Homeward Bound

Chapter Two

In one of the stone-walled rooms near the main entrance of the redoubt, they found a shelf filled with backpacks. At J.B.'s suggestion, everyone in the party took one, filling it with spare ammo and self-heats. Each of them also carried a couple of clear-plas cans of springwater, the kind that had a ring-pull opener. At some time a round button had been kicked under a metal cabinet. Jak Lauren picked it up and pinned it to the lapel of his ragged leather and canvas camouflage jacket. It was bright red and carried a picture of a helmet. The gold-lettered words said simply: Forty-Niners Go.

The 352 code opened the outer door, revealing a morning of bright sun bursting from a sky tinted purple. The chem cloud storm of the previous evening had vanished. The temperature was a few degrees above freezing. Far on the other side of the wooded valley, Krysty spotted a hunting bird, circling on a thermal, its great wings spread wide. Its wingspan looked to be about fifteen feet.

The bird was the first sign of life they'd seen since the jump.

The first problem to overcome was to find a way down from the redoubt. Inside the main door Lori had found a plan of the entire fortress, with its corridors lined in blue, the exit marked in orange. There was only the one exit shown.

Ryan checked both ends of the broken roadway. The drop was sheer for about forty feet, then he could make out the remains of tracks beaten through the scrub.

"That's what's kept the place clean," he said. "Unless you had a rope launcher, you'd never get up that face. It's smoother than... than Jak's chin."

"For an old man with only one eye, Ryan, you got a fucking big mouth."

"Just a joke, son, just a joke."

"See me laughing, Ryan?"

"When friends fall out, then their enemies make merry," Doc said, pouring a little oil on the troubled waters.

There was an uneasy moment of stillness within the party, which was broken by the Armorer. "Need some fixed lines up here. Then we have to find a way of making sure nothing an' nobody gets in while we're away."

Ryan stood a moment, looking out across the wilderness. "Anyone had any thoughts about where we're going?"

"Let's have a look around," Krysty suggested. The wind was still strong, tugging at them as they stood on the broad ledge. She'd tied back her long crimson hair to keep it out of her eyes.

"You know anything 'bout this place, Doc? Where we landed?"

"Upper New York, I believe you said, my dear fellow. Then that must be the Hudson. Or, perchance, the Mohawk River. Yes. I believe I have been here before. Hunting in the Adirondacks for deer. Ah, so delicate and pretty until the ball struck them. Then the eyes glazed o'er and the spirit fled."

"We head west for a few days, we could meet up with what's left of the Trader's party," J.B. said, scratching at the stubble that darkened his chin. "Cohn an' Ches, Kathy, Loz an' all the rest of 'em in War Wag One. If'n they're all still living."

The idea attracted Ryan Cawdor. It seemed several lifetimes since he and the others had split off from the remnants of the Trader's small army. Since then they'd suffered losses: Abe, Hunaker, Okie, Finnegan and Henn. Already there were so many dead and near forgotten. So many.

"How far from the ville where your brother rules as baron?" Krysty asked.

"Forget it," Ryan snapped.

"Why?"

"Because that's past. Then was then, but this is now."

"Virginia is not too far from here, my dear Ryan," Doc said. "A few days traveling if we could only lay our hands upon some suitable transport."

"I don't give a..." Ryan began, stopping as Krysty's fingers tightened on his arm. "Why d'you?.."

"Because I know what you want, Ryan. I can feel it. Trust me. You have to go back to find your roots. To claim what is yours. You have to try."

"Which direction is Virginia from here? The Shens were south of Newyork city. Must be south. Must be a good ways off."

"Why don't we just go look?" J.B. suggested. "I'd kind of like to meet your brother. Heard plenty 'bout him the last few weeks."

"And none of it good," Jak added, grinning.

"Let us journey on," Doc said. "Truly, like brothers in arms."

Jak and J.B. managed to find a rope inside the redoubt, dark blue plaited plaslon that was strong enough to lower a war wag over the cliff. They secured it at the top, and each member of the group rappeled down, landing safely among the scattered conifers dotted with stately hemlocks. Once everyone was down, J.B. hooked the bottom of the rope on a jagged overhang of splintered granite.

"Be there for when we come back from where we're going." He looked intently at Ryan. "Into the Shens, I guess."

Ryan didn't answer him. He led the way down the narrow path, toward the river. The wind was not as forceful as they walked among the trees, and they could make out the sullen sound of the water as it rolled over great platters of gray stone.

As he picked out the trail among the loose scree, Ryan thought back to the boy he'd once been. He thought about the great sprawling mansion that lay at the core of the ville of Front Royal, down in the blue-muffled Shenandoahs, the endless waves of the Shens. And he thought of the man that he'd become.

Behind him, he heard Lori trip and stumble, cursing in her odd, flat little-girl voice. Doc soothed her. If only she'd throw away the ridiculous bright red thigh boots with the stiletto heels. He'd tried to persuade her to settle for combat boots, but the blond teenager had refused. And Doc hadn't been any help. He'd merely grinned and commented how much he liked them.

"Upon my soul, Mr. Cawdor," he'd said. "Surely a man must be permitted a little harmless deviancy, every now and again?"

The river grew closer, the sound of its rushing waters louder. The trees thinned out and the trail widened. Ryan stooped and examined the ground, seeing tracks that he recognized as elk, and the round pad marks of wolves. He knew from old books that in the olden times, before the long winters, wild animals had been limited to what had been called national parks. Bears and wolves lived only in the desolate high country, rarely seen by man. But since the nuking had decimated the population and destroyed every city, the creatures of the night had come back, growing bolder and often mutated into even more ferocious beasts than before.

The wolves were among the worst.

Something moved in the bushes to his right, and he leveled the G-12, finger tightening on the trigger. The gun was set on triple-burst, ready to cough out three rounds in a fraction of a second. His eye caught a slithery, gleaming animal, larger than an otter, scurrying across the damp boulders, making for the foaming edge of the Mohawk. It paused and stared directly at him, seemingly fearless. Its eyes were deep-set, glittering like bright emeralds, and its jaw hung open in a snarl of manic ferocity. Ryan held the rifle steady, ready to smear the creature into rags of bone and blood. But it turned its head contemptuously away and slipped silently into the water.

Only in the second it disappeared from sight did Ryan notice that the animal had six legs, tipped with claws like ivory daggers.

"If we could find a boat of some type, we could sail down to where the Mohawk meets the Hudson, just above Troy, and thence we could navigate clear to New York itself," Doc said, joining Ryan on the shore of the river.

"If we could find a copter and get some gas for it, we could fly to Front Royal and never get our damned feet wet," Ryan retorted.

They followed the water, heading south, picking their way along indistinct paths. Around noon Ryan called a halt for them to take a drink from the widening river and to open up a self-heat each. During the afternoon there was a rain shower that persisted, becoming a steady, dull drizzle that quickly soaked them all to the skin.

"Take us a year to reach Newyork if'n we don't find us some transport," J.B. said, looking up through the ceaseless rain to the west, where the sky was darkening. "Be night in an hour."

"Wait!"

They all stopped to look at Krysty, who stood with an expression of concentration on her face. Her saturated hair clung to her shoulders like a fiery, frightened animal.

"What?" Ryan asked.

"By Gaia, it's smoke! I can smell woodsmoke."

Ryan held his head up, ignoring the teeming rain that dripped over his face and ran behind the black patch that covered his ruined left eye. He sniffed at the air.

"Yeah, I can smell it, too. Wet weather keeps it low down. Can't be more'n a mile off."

"I will be liking getting warm," Lori said, wiping a strand of sodden yellow hair from her face.

"Not just warm," Jak said. "Fire means people. And in a place like this, people means boats."

"People also means guards and mebbe some chilling to be done. So, step cautious." Ryan led them on again, ever watchful.

It was a ragtag community of double-poor muties. Mud huts, covered in rough branches, had been built around a hewn clearing at the edge of the Mohawk. A large fire of green wood smoldered in the middle of the huts, and a rusty iron caldron was suspended over it. From the smell that bubbled up from the pot, it was some kind of fish stew.

The villagers were all small, not one of them topping five feet. Most were heavily muscled and had shaggy hair that hung over low foreheads. Their jaws jutted out, and they seemed to communicate in a language that consisted mainly of grunts.

They wore jerkins and breeches of a sackcloth, dyed dark green and russet yellow. It was difficult to tell the sexes apart. While Ryan and the others watched from the shadows at the edge of the forest, one of them came to pass water only a few yards from them. Krysty, with her sensitive nose, could easily catch the rancid stench of sweat and grease from the mutie's body. The sickle moon that swooped over the hills behind them also revealed to the watching six that the mutie was grotesquely sexually endowed.

J.B. caught Ryan's hand, pointing urgently beyond the farthest of the tumbledown houses. Hauled up above the level of the river was a crude raft. It was from hewn logs, bound with creepers and was about eight feet square. A stump of mast at its center and a steering oak, hacked from a single long branch, were the only signs that it might be maneuverable.

Ryan leaned closer so that his mouth touched the Armorer's ear. With muties, you never knew what kind of skill they might have. These primitives might be deaf, or they might hear as well as cave-born bats.

"Soon as they sleep," he whispered.

J.B. nodded his agreement, then passed the message quietly to Krysty, to Jak, on to Lori and finally to Doc.

The moon had disappeared behind a bank of cloud so dense it seemed like a floating mountain. A storm was brewing, and the air crackled with ozone. Ryan could feel his hair standing on end with static electricity. The stew had been eaten by the muties, and the fire was dying to glowing embers. The valley was less cold than the upper slopes, outside the hidden redoubt, but there was a biting dampness that seemed to creep through the layers of fur and leather, seeping into the marrow of the bones.

Ryan hooked the G-12 to a loop on his belt and drew the pistol, feeling its familiar weight. 25.52 ounces, precisely. Back when they'd been with War Wag One, J.B. had shown him the crumpled, brittle field manual for the SIG-Sauer P-226, and he remembered all of the details about it.

"Let's go, my friends," he said quietly.

There'd been no sign of anyone out on patrol around the filthy little hamlet. Apart from the rafts, there wasn't likely to be anything there worth stealing. With a wave of his hand, Ryan motioned for Jak Lauren to take the lead. Out of the six of them, the albino boy was probably the best at creepy-crawling. His bleached hair blazed like an incandescent beacon, making Jak easy to follow.

Ryan came second, with Krysty at his heels. Doc and Lori were together and J.B. brought up the rear, several safe paces behind to cover them in case of a sneak attack.

Against the rumbling backdrop of the fast-flowing river, it was hard to make out any other sounds. As they passed between the stinking hovels, Ryan heard a woman's voice. She was singing a mournful dirge, soft and low, with no recognizable tune to it and no words at all. It was fortunate for them that the villagers didn't seem to keep any dogs to warn of strangers. But their hamlet was so isolated that it was doubtful they even knew what human enemies were.

The raft had no sail, but there were a number of smoothed branches, each about ten feet long, that looked as if they were used to propel and guide the clumsy craft.

Jak turned, asking, "We go on this?"

"Yeah. Get ready to cut the rope. We'll have to push her out into the flow, or we'll beach on those rocks a few yards downstream."

In fact, the raft was so firmly grounded that it took all six of them to heave it off the sloping beach of shingle. It sat so low that the Mohawk bubbled over its logs. With six of them on board, Ryan knew they were in for a wet journey. Only the rope held it, knotted around a frost-riven boulder, high up on the bank.

"Get on, and move slow an' easy!" Ryan ordered, eyes raking the sleeping village for any threat.

"Keep to the center," Doc urged, folding Lori Quint in his long arms.

"Right?" Jak called, crouching with one of his leaf-bladed throwing knives in his fist, waiting to slice the knotted creeper apart.

Ryan took up the mooring line, hung on to it with both hands and braced himself against the pull of the current. He kept the raft steady for the boy to run down and board it.

"Now," he said, staring intently into the gloom, able to see only the splash of whiteness that was the boy's hair.

There was the blur of movement as the knife whispered through the rope, and Ryan felt it go slack, so that all the weight was on him. But, as he watched, he saw a chunk of the night rise from behind the boulder and grapple with Jak.

"Fireblast!" Ryan yelled, helpless to assist the boy.

But Jak could look after himself. The mutie had grabbed at him, pulling him to the earth. It uttered ferocious grunting noises, its foul breath nearly choking him. Its stubby fingers ripped at his coat, groped for his eyes, trying to squeeze them from their soft sockets.

The albino still held the knife, its taped hilt snug in his fingers. Using his superior agility and strength, he was able to wriggle out from under the attacker, turning the creature on its back, digging his knee into the soft flesh of its groin. In pain and shock the air burst from the mutie's lungs, a thin scream breaking the silence of the night.

The flesh of the mutie was coarse, almost reptilian, the skin like flaking scales to Jak's touch. His first cut was deflected, the edge of the blade skittering off the side of the stump of a neck. Jak fended off a flailing fist with the side of his forearm, thrusting once more with the knife. As a weapon, it wasn't ideally suited to hand-to-hand fighting, but against the weak and clumsy mutie it was more than enough.

He felt the blood gush out from the deep, narrow wound, steaming in the pallid light of the moon as it appeared from behind the clouds. Jak turned his wrist, like the experienced knife fighter he was, and drove the steel deeper into the mutie's flesh so that the flow warmed his hand.

The body went limp under him, and he started to rise, pulling the throwing knife from the creature's throat. But the mutie wasn't done yet. In a convulsive spasm of dying rage, it reached up for him, fingers locking around the boy's skinny neck, holding him there, the two locked together in a ghastly tableau.

"Chill him, Ryan!" Jak choked out, hacking at the scaly forearms of the mutie.

But Ryan was too busy struggling to hang on to the frayed end of the creeper that held the raft steady against the driving current. J.B. was in the center of the tossing, waterlogged craft, his pistol drawn, sighting along the barrel. But the movement of the tumbling waves threw off his aim, and he didn't dare squeeze the trigger in case he shot Jak, unable to distinguish between the tangled bodies in the murky light.

The mutie was screeching, its blood spouting black and spattering on the damp stones all around.

"Help me!" Jak shouted hoarsely, trying and failing to break the mutie's death grip.

"Cut the fingers," Ryan yelled, head twisted as he tried to make out what was happening behind him.

"Can't!" The screaming had stopped, but enough noise had been made to rouse a regiment of sleeping sec men.

Krysty saved the moment. Jumping surefooted, like a great panther, she landed on the loose stones, her hair breaking free from its binding and whirling around her head like a torrent of fire. She held her Heckler & Koch blaster in her right hand, the moonlight dancing off the mirrored finish of the barrel. In the blinking of an eye, the girl was alongside Jak and the dying mutie, stooping and placing the muzzle against its sagging mouth.

The crack of the 9 mm round was oddly muffled, almost inaudible against the pounding of the Mohawk. The back of the mutie's skull burst apart as though someone had struck it from inside with a sixteen-pound sledge, the contents of the brainpan slopping in the dirt. The fingers convulsed and then relaxed their grip, allowing Jak to break away.

"Come on!" Ryan called, feeling his boots sliding in the wet pebbles that lined the cold waters of the river.

Krysty led the way, running toward the bobbing raft, holstering her pistol as she sprinted. Planting a kiss on Ryan's cheek as she jumped across the gap, she landed on all fours on the moss-slick timbers, grabbing at the mast to steady herself.

"Double-hard bastard to chill," Jak said as he came down the slope, panting like he'd run a desperate race. "Thanks, Krysty. Owe you one."

"Let her go, Ryan," J.B. said. "Be getting us company soon."

The gap between the shore and the raft had been gradually widening, despite all of Ryan's efforts. He dropped the rope and jumped for it, landing awkwardly on the edge, legs trailing in the icy water.

The raft began to move away from the shore ever so slowly, just as fifty or more muties came bursting over the top of the slope toward them.