by James Axler
"Shoot one," Mildred offered. "Size of those bastards, one'll feed us all for a month."
Ryan nodded. "There's a shallow pool under that next falls. If you can put a bullet into one as it's making its leap, it should drop back there and we can grab it easily."
"Good shot in all spray." Jak was grinning widely at the prospect of watching Mildred's ace-on-the-line shooting, as well as anticipating the succulent feast of tender roasted trout that would follow.
"Nobody'll hear the sound of the blaster, even if they're a hundred yards off." J.B. gestured to Mildred. "Go for it," he said, the sun glittering from his glasses.
The polished 6-shot Czech revolver, showing the engraved name of its makers from the Zbrojovka works in Brno, slid from the holster. Mildred thumbed back on the short-fall cocking hammer, the click inaudible against the roaring background of the white-foamed torrent.
She stood with feet slightly apart, perfectly balanced, holding the .38-caliber blaster in both hands, at arm's length in front of her. Mildred looked along the barrel, keeping both eyes open, holding her breath.
Everyone stared at the tumbling water, watching the jostling steelhead as they fought their way toward their ancestral spawning grounds. Ryan was astounded, never having seen such a proliferation of fish anywhere in his life. And some of them were gigantic.
One of them, a good six feet in length, was making its third or fourth effort to negotiate the turbulent, rocky slope, powerful tail flapping with all its power as it seemed to hang suspended in the shining air.
"Now," Ryan whispered.
Mildred squeezed the trigger and the blaster kicked in her hands, the explosion muffled by the roar of the falls.
"Missed," Jak sniggered.
Mildred holstered the blaster and turned to face the teenager, slowly raising the middle finger of her right hand toward him. "Not," she said.
The monstrous trout slid back down among the jagged rocks, landing in the deep pool at the base of the falls. A thread of pale blood leaked into the dark water, circling as the fish flailed in its death throes.
The Armorer warned Jak as the albino started to go into the water to haul out the dying steelhead. "Look out for those jaws. Might only be a trout, but it's a rad-blasted sizable creature to tangle with. Take your hand off at the wrist, easy as winking. Best we all help."
The bullet had struck the mutie fish through the head, blowing a hole the size of a man's fist as it exited. The wound was fatal, but the creature was still thrashing, its tail kicking up a bloody froth.
Despite the wet weather, it wasn't that difficult to scavenge among the tall trees to find enough dry twigs to get a smokeless fire started. The Armorer used his thin-bladed flensing knife to slice the trout into dripping haunches, arranging them carefully on a network of thin branches that suspended them over the bright orange flames.
Krysty and Mildred went hunting with Doc and Dean to try to find something to eat along with the fish, returning with an armful of various roots and herbs that produced a delicious scent as they began to cook.
It took more than an hour before the steelhead was ready to eat. The companions sat around, blowing on their fingertips, peeling off the thick, blackened scales, dropping them hissing into the smoldering ashes.
It was excellent.
Ryan belched, leaning back against the worm-eaten bole of a larch, and yawned. "That was great."
"You feel confident that the flavor of the cooking won't have impinged upon our Native American friends, or upon any more of those religious maniacs?" Doc wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his frock coat.
Ryan sniffed. "Can never be sure, Doc. But a forest as thick as this should swallow up most smells. And the trees are so tall that there's no chance of the smoke being seen. Should be safe enough, I reckon."
"How much farther are we going?" asked Mildred, who'd been watching J.B. meticulously field-stripping and cleaning her revolver.
"See what one more day brings us," Ryan replied.
Chapter Eleven
Between them the seven companions managed to eat the entire fish at two gut-stretching sittings, finishing it off in the late evening, with the moon already rising through the branches of the surrounding pines.
It was good to be able to relax, resting by the lulling sound of the pounding river. So much of their life in Deathlands was running, hiding and chilling.
The rain clouds had passed away, and the sky was clear from north to south, with the promise of a cool night. Somewhere far off they all heard the howling of a lone wolf, a noise that was picked up by another predator, a few miles closer. Ryan instinctively reached for the butt of his pistol, then relaxed as he realized that the nearer animal was still a good distance away from them, and no threat at all.
He had rarely felt as full, his stomach rebelling at the surfeit of strong-flavored fish. The wind was rising again, moving through the vast forest, coming in from the west, carrying the bitter sharpness of salt from the Cific across the hills.
They had allowed the fire to die down, and it had sunk to a small pile of gray ashes that occasionally flared crimson as the strengthening breeze reached it. Doc had already fallen asleep, lying on his back, gnarled hands folded across his chest like a crusader at his eternal rest on a tomb.
Jak and Dean were also dozing, curled up beside the embers of the fire.
Mildred and J.B. sat close together, hands entwined, whispering to each other. Every now and again one of them would laugh quietly.
Krysty looked across at them, then back at Ryan. They both lay close together, sharing a companionable silence.
Time passed, evening creeping imperceptibly into the darkness of full night.
They heard the keening of the wolf once more, but it didn't seem to be getting any closer.
"Rain in the air," J.B. announced, beating his battered fedora into shape.
"Shame no fish left." Jak sat up, honing one of his leaf-bladed throwing knives on a round stone. "Shoot us another, Mildred, huh?"
"Yeah, Mildred. I'm about starved!" Dean added.
She laughed. "Maybe. I still feel kind of stuffed from yesterday."
Ryan stood and stretched, easing the kinks out of his muscles. "Might be best to move on some. Tracks showed plenty of deer around here."
Doc smiled at the thought. "Haunch of venison. With some apple and cabbage and some creamed potatoes. Goblet of a decent zinfandel to wash it down. Followed up with a gut-sticking portion of homemade treacle pudding. And a brimming balloon glass of Napoleon brandy."
None of them, not even Krysty with her "seeing" ability, could have guessed how far off the mark was the old man's sybaritic vision.
THE TRAIL WAS NARROW, winding steeply across the face of a wooded ridge, the ground dropping away to the west toward the river. The water level had fallen during the night, but the river was still a snarling, menacing sight, impossible to cross safely.
There was the threat of rain, though the bank of low clouds had passed over and lifted. Mildred hunched her shoulders and shivered. "Still cold," she complained.
"Spoiled by having such a good fire for two nights running," J.B. said with a grin, wiping away the fine mist of condensation from his glasses.
"Warm up once we get moving properly." Ryan led the way, swinging along at a good four miles per hour, which was a fair pace over difficult terrain.
They hadn't seen any sign of human life for some time, then Ryan spotted a short wooden sign, almost hidden among a clump of flowering thimbleberries: Beaver Lake Trail, 1.6 Miles. An arrow pointed back and downward. Crest Pine Trail, 8.6 Miles. An arrow pointed straight ahead. The lettering was deeply incised, covered with a thin coating of phosphorescent moss.
"Lots of national parks around here and stuff like that," Mildred commented.
They crossed the remains of a wider, edged path, its surface rippled by some postnuke earth movements. Its tarmac surface was furrowed and cracked, and bright weeds sprouted through in hundreds of places.
"More of the Children of the Rock," Krysty said as they gathered round the macabre totem.
It was the wind-dried corpse of baby pig, with trotters and head removed, its flanks shrunken and leathery. Two unmatched dolls' heads, plastic and eyeless, had been nailed to the shoulders, staring into each other's face. Threads of blond hair, looking human, were pasted to one of the artificially pink skulls.
Chicken feet had been sewn onto where the forelegs of the pig would have been, the claws painted a faded crimson. And what looked like the legs of a very large rat were fixed to the rear stumps of the hideous thing.
A delicately embroidered waistcoat in rainbow silks had been fitted around the wasted midriff, fastened in place with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons.
"I vow that someone has taken a great deal of time and trouble, bubble, bubble, double trouble, in the caldron… My apologies, my good and trusted companions, but I fear that my brain took a brief vacation there."
A small white card, about nine inches square, shrink-wrapped in clear plastic, was nailed to the trunk of the tree below the symbol:
The righteous are right and the rest are wrong. We choose life. For you, unless you come to us in abject humility, we choose death and damnation.
It was neatly lettered, signed in scarlet with the stark initials: "CoR."
"Friendly sons of bitches," Ryan muttered. "Religious crazies can be serious trouble."
"Think we should just go back, lover?"
He shook his head hesitantly. "Mebbe not yet."
EARLY IN THE AFTERNOON they reached another cross trail. This one was wider than any of the others and showed distinct ruts from wheeled vehicles and the deep patterns of many horses. Jak squatted on his haunches and peered at them. "Not fresh. Not very. Days not hours."
J.B. leaned over the teenager's shoulders, nodding his agreement. "Yeah. Rain tells us that. But the track's heavy used. Look at the boot marks, as well."
"No gas buggies at all," Ryan offered. "Only flatbed carts. Iron-rimmed wheels. Some ponies unshod. Wonder if they could be the Apaches?"
"Possible." The Armorer looked around them, his head slightly on one side, as though he were listening for some divine message. "Might as well follow them."
"Why not?" Ryan straightened and eased the blaster in its holster. "Just so long as we don't run into the camp of these Children of the Rock."
"THINK SOMEONE'S COMING." Krysty had stopped at a point where the trail wound into a series of hogback ridges, with the trees pressing in thickly on both sides.
"Sure?" Ryan already had the SIG-Sauer drawn and cocked in his right hand.
She nodded, her sentient red hair bunched more tightly at her nape. "Sure, lover."
"Norms or muties?"
Krysty considered the question for a moment, her green eyes squeezed shut. "Norms."
"Many?"
A shake of the head. "Don't think so. Few. But you know that I can never be…"
"Sure," he said, finishing the sentence for her. "Yeah, I know."
Jak cleared his throat. "Can hear something."
"What?"
Ryan knew the albino's hearing was sometimes uncannily acute.
"Bridle. Hooves."
"Right. J.B., you, Mildred, Dean and Doc cover that side of the path. We'll take this side. Keep under cover. Don't make a move unless I do. Best nobody knows we're in the area." As the others began to move, he called out in a penetrating whisper, "But if we need to stop them, then we do it with extreme prejudice." The old killing phrase from the long-gone, distant days before skydark came easily to him.
He crouched in the stygian blackness between two slender sycamores that had somehow seeded themselves among the ranging conifers, his blaster ready, his nerves strung taut.
From where he hid, Ryan could see some distance along the trail toward the north. The sound of a horse coming in his direction was louder, and he heard the soft snuffling of the animal's breath, the noise of the harness and tuneless singing.
It was an old song that Ryan recalled one of the navs on War Wag One used to sing, claiming it was an ancient folk ballad from a hundred years before skydark and that it had at least a hundred verses. And he'd known all of them.
The quavering voice, coming toward them along the trail, could be either an old man or an old woman.
It didn't sound like anything to fear.
Finally the singer appeared, sitting slumped on a sway-backed mule, barefoot, dressed in a collection of ill-fitting rags. It was an elderly man, with shoulder-length, greasy gray hair, tangled and knotted. He held the bridle loosely in his clawed right hand, seeming content to allow the animal to pick its own way at its own speed.
The current verse of the interminable song detailed a biologically impossible encounter between the heroine, Little Betty, and a well-endowed rattlesnake, in a cave filled with long-lost Spanish conquistadors' gold.
Ryan eased his finger off the trigger of the SIG-Sauer. The old man was alone, apparently indifferent to the rest of the world, obviously unaware of any threat to his safety.
It might be worth stopping him and interrogating him about the local region, and particularly about the mysterious Children of the Rock.
Now the mule was almost level with where Ryan was hiding, and the rider still hadn't even looked up, still droning on in a quavering voice.
Ryan made the snap decision to allow him to pass by unchallenged.
When the song stopped, the old man tugged on the reins, bringing the animal to a four-square halt. His head turned slowly toward the fringe of trees, seeming to drill directly at where Ryan was standing stock-still, barely breathing.
He risked a glance around the flank of the tree, seeing to his amazement that the man was stone-blind, his staring eyes both veiled with milky white cataracts.
"Who's there?"
The voice was stronger, and Ryan noticed for the first time that the old man had a blaster tucked into a broad leather belt, a battered Ruger that looked like it had been used for everything from hammering fence posts to stirring mutton stew.
"I can hear you out yonder. If it be one of you brats, then I'll see skin tanned off your asses."
From the other side of the track, Ryan glimpsed J.B.'s face, framed in the low branches of a pine. The Armorer was holding his Uzi at the ready, eyes turned questioningly in Ryan's direction, as if he were waiting for a sign to open fire.
For a dozen slow beats of the heart, nothing happened.
The pale, blind eyes continued to stare toward where Ryan lurked between the pair of sycamores. The mule snickered and lowered its head to graze a clump of long, rank grasses.
"I can hear you. Smell you. By the living God that made me and plucked out my glims, I can taste you! If Brother Joshua hears of this…then on your own gob-smitten heads be it. Don't say you wasn't warned!"
There was a note of genuine rage in the trembling voice. Ryan realized that the blind man wouldn't be a person to cross.
"Well enough." His bare heels kicked into the hollow flanks of the patient mule. "Walk on, you spawn of Shaitan. Miles to go before we sleep."
The animal began to amble down the trail, the venomous old man swaying from side to side on its back. Just before they vanished from Ryan's sight, the song started up again, this time with the verse about Little Betty and her meeting with the over-endowed band of traveling monks.
Ryan watched until the voice had faded away in the distance before stepping out from cover.
"Old man was riding the mule stone-blind," Krysty said wonderingly.
"Mean-looking bastard." Jak spit in the dirt and made the finger gesture to fend off evil.
"I wouldn't want him mad at me," Dean added.
Ryan holstered the SIG-Sauer. "Seems to me that there could be a ville close by. Mebbe the Children of the Rock. We'll keep moving, on condition orange. Eyes and ears o
pen. Let's go."
Chapter Twelve
After a half hour, Ryan relaxed the conditions. Blasters were holstered, and everyone walked with a lighter step. Krysty had closed her eyes and concentrated her seeing powers, reporting that she couldn't feel anyone nearby.
"Think we should have stopped the old man on the mule and asked him about the Children of the Rock?" J.B. called from the rear of their rough skirmish line.
Ryan answered him over his shoulder. "Guess not. Could have set him off making a noise. No idea if there was anyone near. And he didn't look the kind of person who'd take to answering questions." He paused, thinking about it for a few more strides. "And there was something triple creepy about him."
Doc nodded his agreement. "I would second that thought, my dear Ryan. I have seldom encountered a less savory individual in all of Deathlands."
Jak laughed. "Love way put things, Doc. Got way with words, ain't you?"
The old man grinned, showing his strong, perfect teeth. "Praise from you, my winged Mercury, is praise indeed. Thought, word and deed. Yes, indeed. Valiant deeds. Prince valiant deeds. Do-dah deeds!"
Mildred tapped him on the arm, making him jump. "Snap out of it, Doc," she said curtly. "You got your mind to wandering off again."
"Ten thousand apologies, my dear sable madam. If only I had my trusty headgear I could remove it to you in token of my deep regrets. But I don't, so I won't."
Ryan slapped his right hand against his thigh. "Enough, people, enough. Let's keep concentrating on where we are and where we're going."
"We going to get something to eat, lover?" Krysty looked down at the muddied state of her chisel-toed boots. "Gaia, but this rain's played havoc with these. Look at them."
Doc had a sudden coughing fit, doubling over, hawking to try to clear his throat and spitting out a chunk of thick green phlegm. "I'm so sorry," he spluttered. "I fear that this damp has gotten onto my chest."
"Could do with somewhere warm for the night," Ryan said. "Place like this should have some old shelters or huts or something like that."
