by James Axler
Ryan stopped listening to the braggart’s jabber and concentrated on splitting bone.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER the last, campfire-ready coyote haunch hit the meat pile. As water was now in too short a supply to use on hygiene, Ryan scrubbed his fingers and arms semiclean with handfuls of fine dirt, while J.B. and Jak tied the hindquarters in pairs, foot to foot. Each cleaned haunch weighed about ten pounds. Even though they hadn’t discussed it, there was never any doubt as to who would be carrying them. The companions were already toting forty-pound backpacks and weapons.
“Get up,” Ryan told Big Mike. When he did, the one-eyed man stepped closer, drew his SIG and aimed it at his forehead. The distance to target was less than two feet.
“Oh, Mama,” Big Mike moaned, looking down the barrel.
“Don’t move,” Ryan said. At his signal, J.B. and Jak started draping paired haunches over the man’s shoulders.
“What is this!” Big Mike exclaimed, staggering to keep his balance under the full eighty pounds of deadweight. “You can see I’m a goddamn cripple!”
“You sure as hell can’t shoot a blaster anymore, but your legs work just fine,” Ryan told him.
“You’re taking advantage ’cause I can’t fight back anymore,” Big Mike said. “How low-down, sorry-ass is that?”
“As I recall,” Doc said, “fighting back never was your strong suit.”
“More like, roll up in a ball and beg for mercy,” Krysty added.
“If there’s more trouble ahead,” Ryan said, “that extra weight will slow us down. Mebbe slow us down enough to get everybody chilled. You want to follow along, you want to drink a share of our water, you want to eat later on, you’ll carry the load.”
“This ain’t right,” the big man said, but nobody was listening and he didn’t try to shrug off the garlands of meat.
After the companions had shouldered their packs, Ryan took the lead, setting off for the crater’s south rim.
“Now, wait just a nukin’ minute!” Big Mike shouted at their backs. “You’re going in the wrong direction!”
“Nobody’s holding a blaster to your head,” Ryan said. “You’re free to break your own trail anytime you feel the urge.”
“But not lugging our grub, of course,” J.B. added.
“Are you out of your rad-blasted minds?” Big Mike said. “I just came from that way. Nothing over there but Burning Man and the she-hes. You wanna keep on livin’ you’ll head north to Meridianville.” He turned and gestured. “It’s thataway.”
Even as he pointed, off in the distance, somewhere out on the plain above the crater rim, coyotes yip-yip-yipped. And it sounded like there were a lot more of them than just the two that had escaped.
“You wanna keep on livin’,” J.B. said, “you’ll shut your trap and get in line.”
“I’d stay real close to the rest of us, if I were you,” Mildred told him. “You’re pretty much a walking banquet.”
Big Mike opened his mouth, presumably to lodge yet another protest, then closed it without saying a word. His dirty face twisted into a scowl, he shuffled toward them, pinning the draped haunches to his chest with a forearm to stop them slapping against his bib-fronts.
Ryan figured he’d seen the light. On his own, in this heat without food or water, hiding in a hole from the coyotes, he would last about three days—three very unpleasant days. Ryan didn’t waste breath explaining the choice of route. He didn’t have to explain it to his companions. They had the same facts he did and they all knew the drill.
The sound of their massed gunfire would’ve carried tens of miles. If the baron’s sec men were still in pursuit, they would be heading this way on the run. While the old highway was by far the easiest path off the volcanic plain, it was also the most obvious. Sec men who knew the terrain could move quickly to the road and cut them off, front and rear. There was no cover along the ruined two-lane, either. They’d be easy targets for a triangulated longblaster ambush.
The lava field, as tough and as slow as it was to traverse, had some definite upsides to it. Because it was the least likely route for them to take, there was a good chance the pursuit, who couldn’t cover every possibility, would decide to ignore it. Tracking down a quarry over fields of rock was damn-near impossible unless you had a nose like a coyote, which was probably why the baron’s men hadn’t located Big Mike and his dead friend, yet. And then there was the chipmunk factor: a million places to take cover and foil an attack.
After picking their way single file across the crater floor, they climbed out of the depression, working their way up the jumble of rock slabs. When they got to the top, Jak took point and set a course for the southeast horizon.
Ryan and the others fell into a familiar rhythm of march behind him. Not too fast, not too slow. A pace they could maintain in the midday heat. A pace that allowed them to constantly recce their surroundings, keeping on the lookout for potentially hostile movement near and far. Every hour or so, Ryan or J.B. circled wide to the rear to check for pursuit.
No coyotes, no sec men.
As the blistering-hot afternoon wore on, Ryan’s confidence began to grow. It appeared they’d made the right decision by heading south.
Hours later, when the sun began to dip low on the horizon, the air temperature plummeted. As many miles of wasteland still lay between them and the Snake River, Jak went on ahead to scout some shelter for the night. While Ryan stood watch with the Steyr, the others fanned out and started collecting scraps of wood from dead limber pines that dotted the landscape.
They had gathered plenty by the time the albino youth returned. “Found good cave,” he told them. “This way.”
It was a few hundred yards to the southwest, down a small sinkhole, maybe fifty feet across and ten feet deep. There was a cleft in the far wall, and it led to a tunnel that angled back into the lava flow. The passage opened onto a low-ceilinged chamber, the result of an air pocket that had formed in the cooling magma. It was big enough to hold them all with room to spare. A sizeable fissure in the ceiling above a side wall let in a shaft of light. It was a natural stove vent.
The companions heaped the wood beneath it and shrugged out of their packs. With a grunt, Big Mike dumped his load of meat on the cave floor.
Jak and Krysty piled up loose rocks, building a long, narrow fire pit against the wall.
“We could get trapped in here,” Big Mike said.
“Not get trapped,” Jak said. “Picked good cave.” Crossing the chamber he pointed at a narrow opening in the wall near the floor. “Back way out,” he said. “Hard to crawl in, but cave gets wider after. Winds around, comes out long ways off, far side of cinder cone.”
“How am I supposed to squeeze through a little bitty crack like that?” Big Mike said in dismay.
“Better pray you don’t have to,” Ryan said.
Before the last of the daylight was gone they had a crackling blaze going in the makeshift hearth. The vent worked just fine, sucking the smoke up and out of the chamber. As the fire burned down and the heap of glowing coals built up, J.B. and Doc skewered the coyote hindquarters on to limber pine spits. Once the coals were plenty hot, they leaned the spits over them, between the fire pit border and the wall. Grease squirting from the meat made the fire flare up, but the resulting black smoke shot right up the chimney.
“Aren’t you worried something might get wind of that cook fire?” Big Mike said. “More mutie coyotes? Or those sec men? They could still be prowling around, looking for me.”
“No one’s after us,” J.B. told him. “No one anywhere close, anyway. We made plenty sure of that.”
“Even if the sec men could follow the smoke trail,” Ryan said, “there’s no moon, tonight. Anyone trying to track in this lava field is going to fall into a crack or a pit and break their legs, or worse. Like J.B. said, if the baron’s men are trailing us they’re still a long ways off. Odds are, they’ll hunker down just like we are until right before daybreak. By then we’ll be moving on, too.”
“Got to take our chances with the fire anyway,” Mildred said. “We’re not going to eat raw meat, not when we’re still at least a half day’s hard walk from the river. We get sick on the way there, we get dehydrated from being sick in this heat, we’ll never make it.”
Despite the constant, grease-fueled flare-ups, the companions didn’t bother knocking down the bank of coals. Instead they kept feeding the fire fresh wood to maintain the temperature. After about thirty minutes of frequent rotation, the charring on the meat was uniform. Doc deftly sliced into a haunch with the tip of his cane sword. “Done to a turn all the way to the bone,” he announced.
As Doc and J.B. moved the joints out of the fire to cool a bit, Big Mike smacked his lips and said, “You know, that doesn’t smell half-bad.”
“Wish I could say the same for you,” Krysty said, shielding her nose with a cupped hand.
If the fire had warmed the chamber to a cozy temperature, it had also warmed up Big Mike, releasing the full spectrum of his aroma. Even in a time and a place where regular baths with soap were unheard of, his stench was nothing short of spectacular. Before they passed out the food, Ryan made him move to a seat over by the cave entrance. The cold air sucked in by the fire’s draft blew most of his pong up the chimney with the wood and meat smoke.
When the joints had sufficiently cooled, the companions tore into them with both hands, hot liquid fat running down their wrists and forearms. Before Big Mike could begin to eat he had to torque down the knob at the back of his prosthesis with his teeth, closing artificial fingers in a vise grip on the foot end of the leg bone.
“Gaia, that tastes vile,” Krysty said, making a sour face. Her prehensile hair seemed to agree. It had drawn up into tight ringlets.
Behind the smeared lenses of his spectacles, J.B.’s eyes squeezed shut as he forced himself to swallow. “You know,” he said, “this is so bad it makes wolf seem like prime beef.”
“I have to breathe through my mouth to choke it down,” Mildred said.
“Gamier than roast muskrat,” Doc said. “And somewhat more fibrous than armadillo.”
“Bear’s not so greasy,” Jak offered.
“Mebbe we should cook it longer,” Krysty said.
“That won’t improve the taste,” Ryan assured her. The flesh had a definite harsh tang to it already from the burning limber pine resins. It made Ryan’s tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. As he chewed he felt something hard crunch between his back molars. He rolled the gob of meat around in his mouth until he could pick out the inclusion with his fingertips. When he held it close to the firelight, it looked like a lentil bean, flat, circular, but it wasn’t. It was the coiled-up body of a parasite cooked to a cinder.
He spit the entire mouthful onto his palm to examine it. There were more little hard tidbits.
Lots more.
“For nuke’s sake don’t spit out the wire worms,” J.B. told him. “They’re the best part.”
“Nutty,” Doc agreed.
Ryan popped the entire gob back in his mouth and gulped it down. Parasites cooked that hard were dead. And their eggs were chilled, too. Protein was protein. Like most Deathlanders, he wasn’t all that fussy about food. He just didn’t want to crack a tooth on a pebble or a chip of hip bone.
“I’ve had plenty worse than this,” Big Mike bragged, brandishing his half-gnawed haunch in the air like a club. The dripping grease had washed a clean, shiny stripe down his chin. His skin was bright pink under the beard hair. “Worst thing I ever had to eat was a plate of spider stew down in New Mex. Made with hot green chilis and tarantulas as big as your hand.”
“Tarantulas aren’t edible,” Mildred said dubiously.
“Not much meat on them after they’re cooked, that’s for damn sure, and what little there is you got to suck out of the bodies and legs. Real trouble is, they’re covered with all these little hairs that fall off in the stewing. They get caught down your throat and make you gag, so it’s hard to keep any of it down. And two hours later I had the squirts thermonuclear.”
“Arachnid’s revenge,” Doc said.
“You’d better believe it was hellfire at both ends,” Big Mike said through a greasy grin. He pressed the haunch to his mouth and greedily tore off another strip of meat with his teeth.
After a dozen mouthfuls of the cloyingly rich meat, Ryan had had enough. The pile of flesh he’d gulped sat like a boulder at the bottom of his stomach. As he had no desire to save the leftovers for breakfast, he tossed the rest of it onto the banked fire for cremation. If all went well, by the next afternoon they’d be off the volcanic plain and along the river where there would be plenty of better forage to choose from.
One by one, emitting various expressions of disgust and discomfort, his companions discarded their haunches as well.
“We’ve got things to discuss,” J.B. said, cleaning the grease smears off his glasses with the tail of his shirt.
Ryan glanced over at Big Mike, who was still chewing happily. Would the bastard betray them if given half a chance? Even without hands? Even after they’d saved his stinkin’ hide?
Hell, yes.
“Better do our talking outside,” Ryan said. “You stay right where you are,” he warned Big Mike. Resting his palm on the pommel of his leg-sheathed panga he said, “Stick your nose out and I’ll chop that off, too.”
The companions exited the cave and moved away from the entrance, well out of earshot. An overturned bowl of stars lay upon the black blanket of the lava field. It was difficult to see more than a few yards ahead. The clear night had acquired a bone-penetrating chill.
Ryan put his arm around Krysty’s waist and pulled her close as they looked up at the brilliant swath of the Milky Way. He could feel the tension in her body, and though he worried that she was reliving her humiliation at the hands of the she-hes, he didn’t say anything, he just gently held her. After a few moments in his embrace she relaxed, snuggled against him and said, “Nice and quiet out here.”
“For a change,” Mildred said.
“That fat bastard can’t stop running his mouth,” J.B. said. “You name it, and he’s always done one better.”
“Or one grosser,” Mildred added.
“We have another hellish trek ahead of us tomorrow,” Doc said. “Perhaps if we gagged our guest the time would pass more pleasantly?”
“Gagged him and left him behind, you mean,” J.B. said.
“We can’t part company with Big Mike just yet,” Ryan said. “We need the information he’s got on the she-hes.”
“Why they come back?” Jak asked.
“Mebbe they couldn’t find anything better in the alternate universes,” Ryan said. “Everything that’s missing on their Earth—food, clean air and water, open space, small population—we have plenty of.”
“I thought they’d written off Deathlands because of the infection,” Krysty said.
When the companions had examined the bodies the she-hes had left behind at Slake City, they found massive, ultimately fatal, bacterial skin infections. The invaders had been caught unprepared by native microscopic organisms.
“They must have found a cure for it off-world,” Mildred said. “Not unexpected, given the rest of their technology.”
“We’ve got two options come daybreak,” Ryan said. “We can either head for the hills or we can take the fight to them, only on our terms this time.”
“If we choose to retreat now, dear friends,” Doc said, “rest assured these aliens will propagate and then swarm. Like a plague of locusts they will devour the remains of this Earth, just as they devoured their own.”
“If we can believe what Big Mike told us,” Mildred said, “they’ve been here at least a few weeks already, setting up their operation. Their weapons, armor and transport are better than anything Deathlands has ever seen. Every day they go unchallenged they’re going to get stronger and more difficult to defeat.”
“If we run now, we’ll be looking over our shoulders until our
dying breaths,” J.B. said. “I don’t like that.”
“Then we really don’t have a choice, do we?” Krysty said.
“Are we all agreed, then?” Ryan said, looking from face to shadowy face. “We fight them?”
The answer was unanimous and in the affirmative.
“When we last met, the she-hes took us by surprise,” Ryan said. “That’s why we ended up at Ground Zero in laser manacles. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen again. They still have their tribarrels and EM armor, but from what the Drunkard said they don’t have near as many wags as they did before. And mebbe only the single attack aircraft for backup. It doesn’t sound like they replaced any of the norm male soldiers they lost, either. It’s not going to be easy, no way around that, but we know where they are and they don’t know we’re coming. We can’t let any of them slip away. We’ve got to chill them all.”
After a moment of silence, Mildred said, “They were gone from this universe for a long time. I can’t help wondering where they went after they left.”
“Wherever it was,” Ryan assured her, “we’re gonna make them wish they’d stayed there.”
Chapter Four
Jak hunkered down on the flank of the ancient cinder cone, making himself as small a target for the wind as he could. In the past hour the breeze had picked up considerably, sweeping across the plain in shrieking gusts, lifting and fluttering his shoulder-length white hair, sandblasting his face with grit. The sawing wail was so loud it drowned out the chattering of his teeth.
His eyes had long since adjusted to the dim light and his perch afforded him a panoramic view downrange, but detail was difficult to pick out. Starshine reflected off planes and edges of rock, and the twisted trunks and branches of limber pines, turning them shades of gray, but the fissures, the rills, the sinkholes—fully three-fourths of the landscape below him—were pitch-black. Occasionally, he caught glimpses of movement, of what appeared to be rolling tumbleweeds—vague, round, silvery shapes that bounded between and vanished into the impenetrable patches of darkness.