Shadow Fortress

by James Axler

  “Fireblast!” Ryan cursed, stopping in the road and turning. “I’ll hold them until you reach the cliff! Then cover me!”

  “Done!” J.B. answered, and took off at a run.

  As the others departed, the gorillas paused in confusion, then charged in a group. Shooting as fast as he could pull the trigger, Ryan emptied the Webley. Four of the gorillas fell with blood spraying from their faces, but the fifth took a round smack in the chest and didn’t even pause.

  Cursing the miss, Ryan threw a gren, and the ape caught the sphere to sniff at it suspiciously. The blast reduced it to a smoking stain, and Ryan took off after the others, fumbling to open the top of the revolver and thumb in fresh rounds.

  Reaching the rock wall, J.B. turned and waited until Ryan was in sight, then emptied a clip in one stuttering volley into the forest behind the man. The 9 mm rounds ripped apart the leaves, and six gorillas fell wounded or dying. But they started after the companions again, crawling along the ground with their four arms, heading straight for the Armorer, their tiny red eyes staring hatefully at him. The sight chilled his blood, and J.B. had to force himself to stay and reload the Uzi, instead of starting up the cliff face.

  “Get going!” Ryan ordered, dropping the Webley and drawing the SIG-Sauer. He hadn’t wanted to use the silenced blaster because it had less of a punch than the booming revolver, but he was out of ammo for the big-bore top-loader. Krysty had the last of the .44 rounds, and she was completely out of reach.

  J.B. started to object, when a hail of lead hit the ground around the gorillas as they crossed the little stream. Craning his neck, the man saw the others clinging precariously from the rock face, firing their blasters with one hand. Then there came the telltale thunderous boom of Doc’s LeMat, and a wounded male stepped backward to fall over, showing the back of its head missing.

  “Climb!” the old man shouted, sounding like Zeus on Mount Olympus.

  Ryan swept the field with his SIG-Sauer, putting a round into each of the remaining six apes, then turned and threw himself at the rock wall. Both hands grabbing hold of a horizontal crack, the Deathlands warrior pulled himself up until his boots found purchase on the rough surface, and he extended his arms to find another crack.

  Clawing for cracks, J.B. followed a few feet away from his old friend. Cold logic dictated that everybody climb alone in case they lost their grip and fell. They had no ropes, or pitons, only bare hands. There was no way to help each other now, except for not colliding into someone on the way down.

  Dean and Doc were already ten feet off the ground, moving faster than expected, and Mildred was scaling the rocks as if she had done it her whole life.

  As Jak slowly struggled along the crevices, Krysty snagged an outcropping on the side of the mesa and pulled herself higher. Ryan and J.B. followed, pausing when they reached a small ledge to shoot at the hunting apes below. More than half of the muties were sprawled on the ground, but the rest continued on, uncaring of the deadly lead flying past their stubby heads.

  Checking below, Ryan cursed as he saw the huge apes pawing at the rock wall, leaning close to sniff the mesa, then tap it with their massive fingers. The bastard things were still trying to follow the group.

  One gorilla reached up with an incredible long arm and pawed the rocks, pulling itself off the ground with the one hand. Their flexible toes worked as auxiliary hands that fondled the rocks to find any purchase, and the beast moved higher on the wall. Grunting among themselves, the rest tried to follow the first and soon the six were hot in pursuit, and moving faster than any of the companions.

  A particularly large ape roared at the tiny humans, and Ryan tried to target the big male, but the angle of the sheer cliff prohibited that now. Reluctantly, he holstered his piece and proceeded skyward once more.

  “Still after us,” Ryan warned the others.

  “Fuck that,” Jak said, and fired twice at the creatures with his .357 Magnum blaster.

  The apes flinched at the noise of the weapon, and one round ricocheted off the wall, spraying out rock chips and dust. The other creased the hairy shoulder of the bull male, and the beast sounded very human as it cried out from the pain of the wound. Then it locked its gaze on Jak, and the teenager saw the murderous intent in its face. He aimed again, and the mutie moved just as he fired, the round missing completely.

  Unable to load without falling, Jak holstered the piece and concentrated on his climbing once more. But not able to use the hurt leg, his speed was pitiful, and the ape gained on the teenager with nightmarish speed.

  There was a cry from Mildred, and J.B. saw her flail as the root in her hand came free from the wall, loose pebbles sprinkling downward. Instinctively, J.B. reached out a hand to help her, but she was yards away. He watched in horror as the physician struggled not to fall, then cheered as she stabbed a knife into the cliff and used that as an anchor to move to a more secure area.

  Tense minutes passed as the companions did nothing but concentrate on their individual tasks. Fingers dug painfully into the smallest of openings, and boots slipped constantly as they tried to dig in for a purchase that would hold their weight, if only for a scant few seconds.

  Pausing to catch his breath, Ryan shot at the hunting apes and scored a wound. The beast was still scaling the cliff, but much slower. Encouraged by this, J.B. pulled a jagged piece of cliff loose and let it drop at another gorilla. The stone fell straight for the mutie’s face, but the creature reached out with an enormous hand and caught it, then lobbed the stone right back. J.B. barely had time to swing out of the way before the limestone slammed into the mesa where he had just been, exploding into powdery shrapnel.

  “Son of a bitch is fast,” he muttered, paying closer attention to his climbing and wisely deciding to not try that again.

  Then a shout of surprise sounded from above and Dean fell away from the cliff, the end of a thick root grasped in his hands.

  “Dean!” Ryan cried, reaching out for the boy, but Dean was completely beyond his father’s grasp.

  Chapter Eleven

  As Mildred and Krysty fired at the muties below, Doc looked up at Dean’s cry and saw the boy coming. Instantly, the old man dug in his heels and reached out to grab for Dean. He knew it was impossible to catch the lad directly—the impact would pull him off the cliff also. But there was another way. Maybe.

  Doc got a hold of the boy’s belt and pulled with all of his strength, the jerk almost tearing him off the rock face. A searing explosion of pain swelled in his shoulder. Holding on for dear life, the old man swung the boy inward and Dean hit the mesa with stunning force, his head cracking against the stones and going limp.

  By the Three Kennedys, Doc thought. It had worked! He successfully neutralized the inertia by using the cliff itself. The boy could be dead from the blow, but he would have died anyway. At least the boy was given a chance at life.

  Sweating from the strain, Doc could see the boy was unconscious and forced himself to start climbing again. There was no other way. His knuckles were white from tightly holding on to Dean’s belt, and the pain in his shoulder grew into a white-hot agony worse than any bullet wound. It had to be dislocated.

  As he had done many times before in his life, Doc blocked the world from his mind and thought only of the climb and holding on to his young friend. Find another crack, shift his weight, climb, brace himself, find the strength from within, tighten the grip on the belt. Now do it once more. Again, and again. There was no time, no sounds. Only the endless cliff and a universe of distant pain.

  But then there was no more rock before his face, and familiar arms reached to take Dean under the armpits to try to lift him, but Doc refused to relinquish his ward.

  “Let go, Doc,” Mildred said softly. “I’ve got him. It’s okay. Dammit, you old coot, let him go!”

  The man tried to do as requested, but his aching body was moving with a will of its own. Sluggishly, he inched over the edge and crawled onto the top of the mesa, still dragging the unconscious boy
. When he cleared the rim, Doc collapsed onto the bare soil, pulling in lungfuls of air.

  In the background somewhere, Doc heard blaster-fire and the howls of wounded apes. He tried to rise and draw his LeMat, but somebody forced him back down.

  “Rest for a sec,” Ryan ordered, and Doc was too weak to even nod in response.

  “Thank God, Dean is okay,” Mildred announced, brushing the hair from the boy’s face. There were no broken bones or fractures that she could detect. Oh, Dean would have a new scar under his hair, but that was a fine trade against having his brains splattered across the landscape.

  Privately, Mildred still couldn’t believe that Doc managed to catch the boy. She knew his appearance of being old was merely a side effect of time travel, but she had never truly appreciated just how strong the tall man was. Until today.

  As the red fog of exhaustion left his vision, the old man saw Ryan crouched alongside him, resting on his boot heels. Gently, the one-eyed man was probing the swollen shoulder with his fingertips. “No breaks,” he said finally. “Must be dislocated.”

  “I can fix that,” Mildred said, kneeling.

  “Doc, this will hurt bad, but only for a few seconds.”

  “Proceed,” the exhausted man whispered.

  Mildred placed her left boot under the Doc’s armpit and the other on the side of his neck. Wrapping her hands around the man’s wrist, Mildred gently rotated the arm slightly clockwise to align the bones, then savagely pulled with all her strength. Doc screamed, and the electric shot of pain flooded his body with cold adrenaline.

  “Better,” Doc said in an almost normal voice, then after a moment carefully lifted the arm and tried flexing his hand. “Much better. Thank you, my dear Dr. Wyeth.”

  In an unusual display of affection, she ruffled his crop of silvery hair. “No prob.”

  Nearby, J.B. was standing at the edge of the cliff, reloading the Uzi, while Krysty and Jak tossed grens at the gorillas. The dull thuds of the grens faintly shook the ground, and the muties briefly shrieked. Working the arming bolt, J.B. started firing short bursts over the side, and another ape howled, the noise quickly dwindling into the distance to abruptly stop.

  “Two retreating,” Jak stated, thumbing rounds into the Ruger, then switching weapons back to his Colt. His Ruger Redhawk sported only a four-inch barrel, which made it a fast draw. But the six-inch barrel of the Colt Python made a difference in accuracy. Maybe he’d keep both; they made a nice combo.

  “Nobody escapes,” Ryan said in a voice of ice. Sliding the Steyr off his shoulder, the man went to the edge and swept the cliff face with the telescope mounted on the longblaster. When the crosshairs found a mutie, he centered the scope on its face and blasted its features with a 7.62 mm hollowpoint round. The other tried to flatten against the cliff to escape, but Ryan winged it in the leg, and, as it doubled over to grab the wound, he planted a round into its ear. Already chilled, the gorilla went sailing off the rock face and impacted heavily into the ground.

  Ryan pumped a few additional rounds into any corpse that was mostly intact. He wasn’t going to have the apes come back in the night to attack the companions in their sleep.

  “See any more?” J.B. asked with a frown.

  “Not yet,” Ryan stated, slinging the longblaster on a shoulder. “But there’s no way we wiped out all of them. I’ll check on the others. You stand guard.”

  “Done.”

  Holding a wad of cloth to his head, Dean went over to Doc, a trickle of blood flowing from under his dark hair.

  “Thanks,” the boy said, extending a hand. “Owe you.”

  Gingerly, the old man took the hand and they shook. “Next time,” Doc said with a smile, “you catch me.”

  “Done,” Dean said seriously.

  Suddenly, a hairy arm came over the edge of the mesa and the big bull mutie rose into view. The companions drew their blasters, but Jak was first, the Colt firing as the barrel cleared the holster. Ryan was only a split second behind the teenager, and the men led the rest of the companions in hammering the beast with lead until it staggered backward and plummeted out of sight.

  “That’s six,” Ryan said, working the bolt to drop in a fresh clip. He pocketed the spent mag and put his back to the cliff. “Let’s get walking. I’m on point, J.B. cover the rear.”

  Moving away from the edge of the mesa, the companions wearily trudged along the bare ground. Ryan could see his friends needed rest and some food, but this wasn’t the area for that. Once they put a few miles between themselves and the jungle, he’d find a secure spot where they could establish a campsite. Even he got tired after that much combat.

  Lagging slightly behind the rest, Jak was shuffling along, trying to keep the weight off his foot. Doc slowed to walk alongside the teenager, then passed over his ebony stick.

  “Just a loan,” Doc said.

  Jak nodded and, switching the Magnum to his other hand, levered himself along using the stick as a cane. Some of the tension eased from his face, and his speed noticeably increased.

  The top of the mesa was a flat field of bare ground, stretching before them in an endless vista of rough ground that resembled black glass.

  “Cooled lava,” Krysty said, nudging a crystalline spire with her boot.

  Squinting, Ryan looked at the two volcanoes on the island. “Too far away,” he stated. “Something else slagged this ground.”

  “Nuke?”

  “Probably so.” The Deathlands warrior checked the rad counter on his lapel and saw it registering only normal background activity.

  “Clear,” Ryan announced in relief.

  The Uzi cradled in his arms, J.B. glanced at his own rad counter and nodded in agreement. The area was safe.

  Tiny cracks were starting to appear in the smooth flow, and soon small weeds dotted the black ground, the tufts highly visible against the dark material. The greenery thickened until it carpeted the land. Ahead of the companions were trees and bushes, the beginnings of a small forest that appeared to reach all the way to the towering ruins of the predark metropolis. The gleaming towers of steel and concrete rose dozens of stories high, without any apparent sign of corrosion or blast damage.

  A flock of birds nesting in the grassy field took flight at the approach of the norms, and Ryan jerked to a halt. The rest of the companions froze, weapons at the ready, when the man knelt and waved them closer.

  “We’re not the first to reach the top,” Ryan said, lifting a human skull out of the weeds.

  The object was clean, without a sign of flesh, but the bone was still white, not the dusky yellow of a skull long exposed to the inclement weather.

  “How old?” Ryan asked, passing it over to the physician.

  Mildred turned the skull and checked inside. “Year,” she stated, biting a lip. “Maybe two. But certainly no longer than that.”

  “Not a predark?” Dean asked, leaning in to see.

  With a crack, Mildred removed the lower jaw and displayed the pitted yellow, teeth. “All these cavities, and not a sign of dental work?” she said as a question. “No way this man is from my era.”

  “Man?” Krysty asked curiously.

  “You can tell from the size,” Ryan replied, standing and brushing off his pants. Odd there was only a head in the middle of a field.

  A few yards away, Jak gave a sharp whistle.

  “More,” the teenager announced, lifting a shiny femur from the grass. Other than the skull, the thigh bone was the most identifiable part of the human skeleton, with its double knuckles at the top and bottom. It also made a damn fine club.

  “And over here,” Krysty added, scowling, looking for pelvis bones. The bones were all mixed together, cracked open and chewed by animals, and some folks carried away skulls of their enemies as trophies. Counting the number of hipbones was the only way to get an accurate number of skeletons.

  “Nine,” she announced after a couple of minutes. “Could have been a hunting party. Or raiders.”

  Trying not
to step on any bones, Mildred joined the redhead. “Yeah, they’re all adult males, but…look there, some of these are white, some brittle and yellow.” The physician lifted her head and pulled her blaster. “I think this is the dumping spot for the something that has been chilling folks for decades.”

  “The gorillas?” Krysty asked in concern.

  Mildred vehemently shook her head. “I saw the teeth of those muties. They were big, but herbivores. Meat eaters aced these men.”

  “Found their weapons,” Dean announced, standing and wiping the dirt off a broken knife. The metal was green with corrosion, holes eaten completely through the blade.

  Ambling over, Ryan saw the scattered remains of carved bone and bits of plastic mixed together, the steel weapons reduced to mere ghostly outlines of rust. Lifting the largest piece of metal, Ryan studied it carefully.

  “What is this, a matchlock? No, a pipe gun,” he said, the cumbersome weapon crumbling under his touch. The primitive longblaster was merely an iron pipe with a hole in the top for a fuse, and a wooden stock closed off the rear end. That was it. Load the muzzle, light the fuse, aim and wait. The device was so crude it made a flintlock look like a nuke.

  “Dark night, nobody on the islands would use these anymore,” J.B. stated. “This guy must have bought the farm a long time ago. A lot more than a couple of years.”

  Mildred shook her head. “This is new bones on top of old weapons. Layers of people died over the decades.”

  Glancing at the field and forest, Ryan rubbed his chin to the sound of sandpaper. “Folks must have been trying to reach the ruins for quite a while, and something always stopped them right here.”

  “Or trying to leave,” Dean added, observing the towering monoliths, their mirrored sides shimmering in the reflected light of the noonday sun.

  “Welcome to El Dorado,” Doc muttered, drawing both of his weapons.

  Adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses, J.B. frowned. “Don’t get you, Doc,” he said. “I’ve been to Eldorado, big ville in south Tex. Nothing but bars and gaudy houses.”