Eden's Twilight

“Nine o’clock is clear!” J. B. Dix shouted, easing his grip on the S&W M-4000 shotgun. He would have preferred to use the 9 mm Uzi machine pistol hanging under his blanket, but there was probably loose sand in the works and he would most likely only get off a few rounds before the rapidfire jammed. However, the deadly 12-gauge scattergun should be more than enough for anything they encountered in here, norm, mutie or droid.

“Three is same!” Jak Lauren added, watching the other direction. A big-bore Colt .357 Python was tight in the albino youth’s hand, a leaf-shaped throwing knife held loosely in the other. If there had been anything waiting in the dark, the pale teen would have used the blade first, before spending a live round. When the horse died, the companions had been forced to choose between carrying extra food or ammo. No choice there. As his father had always liked to say, rice is nice, but brass will save your ass. True words, and there was always something trying to ace a person in the Deathlands.

As if in reply to the thought, the wind moaned louder through the ragged hole in the door, the stream of loose sand blowing across the murky garage. Pushed back slightly, Ryan grimly dug in his boots and slammed the door shut again. “Knife!” he bellowed.

Understanding what he meant, Jak stepped closer and rammed the blade between the door and the floor as a makeshift stop. Still holding the shotgun, J.B. joined them and together the three men put their shoulders to the trembling metal.

“Dark night, this is like trying to wrestle a grizzly bear!” J.B. cried out, angrily curling his chapped lips. There were red marks on his nose where glasses normally rested, and the wiry man was squinting against the windblown grit peppering his face. Without his wire-rimmed spectacles, J.B. was terribly nearsighted, but that wasn’t really a problem inside the building.

“Worse!” Jak snarled through clenched teeth, his ruby-red eyes glaring hatefully. “Could always ace bear!”

Suddenly a sharp whistle sounded and everybody turned to see Krysty Wroth standing in a rectangle of window light, a wrapped hand resting on top of a large fifty-five-gallon steel drum.

“This one is full!” the woman shouted, tufts of crimson hair sticking out of her wrapping, the prehensile filaments moving defiantly against the acrid breeze.

Abandoning their own searches, Mildred and Doc hurried closer, and the three companions tipped the heavy container to awkwardly roll it across the garage, the loose sand crunching underfoot. As they approached, J.B. and Jak got out of the way and the five of them set the barrel firmly against the door. Easing his stance, Ryan grunted in satisfaction as the fire exit rattled slightly but stayed in place.

“That’ll do,” the one-eyed warrior said grudgingly. “But we better get another.” Irritably, Ryan rubbed the back of his hand against the leather patch where his left eye used to be located. Sometimes in nightmares he could still see his brother’s knife descending and feel the terrible stab of pain that haunted him for so many years afterward.

“And find something to block that nuking hole!” J.B. added, blinking repeatedly. He started to reach for the glasses in his shirt pocket, but forced himself to stop. These were his only good pair—his spares had hideous purple frames—and he could not risk getting them damaged.

“Will this serve?” Doc Tanner asked in a deep stentorian bass, gesturing at a piece of corrugated steel lying on the floor.

“Yeah, looks good,” Ryan growled, lumbering that way. He was tired and sore from battling the storm, but there was a lot to do before any of them could rest.

Each taking a side, Doc and Ryan tried to lift the ramp, but the thick plane of steel proved to be a lot heavier than it looked, and it took all six of the companions to cumbersomely hoist the corrugated sheet off the floor. As it moved, a grease pit was exposed, the shadowy depths lined with shelves filled with plastic bottles of lubricant, oil filters and miscellaneous objects.

Wary of where they stepped, the six companions moved carefully around the deep opening, and hauled the protective cover across the dark garage. Wiggling it between the shaking door and the barrel neatly sealed the hole, and the stinging wind died away completely. However, the companions added another fifty-five-gallon drum to the barricade, and then a third, before they were finally satisfied.

Lighting some candles, the companions dutifully checked their blasters, then did a second recce of the garage just to make sure they were truly alone. More than once they had entered a supposedly empty building only to be attacked by coldhearts hidden in a closet or to have a mutie drop down on them from the rafters. However, they took heart at the fact that there were no unusual smells in the air, just the expected reek of old grease, rust and decaying rubber.

There proved to be nothing lurking in the bathroom, utility closet or even hidden inside the refrigerator, the insides of which resembled a high-school lab experiment gone bad. There was a wooden desk in the corner, but the drawers contained only requisition logs, order forms, time sheets, pencils, paper clips and other assorted effluvia from the old world. Even the tools on the Peg-Board were only rusty ghosts, rendered into outlines from the sheer passage of implacable time. The garage was clear of anything dangerous or useful.

Gathering in the corner farthest from the blocked door, the companions gratefully undid the caked strips of cloth from around their faces, then loosened the ropes holding the blankets in place and gratefully dropped them to the floor.

“Never saw a bastard storm hit this fast before,” Ryan growled, stretching his tired muscles. “If we hadn’t found this place, we’d all have been on the last train west by now.”

Tall and heavily muscled, the big man had a deeply scarred face, with a leather patch covering the puckered hole of his left eye. A bolt-action Steyr SSG-70 was strapped across his lumpy backpack, and a 9 mm SIG-Sauer blaster was holstered at his hip, right next to the curved sheath of a panga.

“Got that right, lover,” Krysty agreed, listening to the thunder booming outside. A split second later lightning flashed outside the windows, casting the people in the garage into stark relief. “However, when I saw that concrete eagle outside, I knew we’d be okay.”

A strikingly beautiful woman, Krysty was tall with ample curves and bright emerald eyes. Long crimson hair hung past her shoulders, the animated filaments flexing and moving around with a life of their own. A canvas-web belt of ammo pouches circled her waist, the checkered grip of an S&W .38 revolver jutting from a holster on her right hip. A large Bowie knife was sheathed on the left. Her worn blue cowboy boots were embroidered with the silvery outline of falcons, and a tattered bearskin coat hung over her shoulders.

“Yeah, me, too,” Ryan said, almost smiling. “National Guard bases are always good boltholes. I read once they were designed to hold back rioting mobs of people. The ones Trader found were usually in good condition.” He paused. “Not always, but usually.”

“Gaia must have been guiding our steps,” Krysty said, removing the cap from her canteen. She took a small sip, sloshing the water in her mouth before spitting it into the grease pit, and then took a long draft from the container. The water was tepid, flat, but tasted like ambrosia.

“Gaia, eh? Mebbe she did help at that,” J.B. added, removing the glasses from his pocket and sliding them into place. “Because I sure couldn’t see the compass, or sextant. We could easily have gone deeper into the desert and ended up as bones in the Great Salt.”

Short and wiry, J.B. was wearing loose neutral-colored fatigue pants, U.S. Army boots, a brown leather jacket and fingerless gloves. An Uzi submachine gun hung off his left shoulder, an S&W M-4000 shotgun was slung across his shoulders and at his side was a munitions bag bulging with assorted explosives. Their old teacher, the Trader, had nicknamed him “the Armorer” long ago, and the title fit John Barrymore Dix perfectly. There wasn’t a weapon in existence the deadly man could not fix, or repair, in his sleep.

“Nonsense, John Barrymore, luck favors the ready,” Doc said, trying to brush the loose grit from his clothing. However, he only seemed to be making it worse, so the man abandoned the effort. “Indeed, observe our current locale! This is a perfect sanctuary from the Dantean fimbulvetr rampaging outside!”

Lean and muscular as a racing whippet, Professor Theophilus Algernon Tanner seemed incongruous in his frock coat and frilly white shirt, clothing from a time when the style of a man’s clothing was vitally important. A huge .44 LeMat pistol was tucked into a wide gunbelt, the canvas ammo pouches full of black powder, lead and cotton wads for the massive Civil War handcannon. An ebony walking stick was thrust into his belt like a medieval sword, and his backpack hung empty and flat across his back.

“Stop mixing mythologies, you crazy old coot,” Dr. Mildred Wyeth shot back irritably, stomping the dust off her combat boots. “Dante’s hell was blazing hot, while the Norse legend of the fimbulvetr said it was freezing cold!”

Short and stocky, the physician was wearing a red flannel shirt and camou-colored fatigue pants, her ebony hair braided into beaded plaits. A Czech-made ZKR target revolver was snugly holstered low on her hip, and a patched canvas bag hung from her shoulder bearing the faded word M*A*S*H. It held the bare essentials: boiled water sealed in plastic bottles, sterilized cloth in plastic bags, two sharp knives, sulfur to dust wounds, flea powder from an animal clinic, eyebrow tweezers from a hair salon, pliers from a dentist, long fingers recovered from an autobody shop and some tampons reserved for deep bullet wounds. It wasn’t much, barely the basics, but it was a start.

“Indeed, madam, but Dante’s hell was also frozen in the center,” Doc countered, raising a finger. “So who is to say the two frigid dreamscapes were not connected somehow in a sort of cosmic abettor?”

Scowling, Mildred started a reply then merely snorted instead, simply too exhausted to argue with the scholar. Besides, she thought, maybe he was correct.

“Hot, cold, not care,” Jak Lauren noted pragmatically, taking a long pull at his canteen before closing it tight. “Long as we inside and storm out.”

A true albino, the teenager was the color of snow, hair and skin alike. He wore loose fatigue pants that had seen better days, a T-shirt that bore a picture of a wolf and a battered jacket covered with bits of metal, glass and feathers. Sewn into the collar were a dozen razor blades, a terrible surprise for any enemy who tried to grab the youth by the neck. A huge Colt .357 Magnum Python rested in a policeman’s gunbelt. At least a dozen leaf-bladed throwing knives were secreted in his jacket. A combat knife was sheathed at his left hip, and the handle of a dagger jutted from the top of his right boot.

“You can load that into a blaster and fire it,” Ryan growled, fisting the leather patch that covered his missing eye. Some of the bastard sand and salt had gotten through the wrapping and were making the empty hole itch like crazy. Turning away from the others, he lifted the patch and carefully poured some water onto his face until the sensation ceased.

Outside the garage, the howling wind increased in volume, the hard-driven grit sounding like winter hail on the roof. Then something heavy slammed into the side of the garage, the impact shaking loose a light rain of dust from the steel beams supporting the ceiling.

“The storm seems to actually be getting worse, if that’s possible.” Krysty frowned, casting an anxious glance at the barricaded door. “We must be near a rad pit, and a really mucking big one.” She did not fully understand the science behind the atmospheric phenomenon the way Mildred and Doc said they did, but the woman knew from experience that the rising heat from a nuke crater could change the local weather in any manner of odd ways; burn a forest into a desert or turn a desert into a swamp. Skydark did more than simply destroy people and cities, it altered the world in ways the whitecoats couldn’t have predicted.

Instantly both Ryan and J.B. checked the rad counters clipped to their lapels, but each of the devices registered only the usual background levels.

“We’re clear,” J.B. announced in obvious relief. “No rads worth mentioning.”

Just then sheet lightning flashed outside in a continuous barrage and thunder rolled for several minutes, making speech impossible.

“Well, we’re not going anywhere until this ends,” Ryan stated, rubbing his unshaved jaw. “Might as well settle in for the night. The ceiling is high enough for us to start a fire, and we can use the desk for kindling. What’s the food situation?”

Taking a seat on a wooden bench, Mildred answered without even looking in her backpack. “We lost a lot of it in the storm,” she said with a sigh. “But I managed to keep about three pounds of dried beans, four self-heats of mushroom soup, some beef jerky that probably won’t crack our teeth too badly, and six cans of…uh, dinosaur.”

The physician tried not to blush at the word. Dinosaur was her private term for cans of dog food. She wanted to call it beef stew, goulash, any damn thing else, but the companions could read and knew better. They didn’t care, food was food, and as a physician she had to grudgingly admit that the…dinosaur…was perfectly edible, tender meat, rich vegetables and a thick gravy fortified with vitamins. Very healthy stuff these blighted days. But until she had removed the labels and started calling it something else, Mildred had simply never been able to stomach the stuff. She tried not to shudder. Dinosaur stew.

Understanding, J.B. patted her on the arm. “Well, at least it’s not boot soup,” he said in consolation. Once, the companions had been trapped underground and were forced to eat their leather footwear to stay alive. It had worked, but the unique flavor was something none of them would ever forget.

In spite of herself, Mildred had to smile at the memory. “You’re right, John, anything is better than that.” She chuckled.

“Not one MRE?” Jak asked hopefully.

“Sorry.” Mildred shrugged. “We had the last one yesterday.”

The teen frowned. “Damn.” Those were his favorite.

The letters MRE were military speak for Meal Ready to Eat, predark army rations. Each envelope was a complete meal, and the pack included a main course, snack, cigarettes, candy bar, dessert, coffee, sugar, moist towelette, chewing gum and even a small packet of toilet tissue for use afterward. The food was incredible: spaghetti with meatballs, veal Parmesan, beef Stroganoff, chicken and dumplings, eggs and bacon, even pancakes and waffles. The meals were fit for a baron. Best he’d ever had! Well, aside from possum, Jak acknowledged. The MRE packs were worth their weight in ammo, and harder to find than a friendly stickie.

“Well, it’s my turn to get the wood,” Krysty said, picking up a heavy wrench from a toolbox on the floor and starting for the desk.