Homeward Bound

by James Axler

  "Earth Mother save us all," Krysty whispered, face blanched with the horror of the vanished city. "Is nothing left?"

  "Might be some of the big blocks standing. Central Manhattan was zapped, but a few scrapers were mebbe big enough. I seen vids of them, and they couldn't have been leveled." Ryan's voice betrayed his own chilling doubt.

  The desolation was so total.

  Ryan thought he noticed an unnatural flurry of movement among the rancid weeds that crowded down to the very brink of the water, now only about fifty paces away from where the raft turned slowly on an eddy, moved by a long-submerged obstruction.

  "Push it away!" he called urgently, taking one of the branches himself and poling off, trying to shift back to the center of the current.

  "What d'you see?" Krysty panted, throwing all her weight against the steering oar at the stern of the raft.

  "Nothing. Something. I don't know."

  "I heard something. Heard it. Like someone laughing. But someone who didn't have a proper mouth. Does that seem stupid?"

  "No. Not down here it doesn't."

  "Let's shove off. Be dark soon," J.B. said. "Fog, too."

  "Yeah. Doc says we're only 'bout twenty miles or so from open sea. Be good to make that."

  "Might be safer night," Jak suggested, his unruly white hair tied back with a ragged length of red ribbon that Lori had given him.

  "Could be," the Armorer agreed. "Map shows river gets double-narrow. Could be chilled from either bank in good light."

  "So, we keep going?" Ryan called, and he got nods of agreement from everyone.

  THE MIST BECAME THICKER, swallowing up the raft in gulps of sinuous gray damp. The long tendrils came in from their right, tasting of cold mud and still, brackish water. The fog had an unpleasant odor that seemed to linger on the tongue as you breathed.

  "Where d'you figure we are now, Doc?" Ryan asked, glimpsing a teetering ruin through a sudden clearance of the darkening fog on their left.

  Doc rose from where he'd been sitting with his arm around Lori. Pearls of moisture hung in his hair like a chaplet on the brow of a crazed monarch. But his voice was unusually calm and sane.

  "Damnably hard to determine, Ryan. No visual clues. Around level with the north side of Central Park, perhaps? Once I sailed clear around Manhattan on a pleasure craft. The sun shone and cameras clicked and whirred. The great buildings like the Twin Towers stood proud and tall, their glass reflecting a thousand bursts of golden light. I felt like a Christian viewing the Eternal City." He stopped speaking for a moment, lost in memory. "And now, it is the valley of the shadow of death. Hobgoblins and foul fiends have inherited the place. It is all despair."

  It still wasn't full dark.

  The fog seemed to carry its own peculiar light, glimmering like corpse candles in a gruesome mire. The river now flowed so slowly that it was hard to detect any movement at all. Once or twice they heard the shrill metallic calling of seabirds swooping above them. But they flew on with sheathed beaks, not bothering the six travelers.

  Krysty told Ryan that she thought she could hear the steady thudding of a gas-powered generator, but the mist distorted noise and she wasn't even able to tell which bank carried the sound.

  At one point Ryan was certain he heard a dreadful, shrill, screaming laugh, definitely off the eastern bank, around where West Seventy-second once ran. But nobody else on the raft caught it, and he decided it must have only been his imagination.

  "We still going south?" Jak asked a half hour or so later.

  "Can't easily tell," Ryan replied. "I'll go to the front and watch the water."

  Doc had fallen asleep, his head in Lori's lap, and Ryan stepped carefully over the old man's extended legs, nearly slipping on the treacherous logs. He lay on his right hip, face level with the leading edge of the raft, only a few inches above the dull water of the Hudson. Everyone was quiet, oppressed by the fog and the feeling of desolation all around them.

  To his left, Ryan was sure he could make out a rippling noise, like the river lapping on stone. Unable to see either bank, it was impossible to have any idea of where they were in the treacherous currents as they shifted and changed.

  The hand that erupted from the water and gripped his left wrist had no nails on its grotesquely long fingers, fingers that had five joints and were webbed halfway along their length. The skin was creased, hanging at the wrist in folds. The touch was cold and slippery, but as tight as a machine wrench.

  The face emerging from behind the pincering hand was worse than anything from the deeps of a jolt-spawned nightmare. The jaw protruded eighteen inches beyond the gaping holes of the nostrils. There was no forehead, the naked bones of the skull angling back in pitted ridges. The ears were tiny, pinned flat to the side of the hairless head. The eyes were narrow, protected by blinking hoods of leathery tissue. Even in that insipid light, the eyes burned with a ferocious and demonic glare—less than a foot from Ryan's own eyes.

  And the clashing teeth! Row upon row of them, overlapping, sharp fangs that grated on yellow stumps farther back in that wolfish thrusting jaw. The breath was fetid, like an opened grave, and it nearly choked Ryan.

  The creature had come up under the bow of the raft in total silence, its attack so stealthy that none of the others had even noticed that Ryan's life was under a desperate threat.

  With his left hand pinioned and lying on his right side, Ryan wasn't able to get at either the blaster or the long panga.

  The mutie grabbed at the logs with its other hand, bracing itself to lunge at Ryan with its fearsome jaw. Life was a bare handful of heartbeats.

  Instead of pulling back, Ryan jabbed his head toward the monstrosity, butting it on the end of the snout with his own forehead. It was a jarring blow. The grip relaxed for a moment, and Ryan was able to throw himself to his side, freeing his right hand. He clawed across for the hilt of the panga, feeling it slide free from the sheath in a whisper of death.

  Jak Lauren had spotted the struggling figures and yelled to the others. But help would be too little and too late. Salvation lay in the eighteen inches of honed steel.

  The teeth were slashing in at him, and Ryan punched with the heel of his hand, feeling blood gush as the jagged fangs caught the side of his wrist. But the maneuver bought him another precious second, time to swing the panga. He tensed his arm and shoulder, putting all of his power and weight into the downswing.

  Instead of aiming at the dripping skull, he slashed at the lean, muscular arm as it rested across the hewn timbers of the raft.

  The impact powered clean to his shoulder, and he felt the panga hack through the flesh and bone, burying itself in the wood. The tight fingers on Ryan's own wrist slackened, and he was able to roll free, tugging at the blade as he fell back.

  The mutie gave a hissing, bubbling cry of pain, still trying with a manic ferocity of purpose to claw its way onto the raft. Its severed hand wriggled and jerked with an obscene life of its own. Even as Ryan looked at it, the clawing hand toppled over the edge and vanished into the Hudson.

  "I've got it!" J.B. shouted, warning Ryan to drop down clear of his line of fire.

  But Ryan Cawdor wasn't about to do that. The sudden appearance of the horror had startled him, had frightened him. That didn't happen very often, and the best way of shifting the memory of the chilling, paralyzing fear was to destroy the mutie with his own hands.

  "Get down!" Krysty shrieked, appalled at the hideous monster that was now aboard their craft. Blood was coming from the stump of its wrist, but it oozed rather than gushed in sticky gobs of dull brown ichor.

  Feeling carefully for balance on the shifting timbers, Ryan readied himself. Feinting at the creature's legs, he altered his aim and cut at the other arm. But the mutie was lightning quick, dodging so that the steel skittered off its reptilian skin, leaving a small gash in the flesh.

  "Don't chill it," Ryan snapped over his shoulder. "The fucker's mine. Mine!"

  Breath hissing from its snapping jaws, the mutie s
huffled forward, its good hand clawing at Ryan. Once caught in that embrace, it would be too late for any of the others to save him.

  Ryan ducked and slashed at the thing's legs, barely nicking it below the knee. But his thrust checked the monster's advance, giving another moment of breathing space.

  "Shoot it, Ryan," Doc Tanner called in a reedy, trembling voice.

  But Ryan's temper had been touched, a temper that he had fought to control most of his adult life.

  "Come on you fucking lizard! Come on, you rad-mutated bastard. Come and eat this blade." He beckoned to it with his left hand, watching for some sign of reaction, but the fishlike eyes remained blank and incurious. Even the amputation of one of its hands didn't seem to have disturbed the mutie very much.

  The fog was growing thicker.

  The mutie slid closer, hand weaving, the elongated fingers opening and closing. Ryan flicked the heavy panga from hand to hand, feinting with the left and then the right. He was growing tired of the standoff.

  "Fuck this," he snarled, picking his moment to attack.

  He fended off the snapping fingers and dealt a short, savage blow that hit the mutie across the side of the head. The broad blade of the panga gouged a chunk of bone from the upper jaw and snapped off a dozen teeth. Blood seeped from the wound, and the creature staggered back, arms flailing for balance. Ryan moved carefully after it, swinging the panga in a roundhouse blow that severed the end of the snuffling jaws, leaving oozing flesh and torn teeth.

  "It's going!" Lori whooped.

  "One more," Ryan grated. He tried a last cut at it, but he was short and the blade hissed harmlessly a couple of inches away from the mutie's throat.

  The creature seemed to fall off the front of the raft in slow motion, arms waving for balance. Its ruined jaw hung open, and a pale red slime trickled out. The eyes fixed Ryan Cawdor with a basilisk stare.

  To his amazement, the creature spoke, even as it was in the act of falling. In a clear, calm voice it said, "Into the long dark."

  It didn't make much of a splash as it went into the Hudson, the body vanishing under the water. Though they kept a careful watch for many minutes, none of them saw the mutie reappear.

  The raft flowed slowly southward in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Chapter Eleven

  AROUND MIDNIGHT the fog cleared away, like a curtain drawn at the opening of a play, revealing the sharp moonlit vista on both banks.

  The raft floated on, like some stately royal barge, with Jak Lauren able to keep it easily on course with the steering oar.

  On the New Jersey shore they saw no signs of life among the waterlogged wharves and jetties of the old docks. It was obvious that the water level had risen since the old days, with less being taken out for power and industry. Now the surface lapped over the rotting concrete of the walls.

  The skyline of Manhattan changed as they moved ever so slowly toward the tip of the island and upper New York harbor.

  Now, at last, there was evidence that the lower parts of some of the scrapers had survived even the megadeath nuking of 2001. Doc strained his sight and his memory to try to identify some of the towering hulks that dotted the weed-wrapped wilderness of the city. But there were no landmarks, nothing to judge by. Two monoliths, each at least a hundred feet high, jostled each other close to the southern spur of the vanished metropolis.

  "The Trade Center. Has to be. I flew into New York myself, and I would deduce the year must have been just before the second millenium. We circled over Manhat-tan, just above low cloud. I saw the flat roofs of those great towers jutting above the bank of stratus, and there were tiny people walking on them. I swear that it was one of the most bizarre hallucinations that I have ever suffered from."

  At that moment the moon vanished behind banks of sailing clouds, and the remnants of the city were plunged into darkness.

  "Look!" Krysty cried. "Lights! I can see some lights."

  She pointed at the flattened debris, almost level with where Canal Street had once run. All five of the others were on their feet, peering into the blackness.

  "I see 'em," Ryan said. "Like points of pins. A dozen or more."

  "Yeah. Flickering. More a hand's spread to the right." J.B. pointed.

  "Like oil lamps," Jak said. "Kind of a gold look to 'em."

  Those tiny spots of lights, moving painfully among the rubble, touched every one of the six.

  Doc Tanner dredged deep into his raddled memory for a suitable quote. Eventually he said, very quietly, "And whatever walked there, walked alone."

  After the attack of the amphibian mutie, no one on the raft felt much like sleeping. The dark water carried them along, now slower than walking, moving toward the dawn.

  "What's that?" Lori asked, breaking the predawn stillness.

  A small island had loomed out of the opaline mists that hung toward the sea. And there was a building, partly ruined, that stood at its center, bleached to the palest of greens.

  "Missile silo," the Armorer said.

  "Lookout post for Newyork," Jak Lauren suggested.

  "Pretty house, Doc?" was Lori's guess.

  "I think I know," Krysty said. "I've seen vid pix from before the long winter. I think I know what it was."

  "More'n I do. My guess'd be along the lines of J.B.'s and Jak's." Ryan turned to Doc Tanner. "Come on. Tell us."

  "It was a statue. A great statue of a woman, holding a torch in her hand to light the path for the hordes of immigrants who flocked to the land of liberty." He shook his head sorrowfully. "I disremember the words, but it carried a message. Something about bringing huddled masses from the old world to the new. I don't… By the three Kennedys, but the wheel turns and turns again and again. He that is first shall surely be last. And the present one day will be the past."

  The sun was rising behind the tombstones of the skyscrapers of the city, painting the remnants of the statue with a soft pink light.

  "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair," Doc Tanner said.

  THE WIND HAD VEERED,strengthening with the dawning, raising whitecaps as it poured in from the southeast. It rushed through the gap that men before the long winter had called the Verrazano Narrows.

  The current of the Hudson had weakened until it seemed the raft was held motionless, moving neither forward nor backward.

  "We'll never make it out to the open sea and down the coast on this heap of shit," J.B. said.

  "Best put in. There's low land to the right." Hanging on to the short mast for balance, Ryan stared out to where beaches broke the force of the waters. "Give it another half hour. Wind'll mebbe fall."

  It would have been better if the fresh wind had continued to blow.

  It didn't just ease; it dropped away completely, leaving them bobbing, becalmed, riding a sequence of sullen, swelling waves.

  The sun came up like burnished copper from a sky that showed red-purple from corner to corner. Ryan dipped a finger into the water, then spit the liquid out in disgust. The spun-glass clarity of the Hudson upriver was gone. There was the taste of salt, and iron, flat on the tongue. A bitter nitrate and oil flavored the water.

  And they were beginning to see things on the water around the raft. Jak Lauren was the first to notice anything, spotting a jellyfish, its skin a leprous yellow spotted with green patches. Its tentacles trailed behind it for better than a hundred yards. Ryan shouted a warning to the albino boy not to touch the creature as it wallowed near them.

  "Heard of a man out in the California lagoons who saw a trailing firefish like that. He touched it and died double-crazed. They said 'fore he bought the farm he started't'bite off his own fingers from the pain."

  Almost immediately after that they all clung to the raft as something immeasurably vast moved sinuously under them, just scraping the bottom of the logs with the top of its spine. Lori stuck her head over the side, trying to see what it had been, but the deeps had swallowed it.

  They had heard gulls, shrieking and crying, all the way from M
anhattan Island, sounding like demented souls condemned to fly the skies for eternity. Now the birds started to come closer, gathering above the raft, beginning to swoop toward the six friends.

  It was Lori Quint who noticed them first. "The birds is coming," she cried.

  Doc glanced at her, as though he were about to correct her grammar, as he sometimes did. But she shouted again, "The birds is coming." His face wrinkled, as though he were trying to recall something half-forgotten, but he shook his head and let it pass.

  The threatening gulls had fifteen-foot wingspans and nine-inch beaks like hooked brass. But Jak pulled out his trusty .357 and blasted off at them. The boom of the handgun was flat and menacing in the open sea and loud enough to scare the birds away. One of their number was left behind, flapping its broken wing, bleeding, in the water fifty yards off. As the six watched its death throes, something came up from beneath it, with jaws as big as a dragline excavator, and sucked the gull down.

  Krysty stood up, mopping sweat from her forehead. "Gaia! I'm starting to stink like a Texas gaudy whore at three in the morning. Gotta face it, Ryan, we're stuck here. We have to start paddling this clumsy mother to that beach."

  She shaded her eyes with her hand, irritably pushing back the long hair that seemed to want to press against her face. Far ahead, just a blur on the horizon, her keen sight could make out something strange. It looked as if the land were creeping in, almost meeting in the middle. She couldn't make out whether there was a gap there or not. Krysty called to Doc, drawing his attention to it.

  "Should be the plainest of sailing out yonder. Nothing beyond the Narrows. If there'd been an offshore wind, I feared a little that we might be carried the whole way to France."