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  Sirena shook her head. "Even if I went over it minute by minute, it wouldn't help you. Preparations are a waste of precious time. I've lived with the doomie sight since I was your boy's age, and I know this for a certain fact—no one can change the course of what will be. My advice to all of you is to enjoy each passing moment as if it were your last."

  "In other words," Mildred said, "we're going to suffer and die, but be sure and have a nice day. That's all she's going to tell us? Why are we listening to this hogwash?"

  "I heartily agree," Doc said. "Might I suggest that our 'passing moments' might be more enjoyably spent away from the confines of this cramped and stinking hovel."

  "You got that right, Doc," J.B. agreed.

  As they began filing from the hut, Sirena called out, "Wait, young Cawdor! Before you go, I have a gift for you."

  From under the translucent cape, she produced a slim six-inch bone dagger in a skin sheath.

  Dean immediately glanced at his father, who indicated his permission with a curt nod of his head. The boy approached the old woman and took the dagger from her. There was no cross guard or pommel. The handle was wrapped with strips of scratchy fish skin. Unsheathing the blade, he carefully tested its serrated edge on the back of his thumbnail. "Demon sharp!" he said.

  "It's made from the tip of a catfish dorsal spine," Sirena said. "It will fit nicely into the top of your right boot."

  Dean tried it. The blade and sheath disappeared completely. "I can hardly feel it's there," he said. "Thanks."

  Sirena reached out and seized his wrist in a grip that was amazingly strong. "I could have told you your future," she said, "and your children's future, too, if you'd just sat on my lap."

  "Mebbe you could," the boy said, jerking his hand away. "And mebbe I don't want to know that bad."

  As Ryan and Dean left the hut, waves of the doomie's shrill, hoarse laughter crashed against their backs.

  IT WAS NEARLY midnight when Ryan saw it, in the tree break over the dark river. The single point of bright light appeared in the west, above the blackness of the canopy, and swept across the starry field of sky. He and the others watched the satellite arc overhead and vanish in the east.

  "Fireblast!" Ryan's curse echoed off the surrounding forest.

  "Couldn't it be something else?" Dean asked him. "Something real old…from before skydark?"

  "It isn't old, son. All the space junk fell to earth and burned up a long time ago. It has to be new. The fish hag spoke the truth. People from the other Earth had to have put it up there. No one else could have done it."

  "We should've chilled those four bastards," J.B. said. "Should've buried them along with all their fancy chilling gear."

  Ryan grimaced. J.B. was talking about the turncoats, the members of the first scouting expedition to cross over from the parallel Earth. With success within their grasp, the warrior-whitecoats had decided not just to abandon, but to sabotage their primary mission, which was to lay the groundwork for the invasion and conquest of Deathlands by the armies of FIVE. Instead of firing the guided missiles they had trucked with them into the sky, they launched it through the reality portal in the hope of sealing the gateway forever. That done, the alternate world conquistadors went native. They stripped off the segmented black battlesuits that made them immune to blasterfire, and they dumped the tribarreled laser rifles that cut through plate steel like so much tissue paper. Ryan and the others helped them dismantle their gyroplane and they buried it deep in a sandy arroyo along with the rest of their gear.

  "Colonel Gabhart and the others might not have had anything to do with this," Mildred said.

  "They could've changed their minds about bringing the armies across, too," J.B. countered. "Mebbe they had blood relatives starving to death on the other side. Blood being thicker than water, they decided to reopen the passageway and save them."

  "However it happened," Krysty said, "they're here. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"

  All eyes turned to Ryan.

  He was the only one who had seen the other world. And though he'd tried to describe its bleakness and horror to his friends, mere words couldn't do it justice. They stuck in his throat like slivers of glass.

  The nukecaust that had laid waste to Deathlands was an accident, an instantaneous, one time event, but the alternate end to history that Ryan had witnessed was the final outcome of a civilization that had attacked nature as if it were a sworn enemy. There was nothing left on the parallel Earth but human beings and the avalanche of disasters their science had brought to life. They were indeed like two-legged cockroaches: indomitable breeders, surviving at all costs, consuming and destroying every living thing and every resource within their reach.

  In his mind, Ryan could see gleaming, hard shelled black armies pouring through the parted lips of the reality corridor. Armies carrying weapons and technology that nothing in Deathlands could match. Armies so vast that even without advanced weapons they could defeat any force the people of Deathlands could field against them.

  Running away only postponed the inevitable. With an eye in the sky endlessly circling and searching their world, there was no safe place to hide. Fate had left Ryan and his companions one choice, and it was bad.

  "We've got to go back to Moonboy ville," Ryan said. "We've got to find a way to fight the bastards and drive them out for good." There was silence along the riverbank. To enter battle with a slight possibility of victory was one thing; to walk willingly into the spinning blades of a meat grinder was another. Ryan thought about the village man who had death marched himself to meet the catfish's impaling spine. Sirena had told the poor bastard his fate, and he had surrendered to it. Just as they were about to do. There was an important difference, of course.

  Ryan listened to the gurgle of the life giving river and felt the embrace of the dense forest that loomed on all sides. Overhead, the blanket of stars twinkled as his world slowly turned. The difference was, they wouldn't die for nothing. And they wouldn't die alone.

  Chapter Three

  A rag securely tied over his nose and mouth, Dr. Huth stopped hacking at the hardpan with the blade of his shovel. The sound of a distant car horn faded in and out, intermittently muffled by the gusts of hot wind that scoured the desert plain.

  Abandoning the shovel, Huth climbed the side of Byram ville's defensive berm for a look. As he scaled the mound of dirt, his feet slipped around inside the oversize jogging shoes he wore despite the plastic bags he'd wadded up in their toe boxes. His polyester pants were as stiff as cardboard. Not because they were new—their rigidity came from the black blood that starched the lap, thighs and shins. The pants were cinched tight around his waist with a length of frayed electrical cord.

  To earn a dead man's trousers and shoes, Huth had dug latrines barefoot and in his underpants for three days.

  He was still digging latrines.

  A mile away, a wag emerged from the dust devils that spun across the ruined interstate. It continued to honk as it approached the lone opening in the ville's mounded perimeter wall. The vehicle, originally a small school bus, was painted in garish pink, green, yellow, red, a chaos of spray-can squiggles and overlayed abstract shapes. Even the sides of the tires and wheels were painted.

  Belching black smoke from its exhaust, the wag stopped at the security checkpoint, which consisted of a breach in the berm that was partially blocked by a heap of junked vehicles. The all volunteer sec force emerged from behind that rusting barrier, shouting instructions as they aimed their handful of centerfire blasters at the driver. The bus's side door opened at once, and the sec men climbed inside to make sure it didn't conceal armed killers trying to loot the compound. The ville's sec men never robbed or extorted wayfarers themselves. Robbery and extortion were left to the twenty-four-hour gaudy house and the seven-days-a-week swap meet.

  The hellpit of Byram ville, whose smoke plume Huth had first seen from atop the red mesa, had grown up around a predark truck stop. At the center of the enc
losure were the remains of a service station, restaurant and minimart. The great steel awnings that had once shielded the rows of junked fuel pumps from the sun had been torn off by skydark's two-hundred-mile-per-hour shock wave. The original roof of the one-story structure had likewise vanished, the plate-glass windows turned to twinkling fairy dust. Roof and windows had been crudely repaired with sheets of metal stripped from the abandoned and overturned semi trailers that littered the huge parking area. These aging artifacts of long-dead interstate commerce were the very heart and soul of the place. Byram ville's upper crust lived inside the trailers and conducted their businesses out of them. The poorer residents kept house in the rusting hulks of passenger cars. The lowest of the low—Huth, included—slept curled up on the ground like mongrel dogs, in the lee of their economic betters.

  Unless someone had died during the night, there were forty-five full-time residents of Byram ville. The locals survived by trading with travelers, taking whatever the newcomers had of value in exchange for jolt or juice or sex, or food or drinking water, or temporary protection from what lay outside the defensive perimeter. Though Interstate 15 was primarily a walking road, occasionally a wag would pass through, bearing trade goods and news from other parts of Deathlands.

  After clearing the entry checkpoint, the bus driver parked alongside the ville's central structure and leaned on his horn for a good thirty seconds. Heads poked out of semis and car bodies and the ruined restaurant and minimart. Seeing what had arrived, people came running.

  Carrying his shovel, Huth joined the crowd that surrounded the strangely decorated wag. The driver stood in the bus's doorway, grinning. He was a big man, easily 350 pounds and six foot two. He wore a squashed canvas fedora, which sat like a pancake on the back of his huge head, and faded bib-front denim jeans. "Come one, come all!" he yelled. "Gather 'round, everybody!"

  As the crowd closed in, the driver used the metal ladder bolted to the bus's side to climb to the roof. Once there, he did a sort of flamenco dance, his arms curved gracefully over his head, his laceless logger boots hammering on the sheet steel.

  Huth noticed the way the sun gleamed off his right hand, which was the color of old ivory and obviously artificial.

  "Come on and bring your cups!" the driver shouted. "I got free joy juice for everybody! I got free slip and slide, too!"

  He stamped on the roof of the bus. "Wake up, you lazy sluts!" he bellowed. "Get up here and show your stuff!"

  A frowzy female head appeared in one of the bus's rear windows, hair like a great lopsided wad of pink cotton wool. A second woman popped up beside the first, her face powdered white and her cheeks rouged a feverish red. The third occupant was male. Dense black facial stubble had grown through his many layers of Pancake makeup.

  This unwholesome trio exited the bus and started up the ladder to the roof. They were dressed in matching outfits: a white string T-shirt and stiletto-heeled leather boots. None of them wore anything below the waist. Their well-worn genitalia had the ruddy brown color of smoked meat; their buttocks and thighs were badly bruised. The pink-haired slut carried a battery-powered boom box, which she passed up to the driver.

  The big man propped the boom box on his shoulder and hit the power switch. Predark music blared from the speakers at ear blistering volume. There were lyrics to the song, hard to catch at first, something about partying like it was the year 1999.

  The three whores began dancing, and the driver did a few turns himself before setting the boom box on the roof.

  "Got your cups?" he called to the crowd over the rhythmic racket. "Well, goddammit, go get 'em!"

  As most of the folks rushed off, the driver descended the ladder and ducked inside the bus's doorway. When he reappeared, he had a gray insulated plastic mug in his good, left hand.

  Huth was standing close enough to get a look at the prosthesis at the end of his other arm. It wasn't carved of ivory, or any other natural material. Every finely sculpted finger had two articulated joints, the thumb had one, plus the knuckles, and there was a small knurled knob on the back of the wrist. As he watched, the big man tightened down the knob, which made the fingers and thumb contract in a death grip around the mug's handle.

  Mug in fist, the driver danced some more; he was very light on his feet for a man of his size. After a minute or two, he stopped and pulled the end of a length of plastic hose out a side window. When he opened the metal clamp on its tip, a clear fluid sprayed into his waiting tankard.

  "We are gonna have so damned much fun!" he shouted to the cloudless sky.

  Then he called up to the whores, "Dance, you sexy devils! Show these good folks what you can do!"

  The trio began bucking their pelvises and rotating their hips with more enthusiasm.

  "For those of you who don't know me," he told the crowd, "I'm Big Mike. Also known as Mike the Drunkard." He tipped back the mug and began to swallow, his Adam's apple bobbing. He didn't stop until he'd emptied it.

  "Ya-hoooie!" he said. "Everybody belly up! Come on, now, don't be shy. It's fill-'em-up time!"

  Hath, who had no cup, was shoved, elbowed and punched out of the way by those who did.

  The boom box on the roof stopped playing for a second, then the same song started over again automatically.

  Mike the Drunkard used his real hand to backslap and goose the spectators as he topped off their containers. And the whole while he jabbered at them. "Oofa, are we going to partay!" he said. "Get this bus a-rocking in no time." He made a lewd crotch thrust at his own drained mug before refilling it.

  In short order, Big Mike had everybody around the bus drinking, dancing and laughing. Everybody but Huth, who stood at the edge of the crowd, leaning dejectedly on the handle of his shovel. When Mike scrambled back up to the roof of the bus, he turned down the volume on the boom box.

  The song started over for the fifth time. By now, all the people knew the words of the chorus and shouted along. To them, 1999 meant predark. Happy days.

  Times of plenty, of relative order and safety. A golden step.

  "Right about now," Big Mike said to them, "you're probably asking yourselves, where does this big old sexy magic man come from? And where did he get all the chiller joy juice he's giving away?"

  "Tell us.'" someone yelled back.

  "Yeah," another person chimed in, "tell us!"

  "The answer to both questions is Slake City," Mike said.

  It took a few seconds for this information to sink in. Gradually, the residents of Byram ville stopped dancing. They stood like statues beside the bus, glaring at the big man.

  Mike raised his good hand. "Now, I know you've heard it's a wasteland over there. But that's a rumor started by some of the people who are already there. They're greedy bastards. They want to keep all the sweet stuff for themselves."

  "That's Baron Jolt's turf," said a man standing up front, "and as far as I'm concerned, that raping, chilling bastard can have it."

  "Everybody knows Slake City's nothing but a nuke slag heap!" another man said. "The background radiation turns you into a pile of pus and sores inside of a month."

  "Nah-nah," Mike said, shaking his head. "That's how it used to be. Not anymore. The place is all cleaned up. It's safe as mother's milk. And Baron Jolt is long gone. We got real jobs there, now. It's fat, I'm telling you, just like before skydark. People are eating regular, getting drunk regular, living out of the chem rains in clean shacks with good shithouses. Slake City is starting over again, and the folks who get in on the ground floor are going to have the edge. Have a chance to get baron rich. That's why I'm here. Slake City needs folks like you. Enterprising, right thinking folks who know an opportunity when they see one."

  While the crowd considered this, Mike the Drunkard clambered from the roof and quickly refilled all the empty cups.

  It was then that Huth took note of the massive bracelet around the bus driver's left wrist. Dull silver in color, its surface was filigreed with solid-state circuitry. The sight of the ornament made Hu
th's mouth drop. Pulse pounding, he fought to get a closer look, though it meant absorbing numerous blows to his head, back and arms.

  "How did you lose your right hand?" Huth called out.

  "Got it caught up the wrong ass," Mike said. Everybody laughed. Everybody but Huth. The former chief whitecoat of FIVE, now latrine engineer, used the handle of his shovel like a lance, clearing a path to the front of the crowd. He held up the pocket of his lab coat to the big man. "Do you know what this means?" he asked.

  Big Mike squinted down at me four letters stitched in red. "Can't read too good," he confessed.

  Huth reached out and tapped the metallic wristband. "I came from the same place as that."

  Big Mike stared at Huth's gap teeth, his dirt-caked face, his unspeakable pants and dismissed him with a "Yeah, right…"

  "I know what it's used for," Huth went on, frantic to get his point across. "You've got bands just like it around your ankles, too, don't you?" The big man's eyes narrowed. "So…?"

  "Did it hurt much when they lopped off your hand?"

  Mike the Drunkard seized Huth by the collar and dragged him and his shovel up the steps into the bus. Inside, it smelted like a cross between a distillery and a bear pit. The rear seats had been removed to make room on the floor for a pile of badly stained mattresses. A half-dozen fifty-five-gallon metal drums of joy juice were securely strapped to the floor. The drums were all stenciled with Baron Jolt.

  Huth endured a brutal shaking, then the big man held him close and growled into his face, "How do you know about my hand? Who the fuck are you?"

  "I crossed over ahead of the people who did that to you," Huth said. "My coming to this world was an accident. I was lost in the wilderness and then I ended up in this place, in very sorry circumstances. My name is Dr. Huth. I am somewhat famous where I come from. Maybe the others talked about me? Or mentioned my name in passing?"

  "Nope," Mike said.