by James Axler
"Those," she said, pointing to a pair in dark blue leather that had silver falcons with spread wings on the front. The tips of the pointed toes, finished in sharp, chiseled silver, seemed like lethal weapons. The heels were no higher than ordinary combat boots, and like the pair that Okie had chosen, Krysty's boots were made by someone called Tony Lama. As Krysty bent to try them on, her scarlet hair spread out in a brilliant wave over the dark calfskin of the boots. Then she stood up, feeling the snugness of the fit.
"They're just wonderful, Lori. Thanks a lot."
A shadow crossed the girl's face, as though someone had walked over her grave, but it vanished so quickly that Krysty wondered if she'd imagined it. But she knew that she hadn't.
"RIPENED IN THE SUN of Kansas and sweetened by the rain of Kansas," said Finnegan, tearing open a waxed pack of breakfast cereal. "What the fuck is Kansas?"
"It was a place, stupe," replied J. B. Dix. "In the east of Deathlands."
Ryan grinned. It was a little after noon and he was preparing to leave the redoubt. He'd hinted to the doddering Quint that he was thinking about it, and the old man had thrown a fit, spraying spittle as he gesticulated angrily.
"Keeper says not go. Those as goes is dead. Those as stays is the lucky ones. Don't try it. Many gone over the years, says the Keeper. Only us left. Lori got to have us a babe. Be next Keeper. Not Rachel, she's too fuckin' old for babes."
Cawdor hadn't argued with him. There was no point in rocking the boat. He and J.B. had discussed it and agreed that they should move on soon. In the redoubt the only thing you got was soft.
HUN, OKIE AND HENNINGS had become fascinated with some ancient vid and audio equipment they'd found in one of the cavernous stores. There were collections of films and TV programs as well as thousands of comp discs. Ryan had discovered similar stocks in other warehouses, but nothing on this massive scale. They could have played them for ten years and never have heard or seen the same thing twice,
Hun had taken a liking to a record called Robert Zimmerman Meets Again with the Boys from the Band, It seemed to be some sort of reunion concert from the year 2000, in some long-gone ville called Hibbing, Minnesota. She kept on playing it through a pocket quad with lightweight cans.
Okie watched endless programs on one of the TVs and was amazed by the amount of violence. A series based on a unit of sec men was her favorite and she bored the others with her enthusiasm.
"Listen, this little bastard called Belker is the greatest blaster you ever seen. Bites the shit out of the scum. But he don't kill as many as he should, probably to make him seem weak an interestin'. He's got some real old guns—thirty-eights and Magnums." She turned suddenly and pointed at Ryan. "Do you feel lucky, punk?" she said, laughing hysterically.
Nobody else laughed. Nobody else understood what on the blasted earth she was laughing at.
DOC WALKED WITH RYAN down through the levels toward the exit. Not sharing an interest with the others in the old techno toys, Ryan contented himself with finding a library of crumbling paperback books—more than he had seen in his life, all gathered in one large room, with ladders to the high shelves and a balcony.
"Had you the time, my dear Ryan," said Doc, "then you would find the answer to every riddle known to man in this one library."
"The secret of who you are and how come you know so much about what happened before the Chill?"
"I like to speak to a man who likes to speak his mind. Indeed I do, sir. I would often tell Wilbur that."
"Wilbur? Who's Wilbur?"
Doc looked puzzled. "I have no recollection, I fear. Did I say Wilbur? Ah well… As to my past, Ryan, I fear it must remain locked away awhile longer."
"But one day, huh?"
"Perhaps, my dear Mr. Cawdor. Perhaps. Ah, here comes the delightful Miss Lori, teetering along so prettily. It is peculiar, don't you think, that she is so much younger than Quint and the harridan? An enigma shrouded in mystery, that."
The girl looked dazzlingly pretty to Ryan, her long golden hair tied back with a strand of emerald ribbon. Her red satin blouse had a small rip across the right breast, showing a tantalizing amount of flesh. Her short suede skirt clung tightly to her thighs, heightening her femininity. On her right hip was the bolstered pearl-handled Walther PPK, apparently chambered for a .22 cartridge. Not much of a stopper unless you were very good with it.
"Hi," said Ryan, receiving a broad smile from the girl, and a nod.
"Leave you two young people together, I think," said Doc, grinning and bowing formally from the waist to Lori, walking off before Ryan could say anything.
"I'm goin' out," said Ryan.
Her head shook so violently that he feared she might have a fit.
"Yeah, want to see some outside. Seen enough inside for a while. You comin'?"
Again a shake of her head. She took his arm and tried to pull him back into the center of the redoubt.
"No, lady, I'm goin'. You stay. That's fine."
She kept her grip on his arm but made no further effort to check him. He walked along with her at his side, conscious of her attractiveness; wearing heels, she topped him by a couple of inches.
Ryan felt himself becoming aroused. Time was he'd have just laid her down in the passage and done it to her—without a single pang of conscience or regret. A woman asked for it with Ryan Cawdor, and a woman got it. Simple as icin' a stickie.
They descended the winding stairs level by level until they reached the tenth floor, which was near the bottom of the complex. At the base of the staircase, there was a pair of heavy steel doors, firmly locked. Ryan paused, wondering what the Keeper wanted to shut off in there.
"What's in there, Lori?"
Her face tightened with concentration. She put both hands to her cheek and closed her eyes, miming sleep.
"Beds? You come and sleep down here?"
Lori shook her head sadly. Then she bit her lip, trying again. She pointed to the doors and clutched her chest, rolled her eyes and sank slowly and gracefully to the floor, where she lay still, one leg bent beneath her. Not quite understanding the meaning of the pantomime, Ryan noticed that the girl wore no panties beneath the red suede skirt, and that her pubic hair was naturally as gold as her head.
"They…they're dead in there? Sleeping? Dead?"
She sat up with a radiant smile, then folded her arms around herself and shuddered.
"Frozen? Fireblast, you mean that there's folk in there, frozen and dead?"
She stood up, looking at him, mouth trembling open, almost as if she was about to talk. But the moment passed, and she turned and ran down a lateral corridor until all he heard was the tinkling of her spurs.
He stood for some seconds, looking at the great doors, wondering if the secret of the lost generations of the redoubt lay behind them. But whatever the secret was, he decided that it didn't much interest him. What he wanted was some fresh air.
He and J.B. had worked out the controls on a previous visit. The exit code was displayed on a green liquid panel. It was three digits. As soon as you pressed the Ready button, a return code appeared, three digits plus a letter to complete the sequence. Ryan touched the button that turned on the display panel. It showed 9.2.9. and the return code, 5.9.6. followed by the letter H.
The secondary entrance to the redoubt slid soundlessly open.
Ryan's nostrils were immediately filled with the stench of sulfur. Outside, sleet and snow whirled across a flat paved area about fifty paces square. In the stockpile they'd found dozens of snow buggies with tracks that enabled them to go over any kind of terrain. But for this brief excursion, Ryan had chosen to go on foot.
Repeating to himself, "Five, nine, six, H," he stepped through the door and watched it close behind him.
The landscape was as bleak as anything he'd ever seen. The redoubt was set into the side of a mountain. A long trail wound toward a steep valley below. There was no sign of vegetation anywhere.
He wore his thermals, with a thick sweater and his trusty
long coat. The LAPA 5.56 mm was on his right hip, the steel panga on the left. The SIG-Sauer was holstered under the coat.
There were jagged peaks all around, vanishing into the murk, all of them layered with snow. The cold was intense, making him think that the rumors of the persisting nuclear winter were true. The sky was a sallow color, streaked like bile, showing occasional flashes of silver brightness from the chem debris that still permeated the heavens. Far off to the west, Ryan could make out a tall mountain with a smear of orange smoke trailing from it, indicating an active volcano.
For an instant, the ground vibrated beneath his feet from a minor earth tremor. Ryan steadied himself, rubbing his right eye to clear the irritation from the ocher clouds.
Squinting with his good eye, he spotted movement on the far side of the valley beneath an overhang of gray rock. It looked like a pair of huge bears, their coats of dirty white marked with yellow mud. As he watched them, they turned toward him.
Although the bears showed no sign of becoming a threat, Ryan drew the LAPA, holding it at the ready. They were probably a good half mile away as the mutie gulls flew, probably five miles by the shortest trail. Ironically, the two animals probably saved his life. Without them he wouldn't have drawn his gun.
The attackers came from above and behind. They dropped on top of Ryan and sent him crashing to the icy ground. He scrabbled to his feet, but just as he was upright again, one of them hit him behind the knees and he went flying to one side. But even as he fell, he snapped off a burst from his LAPA, the stream of lead stitching two of the five diminutive muties. They went spinning away, mouths open with screams, blood and intestines spilling from their torn stomachs.
As Ryan hit the ground, his gun struck rock with a solid cracking noise. His elbow and shoulder were jarred by the fall, but he was quickly up on one knee, steadying the gun at the three remaining dwarfs, who were shrouded in furs so that only their slit-eyes showed. One had obscenely long monkey arms that trailed in the snow as he moved. Another seemed to have a residual third leg sprouting from his left thigh. Ryan assumed that they were men, though there was no evidence either way. All three carried long spears tipped with barbed ivory points. Communicating with one another in grunts, they pointed at their two dying comrades and stamped their feet on the rocky ground in obvious rage.
"Come on, you little fuckers," said Ryan, holding his gun steady.
One of them waved his spear, shuffling nearer to the lone man. Still keeping them covered, Ryan slowly rose glancing around in case more muties were sneaking up behind him.
He held his fire as long as he could, though not out of any foolish milksop ideas of mercy or kindness. It was always good to know as much as possible about your enemies. Anyone not a friend was always an enemy. If Alaska was filled with these bloodthirsty muties, then it was as well to know what their weapons were. Did they have only spears?
They came closer, hissing menacingly, thrusting their wooden lances forward.
"Close enough," said Ryan, tightening his finger on the trigger.
There was a metallic grating sound, and nothing else happened. The fall had jammed the LAPA.
"Fireblast and shit!" snarled Ryan.
Chapter Eight
I hear that grim tyrant approaching,
That cruel and remorseless old foe,
And I lift up me glass in his honor,
Take a drink with bold Rosin the Beau.
The lyrics floated over the bare rocks, reaching the ears of the Russian guerrillas. The words made no sense at all to them. Had they understood them, they would still have been baffled, for the song came from distant antiquity. It dated centuries before the nukes fell from the skies, bringing the long darkness to all the world.
Zmeya came snaking back from the ridge, his clothes stained a dull green from the lichen that clung stubbornly to the lee of the boulders. He scurried to where Uchitel stood, holding his stallion quiet.
"One man alone, a trapper laying lines below the ice of a stream. Shall I kill him?"
"He is the first American. I would see him myself." Uchitel turned to the rest of the band. "Mount up, brothers and sisters. Let us to war."
The trapper, Jorgen Smith, was thirty-three years old and lived in a hamlet a few miles inland. His wife had been killed two years earlier by a pack of mutie wolves. They had had no children. Now he was content to venture out each morning—if the wind wasn't blowing to flay the skin off a man—and lay his traps for the beaver that still lived in the streams that ran fast and clean toward the sea. The water was saved from freezing only by the warm slopes of the live volcanos where the streams began.
Kneeling in the snow, he sang to himself as he worked, fighting the loneliness and isolation. His battered Remington M-700 sporting rifle was at his side in its sheath of caribou skin. The gun, a family heirloom, showed the scars of a hundred years of constant use. It fired 7 mm cartridges of which the community now had less than one hundred rounds left. Soon they would either have to barter for more, or rechamber the rifle. The Garand-type ejector—a spring-loaded plunger tucked in the bolt face—had broken in Jorgen's father's time, and a manual ejector had been rigged up by an itinerant blacksmith who visited each hamlet in the far northwest every two or three years.
"Remember me to one who lives there, for once she was a true love of mine," he sang.
Tying thin strips of rawhide, Smith fumbled with a stubborn knot, considering risking the removal of his gloves. He'd already lost his thumb and two fingers from his left hand by getting them wet and frozen the day he'd tried to rescue Jenny from the wolves.
He caught a glimmer of movement out of the corner of his eye where his goggles were cracked. Quickly pushing them up on his forehead, Jorgen reached for his rifle, dropping the trapping lines in the snow.
On the ridge behind him, silhouetted against the pallid sky, there was a man on a horse: a huge black stallion, much bigger than the little ponies that most folks ride. A gun of a design that Jorgen Smith could not identify, was slung across the man's shoulders.
The stranger was joined by a second rider, then a third and fourth, then more than Jorgen could count.
Holding his Remington, he stood up, waiting as they approached. To see so many strangers was something utterly beyond his experience. They could only be traders, with their goods on the pack horses at the rear of the column. But with their guns, they looked very threatening. Perhaps they were worried about muties. Guns were what kept muties away from the scattered villages.
Uchitel halted his stallion a dozen steps from the man, staring at him curiously, disappointed in a strange way that this American looked so like the wretched peasants on the Russian side of the Bering Strait. He wore torn and ragged furs, and boots that seemed to be no more than strips of cloth and leather wrapped around his feet.
"Hi, there," called Smith. "You tradin'? I've got some skins."
"What does he say, Uchitel? Should I kill him?"
"No, Pechal. Wait. I have a book that teaches how to talk to these Americans. It is here." Fumbling in his saddlebag, he pulled out a dog-eared volume.
On the front cover it said: "Convenient conversations for the traveler for any eventuality." It was written by G. Duluoz and offered easy translations from the Russian tongue to the American and vice versa in seventy different social causes, with full index." It was published by Strafford Books in 1925.
Trying to be casual, Jorgen hooked his rifle so that it lay cradled in his arms, pointing in the general direction of the tall man with the kindly smile and the odd-colored eyes. Something was real wrong.
"You want directions somewhere? Are you lost? Where you from?" His finger touched the Remington's slim trigger, a three-inch nail that had been used to replace the original trigger when it had rusted through.
Uchitel ignored him, flicking through the pages until he found what he wanted. Holding the book in his right hand, he raised his voice so that the rest of the Narodniki could hear and admire. As he was about to beg
in, he heard a snigger.
"Perhaps, Krisa, I shall give you some cause for laughter in a while. You can laugh as your rat's belly is slit and filled with pyrotabs, then set on fire."
"I am sorry, Uchitel," whispered Krisa, blinking his narrow little red eyes in sudden gut-twisting fear.
"Who the fuck are you guys?" asked Jorgen Smith. "I don't know none of you."
To Uchitel, the man's accent was barbaric and grating, yet Uchitel still tried to communicate. "Good morning. Can you direct me us them to the house or mansion? We are awaited."
Jorgen's eyes opened wide with bewilderment. "What the fuck are you talkin' 'bout? You a fuckin' crowd of stupe muties?"
Uchitel tried again. He could feel a pulse beating at the corner of his right eye, which meant he was at risk of losing his temper. This imbecile was trying to make him look like a fool in front of everyone.
"We are—" he paused, deciding to use the Russian name "—Narodniki." He turned the pages with clumsy haste, his eyes brightening as he found what he wanted. "I he she it we they want wants food."
"Food! You crook-talkin' bastards want our food?"
Something was going wrong. Uchitel could sense it. He blinked, trying to clear the reddish mist that clouded his vision. The man facing them was waving his rifle in a way that was clearly threatening. They could all see that.
Stena, nicknamed the Wall because he was six feet tall and five feet wide, heeled his horse forward to the side of Uchitel. "The dog threatens us. Let me kill him, Uchitel?"
"Nyet. Wait."
"Get the fuck out, you snowsuckin' bastards! Go piss up an ice rope."
Jorgen put the Remington to his shoulder and aimed at the man who'd been doing the talking. Stena saw the move and kicked his heels into the flanks of his big bay mare and, yelping his delight, drew the 9 mm Makarov pistol from his belt.
Jorgen Smith's old gun barked first, the 7 mm bullet hitting the big Russian in the right shoulder. Stena fell from his saddle, landing with a great crash on his back in the snow.
