“Think we'll ever find Petrov and his boys?” J.B. asked.
“Don't know,” Ryan said honestly. “But we're heading east again, toward Modine, and we're close to a redoubt.”
“We're still not planning on a jump,” Mildred said, hugging the flaccid med kit to her chest.
“No, we're safe from those wendigos,” the man growled. “But we can check inside the redoubt for supplies. If luck is with us⦔ He shrugged and kept riding onward.
“Not see anything like wendigos,” Jak stated, stropping a knife blade on a smooth rock. “Tough.”
“What's that up ahead?” Krysty asked, craning her neck.
Slowing their mounts, the companions drew blasters and proceeded slowly, moving away from one another purely as a precaution. However, that proved to be unnecessary as over the next hillock was a small farming community. Scarcely more than a village, there was a truck stop surrounded by a dozen houses and a couple of grain silos.
“I don't think this place has ever been looted,” Ryan said, loosening the reins for his horse. “The stickies must have kept everybody else away.”
“But not us,” Krysty added.
“No wonder intact,” Jak scoffed. “Nothing here worth anything.”
“Millie, think there might be an eye doctor here?” J.B. asked.
“There might be.” She smiled. “There just damn well might be!”
As the companions rode closer, they noticed the village was in poor shape, with most of the homes collapsing inward upon themselves. There were wags on the streets and telephone wires overhead, but the little town reeked of decay, the canvas awnings of the stores tattered, and the few intact windows were so thickly encrusted with grime they were a murky opaque in color, a nondescript shade of forgotten.
Checking for ammunition first, the companions discovered that the police station was burned to the ground, most likely from a lightning strike. Only a few scattered pieces of the foundation showed through the accumulated piles of dead leaves and dying ivy. The windows of the pawnshop were intact, but the roof had
collapsed, and now a small jungle of wild plants grew amid the display cases.
On the street, the cars and trucks sat on their rims, the rubber tires long crumbled away. If there had been drivers behind the wheels, the bodies had also gone the way of all flesh, destroyed by time itself, instead of the savage hand of man.
“There's nothing here to scav,” Ryan muttered, looking around the place. “We might as well continue on to the redoubt and see if we can find any supplies there.”
“Quiet,” Krysty snapped, pulling her rapid-fire from the gun boot. Just then, the woman jerked her head up and drew both blasters to fire at something moving fast in the sky overhead.
The night was warm, the rain long gone, and the breeze from the north, carrying the smell of the Cobalt Mountains, was rich and heavy with pine and distant snow.
Sitting inside the rim of a broken fountain, the Pig Iron Gang was cooking dinner over a campfire. The ancient granite reflected the waves of heat from the small fire, making them quite comfortable inside the basin. Above them, the smoke curled along the bronze statue of some predark sec man carrying a muzzle-loading longblaster and wearing a coonskin cap.
Looking over his roasted leg of dog, Petrov Cordalane blinked in surprise. “Say that again,” he ordered, tossing the partially eaten food over a shoulder and wiping his mouth clean on a sleeve.
“I can read it,” Thal said, shaking the journal in one big hand. “I cracked their code!”
Stretching for what seemed like miles around the gang were the crumbling ruins of the predark city of Modine. Great towers rose tilted into the cloudy sky, every window gone or splintered into a spiderweb of crazy cracks. Covering the streets and sidewalks was a thick layer of rubbish, most of it glass, but also a lot of rusting metal in the most amazing variety of shapes and sizes, along with a host of plastic things that nobody had any idea about whatsoever. The ancient rubble was
yards deep in some areas, piled up against the charred buildings like windblown leaves. Different size wags were everywhere, ripe for the looting, the engines still intact and untouched. Some were colored like chunks of the rainbow, while others were huge and gray, massive machines of rusty armor, supporting a blaster so big it had to have taken two strong men to load in a brass. Tricycles and toilet seats, tea kettles and turbines, Modine was the richest predark city west of the Missy Sip. Hundreds of people had to have come every year to try to scavenge something of value. Only the presence of the wendigos kept most folks at bay, including those annoying barbs, but the Pig Iron Gang knew how to trick a wendy, and so had safe passage through the ruins. That made Modine the perfect hunting ground. All they had to do was grow a little moss, poison a few ponds, then wait for the feebs to arrive.
“What's it say?” Rose asked, rubbing a slice of apple on her own roasted leg of dog meat.
“There's a calendar in the front of the book,” Thal said, not answering her question. “Which was odd, because all of the other printed pages are gone, torn out, see?” He riffled the ragged edges of the missing pages. “So I started thinking, why keep this one page unless it was important somehow?”
“Paper is only important in the lav,” Rose replied.
“Anyway,” Thal continued, “underneath the calendar was the only thing in the book not in code, one sentence.” He waited. Nobody said anything. “âThe quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.'” Thal grinned. “It was us eating dog that made me think of it. Dog, that's the key.”
“Has he been smoking any zoomers?” Petrov asked, glancing sideways.
“If so, he ain't been sharing it with me,” Rose mumbled, her mouth full.
“Someone told me once that sentence has every letter in the alphabet,” Thal explained, feeling like he was trying to push a wet rope. “So I started exchanging letters with the garbled stuff, and nuke me, it suddenly made sense!”
“Okay, Thal, you're the baron of all whitecoats, congrats.” Charlie sighed, placing aside his cup and lighting a cig. “So what's it say?”
Angling the journal for some better light from the campfire, Thal pursed his lips, then haltingly began. “Greetings, my name is Mildred Wyeth, I am a physician and was cryogenically frozen in December 2000, only to awaken a hundred year later in Deathlands.”
“This was writ by someone who was frozen?” Petrov asked in a whisper, staring at the big man. “A freezie?”
“Guess so,” Thal said excitedly from behind the book. “Now listen up, you gleebs, here comes the good part.” The man cleared his throat. “I will be putting down my innermost thoughts on these pages, as honestly as I can, to help me sort out theâ¦ahâ¦transition from the past to this monstrous new world.”
“Blah, blah, blah, the freezie prefers the predark world to working for a living,” Petrov scoffed. “Probably too ugly to be a gaudy slut. Why should we give a damn about this drek?”
“â¦I will also be putting down any, and all, useful information that I know,” Thal went on, “from safe
zones where a person can seek refuge, such as Two-Son ville in the NewMex desert south of the Great Salt, to villes to avoid like Rock ville east of the Ohio River. Also, how to spot a rad pit, how to kill the worst of the mutantsâthat's old talk for mutiesâthe formula for black powder and how to process it into the much more powerful gunpowder, basic chemistry, some electronics and all of my vast medical knowledge.”
“A phiz-zish-son. That be a healer?”
“Appears so.”
“Blind NORAD, and we left her by the waterfall for Big Joe to sell to the slavers!” Charlie growled, exhaling a long stream of smoke. “A predark healer! We could have gotten anything we wanted from a baron for her, any nuking thing we wanted!”
“I heard of a coldheart named Fitzwilly sold a healer slave to a trader for a war wag,” Rose added excitedly. “A whole damn war wag! Blaster, brass, juice and everything! Now he rolls under a different name, Broke-Neck Pete, and has barons kissing his arse for the things he brings in for trade.”
“You mean like the stuff we have here in Modine,” Petrov said very slowly, tasting each word. “The drek that's piled yards deep for a mile in every direction.”
Licking her lips, Rose could only nod, while Charlie gave a long, low whistle. Wealth beyond their dreams lay about them piled in heaps, ripe for the taking, if they had a war wag to ferry the stuff to the East Coast barons, those were the richest. More brass and better food than they could ever hope to barter from the traders, and without the constant danger of the fragging
slavers trying to toss the gang into their damn wooden cages.
“Does the book tell the location of her cryo-whatever unit?” Petrov asked eagerly, cracking his knuckles. “That must have been where she got that implo gren and these fancy blasters.”
“Not yet.” Thal sighed, closing the journal with a thump. “I've only done the one page, and that took me most of today. But there's a map in the back of a place looks like a bomb shelter. A huge one, five stories deep, mebbe more.”
Petrov felt as if he had been hit with lightning.
Jackpot!
“Then stop yammering at me and get back to work,” Petrov commanded, with an imperial wave of the hand. “We'll do the rest of the hunting and the cooking. Your job now is decoding that book, and nothing else.”
“No prob. Sure could do with a cig,” Thal said, his words thick with meaning. “That'd help a lot.”
Without a comment, Charlie removed the hand-rolled smoke from his mouth and passed it over.
Smiling, Thal took a long drag, then opened the journal and started counting letters again, flipping back and forth from one part of the journal to another.
“What do you think we'd find in that bomb shelter?” Rose asked, her fingers toying with the pretty sextant hanging between her breasts.
“Our future,” Petrov whispered, lost in thought, stirring the campfire with a green stick. Just then, the clouds parted to bath Modine in silvery moonlight as the hot embers rose in a swirling cloud to fly into the nighttime sky and disappear from sight.
Â
T
HE SOUND
of Krysty's blaster was still ringing in their ears when a spear slammed into the ground among the companions, a scalp dangling from the wooden shaft as decoration.
“Barbs!” Ryan cursed, hauling out the Marlin.
At the word, hundreds of people silently rose into view from every building in the little town. Each of them was dressed in simple buckskins and carried a long spear. Most of them wore bandoliers hung across their chests, the leather strips supporting blasters of every kind, wheelguns, autoloaders, derringers, zipguns and a couple that Ryan couldn't identify. From their travels, the companions knew that the barbs didn't use the blasters, only their deadly spears. They collected the weapons as trophies, to show their chills, the same way some coldhearts did ears or fingers.
Tense minutes passed while Ryan and the chief barb did nothing. With weapons in hand, neither moved or said a word as they faced each other. Slowly, the minutes crept by before the chief barb broke the imposing silence.
“You must leave,” the chief barb said in a deep and commanding voice. “With the destruction of the swamp bridge, the unstoppable Great Ones will be forced to make their nest here, in our holy place.”
Unstoppableâ¦wendigos?
“Why not chill them?” Ryan replied simply.
“Impossible!” a female barb yelled. “Nothing can stop a Great One!”
“We done,” Jak stated with a shrug.
A low murmur of confusion swept through the huge crowd, and the chief barb looked hard at the albino
teenager before nodding. “I hear truth in your voice,” the man said slowly. “Tell us how this was done, and you shall have safe passage through our lands for a day.”
“A month and a day,” Doc said.
Puzzled, the chief barb frowned.
“He means for a moon,” Mildred translated, nudging the old man with an elbow.
A moon and a day? The chief barb dismissed that with a wave of his hand. “No, you ask for too much!”
“We don't know what to ask for,” Ryan said, controlling his temper, “since we don't know the extent of your land.”
The crowd smiled at that, and the chief barb snorted a laugh. The outlander was wise. “We rule from the swamp to the Cobalt Mountains, and from the glass lake to the black doors of Horseshoe Canyon. All of that belongs to us.” The barb expected the outlanders to be impressed, but their silence was heavy, their features stiff from the effort to remain neutral. So, they had seen the black doors, eh? Few outlanders had and lived to speak of it. The Great Ones guarded the doors like their cubs. Yet those were to the north, and the outlanders came from the west. Interesting, the chief barb thought.
“How long would it take to reach Horseshoe Canyon?” Krysty asked, keeping the interest out of her words. Black doors, could that be the entrance to a redoubt?
The barb almost smiled at that question. “Two suns.”
Which meant the earlier offer of one-day safe pas
sage was merely a trick to get them out of the town, Ryan realized coldly, so that the companions could be attacked somewhere else. Perhaps these were the descendants of the original farmers and still held the land in reverence.
“Then again, perhaps we'll stay right here,” Ryan said, patting his horse. “This is good land. We might farm, raise families and never leave.”
“Sacrilege!” a barb screamed, advancing a step and raising his spear to throw.
The crowd gasped in horror at the action, when there came the crack of a blaster and the wooden shaft of the spear exploded as it flew out of the barb's grip. With a cry of pain, the barb cradled his bleeding hand, his fingers bristling with splinters.
“I could have removed his head,” Mildred said, holstering her smoking blaster.
“But you did not,” the chief barb murmured. Was it from fear of their numbers? No, he saw no fear in these six, unlike the four that had passed through earlier on their forbidden machines. They had reeked with nervous sweat, and it was only the speed of the iron horses that allowed them to escape alive.
“We don't chill unless it's necessary,” Ryan stated, crossing his arms.
“Nor do we,” the chief barb replied, turning. “Chal-ka! Who is your worst enemy in the tribe?”
“Tal-hala,” the wounded barb muttered uneasily, his gaze shifting to a beautiful woman who scowled at him in open contempt.
“Since he is no more, his widow, Da-sha, is now your wife for the next winter.”
“Noâ¦!” the barb started, then bowed his head in shame. “I hear and obey. Her pots will be full of meat, her bed warm.”
“Then your sin is forgotten,” the chief barb said ritually, and looked back at Ryan. “You knew we do not chill here.” He didn't phrase it as a question.
“We're still breathing,” Ryan said in explanation, “and you had the drop on us. Fair and square.”
Saying nothing for a few minutes, the chief barb thrust his spear into the soil. “Safe passage for a hand of days, no more.”
Five days to leave territory only two days wide. “Fair deal,” Ryan said, pulling his knife.
Walking closer, the chief barb also drew a knife and in unison the two men cut their own palms, then clasped hands. The entire tribe thumped the ground with the blunt end of their spears in approval.
“I am Hoal-thar, and this is the tribe,” the chief barb said, reclaiming his hand and sheathing the bloody knife.
“The name's Ryan Cawdor.” He introduced the rest of the companions.
“So, tell me, Ryan of the One-Eye, how did you slay a Great One?” Hoal-thar asked, binding his palm with a strip of cloth.
“Fire. They can't regen from fire very quickly,” Ryan answered, doing the same with a handkerchief. “Move fast, and they fall.”
Another low murmur swept the army of barbs at this pronouncement, but this time their faces were stern and disapproving.
“That is a forbidden word,” Hoal-thar growled, tightening the crude bandage until his skin turned white from the pressure.
“Nothing is forbidden if there is no other word to use,” Doc spoke up again.
The tribe made various noises at that, and the chief chuckled. “Your wrinklie is wise.”
“What can you tell us about those black doors?” Ryan asked.
Suddenly, someone on a rooftop screamed, and a barb vanished from sight only to reappear a second later, the two halves of the body sailing away in opposite directions.
“A Great One!” a barb yelled in warning, pulling back his arm to throw the spear, then pausing, unable to break the ancient taboo on chilling.