Moonfeast (8 page)

In short order, the pungent reek of sulfur and hot iron was left behind, and the companions clung to the cushioned gunwales, straining to see into the darkness up ahead, hoping for a glimmer of daylight.

Reaching an intersection of several tubes, Krysty slowed the wag to a crawl, listening for any sound of the surf or perhaps the call of a gull. But there was nothing, only the powerful hum of the big diesel, echoing slightly in the rocky passageway.

“Look, there on the wall!” Ryan stated, thrusting out a hand. “Those are chisel marks!”

“Somebody was down here, probably looking for a sulfur deposit to make black powder,” J.B. said in obvious relief. “Well, if they got in, then we can get out!”

“Only one way to be sure,” Krysty said, shifting gears to back the LARC down the tube a little ways before angling into the side opening.

This tunnel was a lot smaller than the main lava tube, and the rubber bumpers alongside the LARC began to rub along both of the walls. In only minutes they were worn away, and now the bare metal gunwale started to scrape across the congealed lava, throwing off sprays of bright sparks. The noise canceled out any attempt at conversation. J.B. wisely moved away from the sides of the amphibian transport and threw his leather jacket over the munitions bag for some extra protection.

Rubbing a hand across the inside of the windshield, Ryan scowled into the gloom ahead, unsure if he had just seen something. Dragging out a handkerchief, he spit onto the rag and tried rubbing the glass clean, but it was simply covered with too many scratches for his crude ablutions to have any real effect.

“Spot something, lover?” Krysty asked, downshifting the gears to try to keep the wag moving. If the walls got any tighter, that would become impossible and the companions would find themselves on foot.

“Not sure,” he replied, tucking away the damp rag and drawing the SIG-Sauer. Flipping the blaster, he grabbed it by the barrel and swung the handle forward. The glass shattered and fell away, offering him an unobstructed view.

“Ace the lights,” Ryan ordered, holstering the weapon.

Turning off the headlights, Krysty then killed the running lights. Now a soft glow could be seen in the
distance, the dim light almost too weak to spot even in the near pitch blackness.

“Trouble?” J.B. shouted from the rear.

“Tell you in a second,” Ryan replied, brushing the hair away from his good eye.

Slowly the dull illumination got brighter, until another branch in the tunnel was discernable. The right passageway was a Stygian maw, impenetrable and absolute. But the left was definitely lighter, almost a cottony gray.

“Wait a moment, is that…yes, it is. I can hear surf!” Krysty said excitedly, throwing the LARC into gear once more.

“Careful of a cliff,” Ryan warned, reaching out to flip on the headlights. The blue-white beams lanced forward to reveal a hanging curtain of flowery vines just a heartbeat before the LARC plowed through and into bright sunshine.

Instantly, Krysty cursed and slammed on the brakes, savagely turning the wheel as the LARC raced straight for a huge lake of mud, the thick sludge bubbling and steaming.

Banking hard, Krysty nearly tipped over the wag, but the other companions threw themselves in the opposite direction and she managed to skirt along the irregular shoreline, finally coming to a ragged stop only a few inches from a flaming river of molten red rock. The heat from the lava hit them like a physical assault, stealing the breath from their tortured lungs, and the aluminum prow of the LARC began to visibly melt.

Throwing the transmission into reverse, Krysty quickly rolled away from the lava river until reaching
the relative safety of the boiling lake, and the oppressive temperature eased to a more tolerable level.

“Fireblast, that was close,” Ryan muttered, patting the woman on the damp shoulder while glancing around.

The Deathlands warrior had assumed that the wag would come out of the lava tube on a cliff, possibly overlooking a sea. But the LARC was parked on a sort of plateau that jutted from the side of a tall mountain, or rather a range of mountains that stretched for miles. Several of the peaks were masked by thick clouds of fiery smoke, rivers of glowing red lava meandering down the sides. One flow had burned a path of destruction through a lush jungle, the plants withered on either side for hundreds of feet, while another thickly pumped into an ocean, the resulting nonstop explosion of lava mixing with the water creating a huge cloud of steam that blocked any further view.

Surrounding the Navy wag were countless small steam vents, hissing and bubbling like a self-heat ready to pop. Off to their left was the mud lake and straight ahead was the river of lava, the thick molten rock sluggishly flowing over a cliff to rain down into a river valley.

“Behold, the wrath of Vulcan,” Doc stated, shrugging off his frock coat to fold it over an arm. “Unless we have perished in our Quixotic sojourn, and this is the demonic abode of Beelzebub!”

“Either way, it’s hotter than hell,” Mildred agreed, opening the front of her shirt. The heat was incredible, almost palpable, and she was already dripping sweat.

Peevishly, Doc arched an eyebrow. “That is what I just said, madam.”

“Frag, how leave?” Jak demanded, slipping off his jacket. It clanked as the teen laid it on the floor.

“Over here!” J.B. shouted, pointing behind the wag.

Situated between the mud lake and the crumbling granite side of the volcano was a narrow bed of cooled lava, the rough black surface extending down the side of the mountain to another plateau alive with greenery. The abundant plant life continued onward to become a thick jungle, the trees alive with birds and tiny monkeys. In the far distance was a shimmering blue lake that looked deliciously cool and inviting.

“That’ll do,” Ryan stated, never happier in his life to see something that was not boiling or molten. The Great Salt was hotter than a frying pan, but this combination of heat and humidity was sapping his strength. He labored to draw in every breath, and his clothes were already soaked completely through with sweat.

“Agreed,” Krysty panted, shrugging off her backpack, then dropping her bearskin coat to the floor. That helped a lot, but not enough, so the woman undid the buttons of her shirt to let it hang loose. Her sports bra was nearly transparent with sweat, her taut stomach glistening with tiny droplets, but she felt a whole lot cooler anyway.

Removing the cap, Ryan passed her the canteen and she took a long drink, then poured the rest over her head. If they made it to the lake there would be water to spare. If not, the fall would ace them, not dehydration.

“Here we go!” Krysty announced, passing back the
empty canteen. She nodded her thanks, then shifted the wag into reverse. There was nowhere near enough room to turn, so she would have to do the maneuver backward.

Inching along, the LARC eased onto the bed of cooled lava to start crawling down the jagged slope, the tires bouncing and jerking as the sharp lava spires shattered under the weight. The mil tires blew in the first few yards, but quickly sealed themselves, and Krysty continued onward. But each crushed spire now began to emit an endless snaking tendril of dull yellow smoke.

Stopping at a branching tunnel, Baron Jones scowled at the river of dark smoke flowing past. In so many ways, the heavy smoke acted like water, obediently following the tunnels and the grooves in the rock. The rush resembled a solid wall until a person looked closer and saw that it was actually speeding smoke. Deep inside there was a thin red line of lava flowing from one part of the rumbling mountain to another. Like blood in a body.

Mebbe the wrinklies were right, the baron thought, heading down the middle passageway. The Earth was alive in some sort of strange way.

Exiting the tunnel, the baron looked over the small plateau before whistling sharply. Seconds later his wife appeared from the darkness, along with a dozen of the sec men.

“Digger is taking the dust back to Sealton ville,” Lady Veronica stated. “I wanted a shot at Carlton for myself.”

“After me, my love,” the baron returned, studying the western slope of Cesium Mountain. There were numerous steppes and plateaus in sight, most of them empty as a stickie’s pockets. A few were masked completely in steam, while others… The baron blinked to clear his
sight. There was some sort of machine moving along an old lava flow that connected two plateaus.

“That’s a war wag!” Lady Veronica growled in open hatred. Her hair almost seemed to move at the words, but the ebony filaments merely fluttered in the humid breeze.

“That one-eyed bastard must be Carlton!” a sec man growled, raising a longblaster and working the arming bolt to chamber a round. “A pound of dust says I can put one into his good eye!”

“A splendid idea, Eccels,” the baron stated, resting a hand on the barrel. “But the rest of us are too far away for our blasters to be of any use. Can you ace all six people in that wag with your five brass?”

“Three,” the tall sec man sullenly admitted, lowering the weapon. “But I can get him, sire.”

“We want them all, plus their wag,” the lady said softly, unable to take her sight off the redhead driving the vehicle.

There was a strange tingling in her mind, very similar to the feelings Veronica used to get from her mother and sister, may Gaia greet them both to paradise. Then the redheaded woman looked up sharply and Veronica emptied her mind, thinking very hard about nothing, absolutely nothing. After a moment the redhead went back to her driving, the long wag jouncing and bouncing along the rough lava road.

Working the arming bolt on her stubby MP-5 rapidfire, Lady Veronica allowed herself a small smile of contempt. It would seem that Carlton had found himself a witch somewhere, just not a very good one. Now she wanted the redhead aced even more than before.

“All right, we’re gonna do this fast and silent,” the baron said, opening the breech of his M-203 gren launcher and sliding in a 40 mm brass. Located under the fluted barrel of the M-16 rapidfire, the big gren launcher closed with a satisfying clunk. It was the only gren he had for the massive blaster, but it would be well worth the cost if he saw it blow Carlton off the mountain in a dozen small pieces.

“Hart, Billington, stay with my wife! Perriweather, Barker, head for the escarpment! Everybody else with me,” the baron commanded. “Now, iron up! It’s chilling time!”

As the sec men grimly rallied, the nearby Cesium Mountain gave a low and powerful rumble as if somehow anticipating the bloody slaughter to come.

T
HE VEHICLE CLATTERING
and clanking off the irregular lava flow, Krysty gratefully parked in the middle of a smooth patch of grass growing on the small plateau.

Releasing the bent steering wheel, she then turned off the engine to save fuel and flexed her stinging hands. Fighting the ancient wag down the lava road had been like wrestling a kraken. Her whole body ached from the strain of trying to control the rattling wag. Even her temples were throbbing, almost as if somebody had tried to touch her mind with their thoughts. It had been an unnerving feeling, and her animated red hair curled and flexed unhappily.

“That was fun,” Ryan said in a rare display of humor, tugging on his teeth to make sure they were still firmly attached.

Snorting in reply, Krysty dug an elbow into his ribs.

It was much cooler down here, away from the steam vents and mud lake, and the companions spent a few minutes just savoring the wonderful sensation of not sweating like a holiday pig being shown the final apple.

Ahead of the wag, or rather behind, since they were backward, was another lava flow, a lot more rough than the short stretch they had just traversed. Hardly a tempting avenue. However, off to the side was a much smoother dirt trail that led into a field of boulders, but those hid anything beyond.

“Not much choice,” Jak stated gruffly, using a strip of cloth to tie back his sodden hair.

“Six apples or a dozen oranges, eh, Doc?” J.B. asked, drying the moisture off his glasses with a hand kerchief.

Opening his mouth to correct the garbled expression, the old man paused and merely smiled. “Just so, my friend,” he blatantly lied for the sake of camaraderie. “Just so!”

“Everybody remember to lick your arms,” Mildred said, doing just that as an example. “I don’t have any sodium tablets, and we have to maintain our salt level in this heat.”

Leaning in close, J.B. whispered a suggestion to the woman about another possible source of sodium, and she fiercely blushed. Tactfully, everybody else turned away and pretended not to notice.

Stepping out of the tiny pilothouse, Ryan pulled out an antique Navy telescope and extended the device to its full yard length. When closed, it was about the size of a soup can, and the single lens was perfect for a one-eyed
man. Ryan had found the amazing device in an antique store in the ruins of a nameless metropolis they called Zero City. He had almost lost his son in that accursed place, and suddenly Ryan felt the absence of the boy as if he had just been standing alongside the man only a second ago. He seldom spoke of Dean, but the boy was often in his thoughts.

“Dean’s fine, lover,” Krysty said softly, recognizing the expression. “Safe with Sharona.” Reaching out a hand, she squeezed the man’s arm. It was like touching cordwood, but then the strength of the man was incredible.

Nodding in silent reply, Ryan swept the horizon with the Navy ’scope, and saw the ruins of a predark city to the east and a major seaport of some kind across a bay, the harbor jammed full of rusting Navy ships, aircraft carriers laying on top of battleships, destroyers, submarines and frigates. It was a hodgepodge of Navy vessels, now merely windblown trash gathered like autumn leaves by the thermonuclear winds of skydark.

Spotting a vein of sulfur in the nearby rocks, Mildred jumped down from the wag to hurry over and started scooping the dust into an empty plastic jar she carried for just such a purpose. Sprinkled into an open wound, sulfur helped fight infection, and mixed with honey it made a wonderful poultice for a wide variety of ills. Without a hospital pharmacy to draw vital supplies from, the predark physician was quickly becoming adept at finding the basic ingredients of her trade under rocks or scraped off machinery.

“No sign of any villes,” Ryan said, collapsing the telescope. “But a lot of ruins to the north and west.”

“Mebbe chisel marks natural,” Jak suggested, his voice betraying the fact that he didn’t really believe the idea. “Seen gator tracks in mud damn near close to writing.”

“No, my young friend, those were most definitely made by human hands,” Doc countered, the gentle breeze from the jungle blowing back his long silvery hair. “Or, at least by some creature intelligent enough to use tools.”

“Hunters are that smart,” Mildred said, climbing back into the battered LARC. “But then, most bioweps are.” Biowep, slang for biological weapons. Genetically designed, living weapons that were the bane of the Deathlands. Most redoubt droids were a century old, weak on power, malfunctioning and rusty. But the living, breathing, bioweps just bred new generations every year, each smarter and more deadly than their nightmarish progenitors.

“All right, let’s see where the frag we are,” J.B. said, pulling a minisextant from under his damp shirt.

But just then, there came the crack of a blaster and a window in the pilothouse shattered, spraying Krysty with glistening shards. A lock of her living hair fluttered away, severed at the roots, and the woman screamed in pain, tumbling limply to the floor. Instantly the rest of the companions turned and triggered their assorted weapons, the barrage echoing off the rocky walls of the cliff.

Two men stood in the mouth of a cave fifty feet above the plateau. They reared backward, blood spraying from riddled chests as they dropped from sight. Both had been wearing matching dark blue uniforms,
vaguely resembling predark police, and the companions instantly tagged them as ville sec men.

“We’re coming for you, Carlton!” somebody shouted loudly from a higher plateau.

Carlton? Looking up, Ryan looked directly into the face of a barrel-chested giant, a gold ring glistening in his left ear. Then they shot in unison. Ryan felt something hot graze his cheek, and the giant staggered, red blood appearing on his left shoulder. Fireblast, the big man was lightning quick with a handblaster! Faster than anybody Ryan had ever faced before.

Firing the Steyr again and again, Ryan stepped in front of Krysty to provide cover. He had seen this sort of wound happen before and knew that Krysty would be unable to protect herself for several minutes from the incalculable pain. Her hair was as alive as his fingers, and having them cut off would have stopped even him for a brief span. The human mind could only take so much pain before it retreated within itself for protection.

“Dastardly blackguards!” Doc bellowed, discharging both the LeMat and the Webley, the double explosions catching a short man in the face and blowing out the back of his head.

The rest of the sec men scattered for cover, then started firing back with a wide variety of black-powder weapons.

Shouting a war cry, Jak racked the cliff with a long burst from his M-16, the 5.56 mm rounds zinging off the rocks and kicking up a small storm of chips and dust. A section of the cliff broke away, and a sec man screamed as he fell all the way down to land on the cold lava flow, the hundreds of sharp spires piercing his
body. Horribly alive, he twitched once, blood gushing in every direction, then mercifully went still.

Taking a position behind the gunwale, Mildred started snapping off shots from the ZKR, while J.B. rattled off a full clip from the Uzi. Another sec man went falling to his doom.

But now more sec men and women appeared, along with an Asian-looking woman with fluttering black hair. Expertly cradling an MP-5 submachine gun, she sent down a deadly halo of hot lead, the 9 mm rounds ricocheting off the hull of the LARC, smashing another window and blowing a tire.

Then the startled sec men on the cliff paused in their attack to stare as the mil tire stopped deflating and swelled back to normal size.

“Magic!” a sec man cried, turning to run away.

“No, they’re fragging whitecoats!” the giant man roared, aiming the M-203. “Chill them all!”

The huge maw of the gren launcher belched black smoke and something slammed into the grass only a foot from the LARC to explode with amazing force. Shrapnel filled the air, ricocheting off the boulders and cliff. Doc gasped as he was hit in the face, blood pumping from his cheek, and Jak snorted as his hair jerked from the passage of a rock chip.

“Here!” J.B. shouted, thrusting the Uzi toward Mildred. She took the rapidfire and sent a burst skyward as the man swung around the S&W M-4000 scattergun. Which made no sense as the range was far too great for him to do anything more than merely annoy their attackers.

“Dodge this, Carlton!” the Asian woman snarled,
jerking her hands apart and then casting a small square object down the cliff.

Who the frag was Carlton? Swinging up the alley-sweeper, J.B. sent off three belching roars and the falling gren detonated high in the air, harmlessly spreading out a corona of flame and smoke.

As the snarling giant sent down a maelstrom of rounds from the stuttering M-16, another sec man stepped into view holding a glass bottle with a burning rag tied around the neck.

Switching targets, Mildred concentrated on the new danger, the 9 mm rounds shattering the glass bottle and dousing the sec man with the fiery contents of the Molotov cocktail. Covered with flames, the man just stood there, galvanized motionless and shrieking insanely.

Unexpectedly, the Asian woman shot the dying man in the head, tears appearing on her cheeks.

Using the momentary distraction, Ryan got behind the wheel of the LARC and started the engines. Without any kind of a roof, the bastard wag offered them about as much protection as a painted bull’s-eye. It was time to leave. Throwing the wag into gear, Ryan started rolling for the field of boulders, zigzagging along the way to try to throw off the enemy snipers.

That only made the sec men on the cliff shoot faster, but his tactic worked and the incoming lead hammered the ground around the Navy transport, but never reached the companions crouching behind the gunwale.

“Cheap bastard should have given his troops more brass to practice shooting,” J.B. snorted contemptuously, thumbing fresh cartridges into the scattergun. “Blasters are useless if you can’t hit the fragging target!”

“Practice makes perfect,” Mildred replied, reloading her blaster with nimble fingers.

Advancing to the extreme edge of the cliff, the giant man brandished a clenched fist at the retreating companions and loudly bellowed something in a foreign language.

That caught Doc and Mildred completely by surprise, and they openly stared at the dwindling figure until the LARC moved behind a boulder and blocked their sight.

“Madam, did you also hear that, or have I gone mad?” Doc whispered, the two blasters dropping in his hands. The words were slurred slightly, red blood still flowing from the gash in his cheek.

“Damn straight, I did,” Mildred said, thumbing the safety on the Uzi and slinging it over a shoulder. “He cursed us in Latin!”

“Incredible, just incredible,” Doc said, slowly standing to try to see the receding figure. There immediately came the report of a longblaster, and the man ducked back down again. A split second later, something zinged off a boulder.