by James Axler
"You sure they actually screwed last night, lover?" Ryan asked, speaking quietly over his shoulder to Krysty.
"I think they'd prefer to call it making love," she said chillingly. "I know that's what I prefer to call it, lover. But, yeah, I'm damn sure they did. That bother you, Ryan?"
He didn't reply, shaking his head, walking briskly on along the wide street.
Krysty closed up on him, whispering, "You must see how they are, lover. It's like looking at the desert just after the spring rains."
The snow had stopped at some point during the night. The temperature was very close to freezing, and the ville seemed to be completely deserted. Not even a rat moved against the cold, glittering wasteland.
"Wish we'd kept some of our warm clothes," Ryan said. "Lost so much along the way."
"Reason to keep moving," J.B. replied.
"Is there anything in particular we're searching for in these forsaken ruins?" Doc asked. "I'm more than happy to stride along with any man—or woman—but to wander aimlessly has never been one of my favored hobbies."
They'd reached the southern end of Central Park. The farther they walked, the worse the devastation seemed to get.
Mildred stopped, blowing at her hands, rubbing them together, her breath gathering in front of her like plumes of steam. "Sure is chilly."
"Borrow my coat?" J.B. offered. "I don't feel the cold too much."
Ryan avoided the temptation to glance sideways at Krysty.
"Thanks, John. I'll struggle on a while longer."
The wind was still biting in from the north, bringing occasional flakes of snow or a brief rattle of venomous hail.
Mildred shaded her eyes with her hand, bracing herself against the breeze. "Stand hereabouts back in the days before… well, before. You could see all the great skyscrapers. Empire State and down to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center."
"I scaled them both," Doc said. "The Empire State Building was somehow more amusing. On that floor below the top of the Trade Center I confess to a slight loosening of the bowels at the drop through the glass. Now they're large piles of urban rubble."
"In the end I guess this'll finish up like it used to be before we bought it from the Indians." Mildred shook her head. "I'm not truly sure I like this too much, Ryan."
At a cross-street a block ahead of them they watched a five-legged dog—a brindled pit bull—dash over, carrying something dead in its jaws. At that distance it was impossible to make out what it might be.
It was about then that they heard the distant rumble of a heavy-duty wag. They waited, but the noise faded away into stillness.
"One of Trader's war wags?" Ryan asked, looking at J.B.
Over the past year or so they'd occasionally discussed the possibility that the original War Wag One might still be lumbering around Deathlands. Trader had gone some time earlier, but the survivors might still be moving on.
"Doubt that. Never get it into the middle of a honey-ambush like this ville."
"It's not good as I'd hoped," Ryan said. "Damage is triple-total. I somehow hope... I don't know what I hoped."
But he knew in his heart.
It was all a part of the grail he'd been seeking for years. Perhaps for most of his life. What fascinated Ryan Cawdor wasn't the present. That was for surviving in, a place for dodging the skull-faced figure with the whispering scythe.
The past was interesting because it linked directly to the future. The more you knew about the one, the better you could anticipate the other. Since he'd met Krysty Wroth and their destinies had become inextricably linked, Ryan had been looking for a special kind of tomorrow. Amazingly Jak Lauren was the only person who might have found that tomorrow.
When he eventually found it for himself, Ryan felt he'd know. Perhaps in some sun-bleached Arizona arroyo. A house surrounded with dogwoods, dripping with Spanish moss, deep in the bayous. Or something, preserved like a fly in amber, in the untouched kernel of a great ville. A place like Newyork.
Now Ryan appreciated the total desolation and realized his dream wasn't going to be found in the city.
"We might as well turn around," he finally said. "Trouble is, the weather's getting worse. Wouldn't fancy trying to get the raft across the river against it."
J.B. nodded. "Can't argue with that. Like Trader used to say, 'Living's mistakes you don't make.' Could head west and find somewhere to shelter."
"Night before last the boy was saying that some of the old subway stations had been excavated and people used the tunnels." Krysty hesitated. "I just have this feeling about the kind of people who'd live down in there."
Mildred had a vague feeling they might not be too far away from one of the stations for the E train. But she wasn't at all certain.
Doc's memory was a great deal more vague. "I could do adequately if I had to show you around the streets of Omaha, Nebraska, two hundred years ago. But I have scant experience of the subways and bus routes of this city, a mere century back. My apologies, friends."
J.B. carried a selection of miniature maps, along with a micro-magnifier, but none of them showed the rectangular web of streets that covered Manhattan Island.
Though the sky had been dull, like cut slate, there was a momentary clearance of cloud. A watery sun peeked through, veiled by the light snow, producing a blurred rainbow that arched high over the island, to the north of them. It was a beautiful sight and they all gazed at it until the curtain in the clouds slid shut again and the sun vanished, dragging the rainbow behind it.
"Is that a good omen?" Mildred asked.
J.B. answered her. "If we all live through the next twenty-four hours, then it's a good omen. If not… then it wasn't."
IN LESS THAN FIFTEEN minutes the temperature had dropped like a pebble down a well. The wind freshened and strengthened, turning into a full-size gale. And it began to snow.
First came a few ragged flakes, large and cottony, like the drifting feathers from a plucked goose. But the flakes grew smaller and more frequent. The day darkened, and visibility fell from four or five hundred yards to less than a hundred feet.
Then to less than fifty feet as the blizzard sharpened its icy teeth.
Ryan was aware that death wasn't all that far away if they didn't find themselves some cover. Fast.
Mildred was already shivering like an aspen, even though J.B. had insisted on her borrowing his coat. Her teeth were chattering and her skin was turning gray. "Sorry, us black folks needs the sun," she joked weakly.
"Lover," Krysty said urgently.
"I know. Before it closed in there seemed to be some slightly bigger ruins toward the west. Let's go. And keep close together."
IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES. The streets were uneven, snow covering the frozen puddles and making every step perilous. If it hadn't been for J.B.'s steadying hand, Mildred would have fallen again and again. Doc was the worst affected, slipping and going down several times, ending up with a wrenched ankle and a limp.
The layer of whiteness blurred everything. Ryan squinted against the wind, now beating in on the right side of his face. His eye was watering, and every time he opened his mouth to draw breath, the tiny flakes drove in between his cold lips. Everywhere he looked there seemed nothing but piles of stone and metal, sometimes fifty or sixty feet high.
Nothing but rubble, with no sign of any sort of entrance or shelter anywhere.
They blindly staggered on, leaning against the wind like a quintet of ragged mimes.
Ryan had a fine sense of spatial awareness, but even he began to lose touch with the realities of distance, time and direction.
In fact they were blundering roughly toward the west. Some roads were totally blocked off by the ruined buildings, making it necessary to detour for three or four blocks to north or south. Because of the relentless wind, Ryan was tending to take the path of least resistance and move toward the south.
"Can't," Mildred protested, her voice so faint that nobody except
the Armorer heard her.
"Ryan!"
"Yo? What is it?" Both men had to shout at the tops of their voices to be heard over the crazed screaming of the wind.
"Got to stop."
"Dead if we do. There's nothing."
J.B. was almost carrying Mildred. "Find lee of ruins. Get close and hope."
Ryan looked at him, reading the desperation in his old friend's eyes.
"Yeah," he yelled. "Right."
Krysty was tugging at his sleeve, trying to attract his attention. She pointed with gloved fingers ahead of them into a wall of unrelieved whiteout.
"Something!"
"What?"
"Big block. Just for a second."
Ryan relayed the message to J.B. and to Doc. The old man was also close to the end of his tether, staggering with exhaustion, ice crusting around his eyes and nose.
Ryan led them in the direction Krysty had shown him.
And there it was, a massive, looming block, hewn from concrete, towering several stories into the snow-filled sky.
There were several entrances at street level, as well as numerous window holes blasted into its long flanks.
"Thank you, Gaia," Krysty breathed, now bringing up the rear with Doc hanging on to her, slowing her progress.
They were all so near the limit that none of them bothered to think about danger. The only menace to them was the weather, and that was relenting.
Ryan was first, leading them into a maze of narrow passages, blacker than midnight. The wind still howled like a demented banshee, but they were out of the snow. He emerged into a wider space, with a faint light filtering from somewhere above him. J.B. was at his shoulder, one arm supporting the semiconscious figure of Mildred.
Krysty and Doc hadn't appeared yet.
Ryan and the others waited for several minutes, but there was no sign of them. And even though he retraced his steps into the whirling storm, Ryan could find no trace of them.
They'd vanished as completely as though they'd been sucked off the face of the earth.
Chapter Nineteen
THE BLOW ACROSS the back of the neck that felled Krysty also dragged Doc down with her. The thick cushion of red hair protected the woman from the worst of the impact, but it still knocked her to the cold stone floor, head spinning, barely conscious.
She was just aware that she was being dragged away, gripped by the wrists, her heels dragging behind her.
The vicious swing of the club that had been aimed at Doc missed him completely, as he was already falling on top of Krysty.
His senses had been numbed by the ferocious power of the storm, and he hardly even noticed he was suddenly lying on his side. There was scuffling going on all around him, and someone kicked him hard under the ribs. It jerked him back toward a sort of awareness, and he realized they had been attacked. Doc tried to yell out, but all of his breath had been snatched from him.
He had just enough awareness to wriggle around and stuff his precious swordstick down his left leg, inside his breeches.
Then he was being dragged, like Krysty, from darkness into a deeper blackness. His nostrils could catch the stink of sweat, and he heard muttered, guttural voices all around him.
Krysty, with her greater sensitivity, knew what had taken them. Her skin crawled at the feeling of the clawed hands holding her. Her sharp ears could catch the rustling of scaled flesh.
They'd been captured by a large force of scalies, maybe the gang Dred had mentioned with an almost superstitious awe.
Help me, Earth Mother, she prayed silently.
ONCE THE DEADLY combination of driving snow and a horrific windchill factor had been thwarted, Mildred began to recover. She sat pressed between Ryan and J.B., all of them sharing the two men's coats. The storm seemed to be passing outside the cavernous building, and there were frail shafts of light appearing from high above them.
"Some kind of warehouse or garage," J.B. guessed.
"Garage," Ryan offered.
"No."
It was the first word Mildred had spoken since they'd all sat together. Her body still trembled, but her lips were recovering normal color. She'd folded her hands inside her clothes, squeezing them to try to bring back circulation.
"No?" Ryan said.
"Bus terminal."
"Buses? Big wags that carried a lot of people all at once."
There was the ghost of a smile. "Good definition, John. Wins the doll. Yeah. The Port Authority Bus Terminal and Air Transcenter. That was what it was called. Means we're way over west, between Eighth and Ninth, fronting on Forty-second."
"How far from the river does that put us?" Ryan asked.
"Close."
"How far?"
"It's about three blocks."
"Mile?"
She shook her head. "Not even that far."
Ryan closed his eye, fighting against anger, a rage at his own stupidity. They'd been warned that the territory close to the river was rampant with gangs of scalies, and he'd pulled them on through the snowstorm right smack into the middle of the reptilian muties' turf. "Fireblast!"
Mildred felt the depths of his anger. "Where d'you think they've gone?"
Ryan took three slow, deep breaths, fighting for self-control. "If I had any idea, then we'd be moving after them. We don't know. Storm's passing. You're getting better. Then we go take a look."
KRYSTY AS NO LIGHTWEIGHT, and it wasn't long before she was unceremoniously dumped, the fall jarring the base of her spine. She rolled around, moaning, clutching at herself, exaggerating how hurt she was so that she could slide the silvered Heckler & Koch P7A-13 from its holster and stuff it into the small of her back, under the jacket.
"Get up or I'll chill ya." The harsh, grating voice lacked any emotion. There was no anger or hatred, yet the flat, unemotional tone made the threat seem that much more savage.
Krysty stood. Doc had also been dropped and was now dusting himself, standing in a curiously stiff-legged way that Krysty guessed immediately was due to his concealed swordstick. There was also enough light for her to see that the old man had also managed to hide his cannon of a Le Mat away from their mutie captors.
As her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, her heart sank. In her years in Deathlands she'd seen plenty of muties. But she'd never seen what looked peculiarly like an army of them.
There were about fifteen scalies surrounding their two captives. All of them were male, mostly standing between five foot six and five foot nine. You didn't very often see a tall mutie. Or an old one, come to that.
They all wore heavy combat boots studded with iron, dark pants with a variety of thick woolens and furs over the top, and all wore identical black berets, with a crude silver lightning flash sewn to the front. The "uniforms" gave them a bizarre, almost militaristic appearance, quite out of keeping with their faces.
Apart from the webbed fingers, which ended in hooked, hornlike nails, the skins of the creatures were a dark greenish-gray and covered in thick, overlapping scales. They mostly had very prominent jaws and small noses, more like porcine snouts, a double row of snaggle teeth, with serrated, rear-facing points, tiny eyes with vertically split pupils and ridges of protective bone over them, and their ears were set flat against the sides of their narrow skulls.
"Stop looking and walk," the nearest of the scalies said, nudging Krysty with a long-shafted spear. Most of them were armed with cudgels, nail-tipped, or with metal bars. Nearly all had daggers stuck into broad belts of rope or leather. Krysty could only see a couple of blasters—one unbelievably battered M-16 carbine and a Saturday night special almost identical to the ones worn by Dred and Retha.
Krysty began to move forward, alongside Doc, and noticed for the first time that they weren't the only prisoners of the scalies' raiding party. Walking in single file ahead of them, linked by chains attached to neck collars, were a dozen or more men and women. Most carried various pieces of scrap metal and wood.
"Slavers," Doc whispered.
"Right."
The passage in front of them opened up into what had probably once been a part of a shopping mall, now completely stripped.
They walked quickly through it, across a place where several different corridors intersected. Krysty looked up and saw that there had once been a great dome over it, but that was melted a century ago and now stood open to the sky. The clouds had peeled away, showing a patch of bright blue. But around their feet lay several inches of fresh-fallen snow, trampled by boots. She carefully picked her way over to an untouched patch a little to one side so that her distinctive boot heels would leave a trail for Ryan and the others to follow.
Come on, lover, she thought to herself.
"SUNSHINE," Mildred said, hissing through her teeth at the cold air that still lay over them.
Bright golden spears, darting in high above them, lanced into corners of the huge concourse. Now they could see faded signs pointing the way to different bus routes, and empty boxes that had once been smart little stores. Rubble filled the corners and was piled against the stout walls.
"You feel ready?" J.B. asked, uncoiling himself and cracking his finger joints.
"Yes, John, I'm ready. I won't slow you down, Ryan. No, don't say you didn't think that. I can recognize the look in your eye. Krysty's been taken, and you want to be off after her on burning feet of fire. I'm ready for that." She reached out and squeezed his hand in hers.
Ryan nodded. "Go back to the street where we came in. Then try and pick up their trail. Shouldn't be that difficult to track them."
"You think she and Doc are…" Mildred hesitated, allowing the words to fall into the cold, dusty stillness.