by James Axler
Walking was difficult for him, and the others had taken turns helping to support him. His muscles were painfully weak and wasted. Ryan noticed that the freezie's way of walking was slightly peculiar, each foot lifted rigidly then set down with an unusual firmness. Ginsberg also kept clenching and unclenching his fingers, as though they were stiff and sore.
Ryan had, as gently as he could, given him a spotty version of history from the October morning when Richard Neal Ginsberg had last seen the light of day, up to the present morning, one hundred eternal years later. The freezie had taken the news fairly well in spite of Doc's concern for his sanity.
Ryan sketched in what he knew of the end of civilization, the long winters, the barren wastes and frothing hot spots; the changes in the land and in the climate and the changes in the people.
Ginsberg had asked surprisingly few questions.
"When I saw you all, sporting guns, I guessed something was…bad. Had to be. Course, when I went under, the war talk was louder. Same old faces and voices. Hatred. I was born and raised on growing hatred in…once that…can't remember his name, the Russian leader who talked peace. Once he was toppled—word was the CIA brought him down—it all went downhill."
He'd cautiously asked how many had died in the first waves of missiles. Ryan told him that nobody knew the answer to that. All records were gone, and the months immediately following the devastation were known as "the lost days."
Rick's parents had lived in a neat apartment in a brownstone on the Lower East Side of New York. All that Ryan, helped by Doc and Krysty, could tell was that every city had been hit hard and often. There was a ten-tenth's death rate in all major metropolises, and for people within the heat core, death would come like the snuffing of a light.
"A single microsecond of surprise, and then an infinite merging with the cosmos," Doc had told him.
"What's kind of hard," Rick eventually said, "is the sure knowledge that every person I ever met in my entire life is now dead. Most died within a few miserable weeks of my being frozen. Now I'm here and I'm all on my fucking own! I'm still dying and… and what's the point of it all, huh? What's the point?"
DESPITE URGING particularly from J.B., Rick steadfastly refused to carry a blaster.
"Sorry, John," he insisted. "I'm a little of a peacenik in my own way. I abhor violence. From what you've been telling me, I guess I might have to get used to a mighty different world from the one I knew. Maybe in some ways, I might like it better. But tote a pistol? Thanks, but no thanks."
What was odd was that he hadn't shown much interest in precisely who Ryan and the others actually were or how they'd gotten into the triple-secure redoubt or how they moved around the Deathlands.
At Doc's suggestion Ryan hadn't pestered Rick about what he'd done back before the megachill. The fact that it had been highly classified meant it could be an area of his life that might provoke a strong and upsetting reaction.
The outside doors of the redoubt swung open on the familiar 3-5-2 code. Jak led the way into the fresh air, the other six following him. Rick leaned on Krysty's arm, bringing up the rear.
"Oh, to see the sun and taste the breeze…" the freezie said, clearly on the edge of tears. "Whatever happens, I've seen this once more." He hesitated. "Why is the sky that strange purplish color?"
"Strange?" Ryan echoed. "It's nearly always that color."
Doc smiled sadly. "It wasn't always so, Ryan. What our new companion says is correct. The skies were always blue when I was a lad. Yellow sun. White clouds. Not the hideous hues of the chem clouds and the dark nuke sky that haunts us all."
"How come you remember that, Doc?" Rick asked. "Nobody's that old."
"It is a tale told by an idiot, Richard. Told by me. Too difficult to comprehend or even to believe. One day, when you are somewhat recovered, I will tell you."
"Speaking of believing," Rick continued. "In your travels, you never came across—maybe in one of these redoubts—anything called a… a gateway, did you?"
Before anyone could stop her, Lori leaped in with both feet.
"Course, stupe! That's how we always are getting around Deathlands. Jump and jump in gateways."
Once again nobody looked at the freezie. Ryan stared across a narrow blacktop that vanished steeply over the brink of the hillside. Beyond it was a sweep of valley, disappearing into some thick forest. There was no sign of a ville anywhere.
"Just a damned m-m-m-minute," Rick stammered. "Did I hear you right, Lori?"
"Yeah."
"You guys use gateways? They still work? Sweet… They still work? A hundred years after the bombs and they still work. Wow!"
"What do you know about mat-trans?" Doc asked curiously. "Is that why you were given a high-B sec rating, Mr. Ginsberg?"
"I can't tell you. Freedom of information doesn't apply. Would you be on a need-to-know listing? Of course you wouldn't. You were all dead. I mean not alive… when the last need-to-know precaution list was… Oh, this is weird, guys. Like dropping a tab of the best Nicaraguan acid. You've been using the gateways! Which ones? Where?"
Ryan suddenly guessed it. "You worked on them, didn't you? That was the reason for your high sec rating. You know all about gateways and jumps! Fire-blast! You've got plenty to tell us, friend."
J.B. interrupted him. "If we're going to get some miles before dark, Ryan, we'd best get started. Talk can come later."
Ryan ignored the good advice, glaring at Rick. "Is it true?"
"I don't know."
"What d'you mean? You must know what your bastard job was!"
"I think it… it might have been something about gateways, but I can't remember. My head hurts, and I'm tired and confused and why don't you leave me alone? Please."
"Please," Ryan mocked angrily. "You could hold the key to information that might alter all our lives!"
"Ryan," the Armorer urged, "it's a good walk down there. And the freezie's in poor shape. Don't want to get caught by dark halfway down the mountain. Come on, Ryan."
"Sure. Yeah, you're right, J.B., I know that. But—" he faced Rick again "—get your memory working and we'll talk later. You got lots to tell us."
IT WAS a difficult journey.
In several places the road had been washed away by torrential rains or shattered by quakes. When they were about a quarter of the way down, J.B. stopped and drew out his tiny pocket sextant, checking where they actually were in the Deathlands.
Rick Ginsberg sat slumped on a huge boulder, head in his hands, panting with exhaustion. The trail was high, and Ryan was conscious of the thin air. His heart was working harder than usual, and any effort was more tiring. There was a marvellous vista to enjoy to their west—the orange sun was sliding down amid a nest of feathery thundertops tinted a light purple.
"What are the mountains, Doc?" Krysty asked, brushing dust from her coveralls.
"Look like the old Sierra Nevadas, from the shape and feel of them. But if we're in the high Sierras, then I'm puzzled at what that is way away to the west. Beneath the setting sun."
"It's a lake," Lori said. "Big, big lake, far as I can see."
Doc shook his head. "Can't be, sweetness. There is no lake of that size hereabouts. We must be a good twenty miles or more away from it and yet it looks utterly vast. Ergo, we are not in the Sierras."
"Wrong, Doc," J.B. folded the sextant and slipped it into one of his infinitely capacious pockets.
"Wrong?"
"Wrong. We're close by the Pacific. These are the Sierras, all right. This is what used to be called California."
"But the ocean never came this close to such high peaks, unless…"
Rick stood up, his pale face beaded with sweat. "You say this was California. That's bullshit! There's no place in the state where you can see the Pacific from…" His eyes, magnified behind the thick lenses, turned to Doc. "Unless… You were going to say… weren't you? Unless the whole…"
Ryan answered him. "Trader'd been here several times over the years, and he told
me what happened out west here."
"San something…Andreas, that was it. The San Andreas Fault!" the freezie exclaimed.
"That's the name. Trader said that the nukes came down, thicker than fleas on a gaudy-house mattress. Hit lotsa places along California. Cities and silos. Bases and harbors. Said there was that fault you said. It triggered something way deep under the earth, and the whole mess just opened up."
Krysty backed up what Ryan had said. "There was an old woman in Harmony when I was still a suckler. Said her gran had survived. Bad rad burns, but she'd lived. Been born on the foothills of the Sierras, hundred and fifty miles from the sea. Came around after dark day. The Pacific was lapping at her feet. A lot of the state had gone, slipped into the water and off the edge. She said the waters were clogged with bloated corpses for many months. The smell drove folks away—those that lived. Not many."
"Los Angeles gone? San Diego? San Francisco? All gone?" Ginsberg sat down in an ungainly heap, like a rag doll left to its own devices. "Then it's true, what you told me. Not something spawned in my brain. I'm alive and it's happened, and I'm going to die. I'd hoped…"
"Man who starts thinking of hope has given up thinking how to live," J.B. said. "Seems to me, freezie, that you're too bitching sorry for yourself for a grown man."
"You don't understand," Rick said wearily, barely holding back the tears. "This isn't my world!"
"It is now," the Armorer replied. "And we're all wasting time."
RYAN HAD EXAMINED the massive sec doors to the redoubt very carefully before the group started down the blacktop, checking that there hadn't been any serious effort to force them.
Any signs of bad damage often meant a potential threat from local muties. But the doors were untouched, with just the usual evidence of weathering.
They found one possible reason for this when they were a couple of miles down the track. There had been a huge earthslip and the remainder of the road, clear into the forest, was gone.
Now there was just a great expanse of scree, dotted with scrub and sparse thimbleberry bushes. A tiny stream meandered through it, opening up its own little valley between the loose stones. There was about a half mile of nothing before the first shadowed trees. The forest covered a sizable piece of land, eventually filtering down into a terrain of semidesert, dotted with sagebrush and mesquite.
"Get warmer," Jak observed, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his camouflage canvas jacket.
"Soon be evening, Ryan," J.B. said. "We're making slow time with the freezie. Best we can hope is to reach the wood and make a night camp there."
"Sorry to slow you all down. It would be better if you left me. Better you never reactivated me. Best would have been if you'd walked on by and—"
"Rick?" Ryan said.
"Yeah?"
"Shut your damned mouth!"
"Yeah. Sorry."
"NO FIRE," J.B. ordered.
"It'll be coldest!"
"No fire," he repeated.
But Lori was equally insistent. "I don't want cold!" She stamped her foot, the spurs tinkling prettily.
"The forest is exceedingly dry, my dearest little moonstone, and the brush beyond looked like positive tinder."
"What d'you know? You got thick old skin to kept you warmer. Not like me!"
Doc shrank from her venomous anger, shaking his head. Krysty felt sorry for him and stepped into the argument.
"Don't be a stupe, Lori. You know what a danger a fire could be out here. Wind'd raise it in minutes. Not worth it."
"Bring muties," Jak added.
"You're all against me! Always fucking mob up on me. Not fair," she yelled, her voice swallowed by the dark trees surrounding them.
Nobody took any notice, except for Doc, who took a hesitant half step toward the sulking girl. He stopped abruptly when his eye caught Krysty and saw her shake her head.
Rick had taken no part in the conversation. As soon as they had stopped in a small clearing he'd laid down on the soft, dry bed of dead leaves and fallen into a deep sleep.
The six companions took turns keeping a sec watch. It would have been utterly absurd to think about the freezie keeping guard. Ryan was already having serious reservations about Rick Ginsberg, a weak, enfeebled and miserable depressive whose mind was fragile. The only thing that was in his favor was the news that he had once worked in some capacity on the gateways. That alone justified the trouble of keeping him with them.
But only for the time being. The night passed by peacefully.
Chapter Twelve
AFTER A SPARSE BREAKFAST from self-heats and ring-pulls of water, everyone sat around for a few minutes, resting, preparing to move on. Ryan was next to Rick, and he realized the freezie was muttering to himself, something about "tomorrow."
He listened more carefully.
"All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to a dusty death. Life's a tale told by an idiot, filled with sound and fury and signifying…" Ginsberg stopped.
"Signifying what?" the one-eyed man asked curiously.
"Nothing, Ryan," Rick replied with a deadly bitterness. "Absolutely nothing."
Lori's good nature had returned, and she led the group, dancing, light-footed, between the gnarled trunks of the mature live oaks. The bells on her spurs jingled merrily, and she sang as she ran, an old hymn that Ryan had heard in some of the fundamentalist Christian villes.
"Watch your step, precious," Doc called, but the girl ignored him, blond hair flying behind her.
Rick seemed in better health and spirits, walking without the aid of a walking staff that Ryan had cut for him with his panga.
"I used to like hiking," he said. "Until I got ill. It became harder going then."
"How d'you feel?" J.B. asked.
"Better." He grinned. "A whole lot better. You know, the air tastes cleaner. Perhaps I'm imagining it, but it does. Fresher. I suppose all the industry being blasted in the war helps that. No more sulfur, acid rain and holes in the ozone layer that used to worry everyone in the… in the old days."
"Your muscles feel stronger?" Krysty asked, brushing an errant crimson curl back from her eyes.
"Yeah. I think so. You know, I can't remember. Funny. I think a century of freezing's addled my brain. There are things I can remember vividly and some that have gone. I can't visualize my mother's face. Silly, isn't it?"
Ryan shook his head. "Doc has the same kind of trouble, Rick. Tell me something you remember well. Anything?"
"Moments in never," he replied. "I can… when I was about fourteen, going to New York with my father. We'd gotten tickets to see the Giants play the Forty-Niners. And we had a day in Manhattan. We went to an art gallery, which had lots of glass and open spaces. Wonderful paintings by Georgia O'Keefe, Hopper, Wyeth and…so many. All nuked. What a… But it wasn't that. It was a warm October day and we wanted something to eat. We were around Fifth and Fiftieth, by the old Saint Patrick's Cathedral."
"Reaching the edge of the tree part!" Lori called from some distance ahead of them.
The others were entranced by Rick Ginsberg's story. He was like a living time machine, painting a picture of a long-ago scene that none of them, except Doc, could imagine with any kind of reality.
"We decided to get some fast food. There were lots of burger stalls and fries. But there was an old Chinese guy who had a stall with pictures on the side—whatever he was selling. I can still see it, and almost smell how good it was—fried shrimp, crab and fish with some rice and a soda. We sat on the steps and watched New York flow by us. I felt real close to my dad at that moment. I don't think I'll ever forget it. Even if I live to be a hundred."
Jak sniggered. "You're more hundred now, freezie. Lot more."
Rick didn't rise to the bait. He simply nodded at the boy. "True enough. So don't be so rude to your elders!"
The albino threw him the finger and darted off to join Lori at the fringe of the desert brush.
Now they were at a lower level, and it was possible to look back up
the mountain slope. They could see the scar of the scree-fall, but no trace of the hidden redoubt tucked under the lip of the peak above.
"Think there's a ville over there," Krysty said, pointing across the expanse of orange-gray sand. "And I can smell… not sure what."
Ryan stopped, still just within the shade of the forest, and took several deep breaths. There was something. Very faint but…
"Gas!" he exclaimed. "It's gasoline! Fireblast! If we can smell it such a long way off, then it must be a big field. Or a store so big that… If there's gas, then there's wags. Am I right, J.B., or am I right?"
"Could be. Sure is strong. This gas country, Doc? California?"
"Never used to be, but I suppose that the shifting of the great plates of the earth could push oil-bearing strata for hundreds of miles."
"If you got jack, you're fine," Ryan said, "but if you got gas, then you're even better."
Ginsberg sighed. "What's transport like? If gas is that rare and difficult?"
"There's some. Most villes have stocks. There was a huge store that the Trader found, about two hundred miles north of where Boston used to be. But it got blown. Now there's wags. Transport and war wags. Kind of rough."
"Trains?" the freezie asked.
J.B. answered him. "Sure. Often get trains of wags rolling together. Safer that way. Hold off the muties."
"No. I mean trains, like Amtrak. On rails." Seeing the blank looks, he said, "No, I guess there aren't any. How about planes?" Again, he answered his own question. "Stupid. If there's no trains and there aren't many cars, there sure as little green apples aren't going to be any airplanes."
"Wrong," Ryan replied. "I've never seen any flying wags, but the Trader saw one, once. Out East, he said."
"Flying?" Rick asked.
"Crashing," the Armorer said with a short, dry laugh.
"That's what Trader said. Got hauled out some old shed. Already gassed up. Baron's oldest son said he'd try it. Up, up and…down again. Body finished in one field. Head in another. Never found the legs, way I recall it."