Shadow World
Shadow World
JAMES AXLER
Chapter One
Beside the deeply rutted dirt track leading to the ville of Moonboy, wedged between a pair of boulders, a warning sign shimmered in the blistering midday heat. Crudely chiseled into the rectangle of rusted car door were two words NO MEWTEES.
Behind the sign, the good people of Moonboy had left a universal symbol for those travelers who couldn’t read. From a gallows made of an old basketball stanchion and backboard hung a naked corpse. Sun-dried, and as hard and brown as jerky, it had a huge head and a misshapen body, its finger bones twice as long as its arms.
Like many of the other small outposts of human survival in Deathlands, the ville had sprung up from rains more than a century old. On January 20, 2001, a Kamchatka-launched ICBM, part of an all-out, U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange, had vaporized nearby Salt Lake City. The three-warhead airburst had left behind a radioactive, thermoglass rubble field that covered more than fifty square miles. As in the case of other earthly disasterstornadoes, hurricanes, forest firesArmageddon had turned out to be a capricious bitch. Up Highway 15 from ground zero, snuggled in a gap in the promontory ridge of rock, a Salt Lake City bedroom community had taken a less than annihilating hit. What was now the main drag of Moonboy ville had once been a suburban street in the upscale residential development; it was one of the few blocks left standing in the administrative region formerly known as Morgan County, Utah.
Facing rows of stucco-sided, three-story homes, their windows blown out in the same horrific shock blast, were the underpinnings and center point of the ville. Scabrous add-ons and rickety lean-tos used the outside walls of the original buildings as their main structural support. Rusting sheets of corrugated metal formed a jumble of makeshift shanty roofs. Their orange stains streaked the predark stucco, iron oxide bleeding from thousands of less than mortal wounds. Intermittent acid rains had long since turned the asphalt pavement between the rows of houses to coarse black sand, and had cratered and dissolved most of the broad, curving driveways and concrete sidewalks.
On this cloudless summer day, Moonboy’s unemployed residents and visitors sought out the shade of the metal-roofed, ramshackle porches that lined either side of the main street. Steel not only defended them from the brutal sun, but from flesh-etching, sulfuric acid downpours. About two dozen women and men, none particularly clean, most gap-toothed and weathered, sat chewing the fat and sipping air-temperature green beer from recycled, plastic antifreeze jugs. A few lay curled up in the shadows on the hard-tamped dirt, snoozing off the remnants of their market day drunk.
By the standards of Deathlands, where wealth and status were measured in armament, Moonboy was a shitpoor place. Along the main street, there were no weapons that would accept high-power, center-fire brass cartridges. The only firearms of modern design were a handful of single-shot, top-break, exposed-hammer 12-gauges, and every one had a rust-brown barrel, a broken or missing stock and a crudely tied, rope shoulder sling. The rest of the population carried long, razor-honed, chilling knives and cheap, scarred, black-powder revolverslate-twentieth-century, mass-produced copies of Civil War-era side arms.
There were no cops in Moonboy. Official law enforcement was unnecessary with so many weapons on display. Justice, or what passed for it, was within easy reach of every hand. And God help the rad-blasted mutie who stumbled within range of blade or pistol ball.
Piercing screams erupted from the top floor of the gaudy house in the middle of the block. It was impossible to tell whether the screamer was male or female, or if the cries were of pain or pleasure. The porch squatters ignored the shrill racket. Moonboy’s pure norm sluts were well compensated for their time and trouble. After a few minutes, the shrieking stopped and the echoes faded.
None of the drowsy, streetside spectators expected anything interesting to happen until nightfall. The withering heat made a knife fight to the death highly unlikely. The potential combatants were all either too flagged or too hung over to get into a serious beef with anyone.
Then the air in the middle of the street began to shimmer.