Screwing the cap back on his canteen, Ryan wiped his mouth and glanced at the sky. “Day’s nearly done,” he said. “We’ll use what light there is left to head east toward the redoubt from here on. Need to make sure we have someplace to retreat in case of trouble. If it’s clear, tomorrow we’ll start sweeping the valley in sections and find the base.”
“Then chill all blues,” Jak said, rubbing the scratch on his cheek from the near miss before. There was a faint taste of blood in his mouth, and when Jak turned to spit he saw a tiny flower struggling to grow through the thick layer of needles. Hawking into the bushes, the teenager gently pushed the needles away, giving the tiny plant a fighting chance. His wife had always like daisies.
“We ace the blues and Silas. That way, we can be sure he’ll never bother Front Royal again,” Ryan said grimly, picking up his longblaster. “Or anybody else, for that matter.”
Stealthily, the companions moved through the forest. The tall green pines were dense, the air fresh with their clean scent. There were no signs of people having ever been in these woods, not even debris from predark houses. The land was pristine, almost primordial. Occasionally, the call of a wild bird would echo through the branches, or a squirrel would race by. Dean tracked the passage of the rodents with his blaster, but didn’t fire. He knew they were too close to the blue shirts to risk shooting at anything.
Forcing their way through some blackberry bushes, the companions paused at the sight of a bear tunnel going through some of the thickets. Placing a finger on the trigger of his longblaster, Ryan knelt to look inside the dim recesses of the thorny bushes.
“Nothing in sight,” he announced.
Jak kicked at some dried droppings on the ground. “Month, mebbe more. Bear long gone.”
“Odd,” J.B. said, picking a berry off a bush and inspecting it carefully. “Animals don’t usually leave a ready source of food.”
“Mebbe he got chased away by a bigger bear,” Dean suggested.
His father didn’t reply, but chambered a round into the Steyr. A few hundred yards later, they found the half-consumed carcass of a buck deer on the stony ground, the rotting meat completely covered with busy black ants. The ripening stench was awful, and they hurriedly arced around the clearing, staying within the canopy of the trees.
Climbing over some fallen oak trees, Ryan discovered a tiny babbling brook, really no more than a creek, cutting through a tangle of underbrush. Tadpoles and crayfish were busy in the soupy mud. The water read clean on his rad counter, so he filled his canteen and moved onward. The rest of the companions hardly broke their stride, stepping over the trickle of water. A gully cut through the trees, saplings and birch standing ghostly white amid the dark pines. Climbing onto the raised land, the companions started across a sloped field of stubby grass. Soon, a river could be heard flowing nearby.
“Sounds like it’s going in the right direction,” J.B. said, tilting his head toward the noise. “How about making another raft?”
“Had enough of that,” Ryan muttered. Stopping abruptly, Mildred stared hard at the northern sky. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she whispered. “Didn’t we leave the burning Hummer west of us?”
“Sure did,” J.B. answered, then the man sniffed. What was that bitter smell?
Mildred pointed. “Then what the hell is that?”
A thick plume of smoke rose over the forest. The winds were thinning it across the sky until it vanished, but this close the plume was a solid black.
“Way too big to be a campfire,” Dean said thoughtfully. “Mebbe the forest is on fire.”
“Animals not left,” Jak stated, drawing his Colt Python. “They be first.”
Her hair anxiously waving, Krysty sniffed a few times. “That’s coal,” she stated as a fact. “A coal-burning fire.”
“Plenty of coal in Tennessee,” Doc said. “Perhaps it is a local blacksmith.”
“Have to be a damn huge one.”
“Hmm, true, madam. I stand corrected. Perhaps some local baron has built a foundry to reclaim predark metal.”
“Could be anything, even a power plant,” Ryan grunted. He had encountered coal-burning power stations when he traveled with the Trader. Mostly they were crude things, a rusty boiler whistling steam at a homemade turbine attached to a hundred car generators. But even a rickety machine like that made a lot of electricity. Lights, heaters, electric fences.
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