James Axler – Stoneface

Eyeing Zadfrak sadly, Doc said, “Then we should to do what he wants. Get him back to his family.”

“Have you noticed,” Krysty interjected, “that he refers to ‘the’ family and not ‘my’ family?”

“An idiosyncrasy of speech,” Doc said, “using the definite article. Maybe it’s just local idiom.”

“Don’t forget those DNA suckers back in Louisiana who referred to themselves the same way,” Mildred commented.

Krysty hugged herself. “I doubt we’ll ever forget them, though I wish to Gaia I could.”

Ryan studied the position of the sun. “Too late in the day to start now. Think he can last until tomorrow, Mildred?”

“I’ll do what I can,” she replied. “But at this point, it may be damn little.”

Chapter Five

For seven hours the wag had been traveling across a stretch of highway that barely qualified as a footpath. The asphalt was cracked, split, furrowed, wrinkled and overgrown with scraggly weeds. On either side were wide featureless expanses of dark earth. Far ahead, the dome-shaped peaks of the Black Hills shouldered the sky. Rising above them was the snow-capped Harney Peak, the highest point in Deathlands east of what remained of the Rockies.

The relatively smooth surface of the highway had deteriorated with every mile they logged. Zadfrak, drifting in and out of lucidity, neglected to inform J.B. of that fact. More than once he had been forced to engage the wag’s front-wheel drive to get them over sections of highway that had completely caved in. Everyone was jounced, bounced, tossed and thoroughly pummeled. It occurred to Ryan that if the rad cancer didn’t kill Zadfrak, the trip home certainly would. However, they should have known that a halfway decent stretch of road was more of an anomaly than a standard. Over a hundred years earlier, “earthshaker” bombs had completely resculpted the Cific coast.

New mountains had appeared almost overnight, long-dormant volcanoes had erupted and month-long earthquakes had shaken thousands of square miles with cataclysmic shocks and tremors.

A time or two their rad counters registered readings wavering uncomfortably close to the orange sector, but the “warm zones” were quickly bypassed.

J.B. suddenly leaned forward, peering through the ob slit, and relaxed the pressure on the gas pedal. He pointed. “Something up ahead.”

Ryan followed the pointing finger and for a moment couldn’t identify the shapes he saw lining the right side of the roadway. Purely from habit, he drew his SIG-Sauer. Even when he finally identified the shapes as harmless, he didn’t leather it.

Affixed to six-foot-tall wooden poles were grinning human skulls, bleached by the sun and scoured by the wind. Small holes had been drilled in the tops of the craniums, and projecting from them were colorful spinning pinwheels. The brightly hued vanes fluttered cheerfully in the breeze.

J.B. came to a stop near the first skull. Ryan counted ten more, planted at fifty-foot intervals on the edge of the road. Turning to the passenger compartment, he said, “Zadfrak. You awake?”

The man raised his head from the floor. His eyes were sunken, surrounded by dark rings. “Yeah?”

“What are these bastard skulls supposed to mean?”

Zadfrak’s dry lips peeled back from his discolored teeth in a grin. “Signposts. And warnings to the Injuns. Those are the skulls of red men. Put a couple of ’em up myself. When you reach the last one, take a hard right.”

He coughed and then, in a cracked, sandpapery voice, sang, “One little two little three little Indians”

Mildred put a hand over his mouth and shoved his head back down to the floor. “Shut up,” she said in a monotone. “Not another word or I’ll gag you with the tip of my boot.”

Ryan and J.B. exchanged a long look, then the wag began to move again. Just past the tenth signpost was a path that at first glance was no more than a shallow trench raked through the dirt. J.B. turned the vehicle onto it.

It was a rugged, rocky roadway surrounded by castellated hills. The suspension of the Land Rover creaked and groaned so loudly that Ryan wondered if the wag could take the roughing.

The narrow road swerved around rock formations and gullies, and Krysty swore as the vehicle yawed and she nearly fell from her seat. The area looked like hell with the fires out. An ancient sea bottom of clay strata worn by aeons of frost and flood had been shaped into forms resembling colossal pagodas and pyramids. Throat and eye-burning vapors arose from burning coal seams in the ground, cloaking their surroundings with a noxious fog.