James Axler – Deathlands 35 – Skydark

“A ville,” Krysty said.

“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. “My guess is it’ll take us until nearly daylight to get over there.”

“Night march?” Jak asked.

“The stickies aren’t going to stop because of the dark,” Ryan answered. “They like the night for hunting. We’ve got to stay with them. We better get going/’

“At least the stickies are going to be easy to track,” J.B. stated as he started down the rubble mound. “Like walking in the wake of a tornado.”

“Come on, Mildred,” Ryan said when he realized the woman wasn’t moving from the crest. “Mildred?”

She didn’t respond. She stood perfectly still, staring intently at the distant flames.

When Ryan touched her arm, she started violently.

“You okay?”

Mildred blinked at him. “Uh, yeah, I think so.” With a troubled expression on her face, she forced herself to turn away from the vista. “I’m fine. Let’s go,”

Moving single file, on triple red alert, they followed the vague remnants of a road down the flanks of the broad, low mountain. Ryan had no doubt that the road, overgrown as it was with grass shoots as sharp as steel needles, pierced and cracked by stunted, thorny trees tough enough to survive the acid fall, had been unrecognizable before the stickies had taken that route. After they had passed, as J.B. had predicted, it was like walking in the tracks of a whirlwind. In the moonlight, curving down the slope ahead, Ryan could see the swathe of freshly trampled earth and crushed foliage.

He and the others took care to give the broken branches a wide berth. A gummy sap dripped from the wounds in the tree limbs and pooled in white puddles on the ground. The corrosive sap could strip the flesh

from bone in a matter of seconds. Once it entered the bloodstream, the milky juice burned like wildfire, destroying everything it touched. Death, when it came, was never soon enough.

A SULFUROUS DAWN STARTED to leak through blue-black cloudbanks on the horizon as the travelers neared the valley floor. It had been a hard march, with few stops, but otherwise uneventful. They had encountered no stickles en route and had seen no sign of human refugees, either.

Ryan halted the column behind an outcrop and, while his companions rested, he cautiously surveyed the terrain below. The middle of the valley was split by a great predark highway. Though his distant view was obscured to the right by air rank with low-hanging smoke, the road appeared to run the entire length of the basin. It was six lanes wide and had a crumbling median strip that had once separated a two-way flow of traffic.

The road had been built to last From his elevated position, Ryan could see the slip-joints that crossed the roadway at regular intervals, engineered to compensate for seasonal expansion and contraction of the substrate on which the highway sat So on doomsday, when nuke-blast earthquakes rippled through the valley, instead of fracturing into a billion fragments, the enormous blocks of pavement tipped either up or down, absorbing the shock waves. That left the plates of roadway jutting at angles that would have burst the

tires and shattered the axles of predark fossil-fuel-powered vehicles moving at high speed. But the foot traffic and animal carts of the post-Apocalypse, industrial devolution could easily pick their way over or around the obstacles.

No one was moving on the highway now, and beyond it, on Ryan’s left, their immediate goal was no longer visible.

The raging fires that had acted like a beacon during the long night’s trek had burned down, leaving behind a dense pall of smoke that concealed whatever remained of the ville.

Ryan and his companions trotted down to the road and, once there, turned into the cloud of swirling smoke. Visibility dropped to fifteen or twenty feet. They had to slow their pace and close ranks. It was very hard to breathe without coughing. Then a sudden breeze shifted the haze. Looming up in front of them was a massive barrier of concrete rubble-a highway overpass that hadn’t survived the nuke-quakes. It had collapsed a century before, blocking all six lanes. Ryan ted them to the left, off the road, following a two-rut track that diverted traffic around the barrier