Time Castaways

by James Axler

“Indeed? Well, I am always glad to assist a damsel in distress,” Doc demurred gallantly, suddenly feeling very awkward.

  “Thank you,” Liana whispered, throwing her arms around his neck and hugging tight. Then she unexpectedly burst into tears.

  Standing as if hit with a poleax, Doc did nothing for an inordinate length of time. Then ever so slowly, the scholar placed his arms around the young woman and gently returned the gesture, moving as if he were afraid that something might break, and not necessarily the beautiful young woman in his arms.

  Outside the cave, there came a flash of lightning, closely followed by a crackling peal of thunder, and then it began to rain, the shower rapidly escalating until the wild maelstrom that sounded like the end of the world.

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Five

  Once, it had been the skull of a kraken, but now it was the terrible throne room of Anchor ville. The mouth and eyes had been closed with stout wooden shutters, and the interior walls delicately carved with scenes of victorious battle, along with the legendary downfall of the predark world. At this time of night, the throne room was normally full of people, sec men, servants and stewards. But by the command of the baron, it had been completely emptied for a very special visitor.

  Standing uncomfortable in the palatial grandeur, the bearded Hilly was completely dressed in badly cured furs, their pungent reek almost overpowering. As a sign of goodwill, none of his stone weapons had been taken. However, both of the other people in the throne room were armed with working blasters.

  “Exactly how much metal are we talking here?” Baron Wainwright asked, leaning back in her throne. The carved symbol of a holy maple leaf framed her head perfectly. “A pound? Two pounds?”

  “My lady, more than the weight of a man,” the Hilly replied, uneasily hitching up the rope belt around his waist.

  “How much?” sec chief LeFontaine retorted. “I should ace you on the spot for lying to my baron!”

  “No, it’s true!” the Hilly cried, raising his hands in protest. “I watched the jacking from the bushes in the forest. Planned on taking whatever was left behind. But I saw that the outlanders were covered with metal, all different kinds! There was metal in their backpacks, on their faces, around their necks, mixed into their clothing…”

  Listening to the rambling of the outcast, Wainwright and LeFontaine said nothing, but their expressions clearly stated that their interest was quickly fading. Metal worn as mere decorations? What utter and complete drek.

  “An’ they had blasters like I never seen!” the Hilly went on, feeling the sale slip away between his fingers. “I know it sounds crazy, but the things shot faster than a dozen imperial crossbows, and spit out tiny gold pieces of metal that sparkled in the firelight!”

  That caught the baron short, and she studied the man with renewed intent. That sounded like the outlanders had working rapidfires. Could that possibly be true? What few blasters existed on the world came from mainlanders who accidentally landed here after storms. However, nobody had arrived on these shores for a long time. Years, decades!

  “These blasters,” LeFontaine said carefully. “The golden pieces came out the bottom, right?”

  Puzzled, the Hilly frowned. “No, they popped out the side. Kinda made an arch as they flew away.”

  “How did they load them?”

  “Shoved in little boxes.” Then he added, “But first they had to move some kind of stick on the top. Dunno what it did.”

  An arming bolt! That was enough for the baron. There was no way this unwashed feeb could possibly know how a rapidfire worked, unless he had actually seen one in action.

  “All right, little man, I’ll pay your price,” Baron Wainwright said eagerly. “Fifty horses, fifty slaves, ten crossbows and a hundred arrows.”

  “Two hundred.”

  “One-fifty.”

  “Done!” She smiled, then spit on a palm and they shook to seal the deal. “Now, tell me more about these outlanders. Tell me everything.”

  IT WAS LONG after midnight before the thunder and lightning finally began to recede, the pounding rain easing into a gentle patter before stopping entirely as the autumnal storm slowly moved out to sea.

  Ryan was on guard duty inside the cave, sitting on a rock with the Steyr leaning against the nearby cave wall. The SIG-Sauer was tucked into the holster of his gunbelt, and he was testing the action on his new acquisition from the Navy ship, a Desert Eagle. The big-bore weapon was a real handcannon, the wide magazine holding only seven fat .50-caliber rounds. The recoil would be awful, but anything hit by the weapon would be aced, probably damn near blown in two. Unfortunately there was only the one magazine of seven rounds, so Ryan planned to save the handcannon in case they returned to the ship.

  Setting aside the Desert Eagle, Ryan rose and grabbed the Steyr to check outside. The clouds were gone from overhead, and in the east the sun was just starting to rise. Excellent!

  Grunting in satisfaction, Ryan went back inside the cave to quickly walk around the blazing campfire.

  “Hey,” Ryan said, nudging the bare foot of the Armorer with his combat boot.

  Instantly the man was awake, and the U.S. Army blanket shifted to reveal the Uzi machine blaster in his grip.

  “Trouble?” J.B. asked, squinting. His glasses were on a natural shelf set into the rocky wall, safe from any possibility of getting rolled on and crushed during sleep. Lying right next to the glasses was the recently cleaned and oiled 9 mm FN Hershel blaster. The logo on the checkered Zytel grip marked it as the property of NATO, but what that was doing inside an American warship was anybody’s guess.

  “Better.” Ryan grinned. “We’ve got sky.”

  J.B. threw off the blankets. Hastily pulling on and lacing his boots, J.B. donned his glasses and grabbed the dry munitions bag to hurry outside.

  The morning air felt crisp and clean as a yawning J.B. sloshed across the sodden ground to reach the shore. Black storm clouds rumbled on the western horizon, but a glorious sun was rising in the east, the reddish sky brightening into dawn. Unfortunately the ever-present cloud of toxic chems and rads was already starting to roll in from the south, and J.B. knew that he only had a few minutes to get this right. There would be no second chances.

  With Ryan standing nearby as protection, the Ar morer set the Uzi on top of a damp boulder, and swung the minisextant to his eye. Expertly focusing it on the rising sun, he then carefully placed the mirrors and started working the numbers.

  Watching the area for any possible danger, Ryan said nothing, letting the man work in peace. A few moments later the rest of the companions stumbled from the cave, their hands full of blasters and rolls of bog paper.

  Muttering equations under his breath, J.B. pulled a plastic-coated map from the munitions bag.

  “Okay,” he said, biting a lip. “We are…yep, we’re on Royal Island in Lake Superior, smack between Canada and Michigan.”

  “That lake?” Jak asked with a scowl.

  In the morning light, the albino teen could clearly see for miles in every direction, and there was nothing in sight but flat open water to the misty horizon.

  “Well, technically it is a lake,” Mildred replied, closing her jacket. “But really it is an inland sea, hundreds of miles wide and over a thousand feet deep in some spots.”

  “Good God, madam, that would make it roughly the same size as England!” Doc espoused, his tousled hair sticking out in every direction. His clothes were rumpled, but the LeMat was spotlessly clean, primed and ready.

  “Pretty damn close,” Mildred agreed, stomping her boots to encourage circulation.

  “Fireblast! There’s no way we are ever going to paddle across that on a raft,” Ryan stated, resting the Steyr across his broad shoulders.

  “Not and survive,” J.B. agreed, folding the map be fore tucking it into the plastic bag. “Now, Canada is to the north, and only a few miles away. However—”

  “Travel in that direction is forbidden because of Red Mountain,�
�� Liana interrupted, shifting uncomfortably in her new clothing. The spare denim pants and sneakers had come from Mildred, the socks and shirt from Krysty. The clothing was a little tight in some spots and a tad baggy in others, but it was still the finest clothing she had ever worn.

  Adjusting his eyepatch, Ryan scowled darkly. Red Mountain, that was the local name for what had to be a major volcano. The woman had told them about that after dinner. The volcano was huge, probably a series of volcanoes, the lava flow boiling the lake for several miles and generating the eternal fog that was already starting to creep across the landscape once more.

  Oddly, Liana had also said that was the direction that most of the muties on the island came from, and that anybody traveling toward the mountains soon died coughing blood with their hair falling out. That strongly indicated the chain of volcanoes was not natural formation, but had been caused by skydark. The whole bastard world had been changed forever by the bombs of the last war. Mildred called it nuclear landscaping, or nukescaping for short.

  Red Mountain. A rad mountain was more likely, Ryan thought. “Not much of a choice here,” he stated. “Canada is closer, but fragging unreachable. Which makes the only safe way to travel being south to Michigan.”

  “Across two hundred miles of open sea,” Doc rumbled, smoothing down his unruly hair.

  Suddenly there came a faint cry from the trees on the rill of a nearby cliff, and a stingwing lanced down to splash into the lake, and then reappear almost instantly with a wriggling fish impaled on its needle-sharp beak. Flying back to the trees, the stingwing tore the fish apart, blood and entrails raining out in a hellish contrail.

  “Looks like we use Jak’s plan,” J.B. stated, shifting the munitions bag on his shoulder to a more comfortable position.

  “Looks like,” Ryan agreed. “We either buy or steal a boat from some ville.”

  “Only Anchor and Northpoint have boats large enough to carry seven people,” Liana started, then paused nervously. When nobody objected, or corrected her math, she continued with an excited feeling in her stomach. Except for her father, the young woman had lived alone her whole life. Now to have companions made her feel different somehow, bolder, more alive.

  “Think they’d be interested in doing some biz?” Ryan asked, turning her way.

  Addressed directly, like an equal, Liana almost lied, wishing to please the big man, then paused and told the brutal truth. “Not Northpoint, they don’t want anybody else to own boats,” she said. “But…Anchor might. The baron is a fool.”

  “That is where you formerly served as a slave?” Doc asked gently, leaning on the ebony stick. The previous night, Liana had been given a blanket near the fire, but sometime during the night she had moved it closer to him, right alongside, almost touching. That both pleased and troubled the scholar, his mind awhirl with conflicting emotions.

  “No, I was a slave at Northpoint,” Liana stated. “But by now the birds have spread the word of my escape, and I’m worth a full pound of metal to any ville that takes me live so that Baron Wainwright can strap me to the learning tree.” Involuntarily she shuddered at the possibility, and the rest of the companions clearly got the idea of what would happen—death by slow, public torture.

  “Then you’ll just wait in the hills with everybody else until we return,” Ryan stated, sensing the fright in the woman. “If they think you’re a mutie because of those eyes, they’ll think the same thing about Krysty and Jak.”

  “There is nobody like them in any of the villes,” Liana agreed.

  “Nobody good as, ya mean.” Jak grinned confidently.

  “And is there anybody like me?” Mildred asked pointedly.

  Liana blinked. “There’s plenty of women in the ville,” she answered, unsure of the question. “Do you mean the beaded hair?”

  “Never mind.” Mildred smiled. If the girl didn’t even understand the question, then her skin color would not be a problem.

  “And I can’t go because of these,” J.B. added, touching his wire-rimmed glasses. “I’m not blind yet, but near enough to matter in a fight.”

  “Besides, we’ll need to keep watch in case Ryan and Mildred get into trouble,” Krysty stated. “Always have to prepare for the worst, as Doc likes to say.”

  “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,” Doc corrected her. “Ben Franklin was a very wise man.”

  “You…you want me to help guard him?” Liana asked in frank disbelief, staring up at the one-eyed man. Ryan was easily twice her size, with hands that looked capable of squeezing a kraken to death.

  “Anybody can get captured,” Krysty commented sagely. “Besides, we never divide the group unless absolutely necessary. Those coldhearts could have friends. Left here alone you’d be easy pickings for them. Best to keep everybody together.”

  That would also remove the possibility of her running ahead to tell the baron about the companions to earn her freedom, J.B. noted privately. He didn’t think that was likely, but he had been fooled before. A pretty face sometimes hid an ugly mind.

  “At the very least, you will need to show us where the ville is located,” Doc said with a gentle smile.

  Eagerly, Liana nodded. “I can do that easy.”

  As if unaware that there was anybody else on the lakeshore, Doc beamed in unabashed pleasure at the younger woman and she responded in kind.

  “Any good with crossbow?” Jak asked teasingly.

  In a blur, the woman turned and fired, the arrow flashing past the teenager so close that it shook the feathers along his jacket. A split second later, there was a small cry of pain and a squirrel dropped out of the branches of a pine tree to land twitching on the ground, shot directly through the head. Almost instantly, a swarm of black beetles converged on the body and began tearing it into pieces.

  “She-et,” Jak drawled, giving the word two syllables. “Do fine!”

  Already reloading the weapon, Liana preened under the unaccustomed praise.

  “Breakfast before anything else.” Mildred yawned. “Empty bellies make empty minds.”

  “Well, it’s my turn to cook,” Ryan said, rubbing a hand across his unshaved jaw. He would have liked to shave, but it would be better if he looked rough when negotiating with folks who didn’t have any metal. “Is there any of the stew left?”

  “Nope,” Jak said with an apologetic shrug.

  Knowing the appetite of the teenager, Ryan accepted that. “Fair enough. I’ll use some of the MRE packs.”

  “Be glad to help,” Liana offered. “I’m a very good cook.”

  “Me, too,” Ryan replied tolerantly. “This time you watch, learn how we do things, then you can make lunch. Fair enough?” The man understood her eagerness to be seen as a valuable member of the group. But he wasn’t quite ready to trust the newcomer enough to consume anything she made out of sight.

  “Done and done,” Liana said, and offered a hand, as if sealing a deal.

  The smiling man and serious woman shook, then got busy gathering more driftwood, while the others took their turns in the bushes and washing in the cold lake.

  Seeing his refection in a tide pool, Doc decided to shave. Using a scrap of soap recovered from a distant redoubt, he worked up some lather, then used his belt knife, running the flame of a butane lighter along the edge first to make sure it was clean. Over the years, the blade had been thrust into far too many bodies, both norm and mutie, to risk using without sterilization.

  Soon, the time traveler was freshly scraped, his face shiny pink, with only a small cut on his chin. A single red drop of blood fell into the water and faded away from sight into the murky depths.

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Six

  Leaving the cave behind, the companions trundled inland, going high into the foothills then across a woodsy glen.

  Breakfast had been MRE envelopes of pancakes and syrup, French toast and scrambled eggs, plus packets of hot chocolate. Liana marveled over the foodstuff, but passed on the hot chocolate for some of t
he coffee, savoring the dark roast Colombian as if it was made from precious salt. From her sounds of pleasure, it clearly tasted even better than she had imagined.

  As the day progressed, the thick fog returned, masking the landscape until it was impossible to see more than a few yards in any direction.

  Irritably, Ryan realized this condition made the scope of his Steyr useless. Any chilling on Royal Island would be up close and personal, knives and blasters only.

  Preparing to bargain with the local baron, Ryan and Mildred had already removed anything they carried that was made of metal: belt buckles, rad counter, belt knives and such, including their combat boots. The footwear wasn’t made of metal, but was in far too good shape. The spare Army blankets had been converted into crude ponchos, held in place by pieces of hemp rope, with additional pieces lashed into place around their bare feet as crude rag boots. Doc said the idea came from the Middle Ages.

  Trying to look the role of sec men from one of the outer islands, both Ryan and Mildred were armed with a crossbow and quiver, stone knives, wooden boomerang and bolo. However, secreted inside their shirts, under their ponchos, were their blasters and a few grens, just in case of emergencies.

  The two companions also carried a couple of gifts for the baron, hopefully more than enough to buy a boat and fishing nets. The companions had no conceivable use for the nets, but since it was forbidden to leave the island, they would make for a good cover story, as Mildred liked to say. A reasonable lie used to hide the uncomfortable truth.

  Slowly the hours passed as the companions crossed a wide field of daisies growing in wild profusion around the corpse of what might have been a mutie spider, but it was impossible to tell anymore. Just to be safe, J.B. primed a Molotov and watched the trees for any unusually large webs.

  Reaching the forest once more, the companions climbed a ragged hill covered with pine trees only to quickly go around a small bay, the rad counters of Ryan and J.B. both clicking steadily upward.

  “That’s Dead Man Bay,” Liana said with a shiver, making a protective gesture in the air. “It looks safe, but drink that water, or even eat a fish from there, and all you hair falls out, then you start bleeding from the gums.”