by James Axler
" 'The fog, the fog'!" mimicked the big man savagely. "Ya knew this was waitin' for us. Ya knew it. How come, huh? How come ya know so much about this? What else ya got up ya sleeve, blaster?"
Kurt pulled himself away from the leader's grasp. He snarled, "I tell you I don't know anything. Dolfo Kaler talked about the fog, that's all."
"Dolfo Kaler was shot to shreds while he was still crawlin' into town. Even I know that, Kurt."
McCandless's .45 automatic was in the big man's hands, pointing at Kurt's face. McCandless held it two fisted, unwaveringly, his face behind the gun a mad, glaring mask. Kurt's own gun was held right-handed; he knew he didn't have a hope of jerking it up in time to blow McCandless away before the big man had sent a magful into him.
"McCandless, I told you, I was a kid at the time. I was the kid that found him." The words came tumbling out of his mouth. "He was mumbling something about a fog. That's it. That's all. It didn't make sense then, doesn't make sense now. Except there it is, the fog. All we have to do is walk through it."
McCandless's eyes narrowed. Sweat coursed down his face. He lowered the automatic slowly, almost grudgingly. Kurt breathed out hard.
"That's it," he repeated, his voice hoarse.
"Don't look like no fog I ever saw," muttered Rogan. He shot a scowl at Kurt. "He knows somethin' else, boss, you bet."
"Shut it," snapped McCandless.
The big man moved slowly up the road toward the eddying wall. Above, lightning flickered fitfully.
"Don't smell like fog," sniffed McCandless. "Rogan, take a walk."
The tall, craggy man took a step forward, then hesitated and stayed where he was. He stared at the rippling, gray-white wall, his mouth open.
He said, "Hell, boss, send the blaster. Or the mutie."
"The blaster I need, the mutie I need. Get in there."
Rogan backed away. "I ain't goin' in there. You go."
McCandless exploded, "Ya piece of nukeshit, Rogan, get in there!"
Rogan was beside Reacher now. He suddenly grabbed the mutie senser and pushed him, flung him toward the fog. Reacher stumbled. He hit the road and rolled to one side, yelling. McCandless jumped at Rogan, huge gloved hands outstretched, but the tall man evaded him, swinging his rifle and savagely clubbing McCandless's face. The barrel's sight ripped at the big man's right eye, tearing into flesh. McCandless screamed and reeled away. He clutched his head.
Kurt thought, this is it.
He swung his ancient Armalite up but Rogan had danced away toward the senser, who was scrambling to his feet. Rogan's rifle roared twice, on single shot, the bullets slamming into Reacher as a freak gust of wind suddenly roared up the pass. Reacher was bowled over by the impact of the rounds hitting him. Muzzle-flash sparked from Rogan's piece again and with a wail of pain and terror, Reacher jackknifed and sailed backward over the edge of the abyss. His shriek died in the wind's howl.
Laughing crazily, Rogan backed away from Kurt, covering him. He backed toward the fog, seemingly oblivious of its presence. He backed toward a tendril that shimmied out to him like a groping finger.
It touched him.
There was a spark, a flash of angry blue light, and Rogan pitched forward into a somersault, yelling as he spun. He smacked into the road, whinnying in terror.
But he still held his gun.
Kurt sent a shot at him, the Armalite bucking in his hands, but the round ricocheted off rock into the howling, lightning-lit darkness. Before he could center on the tall man again, muzzle-flash flared and an invisible fist pounded at Kurt's shoulder, jolting him backward, cracking his head against the cliff face.
HE COULD FEEL NOTHING except the chill of the wind, a sudden cold wetness on his face, He opened his eyes and saw huge snowflakes whirling down again, driven by the wind. His shoulder throbbed and he stared at it, seeing nothing in the thick fur but knowing he had a bullet somewhere in his upper arm or chest. He found he'd lost his rifle. He was cold and hot at the same time, the sweat freezing on his face. He felt he could stay there forever, propped up against the rock. Focusing on the road, he registered that McCandless now had only one eye.
The big man was wrestling with Rogan, bare-handed, roaring like an angry bull. Rogan had a rock in one hand and was trying to smash it down on McCandless's unprotected head. Where the big man's right eye had been was a red mush that was streaked down his cheek and into his beard, runny with sweat and snow. He was roaring insanely, clawing at Rogan's face. Snowflakes, hard driven, blurred the scene and gave it the quality of nightmare. To Kurt, they seemed like shadow figures backlit by the lightning, their cries torn from them by the driving wind.
Rogan clubbed down with the rock, smacking it into McCandless's head. More blood. The big man staggered and fell to his knees. Both hands now clutched at his face. Rogan lifted the rock once more, then yelled in agony as McCandless head-butted him in the groin. Rogan lost hold of the rock to clutch at himself, his mouth wide, a soundless howl erupting from it.
He booted out at McCandless and rocked the big man backward. He followed this up with another savage, jolting kick. McCandless was on his back, clawing for and then wrenching out a knife. As Rogan grasped hold of the rock again, McCandless stabbed out at the other's nearest leg. The blade sank home; this time Kurt saw blood sluice out through the rent in Rogan's pants, just above the top of his boot. Rogan collapsed onto his adversary, smashing the rock down sickeningly. For a second they lay still, Rogan atop McCandless, then Rogan pulled himself up into a straddling position, brought the rock down a second time onto McCandless's head. Then a third time. A fourth. Kurt could hear nothing, just the insane shriek of the gale, but he knew that labored gasps were heaved out of Rogan with every smashing blow as he pounded away at the big man.
McCandless lay unmoving. Rogan finally collapsed onto him. The two figures began to blur with the snow that thickly distributed itself across the scene, piling up, whipped into low drifts by the wind.
The fog still quivered and heaved as though alive, the blizzard not affecting it, the snow around it.
Kurt tried to get to his feet but he was still dazed by the crack to the back of his head. His boots slipped on the snow-slick ground; it was too much of an effort to do anything but lie there, go to sleep, drift off into eternity.
A sudden movement caught his eye: Rogan rolling off the body of the big man, staggering to his feet in a flurry of snow. Rogan was not steady on his feet, but this did not seem to worry him. He was cackling insanely.
Kurt watched as Rogan leaned forward and dragged at the snow-covered lump on the road. Snow came off McCandless in a small avalanche as Rogan shook him violently, like a dog with a rat. McCandless had no face, just a red ruin. The wind tore at it, rinsing it with snow, but nothing could wash all the blood away, nothing in the world could clean it up.
Rogan dragged the body to the edge of the precipice. The wind had died yet again. Crazy weather, muttered Kurt, dully watching the snowflakes die until there were just a few big ones tumbling silently down, floating gently out of the lightning-shredded blackness. He saw Rogan heave the dead meat that once had been a man over the edge. And now the bastard's coming for me for sure, he thought.
He watched Rogan limp across the snowy road toward him, watched him suddenly stoop, grab something. The Armalite. So that's where it had landed.
"Hey, blaster! Gonna blast ya!" Rogan seemed cheerful. "Maybe I oughta shoot ya around a little," he added, triggering a round.
Kurt heard the sharp crack of the shot, heard himself yell as it hammered into the rock inches from his face, showering him with rock shards as it whined away.
"You thought you was gonna grab it all!" yelled Rogan. "Ol’ Rogan, he wasn't gonna get nothin'."
Again the rifle barrel flamed, again a round tore into the rock face, then careered off into the night.
What a way to die.
The mutie had been right, dead right. Death had been lurking only just around the corner. Their own deaths.
> Then he noticed that the fog was on the move.
At first he thought his eyes were playing tricks. Perhaps it was just the effect of the fog's contraction-expansion motion, the breathing movement that made it seem alive. Then he realized the stuff was actually inching its way down the road, in bulk, the whole huge quaking gray-white mass sliding forward with a rippling motion, tendrils of the misty muck questing out along the blacktop.
"It's moving," he croaked.
"You stupe," crowed Rogan derisively. "You ain't gonna get nothin'. You hear me, blaster? Nothin'. All you're gonna get is a load of lead in your innards. Me, I'm gonna get what's up there, up the top of the mountain. All for me. No share-out. Especially no share-out with that prick McCandless. He thought he was the flaming emperor, but he ended up carcass. Just like you, Kurt. A carcass." He let out a wild, echoing guffaw.
Kurt watched as the advancing fog sent out its gray-white feelers toward the tall man. He couldn't figure it out at all, didn't know what in hell the stuff was, couldn't imagine its origin.
Something to do with the Nuke; something left over, maybe? That had to be it, had to be the answer. He chuckled to himself as he watched the foggy tentacles reaching out for Rogan, not at all blindly but purposefully, as though the very sound of the tall man's harsh, jeering voice constituted its target. Like thick cables, three tendrils snaked through the air to clutch Rogan's body and curl around it.
Sparks erupted fizzingly, half blinding Kurt. Rogan shrieked aloud. He writhed helplessly as though gripped by a giant's fist. He was wrapped in a huge amorphous cloud that solidified around him… then it snatched him up into the air.
Rogan was shrieking with shock and agony, still writhing in its clutch. He had been gathered up in some sort of twister. But this was no mere tornado that sucked objects up capriciously, then blew them all over the landscape. This thing had claws.
Fog devils… tear you apart…
A jolting, destructive, naked power lurked at the fog's heart. It had a mind of its own.
The tentacle that gripped Rogan swung high, long sparks crackling from it, playing around the struggling, yelling figure. Rogan was haloed in fire. With a last despairing shriek, the tall man disappeared into the center of a white wall.
The fog still advanced. Slowly. Inexorably.
Kurt's gloved fingers scrabbled at the rock for a firm handhold. He shoved himself forward and sideways, scrambling to his feet, staring at the advancing mass. More fog tendrils were extending out of it, groping in his direction, questing around. Kurt backed away from them, their acid stink almost overpowering him.
Lightning flared and crackled, revealing the mountain-tops ranged all around him as grimly frowning peaks. Kurt glanced over his shoulder, back down the ruined road.
The wall of fog shifted onward relentlessly.
Kurt let out a mewing croak of terror, turned, one hand clutching at his shoulder where now blood seeped through the fur. He began to stagger like a drunken man down the rutted road, back toward the Deathlands.
Chapter Two
SAVAGE EYES WATCHED the line of lights that bobbed gently up and down in the far distance; preternaturally sensitive ears caught the dull roar and rumble of powerful engines. There was forward movement there, an onward surge. The lights were getting closer by the second.
The watcher had greenish skin that looked, at a distance, as if it were faintly scaled, though it was not. The scale effect was just that—an odd skin effect, something he could not wipe off, something he had to live with, some genetic eruption whose exact origin was unknown. It didn't bother him. He was known as Scale and that didn't bother him, either. Nothing bothered him. Mutation was a matter of complete acceptance among mutants; it was only norms who got twitchy.
He had overlarge eyes, black rimmed, deep hollowed. His mouth was wide and thick lipped. His nose was a slight bulge above the mouth, with two tiny orifices; his sense of smell was almost nonexistent.
He rose to his feet, snapped long slender fingers. Another figure, overtall and with very long arms, slipped from behind to hand him a pair of powerful glasses. The man with the faintly scaled skin took the glasses and put them to his eyes and adjusted them.
There were maybe fifteen vehicles in the convoy, including three big war wagons. The man nodded. The Trader. Only the Trader carried that amount of punch.
The Trader was a hard nut to crack. No one had ever managed to take him, though many had tried, both muties and norms. In many ways the Trader was the most powerful man in the land. He had hardware, high powered and deadly, and plenty of it; he had fuel supplies, secret and well hidden, known only to him and his captains, his closest and most trusted confidants; he had contacts, from the civilized East to the primitive West, from the suspicious North to the outright barbaric South. He dealt in weapons, a trade built up over twenty years or more. But he bartered and sold other merchandise, too: food, clothes, gadgets, fuel, generators, wisdom, knowledge. He even dispensed justice in the more outlying regions, in the tiny scattered hamlets hundreds of kilometers from the huge Baronies of the East and South.
He was trusted and he was fair, but he was no simp and his revenge could be devastating. All who knew of the Trader knew the tale of the Eastern town that had tried to mess with him, a town of low morals run by an ambitious madman. The exact nature of their mistake had been lost over the intervening years, but the outcome was retained in the memories of most who had dealings with him. The town had been destroyed, razed to the ground, wiped from the face of the earth. He had spared no one. Such had been his fury that he had massacred the inhabitants to a man, woman, child. And animal. He had not even spared the animals, had not taken them for himself but instead had slaughtered the herds and left the carcasses, and then moved on.
It was a lesson. You did not mess with the Trader.
Sure, there were other traders, men and women who traveled the Deathlands in convoy, bartering and haggling, stealing and slaving, picking up merchandise here, selling it there. But none of them traveled the Trader's routes, none had his expertise, and none had his nose for the hidden Stockpiles that the pre-Nuke military men had laid down more than a century before.
Those were the plums that everyone wanted to pick, the hidden man-made caverns scattered across the land, stuffed with hardware, fuel, weaponry; the secret silos that the governments of the day had ordered to be constructed against a time when the world might be in ruins and power shifted solely to those with the muscle and the guns to hold on to it. The irony was that the Nuke had been so devastating, so ferocious, so unbelievably swift that chains of command all over the world had been destroyed more or less at a stroke, and their secrets had been lost with them, lost for nearly a century.
Now they were being uncovered slowly, very slowly— secrets hidden from most of those who had inhabited the land once known as the United States.
And mostly they were being uncovered by the Trader, who traveled the land, north, south, east, west; who probed and poked and dug and excavated; who journeyed far into regions no man had trod for a century, regions no sane man wished to tread. It was said that the Trader had trekked deep into the heart of the fiery southwest where hurricane-force winds howled across a moonscape where nothing grew, no man lived. It was said that his land wagons had specially reinforced and adapted roofs because he journeyed deliberately into regions where the acids could strip a man to his bones in a second. It was rumored that he had even penetrated the mountains overlooking the bleak western coastal strip, had viewed like a conqueror of old the steaming lagoons, the long jagged fjords thrust deep between craggy peaks, and had sailed the simmering seas below which vast cities lay crumbling and rotting as they slept an eternal sleep.
All this was said; much of it was true. And the proof was the hardware, the strange and incomprehensible artifacts, the sealed crates of exotic foodstuffs he brought back time and again after each trawl through the Deathlands.
The man called Scale handed the glasses back to his co
mpanion. He gazed up at the dark sky broodingly, calculating that there was an hour to dawn. No hint of a smile crossed his face, but his dead eyes had come alive.
He said, "Trader."
Not "a trader," noted the man with the very long arms.
"We take him?"
"Sure."
"We take the Trader?" The long-armed man was dubious.
"Sure."
The man thought about this, staring at the line of lights wobbling far away. It seemed to him that Scale was about to bite off more than he could chew. It seemed to him that Scale was in danger of choking himself to death.
"He's heavy."
"So are we."
"Not like him."
Scale shrugged.
"We hit him in the dark. Three war wags. Front, middle, rear. Can't turn in the pass—too narrow. So go for them and hit 'em hard. We got the muscle. We disable the middle so it blocks the road. Rear trucks can't go forward, front can't go back. We hit both ends, simultaneous. Ain't got a prayer."
The man with the long arms pondered this. In principle it sounded good, the perfect ambush. But—the Trader? He bit his lower lip with three sharp, filed-down teeth, the only ones in his mouth.
"He got muscle. Plenty muscle."
"Sure. So have we."
"Not like him."
"We do it."
The long-armed man turned to stare down into the darkness cloaking the patiently waiting band of men below.
"Hellblast, Scale, we already got us a catch. Two land wags, truckin' out to the Darks."
The man with the faintly scaled skin shook his head irritably.
"Ain't enough. Any case, it's the ammo. Trader, he's got plenty ammo, plenty guns. Big mothers."
"Plenty men, too," the long-armed man pointed out.
"Nah. He travels light, from what I hear. Lot of big wind about his manpower. These days, he travel light."
"Where'd you hear that?"
"Fat Harry. Last time there. Said the Trader was gettin' to be an old man, thinkin' of quittin'." He chuckled suddenly, a dry, sour sound. "We'll hurry it along. Quit the fucker ourselves."
