Time Castaways (21 page)

Just hadn’t given humanity enough credit to muddle through the holocaust anyway, Mildred added privately, feeling an odd sense of pride over the matter. The quintessential definition of the human race had always been as survivors.

“Better steer clear of the dockyards,” Krysty advised, watching the pattern of the waves. There seemed to be a lot of wreckage under the water. “At this speed, if we hit a submerged bridge, or railroad, it’ll rip off our keel as clean as opening a self-heat.”

“Too true, madam!” Doc said in agreement. “However, observe! There is a pristine beach just to the west of the city. That should serve us well as an impromptu dry dock.”

“Then we’re gonna land?” Liana asked excitedly, looking across the new world.

“Immediately, my dear. A bird in the hand, and all that.”

Was worth two in the bush. Yes, she knew that old saying from her father. “Okay, I’ll go tell Ryan and Jak!” Liana said, dashing down the stairs, her boots barely touching the steps.

In only moments she returned with the two sweaty men. They went directly to the bow to study the fallen metropolis, and bathe in the cool, clean air.

“Looks good,” Ryan announced, almost smiling. “Between the ruins and the mountains, we can lose the barons easy in this sort of terrain.”

“On our world now,” Jak agreed, hunching his shoulders to work out a few kinks. The muscles under his pale skin moved like bundles of steel cables.

“However, those sec men still outnumber us ten to one,” Ryan replied without enthusiasm. “So, everybody get ready to run as soon as we hit the fragging beach.”

Quickly, the companions raced around the boat, reclaiming their meager possessions and stuffing them into their backpacks.

Less than an hour later, Doc eased the boat through the cresting waves washing onto the smooth beach, the glistening sand grinding under their wooden hull until the boat came to a complete stop, only slightly tilting sideways. Then Doc pulled back the throttle to turn off the engine. The clatter from belowdecks immediately lessened, but the engine kept working for a few minutes before finally expiring with a long exhalation of compressed steam.

“What now, Captain, oh my Captain?” Doc asked, awkwardly climbing down from the wheelhouse. The
wound was healing quickly, but his left arm was still rather weak. As he reached the deck, Liana stepped alongside the scholar, never offering assistance, but staying close in case it was needed.

“We head for the valley between those two big mountains,” Ryan stated, pointing the Steyr in that direction. “Hopefully, they waste time checking the ruins. If for nothing else than sheer curiosity. There’s nothing like this on Royal Island.”

“Nothing,” Liana agreed wholeheartedly. “But do not count too much on their curiosity.”

“Well, the only thing we can be sure that they’ll recce is the Warhammer,” J.B. said, dusting off his hands. “And when they do, we should be able to see the blast from the other side of the continent.”

“Groovy,” Mildred said with a curt nod, hefting her med kit. “Let’s blow this pop stand!”

“Madam?” Doc asked with a quizzical expression.

“Time to leave,” Krysty said in translation, kicking out the hinged section of the gunwale and jumping to the sand.

The fall was only a yard, and the woman landed on her boots, the S&W blaster out and ready in case of any surprises among the sand. Ryan went next, and the rest of the companions soon followed.

Spreading out, they walked swiftly along the pristine expanse of the silvery beach, leaving behind a clear trail of their footprints. Unfortunately, there was nothing to be done about that. The nearest branches were more than five hundred yards away, and they weren’t going to waste time going back. This was now a race
to the nearest redoubt. Until the companions were safely locked inside, they could not allow anything to get in the way, or slow them.

Slowly, the sand merged with dirt and got firmer, allowing them to walk faster. However, the companions were only yards from the trees when they heard a familiar sound from the direction of the ruins. They turned to see a group of people on saddled horses galloping their way. Large men with long ponytails, they wore a mixture of predark clothing and badly tanned hides, the vests edged with fringe. More important, each rider was sporting a longblaster and a handblaster. Then one of them smiled, and Ryan saw that his teeth were filed to needle-sharp points as an aid to ripping meat from bone.

“Cannies!” Ryan growled, feeling a surge of cold adrenaline at the knowledge. There would be no palaver or negotiation with these barbs. This was a hunting trip for them, nothing more. Knowing how low the group was on brass, the one-eyed man debated trying to run and hide in the forest, then he decided on a different plan and quickly relayed brief instructions to the others.

“Hold it right there, outlanders!” the lead rider shouted, and then fired a longblaster in their general direction.

If the intimidation tactic had ever worked, it failed miserably this day. While most of the companions raised their hands in surrender, J.B. quickly lit the stubby fuse on a pipe bomb and let it fly. As the high-explosive charge soared over the cannies, the companions dived for the sand and covered their ears. A split
second later, a powerful detonation hammered the beach, the startled screams of the cannies and their horses lost in the deadly concussion.

As the shock wave of the blast faded, Ryan charged forward, his panga slashing at anything that moved. The others were right behind his attack, and soon they were alone on the beach, surrounded by corpses.

“There!” Liana shouted, pointing toward the ruins.

Spinning, Ryan cursed at the sight of a lone cannie, bent low over his horse and riding like a madman toward the crumbling city. But as he worked the bolt on the Steyr, Mildred raised the Czech ZKR and stroked the trigger. A hundred yards away, the horse flipped over, trapping the cannie underneath. As the frantic man flailed helplessly, Ryan centered the crosshairs of the scope on the cannie and blew off his head with a single well-placed shot.

“A running horse with no rider would have told any other cannies in the ruins far too much,” Mildred stated, holstering the blaster. The act had been a simple matter of survival.

“How did the baron send these men after us?” Liana asked, looking in the cloudy sky for any messenger falcons. “Or have they gotten here before us?”

“Didn’t,” Jak replied, retrieving one of his throwing knives. He cleansed the gory blade on the clothing of the corpse. “Just local boys. Cannies.”

“Cannies!” Liana gasped. “But…but those are only legends. They don’t really exist.”

“Not on your island, no,” Doc rumbled. “But alas, they most certainly do exist here.”

“Are there many more like these?” Liana asked in a worried voice, her blaster out, the hammer cocked.

“Some,” Krysty admitted honestly, opening a leather bag. “But not many.” Inside, she found only dried meat. Closing the bag, she tossed it aside and continued looking for brass.

“Is food short on this island?” Liana asked, suddenly suspicious that she had been brought along purely for the sake of her flesh. But then, she dismissed the nonsense.

“No, my dear, food is plentiful,” Doc said, cracking a revolver to empty out the brass. Three live rounds. Better than naught, he supposed. “These are simply men who…have lost their way.”

Slowly holstering her piece, Liana could hear the sadness in his voice. Theo aced cannies on sight, then nearly wept over the loss of life. A new emotion welled from within her breast, but the woman could not find the correct words. Was this love? She had no idea.

When the arduous task of looting the bodies was completed, the companions headed straight back into the forest. Never stopping for a moment, they tore some branches loose and lashed them to their gunbelts to drag along behind and muddle the trail. Separating around a pond, they joined again on the far side, then started for the mountains. The trick to throw off hunters wasn’t new, but it was the best they could manage under the circumstances. Hopefully, it would be enough.

Finding a dry riverbed, the companions broke into a full run, trying to get as much distance as possible between them and the army of the two barons.

“So where in Kalkaska is the redoubt located?” Krysty asked in artificial indifference. Attempting to force information out of Doc’s damaged mind was like trying to squeeze a song out of a bird by crushing it in your fist. If you got any results at all, they would only be incomprehensible noise. Guile and misdirection were the only paths to success.

“City hall,” Doc replied without thinking, stepping past a gopher hole. Then he looked around in confusion for a minute, before returning to the uphill walk.

Ryan and Krysty shared nods at that, filing away the location.

“Is it on the map?” Mildred asked.

“Should be,” J.B. replied, pausing to unfold the map and check the key. Then he began to curse.

“What’s wrong?” Liana asked nervously, pulling her blaster.

“Remember that crumbling drek hole on the coast?” J.B. said. “The sagging ruin that looks like it burned down after getting nuked?”

“Kalkaska?” Jak asked with a pronounced frown.

“Yeah!” J.B. fumed. “Dark night, I thought fifty miles inland had a familiar ring.”

“No choice then,” Ryan grumbled, turning and heading toward the desiccated river once more. “Back we go.”

Once more, the companions did an abrupt about-face and kept going.

“But what about the cannies?” Liana asked.

With a grim expression, J.B. said, “We’ll just have to reason with them.”

Moving quickly, the companions had barely crested the top of a low hillock when a sprinkling of black shapes appeared on the horizon of the lake heading steadily for the white sand shore.

Chapter Nineteen

Frothy waves crested over the sandy beach, and the forces of Royal Island sloshed onto a bizarre shoreline. Constantly looking around in unfettered fear, the barons and their sec men pulled the longboats onto the shore until the crafts were completely out of the water.

Less than a hundred paces away, the Warhammer lay tilted on her side, without a sign of life on board. But then, the outlanders would have to be feebs to stay on the craft once they reached land.

“Trapped?” Baron Wainwright asked, looking over the vessel.

“Trapped,” Baron Griffin agreed. “We’re gonna have to disassemble the engine before we dare put a stick of wood in the boiler.”

Clearly annoyed, she grunted. Yeah, it made sense. After all, it would be exactly what she and her cousin would have done. “All right, nobody go near the Warhammer,” she stated loudly. “That is, unless you’re fond of seeing your own innards fly!”

The mob of sec men chuckled at the witticism, and took more sips from their canteens of brew. Whatever the stuff was, it put a fine buzz in a man’s head, and made him feel stronger than a bull moose during mat
ing season. They had been rowing steady for three days, and still felt ready to continue the chase on foot, or start rowing back home, if necessary.

Hesitantly bending, sec chief Donovan took a handful of the weird material covering the beach, curiously running the strange dirt through his fingers. “This be some sort of rock,” Donovan told the others in amazement. “No. No, its crystal!” Crystal dirt. What sort of stupe-ass island was this? What kind of plants could grow in crystal?

“Sand,” Baron Wainwright muttered, extracting the word from a childhood memory. Her grandfather had talked about white sandy beaches, instead of the pebble beaches that the world had. But those could only be found on the mainland.

“Sandy beaches,” Baron Griffin whispered, clearly thinking along the same lines. There was a forest up ahead, and he recognized most of the trees—pine, elm, oak and maple, but not the others. “Could those be palm trees and coconut trees?”

“Guess so,” Wainwright lied, not willing to demonstrate any ignorance in front of the troops.

Pulling out half of a broken binocular, Donovan swept the area for any dangers and found none in sight. Then he settled the optical device on the ruins to their south.

“Are they building a ville, or taking one down?” the sec chief demanded gruffly. There did not seem to be any outer defensive wall around the ville, which was beyond strange. However, all of the buildings seemed to be made of brick or concrete. All of them. There wasn’t
a sign of any logs, wood shingles or even a fragging thatched roof in the whole damn place.

Even more outrageous, lying smack in the middle of the ville was a bridge apparently going nowhere. It was a perfectly ordinary bridge of the type they used in Northpoint to cross rough ravines or deep water. But this one was obviously made entirely of metal, not pine boards bounded with rope and reinforced with glue boiled from old bones. But actually forged from metal and bound with metal. The entire place seemed to be made of metal in a thousand different shapes, sizes and types. Sheets, rods, beams, it dwarfed the treasure trove of Green Mountain into insignificance. Whatever else this voyage might accomplish, their shortage of steel was over with, now and forever.

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Griffin replied, spotting the line of footprints leading from the Warhammer. Then he saw that the marks ended at what had to be the blast zone of a gren, the churned sand dotted with the corpses of man and horses. A thick cloud of flies buzzed over the still forms.

Shitfire, had the outlanders already been aced by some local baron? “Double time!” Wainwright bellowed, pulling her blaster. “The bastards went this way.”

Shouting a rally cry, the barons and their mixed troops surged forward, only to stop halfway as a feral dog looked up from amid the piles of flesh and bared its teeth to loudly snarl, laying claim to the bounty of food.

“What in the nuking hell is that?” a sec man screamed at the bizarre creature.

“Mutie,” a sergeant bellowed, and everybody cut loose with their flintlock longblasters.

The barrage of miniballs tore the dog apart, and as it fell, several more dogs rose from their ghastly feasting only to turn and scamper away, yipping in fear from the hated two-legs.

Sneering in contempt, a sec woman lashed out with a boomerang, and the spinning length of hardwood crushed the skull of a dog in a spray of blood and teeth. The death only made the other dogs spread out to head in every direction, then crisscrossing the paths of one another, making the pack nigh impossible to track.

As a grinning sec man spun a bolo to killing speed, Griffin waved aside the attack.

“Let them go,” the baron commanded. “They can’t hurt us, and we’ve got plenty of meat right here already chilled.”

“Haven’t had me some horse since the last Solstice,” an older sec man said, smacking his lips in delight. They had feasted on fresh fish the whole way here, but without any fire, the sec man had soon grown tired of eating the pale flesh raw. Some nice cooked horse sounded utterly delicious.

“Watch for traps,” Baron Wainwright commanded, a blaster tight in her fist, the hammer already pulled back. There were only two live rounds in the cylinder, but only she knew that.

Carefully investigating the bodies, the sec men did not find any booby traps, only an unlimited amount of metal knives, belt buckles, even buttons! They also did not find any of the outlanders strewed among the car
nage, which was more good news as it meant that the bastards were still alive.

However, from the pattern of the blood splatter, most of the chilling seemed to have been done after the explosion with blades, which might mean the outlanders were low on brass. That would have been even better news, except that the horseback riders had been heavily armed with blasters, metal blasters. Every damn one of them. The weapons were still here; only the brass was gone.

“The cowards aced some friendly locals just to get their brass,” Griffin snarled, kicking aside a longblaster, the arming bolt pulled back to reveal the empty breech.

“Which makes the local baron an ally,” Wainwright said thoughtfully, studying the tracks of the animals. They led straight back to the half-built ville down the coast.

Discovering a set of saddlebags, a sec man checked inside and found that it was packed with an unknown meat. Dried, and salted, the dark meat was rich with the smell of hickory smoke. Stealing a piece, the sec man found it delicious, and filled his pockets before passing the bag around to the others. Greedily, everybody took a handful and marveled over the fine texture and succulent flavor.

“Gotta get us more of this,” a sec woman mumbled, tearing off another long strip.

“All right, stop stuffing your faces,” Baron Griffin barked, cracking open his scattergun to check the load. “I want a full combat formation, just as if we were going after some Hillies.”

“You there,” Donovan snapped, pointing at a group
from Northpoint. “Take the lead position. You five, cover the rear.”

“Just keep your damn hands off the damn blasters,” Wainwright commanded. “We’re going to talk to the baron of the ville, not invade.”

“But, Baron, the outlanders plainly went into the trees,” a young sec man stated, gesturing at the footprints in the sand.

“And with their lead we’ll never catch up again on foot,” Baron Griffin retorted, annoyed over having to explain his commands. “But with horses we can ride them down in a day, easy as chilling a newborn!”

There was some shoving and scuffling as the sec men from the two villes awkwardly formed marching columns, but finally sec chief Donovan and the corporals got them into a rough formation.

“Forward…” Griffin began, but paused before finishing the command.

Shuffling out of the nearby trees came a man wearing only ragged clothing, most of it hanging loosely in dirty strips. His skin was a ghastly pallor and covered with circular spots, or marks, that kind of looked like the suckers on the tentacles of a kraken. As the stranger staggered for the pile of corpses, more of the diseased people appeared from the forest, only to stop and stare at the orderly ranks of armed sec men with blank expressions.

“Are…are those muties?” a sec man asked nervously.

“Don’t be ridiculous. No norm ever mutated that badly,” Wainwright snapped in reply. “Those are probably just tattoos.”

“Sure look real to me,” Donovan muttered softly
under his breath, gently clicking back the hammer on his Colt .45 blaster.

“Greetings,” Baron Griffin shouted, unsure of what else to do. “We no harm. You savvy talk-talk?”

As if in reply, the mob of stickies charged forward, waving their boneless arms and insanely hooting in savage bloodlust.

MOVING LOW AND FAST through the bushes covering a long hill, the companions paused to look down upon the remains of the city below. Loose leaves were sticking out of their clothing as crude camou, and each had dirt streaked across his or her face. The light-haired people in the group, Doc, Liana and Jak, also had dark cloths wrapped around their heads.

This close, they could see there were sections of the ruins that were still in livable condition, but not many. Entire neighborhoods were only piles of loose rubble studded with assorted plant life. Most of the streets were only a wild mosaic of cracked asphalt, and bushes grew on slanted rooftops.

Whatever disaster had struck Kalkaska down had nearly removed it from existence. However, a couple of office buildings survived relatively intact. Reaching only ten stories, the structures stood like giants among the field of desolation, their decorative outer marble cracked to show the solid concrete underneath, and the plastic windows still intact, although all of the lower ones were boarded over.

“What in the name of the Elders are these?” Liana asked in a shocked whisper.

“Ruins,” Ryan replied stoically. “Nothing special.”

“But they’re gigantic,” she said, looking down upon the office buildings in wonder. “Hot rain, they reach to the clouds!”

“Near enough,” Jak said politely, remembering the first time he had seen a building over two stories tall. That had been one of his best days, and his worst day, combined. The albino teen had thought the colossal structures were a dream, until the hooting stickies boiled out of the doorways.

“Still, all this metal,” Liana whispered, reaching out a hand, then quickly pulling it back to hug herself. Ever since the attack on the cliff, her world had been changing faster than an arrow in flight. It was always for the better, but she desperately longed for just a little peace and quiet to try to absorb this deluge of startling information and new ways of thinking.

Lying on his stomach, Ryan crawled under a laurel bush to sweep the ruins with the Navy longeye. “There it is,” he muttered, adjusting the focus.

“City hall?” Mildred asked hopefully, hidden behind a flowering shrub.

“The ville for the cannies,” Krysty corrected her, squinting through some tall weeds in that direction.

The home of the cannies was one of the office buildings, the block surrounded by a high wall of sidewalk slabs, topped with what looked like barbed wire. There was no sign of the horses, so the locals had to corral the animals inside the building for safekeeping. The roof was covered with plastic sheeting, probably to protect the building from the acid rains and to collect the pol
luted water to extract the sulfur for making into black powder. Smoke rose from the ventilation shafts set among the sheets, and the wind carried the faint smell of roasting meat.

At the first sniff, Liana started to gag.

“Chicken,” Mildred said quickly. “That’s just chicken, not people.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

With a deep sigh, the woman relaxed.

Turning his head, J.B. arched a questioning eyebrow, and Mildred shrugged in reply. Ignorance was bliss.

Locating the gate in the wall, Ryan saw that it was an impressive hodgepodge of sheet metal in every color and size imaginable, all welded together into a rather formidable piece of armor. Studded with spikes on the outside, the gate hung from a massive pair of hinges, and was reinforced on the inside with railroad ties used as locking bolts.

“Nobody is getting through that baby without a lot of explosives,” J.B. stated, studying the layout. “Sure hope that’s not city hall.”

“Quite so, John Barrymore,” Doc growled in dark harmony. For some reason he felt morally offended that cannies were not particularly stupid, as if their demonic hunger for human flesh was merely a peccadillo and not the aberration of a twisted soul.

“No prob,” Jak drawled, gesturing a pale finger toward the left. “There it be.”

Swinging the longeye that way, it took Ryan a few
moments to spot what the teen had discovered. Then he saw the fallen marble columns and traced them back to a smashed building that once had possessed a domed roof.

“Thank goodness the U.S. government loved Roman architecture,” Mildred muttered in wry amusement.

Doc muttered something in Latin, and the physician nodded in agreement. In everything, be mighty. That Cicero really knew his stuff.