A millisecond later, Krysty was falling in front of him, too. Ryan reacted instinctively, lunging forward, reaching out. His fingers closed on one of Krysty’s backpack straps. Then her deadweight came down on his outstretched arm and dropped him to a knee. His arm rigid, he was bent over the chasm.
From below came a thundering crash of glass on glass, followed by a cloud of upwelling dust.
“Gaia!” Krysty cried. Suspended over the abyss, she kicked her long legs, trying desperately to get a toehold in the wall of glass.
“Don’t struggle,” Ryan warned her. “Makes it harder for me to keep my grip. I’m not going to drop you, lover.”
As he spoke, her prehensile hair rose from her head in snakelike coils and wrapped around his wrist.
Summoning all of his strength, Ryan lifted her far enough to catch hold of the other backpack strap with his free hand. Then, bracing his legs, he gave a mighty grunt and pull, and at the same instant threw himself backward, swinging the upper half of her body onto the edge of the roadway.
J.B., Doc, and Mildred grabbed her arms and pulled her the rest of the way up.
“Are you cut, Krysty?” Mildred asked. “Are you cut?”
“No, I don’t think so,” the redhead said, looking at her hands, then her legs. “A few scratches is all.”
“We can’t stay here,” Ryan said. “It’s too dangerous. Let’s move.”
As they climbed the low bluff, this in order to circle around and regain the road on the far side of the cave-in, Ryan could hear J.B. behind him, muttering a string of curses under his breath.
Jak and Besup and other three advance scouts moved up the dimly visible road, leaving the others behind at the remains of the encampment. They weren’t carrying loaded backpacks, just blasters and knives.
Despite his excitement to once again be on the hunt, Jak found himself hanging back from the warriors, uncharacteristically wary, maybe even a little skittish. He knew what dangers lay ahead in the dark, but he had no idea how they were going to find their way through them.
Besup seemed to sense his unease and confusion. “Don’t try to think,” he said gently. “Just let yourself feel. The guiding spirits are all around. If you let them, they will lead you.”
“Lead me?”
“Close your eyes, White Wolf.”
“What?”
Even though Jak had been riding scout with the whiteface for several days, that experience hadn’t prepared him for the strangeness of the suggestion. For sure, Besup’s trailcraft was beyond anything he’d ever seen. His tracking ability was like a sixth sense. He could pick up trail where Jak was certain there was none. But that magic had been performed in the daytime, and death wasn’t waiting for them on all sides.
Besup rested his hand lightly on Jak’s shoulder. “It will be all right,” he said. “Just close your eyes.”
Jak did as he was told, though the order confused and dismayed him. “What happen now?” he said.
“Wait,” Besup cautioned.
Wait for what? Jak thought. There was nothing. All he could see was the blackness on the inside of his eyelids.
“Don’t try to look forward, through your eyes,” Besup said, firmly squeezing his shoulder. “Don’t use your eyes at all. You must look the other way, White Wolf. Look backward. Look inside your mind.”
Jak tried to do that. Straining for something he still didn’t understand.
“Not so hard,” Besup advised him, squeezing again. “It’s not a reaching, it’s more of an opening up.”
And so it was.
When Jak let go of the striving, of all the effort, and simply
looked back,
like a switch had been thrown, without aid of his organs of sight he became aware of his surroundings. They formed a detailed, 360-degree picture in his mind. How it happened, why it happened, what had happened, Jak couldn’t explain, nor fully comprehend.
It was suddenly just there, inside his skull.
The road of glass lay before him, as did the unfolding desolation of the massif, and the other four Bannock-Shoshone scouts standing, watching him intently, and waiting for his response. He recognized each of them. He could even make out the cracks in Besup’s face paint. Was this what the warrior meant, he asked himself, or was it just his imagination playing tricks on him?
“What I see in head real?” Jak said, his eyes still closed.
“Come with us, now,” Besup told him. “It’s time for us to run.”
“Run?”
The idea of doing that in the dark, of running blind over this man-chilling terrain, made the gooseflesh jump out on his pale arms. It was an insane idea, a terrifying idea, but there was an unmistakable thrill to it. An electrifying thrill.
This was wildness taken to the nth degree.
When Jak opened his eyes, he saw the warriors were already running away from him. Before he could call out, they had vanished into the blackness.
And he stood there alone. His shoulder still tingled from Besup’s touch.
After a split second of indecision, Jak took a quick breath, shut his eyes again and looked backward.
The inner landscape clicked on as if it had been waiting for his return.
It felt like he was standing in two different universes at once, the inner and the outer. And he could “see” the warriors sprinting ahead. As he started to run after them—the tips of his hair whipping against his shoulders, his boot soles slapping the roadway—the sense of exhilaration was like nothing he’d ever experienced.
Jak was by no means a deep thinker, a philosopher. He lived in the moment, for the moment. And always had. He was a doer, not a talker. Besup was also a man of few words, but in the two days that they had ridden together he had taught Jak that the Bannock-Shoshone believed the spirits of the dead constantly surrounded
and interacted with them. And that the whitefaces inhabited two worlds, the human and the spirit. Their sacred religion, their visions of the other reality had nothing to do with prayer or sacrifice—Jak never saw them do either. They didn’t smoke fuddlestick or drink tea made of mind-burst mushrooms. Their faith accepted as truth that normal human senses were constantly deceived, that there was much more to existence than what they revealed; that there were in fact worlds within worlds.
The time Jak had spent with Besup had allayed his natural, born-in-Deathlands suspicion of rad-tainted blood. If the whitefaces were muties, then that mutation was buried deep inside them, in their brains, their hardwiring. It was something they couldn’t or wouldn’t bring themselves to speak of or analyze. When he opened his heart to the Bannock-Shoshone, he realized they meant no harm to him or his friends. More than that, he wanted to learn from them, to travel where they traveled. To experience what they experienced. To share their connection to what lay beyond.
The bond between Jak and these strangers had nothing to do with the fact that his white skin matched their facepaint. He was rooted, as were they, in the warp and weave, and the mystery of the present.
His footfalls hardly made a sound on the road. High-kicking, joyous, energized, he raced onward.
Now, he, too, danced with the spirits.
Jak didn’t dare open his eyes, didn’t dare break the trance that held him enfolded. He knew if he looked outward all he would see before him was dead black emptiness. Looking with his mind, looking inward, he had a stunning vision: he saw himself running in
a circular pool of incredibly intense light that revealed every pebble, every crack, every dip, every slight turn in the road to Ground Zero. He ran faster, but realized it was impossible to outdistance the pool of light because its source was from within him, and it hung like a blazing lamp above his head.
Not dead yet, not dead yet, Jak thought as he sprinted to catch up with the others, drawing on reserves of power and stamina even he didn’t know he had. Not dead yet, not dead yet. Kicking hard, arms pumping, that mantra of astonished disbelief quickly transformed into: not gonna die, not gonna die.
Which then became: damn, this is fun.
Jak rounded a bend and saw the four warriors ahead of him, and that he was rapidly gaining on them. He couldn’t make out their individual circles of inner light, but they were well-illuminated by his. As he closed the distance, he noticed their forms slightly blurred around the edges. Unidentifiable stuff seemed to be coming off their heads, backs and legs. Gauzy, wispy, pale stuff, like steam or smoke, but as he got nearer he realized it was neither. It appeared to be some kind of particulate matter, but without weight or substance; it was like fine ash streaming off their bodies. Bits of it hung suspended in the air for a split second, then as they fell, they disappeared. The closer Jak got to the whitefaces, the heavier the off-pouring of this melting ash became—clouds of it, raining down, vanishing before they touched Jak or hit the ground.
When he was within twenty feet of the warriors he started to see the moving shapes behind them. Human shapes, outlined by the steady flow of this strange,
insubstantial matter. Even as he looked, his perspective switched; it was like seeing a perfectly camouflaged and motionless prey animal make the tiniest movement, and suddenly taking in its full shape, detail and identity. In that way, in that instant, the vague outlines in front of Jak took on solid form. And he saw that the warriors were no longer journeying alone, but had been joined by five, six, seven strangers, who were keeping pace behind them. From the rear, they looked like people, real people, with real skin and muscle and bones. These newcomers wore their hair braided like the whitefaces, and had on the same kinds of tunics and boots.
Jak reasoned that these had to be the whitefaces’ summoned ancestors.
As he followed the living and the dead, the roadway under him rose and fell, descending in long straight-aways through low, flat valleys, up over crests crowned with forests of glass spikes, winding through a series of climbing curves. The road’s course was dictated by the topography. And the topography was dictated by hardness of the underlying strata—the skeletal remains of the ancient megacity—and networks of fracture planes that constantly reshaped the surface.
As the distance to Ground Zero narrowed, Jak’s zone of illumination gradually expanded, until he was “seeing” past the edge of the road, fifty, then a hundred yards in all directions. In the harsh light of his mind’s vision, the landscape of the massif didn’t look any the less hammered, grotesquely twisted and unreal. But a new element had been added: a population. For better or worse, Jak’s brain seemed to have mastered the trick of seeing through death’s camouflage. Thousands of
human forms, presumably of people who had been lost on nukeday, now wandered among the glass-encased spires and frozen waves. The groans of the slipping fracture planes underscored their weeping. Their spirits as entombed in the matrix as the material debris of Slake City.
Jak turned his vision to the rear, to see if he, too, was shedding the strange ash. To see who, if anyone, was running behind him. He saw nothing—no flow of ash, no pursuing spirit forms. Above all, no Christina, his dead wife, and no Jenny, their dead sweet baby girl. But even as he felt the crush of disappointment, he sensed that loved ones lost were somehow still with him, gathered inside of his ring of light.
Hearing the cries of the trapped souls on all sides, seeing in his mind’s eye their anguished faces, their pleading hands, Jak’s instinct was to withdraw, to pull away from their suffering, from their bottomless anger, their sense of being cheated out of the glory of their lives. It was either that or be overwhelmed.
Jak concentrated on his vision of the road directly ahead, and of the warriors and their ancestors leading the way.
But the nukeday dead were unavoidable. The ghosts gathered in mobs, clustered around bases of the massif’s prominent landmarks, as if drawn to the highest points on its surface. The “why” of this behavior came to him in a flash, like the answer had been projected into his head. Unable to ascend higher, to rise above this desolate graveyard, it was as close as they could come to finding peace.
Jak and the scouts had run maybe an hour and a half
straight when Besup and the others suddenly slowed to a walk, then stopped altogether in the middle of the road.
It wasn’t a rest stop.
The warriors didn’t need it; neither did he. Jak wasn’t thirsty or out of breath. He wasn’t even sweating.
Besup knelt in the road, then waved for him to come closer.
“What is it?” Jak asked.
“Ahead, a trap,” Besup whispered. “Can you see it?”
Their mission was to clear the road of obstacles for the force that followed. Up to this point there had been no obstacles to clear.
Jak made the mistake of opening his eyes and was plunged into darkness. He closed them immediately, and the light clicked back on.
“Trip wire,” Besup said. “Stretched across road. Kill zone beyond.”
Jak could see it clearly, a thin, single strand at ankle height, attached to a spindle of nukeglass on the left side of the road, crossing it, and then running off into the wasteland on the right where the nukeglass formed a row of steep-sided peaks. He drew deeper into himself and the circle of illumination broadened on all sides. But not far enough to see the other end of the trip wire.
“Where lead to?” Jak said. “Where enemy?”
“Higher,” Besup said. “Go higher.”
Without his conscious volition, Jak’s perspective immediately began to climb. Like he was in an elevator. Like he was flying straight up in the air. His viewpoint hovered for a moment, then below him, he saw the faint,
red glow on top of an elevated, rounded pinnacle—the roof of a ruined building shrouded in layers of thermoglass—that had a clear overlook of the road.
Dropping closer, Jak could make out a cluster of human figures. Six of them around the banked coals of a warming fire. Not members of the ghostly dead unless the dead snored while they slept. Three were curled up on the rooftop while the others stood watch. They weren’t she-hes in battlesuits, either; these were Deathlanders. Traitors to their own kind. They weren’t armed with tribarrel lasers. A tripod-mounted, heavy-caliber conventional predark machine gun controlled a 150-foot section of road.
Jak could visualize the trap being sprung. There would be no cover from the searching autofire. Nukeglass slabs were no match for full-jacketed ammo, new or reloaded.
The sentries couldn’t see the road on a moonless night; that’s why they had rigged the trip wire.
Jak felt a hand on his arm. When he opened his eyes, he could barely see Besup’s painted face.
“How far Ground Zero?” he asked the warrior.
“Less than a mile, we figure,” Besup said. “Can’t use blasters to take out the gun post crew, and we can’t let them get off a shot. It would alert the main compound of trouble, and we lose element of surprise.”
“Blades only, then,” Jak said.
“Blades only,” Besup confirmed.
With eyes closed, Jak followed the scouts and their ghost ancestors off the road, across the uneven surface of the massif. It was like walking over a field of jumbled lumps of refrozen snow or ice. Only more
treacherous—these lumps were brittle and razor sharp. The scouts moved cautiously and without a sound, circling wide right to approach their target from the rear.
The top five stories of the predark skyscraper protruded from the surface of the massif; the rest of the enormous structure was hidden beneath it. On nukeday, as the tidal wave of liquefied sand had receded back to Ground Zero and the deepest point in the crater, the surface of it that was exposed to the air had rapidly cooled and stiffened, and the dripping, gelling mass had clung to the sides of the rectangular structure, encasing the exterior walls and windows in a sloping tent of dirty green glass many feet thick. And it was even thicker at the bottom, where the downward flow collected then hardened.