gear, ticking over gently. On every side men and women had moved fast to their
firefight positions, standing ready by the ob slits and weapon ports. But from
the lack of urgency in Hun’s voice, there clearly was no immediate emergency.
“What is it, Hun?”
“Look out front. Never seen nothin’ like it. How ’bout you, J.B.?”
They squeezed in either side of her, peering through the forward screen. Ryan
rested his hand on Hun’s shoulder, conscious of the musky scent of her
perspiration. He blinked his eye to rid himself of the sudden and unbidden image
of Krysty, naked, moving beneath him.
“What is it? “he asked.
J.B., not one to waste words, simply shook his head. Hun pointed to the left, to
the great jagged peaks of the Rockies jutting in toward them.
“Saw them first on this side. One or two. Feathers. Then this spooky kind of
stuff.”
Ryan was puzzled. Not many men had been this far into the Darks. The recently
lamented Kurt was one of only a handful who had penetrated deep into the rugged
fastness and survived. So who had put up all the decorations?
They were made out of branches of trees that Ryan believed were called aspens.
“Quakers” they’d named them. Poles had been hewn from the silvery-green wood,
with its criss-crossing black scars, then tied into shapes like the tepees that
some of the double-poor of Deathlands lived in.
There were three of them, stretched across the crumbling relic of a road. The
one nearest the edge was covered in a sprouting bunch of feathers. Red and
yellow and golden-brown; hundreds of them. And topping it was a narrow-bladed
knife of rusting iron, its haft wrapped in strips of what looked like dried
leather or skin.
The right-hand tripod was leaning to the front, set close against a cliff of
moss-streaked stone. Melt from a glacier, farther up the mountain, came
cascading across the road in milky turquoise torrents. Tufted pink flowers
decorated the poles, some of the flowers dead, drooping and falling on the damp
earth.
But it was the center set of branches that caught Ryan’s eye.
It was much the tallest, well over a tall man’s height, blocking the trail.
Ribbons of material were festooned all over it, tied in place with rawhide
thongs. Small metal stars of brass and copper dangled from the silks and satins,
chiming against one another.
And on the top, held in place with circling strands of green wire was— “A human
head,” said J.B.
The eyes had gone, and half the teeth were missing. The lower jaw dangled in a
macabre leer, kept by a thread of gristle. There were still a few shreds of
leathery skin clinging to the yellowed bone.
“What’s that on its forehead?” asked Hun.
“Bullet hole,” replied J.B.
“Looks like a warning,” said Ryan.
“Do we stop, or go on, or what?”
“We go on.”
War Wag One rolled forward again as Hun engaged the gears, driving straight for
the center of the sets of aspen poles, crushing it beneath the heavy wheels.
Ryan watched through the front screen, imagining he could hear the brittle crack
as the skull was splintered, but through the armor he knew that was absurd.
In the next hour they came across three more sets of the weird signs. Both J. B.
Dix and Ryan Cawdor stayed in the main control cabin, keeping the combat vehicle
in a state of full fighting readiness with everyone on alert.
“How far?”
Hun threw the question over her shoulder. The trail ahead was becoming steeper,
and the gauges showed a sharp temperature drop as night closed in on them.
Ryan eased the white scarf around his neck. “Not sure. All we can do is put
together everything we know and add in Kurt’s ravings an’ what Krysty knew. Best
map we have don’t show us much. But if there’s this Stockpile or Redoubt up
there, then it’s close to a place called Many Glaciers. Near as we can figure.”
“We stoppin’ soon?” Hunaker asked.
“Yeah. Give it another ten, then pull on over. That looks like a meadow along
that river. Trees far enough back to cut down an ambush.”