by James Axler
“What the hell is this place?” he asked his comrades. “You ever see this before?”
Astride his own mutie caribou, the man shook his head. “Maybe she went inside,” he called as he unstrapped a blaster from its leather sheath at the side of his boot. The weapon was some kind of abbreviated carbine, its barrel sawn so short that it could only possibly be effective at close range.
The first rider clomped over the snow-brushed scrub, holding his pike at a horizontal in line with his waist. “Come on out, sweetie,” he cooed. “Your little game’s all over now.”
“Pomoshch,” the frightened woman in J.B.’s arms whispered. “Please.”
As the first rider reached the doors, Krysty emerged from her position behind the door frame, bringing her blaster up to the man’s temple with a click of the cocked safety. “You want to drop the stick and reach for the sky?” she suggested.
The man reacted far quicker than anyone expected, whipping the pike around and swiping at Krysty with the long haft. The redhead grunted as the rounded metal pole struck her across the rib cage, and she stumbled forward with a lurch.
“Bad choice,” J.B. stated as the other companions began firing, peppering the figure framed in the doorway before he knew what was happening. The mysterious figure stumbled back as a half-dozen bullets struck him. In Deathlands the best rule was to shoot first, and the companions hadn’t lived as long as they had by taking chances.
As the figure went caroming to the ground, the second rider brought up his abbreviated carbine—the chop-shop remains of a Simonov SKS—and began blasting. A stream of vicious 7.62 mm bullets came singing from the weapon’s stubby nose, drilling through the doorway like the expulsion of a shotgun rather than a rifle.
Krysty skipped back, her boot heels scraping across the hard floor as chunks of concrete were kicked up from the walls and floor under that deadly assault.
“Back,” Jak barked, targeting the rider in the sights of his Colt Python and pulling the trigger. The weapon coughed, blasting the first of three .357 Magnum bullets at the rider. But Jak’s angle was wrong. His bullets struck the thick head of the mutie caribou. The creature reared up, snarling with a low rumble as three bullets skipped across its hide.
Atop the beast, the rider was working the carbine one-handed, resting its grip on his leg as he reached into his ragged cloak for something else. Nearer the door, both Krysty and Jak saw just what it was in the second it appeared—a round metal pineapple no bigger than a man’s palm. A grenade.
In a single instant, the rider on the horned caribou tossed the bomb at the open doorway of the redoubt, where his partner lay in a bloody heap.
“Gren!” Krysty shouted, leaping back from the doorway with her arms outstretched.
“Protect yourselves!” Doc gasped, dropping back against the nearest wall.
The other companions backed away as the grenade landed inside the open doorway, striking the floor with the low tink of metal on concrete. Jak, however, leaped through the doorway and out into the snow.
The gren went off, sending a shock wave through the air with a great clap of noise. Nearby trees and bushes trembled, tossing snow from their branches as the wave of pressure rolled over them. Jak ignored it, using its power to drive him forward toward the riderless caribou that waited twenty feet in front of the redoubt. His breath came harsh in the cold air, each inhalation burning against his nostrils and throat like ice.
The remaining rider had turned his head as the gren exploded, sending bloody chunks of his own partner through the air in a spray of mangled flesh and bone. He looked back in dismay as Jak raced across the powdered snow, his white skin and hair so pale it seemed almost as if an empty set of clothes was running across the snowy ground.
Jak tossed his Colt Python aside, brushing it from his mind as it sunk into the powdery snow. It was no use against these creatures and their thick hides. To deal with them he needed to get up close and personal—just the way he liked it. The albino sprinted, pulling back his jacket and reaching inside with both hands in a practiced movement, drawing loose two leaf-bladed throwing knives.
First one hand then the other whipped forward, throwing the vicious little blades ahead of him as he ran toward the nearer of the beasts. The first blade struck the creature’s black hide and bounced off it to no effect. The second blade fared a little better, clipping the mutated caribou just above its lip and carving a rent through its right nostril.
Jak was a master of the throwing knife, expert at judging the weight of the metal. The creature reared in pain, its breath puffing out in a damp cloud of water vapor.
Then Jak was on it, jumping into the air, another twin set of blades already materialized in his chalk-white hands. He carried countless blades about his person, hidden in wrist and ankle sleeves, strapped to his torso and stitched into every accessible tuck of his jacket’s lining.
Jak leaped at the caribou, plunging one of his drawn knives into its face as his feet struck the animal’s flank. The creature huffed in pain as Jak’s knife grazed its eyeball, tearing a great gob of flesh from its flat nose. Above its triangular head, Jak twisted, kicking out at the startled rider and knocking him from his mount. The rider shrieked in surprise as much as pain, his carbine going off again as he sank from the creature’s side.
Jak was astride the creature now, and with a quick shift of his weight he kicked his heels against its flanks and drove both of the blades he held into its back, where the head met with its stubby, armored neck. The monster growled deep in its throat, the sound like a goose’s honk as it began to charge wildly ahead. The second of the monstrous caribou was just a few feet away, and Jak dug his heel in once more to aim the panicked creature at the other. The mutie caribou reacted instinctively, ducking its horned head low as it spotted the other charging it. Between them, the fallen rider struggled to roll free of the destined clash, but he was too late. Suddenly, he found himself trampled by his own steed, leg bones and ribs shattering as the mighty caribou stomped over him.
Jak leaped free as the two-horned monstrosities butted heads together in a thunder crack of bone, blood still spurting from the first creature’s knife wounds. Beneath them, the mutie rider was screaming in agony, his body a mangled and bloody mess as the angered creatures crashed together in a contest of supremacy.
Inside the redoubt entrance, the companions were just recovering from the shock wave that had struck the redoubt’s door. Positioned at the rear of the group, Ryan and Ricky were the first to recover. Ricky had one hand up against his ear, trying to stop it from ringing. Ryan looked about, scanning the entrance to the redoubt and checking that his friends were all accounted for.
“Everyone okay?” Ryan asked. “Where’s Jak?”
“I believe our pale-skinned companion decided to take the fight outside,” Doc said, dabbing cement dust from his brow with a blue handkerchief.
“Sounds about right,” Ryan grumbled. “Everyone else okay?”
They were shaken by the blast but otherwise unharmed. Ryan hurried over to check on Krysty, but she confirmed that she had gotten clear of the blast with seconds to spare. “Well, maybe one second,” she admitted when Ryan gave her a dubious look.
“The entry took most of the impact, by the looks of it,” Mildred said as she made her way to the doorway. A blackened crater marred the floor where the grenade had gone off.
Doc was at the doorway now with Mildred at his side, scanning the bleak landscape for Jak. Two mutated caribous were butting heads in a smear of blood and pulp, while Jak, with considerable aplomb, crouched in the snow to pick up his discarded Colt Python while still watching the fight. The albino looked like a kid who had snuck into a prize fight.
Back inside the redoubt, J.B. was just bringing himself up off the floor. He had been very near to the explosion when it had gone off, and it had only been his quick thinking that had moved him and the mysterious young woman out of harm’s way.
“Dark night, that was close,” J.B. said
as he struggled back to his feet. He had reacted instantly at Krysty’s warning, shoving himself and the young woman to the floor at the speed of thought. The blonde was sprawled on the hard concrete floor, sobbing quietly, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“It’s okay,” J.B. told her. “We’re still alive.”
The young woman looked at him with a tentative smile. “They are gone?” she asked.
“Two of them—both chilled,” the Armorer confirmed.
“Nyet,” she said, shaking her head rapidly. “There were more of them. More than...twelve, maybe fifteen.” She was fretting immediately, and J.B. had to hold her arm to steady her as she tried to run deeper into the redoubt. “They’re after my father.”
“Hear that, Ryan?” he called.
Ryan nodded grimly. “Then we’d better get moving,” he said.
A moment later, the seven companions and their mysterious new charge exited the redoubt, Ryan tapping in the coded sequence that sealed the door before they made their way out into the snow-speckled night, past the riled-up mutie caribou. The caribou ignored them, their horns locked, too busy engaged in their own squabble to worry themselves with the trifling affairs of the humans.
Chapter Three
“Alaska,” J.B. said, lowering the tiny folding minisextant and putting it into one of his deep pockets. “That’s my best guess, anyways.”
Standing amid the fallen branches, Ryan looked at him. “Best guess?” he probed.
The Armorer shrugged. “Stars are in the right place for sure,” he explained, “but by my calculations we’re farther north than the maps go.”
“The maps could be wrong,” Doc opined, tugging his collar closer to his neck. While the others were well-equipped for cold weather, the old man only had his light frock coat to keep him warm and, ironically, he was the one who felt the cold most. “A lot of changes were wrought unto the landscape with the outbreak of the nukecaust.”
“Doc has a point,” Mildred added, not looking up from where she was examining the blonde. “We know that tectonic plates have been shunted out of their old positions in other parts of the world. No reason it didn’t happen here, wherever here is.”
“Might be Nome,” J.B. said with marked indifference, scanning the vinyl-covered predark map that he had produced from one of his jacket’s capacious pockets.
Krysty laughed. “Sounds more like a creature than a place,” she said. “Gnomes and pixies and little elflings. My mother told me all about them back in Harmonyville.”
“Well, wherever we are, it’s here,” Ryan said with his usual pragmatism. He scanned their surroundings for a moment, eyeing the patchy snow clumping indifferently against the frozen tundra. Having locked the redoubt, the companions had made their way through the thorny bushes that surrounded the entrance, following the path that the tired-looking young woman led them through. She was clearly distraught, mumbling in a language that Ryan couldn’t make sense of. She led them up a frost-carpeted slope to a cluster of trees, well hidden in the moonless night while providing an ideal vantage point of the immediate area.
Ryan had put Jak and Ricky on sentry detail, the latter assuring the one-eyed man that he had finally recovered from the effects of the mat-trans jump. Ryan peered through the trees at the snow-dappled ground all around them. Visibility was poor, but that meant that anyone sneaking up on them would have just as much chance of missing the companions as they did them. Anyway, Ryan figured, there wasn’t much to see. All there was was another pest-hole full of chillers.
“The girl’s calmed down,” Mildred said as Ryan surveyed the area. Beside him, J.B. carefully stowed away his battered map. A chill breeze cut through the trees, tossing the falling snowflakes on the air like dancers at a predark ball.
Ryan nodded, pacing across to where the young woman sat with her back propped against the trunk of a tree. She looked frozen, hugging herself as she tried to keep warm. Mildred had given her a blanket from their supplies and had handed over her spare socks in place of her missing shoes. It wasn’t much, and Mildred felt it was even odds that the young woman might lose a foot before the night was over unless they got her somewhere warmer.
“You okay now?” Ryan asked the shivering woman as he stood before her.
She looked at him, and Ryan eyed her closely for the first time. Behind the smudges of dirt and the messy tangle of hair she was young and quite beautiful. He estimated she was no more than nineteen, but it was hard to tell, given how thin she looked. Probably not much food going spare if the weather’s always like this up here, Ryan realized.
The teenager was staring at Ryan’s eye patch, as if unable to look away. She began to say something, but it was unintelligible to Ryan.
“I think she wants to know why you wear your patch,” Doc suggested.
Ryan nodded solemnly. “You want to know how I got this?” he asked, and the young woman nodded once. “Fight with my brother. You have a brother? Or a sister mebbe?”
She nodded. “Tri,” she said. “Dve sestry...end brother.”
“They around?” Ryan asked.
She averted her eyes, looking at the ground as she shook her head.
“I’m Ryan,” he told her. “You have a name?”
“Nyarla,” she said timidly after a moment’s consideration.
Ryan held his empty hands out to her. “You’re okay now,” he told her. “You’re safe.”
Nyarla nodded again, taking his hands for just a moment in gratitude. After that, Ryan stepped back to confer with his companions.
“Any sign from Jak or Ricky?” Ryan asked.
J.B. shook his head. “They’re out there, we’ll know if they spot anything.”
* * *
JAK STALKED through the icy undergrowth with Ricky a few steps behind him. They held their bodies low to create smaller targets. Jak was a natural loner, used to operating alone even while playing his role in Ryan’s hodgepodge team. Having Ricky at his side was new. He liked the kid, had seen and admired the way he handled a blaster when all hell was breaking loose. But it still took some getting used to having the kid at his side like this.
Jak brushed at his collar, smiled momentarily at the snow that had settled across the line of his shoulders, clinging to the sharp shards of glass and metal that were sewn there. In this environment the snow was good—it provided camouflage, helping him and Ricky blend into the surroundings.
Jak was an expert tracker, blessed with enhanced senses far superior to an average person’s. Right now, as the two of them made a circuit around the copse of trees, Jak smelled something. He sniffed again, scenting the air. It was blood, and even with the wind whipping around the trees the way it was, he could tell it wasn’t coming from the direction of the bloodbath at the redoubt. Something else had lost blood out here this night, and Jak wanted to know what.
Ricky saw Jak slow. “What is it, Jak?” he whispered from behind him, hunkering low to the ground. He had never seen weather like this, never felt cold like this. Alaska was a hell of a long way from his home on Monster Island.
Jak’s nose wrinkled, his keen eyes searching the woods. The trees were sprinkled with snow, not thick but enough to line their branches, ice crystals making their leaves glisten in the faint starlight. Little patches of snow littered the ground, too, dotted here and there like some unfinished mosaic, the green shoots of grass clumping between the tiny oases of white.
Jak said nothing, merely gestured to Ricky to indicate that they would keep searching. He hurried on, weaving swiftly between the trees, the Latino youth following in his wake. The smell was getting stronger, a smell like raw meat.
The trees were less dense here, and Jak could see now almost the whole way down the slope on the opposite side to the path they had taken to reach the copse. Down there, where the ground leveled off, he saw a dark shape splayed across the snow. It looked like a snow angel.
Jak stopped suddenly, motioning with one hand for Ricky to do the same. “There,” he said, pointin
g to the snow angel.
“What is it?” Ricky whispered, narrowing his eyes to see. His hand was automatically reaching for his Webley Mk VI revolver, instinct kicking in.
Jak glanced at the boy’s hand and shook his head. Not yet. He didn’t want any shooting unless necessary, bad enough they had had to chill the two mutie riders at the redoubt’s doors. Why draw more attention unnecessarily?
Jak held his hand up, his pale flesh ghostly in the faint glimmer of distant stars. He motioned toward a snow-sprinkled ridge that ran down between the trees. The ridge was shallow enough to climb down. “Safe way.”
Ricky nodded, following Jak down the slope, his hand still close to the butt of his holstered revolver. In silence, they hurried down the slope, ever alert to the presence of other people or wild animals.
There was a subtle change in the acoustics at the bottom of the slope, one that Ricky noted just momentarily, while Jak seemed much more concerned with it. The snow was light in the air, but it was enough to muffle noise, sufficient that they might be crept up on without noticing.
“Careful,” Jak warned his companion.
Ricky nodded, and then Jak was away, legs and arms pumping as he darted out beyond the edge of the line of trees, keeping his body low as he sprinted to the figure lying in the distance. Ricky followed, his heart pounding at his chest as he hurried to keep up. Ahead of him, Jak was a white blur, the blush of snow across his shoulders and back.
The two stopped. It was a man, naked and nailed down with his stomach opened to the elements. The flesh of his stomach had been pinned back, trails of guts and intestines pulled out from it in bloody coils that turned the snow red.
Ricky gulped, tamping down his urge to throw up. “Who would do this?” he whispered.
The man’s eyes flickered at the noise. He was alive.
“Help me,” the man croaked.
Ricky stepped forward, but Jak stopped him with a gesture. There was something else there, Jak realized, something watching them.