by James Axler
Bass sat there hunched over his misery. Ryan rose, stretched.
“I’m turning in,” he said. “Got watch to stand later.”
He looked down at Krysty. She smiled and stood.
As she did, she saw Olympia rise, as well. The young woman turned and walked away without farewell or explanation, as she usually did.
Surprisingly, Bass heaved to his feet and hurried after her.
Ricky jumped up. Even J.B. turned a questioning look on Ryan.
But Ryan shook his head once, then looked up and past the parked chuck wag. There in the darkness beyond the fading reach of the firelight Krysty glimpsed a white shadow, a ghost of Bass Croom’s past, perhaps.
Or Jak, less aloof from the affairs of mere mortals than he liked to pretend, eavesdropping on their employer’s confession.
This time Ryan nodded once. The hint of white became blackness.
The one-eyed man sighed softly, then hunkered down again.
“Reckon I’ll sit by the fire a spell longer, after all,” he said.
* * *
TALL AND SLIM, Olympia walked into a flat spot about twenty yards wide and thirty feet downhill from the wag circle. Springing lightly from rock to rock, Jak shadowed her, unseen in the dark—he thought, anyway. He had learned not to underestimate the strange young woman. Her wilderness and stealth skills were no match for his, but her senses were keen, and she knew how to use them.
Still, Jak was sure she’d never spotted him, ghosting her like this when she did her funny exercises. To protect her, he assured himself, as he usually did. After all, no matter how sharp she was, it was bad practice to go away from the others by herself in the dark like this. Ryan had said no one should do that right off, and Croom and Cable backed him. Even when the sec boss was carrying his hard-on for Ryan. But Olympia held to no law but her own, although she was as scrupulously clean and polite in camp as any could ask. Without saying so, though, she had somehow made clear that was because it was her way, not someone else’s dictates.
Now, though, instead of standing with feet shoulder-width apart and slowly raising her hands in front of her face, she stopped, turned back and stood looking toward the glow of the campfire around the bulk of the parked chuck wag.
Jak heard the crunching of someone walking on dirt, without much skill at going quietly but not even trying for stealth. From the sound and pacing of the footfalls he knew who it was before the bearlike figure came out of the night.
Bass Croom’s pace had changed, especially since the betrayal and escape at Raker’s Rest. It had grown steadily slower and more tentative. Now it was at best the next thing to a stumble.
The master trader walked up to within six or seven feet of Olympia and stopped. His breathing was loud and ragged as if he’d run a mile. Even by the gleam of stars through high, scattered clouds chasing each other frantically across the sky Jak could see how deeply sunk his eyes were, how furrowed his face.
“Got something to tell you,” Bass said huskily. “You alone.”
She said nothing.
He stood a moment. Jak thought he was about to turn and run. But he licked his lips and went on.
“That story I told,” he said. “It was true. Mostly. Up until...until I stole the map. But I left out the worst part.”
Again he waited for her reply.
Again it was silence.
“I chilled him,” he blurted, so loud Jak thought even the others had to have heard, a hundred feet away and upwind. “I—I couldn’t help myself. Rage just got me in its teeth and wouldn’t let me go till I beat him to death with a rock.”
He covered his face and sobbed. “When I told the others that theft was the worst thing I ever did, well, it was true. Except for this thing. A thousand times worse.”
Still Olympia stood unspeaking. Her eyes, though, focused on Bass’s face as intently as an owl gliding silently in the night sky, watching the mouse it meant to swoop down and take for its supper.
He lowered his hands and stared at the palms. Even Jak, not given to such fancy flights, thought he had to be seeing them again covered with a chilled man’s blood.
“I lived with it all these years,” Bass said. “The guilt. The pain. The wish I could take it all back. I tried to lead as good a life as I could to atone. Told myself that when I found it—the Promised Land—I’d...I’d do something to pay the man back. But—”
He broke off and wept openly. Jak crouched and watched. Olympia stood and watched.
“When I had taken the map from around his neck,” Bass said, his voice muffled by his hands, “I saw somebody watching from the darkness, by a pail of old tailings between two shacks. Just a—just a slip of a girl. I could tell that and no more. Then she ran away. So did I.”
Slowly he lowered his hands and looked at the silent young woman. Then he dropped to his knees. Jak was surprised he managed not to fall forward on his face on the clumpy grass or simply slump into a boneless sack.
“Forgive me,” Bass said.
Olympia smiled.
“What makes you think I can forgive you?” she asked, then turned and walked off into the darkness.
“His eyes,” Bass said. “He had Asian eyes. Aren’t you his daughter?”
His only answer was her vanishment. He fell forward on the cold, hard ground and cried like a baby.
* * *
IN THE EARLY HOURS of the next day the convoy was halted by a flock of sheep coming up the narrow streamside road they were descending.
Ryan climbed down from his sandbag nest atop the cargo wag and joined the others by Croom’s command wag. The rocky slopes were steep and close on both sides. There was just room for the sheep to flow past on either side. A group of small kids trotted along beside them, chirping to them and calling out in some language Ryan didn’t recognize and switching lightly at them with sticks. They seemed curious about the intruders but focused on the woolly, bleating beasts.
An old man with a long staff and a bent back came last, seeming in charge of the whole herd of sheep and kids. He had a hat crammed onto his head, battered shapeless and, beneath a coating of dust, stained to the point the only color Ryan could think to call it was dark. He was dressed in a baggy long-sleeved sweater with sleeves that came down and bunched around his knobby wrists. They were made all of wool. Like the smocks and pants the kids wore, come to think of it.
He bobbed his head and grinned with a mouth that had about three teeth in it Ryan could see, twisted and well browned by tobacco.
“Hello,” the old man said.
“Hello,” Bass replied. He was riding in his wag alone. Except for ghosts, Ryan reckoned. As usual the master merchant tightened up when dealing with a new person, although all he could muster was a sort of ghastly parody of his early confident cheer. “I was wondering if you could give us some directions, please.”
The old man smiled and nodded up a storm, then he shook his head. A torrent of words poured from his ruined old mouth, not a syllable of which made any more sense to Ryan than a dog barking.
There did seem to be an uncommon quantity of z’s and k’s. Ryan felt lucky to pick out that much.
“Wait.”
It was Mildred, walking up from the chuck wag, last in line, which she was driving that morning. She wore a wool sweater of her own, if fortunately far less fragrant than the one the old man had on. She had her arms clamped firmly beneath her large, heavy breasts as if that would keep off the chill of the bright, mostly clear mountain morning.
“I caught the word Euska-something in there,” she said. “I think these people are Basques. Like those people on the island.”
The old man’s face lit up like a wrinkled brown moon. He bobbed his head some more.
“We Basques!” he announced proudly.
“What are you d
oing here?” Ryan asked.
“Sheeps!” the old man said perkily. His rheumy old dark brown eyes lit right. “We tend sheeps!”
“Yeah,” Ryan said as the last of the flock bleated its way past the parked vehicles. “I got that. Sheep. Yeah.”
“The Basques are the best shepherds in the world,” Mildred said. “So a few years back, uh, before my time, I mean, a bunch of sheep owners in Idaho and such places got the bright idea of importing a bunch of them.”
“To herd sheep,” Ryan said.
“Yes, yes!” the old man repeated. “Sheeps!”
“They seem very happy,” Doc said. “Also the sheep.”
For all the crises and disasters of the past few weeks—and the weeks preceding, of course—it had been a spell since Ryan had felt events slipping away from him at quite this dizzying a pace.
“Ace on the line,” he said. “So these are Basques. Basques like sheep. Sheep like Basques. How does this load any magazines for us?”
“Can you tell us anything about a place that lies nearby?” Bass said. He spoke slowly and distinctly but didn’t make the common English-speaker’s mistake of shouting. “A beautiful valley? With a great treasure?”
“If he knows about treasure, Bass,” Sandra said, “why wouldn’t he and his people have claimed it for themselves?”
But the old man reacted in a way Ryan didn’t expect. His mouth opened wide, revealing a stray tooth or two lurking hitherto unseen around the edges, and his eyes went round.
“No, no,” he said. “Not go! Not go there!”
“Why not?” J.B. asked, taking off his fedora to scratch the top of his head.
“Cursed!” the old man yelped. “Bad, bad place. You go, you die, she die, everybody die!
“Die bad!”
Epilogue
“Well,” Sandra said, “it is everything it’s cracked up to be.”
The mountains—foothills, now—had retreated farther and farther the last few miles. They had come into a wide, shallow valley that gave promise of the high plains Krysty could glimpse past the hills beyond.
But it was up and to the east that they were looking. Up a narrower valley perhaps a quarter-mile long and a little less than that wide. Its beauty took Krysty’s breath away: the lush green perfection of the grass, so early in the year, that not even the crystal-clear waterfall breaking amid rainbowed spray, thin and pure down a sheer granite face that seemed to wall the upward end, could seemingly account for. A wonderland of wildflowers nodded to a gentle breeze, all gold and white and blue and magenta, as if bags of different jewels had been carelessly strewed around the meadow.
Off to the right of the narrow cascade, and the broad inviting pool at its base, Krysty glimpsed an oddly rectangular darkness in the dark rock. Though the sun was only just rising higher than the cliffs, she could still make out what looked like dull glints of metal masses at one edge.
“Redoubt,” Jak breathed.
“This is the place!” Bass exclaimed, stabbing at the wrinkled map he held unfolded in his palm.
He raised his face, and instead of haggard misery, his bearded features held a look of exaltation. As if, Krysty thought, he saw redemption there.
Jak had told them, privately, of the master merchant’s midnight confession to Olympia. Ryan had shrugged it off, and Krysty understood.
It made little difference to them now.
“Hate to be the one to piss on everybody’s parade,” J.B. said, “and I don’t hold with talk of curses, myself, but hasn’t anybody else noticed all the rad-blasted skeletons?”
And skeletons there were. Some were almost completely overgrown, like the antlered skull with a spray of purple daisies spouting from one vacant eye socket. Some were half buried in the rich, ripe grass. Most were bleached white by the sun, but not all—like the sheep skeleton that lay not fifty feet in. As Krysty watched a raven perched on its side, bent, then flapped away with a dark strip of something clutched in its beak.
“I don’t think we wanted to, J.B.,” Mildred said in a tone of awe. “It’s so beautiful the eye just wants to—edit them out.”
Krysty nodded. None of the skeletons, she noted, was farther in than a hundred yards.
She turned to a crumpling sound. The map, which Bass had obviously cherished and cared for secretly for two decades, was wadded in one clenched hand.
“What are we waiting for!” he said. “It’s here! The Promised Land! And as I told you, my friends, everyone shares and shares alike.”
“I’ll pass,” Ryan said. “All I see get shared here is death. I don’t believe in curses, either, but something’s kept the Basques out all these years. And other people—there’s a road runs right by here west that looks traveled regular. But nobody seems to have tried to settle here.”
“And those who may have tried seem to have fared poorly,” Doc said, squinting beneath his palm. “Not all those skeletons are animal, my friends.”
Bass looked at Ryan in disbelief and something like horror. Shaking his head as if in vast and unfathomable disappointment, he turned to his own people.
“Sandra?” he asked his quiet and devoted aide.
She shook her head.
“Bert?”
“No, boss.” The young sec man looked stricken, but his head shake was firm. “It’s like Ryan says. No treasure’s worth it if you’re chilled.”
“But surely—Cherokee? Bit? You’ll come with me, won’t you?”
But the two drivers, the man Cherokee and the tiny brunette woman Bit, shook their heads.
Another person had come up to stand on the verge of the lush pasture, with its flowers and picked-over chills. As usual Olympia stood a bit apart from the others, calm and straight.
But her blue-jade eyes were fixed, not on the unbelievable, if lethal, beauty of the hidden valley, but on Bass Croom’s bearded face.
He looked a plea at her.
She met his eyes levelly. Her lips didn’t move, but it was as if something passed between them. Bass shook himself. As if accepting her unspoken judgment, he turned away. He dropped the map he had bought at such enormous price—to himself as well as others—on the bare ground by his boots, then strode forward into the valley.
After just a few yards, he began to run, then falter.
“Look!” Jak cried.
Krysty did. They all did.
Small, yellow-furred forms had begun to spring from concealment in the grass. They stuck to him like cockleburs, but they moved.
Bass Croom screamed, shrilly, like a man being burned alive.
Or eaten alive. A tiny creature with black-and-white stripes down its back and a stubby tail landed on the master merchant’s shoulder. Blood fountained from his thick neck, shocking red in the sun.
“Bass!” Sandra cried. She started to run forward. J.B. caught her by the arm and held her back.
More and more of the furry shapes emerged to swarm over the doomed man. He fell to his knees, batting at them with his hands. It did him no more good than his increasingly shrill howls of intolerable pain. One hand came away spurting gore from the stub of a bitten-off forefinger. Bert García turned away and puked his breakfast of beans and hardtack onto the ground.
The blaster shot rang as loud as thunder from lightning striking a handful of feet away. Bass’s head jerked. He stiffened, arching his back so violently some of his tiny tormentors were flung clear, wriggling and squeaking and shedding red drops.
Shot echoes chased each other up the walls of the treacherous paradise like mocking spirits. Bass pitched forward to lie half buried in the beauty of grass and flowers. Then he was covered over completely in yellow-furred horror.
“Now that,” J.B. said, rubbing his jaw as Ryan lowered his P-226, “is something you don’t see every day.”
“Jesus!” Ricky breathed. He crossed himself. Mildred laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. Or maybe a hand to hold him up; his knees weren’t looking steady to Krysty.
“Mutie piranha ground squirrels?” Mildred asked in disbelief. “You have got to be shitting me!”
“It would certainly appear so,” Doc announced. He spoke in his best scholarly tones, though he had gone dead white to the stained and rumpled collar of his mostly white shirt.
“I don’t plan on finding out,” Ryan said, “and that’s a fact.”
The sound of a door opening behind them made them all turn. Olympia was bending inside the rear of Bass’s command wag. She backed out and straightened, settling her backpack over her shoulders. Without a word she began to walk down the road that led west into flatter, more arid land.
Ricky ran a few steps after her. “Wait!” he called out. “Where’re you going? Why are you leaving?”
“Reckon you got a share coming,” J.B. said, ever practical. “Of the swag from the wags, that is.”
Olympia turned back. She smiled her enigmatic smile.
“It’s yours,” she said. “I paid for passage, and now I’m here.”
She walked away.
The others stood staring after her as her form diminished down the dusty, rutted track. Wherever she was going, Krysty thought, she seemed confident about it. Then again, she had seemed confident about everything she did.
“Will somebody please tell me what in the name of glowing night shit that was all about?” Ryan demanded.
Doc turned to his companions with a light in his pale blue eyes and a strange half smile on his withered lips.
“Why, don’t you know?” he said. “Nemesis, my friends.”
* * * * *
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