James Axler – Shadowfall

Finally he fell silent.

Ryan was relieved when the old man eventually gave up on his pointless and muddled tale.

He had never seen such a depressing and alien terrain. Not anywhere through all his thirty-odd years in Deathlands. Here was only a bleak, crazed despair, as though the malevolent and psychotic Lords of Chaos had given vent to all of their most profoundly horrid imaginings.

The path from the coast snaked through a region where not a living thing existed. No birds flew through the tainted, misty sky. No animals walked between the twisted columns of flowering sulfur. No fish could hope to survive in the steaming, bad-water pools that fringed the trail.

Not a flower bloomed therenot even the ubiquitous Deathlands daisy. A few fossilized stumps of ancient trees stood stark, here and there, among the bubbling lakes of yellow mud, blasted by the impossible climate and the stinking fumes that drove away any hint of clean air.

There weren’t even any flies humming through the fetid, humid air, or iridescent beetles to crawl around in the soft, sticky mud that seemed to lie everywhere.

The group of friends trudged along in single file, Ryan out at point, J.B. bringing up the rear. The path snaked in a generally easterly direction, inland, gently upward. Despite that, all of them were finding it arduous going, panting and sweating.

The rad counters were still showing orange, though it seemed that they were sliding a little way down the scale, closer to the yellow section.

“Can we stop for a sip or two of water?” Doc asked. “I still have a drop left in my canteen.”

“Best keep,” Jak said, rubbing his fingers through his long white hair, staring in disgust at the bright yellow stains on them.

“You kept yours?” Trader asked.

“See.”

The teenager took his canteen from his belt and tossed it hard at Trader, who caught it easily, shaking it in disbelief. “Fucking full!”

“Not quite. Taken some small drinks. Most left.”

“Not all of us are supermen, my dear magnesium-maned chum,” Doc said.

Ryan interrupted the conversation. “Best we hold what water we’ve got. This is all undrinkable. Probably poisonous. Just keep going.”

“LIKE GOLDEN FLOWERS of stone, aren’t they?” Krysty had paused to look at a strange rock formation just to the left of the pathway. The rounded boulders were covered in crystalline sulfur, in delicate stalactites, with water dripping from them into a large steaming pool.

Somewhere out of the wreathing fog ahead of them there was a great roaring sound that stopped everyone in their tracks. It was a venomous noise, hissing, gurgling and bubbling, like the biggest mutie snake in the world.

“What the” Trader said, automatically bringing the Armalite to his shoulder.

Doc laughed. “Need more than bullets to try to stop that, my friend. Perhaps a particularly enormous cork driven into the vent of the geyser might do the trick.”

“Geyser! You mean one of those pissing jets of hot water? That all it was?”

Ryan licked his lips. “Yeah. You can actually taste the warm spray.”

THERE WAS A BRIEF PASSAGE, when they were walking along the rim of what looked like a missile crater, that the rad counters went soaring into the high orange, verging on the lethally dangerous crimson.

But a hundred yards farther they had eased back down again into the low orange, and another quarter mile saw them showing yellow.

“Thought it was clearing up a bit,” Krysty said, as they followed the narrow, winding trail down into a patch of much thicker fog.

Ryan stopped before answering, not wanting to take the risk of carrying on walking while looking behind him. The path was less than a yard wide in places, sometimes covered in scattered stones and sometimes slippery with thick ocher mud. To his right was a layer of crystallized rock salts that he suspected might only be a couple of inches thick and covered over a lake of water that was close to boiling point.

On the left was a steaming swamp of foul-smelling mud that bubbled and plopped. It ran as far as the eye could see, into the mist.

To stumble and fall on either side would mean, at the best, horrific scalding. At the worst it would mean a hideous way to buy the farm.