Bucketing ribbons of twisted concrete vanished into rivers and never came out
again. Whole slabs of the hillsides had melted during earth tremors a century
ago. They were looking for the remains of a township shown on their tattered
maps as Babb, but the devastation was so total that they had little hope of
finding it. Lakes had filled in where there should have been dry land, and tiny
feeder streams had become howling torrents of angry melt water.
The greater the elevation, the slower their progress. The farther they went, the
worse the weather became. The night skies clouded over and the fearsome chem
clouds of nuclear detritus billowed about them, with incandescent bursts of
flame searing the tops of the peaks. The great northerly winds came screeching
in from the desert wastes that had once been the fruitful prairies of Canada. It
took them four grindingly oppressive days to get close to the tree line, finding
that great fires had raged through the pine forests, stripping the land, leaving
the soil to be eroded to bare rock and ice. The dials in the war wag showed a
daytime high of minus ten Celsius, with the night temperatures dropping fast to
minus thirty. Add in the windchill factor and you had a land where a man would
be dead within minutes if he didn’t have adequate thermal protection.
Ryan was dozing in his bunk when a particularly vicious jolt woke him. As he
stood he was aware that they had stopped moving and the engine now ticked over
in neutral. He was on his way to the control room before Ches started calling
him over the intercom.
J.B. was there before him.
“End of the line,” he said.
Ryan looked out the front screen, seeing only gray ice and swirling snow. The
road, if there was one there at all, was invisible.
“Not even the war wag can get us farther,” said Ches, leaning back in the padded
seat. “The trail’s gotten way too narrow. Looks like one track in and the same
one out. So there’s no point goin’ back and tryin’ some other way.”
“How far from where the Redoubt might be?” asked Ryan, biting his lip in
impatient anger. To have come all this way and fail so near to their destination
only added to the concern he already felt about their supplies, and Ryan was
angry. Gas would be running low in about a week, and way up here in the Darks
there wouldn’t be caches hidden away for them. The Trader had made sure that
throughout the Deathlands there were plenty of such caches, buried deep and
safe. But not this far north into the blighted country.
Cohn was hunched over his mapping table and he replied to Ryan’s question. “Way
I see it… from what you said and the redhead said and most of all from what that
poor bastard Kurt said, it should be ahead about a day’s climb. Someplace.”
“That’s a lot of hellfired help, Cohn. What the hell does ‘someplace’ mean?”
“Sorry, Ryan. Just that my map’s all worn and patched. Looks like ‘Grinning
Glacier,’ best I can see. Steep trail over where a lake used to be. Who knows
what’s there now?”
J.B. turned from the screen, “Time our feet earned their living, Ryan. Let’s go
talk.”
TEN.
That was the final number for the party, reached after better than an hour of
discussion. J.B. had wanted to keep it smaller, but Ryan had pushed for more to
be included. And both of them wanted to come on the expedition, insisting that
the other should remain in charge of the war wag.
In the end it was Cohn, the most experienced member of the unit, who was
delegated to take command while Ryan and J.B. led the trek toward… Toward what?
Krysty had to come, and so, Ryan insisted, did Doc. Whatever there might be up
behind the fog with teeth and claws, Doc seemed to know something about it. And
something was all they had. The remainder of their team were Hunaker, Koll,
Hennings, Abe, the man called Finnegan and a top blaster, Okie. She was a tall,
silent girl whose skill with any firearm was legendary on the war wag.