“Certainly. However, it is too much trouble to start and stop this cumbersome dreadnought,” Doc said, undoing the belt. “Grab hold of the wheel, and as I slide out, you squeeze in.” The exchange was made without mishap.
Ryan settled into the task, almost enjoying it.
Less than an hour later, the soaring skyscrapers were readily visible over the treetops, and Ryan looked for a clear path through the trees to the city beyond.
Locating a breach, he lumbered onto the muddy shore and directed Leviathan along a cracked concrete stretch that angled off in the correct direction. Soon, the burned-out frames of individual homes marked the beginning of the old civilization. Sometimes only a bent stack of chimney stones remained to show where a home had once stood. Wordlessly, they passed the crumbled remains of stores and shops, the glass windows long gone, molding leaves piled high inside.
Then the road became smoother, with more ruined houses appearing until they regularly lined both sides of the street. As Leviathan advanced farther, the buildings looked to be in better condition, until they crossed some railroad tracks and entered a warehouse district Here the streets were covered with a thick cushion of green ivy that grew along the outside of everything in sight. Odd lumps dotting the street were presumably parked cars. Filling every block, hundreds of green buildings rose six or more stories tall. And standing as sparkling glass giants among these were the skyscrapers, their pinnacles nearly out of sight. The company names on the lintels were readable, but meant nothing.
“How big?” Jak asked, furrowing his brow.
Abandoning her attempt to read a vine-covered movie marquee, Mildred answered, “Thirty stories. Maybe forty. Surely no higher than that”
Jak stared at the woman as if she had clearly gone insane.
“People,” he said.
“Oh, population. I don’t know. Maybe a hundred thousand.”
“I would postulate a neutron bomb,” Doc said, and he shuddered.
“I agree,” Mildred replied softly. “Damn the fools. God damn them all.”
“A what?” Dean asked, unable to look away from the city. So much green! Could the ivy be protecting the city from the terrible effects of the acid rains?
Making sure Leviathan didn’t bump into any of the lumps in the street, Ryan said, “The ancient whitecoats had lots of different boomers. I read a long time ago that the worst was the Hellstorm. It set fire to the atmosphere. Second worst was the neutron. It killed people, but didn’t damage the buildings or machines.”
“Just killed the people?”
“Killed everything alive,” Krysty said angrily. “People, bugs, bathroom fungus, anything.”
“Except ivy,” J.B. added, scowling at the lush plants rustling at their approach. All this green was unnatural.
“How find what we need?” he asked.
“Keep a watch for machine shops and gas stations. If need be, we’ll climb down into some elevator shafts. Maintenance department is always in the basement. The oil from the hydraulic pumps will do fine for the transmission.”
“Excellent”
“I wonder why this city has not been occupied,” Doc remarked. “These buildings are in perfect condition.”
“Impossible to defend.” Krysty pointed with her gun barrel. “Too many windows.”
“Rad is clear,” J.B. told them, checking his counter.
Leviathan proceeded slowly toward the center of the wide street, the ivy crushing softly under the military tires. Most of the store signs were impossible to read, either covered by the plants or damaged by minor rust The few they could decipher weren’t helpful-clothing stores with mannequins in the windows, pizza parlors, bookstores with white rectangles displayed, the covers bleached from decades of exposure to sunlight
“No people in sight, or any sign of them,” Ryan said. He turned to Krysty. “You feel anything?”
Krysty shook her head. “No norms or muties, but there’s something alive out there.”
“Mebbe the ivy?” Dean suggested.
She was tolerant “That’s just a plant”
“Not exactly,” Doc stated. “Ivy isn’t a separate crop such as stalks of corn, or groves of apples. Ivy grows together into a single homogenous plant”
“Covering a whole city?”
“The old coot is right for a change,” Mildred said. “If nobody’s here to prune it, why not? Stuff’s more resilient than kudzu, or even horseradish.”