Ahead of them loomed the shadow of an ancient green truck sitting on six flat tires. With its doors and hood flung open, it looked like some sort of prehistoric monster.
“What is that?” Corrina asked, her voice high and trembling.
Hagy gave it a flash of her light. “Just a truck, child. An old soldier truck, nothing more.” There were more trucks up ahead. Despite the brave face Hagy put on, she approached them warily her scattergun at the ready. She checked each to make sure there wasn’t someone or something hiding behind them. More and more of the trucks had bullet holes in them. These were mainly through the windows.
“They were shooting out,” Hamilton said, toeing old glass that was sprayed across the roadway. No one had to ask why. The soldiers had taken refuge inside and died there as well. Along with the bullet holes there were great splashes of old black blood, and bones of course. There was just a scattering of them at first, gnawed on bits and pieces. But as they went on, the shards of skulls and the broken femurs that resembled spearheads, and the little pieces of rib multiplied into the thousands until they formed a deep carpet that crunched underfoot as they walked.
The seven of them left the trucks behind and came to a mass of strange boxy vehicles, like giant green tractor-looking machines that sported huge machine guns, and enormous cannons from a turret set on top. There were a dozen of these sitting three across and positioned in something of a checkerboard pattern so the ones in the rear could fire along narrow lanes between the ones in front.
Some of the machines had been eaten by fire, some were on their sides twisted and broken, and others were virtually unscratched and seemed completely untouched by the passage of time. Cole knocked a knuckle into the side of one and found it solid as a brick wall. How the Dead-eyes conquered these, he couldn’t understand.
In front of the vehicles, the tunnel was in shambles. There were scorched and gaping holes in the walls and ceiling. Where there was tile at all, it was riddled with smaller holes or shattered completely. Across the roadway were great piles of bones and the remains of some sort of barricade but it had been so thoroughly destroyed that it was impossible to know what it had been made from.
Hagy took a path through the heaps of bones. There seemed to be millions of bones and the piles went on and on, like sand dunes at a beach. The tunnel must have been almost completely filled floor to ceiling with zombies to leave behind this many bones. How many had there been? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? Whatever the number, it must have been terrifying to be one of the soldiers trying to stop them.
Half a mile further on, they came to more of the vehicles. These were almost completely buried beneath more mounds of bones. Once they were beyond these, a diffuse light could be seen making a grey circle in the darkness. They were almost to the Rad Lands and the grey light was the last of the day.
“Remember, no sudden moves,” Hagy said. “Keep your hands off your guns and keep the girl in the middle. If the Crag ask any questions of you, Cole will answer for the group.”
Hamilton and McGuigan looked at each other; both had been lieutenants. “Why him?” Hamilton asked. “He’s not leading us.”
“Because he looks the most like a slag,” she answered tartly. “They don’t trust people that look like you. If it weren’t for the rags, they’d think you were vamps and that you got pockets full of gold. Course the only thing worse than a vamp to them is a taxman, so yeah, Cole’s the leader.”
Cole had forgotten his tats and his chopped hair style. He couldn’t forget the bruises or the swollen eye socket, however. “Let’s do this,” he said. “We’ll stick to the same formation as before.”
They moved in a tight cluster through more bones and past more of the dead vehicles. At the entrance to the tunnel there were more bones, huge mounds of them twice as tall as Cole. The fighting here had been furious and the walls of the highway leading up out of the tunnel were cratered and barely recognizable as walls at all. The same could be said of the land stretching out in front of them.
So much of New Jersey had been a sprawling, crowded, urban mess before the bombs came, but the very eastern part of the state that stopped at the Hudson River had been a concrete jungle where one building was almost stacked on the next. Now it was rubble.
Jersey City had ceased being a city even before the nuclear bombs fell. Thousands of missiles and hundreds of tons of conventional munitions had leveled half the buildings. Time, erosion and the radiation storms had finished the job, creating a wasteland of shattered brick, broken concrete and heaving asphalt. Amazingly some buildings remained upright despite the cataclysm. Most, however, had caved in on themselves or had toppled sideways, leaving two or three stories jutting up like tombstones.
“People live here?” McGuigan asked, staring around in disbelief.
Hagy answered tersely, “Yes.” The twilight shadows made it seem as though they had just crossed the River Styx and were standing on the edge of hell, and she saw that everyone, Corrina included, had reached for a weapon. “No guns! It won’t be long now.”
Despite her words, she kept one hand on the butt of a pistol at her hip as she began winding through the mounds of broken brick and concrete. The streets of the city had mostly disappeared, either enveloped by the rubble, broken by the bombs or eroded into dangerous ravines by the endless rains. There were paths, however. Some were wide enough for a car to drive along; most were little more than trails that twisted and crisscrossed until the little group became turned around when they couldn’t see the lights of New York. From the Jersey side of the river, New York looked almost gay.
They had trekked half a mile before they found the first sign of humanity. There was a whiff of vile smoke on the air. “What the fuck is that?” Cole asked, pulling the rag around his face tighter. “It smells like burning shit.”
“It is,” Hagy said. “Sometimes the Crag burn dung. It’s a good sign for us. It means there’s a horde nearby.”
“Because burning shit keeps the zombies away?” Hamilton asked. “How is this a good sign?”
“Usually, the Crag get their wood from buildings. Breaking walls is loud. Being loud attracts the dead. So does asking stupid questions.” With that, she turned her back on him and started on again. Hamilton snarled a number of curses until Sergeant Phillips shushed him. When Hamilton got angrier, they all shushed him.
He kept cursing, though now he did it under his breath as they followed the harsh scent of the smoke towards the north west. They crossed over the rusted, corroded remains of half a dozen railroad tracks and then passed through a stunted, grey “forest” of gnarled trees. There were maybe forty of them and with their withered limbs and twisted trunks they looked dead, but Hagy assured them that they were not.
“They sleep in the winter,” she told them.
Corrina, who had seen a total of three trees in her life, touched the wood, putting her fingers in the scored marks from the radiation. “They’re not like in the pictures.”
“Nothing ever is,” Cole replied. “How’s the pack? Too heavy?” She insisted that it wasn’t. He didn’t believe her, and as they were supposedly in a safe area, he took the pack and slung it on one shoulder. They hadn’t gone far after that when they heard a scattering of falling stones off to their right. The night had too great a hold on them to see what had caused the sound. It repeated not long after, this time closer.
“It’s them,” Hagy whispered.
“Zombies?” Corrina asked.
“Don’t be stupid, child. It’s the Crag. Probably a look out. We will wait here for them. Spread out, but do not touch your guns!”
The sounds picked up in volume and slowly multiplied until it became obvious they were surrounded. “Parley!” Hagy said, raising her voice slightly. “We come from the city. We come from the city with gifts.”
“In exchange for what, Hagy?” The words were soft and sinister, like they had been spoken by a lizard. “Krupp never gives nothin’ for free.”
“The de
ad. We have Ammo and candy.” Excited whispering broke around them. There were more of the Crag than any of them realized. Hagy turned to make sure that no one was reaching for a gun before she went on, “It’s twenty stones.”
The Crag did not understand normal weights and so dealings were made in stone, of which there was one master stone, which weighed about a pound and a half. More whispering and someone asked in a garbled voice, “Ya, got za shour candy?”
“Yes.”
Her answer brought the Crag out of hiding and a group three times the size of their own emerged from the shadows. They were covered head to toe in rags, hiding their features. Their stink was another matter altogether. Cole had never smelled such rancid body odor. It smelled as if they had never bathed in their entire lives, or washed their clothes for that matter. It was a repulsive eye-watering stench.
As Hagy handed out one piece of candy to each of the Crag, Cole and the others were given as close an inspection as a person could get without being touched. The Crag came within inches to sniff them and to stare into their eyes. They gave Corrina particular attention until Cole growled them away. They were like jackals. Although they had the numbers, they had a healthy fear of a lion like Cole and retreated from the girl.
When this strange ritual was over, one took the lead, guiding the little group through the dark, while the rest seemed to melt into the shadows on either side of them. These invisible Crag kept pace; every once in a while, as Cole picked his way through the mess, he could hear a rock being kicked or a bit of glass cracking under someone’s weight.
Eventually they came to the ruins of a building that had used large blocks of cement for both its foundation and two lower floors; these floors had survived but were a veritable death trap. They entered through a hole in the wall and immediately had to cross a board set over a chasm that dropped away into darkness. The board ran the length of the room and could only be crossed one at a time. It bowed badly when Cole crossed and made a cracking sound when Hamilton was halfway to the other side.
This had the Crag chuckling quietly and placing bets as to whether he would fall or not. He made it across, however the board broke under Brunker and he plunged down with a shriek.
“Shut the fuck up!” snapped Hagy, as she dug out her flashlight. “These are the Rad Lands you pussy. We don’t scream like little girls here.” She partially covered the lens before turning it on. In the filtered light they could see Brunker twelve feet down sitting in something of a heap between broken slabs of concrete. “You dead?”
“No,” he snapped, through gritted teeth. “Just cut up some and my fucking knee is killing me.” He pushed himself to a standing position and worked one shoulder around in a circle. “Fucking board. Who uses a junky old fucking board as a bridge?”
Hagy hissed, “Sst!” at him as if he were a cat that had just jumped on the dining room table. Around her, the Crag were glaring through the slits in their rags. “Shut your trap and get out of there.” She spun the light toward the wall she was perched on. There were enough handholds for him to climb up. Hamilton and Sergeant Phillips reached down and pulled him up when he had scrambled close.
“Don’t insult them again or they will kill you,” Hagy whispered to Brunker.
Looking like a petulant teenager, he muttered, “I was insulting the board not them.”
“When they’re gutting you, make sure you tell them that,” she snapped and turned away, clicking off the flashlight. The group waited a minute until their night eyes returned, and then they followed one of the Crag women through the building until they reached an elevator shaft where ancient metal cables had been restrung. One end was looped around a girder; the other snaked down into deeper darkness.
“Cole,” Corrina whispered as the Crag woman wrapped herself around the cable and slid down. “I-I don’t know if I can do this. I-I don’t like heights. And…and what if the thing breaks? Huh? How far down does it go? You can’t see the bottom.”
Her fear was infecting Brunker who was tight-lipped and pale. McGuigan didn’t look much better as Phillips accidentally kicked a rock and it seemed to take forever before it smacked the bottom with an echoing sound that had the other Crag frowning.
“Hey, relax. If they can do it so can you,” he told her. “I’ll take your pack, so all you got to do is hold on and slide. It’ll be fun. Kids do this all the time and they never fall.” Her look was one of terror rather than anticipation of fun. She wasn’t a normal kid. If someone asked her what her idea of a fun time was, she would have to strain to come up with an answer that didn’t involve getting high or drunk.
He made sure to hold her tight as she wrapped her legs and then arms around the cable. “There you go. Just slide, and don’t scream. You’ll be at the bottom in a second.” When he let go, she slid away into the darkness, her pale, terrified face looking up at him as if accusing him of betraying her by letting go. Cole listened intently with his breath caught up in his throat, afraid that he would hear a scream followed by a sickening thud.
She landed lightly and gushed in relief, “I made it. Oh, God, I made it.”
Brunker went next, pushing Cole aside. He was just as afraid as Corrina and wanted to hurry before his courage left him completely. He asked for Cole to hold him while he got situated on the cable. With the heavy pack and the scatterguns, it wasn’t easy.
“Don’t scream,” Hamilton said and chuckled, elbowing a whey-faced Sergeant Phillips.
“Fuck you,” Brunker shot back, his knuckles white on the cable. His grip was so tight that he went down in spurts, a few inches at a time.
Cole was next. The packs were ungainly and the bandoliers for his guns kept his shoulders from coming in properly. In that transition stage from solid ground to an inch-wide cable suspended over black air, even he had a moment of “nerves” as he called the fear that had his heart in his throat. Then his legs wrapped around the cable and his raw hands found a grip.
Like Brunker, he went down in a controlled jerking motion; control being the word that mattered.
He slid through the elevator shaft which gave way to some sort of fissure within the earth with uneven dirt walls that looked as though they could collapse at any second. Thankfully, the fissure wasn’t all that deep and soon he was on the broken floor of a “natural” tunnel. It was natural only in the sense that no one had dug it by hand. A nuclear bomb falling ten miles to the west had created the crack and thousands like it.
Cole found himself in near absolute darkness and the people around him weren’t even shadows. They were a hint of an outline only and right away he stumbled into someone.
It was Hagy. “Get out of the way. They might fall on you.” She tugged him to the side where he knocked into Brunker, who muttered a curse and shoved him away into a bundle of rags. From within it a small hand found his arm.
Corrina whispered, “Is that you, Cole?”
“Yeah. Here, hold onto my pack, I need to keep my hands free.” Just in case, he thought. He didn’t trust the Crag. He didn’t trust Hamilton and the others, and he sure as hell didn’t trust the governor. But what about Ashley? Could he trust her? A vision of her was just forming in his mind when Hamilton thudded down, stumbled and fell into Cole.
“Why is it so fucking dark?” he muttered.
“Because you didn’t bring no fucking light with you,” one of the Crag said to the laughter of the rest.
Cole could hear Hamilton suck in a breath to reply. Before he could, Cole grabbed him. “Shut your trap,” he ordered. “We’re guests, remember?” Hamilton simmered in dark silence as the rest of the group came down. Only then was a match struck and a lantern lit. At first it was dazzling, but gradually their eyes got used to the little flame.
It gave off enough light to guide them through the long jagged crack in the earth. It was rugged and dangerous. Eventually it opened into a cavern of sorts, that was made partially from the foundation of a building and partially from what appeared to be a cave. There were a number
of small hazy fires going and the smell from the burning shit made Cole want to gag.
“Thish way,” a slurring voice said. A humped form guided the group along a worn path between what Cole had at first thought were boulders or jutting outcrops of rock but were in fact small tents held up by old rusting poles and layered with ancient, threadbare blankets. For the most part, the tents were empty as the Crag were waiting on them in the center of the cavern around the largest of the fires.
The Crag were so filthy that they blended in with the dirt and in the dim light it was hard to count them. Cole guessed there were at least fifty of them staring at the little group, some with what amounted to hunger on their twisted faces. They were a deformed, ugly people. Their heads were like potatoes and no two had the same shape. Their bodies were hunched, twisted, and lopsided. Slag was not their problem, in fact they were not trogs at all. Radiation had warped them even before birth and now it was killing them slowly.
Many had burns, red, scabbed and wet. Few of them had a full set of teeth and what teeth they did have were set in swollen oozing gums. Every face seemed to sport sickening, weeping sores, especially around their mouths. What hair they had on their misshapen heads grew in greasy patches so that they looked as though they had contracted mange like a dog in the pound.
Their leader sat on a throne of a chair. It had been dragged from the remains of a church fifty years before by the first “King of the Crag.” The current king was named Mark Campana and he ruled because he was the biggest and the straightest, and because he had killed the last king with a hammer. He sat like a shaggy beast on his filthy throne holding a rifle like it was a scepter.
“Hagy, it has been a long time since you showed your pretty face.” Coming from anyone else that might have been an insult, but Campana was so hideous he made Hagy look plain in comparison. “Why is that? Hmm? And why you come now, hmm?” He leaned forward into the light so that Cole could see his face looked melted on one side so that his right eye sat higher than his left. Even with the filth and the scraggy beard, Campana could not hide the lie which sat plainly on his face. He knew something.
Dead Eye Hunt (Book 2): Into The Rad Lands Page 25