by James Axler
J.B. glanced sidelong at their host, standing above them at the rail. Over one shoulder protruded the long slender barrel of a Browning M-2 set in another improvised mount. In a way the cabin cruiser might still be what it started life as, a rich man’s toy. But it was one with teeth. Nor was the baron himself unarmed. He wore a white shirt with loose sleeves, dungarees, a belt with a big wide turquoise-inlaid silver buckle, and strapped onto it a black combat holster. In the holster rode, cocked and locked, a blaster the Armorer had blissfully identified as a .40-caliber Witness, a lightly modified version of the classic CZ-75 license-built by Tanfoglio in Italy. It was an altogether businesslike fighting blaster, and seemed startlingly out of character for their spare, small, almost bureaucratic host.
“Look at him up there,” the Armorer muttered. “He’s enjoying this way too much. He ought have a bandanna around his head, an eyepatch and a cutlass in his teeth, like a pirate in an old-time pic book.”
“Where’d you ever see pic books with pirates in them?” asked Ryan, who had grown up reading a tattered copy of Treasure Island from Front Royal’s baronial library.
J.B. shrugged. “My mama told me about them,” he said. “She actually had herself a few books, growing up.”
“We don’t hear you talk about your childhood very often, J.B.,” Krysty said with a radiant, if slightly wan, smile.
IT WAS THE MORNING of their third day in the City in the Lake. The first, the morning after their arrival, the companions had mostly slept—even Mildred, after she was finally convinced the baron’s med people were competent to look after Krysty. The next day had been spent lounging, eating, talking with Don Tenorio and some of his lieutenants who spoke English, such as young Ernesto, his bespectacled chief aide—who was along for this cruise, although constantly fussing on the talkie—and his rather glum and cadaverous-looking sec boss, Colonel Solano. Krysty had already begun to regain consciousness for protracted periods, and her fever had greatly receded. Mildred had been busiest of any of the companions, shooing the others away from Krysty’s bedside after brief visits to keep them from tiring her out, insisting that Krysty herself sleep and drink as much fluid and soup made from the chickens the scavvies kept in profusion as she could.
Just as Mildred had predicted, given rest, comparative security, and maybe a bit of a boost from Gaia, what with all the seismic energy being released in the area, Krysty’s immune system had driven back the nasty infection caused by the shit-smeared crossbow quarrel, and gone a long way toward healing the actual wound. Had any other patient suffering similar insult tried to climb out of bed inside a week to ten days, Mildred maintained, she’d have stunned them with a bat. But physician that she was, she had learned to trust Krysty’s instincts about the redhead’s own healing processes. If Krysty thought what she needed today was fresh air, sunshine and a little light exercise, then fine; Mildred was happy to kiss her and the rest goodbye and to spend the day propped up in a real bed drinking chocolate sweetened with honey, another venerable local tradition that had been revived in the modern-day valley.
J.B. SHRUGGED IN RESPONSE to Krysty’s remark and looked away to the green rolling country stretching north. Its serene beauty was deceptive. One of the things making Ernesto twitter even more than usual were reports that the Chichimec horde, under their mad prophet Nezahualcoyótl, was on the move, devouring crops—and villagers—like mutie locusts within twenty miles of the Lake. They were moving slowly but ominously closer each day.
“Not much to tell,” J.B. said.
Completing the expedition was the young albino Jak Lauren, his white hair whipping his scarred lean face, sunlight twinkling on the jagged bits of metal worked into his jacket. His arms were folded on the railing at the boat’s prow. He walked a small leaf-blade throwing knife along the backs of the fingers of his right fist like a stage conjurer with a coin.
The boat had nearly circumnavigated the ruined city. Now it swung to port to avoid a fallen skyscraper, faced with shiny dark-red stone, that stretched like a finger into the lake. A pelican perched on a corner of its roof, which stood perhaps two feet out of the water. As the boat growled past, it spread its great white wings and flapped majestically away.
The small, spare alcade had vanished from the flying deck above them. Now he strolled out onto the foredeck. “You’ve seen what it looks like from the outside, my friends,” he said in that rich voice, which seemed it by rights should emerge from a much grander, more imposing personage. “Now would you care to tour the streets of our city?”
“Sure,” Ryan said. “I’m interested in seeing your operation.”
“Then see it you shall.”
Don Tenorio held up a spare brown finger. The helmsman in the glass-enclosed cabin put the wheel over. The boat heeled to starboard, curved toward a watery avenue that led between two looming buildings, one of which had broken off a hundred feet or so above, another that soared, apparently intact, a good twenty stories.
The boat slowed to a putting creep. “With the constant earth tremors, things are constantly falling into the water,” Don Tenorio explained. “Also existing snags shift unpredictably, or structural steel members can be thrust without warning into channels that yesterday were clear. Besides, we don’t wish to swamp anybody’s home or garden with our wake.”
He had a point. Off their port bow floated a growing plat perhaps a hundred feet square, its furrows of dark soil sprouting knee-high corn plants. To their starboard rode a houseboat of sorts, or perhaps a floating shanty, rising two stories above its gunwales and seeming to have been cobbled together of colorful panels of plastic. Or to be in the process; two men and a woman were engaged in fixing a new sheet to the upper story, the woman on the roof, one man on a ladder that the second man steadied from the deck. The woman and the man on the ladder waved cheerfully to the boat as it prowled past.
Don Tenorio raised a hand in reply and beamed. “For a century people shunned this city, thinking it accursed—believing horrific spirits stalked its streets and canals. We had to sneak to the ruins in our boats like thieves in the night, lest we be attacked for running the risk of disturbing the evil ghosts and bringing their wrath upon the surrounding villages. Danger we found here in abundance, even death. But no curse.
“For our daring we have won great riches. And now that we have, through our sweat and ingenuity, regained a foothold in this once-great city, we can dare to hope to envision the day—maybe not in our lifetimes, maybe not for many lifetimes of our descendants—when it is one day great again.”
“A most inspirational dream,” Doc murmured. “May you and your followers realize it.”
But Ryan felt a chill scurry like a small scaly mutie down his spine as they passed between the giant structures and into the ruin itself. Only the shade, he told himself. But then Krysty caught his eye and gave him a slight smile that was almost a grimace, and he wondered if her scant, sporadic doomie powers were showing her some foreboding glimpses into the future of the baron and his pioneering people.
Not ours, he told himself, or she’d say something. He moved to her side, the right, laid a hand on her unwounded shoulder. She reached up to cover it with her own.
In some places the remaining structures crowded to either side of them like glass and stone and steel cliffs. In others they fell away to leave the Paloma crossing broad swatches of open water covering what had been plazas to begin with, or places where nothing taller than the lake was deep had survived the quakes. From one such the companions all pointed and made wondering noises at the spectacle of three skyscrapers, twenty stories high and more, that had been felled by one falling against the other so that they lay tilted like dominos; the last was propped on the semicrushed remnants of a building that had either been built shorter or had itself snapped off.
“Impressive devastation,” Doc observed.
Just how many followers Don Tenorio had trying to wrestle the city back from that devastation, chaos and the elements, neither the alcade nor Five
Ax had specified. Although they seemed well-meaning and openspirited, perhaps too much so for the age, Ryan had to admit they were far from foolish. Their habit of talking freely, even expansively, of their efforts seemed always somehow to skate around giving information that might be of great use to ill-wishers—such as their numbers. Still, from circumstance, Ryan knew they had to number in the hundreds, perhaps as many as a thousand.
“Haven’t made much of a mark on the place, however many of them there may be,” J.B. said, sidling up to Ryan. They had been together so many years it was often as if one could read the other’s mind, a communion Ryan also shared with Krysty and, to a lesser extent, the other companions. The Armorer had been his comrade almost his entire adult life, since the early days in Trader’s caravan.
Ryan’s old friend was also right, as usual. As they cruised cautiously along the waterways between the half-destroyed structures, they saw pockets of concerted activity—here, people clearing rubble from a floor two stories above the green water that had been completely exposed by the devastation; there, people loading cardboard boxes into a flat-bottomed boat. All of them greeted their passage with a cheerful wave. Most of them seemed to be armed, carrying handblasters holstered or standing watch with ready longblasters.
The timbre of the water wag’s engine changed. Tenorio glanced up from his chart as the big boat began to slow still further.
“I’ve arranged for you to view one of our explorations,” the alcade said, approaching Ryan and the rest in the prow. “It will give you a chance to meet some of us doing the actual work, see how we live our lives.”
Ryan nodded. He was a little dubious himself. The wag was approaching the flank of a building faced in glazed stone of a rusty red color that leaned crazily against the black tower next to it. A bumper of tires had been hung between two glassless windows with a blue nylon rope so that they hung level just above the water. A houseboat was anchored a few yards down the street. Evidently it had been moved to allow the Paloma room to pull in. As the boat slowed, a crewman tossed a line up to an open window. Hands grabbed it, made it fast within, then a rope ladder was tossed down.
“My friends?” Tenorio indicated the ladder. “I regret the inconvenience of having to scramble to get inside.”
“We done worse,” J.B. said, rubbing the back of his neck, “mebbe a time or two.”
By unspoken consensus Jak, with his predator’s instinct for danger, swarmed up first. Krysty went next. She negotiating the swaying ladder with neither hesitation nor visible difficulty. Ryan still wondered if she wasn’t being ballsier than was good for her. Still, he trusted her judgment implicitly in all things, and who would know better what she could handle?
As he followed her up into the cool depths of the building, the unmistakable sound of a muffled shot came echoing from within.
Chapter Thirteen
Ryan rolled over the top, came up with his SIG-Sauer in hand. Or tried to. What he actually did was half roll, half skid down the canted concrete floor until he fetched up into what proved to be a waist-level web of bungee cords. After only a moderate amount of flailing with his left hand, he was able to get his feet under him and recover. He was glad he’d had the blaster on safe.
Laughing silently, Jak helped him disentangle with his left hand. His right held his shiny Python. Krysty stood down along the angle where floor met wall with two bearded male scavvies, her own blaster in hand. The younger and trimmer of the pair was just holding his hands up to her in a back-off-the-trigger gesture.
“Our scout,” he announced in accented English. “She’s fine. No threat.”
The others joined them with a minimum of comedy. Doc slid down on the seat of his pants, maintaining great dignity. The carpet had been devoured long since by some sort of ugly crud, so that now all that remained of the floor covering were patches of powdery yellow fungus. Ryan didn’t have the heart to tell the older man the seat of his trousers was now bright yellow.
The scavvies on station were introduced. The one who spoke English, a middle-size guy with thick chest and shoulders, very sleek black hair and carefully trimmed beard framing his broad oblong face, was Ricardo. The other, a big, unkempt guy with frizzy wiry hair standing out in gray clumps to either side of his bald head like scrubbing pads, a scarred face with an unhealthy-looking potato of a nose, and an imposing paunch pushing out his blue-gray mechanic’s-style coveralls, was Teo. He wore a .45 1911 auto. Ricardo had a Beretta.
Ricardo explained to them that they were surveying. Their team, the three of them and their scout who had fired the shot from somewhere off in the ventilation system, were basically mapping out what parts of the buildings on this block were accessible, what they had been and how likely they were to reward further work, either exploration or hauling out goodies.
“This was just an office building,” Ricardo explained. “Not likely much useful. Still—” He smiled and shrugged. “Who knows what we find?”
“How are you doing?” Ryan asked Krysty, making his way next to her where she sat on the sloping floor with her knees up. She had made sure not to plant herself in a patch of the chrome-yellow mold.
“Fine, lover,” she said. “Really. The energy I’m getting from all around is fantastic.”
“If you say so,” he said.
A cry floated out the hole in what had been the ceiling that gave into the HVAC ducts. A moment later a figure came crawling out hand over hand on a rope that had been tied to a heavy, rusted hunk of desk and let into the hole. Ricardo scrambled up the wall to lend a hand.
The scout allowed himself to be helped out and down, although the way he moved indicated he didn’t really need it. Or she, Ryan realized. The face was so smudged with grime and overhung by a hard hat topped with a battery-powered lamp that it was hard to tell at first.
“Allow me to introduce Claudia,” Ricardo told the visitors with pride. “She is my novia. What do you say? My fiancée.”
Her face split in a bright smile. She came scooting down the angled wall. She wore a backpack. On the outside of it was lashed, of all things, a huge dead mutie rat.
The foreigners were quickly introduced. Claudia expressed pleasure at meeting them in Spanish, duly translated by Doc. She seemed a pretty, vivacious little woman underneath the gunk.
She had been creepy-crawling the other rooms and offices accessible through the ductwork. This, apparently, was her job: the nasty, claustrophobic and dangerous work of crawling through the bowels of a steel-and-concrete stiff, looking to strike prime salvage. She had not found anything very worthwhile on this jaunt. Until the rat had lunged for her face from a side vent, at which point she had popped it neatly between the eyes with her handblaster.
Now she unslung the rat and held it excitedly up for inspection. It was a suitably nasty-looking specimen, body a good two feet long, its orange incisors as long as Ryan’s little finger. It looked to have a ruff or mane of quills like a porcupine, but that might have simply been extra-long guard hairs matted by immersion in none-too-clean water.
Jak eyed it with keen red interest. “Good eats?” he inquired hopefully.
Claudia grinned even wider and bobbed her head.
THEY HAD LUNCH on the houseboat, which served the trio as mobile workshop and base of operations. Mutie rat wasn’t on the menu; the scavvies told their guests that to be digestible it had to be slow-cooked many hours in a covered pot, then marinated in red chili sauce, at which point it became an excellent tamale filler. Instead there were chicken enchiladas and beans.
J.B. talked shop with Teo; the large, lumpy, coverall-clad man was the general fix-it guy and machine doctor, who both kept the mechanisms the team used, such as pumps and generators, alive and kicking, and examined scavenged equipment to determine its function and whether it was ever likely to be able to be coaxed into performing that function again. He wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about blasters, which of course were J.B.’s abiding passion, but the pair had managed to lose themselves in a disc
ussion of small engines. Doc, whose knowledge of Spanish, while both wide and deep was decidedly nontechnical, did his best to keep up the translation. Fortunately much of the jargon was similar in Spanish and English.
Tenorio was discussing the progress of the team’s survey of the block with Ricardo and Claudia. His two bodyguards were squatting up on the roof, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and batting the breeze, apparently out of preference. Ernesto was back on the water wag, worrying on the radio.
Cleaned up, Claudia, the intrepid dead-skyscraper spelunker, proved to be a strikingly pretty woman, almost certainly not as young as she looked, with fine features, big dancing dark eyes and a restless manner. As she talked, she kept playing with her prize find of the day: a squat, three-inch-tall, wind-up toy in the shape of a green lizard with a row of yellow spines down its back. It still worked; Claudia would wind the plastic key and it would waddle across the table, growling.
“What do you reckon that thing is, anyway?” he asked Krysty.
She looked at him as if the question were double stupe, at the very least. “It’s Godzilla.”
Claudia looked at them. “Sí, sí. Es God-zee-ya.”
“I’ll be switched,” he said as the little monster fetched up against a big bowl with faded fruits painted along the rim. It continued to try to advance, little wind-up motor grumbling and stumpy feet churning. “I remember when I was a kid, how disappointed I was when I found out he wasn’t real.”
“Then you grew up and found out there were plenty of real monsters to go around,” Krysty said, smiling.
“Ain’t it the truth.”
She was obviously not all the way back to normal, because she didn’t correct his grammar. She hadn’t done that often lately. Instead she looked again at a framed print hanging on the wall beyond the head of the table, over Don Tenorio’s shoulder. It reproduced a stylized kind of painting of a woman in a hooded robe surrounded by golden radiance, standing on a crescent shape like a moon, only black. This time Claudia noted her interest and spoke, seriously for once.
