James Axler - Doom Helix

No wags here.

The faint ghost of a predark highway, eroded by chem rain and crosscut in places by five-foot-deep washouts, was only fit for foot or horse traffic.

Ryan turned toward Jak Lauren, who squatted on his left. The albino’s white hair fell in lank strands around his shoulders, his eyelids narrowed to slits as he faced into the hot wind. Jak’s short stature and slim build made him look younger than his years. Those who mistook him for a mere teenager and underestimated his fighting skills, only did so once. The ruby-eyed youth was a stone chiller, Deathlands born and bred. From ten feet away Ryan could almost feel the intensity of Jak’s focus, which was pushing every sense to the limit in order to read the faint sign.

“What do you say, Jak?” Ryan asked. “What is it?”

The albino’s reply was delivered without emotion, a death sentence. “Something’s cornered,” he said. “’Bout to get et.”

“Let’s give whatever it is a wide berth,” J. B. Dix, the group’s armorer, said. He swept off his fedora and mopped the beads of sweat from his face with a frayed and stained shirtcuff. “It isn’t our problem. Got to keep moving. Don’t want to have to spend an extra night out on this rad-blasted rock.”

Mildred Wyeth lowered the plastic water bottle from her lips. The freezie, a twentieth century medical doctor and researcher, had taken advantage of the pause in the march to slip out of her pack and stretch her back. Her sleeveless T-shirt was soaked through with perspiration, her brown arms glistened and the tips of the beaded plaits of her hair steadily dripped. “But maybe we can be the ones doing the eating,” she countered.

Ryan had already considered that possibility. Their food cache was down to a few strips of venison jerky each.

Two days earlier they had made their way out of an underground redoubt hidden among the 11,000-foot peaks of the mountains of southern Idaho. The deserted complex’s armory turned out to be a bonanza: unfired cartridge cases in a variety of calibers, gunpowder, primers and bullets, all kept separate, all hermetically vacuum-sealed, in a temperature and humidity-controlled chamber.

After J.B. and Ryan had loaded and test-fired some sample rounds, they began loading cartridges, assembly-line fashion. They loaded as much ammo in 9 mm, .357 Magnum, .38, 12-gauge and 7.62 mm as the companions could carry. Reliable center-fire ammunition was as good as gold, worth top jack and top trade anywhere in the Deathlands. Unfortunately, the redoubt’s food cache had turned out to be unusable. Decades earlier, all the ready-to-eat packets and the canned goods had ballooned up and burst. Foot-high tendrils of dead, gray mold carpeted the contents and floor of the storage room. The seals on the bottled water were intact, though, and it seemed safe to drink.

From the readings on the site’s remote radiation counters, the area had taken a near hit on nukeday. It could have been the result of a targeting error on the part of the Soviets, an MIRV inflight guidance malfunction, or a failed attempt to take out the redoubt. Whatever the cause, it meant traveling northwest wasn’t an option for the companions. Given the food situation, they would have jumped out with their booty, but before they could do that, the redoubt’s power inexplicably failed.

Which had left them on foot, with one open direction of travel: away from the rugged mountain range, onto the edge of the volcanic plain.

Many times in the past Ryan and his companions had taken large prey for their own after others, animal and mutie, had done the hard work of hunting and chilling—a case of survival of the best armed. From what Ryan had seen so far, the biggest critters living on this harsh landscape were yellow chipmunks. And they weren’t worth the price of a looted bullet. Not that a crispy, roasted chipmunk-on-a-stick or two wouldn’t have gone down nicely after thirty-six hours of starvation rations, but a hit by a nine mil or a .38 would have left a scrap of bloody fur with feet. In the jumble of broken flood basalt, it was impossible to catch or trap the little rad bastards. Escape routes, deep cracks and holes were everywhere.

“Might be a jackrabbit,” Krysty said. “They can scream.”

“Bobcat or eagle would make short work of a rabbit,” J.B. said. “One squeak and it would be over. If it wasn’t chilled on the first hit, it would just jump in a hole and hide, out of reach. It wouldn’t keep yellin’ like that.”

“There’s also the possibility that it’s a much larger animal, more difficult to pull down,” Doc said. “A deer or a stray horse resisting the attentions of a pack of predators.” Perspiration had pasted Doc’s long gray hair to the sides of his deeply lined face and neck.

“Or something much more highly evolved,” Mildred suggested.

“We can’t see what it is from here,” Ryan said. “And there’s only one way to find out for sure.”

“We don’t need more trouble than we’ve already got,” J.B. said. “For nuke’s sake, Ryan, it could be a trap, something triple-bad luring us in for an ambush—the oldest trick in the book. There’s a million hidey-holes for things to jump from. If we’re caught flatfooted on a patch of open ground, we’re never going to get out of this nukin’ frying pan.” The short man paused to thumb his wire-rimmed spectacles back in place, up the sweaty bridge of his nose. “We’ve got a lot of miles of lava field left to cross,” he said. “We should stay on the road, swing wide of whatever it is and never look back.”

Ryan took the Armorer’s point. But as things stood, their lives were balanced on a knife edge, and it was a question of priorities—a decision had to be made as to what came first.

“We need to round up some food,” Ryan said. “We won’t poke our noses in if there’s nothing to gain.”

Their stomachs audibly rumbling, Doc and Jak nodded in agreement.

Outvoted, J.B. screwed his hat back down with a flourish and said no more.

Ryan shoulder slung the Steyr and led them offroad, confident that J.B.’s injured feelings would quickly pass, whether or not they found fresh meat. J.B. was a team player, had been ever since the glory days with Trader—that meant honoring a group decision even if he didn’t agree with it.

Off the highway there were no trails for Ryan to follow. The jumbled chunks of lava were a solid mass underfoot. Sometimes he was stepping on jagged points, sometimes in between them, and the edges of the rock tore at the soles and sides of his boots. The surface was so rough that running over it without falling would have been impossible. Even walking a short distance in a straight line was damned difficult. Every ten yards it seemed, holes as big as semitrailers and twisting crevasses blocked their way.

Gradually, the vista ahead revealed itself, and it wasn’t as flat as it had appeared a quarter mile back—a trick of perspective and of the uniformity of the terrain’s coloration. Before them was a dished-out, sunken swath of ground, the top of a huge, collapsed lava dome. Ryan could see the far rim of the crater, a crescent of blacker black, and it was at least a mile away. The deepest part was in the middle, a hundred feet below the rim. The surface looked to be basalt, but the fractured plates of rock were much bigger and tipped up at steep angles.

Ryan knelt at the edge of the drop-off, hand-signaling for the others to do the same. From their new vantage point, the sounds were much more distinct and disturbing.

“My word!” Doc exclaimed. “That scream sounds almost human.”

Jak pointed and said, “There.”

Ryan caught a glimpse of movement in that direction, but it was too far away to make out details. He unslung the .308-caliber longblaster and uncapped its scope. Seven hundred yards downrange he saw a cluster of four-legged animals madly scrabbling, their heads lowered, their tails in the air, pulling and tearing at something on the ground. The low-pitched sounds he’d heard were their growls and snarls. What with the movement, the intervening heaps of rock, and the heat shimmer it was difficult to see clearly, but he could make out tall, skinny creatures with ribs showing through gray coats, and pointed muzzles and ears. And their heads were all oddly marked: the hair on top, between their ears, was bright orange-red. The violent tug-of-war took the animals and the prize they were fighting over out of sight behind the upturned slabs.