Puzzled, he realized that whatever had happened in this place, he had taken no personal part in the firefight.
So what had happened? How had he ended up here, and who were the chilled he could smell so strongly around him, their stench drowning the surrounding scents?
Jak’s frown deepened. There was one possibility that he didn’t want to consider.
Fighting the rising tide of horror that choked his throat with bile, Jak rose slowly to his feet and took a long, slow survey of the land around him, certain now that he was alone for the immediate vicinity.
He was in the middle of a veld that stretched for at least a mile in each direction. There were distant stands of trees, stunted and blackened with leaves that hung as heavy as drops of blood in the clear, bright sun. The sky was a deep blue, tinged with just the faintest hint of chem-cloud purple. Traces of wispy cumulus broke the unrelenting block of color, the sun hazy behind the chem-addled atmosphere. The sun was orange, beating down with a heat that was oppressive, causing the smell of the charnel house to hang still in the air.
Despite the heat and lack of cloud, he figured that the area had to have a good rainfall, as the earth on which he had been resting was moist, the loam soil rich smelling. And furthermore, the grass was a lush green, not dry and spiky. The flowering plants were still in bloom, their thick and twisting green stems looking healthy and not starved of water. They grew to a height of between two and a half and three feet, thick enough in places to form small banks of color that showed the indents of fallen bodies even though the corpses themselves were hidden from view.
In other places, Jak could see the signs of violent struggle more clearly. There were glimpses of fallen fighters, blood smearing the grass and earth around, the stained clothing and ragged and torn flesh clearly visible.
With a sense of terrible inevitability, Jak counted the number of corpses.
There were six.
He moved across the veld, his light and instinctive footing leaving no trace of his passing, the barely disturbed grass and plant stems rising as the pressure of his tread was released.
The first corpse was a woman. A black woman. She had no face anymore, the exposed bone and pulped flesh a mass broken only by the distorted position of her unseeing eyes. The braids that still hung limply around her head identified her as surely as the Czech-manufactured ZKR pistol that hung from her lifeless grasp. Dr. Mildred Wyeth, the freezie who had defied skydark by being cryogenically frozen after a reaction to anesthetic and who had been revived into the post holocaust world her generation had engendered, had finally come up against one too many odds. As if the injury to her head hadn’t been enough to buy the farm, she also had a large gash across her chest, cutting through the layers of clothing to tear clean through to the rib cage, exposing it to the air.
Just a few yards away lay J.B. Dix, the Armorer. His eyes stared sightlessly from behind his wire-framed spectacles. His beloved fedora lay a few feet from his chilled corpse. His close cropped hair was soaked with blood from a deep gash across his forehead. But it wasn’t that wound that had killed him. Rather, it was the fact that his head had been cleanly severed from his body, bloodied veins and vertebrae still hanging from the remains of his body, which lay only a few inches from the head. The body was untouched in any other way.
Jak knew that whatever had taken out the Armorer had been swift. J.B. was a wiry and tough fighter, with lightning reflexes, yet his Uzi was still strapped across his body, his M-4000 Smith & Wesson scattergun with its deadly load of barbed metal flechettes still across his back, the stock poking awkwardly from beneath the fallen corpse. The Tekna knife that he used in close combat was still sheathed, and the vast amounts of ammunition and grens that he carried about his person and in the canvas bag that lay to one side of him were untouched.