James Axler - Pilgrimage to Hell

Now Uncle Tyas was dead, he and all his companions on that strange pilgrimage. Rest in peace, she thought.

"You were remembering," said Ryan.

He had watched her as she'd stared blank-eyed at the floor. The pause had drifted on for maybe thirty heartbeats, and it was clear from her face, from the shadows that flickered across those drawn features, that memories were flooding into her mind, memories of those now dead. She seemed to him to be a strong person, a woman of courage, a woman who could cope with disaster, yet even the toughest individuals had their limits.

"Yeah, I was." Her voice was low. "There's so much I recall." She gazed at Ryan now, as if deciding whether to tell him one thing more.

"Later, when I was older," she said, "I came back to the house in the afternoon, and Uncle Tyas — I'll never forget it — he yelled something at me as I went in the door. He said, They're there! I know it! I can feel it in my bones! It's not a joke! Bastards didn't have a sense of humor!'"

"Which particular bastards?" queried Ryan patiently.

"Scientists is what he meant. Old-time technics. Uncle Tyas was certain they all had no sense of humor. He claimed that was why the world blew up, because the scientists had had no sense of humor, that they were all cold fish without a joke among them."

"Maybe he had a point."

Ryan did not mind her talking on like this, although he doubted very much that there was anything to be gained from her story. He had an idea what the punch line was going to be. He'd heard it, in one form or another, before. Many times. But that didn't matter in the least. It was therapy, he knew — a torrent of words pouring out of her, some kind of emotional release. It was all to the good if it somehow flushed her system of the horror of the past couple of days.

Ryan said gently, "Okay, so what was he talking about?"

She took a breath, bit her lower lip and said, "A couple of months ago I got back to the Forest. I'd been away for a year or more. I've been doing a great deal of moving around myself. Things happen. Change." She shrugged. "I got back and Uncle Tyas opened the door to me. He didn't know I was coming, but as soon as he saw me he said, 'My God, Krysty, I had it all the time and I never knew.' He was shaken, totally shaken. And drawn, too, and ill. He said there was a 'land of lost happiness.' Those were his words. A land of milk and honey beyond the Deathlands. And he'd found the gateway to it, and he knew how to open it.

Ryan thought about what she was saying. He had heard stories like this before, although only stories. Hints, rumors, whispers. A land of lost contentment. No one, to his knowledge, had ever tried to do something about finding the place. Which, in any case, wasn't to be found. It was a myth, a dream. Something to compensate for the horrors of Deathlands existence. Sometimes the stories told of a fabulous treasure hidden somewhere — significantly, always in the most wild and inaccessible places: the Hotlands in the southwest, the icy regions to the north, those mysterious and plague-stricken swamps that glowed in the dark down in the south. Or across the simmering seas to the west. Or even, he'd once heard, up in the sky.

And that was it. Pie in the sky. Heaven. Somewhere — anywhere — other than this hell on earth known as the Deathlands.

On the other hand "...more hidden underground than had ever been discovered..." Sure, he thought, that was true enough. He and the Trader and J. B. Dix knew very well that it was so, that there were far more Stockpiles hidden away in man-made caverns than they had stumbled across thus far. That had to be admitted. But strange weaponry? Bizarre secrets? Just a dream. The only bizarre shit they'd ever uncovered was a sea of nerve gas in the hills of old Kentucky, and they'd reburied it in very short order. For the rest — although a manufacturing industry was alive in the Baronies, creakingly primitive as it was for the most part — people were still living with mainly late-twentieth-century artifacts and weapons, and if they were creating new materiel it was based on the old. There were no new kinds of weapons in the here and now. None whatsoever.

"Look," he said gently, "I have to tell you that there is no land of lost happiness. Your Uncle Tyas really was chasing a rainbow, and there's no crock of gold at the end of it because there is no end."

Her head jerked up. She said almost defiantly, "He wasn't a fool and he wasn't crazy. Whatever else he was, Uncle Tyas wasn't crazy."

"I didn't say..."

"He did find something! I know it. It was something important and it was something... outrageous, something completely wild... something that no one's ever discovered before. He wasn't simply some crazy old fucker obsessed with a phantom!"

"Sure."

"And don't 'sure' me, asshole."

"Okay, okay. I'm sorry."

The anger went out of her eyes, the granite hardness from her face. Her body, suddenly tense, relaxed. She breathed in and said "Okay" while breathing out again. "I'm sorry. Hell, you saved my life." All at once she grinned. "You can't be a complete asshole."

Ryan glanced sideways, saw that up front the Trader was watching him, eyebrows raised. Through the steel mesh that covered the blown windshield he could just make out that they were heading through trees, an overlush forest that a century ago had probably simply been pine but was now a moist tangle of humid undergrowth and purplish topgrowth. He remembered the area. They were about five miles out of Mocsin. Talk about bizarre, he brooded. There was enough that was bizarre in the Deathlands without adding to it with all these dreams of fantastic weaponry and who knows what all else. This forest alone was bizarre. How it had grown was beyond him: a random gift from the Nuke. On the other side of Mocsin it was mostly scrub desert to the foothills of the Darks, no purple forest at all.

He suddenly thought, the Darks.

He said, "You were heading for the Darks. Was that where this wild blue yonder all started?"

She scowled at him.

"Still heading," she said.

"You're what !"

"Still heading. Still heading for the Darks."

Ryan said, "Come on!"

"Don't patronize me," she said through her teeth, the angry look back in wide green eyes.

Ryan held up his hands in mock surrender.

"I'm not patronizing. I'm trying to be realistic. You got any idea what's in between Mocsin and the hills? One hundred klicks of wilderness is what. You gonna walk it?"

"I'll get a buggy."

"How? You got any creds?"

"I'll sell my body."

"As to that," said Ryan, "there's quite a bit of competition in Mocsin. And it's regulated. And the pay's piss poor. And it's a hell of a life. And ..."

She shot him a withering look.

"You don't maybe consider I have a touch more class than the majority of my working sisters?"

Ryan tapped his teeth with a fingernail and looked her over with amusement.

"Here it is," he said, his eyes locking on to hers. "You have more class than I've seen in five years."

"Only five years? How blasted gallant." Her tone was sardonic. "Don't bother with the honey talk. I can get by."

Ryan stood up and leaned against the steel-faced wall. He went on as though she hadn't said a word. "But that of course only makes it worse. You wouldn't start out in the back-street sleaze pits, you'd go straight to the top. And that means you'd start off with Jordan Teague, the fattest hog in the territory. You'd not only supplant all his harem, which means they'd be gunning for you the whole time, but you'd have to put up with his personal habits and sexual demands, which are by no means couth."

" 'Couth!'" She laughed suddenly. "That I like!"