James Axler - Perdition Valley

“Okay, we’re short on rides,” Stirling said, slinging the canvas bag over the pommel of his horse. The animal whinnied nervously at its master, and he tenderly scratched it behind the ears. “Divvy up the food, keep all of the ammo, and we’ll travel in pairs. Renée rides with me, Nathan with Gill, Alton gets all of the extra bombs and water.”

The hooting sounded again, closer this time, and down in the ravine something started savaging the tattered chunks of the dead mutie.

Without comment, the Two-Son ville sec men rushed to their assigned tasks and were soon galloping away from the ravine. Taking the lead, Stirling realized that he had lost all sense of direction fleeing from the drinker. Arbitrarily, he chose the largest object in sight to guide them through the night, and headed the group straight for the jagged peaks of the Mohawk Mountains.

There was a thick copse a few klicks away that they could bed down in for the night. The sec men should be safe enough there. Hopefully.

The roiling clouds filled the sky as the companions raced across the New Mex desert. A dull glow emanated from above, but whether it was the full moon or airborne rads rich with hot isotopes was impossible to say. Then the moon broke through for a scant moment, bathing the world in cool silvery light before vanishing behind the curtain of polluted clouds once more.

Hours passed as the miles flew beneath the pounding hooves of their horses. Soon, the ground turned into a mix of sand and soil, then came irregularly spaced tufts of weeds and grass. Finally the companions galloped across a flat grassland. There was no reeking taint of acid rain on the wind, only the sweet smell of living plants, so the companions gave the animals their heads, and let them run free, stretching their muscles as the group moved swiftly across one of the small sections of the Zone that was still alive.

“Lovely,” Doc said, inhaling the clean breeze. “Just lovely.”

Scowling darkly, Ryan grunted at the pronouncement.

“Yeah, fragging swell,” J.B. added sarcastically, pulling an anti-pers gren from his munitions bag and checking the tape on the arming handle. “As long as we don’t run into any drinkers. Grass and sand are a bad mix.”

“Especially on the fairway near the sixth hole,” Mildred said in wry amusement to herself.

Her red hair streaming in the wind, Krysty shot the physician a strange look. Mildred could only shrug, unable to explain the golfing allusion. Then she gave a start. Just a minute, there was a water hole here, and copse of trees standing in the middle of nowhere, long stretches of flat grassland…They were riding across a golf course! Okay, one overrun with weeds and bushes, now mixing with the real desert, and slightly nuked a hundred years ago, but still easily identifiable as a golf course.

“You spotted the design, too, eh, madam?” Doc asked.

“Kind of hard to miss when you know what to look for,” Mildred answered, hunkering lower in her saddle. Surrounded by a slice of the past, the fairway only incurred uncomfortable memories for the woman, and she concentrated on riding. The game of golf was as far in the past to her now as a New Year’s Eve party. Long gone, and only dimly remembered.

Ryan’s rad counter suddenly started to click wildly, and he abruptly veered to the left, starting a long curving sweep across the flat landscape. The others had seen this sort of thing many times before, and stayed close. The one-eyed man couldn’t see any indications of a blast crater, there were no glowing pits or glass lakes. But he knew that could simply mean the area had been hit with one of those air-burst atomic bombs he’d read about. Mebbe one of those neutron things that killed folks, but didn’t harm the buildings or plants.

“Golf?” Jak asked, arching a snowy eyebrow. “Not see sign of ocean.”

“No, not a gulf, golf. It’s a game, you see, and…” Mildred started, then bit her tongue. “Never mind. Just old talk.”

Bent low over his mare, the teen accepted the answer with a shrug. He knew the physician had been born long before skydark and sometimes talked about things almost impossible to translate clearly. He never would have understood the notion of an elevator until taking a ride in one in the redoubts.

Keeping careful track of the rise and fall of the clicks of the rad counter, Ryan and J.B. directed the companions past the lingering death of the invisible rad zone. Once the clicks returned to the normal level of background rad, Ryan called a halt on the crest of a low sweeping hillock. The elevation gave them a commanding view of the landscape. Even in the dappled light from the moving clouds, they could see there was nobody around for miles in every direction.

With the butt of the Steyr resting on an outthrust hip, Ryan stood guard while the companions watered their tired horses. Rummaging in a pocket, J.B. pulled out his recently acquired compass and waited for the needle to settle down. But it kept spinning about madly, occasionally pausing to then start rotating in the reverse direction.

“Aw, to hell with it,” J.B. said in frustration, tucking the device away. “There’s just too much crap in the air from the clouds to get a clean mag reading.”

Spooning some spaghetti from a MRE pack, Mildred caught the motion, but said nothing. J.B. had been able to trade one off a baron’s brother in exchange for a gren. At the time, it seemed like a bargain, but now she could see in the Armorer’s face how much he wanted that gren back.

“Those really work?” Jak asked.

“Absolutely,” Mildred said, shoveling in another mouthful of pasta and sauce. “Oh, a Boy Scout compass, or something from the military would be a lot better,” she admitted, “but then, half the world was explored with a magnetic needle resting on a piece of cork that floated in a bowl of water.”

Rubbing the muscular neck of his beast, the teen made a face of total disbelief.

“It is true, Jak,” Doc added, lowering his canteen and wiping his mouth clean with a linen handkerchief that had seen better days. “In the Hung Dynasty of ancient China, a magnetic needle was worth the owner’s weight in gold. That would roughly translated today into, say, twice your bodyweight of live brass.”

“That much?” Krysty asked, watching something flying through the distant clouds to the west. Mother Gaia, that looked like a flock of screamwings! Thankfully, the deadly winged muties were heading in another direction. Had to be a fresh chill because they were moving even faster than usual.

“Trader always said that the only thing constant was change,” Ryan said, biting off a chunk of jerky from their Two-Son ville supplies. “Nowadays, a hammer is more valuable than one of those microscopes I read about.”

Noticing Krysty’s posture, J.B. pulled out his longeye. He had found the old Navy telescope in a pawn shop in the place they called Zero City, and it was in perfect condition. About the size of your fist, it extended to over a full yard in length, and was much better than even binocs. Pushing back his fedora, J.B. began to sweep the horizon, but all he could see was blackness. Wait a sec, what the frag was that? he thought.

“The center is chaos, the circle cannot hold,” Doc spoke softly in an odd singsong manner that meant he was quoting something. Using both hands, the time traveler unwrapped a package of cheese and crackers from the open MRE in the pocket of his frock coat. The cheese was a dull gray in color, but since that was its natural color he paid it no special attention. The predark military machine wanted the food for its troops to be nourishing, and long-lasting, but apparently nobody gave a damn if it was appetizing.