Prophecy (5 page)

Doc, like Mildred in another place, also lost consciousness.

 

J
AK WAS LOST
—physically, and also inside his head. The former was nothing: a temporary loss of bearings had happened many times before, and all it took was time, and the chance to stop and take bearings. In a situation like this, where it was now impossible to see anything—up, down, forward, backward—because of the clouds of dirt that swirled around in the crosscurrents, it was a matter of shelter, rest and wait until such time as it was clear. Even the frogs and the locusts didn't bother him. The way they buzzed and bounced around him was irritating, sure, but Jak had experienced a whole lot worse over his life. This was nothing. Find shelter, hunker down, wait.

No, it wasn't any of that that caused him to feel the dark clouds of fear edging into his consciousness. It was something else. Something that was, for the most part, alien to him. A feeling that he had only rarely experienced, and then only in the relative safety of dreams.

Dark doubts began to assail him. He had left the
shelter of the wag to find J.B. and Mildred; and, in turn, to help them get Doc to safety. But now he was wandering in a storm, with no sign of shelter and no sign of those he had set out to find. Tracking, hunting, finding people and animals: that was Jak. He was a hunter. A good one. Without that he was nothing.

And he was failing. Had failed. He was alone.

Failure.

Jak stopped walking. He stood simply, with no defensive or offensive posture. There was no point. He could sense no danger: in truth, he could sense nothing. The hearing, smell and sight that served him so well had been reduced to nothing. He was nothing.

Looking slowly around, trying to focus those senses that had served him so well, he became aware that he had no notion of anything living that was near to him. He had no idea of where his friends might be, where the shelter of the wag may be, or even if they were alive or chilled.

He had no idea of where he was. It was as though the storm had formed a cocoon of dust and dirt around him. He was contained within it, and had no idea of what may exist outside the immediate area that was all he could see, hear or feel. Even the locusts that buzzed around him, and the frogs that fell at his feet, seemed to have no real substance. His awareness of them had become reduced so that they were little more than the vaguest of distractions. He could no longer smell the earthy scent of the amphibians, nor feel the flutterings of the insects as they passed his face, ears and eyes.

Such a complete negation of his being made Jak feel empty and alone. Alone was not such a new feeling: Jak had never been a person who was close to anyone—at least, not for so long—but this was more than that. This was a complete desolation.

And if there was nothing—not even himself—then what was the point of continuing to exist?

Jak sank to his knees. For what was possibly the only time in his life, Jak paid no heed to anything around him. There was no need to keep triple red. No need to be aware of any dangers. No need for anything other than to just give in to the darkness that was beginning to envelop him.

Without any resistance, Jak allowed it to take him.

 

“A
NY SIGN
?” Ryan asked as he rubbed the aching area over his good eye. Zigzag lines in white crossed his vision, each line accompanied by a searing pain in his skull.

Krysty risked another look beyond the tarp at the swirls of dirt that now seemed to constitute the very air.

“Nothing. Can't see or hear a thing. Sweet Gaia, I've never seen anything quite like this.”

She was finding it hard to think. Those few locusts that had penetrated the tarps were buzzing annoyingly around the inside of the wag. Each time she smacked one down, it seemed that there were two more to take its place. The rain of frogs beat an insistent and arrhythmic tattoo on the roof and hood of the wag. And always, in the back of everything, there was the moaning of the winds that drove dust and dirt at them.

In the midst of all that, how the hell did Ryan expect her to hear the cries of Jak, J.B., Mildred and Doc? Maybe they had found one another. Maybe they were all wandering around, close to one another yet unable to see or hear in the confusion. Maybe they'd all bought the farm…This latter she did not wish to consider, yet it still prodded at her consciousness.

Why had it happened this way? Not the storm: that was just one of those things, the kind of hazard that they encountered almost every day of their lives. No, what she wondered was why, when Doc had wandered off, Mildred and J.B. had been so quick to get after him. Why Jak had followed seemingly without any thought or consideration. Why Ryan had let them. Why she had let them, come to that.

Ryan was concussed, not thinking clearly. Confused at the very least. As she looked at him, she could almost see the struggle manifest itself physically as he moved uneasily, rubbing his head and grimacing in pain.

None of them had acted totally as themselves—even herself—and it was getting worse. Both Ryan and she were trapped in this wag as surely as if it had been a locked room. Unable to move, caught in an agony of indecision.

They would sit it out until the storm abated. Not because that was the best course of action, but because they could think of nothing else to do. While, outside, their friends may be facing the farm on their own.

Krysty tried to move. Nothing. Her limbs were heavy, almost paralyzed. Yet it was a paralysis in which
there was still feeling. A heavy torpor washed over her. She had no strength

It was such an alien feeling that it should have terrified her. Yet even this capacity was now beyond her grasp.

She felt all awareness begin to recede into an infinite distance.

Mildred was aware, first, of the tingling ache in her arm. It stirred her, deep in her slumber, and she moaned softly as she tried to move her arm, to relieve the symptom. But it refused to budge. Penetrating deep into her subconscious, it made her slip from the warm blanket of unconscious and into the cold of the conscious.

And hell, was it cold. As she rose to the surface, she felt the cold that had seeped into her limbs. It was only then that she realized that her arm was beneath her, hand still raised to her face. Not that she could feel it.

She shuffled in the tight constraint of the sheet that covered both herself and J.B. The Armorer was quiet beside her and did not immediately stir as she moved against him. For a moment she wondered if he was alive, but his steady breathing reassured her. For such a small, wiry man he was proving to be one hell of a deadweight.

Heaving, Mildred managed to move him enough to free her arm. She gasped as the tingling fled, a weakness spreading through the limb as she tried to flex it. She paused, counted to twenty, then tried again. This time, it felt more like normal.

She took a chance at sitting up, moving the edges of the sheet from where it was tucked beneath her body. A wan light penetrated the thin material, and there was silence beyond the veil it provided.

One good thing—the storm had ceased. As the sheet slid down her body, she propped herself up on her elbows and looked around.

The sun was on the rise. It had to be morning, she thought. The sky was as it had been the afternoon before, clear, yet tinged with strange coloring. There was no sign that a storm had swept across them.

More importantly, there was no sign of the wag or their fellow travelers.

Mildred got to her feet. Cramp ached and bit into her calves, but she stamped it out. The sound of her feet roused J.B., who mumbled and grumbled his way to the surface of waking while she looked around.

“I'll tell you something, John. We're well and truly screwed.”

“I've always liked your positive outlook,' the Armorer husked wryly as he, too, rose to his feet and joined her.

The land that spread in a vista around them was empty and impassive. Flat plainlands spread to all corners of the horizon, broken only by the distant plateaus of hill and mountain ranges, spread unevenly. In between these distant markers and the place where they stood was little except the occasional patch of scrub and rock, and those ridges in the earth that were invisible to the naked eye.

“How the hell did we manage to come so far that we've lost sight of the others?” Mildred whispered.

J.B. didn't answer for a moment. He scanned the horizon, turning a full 360 degrees.

“It shouldn't be possible,” he said finally.

“Yeah, well, I don't see anyone else. And what happened to us yesterday shouldn't have happened, either. But it did. The question now is how we're going to find them again. Or anything, come to that.”

J.B. was lost in thought, gathering in the sheet that had served them so well. Replacing it in his backpack, he pulled out his minisextant.

“I'll see if I can work out how much we've moved,' he murmured as he took a reading and ran calculations in his head. Then, after a short pause, he added, “It doesn't add up. According to my calculations, we must have walked about four miles. And we should still be able to see the wag.”

Mildred stared at him. J.B. was rarely mistaken on such matters.

“How can we have come that far? There wasn't enough time…at least, it didn't seem like it was that long.” The more she thought about it, the less sense the previous day was beginning to make. “So where's Doc? Where the hell can that wag have been hidden?”

J.B. just shook his head. He was as baffled as Mildred. The only thing he could think of was to take action. Experience taught him that action usually started a chain of events.

“I dunno about Doc. Mebbe we'll find him, mebbe
the old bastard really has got himself lost this time. But if we start to go that way—” he indicated a south-southeast direction “—and keep on going, we should hit where the wag is supposed to be. Mebbe Ryan got it going again, and they've headed off in the wrong direction trying to find us. If so, then mebbe we'll find some tracks to follow.'

Mildred shrugged. As a plan, it wasn't the best she'd ever heard. But right now, she couldn't come up with anything better.

Stopping only to eat from some self-heats that they carried as emergency rations, and sipping sparingly from their canteens, they began the long trek back in the direction that J.B. had determined had been their point of departure.

With every yard that they covered, Mildred expected to see a dust-covered bump on the ground that would turn out to be Doc, alive or having gone to face the judgment of which he had been ranting when last seen. She scanned the land around with every step, but there was no sign. Perhaps the old buzzard had managed to survive yet again.

They trudged across the hard-packed plain, small zephyrs of dust raised by the steady, rhythmic marching of their feet. The sun rose inexorably, and the temperature rose sharply, unimpeded by the clear skies. J.B. had his fedora to shade him from the worst of the heat, while Mildred improvised a covering for her plaits, using a little of her precious water to dampen the cloth before tying it around her head.

They had been walking for several hours when there was the first intimation of any life on the plain other than their own.

Silence had been the norm, to preserve energy and avoid the need to moisten their tongues as much as the lack of anything to say. But now, J.B. broke that long silence.

“What is that? Two o'clock,” he added, indicating an area where there was a cloud of dust raised near the horizon.

“Where's it coming from?” Mildred asked. It was still some way off, but had seemingly sprung from nowhere. Maybe they just hadn't noticed it before, too absorbed by the effort of moving one foot in front of the other. That was a sobering thought: losing their edge, their ability to stay frosty and triple red. It was symptomatic of what had happened the previous day. Something was beginning to make sense at the back of her mind….

“Moving quick,” J.B. said sharply, breaking her reverie. She followed his arm, which was still raised. It was true. Whatever was raising the dust cloud was advancing rapidly. Immediately, her coalescing thoughts were driven from her mind by the need for action.

Looking around, she could see that there was little cover afforded to them by the terrain.

“Hostile?” she asked, knowing what J.B.'s answer would be.

“Assume it.”

Even as he spoke, the Armorer was unslinging his
mini-Uzi, running checks without even thinking, and scanning the area. The only thing within any kind of distance was a small patch of brown-and-green scrub, with a few patches of purple flowers. How that survived in this climate was a mystery for another time. But not as great a mystery as how they could turn this into some kind of cover.

J.B. gestured that they should make their way toward it. Mildred, checking to make sure her ZKR was ready for combat, nodded. They traveled the five hundred yards to the scant cover. When they had made the best of the brush, JB finally spoke.

“They must have seen us moving. They're heading right toward us.”

“Well, let's just hope that we can get a bead on them before they can on us,” Mildred countered. “Depends on what sort of weapons they're carrying,” she added, knowing that their fate was on the line.

They settled in and waited for the dust cloud to reach them.

As the cloud became more defined, and they could see the center of disturbance that was stirring up the dust, neither of them was sure that they could believe their eyes.

For approaching them, calm in the eye of the cloud, were a dozen men mounted on horses. Piebald and chestnut creatures whose manes swirled with the dust, they seemed almost to glide across the ground. Seated atop them were men whose impassive faces were matched by the stately grandeur with which they rode
the rolling plain. Like marble statues, they seemed immobile astride their steeds, man and horse as one living entity on an endless journey.

No less impressive was the manner in which they were attired—furs and skins, woven into breeches and moccasins, with jerkins that left their scarred and pierced chests open to the air. From their bare skin hung bones decorated with different varieties and colors of feather. Their hair was long, worn either loose and flowing in the momentum of their relentless progress, or else plaited and held to the side of their head by a snakeskin headband.

They were armed, but not in the manner that either J.B. or Mildred would have expected. Quivers filled with arrows hung from the saddlebags of their mounts and bows were secured across their backs. J.B. couldn't see a blaster on any of them.

Part of his mind wondered how they managed to survive without the use of blasters, bow and arrow being—like a blade—an instrument with less range and destructive power, effective only if wielded with precision. Another part of his mind figured that Mildred's sure eye and the sweep of his SMG could cut a swathe through these coldhearts…if that was what they proved to be.

For the moment, that was less than certain. As the party of riders advanced, they had a confidence about them. There was no sign that they would raise a hand in anger, yet they seemed to fear no attack.

Mildred and J.B. exchanged glances. This was no
normal situation. The Armorer shrugged and rose to his feet, stepping out from cover. Mildred followed. Both had their blasters at ease, yet their body language spoke of the ability to change to the offensive if necessary.

As the mounted men drew nearer, they began to slow. J.B. studied them. It had been a long time since he'd seen anyone who was dressed and ornamented in a similar manner.

As one, the mounted men came to a halt. They were within ten yards of the companions. As their horses snorted and moved their hooves, the dust settling around them, the warriors—for there was no doubt that this was what they were—sat impassive and silent. It was as though each was taking time to assess the people in front of them.

“You gonna say something, or we just gonna stand here and roast in this heat?” J.B. murmured laconically as the still and silence got to him.

“You and the woman are not attacking us,” the Native American at the head of the posse stated.

“We'd defend ourselves, but you show no sign of wanting to attack us,” Mildred countered.

The flicker of a smile crossed the man's weather-beaten face. “We have no desire to attack you. Why should we? We have been waiting for you.”

J.B.'s brow furrowed. “Waiting?”

He was answered by a brief nod.

“How did you know we would be here? We didn't know it ourselves,” Mildred said sharply.

The smile grew broader. “You know, even though
you don't know.” The smile turned into a deep-throated chuckle as he caught the bafflement on their faces. “Come with us, and you will soon understand.”

“Mebbe we don't want to come with you,” J.B. said guardedly.

The Native American looked up at the empty, burning sky. “You'd rather stay out here?”

“It's a good point, John,” Mildred said quietly, without taking her eyes from the men in front of them. “It doesn't seem to be much of a choice for us right now.”

J.B. sighed. “Guess so. We'll take you up on it,” he said to the mounted man, adding, “For now.”

Two of the mounted men moved forward from the group, indicating without speech that J.B. and Mildred should mount up behind each of them. Stowing their blasters, both raised themselves into the saddle, settling behind the impassive and silent warriors.

It was only when they began to move off, and Mildred had the chance to survey the territory without the incessant march of her own feet that she realized at least one of the things that had been bugging her since they had first set out that morning.

The dust and dirt floor of the plain was clear.

What had happened to the locusts? Where were the frogs that had bombarded them? The ground should be littered with amphibians. If the live ones had sought shelter, then at the very least the ones who had bought the farm should be starting to stink up in the heat.

But there was nothing.

So where had they gone?

 

D
IM LIGHT SUFFUSED
the interior of the wag, heat from the rising sun stifling the atmosphere, making it hard to breathe. The stench of their own bodies filled the wag, the secured tarps keeping in the sweat and heat that had suffused them through the night. The closeness of the air, the lack of anything fresh, gave Krysty a headache that pounded at her skull. She awoke to a feeling like a jackhammer thumping incessantly. Her mouth, too, felt like she'd been gargling from a cesspool.

A blue aura, from the light defracted by the tarps, made it hard to see into the shadows of the wag, and it took her a few seconds of fuzzed confusion to recall where they were.

And how few of them were left.