by James Axler
Ryan obeyed. The Hummer heeled over alarmingly to the left as the wag turned sharply. The one-eyed man almost left his teeth in the steering wheel as the front bucked up. And then the engine was straining, whining in anguish as it struggled to push them over a boulder in their path. The wag climbed, almost stalled, then pitched forward. Ryan gritted his teeth as the wag’s belly scraped over the sharp-toothed lava rock. But the rugged vehicle neither dropped its guts nor hung. It ground over the top and down. Mildred cursed as the top of her head hit the ceiling.
Ryan cranked his head around to see a yellow glowing worm of lava force its way over a dam of rock and slop down in a shower of sparks, right where the wag had been before the Armorer had shouted his warning.
A long breath escaped Ryan’s lungs. J.B. shoved his face back down the well of the blaster-mount. “At least we’ve shown we can take the bastard best the mountain has to throw at us!” the Armorer called.
The Hummer rocked to an impact that sank it on its springs. Two curving white blades, spaced a hand span apart, suddenly protruded downward from the Kevlar roof.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. A dark jet suddenly spewed from each curved blade. Jak and Doc cried out in alarm and flattened themselves against the doors.
“What—” Ryan began.
From almost directly overhead came the ripping roar of J.B.’s Uzi, loud even over the ceaseless bellow of the volcano. With a rending, wrenching sound, the curved blades were yanked out of the vehicle’s roof.
“Snake…” the Armorer shouted, a sudden crackle of noise like skyscraper-size firecrackers going off drowned most of his words.
“What?”
“I said, it’s a bastard rattlesnake, the biggest bastard snake I ever saw!”
Ryan stuck his head out the window and craned his neck around. Silhouetted against a demonic sky, a head as wide across as Ryan’s own shoulders reared up ten or a dozen feet above the Hummer on an impossibly thick body. Ryan wondered for an endless interval between one heartbeat and the next whether the creature was actually that huge or whether its size was an illusion produced by the glaring, ever-shifting light.
The head split open into a vast flame-yellow mouth. Its fangs, each as long as one of Ryan’s arms, unfolded like the blades of a lock-back knife. As Ryan slammed the accelerator home, the head darted forward with dizzying speed, fangs thrusting ahead of it like spears.
Mildred screamed in fury more than terror as the fangs stabbed down through the roof, one gleaming ivory scimitar missing her head by inches. Gathering the now semiconscious Krysty into her strong arms, Mildred rolled herself and the redhead to the side of the cargo compartment, away from the reeking, fuming venom that spurted in pulses from the fangs. Then she turned back to hammer at the nearest fang with the heel of her fist. It had no effect.
“A fascinating adaptation,” Doc remarked in as calmly conversational a voice as the others had ever heard him use. “Clearly the serpent soaks up heat from the ambient rocks, allowing it to move and hunt as freely at night as in the daytime.”
“That’s great, Doc,” Ryan said, “but how do we kill the nuke-blasted thing?”
Despite the wag’s wild bucking, J.B. popped back up through the vacant gun mount with his Uzi. He emptied the magazine at the creature in three long ragged bursts as it coiled yet again to strike.
Ryan saw a relatively clear stretch of slope, if steep, and sent the wag bucketing down it amid a baby avalanche of loose rubble. The impacts slammed his lower jaw into the upper and threatened to shake his joints apart.
“We’re getting away!” Mildred shouted.
“We better,” J.B. said, dropping back down into the passenger seat to change mags. “I might as well be pissing at the bastard. I’m not sure any of my rounds even penetrated.”
The monstrous snake launched itself, not in a strike but slithering down the slope parallel to them, flowing sinuously over jagged steaming black rock and gray boulders like a living avalanche. It caught up with them, lunged again, this time as if trying to bring its terrible mass crushing down on the wag. Ryan spun the wheel right. For a terrifying fraction of a second the vehicle slewed sideways in the scree, heeling way over toward the bottom of the slope, threatening to break away at any instant and go rolling down the smoky like a loose boulder, battering itself to pieces and churning its occupants to lumpy red puree. Then the vast cleated run-flat tires bit and thrust the wag forward across the slope, no longer in danger of tipping over but still not clear of the snake.
Ryan heard loud reports from close behind, dared a look over his shoulder. From one window Jak was cranking shots from his Python handblaster, from the other, Doc was booming away with his venerable LeMat. The pistol rounds, like the 9 mm bullets fired by J.B.’s Uzi, were almost certainly as futile as spitting at the rattlesnake, but Ryan had to grin approval of his comrades’ fighting spirit.
The thing was right after them, writhing with incredible speed. On a flat, on anything like a decent surface, the Hummer would’ve left the horror in its dust. On this evil broken slope, the snake had every advantage.
“I can’t even slow the bastard, Ryan,” J.B. yelled, blitzing off another magazine. “Dunno if even your Steyr could hurt it.”
“Nor, it seems, can we outrun it, had we Hermes’s wings to speed our heels,” Doc Tanner murmured.
“Then, like Trader used to say, when all else fails—cheat,” Ryan said grimly.
“I thought that was Samantha the Panther,” J.B. said.
“Whoever.” Ryan spun the wheel left. His companions yelled in alarm as the wag bounced right and cut across the giant snake’s path. The rattler, surprised by its prey apparently turning on it, reared up hissing. It struck. Anticipating the attack, Ryan had cranked the wheel and taken off at a tangent. The Hummer still rocked as the monster’s head glanced off the wag’s rear bumper.
Ryan was hammering the wag right across the mountainside, back toward the spewing vent—back upward toward the river of living fire that had almost trapped them before.
“Ryan,” J.B. said from the gun mount. “Ryan, lava—”
Lava it was, yes, running down the mountain at them in a racing flow of glow, red and fast as water. For his part Ryan was racing to meet the stream. It spurted out over a shelf of rock as if reaching out for the puny skittering thing. The snake raced after them, blunt nose almost prodding their tailgate. The fires of Hell danced in its slit-pupilled eyes.
The liquid rock-stream splashed down behind a boulder in a shower of glowing gobbets. J.B. cried out in pain as a droplet of yellow-glowing lava brushed his cheek. Another burned right through the roof and struck, hissing by Ryan’s right boot as the Hummer jounced across the lava stream’s path with the rattler in mad pursuit.
A vast, fiery wave of lava broke over the boulder and thundered down onto the snake. The monster reared back, emitting a shriek that threatened to rupture the companions’ eardrums. A huge cloud of steam bellowed out as the molten rock flash-boiled the snake’s body fluids. A terrible stench, like burning hair magnified a millionfold, enveloped the wag. Mildred puked noisily in the back.
“Dark night!” J.B. yelled.
The rattler’s head reared out of the lava. The molten rock fell away from it in burning rivulets. For a terrifying moment it seemed as if the monster would continue its hellhound pursuit, shedding the lava like a duck’s wing shedding water.
Then it collapsed, to sink steaming and reeking into the already crusting lava pool.
Chapter Five
The wag sat creaking and popping as it cooled off in the long grass beside a stream. Ryan squatted on a roof blistered and discolored by embers, hot gases and blobs of lava, and torn in several places by the giant snake’s fangs. He cradled his Steyr across his lean-muscled thighs. Between thumb and forefinger of his right hand he absently rolled the stem of a blue-white wildflower he’d picked before climbing to the top of the Hummer. Patches of them and differently hued blossoms dotted the fertil
e zone they were in now like pigment spills.
He was keeping watch while his comrades cleaned themselves and the wag. Mildred had insisted on the cleanup, and she wasn’t just being predark fastidious.
“We need to clear out every last trace of that venom,” she’d said. “Even assuming its potency and characteristics are those of normal rattlesnake poison, and don’t carry any kind of nasty mutie kicker, if any of it gets into an open wound, even a scratch, you’ll be in a world of hurt. Rattler venom’s primarily a hematotoxin. It makes your red blood cells explode. And we’re fresh out of antivenin.”
So they were taking a pause, down in the surprisingly green and fertile valley that stretched away north from the mountain into whose bowels they had jumped, and a similar volcanic peak a few miles away that didn’t seem to be erupting as enthusiastically. They still seemed to be a good twenty miles from the wide lake. In the bright sunlight they could make out the shapes of skyscrapers rising from the middle of it.
J.B. tucked his minisextant into his kit and glanced at his old map. “Latitude’s right for Mexland,” he announced. “Right about Mex City, truth to tell.”
“I could’ve told you that,” Mildred said. She was redressing Krysty’s shoulder. The giant rattler’s venom had splashed her bandages. Thinking fast, Mildred had clawed them away before the poison could come into contact with Krysty’s wounds.
“Air thin,” Jak said.
“Yeah. Good thing we’ve been up in the mountains getting acclimated for a few days. This whole valley’s pretty high. Don’t remember just how high that is exactly. I came down here for vacation once, couple years before the balloon went up. I recognize those mountains. Big one we popped out of is Popocatépetl. The shorter one’s Iztaccíhuatl.”
“What’s that mean?” J.B. asked, blinking owlishly through his spectacles, which he had just cleaned on his shirttail.
“How should I know? I can’t even spell’em. I don’t even know why it looks as if the ruins of Mexico City are out in the middle of a great big lake.”
“They were lovers,” Doc intoned. He was wringing out his shirt. His thin, shrunken chest was fishbelly pale. In comparison his hands and face looked deeply tanned.
“Say what?” J.B. asked. “You’re not losing your grip again, are you, Doc?”
The old man didn’t deign to respond. “She was the emperor’s daughter. A most beauteous maid. He was a mighty young warrior. They fell in love. Her father disapproved. He sent the young man off to war, then told his daughter he had fallen in battle. Whereupon the girl expired from grief. Then the warrior returned home to find his beloved dead, and he died of grief, as well. The gods, taking pity on them, transformed them into the mountains we have just quit. Iztaccíhuatl means ‘Sleeping Woman.’ Popocatépetl is ‘Smoking Mountain.’”
Jak was squatting by the stream, ignoring the fact his feet were sunk in cold muck. He turned his ruby gaze over his shoulder on Doc.
“Gods turned to mountains?” he asked. “What good that do?”
Doc shrugged delicately. “The ways of gods, the theologians assure us, are not the ways of men. Though in sooth, the gods and goddesses of most of the globe’s mythologies seem to manifest a decidedly puckish sense of humor.”
Ryan checked the rad counter clipped to his coat for maybe the dozenth time. “Anybody getting any kind of a reading?”
“Nope,” J.B. said. “Background’s mebbe a little high. That’s it.”
“So no nukes went off in the vicinity.” Ryan shook his head. “Something did some damage.”
“No kidding,” Mildred said. “In my day this was the most populous city on Earth. We should be in the suburbs now. Something didn’t just damage them, it made them disappear.”
“Mebbe the smokies?” J.B. asked. Ryan shrugged.
J.B. had begun to load the few supplies they’d managed to scavenge from the Popocatépetl redoubt back into the wag. He noticed that Jak was staring out across the little stream again, seemingly morose.
“What’s eating at your innards, Jak?” he asked.
“Snake,” the youth said.
“You’re thinking about that bastard snake?”
Jak shrugged. “Big,” he said. “Caught, eat like kings.”
As if to emphasize his words, he suddenly lunged into the stream in a great splash. He grabbed, then he straightened, holding a squirming leopard frog. He bit off the head, spat it into the weeds, then began to eat the still-kicking amphibian.
Mildred winced. “I hate it when he does stuff like that.”
Ryan gave a last look around. Their immediate surroundings were broken enough with jagged ridges and obvious cooled-lava flows that any ill-intentioned strangers could work their way to well within longblaster range of the party and he’d never see them. He tossed away the flower and jumped to the ground. The soil was black, rich and springy beneath the soles of his boots.
“How’s Krysty?” he asked Mildred, walking to where the woman was laid out by the stream.
“Pretty much out of it. The infection’s taking hold and she’s obviously weakened some since we got away from the eruption, with all that raw Earth energy exploding all over the damn landscape.”
Ryan thought he kept his feelings from his face. He had long years of practice at that. But Mildred said, “Don’t worry. It’s not so bad as it sounds. I think it’s a good sign she’s out. Her body is fighting to repel the infection and start healing. Her mind has shut down so that she can concentrate her resources on the task at hand. At this point, other than trying to avoid any more exciting encounters with the local wildlife, which was something else I didn’t see when I was down here as a turista, it’s most important to make sure she wakes up regularly to eat. Keep her strength up.”
She stood. “Speaking of which, I’m not so concerned about the food thing as I was, for any of us. There’s some real fertile-looking land out here, interspersed with all the lava flows and ash falls. So I don’t think we’ll have to settle for feeding her raw frog. But since it looks as if there’s likely to be better on tap, it’s probably not too soon to start looking out for it.”
“I think there’s a ville a couple miles ahead,” Ryan said. “We’ll make for that.”
THEY CAME AROUND one of the omnipresent saw-toothed hogsbacks and found themselves on the outskirts of a ville. At first glance it appeared almost painfully neat, compared to the devastation and decay they were used to: sturdy, square adobe-brick houses, washed in white and pink and shades of tan and brown, with heavy ceiling beams projecting from the fronts. Not a whole lot different than they’d seen in New Mexico north of the Jornada del Muerte, if better kept-up. But worlds different from the urban sprawl that had occupied this area a hundred years before, according to the recollections of Doc as well as Mildred.
The Hummer had rolled in among the first few houses. The companions realized with a sort of shared shock that they’d allowed the ville’s appearance at a distance of tidiness momentarily to deceive them. Obviously the place had been built with care since skydark and tended with love throughout however many years it had stood.
It had, however, been trashed quite recently, by the looks of things.
Many houses sported windows of glass, flat, clear, manufactured panes, not ripply and murky from being made in some postnuke glassblower’s shop and not purple from a century’s exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, either. Sure signs that the residents traded with scavvies working a big city where warehouses and shops still contained unbroken sheets of glass. They were also sure signs of prosperity, since such salvage didn’t come cheap.
Many of the panes were broken, which was a sign bad trouble had come to the ville. The modern world was no haven of law and order, likely no more so here than in the most nuke-scarred regions of North America, but one thing about it: people who built their homes by hand and kept the trim painted and paid to put in nice, salvaged windows didn’t tolerate casual vandalism. You tagged, they slagged. You busted a win
dow, they busted you. In pieces. That simple.
Doors neatly painted dark red or blue—many hardly faded at all by the intense high-altitude sun—hung askew from their frames. Mismatched curtains of savvied cloth flapped freely over glass fangs in the quickening afternoon breeze. The travelers saw no flames but smelled smoke—and floating on the wind the unmistakable stink of fresh death.
From the gloomy depths of a hut with its front door gone altogether lurched a mound of horror. It had no head. Rather its right shoulder came to a point perhaps seven feet tall, so that it had to squat down on thin bandy legs to clear the doorway. Its left shoulder was a good foot and a half lower. Normal-appearing arms hung from both shoulders. Another arm sprouted halfway down the mutie’s right side. It had a single saucer-size eye in the middle of its lesion-covered torso, that wept constant yellow pus toward a slack-lipped, jag-toothed mouth.
Jak stuck his hand out the window past Ryan’s head and shot the mutie with his Python.
Chapter Six
The 158-grain semijacketed slug hit the mutie in its single eye. A spray of fluid that looked more maroon than norm blood and some clotted pale chunks of what had to have been brains erupted from the creature’s back. Clear ichor gushing from its collapsed ocular, the mutie emitted a whistling shriek from its mouth and collapsed.
Despite his case-hardened constitution, Ryan winced. The .357 Magnum round had maybe the nastiest muzzle-blast of any handblaster he’d encountered, sharper and more painful to the ear than even the louder but lower-pitched report of a .44 Magnum. Primer fragments blasted out between the rear of the cylinder and the frame stung his cheek and spattered like rain on his eyepatch.
He frowned, not just at the ringing in his ears. A hunter born and bred, as much feral predatory animal as human, Jak was hard even by the standards of his time and place. The word mercy was in his vocabulary only because Doc had taught it to him. But the ruby-eyed albino boy had always accepted Ryan’s rules, which were pretty much the same as vanished Trader’s had been. And one of the foremost was: No chilling for chilling’s sake.
