The Wiz Biz II: Cursed & Consulted (28 page)

Mikey threw a lever on the side of his device and the silvery ball whisked down the trough and out over the valley in a high, lazy arc. Craig watched the ball shrink to a dot and then lost it in the sun.

Suddenly the world exploded.

Castle, valley and mountains all disappeared in a blaze of blinding radiance. Craig squinched his eyes shut but the sight was burned into his vision. He opened his mouth but he was bowled over backwards as if he had been slapped by a giant hand. Sand and bits of rock stung his skin and the wind whipped insanely about him. The parapet shook beneath him until he was sure the castle was coming down. The noise shook him like a terrier shakes a rat. All he could do was lie curled up in a ball and scream at the pain in his ears and the red after-images in his eyes.

Then it was over. As suddenly as it had come the noise and the shaking stopped. Cautiously, Craig opened his eyes and tried to climb to his feet.

Mikey was standing at the battlement braced like a sea captain facing into a storm. His hair was blown back and his clothes had been whipped about, but he stood firm and unrelenting, looking out over the valley. As he gazed on the roiling clouds of dust and debris below his smile reminded Craig of a picture he had seen once in Sunday school, of Moses looking out over the Promised Land.

Craig shook himself and looked around. The pennants on the castle towers had been torn to shreds by the blast. Half the roof tiles had been blown off the conical roof of the nearest tower and the chamber below gaped up. His robot guide lay in a twitching heap, unable to rise.

Mikey said something, but it didn't register on Craig's numbed and ringing ears.

"What?"

"I said, 'Neat huh?' " Mikey
half-shouted.

"What in the hell was
that
?"

"Like I said, a water balloon."

"Like hell!"

Mikey's smile grew broader. "Nope. Take a sphere of water—just ordinary water—and squeeze it real hard. Pretty soon the atoms disassociate into hydrogen and oxygen. Then if you squeeze it hard enough those hydrogen atoms are forced close enough together that they fuse." He threw up his hands. "Poof! Instant H-bomb."

"Jesus Christ," Craig said. Then he looked out over the dust-filled valley. "Jesus H. Fucking Christ on a goddamn rubber crutch!"

"Hey, that was nothing. The castle's shields took most of the blast so we only got a little of it. And the best part is that the spell to compress that water is so simple I can make my H-bombs any size I want. A hundred megatons, two hundred, even a thousand megatons, no problem."

Craig leaned against the battlement to ease his shaky knees. "That's some water balloon. You ought to put one of those things in the nose of an ICBM."

"ICBMs? We don' need no steenkin' ICBMs. Combine that with the teleportation spell. What do you think would happen if you shoved a mother big bomb down into the planet's crust?"

"Jesus," Craig breathed. "You could sink half a continent!"

Mikey's smile grew wider. "If you do it right you should smash the world." He looked out past Craig, past the fortress and past the dissipating cloud.

"The whole fucking world," he repeated dreamily.

In spite of the night's activities, Karin and Mick got an early start. Mick caught a quick bath in the freezing stream at first light while Karin spent time with Stigi. Then they set out on the hunt as dawn turned the sky red.

The pickings weren't as easy as they had been. The dinosaurs had learned to be wary of the humans and keeping Stigi fed now involved more stalking. Fortunately Karin was adept at hunting with a bow.

Still it was nearly noon before they found a likely looking herd and moved into position downwind for the stalk.

Karin was just sizing up the situation when a second sun blossomed in the northern sky. In an instant the world turned overexposed blue-white with stark black shadows, as if a gigantic flashbulb had gone off behind them.

"Get down!"
Mick yelled and pulled Karin down beside him.

"What . . ." The dragonrider tried to look back toward the source of the flash, but Gilligan reached out and forced her head down.

"Don't look! Keep your head down and close your eyes."

"I . . ." Karin begin, but her voice was drowned out when the shock wave hit.

Gilligan pressed his face into the dirt and screamed at the top of his lungs as the wall of dust and flying debris passed over them. The wind yanked at his flight suit and the wind-driven sand stung his exposed skin. He kept his head down and his eyes screwed shut until the gale ceased.

When he opened his eyes Karin was staring at him in shock. She tried to get up but at that instant the ground shock wave hit them and she was knocked first to her knees and then flat as the earth trembled beneath her. She lay on her stomach and clutched at the ground with clawed fingers as if she was afraid the shaking would throw her off.

Gilligan waited until everything was still and probably quiet—his ears were ringing so he couldn't tell—before he climbed shakily to his knees and looked around.

Dust stained the sky an ugly mustard yellow and dimmed the sun to a reddish disk. One of the nearby trees had been blown down and limbs had broken off several others. In the distance a herd of reptiles stampeded blindly, bellowing their panic across the plain.

"Okay, you can get up now."

Karin's face was white where it was not smudged with dirt and her freckles stood out starkly.

"Mick, what was that?" She clung to his forearms to hold herself erect.

"Let's get out of here," Gilligan said grimly.

"But Stigi needs to eat."

"He'll have to hunt for himself if we both die of radiation poisoning. Now let's get the hell out of the open!"

She bent and retrieved her bow. "He will be frightened," she said by way of agreement.

He's not the only one, Gilligan thought.

Karin was right. Stigi was blundering around roaring in fear and pain. The campsite was a wreck where the dragon had lumbered through it, flattening shelters and mashing things into the dirt.

The dragon rider set about the task of trying to calm her mount while Gilligan gathered everything of value and flung it under the overhanging rock for protection from fallout. He kept his eye on the skies, looking for rain clouds.

"Karin, get over here!"

"But Stigi needs me."

"Bring him here then. But get the hell under cover."

She led the dragon over to the rock shelter, still patting his great scaled neck and talking to him in soothing tones.

"Get in here with me and have him lay down next to the overhang so he blocks the entrance," Gilligan commanded.

For once Stigi did not object to Gilligan's proximity. It was hard to imagine an eighty-foot monster cowering, but this one was shivering from fang to tail tip. Karin kept patting his back and talking to the dragon even after it lay down.

Gilligan checked his shoulder holster and found that about a handful of sand had gotten into it when he hit the dirt. Rummaging through the haphazard pile of equipment he found his cleaning kit and proceeded to field strip and clean his Beretta.

Objectively it didn't
help much, but it made him feel better.

"You said you would tell me what that was later," Karin said after a time. "Is now later enough?"

"It was an air burst," Gilligan said tightly. "I don't know how big because I don't know how far away."

He looked out around the quaking dragon at the sky. "Pretty far, I think. There's no sign of blast-induced rain."

"It wasn't natural, was it? I mean it isn't something that just happens here?"

"No, it's manmade. Or
something
made anyway."

Karin eyed him sideways. "And you have seen them before?"

"Never. I always hoped I never would." He slid the pistol back into its holster. "You remember I told you that we would fight an all-out war with weapons that could destroy a city in the blink of an eye? That was one of those weapons."

"Then your people . . . ?"

"No!"
Karin jerked back as if she had been slapped at the violence of his reply. "I told you we'd never use them unless we were attacked. Nobody would. We're all too afraid of them."

"I can see why."

"Besides, if we did use them we wouldn't set one off over a deserted plain like that and we wouldn't use just one of them."

"But you are expecting more of them. You make us stay under the rocks."

"If there were going to be more we never would have gotten off the plain. We're here because of fallout."

"What is that?"

He turned to her. "Nuclear weapons don't just make a big explosion. They produce all kinds of poisonous byproducts. Even if the blast doesn't get you you can still sicken or die. That stuff will be coming out of the sky for the next few hours and it will be dangerous for the next few days. That blast was a pure air burst so there won't be as much fallout as there could have been. The wind is generally away from us so the plume may not reach
us. We may be safe, but I don't want to take chances."

"What about Stigi?"

"You see any place around here that could shelter him?"

Karin shook her head reluctantly.

"Besides, he may not be as affected by this stuff as we are."
For all I know he's got a nuclear reactor in his gut,
Gilligan thought. He wondered if anyone had ever worked out the dose response tables for a firebreathing dragon.

There was no rain that night, and no more explosions. Sometime on toward dawn Gilligan finally drifted off into an uneasy sleep. He dreamed of ruined deserted cities and Karin with her hair falling out.

He awoke numb and muzzy headed. The sun was above the horizon, Karin was gone and so was Stigi.

He cast about frantically for a moment, but Karin's pack and Stigi's saddle were still where he had piled them. Obviously Karin expected to be back soon. Gilligan forced himself to sit down under the overhang and wait.

Perhaps an hour later Karin led Stigi back up the path and into the wrecked campsite.

Heedless of the possibility of fallout or Stigi's steamwhistle snort, he raced across the clearing to meet them. "Karin, I was worried about you," Gilligan said as he took her in his arms. They kissed deeply and then Karin broke away.

"Stigi was restless so I took him to the stream for a bath," she explained. "It always calms him."

"That wasn't safe. We don't
know we're out of the fallout plume."

"Oh, but that thing did not leave poison here," Karin said almost gaily.

"What makes you so sure?"

"This," she said, digging into her pouch and producing a small object apparently carved out of jet. "Scouts carry these because sometimes we must forage abroad. It tells us if something is safe to eat or drink. I checked everything I could find and there was no sign of harm."

"I don't know how good it is at detecting fallout," Gilligan said dubiously.

Karin returned the amulet to her pouch. "It has never failed us."

Mick nodded. It was possible serious fallout hadn't reached this far and they had nothing to worry about. If the fallout had reached them they were already facing a bout of radiation sickness. Logically there was no reason to believe Karin's magic rock was telling the truth, but it felt better that way.

He hugged her again "I was worried about you," he said with his nose and lips buried in the hair on her neck.

"I am sorry, love."

"That's the first time you called me that."

Karin pulled her head away and laid her fingertips on his cheek.

"Well?"

"Well, I like it." He kissed her again.

After a long moment Karin pulled away. "Mick, we have to talk."

"Okay, about what?"

"What happened yesterday. We cannot stay here now."

"You got that right. The best thing would be to move to the opposite end of the island, as far away from that castle . . ."

"No," Karin cut him off.
"I need to go the other way. I need to get as close to that castle as I can to spy out its defenses."

Mick dropped his arms to his sides.

"One of those 'defenses' you're talking about is nuclear weapons. That's crazy!"

"Nevertheless," Karin said quietly, "I must."

"Look, at least wait until Stigi's wing is healed. That's, what, another week?"

"Longer than that, I fear. He apparently tried to fly yesterday in his panic and re-injured it."

"So you're going to walk?"

"I have no other choice."

"The hell you don't! You can stay here like a sensible person. Until help arrives or until that dragon can fly."

"And meanwhile the ones in that castle will be brewing up who knows what kind of horrors," Karin blazed back. "No. I have my duty as a scout and flier and I will not shirk it to lie around here while my very world is threatened."

"I don't know how it is in the dragon cavalry, but in the Air Force a recon pilot's first job is to get the information back to his base."

"A scout's first job is to gather information. Having no way of getting anything back, I can only gather more."

"I'll bet you've got some kind of regulation against this kind of behavior," Gilligan said with a shrewdness born of desperation.

"There is also a regulation saying regulations are guides and must be applied with wisdom. This is an unusual situation and I must take unusual action."

Like me sending Smitty back and pressing on alone,
Gilligan thought. Somehow he felt that the universe was getting even with him for that.

"What about Stigi?"

Karin frowned. "That is the thing which made it so hard. I will take Stigi with me. He can walk and dragons can keep a fairly good pace."

"Okay, you feel you've got to scout ahead. You could do it faster once Stigi's wing heals."

"It will heal just as well on the march as here."

"And if you're caught in the open?"

"That is a chance I must take."

Gilligan opened his mouth and found he didn't have any more arguments. Karin obviously wasn't thinking straight, but that didn't matter. She was driven by an overpowering urge to do something, anything, except the intelligent thing, which was sit and wait.