by James Axler
For a few moments Ryan couldn't even see what it was. He did know that it was large and coarse-haired, and that it had curved canine teeth that snapped at his throat. Part of his brain guessed it was a big timber wolf, but most of his attention was wonderfully concentrated on fighting off the murderous bastard.
He managed to get a forearm across the beast's neck, keeping its clashing teeth a few inches from his own face. Then it kicked, its sharp claws ripping at him, trying to spill his guts steaming into the snow. The Kenworth had gone, probably stopped some way down the slope, the others tumbling from it in a bid to rescue him. But the snow had thickened to a blizzard, dropping visibility to only a couple of yards. If he didn't save himself, the others would be too late.
"Fireblast, you fucker!" he grunted, managing a clumsy punch that made the creature whine in pain and back off for a moment, where it crouched on its haunches, eyes glowing like living rubies.
It was a wolf — one of the biggest Ryan Cawdor had ever seen.
There were burrs matted in its brindled coat, and bloody froth dripped from its reeking jaws. It stood close to four feet tall at the shoulder. Keeping his eye fixed on it, Ryan reached for his blaster, but the torn strip of leather from his coat was still tangled about the butt of the gun. He dropped his hand to the cold hilt of the eighteen-inch panga on the other hip and drew the blade in a whisper of steel.
"Come on then," he called out, blinking in the driving snow.
The world had shrunk to a shifting circle of whiteness, barely two paces across, containing Ryan and the mutie wolf.
Ryan dropped instinctively into the classic knife-fighter's crouch, the blade in his right hand pointed up, feet a bit apart, shuffling in at the wolf, keeping his balance, breathing lightly.
The animal continued to snarl at him, belly down in the snow, inching closer.
Ryan feinted a low cut at the wolf's muzzle, making the beast hiss defiantly as it held its place. The ice was slippery, and Ryan edged closer carefully, watching the monster's eyes. It was one of the things his dead brother had taught him when he was only a callow boy.
He heard Morgan's calm, gentle voice in his head. "The eyes, little one. Always watch the eyes."
The great timber wolf blinked at the human that dared to face it down. Then Ryan saw the signal, deep in the glowing crimson coals.
Now.
He sidestepped the baying charge, hacking at the creature's shoulder as it brushed past him. The blade of the panga bit deep, and he felt the jar as it cracked into bone. Blood sprayed, steaming in the cold, patterning the snow around them. The wolf howled, a tearing, unearthly banshee wail that froze the blood. Then it whirled around, snapping at its own wound, and charged again.
This time Ryan stood his ground.
Meeting the rush head-on, he swung the foot and a half of blood-slick steel with all his power, as if he were trying to fell a great oak with a single blow.
The blade hit the leaping wolf's frothing muzzle and sliced through the flesh of the animal's upper jaw, snapping off oversized teeth and burying itself finally in the side of the creature's skull, just below its crazed eye. The weight of the wolf pulled the panga's hilt out of Ryan's hands, and rolling over in the snow, the beast kicked itself to its feet again, the steel dangling from its narrow head.
"Tough mother, huh?" Ryan said to himself, carefully freeing the pistol from his coat. The animal was panting, blood flowing freely over its grizzled pelt and soaking the earth around its forepaws. Despite the crippling wound, the wolf wasn't finished yet.
The P-226 9 mm blaster was in Ryan's right fist, its twenty-five and a half ounces of weight feeling as familiar to him as his own face in a mirror. The barrel was more than four inches long, and it held fifteen rounds of ammunition. One bullet in the right place would kick a man over on his back, leaving him looking blank-eyed at the sky.
It was enough even for the mutie wolf.
The animal lurched toward Ryan again, hackles up, snow hanging in the folds of muscle around its throat. The gun barked, the flat sound muffled by the storm. The bullet hit precisely where Ryan had aimed it, between the kill-mad eyes.
The wolf howled, the long drawn-out scream of pain and frustrated rage echoing and fading off the trees. The high-velocity round exited from the back of the beast's skull, a fine spray of brains and blood hanging in the air for a moment. A great splinter of bone, inches across, pulped into the snow. The body was knocked sideways, the legs kicking frantically. Ryan heard the mutie beast's claws scrape through the ice at the road gravel beneath.
"Where are you, Ryan?" It was Krysty, stumbling over the slippery ruts of ice, her Heckler & Koch pistol in her hand. Ryan saw her looming through the wraiths of wind-torn snow. She stopped when she saw the twitching corpse of the timber wolf. "By Gaia! That's a big bastard. You all right, lover? I just saw it come out of the shadows at you, but I couldn't be sure what it was."
The Kenworth had finally ground to a halt just around the next bend in the road, its exhaust vomiting smoke. To Ryan's educated hearing, it was obvious that the truck's engine was beginning to fail. There was a much rougher note than when they'd left the town, and he could actually catch the taste in the air of burning oil as the engine overheated. His guess was that they'd covered around fifty miles from Ginnsburg Falls, moving slowly along the treacherous highway. They'd been told that the range of the Kenworth was only around one hundred miles. If that was right, they'd soon have to consider returning and trying to get to the gateway through the town.
Or going on and risking being totally stranded in the desert of rocks and snow.
* * *
Once they were all safely in the cluttered, cramped cab of the rig, they discussed what they should do.
"There's a big fucking ridge ahead," Finnegan said. "Saw it 'fore this fucking snow came down. It's only 'bout five, six miles ahead. Sky seemed clearer north."
"This wag won't run much longer," J.B. commented, taking off his glasses and polishing them clean of the smears of snow. "I doubt we'd make it back to the ville."
Ryan nodded his agreement. "Could be best to go on, I guess."
Jak stared moodily out of one of the high side windows and picked his nose. "The trans message was this way? Came for that. Go on."
Krysty shook her head. "If we stop now, then we should make the gateway. Try somewhere else. Farther we go on, the farther we've got to come back. Mebbe on foot. It's a bleak land."
Doc Tanner coughed to clear his throat. "We blunder across the Deathlands, like children, lost in a maze, like the players of some celestial game where we know neither the object nor the rules."
"What's your point, Doc?" Ryan asked.
"The point, my dear and somewhat brutal Mr. Cawdor, is that we could have here a chance, rare as Vatican charity, to improve our tiny store of knowledge."
"The message, you mean?"
"Indeed, I do. I, for one, am set that we should continue across this darkling plain, blighted by the long-dead ignorant armies."
"But we don't know where we're heading," J.B. said. "Got no radios with us."
"Ah, Mr. Dix," the old man said, grinning. "That is where you are wrong. Show the nice gentleman the pretty toy you found on the floor of this rumbling behemoth, dear child."
Lori smiled at him and reached inside her gray fur coat, pulling out a small black plastic box with a dial and several buttons.
Finn glanced sideways at it. "Fucking ace, lady. Nice little radio-trans. Where didja find it, Lori?"
"Under the seat when I get in."
"Got in," Doc Tanner corrected gently.
"It work?" Jak asked.
"Sure does, son," the old man replied. "You found that recorded message on the dial last time, Finn, did you not?"
"Yeah."
"Can you do it on this?"
"Sure. Strength of the signal should tell us if'n we're heading in the right fucking direction. Someone else can drive this crumbling shit heap a spell."
J.
B. took over, muttering to himself in a bad-tempered monotone at the way the steering was becoming loose. Finn changed seats and took the little radio from the girl, peering at it in the light from the east of the valley.
"I think it was..." he began.
There was a faint crackling of static and hissing. Ryan had read in an old book, from before the Apocalypse, that in the golden age it was possible to spin the dial on a radio-trans and pick up hundreds of different stations, all broadcasting at once. Now you were very lucky to pick up even a single station.
"Mebbe we've gone wrong," Krysty suggested.
"Mebbe we..."
The voice was deafeningly loud, booming out in the cab of the Kenworth, repeating the same message they'd heard before.
"Stay tuned to this frequency. North of Ginnsburg Falls where the old Highway 62 reaches the trail to Crater Lake. Go there and wait. You will be contacted."
There was a brief pause and then the loop-tape message began again.
"Anyone receiving this message who requires any assistance in any matter of science or the study of past technical developments will be aided. Bring all your information and follow this signal where you will be given help. Stay tuned to this frequency. North of..."
Finn switched the machine off.
"How far?" Jak said, breaking the sudden silence in the cab.
J.B. was still wrestling with the steering of the ailing Kenworth, taking some time to answer. "Can't be more than a few miles. That signal's nearly on top of us, isn't it, Finn?"
"Guess so. Little fucking toy like this trans here... Can't have a range more'n five, mebbe ten miles tops."
"Straight ahead, up those hills?" Ryan asked, rubbing at the windshield with his glove, trying to see out through the swirls of light snow.
The Armorer nodded. "If this bitching wag can make it that far."
His concern was well placed.
About eight miles farther along the old blacktop, just as the bright sun of late afternoon was breaking through, the engine coughed and then seized up with a grinding, metallic sound that had a dreadful finality about it.
Everyone got out of the rig.
Chapter Thirteen
"By god, but this was such a good country once," Doc said, voice low, hushed by the staggering natural beauty of the sight ahead of them.
By Ryan's calculations they'd walked around three miles, having left that ruined wag standing like a slaughtered behemoth at the side of the snow-covered road. The blizzard had faded away behind them, with skies to the south that were like frozen lead. It was still bitingly cold, but the driving wind was also gone. The sun shone through a dome of blue, laced with high fluffy white clouds. The air tasted clean and dry, with none of the acrid toxics caused by the lowering chem-clouds in other parts of Deathlands.
Suddenly, over the rim of the trail, they'd come across what Ryan had recognized immediately as the Crater Lake they'd been talking about — a bowl of jagged rocks surrounding a massive lake of the bluest water he'd ever seen in his life. Now, gazing with awe at the tranquil scene, they all sat on small boulders that bordered what could once have been a parking lot for domestic wags.
"Hell of a fine country," the old man mused. "Must have been like this most everywhere before we came trampling all over it in nailed jackboots, despoiling the earth."
Krysty nodded agreement. "I saw pictures in old books back in Harmony. Pictures of what the old ones called paradise. I guess as a young girl I always thought that their paradise must have been something like this."
Rare in the wastes of Deathlands, there was a profusion of natural life, with no visible evidence of any mutations from radiation.
Ryan was no expert, but he recognized great stands of hemlock, fir and pine around the rim of the huge crater. Guessing, he figured the lake must be close to five miles across, with a circumference of thirty miles. A couple of islands broke the surface of the lake. One, on the far side, was small and shaped like a ship. The other was closer and larger, with a miniature volcanic cone at its center. Ryan thought for a moment he saw some isolated movement on that island.
"Look. Big fire," Lori said, pointing away to the west. A distant forest was divided by a great swath of blackened stumps where a lightning strike had triggered a fire that had raced across half the face of one of the surrounding peaks.
It was hard to believe the evidence of their own eyes at the living creatures that moved around them, seemingly oblivious to the presence of humans.
Marmots lolled in the clearings, bellies splashed yellow. Their brave indifference to Ryan and his friends was a clear sign that this wasn't an area where man was a hunter.
In the high branches of the trees that shaded them, squirrels chattered at one another. Ryan saw a badger snuffle for roots as it lumbered across a sun-splashed glade. A bobcat, lean and tawny, padded by within twenty paces of them, not even bothering to turn its head in their direction.
Bright jays darted and scolded in the bushes that grew thickly from the top of the slope down to the dark water.
Jak pointed above them, his keen eyes spotting a golden eagle circling majestically on a thermal over the lake.
It was unlike anyplace any of them had ever known; it seemed close to a mythic idyll of peace and serene happiness. Krysty lay on her back, one foot crossed over the other, staring around her, relaxing on a soft couch of deep green moss.
"What you said, Doc, about how it used to be... Was it really like this?"
"Oh, indeed, it was, my dear lady. I swear it was like this. Of course there were cities. Great wens that soured the land and skies around themselves, blighting the environment. That was the buzz word. Environment. But there were limitless billions of acres of unspoiled wilderness."
They were silent for a moment, locked into their own thoughts. Ryan lay next to Krysty, and he felt her hand rest on his, warm and loving.
"Why keep moving, lover?"
"What?"
They kept their voices quiet, private.
"Why keep on moving all the time, Ryan? Why not stop? Stop here?"
Ryan breathed in, deep and slow, trying to find words that would be an answer, not coming up with anything that sounded right or tasted good.
"I guess...I don't know," he said finally.
"Up here the air's like... like nectar. I recall that from an old vid I once saw. Like nectar. Means sweet and fresh. There's valleys all round here," she said, indicating them with a sweep of her hand. "Fresh water and good timber. We could build us a home."
"Us? Who's that, Krysty?"
"You. Me," she said, hesitating. "All of us. We get on well. Got the skills. We could settle, like they used to on the old frontier. Mebbe try and farm some. Run the ridges of this green land, Ryan. Raise us a family one day."
It was out, the words lying in the air between them. Words that both of them had thought about ever since they'd first met. Words that neither of them had said before, not even whispered during their lovemaking, or after.
"One day, Krysty," Ryan said finally.
"One day, lover?"
"Yeah, one day."
But not yet.
* * *
They camped for the night on the rim and built themselves a small fire from the abundance of fallen branches, lighting it with a pyrotab from J.B.'s capacious pockets. As the light faded, they watched small brown deer come cautiously from the woods to feed, their hooves crunching delicately on the loose pumice that lay everywhere along the slopes, a legacy from the original eruption of Mount Mazama, seven thousand years ago.
It had been agreed that at dawn they'd split into two groups, one going east around the narrow perimeter trail, the other west. Finnegan was convinced the radio message that had drawn them on from Ginnsburg Falls must have come from very close to the lake.
"We'll walk easy and take care."
J.B. had asked about guards. The Trader had instilled into them that you always posted sentries — it was universal practice.
"Eve
n here?" Finnegan asked.
Ryan was torn. All his senses told him that even in paradise there might be poisonous serpents. But the temptation to succumb to the beauty and peace of the place was overwhelming.
"Let's let it go a night. Nobody can come up without waking one of us. Not over that loose stone."
"Be real good to have a fucking night without having to get up and fucking walk around on guard," Finnegan said, grinning from ear to ear.
* * *
Ryan woke once, disturbed by the charred end of one of the branches falling into the gleaming ruby embers of the fire. Through the lattice of the branches of the pines around him, he could see the bland face of the moon shining serenely down. He got up to take a leak at the edge of the clearing, his urine steaming in the cold.
His mind was filled with Krysty's words about settling down and raising a family. And he remembered Doc's words.
"Must have been a hell of a good land," he whispered to himself before rejoining the others and enjoying the best sleep he'd had in ages.
They woke to find themselves prisoners.
Chapter Fourteen
Jak Lauren woke first, disturbed by the faint crunching of boots over the rough pumice. He blinked his eyes open, looked quickly around the clearing where they all slept and saw that it was still night, with only the cloud-fringed moon casting a pale silver light. The fire had died away to a pile of gray ashes.
"We got company, friends," he said in a normal conversational voice, taking the greatest care not to make any hasty movements.
Ryan woke next, his one good eye opening. He too looked around while keeping very still.
"Fourteen," he said to himself. And if he could see that many, then he was almost certain that there were more in the trees around the camp.
Lori woke next, sitting up, her hands going to her mouth in shock when she saw the ring of silent figures in identical uniforms of black plastic that reflected the silver moonlight.
J.B. reacted like Jak and Ryan, simply opening his eyes, taking in what was happening, not taking any risks on getting shot. Squinting in the darkness, his eyes locked on the intruders' weapons. Their blasters were stubby, like machine pistols, with a narrow barrel above the firing muzzle. They probably had some kind of laser-controlled firing system, he thought, but the magazine seemed to hold ammunition unlike anything the Armorer had ever seen.
