RYAN AND THE COMPANIONS arrived at the rim of Moonboy ville’s box canyon early in the morning of their third day of march. Shouldering his Steyr, he used its telescopic sight to scan downrange. The sun was angled behind him so flare off the front lens wouldn’t give away his position.
Before Armageddon, Moonboy had been a bedroom community of Salt Lake City; now it was a shamble of huts, lean-tos and rubblized lots where a development of upscale, three-story tract homes had once stood. Four of the ville’s original streetlight poles still stood more or less upright, their gutted sockets trailing pigtails of severed power cord. The poles cast long, crooked shadows over the jumbled roofs of rusting corrugated metal.
Moonboy had once prided itself as being a “pure norm” ville. Which meant that in the vicinity it was always open season on muties, or suspected muties, who happened to wander by. It was the kind of place that accumulated human trash like the corner of a back alley. Hopeless marginals—over the hill black-hearts, inbred droolers, assorted triple stupes—swirled randomly around Deathlands for years only to wind up in this or some similar blind canyon graveyard. With their backs to the wall, literally, at the end of the road, literally, they could tell lies in the shade and safely rot.
Or so they had thought.
Unfortunately for them, the first expeditionary force from the parallel universe had made Earthfall smack in the middle of the ville’s main street. The drunken residents had mistaken their black battlesuits for some kind of mutie insect shells, and had opened fire in a wild but ineffectual free for all. After easily subduing Moonboy’s inhabitants, Colonel Gabhart and his crew examined the survivors for brain viruses and for invisible but inheritable mutation caused disorders. Ironically, they found that all the “pure norms” were incurably diseased.
A quick survey of the landscape told Ryan that no one had moved into the vacant huts since he and the companions had been there last. That didn’t surprise him much. Even in broad daylight, Moonboy ville had a bad feel to it. It wasn’t just deserted; it was tainted, spoiled. And if there were no visible signs of life below, there were still plenty of visible signs of death. Since Ryan knew what to look for, he could find them even at a distance of six hundred yards. They were nestled in protected places where the chem rain couldn’t wash them away—under the collapsed roofs of lean-tos, inside the doorways of hammered down hovels.
And if a passing would-be squatter didn’t realize what the oblong brown blotches in the dirt signified, one whiff of the sick sweet stench that hung over Moonboy like an evil fog would be clue enough.
Because Colonel Gabhart was afraid of contagious diseases spreading to his crew, he had used carniphage foam on the dead and the dying to sterilize the place. Ryan had witnessed the foam in action. He could still remember the way the cannie had squealed as he tried to drag himself out from under the mounds of ravening microorganisms, as muscle and bone dissolved into a brown liquid that apparently even wild animals wouldn’t touch.
The pervasive odor of decay had forced Gabhart and the rest of his team to make their permanent camp a good distance from the site of the massacre, on the farthest edge of the faint gridwork of the development’s streets. That was where Ryan and the others had left them.
The camp was still there, but nobody was home.
“It looks like our friends have already moved on,” Ryan said, lowering the rifle.
“Question is,” J.B. said, “where did they go?”
“And did they go willingly?” Krysty added.
“No way of figuring that out from up here,” Ryan said, “If we check the arroyo, we can see if they dug up the gyroplane and chilling gear. That would tell us something.”
“Walk across canyon no good,” Jak said, his red eyes glittering. He raised an arm and pointed around the top of the rim. “Hides for shooters along summit. Go down there we’re in bastard cross fire.”
“He’s right,” Mildred said. “Once we’re in the middle of the canyon floor we’ve got nowhere to run. All the enemy has to do is seal off the mouth and start pushing us back. We’ll end up pinned against the canyon’s rear wall, facing a firing squad.”