Homeward Bound

by James Axler

  "But are we close to the sea?" J.B. pressed.

  Doc shook his head, the light wind disturbing his gray locks. He smiled and showed his peculiarly fine, strong set of teeth. "What is close, John Barrymore Dix? How when is up? How meretricious is now? Riddle me that, my friend."

  They dropped the question of how close they were to the sea. In fact, it was approximately one hundred and fifty miles from their stopping place to the open ocean beyond Manhattan.

  Ryan set guards, giving everyone a two-hour duty during the time of darkness, and left the last watch for himself. The rest of the group huddled together in the open, eating from their self-heats, using the water from the Hudson for drinking despite the faint hint of salt it held.

  "Be better in the trees for shelter?" J.B. suggested.

  "We haven't seen any sign of life for hours. Not since the crazies on that bridge."

  It was true what Krysty said. The banks of the Hudson seemed deserted. Ryan had been taking regular readings with his rad meter, but it hadn't gone seriously across the orange and into the red. The land was warm, but no longer hot.

  "Because we don't see 'em, it don't mean they aren't there," he replied.

  "Yeah," the laconic Armorer said.

  They stayed where they were.

  It was a beautiful night, warmer than it had been farther north. The moon was untroubled by clouds, sailing above them, sharpening the edges of all the shadows.

  Lori was on watch a little after three in the morning. When the stickies came, they beat the girl to the ground before she could give any warning.

  Chapter Five

  NOBODY KNEW a whole lot about stickles. They were found in small, vicious colonies, generally in parts of the Deathlands that had been particularly heavily nuked. Some said that the missiles that spawned the genetic horrors that were stickies also held some secret chromo-somic deviator that accounted for the peculiar nightmare that they had become.

  Some blamed grossly contaminated water supplies in a mysterious process that involved nitrates leached from the soil.

  All that was truly known about stickies was that they were triple-crazy. They loved killing and ripping things apart. They liked the sight of blood. They also relished fires and explosions, taking some bizarre and perverse pleasure from staring into dancing flames.

  Oddly stickies had only been known in the past twenty or so years. A three-hundred-and-fifty-pound showman named Gert Wolfram was credited with discovering stickies and putting a pair into his traveling freak show. Word was that Gert hadn't lived too long after that.

  Stickies had vulpine teeth and staring eyes, eyes that were utterly dead and devoid of emotion, like a basking shark. The main thing about stickies was that they had developed peculiar sucking pads on their webbed fingers, which enabled them to cling easily to smooth surfaces like flies. It was rumored that stickies could come at you across the ceiling, but that was generally discounted. But they could surely climb walls and hang on to windows.

  In the entire Deathlands stickies were the only breed of muties that everyone would automatically kill on sight. It was possible to speak to them, but you had to shout and talk very slowly, as though they heard you through a strange kind of lip-reading. They had no ears.

  Lori never heard them. Never saw them. She was sitting down, coat wrapped around her, slipping from an uneasy wakefulness into a half sleep. She was recalling the crazed days with her father. Her husband. Lover. Keeper. Quint. White beard to his stomach, stained amber with nicotine. Jacket spotted with sequins. The hooked nose and narrow, cruel mouth. And the violence.

  In her dream, the girl was tied, naked and spread, to the metal frame of a bed, while Quint moved toward her, leering and dribbling, a polished chrome phallus in his hand, its tip studded with shards of broken glass smeared with blood. As Lori tried to scream, a hand clamped itself across her mouth.

  She woke and tried to scream, but a hand had been clamped across her mouth.

  Lori was held down, and the last thing she heard before a crashing blow delivered to the side of her head plunged her into darkness was a soft, bubbling laughter.

  Ryan had agreed they could build a small fire to hold the night's chill at bay, and it had been its ruby glow that had attracted the stickies, bringing nearly a dozen of them slinking from the darkness under the looming pine trees. They moved with a sinuous quiet, their bare, suckered feet making only the faintest slithering sound on the old stones.

  It was Krysty Wroth's special part-mutie senses that saved the friends from a swift and evil ending. Krysty didn't have the true power of doom-seeing, but she had highly developed sight and hearing. In her sleep she caught the noise, like tiny lips kissing, of the advancing stickies.

  Her green eyes flickered open, glancing beyond the glowing remains of their fire. She saw the skulking figures of the stickies, their eyes blinking, reflecting the flat color of the fire.

  "Stickies! Wake up!" she yelled, reaching for her blaster and ripping off a couple of shots at the nearest of the muties, who were barely twenty paces from where she'd been sleeping.

  Ryan, J.B. and Jak all came awake, guns magically in their hands. Doc Tanner took a while longer to reach the surface.

  Like many such firefights, it lasted less than fifteen seconds.

  Many muties had different body structures from norms, more primitive and brutish. They were, consequently, more difficult to put down—and keep down. Stickies were among the hardest of all to chill.

  Krysty took out the first two, her 9 mm bullets punching holes clean through flesh and muscle at such close range. The stickies kicked over in a scrabbling, screaming tangle, their fall obstructing their following companions. Her next two rounds missed, then she hit a third mutie with two bullets, both in the belly, folding him over, vomiting blood.

  Jak took out two more stickies with his Magnum, the huge handblaster coughing in the darkness, spitting fire and death. One of the two was up immediately, even though its left arm had been nearly severed at the shoulder by the big .357 round. The creature lurched on, screeching, eyes wide, its blood crimsoning its chest and legs. Jak took careful aim and put another bullet in the middle of its face, the skull disintegrating like a peach beneath a war wag.

  J.B. held the mini-Uzi, chattering death, smearing the five stickies on the left of the attacking bunch, raking the barrel of the mean little gun backward and forward, using up the whole mag to make double-sure they were well chilled.

  Ryan Cawdor was left with three of the stickies for himself.

  Awakened by Krysty's yell of warning, his hands went by automatic reflex to the rectangular shape of the Heckler & Koch G-12. He rolled on one side, kicking away the single blanket that had been his only protection against the night.

  Because of the high cross-sectional density of the round, there was very little transverse drift. At such close range, set on triple burst, there was no sideways drift at all. Ryan squeezed the trigger, not needing the laser-enhanced night sight, able to pick his target with ease. The G-12 fired triple bursts at better than thirty rounds per second, the recoil feeling like a single round, barely registering.

  The bullets from the blaster didn't tumble at all, reducing their effect on human flesh, but the extreme velocity caused massive trauma in the area of the body surrounding the actual point of impact. Ryan gave each of his targets a single burst of three shots.

  The tallest of them, suckered hands stretched out to grasp at the human prey, was hit in the groin, the three 4.7 mil rounds ripping the mutie apart, slicing into its pelvis, exploding the bones, angling upward and destroying the lower stomach. The stickie toppled sideways, fingers reaching for the wound, fumbling among the loops of greasy intestines that cascaded out of its body.

  The next mutie had its hands in front of it, and the bullets pulped the fingers, chunks of flesh and bone flying into the homicidal creature's face, blinding it. As it stumbled, the bullets stitched across its chest, driving splinters of torn ribs tumbling through th
e body, slicing the pumping heart into ribbons. Blood gouted and the stickie fell, dying, stumps of fingers opening and closing convulsively in its murderous death throes.

  The last stickie seemed oblivious to the massacre of its fellows and still came on, mouth open in a silent scream. Ryan switched the aim of the G-12, pumping out a triple burst. Unfortunately Doc Tanner, who was just waking to the awareness of the attack, staggered to his knees and called out to Lori, distracting the mutie at the crucial millisecond that Ryan squeezed the trigger. The creature turned in midstride, launching itself at the old man, suckered fingers reaching greedily for his throat. The strength of a stickie's grip was notorious. Ryan had personally seen a man pull a stickie's hand off a friend's face, bringing half the cheek and one eye with it.

  The trio of bullets missed the stickie's body, barely clipping the top of its legs, punching the creature off-balance. The snarling mutie fell, only a hand's span from Doc Tanner. Though not normally a great fighting man, Doc calmly drew the rapier blade from his swordstick and thrust it into the stickie's open mouth. The angle was perfect, the steel penetrating a foot and a half down its throat. Doc twisted his wrist like a master of the duel, opening the inside of his enemy's neck. Blood spurted between the bared teeth, splattering across the pebbles. The stickie reached convulsively for Doc, its fingers failing to find a grip on the blood-slick steel.

  "Move," Jak ordered, leveling his pistol, waiting until the old man had withdrawn his sword and scrabbled out of the way. Then he put a booming bullet through the back of the dying mutie's skull, kicking it into a jerking tangle of twitching limbs.

  "All done?" Ryan asked, his voice sharpened by the sudden explosion of violence.

  "I counted twelve in, and I counted twelve down," J.B. replied, calmly holstering his mini-Uzi.

  "Where's Lori?" Doc asked, wiping the blade of his swordstick on the rags of the nearest of the stickies, then sheathing it once more. Stooping, he picked up his faded hat and jammed it on his head.

  "There," Krysty called, pointing along the narrow peninsula toward the looming forest.

  Showing an unsuspected burst of speed, the old man darted like a disjointed crab to where they could now see the motionless figure of the young girl.

  The others followed, Ryan and the Armorer taking a few moments to check that all of the dozen attackers were truly dead. With stickies you never could be too careful.

  They were all chilled.

  "Oh, my sweetest little darling," Doc sobbed, bending and cradling the girl in his arms. His knee joints cracked as he knelt on the stones, pressing her head against his chest. "My sweet dove of innocence," he moaned.

  Having seen the way Lori Quint had ruthlessly butchered the drowning mutie after the incident with the im-plo-gren, Ryan Cawdor wasn't too sure he agreed with the description of her as an innocent dove.

  "She is slain," Doc Tanner cried, his grief unrestrained. His head was thrown back, and he was howling like a tormented animal.

  "She's alive, Doc," Krysty said, kneeling at his side.

  "What?"

  "Alive, Doc."

  "No."

  "Yes," Jak said. "Tits move. Breathing. She's alive."

  "Oh, thanks be to the Almighty! By the three Kennedys but it seems barely possible. After those vile monsters had…"

  "Best let me take a look at her," Krysty suggested.

  "Look at? Oh, of course, my dear girl. Do look after the child."

  Krysty stared down at Lori. "Light's no good. Ryan, carry her to the fire. Jak, get some wood from the trees there."

  "I know where to get wood," he sniffed, insulted at the suggestion.

  "Then do it," she snapped. "She's taken a hard knock on the temple. I can feel the lump. Move, Jak!"

  It took several minutes before Lori began to show signs of recovering consciousness. The fire by then was blazing brightly, with the pine branches spitting and crackling. Jak and J.B. had gone to the end of the finger of land, watching carefully in case any more of the stickies were lurking there and waiting for a chance to attack. While Krysty worked with Lori, Ryan and Doc managed to shift the bloodied corpses of the muties, dragging them by the heels and allowing the force of the Hudson to roll them away into the night.

  "Be in Newyork 'fore us," Ryan said.

  But the old man was far more interested in getting back to the fire to see how Lori was progressing. His delight when she started to come around was touching. He knelt at her side, tears coursing down his wrinkled cheeks and through the gray stubble on his chin.

  "What happens?" the girl mumbled, eyes blinking against the brightness of the blazing fire. "I dream and then…"

  She shuddered, clutching at Krysty with white-knuckled hands.

  "What was the dream?" Doc asked, holding one of her pale hands in both of his. "Tell me, my dearest child."

  "I dream of Keeper. And he is fucked with me. And hand on mouth… and…" She began to cry. Krysty nodded at Doc, who took her place, holding the girl half on his lap.

  "It's all done, lily of my heart. My dear deer. Your heart, dear hart, that pounds within your breast has…" He stopped rambling. "Some mutants came calling upon us, Lori. We exchanged a few words with them, and now they've gone away."

  "Where, Doc?" Lori asked.

  "Away down river. I think it unlikely they will return to bother us again."

  "I think that's right, Lori," Ryan added. "Night swimming always was dangerous."

  THERE WAS A LIGHT MIST hanging on the face of the wide river, obscuring the dank forests on the farther, western shore, when they woke the next morning. A watery sun hung among citron clouds, giving a little heat in the shivering dawn.

  They pushed the raft off and floated southward, none of them even glancing back at the desolate scene of the previous night's slaughter.

  Chapter Six

  LORI QUINT RECOVERED WELL from the horror of the attack by the stickies. There was some scabbing and peeling of skin around her mouth from the pressure of the suckered fingers, but it was already healing. She and Doc were happy to be together at the rear of the ungainly craft, handling the long steering oar that kept them moving roughly in the center of the current.

  It was a beautiful day. The early morning mist had faded away like the dew on a summer meadow.

  Ryan had ridden rivers before, but most of them had been fast-flowing, broken with turbulent rapids, places where a moment's relaxation could mean an instant chilling. The Hudson was different. Most of the time it was several hundred yards wide, rolling steadily toward the sea between wooded banks that showed little evidence of man.

  For the first time in a long while, Ryan Cawdor actually felt he could lie back on the timbers and take it easy. The wood seemed to be drying out in the warm sun, and the craft was riding higher in the water.

  "Those hills on the right used to be called the Cats-kills," Doc shouted, lifting his voice against the sound of the river bubbling around the raft. "Folk took vacations there."

  "What were vacations, Doc?" Jak asked. The albino boy was sprawled on his back, shading his vulnerable eyes against the golden sunlight. He had peeled off both his camouflage canvas jerkin and the ragged fur vest that he wore beneath it. His skin was as white as paper, stretched tight over prominent ribs. Ryan, looking at Jak, thought at that moment that he barely looked his fourteen years, seeming more like an undernourished and skinny boy, on the threshold of his teens.

  "Vacation, son?" the old man mused. "Time was folks would have laughed at you and thought you was joshing 'em."

  "It's a time out from killing," J.B. said quietly, wiping spray off his spectacles.

  "It's when you can be with the person you want, and go where you want and do what you want," Krysty suggested, smiling at Ryan.

  "Can't do better'n that," Ryan agreed, venturing a rare smile at the girl.

  "I know," Lori called. "Doc tells me. It's good time out of bad. Like a day Keeper doesn't fucking up rectum." She looked proudly at Doc, who shuffled his fe
et.

  "Took me all this time't'stop the chit from saying something a deal worse than rectum."

  Jak wasn't satisfied. "Tell us what vacation was, Doc."

  "Saltwater taffy, balloons, laughter, hot dogs, ribbons and bows, gingham and lace at collar and cuffs. Smell of frying and best scent and a lot of sweat. Did I mention laughter? Believe I did. Key ingredient in any vacation, laughter. Ice cream on a stick. Fiddler in the park. Fresh-baked apple pie with a spoon of cream on top. Kids, everywhere. Taxi-dancers. Jazz bands. Linked arms along the boardwalk. Hot lips together under the boardwalk. Talking of hopes for better days. Dreams. Laughter and dreams, Jak."

  The raft was silent at the litany from the long-dead, long-gone past, words that Ryan had only ever read. Doc's head dropped on his chest, and he continued to speak, softer, his voice matching the stillness of the river.

  "Emily and I had but one true vacation together. My work… I couldn't… Had I but known what the future held. Ah, the future. We talked much of the future that summer's day in 'ninety-six. Rachel toddling bravely beside us, and young Jolyon on his blanket."

  A flock of what looked like pigeons flew from some sycamores on the eastern bank, the sun striking the bars of vermilion on their fluttering wings. The river was in a wide sweep to the right, flowing slowly and calmly. Doc's voice became even quieter.

  "I had friends among the Apaches of New Mexico Territory, and we visited them. They made us welcome. It was ten years to the very day that the old fox, Geronimo, surrendered to General Nelson Miles. Wonder what happened to… ? Never looked after I'd been trawled on the chron-jump. Never thought to. The sun shone every day. The Apaches loved Rachel and Jolyon. Happiest time… laughter… Harriet Beecher Stowe died that summer, as I recall, and there was some news of prizes for scientists by the man who… dynamite… name's gone. Emily joked I would win one of them, one day. Oh, God, but I was never so happy as on that vacation. That's what it was, Jak," he said, turning his face away so that none of them could see the tears.