Deathlands 068: Shaking Earth

by James Axler

  The raiders displayed the same wide spectrum of weaponry they’d seen among their attackers in the abandoned ville, ranging from a stone club in the warted hand of a mutie, up through bows with crooked arrows and makeshift muskets, to a lever-action carbine or two and at least one AKS. The distribution was sort of a pyramid, with the low-tech weps predominating. Ryan did see one thing that made his blood run chill inside him and made him glad Mildred had decided to duck for cover in that garage: a human carrying an unmistakable RPG-7, a predark Soviet antitank rocket launcher that could pop open the Hummer like a stinkbug on a hot iron stove.

  The scout made a gesture like a slow-motion downward patting of the air, which Ryan took to mean they would wait. The two couldn’t really talk, although Five Ax obviously understood at least some spoken English. But they found they understood each other pretty well without speaking; any communicating that needed to be done seemed to be accomplished with a few compact gestures.

  Five Ax waited as the afternoon shadows lengthened and the Chichimec band passed. Then he slipped backward down the slope, got cautiously to his feet, picking up his rifle. It was a Lee-Enfield Mk IV in fairly decent condition, the mark with the peep sight back at the rear of the receiver. It wasn’t a finely tuned precision weapon like Ryan’s SSG, nor yet a bullet sprayer like J.B.’s Uzi. It was just business, a lightweight, robust bolt-gun that went bang when you pulled the trigger and shot pretty much as well as you did out to most conventionally useful ranges. It had a detachable 10-round box magazine; Ryan didn’t know whether it still fired the original .303 Brit cartridge it had been designed and built for, or whether it had been rechambered to fire the somewhat more powerful NATO .308. On the whole it was a blaster a lot like the man who carried it.

  The Jaguar Knight made no noise Ryan’s keen ears could hear above the breeze, nor had he much disturbed the sparse vegetation where he’d lain. He was, like Jak, the sort of man whom Trader might have said barely cast a shadow when he moved. Come to think of it, Ryan reckoned Five Ax would have fit in well with the picked professionals of Trader’s caravan, once upon a long-lost time.

  They moved back to the Hummer, where Jak crouched on top of the roof, looking more like some kind of predatory animal than usual in the buttery late-day sun with his white hair blowing around his face, and J.B. was just buttoning his fly from relieving himself among the weeds. Krysty was sitting up in the back of the wag with Mildred helping her drink. She saw Ryan and gave him a wan smile. It was obvious she was hurting. He made himself smile back to encourage her, and she lay down out of sight, assisted by the stocky black woman.

  Five Ax spoke to Doc, who was sitting on the Hummer’s wide hood with his back against the windshield and his long, lean legs out in front of him. “He says that should be the last of the Chichimecs we encounter. They do not like to get too close to the lake, although they have been growing bolder of late. We should be able to reach the city with time to spare before the sunset. Which even our redoubtable young friend seems to think is a very good thing indeed.”

  Five Ax nodded, looking serious, just hovering on the edge of uneasy. Ryan wondered what was abroad at night that would put the wind up a seasoned warrior like that. Perhaps the giant rattler wasn’t the only monster in these parts.

  “NOW, THAT’S A PRETTY impressive sight.”

  They had been catching glimpses of the lake all along. Now they came over a last rise and here it was.

  The sun was falling into the jagged mountains, walling the valley to the west. The light was an amber color that seemed to invest everything it touched with richness and with sadness. The shadows seemed to stretch forever.

  In the near twilight the water was gunmetal-gray. From the middle of it rose a drowned city. Buildings, skyscrapers, jutted from the placid water. Some, intact, soared high into the pale blue and dove-wing-gray sky. Others were snapped-off stumps, their break points still ragged and fanged with girders. Still others lay toppled, some half submerged, some more than half, like giant quiescent water worms. Lights were becoming visible among the structures, the nearest still perhaps a mile away across the water.

  Five Ax guided them around a big hill covered with scrub and woods that rose like a ramp from near the shore into the west, toward the mouth of a narrow causeway stretching out to the half-toppled and half-drowned city. The mouth was guarded by a tangle of razor wire and a miniature adobe fort. As the broad-shouldered Hummer rumbled down the path toward the causeway, sentries in the minifort swiveled the perforated barrel of a tripod-mounted machine gun to bear on them.

  “Stop here, my friends,” Five Ax said by way of Doc. “I’ll talk to them and get us through.”

  “Do that,” Ryan said, glad he had his Steyr stowed for the moment out of sight. He didn’t doubt the sentries would pass the scout, nor did they seem reflexively hostile, merely cautious. But he knew how easily accidents could happen where loaded and cocked blasters were concerned. Especially when authentic threats lurked in the vicinity—which these days, granted, was pretty much everywhere and all the time.

  Five Ax popped out of the vehicle, waved his arm and shouted. The sentries greeted him with cheerful cries of recognition. To the friends’ relief they promptly traversed the gun to aim out into the dusk gathering among the green fields and ridges and snaky black twists of lava flows.

  “Our youthful friend is explaining to his comrades-in-arms that we are mighty warriors and traders from the north,” Doc translated. He had climbed out to stretch his storklike limbs. “As we already gathered from what Five Ax has said, apparently they have seen our like before, from time to time.”

  “I hope the earlier visitors didn’t pop out of the volcano the way we did,” Mildred said. The travelers were always uneasy at the prospect of others stumbling onto their secret mode of travel—not to mention escape.

  “Can’t be that many people using the mat-trans network,” Ryan said. “We’d run into more of them if there were.”

  A couple of guards in baggy civilian clothes came out of the minifort and dragged the coiling razor-tape tangles out of the way with salvaged swimming pool hooks. “Death Slinkies,” Mildred muttered. The others looked at her blankly.

  Five Ax seemed eager to get across the water and into the city. Everybody got back in the wag, and Mildred drove it out onto the causeway. The sentries carefully dragged the wire tangles back into place the moment they had passed, then scampered gratefully back inside the thick mud-brick walls of their fortification.

  The causeway was of crushed volcanic rock, black with patches of a deep rust red. The porous pebbles used to metal the surface made squealing, crunching sounds as the tires crushed them. The freshening sunset breeze brought a smell of cool, fresh water through the wag’s open windows—although from somewhere, possibly the ville they had been holed up in earlier that day, perhaps another hapless target of the Chichimecs’ depredations, drifted the faint but distinctive scent of distant death.

  Boats skimmed the green water, some with triangular sails turned yellow by the light’s fading, some driven by oars, a few showing no external means of propulsion and hence no doubt driven by some kind of motor. They seemed to all be heading for the City in the Lake, in which lights were beginning to glimmer awake.

  J.B. still rode shotgun. Ryan was in the back seat with Doc between him and their guide. Mildred had complained the arrangement meant the nineteenth-century scholar blocked her vision out the rearview mirror; Ryan had countered that traffic from behind was the last of their worries.

  Jak was still back in the rear compartment with Krysty, who was moaning sporadically and tossing her head from side to side but seemed thoroughly unconscious. The boy reached chalk-white fingers over the seat back to clutch Ryan’s shoulder.

  “Light,” he said. Ryan turned to look back toward the sentry tower. Sure enough, a light was shining from its top, blinking rapidly. “Signaling.”

  From somewhere up ahead in the city a flicker responded, this clearly from a mirr
or reflecting the sun’s last light. “You folks have some pretty good communications,” Ryan told Five Ax through Doc.

  “How else do you think we knew how to intercept you when you cut out of that ville?” the young man said, and grinned his infectious grin. “It was Two Arrow himself who told us you were there in the first place, when he reported back to Hector on his talkie. That’s why we like to use the reflecs. Can’t listen in unless you know the code.”

  “This Don Hector’s bunch got commo good as yours?” J.B. asked.

  “No,” the Jaguar Knight said, shaking his head. “At least we don’t think so. They haven’t shown any sign of having as efficient a system as we do. But they might be holding something back.”

  Ryan nodded, rubbing his chin, which was raspy with late-day growth. The more he saw of this Five Ax the better impressed he was. The young scout was able to see beyond that which stared him plainly in the face. Not everybody had that gift.

  Off to their left his eye caught a flicker of motion, a dull glint of reflected glow no brighter than an ember in a nigh-dead campfire. There came a mighty splash.

  “Whoa!” Mildred exclaimed. “What in the wide, wide world of sports was that?”

  “Pesca,” Five Ax answered matter-of-factly.

  “A fish? A fish? That was a hell of a big fish, amigo.”

  “We get a lot of food from the lake. Nothing like a good trout steak. Only thing better is a nice slab of fresh giant axolotl.”

  “Tell me ‘axolotl’ means something other than I think it means, Doc.”

  “An axolotl is still a large, neotonous form of salamander. A giant axolotl is, one infers, well…an extra-large specimen. I take it that was not the response you hoped for from me, dear lady?”

  “They eat giant mud-puppies here,” Mildred said hollowly.

  Jak smacked his lips. “Go some right now.”

  Ryan’s stomach rumbled. It had been many wild hours since it had last felt the fall of food. “I’m with you, Jak. I hope Don Tenorio can spare us some chow.”

  Five Ax nodded vigorously. “Don Tenorio will honor you with a mighty feast. All the giant axolotl you want. And also dragonfly eggs.”

  “Sounds mighty tasty,” J.B. said.

  “I’m in hell,” Mildred muttered.

  * * *

  Chapter Eleven

  Don Tenorio turned back from the giant window that constituted the west wall of his office. Out across the lake the last declining remnants of day showed as a thin band of blood-colored glow behind the western peaks. The light show from Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl easily outshone them. The crimson fire fountains flung into the face of night by the distant mountains was reflected hellishly in the smooth waters of the lake.

  He turned, swirling tequila in his glass. “It is rare that we are privileged to receive visitors from your land,” he said in heavily accented but clearly comprehensible English. His voice was startling deep and mellifluous, coming from such a slight figure. “Two years, I believe, have passed since the last time.”

  Ryan stood next to a wall-size shelf of hardcover books, with titles in English, Spanish and some languages he didn’t recognize printed on their spines. He was nigh stunned with fatigue. But his spirit was too restless within him to allow him to sit. Even having seen Krysty laid down on clean, crisp sheets in the infirmary of Don Tenorio’s headquarters, under the care of staff who had met Mildred’s exacting standards, wasn’t enough to free him to rest quite yet.

  Uncertainty was a fact of life in the world in which he’d grown to manhood. But certain kinds of uncertainty could turn out to be facts of death. He had some questions that were restless to be asked.

  Of course, the growling in his stomach might’ve had something to do with his continued wakefulness, as well. Neither he nor his companions had enjoyed any kind of proper meal since their last feed in the Popocatépetl redoubt, in what had proved to be the very early hours of that morning.

  “You mean somebody else made it down before us?” asked J.B., who sat next to Mildred on a sofa with a ponderous dark-stained wood frame and cushions upholstered in gleaming brown leather. “What with the hot zones and bands of chem storms up north of here, I kinda figured we’d be the first.”

  “Ah, but no, Señor Dix. There have been others in my lifetime, although I have never ascertained whether accounts of visits before my time were mere legend or not.” He smiled. “Most of our visitors have, much like yourselves, been interested in exploring the possibilities of trade.”

  Ryan glanced at J.B., who was studiously gazing off across the night and the lake. That had been the story they’d agreed upon in advance: that they had come to Mex-land seeking to open up trade routes, traveling down the desolate and sparsely inhabited west coast, but that some unspecified disaster along the way had cost them most of their goods. The story was, as the Armorer said, thin as the seat of a ville rat’s drawers. But all agreed it was better than the secret of the mat-trans—not to mention at least marginally more believable.

  “Our last set of visitors from el norte,” Don Tenorio said, “apparently anticipating that we Mexicans had been reduced to the status of primitives by the war, came among us intending to emulate your long-dead countryman, William Walker. Ah, Doctor, I see you know the name.”

  Doc sat in a leather-covered armchair beside Tenorio’s desk. He was playing with a five-inch globe of polished stone somehow painted or printed to represent the Earth, that he’d picked up off its brass and mahogany stand on the desk. “I do, indeed, Don Tenorio. Although he was a bit before my time.”

  Their host blinked at the tall, skinny man. Out of the baron’s sight J.B. rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. Fortunately the nineteenth-century scholar, while mostly maintaining, had already slipped out of phase with reality a few times in Tenorio’s presence.

  “Fortunately, between us, Don Hector’s people and mine, were able to frustrate his plans—ah, María, what is it?”

  A dark, pretty woman dressed in a colorfully embroidered linen dress came into the room. She was tiny, no more than four feet tall, though voluptuously built. She spoke softly to the baron in Spanish. He answered in the same language before turning to his guests.

  “At last our dinner is prepared,” Don Tenorio said. “My apologies for such delay, for I know you must be famished. Still, it isn’t often that I entertain guests so distinguished as yourselves, and so it took my staff, hardworking though they are, extra time to prepare an appropriate repast.”

  “Didn’t really need to bother,” J.B. rumbled. “I’m so rad-blasted hungry I could eat the ass end out of a dead—”

  “We’re delighted and honored that you’ve gone to such trouble on our behalf, Don Tenorio,” Mildred said loudly, rising from the sofa. “I’m sure the meal will be well worth the wait.”

  PERHAPS BECAUSE SHE WAS every bit as hungry as she had kept J.B. from too graphically describing himself as, Mildred ate the sumptuous meal Don Tenorio had provided as eagerly as everybody else. Of course it didn’t hurt that the grilled meat, like everything else, was liberally doused in a thick sauce, sufficiently sharpened with chili that other tastes were muted at best. Nor that the room was lit only by candles, well enough to eat by but not any great aid to identifying what one was eating. Still, it was perhaps just as well for her twentieth-century sensibilities that nothing obviously discernible as dragonfly eggs was laid out on any of the heavy earthenware dishes set on the expanse of white linen tablecloth.

  Still, at one point when she had mostly sated her appetite, Ryan heard her mutter as she studied a chunk of baked flesh impaled on her fork, “Mud puppy—the other white meat.”

  Don Tenorio’s dining hall was another room in the truncated skyscraper he had appropriated as his headquarters, so situated as to look directly south, providing a splendid view of the volcanoes. Popocatépetl was in especially fine form this night, hurling constant arcs of red molten lava, brilliant as filaments in a light bulb. The travelers all marveled that they h
ad, not twenty-four hours before, found themselves in the midst of that.

  They had been describing life in the Deathlands to their host, who was brimming with questions although he did in fact display a fair degree of knowledge as to conditions there. Ryan tore a piece of rolled tortilla away with his teeth, chewed and swallowed, then as he dipped the raw end of the flat bread in the pungent reddish sauce, said, “We’ve been wondering why it is there’s so little background radiation hereabouts.”

  Don Tenorio was taking a swig of cool water, which seemed to be his drink of choice, from a heavy fired-clay mug. For such a wizened little guy he ate and drank with gusto befitting the fattest sec boss. Maybe his emotional intensity burned it all off.

  “Perhaps, my friends, you wonder, and are too polite to openly ask, why our once glorious Mexico City, once the most populous on Earth, is such a shattered ruin, without having been bombed as intensively as your great cities in the north? Indeed, the city was not bombed at all. Which is the answer to the question you did ask.”

  The companions were way too seasoned to contradict a baron—alcade, his people called him—at his own dinner table, even one as mild-seeming as Tenorio. But they all looked up and around at one another. Even ruby-eyed Jak, who normally could be distracted from feeding by nothing short of immediate mortal peril, glanced up from the leg of something Mildred fervently hoped was chicken he was holding in both hands to tear at with his sharp white teeth.

  “I see your skepticism. Yet I speak the truth. With your indulgence I will tell you the sad tale of our city’s fall.”

  J. B. waved his own well-gnawed leg of whatever. “Speak your piece, Baron. We’re all ears. Well, and gullets.”

  “We were spared direct thermonuclear bombardment during the great war, as your instruments indicate. But that does not mean we were spared the wrath of the combatants, nor indeed a matanza, a slaughter no less comprehensive, in the end, than that suffered by many cities reduced to radioactive glass craters.