The highway remained clear. Ryan guessed some enterprising souls—or harsh slave masters, depending—had cleared away the rubble that had fallen onto it over the years. There were, he realized, a million stories in the dead city.
Not that he gave a baron’s promise for any of them.
They passed through the skein of ruined roads and pressed on. As they drew abreast the firelit stadium Ryan held up his hand.
“Hold up,” he called softly. The shouting and cheering and screaming from the bowl of firelight to the west seemed loud enough to drown out any noise they might make, up to and including setting off grens, if they had any, which sadly they didn’t. But he really and truly didn’t want to take any chances of drawing the attention of whoever all those fusies in there were.
“What is it, my dear Ryan?” Doc asked.
“Something to the north,” Ryan said. “Other side of the road.”
“Rider,” said Krysty. With Jak gone she had the sharpest eyes of the group. “Coming south fast.”
Ryan could see it now. More by chance than anything else they followed the eastern, once the northbound, half of the divided highway. As if following the same long-dead traffic rules, the dark rider came down the southbound side. Mebbe the trade caravans coming through just followed the old rules to avoid conflict.
“Defensive positions, everybody!” he shouted. “Go to ground and get ready to fight.”
With the unspoken harmony of long practice the companions went prone to form a defensive star with Brother Joseph in the middle.
“Aren’t you even going to ascertain their intentions first?” the guru asked.
“We aren’t going to shoot at them unless they make a move toward us,” J.B. said. “Now get your triple-stupe ass down!”
But the horseman showed no sign of noticing them. They heard the distinct clip-clop of the hooves as it approached. The horse was huge. If it wasn’t midnight-black, it was dark enough to make no difference. Despite the heat, humidity thick and clinging as a wet wool blanket, the rider wore a hooded cloak that obscured his features. Or hers, Ryan supposed. Or
its.
The cloak billowed out behind its black-clad form.
Without a sideways glance at the group it galloped on past to the south. It quickly became one with the twining shadows of the devastated flyovers.
“What in the name of the days of the smoke clouds was
that?
” J.B. demanded.
“You’re the local, Bro,” Ryan said, cautiously picking himself up.
Brother Joseph shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said. “But I must admit, seeing it caused me to feel a chill. Quite inexplicably.”
“Much as I hate to agree with him,” Mildred said, “I felt the same way.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Me, too. But whatever kind of horror that thing was, it’s somebody else’s horror now. We got enough ahead of us.
“Start hauling it, people. Time’s blood!”
Gradually they left the old stadium behind. Ryan felt relief. This road wouldn’t take them to their goal, which he could see clearly, a spike of greater darkness against the night, hiding stars. But it would get them to within a few blocks.
Granted, those blocks were sheer lethal obstacle courses of rubble, infested with enemies. But nobody said this would be easy.
Then he spotted lights bobbing on the roadway a couple hundred yards ahead of them. As he watched, more seemed to join, appearing from the half swamp, half flooded area to the right of the road, by the nearer, big-angled leg of what Mildred claimed had once been a golden arch taller than the skyscraper that was King Screamwing’s lair.
“What’s that?” Brother Joseph asked sharply.
“Stickies, likely,” J.B. said. “They do love them some fire.”
“It doesn’t matter much who they are, does it?” Mildred asked.
“Not a spent round’s worth,” Ryan said. “Whoever it is, we don’t want to meet them.”
They hurriedly headed left, across the divider between the halves of the road. The torchbearers, whoever or what ever they were, spilled over both halves of the old interstate. So the companions kept moving west, toward where a skeletal dome rising from a colonnaded rubble pile loomed above a strip of dense forest.
Ryan began to breathe easier when they slipped through
the outer screen of brush in among the trees. Stickies didn’t generally care much for woods.
“Mebbe I should take point,” J.B. said. “I’ve got the scattergun. If something busts loose here, it’ll bust loose at hand-shaking range.”
Ryan nodded. “Take it. I’ll flank right.”
“Ryan,” Mildred said, coming up alongside him, “are you sure—?”
“Everybody keeps asking me that,” he said. “He needs to do it. No matter how much his chest hurts. He’s got to show he can carry his weight, on the trail or in a fight.”
She shook her head. “Testosterone poisoning,” she muttered. But she made no more protest.
Drums abruptly boomed from the stadium.
“I wonder where they got drums that big?” Krysty said.
“I don’t,” Ryan said.
They followed trails that led through the brush. It enabled them to move faster as well as more quietly. For all Ryan knew they might be game trails. Deer could live in these woods, he knew from experience. If old St. Lou had boasted a zoo, and given its size it probably had, there could even be descendants of exotic escapees roaming the ruins. A stand of woods like this would draw them like flies to a fresh chill.
“Eyes and ears wide open, people,” he said quietly. “All we need is to run into a tiger in here.”
J.B. led them deeper into the woods. A wordless chant rose from the stadium, joining the drums. Whatever the evening’s entertainment was in there, it appeared to be reaching a climax.
From somewhere ahead, Ryan heard a branch swish against another.
He froze. Turning his eyes left, he saw that J.B., caught
in midstep, was slowly lowering his left boot to the ground. Convalescing from his chest wound hadn’t messed up his balance, fortunately.
Something swooshed from the brush ahead. In the moonlight Ryan saw J.B. twist his body clockwise. Whatever it was swept past him, a pale blur in the moonlight. As it passed between Brother Joseph and Ryan, Ryan reflexively grabbed at it, afraid it would hit Krysty behind him.
Almost to his surprise he caught it. He found himself holding a slender pole, actually a not terribly straight branch devoid of twigs. In a cleft in its end a wicked narrow wedge of flattened can was bound with what looked liked sinew.
J.B.’s shotgun roared answer to the sudden spear. The brush ahead began to thrash furiously, to the tone of frenzied catlike yowling.
A shower of rocks and crude spears erupted from the woods ahead of the small party. J.B.’s M-4000 boomed again. Then an earsplitting rattle of blasterfire erupted from his four companions’ handblasters.
“North!” Ryan shouted. “We can’t just bust caps blind!”
But he did, firing twice more toward where he thought he’d seen missiles fly.
He was glad to see J.B. turn right and run, pumping out blasts from the hip that shredded foliage and lit up the woods as he ran. He glanced back to see Brother Joseph stumble forward, propelled by a hand in the back from Mildred. Then came Doc, high-stepping, holding his sword stick and his smoking blaster.
“Krysty!” he shouted.
A figure burst from the undergrowth not a dozen feet in front of him. The cannie was buck-naked and brandishing a nail-studded branch as a club. Ryan aimed for
the center of the pallid mass and fired a double-tap. His attacker went down with a gut-shot wail.
Something grabbed Ryan’s right arm and pulled with surprising strength. “I’m right here!” Krysty shouted. “Time to go!”
He couldn’t argue with that. He went.
A dozen desperate heart-pounding lung-tearing paces took them out of the woods and into the street. The building directly across from the woods was a sprawling heap of dark rubble a good forty feet tall. No refuge there.
J.B. knelt, shooting into the woods they’d just left and stuffing in single shells after each shot. He’d shot his tubular mag dry. Running quite well, all things considered, Doc led the pack toward the northbound street west of the huge dark mass. Ryan and Krysty followed, bringing up the rear.
“C’mon, J.B.!” Ryan shouted to the Armorer as they sprinted past. To his relief the little man jumped up as if he were in the best shape of his life. He ran right after them, holding his shotgun in one hand and clamping his fedora to his head in the other.
From the mouth of the street Doc and Mildred laid down covering fire. A spear arced over Ryan’s right shoulder and scraped off the pavement in front of him. The cannies hadn’t given up yet.
As he and Krysty sprinted between the mound of wreckage and the building across from it, Ryan noticed that a spill of rubble lay across the street a hundred feet down. It looked like an extension of the huge pile of debris to their right. This side of the tall building on their left was largely intact. The front part of that structure, an extension maybe three stories tall, had apparently had only windows for walls. These had been blown out long ago, leaving the structure consisting mostly of framed black spaces.
Brother Joseph sat on the ground between the two, rubbing his knee. Mildred looked up at Ryan as he slowed down.
“He didn’t seem to want to stop,” she said, “so I tripped him.”
Bro Joe muttered something about madmen and women.
J.B. stopped and turned back, his shotgun on his shoulder. His breathing was labored. “Looks as if they quit chasing us,” he said.
Doc had his head tipped to one side and his eyebrows knotted. “Do you hear something?”
Ryan listened. “Huh? No.”
“Precisely. It’s what the dog didn’t do in the night, my friends!”
“Doc,” Ryan said urgently, “you got to be here and now for us.”
“He means the rad-blasted stadium, Ryan!” J.B. exclaimed. “You hear the noise from there?”
“No. I—Oh, holy shit!”
They looked back. To the south, across the trees, they could see lights flooding the ramp that wound down from the upper levels of the stadium, as if people carrying torches were swarming out of the seats and down toward the ground.
“They heard us shooting,” Krysty said. “Now they want to play, too.”
“Could things possibly be worse?” Brother Joseph moaned.
And something brushed the hair atop Ryan’s head.
He reached automatically up to brush at it, thinking it was a bat. Then he heard a solid thunk of something striking rubble right behind him. He wheeled around to see a
head-size chunk of masonry bouncing down the side of the vast mound.
He spun back. Obviously the missile had come from the skeletal structure on the west side of the street. He aimed his SIG that way. He didn’t see movement there now.
Krysty stood facing him. He saw her eyes go wide in the moonlight.
“Ryan,” she said in a choked voice, “up there!”
He turned back to the great mound of ruined building yet again. Pale shapes were rising from it like maggots from the bloated corpse of a dog.
“Cannies!” he shouted.
“They’re in the other building, too!” Mildred cried.
Pales figures danced against the sky atop the low structure, waving arms against the stars. Others moved along the upper floor.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “The devils are behind us as well!”
A rock grazed Ryan’s cheek from the mound. More missiles slanted down from the building across from it. And then he saw figures rise up on the low arm of debris that blocked the street to the north—blocked their path to the great dark tower. And Jak.
“Well, we’re surrounded,” Brother Joseph remarked in disgust. He moved his head aside as a half brick flew past his ear. “Are you happy now?”
“Krysty, grab one of the Molotovs we made in the ville out of my pack. Light it and throw it at that barricade!”
“But we need them—”
“Now!” He shot upward at the figures, hurling broken bits of concrete and brick from the mound. “We need it now!”
The others had opened fire again. Ryan felt Krysty yank at the flap of the pack on his back. He knew she
was working efficiently despite the adrenaline that had to be sizzling in her veins, but it felt like an eternity as he sighted and fired at the dancing, chanting cannibals.
“Ark! Ark! Ark!”
Ryan ducked his upper torso right to avoid a brick thrown at his blind side, which he caught from the corner of his good eye at the last possible instant. He felt a flash of fear: what if he made Krysty drop the lethal concoction?
“Got it!” she cried triumphantly. He heard the rasp and crackle of one of the spring-powered flint-strikers J.B. had cobbled together for them out of bits of salvage. Then a blazing blue meteor arced toward the low wall of rubble blocking their passage.
Before leaving Soulardville they had each hurriedly made up two improvised Molotovs—ceramic jars and vases filled with a mixture of Bro Joe’s fuel alcohol and the fish oil the ville used to fire a lot of its lamps, a bad-smelling but effective expedient, and apparently a useful byproduct of the river-fishing industry thereabouts. When it shattered on a masonry chunk the Molotov didn’t make as vigorous an explosion as a gasoline bomb would, nor as bright and hot a rush of flame. But it made plenty, and it was what they had.
Ryan rushed toward the sudden blaze of blue fire. A figure was spinning in circles atop the low wall, shrieking, waving arms like wings of flame. Apparently cannies had lost the ancient lore of stop, drop and roll.
The one-eyed man ran to the left of the burning cannibal, firing his SIG. He hoped nobody—meaning Mildred—would chill the suffering cannie out of a misguided sense of mercy. Nothing like having one of their buddies on fire to get enemies’ minds right, no matter who they were.
He hit the rubble wall running as the cannie—his
whole upper body now ablaze—fell over the far side. Ryan reached the top of the six-foot-high slope on all fours. A cannie stood to bar his way at the top, and he backhanded the creature across the face with his SIG. Bones crunched. The cannie’s head snapped to the side and it fell.
Gaining the top, Ryan ripped his panga from its sheath left-handed, chopped down one cannie, shot another in the chest and belly as it rose up to his right.
“Come on!” he shouted back at his companions. “Speed’s all we got!”
“Forgive me, madam,” Doc cried before he cracked a cannie woman wielding a big knife across the face with his sword stick. J.B.’s shotgun roared. He butt-stroked a cannie who wasn’t quick enough getting out of his way.
Here came Brother Joseph, looking unusually pale, with Krysty and Mildred howling at his heels like furies. The fact they were shooting past him to either side couldn’t have been a comfort to the man.
Even as he turned a club blow with his panga and slashed its wielder across the mouth with the return stroke, Ryan grinned.
Then his friends were across the barrier and running up the street. The way lay clear—at least as far as their next intersection. A left turn there would bring them one more block closer to their destination.
The cannies who could still move seemed to have cleared out. A glancing impact on the back of Ryan’s right shoulder told him their friends on the big rubble mound were still in the game. On the west side of the street the building shot up ten or more stories. The cannies didn’t seem to be going there. He ran on, clutching a weapon in either hand.
Just before the corner, which Doc had turned at a run, followed by the two women herding Joseph, Ryan caught
up with J.B. The Armorer was visibly limping, and his breath sounded like a man ripping a sheet to strips. But he was busily reloading his shotgun magazine, pretending nothing was wrong.