Rage (16 page)

And that smell triggered something primal.

Definitely higher on the food chain …

If he needed any more motivation, he had it.

He targeted one, then another, mixing up the wounds, trying for the kill.

But they moved in such a strange, crab-clawing way that it was difficult to get a steady bead on their heads, between those egg-sized eyes that clearly weren’t human.

A memory flashed through his mind: diving off Belize. Facing a fourteen foot blue shark. Dark, black, ancient eyes focused on only one thing.

To strike, to kill, to eat.

He pulled out the handgun.

With a half dozen of them close now, unfazed by the dead mutants they left behind, Raine was past the point or use of aiming.

They had raised their odd assortment of jagged and sharp weapons, their homemade devices for cutting and tearing.

And just when he wished he heard another human voice—always so important when in battle, having a guy chattering next to you; the little bit of bravado that helps you go on—he found that he couldn’t say anything now. No words to cut across the desert silence.

Just the endless chatter of the guns firing, one in each hand like some psychotic character out of a spaghetti western. The grunting bellows of the mutants, so close. He kept firing.

Until—

He was out of ammo.

Out of ammo. And no chance to reload.

How many left? There were two nearly on him. A third, wounded, was still shambling toward him, but then stopped, finally dead.

The last two—one mutant with a curved piece of shining metal that caught the sun, the other with what looked like a medieval weapon, a club with nails and spikes stuck at the end.

They seemed to realize in some insane, brainless way that he couldn’t shoot anymore.

They slowed. Barking at him, nearly like grizzlies, testing him before they made their final attack.

Up close, Raine could see the way their bodies were different from a human’s. The torso thick, barrel-shaped. The mouths deformed, more like an open chute that had to be filled.

Looking at that mouth, he thought:
No fucking way.

Not happening.

Not after a hundred years.

Doesn’t end here. Not like this.

The two mutants had gone to either side of him, as if deciding which one of them was going to be the first to make the move.

A feast for two.

Raine still held the guns out, though they had both turned useless.

He slowly moved away from the buggy. Should he survive, he didn’t want them screwing up the engine any more. They followed his steps.

With an instinct born of a hundred firefights, he knew they were seconds away from making their attack.

He looked—for the quickest moment—at the back of the buggy. A long piece of pipe.

A tire iron. Homemade by the Hagars probably.

A good piece of hard metal.

A last bellow. Their attack about to come.

Raine dropped his guns, spun to the left and grabbed the iron.

And of course, they had started moving.

He swung the pipe like a baseball bat, trying to clear some space before they landed on him. Their smell—now that they were so close—made his stomach churn.

The iron caught the mutant with the curved piece of metal—which Raine realized was a crude sword—in the side … to apparently little effect, as it merely staggered backward.

The other mutant, with the club, quickly raised it over his head to smash down at him.

Raine recovered from his first useless hit and—locking two hands on the pipe—jabbed at the club mutant’s throat, just under its simian chin.

It reeled back, its intended blow forgotten.

But that gave the mutant with the makeshift sword a chance to hack at him—and hit.

The blade dug into his left shoulder, hitting bone. With a little more force, the arm would have gone flying off.

With all his adrenaline pumping, Raine ignored the blasts of pain, the screaming agony the wound created.

He also ignored the immense amount of blood that started gushing out.

His eyes filled with red lines, the nanotrites feeding back to his brain the information on the calamity that had just overtaken his body.

Absolutely of no use to him now. He blinked it off.

In time to see to the mutant with the club, still gasping for air, but also readying a second chance to plant the club into his head. Its mouth was open, hacking from the throat blow.

A perfect—ugly and smelly—opening.

Raine leapt at the thing as best he could, jamming the pipe right into that hole.

The dark, soulless egg-eyes of the thing went even wider.

Raine pressed harder, all the push coming from his one good arm, the other now useless, hanging at his side.

He heard words.

Curses. Over and over. A litany of death.

His
words, as he jammed the rod deeper, like digging in dirt, harder, past the mouth cavity, deeper, cracking bone, penetrating to where there had to be a brain.

Sometimes it’s not such a good thing to have a brain.

The thing toppled backward, the dull eyes lifeless.

Without even looking, Raine rolled to the right, shaking free of the dead mutant. He couldn’t see it, but he could
hear
the other mutant’s blade strike down to where it thought he would be.

Missing by inches, hitting its dead partner.

Raine noticed that the pipe in his hand had a narrow end, where the metal tapered. It wasn’t that sharp, but then again, this wasn’t a real weapon.

It would have to do.

The last mutant was trying to remove its blade from where it got stuck in its now lifeless partner. The blow had been so strong it lodged the blade deep in the bloated body. From the grinding sounds, it must have caught bone.

Raine took the tapered end of the iron and used it as a blade, slamming it hard against the side of the mutant’s head.

The mutant turned at the last minute, eyes trying to comprehend how things went so wrong.

Raine rammed it hard. At first he thought it would just slide away, a useless blow against an obviously stronger skull than what mere humans had.

But then the telltale
crack.

Not a death blow.

But the skull cracked. The thing’s blood, not red but a near blackish-purple, seeped out.

It had its blade free, standing up. Ready to use on its intended target.

But Raine had a way in.

Despite the agony from his arm and the fireworks display behind his eyes, he used the tire iron like an oversized dagger, right at the same spot.

And with the crack open, the iron slid
in.

Raine left it there. Staggered backward.

He had nothing more to give.

One way or the other, the battle was over for him.

But he saw that for that last surviving mutant, the battle had indeed ended first.

Raine fell back onto the sand.

H
e came to, his head bumping up and down, banging against metal.

He opened his eyes, expecting to be looking straight up at the sun.

But the sky had deepened in color, and the sun had to be behind him, low. It felt cool.

He looked left.

Someone was sitting next to him, two gnarled hands on an oversized wheel. A man. He nodded as he steered, as if having some kind of internal discussion.

Then the man happened to casually look over at him.

“Oh! Oh, well. You’re up.
Up
is good. Eyes open. Sorry for the—” He slapped the wheel of whatever he was steering.

Wasn’t a buggy. Or a car.

More like … a tractor.

Raine started to sit up, and the move made his wounded arm ache. He groaned.

“Take it easy there. Just have that arm wrapped for now. Gonna need some real attention once we get to my place.”

Raine continued to sit up, taking care not to pull on his arm. Something wasn’t adding up. Wait …

“Where is …?” he asked, shooting his head around, looking.

“Your buggy? Towing it behind us. That will need some looking into as well. That the best they could give you? Come a hundred years—a hundred years into the future—and you’re driving a piece of garbage like that? No respect.”

The man laughed. A cackle. Sounded like something he would do whether he had an audience or not.

“No respect for their elders.” Another cackle.

Raine saw his buggy being towed by this … thing. Not completely a tractor, but most of it was. High seats. Big wheels. Moving so slowly.

“Thanks for—”

“Saving you? Seemed like you did a pretty good job of that yourself. Never saw so many muties just scattered around. Quite a mess. Though I imagine if I hadn’t seen you, others would have come.”

“Thanks, anyway.”

The man shot him a look and grinned through his bristly, wiry beard. “Yeah, well you might have held out. But—sooner or later—you’d be just another body in the desert. Be a shame, after you made such a hash of them.” The man went back to nodding, analyzing whatever it was going on inside his head. After a long spell of that, the old man finally said, “What’s your name?”

“Raine.” He remembered something the man initially said, which had been bothering him. “You said ‘a hundred years.’ You
know—” He hesitated, not sure of the term. “—that I’m an Ark survivor?”

Another cackle. “Word gets around … word gets around, my friend. How many days you been here? Amazed you’re still alive.” The old man’s eyes narrowed. “Most don’t last long.” He sniffed the air. “I’m Kvasir.”

“Thanks, Kvasir.” A bump jostled Raine, and he winced. He looked at his shoulder. “How’s my arm?”

“Seen worse. Will have to unwrap it at my place. Got a real lab there. Be able to take a good look then. But you got those nanotrites. Probably why you’re still alive. Damn things can be useful. Sometimes.”

“You know about … nanotrites?”

The man laughed loudly, head back, a bark up at the desert sky.

“Know about ’em?” Another laugh. “You might say that.”

Kvasir shook his head at the private joke.

“I was headed to Wellspring.” Raine took a breath. “Or maybe you knew that, too?”

Kvasir took the sarcastic question in earnest. “No. Can’t say that I did. Not surprised, though. Out here, where else would you go?” The tractor hit another bump, moving through a ravine. On either side Raine saw a jumble of random chunks of metal that seemed to stretch the length of the pass.

“Not sure how long you would have lasted there. Still, I guess you’re thinking about what options you actually got.” He looked at Raine again. “Let me tell you, that’s the right thing to be thinking about:
options
, my friend.”

“If you say so. Where is … 
what
is your place?”

“You’ll see, Raine. For now”—another grin—“just enjoy the ride. Getting dark. Don’t want to be out here in the dark.”

Raine got as comfortable as he could in the seat as Kvasir took him wherever he was taking him.

•  •  •

The ravine opened up to a huge, craterlike gash in the ground ahead. The sun was down, but the sky still had enough light for Raine to see …

A bridge with a gate at one end, leading across the massive hole in the ground, up to a stony hummock with a building on it. Like everything he’d seen in this world, the building seemed made of three or four different structures slapped together.

Kvasir stopped at the gate, pulling up to a device Raine hadn’t thought he’d ever see again. Out of a small speaker—like those from a fast-food drive-thru—a voice.

Kvasir’s own.

“Who’s there? Go away! Don’t want to see anybody.”

The old man calmly ignored his recorded self and said his name: “Kvasir.”

The metal barrier opened up, pulled by a rickety gear and pulley system. Raine noticed it wouldn’t be too hard to ram right through it, so he wasn’t sure how much security it gave Kvasir.

“That sounded like your voice.”

“It was. Works even when I’m not home. I call it ‘voice recognition.’ ”

Raine grinned. “Never catch on,” he said.

Kvasir caught the sarcasm.

“Oh you think that because
you
had everything in the past, that what we do—what we
make
—all means nothing?”

“No. I just meant—”

“You may have had all that. So much. And when you weren’t wasting it, you were using it to kill yourselves. And in the end, when the rock fell, what the hell good did any of it do for you?”

“Apparently not much.”

The bridge swayed with the weight and movement of the tractor.

Neither spoke for a moment.

Kvasir might have saved his life, but he also was pretty damn prickly. Raine wished the old man would start cackling again.

Then, like a cloud passing, Kvasir said, “Ah … who can blame you? It’s what makes us humans and not muties, hm?”

Finally they got off the swaying bridge, leaving the disturbing creaking of the metal braces behind, and Kvasir pulled up to his “place.”

Raine walked in, and immediately saw that Kvasir’s home was more like a science lab: tables with microscopes, a row of computer screens, a mechanical arm suspended from the ceiling ending in a series of pointed tools—something out of an operating room or a nuclear lab. Shelves with jars. The smell was of chemicals and machine oil.

Off to the side, in a smaller room, a cot-sized bed was just visible.

Kvasir threw a switch, and Raine heard the sound of an engine from outside.

“Gets cold up here. At night, at least. Got a heater. Uses my ‘special blend’ of fuel. Burns like gas, but I can stretch farther than I could with petrol. Even runs my tractor, but it’s useless for anything like regular buggies. I’m working on it, though.” He nodded to the sound outside. “The generator charges my batteries. And that’s the five-cent tour. Okay—lie down.”

“Hm?”

Kavsir pointed to a metal table. He went to it and cleared a microscope and metal trays.

“Go on. Lie down here. Can’t leave your arm like that, nanotrites or no nanotrites. Got to get something on it. Maybe sew it up a bit.”