Despite the constant, grease-fueled flare-ups, the companions didn’t bother knocking down the bank of coals. Instead they kept feeding the fire fresh wood to maintain the temperature. After about thirty minutes of frequent rotation, the charring on the meat was uniform. Doc deftly sliced into a haunch with the tip of his cane sword. “Done to a turn all the way to the bone,” he announced.
As Doc and J.B. moved the joints out of the fire to cool a bit, Big Mike smacked his lips and said, “You know, that doesn’t smell half-bad.”
“Wish I could say the same for you,” Krysty said, shielding her nose with a cupped hand.
If the fire had warmed the chamber to a cozy temperature, it had also warmed up Big Mike, releasing the full spectrum of his aroma. Even in a time and a
place where regular baths with soap were unheard of, his stench was nothing short of spectacular. Before they passed out the food, Ryan made him move to a seat over by the cave entrance. The cold air sucked in by the fire’s draft blew most of his pong up the chimney with the wood and meat smoke.
When the joints had sufficiently cooled, the companions tore into them with both hands, hot liquid fat running down their wrists and forearms. Before Big Mike could begin to eat he had to torque down the knob at the back of his prosthesis with his teeth, closing artificial fingers in a vise grip on the foot end of the leg bone.
“Gaia, that tastes vile,” Krysty said, making a sour face. Her prehensile hair seemed to agree. It had drawn up into tight ringlets.
Behind the smeared lenses of his spectacles, J.B.’s eyes squeezed shut as he forced himself to swallow. “You know,” he said, “this is so bad it makes wolf seem like prime beef.”
“I have to breathe through my mouth to choke it down,” Mildred said.
“Gamier than roast muskrat,” Doc said. “And somewhat more fibrous than armadillo.”
“Bear’s not so greasy,” Jak offered.
“Mebbe we should cook it longer,” Krysty said.
“That won’t improve the taste,” Ryan assured her. The flesh had a definite harsh tang to it already from the burning limber pine resins. It made Ryan’s tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. As he chewed he felt something hard crunch between his back molars. He rolled the gob of meat around in his mouth until he could pick out the inclusion with his fingertips. When he held it close to the
firelight, it looked like a lentil bean, flat, circular, but it wasn’t. It was the coiled-up body of a parasite cooked to a cinder.
He spit the entire mouthful onto his palm to examine it. There were more little hard tidbits.
Lots more.
“For nuke’s sake don’t spit out the wire worms,” J.B. told him. “They’re the best part.”
“Nutty,” Doc agreed.
Ryan popped the entire gob back in his mouth and gulped it down. Parasites cooked that hard were dead. And their eggs were chilled, too. Protein was protein. Like most Deathlanders, he wasn’t all that fussy about food. He just didn’t want to crack a tooth on a pebble or a chip of hip bone.
“I’ve had plenty worse than this,” Big Mike bragged, brandishing his half-gnawed haunch in the air like a club. The dripping grease had washed a clean, shiny stripe down his chin. His skin was bright pink under the beard hair. “Worst thing I ever had to eat was a plate of spider stew down in New Mex. Made with hot green chilis and tarantulas as big as your hand.”
“Tarantulas aren’t edible,” Mildred said dubiously.
“Not much meat on them after they’re cooked, that’s for damn sure, and what little there is you got to suck out of the bodies and legs. Real trouble is, they’re covered with all these little hairs that fall off in the stewing. They get caught down your throat and make you gag, so it’s hard to keep any of it down. And two hours later I had the squirts thermonuclear.”
“Arachnid’s revenge,” Doc said.
“You’d better believe it was hellfire at both ends,” Big
Mike said through a greasy grin. He pressed the haunch to his mouth and greedily tore off another strip of meat with his teeth.
After a dozen mouthfuls of the cloyingly rich meat, Ryan had had enough. The pile of flesh he’d gulped sat like a boulder at the bottom of his stomach. As he had no desire to save the leftovers for breakfast, he tossed the rest of it onto the banked fire for cremation. If all went well, by the next afternoon they’d be off the volcanic plain and along the river where there would be plenty of better forage to choose from.
One by one, emitting various expressions of disgust and discomfort, his companions discarded their haunches as well.
“We’ve got things to discuss,” J.B. said, cleaning the grease smears off his glasses with the tail of his shirt.
Ryan glanced over at Big Mike, who was still chewing happily. Would the bastard betray them if given half a chance? Even without hands? Even after they’d saved his stinkin’ hide?
Hell, yes.
“Better do our talking outside,” Ryan said. “You stay right where you are,” he warned Big Mike. Resting his palm on the pommel of his leg-sheathed panga he said, “Stick your nose out and I’ll chop that off, too.”
The companions exited the cave and moved away from the entrance, well out of earshot. An overturned bowl of stars lay upon the black blanket of the lava field. It was difficult to see more than a few yards ahead. The clear night had acquired a bone-penetrating chill.
Ryan put his arm around Krysty’s waist and pulled her close as they looked up at the brilliant swath of the
Milky Way. He could feel the tension in her body, and though he worried that she was reliving her humiliation at the hands of the she-hes, he didn’t say anything, he just gently held her. After a few moments in his embrace she relaxed, snuggled against him and said, “Nice and quiet out here.”
“For a change,” Mildred said.
“That fat bastard can’t stop running his mouth,” J.B. said. “You name it, and he’s always done one better.”
“Or one grosser,” Mildred added.
“We have another hellish trek ahead of us tomorrow,” Doc said. “Perhaps if we gagged our guest the time would pass more pleasantly?”
“Gagged him and left him behind, you mean,” J.B. said.
“We can’t part company with Big Mike just yet,” Ryan said. “We need the information he’s got on the she-hes.”
“Why they come back?” Jak asked.
“Mebbe they couldn’t find anything better in the alternate universes,” Ryan said. “Everything that’s missing on their Earth—food, clean air and water, open space, small population—we have plenty of.”
“I thought they’d written off Deathlands because of the infection,” Krysty said.
When the companions had examined the bodies the she-hes had left behind at Slake City, they found massive, ultimately fatal, bacterial skin infections. The invaders had been caught unprepared by native microscopic organisms.
“They must have found a cure for it off-world,”
Mildred said. “Not unexpected, given the rest of their technology.”
“We’ve got two options come daybreak,” Ryan said. “We can either head for the hills or we can take the fight to them, only on our terms this time.”
“If we choose to retreat now, dear friends,” Doc said, “rest assured these aliens will propagate and then swarm. Like a plague of locusts they will devour the remains of this Earth, just as they devoured their own.”
“If we can believe what Big Mike told us,” Mildred said, “they’ve been here at least a few weeks already, setting up their operation. Their weapons, armor and transport are better than anything Deathlands has ever seen. Every day they go unchallenged they’re going to get stronger and more difficult to defeat.”
“If we run now, we’ll be looking over our shoulders until our dying breaths,” J.B. said. “I don’t like that.”
“Then we really don’t have a choice, do we?” Krysty said.
“Are we all agreed, then?” Ryan said, looking from face to shadowy face. “We fight them?”
The answer was unanimous and in the affirmative.
“When we last met, the she-hes took us by surprise,” Ryan said. “That’s why we ended up at Ground Zero in laser manacles. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen again. They still have their tribarrels and EM armor, but from what the Drunkard said they don’t have near as many wags as they did before. And mebbe only the single attack aircraft for backup. It doesn’t sound like they replaced any of the norm male soldiers they lost, either. It’s not going to be easy, no way around that, but we know where they are and they don’t know we’re
coming. We can’t let any of them slip away. We’ve got to chill them all.”
After a moment of silence, Mildred said, “They were gone from this universe for a long time. I can’t help wondering where they went after they left.”
“Wherever it was,” Ryan assured her, “we’re gonna make them wish they’d stayed there.”
Jak hunkered down on the flank of the ancient cinder cone, making himself as small a target for the wind as he could. In the past hour the breeze had picked up considerably, sweeping across the plain in shrieking gusts, lifting and fluttering his shoulder-length white hair, sandblasting his face with grit. The sawing wail was so loud it drowned out the chattering of his teeth.
His eyes had long since adjusted to the dim light and his perch afforded him a panoramic view downrange, but detail was difficult to pick out. Starshine reflected off planes and edges of rock, and the twisted trunks and branches of limber pines, turning them shades of gray, but the fissures, the rills, the sinkholes—fully three-fourths of the landscape below him—were pitch-black. Occasionally, he caught glimpses of movement, of what appeared to be rolling tumbleweeds—vague, round, silvery shapes that bounded between and vanished into the impenetrable patches of darkness.
He had had the foresight to survey the landscape from this position in daylight, and had mapped it in his mind, marking and memorizing all possible access routes to the cave’s back entrance—routes he would have taken if the mission was reversed, if he was the stalker, moving in for the quiet chill. He’d seen no evidence that the cave or the paths to it had ever been used by people, or
by animals bigger than chipmunks. Which came as no big surprise. The plain was littered with similar hidey-holes.
As Jak systematically checked and rechecked each of the routes, looking for movement he couldn’t otherwise identify and for the glint of starlight reflecting off eyeballs, J.B. was doing the same thing, on the far side of the sinkhole. They had both drawn the second watch.
Despite what had been said in front of Big Mike about their not being followed, nobody had argued when Ryan suggested they post sentries throughout the night. Though pursuit by coyotes and sec men was a longshot, a bivouac in hostile, unknown territory demanded they take customary precautions. They’d been caught off guard before.
If the darkness, cold and wind challenged Jak’s skills as a scout, they also challenged his endurance. As strong as he was, as battle-hardened as he was, the effects of exhaustion and lack of sleep, of days of walking under a blazing sun on low rations with minimal water, were taking their toll. His mind kept wandering from the task at hand to his discomfort, and from his discomfort to replays of recent events, including the action plan the companions had discussed and all agreed upon.
They were heading deeper into the turf controlled by the flame-throwing baron and the freshly loaded ammo they carried was a prize he would surely covet. If Burning Man wasn’t in a trading mood when they crossed paths, he’d surely try to take it from them by force. Either way, parting with the ammunition wasn’t an option. They were going to need every round once they got to Slake City. The only answer was to avoid contact, to bypass
the baron’s toll bridge and find another way to cross the river to the west.
“Even if we have to build our own barge…” Ryan had told the others.
A buffeting gust of wind jerked Jak back from the vivid memory. He had no idea how long he had been wool-gathering—a second, a minute, five minutes? To wake himself up, he pressed his kneecap into a sharp rock, leaning down with more and more weight until the pain made his red eyes water.
Below him to the right, low on the cinder cone’s slope, something moved.
A silent, silver blur against the blackness. There for a second, then it vanished.
There were no straight lines of approach up the cinder cone’s slope. Long sections of the winding routes, like the cracks and the gullys, were either sheltered from his view or from the starlight.
Tumbleweed, he told himself. Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, he watched for it to reappear.
It didn’t.
Maybe it fell in a gully, or got pinned against rock slab, he thought.
Holding his breath, Jak strained to hear over the howl of the wind, to pick up the scrape of boot soles, the scratch of claws.
Nothing.
A whole lot of nothing.
Jak found himself wishing for one of the she-he’s tribarrel blasters. With one of those babies, he could have lit up the lower slope in an emerald-green flare.
He could have also heated a nearby slab of rock to keep himself warm.
Once again, seemingly of its own volition, his train of thought—and his attention—strayed.
He recalled how the companions had turned captured laser weapons against the invaders. Tribarrels didn’t work against the battlesuits’ EM shields, so they had used them to alter the nukeglass landscape, to collapse roads that crossed the deep crevasses, taking the invaders down with them.
The captured tribarrels’ nuke batteries had soon run out, and with the she-hes having fled to some other universe, repowering them was impossible. Even if they could have recharged the weapons, the tribarrels were designed for one purpose: chilling large numbers of tightly packed human beings. They weren’t any good for hunting game. The effect of three laser beams pulsing slightly out of sync produced grievous but cauterized wounds which, if they didn’t cause instant death, brought on intense shock. As the animal struggled to escape, nasty-tasting juices were released into the flesh.
A clattering rock slide somewhere on the slope below pulled Jak back into the moment. His hand instinctively dropped to grips of his holstered Colt Python, fingertips tingling from the adrenaline rush.
Fully alert, he strained all his senses trying to locate the source of the sound in the darkness, to pick up the slightest hint of movement. He heard nothing over the wind’s wail, saw nothing, smelled nothing. And yet he felt a vague pressure, a presence closing in on him from all sides. His pulse began pounding in his throat and the short hairs on his arms stood erect. The big, predark
Magnum blaster came up in his hand, seeking targets, but there was nothing for him to aim at.
Seconds slipped by and the rush of adrenaline faded, leaving him even more exhausted than before. The sense of building pressure, of being stalked, faded as well. Mebbe he had imagined it because he was so tired? After all, a silent approach over broken, uphill terrain on a moonless night was next to impossible. Must’ve been the gusting wind that caused the slide, he told himself.
Just as he was about to reholster his blaster, it appeared as if out of thin air in front of him, not five feet away: a face as snow-white, as stoic as his own, blazing reflected starlight. For an instant it was like he was looking into a mirror.
Then the impasto of war paint cracked around a grinning mouth.
The sheer impossibility of it—that someone had scaled the slope, gotten so damned close, without his seeing or hearing
anything
—momentarily froze him. Before Jak could recover and sweep the Python’s muzzle three feet to the right, onto the target, the butt of a longblaster came out of nowhere and caught him full on the opposite cheek.
The crunch of impact made lightning flash inside his skull, then everything dissolved into black.