by James Axler
"Let her go, Ryan," J.B. said. "Be getting us company soon."
The gap between the shore and the raft had been gradually widening, despite all of Ryan's efforts. He dropped the rope and jumped for it, landing awkwardly on the edge, legs trailing in the icy water.
The raft began to move away from the shore ever so slowly, just as fifty or more muties came bursting over the top of the slope toward them.
Chapter Three
If any of the stupes had owned a blaster, then Ryan's group would have taken some chillings. Even a couple of long-barreled Kentucky muskets would have picked them off like hogs on ice. Even bows and arrows, or straight spears would have been lethal at such close range, against helpless targets. Hanging on the slimy logs of the bobbing raft for their very lives, none of the six could even hold a blaster, let alone hope to hit anyone with one.
The muties hadn't come prepared, and the only weapons they had were the stones from the narrow expanse of the beach.
At less than twenty paces, the jagged missiles were potentially lethal, but the rocking of the raft that prevented Ryan and his friends from wiping away the muties also made them difficult targets. Krysty caught a painful blow on the left elbow, and Doc was cut on the forehead, but most of the stones bounced harmlessly off the raft.
A whirling current made the cumbersome vessel pitch and spin, then it broke free and began to move faster down the Mohawk, away from the murderous muties. As the raft steadied, J.B. stood up with his mini-Uzi, balancing himself against Ryan.
"Want me to take some of the bastards out?" he asked. "Be easy."
"No. Leave 'em," Ryan replied, peering behind them into the darkness. "Best take care when we come back to the gateway.''
"That's too damned right," Krysty agreed, rubbing at her damaged elbow.
The river gradually became wider, the raft floating sluggishly in its center. As it widened it also became calmer, with no hint of rapids. The banks were each a hundred paces away, leaving them safe from attack. The night wore on, and most of them managed to snatch a few hours' sleep, though Ryan took the precaution of keeping one of them awake and on watch.
"Keep careful — keep alive," had been one of the Trader's rules of living.
Just before dawn they passed another of the squalid little riverside communities. From a distance it was hard to see, but Krysty, with her sharp eyesight, was certain that it wasn't a nest of muties. Just double-poor folk dredging up an existence on the razor edge of poverty.
An arrow was fired from a screen of dull green pine trees, but it fell woefully short of the raft. On a narrow headland, daubed pink by the florid orange sunrise, the six were watched by a pack of hunting dogs, with slavering jaws and a crust of yellow froth around their long incisors.
Gradually the sky lightened. Around eight in the morning one of the limitless thousands of chunks of space debris, dating from the ill-founded Star Wars defense system, finally reentered the atmosphere of the Earth. It burned up in a dazzling display of green-and-red pyrotechnics, breaking up and melting as it ripped through the clouds in a fearsome explosion.
Doc Tanner took off his beloved stovepipe hat and wiped sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief, which was decorated with a swallow's-eye design. His eyes dimmed as he rubbed absently at the dent in the crown of the hat. "There will always be that sort of memory. Millenia will come and go and still that damnable filth will boil in the spatial maelstrom, falling now and again to remind us of the futility of it all. Oh, if only..." The sentence, unfinished, trailed behind him like a maiden's hand in the rolling water.
"Look," Lori said, shading her eyes with one hand and pointing ahead of them with the other. "Road across water."
"It's called bridge," Jak told her, balancing easily against the pitching of the raft. The vessel seemed even lower in the river now, the clear waves seeping over the front of the logs.
It was a place where the river narrowed, the banks closing in on either side, rising steeply to wooded bluffs. The bridge seemed to be made out of cables or ropes, strung like some dizzy spiderweb, dangling low in its center, barely thirty feet above the level of the surging Mohawk.
"And we got us company," J.B. said, unslinging the mini-Uzi from his shoulder.
They could see small, dark figures silhouetted against the light violet of the sky, scurrying toward the middle of the bridge, swinging hand over hand like tiny malevolent insects. Unlike the muties from farther upstream, these wore long cowled robes that concealed their faces and most of their bodies.
"They got no blasters," Jak said.
"Some got stones. And those two on the left have hunting bows," Krysty exclaimed, pointing with the muzzle of her P7A-13 handgun.
The raft was swooping fast toward the bridge, pitching and rolling. Ryan squinted ahead, clutching his G-12 caseless, trying to estimate how severe the threat was. Getting involved in a firefight in these circumstances was highly hazardous. The enemy, if proved hostile, held all of the jack. To try to blow them off their vantage point would be difficult at best, and extremely costly in ammo at worst. Even an ace shot like Ryan Cawdor couldn't guarantee wreaking much havoc from the unsteady platform of the waterlogged and rotating raft.
"Hold fire!" he yelled, hoping everyone could hear him above the pounding of the white-topped waves surrounding them.
"Be hard to chill 'em," Jak shouted from the front of the raft, where he crouched with his beloved Magnum, the spray washing over him.
"Doc! You an' Lori take that steering oar and try to keep the bastard steady. Keep her going forward and hold her from circling."
The girl and the old man staggered to the stern, Doc slipping and coming within an inch of toppling into the swollen waters. But they clawed a hold on the misshapen branch that trailed in the river, throwing their combined weight against it, gradually controlling the swinging of the clumsy craft. It was some improvement, but the chances of pulling off any accurate shooting were still dozens to one.
There were about thirty people on the fragile bridge, making it pitch and dip even lower.
Oddly none of them was showing any obvious signs of aggression toward Ryan and his group, no waving of fists or throwing of stones. The couple with bows simply held them, unstrung, in their hands.
J.B. glanced toward Ryan, the unspoken question clear on his face. He reached up and wiped spots of water off his wire-rimmed glasses, shaking his head in puzzlement.
"Why don't they?.."
Ryan readied himself. "Mebbe they aren't against us."
Doc heard him above the sound of the river. "Wrong, my dear Ryan. Anyone who is not for us, must be against us."
They were less than two hundred yards from the bridge.
One hundred yards.
"They're going't'let us through," Jak yelped, staring up at the hooded strangers.
"Mebbe," Ryan muttered. It was true what Doc had shouted. In the ravaged world of Deathlands you had few friends. And a mess of enemies.
Twenty yards.
A fish leaped in the air off to the left, bursting in rainbow spray, taking everyone's eyes for a crucial moment.
"We making..." began Lori, eyes wide with the tension of the second.
Dangling monkeylike from the center span of twisted cords, one of the silent watchers reached out as the raft floated directly beneath him — or her — and opened a hand, allowing something to drop. The object landed with a metallic thud on the logs, hitting the mast and wedging itself between two of the knotted creepers.
It was oval in shape, about the size of a man's fist. The top was dull, steel glinting through a number of gouged scratches. There were scarlet and blue bands painted around it.
"Implo-gren!" J.B. shouted in a thin, cracking voice, shaken into dropping his normal laconic mask at the sight of the bomb.
It had been a similar implosion grenade that had broken through the creeping fog when Ryan had entered the first mat-trans gateway. Using some very basic experimental anti-grav material, the hand b
ombs created a sudden and extremely violent vacuum so that everything around the edge of the detonation was sucked into it. The displacement was more ferocious than with a conventional explosion. Very few of the implo-grens had been made, and it flashed through Ryan's mind, even at that moment of maximum danger, to wonder how these isolated villagers had gotten hold of one.
The other thought that flooded into his brain was to try to recall what kind of fuses the grens had. Twelve seconds? Ten?
Five?
Doc and Lori were helpless, hanging onto the steering oar at the stern. J.B. was nearest, but the bulk of the mast obstructed him. Jak was the one with the fastest reflexes, but he was kneeling at the front of the raft, gun drawn, looking up at the monklike figures who hung on the bridge above them.
Krysty Wroth began to move. Despite having part-mutie sight and hearing, her reflexes were no faster than any normal person's.
Which left it in Ryan Cawdor's court.
As he started to dive for the implo-gren, he remembered about the fuse.
They were generally eight seconds.
Chapter Four
The metal was cold, slippery with the waters of the Mohawk.
Ryan's fingers closed on the gren, and he hefted it from the sodden logs, cocking his arm to throw it over the side of the raft. The rope bridge above them replaced a four-lane highway bridge that had crumbled in the first minutes of the nuking of 2001. Even now, a century later, some of the original stone and girders still lay in the river, just below the surface. At that moment the laden craft struck some relic of the ruined bridge, jarring into it with a sickening crunch.
The raft swung into a sullen half circle, throwing Ryan completely off guard. He stumbled, fighting for balance. He tried to dump the grenade over the side, but his fingers had locked over it as he fell. At the last moment he struggled to roll on his shoulder, but the slick cold wood betrayed his footing and he tumbled sideways. His shoulder thumped against the stump of the mast, and he half rolled on top of Krysty, who snatched at his coat to check him from falling over the side into the Mohawk. The implo-gren slipped from his hand, clattering under both their bodies.
The crowd on the spiderwork bridge gave a ragged cheer, waving their fists at the clumsy craft beneath them.
Ryan groped for the fallen grenade, feeling the raft hit again, with a jagged, splintering sound, holding it in the same place. Even as he touched the icy metal, his brain screamed to him that he was way too slow, that the eight seconds were up and gone. The metal would disintegrate and he would be sucked into the hissing vacuum and destroyed, along with everyone on the doomed raft.
He dropped the gren twice more, until he was finally able to grip it securely, sitting up and holding it in his right hand. Ryan was almost unable to believe their good fortune. Above him the cheers turned to screeching anger.
"It's a fucking malfunk!" Jak yelled. "Lemme chill the monsters."
"No. Let's get out," Ryan called. "Doc? Push us off with that steering oar."
"Consider it done," the old man replied.
"Throw it, lover," Krysty said, face white with shock at their narrow escape.
"Sure." He looked up at the horde of cowled figures hanging from the network of creepers and shouted, "Here, have the bastard back!"
Once, about eight years ago, Ryan had been with the Trader when they'd broken into a small redoubt, a long way west, in a valley of the Rockies. They'd found some old vids stashed away and a sealed battery player. Most of the tapes had rotted and crumbled, but they'd watched a few minutes of one of them. It had been a film of a football game. Ryan couldn't recall the names of the teams or the players, but he still remembered the grace and power of the man who'd thrown the football, flexing his arm and letting it go, soaring upward and on.
He hefted the implo-gren and heaved it toward the watchers on the bridge, hoping to hit one of them and maybe even pitch him into the river. The raft was already starting to roll uncontrollably down the Mohawk, and it wasn't worth wasting any ammo.
He watched the scarlet and blue bands revolving in the cool, damp air.
The sound of the grenade detonating was unmistakable: a muffled, inward, whooshing sort of noise, as the implosion sucked everything into itself. The gren had been at its highest point, hanging in the air only a few yards from the bridge, when the fuse finally worked.
The frail structure of knotted creepers disintegrated instantly, its strands spinning toward the whirling circle of air that had been the implo-gren. And the hooded figures were tugged with it, tumbling into screaming space, into the waiting river, which received them gratefully.
Ryan and his friends watched the destruction of their enemies with disbelief. The small bodies splashed into the fast-flowing water, most of them not even resurfacing, dragged down by their heavy robes.
Doc and Lori abandoned the steering, allowing the heavy raft to find its own direction and speed. All six of them stared behind at the spectacular results of the malfunctioned gren. On either side of the river they could see the dangling cords, snapped off short, that had held the bridge. But the whole center section had disappeared, floating past them in torn and fragmented sections.
Only one of the muties made it to the surface and tried to swim toward the raft. Its clothes were gone, and it resembled the muties they'd seen higher up the Mohawk — short arms and legs, and skin like a reptile. This one had no hair at all on its wrinkled skull, and they were shocked to see a vestigial third eye, staring wildly at them, in the center of its brutish, low forehead.
As it floundered along, closing in on the slow-moving raft, its lipless mouth stretched open and it screamed to them in a feeble voice.
"Elp, elp, elp, elp!"
Its fingers groped for the rough-hewn edge of the logs, near where Lori stood.
"I'm helped you," the girl shouted, still trembling from the shock of their brush with death.
Before anyone else on the raft could move, the slender girl hefted one of the ten-foot-long branches that served as paddles, lifted it and brought it down on the bobbing face. The stump of wood pulped the man's nose, splitting his lips, breaking off several of his teeth. Blood jetted, flooding his throat, making him choke. His hands slipped off the side of the raft and he bobbed away, a tendril of crimson trailing from his smashed face.
The last they saw of him was a hand clutching at the cold air.
* * *
Before evening the Mohawk was joined by another, wider river, coming in from the north. Doc Tanner pronounced that it was the Hudson. Even Jak Lauren had heard of that name.
"Runs by Newyork?"
The old man sighed. "Time was it did, my snow-headed young colleague. But what remains of that great metropolis now I wonder?"
"When I was a kid, folks talked of it as a hot spot, full o'weeds," Ryan said. "Only ghouls lived there, eating each other."
Doc smiled. "Sounds much as it was back in my day, Ryan."
The light was fading and an evening storm threatened. Ryan pointed toward a low spit of land, jutting out, with the shattered remnants of a building just visible at its end. Because of its length and narrowness it would be easy to defend against a sneak attack from the land side.
"Bring us in there if you can," he called to Jak, who was manning the steering oar with Krysty.
The farther south they drifted, the slower and wider the river became, with none of the gushing rapids they'd encountered higher up, near the abandoned redoubt. The water was amazingly clear, with the rocks on its bottom looking close enough to reach down and touch, though a quick measurement with a length of cord and J.B.'s Tekna knife showed them a depth of about fifteen feet. Doc kept wondering at how unpolluted the Hudson appeared.
"Back when I knew it nobody would place a hand in the water, for fear the acids and chem filth would scorch it to the bone."
The raft grounded with a soft crunch on the shingle, and they all leaped gratefully off it, stretching their legs. Jak tied the remnants of the mooring rope aroun
d a rusted girder that stuck vertically out of some crumbling concrete. The boy stooped and lapped at water from his cupped hands, wrinkling his nose.
"Tastes of salt," he said.
"Salt?" Ryan queried. "Must be close to the sea. I haven't seen the sea for... for too many long years. Is that right, Doc?"
"We must go down to the sea again, and do business in great waters," the old man chanted. "The wonders of the Lord, my dear Ryan, is what we might all share, one day hence."
"But are we close to the sea?" J.B. pressed.
Doc shook his head, the light wind disturbing his gray locks. He smiled and showed his peculiarly fine, strong set of teeth. "What is close, John Barrymore Dix? How when is up? How meretricious is now? Riddle me that, my friend."
They dropped the question of how close they were to the sea. In fact, it was approximately one hundred and fifty miles from their stopping place to the open ocean beyond Manhattan.
Ryan set guards, giving everyone a two-hour duty during the time of darkness, and left the last watch for himself. The rest of the group huddled together in the open, eating from their self-heats, using the water from the Hudson for drinking despite the faint hint of salt it held.
"Be better in the trees for shelter?" J.B. suggested.
"We haven't seen any sign of life for hours. Not since the crazies on that bridge."
It was true what Krysty said. The banks of the Hudson seemed deserted. Ryan had been taking regular readings with his rad meter, but it hadn't gone seriously across the orange and into the red. The land was warm, but no longer hot.
"Because we don't see 'em, it don't mean they aren't there," he replied.
"Yeah," the laconic Armorer said.
They stayed where they were.
It was a beautiful night, warmer than it had been farther north. The moon was untroubled by clouds, sailing above them, sharpening the edges of all the shadows.
Lori was on watch a little after three in the morning. When the stickies came, they beat the girl to the ground before she could give any warning.
