James Axler - Ice and Fire

"We decided to get some fast food. There were lots of burger stalls and fries. But there was an old Chinese guy who had a stall with pictures on the side — whatever he was selling. I can still see it, and almost smell how good it was — fried shrimp, crab and fish with some rice and a soda. We sat on the steps and watched New York flow by us. I felt real close to my dad at that moment. I don't think I'll ever forget it. Even if I live to be a hundred."

Jak sniggered. "You're more hundred now, freezie. Lot more."

Rick didn't rise to the bait. He simply nodded at the boy. "True enough. So don't be so rude to your elders!"

The albino threw him the finger and darted off to join Lori at the fringe of the desert brush.

Now they were at a lower level, and it was possible to look back up the mountain slope. They could see the scar of the scree-fall, but no trace of the hidden redoubt tucked under the lip of the peak above.

"Think there's a ville over there," Krysty said, pointing across the expanse of orange-gray sand. "And I can smell... not sure what."

Ryan stopped, still just within the shade of the forest, and took several deep breaths. There was something. Very faint but...

"Gas!" he exclaimed. "It's gasoline! Fireblast! If we can smell it such a long way off, then it must be a big field. Or a store so big that... If there's gas, then there's wags. Am I right, J.B., or am I right?"

"Could be. Sure is strong. This gas country, Doc? California?"

"Never used to be, but I suppose that the shifting of the great plates of the earth could push oil-bearing strata for hundreds of miles."

"If you got jack, you're fine," Ryan said, "but if you got gas, then you're even better."

Ginsberg sighed. "What's transport like? If gas is that rare and difficult?"

"There's some. Most villes have stocks. There was a huge store that the Trader found, about two hundred miles north of where Boston used to be. But it got blown. Now there's wags. Transport and war wags. Kind of rough."

"Trains?" the freezie asked.

J.B. answered him. "Sure. Often get trains of wags rolling together. Safer that way. Hold off the muties."

"No. I mean trains, like Amtrak. On rails." Seeing the blank looks, he said, "No, I guess there aren't any. How about planes?" Again, he answered his own question. "Stupid. If there's no trains and there aren't many cars, there sure as little green apples aren't going to be any airplanes."

"Wrong," Ryan replied. "I've never seen any flying wags, but the Trader saw one, once. Out East, he said."

"Flying?" Rick asked.

"Crashing," the Armorer said with a short, dry laugh.

"That's what Trader said. Got hauled out some old shed. Already gassed up. Baron's oldest son said he'd try it. Up, up and... down again. Body finished in one field. Head in another. Never found the legs, way I recall it."

Though the land had looked fairly even from high above, it was actually seamed with innumerable narrow ravines and dry riverbeds. Doc surmised that this was all a result of the unimaginably catastrophic forces that had shifted the land a hundred years earlier. Since the old Golden State had always been a place of earthquakes and landslides, it wasn't surprising to see the flat desert ripped and patched.

Krysty's feeling that there might be a ville on the far side made them cautious about approaching carelessly. Also, there were sinister tracks in the soft red dust.

"Sidewinder," Jak suggested, pointing to an odd swirling pattern in the sand. There were also peculiar marks, as though large wag tires had been rolled ceaselessly around.

The light breeze through the shoulder-high scrub produced a constant dry rustling that would cover the approach of any creature. Ryan felt the short hairs raising on his nape.

"Bad place," he muttered, almost to himself.

But Krysty, at his side, heard him and nodded. "I got that feeling, too. Best we get across it as fast as we can."

"Not easy, towing the freezie. The way he looks, a half mile'll put him down and out."

"Could go back, lover?"

"Yeah. Nobody ever gets anywhere by going back, do they? Let's go on."

Once they had plunged into the sagebrush, dotted with elegant saguaros, it became difficult to see more than ten paces ahead. The switchbacking terrain was exhausting, even for the hardier members of the group. For Rick Ginsberg, the effect was devastating. After less than twenty minutes he collapsed, eyes rolling up into their sockets, a thin froth dribbling from his cracked lips.

"Cruise up Mulholland after dark and just watch the lights," he mumbled.

The other six gathered around him. Lori dropped to her knees, breathing hard, wiping dusty sweat from her forehead, brushing away her tangled hair. Doc also knelt down.

"By the three Kennedys! This heat quite debilitates one, does it not? I fear that our frozen comrade is not quite up to it. Should we not return to the redoubt and jump elsewhere?"

"I'll give him some water," Krysty said, kneeling beside the prostrate man.

Ryan looked around. They were in a shallow saucer-shaped depression, but ahead of them the land seemed to be rising. "Jak?"

"Ryan?"

"Go up and see if you can get high enough to check how far to the edge of this desert."

The boy returned in less than five minutes, his white hair tinted pink with the fine sand. He jumped down the last bit of the slope.

"Not far," he said.

"Hour? Two?"

"Three. With freezie?.. Ten hours. Mebbe more."

Rick was, once more, asleep. Krysty looked up from giving him a drink, her green eyes meeting Ryan's stare unflinchingly.

"Nobody said it'd be easy," she whispered accusingly. "Man's sick, tired, been lying with a dark mind for a hundred years. What'd you expect, lover? Got to be slow with him."

"I know it."

Oddly it was Doc who first heard the distant sound.

He stood up, putting his hand to his ear, listening hard. Apart from the dozing freezie, the others all looked curiously at the old man.

"What is it?" Ryan asked, his ears filled by the noise of the wind hissing through the scrub. He could just catch the sounds of a chem storm, rumbling and crackling, miles to the east, beyond the mountains.

"For a moment I thought I could hear the sound of... But that is midsummer madness. The folly of an old fool, they always say, you know."

Ryan was about to relax again, deciding it was one of Doc's fantasies, when he heard it, too. When all of them heard it.

A distant, regular humming noise, like an errant wasp, buzzing across the desert, coming from where Krysty claimed there might be a ville. The sound was growing louder.

"Mighty big insect," J.B. observed, cradling his new blaster, and looking anxiously up at the cloud-speckled sky.

Rick opened his eyes and gazed blankly upward, blinking through the pebbled glasses. "What's?.. It's an airplane? By God, but it's..."

"Everyone down," Ryan shouted, setting an example by diving beneath a stunted clump of ocotillo. Krysty landed at his side, with J.B. beyond her. Ryan could see that the others were also taking cover.

The noise was louder, hiccuping occasionally, rasping and whining. He peered up through the sparse protection of the brush.

And saw it.

The freezie had been right. It was a plane. Two wings on each side, with circles of red, white and blue painted on them; a stubby body, with twin cockpits. It was about a hundred feet above the ground, swaying from side to side, the racket now quite deafening to the people below it.

It had a single revolving propeller set on the point of its nose. Blue smoke coughed from the engine. Ryan could make out only one flier, his round, helmeted face hidden behind an enormous pair of glinting goggles. As far as he could make out, the flying machine carried no blasters.