Eden's Twilight

“Tough break for the folks inside,” Mildred added. “If they are people, and not muties, or, well, something.”

“But, madam, will they not perish without power?” Doc asked in pensive concern, then he relented. “No, forgive me, we have seen such things before. Disconnected from their power source, the units will automatically open.”

“Exactly,” Ryan said, climbing inside now that he was free from the weight of the rope. “Only we want to be far, far away when that happens.”

“Just in case they are norms,” Krysty added, “we’ve left them some army boots, a candle, a butane lighter and a knife. After that, it’s up to them. We can’t spare any food or water.”

“What mean?” Jak asked, taking the rope and looping it around the busted handle of the roof hatch, then lashing it to a cargo ring on the floor. “Left behind hellhound. Good eating!”

“If you say so,” Ryan muttered, wondering just how hungry a person would have to become to eat one of the things raw. And right out of the box, too.

“So, what’s the plan?” J.B. asked from the front. “We drop off the sleeping beauties and haul ass?”

Taking a jumpseat, Ryan buckled on the safety harness. “Now that we’re no longer at the mercy of the bastard winds, we can head due north, straight to the next redoubt.”

“Works for me!” J.B. said, hunching forward slightly and turning on the engine. The ceiling lights brightened slightly and the dashboard came to throbbing life.

“By Gadfrey, I dislike going back into the storm,” Doc said, pulling out a bodybar and locking it firmly into place. “But if another sec hunter droid shows up now, or worse, a spider with a working laser, we would be the proverbial sitting ducks.”

“Spam in can,” Jak corrected politely, taking the gunnery seat alongside the driver.

“Don’t worry about the vehicle,” Mildred said confidently, patting the chassis as if it were a well-trained horse. “I heard that these things are rad proof, bomb proof and were built to drive though nerve gas and napalm. I think she’ll do fine against sand.”

“Only one way to find out,” J.B. said, shifting into gear. “You folks ready back there?” There came an answering chorus of assent. “Okay, here we go!”

Letting the engine idle for a few moments to warm the seals, J.B. slowly eased the UCV forward. Behind them, the rope wrapped around the top cryo unit grew taut, stretching straight to a hoist on the front of a wrecked Hummer. Moving at a crawl, J.B. straightened the vehicle slightly as the unit began to be dragged out of the war wag, pushing the other two units ahead of it. As they got close, Ryan unplugged one freezer, Krysty did the other, and the units were pulled out of the wag to crash onto the floor of the garage. Instantly, the control panels started strobing brightly, and there came the telltale sound of hissing.

Reaching out, Ryan and Krysty grabbed the handles on the aft doors and slammed them shut.

Watching in the rearview mirror, J.B. needed no further prompting to stomp on the gas. Shoving aside a wrecked Hummer, the man drove directly to the nearest louvered door. Switching on the second engine, J.B. lowered the fork until it was scraping along the floor, throwing off bright sparks. It slid neatly under the door, and J.B. flipped another switch. Nothing happened for a moment, then the fork began to rise to the sound of crunching metal. In squealing protest, the garage doors were pushed upward, the louvered steel bending and folding like an accordion, until ripping free from the guides in the cinder-block wall with a crash. Instantly, the storm flooded the truck garage and the windshield darkened to a blue color.

“How do?” Jak asked, sitting upright.

“Not me,” J.B. replied, throwing switches. “The damn wag did that by itself!”

“The windshield is polarized,” Mildred explained, unable to take her eyes off the three cryogenic freezers. “It’s a chem reaction, nothing mechanical involved.” One of the units had fallen sideways, the aced hellhound spilling onto the floor. But the other two freezers were still right-side up, the control panels blinking wildly, the vents issuing white clouds.

As the vehicle trundled into the sandstorm, she lost sight of the units and felt something tug inside her chest as if they were emotionally attached to each other. Men or monsters, the occupants were from her time period, and she felt a strange connection to them that she could not really explain. Just a touch of homesickness, that’s all, she rationalized, turning away. Nothing more.

In sympathy, Doc patted her knee. “I also miss my home,” he whispered, the words meant only for her.

Mildred took his hand and gave it a squeeze in understanding and thanks.

Outside the wag, the companions could see the storm raging, but there was only a faint whisper of the sand hitting the roof hatch. The rope was taut, but apparently the seal was not hard anymore. But no grit or salt was coming inside, and that was good enough for now. Once they reached a redoubt, Ryan and J.B. could weld the lock into place, sealing the hatch airtight once more.

J.B. turned on the wipers, then tried the headlights, but if they worked, the beams were not strong enough to penetrate the clouds of dirty sand. “Dark night!” the man cursed. “This sure as hell is one nuke storm of a—”

“Dark night?” Jak supplied.

The two men exchanged glances and broke into laughter as the trundling vehicle moved past a dune and was hit by the full force of the maelstrom. The wag began to slide sideways from the sheer force of the wind, but the eight huge tires dug in hard, throwing tall arches of sand into the air. With a lurch, the vehicle gained a purchase and began lumbering along once more.

“Keep the radar working,” Ryan suggested, pulling out the SIG-Sauer to start the cleaning process again. “If a droid comes this way, that’ll give us enough of a warning to get away.”

“No prob,” Jak answered, and flicked a switch. Born and raised in the backwoods of the bayou, the teen hadn’t known much about tech until traveling with the companions. Now he was an old hand at such things. The radar swept around on the luminescent screen, showing nothing dense enough to register.

“National Guard bases are always near a city, so there should be something nearby,” Krysty said, looking over the ruins. Aside from the garage, the rest of the complex was only broken walls, open to the acid rain and wind. “We came from the south, and there is only desert to the west, so do we go north or east?”

“Nor’east,” Ryan decided. It was just like using a blaster that you were unfamiliar with. Never try for any sharpshooting the first time, just go for the heart. That way, if you’re too low and you hit the belly, or too high and hit the face, either way, the other guy is eating dirt.

“Fair enough,” J.B. said, shifting gear and giving the engines more juice. They obediently revved with power.

“Hummers, armed troops, sec hunter droids,” Krysty said, her hair coiling around her face. “I wonder if those were safeguarding the occupants of the three cases or escorting them somewhere special to be safely disposed.”

“Like the National Guard base?” Ryan asked, suddenly alert.

“Could be.”

Nobody had an answer to that, so the companions began to tend to the mundane aspects of travel, first cleaning their weapons, then preparing a meal of MRE packs. Impervious to the storm, the UCV rolled through the tempest, rising and falling like a ship at sea, the brutal winds hammering against the armored wag far into the long dark night.

AS THE UCV CRESTED THE HORIZON, it passed the mandatory safety zone. The two cryogenic units in the National Guard base activated, the lids smoothly rising as thick clouds of swirling mist rose into view. The slumbering occupants took their first breath as they sluggishly began to awaken.

Chapter Five

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.”