Ryan took some loose cartridges from his pocket. As he set them on the ground, he said, “Don’t touch them until we’re out of sight”
Chapter Four
As Ryan flicked the sweat from his brow, he marveled at the way Doc could run. For two hours they had been jogging on the highway’s fractured surface, laboring under the weight of the extra ammo. For two hours the academic had been at the front of the file, pounding out the pace in easy, loping strides. It wasn’t fast, but it was gruelingly steady.
As Doc jogged along, he mumbled to himself. Ryan could hear his constant muttering over the in-sync tramp of their footfalls and the rattle of their gear. As was usually the case, the old man was holding a conversation with someone he had conjured up from long ago. His words were so indistinct it was hard to tell if the departed was someone dear to him or someone he despised. Ryan understood the general nature of Doc’s ghosts, though. He knew that in everyone’s life, specters accumulated, hovering until the moment of death. They were memories of things that should have been said and done that were not, or things that were done and said that should not have been. Doc had been ripped from the bosom of his family, and had much unfinished business to reconcile.
Ryan held up his hand to shield his single eye from
the glare of the noonday sun. Ahead the baron’s toll road stretched into the flat distance. At the horizon it vanished into a heat mirage, a shimmering lake of mercury. On the right side of the highway, the valley floor sloped to a barren expanse of silt plain, through which a brown river moved sluggishly. The deeply eroded hills that framed the six-lane road were patched with clumps of stunted trees and spike grass, and scrubby, knee-high colonies of orange-and-white, rad-mutated lichen.
He had decided to use the highway because it was the fastest and most direct route to Willie ville. He wasn’t concerned about the lack of defensive cover along the way. If it left them somewhat vulnerable, it also meant that the stickies would be visible from a long way off. He wasn’t worried about stumbling into an ambush, either. The army of monsters was after much bigger game than a few stragglers. And he didn’t think some part of the enemy force would be lying in wait along the road. Everything the stickies had done so far indicated that they were moving in a single, cohesive unit, for some well-defined purpose.
The idea that one mutie could lead and control that many stickies was as puzzling to Ryan as it was disturbing. Stickies usually had no external ears, which made it hard to communicate with them using speech. Orders had to be shouted at top volume and at the same time, spoken very slowly and distinctly. It made complex operational control of large groups of stickies virtually impossible; the monsters in the back rows never
got the message. And on top of that, stickies seemed to have unusually short attention spans.
Something appeared in the middle of the mercury-lake mirage. A black form was headed their way. Ryan strained against the glare to keep the shape in focus. When the dark form cleared the mirage, its head flashed glacier white in the sun.
Jak was returning from a long-range recce.
“Doc,” Ryan said, “hold up.”
The old man craned his head around and nodded.
“Jak’s coming back,” Ryan explained as they all slowed to a walk. “Let’s take a breather.”
They dropped their loads and sat in the meager shade of the median strip’s wall. Taking the opportunity to drink from their water bags, they let Jak come to them.
Doc’s Adam’s apple bobbed mightily as he gulped down the tepid liquid.
“Easy on that water, Doc,’* Mildred warned, “or you’re just going to puke it all back up.”
The old man lowered the bag. “I bow to your expertise on such matters, dear Doctor,” he said, puffing.
Ryan was glad to see that Mildred had recovered from the odd turn she had taken back at the burned ville. She had never acted like that before, and it worried him. Like Doc, she wasn’t a native of this time and place and didn’t possess the psychic armor to protect her from the shocking violence, the unspeakable monstrosities that were part of day-to-day existence in Death lands. When he had seen her come stumbling back from the heart of the ville’s holocaust, her clothes