Pilgrimage to Hell d-1

by James Axler

  The greater the elevation, the slower their progress. The farther they went, the worse the weather became. The night skies clouded over and the fearsome chem clouds of nuclear detritus billowed about them, with incandescent bursts of flame searing the tops of the peaks. The great northerly winds came screeching in from the desert wastes that had once been the fruitful prairies of Canada. It took them four grindingly oppressive days to get close to the treeline, finding that great fires had raged through the pine forests, stripping the land, leaving the soil to be eroded to bare rock and ice. The dials in the war wag showed a daytime high of minus ten Celsius, with the night temperatures dropping fast to minus thirty. Add in the windchill factor and you had a land where a man would be dead within minutes if he didn't have adequate thermal protection.

  Ryan was dozing in his bunk when a particularly vicious jolt woke him. As he stood he was aware that they had stopped moving and the engine now ticked over in neutral. He was on his way to the control room before Ches started calling him over the intercom.

  J.B. was there before him.

  "End of the line," he said.

  Ryan looked out the front screen, seeing only gray ice and swirling snow. The road, if there was one there at all, was invisible.

  "Not even the war wag can get us farther," said Ches, leaning back in the padded seat. "The trail's gotten way too narrow. Looks like one track in and the same one out. So there's no point goin' back and tryin' some other way."

  "How far from where the Redoubt might be?" asked Ryan, biting his lip in impatient anger. To have come all this way and fail so near to their destination only added to the concern he already felt about their supplies, and Ryan was angry. Gas would be running low in about a week, and way up here in the Darks there wouldn't be caches hidden away for them. The Trader had made sure that throughout the Deathlands there were plenty of such caches, buried deep and safe. But not this far north into the blighted country.

  Cohn was hunched over his mapping table and he replied to Ryan's question. "Way I see it... from what you said and the redhead said and most of all from what that poor bastard Kurt said, it should be ahead about a day's climb. Someplace."

  "That's a lot of hellfired help, Cohn. What the hell does 'someplace' mean?"

  "Sorry, Ryan. Just that my map's all worn and patched. Looks like 'Grinning Glacier,' best I can see. Steep trail over where a lake used to be. Who knows what's there now?"

  J.B. turned from the screen, "Time our feet earned their living, Ryan. Let's go talk."

  * * *

  Ten.

  That was the final number for the party, reached after better than an hour of discussion. J.B. had wanted to keep it smaller, but Ryan had pushed for more to be included. And both of them wanted to come on the expedition, insisting that the other should remain in charge of the war wag.

  In the end it was Cohn, the most experienced member of the unit, who was delegated to take command while Ryan and J.B. led the trek toward... Toward what?

  Krysty had to come, and so, Ryan insisted, did Doc. Whatever there might be up behind the fog with teeth and claws, Doc seemed to know something about it. And something was all they had. The remainder of their team were Hunaker, Koll, Hennings, Abe, the man called Finnegan and a top blaster, Okie. She was a tall, silent girl whose skill with any firearm was legendary on the war wag.

  Cohn's orders were simple and explicit.

  "Keep in radio contact. Twenty-four-hour watch on the emergency frequency. Four guards out, turn and turn about each hour. Full alert all the time. Keep her locked up tighter than a Baron's cred chest."

  And then the most important part of it.

  "If we're back, then we'll be here in four days. Call it a flat hundred hours. Unless you hear from us to abort this command, after one hundred hours precise, you push the boot to the floor and give her the gas and get out. From then on you're on your own."

  "What about a relief party?" Cohn asked J.B. and Ryan.

  "There won't be one, you stupe bastard," snarled Ryan. "Hundred hours and we're not back, you go."

  "Where?"

  "Watch my lips, Cohn," interjected J. B. Dix. "We go. You stay. We come back in less'n a hundred hours, all fine. If not, then War Wag One is yours. And you'll be low on gas and supplies, so get out fast. Now just nod your head if you understand."

  "Sure," Cohn replied with a nod. "That's fine. I'll be here like you say. And if there's problems, call it in."

  Each member of the team carried a pistol and rifle of their own choice. Each carried four grenades on the belts, a mix of incendiary, stun, implosion, high-ex, shrap, nerve gas and smoke. Each of them had a knife or edged weapon of his or her choosing, ranging from Krysty's delicate throwing knives in her bandolier to Finnegan's butcher's cleaver that would take the head off a horse in one blow.

  They carried enough food for five days, with a small supply of water-pure tabs. Ammunition supplied most of the weight to their packs, along with a radio operated by Henn. No spare clothes or sleeping gear. There was no room for that kind of comfort.

  They agreed that the best time to leave was around dawn the next day. Koll was designated to take charge of Doc, whose mind still vacillated between extremes of brief clarity and long spells of catatonic madness. His only response when Ryan Cawdor told him that they were planning on going toward the hidden Redoubt was to smile and bow, his hat nearly falling off. Krysty had managed to sew some strong elasticized cord for him to use when they ventured outside into the gales. He'd refused any helmet or goggles like the others, saying that a scarf for his throat would suffice.

  "Suffice" was the word he'd used. Now he just asked Ryan about the guard dog.

  "What dog? You mean the fog, Doc?"

  "No. I speak of the canine deterrent... Ah, what memories that word brings back to me, Mr. Cawdor."

  "What memories?"

  A look of pain flitted across the aquiline features of the old man. "Sadly, that has escaped me, sir. But I believe there was something about a dog."

  That night Krysty came to Ryan in his bunk, and they managed, despite the tightness of the accommodation, to make slow, tender love three times before reveille finally woke them.

  Farewells were short and formal. During the years that Ryan Cawdor had ridden with the Trader he had seen literally dozens of relationships formed and broken in the war wag. Many formed from loneliness and fear. Many broken by death.

  Ryan noticed Hun taking a long time in quiet talk with a little girl called Sukie who had only joined War Wag One from three a day or so before the fall of Mocsin as a relief gunner on the mortar.

  For the rest it was mainly a quick shake of the hand and a muttered word. Ryan had once seen a scratchy antique vid about some Westerners in a fort. Or had it been a church? There they were taking last messages to families and loved ones. That didn't arise in the Deathlands. Either your family and loved ones were on War Wag One or they weren't anywhere.

  "What's the weather, Cohn?"

  "Minus fifteen. Wind around fifty, from north, veering east. Some hail in it."

  Ryan rubbed at the stubble on his chin. "Sounds a fine day for a short walk in the Darks. Be seein' you, Cohn."

  "Good luck, Ryan. Give the bastards broken teeth." The two men shook hands and the main entry port slid open, letting in a flurry of snow and a biting wind. Ryan pulled up his goggles and exited with a jump, waving for the others to follow him. Ice crunched beneath his boots. While he waited he glanced down, seeing the mark on the right toe where a rabid dog had tried to bite his foot off. It had taken a 3-round burst from the LAPA to blow the mongrel away.

  Between his feet, in a small hollow sheltered among some scattered pebbles, he noticed a tiny bunch of flowers. White petals, with a heart yellow as butter. Surviving in one of the least hospitable places on earth. For a reason that he couldn't explain, the sight of the frail plant lifted his spirits.

  He tucked the weighted silk scarf around his neck, trying to fill the chinks where the wind
was thrusting icy water. He took a quick finger count to make sure the group was all there. Nine. With J. B. Dix bringing up the rear as ten.

  After fifty paces Ryan turned around, bracing himself against the driving gale, squinting back at where he knew the war wag was. But it had already disappeared in the general whiteout. Without a compass he knew that they had absolutely no chance of ever finding it again.

  The track was very rough, often barely visible, and the weather was worse than he had anticipated. But after a half hour they rounded the massive corner of an overhanging bluff and the wind dropped dramatically.

  "Way Kurt called it, there's a half day's walk to get to where the fog was waitin'."

  "I am of the decided opinion that the fog will still be here and waiting for all comers, Mr. Cawdor," said Doc. His cheeks were almost blue from the biting cold of the wind, yet beads of perspiration hung in the deep furrows of his cheeks, glistening in the stubble on his chin.

  "You know that?" asked J.B.

  "It is an axiom of some veracity that a good guard dog never sleeps. Cerberus was assuredly of the best, Mr. Dix."

  "Every piece cocked," instructed Ryan. "Round under the pin. Fingers..."

  "On triggers," finished Okie, unsmiling. "We know that, Ryan."

  They went on.

  The road, if that's what it had once been, wound and twisted like a broken-backed adder, clinging to the edge of the ice-sheeted cliffs, a dizzy abyss plunging away to their left. At one bend Ryan held up a gloved fist, halting the party, waving them forward.

  "What do you see?" asked Hennings, his dark skin pallid against the black fur hood.

  "Down there," replied Ryan, pointing to where the tumbling waters of a river in flood tore over gray boulders. Visible now and again through the gusted clouds of snow were the red and brown metal bones of several vehicles. Torn and twisted, spotted with ice and blown spume. It was impossible to make out what they might once have been, but there could have been three or four of them. One large rusting chunk of iron might have been the rear suspension members of a large truck.

  "Someone didn't make the turn," said Finnegan.

  "Dolfo Kaler," suggested J.B. "Kurt talked about broken trucks an' all. They're what's left of Kaler's expedition after the Redoubt up here."

  "Which means the fog that has teeth and claws is around just a couple more corners," said Krysty Wroth. She stood close against Ryan, shivering at the cold.

  She was nearly right.

  It was only one corner.

  Waiting, quiet and immense. As Ryan cautiously waved the others forward to his side, the words of Doc came back to him. It waslike some gigantic, patient guard dog. Crouched on the rutted surface of the track, among the snow-filled pits and hollows, it throbbed.

  "There is Cerberus," whispered Doc. Behind them the wind still howled and the air was still filled with needled chips of ice swirling from the leaden sky. But on this stretch the wind was gone, echoing behind them but not before. Here it was preternaturally quiet.

  Ryan gazed at it, filled with an awe that came close to fear. In all his life he had never seen anything like it. The fog squatted on the road, at least the forward part of it did, and behind it rose vastly above them until it merged with the sky. It was impossible for Ryan to guess its height. Despite the wind all around them the fog did not move, beyond a gentle rocking, pulsing movement that seemed to be generated somewhere within its enormous bulk. It looked as though a light glowed somewhere within it, like some settlement glimpsed at a great distance through mist.

  He took a few cautious steps toward it, and the swaying increased. The whole mass moved the equivalent paces toward him. Tendrils came creeping from its base, edging along the road in his direction. They stopped moving as he did.

  Hunaker threw back her hood, ice gathering immediately on her short, green hair. "Let me waste this shit with my rifle!" she shouted.

  Immediately the fog reacted, swooping with its sinuous fingers down toward them, sending them all scurrying quickly back along the trail, back toward the bend. The fog reached to within a few steps of where Hunaker had been standing, then seemed to gather itself together and resume its previous condition, swaying smugly within.

  "If I might proffer a small suggestion, Miss Hunaker?" began Doc.

  "What? How 'bout, don't make any fuckin' noise or threaten it or even go close to it?"

  "Those were my thoughts, dear lady. Those were indeed my thoughts."

  While it had been just Kurt's ravings, or the mythic words of Krysty and Doc, it had not seemed as if it would be such a problem. Ryan had somehow thought that they'd walk through it or climb around it. Confident that once he saw it, assuming it really existed, it would just be a minor problem like hundreds of others, and with an easy solution. Now that he stood so close to it, he realized that this was in fact a form of primal force that functioned in ways that he had no idea about.

  "Now what?" J.B. muttered.

  Ryan unzipped his coat. Despite the ice and the bitter wind, he found that he was sweating freely. "Who knows," he said angrily.

  Dix widened the question. "Anyone? How about you, Doc? You know about this bitching thing?"

  "Not to put too fine a point upon it, young man, I am as much in the dark as you. I believe this is here to keep malefactors away from the Redoubt and the gate."

  Ryan noted the word gateand filed it away as something to ask about later. If there got to be a later.

  "We could try some grenades," suggested Okie.

  "Could do," Ryan said. "Gotta think. No other trail. Not one that we could ever hope to find. It's this or nothin'. And there's no way under it. It hangs over the edge of that sheer cliff. There's no way over it. So you want to know what I think? I think one of the Barons out east's got him a chopper. If we just had that..."

  "If we had a balloon we could float up and over it," said Koll. "But we don't."

  So they tried grenades.

  High-ex and incendiary looked the best bets. No point in wasting shrap or nerve against a fog.

  The hand bombs made a load of noise and some fire. The flames seemed muffled by the fog and the high-ex did nothing at all that anyone could make out. Some rocks and ice from high above them came rolling down, pattering on the road. The fog retreated about as far as a man could spit, then came back. Back toward them, stopping at the bend of the trail, becoming a huge wall, almost as if it had been cut clean with a giant's cleaver.

  Doc had sat down, drawn and pale, looking as though the confrontation with the fog had exhausted him. He felt Ryan's eye on him and clambered up, pulling himself to a standing position with his hands on the rock face.

  "My apologies, sir, but all the noise and fire has quite..." The eyes cleared as though a veil had been ripped from them. "Antimatter, Mr. Cawdor. I believe that might do the trick. Implode, and the foul fiend will be undone — it will separate from its source."

  J.B. banged one gloved fist into the other. "Implosion grenade. Turn that chiller inside out. Yeah. Koll?"

  "What?"

  "You got the implo?"

  "Yeah. Couple."

  "Go hurl them into the middle of that bastard fog. Right in, far as you can throw."

  "Sure," said Ryan. "You got about the best arm, Koll. Go close as you can, then get the heat out of there."

  Koll lowered his hood, wiping tiny gems of steel-gray ice from his long mustache. He unhooked the two implosion bombs, with their distinctive scarlet and blue bands around their dull tops.

  "Chill it, Koll," whispered Hunaker, patting him on the arm.

  The towering mist, with the strange pale light throbbing at its center, had retreated once more until it hung precisely where they had first seen it, countless small tendrils creeping from its base as though tasting the air for the scent of an enemy.

  Koll crouched like a runner readying for a sprint, a grenade in each fist. He drew in a number of deep breaths, composing himself. Ryan stood at his heels.

  "Not tooclose, Koll.
No dead heroes on War Wag One, remember."

  Koll nodded his blond head. Five more breaths, faster and more shallow. He powered himself up the trail, boots sending chips of stone and ice flying back into the watching group. For some seconds the fog showed no sign of awareness of the threat. Then it began to move.

  Faster than before.

  Koll skidded to a halt less than fifty steps from the nearest tentacle of the fog, looking up at its shimmering bulk for a second or two, as if he was hypnotized.

  "Now!" yelled Ryan Cawdor at the top of his voice. Breaking the spell.

  Koll lobbed the first of the implo bombs into the fog. For one sickening moment Ryan wondered if it would simply stick there, like a pebble in fresh dough, but it vanished deep within. The second one followed it, thrown with all Koll's most desperate strength.

  "Back," said Doc calmly, speaking in a conversational tone to the eight others who stood near him. He led the way by shambling quickly around the bend of the trail, behind the rock wall.

  "Koll!" shouted Ryan. "Get the..." but the words died in his throat and for a moment he closed his eye, turning away.

  The fog had sensed the threat to its existence. The tendrils had shot from its base, faster than a shooter drawing his blaster. They slapped at Koll's feet and legs, before he could take more than a half dozen steps toward safety.

  Ryan was the last of the party to move with Doc out of sight, and he saw it all. As the first coiling arm of the fog touched Koll, sparks flew from the man's flesh. Orange and blue fire sprayed out into the cold day as if from a welder's torch. Koll dropped his rifle and screamed, rolling onto his back and kicking. For the briefest of moments he managed to break free from the caressing tendril.

  One fell across him, not hard, but more flames spat from Koll's body, at the top of his thighs, near the groin. He arched back, and the scream rose higher and higher. Smoke and the smell of burning filtered through the crackling air. The screams continued, thin and piercing, like a stallion's at the gelding.

  Another tendril lashed at Koll's face and he raised his hands to take the impact, thrashing at the unknown power. Now there were a dozen or more of the thick gray tendrils enshrouding him, cording and swelling. Koll was lifted into the air by them, drawn toward the main expanse of the fog.