Shaking Earth

by James Axler

  “Shit,” he murmured. “I’m getting all philosophical. I need to leave that nukeshit to Doc.”

  Out in the night a coyote howled. A chorus of voices answered. The coyotes followed the Chichimecs as religiously as if they believed in the Holy Child themselves, so Five Ax had told him. The invaders left a wake of bodies wherever they marched for all that they were cannies; the wolf-dogs ate like kings. Well, they were eating like the baron of all barons this night; the scavvies had policed up their own dead, but most of the Chichimecs and, as far as Ryan knew, Hector’s casualties lay where they fell.

  But Ryan wasn’t wasting mind time envisioning redmuzzled coyotes rooting in the bellies of what had that morning been living men. He had drunk with the others, pulque and some much more palatable stuff the scavvies had brought along with their stores wags, just in case. He had become…relaxed. He had reached a point where he wasn’t worrying about whom he’d dropped the hammer on that day, or how close he and his had come to the red roaring edge. He was just warm and comfortable, and even leaning against the big knobbly tire of the wag felt fine.

  Five Ax was talking to his buddies, who seemed to be heading off for the main scavvie encampment. “Welcome to bunk here if you like, Five Ax,” Ryan said. “Plenty of room.” But the bandy-legged little Jaguar Knight was definitely the worse for wear.

  “Damn,” Ryan said. “That means I’m gonna have to rouse my dead ass and take first watch.” He wished he’d chosen to head back into the city with Doc, Don Tenorio and the wounded. He wasn’t even sure now why he hadn’t. Something, maybe, about feeling responsible for the scavvie field force. They deserved somebody to look after them.

  “No, that’s not right.” Had he spoken aloud? The scavvies could take care of themselves. But…Don Tenorio’s place this night was back in his city. Ryan’s place this night had been out here with the army he’d helped win a desperate victory, even if it meant a night separated from Krysty.

  He wondered how she was, but he wouldn’t call. Mildred would either be asleep or busy treating the wounded. And she would have called him as promised had there been anything to report good or bad. He trusted her for that.

  Something seemed to flicker in Ryan’s vision. Dark liquid gushed from the region of Five Ax’s chin and splashed hissing and reeking into the fire, half-dousing it. Ryan opened his mouth to chide the commando for getting so drunk he vomited out the campfire. Then he saw brown arms tangling Jak, who, too late, came alive with whirling fury.

  It wasn’t vomit putting out the fire. It was blood from a slit throat.

  All at once the dark and Ryan’s peripheral vision were alive with flitting shadowed menace. He grabbed for his SIG-Sauer, sprang to his feet.

  As he did, something was descending hard and fast for his face. Firelight danced dimly on thin blades of obsidian, sharp as fate.

  A thudding crunch, a flare of agony in his head, a blinding white flash of light. Then falling, falling into dark…

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Krysty! You’re awake.”

  Wearing only a long white T-shirt bearing the name and likeness of some long-dead pop star of the days before the skydark, Krysty sat with her white but hardmuscled legs dangling over the side of the cot she’d been laid on. It sat in an office off the main floor of the cafeteria, which had been commandeered as a receiving ward for wounded from the battle. Her sentient red hair hung lank around her shoulders.

  The redhead nodded. Mildred glanced around the makeshift ward. For the moment the situation appeared to be under control. While there were no medical doctors trained as she had been among the scavvies—nor much of anyplace in the world, for that matter—there were people who had read extensively of scavenged medical literature, and some who possessed pretty comprehensive rough-and-ready knowledge. Emergency surgery wasn’t really that rare in a community devoted to foraging through half-destroyed and half-tumbled buildings in an incredibly active seismic zone. She had numerous assistants, including friends and family of the injured, many of whom had some idea what they were doing. It was an asset at least as valuable as the relative abundance of med supplies the settlers had scavenged.

  Mildred went to Krysty and began inspecting her with professional dispatch. “So that Gaia-powered immune system of yours shook off the infection, finally?” she asked, peeling back an eyelid and shining a light in one blue eye.

  “Not infection,” Krysty stated flatly. “Drugs. Some kind of plant poisons. Maybe several different ones blended to produce nausea, fatigue and fever.”

  She tried moistening cracked lips with her tongue and asked for water. Mildred made a sipping gesture. A scavvie girl of ten or eleven named Juliana, with big shiny black eyes and ears whose prepubescent prominence was emphasized to an almost comical degree by the painful tautness with which her long black hair was drawn back in two braids. The girl, who spoke some halting English and professed her intention of becoming a healer herself someday, was serving as gofer. She came bouncing up carrying a plastic sippy bottle. Mildred smiled and thanked her. The girl nodded gravely.

  Krysty drank greedily. “Thank you,” she said to Mildred and, “Gracias,” to the girl.

  “You recognize the agents involved?” Mildred asked. Alongside her self-healing powers Krysty was an herbalist of great skill.

  Krysty shook her head, drank again, handed the bottle back to Juliana with a radiant smile. “No. The effects on my body—they didn’t have the harshness of man-made or mineral poisons, I guess is the best way to put it. They lacked some kind of edge.”

  “But not potency.”

  “Not potency. Somebody intended to put me out for a while.”

  “Not kill you?”

  “No.” Krysty frowned. “There was something else…maybe it didn’t really mean anything.”

  “Let me at least hear about it so I can pass judgment.”

  “Nothing medical. At least I don’t think so. Several times when I was slipping between a fitful doze and a deep sleep, it seemed to me that I saw a woman standing near me.”

  “A woman? You mean, like, in your room?”

  “No. Not in the room. In the world behind the world. She looked like the pictures we saw. Of the Lady of the Valley.”

  “I see,” said Mildred, who didn’t really. Juliana, who had started to lope away with the now-drained bottle stopped and turned back. “You’re not going all mystical on me now, are you, honey?”

  Krysty shook her head. “I think she was my own doomie power talking to me. She told me…confirmed for me, I had been dosed with a herbal poison. And she told me I would confront some great dark power and I must risk everything to save myself and those I loved.” She looked up at Mildred. “To save my soul,” she said.

  “¡La Dama!” Juliana exclaimed, and rushed away to speak excitedly to the other helpers.

  “Probably just a dream induced by your fever,” Mildred said, without much hope of convincing her friend. “Probably doesn’t mean anything.”

  Krysty just smiled knowingly at her. The other assistants were all looking their way now. Several of them crossed themselves, a gesture Mildred hadn’t seen much for, well, over a century.

  “Girl, this is way over my head.” She checked her wrist chron. “Well, Osberto should be about ready for me to try stitching his gut back together. I’m glad to see you come out of it, but now you should try to rest—”

  From the doorway came a shattering burst of noise.

  “OW! NUKESHIT!”

  Ryan heard himself yelp the words. Then he realized he was alive.

  Something tinkled almost musically. “For the moment, Barnabas, my friend. Here, hold still.”

  Ryan blinked his eye. He was having trouble focusing. It was dark all around, except for a blinding white full moon. The moon seemed to move around slightly; his vision must still be swimming from whatever happened. There was nothing wrong with his ears, though.

  “Doc?” he croaked.

  “One and the same. Hold stil
l, I say!”

  Then something crossed the moon, causing it to move even more. The object glinted dull silver. Ryan realized it was some kind of multitool pliers. And the moon was a small intense flashlight.

  He felt the pliers grasp…something. Something that almost felt as if it was part of his head but wasn’t. Something embedded in his head.

  “What in the name of glowing night shit—ow. Fireblast!” Doc had pulled whatever it was out with a twist of his bony wrist, pale in the artificial light.

  “You bore your suffering with much more stoic silence when you were passed out, Barnabas.”

  Barnabas? Whatever. Doc seemed to be mildly phased out of reality. It didn’t seem to be impairing his ability to treat Ryan’s wounds, so under the circumstances it was far less pressing than other concerns. Such as…

  “I was out. Serious out. Does that mean I’ve got a bleeder in my skull that’s going to implode my brain?”

  “I believe you lost consciousness due to wound shock. You had one of those barbaric obsidian-edged clubs buried in your cranium. Some of the stone shards are still stuck in there.”

  Back into the light swam the pliers. This time they held a wafer of black glass. It had dark clotted stuff stuck to it and a few curly dark hairs.

  “Fireblast,” Ryan said again.

  The tinkle again. Doc was tossing the fragments of volcanic glass from the broken macahuitl into a coffee can. “A painful wound and a shockingly bloody one. But superficial for all that. Still, you can be grateful for it.”

  “Why the hell is that?”

  “You’re still alive because of it. Or at least free. Your would-be captors thought they had killed you. As they did for our noble red friend Five Ax, there.”

  He twitched the flashlight. Five Ax lay sprawled by the fire. His own macahuitl, busted off near the hilt, lay near his hand. His body had been gashed and gored horribly. At least three other bodies lay near him—small, dark, almost naked. Chichimecs.

  “I…saw him get his throat cut,” Ryan said. His throat felt as if somebody had been down it with a giant wood rasp. “Or did I imagine that?”

  “No. Though his wound was mortal, he fought fiercely. And slew his foes, until he bled out and fell. An epic scene, I should imagine.”

  “What about J.B. and Jak?”

  “They are gone. Marched into captivity. One does not like to think of their fate.”

  “We’ll get them back. Is there any more of that crap stuck in my head?”

  “One more piece, which I will attend to, once you cease fidgeting.”

  Ryan held himself stock-still.

  “Very well.” Doc plucked the last fragment from Ryan’s head and dropped it meticulously in the can. Then he tore open a scavenged packet, poured antibiotic powder into the wound and bandaged it with more supplies from the medical kit the scavvies had provided them for the fight, taking great twists of tape around Ryan’s head. “That’s the best I can do for you now. It will pull your hair most cruelly when the tape is removed.”

  “Fine. How about the wag?”

  “What do you think it is you’re leaning against?”

  “Oh.”

  With Doc’s help, Ryan got to his feet. He examined the wag quickly by the shine of the small flash. The machine gun was gone and the tires were slashed. The microphone for the radio had been ripped away; the cord dangled out the open door like a curiously coiled umbilicus.

  “Wonder why they didn’t burn it,” Ryan muttered.

  “That would ill have accorded with the stealth that was needful, to commit murder and kidnap under the noses of a sleeping army.”

  “A sleeping, dead-exhausted, largely drunk army,” Ryan said. “But yeah, a blazing wag would have been a little conspicuous.”

  He half turned and fell into the driver’s seat. He started the engine. Reaching down, he found by feel and pulled a lever. A hissing sound came from under the chassis. The Hummer slowly began to rise from the ground.

  “Our friends did their savage best to incapacitate our vehicle quickly and quietly,” Doc said. “Sadly for them, they failed to reckon with that apex of technology that was attained in the late twentieth century, shortly before everything blew up, of course.”

  The Hummer’s tires, which were run-flats to begin with, were resealing themselves with a quick-hardening compound and reinflating automatically by means of a compressor powered by the nuke battery that ran the wag itself.

  “So how did you come to be wandering around out here to stumble across me, instead of being back safe and sound in the city with Tenorio and the rest?”

  “As we made preparation to pull out, I decided my place was with my comrades, after all. I suppose that I felt guilty for not having shared your danger. So I begged leave of Don Tenorio to remain behind, which he graciously extended. Then I found myself walking in the moonlight, regarding the battlefield and regarding the fugacity of life, rather than proceeding here straightaway. With the result that I did not arrive until shortly after the villains decamped with our comrades. At which point I knelt to examine what I sorrowfully took to be your corpse, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

  “I’m glad I’m not.”

  He patted himself down. “They left me my SIGSauer and my panga.”

  “They got the other weapons, including the BAR that our hosts lent to John Barrymore.” The Armorer had left his pet Uzi and shotgun safely back in the city. “I believe your splendid rifle, as well.”

  Ryan shrugged. The Steyr was a fine blaster for a fact, but it was just a blaster; if he lost it, he lost it. He didn’t feel the same about his friends.

  “You still got your swordstick and that giant old horse pistol, don’t you?”

  “Most assuredly.”

  Ryan nodded. “We got all we need and mebbe a hair more. Let’s go.”

  “To the rescue of our compatriots?”

  Ryan had drawn his handblaster, pinched back the slide to check for a chambered cartridge. Brass gleamed yellow in the moonlight.

  “Damn straight.”

  SCREAMS. Mildred and Krysty looked out of the cubicle. Two men in dark green camou flanked the door, their faces painted in black-green gray. One held a 9 mm Colt Commando carbine, the other an MP-5.

  Between them, dressed the same but with face unpainted, stood Felicidad Mendoza. She was holding up a short-barreled AK-74 Sov-made assault blaster from which she’d just fired a burst into the acoustic-tiled ceiling. Little wisps and dust particles were floating down around her.

  A scavvie whose leg Mildred had set and splinted after a Chichimec had broken it for him with a three-foot-long pipe came up to a sitting position on one of the tables with a Beretta in hand. Smiling tightly, Felicidad snapped down the blaster and shot him with a burst of 5.45 mm before he could get off a shot. Then pivoting slightly to her right she began to spray the room from side to side with an ear-imploding roar.

  Mildred threw herself over Krysty, expecting to feel the sledgehammer impacts of bullets burrowing into her broad back. None came. The chattering roar stopped for an instant, then commenced again.

  When it ended, Mildred dared to look up. The copper-haired woman was feeding a fresh red plastic banana magazine into the well of her weapon. Moans and the stink of burned lubricant and propellant and spilled blood and guts filled the room. At least half a dozen scavvies, wounded or healers, had been hit. Little Juliana stood by one wall with blood spraying in a wide pink fan from a severed carotid artery. She pressed one small hand to the side of her neck and collapsed.

  “You psycho bitch,” Mildred raged, “what the fuck do you want?”

  Felicidad smiled. “You,” she said. “And even more, that red-haired bitch behind you.”

  More of Hector’s sec men, painted up and armed to the gills, had crowded in behind her. “Take them,” she ordered, nodding at the two outland women. “If they resist, shoot them in the legs. But don’t kill them.

  “Their deaths will greatly please the gods—but
not now.”

  “DOC,” RYAN SAID gently as he drove through the darkness, “who am I?”

  The older man blinked at him. “Why, you are Ryan Cawdor, our fearless leader and faithful friend.”

  “Who did you think I was back there when you were pulling obsidian splinters out of my head, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Why, whatever do you mean?”

  “You called me ‘Barnabas.’ I don’t know any Barnabas. Friend of yours from the old days?”

  Doc drew himself up as best he could sitting down. “I fear your injury impaired your perceptions. I wasn’t calling you Barnabas. I was merely recalling—out loud, as sometimes I do—a favorite television show from my sojourn in the twentieth century.”

  “Television show?”

  Doc nodded. “‘Dark Shadows.’”

  Ryan shook his head.

  Doc turned ostentatiously to peer out the windows. “At least your attackers were considerate enough to leave a few traces to track them by.”

  The Chichimec trail was anything but hard to follow. The bright moonlight was a pure luxury. Hundreds of bare horny feet had trampled the grass in a swath a hundred yards wide. Here and there the bodies of stragglers lay, dark and still.

  “They say the Chichimecs eat their dead, which to them apparently includes those too badly wounded to fight or keep up,” Doc said.

  “Reckon they got all the meat they can carry as it is,” Ryan said grimly. He was behind the wheel, periodically poking his head out the window to make sure of the trail and terrain. They didn’t dare use headlights, which the Chichimecs would spot miles off, so the moonlight was useful in helping him pick a safe path without bogging the wag or dumping it into an arroyo even it couldn’t negotiate. The Hummer was equipped with infrared headlights, but unfortunately not with IR goggles, so they were useless.

  “You seem confident that our boon companions are not to be found among the sad relics lying by the way.”

  “Yep. Unless they were bad hurt they’d keep up with a bunch of raiders worn out from marching and fighting all day. And I got a definite hunch the Chichimecs mean to keep them alive. For now. After all, they went to considerable effort to target us, cut us out from the rest. If they’d wanted J.B. and Jak dead, they’d have left them there in their blood the way they did me.”