The frail structure of knotted creepers disintegrated in-stantly, its strands spinning toward the whirling circle of air that had been the implo-gren. And the hooded figures were tugged with it, tumbling into screaming space, into the waiting river, which received them gratefully.
Ryan and his friends watched the destruction of their enemies with disbelief. The small bodies splashed into the fast-flowing water, most of them not even resurfacing, dragged down by their heavy robes.
Doc and Lori abandoned the steering, allowing the heavy raft to find its own direction and speed. All six of them stared behind at the spectacular results of the mal-functioned gren. On either side of the river they could see the dangling cords, snapped off short, that had held the bridge. But the whole center section had disappeared, floating past them in torn and fragmented sections.
Only one of the muties made it to the surface and tried to swim toward the raft. Its clothes were gone, and it re-sembled the muties they’d seen higher up the Mohawk- short arms and legs, and skin like a reptile. This one had no hair at all on its wrinkled skull, and they were shocked to see a vestigial third eye, staring wildly at them, in the center of its brutish, low forehead.
As it floundered along, closing in on the slow-moving raft, its lipless mouth stretched open and it screamed to them in a feeble voice.
“Elp, elp, elp, elp!”
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Its fingers groped for the rough-hewn edge of the logs, near where Lori stood.
“I’m helped you,” the girl shouted, still trembling from the shock of their brush with death.
Before anyone else on the raft could move, the slender girl hefted one of the ten-foot-long branches that served as paddles, lifted it and brought it down on the bobbing face. The stump of wood pulped the man’s nose, split-ting his lips, breaking off several of his teeth. Blood jet-ted, flooding his throat, making him choke. His hands slipped off the side of the raft and he bobbed away, a tendril of crimson trailing from his smashed face.
The last they saw of him was a hand clutching at the cold air.
before evening the Mohawk was joined by another, wider river, coming in from the north. Doc Tanner pro-nounced that it was the Hudson. Even Jak Lauren had heard of that name.
“Runs by Newyork?”
The old man sighed. “Time was it did, my snow-headed young colleague. But what remains of that great metrop-olis now I wonder?”
“When I was a kid, folks talked of it as a hot spot, full o’weeds,” Ryan said. “Only ghouls lived there, eating each other.”
Doc smiled. “Sounds much as it was back in my day, Ryan.”
The light was fading and an evening storm threatened. Ryan pointed toward a low spit of land, jutting out, with the shattered remnants of a building just visible at its end. Because of its length and narrowness it would be easy to defend against a sneak attack from the land side.
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“Bring us in there if you can,” he called to Jak, who was manning the steering oar with Krysty.
The farther south they drifted, the slower and wider the river became, with none of the gushing rapids they’d en-countered higher up, near the abandoned redoubt. The water was amazingly clear, with the rocks on its bottom looking close enough to reach down and touch, though a quick measurement with a length of cord and J.B.’s Tekna knife showed them a depth of about fifteen feet. Doc kept wondering at how unpolluted the Hudson appeared.
“Back when I knew it nobody would place a hand in the water, for fear the acids and chem filth would scorch it to the bone.”
The raft grounded with a soft crunch on the shingle, and they all leaped gratefully off it, stretching their legs. Jak tied the remnants of the mooring rope around a rusted girder that stuck vertically out of some crumbling con-crete. The boy stooped and lapped at water from his cupped hands, wrinkling his nose.
“Tastes of salt,” he said.
“Salt?” Ryan queried. “Must be close to the sea. I haven’t seen the sea for…for too many long years. Is that right, Doc?”