Читать книгу Eden's Twilight - James Axler - Страница 12

Once past the wreckage in the snowy mountain pass, the convoy of war wags moved swiftly through an array of jagged tors, the irregular spears of cooled lava brutal reminders of a nuke-volcano.

As the traders left the region and headed south, crystal shards rose from the ground like a forest of mirrors, so War Wag One took the lead, the armored prow creating a trail for the smaller war wags by simply smashing through the delicate formations to the never-ending sound of shattering glass.

In the control room of War Wag One, the crew stayed alert for any further dangers. They were approaching difficult territory. No convoy had gotten past the Hermit on the Hill, only individuals who crept past in the thick of the night. And even then, some of them didn’t escape from the high-explosive death of the crazy wrinklie.

Inside the cramped control room, Jake was at the wheel dodging obstructions with consummate skill, Quinn watched the radar and Jimmy listened intensely to the Ear, a patched set of headphones attached to a dish microphone mounted on the roof. When the conditions were right, the Ear could listen in on conversations more than a thousand yards away, although it usually was only good for a couple of hundred yards, and even less if there was a lot of ambient noise, like a waterfall.

Over by the periscope, Jessica watched the horizon for anything suspicious while Roberto sat in the command chair, checking over some predark maps and keeping weight off his bad leg. The cold was making it ache more than he wanted to admit, but keeping off his feet helped.

Softly, the radio crackled with static as the tires rumbled over the loose shale covering the ground like oily dinner plates. Down the hallway leading to the engine room, gunners were alert at the .50-caliber machine guns, hands on triggers. The evening guards were asleep in their bunks, somebody was singing in the shower, and Matilda was in the galley frying onions and something spicy for the evening meal, the delicious aroma mixing with the tang of ozone from the humming comps and the smell of diesel exhaust from the engines.

“Mmm, smells like rattlesnake surprise,” a crewman said, sniffing happily. Nobody made a comment. “Surprise, it’s rattlesnake again!” he said, waiting for a laugh. When none came, the crewman sighed and went back to sharpening the bayonet on the end of his AK-47 rapidfire. Some folks simply had no damn sense of humor, he thought. It was a real ass-kicking joke, so he only told it ten, mebbe twelve times a week, to keep it fresh.

Off in the corner of the control room, a tall man was sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, humming a wordless tune. His skin was dark black, but his long hair and beard were silver, the same as his strange eyes. In spite of the cold mountain air coming in through the vents, he was dressed in only light clothing, his shirt open to expose a muscular chest covered with the scars of a hundred knife fights, along with an irregular pattern of circles that boasted of surviving a stickie attack, an event so rare it bordered on the miraculous.

Glancing at the doomie, Roberto remembered seeing Yates once stop a bar fight by merely revealing his chest and letting everybody see the incredible scars. The drunken rage of the ville sec men turned to awe, and Yates spent the rest of the night telling his tales of survival over and over again, as the crowd poured endless glasses of shine until dawn arrived. The damn scar was almost a protective charm, as if escaping from the last train west, Yates could no longer be a passenger. Pure shit, but still, Roberto felt better when Yates was around to guard his flank. Not his six, of course. He only trusted Jessica that much.

Just then, the radar beeped, as if detecting another unit somewhere, then it went silent, so the crew ignored it and continued in their assorted tasks. It had to have just been some static from the background hash, nothing more.

Over the long miles, the shale-covered ground began to slope more and more steeply, and the speed of the convoy sharply accelerated until the vehicles were almost careering down the steep slope.

“Easy now,” Roberto warned, neatly folding the useless map. According to it, they should be in the middle of a fragging lake. “Take your time, we’re in no hurry…”

“Tell that to the fragging tires!” Jake shot back, working the brakes and shifting gears steadily. “There’s so much loose rock covering the ground we’re losing traction and starting to slide.”

“I sense danger…” Yates intoned, his eyes closed, his head turned toward the windshield as if he could still see.

“Tell me something I don’t know, ya fleeb!” Jake shot back petulantly.

“The wall approaches!” the doomie cried, raising both arms.

Suddenly the radar started to beep, the tones coming faster every second.

“Son of a bitch, there’s something dead ahead!” Jake shouted over the noise of the device. He tried the brakes and the war wag started to slip sideways. Knowing that would only make them flip over, the driver eased off the pedal and fed the engines more juice, accelerating their speed, but straightening the vehicle. “If we crash into something, at least it’ll be head-on!”

“Should I toss out the anchor, chief?” Jessica asked, going to a corner and resting a hand on a large lever.

“We’re going too fast,” Roberto growled, studying the landscape rushing past the wag. “It’ll only snap off, or worse, rip us in two!”

Breathing hard, the woman removed her hand from the lever. “Then what are your orders, sir?” she demanded.

Roberto caught the honorific and understood that was her way of saying she had no idea what to do next. But that was okay, because he did. Reaching over, he tapped a button on the intercom. “Eric, are you ready?”

“As ever, Chief,” came the smooth reply. “Just say the word.”

The radar pinged away, the noise almost a continuous tone by now. Speeding over a low swell in the ground, there was suddenly a rocky cliff directly ahead of the charging wag. A dark rill of cooled lava, studded and jagged. A wall of death.

“Wait for it…” Roberto commanded, listening to the radar and watching the rill rapidly approach. It if was thicker than a yard, their journey ended here and now. “Steady…no rush, plenty of time…and fire!”

There came the thud of the missile pod opening, then the crunching-paper sound of a rocket building power, immediately followed by the whoosh of a launch. Something flashed ahead of the wag, trailing smoke and fire. Then a tremendous explosion rocked the world and the radar stopped beeping.

Everybody tried not to hold their breath as the war wag plowed into a cloud of dark smoke, and they could dimly see the shattered remains of the thin rock wall on either side for less than a second, before they were through!

Jouncing over some uneven ground, the wag seemed to go airborne for a few seconds before crashing back down. The entire vehicle shuddered, loose items flying free, then there was the sound of shattering glass, a muffled cry of pain.

The war wag leveled out smooth and true once more, and there came the low hum of tires rolling along on a paved road!

“A road!” Jessica exhaled, one arm hugging her chest, the other wrapped tight around the periscope. “We’re on a predark road!”

“Just like Yates predicted!” Jimmy shouted in delight, beaming a smile at him.

Wordlessly, the big doomie nodded as if all was right in the world.

“That’s gotta mean we’re near the Nowhere Bridge,” Roberto said confidently, reaching out a shaking hand to retrieve a ceramic cup from a recess in the wall. The contents had slopped about some, but he didn’t give a damn. They had made it through and were still sucking air.

“Request permission to piss in my pants, sir,” Quinn said with a rueful grin. “Aw, too late, again.”

The tension broke in the room, and everybody laughed, bodies relaxing now that the worst of the trip down Hellfire Mountain was behind them.

“Get that man a mop!” Roberto commanded with a grin, taking a sip from the mug. Blind Norad, it was awful, but he swallowed the stuff anyway. He wished to hell there was coffee sub, but the convoy had run out of that months ago, and there’d be no more until they reached the stockpile near Tumbledown.

This muck was just some of the homemade brew that Matilda concocted back in the kitchen out of burned bread-crumbs, chicory and who knew what else. It smelled like coffee, and tasted sort of similar. Okay, it tasted nothing like the real stuff. However, it was hot and eased the chill on his leg, which was all that really mattered. Locked inside the safe under his bunk was a sealed can of the real stuff, predark Colombian dark roast, but that was being saved for a special occasion. Like finding Cascade.

“You sure we’ll find it there?” Jessica demanded, returning to her chair near the blaster rack. She slung a leg over the arms and sat sideways. “This is a hell of a gamble we’re taking.”

“It’d be a much bigger gamble to try for Cascade without any fragging proof,” Roberto replied, sipping the tepid brew.

“The proof exists.” Yates spoke in a hollow voice, making a vague gesture. “The box is red, and near a stone of fire.”

“Does that mean lava, or coal?” Jessica demanded, but the doomie would not, or could not, say any more.

Easing the velocity of the war wag to a more manageable level, War Wag One took the lead, and the other convoy vehicles assumed a standard triangular formation as it rolled along the ancient roadway. The median was full of tall weeds, and they passed a car on the side of the berm, the wreck alive with bees. Several miles down the road, the wags had to go around a toll station choked solid with cars, trucks, buses and army tanks smashed together, forming an impassable barrier of rust, weeds and old bones.

The countryside was gradually leveling out, the steep foothills becoming rolling hillocks. Made of concrete instead of asphalt, the highway was in much better shape than expected.

However, a murky shadow began to creep across the world as the red sun slowly moved behind Firestorm Mountain. Suddenly darkness covered the land, yet the cloudy sky was still bright with the orange and purple of toxic chems. It was as if the convoy had gone underwater. Jessica turned on the halogen headlights, and the beams cut bright swatches through the gloom.

“Hold!” Yates said, raising a hand. “It is near!”

Pneumatic brakes hissing, gears grinding, Jake slowed the war wag, and soon it crawled to a gentle stop. The artificial night enveloped the convoy, the only sounds coming from the big diesel engines. With the warmth of the day gone, a phosphorescent mist rose from the ground, moving across the cracked expanse of highway, seeming almost alive.

“Report,” Roberto demanded.

Going to a rad counter, Jessica checked the background levels. “Clear,” she announced. “It’s just mist.”

“Glad to hear it,” Roberto muttered. “Quinn, work the arc.”

Flipping several switches on the control board, the bald man eased the power up on the arc lamp until a searing beam of light stretched ahead of the wag for hundreds of yards. They had discovered the hard way that the electricity had to be increased gradually on the arc lamp, or else the carbon elements blew, and it took days to whittle out new ones. Even then, the lamp had a short life, but there was nothing brighter. The electric arc made the vaunted halogens seem weak as tallow candles.

Using a joystick, Quinn moved the brilliant beam across the wags in a circle, then started exploring farther and farther away, until a pair of massive concrete pylons came into view. Angling upward, the lamp revealed what they had come for—the Bridge to Nowhere.

“Jesus, Buddha and Zeus,” Jimmy whispered, making an ancient protective gesture.

Whatever the bridge had been connected to in predark was long vanished. Now, the colossal structure stood in the middle of a grassy field, the four concrete-and-steel towers supporting a half mile of roadway some fifty feet off the misty ground. Whatever was on top could not be seen, but if the doomseer was correct, that was where the key to the future was hidden, a map to the greatest treasure of the predark world.

Hunching forward, Roberto clenched and unclenched his fists. “Black dust, we can’t see a damn thing from this angle,” the trader growled. “We’re gonna have to do a recce on foot.”

“My boys are ready,” Jimmy said, standing and taking an AK-47 assault rifle from a wall rack. The barrel was actually from an AK-101, the magazine from a Chinese QBZ longblaster, and the stock was hand carved, but the mismatched rapidfire worked fine.

“Everybody take extra brass,” Jessica directed, opening a small box and extracting a flare pistol. The woman passed it to the crewman, along with a couple of waxy cartridges.

“If you see red…” Jimmy began, tucking the items into his pocket.

Interrupting the man, the radio moaned with modulation, and then briefly cleared.

“Tiger Lily to Scorpion,” the ceiling speaker crackled. “Tiger Lily to Scorpion.”

Taking down the mike, Roberto thumbed the transmit switch. “Scorpion, here, Tiger Lily,” he replied. “Spot something moving?” The codes were not necessary in this desolate area as there were probably no other working radios for a hundred miles, but practice made perfect. In a firefight, a single wrong word could ace everybody.

“Nothing important, just wanted to remind you hotdogs that according to the duty roster, this recce is mine,” Diana stated. “And my boys are itching to find out if what the doomie says is true.”

Yeah, mine, too. Privately, Roberto wanted to countermand the woman, but that would only make her lose face in front of the crew. No choice, then. “Confirm, Tiger, the job is yours,” Roberto said, a narrowing of his eyes the only sign of what he was feeling.

Rubbing his chin, Jimmy started to object, and Jessica shut him down with a stern look. Rules were rules, and Roberto was the leader here, end of discussion.

“Move slow, and stay low,” the trader said into the mike. “Anything twisted, have your people run like their pants are on fire. And that’s an order. You savvy?”

“No prob, Chief,” the commander of War Wag Three replied with a laugh. “I even took away their combat boots, and issued ’em sneakers.” There was a brief pause before the woman added, “Any idea what they’ll really find up there?”

Salvation.

“You tell me, Tiger Lily,” Roberto said. “Look for the box, but come back alive.”

“Roger that, Scorpion. Tiger Lily out.”

Releasing the button, Roberto kept the mike in his grip, ready to relay instructions. Then he reluctantly returned it to the wall hook. He either trusted his people or he did not. There was no third option.

“All right, you lucky bastards, Diana is taking care of this one,” Jessica said loudly, looking around the control room. “So you apes stand down.”

Unhappy grumbling filled the room, and several members of the crew shifted their shoulders to glance at the hallway door as if they were going to go outside anyway. Then they relented, flicked the safeties back on and started dropping clips as a prelude to returning the rapidfires to the wall racks.

“And what the frag are you assholes doing?” Jimmy replied, placing his fists on his hips. “Keep that iron in your mitts in case Three needs cover fire!”

The frowns became grins, and the crew rushed to the blasterports. If there was any trouble, Two and Three would do what they could, but any serious chilling would be handled by War Wag One and its heavy weaponry.

Roberto touched the intercom. “Eric, get the L-Gun hot in case Tex has to burn some crystal.”

“Will do, Chief,” Suzette replied. “The comps are running five by five, no glitches or hitches. We’re good to go.”

“Nice to know. Where the frag is your husband?”

“Checking the flamethrower on Two. Just in case.”

The trader had to smile at that. There was a predark word he had heard once in Two-Son ville, para-something…What was it again? Oh yeah, para-annoyed. It meant you suspected everything of doing anything. That was Eric. The only thing that kept the twitchy little tech sane was Suzette. “Fair enough. Just let me know when he’s back.”

“Will do!”

“Scorpion out,” Roberto said, and clicked off the device.

“And there they go,” Jake announced, his hands folded over the steering wheel, both boots flat on the floor mat. The disappointment was clear in his voice.

A group of people climbed out of War Wag Three and walked into the chilly mist. Their shapes were lumpy with backpacks and shoulder bags, their hands cradling longblasters and torches.

Roberto nodded at that. Smart move. Even the arc lamp couldn’t shine a beam around corners.

It took them only a few minutes to reach the bridge. Trudging to the nearest end, they stabbed the torches into the soft ground, then aimed crossbows upward and fired. The hooked quarrels arched high and sailed over the edge of the elevated roadway, only to slide off and come tumbling back. It took several tries before one of the hooks snagged something, but it was only a tire rim. A dozen tries later, the members of the crew hooked something strong enough to support their weight.

Divesting themselves of everything but rapidfires, they slowly climbed hand over hand to reach the top, and disappeared from sight.

“Okay, people, what do you see?” Roberto said into his mike. There was only static for an answer, and he increased the power to maximum.

“…epeat, can you hear us?”

“Now, we can. Proceed.”

“Okay, it’s a right mare’s nest up here, Chief,” a man replied, the radio crackling with static. The range was less than a hundred feet, and the megatons of nuke trash in the air still garbled the communications slightly. Anything over a mile and even the most powerful radio was useless these days.

“We’ve got cars and trucks piled three, four layers high,” the crewman continued. “And everything is covered with bird shit, and ivy, loose leaves and…wait a sec…”

A minute passed, then another.

“Nuking hell, the doomie was right!” the voice on the radio called. “We found a truck crashed into an ambulance, making a sort of natural shelter. Somebody used it as a campsite, there’s the remains of a fire, empty tin cans and the whole shebang.”

“What about the box?” Roberto asked, unable to keep the eagerness out of his voice.

“It was right near a rusted-out old Caddy, and guess what? The name on the tires was Firestone.”

“Son of a bitch,” Quinn muttered, casting a furtive look at the doomie. But if Yates heard, or cared, there was no indication.

“What’s inside?” Jessica demanded into her own mike.

“Tell you soon,” the crewman replied. There was a brief crackle of static and the words were lost.

“Say again, what did you find?” Roberto demanded.

“Well, hang me for a mutie, Chief,” the man replied excitedly. “I’m holding the damn thing in my hand! It’s true. The legends are all true!”

“Well, get your butts back down here,” Roberto said, grinning widely. “I wanna see for myself!”

“Break out the good shine, we’re on the way…What the frag?”

There was no noise from the radio, but tiny flashes of light could be seen coming from on top of the bridge. Blaster fire!

“What the frag is going on up there?” Diana demanded loudly over the radio. “Jefferson, report, goddamn it! Have you been jacked?” But there was only a thick silence.

Then there came the dull thud of a gren, and a body tumbled over the edge to hit the misty ground with a hard thump.

“Holy shit, that was Jefferson!” Quinn cried out, standing at his station.

“All right, let’s go!” Jessica directed, grabbing an AK-47 and stumbling for the hallway.

“You stay!” Roberto boomed, gesturing with the hand holding the mike. “Jimmy, go get our people!”

Paused alongside the exit door, the woman radiated a controlled fury as the other crew members grimly streamed outside. Silently, the trader and his second in command held a private conversation, and she grudgingly limped back to her chair, an arm cradling her bandaged ribs. Just because he was right, didn’t mean she had to like sitting on her ass.

As the crews from War Wags One, Two and Three rushed toward the ropes dangling off the bridge, they could see more flashes on top and heard the telltale boom of another gren. The recce squad appeared, scrambling along the outside edge of the bridge, firing their rapidfires at something unseen above and behind them. The crewmen on the ground raised their longblasters, but there was nothing in sight. What the frags were the others shooting at, thin air?

Reaching the rope, the recce squad grabbed it one after the other and insanely dived off the structure, swinging wildly as they slid down the nylon length with smoke rising from their gloved fists.

As they got close to the ground, the first crewman released the rope and jumped away, the others arriving only moments later. Most landed hard, but came up running. However, one crewman went sprawling and there was an audible crack of breaking bone. Grimacing in pain, he rolled onto his stomach and started crawling for the wags. Pausing in their flight, two of his companions went back, grabbed the wounded man under the arms and hauled him along, their faces pale with fright.

“Vine puppets!” a running crewman yelled, his shirt covered with blood. “The whole fragging bridge is infested with vine puppets!”

The words sent cold knives into the guts of everybody present, and they looked up just in time to see a row of naked people appear along the edge of the bridge. Incredibly, the men and women simply stepped off the edge. But they did not fall. Instead, they gracefully eased downward as if gliding on invisible wings.

However, as they got closer, the crewmen on the ground could see the leafy vines embedded throughout their nude forms, the mouths slack and drooling, the wide eyes horribly alive and shrieking in wordless torment.

Snarling curses, the crew cut loose with concentrated blasterfire from the Kalashnikovs, the 7.62 mm rounds tearing the naked people apart. But instead of red blood, a thin green sap oozed from the gaping wounds, along with hair-thin tendrils resembling pale roots.

Then the puppets landed, and the tattered corpses began walking toward the norms, the flexing ivy still connected to the animated corpses.

As the crew hastily dropped back, the M-60 machine guns of Two and Three cut loose, the big .308 rounds chewing the bodies into pieces. Shaking off the lumps of flesh, the green vines snaked out after the fleeing norms, catching the crippled crewman in the back. Instantly he went stiff, his eyes rolling in unimaginable agony.

Releasing his arms, the other crewmen fired point-blank, blowing out the back of his head, the pink brain already full of wiggling tendrils.

Not bothering to open the backpacks on the misty ground, the panting crewmen peppered the canvas bags with blasterfire until the Molotov cocktails inside ignited. Engulfed in flames, the puppets kept walking onward until the ivy blackened and jerked out of the bodies to lash around madly. Throwing off charred leaves, the greenery began to shrivel, then the vines snapped in two, the undamaged sections retreating to the bridge, the rest of the hellish plant consigned to deadly flames.

Only now more vines came snaking down from the bridge from every side, some with puppets attached and some without, obviously on the hunt for new slaves.

“Fucking mutie!” Jefferson screamed, blowing thunder at the moving greenery.

Throwing down more Molotovs, the crew tried to form a wall between them and the vines, and the plants disappeared. But then vines erupted from the ground well past the conflagration and surged forward.

Any semblance of organized resistance disappeared at that, and everybody took off, firing and running in a near panic.

Pausing to pull the arming ring from a gren, a crew member dropped her explosive charge as a vine whipped around her throat and entered her cursing mouth. Gagging, she tried to chew it out, then went oddly stiff and turned to face the other norm fumbling to work the gren in his clumsy hands.

Ruthlessly, the others cut her down, then ran for their lives.

Charging out of War Wag One, Abduhl strode into view, the pressurized canisters of a portable flamethrower strapped to his back.