Perdition Valley

Sliding off his horse, Stirling passed the reins to Renée. Drawing his revolver, the sec chief warily proceeded to the crumbling edge of the smoke-filled ravine. There was only churning water below, mixed with bloody debris. A thorny tentacle lay twitching on a small boulder, and a single great eye rested in the shallow creek, staring up at eternity in soulful reproach.

“Everybody okay?” Stirling demanded, warily watching flesh and organs in the ravine for any unnatural motion. Only a feeb trusted a mutie, even a chilled one.

“No, Gill got hit!” Alton answered loudly.

Turning from the ravine, Stirling saw Gill holding a knife in his hand and poking at the piece of tentacle across his left arm.

“Can’t cut it off,” the sec man grunted as a trickle of blood appeared from the end of the plat. “Fragging thorns are in deep!”

“Put that blade away,” Stirling said, sliding the strap of his longblaster over a shoulder. “We gotta burn it off.”

“I…was hoping if I moved fast enough…” Gill panted, stabbing the knife under the throbbing length of plant once more. Then he sighed and dropped his shoulders. “But that was a stupe’s wish, eh, Chief?”

“Would have tried the same thing myself, Gill,” Stirling said soothingly. “Burning is no fun. Nathan!”

“Sir?” the teenager replied spinning about with a pipe bomb at the ready.

“You and Porter—” The chief stopped and started again. “You and Alton check the horses for damage. Renée, watch their backs. I’ll do Gill.”

“Shouldn’t we move away from here first?” Nathan asked, casting a glance at the body parts strewed about. “All this blood and meat is going to attract every pred for klicks.”

“Preds, rists and muties, ya mean,” Renée corrected grimly, reloading the BAR with sure fingers.

“No time,” Stirling growled, helping Gill off his horse and onto a nearby mound of dirt. “We do this fast, or Gill joins the sky choir.”

Sitting, the sweaty man watched as Stirling wrapped a cloth around the upper part of the wounded arm, then tied the rag into a tight tourniquet. The trickle of blood from the gaping end of the vine slowed, but not by much.

“Better find something to bite on,” Stirling warned as he pulled a bag of black powder from a pouch on his gunbelt.

“I got some shine in my bags,” Alton offered from among the horses. “That’ll help kill the pain.”

“And make me useless for the rest of the night,” Gill replied, pulling off his gunbelt. “Just do it, and be fast.”

Pouring the black powder along the spiky piece of vine, the sec chief said nothing, concentrating on the work. When the ammo bag was empty, Stirling passed it to Gill, who stuffed the leather into his mouth. Thumbing a butane lighter alive, the sec chief glanced at his friend. Gill gave a nod, and Stirling lit the powder.

There was a blinding flare and Gill gave a muffled scream, every muscle going rigid. He became lost in the searing glare, but as the harsh light died away, Stirling saw that the smoldering vine lay twitching on the ground. A neat line of holes went across the sec man’s arm, but the bleeding had already slowed to a trickle, then stopped completely.

“Bet you could use that drink now.” Stirling snorted, angrily stomping his boot to grind the charred vine into the ground. The smoking length crumbled apart with a crunchy noise, and finally ceased to move.

“Gill?” Stirling asked, raising his head.

But the sec man lay slumped over on the mound of earth.

Worried, Stirling checked the man’s pulse, but found it strong and steady. The sec man had just fallen unconscious from the pain. Gently rubbing the old wound on his shoulder, Stirling really couldn’t fault the man. He’d done the same thing himself once.

“Should we let him sleep?” Nathan asked, stepping closer to offer one of the new med kits. “We could build a fire, and there are plenty of blankets.” The kit was just a lumpy canvas bag with the letters M*A*S*H carefully stitched into the fabric. Mildred had showed the ville healers a lot of tricks for keeping people alive, shine to wash wounds, boiled white cloth for bandages, and such. These crude duplicates of her predark med kit were the result. With one of these, a sec man had a hundred times better chance of surviving a wound than ever before. Just another of the countless debts for which they could never completely repay the outlanders.

“Hell, no. We get moving,” Stirling declared, opening the canvas bag. “The smell of blood is in the wind, and soon this place is going to be overrun with animals and muties fighting over the scraps of the drinker.”

From high above there came a screamwing cry, and in the distance a stickie hooted.

“Mebbe even a second drinker,” Alton stated, checking the load in the scattergun. He closed the breech with a snap and set the lock. “We got enough bombs to stop another one, but not while we’re also fighting screamwings!”

A blaster shot sounded, then another, and Renée appeared, reloading her revolver.

“Okay, vines fell on two of the horses and I had to ace them,” the sec woman stated without emotion. “So we’ll have to double up, or drop supplies.”

“We drop nothing,” Stirling barked, pouring shine over the sec man’s arm. The raw alcohol washed the open wounds and became tinted with red. Gill gave no response. Satisfied, the sec chief put away the bottle of shine and started to wrap the forearm.

The cloth strips had been immersed in boiling water for as long as a man could hold his breath. Something about killing stuff called gems, or germs. Whatever. Mildred had taught them this. Tying off the bandage, Stirling packed the med supplies into the canvas bag. Everybody Mildred treated got better ten times faster than seemed possible, so mebbe she was right about germs. Chilling was his job, not putting folks back together afterward.

“Okay, we’re short on rides,” Stirling said, slinging the canvas bag over the pommel of his horse. The animal whinnied nervously at its master, and he tenderly scratched it behind the ears. “Divvy up the food, keep all of the ammo, and we’ll travel in pairs. Renée rides with me, Nathan with Gill, Alton gets all of the extra bombs and water.”

The hooting sounded again, closer this time, and down in the ravine something started savaging the tattered chunks of the dead mutie.

Without comment, the Two-Son ville sec men rushed to their assigned tasks and were soon galloping away from the ravine. Taking the lead, Stirling realized that he had lost all sense of direction fleeing from the drinker. Arbitrarily, he chose the largest object in sight to guide them through the night, and headed the group straight for the jagged peaks of the Mohawk Mountains.

There was a thick copse a few klicks away that they could bed down in for the night. The sec men should be safe enough there. Hopefully.

Chapter Five

The roiling clouds filled the sky as the companions raced across the New Mex desert. A dull glow emanated from above, but whether it was the full moon or airborne rads rich with hot isotopes was impossible to say. Then the moon broke through for a scant moment, bathing the world in cool silvery light before vanishing behind the curtain of polluted clouds once more.

Hours passed as the miles flew beneath the pounding hooves of their horses. Soon, the ground turned into a mix of sand and soil, then came irregularly spaced tufts of weeds and grass. Finally the companions galloped across a flat grassland. There was no reeking taint of acid rain on the wind, only the sweet smell of living plants, so the companions gave the animals their heads, and let them run free, stretching their muscles as the group moved swiftly across one of the small sections of the Zone that was still alive.

“Lovely,” Doc said, inhaling the clean breeze. “Just lovely.”

Scowling darkly, Ryan grunted at the pronouncement.

“Yeah, fragging swell,” J.B. added sarcastically, pulling an anti-pers gren from his munitions bag and checking the tape on the arming handle. “As long as we don’t run into any drinkers. Grass and sand are a bad mix.”

“Especially on the fairway near the sixth hole,” Mildred said in wry amusement to herself.

Her red hair streaming in the wind, Krysty shot the physician a strange look. Mildred could only shrug, unable to explain the golfing allusion. Then she gave a start. Just a minute, there was a water hole here, and copse of trees standing in the middle of nowhere, long stretches of flat grassland…They were riding across a golf course! Okay, one overrun with weeds and bushes, now mixing with the real desert, and slightly nuked a hundred years ago, but still easily identifiable as a golf course.

“You spotted the design, too, eh, madam?” Doc asked.

“Kind of hard to miss when you know what to look for,” Mildred answered, hunkering lower in her saddle. Surrounded by a slice of the past, the fairway only incurred uncomfortable memories for the woman, and she concentrated on riding. The game of golf was as far in the past to her now as a New Year’s Eve party. Long gone, and only dimly remembered.

Ryan’s rad counter suddenly started to click wildly, and he abruptly veered to the left, starting a long curving sweep across the flat landscape. The others had seen this sort of thing many times before, and stayed close. The one-eyed man couldn’t see any indications of a blast crater, there were no glowing pits or glass lakes. But he knew that could simply mean the area had been hit with one of those air-burst atomic bombs he’d read about. Mebbe one of those neutron things that killed folks, but didn’t harm the buildings or plants.

“Golf?” Jak asked, arching a snowy eyebrow. “Not see sign of ocean.”

“No, not a gulf, golf. It’s a game, you see, and…” Mildred started, then bit her tongue. “Never mind. Just old talk.”

Bent low over his mare, the teen accepted the answer with a shrug. He knew the physician had been born long before skydark and sometimes talked about things almost impossible to translate clearly. He never would have understood the notion of an elevator until taking a ride in one in the redoubts.

Keeping careful track of the rise and fall of the clicks of the rad counter, Ryan and J.B. directed the companions past the lingering death of the invisible rad zone. Once the clicks returned to the normal level of background rad, Ryan called a halt on the crest of a low sweeping hillock. The elevation gave them a commanding view of the landscape. Even in the dappled light from the moving clouds, they could see there was nobody around for miles in every direction.