by James Axler
"So long," he grunted, the broad metal blade slicing easily through the center of the ant's swollen belly. A foul-stinking liquid squirted out, a few drops pattering on the skin of his wrist. Feeling it beginning to burn his flesh, Ryan quickly wiped it off with his sleeve.
Almost instantly a dozen more of the mutie insects came chittering over the side of the branch, scuttling toward him.
"Move, lover!" Krysty called from thirty feet above him.
"Yeah. Guess I'd better."
"THIS IS what I believe is called a Texarkana standoff," Doc said. "We can stop them getting at us, but I fear that they can make it confoundedly difficult for us to remove ourselves."
Darkness was creeping over the land, drawing a cloak of night across the jungle. The drumming that Krysty had heard earlier had ceased. Clouds had come up and the setting sun, away behind them, was only visible as a crimson glow at the edge of the bowl of mountains.
"Could be the last hurrah for us," Mildred said quietly. They kept their voices down once they discovered that any noise they made seemed to provoke the ants to ferocious activity.
As long as the friends watched the main trunk of the mangrove immediately below them, the mutie insects had no way of reaching them. It wasn't hard to hold them off with the panga if they came crawling up.
It would be a little harder in the dark.
The traveling army of giant ants seemed content to wait.
The dying embers of the day shone over their orange-red bodies, making it seem that the very land was smoldering. After Ryan had killed a hundred or more, they'd suddenly ceased their efforts to climb the mangrove. Once or twice a lone soldier had attempted an attack, but its headless corpse had fallen to the earth.
J.B. had methodically checked their options, climbing to the soaring, swaying peak of the tree, to try to find out whether they might be able to scramble away into the nearby branches. But the closest was more than twenty feet away and was so slender that to jump would mean a fifty-foot fall into the carpet of ants.
He and Ryan had discussed the possibility of using some of their newfound supply of grens to try to dissipate the patient army of gigantic insects. Even a couple of burners might only kill a few thousand ants. Frags and implodes wouldn't even scratch the surface of the limitless forces, which surrounded the tree as far as the eye could see in every direction.
"Outwait them" was J.B.'s best offer.
Ryan didn't have anything much better. "If they're still here through tomorrow, then we have to reckon they'll stay here forever. Or for long enough."
"But they'll starve," Krysty said.
Mildred knocked that one down. "Army of ants like this could survive days. If they just use a small part of their force to scavenge around for food for the others, they can outwait us. We have those food-tabs, but in heat like this we're sweating about a pint of water an hour."
"How long could we survive?" Doc asked. "Until tomorrow night?"
She nodded. "Probably. But we'll be in poor shape by then."
Ryan sniffed. "So, the only chance is to try and run through them. If we can keep going, and not fall, our speed could get us through and out the other side. Unless anyone's got a better idea, we can try it at dawn. Mebbe drop a gren or two to give us a head start on them."
"Why dawn?"
Ryan looked at Jak. "Can't risk it in the dark. False step, twisted ankle… and goodbye was all she wrote. Wait longer and we just get more tired. Dawn's the best moment."
Nobody agreed with him out loud. But then again, nobody disagreed either.
BOTH KRYSTY AND JAK had excellent night vision, but the darkness in the jungle was so intense that neither could even see the ground. The blackness was so smothering that it wasn't even possible to see an outstretched hand.
The ants stayed quiet. Ryan organized everyone into a double sentry watch, keeping the guard in pairs to make sure there was no sleeping. If a dozen or more of the creatures below succeeded in sneaking up the tree under the cover of night, the venom of their bites could be enough to prevent any worthwhile defense.
Ryan and Krysty took the four hours that ran from early morning to the first pallid hint of the false dawn.
"Sure I heard drums again, around midnight," Krysty whispered.
"Same direction?"
"Think so. Northerly."
"If we make it out of this, we can go take a look."
She touched Ryan gently on the arm. "Just in case we don't, tomorrow," she began.
But he reached for Krysty's face, finding her lips, and laid his hand across her mouth. "No need, lover. We both know what we feel about each other. Doesn't take words. If we get chilled in the morning, then it'll likely be quick. But I don't reckon on going. Not yet. Got too much living to do, lover."
She held his hand and breathed a kiss into his palm. "Fair enough. We'll make it together. Like you say… we both got a lot of living still to do."
The layers of the night peeled back with an imperceptible slowness and subtlety. Ryan suddenly realized that he had caught a faint spark of fire from Krysty's long red hair.
"Dawn's coming," he announced.
Chapter Seventeen
"MY DADDY WAS a Baptist minister, in a town outside of Montgomery, Alabama, until the Klan burned down his church and him inside it. He taught me how to pray, and this time I guess someone must have been listening in."
Mildred sat on the lowest branch of the mangrove, feet dangling over the bare earth. The heels of her sneakers rubbed against the main bole of the massive tree, which was scarred and torn by the serrated mandibles of the ants.
The army had gone, vanishing silently in the black middle of the night. It left nothing of itself behind, other than a swath of utter desolation, fully eighty paces wide and stretching in two directions as far as Ryan could see—toward the mountains, now visible as rounded silhouettes against the opalescent pink light, and back toward the river and the distant redoubt.
The trees remained, though some of the smaller ones had been stripped of leaves. Every flower and shrub had been devoured down to the ground, and every blade of lush grass had disappeared. The earth itself had been trampled flat, from the pounding of tens of millions of feet.
Ryan had wakened J.B., Jak, Doc and Mildred, showing with a wave of the hand that they'd been saved from testing themselves against the mutie ants.
"Where've they gone?" the Armorer wondered, rubbing his fingers over the scarred bark of the mangrove. "Looks like they thought about trying to cut this bastard tree down. Then gave up on it."
Mildred nodded. "Guess their scouts told them there was better eating ahead. If they'd really wanted us, they'd have stayed and cut through ten solid feet of wood as easy as a razor through an artery."
"I would hazard a guess that they could scent the river behind us," Doc suggested. "I also suggest that we might profitably begin to move ourselves. The migrations of killer ants are a total mystery to scientists. There isn't a guarantee that the little chaps won't return the same way in a couple of hours."
Moments later they were on the ground, following the trail of the army of ants. "It's like going from Atlanta to the sea," Doc commented. "Not a living thing left."
Away to the left, through the stripped, ravaged land, they glimpsed a river, perhaps the same one that had nearly taken Jak. At this point the ants' beaten track meandered away to the west.
"Didn't run fast," Jak said, pointing to something that gleamed white in the shadows.
"Wolf cub?" J.B. queried.
They stood in a silent half circle around the neat pile of polished bones. The ants had done their job with a total, finite efficiency, leaving nothing but the skeleton. Not a trace of sinew or ligament remained on the bones, but a few scrubby bunches of coarse, brindled hair lay on the ground. The eye sockets were empty and the long jaw was scoured clean.
"Not a wolf," Krysty said, stooping. "Not wild, anyway."
"How come you… ? Oh, yeah." Ryan looked at what Krysty held out
to him.
It was a narrow collar of plaited silver wire with a flat medallion on its end. Something was scratched on it.
"What's it say?" Mildred asked. "A name?"
"Odin," Doc replied.
"What fuck's an Odin?" Jak asked, turning the silver disk so that it caught the morning rays of sunlight.
"It's the name of one of the old Viking gods. Some people claim that it was the Vikings who first discovered the United States of America. Leif Eriksson, son of Erik the Red, called it 'Vinland,'some say. Odin was the leader of their gods, who was in charge of death and war, among other things."
"I saw part of an old vid once, Doc," Ryan said. "Long ships with oars on each side, and a man with only one eye. That's why I recall it. Swords and axes. How come there's a mess of bones out here called by the name of one of their gods?"
"Vikings here?" Krysty asked.
Mildred threw her head back and laughed, long and loud. "Hardly! No. Odin's the kind of jerk-off name that people gave their guard dogs back when I was…you know. Probably someone in a village or city somewhere came across the medallion. Liked it and tied it around the neck of his pet dog."
"Mebbe," Ryan replied. "Don't get many dogs kept as pets in Deathlands. Food, but not often as pets. And you have to remember there aren't cities anymore. Big villes and small villes. Not many big villes, either."
"God of death, you said, Doc." J.B. stirred the tumbled bones with the toe of his boot. "That's all he got."
THE AIR WAS GROWING cooler and fresher as the companions climbed toward the brink of the hill. They encountered more trails, some of which seemed to show the marks of human feet. But it had obviously rained within the previous sixty hours or so, and the spoor was indistinct.
"Look," Mildred said, pointing high above them, in the pale purple sky.
A bright crescent of flame arced from east to west, setting off a crackling chem storm of lightning as it passed.
"Nuke debris," J.B. explained.
"Sweet Lord! You tell me the world damned near blew apart a hundred years ago and there's still pieces of techno-shit falling from the heavens? If I could just go back—"
"One small step for the Totality Concept, one billion-dollar hunk of scrap iron for mankind," Doc muttered.
"Looks like some fog up ahead," Ryan called, easing the strap of the Heckler & Koch over his shoulder. "Must be where the edges of the hot air and the cold air marry together."
The top of the hill was about a half mile away. The thick jungle had gradually faded into low scrub, and the temperature had dropped to somewhere in the low sixties. Mildred had pulled on the hooded sweater. The ant bite she'd sustained had been swollen early in the morning, puffy and inflamed around its edges. But she'd pressed on, saying she figured it was best to try to walk the poison out.
"It looks like the mist tumbling in over the hills around San Francisco Bay," she said, shaking her head nostalgically. "I swear to God that it was one of the most beautiful sights in the whole ever-loving world."
The damp earth and compressed leaf mold had given way to small pebbles and bare rock. The trail had narrowed and become more distinct, zigzagging above them in a steady climb. The last hundred feet or so had now disappeared in the clinging bank of low cloud.
"Heard the drums again, lover," Krysty whispered at one of the sharp bends in the path.
"Sure?"
"Sure."
"SLOW DOWN, JAK!" Ryan called, feeling his voice muffled in fog the moment it left his lips. The skin on his cheeks felt cold and tight, and his coat was covered in a layer of fine drops of water. On an impulse he tasted it, finding the slightest hint of salt.
"I'm top," the boy replied from somewhere ahead and above them.
"I fear that the bellows to this organ of mine are becoming a trifle short of pressure," Doc said, doubling over in a coughing fit, hands on his knees.
"He means he's run out of breath," Mildred translated, picking up the ebony cane the old man had dropped and handing it back to him.
"You certainly have a way with words, ma'am. Short and simple."
She didn't rise to his baiting.
"Looks like the ridge, here," J.B. said, moving a few cautious feet along the spine of the hill, testing the path beneath his boots.
"Hear drums?" Jak asked suddenly, looking first to Krysty, as he knew that she had the best hearing in the group.
"Last night, in the tree, and this morning," she confirmed. "Down there. I can also feel water. Like an ocean. Could be one of those big lakes you mentioned, Mildred."
"Lake Superior? Could be. Would account more for this blasted fog."
J.B. joined Ryan. "Drums like they hear could mean Indians. Could be more of this stinking wet forest down there. Figure we go on or turn back now? Could be near the redoubt before full dark."
Ryan thought about what the Trader used to say: "Most men, faced with going on or turning back, will likely go forward. Nobody likes turning back. All you have to do is think clear which option is best." Ryan sometimes wondered if Trader's words had always been true. Certainly, in Deathlands, most men would strike ahead.
"It'll be closing on dusk when we're down in that jungle, J.B., and we don't know where those bastard mutie ants went. I say we go on, but slow and careful. You?"
"On? Hell, I knew that all along, Ryan. Just wanted to check you thought the same."
"DRUMS AGAIN, louder this time," Krysty called over her shoulder.
"And trees," Jak added, dancing light-footed ahead on point. "Spiky, not soft."
They were conifers, sparse at first, looming from the mist like stunted guards wrapped in cloaks of dark green. Then there were more of them, packed in closer to the edges of the winding trail.
By now they could all hear the rhythmic beating of drums.
"Kind of chilly for Indian savages," Doc said.
"Crap! "Mildred spit.
"How's that, madam?"
"Saying Indians don't come from cold regions. I guess I could name you a dozen tribes or more that do."
"Go on," Doc challenged, stopping on the path and bringing the whole group to a halt.
"Micmac, Penobscot, Algonquin, Huron, Ojibway, Mohawk, Yakima, Okanagan, Tlingit, Chinook, Beaver, Tanana, Cree, Bannock, Crow, Shoshone, Cheyenne. How many's that?"
"Around fifteen or so," J.B. said, grinning. "Better'n a dozen."
"If you like I could go on with another fifty, Doc. My minor was North American Indian Sociology, groupings and distribution."
"Humph!" Doc snorted and turned on his heel, setting off again down the trail at a fast lick.
The trees grew thicker, filling the damp air with the scent of balsam, and the mist became thinner.
"Think there's water close by," Krysty said, putting her head back and sniffing.
The steady beat of the drums was very loud. The path was leveling off as they came onto a flat wider trail among the trees.
"Meat cooking," Jak said.
Moments later they all caught the flavor of roasting, overlaid with the tang of smoldering pine logs.
"I'm not sure that noise is Indians," Mildred guessed. "More like African. Or… I don't know. It's not really like anything I ever heard."
There was the sudden sharp barking of a dog, followed by a shout and a blow. The barking stopped.
"Got to be a ville. Sounds less than a coupla hundred yards off," J.B. said, unholstering his Steyr AUG.
The wind gusted, and like a magician's trick, the curtain of fog vanished. They could see that they were close to the edge of the forest, and off in the distance they could make out the glittering expanse of a vast body of water. But between trees and lake was a largish ville: huts and fires, cows and hogs, men, women and children.
For several seconds none of the six friends spoke. It was Mildred Wyeth who broke the silence.
"Well, pardon my French, but you can fuck me sideways if they aren't Vikings!"
Chapter Eighteen
JORUND THORALDSON, the ba
ron of Markland, stood five inches over six feet and weighed nearly three hundred pounds. Not a lot of it was soft fat. His eyes were as blue as melting sea ice, and the hair that hung over his broad shoulders was white blond. Not quite as stark a hue as Jak Lauren's hair, but not far off it. His voice was a hearty rasping bellow that carried the flavor of oak-aged beer and salted herrings. He wore a shaggy woolen coat and leather pants, which were tucked into knee-length suede boots. A long, two-handed sword was sheathed on his left hip, and he carried a .38 Colt on his right.
"Greetings, outlanders!" he called, striding into the main hut of the ville, where Ryan and the others had been taken.
There had seemed no great threat as they hid at the fringe of the forest, watching. Then a skinny mongrel had scented them, its furious yapping bringing a dozen men to investigate.
It was a hair-trigger decision. Five or six of the villagers were carrying blasters, but they looked like old cap and ball pistols with a couple of ancient automatics. If Ryan had given the word, the villagers would have been down and dying in the damp grass.
"Hold it," he'd said.
And that looked like the correct decision.
The men, all of whom had long or plaited blond hair, had surrounded them and asked their business. Ryan had explained they were travelers from the other side of the hill, beyond the tropical jungle. Their wag had broken down and then they'd run into the army of ants that had driven them up the mountain, and down into the ville.
They were greeted with no hostility, nor was there any clear evidence of friendship. Just a calm acceptance of what they said and the suggestion that they should all come to the ville's meeting house to explain themselves in front of the Vikings' karl, Baron Jorund Thoraldson.
The last half mile or so of the friends' trek had been colder, and Mildred Wyeth had pulled the hood up higher, covering her head and shadowing her face. Krysty's red hair was tightly curled and dulled by the mist. Jak's white hair hung limp like curdled milk over his shoulders.