Separation

Doc’s eyes, surprisingly clear and piercing considering his state a few moments before, met Dean’s.

“A strange world, is it not?” he asked simply.

“Sure is, Doc,” the young Cawdor replied.

He moved his gaze to watch Mildred bend over Jak, with J.B. waiting patiently near. Continuing on, his eyes rested once more on his father and Krysty.

He had the strangest feeling. Something had been eating at him from the back of his brain. Something that had to do with family and the feeling that he had to search for something—or someone. It had been there before the sudden breaking of light and the wave of nausea had washed over him to wipe out everything.

But it was gnawing away, trying to make itself known again.

THE REDOUBT WAS EMPTY. The companions adopted standard tactics for exiting the chamber and securing the immediate area. Because of the opacity of the armaglass and the function making soundproofing thickness a necessity, it was always hard to tell if the area immediately outside the chamber door held any threat. So it was a matter of course to adopt triple-red status until safety was revealed.

From that point it was simply a matter of sweeping through the corridors to ascertain their status. A simple task in this instance, it seemed that the redoubt had been unoccupied for some time and the entrance had either never been discovered or breached by anyone from the outside. Because of that, the redoubt was still as fully stocked as it had been before the nukecaust. The companions were able to sleep easily and comfortably for the first time in ages, and also to shower and change their clothes. For Mildred, it was an opportunity to restock pharmacy supplies. For J.B., the chance to replenish stocks of ammo, grens and plas ex. The kitchens allowed them to plunder some self-heats. The canned food, which combusted with enough heat to warm the food on opening, was far from ideal. But when it was difficult to find any kind of game to hunt, self-heats came into their own and kept the companions fed until they were able to find something more palatable.

“ARE WE READY TO HEAD OFF?” Ryan asked as he shouldered the backpack containing supplies plundered from the redoubt, one of several such bags they had filled from the well-stocked base.

He was greeted with assent from the companions, who hoisted their own loaded backpacks and shouldered their newly cleaned and refilled weapons.

“Let’s hope that the reason we’ve found this undisturbed isn’t because the entrance is under a ton of rocks,” Doc commented dryly.

“You don’t even want to go down that road, my friend,” Mildred said before adding, “Not that you could, if it was under a ton of rock.”

Her good humor reflected how the companions felt. After two days’ rest in perfect peace, and the added bonus of a shower and a change of clothing, they felt more than ready to face what may lay ahead.

“Okay, let’s get going,” Ryan stated.

They made their way in line through the echoing and empty corridors of the lower level to the elevator. Having already tested the car during their brief stay, they knew it could carry them to the top level. They entered the elevator and traveled up in silence. Leaving the car as it came to rest, they walked briskly along the winding corridor until they arrived at the final set of sec doors, which was all that separated them from the outside world and whatever it may hold.

Ryan, at the head of the line, paused before initiating the procedure that would open the door. As did the rest of the companions, he scanned the walls and ceiling of the tunnel, searching for any sign of stress that may have resulted from earth movement, indicating that the door could be in any way impeded.

It was Mildred who voiced the general opinion. “Doesn’t look like there’s any problem so far—this tunnel looks as smooth as the day it was built,” she said softly.

The sec door began to rise, a cool breeze wafting in through the widening gap. As the viewing space increased with the ascent of the door, they could see that the redoubt was positioned at the summit of a small hill. A road twisted its way down the incline of the slope until it reached the edge of a beach, then veered off to the left behind the circumference of the hill. The beach was short, leading into a stretch of water that was about two miles long before hitting an island that looked to be only a few square miles in size. Beyond the island, the sea stretched toward the horizon.

“They didn’t exactly try to hide this one, did they?” Doc commented.

“I don’t know,” J.B. mused. “Facing away from the mainland, would anyone have come around this side of the hill? There’s only that island and not a lot else.”

“Yeah, I can figure that before skydark, but what about after? How come no one coming down the peninsula has searched this out, especially as it’s so open?” Mildred asked.

Krysty shrugged. “Could be—if there are no villes near—that no one wants to come down the peninsula, even if they’re in search of shelter. After all,” she added, looking out to the sea on either side of the hill, with only the distant coastline to break the view, “it’s not as if this is even much of a peninsula.”

“Best to wait to see what it’s like when we get around the other side,” Ryan said. “Keep on triple-red, and string out. We’ll follow the road.” He looked around. “There isn’t much cover for us or for anyone wanting to attack us, so I guess we should be okay as long as we keep alert.”

The one-eyed man signaled them to move with a wave of the Steyr rifle that he held in his right hand, and began to walk down the road that curved along the slope of the hill. Following him down, it was easy for the rest of them to see that he was accurate in his assessment of the territory. The hill was a verdant green, with only small rocks and pebbles poking through the covering of topsoil. There was little in the way of vegetation to provide any sort of cover on the hillside, and Krysty’s hair flowed free down her back, indicating that there was little in the way of hidden danger to alert her mutie sense.

The road had a rough shale-and-gravel surface that crunched under their marching feet, the loose rock shooting across onto the grass and down the slope of the hill toward the beach.

As they descended, Mildred looked at the island that lay only a couple of miles out across the narrow channel. It was fairly flat and seemed to be well covered by vegetation and trees. The environment on the small piece of land seemed to be better equipped for supporting life than the barren hillside of the peninsula.

They reached the bottom of the hill and followed the road, most of them glancing out at the channel. It seemed calm as the waves lapped gently along the shallow beach, but as their glances strayed farther out, they could see patches of white water that pointed to a crosscurrent that could be deadly to the unsuspecting. It was likely the island was isolated and uninhabited because of it. Despite the proximity to land, negotiating the narrow channel would be a dangerous task.

Looking up, the entrance to the redoubt could be quite plainly seen and once more it crossed Mildred’s mind to wonder why the predark base had been left so completely undisturbed over the past century.

Rounding the hill, the companions found that they were immediately ascending once more, the land on the reverse of the hill narrowing to a band of rock that formed a sharp slope that led upward to form a bridge between the hill and the mainland. The tides around the coast had to have eaten away at the rocks over centuries, chipping away the land until it formed little more that a narrow causeway. The topsoil that covered the hill became more sparse, slabs of rock showing through and coloring the landscape a slate gray.

“I’ve got a feeling I know why the redoubt has been left alone,” Mildred said as they climbed, the incline becoming steeper with each footfall.

It was a rhetorical statement. They could all quite clearly see what had happened. The centuries of tide had worn the rock to a narrow bridge, the shift in the landscape fashioned by the post-nukecaust nuclear winter rendering a causeway at its narrowest point. Jagged shards of rock fell abruptly away to the razor-sharp granite below, which was consistently being lashed by the current as the tides forced water into the narrow channel. Across the divide, which seemed to be about ten yards in length, the causeway reappeared with the same jagged disruption in the pattern of the dark rock face. It was as though the tide and the earth movement beneath had caused a great chunk of the natural bridge to be ripped wholesale from the causeway and just tossed away, isolating the hill completely from the mainland. Beyond the divide, the causeway widened to join the rest of the coastline, where the greenery was lush and the land looked fertile and verdant.

“Fireblast,” Ryan whispered softly. He knew that if there was some way to bridge the divide, they would reach a landscape that offered the promise of good living and perhaps a friendly ville. To their back lay only an island and the barren hill, with the possibility of a quick mat-trans jump to another place—always assuming their constitutions could take another jump so quickly. Knowing how Doc and Jak were always affected, and from the way in which Dean had suffered with this particular jump, it didn’t seem a viable option this soon.

Jak joined the one-eyed man at the head of the divide and looked down onto the razor-sharp rocks. The albino looked across toward the far side of the gap, screwing up his red eyes to get a better view in the wind that whipped through the hole left by the missing rock.

“If bit shorter, would say try climb down, mebbe get across, then make rope across.”

Ryan nodded briefly. “String some across, then hand-over-hand. Half, mebbe three-quarters, of the distance and we could all make it. But this is a bit much for Doc, mebbe for Mildred and Dean, as well. Anyway, who could get down this side, across and then up the other?”

Jak shrugged. “Mebbe me, if water not run strong down there.”

Ryan cast his eye down to the cross-tide as it crashed on the razored rocks. He grimaced. “Yeah, try to get across those rocks with no tide and you could probably just about make it. But if one of those waves catches you, you’re fucked.”

Jak nodded once. “Cut you up like the sharpest knife.”

“Nothing to do except go back, then,” Ryan stated.

The other companions moved to the edge of the rock for a better view of the channel. Looking along the coastline that lay behind the hill and peninsula, they could see that the drop from the top of the land to the sea below was sheer for as far as the eye could see. Small strips of sand here and there ended in a sheet of rock that would impede any progress, even assuming they had a craft on which to sail around the hill and the causeway. The rock bridge, so violently severed, was their only practical hope of reaching the mainland.

“I fear this may turn out to be something of an anticlimax,” Doc said woefully.

“Mebbe not,” J.B. told them. “We’ve got two choices—go back to the redoubt and get the hell out…”

“Or?” Dean asked.

“Or we try to get to that island, see what it’s like there. Mebbe there’s some life of some kind, or mebbe just a place we could rest up for some time.”

“Life?” Mildred questioned. “John, how the hell could anyone live on there, cut off from anywhere else?”

The Armorer gave her a rare grin. “I only said mebbe, Millie,” he countered.

They turned and walked back down the incline of the road to the base of the hill.

“What do you think, Dad?” Dean asked. “Reckon we could get out to the island?”

“Not keen on making another jump so soon?” Ryan queried.

Dean tried to keep the darkness out of his voice, but couldn’t stop it crossing his brow as he spoke. “I can’t say as I’d be too happy about having to do that,” he said simply.