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“Yeah, well, I don’t see anyone else. And what happened to us yesterday shouldn’t have happened, either. But it did. The question now is how we’re going to find them again. Or anything, come to that.”
J.B. was lost in thought, gathering in the sheet that had served them so well. Replacing it in his backpack, he pulled out his minisextant.
“I’ll see if I can work out how much we’ve moved,’ he murmured as he took a reading and ran calculations in his head. Then, after a short pause, he added, “It doesn’t add up. According to my calculations, we must have walked about four miles. And we should still be able to see the wag.”
Mildred stared at him. J.B. was rarely mistaken on such matters.
“How can we have come that far? There wasn’t enough time…at least, it didn’t seem like it was that long.” The more she thought about it, the less sense the previous day was beginning to make. “So where’s Doc? Where the hell can that wag have been hidden?”
J.B. just shook his head. He was as baffled as Mildred. The only thing he could think of was to take action. Experience taught him that action usually started a chain of events.
“I dunno about Doc. Mebbe we’ll find him, mebbe the old bastard really has got himself lost this time. But if we start to go that way—” he indicated a south-southeast direction “—and keep on going, we should hit where the wag is supposed to be. Mebbe Ryan got it going again, and they’ve headed off in the wrong direction trying to find us. If so, then mebbe we’ll find some tracks to follow.’
Mildred shrugged. As a plan, it wasn’t the best she’d ever heard. But right now, she couldn’t come up with anything better.
Stopping only to eat from some self-heats that they carried as emergency rations, and sipping sparingly from their canteens, they began the long trek back in the direction that J.B. had determined had been their point of departure.
With every yard that they covered, Mildred expected to see a dust-covered bump on the ground that would turn out to be Doc, alive or having gone to face the judgment of which he had been ranting when last seen. She scanned the land around with every step, but there was no sign. Perhaps the old buzzard had managed to survive yet again.
They trudged across the hard-packed plain, small zephyrs of dust raised by the steady, rhythmic marching of their feet. The sun rose inexorably, and the temperature rose sharply, unimpeded by the clear skies. J.B. had his fedora to shade him from the worst of the heat, while Mildred improvised a covering for her plaits, using a little of her precious water to dampen the cloth before tying it around her head.
They had been walking for several hours when there was the first intimation of any life on the plain other than their own.
Silence had been the norm, to preserve energy and avoid the need to moisten their tongues as much as the lack of anything to say. But now, J.B. broke that long silence.
“What is that? Two o’clock,” he added, indicating an area where there was a cloud of dust raised near the horizon.
“Where’s it coming from?” Mildred asked. It was still some way off, but had seemingly sprung from nowhere. Maybe they just hadn’t noticed it before, too absorbed by the effort of moving one foot in front of the other. That was a sobering thought: losing their edge, their ability to stay frosty and triple red. It was symptomatic of what had happened the previous day. Something was beginning to make sense at the back of her mind….
“Moving quick,” J.B. said sharply, breaking her reverie. She followed his arm, which was still raised. It was true. Whatever was raising the dust cloud was advancing rapidly. Immediately, her coalescing thoughts were driven from her mind by the need for action.
Looking around, she could see that there was little cover afforded to them by the terrain.
“Hostile?” she asked, knowing what J.B.’s answer would be.
“Assume it.”
Even as he spoke, the Armorer was unslinging his mini-Uzi, running checks without even thinking, and scanning the area. The only thing within any kind of distance was a small patch of brown-and-green scrub, with a few patches of purple flowers. How that survived in this climate was a mystery for another time. But not as great a mystery as how they could turn this into some kind of cover.
J.B. gestured that they should make their way toward it. Mildred, checking to make sure her ZKR was ready for combat, nodded. They traveled the five hundred yards to the scant cover. When they had made the best of the brush, JB finally spoke.
“They must have seen us moving. They’re heading right toward us.”
“Well, let’s just hope that we can get a bead on them before they can on us,” Mildred countered. “Depends on what sort of weapons they’re carrying,” she added, knowing that their fate was on the line.
They settled in and waited for the dust cloud to reach them.
As the cloud became more defined, and they could see the center of disturbance that was stirring up the dust, neither of them was sure that they could believe their eyes.
For approaching them, calm in the eye of the cloud, were a dozen men mounted on horses. Piebald and chestnut creatures whose manes swirled with the dust, they seemed almost to glide across the ground. Seated atop them were men whose impassive faces were matched by the stately grandeur with which they rode the rolling plain. Like marble statues, they seemed immobile astride their steeds, man and horse as one living entity on an endless journey.
No less impressive was the manner in which they were attired—furs and skins, woven into breeches and moccasins, with jerkins that left their scarred and pierced chests open to the air. From their bare skin hung bones decorated with different varieties and colors of feather. Their hair was long, worn either loose and flowing in the momentum of their relentless progress, or else plaited and held to the side of their head by a snakeskin headband.
They were armed, but not in the manner that either J.B. or Mildred would have expected. Quivers filled with arrows hung from the saddlebags of their mounts and bows were secured across their backs. J.B. couldn’t see a blaster on any of them.
Part of his mind wondered how they managed to survive without the use of blasters, bow and arrow being—like a blade—an instrument with less range and destructive power, effective only if wielded with precision. Another part of his mind figured that Mildred’s sure eye and the sweep of his SMG could cut a swathe through these coldhearts…if that was what they proved to be.
For the moment, that was less than certain. As the party of riders advanced, they had a confidence about them. There was no sign that they would raise a hand in anger, yet they seemed to fear no attack.
Mildred and J.B. exchanged glances. This was no normal situation. The Armorer shrugged and rose to his feet, stepping out from cover. Mildred followed. Both had their blasters at ease, yet their body language spoke of the ability to change to the offensive if necessary.
As the mounted men drew nearer, they began to slow. J.B. studied them. It had been a long time since he’d seen anyone who was dressed and ornamented in a similar manner.
As one, the mounted men came to a halt. They were within ten yards of the companions. As their horses snorted and moved their hooves, the dust settling around them, the warriors—for there was no doubt that this was what they were—sat impassive and silent. It was as though each was taking time to assess the people in front of them.
“You gonna say something, or we just gonna stand here and roast in this heat?” J.B. murmured laconically as the still and silence got to him.
“You and the woman are not attacking us,” the Native American at the head of the posse stated.
“We’d defend ourselves, but you show no sign of wanting to attack us,” Mildred countered.
The flicker of a smile crossed the man’s weather-beaten face. “We have no desire to attack you. Why should we? We have been waiting for you.”
J.B.’s brow furrowed. “Waiting?”
He was answered by a brief nod.
“How did you know we would be here? We didn’t know it ourselves,” Mildred said sharply.
The smile grew broader. “You know, even though you don’t know.” The smile turned into a deep-throated chuckle as he caught the bafflement on their faces. “Come with us, and you will soon understand.”
“Mebbe we don’t want to come with you,” J.B. said guardedly.
The Native American looked up at the empty, burning sky. “You’d rather stay out here?”
“It’s a good point, John,” Mildred said quietly, without taking her eyes from the men in front of them. “It doesn’t seem to be much of a choice for us right now.”
J.B. sighed. “Guess so. We’ll take you up on it,” he said to the mounted man, adding, “For now.”
Two of the mounted men moved forward from the group, indicating without speech that J.B. and Mildred should mount up behind each of them. Stowing their blasters, both raised themselves into the saddle, settling behind the impassive and silent warriors.
It was only when they began to move off, and Mildred had the chance to survey the territory without the incessant march of her own feet that she realized at least one of the things that had been bugging her since they had first set out that morning.
The dust and dirt floor of the plain was clear.
What had happened to the locusts? Where were the frogs that had bombarded them? The ground should be littered with amphibians. If the live ones had sought shelter, then at the very least the ones who had bought the farm should be starting to stink up in the heat.
But there was nothing.
So where had they gone?
DIM LIGHT SUFFUSED the interior of the wag, heat from the rising sun stifling the atmosphere, making it hard to breathe. The stench of their own bodies filled the wag, the secured tarps keeping in the sweat and heat that had suffused them through the night. The closeness of the air, the lack of anything fresh, gave Krysty a headache that pounded at her skull. She awoke to a feeling like a jackhammer thumping incessantly. Her mouth, too, felt like she’d been gargling from a cesspool.
A blue aura, from the light defracted by the tarps, made it hard to see into the shadows of the wag, and it took her a few seconds of fuzzed confusion to recall where they were.
And how few of them were left.
“Ryan,” she whispered, shaking the one-eyed man’s arm. He lay across the bench seat in the rear of the wag, one arm raised across his face. She had been in front, slumped at an angle that had left her with a shooting pain in her neck. Yet she knew that she had to cast that aside. Rubbing at the soreness with one hand, she continued to shake Ryan, repeating his name.
Ryan grunted, his good eye opening beneath the cover of his arm. The lid was sticky and the eye sore. For a second he couldn’t focus, and all was dark. It was only then that he realized that he was blocking the light with his own arm. He shook his head to clear it as he raised himself, rubbing at the eye to try to remove the grit that clogged and obscured his vision.
As his vision cleared and adjusted to the low-level light inside the wag, he could see Krysty looking at him. Casting his eye around, he could see that they were alone.
“So it wasn’t just the bang on the head,” he said, “we really did let them go out there.”
Krysty nodded, regretting it as a sharp pain seared her skull. “Some weird shit going on, lover. Now there’s just the two of us, and I don’t know where the hell the rest of—”
Ryan stayed her with a gesture. “No reason to beat shit out of ourselves for it. Just have to try to find them. Figure it’s safe out there?”
Krysty paused, listening to the silence that existed outside the womb of the wag’s interior. “Doesn’t sound like there’s anything—anything at all—going on out there,” she said softly.
“Then let’s recce and see what we can do about it,” Ryan said simply.
They both moved with some hesitation. Their limbs ached and their heads felt fragile. As they took the tarps down from the glassless windows, and from the windshield, they both winced at the light that streamed in. It was airless out there. The stillness of the plains slowed the flow of cooler, fresher air into the wag. Thankfully, the windshield glass had escaped destruction in the storm, so if they could get the engine working again, driving across the plain would not be impeded by a faceful of grit.
The desolation of nothing but flat dirt and scrub, with only distant hills to break the monotony, hit them hard. They exchanged glances that spoke volumes. They could see what appeared to be a mile or so in each direction, and there was nothing to relieve the emptiness. No sign of Doc, Jak, Mildred or J.B. It was as though their companions had been wiped from the surface of the Earth.
“What direction?” Krysty asked, as much to herself as to Ryan. “How do we decide?”
Ryan screwed his face into a mask of indecision, wiped a hand across as if to drywash it from him. “Could be any.” He looked up at the sky. The sun was low, not long risen by the looks of it.
Getting out of the wag, feeling the ground beneath his feet and for the first time in what seemed like days, Ryan looked around, circling slowly. There was no way of telling if any of their companions were still living out there. No way of telling in which direction they had wandered.
Lifting the hood of the wag, Ryan asked Krysty to try the ignition. As she pumped the engine, and it tried to pitifully cough to life, Ryan studied it. Although it wasn’t firing, and he was no expert, the one-eyed man was sure he could fix it enough to get them going. The question was, what direction should they take? He pondered that while he tinkered with the engine, getting Krysty to turn it over until he had fixed the problem.
If it had been himself stranded out there in the storm, and he’d managed to find shelter, then as soon as he was able he would have tried to either find his way back to the wag, or else to head back toward the nearest ville. Population. Water. Food. He knew that they all carried survival rations, but they would only last so long.
As Krysty got the engine started, Ryan shut the hood and took a look around him. The wag would be visible for a great distance. If they began to head back toward Brisbane, then—
The thought was stopped dead in his mind. Coming toward them was a cloud of dust in the distance. He had no idea where it had sprung from, as it hadn’t seemed to be there a moment before. Now it was approaching at a steady rate, and it was impossible to see what lay at the heart of it.
He slid into the seat next to Krysty.
“Meet them head-on?” she queried.
“Yeah. Not too fast. Let them come to us, but be ready to hit them.”
Krysty put the wag in gear and steered it toward the direction of the cloud. Ryan checked his SIG-Sauer and Steyr.
It was only as they got within five hundred yards that they could see what lay at the heart of the cloud. “Gaia.” Krysty whistled, while Ryan breathed in heavily. Both, without discussion, had expected another wag—like, or perhaps even, the coldhearts who had driven them this far onto the plain—but neither had expected the party of mounted Native Americans.
Krysty brought the wag to a halt. Both she and Ryan got out of the wag, using the open doors as cover, and stood waiting for the approaching party. Neither of them moved. The mounted warriors rode without fear or without threat.
When they were less than a hundred yards away, the party came to a halt, and the leading rider dismounted. He walked toward the wag, one hand raised in a gesture of peace.
Ryan stepped out from the cover of the door, holding the Steyr to one side as an indication of his own desire to avoid hostility.
“We won’t fire on you unless you make the first move,” he said slowly, “but we will fire. Make no mistake.”
The man standing in front of him, clothed in skins, and with his own skin covered in tattoos and paint, shrugged.
“You fire, then you got the wrong idea. We’ve got nothing but welcome for you both. We’ve been waiting long enough for you to turn up.”
JAK LOOKED UP at the sky. The first rays of a rising sun had spread warmth on a body that was almost frozen. He felt groggy, his limbs heavy and torpid. He was aware that he had become dangerously cold—that thing that Mildred called hypothermia—and that he had to force himself to move, to eat and drink, to get up from the hard ground.
Every movement had to be wrenched from his body. Muscles groaned and protested, refused to act on command, and teetered on the brink of collapse. It was only by the greatest act of will that, after what seemed like hours of effort, he managed to pull himself up, and to his knees. He had to stop there, blowing hard as though he had been chasing prey for hours, feeling sweat run down his forehead, matting his hair. He could feel a cooling puddle form in the hollow at the base of his spine. Grimly, he consoled himself with the thought that he had at least pushed his body temperature up a little.
Moving into a sitting position, he reached into his patched camou jacket, past some of the many hiding places for his knives, and to the place where he kept his water. He took a long drink, then forced himself to chew on some jerky, even though he felt anything but hungry. He knew he had to build up some reserves of energy, give his body something on which to feed. All the while he kept his senses keen—or at least, as keen as they could be while he recovered. Yet the instinct honed by years of being hunter and hunted, at different times, told him that there was little danger around.
The feeling of dread that had swept over him before he blacked out had now gone. He had no wish to dwell on it, but still it puzzled him as to what had triggered emotions that were usually so alien.
Massaging feeling back into limbs that had started to cramp, Jak rose unsteadily to his feet and took a good look around. He looked up at the sky, studied the position of the rising sun. From this he looked to the plateaus that marked the farthest points of vision.
He realized something that Mildred and J.B. would fail to pick up on—from the position of the distant ranges, misty in the early morning, and the place in the sky of the rising sun, Jak knew that he had traveled a vast distance for the duration of the storm, the kind of distance where he must have been walking for more than twenty-four hours.
It seemed impossible. Thinking back, the span of time did not seem that great. It had seemed only like an hour or two that he had been in the swirling seas of dirt, insects and frogs. Yet there was no sign of the latter around him. Neither would a simple hour or two of walking, even with the protracted period of cold and inaction, account for the weariness he felt in his limbs. Had he been out of it for most of the time that he had walked? Or had something happened to alter his sense of time?
Jak didn’t know how the storm could have done this, but he could think of no other reason to account for this. If nothing else, it might explain the strange emotions that had overwhelmed him just before the blackout. In truth, it did not matter now. All he could do was accept it and try to find his way back to where he believed the others would be waiting.
No. Just Ryan and Krysty. It was strange that memory was so hard. Vague impressions came to him: Doc, ranting in the storm, talking crap like usual, with J.B. and Mildred trying to rein him in, bring him to shelter. Then Doc breaking away, losing sight of them all in the solid fog that the plain had thrown up around them.
Why had he done something so stupe as to leave shelter and try to aid them, especially when he knew in his gut that there was little chance, and he would only add to the confusion? And why had Ryan and Krysty let him? The weird shit storm. It had to be that. The frogs and insects were weird on the outside, and the way they had acted was weird on the inside.
Jak just accepted that. There was little point in worrying about it. Now that it had happened, and it could be used to account for why he had ended up where he was, all that mattered was whether it was still affecting him. If it was, then there was no guarantee that he could rely on his instincts and senses to find his friends.
Jak sniffed the air. It was dry and arid, with little scent and only the lingering moisture of the cold night air. He felt it fill his lungs, and listened to the faint sounds of the air currents as they hummed around him, barely there, but discernible if you were attuned.
There was nothing in him that felt wrong, or even unusual. Whatever the storm had brought with it, so it had also taken with its passing.
Jak figured that the best he could do would be to try to head back toward the area where he thought he had left the wag. He couldn’t be exact, but reasoned that in this kind of wide-open expanse, a vehicle like the one he was seeking would soon stand out against the vastness of the plain. He thought back, tried to recall the outlines of the land as he had seen it before the storm ascended. It wasn’t easy. The wag chase across the plain had made the landscape move with a rapidity that hindered recall. There had been other things to take his attention, after all. But despite this, he was sure of a rough bearing that he could take.
Steeling himself for the long march ahead, he shook himself down, then began to walk, one foot in front of another. Failure was not an option.
After about an hour, he could hear a change in the movement of the air. It was something almost out of the range of hearing, but it was there: a note that changed slightly in pitch—a wag engine, moving away from him. He cursed. No point in hurrying after it. There was too much distance, and already it had moved before the sound reached him.
Shaking his head, he changed course slightly to follow the direction of the distant sound.
This new course took him, within an hour, to the shelter of a rock outcrop that stretched some fifteen feet into the air, with an overhang that offered shade in the increasing heat of the day. He looked up at the clear sky, at the burning orb of the sun, which was still some way from the center of the sky. It was going to get a whole heap warmer. The receding wag noise told him that there was little need to hurry. Perhaps a brief rest would be beneficial.
