Deathlands - Dectra Chain Part 7

The whale-shark was closing in, and Lori and Doc weren't going to make safety.

"Now!" Jak cried as the black body turned, revealing the white throat and belly, and the ma.s.sive gaping jaws that snapped open in a cavernous grin.

It was no time for subtlety. Ryan squeezed the trigger, feeling the G-12 buck against his hip, blowing the entire magazine in a couple of seconds. He tried to keep the rifle trained on the same spot, below the tiny black eye, where he hoped there might be something vulnerable, like a spine.

J.B.'s mini-Uzi coughed out a full mag, and both Jak and Donfil fired their handblasters again and again, the heavy-caliber bullets ripping out chunks of bloodied flesh.

But the mutie was so enormous and its functional system so primitive that the rounds from the two Magnums did no more than mildly irritate it. The Uzi was a little more effective.

The Heckler & Koch G-12 destroyed it.

The self-lubricating, nylon-coated rounds were fired at nearly three times the normal velocity. Their lethal peculiarity was that the rounds themselves stopped quickly, but their kinetic energy carried on, sending deadly shock waves rippling through the body, pulping flesh and muscle into torn tatters.

Fifty bullets. .h.i.t the vicious predator in an area little larger than a soup plate. At less than fifty-foot range their effect was extreme termination.

The creature immediately lurched away from the swimming couple, tail beating, las.h.i.+ng up a great wall of spray, behind which Lori and Doc totally disappeared. Blood jetted from the mutie monster's body, staining the gray waters red-pink.

"Got it," J.B. said laconically, throwing away his empty magazine, slotting in a fresh one from one of his many capacious pockets.

The water foamed and boiled as the huge creature continued to thrash around in blind circles, blood flooding from the great body, darkening the ocean.

"Totally," Ryan said. His own coat's pockets held spare caseless ammo for his G12, enough for one full reload and a few left over. Once they were gone, he knew he'd have to dump the unusual blaster and pick up something more conventional.

Lori came aboard, clots of blood streaking her yellow hair, pulling Doc after her. The old man was grinning apishly and he blinked away the water, watching the death throes of the leviathan as it dived and broached, dived again.

"Wonderful specimen, my dear Ryan, quite wonderful. But such a shame you had to butcher it. Necessary, I suppose."

"Yeah, Doc. You f.u.c.king suppose right."

By the time they eventually grounded the raft on the beach of the mainland, the whale-shark lay still and dead in the bay, its carca.s.s wallowing under the attention of thousands of seabirds.

Chapter Nine.

THE PATH WAS STEEP and narrow. There were the remains of old steps, blocks of crudely carved stone set in the loose earth. But time and weather had eroded many of them, sending them sliding down the hill toward the beach.

With a great struggle Ryan and the others managed to haul their waterlogged raft high enough up the sh.o.r.e to keep it clear of the seaweed-strewn tidemark. The drums began to leak silvery drops onto the piled s.h.i.+ngle, drying out.

"With luck it'll float again when we need it. Long enough to get us back to the Ile au Haut and the gateway," Krysty said.

Jak tethered it to some frost-riven granite slabs, holding it fast against their eventual return. "Now what?" he asked.

"Now we go inland a ways. Find us some food and some way of getting dry. Look around some. That's what we do next," Ryan replied.

"Must have been many small hamlets scattered about this part of New England, back before the darkening of the skies," Doc said, s.h.i.+vering in his soaking clothes. "Some of them were allegedly places of inbred oddities. I recall a writer called Hodgcraft, or some such... wrote of blasphemous ent.i.ties and colors beyond s.p.a.ce. Set many of them in this region. I strongly recommend that we be most careful."

"Know what steps take if see real horror, Doc?" Jak asked, grinning impishly.

"No, young fellow. What steps should I take?"

"Long ones." The boy laughed.

The cliffs had fallen in sometime in the past hundred years. The final ninety feet of the path had vanished in a blur of tumbled pines and furrowed mud slides.

When they finally reached the top, Ryan paused and looked backward, across the stretch of ocean to the lopsided island. He saw that the other predators had scented the death of the mighty whale-shark. They were almost hidden by kicking spray, but he could make out the indistinct shapes of other sea creatures, tearing at the streaming corpse. The agitation had driven the gulls from the feast, leaving them to circle, screaming impotently, in a whirling cloud of hunger.

"Which way?" Donfil asked, peering around at the shrubs and stunted trees that angled toward the land, away from the sea's gales. "Looks something like a road over there."

They all followed the direction of the pointing finger. Among the scrub and trees, visible as it coiled over a low hill, there did indeed seem to be the dark ribbon of a highway.

DESPITE THE COOLNESS, their clothes were drying on them as they walked. If it had been nearer winter with the prospect of a hard frost, Ryan would have made sure they lit a fire immediately to dry out and warm up. Cold and wet were the two biggest killers in the Deathlands. Far bigger than stickies or crazies.

"There's some sort of direction post up ahead," Doc called. Now fully recovered from the ordeal, he was striding along with Lori on his arm, pointing out interesting features of the land to the girl.

The seven were strung out in a loose patrol formation, on what the Trader would have called a "condition green" a.s.signment, where there were no signs of any threat or danger-which didn't mean that you ignored any possible threat. It meant you didn't bother with someone out at point or using flank scouts or a distanced rear guard.

The post had fallen over at an angle, propped against the tumbled end of a picket fence. To have lasted so long in such a harsh climate the wood must have been amazingly well seasoned and protected. Doc and Lori were there first, and the old man bent to read the names on the four pointing fingers.

"Dunwich one way. Miskatonic University next one around. Of course, we don't know which way the sign originally pointed so we aren't really any wiser. The third name is Castle Rock."

"Doc," Lori said, as though she were trying to point something out to him.

"Shh, my sweet youthful bird. The last name is Jerusalem's Lot."

Ryan was next up, bending over the broken signpost, peering at the moss-covered boards. He straightened and looked at Doc, who was sn.i.g.g.e.ring like a schoolboy.

"There's nothing on any of them, Doc. All worn off and blank."

"Yes, Ryan. Just one of my little jokes. You know me."

"Sure, do, Doc. Don't suppose you could explain this particular joke? All the names that don't exist nowhere. I mean, anywhere." He glanced at Krysty.

"No, Ryan. I don't believe I can. Perhaps the truth might be found in a certain arcane volume, bound in human skin, written by the mad Arab, Alhazred." He smiled gently. "Then again, Ryan, my very dear friend, perhaps it might not."

"So, which way?" J.B. asked. "Could do with shelter with the night closing in."

"Where there is a sign, then once there has been a road," Donfil said. "Where there is a road, then there are life and people. Even if much has gone, we shall find something." He stooped and picked his way around for a few paces. "Here. The road ran that way. Blacktop. Other was only dirt." He pointed farther along the green path. "Another sign."

This one hadn't faded to illegibility: Consequence, Maine. Population 843.

"Hope there aren't any of those inbred oddities you talked about, Doc," Krysty muttered.

"OLD HOT SPOT," J.B. commented, checking the small rad counter on his lapel. "Only just touches orange. This gotta be the edge of one of the original craters. Don't see that many you can tell so easy. Like a d.a.m.ned big dish carved out of the stone."

It looked as if it had been a stray, medium-sized Russian missile. Maybe an AS.B.18, launched from one of the old Oscar-cla.s.s submarines lurking off the Atlantic seaboard.

The saucer-shaped hole was a little more than six hundred yards across, dipping around fifty feet deep. A pond of stagnant water had collected at its bottom, reflecting the orange glow of the setting sun. Unusually, there was little vegetation sprouting from the shattered stone.

"That can't have done much for the population of 843 in the ville of Consequence," Ryan observed.

It looked as though Consequence, Maine hadn't ever amounted to much. One road ran in and the same road ran out again. The derelict ruins of a light engineering factory were set back to the left, and a smaller workshop specializing in brake linings for tractors was opposite.

The Peter Pan Adult Motel-quadruple X-rated movies and one water bed-had its flat roof folded in like a concertina. Its neighbor was the Church of the Last Coming, linked with the Fellows.h.i.+p of the Blessed Saint Bubo of Ishmaelia. That roof was utterly gone, all four walls tipped in on one another, rotting from the bottom up. What looked to have been a general store was flattened completely.

The seven began to wander cautiously through the ruins, and Ryan looked down through the dusty gla.s.s of an unbroken window. There was a hand-lettered notice.

Waltzes and shuffles. Down-home music for friends and neighbors. Milt Tyson and His Cowboy Quartet. Pies and punch. For Claggartville General's Scan Fund. Tickets-five dollars. Doors open at Church Hall at seven o'clock. Last day of January 2001. Be there or...

The corner of the poster was missing.

"Be there or be dead," Ryan finished. "World died a week before they had their dance."

He turned and gazed up what must have been the main street of Consequence. There was hardly a house left standing, time and weather continuing what the missile had started.

"Getting cool," Krysty observed, threading her arm through his.

"Road goes up, then down. Any blast might've been deflected by that. Best chance of shelter's over the ridge."

"Found old wag!" Jak called.

Ryan was sometimes surprised at how few vehicles survived from before the long whiter. There must have been tens of millions of wags around, but all anyone ever saw were rusted wrecks. Only the wealthiest barons with access to a gas supply could now afford to drive for pleasure.

This vehicle was like the others. It looked as though a garage had once sheltered the pickup truck, but that had gone and the winters had stripped off the layers of paint. Tires had rotted; the gas tank had been hacked open; the gla.s.s shattered; seats removed. What remained was only the sh.e.l.l of a Chevy K2200.

The others gathered around the wag in silence. Somewhere out in the woods they all heard the mournful cry of some hunting animal. The reminder that night was near prompted Ryan into action.

"No time to hang around here," he said. "Best keep together now and get shelter."

The temperature was dropping fast. Once the sun had gone there was the first frosting of ice lipping the puddles. Breath streamed out like wood smoke, hanging in the still air. The sky was fading to a velvety purple-black.

Ryan's guess was right. Once they were over the hill, several of the houses looked better preserved. The street eventually petered out in a dead end, the overgrown remnants of a dirt road winding up into the forest to their left.

"One of these?" Lori asked, shoulders huddled against the cold.

"Yeah."

"I dream of stumbling over some old, long-lost ville," J.B. said, "and finding in a sealed garage a mint, fresh, oiled and ga.s.sed-up Jeep. Figure I never will, but it's nice to think on."

Ryan looked at his old comrade, jaw dropping. It was so unusual to hear the Armorer talk about anything other than weapons or food that he didn't know what to say.

CONSEQUENCE DIDN'T LOOK as if there'd been an awful lot of money working there. Apart from a couple of old frame houses, which had suffered particularly badly from the weather, most of the dwellings were single-story shacks or cabins. The one exception stood foursquare at the end of the road, as though daring it to go any farther.

It was based on granite, gray and strong, wood-framed, with screened windows and pointed turrets to the four corner bedrooms on the third floor. The porch was pillared and ran the whole length of the front of the building. From the sc.r.a.ps of paint that cowered in sheltered crevices, it seemed that the house had been dark brown and cream. The gravel path was bordered with shrubs, rampant, and on either side of the wrought-iron gate were rusting columns of metal, each carrying an iron ball the size of a man's head.

"Looks like the Baron Big of Consequence must have lived there," Ryan said. "Good enough for him, good enough for us."

All the windows on the top floor had been broken, but most of those lower down were intact, which must have been a result of the blast pattern of the missile that had left the crater down the way.

"How come it's not been ripped apart?" Donfil asked. "Place like this must have had its share of freak survivors. Why didn't they hole up in this house? Built like a fort."

"Could be that this is one of the regions that lost all the population. The way it looks from outside, the house might be empty," Ryan suggested.

It was.

The main lock on the front door had been kicked in, but the interior was completely stripped-not a stick of furniture on any of the floors. Ryan a.s.sumed that anyone coming in after the nuking wouldn't even have bothered to vandalize the house.

"There's some junk mail here," Doc said, pointing to a corner of the entrance hall behind the door. "All dated December and January. Just before they...you know. The owners must have moved out and maybe put the place on the market. Never found a buyer."

"You mean letters from that long ago?" Krysty exclaimed. "I've never..."

The old man stooped with a sigh, picking up the dry, dusty, scattered envelopes. "Junk, my dear. All junk." He ripped them open and threw the contents to the cracked parquet. "Reader's Digest, Time-Life Books, magazines and ceedees. A restaurant opening in Claggartville. The town's only about ten miles off from this sketch map, unless it was nuked to ashes."

Ryan took some of the envelopes from Doc's hands, looking at them himself, intrigued by this odd little peephole into the long-dead past.

There were invitations to buy this and that-ceramic statues of shepherdesses; facsimile clocks from Europe; devices to make your rooms dryer or less dry; books that would make you richer, happier, sleep better, make love with endless energy, read faster; flesh-colored Christs that were luminous when you turned out the lights; blasters of all sizes and shapes and prices. "Protect your home and the ones you love. A dead intruder won't be back."

"Is this the kind of stuff the mailman used to bring, Doc?" he asked.

"Guarantees... fire-damaged stock... Shown half actual size... No deposit required... Ask our area manager to call... Complete satisfaction..." Doc snorted and crumpled the brittle paper in his hands. "Satisfaction! By the three Kennedys but this makes me want to vomit, my friends. This was the peak of thousands of years of civilization! A free condom with every meal at this eatery! Offer conditional on being alive after world madness! Oh, these were such times, my brothers!"

The old man threw the paper to the floor, where Jak started to pick it up. "Good for starting fire, this. Break off some that stuff side stairs. Plenty good dry wood.

Yeah, Ryan?"

"Yeah, Jak."

All of them were used to sleeping on bare earth, so the lack of beds didn't bother anyone. After some discussion, Ryan and J.B. agreed that there didn't seem to be any feeling of danger. But they'd set single guards.

Two hours each, just in case.

Like Trader said-n.o.body ever got dead from being careful.

Chapter Ten.

THE SMOKE DREW THEM to the big, empty house at the end of the street.

It snaked through the frosty New England night, weaving out of the remnants of the towns.h.i.+p of Consequence, in among the silent sentinels of oak, pine and maple. To the hillside where they lived.