by James Axler
By now they were all standing together in the center of the raft. During the time they'd been on their makeshift craft, they'd all learned caution, finding that a sudden movement to one side or the other would make it appallingly unstable.
"Lift me, lover," Krysty said.
"What? Why do… ? Ah, I get it. Give you height to look ahead."
"Right. Bend down."
Ryan stooped, dipping his head. Krysty, helped by J.B., swung a leg over his back and settled herself astride his neck, tightening her thighs. She tucked her legs under his arms, locking her boots in the middle of his back.
"Now," she said.
Though the girl weighed in at a muscular 150 pounds, Ryan lifted her in the air without any noticeable effort. He steadied her with his hands on her legs and balanced himself against the pitching of the raft.
"Try and… Yeah, that's…" Krysty then fell silent. Eventually she tapped Ryan on the head as a sign to let her down again.
"What d'you see?" he asked her.
There was a worried expression on the girl's face. "Not good, friends," she said. "Looks like there's been some bastard great upheaval that's blocked off most the water. Brought up the floor of the ocean, back in the long winter. This isn't open sea no more, Doc."
"What? You mean it's a kind of lake? No way past for us?"
"Can't see it. Look at the water around us now. It hardly moves and has a kind of skin on top, like a sort of scum."
It was true.
Though the sea still rocked with an oily swell, they had totally lost any feeling of forward momentum. They were becalmed.
KRYSTY WAS SINGING QUIETLY to herself, her pure voice the only sound in the stillness.
"A maid again, I ne'er will be, Till peaches grow on a cherry tree."
Doc smiled across at her. "I haven't heard that tune in… I guess a coupla hundred years. There's a damned odd thought. It's lovely. You learn that from your kin back in… What was the ville called?"
"Harmony. Herb Lanning the blacksmith knew lots of real old songs. Way prechill. It was his son, Carl, who plucked my cherry. That's when I learned the words."
"Must have been a real good ville."
Krysty smiled at the old man. "Yeah, it was. But all things change. That was why we… why we were moving on."
"Your ville a good place, lover?" she asked Ryan.
"Seemed so, then. Until I saw the skull that was hid under the smiles."
"Life's a deal of hard traveling," J.B. said sagely, surprising everyone. Homespun philosophy wasn't normally what you heard from the Armorer.
Jak and Lori were working with the stern steering oar, slowly propelling the raft toward the western shore, now only a couple of miles away. It was backbreaking, soul-destroying work, and they'd found from painful experience that it could only be done in pairs. Any more and chaos followed with everyone knocking and pushing into everyone else.
It took them close to four hours to move roughly half the distance they needed to reach the land.
The waters around them had gotten more and more polluted. Dead fish and birds hung suspended, rotting and half-eaten, bones coated with a yellow grease. An hour back they'd poled past the corpse of a massive shark—a great white, at least fifty feet from porcine snout to the mangled tip of its tail. It hadn't been dead long, and its flat little eye still rolled incuriously toward the rich violet sky.
"Jaws," Doc muttered, enigmatic as ever.
The beach, sand dunes rolling back toward a line of low scrub, was now less than a half mile off. The sun had sunk well behind the hazy bulk of the land. In the last quarter mile they'd finally broken clear of the stickiest of the watery dreck, but the bitter labor had taken its toll.
Doc Tanner had collapsed, muttering feverishly about painted ships and painted oceans. Lori had fainted fifteen minutes later, slumping on the timbers, banging her head again. Despite her reserves of mutie strength, Krysty had given up, sitting down in a heap, her face white and drained. "Sorry, folks," she said, hoarse with exhaustion. "I've paid all I can find. Got no more. Sorry."
It had been left to Jak Lauren, with seemingly bottomless reserves of stamina in his slight body, J.B. and Ryan, to keep working on the clumsy steering paddle. Heaving it backward and forward, each stroke making the muscles of shoulder and spine scream in protest. Each stroke pushed the raft a scant couple of feet nearer to land.
Now the worst was over. Lori, Doc and Krysty had recovered a little, relishing the cooler breeze coming off the beach. Jak and the Armorer were at the oar.
Krysty smiled weakly at Ryan as they sat together. "I felt awful about stopping."
"Don't be stupid."
"Could have used the power of the Earth Mother. But it…"
Ryan squeezed her hand. "No. I've seen you after you've done that. Not worth it. Only 'bout another half hour and we can get off this bastard raft."
"You know we were talking 'bout Harmony? And your old ville?"
"Front Royal?"
"Yeah. If we get there and you kick Harvey Cawdor's ass out of the land… what happens then?"
"Do I get to be the baron? Take over the line? Is that what you mean?''
"Course. Would you take it on? Give up all these mat-trans jumps? Give up all the killing? Settle? That's why I left Harmony in the first place."
Ryan looked around them. "We've talked 'bout this before. I don't know, lover. That's the fucking truth. I just don't know."
"Want to spell me, Ryan?" J.B. called.
"Right. One minute."
"Answer me, lover," pressed Krysty. "I want to know what I'm getting into when we get down to the Shens and your ville."
The jagged cut the mutie had inflicted on Ryan's hand seemed to be healing. He picked at a small piece of rough skin around it, trying to sort out how he wanted to answer Krysty's question.
"A baron holds his ville by his weapons and by fear. That's always been the way of it. I don't know if that's the way I want to live, Krysty."
"It can change."
"You can never turn your back when you're the baron. I was old enough and saw enough before I left Front Royal to know that. You never sit, unless you've got your back 'gainst a wall. You never sleep long and easy. You never trust a smile, Krysty. You have too many enemies and no friends."
With that he stood up and took the place of J.B. at the steering oar, leaving Krysty Wroth with her own thoughts.
A half hour later, with a grating sound, the raft beached on the New Jersey shore.
Chapter Twelve
THE RAD COUNT HAD SLIPPED well away from the dangerous hot spots of the red area, but it still lingered way over into the orange.
They left the raft, which had grounded on a mix of sand and shingle. They picked up their backpacks, checking weapons, leaving nothing behind, before striking off inland to camp for the night. Ryan led them only a mile into the dunes, not wanting to risk stumbling in the dusk over some double-poor mutie commune farther from the sea.
The evidence of heavy nuking was still to be seen everywhere. There was a great area of sharp-edged glass, twisted and warped into molten, lethal shapes. Ryan had never seen anything like it, but the Trader had told of seeing patches like it down in the deserts of Vada. It was where missiles had exploded in sand, the unbelievable temperatures fusing the mica into the lake of nuke glass.
Nothing grew taller than some stunted alders and willows, their trunks rotting and turning in on themselves. They camped for the night in a clearing on top of one of the sand dunes. They could watch for at least a quarter mile in any direction and not even Krysty could hear or see anything. The wind had turned once more, becoming a gentle breeze from the west. J.B. suggested they not risk a fire, and Ryan agreed with him. It was several degrees above freezing, with a clear sky that held no threat of rain.
Krysty moaned in her sleep, clutching at Ryan, her body trembling. She was so close against him that her scarlet hair, with its own mutated life, folded its tresses around his neck and upper
arms, as though it, too, sought comfort.
In the morning he asked the girl what her dark dream had been, but she couldn't recall much about it.
"I was cold. I remember that. Sitting on a ruined harbor on the edge of a gray sea with slick granite rocks that reached out into the water. I was huddled up without any protection. Waiting. I was waiting for something or somebody."
"Me?"
She shook her head, stippled with the early morning moisture like tiny pearls amid an ocean of rubies. "No. Not you, lover. Can't… It was the cold that was worst."
They started off, moving westward, just after dawn. Until the blurred outline of the sun was nearly overhead, they saw absolutely nothing to indicate any life-form. Ryan was walking point, checking the soft earth for tracks and finding none, not even any tiny scuttling lizards around the exposed roots of the dwarf bushes.
"Where's the nearest town to here?" Krysty asked. "What's the map say, J.B.?"
The Armorer tutted through his teeth. "No map for this part. I recall Washington and Philly were around here. Don't know where. Doc? You got any idea?"
The old man was marching along, wrapped in his own world, humming a song about following a drinking gourd. He turned at J.B.'s call.
"My deepest apologies, my dear Mr. Dix. I fear that I was traveling some byway of my own. Could you repeat the question?"
"Know any towns around here?"
"The city of Brotherly Love was… No. We are in a dull area for my memory. When I was born I learned in school of a march to the sea. The blue and gray. But towns… ? I fear not."
Ryan looked at the sky. "No sign of any chem storms. I know we're headed in the right direction. We keep on westward, then south. Into the Shens. What kind of nukes they use round here, Doc?"
"All kinds. High yield. Low yield. Air-burst. Water-burst. Low-alt and high. Some neutron stuff."
"Down near my ville, when I was a kid, most roads were passable. Never went that far north or east then. But I'm certain sure that a lot of the blacktops weren't too wrecked."
"That'd be neutron," Krysty commented. "Take out life and leave things standing. The idea was you could come in and take over. Didn't figure on doomsday and everyone gone everywhere."
During the afternoon, they reached the ruins of a major highway, which blocked their path, coursing like a stone arrow from north to south. A couple of hundred yards to their right was a tumbled sign, hanging off its broken support. Jak trotted off, and Krysty followed him. They came back together.
"What's it say?" Ryan asked.
"Garden State something. Begins with a P and an A, so it might be Parkway. Some roads was called that kind of name." Krysty was seized with a coughing fit from the dust they'd kicked up. "Gaia! Could do with some fresh water."
They crossed the wide six-lane highway and kept moving west.
During the next day and a half, they found the land was changing. The bleakness gradually eased away, being re-placed by a greener, softer look. The arid sand was covered in clumps of coarse grass that slowly became gentler turf. Here and there they found small copses of live oak and sycamore. And there were flowers again.
Purple orchis jostled among clusters of delicate starry campions. Huge sundrops overshadowed tiny arrow-leaved violets. The six walked at a steady pace through fragrant meadows, past streams that ran east toward the sea.
They found a fine place to set up camp for the night near a clean stream that ran through a pool, which was like liquid crystal and fully ten feet deep with a rock bottom. Trees grew in abundance, but well spread, so that it would be hard for anyone to come at them unseen, not that they'd found any sign of human activity since they'd come ashore.
For supper they opened more of the self-heats, scraping out the spun-soya contents. The fire of tumbled branches was burning brightly, sending a crackling fount of red-gold sparks bursting into the cool night air.
Krysty got up, stretching herself like a tall, elegant cat. She walked the few paces to the pool, bending and putting her hand into it.
"Not too cold," she said.
"You going in, lover?" Ryan asked.
"Tempting. Lori, you want to wash?"
"Why?"
Krysty laughed. "You kill me, kid. You wash because you get dirty. Right now it's the time of month for me to need to keep extra clean."
"When you get bleeding? Why is it dirty?"
The four men listened, interested in hearing what answer Krysty would give the younger girl.
"It's… Gaia! If you don't know why you need to wash, then mebbe you an' me should talk some, Lori. Get your clothes off and come in the water with me, and I'll tell you some facts of life. Your mother should have… No, forget that." She turned to Ryan, face flushed in the firelight. "Wipe that grin off, you stupe ape! And stay here and let us get bathed without you ogling at us."
"I shall sink," Lori said. "Too afraid."
Krysty smiled at her. "Never you mind. Looks shallow the upstream end of the pool. Come in there, and you'll be fine."
The two women went together, moving out of the circle of the fire. Doc Tanner broke the silence among the men. "Perhaps we might show courtesy by keeping our backs turned?"
"Yeah. Be decent," Ryan agreed, shifting his position so that he looked away into the forest. J.B. was already facing in that direction. Jak was the only one still gazing toward the sheltered little pool of shadowy water.
"Young man," Doc said sternly.
"Okay! All right f'you two. Got women. I don't. Only done coupla times. Gaudies in Lafayette. Krysty an' Lori are double-fuckable and you stop me looking."
Ryan patted the teenage boy on the arm. "Most things a friend can take. But not my blaster. And not my woman. So turn your back."
"But just wanna have—"
"Jak!" Ryan said threateningly. "Just do like I say."
Grudgingly the albino did, his long white hair now released from the red ribbon. They could hear giggling and then a stifled squeal from Lori as she found that the water was colder than she'd expected. Then there was only the sound of splashing, which drowned out any conversation the two young women might be having.
Very slowly Doc Tanner turned his head, ignoring a glare from Ryan. "Hades! They look like a brace of white dolphins sporting together. My Lord, but it makes me feel young again. I recall Emily and I once, on a… But that's yesterday and today's today."
Ryan also glanced behind. Lori was cautiously trying to push out of her depth, mouth open, blond hair trailing behind her. Krysty's bright red locks seemed huddled together like a tight ball of flame. The brightness of the fire didn't reach to the shadowy pool, and it was hard to make out more than the blurred outlines of the two slim bodies.
Krysty brought her hands together and threw a great ball of water in the air so that the orange light caught it as it burst into a million tiny sparks of fire. It fell and streaked over her face and body, funnelling into the valley between her breasts.
J.B. was honing the Tekna knife against the sole of his boot in a steady, preoccupied way. Jak stood and walked quickly to the edge of the trees, throwing a muttered few words over his shoulder.
"Going to scout some."
"Take care, Jak. Watch for muties," Ryan called, but the boy was gone, sulking off into the darkness.
"IT WAS MAGICAL, lover," Krysty said between pants as she and Lori rejoined the men around the glowing embers of the fire. Both girls had faces that glowed, and their hair hung damply on their shoulders. Lori knelt in front of Doc Tanner and gave him a great hug and a kiss.
"I was in water, Doc! You see me?"
"No. I mean, yes, I did. Wonderful, my dear child. Wonderful."
"Where's Jak?" Krysty asked.
"Told him not to get his young meat heated by watching you two in the water.''
"Oh, Ryan!" Krysty exclaimed. "He's one of us, isn't he?"
"Doesn't mean he can… Oh, fireblast!" Ryan felt confused and irritated. "Anyway, he went off to scout some. It'll do him good and
we can do with help. Food's low, and we got to find us some transport."
"Yeah, I guess so. The smell of burning wood's so strong from our fire I couldn't smell anything else even if it was fifty paces off."
"Someone's coming," J.B. said with a quiet urgency, grabbing his mini-Uzi and diving away from the fire into a dip in the ground. Ryan snatched up the G-12, moving in the opposite direction, hitting cover even before the Armorer. Krysty, hair flying, was at his side, the H&K P7A-13 blaster in her hand. Lori stood, bewildered, by the fire, until Doc Tanner pulled her to the earth, protecting her with his own body.
The land was quiet.
Ryan squinted across the clearing, just able to see J.B. flattened behind a bank of blooming heather. The Armorer half turned, pointing among the trees to the west.
The logs smoldered and light gray ash trickled down onto the coals with a ceaseless, whispering sound. Ryan thought he caught the far-off noise of an owl hooting, but he couldn't be certain.
Then he saw movement, something that flickered for a moment like a will-o'-the-wisp, visible only for a frozen heartbeat behind the trees. There was no moon, and whoever it was had the cunning to close in on them from behind the brightness of the fire, making it almost impossible for their eyes to adjust and see him properly.
"I see him," Krysty whispered. "Flat-topped willow, right of fire. Crouched. Give me the G-12, and I can chill him."
Ryan passed over the rectangular shape of the automatic rifle with its built-in image intensifier. "It's on triple," he hissed. "Won't lift at this range. No recoil."
The girl steadied the blaster against her shoulder, holding her breath, finger caressing the trigger.
When the attacker stood up, showing himself, his stark white hair was like a siren of light in the gloom. "Don't shoot, Krysty! Found us a wag to ride!"
Chapter Thirteen
THE VEHICLE WAS just over a mile inland. Jak led them through the scattered trees of the forest, across a winding stream and onto a narrow path.
"Saw tracks. Boots. Must have used for water. Not far. Keep double-quiet."
"Smoke," Krysty whispered to Ryan. "Not from our fire. Meat cooking."