“All hail the Scorpion God,” he said with a guttural laugh, then spit on the dead man.
“Wh-what about us, Baron?” a sec man asked nervously. “How…how c-can we prove our loyalty to you?”
Baron Gaza looked at the man coldly.
“You can’t,” he said, and the women cut loose in a volley of lead, cutting down the rest of the sec men on their knees.
The sound of the blasterfire was still echoing among the dunes as Gaza went to the fallen 25 mm cannon and lifted it from the filthy sand. As gentle as stroking a lover, the man caressed the satiny smooth barrel.
“Now we’re a match for the Trader,” Gaza said with feeling, and started walking to the APC with his prize. “Load the rest of the ammo, and loot the bodies of weapons or anything else useful. I’ll see to the installation of this personally.”
Impressed at the display of raw strength, his wives preened in pride as the man walked the staggeringly heavy weapon over to the LAV 25 and started attaching it to the pintel mounting. Then shouldering their blasters, the women started stripping the men and horses when Victoria suddenly stood straight up and pointed to the south, making loud grunting noises.
Scowling, Allison turned and gasped, dropping the bloody boots in her hands. There, rising high above the world, was a white mushroom cloud.
EVENTUALLY, the rumbling winds passed and the companions slowly eased hands away from their faces to fill their aching lungs with the clean fresh air blowing in from the desert.
Dusted white from the billowing salt, Ryan blinked hard to clear his vision and could finally see again. The building under their boots still shook slightly, but the salt dome was gone, exposing something from another world.
It was a preDark city. The companions were standing on top of a skyscraper that rose above a perfectly preserved town that appeared to stretch for dozens of blocks in every direction. Mebbe more! The city filled a circular depression in the ground, edged by a sheer rock wall that rose to the desert floor above them. For a moment the man had a rush of vertigo as he adapted to the fact that he had fallen down to land high in the sky.
In the distance the remains of the dome crumbled along the rim of the cliff, the huge pieces falling into the city to smash cars and buildings. White salt clouds moved like fog along the streets, and a raging fire burned out of control in an intersection where a gasoline tanker had been flattened by the plummeting tons of the falling dome.
“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc whispered in unabashed wonder, turning in a circle. “It is as if we have traveled backward in time.”
“A preDark city,” J.B. said, recovering his hat from the rooftop. “Not a ruin, but the whole damn thing.”
Walking to the corner of the roof, Ryan looked out across the nameless Texas city. The skyscraper they were on was in the middle of the sprawling metropolis, near some sort of an open stadium, dust clouds still billowing inside resembling a winter snowstorm.
“A sink hole,” he said. The one-eyed man had seen similar before, but never anything on this scale. It was staggering! “Must have been caused by the first nukes. Sometimes the land just cracks apart, sometimes it rises into new mountains or mesas, and sometime falls into the earth like this.”
“I remember seeing pictures in Time magazine about a mining village in Pennsylvania,” Mildred said, shifting the satchel on her shoulder into a more comfortable position. “Almost the same damn thing as this happened. A section of ground dropped out from under the folks like an elevator, removing the heart of the city. Only it didn’t drop nice and even like this, it was sharply titled. Took the Army Corps of Engineers a week to rescue everybody while it continued to slowly descend.”
“Is that happening here?” Dean demanded, suddenly alert, hands splayed for balance. “We still going down?”
“No, we’re stationary,” Krysty said, her fiery hair slowly uncoiling from the startling sight of the city. She kept starting to call them ruins, but the buildings were in perfect condition, aside from some minor damage caused by the falling dome. A few of the larger chunks had hit the streets below and not broken apart, the slabs of pristine white salt scattered about like pieces of an eggshell amid the homes and office buildings.