by James Axler
Dazzled, its mouth on fire, the polar bear swayed blindly into the counter, bumping against it before staggering back against the wall.
That was all the opening Ricky could expect and he knew it. In an instant he was over the counter and running across the ruined aisles of the store, giving a wide berth to the hole in the floor.
He reached the front door in five seconds, pulled at the handle with all his strength, but the door wouldn’t give—it was locked in place.
Ricky glanced back over his shoulder, to where the storeroom was with its back door leading into the cold. The polar bear was writhing behind the counter, black smoke billowing from its ruined mouth. There was simply no way that Ricky could get past it and reach the back door. The creature was as mad as hell and whatever damage he had done its mouth wouldn’t stop its muscular arms delivering a bone-shattering blow to his body, nor its wicked claws carving up his flesh. He was trapped.
“Madre de satanás,” Ricky cursed.
Then something smashed through the boarded-up door behind him. Ricky stepped back, fearing it was another of the mutie creatures. He watched in the darkness as something smashed against the middle board, and it began to splinter, breaking up under a relentless attack from outside. Then he saw the glint of metal, and Jak’s face appeared in the gap that had been created.
“Jak, what kept you?” Ricky asked. It was a stupid thing to ask, but he was scared and close to panic.
In reply, Jak just gave him that eerie, feral grin he sometimes had, and began working the great strip of metal he had produced to pull at the second board over the door, ripping at it like a jimmy.
Behind them, the mutant polar bear was shaking its head angrily as it recovered itself, trudging drunkenly from behind the ruined counter. Ricky watched over his shoulder, bringing the blaster up for another shot and taking careful aim as Jak ripped out the boards that crossed the door. His finger snapped at the trigger, once, twice, but nothing came out. The weapon was empty, but in his panic Ricky had forgotten that. He looked at the blaster angrily, muttering a curse at it as, deep in the darkness of the store, the wounded polar bear began to charge.
Jak’s pale hand reached through the door and shoved a board aside before grabbing Ricky by the back of his jacket and pulling. He wrenched him through the gap as the polar bear hurtled toward them like a runaway steam engine, black smoke still pouring from its burned mouth.
Ricky awoke from whatever daze he had been in and kicked back, wending his body through the narrow gap in the door and almost diving through as Jak pulled him. Behind him, the polar bear continued its charge, battering against the broken door like a rock from a catapult. The door frame shuddered and a cascade of snow tumbled from the roof where the whole building shook. But the door—or what remained of it—held, caging the wild animal within.
Ricky lay faceup in the snow, his breath coming in ragged gasps, Jak standing beside him with the makeshift tool in his hands.
“Okay?” Jak asked.
Still breathing heavily, Ricky nodded. “Damn blaster quit on me,” he explained. “Both of them.”
“Out of ammo,” Jak said and he handed the teenager one of the finds from the corpse upstairs. “Not anymore.” It was a single bullet, one of the three and the only one that would fit the Colt blaster. Ricky took it and fumbled with the weapon, reloading it as the polar bear slammed against the other side of the door just a few feet away from them both.
Jak’s eyes flicked knowingly to the crumbling storefront as the door shook again. “Best move,” he said.
Ricky agreed, pulling himself to his feet and following Jak in a brisk jog across the snowy plain, getting far away from the cluster of buildings as swiftly as they could, before the mutie bear figured another way out.
As they trudged across the white-blanketed hellscape, the snow swirling across their path in fits and starts, Ricky handed the blaster back to Jak. “You should keep this,” he said. “You found it, it’s yours.”
Without a word, Jak took the blaster and shoved it into his waistband with the safety on.
Already, the clutch of buildings was lost behind them amid the swirling snow, while up ahead all they could see were a few trees dotting the horizon like mourners at a grave site.
“You reckon J.B.’s okay?” Ricky said after a while. “Ryan? The others?”
Jak looked at the kid with knowing eyes, eminently wise in comparison to this newcomer to their group. “Ryan always survives,” he said. “J.B., too. We find or they find. We just stay alive.”
Ricky nodded. Stay alive. It sounded so easy the way Jak said it.
* * *
FROM THIS DISTANCE, looking through the ice-caked windowpane, the vicious, gnashing teeth of the chronovores looked like blades stabbing at the snow. Attacking the ground, snapping at the place where the energies swirled uncontrollably, more and more were appearing with each scissor snap of teeth, the sound like crunching aluminium foil. Symon watched uncomfortably as they all attacked the same spot in the snow, dozens of them materializing from the ether, feasting on time’s spilling energies.
“Where did they come from?” he asked.
“Who can say?” Piotr replied. “Something draws them, the same way it stops things or speeds them up, over and over. Sometimes we see ourselves in the mists.”
“Or people we knew,” Marla interjected.
“I saw myself,” Symon admitted thoughtfully. “Out there, when the caribou died. I thought I was hallucinating.”
“You weren’t,” Graz said sullenly. “Time is unchained here, it loops and swirls. Sometimes it’s like looking in a mirror, just seconds between you and your other self.”
“It’s worse when you see what you’re about to do,” Marla said. “You watch but you can’t stop yourself doing it, taking that step, brushing that branch aside.”
Standing beside Symon in the patchwork shack, his daughter Tarelya looked fearfully through the misted window, her breath hanging in the air like fog. “What happens if they see us? Won’t they try to eat us, too?” she asked.
Piotr looked at her and nodded. “Stay out of sight.”
“Do you have weapons here?” Symon asked, glancing around the claustrophobically disorganized interior of the supermarket.
“Besides what we carry?” Graz challenged. “Very little.”
“We’ve found a few blasters in some of the houses,” Piotr admitted, “but there’s barely any ammunition. And without ammunition, the weapons are useless.”
“Could a blaster put a dent in one of those...things?” Symon asked, indicating the swarming mouths.
“Yes,” Piotr told him. “But there are too many to risk it now. At first, we would pick them off, but our ammunition runs low and their numbers are never ending. Now we pick our battles with care and run when we can.”
“What if they come to eat this place?” Tarelya asked worriedly.
“Then we shall move,” Piotr said.
“Or we shall die,” Graz added ominously.
Symon shot him a warning look. “Don’t tease my daughter like that, friend.”
Graz began to reply but Piotr stopped him. “He meant nothing by it,” Piotr reassured the fisherman and his daughter. “Just a joke.”
But it wasn’t a joke, Symon knew that. It was a reality that these poor wretches had resigned themselves to. No doubt they had been forced to make a hasty exit from other locations. Perhaps they had lost others of their number. It was best not to ask in front of his daughter.
“Does anything eat them?” Symon asked after some consideration. “The crows?”
“Not eat them, no,” Graz told him, “but the watchers sometimes hunt them for sport.”
“They catch them,” Marla added.
“What for?” Symon asked.
Marla shook her head. “They’re psychotic. Only a nutcase would do that. The chronovores are relentless. Trust me—you don’t want to go near them.”
“Or the clockwatchers,” Graz added f
irmly.
Symon and his daughter continued to watch the chronovores as they feasted on the untamed energies amid the snow. Out there, through the window, End Day ran on.
Chapter Seventeen
They had left the ville far behind them now, yet it still shone like a beacon on the gray horizon as the fires burned through it. The place had been lit and heated with gas and oil, highly flammable materials that had caught the fire and spread it. The companions could only hope that the prisoners and those ville dwellers who had some decency in them had escaped the raging inferno that had once been their home. Even now, more than an hour after J.B.’s initial fire, they could hear the occasional explosion as another canister of gas went up, the boom echoing through the snowy landscape in an eerie, muffled kind of way.
Nyarla walked up front with Mildred and Doc, while Ryan spoke with Krysty and J.B.
“Quite a show you put on back there,” Ryan told J.B.
The Armorer smiled briefly. “Just survival,” he said, downplaying the whole affair. “Any showmanship was strictly accidental.”
Snow was falling still, not thick but well-spread, dotting the air with its pretty white specks. To Ryan, his face wrapped in the weighed white scarf he had carried with him longer than he cared to remember, the snow didn’t look pretty—it looked like everything else in the Deathlands, just one more way to execute a man, freezing him to death.
The falling snow left no paths visible so the group approximated the way to the mine as best as they could, sticking to the cross-country route so as to avoid stragglers from the ville. While Jak was often cast in the role of tracker, each of the companions had a strong sense of direction. Such was necessary in the shockscape of the Deathlands, where few of the traditional symbols remained by which a person could navigate, and where so much could change in a single shower of acid rain.
The military site waited as they remembered it, a crater punched into the earth, the missile tail jutting from the ground like some conquering flag placed by the gods. In a way it was, for the missiles had conquered the land once called America, leaving nothing that person could truly call his or her own. Total war had led to near-total annihilation.
As soon as they were within sight of the mine, Ryan halted the group, commanding everyone to find cover. With snow falling and the poor illumination of the struggling sun, it wasn’t hard to stay out of sight this far from the base. There had been sec men waiting when Ryan and the others had been taken there yesterday, and he didn’t want to run in to any additional problems now.
Crouched behind the bole of a tree, Ryan brought his Steyr Scout up to his eye and peered through its magnification scope. The metal felt ice-cold against his face. Beside him, J.B. produced a pair of binocs from his coat, recovered by Mildred from the haul that had been taken from him by the ice ville dwellers.
“There,” Ryan said after a moment. “Two of them, waiting right by the entrance.”
“I’ve got a third,” J.B. added. “Up at three o’clock. You see him?”
Ryan moved the rifle’s scope around until he had the sec man framed in the crosshairs. The man was taking a slow drag from a hand-rolled cigarette and smoke seemed to pour from within the confines of his fur-lined hood.
“We could take them,” J.B. suggested.
Ryan moved the Steyr’s scope back to frame the two men at the entrance. “The sounds are sure to bring backup if they have it.”
“Bring it,” the Armorer replied. “I’d sooner see them chilled now than find them snapping at our backs when we enter that.” He meant Temno Bozh’ego Sada, of course, the edge of the world. It loomed just beyond the complex of mines, a great wall of magnetic distortion turning the air into eerie shades of green and blue, warping the atmosphere in an ever-changing miasma of light.
Agreeing with his friend’s logic, Ryan hissed out commands to the other companions, warning them to get in position and get ready. If he could, he would chill these sec men from a distance and that would be the end of it. But if there was backup, like J.B. reckoned, then it would require all of his team to stay alert until the threat was dealt with.
Wrapping the shooting sling over his left arm, Ryan secured the butt of the longblaster in the groove of his shoulder, watching the sec men through the falling cascade of snow. Magnified into great white streaks by the scope, the snow obscured his vision. Ryan took a moment, steadying his breath. A thin trail of mist ballooned from between his parted lips as he prepared himself.
Then he fired. Twin shots rang out across the snowy plains, blasting in quick succession. The first sec man collapsed backward, his face erupting in a spray of blood. The second took a bullet just below the chin and he, too, went down, flopping to the ground like a beached fish.
Ryan was already switching his aim, bringing the Scout around and fixing the third sec man in its sights. The man had heard the shots, and he began sprinting across the snow toward the mine entrance. Ryan tracked him for three seconds, watching as he leaped over a mound of snow, shoving the twigs of a dead bush aside in his haste. He had the man’s speed now, and his index finger brushed the trigger of the longblaster again, sending another 7.62 mm slug hurtling from the barrel.
In the crosshairs of the scope, Ryan watched the third sec man drop to the ground, tumbling over himself as he struck the snow. The one-eyed man waited a moment, his breathing coming faster now, to see if the man would move again. A tiny red patch began to emerge beneath the sec man’s fur coat, leaking into the snow like spilled paint.
The sound of a bullet cut through the air, and J.B. cursed from beside Ryan’s shoulder. “Dark night! More of them coming. Mine entrance and up on your nine.”
“Fireblast,” Ryan spit, bringing the scope around. Five more were at the mine entrance, he saw. They were using the walls for cover and bringing up long-range blasters as they searched for their attackers.
“You handle the main entrance,” J.B. said, drawing himself up from his hiding place, “and we’ll deal with the stragglers.”
Before Ryan could say anything, J.B., Doc and Krysty were running toward the mine, while Mildred remained with Nyarla.
Ryan swiftly picked off two of the men at the mine entrance, drilling them through the skulls with a bullet each as they tried to locate their attackers. A third man got lucky, pulling up a longblaster and sending a half dozen shots in Ryan’s direction on semiauto. Ryan rolled back as the shots peppered the trees and the ground around him.
“Get the girl back,” Ryan said to Mildred as he dropped down to his belly.
Behind him, Mildred ushered Nyarla away, her hand on the young woman’s head, urging her to stay down.
Ryan had the Scout back in firing position, his eye pressed against the scope. Two of the sec men had broken away from the main entrance of the mine while the third stayed back, using a modified sniper rifle to scour the territory. The man was well-covered, peeking out from cover only briefly, just the muzzle of his rifle visible.
Ryan shifted his focus, searching the snow-covered plain for sign of the other men.
* * *
INSIDE THE EXCAVATED redoubt, twelve sec men were readying themselves for the assault. The mine had been attacked before, over the past few years, from the time that Baron Kenojuak and his people had first begun investigating the site. It had been hard work back then, burrowing into the earth, inch by unforgiving inch, reaching into the collapsed base where the missiles had sunk it into the soil. Now, the alarm had been raised and it appeared that the place was under attack again.
“No one gets in but us and our people,” the lead sec man commanded. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man called Curt, with a scar down his left cheek and one eye turned blind white. He had fought for the ville for as long as anyone could remember, even served time in the gladiatorial ring for the entertainment of the masses. He had defended the mine from attack more than once before. “They’ll try to storm the mine soon, and we need to be ready. Grab a blaster and whatever ammo you can, and if they mo
ve against us, chill the prisoners.” He was smart enough to know a liability when he saw one—prisoners, miners, slaves, they could be replaced. The weapon stash was the important thing here.
All around Curt, the sec men split up, making their way toward the nearest exits to rain fire down on whoever dared attack their mine.
* * *
CLOSE TO THE MINE, J.B., Krysty and Doc were working their way through the sparse cover of dead trees, searching for the enemy. They kept well apart, following a path that J.B. found to bring them around to one of the mine’s several side entries.
J.B. spotted movement in the bushes to his right, brought his M-4000 shotgun up to track it. The Armorer didn’t want to shoot without being sure. Could be it was Jak or Ricky, making their way back from the edge of beyond.
Then two figures emerged from the scrappy undergrowth, shoving a chain gun mounted on skis ahead of them. J.B. recognized the weapon, a U.S.-built EX34 that used a potentially endless loop of ammunition to deal damage to an enemy. The two men had it prepped, nudging the pipe nose of the weapon through the cover of the bushes. In the split second it took for J.B. to process this information the sec men wedged the skis in place and a stream of 7.62 mm bullets cut through the air toward the Armorer.
* * *
BULLETS PELTED THE AIR all around Ryan as he brought the longblaster around in a slow, steady arc, searching for the missing sec men. He found one creeping up the crater bank, his body low to the ground and the familiar black shaft of a shotgun barrel in his right hand.
Ryan fired, sending a shot through the trees. The bullet clipped the creeping sec man in the shoulder, sending him tumbling down the slope of the crater and back toward the mine entrance in a splash of spilled blood and snow.
Mildred’s voice rang out behind Ryan. “At your ten!”
Ryan saw the man’s shadow cut across his line of fire.
Chapter Eighteen
Ryan rolled, pulling his eye away from the scope and bringing the longblaster around to his ten o’clock, firing automatically. There was another sec man there, just twelve feet away. This one was wrapped in bulky furs and carrying twin handblasters in his gloved hands as he stalked toward the one-eyed man. Ryan’s blind shot hit him in the upper flesh of his left leg. The man cursed, bringing up both blasters to chill Ryan.
