Red Equinox

by James Axler

  In among the endless rows of conifers, Ryan ran and dodged, never once looking back. The trees were so close together that his shoulders brushed on both sides as he twisted and turned. On either flank, just a little behind, he was aware of Krysty and J.B., following his headlong dash.

  Ryan had reacted so quickly that not a single shot was fired from the men in the jeep. By the time the Russians clambered down from the vehicle and ran to the place where the trio had vanished, there was no sign of them.

  The woods were lonely, dark and deep.

  "WE GOT MILES TO GO," Ryan said, crouching against the bole of a dead spruce tree.

  "Back to the house?" Krysty panted, throwing off her furs, wiping sweat from her forehead.

  "No choice. If the freezie'd been with us we could have bluffed our way. I heard one warning shout from the guys in the jeep. Once you stop, you're dead. Mebbe they'll think we don't hear too good. Or we're scared by the way they appeared."

  J.B. was trying to clean his glasses on a kerchief from one of his capacious pockets. "Yeah. We have to go back. Be stupid to get holed up like that. Now we know they got sec men out. See the badge?"

  Ryan shook his head. "No."

  "Like you described those troops up in the snows. The Russkies. Single silver circle. No doubt about it."

  "If they're regular soldiers then they could have radio communications. Call up reinforcements. Sooner we get away from here the better. That door to the gateway's well hidden, but not good enough if we finished up trapped in there. Few pounds of ex-plas'll bring the place on our necks."

  "Back to the trail?" J.B. queried. "Figure it's the only way. We try and circle around and we're in trouble deep."

  "They could be waiting," Krysty said, replacing her pis­tol in its belt holster.

  "This wood's so thick that we could get close enough to chill 'em from cover," J.B. suggested. "Long gun like those Kalashnikovs…great in the open. Useless in here. Can't see more than six feet in any direction. Knife's more use."

  "Time's wasting," Ryan said. "Longer we wait, the more they got to cut us off. Let's go."

  THE APPROACH OF EVENING brought a return to the colder weather. But it was not nearly as lethally chill as it had been the previous day. The temperature slithered down toward freezing, but the mixture of mud and thawing snow re­mained semiliquid. It was difficult and treacherous to walk through.

  There was no sign of the jeep along the track, though a set of double wheel marks showed it had driven as far along as the miserable little ville, and then returned in the general direction of Moscow.

  Ryan led the way around the hamlet, taking care to keep out of sight, guessing that the sec men could have given some sort of warning about strangers in the area.

  The dog's corpse had been dragged away from the killground.

  "Going to be a struggle to get to the house before full dark," J.B. warned. "Still a good few miles to go."

  "No point trying to hole up. It's the best place we got," Ryan replied.

  They heard the wolves when they were within the last mile, far off, almost at the edge of hearing. The howl was a susurrating ghost of a sound, rising and falling, like the keening of a mother for her dead child. Across a distant valley, the noise echoed back from unseen hills, making it difficult to judge where the pack was running. Ryan put the direction some way behind them and to the south. But the noise was coming closer. Louder.

  In the century since doomsday, many wild creatures had come back from the brink of extinction: cougars and rat­tlers, grizzlies and wolves. During the tired embers of the 1990s the creatures had been illegally poached and hunted into the remote high country and the desert fastnesses.

  It hadn't taken long for them to realize that their most bitter enemy, man, was all but gone from the land. So they returned. And they bred and they flourished. And, in some cases, they also mutated.

  "How far away, lover?" Ryan asked.

  "Five miles. Getting nearer."

  "Hunting pack?"

  Krysty nodded. "Sure. Moves around fifteen to twenty miles in an hour if they're on a warm scent. And if they're hungry. If it's been, a bleak winter in these parts, they could be real hungry."

  The sun was long gone, with only the palest hint of its passing tinting the western sky. A three-quarter moon was sailing calmly through tattered relics of cloud. During the warmth of the day a surprising amount of the snow had melted away, patches of white remaining only in hollows and shadowed places.

  "Don't want to lead them to the others," Ryan said.

  "Can keep 'em out easy of that place. There was shut­ters against the broken windows on the first floor. Doors were sound."

  Ryan agreed with the Armorer. "Sure. But if they set outside for a while, it could kind of attract some attention to us."

  "If we were closer to the hut we could have cut some flesh off the giant mutie. That would have sidetracked them."

  J.B.'s suggestion was a good one, but the loping wolves could be on top of them within fifteen minutes. Ryan looked at the narrow stream, at that point less than a dozen feet in width.

  "Come on," he said, wading in, gasping at the coldness as it soaked instantly through his breeches. It was nearly waist deep on him, and came up over the belt of J. B. Dix, who took off his fur coat and removed the blaster before stepping into the fast-flowing stream. Krysty Wroth came last, whistling between her teeth at the biting shock.

  "Gaia! All I need. Perfect end to a fruitful, perfect day."

  "Tomorrow we do it again with Rick to field the ques­tions. Crazy to think about doing it this way," J.B. panted.

  "Long as the freezie don't die on us," Ryan added, stepping cautiously over a submerged branch.

  The old trick worked. Without it they could have found themselves fighting the wolves off from the very steps of the American country dacha. They heard the high, nerve-rending cry of the hunting pack drawing closer, the ani­mals running at an easy pace, devouring the miles on their wide-padded paws.

  Just as Ryan and the other two reached the grounds of the mansion, they heard the sound of the wolves change suddenly. From eager anticipation to confusion. The note became lower, individual animals howling this way and that as they scoured the swift stream for some sign of where their prey had gone.

  "Nice one, lover," Krysty murmured, smiling at Ryan in the moonlight and squeezing his arm.

  "Hope they're gone by the time we set out again tomor­row."

  "Right," J.B. agreed fervently.

  THE OTHERS WERE SURPRISED to see them back the same evening. Rick had already gone to bed. Doc was sitting near him, tending the small fire in the open hearth. Jak was on watch, patrolling the second floor of the rambling build­ing. He spotted Ryan and the others as soon as they broke cover and ran down to the main doors to greet them.

  "Freezie's ill," he said, speaking, as he nearly always did, only to Ryan. He virtually ignored the other two.

  "Bad?"

  "Fucking tired."

  "See anyone, Jak?"

  The albino boy shook his head. "No. Heard wolves. After you?"

  "Yeah. We sidetracked them. Doc okay?"

  "Sure. Happy. Forget Lori."

  Krysty spoke for the first time. "Maybe not forgotten, Jak. Just put away into one of those back rooms in our mind where we store things we don't care to think on too much."

  He considered that. "Could be. Yeah. Could be right." Krysty smiled. It was as near as she got to praise from the teenager.

  They didn't bother to wake Rick to tell him he was trav­eling the next morning. Time enough for that.

  Chapter Fourteen

  "NO WAY

  , RYAN."

  "No choice, Rick."

  "Go and piss up a rope, you monocular son of a bitch!"

  "Sure. But you still have to come with us. There's no—"

  The freezie was angrier than any of them had ever seen him. He shook his head so violently that his heavy glasses nearly became dislodged.

  "I
'm sick, you ice-hearted bastard!" Suddenly he was near to tears. "Christ on a cross! I got this shitty illness and I'm dying and I get fucking frozen. Supposed to be woken up when it's time for the doctors to cure me! And you did it too early."

  Krysty tried to calm him. "Rick, it wasn't too early. You know that. The world you knew got blown to hell on Jan­uary 20, 2001. There won't be a cure. There won't ever be doctors like you knew, hospitals. Nothing like that. Just the Deathlands forever and ever."

  "Amen," Doc muttered.

  "So, why go on? Why fucking bother, Krysty? Let's just give up now. Right now!"

  He was weeping, leaning on his stick, tears streaming down his thin cheeks. Ryan realized how frail and ill he'd become in the past two or three days.

  Krysty laid her hands on his shoulders, trying to steady him. "Why? Why don't we all just sit down and give up?"

  "Yeah." He wiped his eyes with a clumsy hand. "Yeah. Why go on?"

  Outside the sun shone with a hard, facile brilliance, from a faultlessly blue sky. The snow had virtually disappeared, and there had been no sign of the wolf pack.

  Krysty's emerald-bright eyes fixed the man with a cold, inexorable stare. Rick actually took a stumbling step away from her flaring anger.

  "I can't mend that damaged door. Ryan can't. Nor can J.B. or Jak or Doc. If it doesn't get fixed we stay here, Rick. We stay here and we all get chilled. Sure, we can hold out for a few days. But in the end, though we're good, they'll track us down and chill us. You sit down on your ass and give up and you chill us. Just as surely as if your finger tightens on the trigger of the Kalashnikov."

  The sun-splashed room was very quiet. The others were all standing, listening to the argument. No one inter­rupted.

  Rick nodded slowly. "I see that, and I guess I'll do what I can. But after that? Why do you keep trying, Krysty?"

  She smiled then, and kissed him gently on the cheek. "Tell you the truth, Rick, I sometimes wonder about that myself."

  SOMETHING HAD AWAKENED Zimyanin from a deep sleep. He eased himself away from the hoggish bulk of his wife, wondering if it was the newborn twin baby boys in the apartment immediately above who disturbed his sleep. They bawled endlessly.

  But it wasn't that.

  Something in his sleep. "The bed was exceedingly comfortable. Thank you for asking," he whispered to himself.

  Anya Zimyanin rolled onto her back and farted long and loudly.

  He swung his legs out of the bed, wincing as his feet made contact with the cold plas-floor. There was some of the weeks' ration of chay left. If the power was high enough he could boil a pot of water and make himself a cup of tea. The idea appealed to Zimyanin. But he still couldn't quite remember what it was that had woken him in the first place.

  The cramped kitchen seemed smaller than usual. Dirty dishes and cutlery remained piled on the counter by the sink. It hadn't been a bad meal. Anya had bought some smoked sprats for the appetizer, serving them with buck­wheat pancakes.

  Zimyanin knew the old conventions about meals and made sure they were observed whenever possible. He in­sisted that Anya prepare pervoe blyudo and vtoroe blyudo—fish for the first main dish then meat for the sec­ond main dish.

  Minced pike was followed by some indeterminate meat that his wife had sworn was mutton. Unless they were put­ting horseshoes on sheep, he'd permitted himself to dis­agree with her. Out east he'd eaten enough horse meat to be sure. A young recruit had once asked him why he hadn't called his horse by any name. He'd replied that he wouldn't give a name to something he'd probably end up having to eat.

  For dessert they had consumed a store-bought cake, sticky with honey and raisins. Anya had gotten up from the table and kissed him drunkenly, her mouth oozing sweet­ness. Someone had given her a bottle of heavy Moldavian red wine, and it had gone to her head.

  Zimyanin slept naked and he looked down at his body with a shudder of revulsion. The mute evidence of their loveless coupling was matted in the wiry nest of dark curl­ing hairs that covered his groin. While the kettle simmered he walked quietly through to the tiny bathroom and washed himself.

  The overhead light was flickering and dim. Power often fell away during the night. He glanced at his face in the mirror, seeing how the erratic shadows gave the illusion that his mouth and nose had merged into a single dark cavern.

  "Ah," he muttered.

  That brought back the dream that had jerked him from sleep.

  Aliev had been in it. He and Zimyanin had been walking through the grim wastes of the Kamchatka Peninsula, hunting the Narodniki, following their trail of bestial vio­lence and murder.

  The weather had been appalling. A chem storm had howled in from the distant purpled mountains, driving acid rain across the barren land, rad-high enough to strip a man's flesh from his bones if he couldn't find cover fast enough.

  The sky seemed full of trails from old chunks of nuke waste as missiles burned down through the atmosphere. They'd passed three men on horseback, all of them so wrapped in heavy furs that their faces were obscured. Zimyanin had shouted to them to beware of the lethal weather, but they'd taken no notice. They'd ridden slowly on into the eye of the storm as though they were deaf. Aliev had snuffled and grunted at his side, pointing toward a ru­ined building that seemed to stand on the edge of the world.

  The hurricane screamed at their heels as they closed in on the old house. But the door was locked and coated with a glittering layer of titanium steel. A tiny ob-slit was cut into its center.

  Zimyanin pounded on the door with the butt of his Makarov, the noise ringing like a fist beating on a shield of bronze. But nobody came. Aliev had fallen whimpering to his knees, arms locking around the legs of his superior. To try to free himself from the grip of the tracker, Zimyanin reached down and pulled at his head. But hanks of coarse hair came away in his hand, and strips of flesh peeled whitely away from the wretch's face. Bone showed through, and Zimyanin saw to his horror and disgust that it was carved in tiny, delicate figurines of copulating men, women and animals.

  He knocked again on the door and heard footsteps above the screeching of the chem storm, combat boots that marched slow and steady. A bolt grated and the ob-slit moved back on its hinges.

  Part of a face appeared and studied the major-commissar for a long, long moment. Then the panel slid back again and Zimyanin could hear the steps receding.

  As he sat at the table in the kitchen, Zimyanin remem­bered the bowel-tearing feeling of helpless horror as the le­thal storm had enveloped him.

  Though he'd been able to see only a small part of the man's face behind the bolted door, he'd felt that he some­how recognized him. Now, all the major-commissar could recall was that the man had been scarred. And had one eye.

  RYAN, KRYSTY and Rick were making slow progress. Even with his walking stick the freezie needed to stop every half mile or so to sit down and recover, his head sunken on his chest, his breath rasping with a shuddering force. His lips turned a frightening shade of pale cyanotic blue.

  "Time was I could hike the glacier with the best of 'em," he said. "Now I'm limp as overcooked pasta. That's what my grandmother used to say. This is crazy, Ryan. By the time we get to anywhere we can find some tools, I'll be bloody dead."

  "If there hadn't been an armed sec patrol we could have risked the first plan. But without someone who can speak a little to any Russkies we meet, we'll be deader'n these coats."

  "Sure, sure." Wearily he climbed to his feet again, sigh­ing heavily. "At least most of the snow's gone today."

  The weather was beautiful. The temperature was cool enough to need the coats, but not so cold that it gnawed at exposed skin. The stream chattered to itself as it tumbled over the boulders in its scoured bed.

  The giant mutie had been removed from the cabin. Ryan risked a quick glance inside and saw that it had been com­pletely stripped. The three bodies of the horsemen had also vanished. From the odd fragments of bone and torn cloth it looked as if the wolves had gotten to them before the s
earch party from the ville.

  Once they'd successfully circled around the community, the companions stopped for food. Ryan and Krysty ate sparingly of the dried meat and fish, and sipped at their canteens, replenishing them from the adjacent river. Rick hardly touched his food, but he drank heavily, draining the canteen and nodding his thanks as Ryan topped it up for him.

  "You have to eat, Rick," Krysty urged. "And you should harvest the water. Might not be any where we're going."

  "Food makes me wanna puke, and I get so dry I could—"

  "You still have to eat."

  "Why?"

  "Just to keep your strength."

  "What strength is that, lady?" He laughed bitterly. "One round with My Little Pony'd put me into rehab for a month."

  "Little pony?" she asked, puzzled.

  "Forget it."

  "But I'm interested in the past and things like that, Rick."

  He shook his head. "You wanna play, you gotta pay, Krysty. Be there or be square, like the man said. Radio said they was just refugees. Don't let the sun catch you crying." His eyes were closed and he seemed to have slipped into a weird kind of trance.

  Krysty turned to Ryan, who shrugged his shoulders. "Don't ask me, lover. Guess it's like Doc. Some things a man just doesn't get over. Not all the way, all the time."

  Rick stopped mumbling to himself and looked up at Ryan. "Truest thing you ever said, good buddy. Let's get moving again."

  RYAN'S TOOTHACHE was becoming much worse, hurting to such an extent that he didn't even want to risk breathing in cool air through his mouth. But the effort of the long walk, often having to help Rick along, made him pant.

  "Fireblast! What's the Russkie word for 'dentist,' Rick?"

  The freezie paused. "I think it's zubnoy vrach, but I'm not really sure. I guess you just pull a face and point at the tooth that hurts and the guy'll draw it for you. Not a lot different from visiting the fang factory up in Queens."