James Axler – Shadowfall

“Thanks,” Dean muttered, eyes fixed resolutely on his feet. “But we all stay together.”

Trader slapped him on the shoulder. “Nothing’s forever, boy. Time comes when everyone has to move on. Fucking better or worse. Way life is.”

Dean swallowed hard. “I know that’s true, Trader. And me and Dad’ve talked some about about making changes. But not yet, not now. Got to go a little farther down the line. But I like being here and I like you, Jamie. Be good if we could sort of meet again.”

“Farther down the line?” Jamie grinned, then got up and offered his hand to Dean.

The two boys shook, watched approvingly by the others.

Baron Weyman broke the silence, coughing into a white linen kerchief. “Forgive me. Time passes and you must be gone. You’re sure you don’t want an escort to the coast?”

Ryan shook his head. “Appreciate the offer, Baron. But I think we can handle any raggle brushwood remainder that might’ve made it through the mutie pigs and the scabbies and the sulfur swamps. Thanks, anyway.”

THEY HAD their armament, clothes washed and patched, wounds treated and rebandaged.

Rainey and a couple of sec men rode with them as far as the remains of the camp, stopping there to lead back the string of horses that the friends had borrowed. It was late morning when they finally parted company, after the briefest of farewells, and headed west on foot, toward the ocean and the raft. There was far too much death between them and the solemn-faced sec boss for any more cordial goodbyes.

Trader walked with Ryan.

“Don’t know which is the worse stink,” he commented. “Sulfur all around us in this bastard fog, or the smell of those bodies rotting away back there.”

“You and me’ve smelled more bodies than sulfur over the years, Trader,” Ryan said.

The older man shrugged the Armalite to a more comfortable position on his shoulder. “Ain’t that the truth, Brother Cawdor? Sure have seen too much chilling.”

“Likely see plenty more.” Behind them, the vultures that had been scared off into the misty sky came flapping down again on their wide, leathery wings. There hadn’t been that much left of the brushwood dead after the pigs and the carrion eaters had taken their pleasure of them.

There were only a few pathetic tangled piles of gnawed bone and sinew between the wrecked camp and the beginning of the sulfur pools and hot springs.

“FOG’S THICKENING a lot, lover.”

“Yeah. Wind’s freshening, as well. Blowing dead behind us, from the Sierras. Could be some seriously bad weather to come. Sky’s black as an Apache tear.”

Krysty’s hair was curled tightly around her nape against the miserable, damp weather.

“Least we can get on the raft, paddle across the strait and make the jump. Reckon we should be at the coast in about fifteen minutes.”

They had come through the seething, blighted terrain without serious harm to any of them. Jak’s ankle was still giving him trouble, and he had once stumbled over some loose stones and nearly fallen into one of the boiling springs. But his amazing reflexes had saved him.

The whole region still carried the sickly smell of overbroiled meat.

Much of it was pork, with several of the smaller basins of scalding mud choked with the corpses of the stampeded herd of pigs, the meat already tumbling from the white bones. There was also evidence that more of the brushwooders had perished in that bleak and dreadful place.

The lower half of a woman’s body lay on the winding path, several chomping bites ripped from the thighs. The upper half of the corpse was immersed in brightly boiling, salted water.

It wasn’t possible to tell any difference between boiled pork and boiled human.

Doc chose that place to offer an academic lecture on how cannibals in the South Seas used to call human flesh “long pig” because of its alleged similarity in terms of texture, smell and flavor.

JAK EXAMINED THE TRAIL once they were through the hot springs. “Some pigs got past safe,” he said. “Some came back.”

“Brushwooders?” J.B. asked. “Some. Also bare feet. Scabbies? One man in Western boots. Straub?”