by James Axler
“Well, madam?” Doc shouted from the wheelhouse, both hands draped casually over the wheel.
“Still coming!” Mildred replied, casting again.
“Indeed. The bastards can probably hear our engine, the same way we do their drums!” Doc yelled back, checking the compass to keep them on course. “Most certainly, they can have no compass or sextant as a navigational aid.”
“They’re just following the smoke,” J.B. stated, sitting cross-legged on the deck and tinkering with something inside his munitions bag.
Reeling in the soggy line, Mildred involuntarily glanced at the thick column of black exhaust rising from the chimney and seeming to go all the way to the tumultuous sky. This far out on the open water, the smoke stood out like the finger of God, pointing straight down at the huffing boat.
Just then, something moved below the water, causing a low swell that rocked the boat slightly.
“Is that a kraken?” Mildred whispered, reaching for her blaster.
Rising, Liana took a look at the wake of bubbles. “No, just an elephant,” she replied, sitting.
Everybody exchanged glances at the strange pronouncement, but since Liana did not seem concerned in the least, the companions returned to their tasks. Weapons and food were always a prime concern.
“Well, I want to know how they’re keeping pace,” Krysty demanded, trying her own luck over the side with a spear lashed to another spear to double the reach. “Gaia, we’ve got a bastard steam engine and they’re always just over the horizon!”
“Agreed. They should have passed out from exhaustion after the first day or so,” Mildred replied, casting once more and jiggling the line. For three long days, the Warhammer had steadily chugged across the vast expanse of the lake without sighting land or another vessel. It almost seemed as if the little craft was alone in the world, and the companions were the very last people alive. Then the wind would shift a little, and there came the muffled sound of those timing drums again. Forever just on the edge of disillusionment, but as unchanging as the beat of a human heart.
“Liana, do the barons have any more engines?” J.B. asked, holding up a U.S. Army chem fuse to visually check for any corrosion. “Or maybe some sort of a trained mutie that can pull a longboat, the way a horse does a cart?”
“No, those all died in the Black Fog long before I was born,” Liana replied, fingering her flute. “These days, the barons use a white powder. Craz stuff. They give it to the slaves when they’re out chopping through the winter ice. It makes them trip strong, and they can’t feel any pain anymore. They don’t sleep, or even want to eat, or nothing. They just work away, laughing.”
“Laughing?” Mildred demanded with a scowl, pulling in the line by hand to inspect the hook. The untouched beef was still there. “You sure about that?”
Blowing a single clear note on the flute, Liana nodded in reply. “Oh, yes, I’ve seen a slave accidentally chop off his own leg and keep on breaking ice, still singing a happy work song until he toppled over.”
“That sounds like some form of PCP,” the physician guessed. “Probably mixed with jolt or wolfweed.”
Having no answer for that, Liana merely shrugged and went back to playing her instrument, concentrating on calling in snakes to the baited hooks on the fishing lines. However, there was no answering tug inside her mind, aside from a faint sensation coming from the direction of Krysty. Liana glanced that way to see the redhead looking back. The two woman shared a secret smile, then went back to their work.
Angrily casting again, Mildred tried to recall the lessons she’d learned at summer camp to make the wind carry her line farther away from the boat than she could possibly throw. Wonder of wonders, it actually worked, and the baited hook hit with a plop, then sank out of sight. Wonderful, we’re being chased by a small army of murdering lunatics cranked on animal tranquilizers, Mildred raged internally, moving the pole back and forth. In her time, Angel Dust had been the scourge of the civilized world. That was, until the arrival of crack, and then crystal meth. Often, it seemed to the physician that humanity had always been trying to destroy itself in some manner or other, with skydark merely being the inevitable, and terrible, success.
Stomping sounds from the stairwell heralded Ryan’s arrival from belowdecks. Dripping sweat, the one-eyed man was stripped to his shorts and combat boots, a rag holding back his long curly hair. Taking a bucket from a niche, he filled it from over the side and poured the contents over his head, sluicing his body clean.
“Hi, lover, how’s the fuel?” Krysty asked with a smile.
Without replying, Ryan smashed the bucket over a raised knee and tucked the pieces under his arm before wearily stomping back down the stairs. A few moments later, Jak appeared holding an ax. Wordlessly, the half-naked teenager hacked apart the door to the stairwell, then made a bundle of the slats and returned to the engine room.
“My guess would be that we are out, dear lady,” Doc said loudly from the wheelhouse, looking at where the speaking tube had been only a few hours ago. That had been the first thing deemed as unnecessary, and taken to burn in the firebox of the engine. “How far do we have yet to travel, John Barrymore?”
J.B. took out the minisextant and scanned the stormy clouds until getting a brief glimpse of the sun. Quickly, he did a few mental calculations, then checked a plastic map of North America. “According to this, we’re already fifty miles inland,” he snarled. “So I have no idea where we are at the moment.”
“Unless this is—” She stopped talking at the sight of Liana sitting bolt upright then spinning around to stare at the front of the boat.
“Trouble?” J.B. asked, reaching for the Uzi machine pistol. “Did the barons somehow get ahead of us?”
“No, it’s snakes,” Liana cried happily. “I can feel them in my mind. Hundreds and hundreds of snakes.”
“Food.” Mildred sighed in obvious relief.
“Better,” Liana stated, rushing to the gunwale and leaning dangerously over the side. “These snakes hate the water. Any type of water.”
That took a full second to process. “They’re on dry land?” Mildred asked softly, the words pregnant with hope.
“And there it is!” Krysty shouted, squinting into the distance. Far ahead of the boat was a rising swell of green that rapidly extended along the horizon as snowcapped mountains gradually began to ascend toward the heavens. Then the ruins of a metropolis came into focus, a ragged array of windowless skyscrapers and crumbling office buildings, and some kind of a dome.
This city was in just about the worst state of anything Krysty had ever seen. Most of the masonry had crum bled back into the soil from which it came, leaving only the bare metal skeleton jutting like the bones of a decaying corpse.
“Yeah, we’re not gonna find anything useful there,” J.B. announced glumly, adjusting his glasses. “Aside from rust and dust and a zillion cockroaches.”
Stashing away her fishing tackle, Mildred grunted at that. In high school she had been taught that the common roach was as resistant to hard radiation as any living creature could be without mutating. Her teacher had theorized that after a nuclear war the lone survivor on the planet would most likely be the lowly roach. And he hadn’t been half wrong.
Just hadn’t given humanity enough credit to muddle through the holocaust anyway, Mildred added privately, feeling an odd sense of pride over the matter. The quintessential definition of the human race had always been as survivors.
“Better steer clear of the dockyards,” Krysty advised, watching the pattern of the waves. There seemed to be a lot of wreckage under the water. “At this speed, if we hit a submerged bridge, or railroad, it’ll rip off our keel as clean as opening a self-heat.”
“Too true, madam!” Doc said in agreement. “However, observe! There is a pristine beach just to the west of the city. That should serve us well as an impromptu dry dock.”
“Then we’re gonna land?” Liana asked excitedly, looking across the new world.
&
nbsp; “Immediately, my dear. A bird in the hand, and all that.”
Was worth two in the bush. Yes, she knew that old saying from her father. “Okay, I’ll go tell Ryan and Jak!” Liana said, dashing down the stairs, her boots barely touching the steps.
In only moments she returned with the two sweaty men. They went directly to the bow to study the fallen metropolis, and bathe in the cool, clean air.
“Looks good,” Ryan announced, almost smiling. “Between the ruins and the mountains, we can lose the barons easy in this sort of terrain.”
“On our world now,” Jak agreed, hunching his shoulders to work out a few kinks. The muscles under his pale skin moved like bundles of steel cables.
“However, those sec men still outnumber us ten to one,” Ryan replied without enthusiasm. “So, everybody get ready to run as soon as we hit the fragging beach.”
Quickly, the companions raced around the boat, reclaiming their meager possessions and stuffing them into their backpacks.
Less than an hour later, Doc eased the boat through the cresting waves washing onto the smooth beach, the glistening sand grinding under their wooden hull until the boat came to a complete stop, only slightly tilting sideways. Then Doc pulled back the throttle to turn off the engine. The clatter from belowdecks immediately lessened, but the engine kept working for a few minutes before finally expiring with a long exhalation of compressed steam.
“What now, Captain, oh my Captain?” Doc asked, awkwardly climbing down from the wheelhouse. The wound was healing quickly, but his left arm was still rather weak. As he reached the deck, Liana stepped alongside the scholar, never offering assistance, but staying close in case it was needed.
“We head for the valley between those two big mountains,” Ryan stated, pointing the Steyr in that direction. “Hopefully, they waste time checking the ruins. If for nothing else than sheer curiosity. There’s nothing like this on Royal Island.”
“Nothing,” Liana agreed wholeheartedly. “But do not count too much on their curiosity.”
“Well, the only thing we can be sure that they’ll recce is the Warhammer,” J.B. said, dusting off his hands. “And when they do, we should be able to see the blast from the other side of the continent.”
“Groovy,” Mildred said with a curt nod, hefting her med kit. “Let’s blow this pop stand!”
“Madam?” Doc asked with a quizzical expression.
“Time to leave,” Krysty said in translation, kicking out the hinged section of the gunwale and jumping to the sand.
The fall was only a yard, and the woman landed on her boots, the S&W blaster out and ready in case of any surprises among the sand. Ryan went next, and the rest of the companions soon followed.
Spreading out, they walked swiftly along the pristine expanse of the silvery beach, leaving behind a clear trail of their footprints. Unfortunately, there was nothing to be done about that. The nearest branches were more than five hundred yards away, and they weren’t going to waste time going back. This was now a race to the nearest redoubt. Until the companions were safely locked inside, they could not allow anything to get in the way, or slow them.
Slowly, the sand merged with dirt and got firmer, allowing them to walk faster. However, the companions were only yards from the trees when they heard a familiar sound from the direction of the ruins. They turned to see a group of people on saddled horses galloping their way. Large men with long ponytails, they wore a mixture of predark clothing and badly tanned hides, the vests edged with fringe. More important, each rider was sporting a longblaster and a handblaster. Then one of them smiled, and Ryan saw that his teeth were filed to needle-sharp points as an aid to ripping meat from bone.
“Cannies!” Ryan growled, feeling a surge of cold adrenaline at the knowledge. There would be no palaver or negotiation with these barbs. This was a hunting trip for them, nothing more. Knowing how low the group was on brass, the one-eyed man debated trying to run and hide in the forest, then he decided on a different plan and quickly relayed brief instructions to the others.
“Hold it right there, outlanders!” the lead rider shouted, and then fired a longblaster in their general direction.
If the intimidation tactic had ever worked, it failed miserably this day. While most of the companions raised their hands in surrender, J.B. quickly lit the stubby fuse on a pipe bomb and let it fly. As the high-explosive charge soared over the cannies, the companions dived for the sand and covered their ears. A split second later, a powerful detonation hammered the beach, the startled screams of the cannies and their horses lost in the deadly concussion.
As the shock wave of the blast faded, Ryan charged forward, his panga slashing at anything that moved. The others were right behind his attack, and soon they were alone on the beach, surrounded by corpses.
“There!” Liana shouted, pointing toward the ruins.
Spinning, Ryan cursed at the sight of a lone cannie, bent low over his horse and riding like a madman toward the crumbling city. But as he worked the bolt on the Steyr, Mildred raised the Czech ZKR and stroked the trigger. A hundred yards away, the horse flipped over, trapping the cannie underneath. As the frantic man flailed helplessly, Ryan centered the crosshairs of the scope on the cannie and blew off his head with a single well-placed shot.
“A running horse with no rider would have told any other cannies in the ruins far too much,” Mildred stated, holstering the blaster. The act had been a simple matter of survival.
“How did the baron send these men after us?” Liana asked, looking in the cloudy sky for any messenger falcons. “Or have they gotten here before us?”
“Didn’t,” Jak replied, retrieving one of his throwing knives. He cleansed the gory blade on the clothing of the corpse. “Just local boys. Cannies.”
“Cannies!” Liana gasped. “But…but those are only legends. They don’t really exist.”
“Not on your island, no,” Doc rumbled. “But alas, they most certainly do exist here.”
“Are there many more like these?” Liana asked in a worried voice, her blaster out, the hammer cocked.
“Some,” Krysty admitted honestly, opening a leather bag. “But not many.” Inside, she found only dried meat. Closing the bag, she tossed it aside and continued looking for brass.
“Is food short on this island?” Liana asked, suddenly suspicious that she had been brought along purely for the sake of her flesh. But then, she dismissed the nonsense.
“No, my dear, food is plentiful,” Doc said, cracking a revolver to empty out the brass. Three live rounds. Better than naught, he supposed. “These are simply men who…have lost their way.”
Slowly holstering her piece, Liana could hear the sadness in his voice. Theo aced cannies on sight, then nearly wept over the loss of life. A new emotion welled from within her breast, but the woman could not find the correct words. Was this love? She had no idea.
When the arduous task of looting the bodies was completed, the companions headed straight back into the forest. Never stopping for a moment, they tore some branches loose and lashed them to their gunbelts to drag along behind and muddle the trail. Separating around a pond, they joined again on the far side, then started for the mountains. The trick to throw off hunters wasn’t new, but it was the best they could manage under the circumstances. Hopefully, it would be enough.
Finding a dry riverbed, the companions broke into a full run, trying to get as much distance as possible between them and the army of the two barons.
“So where in Kalkaska is the redoubt located?” Krysty asked in artificial indifference. Attempting to force information out of Doc’s damaged mind was like trying to squeeze a song out of a bird by crushing it in your fist. If you got any results at all, they would only be incomprehensible noise. Guile and misdirection were the only paths to success.
“City hall,” Doc replied without thinking, stepping past a gopher hole. Then he looked around in confusion for a minute, before returning to the uphill walk.
Ryan and Krysty
shared nods at that, filing away the location.
“Is it on the map?” Mildred asked.
“Should be,” J.B. replied, pausing to unfold the map and check the key. Then he began to curse.
“What’s wrong?” Liana asked nervously, pulling her blaster.
“Remember that crumbling drek hole on the coast?” J.B. said. “The sagging ruin that looks like it burned down after getting nuked?”
“Kalkaska?” Jak asked with a pronounced frown.
“Yeah!” J.B. fumed. “Dark night, I thought fifty miles inland had a familiar ring.”
“No choice then,” Ryan grumbled, turning and heading toward the desiccated river once more. “Back we go.”
Once more, the companions did an abrupt about-face and kept going.
“But what about the cannies?” Liana asked.
With a grim expression, J.B. said, “We’ll just have to reason with them.”
Moving quickly, the companions had barely crested the top of a low hillock when a sprinkling of black shapes appeared on the horizon of the lake heading steadily for the white sand shore.
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Nineteen
Frothy waves crested over the sandy beach, and the forces of Royal Island sloshed onto a bizarre shoreline. Constantly looking around in unfettered fear, the barons and their sec men pulled the longboats onto the shore until the crafts were completely out of the water.
Less than a hundred paces away, the Warhammer lay tilted on her side, without a sign of life on board. But then, the outlanders would have to be feebs to stay on the craft once they reached land.
“Trapped?” Baron Wainwright asked, looking over the vessel.
“Trapped,” Baron Griffin agreed. “We’re gonna have to disassemble the engine before we dare put a stick of wood in the boiler.”
Clearly annoyed, she grunted. Yeah, it made sense. After all, it would be exactly what she and her cousin would have done. “All right, nobody go near the Warhammer,” she stated loudly. “That is, unless you’re fond of seeing your own innards fly!”
