James Axler - Shaking Earth

He was keeping watch while his comrades cleaned themselves and the wag. Mildred had insisted on the cleanup, and she wasn’t just being predark fastidious.

“We need to clear out every last trace of that venom,” she’d said. “Even assuming its potency and characteristics are those of normal rattlesnake poison, and don’t carry any kind of nasty mutie kicker, if any of it gets into an open wound, even a scratch, you’ll be in a world of hurt. Rattler venom’s primarily a hematotoxin. It makes your red blood cells explode. And we’re fresh out of antivenin.”

So they were taking a pause, down in the surprisingly green and fertile valley that stretched away north from the mountain into whose bowels they had jumped, and a similar volcanic peak a few miles away that didn’t seem to be erupting as enthusiastically. They still seemed to be a good twenty miles from the wide lake. In the bright sunlight they could make out the shapes of skyscrapers rising from the middle of it.

J.B. tucked his minisextant into his kit and glanced at his old map. “Latitude’s right for Mexland,” he announced. “Right about Mex City, truth to tell.”

“I could’ve told you that,” Mildred said. She was redressing Krysty’s shoulder. The giant rattler’s venom had splashed her bandages. Thinking fast, Mildred had clawed them away before the poison could come into contact with Krysty’s wounds.

“Air thin,” Jak said.

“Yeah. Good thing we’ve been up in the mountains getting acclimated for a few days. This whole valley’s pretty high. Don’t remember just how high that is exactly. I came down here for vacation once, couple years before the balloon went up. I recognize those mountains. Big one we popped out of is Popocatépetl. The shorter one’s Iztaccíhuatl.”

“What’s that mean?” J.B. asked, blinking owlishly through his spectacles, which he had just cleaned on his shirttail.

“How should I know? I can’t even spell’em. I don’t even know why it looks as if the ruins of Mexico City are out in the middle of a great big lake.”

“They were lovers,” Doc intoned. He was wringing out his shirt. His thin, shrunken chest was fishbelly pale. In comparison his hands and face looked deeply tanned.

“Say what?” J.B. asked. “You’re not losing your grip again, are you, Doc?”

The old man didn’t deign to respond. “She was the emperor’s daughter. A most beauteous maid. He was a mighty young warrior. They fell in love. Her father disapproved. He sent the young man off to war, then told his daughter he had fallen in battle. Whereupon the girl expired from grief. Then the warrior returned home to find his beloved dead, and he died of grief, as well. The gods, taking pity on them, transformed them into the mountains we have just quit. Iztaccíhuatl means ‘Sleeping Woman.’ Popocatépetl is ‘Smoking Mountain.’”

Jak was squatting by the stream, ignoring the fact his feet were sunk in cold muck. He turned his ruby gaze over his shoulder on Doc.

“Gods turned to mountains?” he asked. “What good that do?”

Doc shrugged delicately. “The ways of gods, the theologians assure us, are not the ways of men. Though in sooth, the gods and goddesses of most of the globe’s mythologies seem to manifest a decidedly puckish sense of humor.”

Ryan checked the rad counter clipped to his coat for maybe the dozenth time. “Anybody getting any kind of a reading?”

“Nope,” J.B. said. “Background’s mebbe a little high. That’s it.”

“So no nukes went off in the vicinity.” Ryan shook his head. “Something did some damage.”

“No kidding,” Mildred said. “In my day this was the most populous city on Earth. We should be in the suburbs now. Something didn’t just damage them, it made them disappear.”

“Mebbe the smokies?” J.B. asked. Ryan shrugged.

J.B. had begun to load the few supplies they’d managed to scavenge from the Popocatépetl redoubt back into the wag. He noticed that Jak was staring out across the little stream again, seemingly morose.

“What’s eating at your innards, Jak?” he asked.

“Snake,” the youth said.

“You’re thinking about that bastard snake?”

Jak shrugged. “Big,” he said. “Caught, eat like kings.”

As if to emphasize his words, he suddenly lunged into the stream in a great splash. He grabbed, then he straightened, holding a squirming leopard frog. He bit off the head, spat it into the weeds, then began to eat the still-kicking amphibian.

Mildred winced. “I hate it when he does stuff like that.”

Ryan gave a last look around. Their immediate surroundings were broken enough with jagged ridges and obvious cooled-lava flows that any ill-intentioned strangers could work their way to well within longblaster range of the party and he’d never see them. He tossed away the flower and jumped to the ground. The soil was black, rich and springy beneath the soles of his boots.

“How’s Krysty?” he asked Mildred, walking to where the woman was laid out by the stream.

“Pretty much out of it. The infection’s taking hold and she’s obviously weakened some since we got away from the eruption, with all that raw Earth energy exploding all over the damn landscape.”

Ryan thought he kept his feelings from his face. He had long years of practice at that. But Mildred said, “Don’t worry. It’s not so bad as it sounds. I think it’s a good sign she’s out. Her body is fighting to repel the infection and start healing. Her mind has shut down so that she can concentrate her resources on the task at hand. At this point, other than trying to avoid any more exciting encounters with the local wildlife, which was something else I didn’t see when I was down here as a turista, it’s most important to make sure she wakes up regularly to eat. Keep her strength up.”

She stood. “Speaking of which, I’m not so concerned about the food thing as I was, for any of us. There’s some real fertile-looking land out here, interspersed with all the lava flows and ash falls. So I don’t think we’ll have to settle for feeding her raw frog. But since it looks as if there’s likely to be better on tap, it’s probably not too soon to start looking out for it.”

“I think there’s a ville a couple miles ahead,” Ryan said. “We’ll make for that.”

THEY CAME AROUND one of the omnipresent saw-toothed hogsbacks and found themselves on the outskirts of a ville. At first glance it appeared almost painfully neat, compared to the devastation and decay they were used to: sturdy, square adobe-brick houses, washed in white and pink and shades of tan and brown, with heavy ceiling beams projecting from the fronts. Not a whole lot different than they’d seen in New Mexico north of the Jornada del Muerte, if better kept-up. But worlds different from the urban sprawl that had occupied this area a hundred years before, according to the recollections of Doc as well as Mildred.

The Hummer had rolled in among the first few houses. The companions realized with a sort of shared shock that they’d allowed the ville’s appearance at a distance of tidiness momentarily to deceive them. Obviously the place had been built with care since skydark and tended with love throughout however many years it had stood.

It had, however, been trashed quite recently, by the looks of things.

Many houses sported windows of glass, flat, clear, manufactured panes, not ripply and murky from being made in some postnuke glassblower’s shop and not purple from a century’s exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, either. Sure signs that the residents traded with scavvies working a big city where warehouses and shops still contained unbroken sheets of glass. They were also sure signs of prosperity, since such salvage didn’t come cheap.