Robert Adams - The Witch Goddess

He had retained his faith through the academy and through the service years, thereafter. He had remained religious up until the first time he had had to choose between a painful death and a transfer of his consciousness into a younger, vibrantly healthy body. And each succeeding transfer over the hundreds of years since that first one had chipped off a bit more of his original faith. But still there remained a flinty core of the edifice which once had been so grand and imposing, and that core still nagged him, troubled him on occasion.

It troubled him now. “Dave Sternheimer, that pompous ass, throws fits every time someone forgets and brings up what the mutants call us—vampires; yet, that’s precisely what we all are—unnatural creatures, maintained in our deathlessness by a godless perversion of science.

“We all should rightly have died with the nation, the world that spawned us, and since we didn’t, we have remorselessly levied a tribute of young men and women—living flesh and blood to sustain us—from every succeeding generation. Small wonder that normal folk and those mutants call us ‘witches’ and ‘vampires,’ for to this world we are the very monsters of antique legend. Minotaurs we are, and Kennedy Research Center the maze. How long, I wonder, before this world produces a Theseus to finally rid mankind of the murderous, unholy parasites we’ve become? Perhaps this Milo Morai, the mutant who has lived since before the War, will extirpate us, will one day cleanse the world of our sinful works and send our souls on to whatever hellish torments our misdeeds have earned us. Not even sweet, gentle Jesus could be expected to be merciful toward such a pack of selfish, merciless…”

His mind came abruptly back to the present situation and to the knowledge that something was wrong, very wrong. He had assumed that the high-mounting dust from the collapse of the cliffs had been dimming the sun, but though that dust was subsiding, the light still grew steadily paler, and he cast his gaze to all quarters seeking a reason.”

Then that questing gaze was suddenly locked upon the northern horizon. There, looking close enough to reach out an arm and touch it, towered an immense, furiously roiling cloud of multihued smoke, steam and dust. Thick as any mountain, it stood, rising to a height of at least a full mile!

” The volcano !” he whispered to himself in awe. “My God, my God, what have we, what have / wrought?”

So rapt was Corbett that when Erica hobbled up again and touched his arm, he started. ‘That… that thing is a volcano, Jay; I’ve seen them before, in Cuba. Do… do you think it’s possible that… that our … ?”

“Oh, yes, Doctor,” he interrupted her, his voice savage. “It’s our own, devil-spawned, twentieth-century witchery that’s responsible for that… and, God forgive us, for that!” He waved his arm at the site of the deadly rockfall.

“Of course!” She nodded quickly. “With his knowledge of geology, Braun should have expected this mess or something like it. Sternheimer will have a fit when he hears of it, of the loss of all those machines and devices, but we can still bring a crew up here, after we get back to Broomtown, and salvage the metals, most likely, even if nothing else. We— For the love of… !” She took a hasty step back, her hands raised defensively, instinctively, before her. “ Jay ! What’s wrong with you? You… you look as if you… you’re ready to… to kill someone!”

“You and Braun and Dave Sternheimer and your goddam precious, priceless ancient relics! Doesn’t it matter one damn bit to you, you harpy, that they’re likely half a hundred dead men under those rocks— my men, good, loyal, decent men? Can’t you realize that it was our larcenous selfishness that murdered not only those helpless folk up yonder where that volcano is now, but our own Broomtowners, as well?”

As a soul-deep agony began to replace the killing light in his eyes, Erica’s fear too ebbed and she felt it safe to shrug, saying, “Fortunes of war. You’re a soldier, Jay, and so were they. You all take the same risks in that trade, don’t you?”

Before he could answer, Sergeant Gumpner mounted the knoll to salute and render a brief report. “Sir, one pony dead of a broken neck, three more had to be put down—with the axe, to save ammo; I had to shoot one round to save Trooper Jenkins’s life from the doctor’s mule, and that animal is dead, too. A couple of ponies were bitten by the mule, but not so badly they can’t be ridden. Both Jenkins and Pruitt were knocked down and bruised, but neither is hurt. Your orders, sir?”

The order did not come, for at that moment, the boiling column on the northern horizon was suddenly shot through with flames and objects glowing so brightly that it blinded one to look at them. And, within split seconds, came a sound so loud that the barely quieted beasts were set once more to rearing and screaming, while men clapped hands to their abused ears and writhed on the ground in pain. But as quickly as the unbearable noise came, it was gone.

Corbett had just jumped up and grabbed the bridles of the two near-hysterical mules when he heard Erica shriek. A quick glance over his shoulder showed the battered, bloody-faced woman pointing mutely at the sky, through which a veritable host of dark somethings were hurtling out of the flame-riven column of gases from the volcano. In all directions they spread trailing plumes of smoke.

The first to ground anywhere near Corbett bounced down onto the rocky rubble covering the pack train and his men. It struck and bounced, once, twice, then shattered into many chunks and pieces… pieces of dully glowing rock. Almost immediately, a strong wind commenced to blow up from the south, its passage ruffling the sere grasses, brush and trees. In nearby places where other superheated rocks had grounded, fires sprang up rapidly and, fanned by the sudden wind, became instant conflagrations, sending animals and ponies that had fled into the forested areas racing back onto the relatively open areas flanking the track.

Erica limped again to Corbett’s side. “Jay, I saw something very much like this happen in Cuba. It was about five hundred years ago, at the time of those worldwide seismic disturbances, the ones that ended by turning Florida and most of the Gulf Coast into swamps and sank so much of the East Coast. I know, therefore, what will happen now, and we’ve got to move fast if we mean to live through it.”

By radio and by voice—for the fine, falling ash and the consequent lessening of sunlight had made a twilight world of their surroundings—Corbett and Gumpner and a corporal who happened to own a fine, far-ranging tenor began to rally such men as had survived the hideous disaster, then led them all, with their mounts and such pack animals as were easily caught, to an area chosen by Erica. There, hard by the rockfall beneath which lay the bodies of their comrades, the men moved out in a wide arc, firing the brush.

The slice of hell to the north was still sucking in cooler air from every direction and the swift-flowing wind currents had soon whipped the series of small blazes into a holocaust of truly monumental proportions. Northward and westward the fire raced, to join here and there those fires set by the first shower of hot rocks.

From within the depths of those merciless flames came the agonized death screams of countless beasts, and a violent explosion a few hundred yards to the west told of the demise of one of the panicked pack mules with a load of munitions. Another pack animal—this one a largish pony—stumbled out of the blazing brush, obviously blinded and screaming like a lost soul, until Sergeant Gumpner ran to its side and ended its suffering with his short-handled, heavy-bladed and already bloodstained battle axe.