James Axler - Pilgrimage to Hell

Ryan shivered, closed his long fleece-lined coat, stamped his boots. He said to the Trader, "We still heading south after this number?"

"Yeah."

"Great. It's too near to the Icelands up here. At night you start to breathe sleet chips."

The Trader laughed raucously.

"You're getting soft, Ryan. When you've had twenty years or more of this crap, you don't notice it."

Ryan watched the busy scene below. The land wags, trucks and two of the war wags were parked in a wide circle off the road. Fires were being built outside the vehicles' perimeter, massive constructions of logs and thorn and brush scrub and chunks of long-burning hardwood carried especially for the purpose in one of the trucks. Fires, as such, did not particularly deter marauders or strange animals that sometimes came shuffling around, sniffing for easy kills — dogs as big as steers with tusks a foot long, roaming in packs, bred in secret, truly carnivorous; or hideous, unknown beasts of great bulk that left wide trails of yellow slime behind them — but flames would give light when you didn't want to waste the generators, and psychologically, they were good for the men. What did deter was the immense amount of firepower concentrated in that circle of travel-worn and travel-stained vehicles.

There was enough blast power there to shred anything that might dare to take on the land wag train.

On the road itself, maybe forty meters from the bottom of the hillock on which he and the Trader stood, was the lead war wag, two big container rigs and an armored truck on Ryan's buggy. Men were milling around there; Ryan could see J.B. giving terse orders, checking things out. He yawned, turned, took in the dreary terrain.

This was basically flatland, desert scrub. Behind lay the purple forest, a dark mass only just glimpsed beyond the rises of the semi-ruined blacktop. To Ryan's right, more forest. To his left, low hills, dun colored, sparsely vegetated with brush and trees picked as clean as ancient animal bones. In front of him, far distant, the foothills leading up to the towering tors and peaks that marched across the dying sun. And between them and Ryan was the road, more woodland and, beyond, out of sight, the mess that was Mocsin.

He glanced northwest. There the hills were significantly darker, blacker. Hence "the Darks." Once, he believed, they had been known by some other name, but what it was he could not say. The Darks suited them: black, brooding mountains, slashed by hideously deep ravines, with a climate and an ugly mythology all their own.

There ... lay Paradise?

The Trader said, "How's the girl?"

"Great minds think alike."

The Trader glanced at his tall war captain. "Getting yourself in there, huh?" He chuckled. "You young dogs. Make me feel like a real cripple, real old fart."

"I was thinking about what she said. The Darks."

"Most unpleasant locale. Never penetrated it. Nothing for us there, boy. At least nothing marked on old Marsh's plans."

"Doesn't mean to say they're empty."

The Trader laughed.

Had they not once made the long haul through the mountain chain maybe four hundred klicks south of there, and stood looking out over the seething Pacific Ocean, watching it roil and bubble and steam?

Had they not actually managed to sail around the lagoons that lay over what on the old maps once been called "the Black Rock Desert"?

Had they not found a vast inland sea where once had been a lake? Had they not penetrated the peripheries of that dread land of fire and howling wind that lay far to the south of them now, where terrifying gale-force gusts tore across the parched landscape, transforming the world into a hell of dust and whirling grit that shredded bare skin to the bone?

All in search of Stockpiles. All in search of...

Suddenly he stopped laughing, whipped his head around, stared at the tree line toward Mocsin.

"I think I caught a flash." He had turned to the west, one arm flung over his eyes.

"A flash? In this light? What kind of flash?"

"Light on metal. I could be wrong." The Trader shrugged. "Wouldn't surprise me if that fat bastard had guys on lookout for us. But so what? They won't try anything, you bet your life. They'd be outta their skulls. They'd need a few major field pieces to blow our snot away, and Teague's got none."

"That we know of."

Again the Trader's shoulders moved, and he turned full on to Ryan. "Where is the girl, anyhow?"

"Asleep. War Wag Two. She wanted to come with us but I got Kathy to feed her some caps. She's out. She'll stay out for hours."

"And then? Can't keep her on the train if she don't wanna stay, Ryan."

"Kathy'll talk to her, try and persuade her to stay clear of Mocsin and out of the Darks. It's an insane idea to head up there alone. She wouldn't stand a dog's chance."

"Looks a tough cookie to me."

"Not the point."

The Trader pushed a hand back through his grizzled hair, sniffed and spat. He jammed the cigar, now dead, back into his mouth.

"Up to you."

Below, J.B. was climbing the hillock followed by the lanky, long-haired Abe. J.B. stared up at Ryan through his steel-rimmed glasses.

"See the flash?"

The Trader grunted.

"What say we give 'em a little present?" said Abe. "What say a rocket up the ass? Huh? Huh?"

"It's not them I'm worried about," said J.B. darkly.

Ryan caught his eye.

"What's the problem?"

The thin little guy stared at the ground, then glanced to the east where darkness was reaching out toward them.

"Should've made sure of that mutie bunch."

"Man, we destroyed 'em!"

"Could've been more in the rocks. Could've cleared out long before we started looking."

"We were there most of the day, J.B."

Dix's shoulders twitched. "Don't like it. Should've sanitized the place. Scorched earth."

Abe looked uneasy. Ryan felt uneasy. The Trader's face was blank. J.B. looked up, his sallow face coloring slightly.

"Okay. We don't kill for the kill. Even so. Guy who ramrodded that band had brains. Thought he could nail us, which was stupid. But he went about it the right way. That's what counts."

"He's dead," said Ryan. "Gotta be. The girl, Krysty, said a sticky chased him. The sticky came back but the scaly guy didn't. What more d'you want?"

J.B. said, "His head." He added, "I just got a feeling."

Ryan felt he'd known J. B. Dix for a long, long time: an age, a lifetime. He had joined the Trader's band only a year or so after Ryan himself had signed up, and had proved himself utterly indispensable as the Trader's weapons master. Thin and intense, slightly melancholic, he rarely said much; what he did say was short and to the point. Whereas others might yell and rage to push their argument, J.B. just got gruffer, his sentences more clipped. Ryan respected this incisiveness, his singular mind.

Even so...

"Ah, come on!" Ryan punched him on the shoulder lightly. "If that mutie can take the train solo, he can have it. He'll have earned it. We oughta sign the bastard on!"

They began to move off down the slope, Abe veering left, the others heading for the small convoy on the road.

The Trader yelled, "Don't forget. Every hour, on the hour."

Abe waved. "We'll be there."

The Trader said, "Hey, J.B., you tell the guys to check their boots?"

Dix didn't reply.

In a huge, high-ceilinged room with a gallery running around its walls midway up, and tall windows now cloaked with rich, wine-red velvet hangings, and a door at the far end similarly masked, lit by light lancing down in an intense cone from a single spot concealed in one of the corner angles high above, a man of indeterminate age, clad in a faded and filthy black coat that reached to his thin shanks, and black pants, cracked knee-length boots, a shirt that perhaps centuries ago might have been white but now was a mottled brownish-yellow, and with a tall hat on his head, the brim chipped and worn, the crown sagging sideways as though it had half-snapped off, capered and danced and recited in a cracked tenor: