Shaking Earth

As if to emphasize his words, he suddenly lunged into the stream in a great splash. He grabbed, then he straightened, holding a squirming leopard frog. He bit off the head, spat it into the weeds, then began to eat the still-kicking amphibian.

Mildred winced. “I hate it when he does stuff like that.”

Ryan gave a last look around. Their immediate surroundings were broken enough with jagged ridges and obvious cooled-lava flows that any ill-intentioned strangers could work their way to well within longblaster range of the party and he’d never see them. He tossed away the flower and jumped to the ground. The soil was black, rich and springy beneath the soles of his boots.

“How’s Krysty?” he asked Mildred, walking to where the woman was laid out by the stream.

“Pretty much out of it. The infection’s taking hold and she’s obviously weakened some since we got away from the eruption, with all that raw Earth energy exploding all over the damn landscape.”

Ryan thought he kept his feelings from his face. He had long years of practice at that. But Mildred said, “Don’t worry. It’s not so bad as it sounds. I think it’s a good sign she’s out. Her body is fighting to repel the infection and start healing. Her mind has shut down so that she can concentrate her resources on the task at hand. At this point, other than trying to avoid any more exciting encounters with the local wildlife, which was something else I didn’t see when I was down here as a turista, it’s most important to make sure she wakes up regularly to eat. Keep her strength up.”

She stood. “Speaking of which, I’m not so concerned about the food thing as I was, for any of us. There’s some real fertile-looking land out here, interspersed with all the lava flows and ash falls. So I don’t think we’ll have to settle for feeding her raw frog. But since it looks as if there’s likely to be better on tap, it’s probably not too soon to start looking out for it.”

“I think there’s a ville a couple miles ahead,” Ryan said. “We’ll make for that.”

THEY CAME AROUND one of the omnipresent saw-toothed hogsbacks and found themselves on the outskirts of a ville. At first glance it appeared almost painfully neat, compared to the devastation and decay they were used to: sturdy, square adobe-brick houses, washed in white and pink and shades of tan and brown, with heavy ceiling beams projecting from the fronts. Not a whole lot different than they’d seen in New Mexico north of the Jornada del Muerte, if better kept-up. But worlds different from the urban sprawl that had occupied this area a hundred years before, according to the recollections of Doc as well as Mildred.

The Hummer had rolled in among the first few houses. The companions realized with a sort of shared shock that they’d allowed the ville’s appearance at a distance of tidiness momentarily to deceive them. Obviously the place had been built with care since skydark and tended with love throughout however many years it had stood.

It had, however, been trashed quite recently, by the looks of things.

Many houses sported windows of glass, flat, clear, manufactured panes, not ripply and murky from being made in some postnuke glassblower’s shop and not purple from a century’s exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, either. Sure signs that the residents traded with scavvies working a big city where warehouses and shops still contained unbroken sheets of glass. They were also sure signs of prosperity, since such salvage didn’t come cheap.

Many of the panes were broken, which was a sign bad trouble had come to the ville. The modern world was no haven of law and order, likely no more so here than in the most nuke-scarred regions of North America, but one thing about it: people who built their homes by hand and kept the trim painted and paid to put in nice, salvaged windows didn’t tolerate casual vandalism. You tagged, they slagged. You busted a window, they busted you. In pieces. That simple.

Doors neatly painted dark red or blue—many hardly faded at all by the intense high-altitude sun—hung askew from their frames. Mismatched curtains of savvied cloth flapped freely over glass fangs in the quickening afternoon breeze. The travelers saw no flames but smelled smoke—and floating on the wind the unmistakable stink of fresh death.

From the gloomy depths of a hut with its front door gone altogether lurched a mound of horror. It had no head. Rather its right shoulder came to a point perhaps seven feet tall, so that it had to squat down on thin bandy legs to clear the doorway. Its left shoulder was a good foot and a half lower. Normal-appearing arms hung from both shoulders. Another arm sprouted halfway down the mutie’s right side. It had a single saucer-size eye in the middle of its lesion-covered torso, that wept constant yellow pus toward a slack-lipped, jag-toothed mouth.

Jak stuck his hand out the window past Ryan’s head and shot the mutie with his Python.

Chapter Six

The 158-grain semijacketed slug hit the mutie in its single eye. A spray of fluid that looked more maroon than norm blood and some clotted pale chunks of what had to have been brains erupted from the creature’s back. Clear ichor gushing from its collapsed ocular, the mutie emitted a whistling shriek from its mouth and collapsed.

Despite his case-hardened constitution, Ryan winced. The .357 Magnum round had maybe the nastiest muzzle-blast of any handblaster he’d encountered, sharper and more painful to the ear than even the louder but lower-pitched report of a .44 Magnum. Primer fragments blasted out between the rear of the cylinder and the frame stung his cheek and spattered like rain on his eyepatch.

He frowned, not just at the ringing in his ears. A hunter born and bred, as much feral predatory animal as human, Jak was hard even by the standards of his time and place. The word mercy was in his vocabulary only because Doc had taught it to him. But the ruby-eyed albino boy had always accepted Ryan’s rules, which were pretty much the same as vanished Trader’s had been. And one of the foremost was: No chilling for chilling’s sake.

Then he saw Mildred, right in front of him, thrust her Czech-made .38 target revolver out her window and fire a solo shot at a figure looming behind the busted-out window next to the door. At the same time the hideous mutie Jak had chilled dropped what it had been holding concealed behind its back with its two right hands: a crude musket or shotgun made out of heavy-gauge pipe and wire.

“Fireblast!” Belatedly, Ryan was becoming aware of movement all around them, seething out of the houses like maggots from so many beast skulls. “Mildred, get us out of here!”

The stocky physician had tucked her blaster away and was doing just that. Both hands death-gripping the wheel, she goosed the beefy wag along the narrow rutted-earth street. The way the Hummer was jouncing over the ruts, Ryan had no chance of acquiring any targets through the variable-powered scope mounted on his SSG. Nor would he have been able to hold on any target long enough to take a half decent shot. Cursing to himself, he hauled out his 9 mm handblaster with the built-in silencer.

The wag was armored, if lightly. The Kevlar and steel of its roof and sides and its Lexan windows should have been more than adequate to keep off the arrows, stones and bullets the suddenly swarming muties showered down on them, especially since the blasters they were loosing off, with hollow booms and big puffs of dirty-white smoke seemed mostly to be crude homemade muzzle-loaders like the one the first mutie had carried, firing big soft blobs of lead or maybe even fistfuls of nails, busted glass and pebbles. But the Hummer wasn’t designed to be an armored personnel carrier, whose occupants were meant to do serious fighting from inside it. It was a utility vehicle, a scout car; the heavy weapon, machine gun or grenade launcher, which had once occupied its pintle mount had been intended to lay down a base of fire from a distance in support of dismounted infantry, and also to give it a sting and enable it to scoot out of any trouble it happened to roll into. It didn’t have fancy firing ports. It had windows that had to be rolled down to allow the passengers to fire out. Which of course let all kinds of missiles in.

Nor were the muties totally limited to rocks and museum-piece projectile weapons. Mildred yet out a yelp of alarm as fire blossomed yellow-orange right in their path. Flames and dense black smoke rolled in a tide up the hood to break against the windshield. Everybody ducked as a dragon’s belch of flame-heated air and choking smoke rushed in at the windows to fill the passenger compartment. Then they were through the flame pond created by the Molotov cocktail.

A crowd of screaming muties had rolled a battered stakebed truck into their path fifty yards ahead. “Hang on, everybody,” Mildred shouted, and cranked the wheel left, toward a gap between houses just large enough to pass the Hummer.

The wag heeled way over to the right as the occupants grabbed for whatever purchase they could. Jak dropped his Python inside the cargo compartment to grab a tie-down with one hand and the out-cold Krysty with the other. Their tires were still spinning off tongues of fire. Then the bow wave of dust they threw up doused the burning mixture.

Almost at once the Hummer went nose-down and tail-up like an angry stinkbug as Mildred hammered down the brakes. A pile of rubble, khaki-colored adobe blocks obstructed the alley. “Crap!” Mildred exclaimed. “Crap, crap, crap!”

“Drive on,” J.B. shouted, holding his fedora on his head with one hand and brandishing his stamped-steel machine pistol with the other. “This baby’ll plow through.”

“Not on your tintype,” Mildred shouted back, throwing the wag into reverse and cranking her head around on her neck. “Can’t even chance getting high-centered with these hoodoos swarming around like yellowjackets.”

The alley behind had filled instantly with ambushers, waving spears and clubs and at least one modern firearm—an M-1 carbine to Ryan’s quick glimpse. They stopped and stared with comical surprise as the wag chunked through a gear change and came hurtling straight back at them like a multiton rocket. Most of them were muties, although none in this clot of a half dozen or so was either as huge or grotesquely malformed as the first creature they had seen. Most were downright small. In fact, the one closest behind the Hummer, whose wide anthracite eyes locked on Ryan’s for a fraction of a second before the Hummer’s rear bumper took him in the thighs and body-slammed him to the ground, looked as human as Ryan himself.

The wag bucked, and screams, along with crunching and squelching sounds, came from beneath the vehicle as the huge cleated tires rolled over several ambushers unfortunate enough not to be able to spin around and clear the alleyway in time. One mutie, a being reminiscent of a stickie in shape but with a dry-looking tan skin covered with reddish-brown camouflage rosettes, clung to the side of the house on Ryan’s side with toe and fingers pads. Instead of knocking him free, the Hummer’s bulk spun him, pinned him and then rotated his body, crushing and grinding simultaneously as it roared backward down the alley. The creature screamed in a shrill but wholly-human voice. A blast of horrid carrion-eater breath blew in the window as the creature rolled by between the brown-stuccoed wall and the wag’s steel flank.

Then the Hummer was back on what passed for the ville’s main street. It had flooded with marauders, half a hundred or more. Mildred just kept the wag grinding in reverse, squashing a couple more of their less-agile ambushers, turning the wheel slightly to angle the Hummer into another alley catty-corner across the way behind them. For a moment they passed between mud houses, with more clearance this time. Then they were out and backing at a brisk clip across another street, right at an opening into darkness.

The structure was larger than most of the houses and had double wooden doors open wide. Muties were issuing from the interior with crates and boxes in their arms: looters. They scattered. A taller than average one who looked normal aside from having a mouth that stretched clear to the back of the jawbone on either side was caught standing right in the middle of the entry, clutching a box of what looked like hand tools. He stared at the onrushing wag as if jacklighted. The rear bumper hit him and bore him screaming back to smash him squalling against a set of wooden shelves.

Five muties cringed against the walls to either side of the wag. J.B. popped up out the top of the vehicle. “Afternoon,” he said, and chopped down the three to the right with two scything back-and-forth bursts from his Uzi.

The one nearer the door on Ryan’s side dropped what he was carrying and ran right out into the sunlit street. The other, who had long tufts of dark hair sprouting at random from face and body, raised a foot-long wrench over his head and lunged screaming at Ryan.

Ryan opened the door into him with a slam. The mutie staggered back gushing blood from a split forehead. The one-eyed man poked his SIG-Sauer through the door’s still-open window, shot him twice in the chest. Then, because he didn’t go down fast enough, he shot him again through the forehead.

The remaining mutie seemed to be making good his escape. But panicked or plain stupid, he failed to dodge to one side or the other, where a few steps would have taken him out of the line of fire. Instead he raced straight away from the door, across the street.

Unhurriedly, Doc opened his door, unfolded himself. Laying his heavy LeMat across his upraised left forearm he aimed, fired through his own open window. The ancient pistol boomed like an immense drum and spit out a four-foot-long tongue of flame, bright pink in the shaded interior. Dust puffed up from the middle of the back of the hide vest the fleeing mutie wore. The creature threw up taloned hands and went facedown on the hardpan.

The doctor lowered his smoking handblaster. He shook his head regretfully. “Ah, well,” he said, “he who turns and runs away, lives to slit our bellies later in the day.”

Jak did a roll over the rear seat of the Hummer, piled out Doc’s door with his Python in his snow-white fist. Ryan was already racing along the wall toward the gaping entryway. He darted out into the sunlight, firing his 9 mm blaster with sounds like explosively exhaled breaths. The bullets made loud cracks as they passed objects; he wasn’t wasting his precious remaining stock of subsonic rounds that made no more noise at any point than a muffled sneeze. Nor was he bothering to aim, merely trying to keep the muties who had fled the Hummer’s charge heading in the right direction long enough for him to grab hold of the open wooden door. Loud cracks from behind him told him the albino youth was doing the same thing.

The doors were heavy and their hinges protested with loud squeals against being moved. But the two men had adrenaline on their side; even the slight Jak was able to get his door into motion. Both halves swung back into place well before the marauders outside could get themselves sorted out enough to interfere. Ryan swung a hefty plank down into waiting brackets to bar the doors shut.

A smaller doorway opened in the wall on the driver’s side. Mildred got out with her ZKR in hand. J.B. eeled out the top of the pintle mount, scrambled across the Hummer’s torn and blistered Kevlar roof to drop down beside her, Uzi in hand. She nodded to him.

“Cover me,” she said, then darted through the door. She had to duck down to get through. J.B. hit the doorjamb with his Uzi up and ready.

From inside the next room two yellow flashes, two echoing cracks. Then a slow, sad, sliding sound.

“Clear,” the others heard Mildred call. “Just one mutie who wasn’t hid near as well as he thought.”

“Damn, Ryan,” J.B. said, taking in their surroundings, “nuke me till I glow and shoot me in the dark, but I think this is a garage.”

Ryan had popped out his partially empty mag from his handblaster, dropped it in a pocket, brought out a fresh magazine from another. He weighed it in his hand, eyeing it ruefully. Not many left.

He jammed it decisively home in the well. “Think mebbe you’re right, J.B.,” he said. “Even got a grease pit dug in the middle of the floor.”

Jak whipped out one of his throwing knives, stuck it in his teeth, dropped to the packed-earth floor and slithered under the rear of the Hummer. “No muties hide,” he reported, voice muffled by the wag’s mass. He slithered back out.