Red Equinox

 9 in the Deathland series

 

 James Axler

 

Everyone needs a hand to guide,

an arm to support.

A light in the darkness

and a best friend.

This one, as before and for always,

with all of my loving,

is for Liz.

 

 

 

First edition June 1989

ISBN 0-373-62509-X

 

 

 

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

--Winston Churchill, October 1, 1939

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter One

 

Western wind, when wilt thou blow,

That small rain down can rain?

 

DOC TANNER WAS truly happy. The assorted horrors that had blighted his mind and brought him teetering to the far edge of madness had faded away from him like the dew in the morning.

Oh, if my love were in my arms,

And I in my bed again.

It was a fine summer afternoon in Omaha, Nebraska, in the year 1896.

He was twenty-eight years old and had been married for just a few weeks over five years.

"Such happiness, Emily," he said in his rich, deep voice, smiling at her.

His wife smiled back and reached out to him, squeezing his hand between her fingers. She wore a dress of flowered gingham, with a bonnet trimmed in white lace. Her high button boots had picked up shreds of dry grass and seed from the meadow where they'd come for their picnic.

The children played on a patterned blanket close by. Two-year-old Rachel, toddling bravely on stumpy little legs, laughed as she vainly reached out to capture a bright butterfly. Her baby brother, Jolyon, approaching his first birthday, was content to lie on his back and kick his bare feet at the soaring golden ball that floated in the perfect blue sky. An angled parasol protected his sensitive skin from the direct heat.

Oh, if my love were in my arms,

And I in my bed again.

Emily had a beautiful voice, a trained contralto that thrilled the air.

The remains of their meal lay spread over the damask cloth some slices of honey-roasted ham; three different jars of pickles; half a new-baked loaf, and some butter wrapped in damp muslin to help keep it cool; a bowl of lettuce and tomatoes, wilting a little now; and a crock containing several different cheeses.

"You always like cheese, don't you, dearest?" Doc said. "I mean that you used to like it, didn't you?"

Emily turned to him, her smile sliding away into bewilderment. In the distance Doc could hear the faint sound of rumbling thunder. Clouds were gathering along the horizon of the prairie, threatening a storm. The horse that stood patiently in the shade of a clump of live oaks, freed from the traces of the wagon, whickered softly.

"Why do you say that I used to like it, my darling? I still do. Most truly."

Doc blinked. For a moment his vision blurred and he shook his head. His wife's face, better known even than his own, seemed to shimmer as though a fog had dropped between them.

"Emily-" he began, but a clap of thunder drowned out his words. The clouds were coming swiftly toward them, changing color from white to leaden gray to a peculiar pinkish-purple hue. They resembled a livid bruise, he thought.

"The children, beloved," Emily said. Yes, it was Emily. It was her.

"Indeed. Let us take them to the carriage and get shelter from the storm."

"I'll gather everything up. Ready for next time." She looked at him, and it was as though a great dagger of smooth ice had been thrust into his heart. "Because there will never be another time, Theo, my dear."

"I know that. By the three! I fear that I disremember what."

All around him, the grass was growing, sprouting faster, so that baby Jolyon had already vanished. And Rachel's head barely showed above the waving tips.

"Oh, help me, Papa, for I am frightened," she cried in a lisping, squeaky voice.

Western wind, when wilt thou blow,

That small rain down can rain?

But the voice wasn't that of Emily. It was a different, younger voice. Doc knew that he recognized it.

"Quickly, my dearest!"

"Help me with the children, Emily. I can't see them. The grass is so long that they have simply vanished from sight."

Smoke.

Now he could smell smoke.

Behind him the horse whinnied and tossed its head, snapping the bridle and galloping away, eyes rolling, hooves pounding like thunder.

"Emily! Emily!"

Doc dropped to his knees, fumbling in the grass, feeling it moving over his skin like sentient human hair. He couldn't feel the children, but he could hear them, giggling together, their bubbling laughter seeming to come from all around.

The smell of smoke was growing ever stronger, and now he could actually hear the crackling of flames.

His wife was no longer to be seen. Through the mounting horror, Doc remained calm. He stood on the tips of his toes to try to spot Rachel and Jolyon, but now the grass was as high as his shoulders. The grove of live oaks had gone, and in their place stood a mound of earth, with a circle of stone pillars at its heart. And there stood

"Emily!" he shouted, voice cracking. He started to run toward her, recognizing the mane of golden hair that hung to her waist, the bright crimson skirt, halfway up her long thighs, the high scarlet boots and the sound of tiny spurs, like silver bells, tinkling as she walked.

Flames, dazzling yellow and orange, were swooping across the skyline, exploding through the tops of the grass.

The wagon, horse, childrenall were gone. All that was left was Emily.

"Emily?" Doc called. "Emily!"

"Lori," Doc said. "Oh, if my love were in my arms." He reached out as he stumbled toward her.

The tall teenager turned at his shout, beginning the familiar, gentle smile that had brought him such happiness for so many months. They were nearly close enough to touch.

Smoke billowed into Doc's face, blinding him and making him cough, but he felt his arms close around Lori.

Emily.

Lori.

He opened his eyes again, his ears filling with the roar of the fire, his skin scorching, his clothes beginning to smolder from the heat.

Doc experienced the illusion that his body was shrinking, becoming brittle and frail. His bones were layered in dust, his skin tight and dry.

He was holding Emily, Lori, Emily, Lori, closely to him. Doc began to smile reassuringly at her, but the smile died, stillborn. His mouth filled with bile as bitter as wormwood and he began to scream.

Doc held a log of charred, blackened wood, shaped like a human being, smoking, with parts of the flesh still glowing like tiny rubies. The scorched ends of whitened bone protruded here and there through the roasted meat. A stubble of hair remained on the seared skull, like a cornfield after the fires of autumn have cleansed it. There were no eyes in the bubbling sockets, and the mouth was a sighing cave of agonizing death.

"My love is in my arms," a voice whispered in Doc's ear.

He dropped the corpse, stepping back from it, and saw that it still lived. The burned branches of arms and legs still moved in feeble, uncoordinated motion, like a willow near a shaded pool as the breeze touches it.

"Die," Doc begged.

But it wouldn't.

It was even struggling to rise, fingerless hands reaching plaintively toward him in a mockery of prayer.

"For the love of God, Montresor," Doc moaned, waving helplessly at the creature with his swordstick, the silver lion's head gripped firmly in his gnarled fist.

The mouth opened. "And I in my bed again," it croaked.

Doc Tanner began to scream, and the noise woke the other five people who lay sprawled around the mat-trans chamber.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 RYAN CAWDOR OPENED his eye.

The walls of the gateway they'd jumped from had been dull gray armaglass. That redoubt had been situated in the quake-torn remnants of what had once been known, nearly a hundred years ago, as California, way back before the Great Madness when the skies grew dark and a civilization died. A world had almost died, as well. The surface of the Earth was now dotted with no more than small, inbred, isolated settlements, often with a high rate of bizarre mutations.

On the far side of the six-sided room, Doc Tanner was sobbing to himself very quietly, like a tiny cornered kitten. His mouth sagged open and a thread of spittle dangled into his lap. One hand still gripped the silver lion's head hilt of his ebony swordstick. Ryan could see that the old man had been crying, with gobbets of tears clinging to the gray stubble on his cheeks and chin.

The sudden, shocking death of Doc's girlfriend, Lori Quint, had horrified them all. The rushing fire had dashed all hope of a rescue. There had been no chance even of a decent burial. Bearing in mind the fragile state of Doc Tanner's mind, it wasn't out of the question that he'd slipped straight into a catatonic madness.

Ryan sighed, massaging his temples with his fingers. Making a jump was like having some crazed mutie with iron gloves rummaging around inside your brain. Ryan had once been fed some jolt that contained a quantity of synthesized spin. His head had felt like it was being sucked dry and sandblasted all at the same time. Using a mat-trans gateway was much worse.

He coughed and reached down automatically for his G-12 caseless Heckler & Koch assault rifle, fingers stroking its smooth body. Ryan shuffled himself to a more upright position, wincing as the butt of his handblaster dug into his hip.

To clear his scrambled mind he ran through a check on the specifications of the pistol.

"Schweizerische Industrie-Gesellschaft Sauer of Eckenforde, model 226, 9 mm. Overall length is 7.62 inches. Barrel length is 4.41 inches. Weight, loaded, is 25.52 ounces. Fifteen rounds. Push-button release."

"You didn't mention the built-in baffle silencer," J. B. Dix called from the opposite side of the chamber.

"I was coming to it." Ryan grinned at the diminutive armorer.

"Sure you were. Rad-blast it! These jumps still make me feel like throwing up." J.B. carefully unfolded his wire-rimmed glasses from a pocket of his worn leather jacket and wiped them on his sleeve. He held them up to the ceiling lights then placed them on his nose. He looked at Doc, who sat next to him.

The old man's eyes were closed and he was still weeping, but the mewing sounds of his distress had ceased. J.B. caught Ryan's eye, and he tapped his own forehead meaningfully. "Could be Lori's chilling's pushed him into the back room for keeps."

"Could be."

Krysty Wroth, next in line to Ryan, was also awake. She brushed a hand through her fiery mane of scarlet hair and sniffed. "Thought I was going to float around in the dark forever. There has to be a better way of traveling a thousand miles in a couple of seconds." She looked across at Doc. "Hope you aren't right, J.B., about him. The old-timer's hold on what's real and what isn't was never too, strong. Lori dying like that It's enough we got a sick freezie on our hands without Doc going slack-mouthed on us."

The freezie was lying on his back next to Krysty. A thin, trickle of blood seeped from a corner of his lips, through the black stubble of his sprouting beard. His horn-rimmed glasses lay on the floor on one of the glowing metal disks.

Ryan Cawdor looked at the man.

When Richard Neal Ginsberg had gone into the cryo center in October of the year 2000, only three months before sky-dark, he'd been thirty years old, and a top scientist and electronics expert, working on aspects of the mat-trans chambers known as gateways. He had also been suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis"Lou Gehrig's disease"an incurable progressive disease that leads to unsteadiness, wasting of the muscles and exhaustion.

Rick Ginsberg had been woken from his long freezing, expecting to find himself in some future world of wonderously advanced medicine and science that would cure his ailment. Instead, he'd been jerked to life in the Deathlands, still terminally ill, though the sickness was prone to periods of remission.

"Hell's bloody bells!" Rich moaned, turning on his side and beginning to retch.

"Know how feels," Jak said, the last of the six to recover. "Head's like gaudy-house shit-bucket." The boy stood up, staggering slightly, pressing his pale hand against the armaglass. "Wonder where fuck are this time?" he asked, as laconic as ever.

Jak was fifteen years old, as skinny as whipcord and one of the best hand-to-hand fighting machines that Ryan had ever seen. And he'd seen some good ones in his time. Jak had hair as white as the driven snow on the Sierra peaks, and eyes as red as a laser death-sight.

Ryan forced himself to stand, hating the dizziness and weakness that a jump always brought on. He leaned against the wall, glimpsing his own reflection a tall man with long, curling black hair, a patch covering his left eye. A vivid cicatrix seamed his right cheek from near the corner of his eye to the corner of his narrow, cruel mouth.

"I look like a one-legged whore could spit in my face and knock me down," he muttered.

"No different from usual, lover," Krysty replied, reaching up for his helping hand.

He pulled the woman to her feet, aware of the lithe strength in her body. He felt a surge of passion for her, a passion that he knew in his heart was closer to love than anything he'd ever known in his thirty-five years.

"Doc," she called.

The metal disks that patterned ceiling and floor had finally lost their glow, fading to cold, dull metal. Everyone except Doc and Rick had gotten up from the floor. The freezie was on hands and knees, breathing hard through his open mouth.

Krysty walked across the chamber and knelt by Doc's side, holding his hand in hers.

"Doc?" she repeated.

He blinked and managed to sit up, with her arm around his shoulders. "I fear that I have been crying, my dear," he said, wiping at his red-rimmed eyes with trembling fingers. "Made the most awful ass of myself, I expect. But I dreamed, you see."

"It's all right, Doc," Ryan said. "We all got dreams some of the time. You don't have any dreams, then they can't come true."

"Not that sort of dream, Ryan, my dear fellow. Oh, my head is splitting. More of a nightmare. I was on a picnic with my dearest Emily and the two little babes. But there was-" He stopped suddenly and looked around the gateway.

"What is it, Doc?" Krysty asked.

"Where is my- Where is Lori? Where has she gone, my own?"

"Fire, Doc," Jak told him. "Fell and got burned. Nobody could've helped. No fucking chance."

The old man looked puzzled. "Then, she is dead. Ah, the dream contained the- Then, what year is this, my comrades? For a moment I thought I had ascended to Heaven."

"Hell, Doc," Rick said, pulling himself to his feet with the aid of a stout bamboo walking stick.

The old man clutched Krysty and began to sob again, shoulders quivering, the ragged noise of his crying the only sound in the total stillness.

Ryan bit his lip. If Doc was going to give up on them, then there would be a hard decision to make. He liked the old man very much, but the safety of the group came first.

He knew something of Doc's past and knew that his mind had improved since they'd plucked him from the living death of Mocsin and its hated sec boss, Cort Strasser. But it hadn't been the ville of Jordan Teague that had stripped a few notches from Doc's mental equipment. For that you had to go way, way backmore than a hundred years.

In the 1990s, scientists working on Overproject Whisper were researching the possibility of time travel"chron-jumps" as they were known. The gateways hidden within max-sec redoubts were part of Project Cerberus, and the scientists working in that area of the project were developing matter-transmission.

Several experiments were carried out in "trawling" someone from the past. The failures were indescribably horrific. There was, as far as was known, only one successful trawlDoctor Theophilus Tanner, a young married scientist from 1896.

But Doc proved to be a damnably difficult and uncooperative guinea pig. After several attempts to chron-jump himself back to his wife and family, the men and women working on Overproject Whisper finally jumped him forward, only weeks before sky-dark. Nearly a century into the future, he arrived in the ville of Mocsin, up in the Darks, where Ryan Cawdor had helped to rescue him. Two chron-jumps and two hundred years of disorientation had physically aged the man and reduced his brain to a mixture of oatmeal and pearls. When Ryan had first met him, there hadn't been that many pearls.

And now?

Rick was taking deep breaths, swaying on his feet. "Bastard things, these jumps. They always bad as this?"

Doc gave a croaking laugh. "Upon my soul, Master Ginsberg! Mostly they are much worse than this!"

The freezie shook his head. "I'm not sure I can live with this kind of traveling. I'm so shook up it feels like my guts are in tomorrow and my brain's in yesterday. Or the day before."

"Where are we?" Jak asked. "Room's smaller than most."

Ryan hadn't noticed it, but the teenager was right. The chamber was slightly smaller than any of the others they'd jumped from. Not by a lot, maybe three-quarters the size.

J.B. nodded. "Yeah, and the air's not that good, either. Stale. Like the conditioners not working properly."

Krysty licked her lips, tasting. "It's like old air. And the light's weaker than in the other redoubts we've been in."

"How about it, Rick? You're the gateway expert in the group."

"Don't know, Ryan. I can give you the batting stats for the Yankees back to the Second World War and the rushing stats for the Giants for the same period. But I don't know squat about where all the gateways were or if any of them deviated from the standard norm."

"One way find out," Jak said, moving to the heavy door of the chamber. The albino began to heave at the control handle.

Nothing happened.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

"FUCKER'S JAMMED!"

Everyone had tried it, pushing, heaving and lifting. Even Rick had leaned against the armored door, ear pressed to the lock, fumbling at the handle while everyone else kept silent and waited to see what happened.

"Nothing," he pronounced.

It was only then that the grim reality of their position struck Ryan Cawdor.

The controls of a gateway were triggered in one simple way. After the numerals and letter coordinates had been set on the coded panel in the outer room, the closing of the door initiated the technical process of the jump. If you couldn't open the door, you couldn't start a jump.

"We're trapped here," J.B. said quietly, reaching the same conclusion as Ryan.

"Looks that way."

Rick sat on the floor with a sigh. "This is all my fault, isn't it?"

"How d'you figure that?" Krysty asked.

"I worked on these goddamned gateways, didn't I? I knew about how they functioned."

"But you never knew all the transmit codes, did you?" Doc asked.

"No, but I knew the codes to make sure you didn't hit a damaged gateway, and the thirty-minute automatic recall code." Rick shook his head, lips trembling, on the edge of tears. "And now I forgot them. All that bullshit I put up with for years about sec clearance. If I could've remembered that, we'd be on our way out of here real soon. But I can't can't remember it. I think it started with a- No, I can't recall any of it."

"No point talking," Ryan said. "Wastes breath. Wastes time. Mebbe you'll remember it one day. Mebbe not. Either way, it doesn't help us any stuck in here now."

"Blasters?" Jak asked.

"Ricochet," J.B. replied.

It was true. The armaglass walls of the chamber would bounce back bullets from their blasters with lethal effect.

"Got some plas-ex," suggested J.B, the armorer of the group, just as he'd been the armorer to the Trader during the years that he and Ryan had ridden the war wags together.

Ryan shook his head. "Last resort time. Same as bullets. Any kind of explosion in here and we'd be picking bits of wall out of our bellies. Gotta be a better way."

"Over, under or around," Krysty said. "Isn't that what Trader used to say when there was a real serious problem?"

"Yeah. Trouble is, lover, we got the same kinda stuff all around us. And over and under, too. It's the door or it's nothing."

"I could use the Earth Mother's force," she said after a long pause.

Nobody said anything. Rick looked up at her. "Earth Mother? What's that, Krysty? Sounds like something out of San Francisco in the good old flowery sixties."

"You know what it does to you," Ryan warned, ignoring the freezie's question.

"Got a better idea, lover?" she replied, smiling at him. "I'll be all right. Just need a rest after I've done it."

"Take no notice of Richard Ginsberg. Pretend he's not there. Bloody invisible man, that's what I am," Rick complained.

"Sorry. From when I was a skinny sprat, back in the ville of Harmony, I was being trained. Taught certain well, powers, I guess. My mother, Sonja, always told me to strive for life. Now, if I go inside myself, I can sometimes get the power. I can't describe it any other way, Rick."

"Let me try the door one more time," Ryan suggested. He'd only seen Krysty use the mysterious power on a few occasions, but he'd seen how his woman was devastated by the aftereffects.

The handle moved an inch or so, then it stopped solid. The doorframe looked as if it had been twisted and warped, probably the result of the earth-shifts caused by the massive nuking.

"No," he said, "not going to move."

"I'll try it. Might as well sit down a while. It takes a little time."

Ryan hunkered down next to Rick, while the other three ranged themselves around the six-sided gateway. Doc managed a half smile in Ryan's direction, then folded his arms on his bony knees and lowered his head onto them.

Krysty turned away and leaned against the cool glass wall, closing her eyes, relaxing her whole body. Her arms hung loosely at her sides and her lips moved as she began to psych herself into the mystic depths of her arcane power.

"Gaia, aid me! Send me the blessed strength of your power. Draw it from the earth, and the sea. From the mountain and the valley. From the sky, the sun and the moon. From the cold stars. From the desert and the lake. From the chem storm and from the tumbling wind."

Her voice was becoming dulled and flat. She swayed back and forth, fists clenching. Ryan watched her closely, seeing the trickle of crimson blood from her hands, where her own nails were gouging half-moons from her skin. Krysty moved a few steps to her left, until she was pressed against the door. Her flaming mane of hair shifted uneasily, coiling at the nape of her slender neck.

"Gaia! Gaia, help me. For Mother Sonja and all her wisdom. For nail and skin. For eye and tooth. And for the blessing of the blood. Gaia, help me for the blessing of blood!"

She was trembling as though a fever possessed her. Through the thin material of her shirt, Ryan could see that her nipples had hardened. She was breathing faster, the words coming more harshly. The climax was close.

"Gaia! Oh, Gaia, help me! Give me the power, the power, the power! Now!"

She seized the lever in both hands, putting all her strength against it. Ryan could actually hear her muscles cracking with the enormous strain. The soles of her boots creaked against the floor. Veins stood out across her temples like throbbing cords, the sinews in her jaw tightened.

"Judas H. Priest!" Rick breathed with an almost reverential awe.

"Gaia," she moaned. The door handle still hadn't moved.

"Can't do it," Jak whispered.

"I thought it- No, wrong I guess," J.B. muttered.

Doc yelled out loud, making them all jump. "Yes, yes, Miss Wroth. Epur si muove. Galileo was right. Yes, it does move!"

 

"ONLY PROBLEM IS, Krysty bent the handle and ripped the lock apart. Could be difficult to get the little booger patched up ready for when we want to jump out of here. Wherever 'here' is," Rick concluded as he finished his examination of the broken lock on the chamber door.

Krysty lay on the smooth floor, her head cradled in Ryan's lap. The sentient hair had gone limp, seeming to lose its bright color. Her eyes were closed and her skin was parchment pale. Ryan was chafing her hands between his.

The supernatural effort of wrenching the jammed door open had carried her over the brink of total exhaustion. Her pulse was fluttering and irregular, her breathing shallow. As soon as the metal had crunched apart and the chamber entrance had begun to swing open, she had let go her hold and slumped semiconscious to the floor, where Ryan had been just in time to catch her.

"How long before the sweet child has recovered sufficiently for us to continue with our perilous voyage of exploration?" Doc asked.

"Hour or so," Ryan replied, smoothing Krysty's forehead with his long, muscular fingers.

"Make that a day or so, lover," she said, opening one eye and managing a weak smile. Krysty licked her lips. "Could do with a drink. Anyone got any prenuke brandy? Uncle Tyas McCann back in Harmony had a dozen bottles. Used to have a sip on special occasions. Best I ever had."

"I guess that means you're feeling a whole lot better." J.B. grinned.

"I feel like I might not die after all," she replied. "But I'd surely like some eats and some drink. Calling on the Earth Mother always drains me right down."

Ryan glanced at J.B. questioningly. "Ready to move?"

The armorer nodded. "Why not?"

Everyone was standing, except Krysty. She shrugged off Ryan's hand and pulled herself to her feet, with a little help from the gray wall. She shook her head. "Something's not right. Don't know what, but I can feel it. The air or Don't know."

"Let's go," Ryan said, leading the way, blaster cocked and ready. Everyone else had their handguns drawn, except Rick. Despite all of Ryan's efforts, and the urging of the others in the group, he'd steadfastly kept to his old nineties peacenik beliefs. Shortly before they'd left Snakefish, Rick had been forced by circumstances to finally use a blaster against another human being. But he'd hated the experience and hated his new friends who had compelled him to pick up a loaded gun and squeeze the trigger.

He was unarmed now, except for the heavy bamboo cane.

Ryan knew what to expect beyond the damaged door to the gateway. There would be a small room about twelve feet square, probably completely empty. Most of the buried and hidden redoubts that they'd discovered so far had been deserted and abandoned.

Beyond the antechamber would be the main control room for the mat-trans unit, filled with flickering lights and humming computers. All of the massive fortress complexes had been run by independent nuke-power plants. Most of them still functioned even after a hundred years of neglect.

And beyond that control room would be the locked sec doors that sealed the gateway off from the rest of the redoubt. Normally, if there was danger, it came when those doors were opened.

Ryan stepped outside the chamber, pausing and glancing quickly around.

"Not the same," he announced.

There was no small anteroom. The armaglass door swung back to reveal a control room, but it was tiny compared to the others that they'd seenbarely twenty feet across, with a single, simplified master console. Ryan recognized some of the basic command units from other redoubts.

"Why so small?" Jak asked wonderingly.

"Experimental?" J.B. suggested. "Or a real small redoubt."

"There's some state-of-the-art technology in here," Rick said, limping heavy-footed around the comp-displays. "A lot of real costly miniaturization and laser-tech boards. Not experimental, J.B. No way, Jose."

"This place is inordinately clean, is it not?" Doc observed, running a finger along the top of one of the desks, showing it untouched by dust. "And I do believe.. Yes." He stooped and peered underneath. "I think we should exercise a little care in what we touch in this place."

"Why?" Krysty asked.

Ryan knelt down and looked where the old man pointed, straightening slowly. "See what you mean, Doc."

"What is it?" the woman repeated.

"Place is boobied. Nice little packets of plas-ex, some shiny detonators and plenty of red wire and green wire and even some blue wires."

"Sabotaged, you mean?" Rick said, puzzled. "Who would do that? And why? It isn't as if the good old U.S. of A. was in any danger of being invaded. Who were they hoping to catch?"

"Could be demolition charges. Could be they were just taking precautions." J.B. scratched the side of his nose, looking carefully at the wiring, but not touching anything. "No. Definitely antipersonnel. Not big enough to blow the building. Take your head off in a messy kind of way."

"Cut 'em?" Ryan asked.

"Not a lot of point. Nothing on the deck here we need."

"We have to repair that door," Krysty reminded them, "or we don't get out of here again."

Rick had been looking at the damaged portal to the gateway. "Not easy, lady. Not easy at all. The main contacts need some serious electrical work."

"Can you do it?"

"Sure, Ryan. I might be dying and my memory's got more holes than the Jets' defense, but I can still do me some wiring." He paused. "But it'll take some time, Ryan. A couple of days heavy work, the way it looks to me."

"We'll take a look around first. Then make a decision on what you do. And when. First thing's to get us some food and drink."

"Leave this?" J.B. asked, gesturing to the wired-up explosives.

"Yeah. Plas-ex that old might blow if you look at it wrong."

"Do you suppose trying to use the gateway again triggers the boobies? Then I fear that we would find ourselves in the deepest ordure."

"We all gotta go sometime, Doc." Ryan grinned. "Let's cross that overpass when we come to it."

Krysty was standing still, staring vacantly into space across the control room. She shook her head. "Something bad here. It doesn't feel like any redoubt I've ever been in."

"Danger?" Jak asked.

"Not immediate. But Can't find the handle for it."

"No point sticking around. We'll worry about that broken lock when we're ready to leave, Rick. At least the main doors don't look like they've been tampered with."

The hugely strong sec doors were painted a very light shade of green. The control lever was a darker green.

And it was in the Open position.

"Think it's mined?" J.B. asked.

"Probably," Ryan guessed.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Four

 

 Jak spotted the wire.

"Look!"

A thin pale blue length of wire ran into the crack in the wall, behind the massive sec-steel hinges. J.B. traced it with a cautious finger, watchful for any mercury tremblers or prox-fuses. But it was a very straightforward piece of plas-ex plus detonator. The actual explosive was concealed on a ridge above the top of the doors.

"Nobody been in here since sky-dark," the Armorer said.

"Could be recent."

J.B. shook his head at Ryan's suggestion. "No. Not stuff wired this way. It's crude, and it's also old. Besides, it would've blown if anyone had tried to enter."

"Cut it?"

"Yeah." J.B. dragged over a wooden chair and stood on it, drawing his Tekna knife and easing the needle point behind the wire.

"Everyone take cover," Ryan ordered, crouching behind one of the consoles in the corner of the strangely cramped room. Krysty knelt beside him, with Jak, Doc and Rick farther along, near the wall.

"What if it blows?" the freezie asked.

"Keep tight and small on the floor, hands over your ears, eyes shut. And keep your mouth open. That way you keep the blast damage to a minimum."

"Thanks, Ryan. Thanks a lot."

"Stick head between knees and kiss ass goodbye," Jak sniggered.

"Everyone ready?" J.B. yelled. "Then here we go."

The snick of the knife cutting through the wire was followed immediately by the deafening boom of the explosion.

Despite having followed his own instructions, Ryan felt the pressure against his eardrums, the plas-ex blowing and filling the room with noise and fine white dust.

"Fireblast!" he coughed. "J.B.! Hey, you all right there?"

Jak moved first, darting toward the entrance doors, ducking under the blinding cloud. "He's here, out cold. Blood on him."

Ryan was the second one there, stooping alongside the white-haired boy, seeing the slight figure of John Barrymore Dix lying like a child's discarded doll, one arm crooked, legs doubled under him. His glasses were hanging on one ear and his beloved fedora had vanished. Blood oozed from J.B.'s ears, nostrils and open mouth. The Tekna was still gripped firmly in his right hand.

"Breathing," Jak pronounced, feeling for the pulse beneath J.B.'s right ear. "Strong beat."

"Roll him onto his side so that he doesn't risk choking," Doc suggested.

"Leave him be!" Krysty demanded, leaning over Ryan to look at J.B.

"Shoulder's out," Jak observed. "Put back now or big problem. See it 'fore."

J.B.'s eyes flickered open and rolled in their sockets. "Kid's right. Put back now, Ryan. Do it for me." His eyes closed again and his body tensed, anticipating the pain to come.

"Could be he's snapped a rib or two," Rick said worriedly. "Try anything and you could hurt him real bad."

"Already hurting real bad, freezie," J.B. muttered, keeping his eyes shut. "Listen, Ryan, before you do it. There was a second charge. Never seen it. Cut the wire and it blew. Must've lost most of its power. Should have taken me off at the shoulders. Okay. Now do it."

Riding with the Trader, Ryan Cawdor had seen most every kind of wound or sickness or injury known to man or to woman.

Traveling over rough terrain, often on broken-down highways corrugated by the ripple effect of nukings, meant some bumpy journeys. A sudden turn or lurch could cause sprained wrists, broken ankles and, often, dislocated shoulders. The cure for that was fairly simple.

Painful, but simple.

While Doc and Krysty each held a leg still, Jak took the Armorer's other arm and locked it tight in his hands. Ryan sat on the floor, putting his right foot into J.B.'s armpit, gripping the wrist of the damaged arm in both hands. He wriggled around to get comfortable and make sure he had enough purchase to do what had to be done. If it was left more than a few minutes the repair of the dislocation was going to be a major operation and could leave J.B. with a permanent weakness.

"Ready?" Ryan asked.

"Do it, Ryan," J.B. gritted from between clenched teeth.

Ryan braced himself and tugged hard on the wrist, feeling the damaged joint snap back into place with an audible click.

Ryan let go and stood up. "How's that?" he asked. But J.B. didn't answer him.

"Fainted," Jak said. "Shouldn't have called me 'kid.' Told him."

 

FORTUNATELY, apart from some pain and stiffness in his shoulder, the Armorer wasn't too badly damaged. His ears were ringing and his head ached. The blood from his mouth was the result of biting through the tip of his tongue as the explosion hurled him off the chair. He was bruised around the kidneys and down the outside of the right thigh.

"Good news is that my hat's fine, glasses aren't broke, and pants aren't torn. Never got much good at mending. And all the weapons are fine."

"And the doors are open," Rick finished.

Ryan laughed. "They were open before J.B. got to playing with them."

The Armorer gave him the finger.

In all of the other redoubts they'd entered, the ponderous double sec doors had always opened onto an expanse of wide, brightly lit corridor that was part of the main military complex.

But not this time.

Ryan cautiously pushed the left-hand door, careful to make sure that the previous tenants hadn't left yet another plas-ex calling card to greet them.

"Fireblast," he spit.

"What is it?" Krysty asked at his shoulder, her own Heckler & Koch P7A-13 blaster at the ready. "What?"

Ryan loudly sucked in air. "This fireblasted triple-rad tooth of mine gave me a crack. Gotta get it pulled some time. Hole feels bigger than a three-hundred-pound gaudy whore's"

"Ryan," she warned, lifting the barrel of the silvered pistol.

"Well. Hole feels big, and that's the truth, lover. It's bad."

"Never mind your black-dust tooth, Ryan! What's out there?"

Ryan looked around the edge of the door, turning back to face the others.

"Not a lot."

The walls were made of dirt, not concrete--dusty brown earth, packed tight, supported by thick wooden beams. Up in what once had been Pennsylvania, Ryan had come across an abandoned coal mine. It had been used as an emergency nuke shelter, but the bombing had caved in the entrance. A century of wind, rain and shifting land had opened it up. Ryan had never seen so many desiccated corpses, piled and tangled one upon another. The corridors had been supported in the same way as the room outside the gateway control.

There was no illumination at all, but Ryan spotted a neat plastic box-switch by the doors. He clicked it down and a few bulbs flickered into hesitant life. The room was barely eight feet across, with a ceiling that couldn't have been more than seven cramped feet in height. Some sort of barred gate was set in the far wall.

"Looks like the first redoubt ever built," Krysty said.

But Rick disagreed. "No. Can't be. I know this looks like someone's backyard but the mat-trans technology is like I said. It's state-of-the-art. Miniaturized circuits, the works. So, this stuff outside doesn't make any sense."

The air tasted cool and damp, like the cellar of a long-abandoned house, a smell of kerosene and old bicycles, of empty bottles and piles of rotting newspaper tied up with twine.

"What do you feel, lover?" Ryan asked. "Anything bad around?"

Krysty shook her head. Her long red hair was still curled tightly around her nape. The effort of forcing the door had taken a toll, and she could barely stand unsupported.

"Don't know, lover. Truth is, I don't feel anything but bushed out. Sorry."

Ryan nodded. "Sure. Let's go find a way out of this tomb."

He led the way, blaster probing the air in front of him like the tongue of a cobra.

The barrier in the far wall was high-quality vanadium steel, made from bars as thick as a man's index finger, with a space between them of less than a half inch. The crossbars were set three inches apart. It was an impressive security device, its quad-lock and bolts set in a steel insert drilled right through into concrete. There was no gap in the door, either at the top or bottom.

Cautiously Ryan reached out and pushed it, and the barred door swung silently open.

"Unlocked," he said, unable to hide his relief. It wouldn't have been easy to blow.

Beyond it was another wall switch. He considered the possibility that this could also have been wired, but rejected the notion. The charges planted back at the gateway had all the hallmarks of a last-minute decision. Maybe in the final minutes of the withdrawal from the redoubt someone with a few yards of wire and a handful of plas-ex decided to make it tough for anyone trying to break into the mat-trans section of the complex.

The overhead neon strip stuttered into life. They were all in a small stone-walled chamber, ten feet square. The smell of damp was much stronger, and the earth beneath their boots was moist. The walls were streaked with fungus and slime-green lichen.

"Look." Jak pointed to a rusted metal cabinet screwed to the wall by the barred door. "Open it?"

"Yeah. Slow and easy," J.B. said.

The door wasn't closed and the boy levered it open with his fingers, wincing at the screech of corroded metal from the hinges.

"Blaster," he said, hooking it out and holding it to show the others.

"Smith & Wesson .38," J.B. observed. "Or what's left of it."

The penetrating damp had reduced the handgun to a fragile orange skeleton. Jak dropped it to the floor where it crumbled apart, the brass-jacketed rounds spilling out.

"I never seen a redoubt like this one," Ryan said to nobody in particular.

"That way?" Rick asked, pointing to a plain door on the far side of the small room. "Stupid question, Ginsberg. Where the hell else are we going to go? Back to the torture chamber again? Thanks, but no thanks, guys."

Ryan gripped the handle and pressed it, part of his mind waiting for the starburst of an explosion that would tell him he'd made a poor calculation. There was the click of the lock turning and the door opened. Light spilled from the room behind him, illuminating the bottom of an iron spiral staircase, the treads and rails coated with a patina of reddish rust. There was no other exit or door.

"Up," he said.

"Wow!" Rick panted about five minutes into the climb. "This is what we used to call a whole lot of no fun."

He and Krysty were finding the going very hard indeed.

Ryan tested the stairs, worried that a hundred years of the bone-chilling damp might have rotted the iron. Though the surface flaked away, the main structure seemed sound. The light switch at the bottom of the ladder didn't work, so they ascended in almost total blackness. It wasn't even possible to see how far they had to climb, or if there was any way out once they reached the top. Ryan sympathized with the freezie's comment. It was a lot of no fun,

 

"FIFTEEN MINUTES." J.B.'s voice echoed around the concrete stairwell. "Reckon we've climbed around two hundred feet, allowing for the stops."

"You talking about me, J.B.?" Krysty asked, pausing for breath.

He didn't reply.

"Can't sorry, folks. I'm utterly I'm fucked up hill and down." Rick sat on the cold steps, nearly weeping, his face a pale blur in the darkness. The others gathered around him. Krysty was also near the outer limit of exhaustion, head in her hands. Doc was bearing up surprisingly well, his cane tapping away on the sonorous metal, ringing in the sighing space below them.

Ryan, J.B. and Jak were capable of climbing on forever.

But it was an eerie feeling. The light from beneath had almost vanished, just a tiny circle of palest yellow, so faint that to blink was to lose sight of it.

"I swear that this is akin to swimming in the ether, lost between heaven and earth," Doc muttered.

"Reminds me of Pontchartrain Causeway," Rick said, fighting to gather breath. "Long bridge that brings you into New Orleans. Guess I should say that it used to bring you in. Must be gone now. It was so damned long that when you were driving across and you were around the middle" A coughing fit cut off the words. "Sweet Lord! Oh, better now. Yeah. In the middle you could look to both sides and see nothing but water. Look ahead and you couldn't make out the city. Just water. And you looked behind and the land vanished. Just more of the same water. Scared the shit out of me when I was a kid."

Ryan leaned on the rail, feeling it give a little under his weight. He straightened, looked down, then up, trying to make out an ending of the spidery staircase. "Yeah, Rick. Know what you mean."

"Here!" Jak called, his faint voice floating down from the angelic heights far above the others.

"Door?" Ryan shouted.

"Yeah. Can't move. Shall?"

"No. Wait for the rest of us!"

He climbed swiftly, J.B. at his heels, leaving the other three to fumble their way up after him as best they could.

There was a platform, big enough to hold a dozen men, but as Ryan set his foot to it, he felt the tremor of movement and turned to the Armorer, behind him. "Stay there! It's swaying some."

"They can't have done this trip every time they wanted to use the gateway," J.B. said, no more out of breath than if he'd taken a stroll around a garden on a spring morning. "Got to be an elevator someplace here."

"Could be it got wrecked during the nukings. They put this in as a standby."

"Mebbe. Tell you, Ryan, this is the damnedest place I ever did see."

Doc was closing in on them, his voice ringing like a cathedral bell. "Oh, if my love were in my arms"

"Take it easy," J.B. called, silencing the song. "Platform here's not that safe. Tell the others behind you."

They heard the old man relaying the message down the spidery staircase.

Ryan felt his way toward the albino boy, grateful for the avalanche of snowy hair that guided him like a beacon.

"Got it. There's..." He ran his hands over the whole door, feeling two small sec bolts at top and bottom. He slid them both open, turned the handle and pushed the door away from him.

A rush of bitingly cold air swept over him, air so fresh it almost brought tears to his eye.

"We're out," he said, looking into a wintry night.

From the delicate coral pink of the eastern sky, dawn wasn't far off. The six friends huddled together for warmth. Ryan, arm around Krysty, looked around and tried to make sense of what he saw.

The door had been cunningly concealed as a part of a chimney flue, so cleverly camouflaged that it was no surprise it had been hidden for a century. But this was no redoubt.

They were in the ruined attic of a large house, almost a mansion from what they could see of it. Some of the roof tiles had disappeared, revealing the star-spangled heavens, though scudding clouds made it impossible to recognize any of the constellations. Snow came in fine showers between the stark rafters, piling under the eaves.

Jak was all for exploring, but Ryan told him to sit still and not risk moving around in the dark. Ordered him, pointing out that the state of the outer roof spoke of serious damage. And who knew what worse damage was lower down.

Doc and J.B. fell asleep and Krysty dozed a while in Ryan's arms. Jak was sulking at being told off. Rick, on Ryan's left side, was still awake.

"What d'you figure?" he whispered.

"Fucked if I know, Rick. It's no official redoubt, that's certain."

"Could be a private sec center. I heard some rich folks seriously rich, you understandhad their own cryo centers."

"Private freezies?"

"You hear of someone called Walt Disney?"

Ryan nodded. "Course. Invented Mickey the mouse. Seen old vids."

"Sort of. Well, the word was old Walt had himself frozen--he had the big 'C'--and he was kept on ice in a sort of fun fair, in Sleeping Beauty's castle. Kind of appropriate, isn't it?"

"Sure." Ryan had no idea what Rick was talking about.

Soon as the first light of the sun appeared, J.B. took out his minisextant and computed where they were.

He repeated the procedure and shook his head. He did it again. And again. By now they were all awake and watching, puzzled. Ryan asked the question.

"Where are we?"

J.B. swallowed hard. "Something wrong with this," he said, shaking the sextant. "Either that, or we're smack in the middle of Russia. Somewhere near their old city of Moscow."

Nobody said a word.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Five

 

 "COULD BE."

"Never."

"Why not?"

"My dear Richard, it must surely be obvious even to someone whose brains have been addled and whipped into a cold collation."

"Up yours, Doc. Just tell me why we couldn't be in Russia."

"A gateway!"

"Yeah. A gateway. A mat-trans unit. Jumps for the making of. Why not?"

Doc shook his head, the rising sun glinting off his silvery hair. "Because it's absolutely out of the question, Richard, that's why. You hardly think our Communist brethren would have allowed such a thing, do you?"

Rick nodded. "Yeah. As a matter of fact, I do."

Ryan interrupted the quarrel. "Come on, Rick. I wasn't there, but I've seen and read enough to know that there wasn't too much love lost between them and us."

"They started sky-dark," Jak added.

"Sure they did," the freezie agreed. "But you gotta look back a while. Back to the late eighties. A guy called Oh, shit! What was his name? Khrushchev? No. Something that ended like that. Gorby? Gorbachev. Yeah, I think that was it."

"Oh, him. But we all know what happened to him, don't we? And his plans for... let me see. There was a buzzword, was there not? Glasnost. An ending to the cold war. Scrap all missiles. Eternal peace and love and brotherhood. I remember that, my dear Richard. Indeed I do."

The freezie stood up, clapping his hands together. "Jeez! It's cold enough to freeze the balls off a polar bear. Cold enough for Russia, J.B., I'll give you that. But listen. During glasnost there was an opening of frontiers. Barriers came down for a while. Now, suppose this had once been some kind of American embassy or whatever."

"And they built a gateway inside it," Krysty said. "Secretly."

"Sure," Ryan agreed. "Look at that hidden door. Even with the sun coming up, you can't see it. If we hadn't come through it, we'd never know it was there. Stairs go down inside that fake chimney, I guess. Secret's lasted a hundred years."

"Could be," Doc admitted grudgingly. "Shouldn't take us long to find out. Or for them to find us out. Would you not say?"

Once there was sufficient light for them to find their way around, Ryan led a recce party.

It had obviously been a very large house, a positive mansion. They could now see that about a quarter of the original roof had been destroyed. The blackened and charred beams told their own story of the fire. Ryan wriggled cautiously to the edge, peered down and saw that the building had originally been four stories high.

"Lots trees," Jak observed, lying flat on his stomach alongside Ryan, the chill wind tugging at his fine white hair.

It was a fair comment.

As far as Ryan could see the house was surrounded by a rambling forest, reminding him of his own birthplace back in the blue-topped Shens of Virginia. But these trees were mainly conifers, huge, nodding pines and firs, with larch and spruce dotted among them. And the whole scene was blanketed in soft, rolling banks of snow.

Ryan eased back, conscious of the way his breath plumed out into the morning air.

"See anything, lover?" Krysty asked.

"No."

"Think J.B.'s sextant's right?"

"You mean, do I think this is Russia? How should I know? I've never seen Russia. Not much on old vids. Trees and snow."

"Could be the Shens," she pointed out.

"I just thought that. I guess we better find a way down to the ground and see what we can see. Doesn't look like nuke damage."

"No. Would've brought down the chimney. Gaia! It's cold."

Picking their way over the beams and joists, they eventually found a trapdoor with a broken bolt that took them down a ladder onto a narrow, dark landing. The steps were missing every other slat, and hung crookedly to one side.

"Boy!" Rick exclaimed. "This place sure took a pounding. Looks like a New Jersey street gang's been using it for practice."

"You said it could be some place near to Moscow, my dear Mr. Dix?" Doc asked.

"Could be. I don't know the references outside Deathlands. Not that well. But it sure as black dust is Russia."

"Why, Doc? Why d'you ask?"

The old man stood in a pool of sunlight where the ceiling had been brought down. He rubbed a finger along the side of his nose. "Because, my dear Ryan, there is a little something that nags at my memory. Yet..." He shook his head.

"Something about this place?"

"Yes. The name of Peredelkino comes to my mind and-"

"How's that?" Rick asked.

"Peredelkino."

The freezie nodded. "Hell's bells. That brings it back, all right."

"What, Rick?" Ryan asked.

"One of the things I guess you don't know about me is my college career. I majored in electrophysics, specializing in circuit miniaturization and genetic computer coding."

"And?" Krysty prompted.

"And I took a minor in Russian. Did some basic language and a bit of history. Nothing too deep. Enough to be able to ask the way to the American Embassy and kind of skating over Ivan the Terrible and Rasputin. I guess I've forgotten most of it. But when Doc mentioned that name, Peredelkino."

"Something to do with Stalin, was it not?" the old man asked.

"Right on, Doc. Twenty miles southwest of Moscow itself. Originally it was some kind of commune for the acceptable writers and artists who toed the Stalinist line. Collection of very nice dachas, set among woods and lakes. Rural idyll. Kind of a pat on the back for being a good guy. Or a good gal."

"A dacha's a kind of house, like this?" Ryan asked.

"Yes, yes, of course!" Doc exclaimed, rapping on the worn boards with the ferrule of his swordstick. "During glasnost, was it not? A gesture of brotherly affection from Mother Russia to Uncle Sam. We were given our very own dacha."

"And this is it," Ryan concluded.

"Well, I guess it could be. But to believe that the gateway could possibly have survived in working order for a hundred years! It's bullshit! Come on guys, come on!" Rick leaned his hand against the dull plaster of the wall and shook his head sadly.

"J.B.? You sure about the reading? If we're stuck in Russia and the gateway's fucked for us to get out, then we're in the deepest shit."

The Armorer rubbed his hands together, eyes invisible behind his glasses. He looked away from Ryan, along the shadowed corridor, hesitating before he replied. "No way around it. Machine can't lie, Ryan. Even friends can, but not a machine. What Doc and the freezie said makes a kind of sense. That stair was real well hid. After the nukes dropped over here, there can't have been many of the Commies eager to search out anything that well concealed. No, I guess this old house could once have been a little part of America."

It was an uncharacteristically long speech for J. B. Dix.

"Food," Jak said. "Fucking hungry. This place dust-dead."

It didn't look all that promising.

The house had no furniture, no carpets, no drapes to cover the broken windows. The floorboards were warped and cracked, and fine dust hung in the cold morning air, dancing in the bright spears of sunlight. On either side of the passage, doors opened onto totally empty rooms. In fact, most of the doors were actually missing.

"Surprised the whole place hasn't been burned down," Krysty said, walking cautiously into one of the rooms.

"Look." Ryan pointed up to a corner where a small metal bracket remained. "Sec vids were there. Seen them in the corridor."

"In here," Doc called.

"What?" Ryan replied, following the sound of the old man's voice. He found him in another room, looking at a faded drawing on one of the walls. It was a sketch of some balloons, held in the white, gloved hand of a circus clown. Beneath it was a line of neat lettering Hi, from your friend Pennywise.

All six of the group stood and looked silently at this cryptic message from the long-dead past. Ryan broke the stillness.

"Anyone understand it?"

Nobody replied.

Doc coughed. "Private joke of some sort, I guess."

"Rick?" Ryan asked.

"Pennywise the clown? Sorry, brothers and sister. No. Doesn't mean a thing."

"Let's go down," Jak suggested, leading the way out of the ravaged room, along the corridor, to the top of the main staircase that led down to the first floor of the house.

 

THE DEVASTATION WAS at its worst at ground level. Every door and window had been smashed, and a cold wind blew in from every direction. Fine snow was piled softly in the corners, drifted in. The floorboards were largely rotted, making walking dangerous. Ceilings had fallen, and the walls bore the marks of sledgehammers and the dark scars of fires. It was amazing that the structure was standing.

"There's not going to be any food at all around here, lover," Krysty said quietly.

Ryan nodded. "I know it."

"So?"

"So we'll have to go out and find us some. If this is Russia, and not the Shens in a cold-out, then we have to get the gateway working."

The woman glanced behind them at the man leaning heavily on his walking cane. His face was pale, his eyes sunk cavernously dark.

"You mean Rick has to get it working?"

"Yeah. Not going to be easy. Then again, lover, nobody ever said it would be easy."

 

THERE WERE DAUBS of heavy, tarlike black paint in the largest room at the front of the house, strange signs that were like recognizable letters, yet oddly different. They partly covered another piece of graffiti, which was difficult to read in the gloom.

"Shall I open the doors?" Rick asked, moving unsteadily into the wide, echoing hall.

"Careful," Ryan warned. "When we were up on the roof anyone could've seen us from miles off."

J.B. coughed. "We have to make a fast decision, Ryan. No food here. Mebbe a ville near. But if the Russkies know we're Americans..." He allowed the sentence to drift away into the bitterly cold silence.

Ryan sniffed. "Yeah, but the gateway's well fucked. Gotta look around some. We don't find anything in a day's march, then we have a problem. Keep looking and mebbe starve. Come on back here to the gateway..."

"And mebbe starve," Krysty concluded quietly.

"My view, for what little it may be worth, is that we should hazard a trip into the great outdoors," Doc said. "Better to try and fail than not to try at all."

"Nobody this side," Jak reported from near the broken windows on the eastern flank of the large room. "Just lotta snow."

Doc was still trying to read the daubed-over lettering. "I just can't make it out. It's so fearfully faded."

"I'll open this door," Rick called, heaving at the handle. He put his frail weight against the rusted hinges, making them squeal angrily in protest. But the door opened, letting in a dazzling shaft of morning light.

"Uncle Vanya Sucks!" Krysty read.

"What's it mean?" J.B. asked. "Sounds like a Russkie name."

"My memory is not what it was, but I believe it was the nickname for the Communist leader Stalin," Doc offered.

Rick laughed. "No, it's a play. Chekhov. It's the name of-"

The bullet smashed into the door beside Rick Ginsberg, and he toppled into the hall, flat on his back.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Six

 

 "I TRUST that the behavior of my manservant has not inconvenienced you unduly."

The man shook his head and whistled through his teeth. It made damnably little sense to him. He kept his thumb on the page and slowly read the phrase out again.

"I trust that the behavior of my manservant has not inconvenienced you unduly."

He closed the book and laid it on the scarred top of his desk. The cover was torn, but the title could still be read The English Tongue for the Benefit of the Russian Gentleman Abroad.

It would have been nice if he could have found a phrase book that had been published a little nearer to the time that was called, in his country, "the long grayness." In the frontspiece was the date 1911. That was almost two hundred years ago, but it was still better than nothing.

He heard someone walking along the corridor outside his office and he quickly slid the frail book into the center drawer of his desk and locked it. Though he could probably have formulated a defense for possessing it, he preferred to keep his arcane knowledge as secret as possible.

The feet paused and there was a cautious knock on the door.

"Enter."

The blond, cropped head of Clerk Second Class Alicia Andreyinichna appeared around the wood-painted frame.

"Forgive me, Major-Commissar Zimyanin, for interrupting you."

"Come in, Alicia Andreyinichna. What is it?"

The secretary wore a plain skirt that fell just below the knee, in the dull maroon material that was the uniform color for Internal Security, Moscow.

"A message from your wife, Anya, Major-Commissar."

"Yes?"

The girl coughed nervously. It was common knowledge that all wasn't wonderfully well between Gregori Zimyanin and his tall, heavy-hipped wife. There were often angry calls on the telephone, generally ending with the receiver being slammed down and some colorful cursing from the senior officer.

"She wished to know what time you would be returning home tonight, sir."

"By the anvil and the hammer! She knows I'm going to be late. I told her this morning over first food. I told her!"

He remembered telling Anya, remembered her expression, remembered that she had mentioned something about an invitation they had for last food to an apartment in the adjoining block on Begovaya Ulitsa. He couldn't even recall the names. Some woman who worked in the offices of Pensions and Domestic Debts with Anya who had a buck-toothed, stammering husband with a secret taste for decadent music. Zimyanin had arranged to have them investigated. You couldn't be too careful who you knew.

"Can't be too careful," he said.

"What, sir?"

He smiled. "I didn't mean to speak out loud, Alicia Andreyinichna. My apologies. Tell her, as softly as you can, that it will be after eleven." An afterthought struck him. "And offer my deepest regrets that I must miss our last-food date."

"Yes, Major-Commissar."

He managed a smile, though his wife's constant harrying was becoming increasingly tedious. The girl smiled back and withdrew, closing the door carefully behind her.

Zimyanin leaned back, putting his high boots of tanned hide on his desktop. He had been married to Anya for only six weeks. It had only been ten weeks since his promotion from plain major and his arrival at the center of the government, the spiritual and historical home of Mother Russia.

"Anya," he murmured to himself. Perhaps an accidental fall from the high balcony of their apartment? Perhaps a sudden seizure while she was in the bath. His strong fingers flexed at the thought, imagining how it would feel to close them around her soft, fleshy neck, pressing her with an inexorable power under the scummy water. Eyes open. Mouth open. Tongue protruding, purpling, blackening.

He drew out the phrase book and flicked through, looking for the page he wanted. There it was.

"I regret deeply that my lady wife will not be able to attend your soiree on account of her sudden indisposition."

The officer straightened then buried himself in a pile of reports and documents. The spring thaw would soon begin to release the city from the clawed grip of General Winter. There would be much to do, work parties to enlist and press into reluctant action.

A thick red folder on a shelf across from the desk was marked with the single word "Subbotnik." In the old days, Zimyanin knew from his researches, the citizens of Moscow would have to give up their free time to work for the city. This was Subbotnik, the Saturday when you "volunteered" to help with manual labor. Things had changed.

During the cleansing days of the megacull, great swathes of Moscow had been laid into perpetual dust by the nuking missiles of the hated Americans. Little of the center had been rebuilt, but the suburbs survived--after a fashion. But there was so much to do. A century later and there was always so much to be done.

Subbotniks now tended to refer to people snatched by armed patrols of sec men and forced to perform the menial, essential tasks.

And the time of the spring thaw was the worst for that. The thought of the melting ice brought back a memory to the officer.

Another phrase from his well-learned book. "I am delighted to have made your acquaintance." He paused, his totally bald brow wrinkling with the effort of concentration. "But I do not believe we have been formally introduced."

They hadn't.

But he could still see the face of the mysterious American across the frozen sea that nestled against the Kamchatka Peninsula and touched the land of the Americans in the region they called Alaska. It had been there, not far from a hamlet called Ozhbarchik, following the brutish killing band known as the Narodniki.

"Hozhdenie v narod," Zimyanin said to himself. It meant to be going to the people.

The leader had been called... "Uchitel," whispered the officer, nodding his head. The Teacher. That had been the name of the psychopathic slaughterer.

It came back.

The defeat of the Narodniki had been a triumph for Major Zimyanin, his passport away from the icy wasteland beyond the tumbled ruins of Yakutsk. He returned to Moscow with a promotion and thanks from the grateful Party.

"Americans," he said, half smiling.

He had never been sure how many there had been. Even with his precious Zeiss binoculars he hadn't been able to make out their numbers, but he had seen the missile they had ready. That had all been reported to the central offices, an indication that the remnants of the United States weren't yet ready to fall into the hands of Russia.

He'd met four of them face-to-face a tall black man; a short, fat man with the cold eyes of a born slayer; a woman, handsome with the reddest, most fiery hair that Zimyanin had ever seen.

And their leader

"I am desolated to see that you have been incapacitated by an accident, sir," he recited.

His gaze moved to the far wall of the small office, near the window, jammed with brown paper to stop it rattling in the winter gales. A rifle hung there on two rusting nails, his own weapon, an old SVD Dragunov sniper's blaster with a PSO-1 scope sight. It had been given to him by the marksman in his unit out east, Corporal Solomentsov, when Zimyanin had received his promotion.

He ran a finger down the furrows of his pockmarked cheeks, thinking about that adventure and the blood that had flowed.

There was a cautious knock on the door again and his clerk stuck her head into his office.

"I am sorry, Major-Commissar Zimyanin, but I'm afraid that..."

"My wife has called again and she wishes to speak with me," he guessed.

"Yes," she replied, surprised at the accuracy of his guess. "She said to tell you-" She stopped as the officer held up a weary hand.

"Don't, sister-comrade. I'm sure I can imagine what my dear"

He gestured for her to leave, watching as she turned in the doorway. The material of her skirt stretched tight across the firm buttocks; her muscular thighs slid down toward her polished boots. Zimyanin sat for a moment after the door had closed, allowing his sensual imagination to run on for a while, imagining himself locked in a sexual embrace on a soft feather mattress with Clerk Second Class Alicia Andreyinichna.

But the vision faded with the certainty of how shrill his wife's voice would sound when he called.

Gregori Zimyanin reached for the bakelite phone, part of his mind still recalling the leader of the American guerrilla group--the man with the scarred face and a patch over his left eye. A face he would never forget.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Seven

 

 "CLOSE BASTARD DOOR!" Jak yelled, his heavy satin-finish Magnum in his right hand.

"No, leave it!" Ryan countered. "Anyone out there could have an angle to put a bullet through someone going near." He looked sideways at the freezie, who lay flattened against the wall of the long hallway, his bamboo cane just out of reach. "Rick? You all right? You hit?"

"No. I'm terrific, Ryan. Great shape. Popper of amyl'd be down the white line." His voice changed suddenly, louder, more shrill. "Course I'm not all right, you dumb-ass bastard! I damned near turned my jockeys brown."

"Sounds like he's okay, lover." Krysty grinned.

"I believe that the firearm sounded like something from my childhood," Doc called, crouching at the bottom of the stairs.

"How's that?" J.B. said.

"A musket. Black powder. A percussion cap from the flatness."

The armorer glanced around at Ryan and nodded, the light from the half-open doorway glinting off his eyeglasses. "He's right. Not a modern blaster. Some old Kentucky musket. Or whatever they call 'em over here."

Ryan had thought the sound of the gun, bursting at them from the snowy wilderness, had indicated a cap-and-ball kind of weapon. One round, the bullet ripping a long splinter of white wood from the leading edge of the door.

They lay in the dim light for about five minutes, but there was no further shooting. No voice, no sound of movement. Trader had taught Ryan that the worst thing you could do when you suddenly found yourself under blaster fire was to start rushing around carelessly.

"Chickens without heads," Trader had said, in that calm, measured way of his. "Think of a chicken skittering around a yard, blood gushing out the windpipe. Hold that in your mind, and it might--just might--stop you doing something real foolish one of these hot days."

Gesturing to the others to hold their positions, Ryan crawled toward the door, eased his good eye around it and peered out into the stark morning light.

The view was the same as it had been from the roof. Just a little more limited. Snow lay everywhere, piled deep against the trunks of some of the trees. There was no sign of life.

"Jak, cover the rear. Just look, don't shoot. J.B., take the east. Krysty, the west. Doc, go slow up the stairs and see what you can see from the second floor. Slow and easy."

"How about me, Ryan?" Rick asked.

"Sit still, stay quiet and keep a tight grip on your ass."

Ryan stayed where he was, watching the wilderness of tree-scattered white. If it had been a shot from an antique musket, the chances were that the attacker was within a hundred paces. He had come across a beautifully preserved Sharps .50-caliber buffalo rifle a year or so ago. In the right hands, the weapon was capable of putting a man on his back from half a mile away.

He waited for something to happen.

They had cover in the house, although an assault by anything over a dozen might be tough to hold off. One shot. A warning? Too close to Rick for that. It had been aimed to hit. To chill.

Ryan caught a flicker of movement a hundred paces away from the front of the housean elbow, knee or a shoulder, a dark triangle that showed for a splinter of a second, like the fin of a cruising shark amid the snowy billows.

At the same moment, he heard Doc's voice, harsh with excitement, from the room directly above the main entrance.

"A man with a long gun is moving slowly in a crouched position in a narrow draw, eastward."

The warning drew J.B., snake-silent, to Ryan's elbow. "Could be a trick. Bring us out while the others start blasting."

"Doesn't feel like that to me. You?"

The Armorer shook his head. "Nope. Go after him? You and me?"

"And Jak. Get him. Others watch the sides. Leave the rifles behind for them."

In less than twenty seconds the three men were outside, picking their way through the drifted banks of snow, the heels of their boots crunching through the thin layer of ice that crusted everything.

"East," Ryan said, leading.

He glanced once behind them and saw that Krysty was at the second-floor front, framed by the broken casement, arm pointing directly to where she could still see the escaping figure of their assailant. The bright morning sun danced off the vivid flames of her hair, making her an unmissable target if there were any more murderously inclined locals around.

"Back trail?" Jak asked.

Ryan nodded. "Sure. Gotta be over... yeah, down here."

The sniper's nest was unmistakable a patch of trampled, muddied snow; a gnawed knuckle of what looked like a mutton bone; the spaced indentations of the elbows on the ridge, overlooking the front doors; the shape of the body, legs spread-eagled. A couple of steps away was a small area of yellow, smearing the white, where the man had taken a leak.

Jak stopped, tossing his fine white hair from his eyes. He picked at something on the ground and held it up to show them. A blur of gray stained his long pale finger.

"Black powder," he said. "Fucker's got shaky hands."

"Let's go," Ryan said.

"Easy as tracking a war wag down a main street at high noon," J.B. whispered, lips peeling off his neat, even teeth, in his hunter's wolfish grin.

Though their prey was obviously trying to move cautiously and fast, the trail couldn't have been more obvious. From the blurring of the footmarks, it looked as if the man were dragging a bag of some sort behind him.

It took only six or seven minutes to close in on him.

The man was stooped, scurrying along the narrow ditch with his musket slung across his shoulders. He was pulling a pile of furs, and he never once looked back.

Jak gripped the butt of his pocket cannon, gesturing toward the hunched figure ahead.

Ryan shook a warning finger. In a winter wasteland like this, food wasn't going to be easy to come by. If they could take the man alive, they might be able to somehow find out where the nearest ville lay. From the clumsy, halting gait of the man, it looked as if he was old, or maybe a crippled mutie. Either way, the three of them should be able to take him.

They'd only been out of the shelter of the house for a few minutes, but Ryan could already feel the biting wind numbing the skin tight across his cheeks, making his eye water. Without better clothing, a man would soon lie down and sleep in such an iron cold.

The three friends could only go in single file on the cramped path. If the man turned suddenly and had a good handblaster, he could probably get an ace on the line at them. Ryan had his own pistol, the SIG-Sauer P-226, drawn and ready, finger on the trigger.

They were only thirty yards behind, close enough to hear the fur-shrouded man grunting and mumbling to himself with the effort of heaving along his bundle. Then he paused and straightened. Ryan was half a heartbeat from chilling him with a bullet through the back of the skull, but the man hawked and spit a green ball of phlegm to the side of the trail.

Twenty yards.

Fifteen.

And the man turned.

Without a moment's hesitation, Ryan shot at him. But the old man was already falling to the snow, dropping his bundle, hands reaching for the sky. Only Ryan's honed reflexes saved the stunted little figure from a 9 mm bullet through the throat. Seeing, even as he fired, that the man was surrendering, Ryan was able to switch his aim higher, the shot singing harmlessly into the blue sky.

"Fireblast!" he said. "Close."

Jak and J.B. had fanned out on either side as best they could, fighting for a footing in the deeper snow.

The figure in front of them was lying facedown, fists clenched, feet kicking up a storm of powdered white, all the time maintaining a muffled series of inaudible and incomprehensible moans. Ryan cautiously stepped in closer, kicking the bundle of pelts out of the way. Jak took the far side, keeping the old man covered, while J.B. stayed back a few paces, watching carefully.

"That Russian?" the boy asked, head on one side, listening to what sounded like a croaking string of gibberish.

"Could be. Can't recall having heard much Russian spoken. Only time was..." His mind leaped back to another frozen wasteland and conjured a short, stocky man with a pockmarked face and a long, drooping mustache, bald head under a fur cap that carried a single circle of silver. If he tried, the name would come back, as well. The Russkie had introduced himself.

"Was when?" Jak asked, interrupting his train of thought.

The name slipped away. "Zim," something or other. The name would slide again into his memory when he didn't need it. There wasn't much chance of ever meeting the man again. The Kamchatka Peninsula was around four thousand miles away.

"What's he saying?" J.B. said, moving a single step closer, the barrel of his Steyr blaster never deviating from the cringing man's spine.

"Sounds like 'pomegat,' or some such," Ryan replied. "We could use the freezie here to do us some translating."

"Looks like shitting himself," was Jak's comment.

The old man was gradually quietening, risking a glance up from the snow at his captors when he realized that they weren't going to send him off to buy the farm.

The fur hood had slipped down over his forehead, so that his glittering blue eyes barely peeped beneath the fringe. Snow caked most of his face, like a clown, the lips red, the scarlet cobra of his tongue flicking nervously out. He fixed on Ryan and began to crawl very slowly toward him.

"Neschastni sluchai."

None of this had the least bit of meaning to any of the three men.

"Wish he'd get up," J.B. said. "Looks like he's rad-blasted scared."

"Should be. Trying to chill Rick like that. Guess it could have been a mistake. Saw movement and just let it go."

Ryan, standing with legs slightly apart, looked down and saw in the trampled snow and earth a tiny bunch of yellow and white flowers, delicate as a baby's breath.

The old man had wriggled closer.

His hand touched against Ryan's ankle, stroking the damp material of the combat pants. The words had ceased and there was just the whistling of heavy breathing. Ryan stared, still not letting his concentration waver.

Now the face of the old man was between his feet, on top of the little cluster of flowers, hiding them. Both hands gripped his ankles, and Ryan could feel pressure against his foot. He moved a half step sideways to see what was happening. The Russian was placidly licking his boots, the long tongue wiping at the snow and clotted mud.

"No!" Ryan shouted, pulling away, stumbling clear.

"Sure wants to live," J.B. observed.

The old man crawled after Ryan, flat on his belly, left hand reaching out imploringly, the right hand busily burrowing somewhere beneath all the layers of fur. The effort of wriggling through the snow pushed the hood completely off the old man's head, revealing his face.

Revealing the old woman's face.

"Fireblast! He's... It's a woman."

Despite the deep, dirt-crusted furrows, and the straggling downy mustache, it was unmistakably a woman's face, staring beseechingly up at Ryan.

"Doesn't make no difference," J.B. said calmly. "Get her up and find out about a ville and food. If she won't tell us, then we chill her. It doesn't make no difference."

Ryan stood back, gesturing with the barrel of his pistol for the woman to get to her feet. Hesitatingly, slowly, she obeyed him, eyes locked on his face. Her left hand tremblingly brushed snow from her lined face.

She looked totally pathetic, abject and defeated. She shuffled her ragged boots and edged a little closer to Ryan, who half turned to J.B. to help him question their prisoner.

His eye caught Jak.

The face of the albino was a distorted mask, lips pulled back, sharp teeth grating. The teenager's red eyes were wide, staring past Ryan. His white hair was caught in the cold wind, floating around the angular head like mist beneath a high waterfall. The Magnum dropped from the boy's fist, landing silently in the soft snow.

"What?" Ryan began, shaken by the boy's horrific expression. Jak reached behind his neck and withdrew a bone-hilted, leaf-bladed throwing-knife. His wrist whipped the feathered steel toward Ryan's throat.

"Don't move!" Jak yelped.

Then Ryan knew. Despite the warning, he started to turn toward the Russian woman, knowing he would be too late, too slow, a last curse bursting to his lips.

He heard the whirring of the knife as it missed his carotid artery by a couple of inches, heard the unforgettable thunk of steel finding its mark in flesh and bone.

Their prisoner had drawn an old walnut-hafted straight razor from somewhere under the furs and layers of rags, and she was slicing it through the frosty morning air toward the back of his neck.

Jak's aim was true.

Ryan had seen the ruby-eyed boy at his daily practice with his hidden knives, and marveled at his almost blasphemous accuracy. He'd seen him put three blades into a space the size of a man's hand at twenty paces, all three knives seemingly spinning in the air at once.

He realized, as he began to turn to defend himself, that his own bulk had shielded the old woman, leaving Jak the smallest of targets--a part of her face and one eye.

One eye.

The left, he realized with a momentary pang of sympathetic revulsion.

As she staggered, the white hilt bobbled like the body of some obscene insect that had attacked her, launching itself with a venomous accuracy into the gleaming orb of her left eye. There was little blood, but the force of the throw had driven the sharp point deep through cornea, iris and lens, clear into the central retinal artery, piercing the brain.

Her mouth opened and closed like a stranded fish, her hands waving, becoming claws. She was crying, a piteous, feeble sound.

"Done." J.B. holstered his own blaster and turned away, no longer interested in the old woman, knowing that she was down and dying.

Ryan also turned away, ignoring the moaning, kicking thing that thrashed around in the trampled snow and dirt. There were more important things to worry about now.

"Get knife," Jak said, stooping and plucking the blade from the Russian woman's eyeball, sliding it out with a sickening, sucking sound. He wiped it clean on the wadded fur cloak she was wearing. "Could use warm clothes," he added.

"Let's find where she came from. Could be furs, and could be drink and food." Ryan climbed a few paces out of the narrow draw and looked in the direction that the old woman had been heading. Very faint, like a smudge of gray against the blue, he could make out smoke. "That way."

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Eight

 

 THEY DREW NEARER, following the meandering draw as it widened. They could see clearly the tracks of the old woman's boots, marking her outward journey. The large house was now far out of sight behind them, partly concealed by a dip in the land and by the trees that grew in random, scattered clumps.

Jak stopped dead and sniffed at the air, catching the taint from the smear of gray smoke that the breeze carried in toward them. "Cooking meat."

"Sounds good." Ryan nodded. His own sense of smell wasn't subtle enough to distinguish the scent of roasting meat at a distance of half a mile.

They crossed the rippled remnants of an old blacktop, its surface molded like corrugated paper by the shock waves of the massive nukings that had touched every country of the world, back in 2001.

"Glad to see our folks hit some good licks," Ryan said, rubbing at the highway with the toe of his combat boot, seeing the way the snow lay evenly in the shallow hollows.

J.B. was blowing on his hands, trying to warm them. "Yeah. Doc told me all about the Totality Concept, the thing he was on the edge of. Sounded real simple. They hit you and you hit them back." His breath feathered out around him as he spoke. "Worked even if they got in a sneak attack. It'd trigger your buried nukes, launch them at the Russkies, even after..."

"After our side was all chilled," Ryan finished for him.

Now Ryan could taste meat cooking over a smoky open fire.

The smell brought a beading of saliva to his lips, and he wondered what price they might have to pay for food. In a barren, wild place like this, he knew that the price could well be blood.

 

"THERE. BEYOND BUSHES." Jak was lying flat on his belly, wriggling through a grove of stunted larches until he was close enough to be able to spy on the small hut.

Ryan and the Armorer joined him. The sky was clouding over, and the air tasted like cold iron. It was a feeling that Ryan associated with the threat of snow, remembered from his time in the Darks and up in what had once been Alaska.

"Anyone?"

Jak shook his head at the question. "No." There was a tumbledown shed behind the hut and a pen with a broken gate where animals might once have been kept. The place was silent and looked deserted, but the trail of the old woman led to the front door. And if there was meat roasting, someone must be there to watch over it.

Ryan whistled quietly through his teeth. The cold was biting at the small cavity that had appeared in one of his back molars.

"What's wrong?" J.B. asked.

"Nothing. Just that You and me both seen lots of old books and vids about Russia and the dangers of the Commies. Now we're here. Unless there's some real weird mistake, we're here . In the middle of Russia!"

 

THEY FOLLOWED the usual plan of attack. Ryan and J.B. crept cautiously, keeping low, around either side of the clearing, settling into their positions. There was still no sign of life.

A tattered nightshirt in faded pink danced on a line at the rear of the building. Ryan, from his side, could make out what looked like a path that wound away toward the northeast, vanishing over a rise in the land.

As they moved, each of the three companions had been counting on a slow, rhythmic beat, something that they'd synchronized before parting. They agreed to begin closing in when their individual count reached one hundred and twenty.

Blaster firmly in his hand, Ryan finished his count and broke cover. There appeared to be two windows in the hovel, on opposite sides. The rear of the cabin had only a ramshackle door that hung crookedly off a single leather hinge. There was a narrow gap at the top where a man could be sighting at him along the barrel of a rifle.

He glimpsed J.B. making his own move, darting in at an angle, crouched, pistol probing in front of him, glasses reflecting what little sunlight remained.

Out at the front, white hair streaming behind him like a crazed bridal veil, Jak would be now be flattened against the wall by the door, his own cannon filling his hand.

"Time to move," Ryan whispered, taking a slow, careful look all around him and seeing nobody. At that moment it struck him that he hadn't seen a single living creature since leaving the mansion. Not a bird nor an animalnothing but the ragged old woman who had led them here.

He braced himself as he moved away from the tar-painted wooden wall and kicked in at the flimsy door, ripping it off its single hinge. Almost simultaneously he heard a crash as the albino boy burst through the front.

The hut was less than twelve feet square, and nobody was in there.

He faced Jak, eyeball to eyeball, across the stinking squalor of the cabin. They were joined a brace of heartbeats later by J.B.

"Nobody?." the Armorer asked, immediately answering his own question. "No. Nobody."

"Got to be someone close by," Ryan said, pointing at the open hearth where a haunch of meat, vaguely resembling venison, was cooking on a spit. The outside of the meat was already blackened and scorched in a couple of places.

On the corner of the fire was a trivet that held a filthy and chipped enamel pot containing a mix of bubbling vegetables. Ryan licked his lips at the delicious odor that filled the hut.

"One bed."

"Big enough for two," Ryan amended.

"Two plates on table," Jak agreed. "Two spoons. Two mugs."

"One corpse," J.B. added.

 

THE RECCE TOOK only a couple of minutes.

Jak remained by the front door, watching for anyone coming along the same trail that had brought them to the hut. Ryan went one way and J.B. the other, checking the shed and the outhouse. The latter was empty. The former was packed with bales of furs, some of them already sewn into crude coats, cloaks and hats. The shed also contained a large smoked ham and some dried fish. A well at the rear of the property provided sweet water, achingly cold.

"Gotta be someone else around," Ryan said.

"Wind's shifted dry, loose snow. Covered any tracks out the rear." J.B. sighed. "Reckon we should eat what we can, then load up food, furs and water and head back to the others."

"Good sense. I'll watch. You two eat what you can get down. I'll eat, and you can guard and start pulling some furs together."

"Iron-runnered sledge behind the crapper," J.B. suggested.

"Easy for three of us. Carry more that way."

Ryan wished that Krysty had been with them. Apart from her strength and support, the mutie side of her genetic makeup would have been invaluable. She could "see." Not the way a doomie could make out the grim elements of the future, but she could often feel if there was an imminent threat of danger, even confirm that a place was deserted. It would be helpful to know the location of the person who used the second spoon and plate.

"Don't like it," Ryan muttered, rubbing the back of his hand across his stubbled chin. He looked around the room. "Hairs at the nape of my neck are prickling. It's close. Man or woman. It's real close."

Jak, moving as light as quicksilver, darted from window to window, rubbing at the cobweb-covered glass and peering out. "Nothing."

Ryan moved to the front door. "I'll go and keep looking around. You two get into that meat. And leave some for me." His hand was on the carved wooden latch. "And I'll-"

He didn't get to finish the sentence.

The door burst open, sending him tumbling across the room, knocking the legs from under J.B. and pushing Jak off balance. A shaft of light pierced the gloom as the door flew off its hinges, but the pale rectangle was swiftly blotted out.

"Fireblast!" Ryan shouted, fighting for breath.

"Dark night!" J.B. exclaimed.

"Bastard!" Jak yelled, voice cracking with shock.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Nine

 

 ONE OF THE LONGEST-LASTING by-products of the destruction of ninety-five percent of all humanity was the endless chain of genetic mutations that resulted from the poisonous rad clouds that drifted clear around the globe. This was made infinitely worse by the inbreeding that followed in the myriad small villes and hamlets that survived: cousin lay with cousin, brother made love to sister, father to daughter and mother to son. And the spawn of these blasphemous couplings carried the taint on and on for every succeeding generation, on down the line. The curse lingered, like the malevolent smile of a habitual poisoner.

And muties came in all shapes and sizes.

What came in through the door was either a Russian version of a Rockies grizzly bear, or the biggest mutie that Ryan Cawdor had ever seen.

The man--this time there was no possibility of any mistake--stood at least eight feet tall. He'd stooped to enter the hut, and his head now scraped the rafters. Since he was wearing layers of fur, it was difficult to judge his weight, but Ryan's instinctive guess put the mutie at around seven hundred pounds.

His face showed all the intelligence of a fencepost and all the friendliness of a cornered rattlesnake--his eyes were like tiny chips of malachite, scarcely visible behind the rolls of puffy fat that swelled from his cheeks; his nose was a raw hole in the center of his face, edged with dribbling candles of green snot; his ears, under the fringe of straggly blond hair, were mutilated lumps of red gristle.

The man bared his teeth, his cracked lips surrounded by a downy mustache and beard. His huge hands flexed angrily, reaching toward the three invaders of his squalid demesne. He roared, the sound accompanied by billowing waves of stinking breath that made Ryan wince.

The cramped cabin wasn't the best place in the world for hand-to-hand combat with someone of that size.

"Mine!" Jak shrilled, recovering his balance and diving at the human monolith. He aimed a lethal kick at the giant's right knee.

The mutie never moved. Feet planted wide apart, he swatted the boy away from him as if he were merely an importunate gnat.

His hair like an explosion of frost around his face, Jak bounced off two walls, hitting a table on the way down. He landed near the fire and lay still, eyes closed.

"Fuck this," Ryan snarled, drawing his 9 mm pistol.

The mutie peered down at the neat blaster, threw his head back and bellowed with laughter. Used only to work-worn single-shot muskets, the giant was telling Ryan he thought he was holding a toy.

Ryan squeezed the trigger on the P-226.

The built-in baffle silencer did its stuff. There was a sound like a nun coughing discreetly during Compline, and a thin trace of smoke trickled from the end of the barrel.

Ryan had used the gun quite a few times and was used to seeing men go down when they were hit. For a mind-toppling few seconds he actually thought that the automatic must have misfired. He knew there was no way on the good earth that he could have missed the mutie at such close range. It would have been like missing a barn wall when you were shooting from the inside.

The Russian didn't even rock on his heels. He stopped his shout of rage and looked at Ryan with a puzzled expression. Slowly his right hand reached out and he touched himself in the lower part of his chest, where Ryan had aimed. In the gloom of the hovel it was impossible to make out any sign of the bullet's entry on his matted fur coat.

"Again," J.B. urged, his own blaster also drawn.

"Yeah." Ryan felt the first tremor of unease. The Deathlands was full of stories of muties, always someplace over the next hill, who were invulnerable. It was hard enough to waste a stickie, but a good head shot would send them off on the next ferry.

He got off two more rounds, feeling the satisfying kick of the pistol against his braced wrist.

The huge figure took a half step backward, into the doorway. He clutched his chest, this time his hand coming away smeared with bright blood.

"Fireblast!" Ryan shifted his aim higher, seeing that the full-metal jacketed rounds weren't having much more effect than a spitball at a war wag.

Two more shots, one in the center of the throat, and blood sprayed from the torn exit wound at the back of the giant's neck.

The fifth round, delicately placed, whipped clean through the mutie's open mouth, barely burning his lips. The slug then sliced the creature's tongue along its length, angling upward off a broken back tooth. It began to tumble and distort, tearing the soft palate apart in rags of flesh, breaking the side of the top jaw. The round tore through the brain, exiting at the top of the man's head and taking with it a fist-size chunk of the skull. A gulp of pinkish-gray brains and blood splattered over the greasy ceiling of the hut.

Appallingly, the mutie colossus still didn't go down. When he lurched into the doorframe his shoulders got jammed, holding him upright as gouts of blood flowed down over the face.

His eyes were still open and his hands, as big as plates, waved helplessly in the cold air like someone in the last stages of drowning.

"Again?" J.B. asked, the edge to his voice showing his own unease.

"Waste of good lead," Ryan replied. "He's chilled, but he just doesn't know it yet." He shook his head in wonder. "Sure is... Hey, best see to the kid."

Jak's lips moved as they leaned over him. "Don't call me fuckin' kid." They knew he was all right.

 

BY THE TIME they'd got Jak on his feet again and shared a hasty meal of the now well-roasted venison, the mutie's corpse had sagged immovably into the doorway, blocking off the light from the front of the hut. Since the back door was torn off its single hinge, there was some light from the rear. Ryan and J.B. took turns stepping outside into the leaden cold to carry out a swift patrol, though neither expected to see anyone else. The cabin had obviously only held two occupants, and both were unarguably chilled.

"Mutie shit stinks," Jak growled, wiping drips of fat from his narrow chin.

"Generally do when they're alive," Ryan agreed. "Being dead never made them any sweeter."

 

"BEST MOVE." Ryan stood and led the way out of the hut, across the crisp snow, toward where they'd found the sled. "Others'll be wondering where we've gone."

The sky seemed to be sinking closer to the earth, like the canopy over some murderously suffocating four-poster bed.

The wind was still rising, and flakes of bitter white were carried in its teeth. From the dark horizon, it looked as though a bad storm could be on the way.

They loaded up quickly with what they wanted--fur coats, enough for everyone in the group; the gnawed remnants of the warm meat and the pot of turnips. There had been some rough black bread in a cupboard and a pitcher of sour milk. Jak discovered some canteens in the shed, stenciled over with what could once have been Russian military markings and numbers.

"That it?"

J.B. looked around. "Looks that way. Jak, put on the dried meat and fish so we can go."

"Not yet," the albino said, looking past Ryan and the Armorer.

They both turned and saw that they had company.

Ryan had guessed that the lane at the back of the filthy cottage could well lead, eventually, to a hamlet. Maybe even to a ville. The presence of food like fish and milk spoke of barter.

The three stocky men on shaggy ponies had come in from that direction, the noise of the wind swallowing the sound of their arrival.

They sat, fetlock deep in the powdery snow, about fifty paces away, each shrouded in furs from head to boots. The men rode bareback, and muskets were slung across their shoulders. As far as Ryan could judge, they simply seemed to be mildly surprised at the sight of the trio of strangers with the loaded sled. Certainly, none showed any signs of menace.

"Could lead to ville," Jak muttered, his fingers twitching near the butt of his .357.

"Could send us to buy the farm," J.B. added grimly.

Ryan weighed the odds. It now seemed as if there was a ville of some sort not too far away. That could mean food and shelter. He didn't know much about how the Russkies felt about Americans, but his guess was that they wouldn't welcome them with open arms. The old mansion was derelict, which made it a good place to hide.

If the word got around that there were three outlanders on the rampage, then life would be measured in hours. No more.

He glanced at the sky.

"Be serious snow within the hour," Ryan said quietly. "Cover any tracks."

J.B. nodded. "Chill 'em."

"Middle one," Jak whispered.

"Left," the Armorer chose.

"Right." Ryan selected the nearest of the silent horsemen. "Now!"

It took four bullets. Two booming rounds exploded into the stillness from the teenager's pistol, the second needed after the first hit his man high in the shoulder, kicking him over his animal's back. He landed on hands and knees in a flurry of white.

Both Ryan and J.B. put their targets away with single head shots.

"And the horses."

Obviously trained to remain still under gunfire, the three ponies had barely moved as their masters toppled dead into the snow. Ryan moved in a few steps closer, briefly reconsidering his own order. It wasn't a situation where they needed to conceal the killings. The wind and rising blizzard would hide their tracks. If there was a small ville nearby, they'd know where the riders would have gone and find the bodies easily enough. There was no way in a frozen land that a man could bury three horses.

"No, leave them," he said. "By the time anyone comes out here, we're long gone."

 

IN HIS SHORT TIME with the group, Rick Ginsberg had commented on several occasions about the way everyone seemed to have an almost uncanny sense of direction.

"I don't get it, guys," he'd say. "I need my fax to tell me which subway stop I want."

Krysty had replied the last time the subject had come up. "You miss a stop on your underground wags, Rick, and what happens? You have to go back. You miss a stop in the Deathlands and one of your friends gets to sprinkle dust in your face."

All the others were able to find their way around, either by the sun or the stars. Or without either of them. That was a vital skill as the storm descended, the wind screeching in from the Urals, one of the most rad-touched regions on the planet. It carried blinding snow across its shoulders, visibility dropping from a half mile to a dozen yards within seconds.

Trees bowed like dowsers' wands and a man's footprints disappeared within seconds. Ryan and J.B. stooped to the traces on the sled, chests heaving, heads down, while Jak picked his way just ahead of them, guiding them through the instant whiteout.

They stumbled past the corpse of the old woman, now a low hump, snow-buried. Every few minutes they'd change places. Ryan would take the lead while Jak pulled alongside J.B. Then the Armorer would take a breather out front, and Ryan went back to pull with the albino boy.

The noise of the wind rose and became deafening. To communicate it was necessary to put your lips close against the other man's ear and shout at the top of your voice. The furs they wore became heavy with ice. The temperature had dropped fast, and Ryan was aware of the uncomfortable feeling of the hairs inside his nostrils becoming coated in frozen condensation. The skin across his cheeks felt taut and numbedthe first whispering warning, he knew from previous experience, of the threat of frostbite.

All landmarks vanished.

After an hour's straining against the frozen ropes it crossed Ryan's mind that there was a possibility that they weren't going to make it. He'd heard men who had nearly died in snowstorms say that it wasn't a bad way to go. You just got more and more tired, lay down and fell sleep.

And you never woke up again.

It was a relief to make out the rectangular bulk of the mansion, looming before them out of the murk.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Ten

 

 

 

 THE FIRE CRACKLED MERRILY, the wood blazing and spitting sparks. Steam rose from the fur coats of Ryan, J.B. and Jak.