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Something moved out of the shadows at the edge of the torchlight. It moved past Ewald at chest height so quickly he couldn’t raise the machine pistol, let alone track the target. He glimpsed a blur of brown, and got the impression of a sleek, banded body. Many legs. Powerful, jointed legs. There was a scraping sound, but the bright flash of sword he was anticipating never came. The blur bounded high in the air. He thought he saw a turned-up butt, like a deer’s, an instant before it vanished into the blackness ahead.
Then something warm and wet splashed his good arm.
As Ewald turned, Tolliver’s torch dropped to the floor. Sheets of blood poured out from under the man’s beard. He staggered, slamming back against the control panels, and upon impact his head fell off. It didn’t roll away, like the guttering torch. It flopped to one side, toppling from his cleanly sliced neck, and hung there upside down, connected to his body by a strip of skin. Tolliver’s legs gave way, and a blood waterfall became a blood fountain.
Even though he couldn’t see anything to shoot at, Ewald cut loose with a burst of autofire. In the strobe light of muzzle-flashes, slugs sparked off the generator housings, and the ricochets zipped around the room.
“Other way!” he shouted in Willjay’s face.
Reversing course, they sprinted along the wall. Ewald didn’t want to return to the hallway, but he had no choice. He had given up trying to find a quick way out. All he wanted now was cover. Some kind of cover.
They found another metal door fifty yards down the corridor. It was unlocked. Ewald and Willjay stepped into a narrow, low-ceilinged room crammed with with tall metal storage cabinets and open frame shelves. It looked safe enough. The exposed walls were free of weeping holes. They slammed the door and pushed shelves in front of it.
“What’re we gonna do?” Willjay sobbed. The teenager had pissed himself. The insides of both trouser legs were dark, from crotch to cuff.
“Let me think,” Ewald said. “Just shut up and let me think.”
Then he made the mistake of looking down at his arm. And his brain vapor-locked. The heaviest muscles—deltoid, tricep, bicep—had begun to slough off the bones, like overcooked meat. Where his fingertips had been, red bone peeked through.
A sudden, frantic, scrabbling noise made him forget all about his ruined arm.
“Where’s it coming from?” Willjay shouted, looking wildly around the room.
Walls, ceiling, floor, Ewald couldn’t locate the source. But it was close. It was very close.
One of the cabinets behind Willjay shuddered, tipping forward, then crashed to the floor. Ewald blinked and the boy was gone.
Gone.
His torch lay on the floor.
Above the toppled cabinet was a gash in the wall.
Ewald lunged for the hole, the Uzi up and ready in his fist. He saw the boy’s face a split second before he disappeared around a bend in the burrow. A face blanched white with fear. Elbows wedged against the slimy walls, fingers desperately, futilely clawing.
Ewald thrust the muzzle forward and pinned the trigger, firing full-auto until the weapon locked back empty. Gunsmoke filled the gash; his ears were ringing. He couldn’t tell if he’d shot through Willjay and hit whatever had snatched him away. Tossing the Uzi aside, Ewald turned his full attention to the barricade. After he cleared the door and opened it, he bent to pick up the boy’s torch.
As he straightened, the thing climbed out of the hole, head first, uninjured, and in no apparent hurry.
It wasn’t like any mutie he had ever seen.
It had a crop of thick, bristling hairs, like spikes on top of its broad, flat skull. Its widespread eyes were solid black and huge. When it rose from a crouch, he saw the banded segments of its abdomen. It had six legs. The top pair were short, with talons at the ends; the second pair was longer, and the last two the longest of all. Standing on its back legs it was as tall as he was.
The open doorway was a foot from Ewald’s back. The creature stood fifteen feet away. Before it could step closer, he made his move. A pivot started, but never completed. The thing was across the gap and in his face just as his hips started to turn.
Ewald was expecting a slash from the daggerlike horns that studded its rear legs, not a straight thrust from one of the stumpy arms.
The flesh above his right nipple dimpled around the shaft of a black thorn, a long stinger that protruded from the top of the creature’s wrist. Its talons and arm flexed rhythmically, and he felt the pressure of a massive injection. At once, cold flooded his torso. Numbing cold. The small arm jerked back, withdrawing the stinger.
Ewald clutched at the wound in his chest, the numbness spreading to his legs. Before he could take a step, his knees gave way. He slumped to floor on his back and lay there, paralyzed.
As he struggled for breath, the creature leaned over him, clicking. The noise came faster and faster, becoming a single, earsplitting tone. Then the thing opened its jaws impossibly wide and, puffing its abdomen in and out, began to dry-heave in his face.
Chapter Five
While they waited for Jak to return from the canyon bottom, Ryan and the others took a rest break. With the sun almost directly overhead, there was no shade. Every surface reflected blinding light and withering heat. To keep their heads and shoulders out of the sun, they made canopies of their coats, stretching them between the tops of low rocks. As they sat on the hard ground, they tipped back their canteens and sipped at the Anasazi sludge. The thick, gritty liquid rasped down their throats. Once swallowed, it lay in their bellies like bags of wet cement.
They’d all drunk worse.
Ryan coughed to clear the mud from the back of his tongue. Through a shimmering curtain of heat waves, he took in the canyon’s far rim. The valley had widened to about half a mile, and its depth was more than four hundred feet. There was no sign of a reservoir. No sign of the river that had been plugged to create it. In the low spots there were no standing pools, stagnant or otherwise. Nothing green.
There was blue, though.
A tiny clump of bright blue, visible to the naked eye in the distance below.
The plastic, antifreeze jugs stood out against the unrelenting beige of the canyon floor, flagging the water thief’s abandoned campsite. The bastard had lit himself a fire down there, and tossed away his empty containers before moving on, in the direction of the dam.
Jak had scaled the canyon wall, and when he reappeared on the rim a few minutes later, his bloodless face was slick with sweat, his white hair plastered to his skull, and his breath came in ragged gasps. Even Deathlands’s wild child was starting to show the effects of their ordeal. In a gravelly voice Jak said, “Fire pit cold. Nothing left in ashes.”
If the chiller had food, he didn’t need to cook it, Ryan thought. Maybe something dried or smoked. Something the dead travelers had brought with them. Berries and nuts pounded into a paste, then set out in the sun to harden. Or strands of jerky. One thing for sure, the bastard wasn’t living off wild game. Aside from the buzzards, whose guts and body cavities were usually so packed with yard-long flat worms that even a starving man wouldn’t touch their meat, the companions hadn’t seen anything alive. Not so much as a fly. The landscape had been scoured clean.
“Cold fire means he’s still a couple days ahead of us,” Krysty said. “We may never catch him.”
“Could be he’s running on jolt,” J.B. suggested.
The potent combination of methamphetamine, narcotic and hallucinogen was Deathlands’s recreational drug and painkiller of choice. If the thief was staying high on jolt, he could keep walking despite hunger, keep walking until his feet fell off.
“The dam isn’t far, now,” Ryan said. “Another five or six miles, at most. Good chance that’s where our friend will have set up camp.”
The dam was their only hope. The bastard had either stopped there with whatever water he had left, or there was water in the bottom of the reservoir. If neither was the case, they were all headed for the last train west. The companions gathered up their coats and packs, and trudged on.
Exhaustion, dehydration and the flat monotony of the trek made it difficult for Ryan to maintain his mental focus. His thoughts kept wandering back to the carnage they’d seen up-canyon. Dying of thirst was one of the worst ways to check out. There was terrible pain. Delirium. And a slow, lingering slide into death. The guy who’d blown off his own head had witnessed his friends’ suffering, and taken a short cut. Ryan imagined that with his last breath, as he’d pressed that shotgun muzzle hard to his chin, he had cursed the thief to hell.
Betrayal wasn’t unusual in the Deathlands.
It wasn’t a kinder, gentler, I-feel-your-pain kind of place.
Sympathy was in shorter supply than cased ammo.
Individual survival was all that mattered in the hellscape. Survival at any cost. A brutal philosophy that Ryan Cawdor had been steeped in since birth. Over time, his friendships, his battles, and his relationship with his son, Dean, had widened his horizons. Ryan no longer dismissed out of hand the idea of risking his own skin for the sake of strangers, or in fighting for a just cause instead of a thick wad of jack from the highest bidder. And he still grieved the disappearance of his son.
After another hour of walking, as they rounded a sharp bend in the rim, the valley broadened enormously before them. Eight miles ahead, the canyon necked down again, and the sun blazed off a barrier of white concrete nearly as high as the rim. At the base of the dam, there was water; not a great predark reservoir, but a modest lake bounded on three sides by green, furrowed fields and stands of low trees.
As if that wasn’t miracle enough, there was also the ville.
“Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed, thumbing his glasses back up the slippery bridge of his nose.
From a distance, it was like skydark had never happened.
Like the flooding of the canyon had never happened, either.
A mile or two from the near shore of the lake, stone and brick buildings clustered around a central square with a little park in the middle. The largest building was three stories tall with a clock tower. On the far side of the city center stood a row of grain silos. A black strip of two-lane highway paralleled that end of town. The road petered out in the middle of the plain, either buried under shifting sand or ripped away by receding waters.
“Little Pueblo,” Mildred said. “Just the way I remembered it.”
“’Tis indeed a wonderment,” Doc prononunced. “Further evidence that the hand of the Creator works in mysterious ways.”
“I’d say it was more a case of the laws of physics, working predictably,” Mildred countered.
“And whose hand lies behind the laws of physics?” Doc asked with a confident grin.
“Why does there have to be a ‘hand’?”
“Touché, dear Mildred. I am sure we would all like to hear your explanation.”
“On nukeday, the water was five hundred feet deep over the town,” she said. “All that liquid acted like a giant cushion to protect the buildings from shock and blast effects of incoming airburst missile strikes. My guess is the dam didn’t get off so easy, and that’s why the reservoir disappeared.”
“Could have been a near-miss with an earthshaker warhead,” J.B. suggested. “Those babies had an effective blast diameter of five hundred miles.”
“That would explain how the entrance to that redoubt got uncovered,” Ryan said. “The ground tremors brought the whole cliff down. Cracked the dam open, too.”
“I don’t see any people moving, anywhere,” Krysty said, squinting against the glare. “And there’s got to be people. Not just our water thief. Somebody’s been tending those fields.”
With rifle scope and binocs, Ryan and J.B. surveyed the terrain downrange.
There was something else wrong with the picture.
Unlike most other inhabited outposts in Deathlands, Little Pueblo didn’t have a defensive berm of piled dirt and debris.
There were no perimeter gunposts. No fortified gates.
J.B. lowered the binocs. “I suppose there could be snipers and spotters up here on the rim,” he said. “Although they wouldn’t be much use.”
Ryan had to agree with that assessment. The canyon was so wide that much of it was beyond the range of even super-high-velocity, .50-caliber milspec rounds. Cap-and-ball weapons would be about as effective as chucking rocks. Snipers spaced out on the rim couldn’t protect the ville from a large invading force—they couldn’t concentrate enough fire to turn back attackers. The best they could do was harrass. And then only during the day. That was the problem with rim-based, spotter outposts, too. They’d be useless at night. Even if somehow they saw the invaders coming, they wouldn’t be able to direct defensive ambushes in the valley.
“It’s like they don’t give a damn if they’re overrun,” J.B. said.
“Or they know it isn’t going to happen,” Ryan said. “What do you mean ‘they know’?” Krysty asked. “They’re sitting on an oasis in the middle of a radblasted desert. The nearest ville of any size must be 150 miles away. A gang of blackhearts that sets out for Little Pueblo isn’t going to be in shape to rob it by the time they get here. If they get here.”
“How would robbers even know it existed?” J.B. said. “After the reservoir was built, the ville’s name was probably taken off all the maps. It sure wasn’t on the one in the redoubt. Only way to find Little Pueblo would be to stumble onto it by accident. Then you’d have to walk out again to gather a chilling crew. And then walk in again to do the looting.”
“It’s a safe bet that’s never happened,” Ryan said. “If it had, folks down there would know the desert wasn’t enough to keep trouble out. And there’d be perimeter defenses. “
“Bastard thief got in, maybe two days ago,” Krysty reminded them.
“He could be swinging from a tree right now,” J.B. said. “Or else his head’s on a stick in the middle of that square. No way of telling what kind of reception the folks down there give to strangers.”
“We need water and food,” Mildred said.
“Wait for dark, then steal,” Jak suggested.
Doc didn’t like that idea. “From this vantage point the valley looks bucolic and peaceable in the extreme, with ample sustenance for all,” he said. “Perhaps the residents would happily share their bounty with us, if only to get news of the world beyond the hellish plain.”
Jak came back with a less rosy, but much more likely possibility. “Chill us for blasters and ammo.”
“We have a better chance of fighting our way out during daylight,” J.B. said. “At least we can see trouble coming.”
“There’s another problem, whether we steal what we need or not,” Ryan told them. “It’s going to be a bastard long march out of this desert. It may not be possible to carry enough supplies to make it. Once we leave, there’ll be no turning back.”
After a pause, Krysty said, “What about Minotaur?”
“You read my mind,” Ryan said. “If that three-dimensional map is right, there’s a redoubt down there somewhere. And if there’s a redoubt, there’s a chance it has a working mat-trans unit.”
“That would save us a whole lot of boot leather and blisters,” J.B. said.
Before descending the cliffs and starting across the canyon floor, Ryan and J.B. each scoped the opposite rim, looking for sun flash off telesight lenses or gunbarrels, or evidence of shooters’ hides built among the rocks. When they found nothing, they assumed that their side of the gorge was likewise undefended, and that it was safe to proceed. A conclusion based on battlefield experience and common sense. No way would snipers be posted on only one rim of a canyon so wide. The most effective kill zone would be created by overlapping cross fire from two sides at once.
In fighting formation the companions followed one of the large arroyos gouged out of the sand by the reservoir’s violent retreat. Long before they reached the outskirts of the ville, signs of vegetation started to appear on the slopes around them. First, scattered dry weeds and brush. Then living trees, albeit stunted and scraggly. As the weeds grew thicker and green, and the trees became more sturdy, the companions saw lizards, insects, rabbits and birds. The bugs sawed and sang in the afternoon’s blistering heat.
When the arroyo took a dogleg to the right, they climbed the soft bank for a recce. Just ahead was a row of rectangular, concrete pads, each sprouting rusted wires and conduit, and broken off plastic pipes.
“The remains of government-built, reservation housing,” Mildred said. “Those are the foundation pads for modular prefabs and double-wide trailers. The buildings must’ve washed away when the water ran out.”
Around the slabs were unfenced, row-crop fields bordered by irrigation ditches. The water ran clear in the ditches, shaded by tall grass and overhanging trees.
“Look at the current,” J.B. said. “The river’s still here, underground. They’ve got it working for them.”
The companions then took turns laying on their bellies, washing their faces and necks, and drinking their fill of cool water. When they couldn’t drink any more, they rinsed out and refilled their canteens.
“Somebody watching,” Jak said softly to Ryan.
It was difficult to detect glee in those bloodred eyes of his. You had to look hard. And know what you were looking for.
There was glee in them, now.
At the edge of the field, a half-dozen, free-range chickens had stepped into view. Fat and sassy, they pecked at the soil for insects not thirty yards away.
The albino had two razor-sharp knives in his hand, one ready in his fingers, the other clasped against his palm.
Before Jak could get off a toss, the birds spooked, ducking back into the cover of the knee-high corn. He started to give chase, but Ryan stopped him. “No, Jak, let them go. Wouldn’t look real good if we showed up on these folks’ doorstep with their dead hens hanging on our belts. If nobody’s home, we can always come back and get them later.”
Refreshed, if not fed, they slid back down into the arroyo and followed it all the way to the edge of the town square. As they climbed onto the predark street, they heard muffled singing and drumming. The noise was coming from the other side of the town square and park.
“Somebody’s home, after all,” Ryan said. “Stay tight, now. We’re on triple red.”
The central area of Little Pueblo stood on an isolated crown of bedrock. Most of the runoff from the breached dam had channeled through the surrounding gridwork of streets, washing away wood frame houses and trailer homes, leaving bare concrete slabs and open air basements.
Up close, the city center wasn’t in such great shape, either.
