“Need rope,” Jak muttered, releasing his grip on the belt of linked 25 mm rounds going into the electric cannon in the turret. “Make belts.”
“Good idea,” Dean said, massaging a bruised elbow. “But we already used it all tying our extra supplies to the outside.”
“Hold on to your ass harder,” J.B. suggested with a grin.
Extracting herself from a jumble of fallen supplies, Krysty ducked around the ammo belt feeding the machine gun and walked to the front of the wag. “Have we lost the road?” she asked, resting a slim hand on the back of the chair in an effort to stay upright.
“Ten miles ago,” Ryan answered brusquely, concentrating on the task of driving. A strange rustling noise came from the outside as the LAV plowed through some bushes. “We’re crossing a field at present, heading straight for a blast crater. J.B., give me a rad count!”
Quickly, the man checked the predark device pinned to his collar. “No rads,” he reported. “Must have been a clean bomb.”
“Clean?” Doc asked in surprise.
Reclaiming her seat, Mildred answered, “The isotopes used have a short half-life. There would be no residual radiation remaining after only a few years.”
“Clean,” Jak snorted. “Right.”
Dean pressed his face to a defensive blaster port and saw only a rippled expanse of glass stretching in every direction. “Must have been a big nuke.”
“No such thing as a small nuclear blast,” Ryan stated.
Curiously, the boy studied the unearthly landscape surrounding the APC and tried to imagine what the area was like before everything was vaporized in a microsecond flash. Had there been a thriving city here, or a military complex? Or was this a lost strike, a bomb that missed its target and destroyed only woods and fields? There was no way to ever know. Nothing remained but the solid slab of slightly bluish glass, the soil fused crystalline from the extreme heat of the hellish detonation. Distorted objects were almost visible within the translucent material, broken buildings forever trapped in the middle of toppling over, and some charred human figures who would spend eternity desperately trying to swim to the surface of the solidified pool.
The boy turned away from the blaster port, lost in thought. None of the other companions spoke, the sterile vista outside affecting even these hardened warriors. Hours passed with a low hum filling the wag from the tires under the vehicle as the APC raced across the wide expanse of the cracked glass lake. Only the soft crackle of static from the radio marred the near silence. The electronic device had been salvaged from the ruins of another APC, and since it was tuned to the command channel of the blue shirts—the invading force at Front Royal—Ryan brought the radio along just in case. But with the heavy blanket of decaying isotopes in the planetary atmosphere, even the most powerful radio transmitters had a range of only a mile. Nearly useless, but it took up little space.
Shifting gears, Ryan guided the APC up a sharp incline and off the fused soil onto dead earth, not even weeds growing from the gray, sterilized soil. Slowly, over the miles, streaks of dark earth reached into the dead zone, and soon tufts of grass dotted the land. Trundling through a shallow river, the LAV broached some gentle rolling hills, and soon the black ribbon of an ancient road was visible in spots through the dense covering of weeds.
“Get hard, people!” Ryan ordered, downshifting so their speed was more manageable. “We’re past the crater, so Shiloh must be close.”
With trained ease, the companions prepared their weapons, sliding off safeties and making sure spare ammo was available. Jak climbed into the turret of the APC and checked the action of the 25 mm cannon, while Doc took the gunner’s spot and readied the 7.62 mm ultrafast chain gun.
“Gaia, I hate crossing nuke craters,” Krysty muttered, unwrapping some tape from the handle of a gren and placing the live charge in the pocket of her shaggy coat.
“Bad vibrations from all the death?” Mildred asked, closing the cylinder of her Czech ZKR Olympic target pistol. The physician knew that Krysty could sometimes perceive things beyond the usual five senses of other people. Her early warnings of unseen danger had saved their lives more than once.