Chapter Twenty-Two

 

 

A pair of skikes came up out of the water in tandem, breaking the choppy gray surface, and streaked for Ryan. Hoyle had identified the creatures. Ryan moved to the side quickly, his blaster already in his hand. The five-foot wide section of graveled earth that formed a natural berm for the river didn't give him much room to work with.

 

The wedge-shaped bodies arced fluidly, bringing the barbed tails around into attack positions. There wasn't much air current in the cavern to allow the skikes to maneuver gracefully. Once they'd launched themselves from the river, they were more projectiles than fliers.

 

"Goddamn!" Hoyle shouted. The man went to ground, taking cover behind an outcrop, seizing two stones in his fists.

 

Ryan brought up the SIG-Sauer and cut loose two rounds at the lead skike. Only one round hit the mutie creature, but it punched through the skike's chest, blowing its heart and backbone through its dorsal surface.

 

The skike died with a shrill cry that ululated throughout the cavern. Writhing out its death throes, the creature plopped to the ground in front of Ryan, the barbed tail sticking out into the river.

 

The second skike hit the cavern wall over Ryan's head. The mutie creature seemed hardly dazed at all by the sudden impact against the wall. Flexing its sides, it scooted across the gravel, heading back to the river.

 

"Kill it!" Hoyle yelled. "Kill the bastard thing before it gets the chance to tell the others we're here! Those shitters hunt in packs."

 

Ryan kicked the dead skike out of his way as he pursued the live one. Shrilling now, the skike planed across the shallow water, obviously waiting until it reached a deeper part of the river before diving. Taking deliberate aim, Ryan squeezed the SIG-Sauer's trigger three times.

 

The skike possessed an uncanny skill for dodging while in the water, changing course a half-dozen times in an eye blink, rolling its membrane to feint in still other directions.

 

All three rounds missed the creature. Then Krysty's weapon boomed, too, throwing up geysers of water around the skike. Taking a double-handed grip on his weapon and wading into the cold water, Ryan fired in a steady roll, working a pattern around the skike that allowed for forward movement, as well as to either side. The water was the creature's element.

 

He'd almost run his clip dry when he scored his first hit. Ears ringing from the concussions of his weapon, he saw the plume of blood jet up from the creature's left side. The membrane curled in on itself slightly, trying to cover the hole near the bottom. The skike kept moving, pulling to the right and starting to go under.

 

Ryan fired his last two rounds. The slide blew back into the locked and empty position at the same time he spotted the sudden cloud of blood churn the water and erase the skike from view. He replaced the clip, storing the empty in his pocket.

 

He waited, tense. Krysty had a hand over Bernsen's mouth, and the man was only able to make small, plaintive noises. She prodded the back of his skull with the barrel of her weapon to freeze him.

 

"You got it," Hoyle said breathlessly.

 

Ryan glared the man into silence. A moment later the skike's dead and mutilated body surfaced in a diamond of bloody flesh. It floated upside down, blue-gray belly turned up against the ceiling of the cavern. Ryan waited a little longer, until he was sure nothing else was coming after them.

 

 

 

"HOW FAR ARE YOU GOING to go looking for the boy?" Hoyle asked.

 

Ryan had the lead, and Krysty covered his back. Neither of the two men had been allowed weapons. "As far as it takes," he answered.

 

"Him holding on to that raft like he was, he could be anywhere. Hell, if he drowned, he might not be stopped yet."

 

Ryan knew that was true. Linked to the raft, Jak had been at its full mercy. "I'll take that chance."

 

"Leaving your friends back there wasn't any too smart, either, if you ask me."

 

"Didn't ask."

 

"Those skikes will be all stirred up from the floods, swimming around all hot up from being in rut. They won't hesitate about attacking those people back there."

 

Ryan kept moving, ducking under an overhang of crooked, lichen-covered rock that jutted from the cavern wall. The cavern was continuing to widen slightly, allowing more light in from cracks across the ceiling. The river appeared to be moving slower, but still at a steady clip.

 

"They haven't been attacked," he said.

 

"How do you know?"

 

"J.B. would have blasted anything that tried," Ryan replied. "Would have heard that."

 

"What do you intend to do with us?" Bernsen asked.

 

"Depends," Ryan answered. Along the sides of the river, trees and branches and other detritus had hung up in the scattered shallows, seining still more refuse from the current.

 

"'Depends'?" Bernsen echoed. "What kind of answer is that? My God, that's no answer at all."

 

"It's the only one I've got for you," Ryan said. "You and your friend here know this river, and I can use knowledge like that."

 

Ahead and to the right, a scarecrow figure in jeans and a green flannel shirt lay draped over a broken red-and-white-striped sawhorse that had seen its last good days years ago. Ryan approached it long enough to make sure the albino teenager wasn't covered over by the corpse.

 

He grabbed the corpse by the hair and lifted it. The woman was days-old dead, her throat cut straight across. Other cuts marred her face, showing she'd died hard and her killer hadn't been successful on the first try. Or had carried a grudge.

 

Jak was nowhere around.

 

Ryan dropped the woman's head back into the water, disturbing the small minnows that had been feeding on the soft parts of her face. In another few hours she wouldn't be recognizable at all. He walked back out of the water and kept on going.

 

"How far does the cave system go?"

 

"This one?" Hoyle responded.

 

"Yeah." Ryan kept his gaze moving. So far they hadn't been attacked by any more skikes, though they had seen a handful of the creatures skimming by underwater. There'd been no gunfire from farther back in the cave where they'd left J.B., Doc and Mildred, so it was a good bet they were still safe.

 

"This one goes on for a couple miles more. Then you have some daylight for another fifteen miles or so. Another cave system after that where you have to make a decision about where you want to go. The river forks in three directions and continues on for various distances."

 

"As far as Colorado?" Ryan asked.

 

Hoyle nodded, then asked, "What's in Colorado?"

 

"My son," Ryan replied. And he gave the man that, just enough to let Hoyle know he wasn't going to brook any arguments later when answers were called for. "Mebbe you want to tell me what you're doing up here." There was enough edge to Ryan's words that Hoyle would know taking a pass on the question wasn't a good idea.

 

"Working a job."

 

"What job?"

 

"Guide."

 

"For Bernsen?"

 

"And his friends."

 

Ryan followed the turn of the river, going cautious, the SIG-Sauer blaster covering the terrain ahead of him in case there were any lurking skikes. Only parts of the cavern lay in shadow, and beams of sunlight from crevices in the ceiling glinted silver off the unsettled river. "How many friends?"

 

Hoyle made the story short, saying that the men were scientists and all of them had been killed but Bernsen. Three of them had been chilled during an encounter with the brushwooders a couple days earlier. Two had died by skike poison after they'd gotten away from the brushwooders. And Mellelan had fallen to break his neck only the day before when they'd been hurrying through the mountains trying to beat out the approaching storm.

 

"Saw a tattoo on Mellelan," Ryan said when the man had finished. "Spotted one on Bernsen, too. And you."

 

Hoyle scratched the inside of his arm absentmindedly. "They got a thing about identifying each other. In some places they ain't too welcome. Ten, fifteen years ago old David Napier tried telling a few folks up north to be on the lookout for certain things. Some of those folks took objection to what he was preaching, called him a heretic and strung him up. Made the other people of the Heimdall Foundation kind of shy about being noticed."

 

"Heard mention of that Heimdall name, but what is it, this foundation?"

 

"You'd have to ask Bernsen to get the real particulars of that," Hoyle said. "Basically these people use telescopes and stare up at the sky all night long. They got books, vids and some comp progs that talk about all that stuff up there. Call it astronomy."

 

"All that looking, they got to be looking for something."

 

"Falling stars," Hoyle answered.

 

"That what brought you from Montana?"

 

Hoyle narrowed his eyes. "How do you know about Montana?"

 

"Mellelan had a map. Heimdall Point was marked on it."

 

"Now, that's a fool thing to do." Hoyle spit in disgust, "I hope you took up that map."

 

Ryan nodded.

 

"Don't need something like that falling into unfriendly hands. The Heimdall Foundation ain't set up proper to repel an attack." Hoyle shook his head. "These poor bastards, they been in their damn little towers too long looking up at the sky if you ask me."

 

"That's not what I asked you," Ryan said in a harder voice.

 

"Yeah, yeah. I've been guiding these assholes around a few places, going here and there for the last four years. Pay's good. I get some jack at the end of every trek successful or not, and I manage to steal enough predark stuff along the way to hock through some friends I got in a few places to keep myself living comfortable."

 

"Get to it."

 

"Over the last few months they took a special interest in a star they started calling Shostakovich's Anvil ."

 

"Twisted name for a star."

 

"That's what I thought. But they don't ask me before they go naming them. And the way they talked, it sounded like somebody else had already named this one."

 

"Might not have such an easy job when you get back there," Ryan stated, "with a few scientists short."

 

"Hell, ain't none of us loose yet. I figure we won't be clear of the reach of the Five Barons for a while."

 

"Who're the Five Barons?"

 

"Now, that's a story," Hoyle said.

 

 

 

THE HISTORY Hoyle gave Ryan was concise but complete.

 

In the beginning there'd been a gathering of small villes along the Cific coast. Each had clung to ideals and traditions handed down from those who'd survived the nukecaust or had migrated there afterward to be near the ocean. The aquatic life in the area had been less harmed than the land-based creatures, and as Hoyle stated, a man had to eat.

 

The villes hadn't gotten along well together. Each had staked out territorial claims that had been disputed over the years. Several villes had split off from the original ville. One of those had died out from an epidemic that created a natural southern boundary.

 

After that, things remained peaceableuntil the arrival of the barons.

 

"Any of them barons you ask about," Hoyle told Ryan, "you're going to hear a different story about how and why they came to be trapped out in the deserts the way they were. Only them and their Maker and a handful of their close sec people know the right of it."

 

All of the barons, six of them at the time, had wandered in from the desert, drawn by tales they'd heard of the villes and how robbing was easy there because the people in the seven villes were too busy raising stuff to eat and fishing to worry about learning to fight.

 

When the barons got among the villes, greed had set in. The villes were too close to allow for expansion by each separate baron. They tried splitting them up, but none of them were men who wanted to share.

 

"They went to war with each other," Hoyle went on. "Fighting, killing and sabotaging, the like of which none of the people of the seven villes had ever seen before. Oh, they'd had their scraps over the years, but it wasn't nothing like what the barons could dish out against each other."

 

"But with the barons killing one another and reducing their manpower down to something that wouldn't allow them to stand firm against the mutie bands wandering in the desert if they had to return there, they struck a bargain."

 

"Only one of the barons could comfortably run the seven villes at one time," Hoyle said. "So they decided a competition was in order to figure out who was going to get control without killing each other. All of them were so aligned that if any one of them swore out a blood feud against another, the others would step in and stop it. A shift in the balance of power wasn't tolerated. Jink Masten, the old sixth baron, was the only man all five of the others couldn't stand. They killed him three years ago, and became known as the Five Barons."

 

Ryan listened, knowing the savagery that had to have gone on between the barons. The history was a familiar story to him.

 

"They got together and created the Big Game," Hoyle went on. "Found a place out in the desert, somewhere that held a lot of meaning to it at one time. A place where luck and chance came together, they tell me. I never seen it."

 

"What do they do there?"

 

"Choose up teams. Kidnap folk and use them to fight for them. Control of the seven villes for the next year goes to the baron whose team wins."

 

"What does the winning team get?" Ryan asked.

 

"Killed, mostly. Except for one man. Or woman. Or mutie. The barons ain't particular. They don't want anybody to get a chance at getting together an experienced team, you know."

 

"So why do those people fight?"

 

"Don't give them much choice at the time."

 

Ryan turned the story over in his head as he walked through inches-deep water where the river had completely filled the cavern. "Which baron is in charge now, and who's his sec boss?" Ryan asked.

 

"Baron Hardcoe," Hoyle answered. "LeMarck's his most loyal man, but not the only sec boss. Hardcoe probably has a half-dozen of them. Got a lot of men with him."

 

"And they've got control of the seven villes?" Ryan's mind flipped the details around, keeping them mentally accessible while he put everything together.

 

"For now. The Big Game will decide who's going to get control of the seven villes for the next year."

 

"That was LeMarck out there behind us?" Ryan was thinking of the mysterious rifle shot that had nailed one of the brushwooders before he and J.B. had caught up to their companions.

 

"Behind you and the brushwooders," Hoyle confirmed with a nod. "Spotted him through the telescopic sights of that Sharps."

 

"And you'd know him?"

 

"Met him last week. Sort of. Bernsen and his friends thought that star was going to drop somewhere near the seven villes. I explained to them that nothing went on in that area unless it was okayed by the barons, so they marched into Jakestown pretty as you please and asked Hardcoe for permission to stay for a couple days. I've always heard he was interested on predark learnings, and I guess it must be so, because he not only let them stay, but hell, he even put 'em up."

 

"Why would Hardcoe be up here?"

 

"The last I heard, Baron Hardcoe assigned LeMarck to bring in the brushwooder leader. Daugherty's been raiding some of the farmers in the villes, and Hardcoe takes his business serious."

 

"So he could have been after Daugherty?"

 

"Mebbe, but from what I saw, he seemed to be showing a lot of interest in you people."

 

Ryan didn't have an explanation for that, but he let it drift around in the back of his mind while they walked.

 

Nearly an hour later, they found Jak.

 

Ryan spotted the raft first, tucked up mostly out of sight behind and under some driftwood. Jak was just one shadow among myriad others, until he stepped out into view with a leaf-bladed throwing knife in one hand and his .357 Magnum in the other.

 

"Knew you come soon," Jak said, grinning a little. "Waited. Too damn hard pull raft back up river alone."