by James Axler
DESPITE THE COOLNESS, their clothes were drying on them as they walked. If it had been nearer winter with the prospect of a hard frost, Ryan would have made sure they lit a fire immediately to dry out and warm up. Cold and wet were the two biggest killers in the Deathlands. Far bigger than stickies or crazies.
"There's some sort of direction post up ahead," Doc called. Now fully recovered from the ordeal, he was striding along with Lori on his arm, pointing out interesting features of the land to the girl.
The seven were strung out in a loose patrol formation, on what the Trader would have called a "condition green" assignment, where there were no signs of any threat or danger—which didn't mean that you ignored any possible threat. It meant you didn't bother with someone out at point or using flank scouts or a distanced rear guard.
The post had fallen over at an angle, propped against the tumbled end of a picket fence. To have lasted so long in such a harsh climate the wood must have been amazingly well seasoned and protected. Doc and Lori were there first, and the old man bent to read the names on the four pointing fingers.
"Dunwich one way. Miskatonic University next one around. Of course, we don't know which way the sign originally pointed so we aren't really any wiser. The third name is Castle Rock."
"Doc," Lori said, as though she were trying to point something out to him.
"Shh, my sweet youthful bird. The last name is Jerusalem's Lot."
Ryan was next up, bending over the broken signpost, peering at the moss-covered boards. He straightened and looked at Doc, who was sniggering like a schoolboy.
"There's nothing on any of them, Doc. All worn off and blank."
"Yes, Ryan. Just one of my little jokes. You know me."
"Sure, do, Doc. Don't suppose you could explain this particular joke? All the names that don't exist nowhere. I mean, anywhere." He glanced at Krysty.
"No, Ryan. I don't believe I can. Perhaps the truth might be found in a certain arcane volume, bound in human skin, written by the mad Arab, Alhazred." He smiled gently. "Then again, Ryan, my very dear friend, perhaps it might not."
"So, which way?" J.B. asked. "Could do with shelter with the night closing in."
"Where there is a sign, then once there has been a road," Donfil said. "Where there is a road, then there are life and people. Even if much has gone, we shall find something." He stooped and picked his way around for a few paces. "Here. The road ran that way. Blacktop. Other was only dirt." He pointed farther along the green path. "Another sign."
This one hadn't faded to illegibility: Consequence, Maine. Population 843.
"Hope there aren't any of those inbred oddities you talked about, Doc," Krysty muttered.
"OLD HOT SPOT," J.B. commented, checking the small rad counter on his lapel. "Only just touches orange. This gotta be the edge of one of the original craters. Don't see that many you can tell so easy. Like a damned big dish carved out of the stone."
It looked as if it had been a stray, medium-sized Russian missile. Maybe an AS.B.18, launched from one of the old Oscar-class submarines lurking off the Atlantic seaboard.
The saucer-shaped hole was a little more than six hundred yards across, dipping around fifty feet deep. A pond of stagnant water had collected at its bottom, reflecting the orange glow of the setting sun. Unusually, there was little vegetation sprouting from the shattered stone.
"That can't have done much for the population of 843 in the ville of Consequence," Ryan observed.
It looked as though Consequence, Maine hadn't ever amounted to much. One road ran in and the same road ran out again. The derelict ruins of a light engineering factory were set back to the left, and a smaller workshop specializing in brake linings for tractors was opposite.
The Peter Pan Adult Motel—quadruple X-rated movies and one water bed—had its flat roof folded in like a concertina. Its neighbor was the Church of the Last Coming, linked with the Fellowship of the Blessed Saint Bubo of Ishmaelia. That roof was utterly gone, all four walls tipped in on one another, rotting from the bottom up. What looked to have been a general store was flattened completely.
The seven began to wander cautiously through the ruins, and Ryan looked down through the dusty glass of an unbroken window. There was a hand-lettered notice.
Waltzes and shuffles. Down-home music for friends and neighbors. Milt Tyson and His Cowboy Quartet. Pies and punch. For Claggartville General's Scan Fund. Tickets—five dollars. Doors open at Church Hall at seven o'clock. Last day of January 2001. Be there or…
The corner of the poster was missing.
"Be there or be dead," Ryan finished. "World died a week before they had their dance."
He turned and gazed up what must have been the main street of Consequence. There was hardly a house left standing, time and weather continuing what the missile had started.
"Getting cool," Krysty observed, threading her arm through his.
"Road goes up, then down. Any blast might've been deflected by that. Best chance of shelter's over the ridge."
"Found old wag!" Jak called.
Ryan was sometimes surprised at how few vehicles survived from before the long whiter. There must have been tens of millions of wags around, but all anyone ever saw were rusted wrecks. Only the wealthiest barons with access to a gas supply could now afford to drive for pleasure.
This vehicle was like the others. It looked as though a garage had once sheltered the pickup truck, but that had gone and the winters had stripped off the layers of paint. Tires had rotted; the gas tank had been hacked open; the glass shattered; seats removed. What remained was only the shell of a Chevy K2200.
The others gathered around the wag in silence. Somewhere out in the woods they all heard the mournful cry of some hunting animal. The reminder that night was near prompted Ryan into action.
"No time to hang around here," he said. "Best keep together now and get shelter."
The temperature was dropping fast. Once the sun had gone there was the first frosting of ice lipping the puddles. Breath streamed out like wood smoke, hanging in the still air. The sky was fading to a velvety purple-black.
Ryan's guess was right. Once they were over the hill, several of the houses looked better preserved. The street eventually petered out in a dead end, the overgrown remnants of a dirt road winding up into the forest to their left.
"One of these?" Lori asked, shoulders huddled against the cold.
"Yeah."
"I dream of stumbling over some old, long-lost ville," J.B. said, "and finding in a sealed garage a mint, fresh, oiled and gassed-up Jeep. Figure I never will, but it's nice to think on."
Ryan looked at his old comrade, jaw dropping. It was so unusual to hear the Armorer talk about anything other than weapons or food that he didn't know what to say.
CONSEQUENCE DIDN'T LOOK as if there'd been an awful lot of money working there. Apart from a couple of old frame houses, which had suffered particularly badly from the weather, most of the dwellings were single-story shacks or cabins. The one exception stood foursquare at the end of the road, as though daring it to go any farther.
It was based on granite, gray and strong, wood-framed, with screened windows and pointed turrets to the four corner bedrooms on the third floor. The porch was pillared and ran the whole length of the front of the building. From the scraps of paint that cowered in sheltered crevices, it seemed that the house had been dark brown and cream. The gravel path was bordered with shrubs, rampant, and on either side of the wrought-iron gate were rusting columns of metal, each carrying an iron ball the size of a man's head.
"Looks like the Baron Big of Consequence must have lived there," Ryan said. "Good enough for him, good enough for us."
All the windows on the top floor had been broken, but most of those lower down were intact, which must have been a result of the blast pattern of the missile that had left the crater down the way.
"How come it's not been ripped apart?" Donfil asked. "Place like this must have had its share of freak survivors.
Why didn't they hole up in this house? Built like a fort."
"Could be that this is one of the regions that lost all the population. The way it looks from outside, the house might be empty," Ryan suggested.
It was.
The main lock on the front door had been kicked in, but the interior was completely stripped—not a stick of furniture on any of the floors. Ryan assumed that anyone coming in after the nuking wouldn't even have bothered to vandalize the house.
"There's some junk mail here," Doc said, pointing to a corner of the entrance hall behind the door. "All dated December and January. Just before they…you know. The owners must have moved out and maybe put the place on the market. Never found a buyer."
"You mean letters from that long ago?" Krysty exclaimed. "I've never…"
The old man stooped with a sigh, picking up the dry, dusty, scattered envelopes. "Junk, my dear. All junk." He ripped them open and threw the contents to the cracked parquet. "Reader's Digest, Time-Life Books, magazines and ceedees. A restaurant opening in Claggartville. The town's only about ten miles off from this sketch map, unless it was nuked to ashes."
Ryan took some of the envelopes from Doc's hands, looking at them himself, intrigued by this odd little peephole into the long-dead past.
There were invitations to buy this and that—ceramic statues of shepherdesses; facsimile clocks from Europe; devices to make your rooms dryer or less dry; books that would make you richer, happier, sleep better, make love with endless energy, read faster; flesh-colored Christs that were luminous when you turned out the lights; blasters of all sizes and shapes and prices. "Protect your home and the ones you love. A dead intruder won't be back."
"Is this the kind of stuff the mailman used to bring, Doc?" he asked.
"Guarantees… fire-damaged stock… Shown half actual size… No deposit required… Ask our area manager to call… Complete satisfaction…" Doc snorted and crumpled the brittle paper in his hands. "Satisfaction! By the three Kennedys but this makes me want to vomit, my friends. This was the peak of thousands of years of civilization! A free condom with every meal at this eatery! Offer conditional on being alive after world madness! Oh, these were such times, my brothers!"
The old man threw the paper to the floor, where Jak started to pick it up. "Good for starting fire, this. Break off some that stuff side stairs. Plenty good dry wood. Yeah, Ryan?"
"Yeah, Jak."
All of them were used to sleeping on bare earth, so the lack of beds didn't bother anyone. After some discussion, Ryan and J.B. agreed that there didn't seem to be any feeling of danger. But they'd set single guards.
Two hours each, just in case.
Like Trader said—nobody ever got dead from being careful.
Chapter Ten
THE SMOKE DREW THEM to the big, empty house at the end of the street.
It snaked through the frosty New England night, weaving out of the remnants of the township of Consequence, in among the silent sentinels of oak, pine and maple. To the hillside where they lived.
Where they'd always lived.
Where they had their twining caves of earth and stone, where they all existed together. Sometimes one would kill another. They were hunters. Stealthy, cunning in the arts of stalking and trapping.
They never came close to the tumbled buildings of Consequence, where their forefathers and mothers had lived an eternity ago. The buildings were linked with death in their memories, those who had any memories for anything but dung and death.
They coupled with any other of them who happened to be there. Many of them bore babies that never drew a breath.
But some of them lived.
Strangers never went to that area. Claggartville folk knew of the dark region and avoided it as though the plague dwelled there.
But now there were outlanders come to Consequence.
And they were in the big house.
It was the flavor of the smoke that brought them there.
RYAN CAWDOR WAS ON GUARD. He'd picked the duty from two till four in the morning, the time of the soul's dark night, when sleep is deepest, when sickly babies lose their frail hold on life and when the breathing of the elderly becomes slower and falters and fails.
When a sentry is at his most careless and nocturnal attacks can be most successful.
Ryan had the G-12 slung across his shoulders, the white silk scarf tucked down into the fur collar of his long coat, a barrier against the cold that filtered all through the old house. Only in what had once been the music room, where a merry fire blazed, was the chill held at bay. On the upper floors, with broken glass crunching under the soles of his combat boots, Ryan whistled beneath his teeth at the bitterness of the night.
The SIG-Sauer P-226 pistol was on his right hip, balanced by the weight of the panga with its eighteen-inch blade on the other hip. The salt on his skin had made the thong of the eye patch chafe his temple, and he eased a finger beneath it.
A pallid moon rode low on the horizon, smudged behind galloping banks of dark clouds. Once there was a fluttering of hail against the wooden walls of the house, but it passed quickly off toward the south. All around the mansion were only darkness and the still night.
Ryan picked his way among the sleeping figures, his shadow dancing madly off the farthest wall, between the curtainless windows. Lori was cradled, inevitably, in Doc's arms. Jak was curled up like a young puppy, his damp jacket still steaming slightly from the heat of the fire. The wood in the empty house was so old and dry under its layers of varnish that it burned quickly with a ferocious heat. Donfil was stretched out straight near the bolted door, arms by his sides, mirrored glasses reflecting the yellow flames. Krysty was asleep near the wall, where Ryan had been lying. As he stooped to look at her, her long sentient hair curled protectively about her calm face.
Though Ryan moved like a ghost, he woke J.B. The fedora hat was pushed back off the sallow forehead and his eyes glittered like specks of onyx.
"Anything moving?" he whispered.
Ryan shook his head. "Just me," he replied, pitching his voice low.
"My turn?"
Ryan turned the left cuff of the coat to check his chron. "Nope. I'll wake you in another fifteen minutes."
The Armorer slipped easily back into sleep.
Ryan decided on one last slow turn around the creaking floors and stairs of the old house. There was the big main staircase, and the narrow back flights, which brought him through what must have been the kitchens to the unlocked door to the music room.
The cramped top floor with its attics for servants seemed even colder. He checked one of the turret rooms again.
And felt something burst toward his face, slashing and tearing, hot blood on his cheek, near his ear.
"Fireblast!" he cried, staggering back and nearly falling, his right hand punching up at his assailant, feeling the satisfying jar of an impact with flesh. There was a muffled squawk of pain, then the flutterings of great wings.
He watched as the huge owl panicked its way through the empty frame of the window, flying off into the safety of the night.
"Bitching gaudy-whore bastard," he muttered, dabbing at his cut face with the back of his hand, feeling that the cut wasn't much more than a surface scratch.
But the shock had been real enough.
Ryan walked to the casement and leaned on the frame, sucking in the cold air, steadying his breathing and his nerves. He stared down into what had once been the back garden of the house, past some overgrown apple trees and currant bushes.
He saw movement, a flicker among the deep pools of shadow that surrounded the mansion.
After the false alarm of the owl, Ryan wasn't about to open fire and find he'd smeared a rabbit all over the ground.
As light as a big cat, Ryan picked his way down the main stairs, arriving in the entrance hall on the first floor. The door had an old stained-glass pattern to it, acanthus leaves, twined with some unidentifiable purple flowers. The moonlight came and went as the wind drove clouds ac
ross it, and the colors flowed and merged on the dusty floor. The only sound was the bright crackling of the dry wood in the hearth, beyond the locked door to Ryan's left.
His pistol was in his hand, a round ready under the hammer.
There were heavy iron bolts at top and bottom and a rusting sec chain near the broken mortise. Ryan opened the top bolt first, wincing at the thin screech of corroded metal. He stooped to release the lower bolt, checking that the chain was still in place, hooked over the hasp.
He waited a moment for the return of moonlight. When it came he turned the ornate brass handle and put his good eye to the gap, squinting out into the garden.
But his view was blocked.
The cold moon was to his right, free from clouds, making the porch almost as bright as day.
They were out there, ringing the front of the house, standing quite still, like a scattering of obscenely grotesque statues, born from the crazed imagination of some long-dead, demented gardener.
The nearest of them was actually on the porch, less than a yard away from the front door.
It wasn't possible to tell either the age or the sex of the mutie, who stood several shambling inches taller than seven feet, with shoulders broader than an M-16 rifle. Its hair straggled down either side of its face, lank and matted with glittering streaks of orange clay. One lidless eye, weeping a colorless liquid, was roughly in the middle of its left cheek. There was no nose, just a semicircular hole above the chin, fringed with tendrils of pale skin that trembled in time with the thing's breathing. Ryan saw that it didn't actually have a proper chin. The lower jaw was missing, and a row of jagged stumps protruded from the set-back upper jaw.
It wore a long, shapeless sack of filthy material that reached clear to the planks of the wooden porch. Where it had moved up from the garden, Ryan could make out a trail of thick, jellylike slime, like that left behind by a gigantic snail.
