Skylock

by Paul Kozerski

  Trennt kicked at the mucky, rent earth.

  "That!"

  They clawed out wads of the tacky, foul-smelling clay and slapped it to their faces. More was slathered over their skin and clothes. Doing so, Baker spared time enough to quizzically regard his friend.

  "Jimbo, what d'yah figger that ole boy was up to—givin' over the juice like he did, but lyin' to them Commies that way?"

  Trennt sighed. "No personal good, that's for sure."

  * * *

  Sergeant Karelian paused as he finished climbing the rise. Ahead, the major was busily sweeping brush from Top's truck. Noticing his longtime comrade, he offered a disarming smile, but continued in his chore.

  "Have we learned anything of value from our prisoner?" asked the sergeant, a bit mystified by Josef's actions.

  Dobruja nodded judiciously.

  "Much! From the good doctor's explanations, I believe we have captured a fine and valuable prize."

  Sergeant Karelian grinned in accord. But something in the major's tone also struck him oddly—as did the gag over Wayne's mouth and his hands cuffed to the truck. Simultaneously, he noticed two grenades set loose on the ground.

  Karelian never was able to ask why. A second later he found himself gazing down the silenced barrel of Dobruja's pistol. And into the officer's ruthless eyes.

  The sound of the shot was barely that of a grasshopper taking flight. The stunned sergeant grabbed at his chest, slumping dead without a cry.

  Dobruja smiled diplomatically at his shocked prisoner.

  "My regrets for having to view that. But, you see, great promises were made to me early on in my career, yet they remain unfulfilled. All my hard labors have gone unappreciated and promotions been denied me for one vexing political reason or another.

  "I've long needed something to expedite my career. But now, with the article in hand, I realize it just well may be time for me to put further allegiances aside and strike out on my own. There are other legion settlements further up the coast. We will proceed there and trade you and your product to the highest bidder." Josef's eyes ignited. "Back to your own people, perhaps!" He shrugged impishly. "But, I cannot leave witnesses behind. So, please excuse me one last time."

  Dobruja retrieved his grenades and smiled thinly, stepping around the body of his longtime comrade. He walked above the remainder of his men, seated at the hill's base. When a few looked up from their rest break, they saw only their trusted major waving from above.

  Josef gazed upon them with a deep and burning pride. Such fine soldiers. Genuine tears of love gathered as he slipped his fingers through the grenade pull pins. They would understand.

  * * *

  The salt flats had a much softer, spongier surface than during their night crossing. To this point it still held, but with less and less authority.

  To protect the others from a breakthrough, Trennt had spread his point lead twenty yards. They were three-quarters of the way across when he heard Geri's frightened call.

  "Trennt!"

  He saw the danger immediately. Just yards behind, their trailing prints were filling with lazy coils of dense smoke. Like freshly seared branding-iron marks, each new impression was dissolving, linking up to the others in sullen, weblike fractures.

  Advancing from its center, the salt flat itself was gradually passing back into solution. Sluggish, misty waves burped from the awakening stew and radiated outward like a leavening stage fog.

  Trennt checked the sky. The cloud cover still held, but had much thinned to a shade of burnished pewter. The air was warming and, through his boots, he realized his feet were likewise starting to heat up.

  But in the distance he could also see the other shore.

  Baker swiped a hand at his mud-clogged eyes.

  "Mebbe if we slow down some, Jimbo. Our steps'd be lighter then."

  "And slower," he argued. "No. We've got to be over the shallows by now. Way passed the deep stuff and above the last to thaw. Don't slow down. Speed up! Faster! Go!"

  But for the first time ever, Trennt saw Geri shake her head in surrender.

  "Let's go!" he repeated.

  She didn't move. Instead, her eyes swelled with tears. She sobbed and reeled perilously on her feet.

  "No more. I can't. Just leave me be!"

  Her words cut through Trennt at gut level. He felt a genuine sense of fear burn through him; a great notion of lost purpose and direction.

  He walked back and growled in her face.

  "No! You're not going soft on me now! After making it through a plane crash, desert, and all that other bullshit, you're going to quit when safety is only a few hundred yards away?"

  Trennt grabbed Geri by her shirt sleeves and yanked her to face him.

  "Lady, you were the tough one through this whole nightmare! Thirsty, freezing, you never once complained and I admired that. It was you who kept me going, because I was too damned ashamed to quit first! Now, you just want to sit down and die? All right! Quit if you want. But so do I!"

  Trennt swung his hand at Baker, some yards removed.

  "Go on, man! She and I are stopping here! You go!"

  Geri's stupor bled away to shock. Her eyebrows furrowed and flexed in disbelief. Yet Trennt stayed put. For the first time ever, he matched and held her stare.

  His eyes filled with wonder. What a deplorable specimen she was—comically plastered in a foul-smelling mud wrap, speckled in goose bumps and red bug bites, puffy and swollen with cuts and scrapes, feverish from exhaustion and thirst. But in the entire world nothing more beautiful existed for him.

  No contrition could possibly earn forgiveness for all the wrong he'd done. So Trennt merely stood there, hovering before her like a pathetic dunce.

  Then, from somewhere far away, the true and right words gathered and finally came.

  "What happened back at the church was real. I love you, dammit!"

  Geri's bloodshot eyes flared. She didn't speak, but slowly, a hand gently rose to touch his filthy, beard-stubbled cheek. His arms, in turn, went tight around her.

  "I don't care anymore about this," he declared. "I just want you."

  Her gaze thawed. A trusting hand went to his and they joined Baker in making for the home shore.

  The trio shuffle-walked side by side, keeping a double-time pace as growing whiffs of the chemical mist skittered determinedly after.

  It reached their ankles, quickening toward their shins and knees. The white fumes probed vigorously among flex cracks in their flaking mud cover. It found fabric and wicked its way inside, toward unprotected flesh.

  Their skin began to tingle. First, insectlike tickles coursed up and down their legs. Then determined pinpricks, and finally legions of scalding bee stings.

  They struggled on as a unit, forging through the last yards of caustic sands and toward the first spot of true earth. Never losing their contact with each other, the threesome bulldozed through the waist-deep, dead pine boughs, pulling and pushing. With their strength reserves at the absolute lowest, they gathered for a clumsy near-run toward the distant safety broadcast in a faint wash of green.

  In their wake, the first probing rays of a new sun lanced the failing cloud cover. Mini white twisters sprouted in each sunbeam. Teetering uncertainly at birth, they eagerly gained their balance and launched skyward. More bloomed and joined the dance, until dozens of the ghostly entities whirled about in a frenzy.

  Finally the sun burst through, flooding the caustic plain in one single blast. All the solitary flares raced toward its center and detonated into a single, mighty thrusting column of boiling silver-white.

  But safe from its reach, the survivors stumbled, clothes and all, into the welcoming, algae-green waters of a well-shadowed marsh. They gratefully splashed through its shallow acreage, dousing themselves with soothing muck and splashing its scummy waters across their seared flesh, before simply plopping down.

  Dipping her fingers in a shirt pocket, Geri withdrew a familiar and battered foil packet. She wordless
ly rattled it before the others—Top's return-trip ration of detox pills.

  They all choked down their last dose of the astringent zinc and citric acid pellets, adding handfuls of brackish water, as well. Stomachs long empty and numb were violently awakened by the sour medicine and it stayed put only with the greatest effort.

  Trennt spied a tree-lined ridge not far off. Later, they'd spend the night sheltering at its base. But for now, he just wanted to soak in this cool bath and relax.

  CHAPTER 27

  Major Dobruja shoved himself painfully away from the truck's oversized steering wheel. Ahead, shattered windshield glass was flecked with his blood. Through the cracks and spatters, a mauled reflection gazed back.

  The scalp above the major's left ear glistened with a tarry sheen. Matted hair fed sluggish tributaries of ooze that forked about it and rejoined in the coarse weave of his shirt collar.

  He looked to the handcuffed man slumped beside him.

  "Are you hurt?"

  Wayne put uncertain fingers to a bloody nose but did not answer.

  Josef touched his own smashed cheekbone and his universe swayed suddenly with pain. Then he froze, realizing it was indeed doing just that.

  Gazing passed his fractured image, the major settled on a slowly bobbing emptiness just beyond. The truck was seesawing on a rocky ledge. Beneath, a dim rugged slope plunged off to a shadow-choked bottom.

  Josef cursed his haste. Winner's euphoria had clogged his better senses. Flying down the quake-leveled trail, he hadn't anticipated the hard jog cleaved into the fresh ridge. Only his catlike reflexes had prevented both vehicle and men from completing the full ride down. Now they were trapped.

  Dobruja dared raise his eyes to the rearview mirror. Burned into the greasy bunchgrass, a pair of muddy skid marks disappeared beneath him. Only some knobby root ball or fickle boulder wedged under the truck was even now keeping it from completing the ride.

  The Red settled back and took stock of their situation. His weapon was jammed, butt first, against the far door. Just his motion of reaching toward it made the old rover sway menacingly. Likewise, stretching for Wayne's locked wrist did the same.

  The catalyst vials and diary were a better bet, though. Still wedged behind his seat, Josef touched both with no threat to their balance. His sidearm, too, remained securely holstered to his hip.

  While messy and painful, his injuries were not life-threatening. The truck, though, was a lost cause; the odds of salvaging his captive, not much better.

  Josef slowly retrieved and draped the web belt over his head, necklace-style. The journal went inside his shirt. His rifle and passenger were forgotten.

  The major then shifted himself about. Left hand and foot went to the door frame. Right, on the steering wheel and brake pedal. The truck seemed to register his preparation, absorbing and magnifying the furtive motions into a single ominous rhythm.

  Coiling in his powerful athlete's legs, Josef drew a full breath of thick forest air. He glanced at Wayne, stunned and edging toward unconsciousness.

  "Sorry, my friend," he offered. "I can only manage so much."

  With that, Josef erupted from the truck. But leaving, the major felt himself jerk aside as his holster snagged a spoke of the steering wheel. Its leather flap popped open and his precious pistol squirted out, taken in quick trade.

  An assured landing also vanished and Josef fell short, impacting on the ledge face. His boots kicked frantically for footholds. Feverish hands tore at the gnarled clumps of exposed roots.

  Behind, there was a simultaneous groan of complaining metal, as the unbalanced truck shifted about its fulcrum. It dipped left to right, up and down, in ragged seesaw motions.

  Still aboard, only now did the situation register to Wayne. Tugging his manacled hand, his eyes briefly flashed about like a trapped animal. Then inexplicably, they stopped. The arm was lowered and the man assumed an oddly serene posture. Father Wayne drew a breath and gazed upward in surrender.

  Momentarily righting itself, the vehicle teetered. Josef looked back in sudden hopes it might actually find a stable center. Yet the laws of physics were impatient and the truck upended smartly, and slipped off for the ragged, shadowed depths.

  From his uncertain roost, Dobruja realized that his doomed passenger never uttered a single cry. But plastered nearly vertical against the crumbly sand and root-bound ledge, Josef's own survival was still very much in contention.

  He felt the loose journal spin and slip dangerously low, inside his untucked shirt. Its mangled wire spine scraped down against his belly, slipping between it and his fatigue pants. The metal coil then snagged the lip of his cotton belt and dangled full weight, in the open.

  Dobruja chanced a look below. Both he and the diary hung precariously over an eight-story drop. But securing the book was important enough to risk the effort.

  The major loosed a hand. He edged it downward, between cliff and belly, tediously inching toward the notebook. His balance held. Even so, there wasn't clearance enough to quite touch and Josef gently exhaled to make room.

  The action also allowed greater movement for the dangling manuscript. It took up a gentle walking sway, ratcheting over the belt's rough cotton weave, one loop at a time.

  Now just inches away, Josef thrust his hand down. Snatching fingers scrambled over the text. They skipped hopelessly about its ragged cover and the journal squirted out into space, joining the man and precious truck already lost below.

  The failed effort also compromised the major's balance and he felt himself start slowly drawing rearward. From the shadowed depths, however, a fickle breeze stirred. It issued up the stark chasm wall and twirled curiously about the soldier. It caressed his battered cheek and probed the fine muscular tension of his compressed back. Already given so many generous offerings, Fortune smiled.

  The breeze nudged Josef toward safety.

  * * *

  An eternal silence hung through the gauzy prehistoric dreamscape. Day again. The remaining night fog was thickening to a coarseness that hinted of retreat. But not soon. And what had thus far condensed only made them more miserable with a heavy, soaking dew.

  Arms wrapped wretchedly about himself, Baker trembled with chills as he searched the indistinct woodland. All about, the forest lines were dark, oblique slashes.

  "Where d'yah figger the old man's truck is?"

  Tightly holding Geri, dozing in his arms, Trennt shivered too.

  "Seems like we came across further north, maybe. Might have to backtrack to find it."

  A rattle sifted down the fog washed hillside. Geri tensed, waking, but they all remained silent, waiting for a repeat of the sound and hoping it was just a passing animal.

  Seconds later the brush clattered again. And with it came the noise of loose footing. Working at a determined pace, the steps were thoroughly human. Thankfully, the noise was moving away. Its source would soon be gone.

  But a final slide of gravel cascaded down toward them. At its apex a lone, hobbling shape broke through a clear spot in the fog. Grabbing at jerky handholds in the snarled weave of branches, a figure noticed them and paused.

  Dobruja.

  His feet slipped badly in the mushy hillside. Limping along with a gait every bit as lame as their own, he struggled to keep his balance. Half his face seemed smeared with mud or darkened by a large bruise.

  Trennt's eyes found his immediately. A quick twist of surprise flared on his ruined mug and the major was gone. New effort drove him back the way he'd come and higher into the heavy mist.

  Geri felt a quiver radiate through Trennt. His shoulders tensed, then he slumped beneath the crushing yoke of restored duty. Her fingers gently restrained him.

  "Let it go," she urged in a whisper. But the stiffening of his body said that could not be.

  Trennt's eyes eluded her. They raised, instead, to the fog, training on the whirling thick curtain blending shut in the Russian's wake.

  Geri's continued silence remained a plea for him to stay.
Yet even so, her grip relaxed.

  Trennt climbed to his feet and issued a final directive.

  "Baker, head straight west. To the shoreline and south. I'll check this out, then find the truck and catch up."

  He raised Geri to her feet, gently kissing her.

  "You keep her safe for me," he ordered and, not looking back, started off.

  * * *

  Three hours had passed. Trennt broke through a snarling tangle of fireweed to the base of yet another tremor-fresh scarp. Twice since starting, he'd heard brontides. But nothing more had happened and he moved along.

  The air, which had earlier been a chilling nuisance, now offered soothing comfort to his frazzled leg muscles. He rubbed them a time while scouting the line of determined footprints still leading him on.

  Again, Trennt forced his body ahead and his misgivings behind. Still upward and after. Pulling at bare root braids and rocks, his corded arms slowly drew him ahead. Bad enough, having traded a sweet dream for a filthy chore, but not a quarter mile back, an aching question had also been answered.

  He'd found Top's mangled truck, belly-up. Beneath it, a virtuous man, crushed to death and left discarded. And once again, there was no time to spare for a burial—only time enough to remove his own safari shirt and place it over the silent bloodless face.

  Trennt pushed upward. The weary tendons propelling him caught and skipped like frayed cables, one excruciating step after another.

  Finally, he crested the scarp. But having arrived, his aches gave way suddenly to a quick flash of even more powerful hunter instincts. With eyes gone huge and flat, Trennt cast a scouring glance across the hundred-plus feet from this ledge to a lesser twin.

  He knew his quarry was still ahead. Yet his scalp pricked in warning from a new and invisible presence off his flank. He saw nothing though and returned to scout the silvery-green path of trampled grass before him.

  A change of wind brought new smells. The sea, very close now, loomed brisk and refreshing, leavened with vitality. But his ill-timed distraction cost Trennt a misstep and he buckled under a twisted ankle.

  The joint flamed and gave way, dropping Trennt to his rump in the sandy cliff-top grass. He clenched and kneaded the ligament and flesh—fast growing stiff as a hunk of old statue.