Pony Soldiers

by James Axler

  "Probably blown it when it was all over. Case the Reds got in after it. Still, is it worth a look, Ryan? You reckon?"

  "Sure. Let's go."

  It wasn't far, and they had to travel through only two more sets of armored doors. Ryan kept an eye on the rad counter, seeing to his relief that the level had dropped drastically once they got away from the scene of the actual nuking at the north end.

  But J.B.'s fear was correct.

  They reached a series of sec barriers, all with mes­sages warning what would happen to anyone passing through without the proper authorization. Then, as they reached the armory, they saw the evidence of self-set sab-devices. The doors were blown open, hanging crookedly off their reinforced hinges. And inside, the once orderly shelves and sections of the weapons stores were in jumbled ruined chaos.

  Ryan followed J.B. into the long hangarlike room, stepping over twisted chunks of metal or arma-plas, some of them unrecognizable, some of them barely identifiable.

  The Armorer picked his way into the chamber, shaking his head sadly. "If this stuff hadn't been blown away, we could have been the barons of all Deathlands inside six months, Ryan."

  "If that's what we wanted," came the laconic reply from the one-eyed man.

  There were hundreds of handblasters, all smashed.

  "Ninety-four SB Berettas," J.B. said, "and enough M-1911A1s to sink a war wag, M-62 machine guns, some rocket and gren launchers. Not all of these are completely destroyed, Ryan. Give me a little time and I can rig up one to work."

  Ryan shook his head. "No. Too heavy to carry. Leave it be, J.B., where it lies. We aren't touching the bodies. Leave the blasters the same way, like they fell. Come on."

  "What's them?" Lori asked, pointing to the left to some high shelves that housed some long, sharklike shapes.

  "Dark night!" J.B. exclaimed, his fedora nearly falling off the back of his head in his sudden excite­ment. "Missiles!"

  "Not nukes?"

  "No, Ryan, probably not. But there's Dragon and Copperhead antitank rockets there. Must have been overlooked in the last shambles. Launchers. Guid­ance units. Those are the best, there." He indicated a row of stacked rockets, around four feet long. "They're TOW Fours."

  "What'd they do?" Jak asked.

  J.B. closed his eyes and recited from memory. Even though Ryan knew how encyclopedic the little man's knowledge of weapons was, he was still impressed.

  "TOW Four. Stands for Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided missile. Originally replaced the 106 mm recoilless rifle. Got six wings that come out in flight. Uses a Hercules motor. Range around three miles. Flight velocity of 675 mph. Carries a fifteen-pound explosive warhead."

  "How d'you aim it?" Ryan asked, looking at the greased tubes, still gleaming behind their locked doors after nearly one hundred useless years.

  "Optical sensors in nose. Controls go down twin wires. Helium pressure actuators. Nightsight and laserscope. Penetrate any armor anyone had ever seen in those days. Beautiful. Real beautiful. Who'd have thought I'd ever see one."

  Ryan couldn't ever remember hearing the Armorer so enthusiastic about anything.

  Doc coughed and began to move back toward the corridor. "Can we get out of this death shop, Ryan? I find this—" he gestured at the broken metal all around "—saddens and sickens me."

  "They're okay if you use 'em right, Doc," J.B. protested.

  "There is no right, John Dix. Can you not see this? With the dealing of death there can only be wrong. Wrong!"

  "That could be," Ryan admitted, "but I know that if I'm against a chiller with a stick, then I'd welcome a bigger stick."

  The cut on Jak's arm was hurting him and they stopped off when they passed what had been a doctor's office, on the way to the entrance. J.B. cleaned and rebandaged the wound, which seemed to be healing fairly well.

  The surgeon was still in his office. From the sprawled position of the leathery corpse, he must have been leaning back in his swivel chair when he put the muzzle of the Smith & Wesson between his teeth. The impact had blown him over, legs resting on the over­turned seat. Lori stared down into the splintered exit hole in the top of the skull with a morbid fascination.

  "Empty," she said.

  "Would be, by now," Doc replied.

  There was nothing to stay for. The grim Shay Can­yon Redoubt with its flavor of ancient death was deeply depressing for the six friends. Their backpacks already held all the self-heats they needed, as well as some emergency water supplies. J.B. found some aqua-pure tabs and handed them out. Everyone had sufficient ammo for their blasters.

  There was nothing to stay for.

  As they neared the main entrance doors to the re­doubt, they could see a tattered poster tacked to the wall. It showed a hillside covered with fighting men, most on horseback, many with hats made from feath­ers. They were attacking a smaller group of people, who looked like sec men in dark blue uniforms. They were in a defensive ring, battling against overwhelm­ing odds and at their center was a tall man with flow­ing yellow hair.

  "Seventh Cavalry fighting against the Sioux," Doc said knowledgeably. "Battle of the Little Big Horn. The Indians massacred the whites, and served them right."

  The caption on the poster said simply, Custer Died for Our Sins.

  Underneath, in spray-can crimson, faded to a pale pink, someone had added a line: Whose sins are we dying for?

  "THREE… FIVE… TWO…" Ryan punched the open code into the control panel at the side of the massive armored sec doors, and after a fractional delay they began to slide back.

  It had felt warm before. Now they were all struck by a smothering wave of bright heat and dazzling sun­light.

  The twisted waste of red and orange desert stretched limitlessly before them.

  Chapter Seven

  "NEW MEXICO. OR ARIZONA. Near as I can make it. Close to Utah and Colorado as well. Sextant isn't that good, and the maps are kind of old."

  Apart from rough local sketch plans, Ryan knew that no proper maps, covering any appreciable area had been drawn since the United States of America ceased. And became the Deathlands.

  The hot desert air was heavy with the scent of sage­brush, mesquite and creosote. The sky seemed higher, the horizons farther, in that place of shimmering heat. There were vicious streaks of chem clouds, thirty miles or more off to the east, vivid purple against the glow­ing pink sky.

  The doors of the redoubt opened onto a plateau, with the remains of a narrow blacktop winding to­ward the valley beneath. Remote-control vid-cameras ranged the area, protruding from the jagged rocky overhang like the stops on a mission-hall harmo­nium. The complex was so well hidden by the moun­tain soaring above it that Ryan guessed it would be virtually impossible to detect from the flatter desert below.

  Now that they were outside, the pointer on the rad counter was flickering on the line between scarlet and pale orange. It was obvious that the region had once been a ferocious hot spot, which might, Ryan guessed, account for the fact that nobody seemed to have tried to break into Shay Canyon Redoubt.

  "Was this always desert like this, Doc?" Krysty asked, shading her green eyes against the lancing sun.

  "No. The way I recall it, far north as this was more a kind of dry grasslands. Near to the prairies. It seems as though the nukings and the long winters must have tipped the ecological and meteorological balance of the land's structure." He saw puzzlement on most of the faces around him. "It got hotter and dryer, so the grass died off and the sands came north from Mex­ico. If we're near to Canyon de Chelly, as it seems… That was always desert land, but you could cultivate it."

  "What with, Doc?" Krysty asked.

  "I recall the Navaho had peach orchards, until brave Kit Carson came riding in and grubbed them all up."

  "Which way shall go?" Jak asked. "Seems like lots of nothing every which way."

  Ryan scanned the horizon. The terrain looked like he'd once imagined the hot spots of Deathlands must have looked shortly after the dust and smoke c
leared. A land that was twisted and tortured, rock scraping skyward at every angle. Red dominated, and orange, shaded down through pink into gray. It was difficult to judge distances properly in the clear air, but it looked like the jagged mountains to the north could be a good fifty miles off.

  Jak's question was a fair one. Which way should they go? Which way could they go? They all looked much the same.

  "Anyone for going back inside and trying another jump tomorrow?"

  Nobody answered.

  "Anyone got any idea of any special direction for us to go?"

  Again nobody spoke.

  "How about west, along the valley toward those low hills? You all agree?"

  Only the faint whistling of the light breeze broke the silence.

  Ryan laughed. "Well, you don't disagree, so we'll go down and west. J.B., you like to lead off for a change? I'll cover the rear."

  It was late afternoon by the time they climbed down to the rim of the escarpment. There was no sign of any ville as far as the eyes could see. Apart from some un­identifiable birds circling above a clump of stunted trees ten miles to the north, there was no life to be seen. The shifting sand around their feet showed all manner of tracks: the swirling trail of sidewinders, weaving their way, the skittering marks of rodents and, once, the huge pad marks of a big cat. Jak paced the distance between the paws, whistling at his calcula­tions that the puma could be more than twelve feet long.

  As they neared the bottom of the old blacktop Krysty hesitated, peering toward the west. The others all stopped, waiting to hear what she'd been able to see.

  "A column of dust. Could be whipped up by the wind. We called 'em dust devils back home in Har­mony. Then again…" She paused.

  "Then again it might be wags? Men? Horses? Could be anything," Ryan said.

  "Could be. It's far off, lover, moving over behind a low mesa. Now… now it's gone."

  The last two hundred yards of the blacktop had to­tally vanished, disappeared as though it had never been. There had been a landslide and what looked like a series of flash floods, washing away at the land over the decades, changing the topography, hiding the road. There was a trail at the bottom of the valley, but from it there was no trace of the redoubt. Just a blank side of a mountain, scraped red-raw by the harsh weather.

  "No wonder nobody has gotten up there," J.B. said. "Just hope we can find the place when we leave."

  "Rock there shapes like the head of an old man with a big hat," Lori said, pointing just off the trail, near a dry riverbed. They all saw the frost-riven boulder that she'd pointed at.

  Doc Tanner laughed. "Damned if it doesn't look somewhat like me, my dainty little cherub of passion and devotion."

  "No!" she said crossly, stamping her foot. "I said like an old man, Doc. Not like you."

  "Lotta horse tracks," J.B. said, kneeling at a fork in the trail.

  "Shod or unshod?" Ryan asked.

  "Both. What kind of animals do your Indian friends ride, Doc?"

  "By the three Kennedys, John Dix! We are talking about events that took place about two hundred years ago. Then, the warriors of the tribes rode ponies. Un­shod. Around here were many different small tribes. Chiricahua and Mescalero Apaches, as well as the Hopi and Navaho. But if any had survived the long winters, then who knows?"

  "Could any have lived through?"

  Doc rubbed at the stubble that silvered his chin. "I guess so, Krysty. They lived in mountain and valley fastnesses, often far away from any places of white men. Away from what might have been important strategic targets in the holocaust of 2001. So they could have lived."

  "Well, someone around here's been riding horses, and there's narrow wheel tracks as well," J.B. re­turned.

  "Wags?" Ryan asked.

  Jak also stopped to look, his long white hair falling forward to veil his pallid face. "Not wags," he said. "Wheels too thin."

  "Look more like prairie schooners to me, though these tired old eyes aren't as sharp as they used to be."

  "What're they?" Lori asked.

  "Wooden wags, with big high wheels to get through the rivers and the soft sand. With canvas tops. They left their ruts clear across the country from east to west. Moved the frontiers, they did."

  Ryan didn't like the way the trail showed signs of such heavy use. The country was so bare that they'd stand out like a legless mutie at a gaudy house dance.

  "Mebbe we should find a camp for the night," he suggested.

  "Could do with water. Place like this isn't likely to have much. Head for those trees. It's the only spot of green for miles."

  The Armorer was right. In such an arid waste, the sun baking down from dawn to dusk, a man would lose around a pint of precious bodily liquid every hour. And the sun would cook out the sweat, so he didn't even realize the way he was dehydrating. Not until he found himself on hands and knees wondering why the earth kept moving away from him.

  Mariposa lilies dotted the floor of the valley, inter­spersed with spiky clusters of yucca. A large gopher snake writhed in front of Jak Lauren, making the boy reach for his Magnum. He only checked his shot at a warning word from Ryan.

  "Noise like that'll carry for miles."

  "Sure."

  IT HADN'T LOOKED THAT FAR to reach the grove of small cottonwoods, yet they walked steadily for more than three hours before they came close enough to distinguish individual trees, to see the glittering silver bark and the large lacquered leaves shifting in the light, hot breeze.

  "Indians used to make drums out of the trunks of the cottonwood," Doc said.

  "There might be water," Krysty suggested. "I can sort of taste it. Mebbe deep down. Don't know."

  The sun was slithering down behind the tops of the mountains to the far west, casting elongated shadows across the jagged landscape. The chem clouds that had threatened a storm had disappeared, and the sky was clear from edge to edge.

  Doc looked close to exhaustion, leaning heavily on Lori. But as they reached the head of a draw that wound in toward the trees, he straightened and began to sing in a steady, melodious voice.

  "Bringing in the sheaves,

  Bringing in the sheaves,

  We shall be rejoicing,

  Bringing in the sheaves."

  Ryan turned and half smiled at Krysty. The six companions had been through some bitter times, times of infinite peril. They'd survived them, and they were still together. Krysty returned his smile.

  Doc, meanwhile, had moved from one frontier hymn to another:

  "We will gather at the river,

  The beautiful, the beautiful, the river,

  We will gather at the river,

  That flows by the throne of God."

  "Doc?"

  "What is it, my snowy bird of passage?"

  "Way back your days…old days…was there God in old days?"

  Doc Tanner paused in midstride, looking intently at the boy's face, making sure that he wasn't being teased.

  "You aren't joshing me?"

  "What does…?"

  "Never mind. Was there God in my olden days? I'll tell you, that if there was, he kept himself well hid­den, Jak."

  J.B. collected some wood for a fire from a tangled deadfall across the draw, a hundred yards or so below the cottonwoods. It was all bone-dry and burned with a clear gold light and little smoke. Ryan had the un­easy, prickling feel at his nape that someone had been watching them ever since they left the hidden re­doubt. Someone, or something.

  "No chance of any fresh food around here, is there?" Krysty asked.

  Ryan shook his head, lying back on a bed of soft sand and staring into the flames of the crackling fire. "Guess not, lover. When we get into the hills there'll probably be deer. Higher and there'll be bear and goat. Too dry for any fishing. Mebbe I can catch you a snake or two, if that's your fancy."

  "No thanks."

  There had been no water. Lori had taken a jagged length off a branch and started to dig near the center of the grove of trees. She got down to around t
hree and a half feet, reaching earth that was less dry. But it wasn't damp enough to try to siphon any water from its bottom.

  Once Ryan thought he heard the far-off cry of an animal, sounding like a coyote. Krysty and Jak heard it, as well.

  "Definitely a coyote," the girl said. "Heard them around Harmony."

  "Or man sounding like coyote," the young boy suggested.

  THEY ALL HEARD THE COUGHING roar of a mountain lion, tearing the darkness apart with its sudden power and violence. They reached for their blasters, but the sound wasn't repeated.

  It was around eleven o'clock, the light full gone. A sliver of moon had appeared briefly, then vanished behind a bank of low cloud. The fire was burning low, all of the wood finished. Jak stood up and stretched.

  "Get more branches," he said.

  "Yeah. We'll keep a watch. Don't want that cou­gar creeping up on us when it's dark. Want me to come with you?"

  "No, Ryan. Be fine. Get from deadfall. Lots there, huh, J.B.?"

  "Yeah. Watch the ground. It's rough. Lotta scrub and dry stuff. Take care. You could easy turn your ankle on it."

  "Sure." A wave of the hand and he was gone, ghosting away among the silent trunks of the cottonwoods. Ryan watched him, seeing the silver sheen of the albino's hair, floating like a beacon in the dark­ness.

  "Go after him, lover," Krysty whispered, touching Ryan's arm.

  "Why?"

  "Because… Go on."

  Ryan knew better than to waste time pressing her for a reply. The mutated blood in Krysty's veins had given her strange skills and talents. And if she felt unease, then there might be some reason for it.

  He uncoiled from the sand and padded silently af­ter Jak.

  The scent of the mesquite was even stronger and Ryan paused, kneeling and rubbing his hands through the dust, which still carried the heat of the day, and dried his skin. He stood and adjusted the SIG-Sauer blaster in its holster. He followed the boy, out from the cottonwoods, down the dry creekbed, toward the deadfall of jumbled branches. He heard Jak a little ahead of him, picking his way over a scattering of dead brush.