by James Axler
There was a dreadful moment of tension. Everyone in the party except Krysty and Doc had often put their lives on the line. On the war wags, ambushes and traps were part of everyday life. The best chance of escape was almost always in the first paralyzing breaths. Everyone knew that.
Now all of them moved and turned like caged animals, fingers white on triggers, eyes raking the walls and floor and ceiling for some hint of an escape route. But the only marks that sullied the smooth whiteness were the pockmarks where Okie had wasted the vid camera.
It was a frenetic ballet of nerves. Knowing that everyone was riding the knife edge, Ryan called for calm. "Easy. Easy. Whoever it is, they've got us cold."
A voice reverberated from a hidden speaker, so distorted that it was difficult to tell whether it was male or female, young or old. But the message was clear.
"All dressed up to kill... but look who's goin' to die. Guns down, slow and easy. Hands up on heads. You have ten seconds, then I let the gas in. It'll kill you in less'n half a minute."
Ryan spotted another camera near the top of the bulkhead in front of them and guessed the speaker was linked to it. Which, he realized, was a useless bit of information.
"Quickly!" the voice barked, changing then, frighteningly, to a childish whisper. "Do it. Game's done. Ally, ally oxen free. Ally, ally oxen free."
Ryan put his guns on the stone floor and placed his hands on his head. The others followed.
Chapter Two
After the nuclear holocaust of 2001, Russia ceased to exist. The U.S.S.R. vanished overnight and, in sixty searing minutes, the purging flames of the brief war that ended all wars destroyed every single Russian city and industrial complex. Every armaments factory and missile base, every port and bridge, was nuked. The destruction was total.
In places — particularly the farthest recesses of the north and east in the devastated Kamchatka Peninsula, in Siberia and the parts of old Russia near North America — the nuclear winter lingered just as in other regions of the globe, the leaden skies and bitter cold had reigned for a generation.
To survive in temperatures that rarely rose above five degrees required a brutal adaptation. The trees of the taiga were destroyed; only a few stunted, mutated pines were left in millions of acres. Most of the wildlife had succumbed as an almost universal death spread across the North. What animal life survived became mutated like the trees.
And the children of the people who survived, many of them were born mutated like the animals.
The peasants in the Russian hamlet of Ozhbarchik knew little of living. What they understood was how to barely exist. They understood how to maintain the breath in their scrawny bodies on a diet of dried fish and the occasional lucky find of the carcass of a small mammal that the wolves had abandoned. Beyond that, there was watery milk from the village's four rack-boned cows, and an endless diet of potatoes, turnips and other root vegetables. One of the peasants owned a few chickens, and once every few weeks found a tiny egg among the rotting straw.
In these tumbledown hovels, which were scattered along a shallow valley about fifty miles from the sea, there lived thirty-seven men, nineteen women and four children. Only one of the villagers, a man, was older than thirty-five. The grubbing lives of the people of Ozhbarchik were brutish and short.
One of the children of the village, a young boy had the rheumy-eyed, vacant stare and slobbering, sagging mouth of a congenital idiot. His right hand had no thumb, and on his left hand were crammed eleven shrunken, residual digits. Beneath the torn cloth and stinking furs he had two separate and distinct sets of genitalia. One set was male.
One was not.
The group of men surrounding him weren't familiar. A few of them were large men and rode horses, but most of them were small and were astride squat, shaggy ponies. All of them wore layers of fur over their bodies and heavy fur hats halfway over their slanted eyes. Most had rifles slung across their shoulders. Behind them was a train of a dozen pack horses carrying bigger guns and food.
The boy smiled and nodded. Strangers were rare in Ozhbarchik. Strangers meant happiness; he knew that. Sometimes there was music and dancing; he liked that, liked to caper with his ponderous steps, his head swinging low, his hands pawing the air like a mutie polar bear. When he danced like that, his mother and father laughed.
It was good.
The man leading the party of riders was tall, close to six feet. His eyes were almond shaped, with golden irises. His mouth was thick lipped and kindly. Around his forehead he wore a band of beaten silver with a large ruby at its center. His name was Uchitel, and he was nicknamed the Teacher because he was almost the only one in the band who was literate. But that wasn't what made him the leader.
"Boy," he called.
"Yes, master," replied the boy, as he'd been taught, bowing, low.
"This is Ozhbarchik?"
"Yes, master."
"There is food here?"
"Yes, master."
Uchitel nodded. "It is good to see such politeness in one so young. Surely the fathers here teach their children well." The lad grinned, shuffling his booted feet in the powdery snow. "They will welcome strangers and will give us food and wine, will they not?"
"Give, master?" The boy was puzzled. They didn't "give" anything to anyone. They sold or traded or bartered. There was little enough for them.
"Yes, boy. Give us all food? Do you not understand that?"
Despite his idiocy, the lad knew when something was wrong. The smile disappeared from his face as he backed slowly away. "We do not give food, master. No food to give. Poor."
Uchitel turned in his saddle, nodding sagely to the group's incendiary expert, Pyeka, the Baker — the baker of men.
"This spark of sunlight says that his people are poor, Pyeka."
"It is sad to be poor, Uchitel."
"It is truly sad to be poor." To the retreating boy, he said, "Are all poor in your village?"
The stranger's face hadn't changed. There was no anger in the voice, no scowl to the wide mouth. The strange yellow eyes remained fathomless, inscrutable. But something was different. The young boy was so terrified that his bowels loosened and he fouled himself.
"He doesn't answer you, Uchitel," called Bochka, the Barrel, a fat man on an equally fat horse.
"No. He must be taught a lesson in manners, after, all. But what of these poor? Can we help them seek a road from their poverty?"
The man was making a joke. The boy saw that, because many of the men were laughing. But he hadn't heard him say anything funny. He felt dimly that he ought to go and warn his father and mother about these strangers. But his feet seemed frozen to the ground.
It was the lean figure of Zmeya, the Snake, who answered. "There is one sure cure for the poor, Uchitel."
He reached inside his furs and drew out an oiled pistol — a 9 mm Makarov PM, manufactured in the hundreds of thousands in many state factories before the long winter began. It was a compact, handy automatic with a double-action trigger. The band had discovered a cache of them in a concrete bunker seven months before, and Uchitel had insisted that every member take one. Before that they'd had a variety of Stechkins, TT-33s, Radoms and Walther PPKs. Uchitel saw the value of them all carrying the same handgun, though each still carried his own favorite rifle or machine pistol or carbine.
The boy's eyes opened wider and he began to snivel. Some of the villagers had guns, but the weapons were old and battered, mended with baling wire. He'd never seen anything like this glittering, polished pistol. The slim man tossed it upward so that the dim sun was reflected in the silver stars on each side of the crosshatched butt.
Several of the horsemen drew their guns, laughing as the lad fell to his knees. The front of his breeches was now marked with urine; he'd completely lost control.
Out in the open, among the low scrub of the tundra, the cracks of the handguns sounded surprisingly flat and unmenacing. The first bullet hit the kneeling boy through the right shoulder, knocking him over. Blood
gushed from his ragged clothes, staining the snow. A second shot tore through his left thigh, exiting and taking with it a chunk of muscle the size of a man's fist. Blood poured from this gaping wound and the boy screamed, a thin and feeble sound in the wind-washed wasteland.
"He is still poor, Uchitel," yelled Krisa, the Rat, a tiny man with eyes as red as glowing coals. Krisa took careful aim, steadying his right hand with his left, then squeezed the trigger twice.
The first bullet tore into the boy's chest, snapping ribs, exploding the lungs into tatters of torn tissue, sending bright arterial crimson spurting from the gaping mouth. The boy's yelping ceased, and he made a desperate attempt to escape. But the wound in his leg unbalanced him and he fell.
By falling, he put the diminutive Kris off his aim. He had intended to shoot the dying boy again through the center of the chest. But the 9 mm round smashed into the lad's face, breaking his lower jaw and tearing it away on the left so that it hung, hideously lopsided, the row of jagged and broken teeth spilling out with the impact. Continuing, the lead sliced through the boy's tongue and the roof of his mouth, digging deep into the dark caverns of his brain.
The boy kicked in the snow like a rabbit with a broken spine. Watching, the horsemen cheered and laughed; a couple of them made wagers on how long the poor rabbit would last. After fifteen or twenty seconds the corpse lay still, looking oddly shrunken, its blood staining the snow.
Uchitel stood in the stirrups, waved a gloved fist and shouted above the eternal wind, "He is poor no more, my brothers and sisters. Let us go now to his filthy hamlet of Ozhbarchik and help them all to escape from poverty."
As he heeled his black stallion forward, he heard the group laughing. Uchitel smiled, relishing their happiness. In a harsh world, it was good to give pleasure.
The boy's corpse soon stopped bleeding and the wind began to cover it with snow. But not enough to hide it from the scavengers who came creeping from secret places to rend the flesh from the bone.
* * *
Uchitel knew that somewhere far to the west of them was a range of mountains, including several volcanoes, and beyond that the ruins of what had been a fine city that he had once visited. Called Yakutsk, it was near the left bank of the Lena River and had been home to over one hundred thousand people. Intercontinental ballistic missile bases near it had sealed its fate in 2001, and the Americans had used "clean" missiles against it, which slaughtered human beings but left buildings more or less intact. But the change in the climate over the next four generations had made a ruins of the city. Uchitel had been there three times, once when he was only fourteen, then twice in his twenties. There he had found old books and had taught himself the skills that allowed him to lead the guerrillas.
He knew how the land had changed. Lakes had appeared and drained. Mountains had sunk and valleys risen. And in many places there were new smoldering volcanoes.
He sniffed the heavy, ugly smell of sulfur that hung in the air. The wind carried the pale yellow tint of the chemical, fouling the high Arctic, making breathing extremely unpleasant.
Angrily he tugged his thick scarf over his mouth and pulled down his fur cap so that only his amber eyes faced the gusting snow. The boy couldn't have been more than a few minutes walk from his home, he judged; these groveling mutant curs in the wilderness never went farther than a mile from their houses. Rarely did you hear of anyone journeying any distance. There might be a merchant, but to catch one alone was as rare as a day without ice. They traveled in armed convoys and there would be little to bring them this far from anything resembling civilization.
In a tavern a hundred miles southwest, a merchant had whispered disturbing news to Uchitel — news that the man had tried at first to sell.
"How much for word of a hunt?" he'd asked, his greasy head to one side, his little eyes blinking with greed.
Uchitel had asked him why he should pay for such news.
"Because of who is the hunter and who is the hunted." was the reply.
Sitting on his horse, waiting while the stragglers in the band crossed the trackless terrain, Uchitel smiled beneath his scarf at the memory of the plump merchant. To prompt the little man, the tall chieftan had taken his left hand in both of his.
Squeezing.
Squeezing until the merchant whimpered and sweat burst from his temples.
Squeezing until blood came around the sides of the purpling fingernails and the man wept to his mother's grave for Uchitel to stop.
Squeezing until his own knuckles grew white with the effort. And the trader told his tale in a stammering rush of tears.
And still squeezing until every finger bone was cracked and splintered, one against the other. Then pushing the crippled man to the floor among the straw and spilled wine and vomit.
"Much farther, Uchitel?" asked Urach, the Doctor, reining his pony alongside Uchitel's. Urach was the only other man in the party who could read and write. But his nickname — it should have been Surgeon — came from his skill with knives.
"No," Uchitel replied, annoyed at having his reverie interrupted. The fat little trader had given him news of a hunt. News that Uchitel had found most unwelcome.
Though the sun appeared intermittently, most of the day was bleak, with flurries of snow reducing visibility. It was bad, but they had all seen much worse. Occasionally a freak tornado came screaming from the north. The wind would be so strong that it would lift a man and his horse together and send them crashing to their death a mile away. Uchitel recalled being in a township to the south when such a storm arose. The buildings, tethered to bedrock with cables of spun metal, held safe. But one of the group, having drunk too much wine, was caught out in the open. The wind destroyed him, splinters of razored ice flaying the clothes from his flesh, then the flesh from his bones.
To the left, Uchitel spotted movement, white against white. He reached for the Kalashnikov AKM .62 mm, then saw that the bear was moving away from them in a lumbering, unhurried gait. It could be on its own, or it could be one of a large pack of bears whose tracks they'd spotted a day earlier.
Zmeya saw the first of the little houses, which were so flat in the snow that they were almost invisible. "There," he said, pointing ahead and a little to the left.
Uchitel grinned wolfishly. Night wasn't far off. It would be good to have somewhere to shelter against the lethal drop in temperature. Already he could feel the extra bite in the wind. He lowered the scarf from his nose and mouth, his breath pluming out around him like a bridal veil. Within seconds there was the familiar feeling of his nostril hair freezing, the moisture becoming ice.
Uchitel's band carried enough provisions for a couple of weeks. There was generally the chance of shooting some fresh meat. But best of all was finding a community that would support them for a night or two. Some villages grudgingly consented. Most had to be persuaded. The last time they'd visited Ozhbarchik, more than a year back, there had been trouble and a knifing. Uchitel felt that this time their methods of persuasion might have to be particularly harsh.
At that moment, remembering the words of the little merchant, he rose in his horned saddle, peering into the snow spume behind them.
There was nothing to be seen.
Nothing, for the time being.
Chapter Three
With the hiss of compressed air, the massive doorway immediately ahead of them began to rise slowly, clearing the corridor. They remained standing still, hands on top of their heads.
"Good," said the disembodied voice from the speaker. "Very good indeed. The Keeper spares you. A sign of anger, and you would have all been cleansed."
None of the eight needed it spelled out. "Cleansed" was just another word for killed or iced or wasted or chilled or blasted or sent to buy the farm.
"You ain't muties?"
It sounded like a question, so Ryan answered it. "No, we're not muties."
"Them women got funny hair. Ain't natural. Green and red. They muties?"
Ryan thought about Krysty. She di
dn't really look like a mutie at all, despite what he knew of her hidden powers.
"No, none of us is a mutie."
The crackly voice resumed again. "The Keeper says he wants to know how you got in here?"
"Long story," said J.B. Dix.
"Got time. Keeper's got all the time in the world."
"Can we put our hands down?" asked Ryan.
"No. Yes. Yes, the Keeper says yes. Nobody never got in this redoubt. Never in a hundred, never in a thousand, never in a million years. Keeper don't allow it. Doors sealed tight as a bat's ass. No alarms on the outside. Just from the gateway. That how you got in?"
Ryan glanced sideways at J.B. It was a bad situation. The thin, tinny voice sounded crazy. That didn't alter the fact he had them cold. The forces controlling the redoubt would have access to all kinds of sophisticated weaponry. They needed only to shut that bulkhead again and pump in the nerve gas and they'd be dead in seconds. Better to play along.
"Yeah. We come from the Darks. Don't rightly know how or why."
A cackle of laughter. "Not even the Keeper knows 'bout the gateways. You jumped... where from?"
"The Darks. Used to be called Montana. What else do you want to know?"
"Keeper wants to know everythin', friend. Keeper does know everythin', friend. You say you didn't know where you was comin'?"
"Yeah. Where are we?"
"In good time, friend. Keeper has the redoubt in his charge. Keep it safe. Let no man enter with hate in his heart. You got hate?"
Ryan shook his head. "No. We come in friendship."
Around him he could feel the tension of the others. None of them was very good at waiting.
"Surely shall the lion lay down with the lamb. I have to search the books for word on what to do. Keeper has to take care. Move not, friends. Leave your blasters on the floor. I'll watch. So wait."
"Let's run for it," whispered Okie. She was just behind Ryan.
"Where?" retorted J.B. "Pass that door, and there'll be another."
