Time Castaways (15 page)

Chapter Twelve

Ryan woke with a start, memories of the past few days flooding back. The last thing he clearly recalled was a cougar clawing at his chest, the pain fading into an oddly pleasant sensation, and then everything went triple-crazy, colors becoming tastes, sounds turning into colors, and then total chaos filled the world.

“Drugged,” Ryan muttered softly, massaging his temples. That was the only possible answer. Some of that bastard poisoned water had to have gotten into the cuts and knocked him out. He could vaguely remember weird dreams. At least everything seemed back to normal again.

Thick furs and predark Army blankets lay under him as a crude bed. He was tucked into the corner of a large wooden room. There was a large Franklin stove in the middle of the room, jointed pipes on top carrying the smoke outside through a hole in the roof, and wonderful waves of heat were radiating outward from the cast-iron antique.

Soft light was streaming in through glass windows, and there was a large metal desk sitting kitty-corner across the room, a gooseneck lamp on top, as well as a small comp and piles of yellow paper. A wheeled chair
sat partially behind the desk, the green leather cover badly ripped, tufts of yellow foam padding sticking out randomly. He grunted at the sight. Clearly, this was some sort of an office. But where were his companions? Through the window he could see a large campfire blazing, an aluminum pot that he recognized was suspended over the flames, the contents bubbling steadily, but there were no sign of the others.

Rising stiffly, Ryan checked for his weapons and found they were gone. Cold adrenaline flooded the man at the discovery, but then he saw his blasters and the panga lying on top of the desk, along with his backpack, coat and canteen. Okay, I’m not a prisoner. Good to know.

Shuffling across the room, Ryan suddenly noticed the awful taste in his mouth. He almost gagged, and his empty stomach rumbled unhappily.

Reaching the desk, the man quickly checked his weapons, finding everything clean, sharpened, oiled and fully loaded. Strapping on his gunbelt, Ryan then screwed the cap off the canteen and poured some of the contents into his palm. It looked and smelled like water, so he took a lick and was delighted to find that was exactly what it was. Taking a small mouthful, he sloshed the fluid for about a minute, then spit it out into the wastebasket, before taking an equally small sip. It deliciously eased down his dry throat and spread across his empty stomach like a healing balm.

Resisting the urge to drink more immediately, Ryan waited a minute to make sure his guts would keep the water down, then he started sipping and pausing, again
and again, slowly letting his tissues absorb the water until the hunger pangs eased and the foul taste in his mouth noticeably lessened. Unfortunately there was also a distinct rancid aroma in the small room, and the one-eyed man was pretty sure it was coming from him.

Quickly opening the backpack, Ryan found some self-heats and yanked off the lid of one to drink cold soup straight from the can. Ryan was finished long before the container grew warm, and he tossed it into the wastebasket.

Feeling greatly refreshed, Ryan wiped his mouth on a sleeve and found a heavy beard on his face. His fingers checked the length and he guessed at least three days had passed since the fight at Hill ville.

“Nice to see you again, lover!” Krysty said from behind him.

Spinning in a gunfighter’s crouch, Ryan eased the blaster back into the holster when he saw it actually was Krysty, her long hair moving constantly as if stirred by secret winds.

“About time you got up!” J.B. added heartily, stepping in through the open doorway with the rest of the companions. “For a while there, we were afraid that you were taking the last train west.”

“Indeed, sir,” Doc added in his deep rumble. “If the good doctor had not forced all of the blueberry juice down your throat, I do believe you may have never returned from the arms of Morpheus.”

“Why…” Ryan was barely able to even get out the garble sound. He swallowed hard and tried again. “Why were you feeding me juice?”

“For the vitamin C,” Mildred explained, going over to him and checking his pulse. “It helps counter the ravages of the hallucinogenic compounds.” Ninety-five beats per minute, she observed. His blood pressure felt high, but that was understandable considering the circumstances.

“Liana showed us where to find the fruit,” the physician continued, inspecting his eye for any dilation or discoloration. “The island is lousy with food, if you know where to look.”

“Knowledge is power,” Doc stated, looking fondly at the diminutive Liana, and she preened under the praise.

“I sang for you, trying to show the way home,” Liana added, holding out a large leaf filled with bright orange strawberries. “But you were lost deep in the nightscape of the dreamworld.”

“Got that right,” Ryan replied, kindly dismissing the offer. He was starving, but not for fruit. “But thanks for trying.”

Placing the leaf on the office desk, the woman seemed to pause, then blurted, “Kin helps kin.”

“Kin helps kin,” Ryan repeated formally in agreement, then gave a rare half-smile.

With that, Liana burst into a wide grin and hitched up her gunbelt. Half of the ammo they had originally given her was gone, and there were three small notches on the wooden grip of the blaster. The former slave had also put on a few pounds, all of it in the right places, and there were wildflowers tucked into her long hair, the bright yellow and blues reflected in the luxurious platinum waves.

“What is this place?” Ryan asked, glancing around the cabin.

“Museum,” J.B. replied, crossing his arms. “There used to be a copper mine here, but it got nuked and now it’s hotter than the Washington Hole, if you can believe it. The rad counters went crazy as we came out of the valley. But we’re safe enough here.”

“And it’s triple-sure that no sec men or cats are going to coming after us through the pass,” Krysty added. “They might go around, but according to Liana that will take them days on foot.”

“Good to know,” Ryan said, glancing around at the mostly bare office. “Was there anything here we could use?” Museums had always been a favorite of the Trader to loot. Lots of the old tech on display worked just fine.

“Just some pamphlets that’ll serve as toilet paper, and a couple of oil lanterns, without any oil,” Krysty replied. “Along with a med kit with only some bandages left, and some lead plumbing that we yanked out of the walls.”

“The sec men were carrying exploding lances, sir,” Doc explained. “According to Liana, they detonate when stabbed into a target. John Barrymore simply emptied out the powder, and filled several sections of the plumbing to make us a dozen new pipe bombs of frightening power.”

“They’ll do the trick,” the Armorer said proudly, patting the munitions bag.

“Sounds good.” Walking to the door, Ryan studied the rolling landscape. Nukescaping, without a doubt.
There were misty mountains rising to the clouds in every direction, and one big waterfall situated off toward the setting sun. “Where are we now?” he asked, brushing back his hair. “This isn’t Hill ville, that’s for sure.”

“No, we left there right after the fight,” Krysty stated, joining the man outside. “This is about fifty miles into the Crown Mountains, smack in the middle of Royal Island.”

“You carried me through the mountains?” Ryan asked incredulously.

“Hell, no.” J.B. chuckled. “We simply lashed your ass to a litter and dragged you along behind our new horses.”

Horses? There was only one possible answer for that. “Sec men came after the cats arrived,” Ryan guessed, turning toward the campfire. Whatever was cooking in the pot smelled wonderful, and he sauntered over for a better look. It was stew of some kind, but the meat was green.

“Yep, eight outriders,” J.B. stated. “We skinned the cats and hid under the pelts, then placed some of our spare blasters near the bloody corpses to make them resemble us. Well, kind of, anyway. However, in the dark the stupes bought the ruse, and when they climbed down for the blasters, we aced them from behind, simple as opening a self-heat.”

“Easier,” Jak drawled contemptuously, a knife slipping out of his sleeve to land in the waiting palm of his hand. The teen flipped the blade in the air, then tucked it out of sight again.

“A couple of the horses died during the fight, so we only have six for the seven of us,” Mildred said, going to the stew and stirring the contents with a green stick. “However, Doc was kind enough to offer to share with Liana, and she doesn’t seem to mind too much.”

“Is this horse?” Ryan asked, his stomach rumbling in anticipation. The smell was intoxicating.

“We butchered what we could carry, but we ate that already. This is hardbacks,” Liana replied. “I tried to sing for snakes. They arrived instead.”

“She sang at midnight, and the turtles arrived at dawn just as we were about to leave,” Krysty explained with a rueful smile. “But better late than never.”

At that news, Ryan grinned in delight. Hardbacks! That was some of his favorite eating.

“Rest horses out back,” Jak said, jerking a thumb. “Lotta freshwater and grass.”

“Along with a lovely little creek just perfect for bathing,” Mildred said, wrinkling her nose as she laid aside the stick. “Now that you’re awake, it’d be nice to be able to smell the stew instead of you.”

“That is, unless you plan to conquer Northpoint by simply flapping your arms, my dear Ryan,” Doc said, faking a cough.

Since it was blatantly true, Ryan accepted the rebuke. “Guess I do smell a little like a swampie,” he admitted.

“Old aced swampie,” Jak corrected with a grimace.

“Besides, it’s almost dark, and we can’t travel at night,” J.B. added, watching the trees, a hand resting on the Uzi at his side. “There are too many flapjacks in the
area, and the damn things are tough enough to see in broad daylight.”

“Fair enough.” Rummaging in his pockets, Ryan unearthed a plastic ziptop bag containing a small bar of used soap. It was military soap, without any perfumes or softeners, but it took the dirt off a person slicker than skimming pond scum.

“Take your time. The stew will be ready when you come back,” Mildred called tactfully over a shoulder, her hands busy dicing wild carrots.

“Good to hear,” Ryan stated, rubbing his unshaved chin. “Because I want everybody ready to leave at first light. Take only the weapons and food. I want to reach Northpoint by noon tomorrow, and get us some transportation off this fragging rad pit of an island.”

“Steal boat?” Jak asked pointedly.

“Sure as shitfire not going to try to buy one again,” Ryan declared gruffly, marching around the cabin and out of sight.

Chapter Thirteen

Taking a dirty cloth from a pocket, Baron Griffin wiped the sweat from his face. It had been over a day since he last slept, but in his dreams, the man constantly relived the events of that terrible day over and over. Sleep brought no rest, so he abandoned the thoughts of it and concentrated on something more tangible. Revenge.

By now, most of the destruction in the ville had been cleared away, the fires extinguished and the dead buried. Or rather, they had been until the kraken arrived. With the sec men almost too exhausted to fight, sec chief Donovan had devised a brutal new tactic and had the ville folk hurriedly dig up the corpses and throw them to the mutie. That hadn’t been enough, so then he fed the thing the slaves, all of them, and then some of the ville folk. Finally sated, the kraken had returned to the depths of the sea, leaving the ville untouched. However, that was not a tactic the baron could ever use again. There was nobody else to sacrifice to the giant mutie.

Tucking away the rag, Griffin shuffled over to a worktable and assembled a sandwich from the assortment of dried meats and sliced breads. Without sitting, he consumed the crude meal in a few bites, then washed
it down with scag-root tea. It tasted awful, even when sweetened with honey, but delivered a big kick.

“All right, let’s try it again,” the baron wheezed, returning to the construction site. “Light the fire!”

“You heard the baron!” Donovan bellowed, hobbling forward on his new crutch.

As most of the sec men backed away to a safe distance, a grim-faced man opened the iron door of the hearth and applied a piece of smoldering oakum to the pile of rags soaked in shine. Instantly, they ignited, and the fire quickly spread through the carefully arranged stack of dry wood filling the hearth to overflowing. Closing the door on the growing conflagration, the bare-chested man pulled on several levers and, studying the gauges, made sure that the fire had sufficient air.

As the temperature climbed, the needle on the repaired pressure gauge steadily rose higher and higher. Licking dry lips, the man muttered a soft prayer to the moon god. The previous ten people who tried this had been horribly aced, cooked alive by the escaping steam, the last one personally chilled by the baron to stop his agonized howling.

“We’re at fifty percent, baron,” the man called out, a tingle of hope in his spine. “Seventy percent…ninety….”

Suddenly a keening volcano of steam erupted from the valve on top of the machine, and the transmission lurched into action, wheels turning and rods shifting.

“Throw the switch!” the baron commanded, taking a step forward, hope giving his haggard face new life. “Throw it!”

Making a protective gesture, the man grabbed the big lever and pulled it all the way back.

There was a brief hammering from the machine, and then the rebuilt Wendigo rolled out of the repair cradle, smashing aside the wooden supports in an explosion of hemp rope and splinters.

Battered and bruised, the dirty repair crew cheered as the armored war wag rolled across the ville, huffing and puffing, but moving faster than ever before. The steam whistle keened again, the man at the controls beaming widely.

“It works,” Donovan whispered, reaching out a hand as if to touch the chugging machine. “By the lost gods, we did it. The son-of-a-bitch thing works!”

Closing his eyes for a moment in silent thanks, the baron then pulled in a deep lungful of air and loudly bellowed, “All right, mount up! We roll right fragging now.”

“To Northpoint!” Donovan added, brandishing his cane.

The sec men gave a ragged cheer. Dashing eagerly around, they grabbed their blasters and climbed into the saddles of their horses, every mind filled with savage thoughts of bloody revenge.

AT DAWN, the companions rose and had a breakfast of reheated stew and black coffee to fortify themselves for the long day ahead. Then they packed away everything useful and buried the campfire, first under dirt and rocks, then dry leaves, to try to disguise the fact that they had ever been here.

Checking the belly strap of the mare he had been given, Ryan heartily approved of the mount. Alvira wasn’t the biggest horse of the bunch—Doc got the big stallion to support the double load of him and Liana—but the big mare was clearly bridle wise and had the look of a seasoned warhorse. This was not a horse that would buck and throw him off at the first sound of blasterfire. However, Ryan would have to be extremely careful of where the animal walked. With metal in such short supply on the island, there were no horseshoes. Unshod hooves had a tendency to bruise, and then the horse would be lame for a week. Which meant that one wrong move, and Ryan was on foot again.

Although seriously impatient to be under way, Ryan still spent several minutes stroking Alvira’s muscular neck. As he checked the straps on the saddlebags, Ryan noticed his Desert Eagle was gone, then saw it tucked into Jak’s gunbelt. He had seen the teen lose the Para-Ordnance in the fight with the cats and didn’t mind the loan. Ryan already had two blasters, and that was enough for him. In the Deathlands, carrying too many blasters was almost as bad as not having enough.

Leaving the campsite, the companions crossed a misty field of grass at an easy lope, letting the animals warm to the work of the day. In a few hours, the companions encountered a wide field of wheat, the tufted stalks waving gently in the cool breeze. There were no rows or furrows anymore. No tractors, plows or silos. Any sign of cultivation was long gone. The grain grew random, choking itself in some areas, and painfully
thin in others, the ever-present fog giving the landscape a faintly surreal appearance.

Grabbing handfuls of the stalks as they rode along, the companions wisely tucked the grain away to feed the horses later. There was plenty of grass, but wheat had more protein and the animals would need all of their strength soon enough.

Between Liana’s directions, J.B.’s use of the sextant and map and Ryan’s telescope, the companions found the dried river by noon. Several yards wide, it began at the base of a dead waterfall, the bare rock of the cliff tinged with green moss. Snaking away, the riverbed meandered through the rolling hills, forming a natural highway that disappeared into a mist-shrouded forest of elm and pine trees.

“The sec men say in the spring this is whitewater,” Liana said, shifting her position on the leather saddle behind Doc. “Impossible to cross because of the mutie fish that swim upstream to breed at the falls.”

“That’s probably what the flapjacks normally feed upon,” Krysty said, studying the scattered bones embedded into the desiccated mud.

Stopping to light torches made of wooden table legs wrapped in oil-soaked rope, the group proceeded down the sloping bank and onto the cracked mosaic of dried mud. Both banks grew steadily higher, the grassland giving way to thorny brambles and then a dense forest. Overhead, the branches reached out to almost touch, forming a cathedral effect, the dappled light sprinkling the ground with pinpoints of starlight in the middle of the day.

Keeping a tight hold on the reins of their nervous mounts, the companions rode slowly along, everybody holding a crackling torch as high as they could. The firelight banished the shadows, and the thick smoke wafted into the canopy of overlapping branches. There was no sign of the flapjacks, but there was constant movement in the treetops wherever the smoke touched. Staying sharp, the companions kept a close watch on the greenery, their hands never far from a loaded blaster, until the forest was far behind them, lost in the cottony fog bank.

Slow hours passed, and it was late afternoon when they crested a hill, and the companions slowed their mounts at the sight of farmland, rows of leashed slaves digging in the dark loam with their bare hands, while fat overseers smoked cigs and occasionally lashed out with a whip to make the men and women work faster. Only one guard was mounted, the gunboot of his saddle filled with a feathered lance. The sec men were dressed in warm furs and heavy boots, while the slaves were in rags, mud covering most of the skinny bodies as crude protection from the afternoon chill. Ratty canvas bags full of seeds were suspended from the wooden yokes around their throats, and they crawled along, kneading the earth to plant a single seed then moving forward a few inches to endlessly repeat the process.

“Look alive, ya gleebs,” an overseer bellowed, snapping the bullwhip a few more times just to make the slaves jump with fright. “The winter snow will be here soon, and without the clover as ground cover there’ll be no food in the spring!”

“Lessen we eat you!” A female overseer laughed heartily.

“Oh, don’t bother talking to them,” the corporal said from atop the chestnut gelding. Popping the cork from a canteen, he took a long drink, then returned the cork with a thump. “Slaves be too stupe to understand how—”

Tossing away the canteen, the fat overseer reeled in the saddle, the barbed point of an arrow sticking out the side of his head. Opening his mouth as if to speak, he only flapped his lips for a few seconds before slipping off the horse to fall facedown into the furrows.

Spinning fast, the other two guards gasped at the sight of the mounted companions. “Sound the alarm!” the sec woman shouted, then doubled over, clutching the arrow that protruded from her stomach.

Frantically clawing inside his jacket, the last overseer pulled out a whistle and raised it to his lips. Then there came a distant crack and his hand burst apart, fingers spraying across his face. Stumbling backward, the wounded guard tripped over a furrow and went sprawling. In a mad rush, the slaves swarmed over the norm, pounding him with rocks, their strong fingers ripping at his clothing. Trying to pull a wooden machete, the overseer disappeared within the howling mob, and soon warm red blood flowed along the cold ground.

Turning around in the saddle, Jak scowled fiercely. “Why do?” he demanded hotly. “Overseers disappear, ville get alert!”

“Kin helps kin,” Liana said simply.

“Quite right, my dear,” Doc agreed reluctantly, low
ering the LeMat. “Freeing slaves is always laudable! However, you should have consulted with us first before acting. Now, we must continue on foot.”

“Why?” Liana asked, clearly puzzled. “There are no more sec men in sight.”

“That know of!” Jak retorted, furious over the newbie’s mistake.

“The horses will help the slaves get away faster,” J.B. growled. “And the more sec men that go after them, the less there’ll be to protect the dockyard.”

“This may actually make it easier to steal the boat,” Mildred offered, trying to cover for the other woman. The physician applauded the intent, but the results could prove disastrous. Act in haste, repent in leisure, as her Baptist minister father always used to say.

“Maybe, or maybe not,” Ryan growled, holstering the SIG-Sauer. “Only now we have no choice in the matter. We gotta help them, to help ourselves.”

“Can’t take them on a boat, anyway,” Liana said in a rush, as if that had been her idea from the beginning. But the feeble defense fooled nobody.

“Depends on the size,” Krysty countered, watching the slaves exact their gory revenge. Her voice and face were calm, but her animated hair revealed her true feelings.

Sliding off his horse, Ryan unslung the Steyr and worked the arming lever. “However, Liana, if you ever do something this stupe again…” He didn’t finish the sentence, unsure of how far his temper would go.

The words so simply said sent a shiver through the woman. Having heard countless threats in her life, the
former slave instinctively knew this one was real and dumbly nodded. She wanted to apologize, but Ryan and the others were already off their horses and pulling items from the saddlebags.

“Either with us, or not,” Jak declared roughly, tucking a pipe bomb into a pocket. “Make choice!”

“Doc,” Liana replied instantly, looking into his face. “I stand with Theophilus.”

Trying not to smile, Doc reached out to gently touch her shoulder, speaking volumes without saying a word.

Cutting across a section of farmland, the companions tramped along the muddy furrows heading due north.