gonna get nothin’.”
Again the rifle barrel flamed, again a round tore into the rock face, then
careered off into the night.
What a way to die.
The mutie had been right, dead right. Death had been lurking only just around
the corner. Their own deaths.
Then he noticed that the fog was on the move.
At first he thought his eyes were playing tricks. Perhaps it was just the effect
of the fog’s contraction-expansion motion, the breathing movement that made it
seem alive. Then he realized the stuff was actually inching its way down the
road, in bulk, the whole huge quaking gray-white mass sliding forward with a
rippling motion, tendrils of the misty muck questing out along the blacktop.
“It’s moving,” he croaked.
“You stupe,” crowed Rogan derisively. “You ain’t gonna get nothin’. You hear me,
blaster? Nothin’. All you’re gonna get is a load of lead in your innards. Me,
I’m gonna get what’s up there, up the top of the mountain. All for me. No
share-out. Especially no share-out with that prick McCandless. He thought he was
the flaming emperor, but he ended up carcass. Just like you, Kurt. A carcass.”
He let out a wild, echoing guffaw.
Kurt watched as the advancing fog sent out its gray-white feelers toward the
tall man. He couldn’t figure it out at all, didn’t know what in hell the stuff
was, couldn’t imagine its origin.
Something to do with the Nuke; something left over, maybe? That had to be it,
had to be the answer. He chuckled to himself as he watched the foggy tentacles
reaching out for Rogan, not at all blindly but purposefully, as though the very
sound of the tall man’s harsh, jeering voice constituted its target. Like thick
cables, three tendrils snaked through the air to clutch Rogan’s body and curl
around it.
Sparks erupted fizzingly, half blinding Kurt. Rogan shrieked aloud. He writhed
helplessly as though gripped by a giant’s fist. He was wrapped in a huge
amorphous cloud that solidified around him… then it snatched him up into the
air.
Rogan was shrieking with shock and agony, still writhing in its clutch. He had
been gathered up in some sort of twister. But this was no mere tornado that
sucked objects up capriciously, then blew them all over the landscape. This
thing had claws.
Fog devils… tear you apart…
A jolting, destructive, naked power lurked at the fog’s heart. It had a mind of
its own.
The tentacle that gripped Rogan swung high, long sparks crackling from it,
playing around the struggling, yelling figure. Rogan was haloed in fire. With a
last despairing shriek, the tall man disappeared into the center of a white
wall.
The fog still advanced. Slowly. Inexorably.
Kurt’s gloved fingers scrabbled at the rock for a firm handhold. He shoved
himself forward and sideways, scrambling to his feet, staring at the advancing
mass. More fog tendrils were extending out of it, groping in his direction,
questing around. Kurt backed away from them, their acid stink almost
overpowering him.
Lightning flared and crackled, revealing the mountain-tops ranged all around him
as grimly frowning peaks. Kurt glanced over his shoulder, back down the ruined
road.
The wall of fog shifted onward relentlessly.
Kurt let out a mewing croak of terror, turned, one hand clutching at his
shoulder where now blood seeped through the fur. He began to stagger like a
drunken man down the rutted road, back toward the Deathlands.
Chapter Two
SAVAGE EYES WATCHED the line of lights that bobbed gently up and down in the far
distance; preternaturally sensitive ears caught the dull roar and rumble of
powerful engines. There was forward movement there, an onward surge. The lights
were getting closer by the second.
The watcher had greenish skin that looked, at a distance, as if it were faintly
scaled, though it was not. The scale effect was just that—an odd skin effect,
something he could not wipe off, something he had to live with, some genetic
eruption whose exact origin was unknown. It didn’t bother him. He was known as
Scale and that didn’t bother him, either. Nothing bothered him. Mutation was a
matter of complete acceptance among mutants; it was only norms who got twitchy.