Deathlands - The Twilight Children Read online

  It was a truly enchanting vista that stretched out before the seven friends.

  There was a plateau of bare rock, looking as big as a football field, that had once been graded and still showed the faint etched lines on the tarmac where parking spaces had been allocated for the military. It was bordered by a row of sturdy concrete blocks along the edge, marking a steep drop toward a narrow valley fifteen hundred feet below.

  A flock of pure white doves circled far above, cooing to one another in the warm sunshine. Far beneath them they could just see the silver thread of a narrow river, while in the middle distance, partly obscured by a haze, there was the shimmering expanse of a large lake.

  "Looks like the land of Paradise," Mildred said. "If you can't recover even more quickly here, Ryan, then you can't recover anywhere."

  "I would beg all of us to bear in mind the sorry but undeniable fact that even the Garden of Eden contained its own serpent," Doc warned.

  "Miserable old bastard," Mildred snapped. "Can't you ever try to look on the bright side?"

  "Turn over every bright side, madam," he replied, with some dignity, "and you find darkness on the other."

  Ryan took in deep breaths of the fresh morning air. "Fireblast! I feel better already. Let's go kill a deer. Or two deer."

  J.B. had examined the exterior of the sec doors before setting the code to close them again. "Looks like someone's been having a try at getting in," he observed.

  They all turned around from the view, seeing where the Armorer was pointing at some clear scorch marks near the bottom of the right-hand door.

  "And I think someone had a go with a couple of frag grens," he added.

  "Any damage?" Dean asked, running to look for himself. "Doesn't look like it."

  "Not all damage shows on the outside," Michael said, staring vacantly into the clear sky.

  "Don't go all mystic on us-" Krysty touched him on the arm "-you'll be slipping into that twentieth-century stuff about being no success like failure."

  Michael started as if he hadn't even noticed the others there. He smiled broadly. "Guess you're right. Can we go down and take a look around?"

  J.B. watched the doors slide shut, with a barely audible hiss of pneumatic power. "Sure, but all keep together. You ready, Ryan?"

  "As I'll ever be."

  Before they started the steep descent, J.B. checked their location with his mini-sextant, confirming that they were somewhere in the middle of what had once been New Hampshire.

  "That could be Lake Champlain, then," Doc said wonderingly. "My dearest Emily and I sailed and fished upon that many times. To see it again after... Lord, after close on two hundred years. If we can get down there we might find some of the finest piscatorial sport that man ever knew."

  "And women, Doc?" Krysty teased.

  "But of course. My own darling wife once hooked onto a monster pike not far from here. Thirty pounds if it was an inch. Sadly I failed to gaff it and fell from our boat into the water. Emily was frightfully cross with me."

  The trail was steep, cutting in a series of switchbacks down the side of the mountain that concealed the redoubt. About halfway down there had been a minor earth slip that had totally washed away the blacktop for several hundred feet, though it finally reappeared again just before plunging into a dark expanse of conifers.

  "Looks like it could be good hunting," Ryan commented, leaning on Doc's sword stick.

  "Hope so." J.B. polished his glasses. "Sooner we get down there, sooner we find out."

  " WERE THERE ANY BIG VILLES around here, Doc? In the good old days before skydark?"

  Dean and Doc were strolling together in the center of the group.

  "Place called Burlington, as I remember, not all that far away. Not a big ville like New York or Chicago, but we thought it pretty up and walking good in New England. I was born only a few miles from here, in that direction." He waved a hand vaguely toward the east.

  "Where?"

  "South Strafford, Vermont. Admirable little place, Dean. Lovely general store. White frame houses. Woods for miles in every direction."

  "And people lived there, in homes?"

  "Indeed, they did. There were folk in South Strafford, aged eighty and upward, who had never traveled more than twenty miles from their birthplace in their entire lives."

  "Truly?" Dean grinned at the old man. "You greasing my wheels, Doc?"

  "How's that?"

  "Joking me?"

  "Ah, I understand. Colorful slang, young fellow. No, I confess I'm not., .oiling your wheels, Dean. Life back then was slower and simpler and cleaner and.. .so very much better."

  "Long ago, and far away, Doc," Mildred said quietly.

  "Correct, my dear. And... Oh, so very much better than it is today."

  Krysty spotted a bald eagle, soaring on an invisible thermal, sending the dove scattering.

  "Whole flock's gone," Michael said. "But the eagle didn't get them."

  "Not a flock, young man." Doc turned, nearly stumbling hi his eagerness to correct the teenager. "The wrong collective noun for doves."

  "Flock of sheep?" Mildred tried.

  "Alpha plus." Doc beamed. "But one should talk about a dule of doves."

  "Dule? You made that up."

  "I did not, Dr. Wyeth," Doc said indignantly. "Many of the names are quite unusual and rather picturesque."

  "Tell us some." Dean looked back where his father was slowly bringing up the rear of the group. "Doc's going... You all right, Dad?"

  "Yeah, thanks. Might have a sit-down when we teach that earth slip. Go on, Doc."

  "Ask me some birds or animals, Dean."

  The boy considered the question. "Wolves?"

  "A route of wolves."

  A snort of disbelief came from Mildred. "How about a 'crap' of old men?"

  "Ignore her, Dean. Go on."

  "Hawks?"

  "A cast of hawks."

  "Toads?" Krysty said.

  "Ah, that's... Yes, I remember me the word. One talks of a knot of toads."

  "How about crows, Doc?"

  "Crows, J.B.? One of my favorites. A murder of crows."

  "Murder?" The Armorer whistled. "All these names from before the long winters."

  "All right, smart-ass," Mildred said. "What about larks? And you better watch it, because I know the answer to this one. Go on, Doc. Larks?"

  "An exaltation of larks." He bowed mockingly to the woman. "Is that not correct?"

  "Well, as it happens, yeah, it's right."

  "A deceit of lapwings. A parliament of owls. A pitying of turtledoves. A siege of herons. A shrewdness of apes. Oh, so many fine terms."

  "Angels?" queried Michael, who'd been listening in silence to the conversation.

  "Angels? Hardly birds or beasts, dear boy."

  "Come on, Doc," he urged with an odd intent-ness. "You know so much, then. What about angels?"

  "A choir, would be the collective noun, I think. But I'm not altogether certain, Michael."

  The young man spit in the dirt and stalked on ahead of them, kicking loose pebbles out of his path.

  "How is it, RYAN?" Mildred leaned across and took his wrist between her thumb and forefinger.

  "Been better. Needed this rest."

  "Pulse is up some. Temperature? About normal, bearing in mind the exertion. How's the neck feel?"

  He lifted a hand and touched the bandage, then pressed a little harder, wincing at the expected stab of pain. "Still real painful, Mildred."

  "Bad as it was?"

  "No!" he said, louder than he'd intended. "No, ifs not. When can I take off the dressing?"

  "I'll look at it later today. I brought some strips of those old sheets ready to clean it up."

  Immediately below them, the winding blacktop vanished under a mountain of loose earth and rock. It was obvious from the amount of rich vegetation growing over it that the slide had been many years ago.

  Ryan reached out from where he was sitting and plucked a tiny flower. "Compare whe
re we are now to that place we finished up with the mutie creatures," he said. "Acid rain and fog and nothing living worth a spoonful of piss. Look." He swept his hand outward. "Beautiful."

  "Would the Trader have appreciated this kind of view, Ryan?" Mildred asked.

  He smiled. "A view? Hell, the only view that Trader really appreciated was one where he could make some easy jack without having to break sweat."

  She picked up half a dozen rounded pebbles and started to toss them in the air, trying to catch them on the back of her hand. "So, this Trader. How come you and John figure the sun used to shine out of his ass?"

  "Because he was the best." Ryan hesitated, looking out over the forest toward the lake. "If Abe's right, then mebbe I should say that Trader is the best."

  "Easy answer. Best at what, killing people?"

  "Yeah. For one thing, Trader knew chilling like other men know breathing."

  "Damn!" She shook her head slowly. "Coming here, from my time, I've seen amazing things. There's a lot about Deathlands that's better than the end of the twentieth century. But this emphasis on wasting people. Like the man with the biggest blaster becomes the biggest man. Not very politically correct, Ryan."

  "Don't understand you, Mildred."

  "No, I guess not. I tell you, if Trader really might be alive, then I kind of look forward to the chance of meeting him. Kind of scared about it. as well."

  Dean interrupted them, bounding up like a puppy. "I'm starving hungry, Dad. Can we get moving again?"

  Ryan leaned on the sword stick and pulled himself upright. "Yeah. Right now."

  IT TOOK THEM MORE THAN an hour to descend over the jumble of shifting stones and earth. The footing was treacherous, and twice they set off minor slides.

  Ryan found it hard going. He slipped and fell heavily when they were close to the bottom, and rolled helplessly, banging his left shoulder hard on a jagged outcrop of granite, the impact starting the wound to leak blood again.

  He opened his eye to find himself lying upside down, with everyone staring down at him worriedly. The expressions of concern suddenly made him start to laugh, and he was unable to stop himself.

  It was only after he'd been helped to his feet and dusted off that Ryan realized that Michael was the only one of the six not to come to his assistance. The teenager had been picking his own path down the steep slope, not even turning his head to watch Ryan's accident.

  "BET THAT RIVER'S BURSTING with trout and salmon," Krysty said. "Only another quarter mile or so and we can rest by it. Looks easy going now that we're off the mountain."

  Ryan looked up behind them, trying to conceal how weak and nauseous he felt. The hillside scraped up away from them, looking almost impossible to climb. From down in the valley, at the bottom of some loose scree, there was no sign at all of the existence of the redoubt.

  It was a little warmer, with a fresh breeze now blowing across the valley, ruffling the tops of the nearest pines. The air smelted like nectar.

  Doc had stretched out on his back, arms behind his head, looking up at the sky. "I don't know bow the rest of you feel, but I have seldom felt so rested and comfortable. Admittedly I shall be even closer to perfection once I have three or four charbroiled trout inside me. The ones that you mentioned, Miss Wroth."

  "Not going to catch and cook themselves," J.B. said. "lt'sgogetthem."

  Chapter Seventeen

  "Fishing is such a different activity to what it was in my days," Doc said, picking at his excellent teeth with a slender bone.

  The ashes of the fire glowed, containing within their heart several more small clay packages, each of which held a tender young trout.

  "How did you fish predark, Doc?" Dean asked.

  "With long rods of bamboo and thin gut lines. Barbed hooks and lures designed to look like the most delicious flies that a fish ever dreamed of."

  "Why go to all that trouble?"

  "Sport," Doc replied, his eyes crinkling with amusement at the look of bewilderment and disbelief on the boy's face. "Lots of times we'd fight old brother steelhead for a couple of hours or more, and then, once we'd landed the brute, we'd simply slip him back into the water again."

  "That's serious stupe!"

  "Looking back I must, peradventure, have to agree with you, Dean. But, as I have oft remarked before, that was then and this is now."

  The one point that Dean couldn't begin to appreciate, and Doc never mentioned, was the factor of the stocking of rivers and lakes.

  Before the meganukes and the long winters, most of America's accessible waters had been overfished. Since then, with comparatively little threat outside of natural predators, the stocks had built up and up.

  The fishing party that day had simply each found a quiet stretch of bank and had laid down in the shadows, bellying up to the water and peering intently into the cold depths until the eyes had adjusted to spot the speckled fish.

  Then all you had to do was slide a hand into the pool, move the fingers gently back and forth and ease it toward the nearest of the trout, taking care not to disturb or frighten the fish.

  Patience was the main virtue you needed.

  And the skill to strike at the right moment, cupping your hand under your chosen victim and simply flipping it up and out onto the bank.

  Grab it by the tail and jerk its head against the ground, then drop its flapping corpse a few yards from the edge of the water and go back for another fish.

  The cooking took a lot longer.

  Once they had a second pile of a dozen or more trout ready to gut and bake, Ryan sent Dean and Michael out into the surrounding forest to search for berries or fruit.

  Dean came back in twenty minutes with his pockets filled with boysenberries and loganberries, fat and brimming with juice, a fine complement for the next helping of baked trout.

  "WHERE'S MICHAEL?" Doc asked, pulling out the silver half-hunter from his fob pocket. "I believe that the boy has been gone for close on an hour now."

  "We split up." Dean rubbed his mouth. "Well, we didn't exactly split up."

  "How do you mean?" his father asked.

  "Michael just went off on his own and he didn't... didn't sort of reply when I spoke to him."

  Mildred wiped a thread of dark crimson juice from her chin. "That jump was real bad for the boy."

  "Thought he'd gotten over it." J.B. had stood and was looking out across the river and into the trees.

  "Thought so, too, love. Could be wrong. Cryosurgery was my field, not psychiatry. Thought there weren't many specialists around that you could have asked about paranoid psychoses arising from a malfunctioned matter-transfer jump."

  "Better go look for him," Ryan said. "I'll stay here with Dean. No, he better go as well. Doc, stay here and keep me company."

  "Willingly. But do you think..."

  "Don't think anything, Doc. Lad's got the fastest reflexes I ever saw. But he could have been cold-cocked."

  "We'd have heard a shot," Krysty said.

  "Yeah."

  "Where's everyone going?" Michael was standing in shadow, leaning a hand against a lodgepole pine, the sound of his approach muffled by the rushing river nearby.

  "You all right?" Ryan got to his feet, his hand on the butt of the SIG-Sauer.

  "As the gentle rain, thanks. We moving on?"

  "Coming to look for you, stupe," Dean said. "You find any berries?"

  "Don't call me stupe. I don't like it. Understand?"

  "Sure. Don't lose... You get any berries?"

  "Berries?" They still couldn't see Michael's face, hidden in the darkness at the edge of the forest.

  "That was what you and Dean went for." Ryan was beginning to lose his temper, only hanging on with the feeling that something was still not right with Michael.

  "Oh, sure. Remember now. Any of those fishes left?"

  "Why, you..." All his life Ryan Cawdor had been plagued by a short fuse on his temper. Though it was better than when he'd been in his teens, there were still moments when it
began to flare out of control.

  "Leave it," Krysty said, sensing the outburst even before it came. "You didn't get any berries, Michael?"

  "No. Didn't see any."

  "See anything else?" J.B. asked, the high, stretched tone of his voice sh owing his own anger.