by James Axler
“What do you mean?”
“We have the option of letting the specters come to term and hatch out of her,” he said. “We can confine them in the same cell. They can’t penetrate the force field and escape. I’ve never had the opportunity to run tests on them outside of a host. Those tests may give us the information we need to destroy them.”
“You could do that with the infected stickies, instead.”
“Yes, I could,” he admitted, “but not with as reliable results. I know very little about the normal physiology and functioning of those mutants. On the other hand, I have a great deal of information on the expression of Mero’s virally altered genetics. As I told you before, discovering what the specters are taking from their victims is the critical element here. Given our failure to destroy them up to this point, understanding what these entities are doing, and why, is probably our last remaining hope. If we euthanize Mero now to ease her suffering and then reality-jump as soon as we have sufficient power, wherever we materialize next we will face the same insurmountable problem, with the same limited set of facts to work from. You can’t let yourself be swayed by emotion. You can’t let this opportunity slip through our fingers.”
Auriel glared at him. True to form, the whitecoat was leaving out a significant downside. If after the monsters burst out of Mero, Dr. Huth couldn’t find a way to kill them, he, Auriel and the sister-warriors could still jump away, leaving Shadow Earth to the specters, who would divide, spread and feed until there was nothing left.
Ceding victory once more to those hated enemies was a bitter pill to swallow. This abundant, relatively unsullied replica Earth by rights should have been hers and her sisters’ to harvest and to husband.
There was also another, even graver possibility: that they were all infected by the spores and didn’t know it yet. The initial error compounded exponentially.
Fatally.
At that moment, seemingly on-cue, the stabbing pain in her gut transformed. Instead of being spread over a wide area, it became centered, a tightly focused pinpoint of sensation. It felt like something was moving, something wriggling inside her.
A chill raced down the length of her spine, and adrenaline rush made her heart pound and her face burn.
With an effort of will she shrugged off the uncharacteristic wave of panic. Merely the power of suggestion, she assured herself. Battlesuit sensors could trigger tiny muscle spasms; it happened all the time.
Besides, she knew that even if it turned out she was infected like Mero, even if they were all infected, it didn’t change anything. For the sake of her ten other sisters she couldn’t give up. They were the first and last of their breed. Her only family. Her only future.
Auriel shut off the com link and turned away from Dr. Huth.
Mero was staring at her through the shimmer of the force field, her naked body trembling, her belly protruding, her eyes pleading for mercy.
Mercy that couldn’t be granted.
Although she had no reproductive organs, Mero was going to give birth. She was going to suffer horribly for the good of the warrior-sisterhood, and the edification of Dr. Huth. Auriel couldn’t explain that to her now, not with all the stickies yelling. Maybe when it was quiet, after they were burned to ash…
In the meantime, standing ramrod straight, Auriel raised a clenched, gauntleted fist to her beloved sister.
The universal sign for “stay strong.”
Chapter Twelve
Over the low rumble of wag engines and the squeak of leaf springs, Ryan heard a droning sound. Distant. Intermittent. The widely spaced wags, horses and dog carts were crawling through the broiling, late afternoon. Minimum speed and maximum separation distance helped to keep down the telltale dust. Burning Man’s wag rolled at the head of the long column, controlling the pace.
Brake lights flashed, and the convoy came to a halt.
Whitefaces on horseback pointed to the north, at the source of the sawing noise.
From the back of a stake truck wag, Ryan saw a darting shadow against the backdrop of brown hills and green-gray massif. The sleek, black ship looked like it was skimming over the surface, only he knew that was impossible because it was moving way too fast. An optical illusion, Ryan realized, because of the distance. It was at least five miles away. The gyro was flying very low, less than two hundred feet above the ground, and angling away from them at high speed toward Ground Zero.
Because the gyro had no altitude to speak of, because it was going in the opposite direction, apparently it couldn’t pick them out against the background of desert. Or maybe its sensors just weren’t looking southeast. Either way, there was no reason for the column to take evasive action.
“Isn’t flying recon,” J.B. said. “Got to be a transport mission.”
“We lucked out,” Mildred added.
Ryan seconded that. If they had been caught out in open, they had no defense against the black ship’s firepower.
The column held position and waited. It didn’t take long. A minute later the gyroplane disappeared over the curve of horizon.
Then the grinding tedium of their advance resumed.
IT WAS EVENING by the time they arrived at their destination. For hours they had paralleled the border where the barren hardpan ended and the thermoglass monolith began. The hundred-square-mile backwash of nukeday was like an unnatural growth, a vast, alien landscape dropped down onto the high desert plain.
When the wag engines shut off, it got very quiet. Quiet enough for Ryan to hear the sounds of babies crying, babies screaming. Not real babies, of course. The wide disparity between day and nighttime temperatures caused the massif to expand and contract. Its manifold imperfections, its embedded material, became focal points for fractures and tectonic shifts, and the friction of glass scraping against glass made the piercing, desperate noises.
Like a burning orphanage.
Ryan and Krysty jumped down from the wag bed. J.B., Mildred and Doc followed. As they all hopped to the ground, Jak rode up on his pinto. After dismounting and tying the horse’s reins to the wag rear bumper, the albino teen joined the others, surveying in silence what little was left of the she-hes’ Slake City encampment.
Before them was a series of tightly-clustered craters blown into the beige hardpan. It looked like the aftermath of an exquisitely targeted artillery barrage. Some of the holes were deep enough and wide enough to swallow four wags abreast.
What had happened here occurred years earlier, Ryan knew. Even so, the detritus of that demolition was still in evidence, scattered all around them. Twisted fragments of black plasteel—some bigger than a person, the rest a confetti of splinters and shards—lay on top of brown earth and the dull green nuggets of glass, the remains of molten hail that had pummeled the earth on nukeday.
When Ryan and the companions had departed this place, there had been wags here. Colossal, 6x6 land-dreadnoughts, armed with laser cannon. There had also been rows of milspec huts connected by enclosed passageways.
The one-eyed man stepped up to the nearest crater and looked over the rim. It was about ten feet deep and twice that across. The bottom was obscured by a puddle of stagnant water. Half-submerged down there was a wag wheel and half an axle. The wheel’s tire was seven feet in diameter.
Burning Man approached them, with Big Mike in tow. Big Mike’s arm stumps and legs were free, but he had a rope noose tied around his neck. He didn’t look at all happy to be there, and certainly not on the eve of battle. Ryan figured it was a case of the glass being half full: Big Mike should have been counting himself lucky there wasn’t a tree in sight to toss the end of the rope over.
“You did all this?” Krysty asked the baron, gesturing at the craters. “Blew up the wags and everything else?”
“Took every gram of explosive I had on hand,” Burning Man said. “But it was worth it.”
J.B. gave him a hard look. “Why did you destroy everything?” he said. “You understood the technology. Couldn’t you have used it?”
“You folks were here long before I was,” Burning Man countered. “Why didn’t you just drive off in the wags? You left them here.”
“They stopped running after the she-hes reality-jumped,” Ryan said. “Out of battery juice. We couldn’t figure out how to repower them. The she-hes didn’t leave any operating manuals behind.”
“You didn’t answer J.B.’s question,” Mildred said to the baron. “Why did you blow up all the wags? They came from your own home world. You had to know how to repower them.”
“That would have been like taking poison,” Burning Man told her. “Because that’s what was left behind—techno poison. To use the technology myself and the tribe, even to leave it intact risked its eventual resurrection here. And advanced technology isn’t what this world needs. If you want to see what the marvels of applied science can do, it’s right in front of you. It’s called Slake City.”
“I do believe our host is something of a Luddite,” Doc said.
“You’re the one to talk,” Mildred said with a smirk. She pointed at the holstered, black powder LeMat. “Pot calling kettle. Come in, kettle….”
“As you well know,” Doc said, “I do not go around destroying modern weapons because I think they are the work of the Devil. I just prefer not to use them myself. It’s a matter of personal taste.”
“‘Prefer’?” Mildred said. “‘Personal taste’? Sorry, Doc, but with you it’s more like a crackpot religion.”
“I refuse to dignify that remark with a response,” Doc said, turning on his heel and walking away, down the line of parked wags.
“The geezer’s kind of a prima donna, isn’t he?” Burning Man said to the others.
“He’s just a little sensitive about his antique blaster,” Ryan said.
“If he’s not careful touching off that piece of junk,” the baron said, grinning with the mobile half of his face, “he and I are going to look like twins.”
Glancing up at the purpling sky and the first stars of evening, Burning Man said, “You’d better call grandpa back. We’ve got just enough time for a last meal before we move onto the glacier.”
After the companions shared a quick, cold, high-energy supper of venison jerky and dried fruit, they were passed cloth bags of ammo, marked by caliber—for their own weapons and for the mixed caliber blasters of the whitefaces—and a handful of rag-wrapped pipe bombs. In the fading rays of daylight, they knelt on the hardpan and started loading their own backpacks.
Ryan waved one of the pipe bombs at the others. “No friction, no rattling around,” he warned them. “We don’t know how stable the homemade explosive is.”
By the time they had shouldered their burdens, the stars were out in full force and limit of visibility had dropped to fifty feet, at most.
Jak looked up at Ryan, his pale face and red eyes lost in the deep shadow. “See later, down road,” he said.
A typically terse, supremely confident goodbye.
“Watch your step, Jak,” Ryan told him.
Without another word, the albino teen turned and joined Besup and the other three whiteface advance scouts. They melted into the darkness ahead like wisps of smoke.
The rest of the warriors had finished watering the dogs, which were shoulder-harnessed, but not muzzled. They had wrapped the animals’ feet in leather booties to avoid glass cuts and give them better traction. The only sound the war dogs made was the occasional excited whimper, as if they knew what was coming, and that there would be plenty of blood for all. Their high-pitched shrills were indistinguishable from the groans and moans of the rapidly cooling massif.
The twenty dogs and their individual handlers set off up the road.
“Move it,” Burning Man said. His flamethrower strapped to his back, he booted Big Mike ahead of him, toward the path.
“Why do I have to go with you?” Big Mike whined. The whitefaces had strapped a heavily loaded pack onto his back, and he still had the noose around his neck. “You don’t need me in this. I can’t fight the cockroaches without hands. And I told you I’ve never been to Ground Zero before, so I can’t help you recce the site….”
“You’re coming along because you haven’t paid your debt to the tribe in full,” the baron said.
“You mean because I’m still alive?”
“Start walking and shut your mouth,” Burning Man said, his gauntleted hand reaching for the flamethrower nozzle’s pistol grip, which was clipped to his belt at the hip. “I’m not going to tell you again.”
Wisely, Big Mike chose not to argue his case further. He did just as he was ordered, shuffling his feet forward, shoulders slumping under the weight hanging from his back, trailing the end of the noose on the ground behind him. If, in the process, he rolled his eyes toward heaven or pulled an anguished face at the injustice of fate, it was too dark for Ryan to see it.
He and the companions brought up the rear of the file, moving quickly to maintain visual contact with Burning Man and his captive. Under a blanket of stars, the nukeglass turned to mottled shades of gray, feathering off on all sides to pitch-black. The blackness at the very edge of sight was as devoid of color as the overturned bowl of night sky, the only difference being, there were no stars in it. Focusing too far ahead was disorienting; sky and earth blended and became inseparable.
And as they advanced it was growing noticeably colder, too.
Taken together, it was the opposite of their first visit here, under blinding sun and withering heat.
The weather-pitted glass immediately ahead of Ryan’s boot-falls, virtually under his nose, had a dull sheen to it. It almost looked wet, but it wasn’t. In the spots where the surface had recently spawled off from the weight of vehicle traffic, where fresh glass was exposed, it was as slick as snot. With the low light it was difficult to estimate the depth of depressions and cracks in the roadway. Because of that, the blackest of black transverse shadows had to be stepped over or jumped.
“Never in my wildest nightmares did I consider the possibility that I would be treading this horrid path again,” Doc admitted.
“You and me both,” Krysty said.
“Isn’t it always what we don’t consider,” Mildred said, “that sneaks up and takes a bite out of our butts.”
“Wyeth’s Law of Unpleasant Surprises?” Doc said.
“In another lifetime, Doc,” Mildred said, “before the nukecaust, I could have built a multimillion-dollar writing career on a self-help book with that title. In Deathlands, it’s a definite no-go. For one thing, it assumes a Deathlander’s life consists of things other than unpleasant surprises. That would be a very hard sell, even to a triple-stupe droolie. And what kind of advice could I give to a Deathlander audience? Kill yourself while you still have the strength?”
“Not to mention the lamentable fact that there are no books being printed anymore,” Doc said.
“And even if there were,” Krysty added, “not a lot of people have the skill to read them.”
Ryan didn’t join in on the banter. Their task was looking more and more difficult, if not impossible. He caught himself clenching his fists as he walked, waiting for, maybe even expecting to hear, a resounding crash and human screams from the impenetrable wall of blackness ahead.
A disastrous road cave-in.
They had already put the first quarter mile of the massif behind them. That part, the outer edge of the monolith, was much thinner than the rest. As the tidal wave of liquefied quartz sand surged away from Ground Zero, its force gradually diminished. The still-molten backwash of that surge had filled the vast cavity of the nukeblast crater, a man-made chasm that was close to a mile deep. But the glacier’s enormous mass didn’t make it any more stable. In fact the reverse was the case—the sheer weight of it caused vast sections to fracture and shear off.
Without warning.
For close to a mile they followed a bluff wall on the left, an elevation that was created when the Ground Zero road had been cut. Its top was higher than Ryan’s head. When he looke
d into the darkness on the right, he got a sense of sprawling open space, and a faint breeze brushed his cheek. From his experience years ago, he recalled the massif’s landscape of fantastical shapes. Twisted, tilting spires. Collapsed calderas. Glass-encased tops of skyscrapers, their flagpoles pitching mad carny tents. A hurricane-tossed, frozen sea that had engulfed and entombed the ruins of a great city.
Krysty walked a few steps ahead of him. Mildred, Doc and J.B. were in single file behind. Around them, the glacier shrilled and creaked.
When the road made a hard bend to the left, Krysty stopped dead in her tracks. Ryan paused in midstep, too, his scalp tingling from adrenaline rush. The tight, cutback turns were the most dangerous sections of the route because that was where the roadway was undermined by avalanches.
Then a disembodied floating head appeared out of the gloom on the right. The whitefaced warrior was waiting for them, a human signpost to steer the tail end of the column away from a precipitous drop-off.
To be able to navigate in this enveloping darkness, under these hazards, Ryan reckoned the warriors had to be some kind of muties—maybe it was their eyes, or some other mutation-heightened sense, or a combination of altered senses. Either that, or it was as Burning Man had said: the whitefaces were guided by the spirits of their departed ancestors who ran alongside them.
The smiling whiteface marked the route to safety. Krysty and Ryan were five feet from him when the ground beneath their boots shuddered violently. With an ear-splitting scream of cracking glass, a huge section of road dropped away. The warrior’s face vanished in a heartbeat, falling into the blackness, right before Ryan’s eye.
A millisecond later, Krysty was falling in front of him, too. Ryan reacted instinctively, lunging forward, reaching out. His fingers closed on one of Krysty’s backpack straps. Then her deadweight came down on his outstretched arm and dropped him to a knee. His arm rigid, he was bent over the chasm.
