by James Axler
The mob of sec men chuckled at the witticism, and took more sips from their canteens of brew. Whatever the stuff was, it put a fine buzz in a man’s head, and made him feel stronger than a bull moose during mat ing season. They had been rowing steady for three days, and still felt ready to continue the chase on foot, or start rowing back home, if necessary.
Hesitantly bending, sec chief Donovan took a handful of the weird material covering the beach, curiously running the strange dirt through his fingers. “This be some sort of rock,” Donovan told the others in amazement. “No. No, its crystal!” Crystal dirt. What sort of stupe-ass island was this? What kind of plants could grow in crystal?
“Sand,” Baron Wainwright muttered, extracting the word from a childhood memory. Her grandfather had talked about white sandy beaches, instead of the pebble beaches that the world had. But those could only be found on the mainland.
“Sandy beaches,” Baron Griffin whispered, clearly thinking along the same lines. There was a forest up ahead, and he recognized most of the trees—pine, elm, oak and maple, but not the others. “Could those be palm trees and coconut trees?”
“Guess so,” Wainwright lied, not willing to demonstrate any ignorance in front of the troops.
Pulling out half of a broken binocular, Donovan swept the area for any dangers and found none in sight. Then he settled the optical device on the ruins to their south.
“Are they building a ville, or taking one down?” the sec chief demanded gruffly. There did not seem to be any outer defensive wall around the ville, which was beyond strange. However, all of the buildings seemed to be made of brick or concrete. All of them. There wasn’t a sign of any logs, wood shingles or even a fragging thatched roof in the whole damn place.
Even more outrageous, lying smack in the middle of the ville was a bridge apparently going nowhere. It was a perfectly ordinary bridge of the type they used in Northpoint to cross rough ravines or deep water. But this one was obviously made entirely of metal, not pine boards bounded with rope and reinforced with glue boiled from old bones. But actually forged from metal and bound with metal. The entire place seemed to be made of metal in a thousand different shapes, sizes and types. Sheets, rods, beams, it dwarfed the treasure trove of Green Mountain into insignificance. Whatever else this voyage might accomplish, their shortage of steel was over with, now and forever.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Griffin replied, spotting the line of footprints leading from the Warhammer. Then he saw that the marks ended at what had to be the blast zone of a gren, the churned sand dotted with the corpses of man and horses. A thick cloud of flies buzzed over the still forms.
Shitfire, had the outlanders already been aced by some local baron? “Double time!” Wainwright bellowed, pulling her blaster. “The bastards went this way.”
Shouting a rally cry, the barons and their mixed troops surged forward, only to stop halfway as a feral dog looked up from amid the piles of flesh and bared its teeth to loudly snarl, laying claim to the bounty of food.
“What in the nuking hell is that?” a sec man screamed at the bizarre creature.
“Mutie,” a sergeant bellowed, and everybody cut loose with their flintlock longblasters.
The barrage of miniballs tore the dog apart, and as it fell, several more dogs rose from their ghastly feasting only to turn and scamper away, yipping in fear from the hated two-legs.
Sneering in contempt, a sec woman lashed out with a boomerang, and the spinning length of hardwood crushed the skull of a dog in a spray of blood and teeth. The death only made the other dogs spread out to head in every direction, then crisscrossing the paths of one another, making the pack nigh impossible to track.
As a grinning sec man spun a bolo to killing speed, Griffin waved aside the attack.
“Let them go,” the baron commanded. “They can’t hurt us, and we’ve got plenty of meat right here already chilled.”
“Haven’t had me some horse since the last Solstice,” an older sec man said, smacking his lips in delight. They had feasted on fresh fish the whole way here, but without any fire, the sec man had soon grown tired of eating the pale flesh raw. Some nice cooked horse sounded utterly delicious.
“Watch for traps,” Baron Wainwright commanded, a blaster tight in her fist, the hammer already pulled back. There were only two live rounds in the cylinder, but only she knew that.
Carefully investigating the bodies, the sec men did not find any booby traps, only an unlimited amount of metal knives, belt buckles, even buttons! They also did not find any of the outlanders strewed among the car nage, which was more good news as it meant that the bastards were still alive.
However, from the pattern of the blood splatter, most of the chilling seemed to have been done after the explosion with blades, which might mean the outlanders were low on brass. That would have been even better news, except that the horseback riders had been heavily armed with blasters, metal blasters. Every damn one of them. The weapons were still here; only the brass was gone.
“The cowards aced some friendly locals just to get their brass,” Griffin snarled, kicking aside a longblaster, the arming bolt pulled back to reveal the empty breech.
“Which makes the local baron an ally,” Wainwright said thoughtfully, studying the tracks of the animals. They led straight back to the half-built ville down the coast.
Discovering a set of saddlebags, a sec man checked inside and found that it was packed with an unknown meat. Dried, and salted, the dark meat was rich with the smell of hickory smoke. Stealing a piece, the sec man found it delicious, and filled his pockets before passing the bag around to the others. Greedily, everybody took a handful and marveled over the fine texture and succulent flavor.
“Gotta get us more of this,” a sec woman mumbled, tearing off another long strip.
“All right, stop stuffing your faces,” Baron Griffin barked, cracking open his scattergun to check the load. “I want a full combat formation, just as if we were going after some Hillies.”
“You there,” Donovan snapped, pointing at a group from Northpoint. “Take the lead position. You five, cover the rear.”
“Just keep your damn hands off the damn blasters,” Wainwright commanded. “We’re going to talk to the baron of the ville, not invade.”
“But, Baron, the outlanders plainly went into the trees,” a young sec man stated, gesturing at the footprints in the sand.
“And with their lead we’ll never catch up again on foot,” Baron Griffin retorted, annoyed over having to explain his commands. “But with horses we can ride them down in a day, easy as chilling a newborn!”
There was some shoving and scuffling as the sec men from the two villes awkwardly formed marching columns, but finally sec chief Donovan and the corporals got them into a rough formation.
“Forward…” Griffin began, but paused before finishing the command.
Shuffling out of the nearby trees came a man wearing only ragged clothing, most of it hanging loosely in dirty strips. His skin was a ghastly pallor and covered with circular spots, or marks, that kind of looked like the suckers on the tentacles of a kraken. As the stranger staggered for the pile of corpses, more of the diseased people appeared from the forest, only to stop and stare at the orderly ranks of armed sec men with blank expressions.
“Are…are those muties?” a sec man asked nervously.
“Don’t be ridiculous. No norm ever mutated that badly,” Wainwright snapped in reply. “Those are probably just tattoos.”
“Sure look real to me,” Donovan muttered softly under his breath, gently clicking back the hammer on his Colt .45 blaster.
“Greetings,” Baron Griffin shouted, unsure of what else to do. “We no harm. You savvy talk-talk?”
As if in reply, the mob of stickies charged forward, waving their boneless arms and insanely hooting in savage bloodlust.
MOVING LOW AND FAST through the bushes covering a long hill, the companions paused to look down upon the remains of the city below. Loose
leaves were sticking out of their clothing as crude camou, and each had dirt streaked across his or her face. The light-haired people in the group, Doc, Liana and Jak, also had dark cloths wrapped around their heads.
This close, they could see there were sections of the ruins that were still in livable condition, but not many. Entire neighborhoods were only piles of loose rubble studded with assorted plant life. Most of the streets were only a wild mosaic of cracked asphalt, and bushes grew on slanted rooftops.
Whatever disaster had struck Kalkaska down had nearly removed it from existence. However, a couple of office buildings survived relatively intact. Reaching only ten stories, the structures stood like giants among the field of desolation, their decorative outer marble cracked to show the solid concrete underneath, and the plastic windows still intact, although all of the lower ones were boarded over.
“What in the name of the Elders are these?” Liana asked in a shocked whisper.
“Ruins,” Ryan replied stoically. “Nothing special.”
“But they’re gigantic,” she said, looking down upon the office buildings in wonder. “Hot rain, they reach to the clouds!”
“Near enough,” Jak said politely, remembering the first time he had seen a building over two stories tall. That had been one of his best days, and his worst day, combined. The albino teen had thought the colossal structures were a dream, until the hooting stickies boiled out of the doorways.
“Still, all this metal,” Liana whispered, reaching out a hand, then quickly pulling it back to hug herself. Ever since the attack on the cliff, her world had been changing faster than an arrow in flight. It was always for the better, but she desperately longed for just a little peace and quiet to try to absorb this deluge of startling information and new ways of thinking.
Lying on his stomach, Ryan crawled under a laurel bush to sweep the ruins with the Navy longeye. “There it is,” he muttered, adjusting the focus.
“City hall?” Mildred asked hopefully, hidden behind a flowering shrub.
“The ville for the cannies,” Krysty corrected her, squinting through some tall weeds in that direction.
The home of the cannies was one of the office buildings, the block surrounded by a high wall of sidewalk slabs, topped with what looked like barbed wire. There was no sign of the horses, so the locals had to corral the animals inside the building for safekeeping. The roof was covered with plastic sheeting, probably to protect the building from the acid rains and to collect the pol luted water to extract the sulfur for making into black powder. Smoke rose from the ventilation shafts set among the sheets, and the wind carried the faint smell of roasting meat.
At the first sniff, Liana started to gag.
“Chicken,” Mildred said quickly. “That’s just chicken, not people.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
With a deep sigh, the woman relaxed.
Turning his head, J.B. arched a questioning eyebrow, and Mildred shrugged in reply. Ignorance was bliss.
Locating the gate in the wall, Ryan saw that it was an impressive hodgepodge of sheet metal in every color and size imaginable, all welded together into a rather formidable piece of armor. Studded with spikes on the outside, the gate hung from a massive pair of hinges, and was reinforced on the inside with railroad ties used as locking bolts.
“Nobody is getting through that baby without a lot of explosives,” J.B. stated, studying the layout. “Sure hope that’s not city hall.”
“Quite so, John Barrymore,” Doc growled in dark harmony. For some reason he felt morally offended that cannies were not particularly stupid, as if their demonic hunger for human flesh was merely a peccadillo and not the aberration of a twisted soul.
“No prob,” Jak drawled, gesturing a pale finger toward the left. “There it be.”
Swinging the longeye that way, it took Ryan a few moments to spot what the teen had discovered. Then he saw the fallen marble columns and traced them back to a smashed building that once had possessed a domed roof.
“Thank goodness the U.S. government loved Roman architecture,” Mildred muttered in wry amusement.
Doc muttered something in Latin, and the physician nodded in agreement. In everything, be mighty. That Cicero really knew his stuff.
“Not going to be easy getting there in broad daylight,” Krysty said, thoughtfully stroking her animated hair, the filaments coiling around her fingers. “That office building has a direct view of city hall.”
“Even then, we don’t even exactly know where the damn entrance to the redoubt is hidden,” Mildred added. “If it’s located under those heavy columns, or worse, the dome, we’ll need dozens of pipe bombs to blow our way inside.”
“No need for that,” Ryan said calmly, still intently studying the ruins. “We’ll use the sewer.”
The sewer? But before the physician could comment, a crunching explosion erupted from the ruins below.
In the middle of the fallen metropolis, smoke was expanding from the only remaining bridge, the flaming pieces tumbling down into a white-water river rushing to the lake. On the far side stood a large group of stickies, angrily waving their arms and most hooting like crazy.
Across the river stood the triumphant barons and a good thirty sec men. A few of them started to shoot ar rows and blasters at the muties, but the two barons soon put a stop to that waste, and the small army turned to head deeper into the sprawling ruins.
“They head straight for cannies,” Jak said with a wide grin. “When meet, nobody gonna notice us slip into redoubt.”
“Sewer,” Ryan corrected him, compacting the Navy longeye. “All right, follow me.”
Easing out of the bushes, the one-eyed man started down the sloping side of the grassy hill with the others close behind.
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty
Moving swiftly down the side of the hill, the companions kept low as they skirted along the ruins. The pavement was long gone, scavenged by the cannies, so the companions kept to the streets. Potholes were everywhere, some of them deep enough to have small trees growing inside, and one held the fiberglass chassis of a car. Insects had consumed the rubber tires, but the rest of the vehicle seemed to be in fine shape, with a grinning skeleton behind the steering wheel wearing the tattered remains of a three-piece suit, a PDA poking from the breast pocket of his suitcoat.
Mildred snorted at the AAA sticker on the window, but said nothing. There was too much death here, and her normal defiance of the Grim Reaper was weakening. In her opinion, the sooner the companions left Michigan, the better.
The weed-filled outlines of where houses had once stood lined the broken streets, along with some charred holes that were always situated on a corner.
“Gas station,” J.B. said, recognizing the pattern of the explosion.
Cutting through a tangle of weeds and trees, Ryan found a small bridge going nowhere. Bypassing the oddity, he could only guess it was something for the tourists. Maybe a playground, or miniature golf. In spite of his long association with Mildred and Doc, that was still a concept he found difficult to understand. Tourism. Truly, the past was a different world.
As the companions got closer to the city center, the destruction steadily lessened, and soon pieces of walls were standing around them, then a few telephone poles, and finally the huge mounds of broken masonry, pipes, cables, cars, mailboxes, billboards and skeletons. Mostly people and what looked like dogs, but the piles were uncountable, and the companions hurried past the unnerving remains of the former inhabitants.
Moving through a strip mall now covered with a thick growth of ivy and numerous apple trees, the companions paused as they heard raised voices in the distance. Then there came the boom of a black-powder blaster, followed by shouting voices and a crackle of blasterfire, mixed with screams and dull explosions.
“Sounds found each other,” Jak said in dark satisfaction.
“Indeed, my young friend,” Doc rumbled, shielding his face with a hand to lo
ok at the office building. “And may the sole winner of their conflict be the emperor worm!”
All conversation stopped as Ryan raised a clenched fist. Studying the ground, he began kicking at clumps of weeds until he was rewarded by a hard metallic sound. Drawing his panga, the man slashed away the plants to reveal a circular manhole cover.
Working together, it took three of them to move the heavy iron disk. But underneath was a dark tunnel. As always, Ryan took the lead, carefully climbing down the rusty ladder with the SIG-Sauer in his hand.
As the sounds of battle faded away, he dropped the last few feet and landed in a crouch, his blaster sweeping for any targets. But there was nothing in sight, aside from a dark, brick-lined tunnel heading in opposite directions. The ceiling was slightly cracked, most likely from the nuke quakes that had reformed the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and countless pale roots dangled from the curved ceiling like jungle vines.
Whistling sharply, Ryan stood guard while the others joined him in the sewer. As Mildred pumped her old flashlight into operation, everybody else lit candles and the companions started off in the rough tunnel heading toward city hall. However, the roots hung so thickly that after only a short distance Ryan was forced to pull out his panga and start hacking a path. It would leave a clear trail for the others to follow, but there was no helping that at the moment.
Reaching an intersection of tunnels, J.B. checked his compass and they went in a new direction. Twice more they changed tunnels, then Ryan called for a halt. There was a side tunnel branching off the main passageway, but unlike all of the others, this one was sealed off with a steel gate and large padlock. Going to the lock, J.B. pulled out his probes and worked diligently for several minutes before he was rewarded with a click and the gate swung away, squealing loudly.
Moving to take the lead, Krysty abruptly stopped before crossing the threshold, her hair flexing wildly. Just then, something moved in the flickering shadows and a large snake came toward the woman, rattling its tail and baring long fangs. The thing was a monster, almost a foot thick and more than twenty feet long.