James Axler - Eden's Twilight

Gathering in the corner farthest from the blocked door, the companions gratefully undid the caked strips of cloth from around their faces, then loosened the ropes holding the blankets in place and gratefully dropped them to the floor.

“Never saw a bastard storm hit this fast before,” Ryan growled, stretching his tired muscles. “If we hadn’t found this place, we’d all have been on the last train west by now.”

Tall and heavily muscled, the big man had a deeply scarred face, with a leather patch covering the puckered hole of his left eye. A bolt-action Steyr SSG-70 was strapped across his lumpy backpack, and a 9 mm SIG-Sauer blaster was holstered at his hip, right next to the curved sheath of a panga.

“Got that right, lover,” Krysty agreed, listening to the thunder booming outside. A split second later lightning flashed outside the windows, casting the people in the garage into stark relief. “However, when I saw that concrete eagle outside, I knew we’d be okay.”

A strikingly beautiful woman, Krysty was tall with ample curves and bright emerald eyes. Long crimson hair hung past her shoulders, the animated filaments flexing and moving around with a life of their own. A canvas-web belt of ammo pouches circled her waist, the checkered grip of an S&W .38 revolver jutting from a holster on her right hip. A large Bowie knife was sheathed on the left. Her worn blue cowboy boots were embroidered with the silvery outline of falcons, and a tattered bearskin coat hung over her shoulders.

“Yeah, me, too,” Ryan said, almost smiling. “National Guard bases are always good boltholes. I read once they were designed to hold back rioting mobs of people. The ones Trader found were usually in good condition.” He paused. “Not always, but usually.”

“Gaia must have been guiding our steps,” Krysty said, removing the cap from her canteen. She took a small sip, sloshing the water in her mouth before spitting it into the grease pit, and then took a long draft from the container. The water was tepid, flat, but tasted like ambrosia.

“Gaia, eh? Mebbe she did help at that,” J.B. added, removing the glasses from his pocket and sliding them into place. “Because I sure couldn’t see the compass, or sextant. We could easily have gone deeper into the desert and ended up as bones in the Great Salt.”

Short and wiry, J.B. was wearing loose neutral-colored fatigue pants, U.S. Army boots, a brown leather jacket and fingerless gloves. An Uzi submachine gun hung off his left shoulder, an S&W M-4000 shotgun was slung across his shoulders and at his side was a munitions bag bulging with assorted explosives. Their old teacher, the Trader, had nicknamed him “the Armorer” long ago, and the title fit John Barrymore Dix perfectly. There wasn’t a weapon in existence the deadly man could not fix, or repair, in his sleep.

“Nonsense, John Barrymore, luck favors the ready,” Doc said, trying to brush the loose grit from his clothing. However, he only seemed to be making it worse, so the man abandoned the effort. “Indeed, observe our current locale! This is a perfect sanctuary from the Dantean fimbulvetr rampaging outside!”

Lean and muscular as a racing whippet, Professor Theophilus Algernon Tanner seemed incongruous in his frock coat and frilly white shirt, clothing from a time when the style of a man’s clothing was vitally important. A huge .44 LeMat pistol was tucked into a wide gunbelt, the canvas ammo pouches full of black powder, lead and cotton wads for the massive Civil War handcannon. An ebony walking stick was thrust into his belt like a medieval sword, and his backpack hung empty and flat across his back.

“Stop mixing mythologies, you crazy old coot,” Dr. Mildred Wyeth shot back irritably, stomping the dust off her combat boots. “Dante’s hell was blazing hot, while the Norse legend of the fimbulvetr said it was freezing cold!”

Short and stocky, the physician was wearing a red flannel shirt and camou-colored fatigue pants, her ebony hair braided into beaded plaits. A Czech-made ZKR target revolver was snugly holstered low on her hip, and a patched canvas bag hung from her shoulder bearing the faded word M*A*S*H. It held the bare essentials: boiled water sealed in plastic bottles, sterilized cloth in plastic bags, two sharp knives, sulfur to dust wounds, flea powder from an animal clinic, eyebrow tweezers from a hair salon, pliers from a dentist, long fingers recovered from an autobody shop and some tampons reserved for deep bullet wounds. It wasn’t much, barely the basics, but it was a start.

“Indeed, madam, but Dante’s hell was also frozen in the center,” Doc countered, raising a finger. “So who is to say the two frigid dreamscapes were not connected somehow in a sort of cosmic abettor?”

Scowling, Mildred started a reply then merely snorted instead, simply too exhausted to argue with the scholar. Besides, she thought, maybe he was correct.

“Hot, cold, not care,” Jak Lauren noted pragmatically, taking a long pull at his canteen before closing it tight. “Long as we inside and storm out.”

A true albino, the teenager was the color of snow, hair and skin alike. He wore loose fatigue pants that had seen better days, a T-shirt that bore a picture of a wolf and a battered jacket covered with bits of metal, glass and feathers. Sewn into the collar were a dozen razor blades, a terrible surprise for any enemy who tried to grab the youth by the neck. A huge Colt .357 Magnum Python rested in a policeman’s gunbelt. At least a dozen leaf-bladed throwing knives were secreted in his jacket. A combat knife was sheathed at his left hip, and the handle of a dagger jutted from the top of his right boot.

“You can load that into a blaster and fire it,” Ryan growled, fisting the leather patch that covered his missing eye. Some of the bastard sand and salt had gotten through the wrapping and were making the empty hole itch like crazy. Turning away from the others, he lifted the patch and carefully poured some water onto his face until the sensation ceased.

Outside the garage, the howling wind increased in volume, the hard-driven grit sounding like winter hail on the roof. Then something heavy slammed into the side of the garage, the impact shaking loose a light rain of dust from the steel beams supporting the ceiling.

“The storm seems to actually be getting worse, if that’s possible.” Krysty frowned, casting an anxious glance at the barricaded door. “We must be near a rad pit, and a really mucking big one.” She did not fully understand the science behind the atmospheric phenomenon the way Mildred and Doc said they did, but the woman knew from experience that the rising heat from a nuke crater could change the local weather in any manner of odd ways; burn a forest into a desert or turn a desert into a swamp. Skydark did more than simply destroy people and cities, it altered the world in ways the whitecoats couldn’t have predicted.

Instantly both Ryan and J.B. checked the rad counters clipped to their lapels, but each of the devices registered only the usual background levels.

“We’re clear,” J.B. announced in obvious relief. “No rads worth mentioning.”

Just then sheet lightning flashed outside in a continuous barrage and thunder rolled for several minutes, making speech impossible.

“Well, we’re not going anywhere until this ends,” Ryan stated, rubbing his unshaved jaw. “Might as well settle in for the night. The ceiling is high enough for us to start a fire, and we can use the desk for kindling. What’s the food situation?”

Taking a seat on a wooden bench, Mildred answered without even looking in her backpack. “We lost a lot of it in the storm,” she said with a sigh. “But I managed to keep about three pounds of dried beans, four self-heats of mushroom soup, some beef jerky that probably won’t crack our teeth too badly, and six cans of…uh, dinosaur.”