ACrucible of Time

by neetha Napew

  The body was bloated, the fur clinging, sodden, to the five-foot-long body. The leprous tail twitched uneasily behind the mutie creature, and the blank golden eyes turned slowly toward the watching man. Common sense told Ryan that the rodent couldn't possibly see him at that distance in that light, but his grip relaxed and he dropped clumsily to the floor of the bathroom.

  He waited, crouched, steadying his breathing, aware that his heart was beating faster than usual.

  There was something hideously malevolent about the soaking predator, waiting out in the storm.

  Where was it going?

  On an impulse Ryan moved fast out of the bathroom, heading to the main entrance. He hesitated a moment, then retreated to their bedroom. He leaned over Krysty and shook her gently awake, his hand pressed over her mouth to stop her from crying out.

  "Quiet," he whispered. "Just saw one of those mutie rats, heading toward where Dean, Doc and Jak are. I caught the bad feeling from you." He took his hand away.

  "Storm," she said, starting to sit upright.

  "Yeah. Bad one." Lightning cracked through a narrow gap at the top of the solid sec shutters, like the slash of a razor-edged knife. "Going outside to recce. Soon as I'm gone out the front, slide the bolts across again. Keep safe. Get dressed. Wait for me comin' back."

  "How about the others?"

  "Who?"

  "J.B. and Mildred."

  "Oh, sure. No point in waking them. No need. Just that feeling. Be back in five minutes or so."

  "If you're still out there after ten minutes, I'll be waking them and coming out after you."

  He nodded his agreement and bent down, kissing Krysty lightly on the cheek, feeling the cool softness of her skin against his lips. "Sure."

  THE WIND nearly whipped the heavy door from his fingers, tugging wildly at it. Ryan held on tight, easing it shut behind him. He stood still and waited to try to accustom his eye to the darkness and the turbulent weather, blinking as yet another dazzling flash of purple-pink chem lightning crackled across the forest, followed by rippling thunder. The noise was so deep and so close that it felt like his spine was vibrating in time with it.

  The mutie rat had vanished, which was both good news and bad news: good if he never saw it again, bad because he now had no idea where the creature might have gone.

  Ryan drew the SIG-Sauer slowly from its holster, thumbing back on the hammer, holding it steady in his right hand, alongside his thigh. He started to move cautiously toward the cabin.

  He kept in close to the protection of the main building of the eatery, past the kitchens, catching the lingering scent of the marvelous jerky.

  He paused at the end of the block, gathering a breath as he readied himself for the dash into the open, checking once more that none of the mutie rats was anywhere around. But the rain-swept clearing was empty of life.

  There was a great temptation to turn on his heel and go straight back to the warmth and comfort of the dry bed. It was almost certain that everything was fine. Dean, Doc and Jak were snug…snug as… "Bugs in a rug," he said to himself. Yeah, almost certain.

  Almost.

  He took a deep breath and moved into the torrential downpour, soaked through to the skin in moments. Ryan didn't make the mistake of trying to run, head down. That way you could easily bump into something profoundly unpleasant and not ever know what it was that had laid you out in the dirt, hot blood gushing from your severed arteries.

  Also, the footing was desperately treacherous, with slimy streams of dark mud, mingling with the leaf mold at the edge of the trees.

  Ryan brushed rain from his good eye, flicking back his wet hair, keeping a good watch all around as he closed in on the dark cabin.

  The iron handle was cold to his fingers and resisted any movement. Ryan waited a moment, then tried again, using greater force.

  But nothing happened; it was rock solid. He looked around as another great flash of sheet lightning illuminated the rain-slick slope.

  The thought of calling out crossed his mind, but he doubted that they'd hear him anyway. The storm's heart seemed locked in place, directly over that part of the Sierras.

  Ryan looked around one more time, shaking his head to clear his vision. He wondered whether he'd actually just seen fresh movement, along a narrow path that he hadn't noticed before, which led past the cabin down toward the stream, flanking what had probably once been a car-parking area.

  On an impulse he followed the movement.

  The wind was deafening, combining with the constant rumbling of thunder to seal him off into a buffeting world of noise. A gang of stickies could have come up behind him, letting off triple-power cherry bombs as they came, and Ryan wouldn't have heard a single sound.

  Branches lashed out at him, making him duck and weave, fending them off with both hands while trying to maintain a tight grip on the blaster.

  There it was again!

  It was definitely one of the rats, scuttling along about thirty yards in front of him, belly down, scaled tail scooping through the mud. The compensation from the storm was that the gigantic rodent was way too busy to worry about whether it was being the hunter or the hunted.

  The trail wound steeply downhill. Ryan could make out faint ruts, despite the streaming dirt, as though some sort of barrow or handcart had been frequently used on the path.

  There had been no lightning for several long beats of the heart, and Ryan reluctantly stopped, waiting to gather his bearings again in the swooping blackness. If the rat had stopped, as well, there was the real menace of walking right into it. With predictably unpleasant consequences.

  To his surprise the ragged veil of clouds was suddenly torn apart for a moment and watery moonlight broke through, showing that he was on the edge of a wide clearing.

  Ryan's mind registered two separate and bizarre images, almost simultaneously.

  One was the rat, silhouetted by the stark light, towering on its hind legs, clambering and gnawing away at a mound that stood up against a roof-high deadfall. The other, seen in that frozen fragment of time, like a fly trapped in amber, was what the rodent was eating.

  There were bones, glistening, stripped of meat, with just a few shreds of gristle and sinew dangling from them. A small mountain of death was piled high, the smell penetrating to Ryan despite the wind and the rain.

  That first hideous glance revealed the presence of dozens of flayed carcasses, all too obviously the source for Mrs. Fairchild's wonderful jerky.

  It was the next flash of chem lightning, a triple heartbeat later, that showed Ryan precisely what kind of meat he and the others had devoured so enthusiastically.

  There were femurs and clusters of carpal bones, entire rib cages and pelvises. But most of all there were dozens of grinning skulls.

  Human skulls.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Aware of the watcher, the mutie rat turned from its feast and dropped to all four legs.

  The few seconds of moonlight were over, the wind blowing the banks of cloud back, plunging the area into total darkness again, with only the scattered bolts of pinkish silver lightning to bring any illumination.

  Ryan moved a few steps to his right, feeling with his hand to encounter the rough, streaming bark of the nearest of the immense pines. He sensed the importance of having some kind of solid cover to make a stand against the mutie rodent and pressed his back against the trunk, the SIG-Sauer probing at the blackness like an extension of his right arm.

  Part of his fighting brain was locked into the problem of the rats, but another part was wrestling with concern over the grotesque hill of human corpses and what the implications were for himself and the six friends.

  And another part of him desperately wanted to throw up and rid himself of the half-digested jerky that seemed to have swollen to near bursting.

  It took an enormous effort of will for Ryan to shutter off the thought of what he'd eaten with such delight. It wasn't a good moment to give in to the nausea and double over, vomiting. Not
with the rat on the move.

  Lightning flashed, a massive display, longer and brighter than any that had gone before, thunder making the centuries-old conifer at his back tremble to its ringed core.

  The mutie rat was coming slowly toward him, head moving from side to side, the silver light reflected from the cold gold eyes. Its mouth was half-open, drooling a thick yellowish grue. Ryan noticed that the thing still held a severed limb in its strong jaws, a fleshless arm, bony fingers clacking as the head moved. And it was making an obscene high-pitched squealing sound as it advanced on the man.

  Ryan steadied his right wrist with his left hand, aiming the blaster at where he thought the rodent was.

  There was a strong wish to cut and run, to get away from the horror that he knew was creeping stealthily toward him.

  It would be a doubly bad move to expose his vulnerable back to the monster and risk running pell-mell into some of its brothers or sisters.

  He stood his ground, ignoring the clubbing wind and the driving rain, ignoring his own utter discomfort and the worries about his friends.

  A staccato burst of short, stabbing lightning strikes burst over the clearing, accompanied by deafening thunder.

  The light showed the rat was in midcharge, its movements twitching in the strobing flashes barely a dozen paces from him.

  The blaster coughed three times, the explosions muffled by the baffle silencer, the glow of the triple discharges barely visible. Ryan felt the kick of the pistol run up his arm, clear to the shoulder, and saw the bullets strike home, blood flaring black in the lightning.

  The first one ripped into the side of the rat's questing muzzle, shredding wet fur and flesh, exiting immediately below the right eye, bursting it from its socket where it dangled in the dirt like a discarded ornament.

  The second drilled into the throat as the rat lifted its head in agony from the impact of the first 9 mm round. The bullet dug deep, nicking the spinal column, before coming out at the base of the skull in a welter of blood and bone.

  The third round was superfluous. The grossly mutated, rad-cancerous animal was already dying, its legs folding under it, the tail flailing like a demented buggy whip. It lurched as the final round hit it through the right shoulder, toppling it onto its side, dropping its interrupted meal. Sable blood oozed from the parted jaws, the scream of shock and agony muffled by its own arterial flow, which flooded its throat and lungs, choking it.

  "Bastard," Ryan said quietly, looking around to see if there were any other giant rats anywhere close by. But the clearing was completely deserted—just the wind, the rain, the lightning and the mortally wounded creature, barely twitching.

  Ryan closed his eye for a moment, pressing the blaster to his cold forehead, taking several slow, deep breaths to try to control the sickness that washed over him.

  But he kept seeing a vision of the jerky, sitting there on the plate, nestled in its bed of potatoes and vegetables, soaked in that rich, luscious gravy, and Mom's smiling, sweating face, hovering over the plate.

  The sickness was shockingly violent, bringing Ryan to his knees in the mud, a thread of bile hanging from his mouth, all the way into the sodden dirt. His stomach rebelled, bringing up every last, bitter morsel of the supper, the watery chunks frothing all around his combat boots.

  "Oh, fireblast," he groaned. "Never ever eat at any place called Mom's again."

  He remembered now that it had been a part of one of the Trader's sayings. "Never play cards with a man called Doc," was another part of it. And there had been a third part, but it had slipped from his memory.

  He knew that—

  "Doc," he said, suddenly remembering his original worry about the old man, his son and Jak. He spun on his heel, still holding the SIG-Sauer, and set off back toward their cabin.

  IT SEEMED that the storm was beginning to move away, toward the Cific coast, across the next range of mountains. There was a noticeable gap between the flashes of chem lightning and the roiling sound of the thunder, and the rain was easing, as the cold blue norther veered easterly.

  Everything was still quiet as Ryan reached the shelter of the overhanging cabin roof, pausing and sniffing, wishing he carried a kerchief. He reached out and checked the big sec lock on the door with his left hand, finding, to his relief, that it was still securely fastened.

  If he couldn't get in, then Ryan was comforted by the thought that nobody else would. Even if they had a key, he could tell from the pressure that there were heavy bolts inside, at the top and the bottom of the door.

  It had to be well past the ten minutes since he left the main building. By now Krysty would have roused J.B. and Mildred, and they would all be dressed and coming out to look for him.

  Ryan started to turn away when there was a dazzling flash of lightning that brought the door and the area on both sides of it into stark relief.

  He noticed something very peculiar. The one side was a narrow strip of timbering, the rough ends of the logs overlapping each other. On the other side the strip was wider, almost the width of the door. And the timbers ended in a straight, clean edge. If it hadn't been for the incredibly bright lightning, he would never have noticed it.

  Ryan waited, totally still and silent, until the next jagged flash burst around him. He peered closely at the odd architectural feature in that moment and saw something else that he would never otherwise have noticed. The planking held the faint but unmistakable mark of a damp hand print, as though someone had recently pushed at the wood.

  Ryan waited again for a few seconds, using the next chem lightning flash to place his own hand precisely in the center of the mark, seeing how much smaller it was than his own spread fingers, and pushing very gently.

  It was a cunningly concealed door, matching up to the real, locked and bolted portal, and it swung inward as though greased and counterbalanced.

  Ryan felt the short hairs prickling at his nape, thinking again about the excellent supper that he'd just puked up, and the tangle of raw heads and bloodied bones hidden out in the forest. His son and friends were in mortal peril.

  Finger tight on the trigger, he stepped inside the cabin.

  He had no chance, no warning. Mrs. Fairchild had been waiting in the blackness and she screamed out her hatred, jumping at him, swinging at the side of his skull with a heavy hatchet that glittered in the flare of the next lightning strike.

  Chapter Seventeen

  No chance, no warning, only razored combat reflexes that had kept Ryan Cawdor alive through long years of hardship and danger.

  He was already deeply suspicious of the dark entrance to the log cabin. The open door and the rain-smeared hand print had warned him of imminent potential danger. So, when it came grinning and howling out of the blackness, Ryan was ready for it. As ready as anyone could be.

  He lifted the powerful pistol and used it to parry the murderous attack with the ax, blocking the singing edge in a shower of sparks, feeling the lethal impact. The force knocked him three paces backward, staggering off balance. "Shit-suckin' bastard…" The voice was high and hoarse, sounding like it could slice through armored sec glass at fifty yards. The woman's breath, rancid in his face, was like the unwashed floor of a charnel house, and she wielded the whirling crescent of steel with a hideous skill, so fast and so furious that it gave Ryan no chance to do anything but defend, unable to bring the SIG-Sauer into use.

  Mrs. Fairchild was in a state of murderous frenzy, forcing him back through the false doorway, off the porch, out into the easing rain, the water dancing off the blade of the hatchet, pattering into his face.

  Ryan tried twice to close with her, to use his extra strength and height. But she was too fast, supernaturally swift.

  He managed to snatch only one shot, taking advantage of a moment when Mom seemed to hesitate, pausing to draw a ragged breath. But his footing was unsure in the thick mud, and the bullet went inches wide.

  If Ryan allowed the woman to dictate the course of the fight, then he was likely to go down. Mr
s. Fairchild was showing no signs of tiring, and it was only a matter of time—a short time—before the hatchet would slip by his woefully inadequate guard and hack a chunk out of his flesh.

  "Bitch fucker!"

  He tried the risk of aggression, managing to press her back onto the streaming, shadowed porch. For the next fifteen or twenty seconds, it was like a Mexican standoff. The maniac vigor of the woman held Ryan off, wearing him down, but she was too aware of the threat of the big pistol to be able to step away for the deathblow.

  He took a quick step to his left, hoping to snatch a nanosecond that would enable him to take another shot at Mom Fairchild. But some of the planks of the porch were rotten and cracked under his heel, sending him toppling away to his right. The woman whooped with obscene delight as she saw him suddenly vulnerable, and swung down with her ax, sending the SIG-Sauer spinning from his wet fingers, the blaster landing in a deep puddle a dozen feet away.

  "Goodbye, you shit-for-brains dickhead!" she roared, the hatchet looping up behind her shoulder, ready for the final, lethal stroke.

  Ryan lifted his right hand to try to parry the blow, realizing the futility of the gesture. His mind's eye projected forward, seeing the steel hack clean through his wrist, leaving a blood-jetting stump, when he saw an amazing sight.

  Something like a long needle of steel, smeared with blood, glistening in the lightning's fierce dazzle, had emerged from the center of Mom's chest, below her pendulous breasts, tearing a small, neat hole in the check shirt she wore.

  "Oh," she said in a little, gasping voice, taking a single, faltering step toward Ryan. Her fingers unclenched the murderous grip on the haft of the ax, allowing it to drop to the boards at her feet.

  "Touché," Doc said, his voice overlaid with a note of quiet triumph.

  Ryan watched, seeing the rapier's point withdrawn and then thrust in again, penetrating between the ribs, beneath the shoulder blade on the left side of the woman's corpulent body, slicing into lungs and heart.