James Axler – Shadow World

Undaunted, Krysty picked up one of the broken creatures. “Must’ve died triple quickit’s still warm,” she said, gently turning the bird in her hand. “No sign of any disease. Looks like they were all struck stone dead.”

Overhead, the sky was blue, and the blue was endless.

“Where the blazes did they come from?” Mildred said. She shuddered as she brushed the feathers from her face and plaits.

Observing her discomfort, Doc said, “A person given to superstition might well consider it a sign from Yahweh himself. Similar to a rain of live toads or lambs’ hearts, an omen of unspeakable evil.”

Clearly disturbed by the unusual event, Mildred immediately snapped back, Is that the kind of unscientific crap the deans taught you at Oxford, Doc? Did you get your doctorate in Victorian nonsense?”

“I am afraid the idea of strange rains goes back a bit further than that, my dear”

“Question is, what chilled them?” J.B. interrupted, using the toe of his boot to spread out a small heap of bodies.

Before the discussion could go any further, Jak cut in. “Ahead, big danger,” he told Ryan. “Feel rumble in feet.”

When they were quiet, they could all feel the faint but unmistakable shaking of the earth.

Shall we proceed on the current course, my dear Ryan?” Doc asked. “Or is an alternate route in order?”

“Don’t know what the rumble means,” Ryan said. “Could be anything.”

“Sure as hell isn’t Amtrak,” Mildred remarked.

“Until we find out what’s going on,” Cawdor told them, “let’s take it nice and slow. Everybody up, now.”

On triple red, they continued following the ridgeline, which began to bend gradually northward. Long before they caught sight of them, they felt the hot wind off the string of lakesfelt, smelled, tasted.

This brimstone was the real thing, giving off a rotten-egg stink that gagged and choked them. The closer they got to the source, the louder the rumbling noise became.

As the companions crested the top of a low rise, they were slammed by a wall of baking heat that forced them to shield their faces with their hands. Below, in a sunken area of the plain, acres upon acres of desert boiled and steamed. The mud-brown lakes were bodies of superheated liquid, erupting from deep in the earth along nukeblast-opened fault lines. Whole trees, uprooted, their upraised branches stripped of leaves and bark and mineralized to a dead white, swirled like drowning men in the violent whirlpools. For hundreds of yards around the lakeshores, there was nothing but peaked piles of sulfur crystals and orange patches of bacteria. Bacteria were the only living things that could survive the combination of high temperature and toxic gases.

In the center of the closest lake, the water’s surface suddenly bulged up, then burst with a dull explosion that sent mud flying like shrapnel and a huge cloud of steam skyward. They all ducked and covered.

“There’s your answer, Mildred,” Ryan said after things had settled down. “Bubble of hot poison gas goes up. Way high, out of sight, the flock of birds flies right through it. Bang, no more birds.”

“Dead in midair,” J.B. agreed.

“Dead there, too,” Dean added, pointing at the ground ten yards ahead.

It wasn’t just birds who got done in by the mud-lake gases. Land creatures wandering a little bit closer to the shoreline had been felled by similar, sideways discharges. Dismantled skeletons of animals, large and small, lay scattered about. The bleached bones were scored with fang marks. Something big had been cleaning up after the dead. “This bad place,” Jak muttered. “If we go around,” J.B. said, “it’s going to add five, mebbe six miles to the hike. Might be after dark by the time we make Moonboy.”

The truth of the Armorer’s words was obvious. If they circled the boiling lakes on the plains side, it would take them south, away from their goal instead of toward it.

“I figure we’ve already covered the distance the barman talked about,” Ryan said. “Looks to me like there’s a climbable gully over there. Let’s follow it to the ridge summit, and have ourselves a look-see on the other side.”

Even though the gully was passable, the climbing wasn’t easy. The gully bottom was lined with heaps of loose, gravellike rock that had flaked off and fallen from the cliffs above, and the terrain got gradually steeper and steeper until the last thirty feet, which was straight up. The backbone of the ridge was made of crumbling spires of rock, and the clusters of spires were divided from one another every few hundred yards by uncrossable chasms and deep clefts, which was why the companions hadn’t tried to travel along it the whole distance from Perdition. Following Ryan’s lead, they carefully crept to the edge of the summit and looked over.