“Earth Mother save us all,” Krysty whispered, face blanched with the horror of the vanished city. “Is noth-ing left?”
“Might be some of the big blocks standing. Central Manhattan was zapped, but a few scrapers were mebbe big enough. I seen vids of them, and they couldn’t have
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been leveled.” Ryan’s voice betrayed his own ch illing doubt.
The desolation was so total.
Ryan thought he noticed an unnatural flurry of move-ment among the rancid weeds that crowded down to the very brink of the water, now only about fifty paces away from where the raft turned slowly on an eddy, moved by a long-submerged obstruction.
“Push it away!” he called urgently, taking one of the branches himself and poling off, trying to shift back to the center of the current.
“What d’you see?” Krysty panted, throwing all her weight against the steering oar at the stern of the raft.
“Nothing. Something. I don’t know.”
“I heard something. Heard it. Like someone laughing. But someone who didn’t have a proper mouth. Does that seem stupid?”
“No. Not down here it doesn’t.”
“Let’s shove off. Be dark soon,” J.B. said. “Fog, too.”
“Yeah. Doc says we’re only ’bout twenty miles or so from open sea. Be good to make that.”
“Might be safer night,” Jak suggested, his unruly white hair tied back with a ragged length of red ribbon that Lori had given him.
“Could be,” the Armorer agreed. “Map shows river gets double-narrow. Could be chilled from either bank in good light.”
“So, we keep going?” Ryan called, and he got nods of agreement from everyone.
the mist became thicker, swallowing up the raft in gulps of sinuous gray damp. The long tendrils came in from their right, tasting of cold mud and still, brackish
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water. The fog had an unpleasant odor that seemed to linger on the tongue as you breathed.
“Where d’you figure we are now, Doc?” Ryan asked, glimpsing a teetering ruin through a sudden clearance of the darkening fog on their left.
Doc rose from where he’d been sitting with his arm around Lori. Pearls of moisture hung in his hair like a chaplet on the brow of a crazed monarch. But his voice was unusually calm and sane.
“Damnably hard to determine, Ryan. No visual clues. Around level with the north side of Central Park, per-haps? Once I sailed clear around Manhattan on a plea-sure craft. The sun shone and cameras clicked and whirred. The great buildings like the Twin Towers stood proud and tall, their glass reflecting a thousand bursts of golden light. I felt like a Christian viewing the Eternal City.” He stopped speaking for a moment, lost in mem-ory. “And now, it is the valley of the shadow of death. Hobgoblins and foul fiends have inherited the place. It is all despair.”
It still wasn’t full dark.
The fog seemed to carry its own peculiar light, glim-mering like corpse candles in a gruesome mire. The river now flowed so slowly that it was hard to detect any movement at all. Once or twice they heard the shrill me-tallic calling of seabirds swooping above them. But they flew on with sheathed beaks, not bothering the six trav-elers.
Krysty told Ryan that she thought she could hear the steady thudding of a gas-powered generator, but the mist distorted noise and she wasn’t even able to tell which bank carried the sound.
At one point Ryan was certain he heard a dreadful, shrill, screaming laugh, definitely off the eastern bank,
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around where West Seventy-second once ran. But no-body else on the raft caught it, and he decided it must have only been his imagination.
“We still going south?” Jak asked a half hour or so later.
“Can’t easily tell,” Ryan replied. “I’ll go to the front and watch the water.”
Doc had fallen asleep, his head in Lori’s lap, and Ryan stepped carefully over the old man’s extended legs, nearly slipping on the treacherous logs. He lay on his right hip, face level with the leading edge of the raft, only a few inches above the dull water of the Hudson. Everyone was quiet, oppressed by the fog and the feeling of desolation all around them.