kid. Miles to go before we sleep, you know.”
They were trudging up an endless country road, detouring around the scattered patches of snow. The sun was failing. Keith stopped on a cancerous-looking growth, painfully bent to scoop it up and throw it into the lifeless woods to the side. “… snow,” Fletch said. Her voice was muffled by the nucleopore and Keith couldn’t make out her words.
“What did you say?”
“I said it’s like snow!” Then, seeing his difficulty, she fell back a step. “The steam explosions went up like a geyser. They sent the hot stuff up where the winds could catch it, and it filtered down like snow. Then it got blown around, so you’ll have bare spots and hot spots throughout the Drift. The big concentrations are still too slight to see, but you can gauge them by their effects.”
She stopped near an old stone farmhouse nestled within an almost healthy looking stand of trees, and did a quick scan of their limited horizons through her binoculars. Save for a collapsed front porch, the house was virtually intact. “Not bad. We’ll stay here tonight.”
They forced the lock on the kitchen door, and chocked it shut with an old dresser. The interior was untouched from the time of the evacuations. Cigars moldered in a humidor atop the refrigerator. A child’s drawing taped to a cupboard crumbled when Keith touched it.
There was a woodstove in the living room. Reluctantly they left it alone, eating unheated tins of beef from Fletch’s saddlebags. They had to lift their nucleopores for each bite, replacing them immediately after.
When they were done, Fletch carried the empty tins outside. She paused on the stoop and cocked her head. “Listen.”
Keith joined her, strained his ears. After a moment he caught it—a long, almost musical howl. A pause, and there was another, equally faint howl in reply. “Some kind of mutated dogs,” Keith said. “I’ve seen them. Big, shaggy animals, like wolves.”
“Actually, they’re a hybrid—a perfectly natural cross between dogs and wolves. They migrated down from Maine a few years back, and now they’re expanding through the Drift. Good luck to them, say I.”
Keith peered into the night, but trees blocked his vision, and there was no chance of his seeing the animal. “Hybrid, mutant, what’s the difference?”
Fletch gawked at him. “They really do keep you poor sods ignorant, don’t they?” She threw the tins away from the house. They fell with a clatter. “The only mutations you have to worry about coming out of the Drift are the new diseases that pop up every year. Now be quiet, and let’s see what goes after the trash.”
Shivering slightly, Keith complied. The minutes crept by, each one a small leaden eternity, and only a continually repeated resolve not to be outlasted by a woman kept Keith from giving up and going inside.
Finally there was a rustling in the bushes.
Something burst out of the darkness in a thundering, headlong rush. It nabbed the tins smoothly in passing and was gone, leaving behind an impression of small bright eyes and a squat, shaggy body.
“Feral pig,” Fletch said. “Now there’s a mutant for you. I’ve cut a few of them open. The appendix is malformed, the stomach is—well, let’s just say their digestive systems are remarkably inefficient. So they have to eat a lot more than their domesticated ancestors did. They’re always foraging, always hungry, and I’d hate to come up against one without a good weapon.” She closed the door. “I saw a red skunk once, but I don’t see much of a future for that either.”
Keith slid the dresser back against the door.
“Well, it looks safe—the pig is able to live around here, anyway. Beddy-bye time for me.”
Keith turned. Fletch had dropped her robe, and was shedding her shirt. Her breasts were freckled, and they swayed gracefully as she moved. Keith watched them, fascinated, wondering whether he really wanted to make love to this woman again. The passion of the previous night had a strong hold on his imagination, and yet it was tinged with shame, as if he had done something shameful and unclean.
Fletch pulled blankets about herself and gestured for him to sleep beside her so they could share body warmth. Yet when he reached out a questioning hand, she turned away and mumbled, “Not tonight, boyo. You’ll be stiff enough in the morning as it is.”
Keith awoke feeling half crippled. Fletch had him out on the road before he was awake enough to protest. Bleak hours passed on tedious roads that Fletch puzzled out from a pre-Meltdown service station map.
Once they had to flee the road and hide when a distant growl warned them of an approaching four-wheeler. They watched it go past, two Mummer assassins in its seat. Still later they were attacked by a feral cat, a small orange-and-white animal descended from house pets. It ran at them yowling when they had paused for lunch, and launched itself at Fletch’s face. She had to club it to death with the stock of her rifle.
She turned the small carcass over with her boot. “See right there?” she said. “That big sore on its side? It must’ve made its lair in a hot spot. It came down with radiation sickness, and the pain made it crazy enough to attack us.”
<
br /> Keith sat down under a flowering apple tree. It leaned over the road, covered with small white flowers—a perversion of its biological programming, for frost would kill the flowers long before they could be pollinated. He picked up his can of beans, spooned out a cold lump, and looked at it. “Fletch,” he said wearily, “when are we going to be out of this hellish place?”
She gathered him into her arms, gave him a hug. “There, there. I’ve got friends not far from here. There’s a small community of Drifters I know of. They’re all outcasts and vagabonds, but reliable in their own way. When we get there we can rest—maybe tonight, if we’re lucky.”
Two days passed. A noontime sun was shining when they reached the mouth of a small, shallow valley. A cluster of nineteenth-century buildings were huddled below, two or three from the mid-twentieth anomalously mingled in. “There it is,” Fletch said. She began loading needlelike projectiles into her rifle.
“What’s its name?”
“Nameless.”
Keith couldn’t tell from her answer whether the community was called Nameless or simply lacked a name. But he was weary and short-tempered from three days of forced marches and sexless nights, and he was damned if he was going to ask. “Not much to look at.”
Fletch grunted, and flicked the safety on her rifle.
It was a short thing, the rifle, about the length of a sawed-off shotgun. The stock was carved to fit her forearm, the trigger was far up along its length, and its barrel, though of normal thickness, had a surprisingly small muzzle. Keith thought, not for the first time, how handy it would have been back in Philadelphia.
After a perfunctory scan of the valley through her glasses, Fletch removed her mask and stowed it in a caftan pocket. “The valley’s one of the clean spots I told you about, but you should keep your mask on anyway. Just in case. When we go inside, though, take it off. These people are touchy. Say as little as possible. Don’t criticize anything. Don’t start any fights.”
Keith was staring at a small weathered shed at the end of a short path off of the roadway. One wall was missing, and there was a kneeling-bar just inside it. It looked like a shrine. Where a crucifix should have been, there was a bright, crudely painted radiation logo. “Some friends.”
Fletch raised the rifle so that its barrel rested against her shoulder and its muzzle pointed skyward. She led the way down.
The cluster of buildings had once been the industrial core of a small mill town. Over the years the outlying houses had been torn down, bit by bit, for building supplies, for firewood, sometimes just for the sake of doing something. Now all that remained was a miscellany of old factory buildings bordering a small, swift-running river. Sheds and stone additions choked the narrow streets, making the whole a combination windbreak and maze.
There were flickers of movement in the higher windows as they walked past, pale bloated faces that appeared and were gone, like goldfish coming to the fore of their bowls and whisking away. A one-legged old man, his single crutch hung with feathers and oddly marked small mammal skulls, lurched around a corner. He saw them and glared. His lips moved, and an indistinct mixture of obscenities and nonsense words poured forth. They hurried past.
“There must be a hundred people in this warren,” Keith said, awed. “What do they all do?”
“Whatever they have to. Now shut up!”
The alleyway twisted and turned, and brought them face to face with an ancient gasoline station. Its windows had been boarded over, and towers of old tires almost obscured it from view. Keith wondered what possible use anyone could have for them, did not ask. A bell over the door jangled as they went in.
The interior was a packrat’s fantasy. Dimly lit by alcohol lamps were clutters and tangles and piles of furniture, fishing gear, musical instruments, woodstoves—a thousand items, all battered and old, all obviously looted from homes abandoned during the Meltdown. A pale, pockmarked face appeared in the shadows to the rear. “You after girls?” it asked.
“Hell no,” Fletch said. She slid the rifle into its sheath. Keith was almost unbalanced by its weight. He staggered, recovered. The face advanced, became a tall, vacant-eyed man with a slouch belly.
“Bringers?” he asked.
Fletch threw him a silver nickel, and he automatically snagged it out of the air. “I want two beers and whatever slop you’re serving today.”
The man stared at them silently, as if puzzling out the meaning of her words. Finally he said, “Tables in back,” and vanished back into the gloom.
While Fletch strode to the tables, Keith remained standing, poking through the mounds of objects. He came across a mirror, wiped the grime from it. His reflection was grim. Mean lines around the mouth, a scowl creasing his forehead. He blinked, trying to erase the wildness in his eyes. No good. A smile was gobbled up by his mask. He pushed it down. A red triangle of chafe-marks remained. He touched them lightly with a fingertip, pushed the uncombed hair back from his forehead. Still he retained the look of a hunted animal.
Keith took a deep breath of air that rushed into his lungs so readily he felt momentarily dizzy. The hell with it, he was not going to put his mask back on until they left.
“Susie!” A gigantic, black-bearded man exploded from the dim recesses of the back. He rushed forward, flung his arms around Fletch, and lifted her into the air.
Keith had instinctively grabbed for Fletch’s rifle, but drew back when he heard her laugh happily. “Bear, you old pirate!” She hugged him and thumped his back vigorously.
They drew up chairs to a table, and Keith quietly joined them. “But what are you doing here?” Fletch asked. “Didn’t you have business”—she lowered her voice—“along the coast?”
“Haw! I was being set up. They’ve got a new administration that’s cracking down on smuggling, much good it’ll do them. But I’ve got friends, yes, and they warned me away.” He shifted his head toward Keith. “He’s okay, right?”
Fletch shrugged, performed introductions. Bear was about Fletch’s age, perhaps a bit older, and he had a paunch that bulged over the table whenever he leaned forward. “We met when I was covering the Northern Liberation Front,” Fletch said. “The guerrillas set up their camps in the Drift, where the government troops wouldn’t go after them.”
The pale man brought their beers and two bowls of watery-looking stew. Looking up, Keith noticed a dwarf enter the front, see strangers, and turn to leave. Wary, intelligent eyes met his, and Keith realized with a start that the dwarf was young, perhaps twelve, and had likely been born within this Drift community. An instant later, both he and the waiter were gone, out their respective exits.
Bear had stopped talking in the presence of the pale man. Now he added quietly, “Listen, Susan. I can see you’re planning on resting here a day or so, but I think maybe you and your young friend here should come stay with me in my cabin instead.” A stray beam of light glinted on a single gold earring in his matted hair.
Fletch was all serious attentiveness. “Why?”
“I was here two days ago, visiting the …” He looked embarrassed. “The girls in back. And some men came in, asking questions about you. Most of this crew thought they were Bringers, and wouldn’t talk to them, but—”
“What are Bringers?” Keith interrupted.
“Aw, these pissants will believe anything. Bringers are supposed to have the evil eye or something, they bring death with them.”
“Never mind that,” Fletch snapped. “Go on with your story.”
Bear seemed relieved to return to it. “Anyway, I decided to hang around, in case you showed up and might need some help maybe. But they looked like killers to me. Six or eight of them. Southern accents.”
“Philadelphia accents?”
“Yeah. I think.”
“Shit.” Her fingertips tapped the table. “Finish your beer, Keith. Bear, have you still got your buggy?”
“Out back. I’ve got my own fuelstill, too. I’m a rich man!”
The buggy was an open-pit
four-wheel drive, and Bear drove it like a madman. Huddled between Bear and Fletch, Keith concentrated on keeping warm and for the first time actually worried about frostbite. The other two chattered happily over his head, ignoring both him and his misery.
They passed another roadside shrine on the way out of the valley, and later a site where a deer had been butchered on the roadway. Cabalistic signs had been drawn in its blood on the concrete. Bear scowled at them. “Superstitious louts!”
At last Bear roared, “We’re here!” He drove the buggy up an almost nonexistent road, across a stretch of meadow, and under a stand of gnarled elms. While Bear was covering the vehicle with a tarp, Keith looked about for the cabin. He couldn’t see it.
“Back this way.” Bear led them up through the trees, and gestured with a mittened hand. “How do you like it? Not much, but it’s home, hey?”
The cabin was built into the slope of a steep hillside. A log wall with one window and door, and a stretch of wood-shingled roof were all that showed.
Bear scooped an armful of wood from a stack beside the door, and led them inside. He talked rapidly, as if trying to make a good appearance for a cabin whose virtues were far from obvious. “Built it myself,” he said. “Dug it into the hill, so the earth kinda evens out the temperature. I scavenged a lot of styrofoam, packed it between the walls and the earth. Doesn’t need much heating-wood. Leave it alone and it stays about thirteen degrees C constant. Summer and winter.”
“Very nice,” Keith said politely, not meaning it.
Fletch studied the cabin judiciously, thumping the walls with her fist. She came to an inside door, raised an eyebrow. “Root cellar,” Bear explained. Fletch smiled.
“So this is your fabled cabin. I never thought I’d actually be here.” She examined the shelves, crammed with boxes and sacks, that covered the free space on every wall, while Bear pulled out prodigious amounts of bedding from several trunks.
He spilled a final armful onto the floor, then stopped and looked ruefully at the mound he’d created, as if seeing it for the first time. “That may be a bit much,” he muttered in an embarrassed tone.
In the Drift Page 5