Shaking Earth

Mildred screamed in fury more than terror as the fangs stabbed down through the roof, one gleaming ivory scimitar missing her head by inches. Gathering the now semiconscious Krysty into her strong arms, Mildred rolled herself and the redhead to the side of the cargo compartment, away from the reeking, fuming venom that spurted in pulses from the fangs. Then she turned back to hammer at the nearest fang with the heel of her fist. It had no effect.

“A fascinating adaptation,” Doc remarked in as calmly conversational a voice as the others had ever heard him use. “Clearly the serpent soaks up heat from the ambient rocks, allowing it to move and hunt as freely at night as in the daytime.”

“That’s great, Doc,” Ryan said, “but how do we kill the nuke-blasted thing?”

Despite the wag’s wild bucking, J.B. popped back up through the vacant gun mount with his Uzi. He emptied the magazine at the creature in three long ragged bursts as it coiled yet again to strike.

Ryan saw a relatively clear stretch of slope, if steep, and sent the wag bucketing down it amid a baby avalanche of loose rubble. The impacts slammed his lower jaw into the upper and threatened to shake his joints apart.

“We’re getting away!” Mildred shouted.

“We better,” J.B. said, dropping back down into the passenger seat to change mags. “I might as well be pissing at the bastard. I’m not sure any of my rounds even penetrated.”

The monstrous snake launched itself, not in a strike but slithering down the slope parallel to them, flowing sinuously over jagged steaming black rock and gray boulders like a living avalanche. It caught up with them, lunged again, this time as if trying to bring its terrible mass crushing down on the wag. Ryan spun the wheel right. For a terrifying fraction of a second the vehicle slewed sideways in the scree, heeling way over toward the bottom of the slope, threatening to break away at any instant and go rolling down the smoky like a loose boulder, battering itself to pieces and churning its occupants to lumpy red puree. Then the vast cleated run-flat tires bit and thrust the wag forward across the slope, no longer in danger of tipping over but still not clear of the snake.

Ryan heard loud reports from close behind, dared a look over his shoulder. From one window Jak was cranking shots from his Python handblaster, from the other, Doc was booming away with his venerable LeMat. The pistol rounds, like the 9 mm bullets fired by J.B.’s Uzi, were almost certainly as futile as spitting at the rattlesnake, but Ryan had to grin approval of his comrades’ fighting spirit.

The thing was right after them, writhing with incredible speed. On a flat, on anything like a decent surface, the Hummer would’ve left the horror in its dust. On this evil broken slope, the snake had every advantage.

“I can’t even slow the bastard, Ryan,” J.B. yelled, blitzing off another magazine. “Dunno if even your Steyr could hurt it.”

“Nor, it seems, can we outrun it, had we Hermes’s wings to speed our heels,” Doc Tanner murmured.

“Then, like Trader used to say, when all else fails—cheat,” Ryan said grimly.

“I thought that was Samantha the Panther,” J.B. said.

“Whoever.” Ryan spun the wheel left. His companions yelled in alarm as the wag bounced right and cut across the giant snake’s path. The rattler, surprised by its prey apparently turning on it, reared up hissing. It struck. Anticipating the attack, Ryan had cranked the wheel and taken off at a tangent. The Hummer still rocked as the monster’s head glanced off the wag’s rear bumper.

Ryan was hammering the wag right across the mountainside, back toward the spewing vent—back upward toward the river of living fire that had almost trapped them before.

“Ryan,” J.B. said from the gun mount. “Ryan, lava—”

Lava it was, yes, running down the mountain at them in a racing flow of glow, red and fast as water. For his part Ryan was racing to meet the stream. It spurted out over a shelf of rock as if reaching out for the puny skittering thing. The snake raced after them, blunt nose almost prodding their tailgate. The fires of Hell danced in its slit-pupilled eyes.

The liquid rock-stream splashed down behind a boulder in a shower of glowing gobbets. J.B. cried out in pain as a droplet of yellow-glowing lava brushed his cheek. Another burned right through the roof and struck, hissing by Ryan’s right boot as the Hummer jounced across the lava stream’s path with the rattler in mad pursuit.

A vast, fiery wave of lava broke over the boulder and thundered down onto the snake. The monster reared back, emitting a shriek that threatened to rupture the companions’ eardrums. A huge cloud of steam bellowed out as the molten rock flash-boiled the snake’s body fluids. A terrible stench, like burning hair magnified a millionfold, enveloped the wag. Mildred puked noisily in the back.

“Dark night!” J.B. yelled.

The rattler’s head reared out of the lava. The molten rock fell away from it in burning rivulets. For a terrifying moment it seemed as if the monster would continue its hellhound pursuit, shedding the lava like a duck’s wing shedding water.

Then it collapsed, to sink steaming and reeking into the already crusting lava pool.

Chapter Five

The wag sat creaking and popping as it cooled off in the long grass beside a stream. Ryan squatted on a roof blistered and discolored by embers, hot gases and blobs of lava, and torn in several places by the giant snake’s fangs. He cradled his Steyr across his lean-muscled thighs. Between thumb and forefinger of his right hand he absently rolled the stem of a blue-white wildflower he’d picked before climbing to the top of the Hummer. Patches of them and differently hued blossoms dotted the fertile zone they were in now like pigment spills.

He was keeping watch while his comrades cleaned themselves and the wag. Mildred had insisted on the cleanup, and she wasn’t just being predark fastidious.

“We need to clear out every last trace of that venom,” she’d said. “Even assuming its potency and characteristics are those of normal rattlesnake poison, and don’t carry any kind of nasty mutie kicker, if any of it gets into an open wound, even a scratch, you’ll be in a world of hurt. Rattler venom’s primarily a hematotoxin. It makes your red blood cells explode. And we’re fresh out of antivenin.”

So they were taking a pause, down in the surprisingly green and fertile valley that stretched away north from the mountain into whose bowels they had jumped, and a similar volcanic peak a few miles away that didn’t seem to be erupting as enthusiastically. They still seemed to be a good twenty miles from the wide lake. In the bright sunlight they could make out the shapes of skyscrapers rising from the middle of it.

J.B. tucked his minisextant into his kit and glanced at his old map. “Latitude’s right for Mexland,” he announced. “Right about Mex City, truth to tell.”

“I could’ve told you that,” Mildred said. She was redressing Krysty’s shoulder. The giant rattler’s venom had splashed her bandages. Thinking fast, Mildred had clawed them away before the poison could come into contact with Krysty’s wounds.

“Air thin,” Jak said.

“Yeah. Good thing we’ve been up in the mountains getting acclimated for a few days. This whole valley’s pretty high. Don’t remember just how high that is exactly. I came down here for vacation once, couple years before the balloon went up. I recognize those mountains. Big one we popped out of is Popocatépetl. The shorter one’s Iztaccíhuatl.”

“What’s that mean?” J.B. asked, blinking owlishly through his spectacles, which he had just cleaned on his shirttail.

“How should I know? I can’t even spell’em. I don’t even know why it looks as if the ruins of Mexico City are out in the middle of a great big lake.”

“They were lovers,” Doc intoned. He was wringing out his shirt. His thin, shrunken chest was fishbelly pale. In comparison his hands and face looked deeply tanned.

“Say what?” J.B. asked. “You’re not losing your grip again, are you, Doc?”

The old man didn’t deign to respond. “She was the emperor’s daughter. A most beauteous maid. He was a mighty young warrior. They fell in love. Her father disapproved. He sent the young man off to war, then told his daughter he had fallen in battle. Whereupon the girl expired from grief. Then the warrior returned home to find his beloved dead, and he died of grief, as well. The gods, taking pity on them, transformed them into the mountains we have just quit. Iztaccíhuatl means ‘Sleeping Woman.’ Popocatépetl is ‘Smoking Mountain.’”

Jak was squatting by the stream, ignoring the fact his feet were sunk in cold muck. He turned his ruby gaze over his shoulder on Doc.

“Gods turned to mountains?” he asked. “What good that do?”

Doc shrugged delicately. “The ways of gods, the theologians assure us, are not the ways of men. Though in sooth, the gods and goddesses of most of the globe’s mythologies seem to manifest a decidedly puckish sense of humor.”

Ryan checked the rad counter clipped to his coat for maybe the dozenth time. “Anybody getting any kind of a reading?”

“Nope,” J.B. said. “Background’s mebbe a little high. That’s it.”

“So no nukes went off in the vicinity.” Ryan shook his head. “Something did some damage.”

“No kidding,” Mildred said. “In my day this was the most populous city on Earth. We should be in the suburbs now. Something didn’t just damage them, it made them disappear.”

“Mebbe the smokies?” J.B. asked. Ryan shrugged.

J.B. had begun to load the few supplies they’d managed to scavenge from the Popocatépetl redoubt back into the wag. He noticed that Jak was staring out across the little stream again, seemingly morose.

“What’s eating at your innards, Jak?” he asked.

“Snake,” the youth said.

“You’re thinking about that bastard snake?”

Jak shrugged. “Big,” he said. “Caught, eat like kings.”