by James Axler
A low groan sounded in the night and Krysty spun with her blaster out and ready. The groan came again, and she proceeded that way warily, until spotting Ryan lying in a tidal pool, his body surrounded by countless tiny fish.
“Lover?” Krysty asked, reaching out to shake the man.
At the sound of her voice, his good eye snapped open and he partially drew the panga before fully awake.
“Hey,” Ryan growled, easing the knife back into the sheath. “Not…aced, I see.”
“Not yet.” She smiled at him, reaching out to pluck a strand of seaweed from his hair.
“Everybody else alive?” Ryan started, then frowned. Fireblast, when the frag had it become night? Adjusting his leather eyepatch, Ryan slowly stood and looked around, easily finding the muddy waterfall on the opposite side of the wide bay. If the giant man and his people hadn’t found the companions yet, then he wasn’t hunting for them. Then again, Ryan could barely believe it himself that the companions had survived going over the thundering falls. The bay had to be very deep, that was the only possible explanation. Mildred had once told him about crazy folks who deliberately went over Niagara Falls and somehow survived. He’d seen pics in old mags. That waterfall was ten times bigger than this one. The trick seemed to be a combination of missing the rocks, mixed with a large dose of dumb luck.
“Wag okay?” Ryan asked, patting his clothing to check on his weapons. Everything was intact, except for his backpack. That had been left behind on the LARC, and was probably at the bottom of the bay. Which meant no candles, bedroll or food.
“The LARC is done,” Krysty answered, jerking a thumb over a shoulder to indicate the wreckage. “We couldn’t fix it if we had a year and two machine shops.”
Accepting the loss, Ryan shrugged and rummaged in his pockets for anything edible. He found only a stick of chewing gum from an MRE pack, and broke it in two to share with the woman. However, the trickle of flavor didn’t ease the hunger in his belly, and it made a loose tooth ache badly. Nuking hell, it looked like he was going to be on soft food for a couple of weeks.
“Doc aced a turtle,” Krysty stated, starting that way. “The damn thing is big enough to feed us for a week.”
“Have to eat it raw. Can’t risk a campfire,” Ryan told her, matching Krysty’s stride. “The light would tell everybody for miles exactly where we are, and I don’t want to tangle with those bastards from the cliff again.”
Moving to where Doc rested in the warm sand, the two companions dragged the turtle into the bushes. Finding a clearing, they flipped the animal over and started the butchering. The flesh was pale, salty and thankfully very soft. It was also delicious and filled their exhausted bodies with new strength. Afterward, Ryan took the first watch, while Krysty caught a quick nap.
Watching the surface of the moonlit bay for any sign of incoming boats, the one-eyed man cleaned and oiled his blasters, then went hunting for coconuts. He’d noted the trees in the near distance. Opening the husk was easy work for the panga, and he found the sweet milk satisfied his raging thirst for fresh water. An hour later, Krysty awoke to relieve the man, and Ryan settled into the warm sand to sleep until dawn. He had no dreams.
At first sign of light on the horizon, Ryan and Krysty awoke the others and got them into the cover of the lush foliage. Breakfast was raw turtle steaks and bananas, washed down with coconut milk. The primitive food was eagerly consumed by the other companions, then the medical repairs began.
Bracing herself against a tree, Krysty held J.B. motionless while Ryan slapped the man’s broken nose back into place. Tears filled his eyes from the explosion of pain, but J.B. never made a sound, only the trembling of his hands as the man lit the stub of a cigar showed how much it had hurt.
Next, they did Mildred, the physician sliding a strip of old leather between her teeth as a precaution. This time, Ryan held the woman, while Krysty took her wrist, rotated the arm slightly, then pulled with all of her strength. The joint popped back into place with an audible noise, and Mildred inhaled sharply, then slowly relaxed, panting hard.
“Well done. You’re both apt pupils,” she said hoarsely, warily testing the shoulder. “This didn’t hurt anywhere near as much as last time in the monastery.”
Relatively undamaged, Jak and Doc only had some cracked ribs, thankfully not broken. Mildred directed the wrapping of both men with layers of duct tape. That made it hard for them to draw a deep breath, but it minimized the pain and got them moving again. Then the physician stitched shut the hole in Doc’s cheek with a curved upholstery needle and nylon fishing line. The man grunted every time the big needle penetrated his flesh, but his only words were those of thanks when she was finished.
“What I wouldn’t give for a proper medical kit again,” Mildred said, tucking the makeshift items back into her canvas bag.
“Now, the Trader used to say, make a wish in one hand and hold the other under the ass of a cow, and see which gets filled first,” J.B. replied, smoothing out his fedora before returning the item to its accustomed position. In his opinion, no man could think straight with his brain exposed to the direct rays of the sun. Just wasn’t natural.
“How…vivid,” Mildred demurred, shocked and amused at the same time.
After finding some tree branches for Doc and Jak to use as crutches, the companions did a brief recce of the beach for anything useful that might have washed onto shore. They found a couple of MRE packs, the airtight envelopes bobbing in the waves like Mylar balloons, but that was it. Everything else was gone.
“I guess we rig a litter and drag the turtle along with us,” Krysty said, warming her face in the rising sun. “The meat should still be good by tonight, and by then we’ll be far enough away from the beach to risk a campfire.”
“Just meat, no organs,” Jak warned. “I see once. Man got aced bad.”
“Probably vitamin A poisoning,” Mildred guessed, chewing a lip. “I know that the Inuit in Alaska liked to remove their enemies by taking them hunting for polar bears, and then giving them the liver as a treat. The poor bastards died right after the meal, and then the Inuit stole their belongings.”
“Good for them,” Ryan mumbled, tonguing the bad tooth. “If you can’t outgun them, outthink them.”
“You can load that into a blaster,” J.B. agreed, pulling out his minisextant. After drying the optical instrument with a cloth, he carefully located the sun behind the clouds overhead, balanced the half-mirror on the horizon, then did some fast calculations. Finally he checked the predark map in his munitions bag.
“This is…San Clemente Island,” J.B. announced. “We’re just off the coast of the California archipelago.”
“That would explain the big pile of warships you saw yesterday,” Krysty said thoughtfully.
“Some kind of mil base located here?” Ryan asked hopefully. Those always had caches of weapons and food stashed away in case of emergencies. If a smart man knew where to look, crumbling ruins could yield the wealth of the predark world.
“Hell, yes!” Mildred replied. “This island used to be the training facility for the U.S. Navy SEALs!” There was a clear note of pride in her voice as one of her cousins had been a SEAL. “They were the toughest, smartest mothers in the history of the whole damn world!”
“So why name after seal?” Jak asked, clearly referring to the animal. “They easy chill.”
“Different type of seal.” Mildred laughed. “The letters stood for sea, air, land. The SEALs could fight anywhere, and did a lot of rescue missions under impossible conditions.” Her face brightened. “They would have extensive medical supplies for field operations!”
“Which also means lots of weapons and wags,” J.B. said, fishing in a pocket for a cigar. But his fingers found only a sodden mess of crumbling leaves, unfit to smoke.
Facing the muddy waterfall on the other side of the bay, Ryan mentally retraced their journey to the grassy plateau, then turned toward the jungle. “The wrecked ships should be that way,” he said, poin
ting to the south. “While the ruins should be to the north.”
“Ruins,” Jak said, clearly stating his preference. The teen had found one of the M-16 assault rifles undamaged. Unfortunately, the rest had all been smashed inside the LARC. He had ten full clips of brass for the rapidfire. That was three hundred rounds, more than most villes had for their entire troop of sec men.
Nobody disagreed.
“Okay, then, let’s start walking,” Ryan declared, slinging the Steyr.
Trudging into the forest, the companions saw that the ground remained mostly sand and never became honest dirt. Slowly a proper forest began to spread, first as low bushes, and then tall stately oak trees, whose branches interlocked overhead to blot out the searing noonday heat.
However, after a few hours, the exhausted people had to abandon the heavy carcass of the turtle, as the litter was slowing them way too much, especially since Doc and Jak were exempt from the work because of their damaged ribs.
Walking through the dabbled shadows, Ryan drew the SIG-Sauer and watched the branches for anything dangerous. Stickies liked to hunt in the ruins of predark cities, but flapjacks liked to drop on their prey from the branches of a tree. Between the two, Ryan would rather fight a dozen stickies than one flapjack any time. Their barbed pseudopods locked into your flesh and drained off your blood to replace it with poison. It was a triple-bad way to buy the farm.
There was a lot of wildlife on the island, with fuzzy cooneys constantly darting around in the bushes, and deer boldly walking into view to nibble at the leaves. It was as if they had never seen people before and didn’t know they were dangerous.
“Fish in barrel.” Jak chortled, triggering a short burst from the assault rifle. Several of the fat coneys dropped while the rest scampered out of sight.
“For lunch,” Jak said, claiming the twitching bodies.
“Excellent shooting, my dear Jak,” Doc said. “But I’m rather surprised that you didn’t ace a deer, instead.”
“Can’t skin while walking,” Jak explained pragmatically, producing a small knife and starting to slice off the fur.
By the time noon rolled around, the companions were more than ready to stop and cook the rabbits. Krysty seasoned the meat with some crushed pine nuts, and Mildred filled a small pot with water from a stream, boiling it thoroughly before adding a few drops of iodine. That would kill almost any bacteria in the water, and was good for the thyroid glands of the companions. Iodized salt was a thing of the past, so the physician kept a close watch on the others for the first sign of a suspiciously sore throat or low-grade fever that never got any better.
After the meal, the companions felt vastly refreshed and continued their trek through the barrens. Strangely, there was an ever-increasing amount of wildlife in the forest, which was starting to make them nervous. A complete lack of people often meant there was some sort of a mutie around that had chilled everybody.
Crossing a field of Shasta daisies, the group paused as a bald eagle screamed defiantly from the sky, laying claim to the entire plateau. In a blur of motion, a stingwing launched upward from some laurel bushes like a leathery missile. The two predators collided in an explosion of feathers and blood. The furious battle was short, and soon the headless corpse of the stingwing tumbled from the sky, the eagle majestically winging away in triumph. The mutie had been vanquished, but found inedible by the eagle, and thus was simply abandoned. The interrupted hunt for clean meat continued unabated.
“‘And thou, wretched boy, who did consort him here, shall with him hence,’” Doc said with a wry smile.
“Romeo and Juliet,” Mildred replied, closing her collar against the encroaching chill. “You ever see the play?”
“Several times, madam. After all, I was once a teacher of literature,” Doc replied, gesturing with the stick. “Once, my students even performed a truncated version of the play, and I was drafted to play the Jewish apothecary to a twelve-year-old Romeo who barely reached my waistcoat.”
“I saw the vid in a redoubt once,” Krysty said unexpectedly. “It was rather hard to follow the story, but I liked the parts about family honor. Funny, I didn’t know they had blasters back in the, you know, the predark times before our predark times.”
Blasters? Doc and Mildred looked at each in confusion.
“You must have seen the modern-day remake of the seventeenth-century classic.” Mildred chuckled in realization. “Yeah, John Leguizamo was excellent! But then he always is…was.”
“So, they didn’t have blasters back then?”
“Nope, just swords and knives.”
“Nothing wrong with that.” Jak smiled.
“Speak for yourself,” J.B. retorted, patting the stubby barrel of the Uzi.
“And what is this I see?” Doc asked in a conversational tone of voice, drawing both of his blasters and clicking back the hammers.
Everybody tensed at the actions. Off to the side of the field was a large stand of trees with thick brambles growing around the trunks. But upon closer examination, it was fake. The brambles were actually a cluster of sharpened poles thrusting into the ground. Pungi sticks, Mildred called them. The companions had used such things many times before around a temporary campsite, or while repairing a wag out in the wilds. Using pungi sticks to fill in the gaps between trees was a deuced clever idea. It would quickly make a crude wall to protect you from the predators of the night.
However, these pungi sticks looked old and weathered, as if the poles had been here for many winters. And there was a gate attached to a tree, a stout barrier of bolted planks, the outer surface studded with so many pungi sticks it was difficult to see the wooden beams underneath. Whatever else the place might be, this was definitely not a temporary structure.
“Odd configuration,” Mildred said, walking closer. Then she saw a thick purple substance smeared onto the needle-sharp tip of every stick. “Don’t touch those poles! They’re poisoned!”
“Have to be, or else this wouldn’t have lasted a week,” Ryan stated, studying the treetops for any sniper platforms hidden among the branches. He easily found several, but they were empty and piled with loose leaves.
“This place is abandoned,” Krysty said, looking over the bristling wall. “Nobody has been here for years.”
“Mebbe,” J.B. countered warily. “But I never did trust folks that liked to use poison as a defense.”
“Perhaps poison is all they had,” Mildred suggested, taking a scalpel from her med kit. Carefully, the woman sliced through the end of a pole, then used a handkerchief to slip it into one of her precious plastic zippered bags for later examination.
Starting to walk toward the right, Ryan pointed at J.B. and he started off the other way. A few minutes later the men returned from opposite directions.
“Four hundred ten feet around,” Ryan stated. “This is no campsite, but a small ville.”
“And this is the only gate,” J.B. added accusingly, clearly not ready to trust anything about the place.
Dropping to a knee, Jak inspected the ground. To the rest of the companions it seemed smooth and featureless.
“Something big tried get in,” the young hunter stated. “Didn’t like wall. Tried bunch times, finally went away.”
“How big, and how long ago?” Doc asked.
“Couple months. Size…” Jak merely shrugged. “Big as some dinos saw at museum.”
“Indeed,” Doc murmured, clicking off the safety on his assault rifle. The ancient beasts on display had been only ossified skeletons, but that had been more than enough to disturb the man for many days. The Holy Bible clearly spoke of monsters in the olden days, and who could say for certain those hadn’t been dinosaurs of a sort? It was a most disturbing possibility.
Indeed, similar creatures stalked the Deathlands to this day. Nobody alive had ever seen a kraken completely out of the water, but the companions had personally witnessed one of the giant muties drag a four-masted sailing ship underwater with a hundred tentacles, each thicker t
han a telephone pole.
“Most dinosaurs were peaceful herbivores,” Mildred said. “They only ate grass and leaves.”
“But not all of them,” Ryan countered. “Right?”
Sadly, Mildred admitted that the man was correct. The largest creatures to ever walk the planet had been carnivores, meat eaters. Just before she had gone into the cryogenic unit, the woman had heard about the discovery of the skeleton of a proto-alligator from the Jurassic period that was over sixty feet in length. That was longer than two city buses! The blasters and grens carried by the companions wouldn’t even annoy such a primordial behemoth, much less chill it.
“We still have two implo grens,” Krysty said, patting the pocket of her bearskin coat.
“Keep one handy, just in case,” Ryan ordered. “How are we on pipe bombs?”
“More than enough to handle anything this side of a kraken,” J.B. said confidently, one of the explosive charges already in his hand. “And I have a stick of TNT primed and ready to go.”
“Smart move.” Proceeding around the open gate, Ryan led the others inside the hidden ville. However, there was nothing to be seen, only a weedy field that stretched from the ring of trees and back again. There were no buildings, tents or structures of any kind.
“Now why would anybody put a wall around a fragging empty field?” J.B. demanded, tilting back his fedora.
“Corral?” Jak asked, frowning. “Mebbe prison?”
“Mayhap there once was a ville, but it burned down?” Doc suggested hesitantly.
Spreading out, the companions checked for any signs of fire damage or foundations. But there was only the weedy grasslands, exactly the same as outside the trees.
“Don’t like this,” Ryan muttered, tightening his grip on the Steyr. “Something wrong here.”
“Pain,” Krysty said in a soft voice, her eyes tightly closed. “I can still hear the screams of the dying.”
