by James Axler
The sound of a shot echoed from behind Ryan, off to his exposed left, and the sec man went down without firing, tumbling forward to drill the barrels of both blasters into the snow.
Ryan turned to see Mildred kneeling a dozen feet away, the ZKR 551 clasped in a sure, two-handed grip. He dipped his head once in thanks before turning back to the Scout’s scope and searching for the man hiding in the mine entry.
* * *
IN THE SNOW-PACKED wilds, J.B. was scrambling toward one of the mine’s side entries. Bullets zapped through the air toward him as he ran, but the men at the chain gun were too high and they had trouble dipping the weapon’s fixed muzzle low enough to snag their target.
The two men stopped firing, and after a momentary discussion they worked together to heft the gun forward, arrowing the skis toward the retreating form of the Armorer. As they did so, Krysty and Doc appeared from opposite sides, bringing their own weapons to bear.
“You gentlemen may wish to reconsider your life choices so far,” Doc mocked as he held them both in the sights of his LeMat.
The men spun, looking for an escape route only to come face-to-face with the muzzle of Krysty’s Smith & Wesson. Behind it, her emerald eyes were all that could be seen beneath the protective wrappings across her face, a single wisp of red hair flying free from beneath her hood.
“I’d tell you not to move,” Krysty warned, “but I figure that’s redundant. Besides, I almost want you to give me an excuse.”
One of the sec men appeared to take Krysty at her word, and his hand dipped to his belt holster, reaching toward the blaster he wore there. Krysty fired but the man had ducked just out of the bullet’s path, bringing his own weapon free from its holster as the bullet careened off toward the mine.
Krysty shot again and the man sagged to the snow, the shot ripping the blaster from his hand and mangling the glove he wore into a blood-soaked mess in an instant. She stepped over him, aiming the barrel of the Smith & Wesson at his frightened face.
His partner, finally seeing the way things were headed, raised his hands in the air in surrender to Doc. “Don’t shoot!”
* * *
WITH HIS BACK to the outside wall of the sunken redoubt, J.B. looked around, scanning the immediate area. Two mutie caribou were tethered just above the lip of the crater, close to the unexploded missile lodged in the soil. Behind that, the faintly unreal line that marked the so-called edge of the world shimmered in place like a towering wall. What was it the girl had called it? The Tall Wall.
The mines could still be full of chillers, J.B. realized. No doubt some of the refugees from the torched ville had gravitated here, taking a much more direct route than he and his companions had. There was every chance that the mines held another fifty men and women, each one armed ten times over with blasters and ammo and who knew what else. The place was a stockpile of weaponry, and the number of sec men at any one time suggested that they had kept much of the stock there even after recovering it from the collapsed base. It stood to reason—why move it until you needed it?
“We need to shut this pesthole down,” J.B. muttered as another clutch of bullets drilled the ground beyond the mine shaft’s reach. He placed one hand to the side of his jacket, felt there for the items he had replaced a little over an hour before. These cannies had had the run of this snowbound corner of Hell for too long, terrorizing innocents like Nyarla and her missing father, he thought. It was time to cut off their lines of supply forever.
* * *
SEC MEN CONTINUED pouring from the exits of the mine, hauling fiercer weapons with them as they tried to defend their territory. In the trees, Doc and Krysty found themselves under attack from a tag team wielding a rocket launcher and a submachine gun, the latter laying down cover fire while the former reloaded. They raced for cover, leaving the two men who had operated the chain gun to stand or fall as best they could. There was no time to restrain them; it was chill or be chilled out there now. A copse of leafless trees provided scant shelter, the billowing snow blustering all around it.
Krysty gasped as a miniature rocket zipped through the trees. “We should have gone around.”
The two of them watched for a moment as the rocket impacted with a far tree in a blossom of flames.
“And have these people at our backs? Following us?” Doc suggested. “No. We burned down their ville and they have nowhere left to go now but into the very place they fear. If we had run, we would be running still, and we would never outdistance coldhearts such as these.”
Krysty knew he was right. She hated it, hated the position they had been forced into. But she thought of Kirima, Narja and the other women who had been forced to serve these heartless men, and she made peace with what she had to do.
Doc shouted a warning, and Krysty ducked automatically as another antitank missile cut a path through the leafless trees.
While the rocket launcher was being reloaded, Doc led the way across the drifting snow, blasting his LeMat in the direction of the chillers, with Krysty just a pace behind him.
* * *
HEAD TUCKED IN, longblaster in hand, Ryan sprinted across the snow as bullets cut the air around him. The sec man at the mine entrance was getting bolder, and though he wasn’t counting the shots—it was hard to do so over the general cacophony of blasterfire—Ryan was pretty certain the man had been joined by a second sharpshooter, the two of them covering the ground in an expanding semicircle.
Ahead of Ryan, a bush poked out of the snow, its twig fingers reaching up from the blanket of white. It wasn’t much in the way of cover, but it would have to suffice. Ryan ran to it, dropping and rolling to tuck himself down behind its fanned branches.
He had the Scout laid out before him instantly, the scope to his eye. He saw both men in profile, facing away from his direction, unaware that he had moved.
Gently, Ryan stroked the trigger with his index finger and let loose two quick shots, watching through the crosshairs as the man with the scoped longblaster went down, his head and chest exploding almost simultaneously.
The second man moved, not back toward the cover of the mine as Ryan might have expected, but forward, out across the snow with his longblaster resting in both hands. Ryan tracked him across the snow, breathing deeply as he lined up his shot, then fired.
The final gunman went down, a bullet wound like a bloody rose in the center of his chest.
* * *
THE MEN WITH the rocket launcher saw Doc and Krysty charging toward them through drifting snow flurries, Doc like a scarecrow from a nightmare, Krysty’s now untucked hair blowing behind her like a living flame. The submachine gunner slammed a new magazine in the stock and depressed the trigger while his colleague took aim. Bullets sprayed the site, throwing puffs of snow all around them as Doc and Krysty weaved in a zigzag pattern down the slope.
Doc’s LeMat blasted again, but this time he had engaged the shotgun barrel, which blurted a great ball of shot at his would-be chillers. The man behind the rocket launcher took the full blast in his face, tipping him over. His finger twitched against the weapon’s trigger, discharging a rocket straight up into the air as he keeled to the ground.
His partner continued to spray the air with lead as Krysty ran at him through the trees. With incredible agility, the red-haired woman leaped over the hail of fire, her free hand snagging one dead limb of a tree overhead and swinging her up and outward in an arc perfectly judged to meet with the triggerman. She barreled through the air for a second, plummeting feetfirst into the man’s face as he tried desperately to adjust his aim. Krysty’s boot heels hit him with bone-jarring finality, the snap of his jawbone audible even over the wild discharge of his weapon.
The man looked up, but the next thing he saw—and also the last thing—was the barrel of Krysty’s blaster as she drove it down between his eyes and shot him.
“Get back,” J.B. called to them from a little way up the slope. Krysty and Doc turned, saw that J.B. was scrambling toward the half-sunken missile that
dominated the crater.
“John Barrymore Dix,” Doc called, “what is it you plan to do?”
“Close this pesthole down,” J.B. replied, “once and for all.”
* * *
AT THE TOP OF THE SLOPE, now standing next to the missile, J.B. enjoyed a brief moment of silence. The blasters had stopped firing and the world quieted, the angry wind muffled by the falling snow.
Taking a deep breath, J.B. looked at the missile before him. The workings had been opened at some point, and the metal panel that once hid them was torn away and hung broken. Ice glistened on the exposed insides, snow tumbling from the missile as he brushed one gloved hand across it. The Armorer reached into his jacket and pulled loose the little wad of plastic explosive he had set aside for the task.
Down below, the collapsed redoubt-turned-weapons-mine waited in ominous silence. It broke J.B.’s heart to lose all that weaponry down there, but there it was. Chipping ice away with the end of his shotgun, J.B. placed the explosive against the exposed workings and gritted his teeth as he primed it.
The little charge slapped in place, J.B. slammed the broken remains of the panel closed on the missile housing and began to run, shouting to Doc and Krysty to do the same. The timer had a short fuse—twenty seconds maybe?—and J.B. knew he simply had to generate as much distance as he damn well could before it went off, triggering the far bigger payload inside the missile. Buried the way it was, the missile’s effect would be dulled, but that wouldn’t matter. Just so long as it took this pesthole, with its psychopathic mining op, out for good, that’s all that he cared about.
He was almost level with the side entrance now, about a quarter turn around the mine and well up from the base of the sunken crater. It had to be far enough, just had to be. The count in J.B.’s head had reached fifteen and he threw himself to the ground, his arms over his head protectively, his face down in the snow. Another second of ominous silence...two...and then the charge went off. It sounded loud as it echoed across the plain, like a cosmic anvil being struck by a hammer.
But the sound was nothing in comparison to what came next. J.B.’s tiny charge ignited the long-dormant works of the missile, setting the payload off in an explosion that turned the whole place into daylight-flash for a second and a half, the accompanying noise deafening in its magnificence.
The explosion ripped across his closed eyelids in a cough of brilliance, visible even through them. And it did a magnificent job of sending the left-hand line of the crater deeper into the earth, driving a punishing stake through the heart of the mine and turning its foundations to dust, collapsing the scratch-built mine shafts.
Chapter Nineteen
The only place to go was onward, Jak knew. To turn back was to reach the barrier again, which had proved impossible to penetrate. To keep moving meant to stay alive, the same basic equation that had guided Jak and his companions through the Deathlands.
He trekked across the dead land with Ricky at his side. The kid was tired and cold, Jak knew, but he didn’t complain. The incident with the polar bear had shaken him up badly, and he would peer over his shoulder every now and then as if certain that the hulking creature had found a way out of the store and was following them.
There were roads drawn in the snow, and one time they heard voices echoing from somewhere nearby. They looked, but the voices went silent and there was no clue where they might have been coming from. Through the snow and the fog, Jak could see a line of buildings, but they were at least a half mile away, and a great chasm yawned between here and there. If the voices came from there, then they would have to stay there. The only real path to take was forward, into the onrushing storm.
Lightning strikes rocked through the sky in the middle distance, a fearsome play of electricity. Jak and Ricky stopped, watching the fiery display shoot across the skies. For a moment, the atmosphere felt charged as a mighty lightning bolt shot up into the air from the ground.
“What would do that?” Ricky asked.
Jak narrowed his eyes, watching the fearsome bolt rocket into the sky before breaking apart with a trident fork of illumination. “Weapon, could be,” he said.
“Damn big blaster if it is one,” Ricky observed worriedly. “No one could survive against something of that size.”
Despite that, the two companions agreed to head toward the lightning’s source. Any other destination seemed pointless.
* * *
THEY ENCOUNTERED a cluster of the eerie bodiless mouths as they paced close to the epicenter of that lightning storm. The mouths had gathered around a smoldering pool where eerie lights flickered. From the distance they looked as if they were grazing.
Crouched on the summit of a snowdrift, Jak and Ricky watched as the disembodied mouths flocked around the pool. It looked like a tear in the earth itself, as if something warm was located beneath the snow, melting it before it could settle. The mouths gave no voice, but Jak’s ears tingled, as if something was vibrating the bones there, just beyond the range of human hearing.
“I don’t like it,” Ricky whispered beside Jak. “They’re creepy and shouldn’t exist.”
Jak said nothing, waiting for the bodiless creatures to move on. The locustlike mouths continued to drink from the spilled liquid, gorging themselves on the deposit of whatever it was. After a while, they seemed satiated and they finally began to drift away in ones and twos, floating sets of teeth swimming through the air. Warily, Jak watched them part, waiting until they had moved well away from himself and Ricky.
“Come on,” Jak instructed then, pushing himself up from the ridge. He and Ricky made their way down to the strange pool.
Jak stopped before it and leaned down to get a closer look at the pool. It seemed alive with color, and he watched images cast across the water’s surface. For a moment, he thought he saw his father’s face in the pool.
Beside Jak, Ricky cinched forward on elbows and knees, gazing into the mirrored surface. “That doesn’t look like water to me,” he said, keeping his voice low.
“No,” Jak agreed. “Looks like mem’ries.”
Ricky gave him a sidelong glance, wondering what he meant. Then, staring back at the heart of the misting pool, he also thought he saw the face of someone he knew, reflected in the waters—Yami, his older sister, her shy smile materializing across her face. When he looked again she had gone, nothing but a trick of the light.
Nearby, the mouths were moving with apparent aimlessness, taking wide circular paths across the ground. Their circuit would bring them back here soon enough, Jak reasoned, which meant it was time to move on.
Unseen by the mouths, Jak urged Ricky back and together they located a new path that took them into the heart of Yego Kraski Sada, where the lightning touched the sky. It seemed normal enough, but as they walked past a cluster of snow-laden trees, something strange happened. Jak noticed it first, his preternatural senses ever alert. He spun on his heel, drawing the stolen Colt Anaconda and thrusting it toward the highest branches of a tree. The tree looked like a skeleton, its bark turned charcoal-black with the damp, its reedy branches speckled with snow. Jak scanned the tree, carefully eyeing those skeletal branches. One of the upper branches near to the top of the tree was broken, and Jak watched as it started falling. But its descent was impossibly slow, slower even than a feather dropping in the breeze.
Jak watched, his blaster redundantly pointing at the branch.
“What is it, Jak?” Ricky asked. The olive-skinned teen had skipped back a few steps to rejoin Jak, standing ten feet from him while light snow flurries dotted his hair with white.
“Not sure,” Jak replied. “Something not right. See?” Jak indicated the snapped branch.
Ricky narrowed his eyes, peering at the dangling branch. The branch had broken clean off and appeared now to be hanging there in midair.
“How is it doing that?” Ricky asked, tilting his head in both directions to try to see if there was some trick to it, perhaps some strings holding the broken branch in place. H
e couldn’t see any.
Then, without warning, the branch tore away from the tree, shooting toward the ground like a launched rocket. Jak and Ricky leaped back as the branch drilled point-first into the ground, driving two inches beneath the snow. It had moved with a blur.
“What—?” Ricky began, but Jak was already moving toward him and shoving him aside.
Ricky rolled to the ground as the rest of the tree began to blur. He watched in amazement as leaves appeared on the once-dead branches, blossoms budded and grew and fell away, the leaves turned brown. The air around shimmered with waves of color.
“What is it?” Ricky asked. “What’s happening?”
“Not the tree,” Jak said. “All around.”
Ricky remembered the bullet he had seen earlier, the way it had waited in the air before surging suddenly forward and into the tree trunk. He turned his eyes from the tree as it hurried through its seasonal cycles again, racing past fall into winter, then spring and summer again. Around them, the snow seemed to melt and straggly blades of grass popped through the melt, then ice appeared in layers before washing away as water, seeping into the ground. It was like time-lapse photography, showing the rush of the seasons in the blink of an eye.
Looming over the two companions, the tree began to shake, faster and faster as if in the grip of an earthquake. It moved so swiftly that neither Jak nor Ricky could see the details of the branches any longer. Behind, the sky seemed to lighten then darken, over and over. The tree fell, its now-dead branches tumbling through the air like bones, crashing to the ground in a heap, leaving nothing more than a twisted stump where the tree had stood just seconds before.
“Hell!” Jak spit, scrambling out of its way.