Rudolph! (12 page)

Prancer was teaching Ring something like the fifth alternate version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" when the young reindeer squeaked.

"Lookit, lookit, lookit," Ring crowed.

I raised my head and glanced at the prancing reindeer on the top of the next dune. The team staggered up the slope and spread out, and when Rudolph reached the top, I struggled up.

In the distance, past a very finite number of dunes, a dark line ran along the horizon.

"Hooray," I croaked. "Something new."

"We made it," Ring sighed.

"Almost," Rudolph said. He went ahead, stepping and sliding down the far side of the dune. The others followed, slowly.

Still, step by step, the dark line got darker. And thicker.

IX

T
he line became a bank of black clouds straining in chaotic motion
at the edge of the desert. There was no sign of any ground, and when we reached the verge of the second circle, we saw why: the desert simply ended in a sheer cliff. Comet walked to the edge of the cliff, ignoring Blitzen's warning, and sniffed the boiling clouds carefully.

"They're just storm clouds," he said. "You can smell the rain." A bolt of lightning flashed somewhere within the cloudbank, and thunder shook the cliff.

Comet backed up, and we all watched part of a dune quiver and slide over the edge of the cliff. The white sand was picked up by the winds of the third circle, and the clouds swallowed the grains instantly.

Rudolph was eyeing the tall plumes of clouds, and I knew he was wondering what the air was like up there. There was a definite temptation to fly over the cloud cover, as they had so many snowstorms during Zero Hour. But it was a dangerous temptation to succumb to.

Ring strayed close to the edge, his nose working. "It stinks," he whined. "Like Brussels sprouts."

"Where?" Comet joined him, testing the air too. "I didn't—oh, yeah, there." He made a face, sticking out his tongue. "Oof. That's not good."

"We have to go down," I said, mostly for Rudolph's benefit. "You descend into hell. We can't fly over this." I had pulled out the book, speed-reading to figure out what Dante had written about the third circle.

And I had just hit the spot where he talked about the guardian of the third circle. The big one.

Rudolph lowered his horns grimly, as if he were going to charge the storm. "Down it is," he said.

"I'm not going first this time," Comet said. Whatever was down there, he had smelled it too. And he looked a little green.

I glanced at the others. We were haggard and exhausted, and this was only the third ring. I didn't have the heart to tell them how many more there were. Blitzen caught me looking at him, and I quickly gazed back down at the book.

I saw the word my finger was resting on—
misery
—and I quickly closed the book. That wasn't helping.

Blitzen sighed, reading something in my sudden panic about the book, and lowered his antlers. He gently prodded Comet in the rear.

Comet danced forward in surprise and then realized he'd been suckered as he danced right off the edge of the cliff. He took it gracefully though, and turned his moment of shock into a somewhat graceful leap. The clouds embraced him, and we heard his caterwauling shout as he dived.

Blitzen jumped off next. Cupid shook his head as the second reindeer vanished. "Lemmings," he sighed as he followed the first two. The rest followed in quick succession. Once a couple go, the rest follow. Reindeer stick together like that.

Ring backed away from the edge until he bumped into Rudolph. "It really stinks," he said.

Rudolph walked around Ring, and glanced back when he reached the edge of the cliff. "You can't stay here," he said gently.

"I could," Ring protested. "I could wait for you right here. I'm good at waiting."

A ghost of a smile touched Rudolph's lips. "No you're not," he said. "You didn't wait for us to come back to the Residence."

Ring hung his head. He took one step forward, and then his nose started working again, and he backed up two steps. He was quivering from nervous exhaustion, and I was struck by how young he really was. The others were old Zero Hour veterans. They had done the impossible more than once. They might not like what was asked of them, but they knew how to push themselves.

"Come on," Rudolph said. "We don't leave any behind."

"But, on the barge . . . ? You said I was expendable."

The smile vanished as a ghost of old memories darkened Rudolph's eyes. "No one is expendable," he said. "I was making"—he shrugged as if it didn't really matter what he had been trying to do—"Come on, little buck. It's time to fly."

Ring still balked. He knew what Rudolph was saying, but his hooves refused to cooperate. He was a sniffer, that one, and he couldn't turn his nose off. The noxious odor assailing him was paralyzing the motor function center of his brain.

Rudolph snapped at Ring, baring his teeth, and the little reindeer spooked. Ring bolted—in the wrong direction at first, but he corrected quickly and nearly flew past Rudolph as he sprinted off the edge of the cliff. He dropped soundlessly into the clouds.

Rudolph didn't move. "There. I apologized. You happy?"

"I'd pencil in a note to be thrilled later," I croaked. "Right after my note to fall down in stunned amazement. Hang on. Let me see if there's a pen in my utility belt."

Rudolph took two steps forward, and as soon as we left the white sand, the wind rose around us. "You can write your memoir later," he said as he flew into the storm of the third circle.

There are reports that Venus harbors a horrifically violent atmosphere beneath its gently swirling cloud cover. I've read a couple articles in
Sky & Telescope
filled with graphs and charts comparing our pleasant Earthly weather to the raging hurricanes that blow night and day across the barren face of Venus. Somewhere between the two extremes fell the weather of the third circle of hell. The weather was only tempered by the fact that if the wind was blowing
that
hard, you couldn't really enjoy the stench rising from the landfill that lay beneath the storm clouds.

Rudolph's descent was initially an out-of-control freefall defying the laws of physics and gravity that shoved my stomach between my lungs and spine. We didn't fall that long—or maybe it was forever, and my brain blocked it all out—and when we broke through the layer of clouds, the wind dropped in intensity to a good, stiff kite-flying sort of breeze.

My ears were ringing, and I felt like I had just been wrapped in burlap and trampled by a herd of musk ox. The ground, which I smelled well before I got a good look at it, came up quickly, and Rudolph botched the landing. He smashed through a mound of garbage, and I lost my grip on the book as a banana peel tried to force its way up my nose.

I tumbled to a stop in a mountain of used coffee pods, and I lay there for a minute, trying to figure out how to breathe without actually breathing. I heard Rudolph groan nearby, and eventually he appeared in my field of vision. Dark stains—like rotten jam and old 40-weight oil—smeared across his withers, and he moved like he was favoring his front left leg. "We can do that again if you like," he offered.

"I don't think I pass the height requirement on that ride," I said, extricating myself from the coffee pod mound. The top layer was loose trash, but the layer was fairly shallow. Looking for the copy of
Inferno
, I scuffed a few microwave pizza boxes out of the way and found packed garbage beneath. Hard, like granite, but still aromatic as only a landfill can be. One that was being baked by eternal fires deep below.

While Rudolph hobbled around, trying to determine whether he's suffered a cramp or a sprain, I kept looking for the book, even though I knew it was lost in all this trash. Hell wanted me to lose my mind over the book, and I had to fight that urge.

I focused on finding other things instead. Like the rest of the reindeer. They all knew to ground themselves in inclement weather. I found a pile of garbage that was solid enough to support my weight, and climbed high enough to take a peek at the landscape.

The terrain wasn't flat. There were ravines and trenches as if centuries of wind and rain had slowly carved courses through everything we've ever thrown away. The Grand Canyon of Trash. Off to my left, movement caught my attention, and I waved when a pair of reindeer crested a nearby ridge. It looked like Dasher and Dancer.

The wind shifted slightly, blowing an especially fetid effluvium of rotten vegetables right in my face. I clamped a hand over my nose and mouth and tried my best to not breathe.

"Here," Rudolph said, and something tapped me on the head. He was offering me a long candy cane. Still wrapped in plastic.

"Where did you get that?" I gasped as the words forced me to inhale.

"I packed some treats," he said. He twisted and rummaged through the pack on his back, producing another candy cane, which he ate—plastic wrapper and all.

I fought with the plastic for a second, and then managed to free the end of the candy cane from its wrapper. I licked it cautiously, and a tingling sensation crawled up my tongue. My head cleared almost immediately, and the pressure behind my eyes eased. I rolled the plastic up and took a large bite, and somewhere in my chest, my stomach started to crawl out of its hiding place. "What's in these?" I asked.

"Natural ingredients," Rudolph said, mouth full. "Totally organic. Hand-shaped by joyous volunteer children."

"The NPC doesn't let children work in the factories," I pointed out.

"I never said they were locally made," Rudolph said. He jerked his head toward the pack on his back. "There are more. Hand them out to the others. We could all use a pick-me-up."

Still sucking on the curl of my cane, I rooted through the pack on Rudolph's back, taking a proper inventory: nearly a dozen more candy canes, only two of which had broken in all the chaos; the plaid thermos I had seen earlier; and a walnut case without hinges.

"What's this?" I asked, hefting the case.

"Oh, that. Yeah, it's for you," he said.

"Celebratory cigars?" I asked, shaking the box slightly.

"Don't—" He shook his head. "You're not supposed to shake presents. Don't they teach you that?"

"You got me a present?"

"Yes. Well, no. I was just being prepared, and I didn't know . . . just open it."

The box was nicely made—all of the edges were rounded and smooth—and it took me a few moments to find the seam along the top. Once I found it, opening the box was easy.

"Oh," I said when I saw what was inside. "You shouldn't have."

Inside the box were a pair of pistols, delicately cradled on a bed of purple velvet. They looked like something René Lalique would have made if he had been hired to make the props for a Flash Gordon serial. Silvered glass and polished metal. Elf-sized too. The grips were insulated, and the pistol was heavier than I expected. I would probably have better luck clubbing someone on the head with the gun than actually shooting them.

"A little short on ammo," Rudolph said. "Which is why I didn't tell you about them earlier. They wouldn't have been much help against all those crabs."

"How short?"

"Four, I think. They're a bit unusual."

"How unusual?" I asked. The barrel of the pistol was cold, and I realized why the grips were insulated.

"Nitrogen pellets. Cold kiss of Absolute Zero with those puppies."

"And you could only manage four?" I scoffed.

Rudolph shrugged. "Hey, four in each. Everyone else only got armor piercing rounds. I don't see what you're bitching about."

I wasn't quite sure where I was supposed to put the gun. I didn't relish shoving it down the front of my thermal suit. The trouble with experimental weaponry was twofold: one, it probably hadn't been tested; and two, someone had identified a target that might require this kind of firepower to vanquish. And pointing that sort of firepower at my crotch didn't seem like the best idea.

Rudolph reached over and deftly snagged the piece of forgotten candy cane in my left hand. "Pose for
Guns and Ammo
later," he said, crunching. "There should be some holsters in the bottom of the box. Let's get moving."

I lifted the corner of the velvet case—there were, indeed, some holsters. Shoulder holsters, in fact, and already rigged for someone my size. As I struggled into the rig and slipped the pistols into their leather holsters, Rudolph trotted off to meet the pair of reindeer.

His gait was solid. Whatever had been troubling his left leg was gone.

"There's something out there," Donner said. Unlike the others, he was a sucker, and he still had several inches of candy cane left. Donner had been the last to rejoin the team, and he looked like he had been running awhile when we had found him.

"Rodents of Unusual Size?" Blitzen asked.

"Larger," Donner replied. He nodded at Ring, who was nursing a bump on his forehead from tangling with a kid's bicycle when he had landed. "Bigger than that one."