James Axler - Shadow Fortress

“Which way?” Ryan asked, brushing back his wild crop of hair.

Reaching into a pocket, J.B. checked the compass in his hand and watched until the needle trembled only slightly. “Left.”

Nodding in agreement, Ryan headed in that direction, using his bare hands to push aside the thick vines and broad banana leaves. The weight of the panga was a tempting reminder of how easy it would be to cut a path through the bushes. But that also left behind a trail so clean any feeb could follow. And on this nameless island, being discovered meant death.

Swatting a buzzing skeeter, J.B. let the tall man get a few yards ahead, then followed in his wake, trying to put his boots in the other man’s prints to minimize the trail. Close behind the wiry Armorer came a ragged line of five more people, each moving quietly through the dense foliage: a tall redhead armed with a Smith & Wesson revolver, an albino teenager hobbling along on a homemade crutch, a stocky black woman with beaded hair who was hugging a predark med kit, a young grim-faced boy brandishing a sleek Browning semiautomatic pistol and, lastly, a thin old man with silver hair, sporting a huge revolver and an ebony walking stick with a silver lion’s head on top. The group stayed three yards apart, the old man judiciously scratching the ground in their wake with his ebony stick to rearrange the leaves and try to hide their passage.

Slow miles passed, and Ryan checked with J.B. twice more on their direction as the group penetrated deeper into the heart of the island jungle. Soon the moss-coated trees were growing so close together that walking between the trunks was becoming difficult, and the branches overhead crisscrossed each other, effectively blocking out the sun. Midnight ruled the forest, but the travelers dared not light their sole oil lantern. The fish oil smelled awful, and they were much too close to the enemy ville of Cascade. The slightest mistake now, and it was all over.

Finally, Ryan reached a grove of massive banyan trees, the hanging vines so thick with leaves and orchids that the group could see nothing in the branches above. The only illumination came from a peppering of sunlight streaming in through a hundred tiny breaks in the foliage. It was like a rain of sunbeams.

As his vision adjusted to the dim lighting, Ryan gestured at J.B. The short man checked his compass, counting to twenty until he saw the needle quiver again, but it no longer seemed to be pulling to the left or right.

“This looks like the spot,” the Armorer stated, tucking the predark device into his munitions bag. “We must be right underneath the plane.”

“Can’t tell a thing from down here,” Ryan stated, studying the overhang of leaves and flowers. “We need Mildred’s flashlight. I’ll call in the others.”

Stepping backward, J.B. put his back to a tree and leveled the shotgun. “Got you covered,” he said, snicking off the safety.

Cupping both hands around his mouth, the man trilled a soft whistle three times. The signal was repeated so low Ryan almost couldn’t hear it, but he answered with one short whistle. A few moments later, familiar faces started easing from the bushes on every side with loaded weapons in their hands.

“Hey, lover,” Krysty Wroth whispered, her animated red hair splaying outward in anxiety. To those who knew the woman well, the movements of her hair betrayed her every emotion.

The tall woman was wearing a khaki jumpsuit with the front partly unzipped to expose a wealth of tan cleavage. Instead of combat boots, Krysty wore blue cowboy boots with steel-tipped toes and a spread-wing-falcon design emblazoned on the sides. Her bearskin coat was tied around her hips to keep the garment out of the way. An old police gun belt with ammo loops circled her shapely hips to support the open holster for the S&W .38 revolver. A sloshing canteen and U.S. Ranger knife were clipped to her regular belt, a bulky backpack riding high on her firm shoulders.

Glancing at Krysty for a moment, Ryan once again realized just how truly beautiful she was. Sometimes it was as if he were seeing her for the first time: the high cheekbones, emerald-green eyes and animated red hair that flowed past her shoulders. Krysty was the most beautiful woman Ryan had ever seen.

Ryan felt the usual rush of blood to his loins and forced his attention back to counting the shadows emerging from the jungle. He had to make sure it was just his crew, and that nobody was trying to sneak among them under cover of the shadows. When he was satisfied there was nobody else in the small clearing but the companions, he reached out and gave Krysty’s slim hand a brief squeeze. She squeezed back with surprising strength almost equal to his own.

“Any trouble?” Ryan asked. He knew Krysty had some mutie blood, which gave her an ability to sense danger. More than once, it had saved their lives.

Leaning against a banyan tree, the woman breathed in the strange perfumes of the exotic flowers. “All clear,” Krysty answered. “Not a sound of folks for miles.”

For the first time in a day, the Deathlands warrior allowed himself to relax the tiniest bit. “Good. You’re on guard. Let me know if anything starts coming our way.”

Stepping away from the tree, Krysty nodded.

“So this is the location of our aerial El Dorado, eh?” Dr. Theophilus Tanner rumbled in a deep voice. The silver-haired man placed his walking stick on a tree root so it wouldn’t sink into the soft earth, and leaned heavily on its lion head ferrule. “Well, we are indeed pilgrims in the valley of the shadows. Most appropriate.”

Although only thirty-eight years old, Doc appeared to be more than sixty, with his heavily lined face and a wild shock of silvery hair. The alteration of his features was merely one of the side effects Doc had suffered at the hands of the ruthless scientists from Operation Chronos.

Ripped from the bosom of his family in the late 1880s, Doc was trawled forward in time to the late 1990s as a test subject. However, Doc proved to be an unruly and uncooperative specimen and was sent forward in time to what had become the Deathlands. Unfortunately, the trawling scrambled some portions of his mind, and Doc sometimes drifted away, reliving prior events or just dreaming aloud while wide-awake. But in a fight, the gentle scholar from Vermont became a deadly fighter and was a valuable member of the group.

Refusing to relinquish any hold on his past, Doc wore clothes of his day, including pin-striped pants and matching vest, a frilly white shirt with a string bow tie and a long frock coat, now with several bullet holes in the twilled fabric. A U.S. Army backpack was carried effortlessly on his shoulders, and around his waist was a cracked leather belt lined with ammo pouches for his gigantic .44 Civil War blaster.

“Pipe down, you old coot,” Mildred Wyeth muttered, using handfuls of grass to try to wipe the residue of quicksand from her clothes. Once it dried, the stuff came off easily. It was only the high viscosity and depth that made the bog dangerous.

Short and stocky, the physician wore loose Air Force fatigues, with a Czech-made ZKR target pistol holstered on her left side for the cross draw she favored. Before skydark Mildred had gone into a hospital for a simple operation, but there had been complications, and a hundred years later she awoke in a cryogenic freezer, a new Gulliver trapped in a frightening world forged from atomic nightmares.

“Might as well set off a gren if you’re going to talk that loud,” Mildred stated, tossing away the filthy grass.

“My humble apologies,” Doc muttered in a wry apology, then continued in the same volume.

“So where is our arboreal harbor located, John Barrymore?”

“Straight up,” J.B. said, jerking a thumb at the impenetrable ceiling of the jungle. “From here, we climb.”