JAMES AXLER
Homeward Bound
JAMES AXLER
Homeward Bound
Chapter One
“IT’S DEAD.”
Ryan Cawdor took the high-image intensifier away from his good eye, tucking it back into one of the pock-ets of his long, fur-trimmed coat.
“Nothing?” asked J. B. Dix, the Armorer.
“Nothing. From this high you can see for miles. Not a sign of life. When it’s cold like this there should be smoke. Folks got to keep warm. There’s wood enough around for ’em.”
Across the steep valley the sun was sinking into a nest of tangled violet chem clouds. Ryan figured the temper-ature had to be already close to freezing. His breath plumed out ahead of him, and the skin on his stubbled cheeks felt tight. The slopes of the hills opposite from the cavern entrance were streaked with snow, and the small pools around the snaking lead-gray river were dulled with ice.
Running alongside the slow-moving water, Ryan had been able to make out the shattered remains of a two-lane blacktop, its edge eroded by a century of neglect.
Krysty Wroth’s hand rested on his arm. He glanced at the girl, smiling at her startling beauty, his eye almost dazzled by the bright crimson of her tumbling hair. “It’s Doc,” she said quietly.
“What?”
8
“When we came out of the gateway he was throwing up. Face like parchment. Lori took him back into the main redoubt entrance to sit him down.”
Ryan sucked on a tooth, looking to his left, where the original road to the concealed fortress had been de-stroyed-either by a landslip or the nuking that had dev-astated the entire length and breadth of the United States. Nearly a hundred years back.
In 2001.
A young boy stood on the rim of the sheer drop, head to one side as though he were listening to something. The bleak wind tugged at his long hair, blowing it across his face. His hair was whiter than the driven snow, his eyes red as polished rubies, set in sockets of honed ivory.
“You hear something, Jak?” Ryan asked.
“Thought I heard something howling, like a banshee back in the swamps.”
Jak Lauren hadn’t been with Ryan and his party for very long. They’d picked him up in the dank vastness of the Atchafalaya Swamp, in what had once been the state of Louisiana. His slight frame concealed a powerful, wiry strength. Ryan Cawdor, who was a good judge of such things, figured Jak as one of the most lethal hand-to-hand killers he’d ever seen.
Jak was fourteen years old.
J. B. Dix stepped to the edge of the cliff and joined the young albino. Squinting into the distance, concentrating, he said, “Could be a wolf.”
Krysty Wroth’s keen hearing enabled her to confirm J.B.’s guess. “Yeah. It’s a wolf. And there’s more of ’em, a pack of around a dozen. Four, mebbe five miles north-east of here.”
“Where in fireblast are we, J.B.?” Ryan asked, hunching his shoulders.
9
The Armorer had a tiny folding comp-sextant in one of the capacious pockets of his dark gray leather coat, with its smart silky collar of black fur. He pulled it out and looked around, easing back the brim of his beloved fe-dora, and took the necessary sighting. He picked a crum-pled chart and consulted it.
“Near as I can figure it, we look to have landed north of what they used to call New York State. And that river has to be the Mohawk.”
Ryan glanced both ways along what remained of the roadway. Each end had been sliced clean off. “That’s why the redoubt hasn’t been entered,” he guessed.
“Uncle Tyas McCann told me how the east and the northeast were hard-nuked,” Krysty said. “All the big cities and most power places. There’s lots of hot spots.”
“Check the rad count,” J.B. suggested. “Broke mine getting off Wizard Island.”
Ryan flicked back the lapel of his coat, moving the end of the weighted silk scarf out of the way. He pressed the On button of the rad counter and listened to the faint cheeping of the machine. The glowing scarlet arrow veered erratically across the scale, wavering uncomfort-ably into the orange sector.
“Warm,” he said.