Latitude Zero

by James Axler

  "What?"

  "First off there's been not even a stream where he could have gone. If you'd had your rheumy old eyes open you'd have seen that for yourself. And second I don't much see how anyone could come 'sneaking' along after us. Not on that river."

  "Well, for your information, my good woman, I think you—"

  Ryan stopped him. "Enough, you two. We'll need to dry out and get some food in us, mebbe see if there's any chance of catching a fish. Rest up. That most of all. Rest up."

  RYAN HAD DECREED that there was no need to keep watch. Nobody would risk navigating the river in the dark. It was perilous enough by daylight. And the cliffs behind them were so stark that nobody could hope to come down at them. Also, everyone was so bone weary that sleep was essential.

  But Mildred had slept badly, finding that the ceaseless surge of the river kept her in a fitful, broken slumber. And the sand that had seemed so soft once they got off the raft now contrived to mold itself to the consistency of concrete, rubbing at her hips, knees, ankles and elbows.

  The dreams had been the same as always—yellow flames against dried lawns; ropes, taut as iron bars, moving slowly against a starry, starry night; white hoods with small, piglike eyes that lurked behind them; knives, slick with spilled red blood; the taint of scorched flesh hanging over the richness of the magnolia.

  She didn't know whether she'd cried out in waking. Looking around at the others, and knowing how lightly they slept, she guessed she couldn't have.

  It wasn't even close to dawn yet, but the river seemed to give off a pale, phosphorescent glow. The stars above were like pinpoints of diamond, and the black woman shuddered at their coldness. Moving with infinite care, so as not to disturb the other five, she walked across the silent sand and stood for several minutes at the water's edge.

  The noise of the rapids drowned out any sound. For a moment she thought she caught the faint scent of wood smoke from somewhere across the river, but then it vanished. She walked slowly toward the great bluff that dominated the bend in the deep canyon.

  Mildred noticed that the level of the water had fallen a little, and there was now a path visible around the bottom of the earth slip that looked like it would take her clear around it. She glanced behind her, but nobody was stirring.

  The water lapped at her sneakers, chilling her feet. By leaning against the cool rock Mildred was able to maintain her balance, picking her way over the slick pebbles. Halfway around she almost changed her mind and went back. But she was stubborn and kept going.

  "Daddy didn't raise no quitters," she whispered to herself with a nostalgic smile.

  Twice she stumbled and nearly fell into the nibbling water, but she kept angling her body toward the land. There were small plants growing in crevices in the dirt. Mildred crushed one of them between her fingers, holding its leaves close to her face and breathing in the sharp tang that smelled like a mixture of sandalwood and coriander.

  The bend of the river was opening before her as she advanced, and she glimpsed the first sight of another stretch of beach, the sand glinting in the starlight. Now she could stand upright without any fear of falling into the water.

  The shore was fringed with small trees and low scrub that eventually disappeared into the blackness. There was the momentary smell of wood smoke again that Mildred guessed must be from their own fire, whirled around between the high cliffs by convection currents.

  The sand near the fringe of the water was furrowed and scuffed up, and Mildred walked along the beach to investigate, puzzled by the marks that looked so much like where they'd pulled their own large inflatable out of the river.

  She never heard the steps close behind her, just the hateful, grinning voice in her ear. "Morning, bitch."

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  JAK WOKE from a vivid dream. He'd been sitting on a summer hillside in a field of cut wheat, looking up toward a farmhouse and a barn, both built in weathered wood. And there was a woman with him, her face turned away, wearing a thin dress of pink cotton, her hair drawn untidily into her nape. There'd been something not quite normal about her left foot.

  Jak knew her name, but the waking and the booming of the river snatched it away from him.

  He sat up, looking around him, sensing that dawn wasn't that far off, though the beach was in almost total darkness. A cloud had drifted across the face of the moon. There was time for an hour or so of sleep before they launched their raft onto the river again. Just as he was lying down, the boy noticed that someone was missing.

  "Mildred."

  He stood up and looked around. The obvious answer was that the woman had gone into the clump of trees to respond to a call of nature. The teenager had spotted soon after meeting the freezie how squeamish and delicate she was over things like that, which he figured came from not being used to life in Deathlands.

  But there was no movement. Jak took a few hesitant steps across the beach, his foot nudging the end of a dried branch. Immediately both Ryan and J.B. sat up, Krysty a split second behind them.

  Only Doc snored on.

  "What is it, Jak?" Ryan whispered.

  "Mildred. Gone."

  Ryan uncoiled from the ground, looking toward the trees, turning back to Jak with the question on his lips.

  But the teenager was quicker. "Could be. Don't think so."

  The strip of beach was so narrow and the towering cliffs so close that it only took them a couple of minutes to search the area—and find that Mildred had indeed gone.

  Krysty woke Doc, who rose mumbling from sleep. "Upon my soul that is… Oh, by the three Kennedys! Could the lady have been swallowed by the waters, do you think?"

  Ryan looked around, glancing at the sky to try to judge how far off the dawn was, and guessed it was still an hour or more. "Could have done, but she'd only have gone to drink. And the sand shelves are gentle."

  "Something out of the river? Mutie fish? Lizard?" J.B. suggested.

  At that moment the clouds cleared the face of the moon and the deep wells of darkness became a little lighter.

  Ryan spotted the tracks immediately, winding down through the soft sand toward the edge of the river, moving parallel, south toward the great bluff that forced the water into a sharp turn.

  All five of them gathered there, looking at the narrow path, lapped by tumbling waves, that vanished around the base of the steep cliff.

  "Why'd she go there?" J.B. asked.

  Doc offered his own solution. "I would venture that it was merely the insatiable and endless curiosity of the species feminine, my dear John Barrymore. That and no more."

  "So, we go after her?" Krysty suggested.

  Ryan hesitated. "Don't like it. Don't like it at all."

  It was a situation fraught with potential danger. The path was so narrow and dangerous that it would have to be taken slowly, and one at a time. The light came and went as ragged clouds scattered themselves over the moon, and if there was someone waiting on the far side…

  "Come on, lover," Krysty prompted. "Mildred could be in trouble."

  "No."

  "No?"

  "No." the flat syllable was repeated, louder this time. Ryan's face set like a marble mask, deep shadows cut around his mouth, highlighting the deep scar that slashed across his cheek.

  "Danger for…" Jak began, the words faltering as he saw Ryan's anger.

  "No. I'll tell you why. Woman shouldn't have gone off alone like this. Triple stupe! Two possibilities is all."

  "Go on," Krysty said.

  "She's safe. She'll come back. Can't yell. She'd never hear us above the river."

  "But suppose the lady has encountered some peril beyond this cliff?" Doc offered. "Surely we should go and offer succor to her?"

  Ryan's flaring rage had cooled. "Only real possibility is Strasser. Either he's got her or he hasn't. But if he has, then the first person around the point there gets chilled. Maybe the second and third. We can't get over and we can't get around. Not by land. Not in the dark. If Strasser's t
aken Mildred he's chilled her or, more likely, he'll try and hold her. There ain't a fucking thing we can do about that. Nothing!"

  He turned on his heel and stalked back up the beach toward the smoldering remnants of their campfire.

  "THEY AREN'T COMING, boss," Rafe said nervously.

  Cort Strasser had been waiting, flattened against the high wall of rock and earth, holding his Stechkin drawn and cocked. Over an hour had passed since the black woman had fallen into his hands, ready as a fresh apple. Now she sat near their inflatable, guarded by Rosa, who was using Mildred's own Czech revolver.

  "I think you're right. Ryan Cawdor has his failings, but being a triple stupe isn't one of them. Ah, well, it was worth the try. Rafe, get the raft ready, and we'll move on. I'll cover you in case they suddenly come at us by land or water."

  It wasn't yet full dawn. Jak had placed himself as near the earth slip as he could, making sure he had the best view possible of the sweeping bend of the river.

  When his yell came, it was in a reedy, splintered voice that would have shattered crystal at fifty paces.

  "Strasser!"

  Ryan ran to join him, staggering as his boot heels slipped into a patch of softer sand. There they were, bobbing away in their craft, a smaller version of Ryan's inflatable.

  "Four," Jak said. "Strasser, woman, man… Mildred. Four."

  There was enough light for all of them to see that Jak was correct. Cort Strasser was in the stern of the yellow raft, his unmistakable skull-like face turned triumphantly toward them, his mouth gaped open in a terrible grin.

  Over the river's roar, Ryan and the others clearly heard the screech of victory of the ex-sec boss, as harsh and raw as a hunting condor's.

  Within seconds the frail craft had disappeared around the next tumbling bend.

  Ryan clenched his fists in a moment of almost paralyzing anger, then he straightened and looked at his four friends.

  "Get launched," was all he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  THE CHASE CONTINUED during the long hot morning, with the two rafts never more than a mile apart. On the occasional calm stretches of the river, Ryan's inflatable with its extra paddling power, would narrow the gap. As soon as they came to the more dangerous rapids, the smaller and more maneuverable craft of Strasser's would ease its way ahead again.

  Half a dozen times they were in sight of each other.

  Once Strasser opened fired at them. They saw him kneeling and taking aim with his sniper rifle. But there was no sign of a muzzle-flash, and no bullet came anywhere near them. Ryan was tempted to try the G-12, but the risk of hitting Mildred was far too great.

  MILDRED MANAGED to keep her fears under control, holding on to her courage and watching for the one snatched moment that could mean freedom.

  The bobbing raft tossed and whirled down the gorge, waves constantly soaking everyone on board. Strasser had made sure everyone was tied on safely, taking the extra precaution of binding Mildred by the waist to Rosa's left wrist. The taciturn woman had Mildred's revolver stuck in her belt.

  Despite the noise and turmoil, Strasser managed to keep up a running commentary on what he intended to do when Ryan and the others fell into his hands. Mildred succeeded in shutting her ears to most of the bloody filth, but she couldn't help hearing something of his plans for her.

  Fortunately they reached her only in fragmented phrases, torn and whipped by the speed and noise of their passage.

  But that was enough to sicken her.

  His hissing, monotonous voice grated in her ears with its promises of the various ways he would inflict pain and degradation, the orifices of her body that he would enter and ravage, slice and burn, the instruments that he would use to cut and tear and scorch her, the senses that he would destroy, with agonizing slowness, one by one.

  And the pleasure that he would take in all of it.

  "YOU REMEMBER ANY of this from the map?" Krysty shouted in Ryan's ear, as his wrist chron showed they were nearing noon.

  "Not much. There was a triple-red dangerous place somewhere way south. Satan's Scrambler, I think it was called. But the land's been pitched and changed so much, it don't mean a thing." Catching her eye, he said, "All right. It doesn't mean a thing."

  "Going faster," J.B. observed.

  The cliffs had begun to close in, shutting out the coppery sunlight, cramping the river and forcing it to run deep and fast. Land shakes, before the long winters began, had plucked massive boulders from the walls of orange stone and hurled them into the frothing torrent, bringing more hazard to the rafts, for there was now no possibility of landing to try a portage around the worst dangers.

  Strasser's raft was in sight, appearing and then vanishing as the river's curves concealed it again.

  Doc yelled out, throwing the shattered remnants of his paddle into the water where it had splintered against a submerged rock. He fumbled with the cords that secured their spare paddles, eventually freeing one. But a violent lurch threw him against the side before he could retie them, and all the spares went tumbling into the rapids.

  "Hang on!" Ryan shouted, seeing the old man leaning out to try to retrieve the bobbing paddles.

  The bends were getting sharper, and they could no longer see the small raft ahead of them. At one point the cliffs were so close together that their inflatable almost brushed both sides, riding on the wall of solid gray-green.

  J.B. turned to shout something to Ryan, while simultaneously fending off the lunging walls of stone. But Ryan couldn't hear him above the thunder of the river.

  ROSA WAS WEEPING. Fortunately for her, Strasser was too busy wrestling with the steering oar in the stern to reach her. He'd tried screaming, raging and threatening, but none of it had the least effect.

  Rosa's shiny boots were dulled with the constant immersion in muddied water, and her trim riding skirt was torn and limp. The elegant ponytail was long gone. Her blankly beautiful eyes were swollen with weeping, and her quirt had been lost over the side of the raft.

  But she was still gripping the butt of the ZKR 551, knuckles as white as carved bone.

  Mildred watched, considering trying to untie herself and then slip into the water, but she could see that her chances of survival would be no better than by staying in the raft and taking her chances with Strasser. By now they were hurtling along at a fearful pace, spinning around blind corners at a speed that must have been close to thirty miles an hour. Mildred could feel herself becoming more and more dizzy.

  Rafe cowered in the bow, having given up on trying to call out dangers to his boss in the stern. In any case, half the time the bow had become the stem as the inflatable whirled around uncontrollably.

  As the raft shot out of yet another blind bend, Mildred glimpsed something, less than two hundred yards ahead, something so bizarre and incomprehensible that she closed her eyes and rubbed them. She opened them to find that her first startling impression had been right.

  Her jaw dropped, and she began to scream.

  Scant seconds later Ryan's larger raft came around the same corner, and they all saw what Mildred had seen.

  Jak pointed, speechless, facing Ryan over his shoulder.

  Then Ryan saw it.

  The river vanished, disappearing into a great cloud of mist. Its edge was green and polished, like waxed oilcloth, seeming not to be moving. Ryan thought for a moment that they must somehow have reached the end of the world.

  Nobody shouted. There was simply this grim fascination with the waterfall that was rushing toward them. It wasn't possible to guess how deep the drop was, or what lay at the bottom.

  Satan's Scrambler, Ryan thought. It was his last coherent thought as the raft reached the brink of the roaring abyss.

  There was a nanosecond of suspense. The inflatable hung in the singing, damp space, its own impetus holding it for a frozen fragment of time. Then it began to fold and tip at the front, and finally fell with a sickening, heart-stopping speed.

  Ryan gave a grunt of shock, feeling
his balls tighten with fear as they fell. Afterward, recollected in tranquillity, he guessed that the drop might have been barely eighty feet, less than two seconds from top to bottom.

  They landed with a smashing force, right way up, water surging solid over every side. The impact burst five of the remaining buoyancy compartments, the aged fabric splitting apart, flooding immediately. Like a brain-shot animal, the raft made a quivering effort to reach the surface, just breaking clear, then subsiding lumpishly toward the bottom of the deep pool that lay at the foot of the teeming waterfall.

  Krysty was thrown against J.B., cracking her head on his forearm. Fortunately the mat of fiery hair protected her from a broken skull.

  Jak was thrown out over the bow, but the retaining cord around his midriff jerked him back in again, like a demented yo-yo.

  Ryan had gone under with his mouth open, feeling liquid ice gush into his throat and fill his lungs. He choked, flailing in a moment of purest dark panic. Then he managed a grip on his senses and fumbled for the knot about his waist, knowing that the raft was sinking under him and dragging everyone down with it.

  His chest was being squeezed in a gigantic vise of pain, and his eye bulged with the effort of fighting for freedom. The water had tightened the thin cord, and he finally reached for his panga, nearly dropping the slick hilt through his numbed fingers, eventually feeling the keen steel part the rope, which allowed him to kick his way to the distant, bleared surface.

  Ryan burst into the fresh air with an instinctive whoop of indrawn air, filling his lungs with the cold dampness.

  At his side he saw Jak, J.B. and Krysty, all treading water, trying to establish their bearings after the plummeting fall.

  "Doc!" he managed to yell, hawking up a trickle of bile and river water.

  Something nudged his ankle and he dived, reaching below the surface of the pool. His fingers tangled in something and he heaved, finding himself dragging up the head of Doc Tanner, the body trailing beneath it. As Ryan supported the old man, his eyes blinked open and he freed his silvery locks from Ryan's hand.