James Axler - Forbidden Trespass

“Mebbe,” Ryan said. “Mebbe not.”

The white-haired youth frowned. Though a product of the Gulf Coast bayou country—even hotter and double-steamier than this—he was proud of his wilderness skills. Indeed, his skills at stealth and tracking in any environment—even urban ones, as alien to his upbringing as the dimpled face of the moon. And for a fact, he was good. Those skills had kept Ryan and the rest of his companions alive on many occasions.

“The pallid shadows again?” Doc asked. Doc was a tall, gaunt man with haunted blue eyes and rich silvery hair. Though he appeared to be in his late sixties, he was, in fact, in terms of years lived, in his thirties. Looked at in a different way, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was almost two and a half centuries old. The whitecoats of Operation Chronos had trawled him from the late 1800s to the twentieth century. When he proved to be a very difficult subject, they threw him into the future, to Deathlands, a prematurely aged husk.

That he had survived was a testament to his intrinsic toughness and drive to live. “Not sure,” Ricky said, shaking his head. The kid had been with them for a while now, tramping the miles and enduring countless hardships with the rest of the companions. He was currently on watch, squatting at the edge of the sinkhole that had claimed some kind of small but well-equipped predark office building. He had his DeLisle carbine across his knees.

“Can find out,” Jak said stubbornly. He hated to stay still for long, especially doing hard physical labor. He felt as if he should constantly be prowling whatever surroundings his companions happened to find themselves in, keeping watch, keeping them safe. And it chafed his spirit to be forced to do so while there seemed to be enemies about.

“Why don’t we wait to see if they are a threat to us, Jak?” said Krysty Wroth, emerging from the large irregular hole in the rubble that led to the intact, buried sections of the small predark complex.

As she straightened, Ryan watched her appreciatively. Like Mildred, she had stripped off the man’s shirt she wore in favor of her halter top. Also like Mildred, she had substantial need of the support it gave. Ryan never tired of watching the rise and fall of her breasts as she straightened. She took a handkerchief from her pants pocket and wiped her forehead. Her glorious red mane of hair was tied back in a green-and-white bandanna. Its strands stirred slightly, restless, despite the lack of so much as a sigh of wind here in this pit in the heavily wooded Pennyrile Hills. Each individual hair was a living thing, capable of motion—and of feeling, which made the occasions she found it necessary to trim it something of an ordeal.

She wasn’t just the most beautiful woman Ryan had ever seen, she was his life-mate. Jak looked at her.

“Want make sure don’t,” he said. The young man tended to expend words, especially things like pronouns and articles, as if they were drops of his own blood. The others had enough experience of interpreting his eccentrically clipped speech they could make out what he meant. Usually.

She smiled her dazzling smile. “They haven’t tried anything so far,” she pointed out. “But why don’t you take over for Ricky on watch?”

Jak liked that suggestion. He nodded and scrambled up the treacherous, sliding slope as if he were half mountain goat, half wraith. Ricky was appreciative of the offer and picked his way cautiously back down to join the others beside the hole and their growing pile of the day’s bounty.

Ricky was something of an apprentice to J.B., having learned weapons-making skills from his uncle Benito back home on Monster Island, and sharing with the man a special love for booby traps.

The Armorer was bent over the crate with a salvaged chunk of orange Formica on it, where their best swag of the day was piled. He had his battered fedora pushed to the back of his head and was scrutinizing the loot. “Mebbe what you’re seeing is what the folks hereabouts call coamers ,” he said, picking up a piece of circuit board and holding it up to the dying sun’s light.

“Grave robbers?” Ricky asked a little breathlessly, as he came up to join his mentor. “Could they be what’s out there?”

“No one has seen them,” Doc said. “They might indeed be our pale ghosts.”

Ricky swallowed.

* * *

THE PENNYRILE HILLS were a fertile and somewhat secluded region of what had long ago been western Kentucky. The area was an irregular patch of rolling, thickly wooded country, dotted with sinkholes and crisscrossed by streams, roughly forty miles long by twenty across at the widest, set in the midst of a larger stretch of arid limestone plain—a large green oasis amid desolation. Some freak of weather patterns provided it abundant rainfall, and protection from the acid rains that periodically scoured the rest of the surrounding karst country.

Therefore the people of the Pennyrile led a relatively isolated existence, and mostly seemed to like it that way. There were a few small villes, of the sort that boasted a mayor instead of a baron. Most of them were scattered in clans and remote cottages and camps, where they lived by subsistence farming, hunting, fishing, trapping, and cutting firewood and lumber. They generated sufficient surplus, on their own hook and through traders and travelers from outlands who found their way into the area, to make it worth the companions’ while to sell the booty they took from the predark trove they had literally stumbled into—thanks to Ricky not always watching where he put his feet—rather than packing the richest haul on their backs and taking it somewhere else.

Ryan was glad the sunken facility had turned up in a sparsely populated area of the Pennyrile. It made sense, of course; if more people lived nearby, odds were that somebody would’ve found and plundered it decades earlier. But also the locals, while prosperous enough not to be desperate as a usual thing, yet not prosperous enough to attract coldhearts or conquerors, tended to be clannish, insular, and to view outlanders with extreme suspicion.

Still, mutual advantage was a universal language, even though it was one a surprising number of denizens of the postnuke world chose to remain deaf to, for reasons Ryan had long since given up trying to puzzle out. Whatever their misgivings or prejudices toward the tall, one-eyed man and his companions, they were glad enough to trade for the treasures the outlanders dug from the earth.

Conn, the proprietor of a gaudy house outside the ville of Sinkhole, was actually welcoming to outlanders, possibly as a concomitant of his occupation. In particular, Ryan thought, he provided a reasonably safe and clean environment in which to do business and even spend some proceeds of the interactions.

Ryan heaved a deep sigh. He was bone-tired from the day’s exertion in the heat and humidity. The sweat ran freely from his shaggy black hair down his face, stinging his good eye—his right one—and tickling when it insinuated its way under the black patch that covered where the other had been.

Sometimes he had to remind himself that if he was this beat, the others had to be dragging themselves along by nothing more than sheer determination.

He walked over to the plunder table, stooped, picked up a clay jug and took a long drink. Then he poured water over his forehead and face. That was one good thing about this area: water was easy to come by. It was another minor wonder the sunken facility hadn’t flooded to inaccessibility.

Doc said something about the sandstone cap underlying the soil keeping the water out here, even though the moisture had infiltrated somewhere nearby and scooped a gap in the soft underlying limestone bedrock. That was what led to the sinkhole opening up and eating the small but well-equipped field office complex, although Ryan suspected it had gotten more than a little help from the unnatural wave of monster earthquakes generated by the nukecaust.