“Colonel Gabhart and the others might not have had anything to do with this,” Mildred said.
“They could’ve changed their minds about bringing the armies across, too,” J.B. countered. “Mebbe they had blood relatives starving to death on the other side. Blood being thicker than water, they decided to reopen the passageway and save them.”
“However it happened,” Krysty said, “they’re here. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
All eyes turned to Ryan.
He was the only one who had seen the other world. And though he’d tried to describe its bleakness and horror to his friends, mere words couldn’t do it justice. They stuck in his throat like slivers of glass.
The nukecaust that had laid waste to Deathlands was an accident, an instantaneous, one time event, but the alternate end to history that Ryan had witnessed was the final outcome of a civilization that had attacked nature as if it were a sworn enemy. There was nothing left on the parallel Earth but human beings and the avalanche of disasters their science had brought to life. They were indeed like two-legged cockroaches: indomitable breeders, surviving at all costs, consuming and destroying every living thing and every resource within their reach.
In his mind, Ryan could see gleaming, hard shelled black armies pouring through the parted lips of the reality corridor. Armies carrying weapons and technology that nothing in Deathlands could match. Armies so vast that even without advanced weapons they could defeat any force the people of Deathlands could field against them.
Running away only postponed the inevitable. With an eye in the sky endlessly circling and searching their world, there was no safe place to hide. Fate had left Ryan and his companions one choice, and it was bad.
“We’ve got to go back to Moonboy ville,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to find a way to fight the bastards and drive them out for good.” There was silence along the riverbank. To enter battle with a slight possibility of victory was one thing; to walk willingly into the spinning blades of a meat grinder was another. Ryan thought about the village man who had death marched himself to meet the catfish’s impaling spine. Sirena had told the poor bastard his fate, and he had surrendered to it. Just as they were about to do. There was an important difference, of course.
Ryan listened to the gurgle of the life giving river and felt the embrace of the dense forest that loomed on all sides. Overhead, the blanket of stars twinkled as his world slowly turned. The difference was, they wouldn’t die for nothing. And they wouldn’t die alone.
Chapter Three
A rag securely tied over his nose and mouth, Dr. Huth stopped hacking at the hardpan with the blade of his shovel. The sound of a distant car horn faded in and out, intermittently muffled by the gusts of hot wind that scoured the desert plain.
Abandoning the shovel, Huth climbed the side of Byram ville’s defensive berm for a look. As he scaled the mound of dirt, his feet slipped around inside the oversize jogging shoes he wore despite the plastic bags he’d wadded up in their toe boxes. His polyester pants were as stiff as cardboard. Not because they were new—their rigidity came from the black blood that starched the lap, thighs and shins. The pants were cinched tight around his waist with a length of frayed electrical cord.
To earn a dead man’s trousers and shoes, Huth had dug latrines barefoot and in his underpants for three days.
He was still digging latrines.
A mile away, a wag emerged from the dust devils that spun across the ruined interstate. It continued to honk as it approached the lone opening in the ville’s mounded perimeter wall. The vehicle, originally a small school bus, was painted in garish pink, green, yellow, red, a chaos of spray-can squiggles and overlayed abstract shapes. Even the sides of the tires and wheels were painted.
Belching black smoke from its exhaust, the wag stopped at the security checkpoint, which consisted of a breach in the berm that was partially blocked by a heap of junked vehicles. The all volunteer sec force emerged from behind that rusting barrier, shouting instructions as they aimed their handful of centerfire blasters at the driver. The bus’s side door opened at once, and the sec men climbed inside to make sure it didn’t conceal armed killers trying to loot the compound. The ville’s sec men never robbed or extorted wayfarers themselves. Robbery and extortion were left to the twenty-four-hour gaudy house and the seven-days-a-week swap meet.