Ritual Chill

Chapter Five

Carnage. That was the only way to describe what they had stumbled into: the result of a bitter battle.

The buildings were empty. The windows in most had been shattered, allowing the elements to rend what had been within. Snow and ice covered clothing, tables, bed and chairs that had had been ripped, smashed and scattered by the winds and by some other agency. Doors hung open, some almost ripped from their hinges, others broken as though rammed. Wood had been splintered by the violence of battle, and those walls that were of corrugated metal, or reinforced by sheeting, showed signs of being bent out of shape. The few that were of cinder block remained intact apart from shattered windows, their lack of damage delineating the limits of the violence. The snow had fallen and settled on the paths between the huts, a light covering that obscured some of what lay beneath. But there were patches of ice, clear enough to show the blood and the churned mud beneath the glassy surface.

And there were the remains. Nothing more than carrion now. Shreds of clothing identifying them as people, but little else that could act as an indicator. There were detached limbs, torsos and crushed bone that may have once been skull. Whatever had whipped through the settlement like a hurricane of violence had made good work of the people living here. Stripped of most of the flesh, no skin remaining with only a few red lumps of flesh and gristle hanging on what had once been rib cages, and mauled out of shape, these were the few remnants of what had once been a community.

“Dark night, what could have done this?” J.B. whispered as he bent to examine something that looked as though it may have been a pelvis. Nearby, a hank of hair with some scalp still attached lay discarded in the mud.

That was odd: mud. The Armorer rose to his feet and walked along the path, noting the churned-up patches under ice. There was little in the way of soil in these parts, little more than rock and ice. Any soil that did manage to exist lay on the upland rock formations to the west.

Around back of one of the cinder block huts he found an answer: log troughs that had held earth two feet deep had been torn apart, the splintered wood littering the immediate area, the remains of some vegetable matter coaxed from the unyielding earth crushed underfoot. Tarpaulins, ripped into shreds, were scattered farther afield.

He heard a noise behind him and whirled, bringing up his mini-Uzi, trigger finger flexing minutely as his nerves tightened.

“There’s nobody here but us chickens, John. Relax.” Mildred stepped around the back of the cinder block building to join him, surveying the decimated troughs. “Crops? Out here?”

J.B. scratched his forehead, pushing back his fedora. “Strange one. Mebbe they couldn’t find as much wildlife as they needed to trap. Must’ve had some kind of trading route set up, though. No way they went and got this much soil for themselves, not as far as it is to the nearest supply. Must have bartered it for something.”

“So, other communities hereabouts,” Mildred concluded.

J.B. nodded. “Which means we can’t be all that far from them. Mebbe press on a little.”

“Not stay here, rest up?” she questioned.

J.B. shrugged. “Depends if we want to stick around to see if whoever or whatever did this turns up again,” he said mildly.

“Not likely. Everyone here bought the farm at least a week back, by the look of what’s left. And most of the damage to that has come from critters making the most of an easy meal.”

“Okay. Figure Doc needs to rest up and Ryan looks like he could do with some, too. Hasn’t had the chance while the rest of us have been grabbing some sleep. Let’s get back and clue them in. And one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

J.B. grinned. “Don’t sneak up behind me like that again. I’m getting more and more jumpy as I get older.”

Mildred raised an eyebrow. “I’ll remember that.”

THE OTHERS WERE WAITING for them a quarter mile off, having found some scant cover among rock formations that had been chipped away by the settlement dwellers for their own use. Where rock had been taken to build walls and reinforce hut defenses, a hollow had been made in which Krysty and Jak had been able to secure Doc. Ryan waited with them, feeling relieved that they had been able to help Doc walk and not have to rig up some kind of carrier, after all. This cover was scant enough, without the extra space a stretcher would demand. That, at least, was one small piece of luck. Maybe there would be others. Nonetheless, he felt uneasy the whole time that Mildred and J.B. were gone. He should be taking the chances, scouting the area. That was part of his responsibility. Besides which, movement would keep him warmer than he felt right now.

“That Ank Ridge you talk about?” Jak murmured, indicating the settlement as they watched J.B. and Mildred approach, spread out and with weapons to hand. They had to approach head-on, with no cover to make use of, and Ryan was too distracted to initially assimilate Jak’s question. It was only when the albino repeated himself that Ryan realized what had been said.

“Can’t be,” he answered tersely. “Ank Ridge was a port, as far as we could make out. End of the river we opened up again when we blew the dam. This is just a little ville that—I hope—is on the way.”

“Why we not follow river when leave redoubt?” Jak asked with a frown.

“Set off in the wrong direction. No reason why we shouldn’t have gone that route. Everything was wrong when we got out of there, and by the time J.B. took direction and set us right, we’d somehow ended up wide of the river.” He shook his head. “Dammit, should have got that right.”

“Shit happens,” Krysty said softly. “None of us were thinking right in that place, it was bound to screw us up. Thing to do is not let it screw us up any more.”

Ryan agreed. “Shitload of things to put right, though. First thing is to see if we can get some proper rest and see to Doc. Fireblast, what’s taking them so long?”

He felt impatient waiting for J.B. and Mildred to reappear. Part of him nagged that he should be doing it. There was something wrong with the settlement. It shouldn’t be that quiet unless it was deserted, and if it was, then why? He wasn’t used to having to sit around doing nothing. It rankled, made him feel irritable.

So it was with a sense of relief that he saw J.B. and Mildred come into view as they trekked back the quarter mile to where the others lay in wait. From the ease with which they traversed the distance, he could see that there was little danger. But what had they found?

When they reached the spot where the other companions were hidden, J.B. told Ryan of everything they had discovered while Mildred checked Doc. He hadn’t deteriorated, but at the same time any progress was being checked by the conditions. She looked up to the sky. Clouds were beginning to gather again, giving the light a yellow tinge. The sooner they could move, the better.

J.B. finished his report. Ryan looked at the others. “Sounds safe enough if we get there quickly, secure one of the huts for ourselves. Whatever hit them will do us more damage out here if it catches us than if we’ve got some kind of cover. And whatever wildlife stripped those carcasses will find us easier pickings here than behind wood or cinder block.”

“You won’t find any complaints from me on that,” Mildred asserted. “And we really need to get Doc under cover.”

With Ryan and J.B. taking their turn in supporting the ailing Doc, the companions came out of cover and headed for the settlement. They made rapid progress, knowing that—at least for now—the territory was safe, and within half an hour had selected one of the cinder block huts as their shelter. Dragging the least-damaged bedding from the other huts, Krysty and Jak cleared out the selected hut and put the bedding down. There was a wood-burning stove set in the middle of the hut, its metal piping chimney into the roof still intact. They selected the driest wood they could find from the damage caused in the settlement, selecting some debris from the troughs and from wooden huts as well as the driest of the wood from the stores that had been ripped open, their contents strewed, at the back of the cinder block hut. The windows had been smashed, so Jak and Ryan foraged for metal sheeting or wooden shutters intact enough to be taken from other huts and placed over the glassless gaps.

While they did this, Mildred settled Doc into one corner of the room and went in search of blankets and clothing that was salvageable from the wreckage of the settlement. She came back with very little, but enough to give Doc a few extra layers of warmth. Searching through her med supplies, she was able to find some sedatives to calm him while the fever raged.

On her search, she also looked for food and water. There were still some water supplies left—each home in the settlement having its own supply tanks which had to have been refilled regularly by the inhabitants—but, as she had suspected, any food had been scavenged by the predators who had stripped the corpses. She reported this to the others when they had completed their tasks and were miserably forcing down more of the self-heats, thus depleting their own supplies, while warming in front of the stove.

“How many huts did you count?” she asked when she had finished detailing her findings.

“Not sure—eight, mebbe nine.” Ryan frowned.

“There are eleven. I counted as I searched them,” Mildred affirmed. “Most of them looked like they had at least two people in them, so there were about twenty-five, thirty people here.”

“Okay,” Ryan said slowly. “So whatever came through here had enough force to take on that many people. We need to be triple red on this, but—”

Mildred shook her head. “That’s not really the point I wanted to make. I know the carrion out there was pretty badly mauled, but how many actual people do you reckon there were scattered around?”

“Hard to say,” Ryan mused. “They were ripped up, scattered about, stripped—”

“But not enough to be all,” Jak interjected, nodding slowly to himself. “Few bones, even if some taken by animals.”

“So what happened to the rest of them?” Millie asked rhetorically. “Whatever hit this ville, it took a lot of them away, live or chilled. What the fuck does that, and why?”

There was a silence while they all considered this. Finally, Jak spoke. “Not matter. If comes back, be ready fight. If doesn’t, then not matter.”

The albino teen made sense. To worry over the unknown would do them no good. All they could do was mount a guard through the night and try to rest up before moving on to the next ville. Maybe do some hunting along the way. At least they knew there was game in the area, thanks to the dogs.

Ryan organized a guard, with Jak and J.B. taking first watch, before gratefully sinking into sleep. Mildred stayed by Doc. His fever showed signs of peaking and the sedatives at least enabled him to get some rest. But she wanted to be close in case it worsened and he needed immediate attention. Krysty curled up near Ryan, but found it hard to sleep. She knew she had to, as she was on next watch and it would be advisable to grab some rest now. But something was worrying her. Her hair rustled and moved of its own volition as she tossed and turned. It was nothing immediate; all the same, she knew that whatever had decimated this settlement was out there somewhere and there was a good chance they would walk right into it.

The cinder block hut was lit by a small oil lamp that Mildred had found in one of the buildings. As with everything else, most of the lighting had been smashed during whatever battle had taken place. Only this one item had survived, along with just enough tallow oil to run it for the night. It meant that they could save the batteries on the remaining working flashlights they carried, although the glow it cast was small and the smell of the oil was caustic if any were fool enough to stand too close.

Most of the hut was in shadow. The lamp illuminated the area where the sentry stood his or her guard, the rest of the hut in a pleasant semidarkness to facilitate sleep. As the others settled, some less easily than others, Jak and J.B. stood silently, occasionally moving from one covered window to another to check the outside.

The hut had four windows: two at the front on either side of the entrance and two at the back, evenly spaced. These were the long walls on the rectangular building, with the shorter walls being devoid of space. And there was only the single door. It had the advantage that there were only five entry points to guard, and the corresponding disadvantage that there were, equally, only the five exit points should they need to evacuate quickly.

When they had reinforced the hut’s security for the night, they had made sure that one window on each side of the hut had a shutter that could be opened from the inside to facilitate the need to survey the area. Added to this, one of the two on watch would patrol the outside, returning at intervals, signaling to be admitted and then replaced by the other. The night temperature was bitingly cold, so it was advisable to spend as little time as possible on the outside.

A simple sec system, and one that worked well for the first hour of watch, with no event. But as they slipped into the second hour, things began to change. It was J.B. who first noticed, on his third stint on patrol.

As the Armorer was admitted after rapping out the prearranged tattoo, Jak could see from his expression that all was not well.

“Something coming down from cover, up a mile or so where the rocks rise.”

Jak nodded. It hadn’t escaped his notice that the area to the west, where the beginnings of the volcanic regions housed some growth of flora in the otherwise barren rocks, would provide cover for anyone—or anything—that would care to bide its time before attack.

J.B. continued. “Ain’t people…animals of some kind, moving pretty quick, too. About a dozen, mebbe more. Look like bears to me, though all I could see were big bastard shapes moving onto the plain.”

“Take look,” Jak murmured. “How big?”

“Big—five-hundred-pounders to show at that distance.”

Jak’s impassive visage showed nothing, but the Armorer knew what was running through his mind. If a pack of bears in search of food had come across this settlement before, then that could account for what had happened. And from the havoc they had found here, it could mean big trouble.

Jak indicated to J.B. that he would be back soon and slipped out the door.

THREE QUARTER MOON. No surprise that J.B. had been able to make such a good assessment, as the sky was devoid of cloud and the light from the wan, yellow-tinged satellite spread over the bare expanse of rock, showing the crops of moss and lichens as black against the slate gray of the plain. To the west, the rising lands with ash, soil and small gatherings of shrub and forestation showed as indistinguishable shapes that took on a malevolent mien with the knowledge of that which they had sheltered.

But not, perhaps, as malevolent as the shuffling pack of dark shapes that moved across the gray rocks. Jak judged the distance. At their current speed, it would take them about fifteen to twenty minutes to traverse the distance to the settlement. Their ambling gait was deceptive. They were moving at a rapid rate, knowing that now was the time to hunt. Jak wondered if they had got the scent of fresh prey across such a great distance, borne on the winds, or if they were only returning to scavenge what little carrion was left.

They were moving as a tight pack, making it hard to pick off individuals as they moved, one obscuring another so that you found it hard to tell if two were three, or three were four. Jak figured that J.B.’s initial assessment was about right. But it wouldn’t do any harm to take a closer look.

The albino youth moved out to meet the pack, moving across the plain, using whatever cover he could find. There was little, but that didn’t really matter. The bears knew he was there, just as he knew they were. All he needed was a clearer look before racing back to prepare a defense.

One of the creatures at the front of the pack got wind of him, perhaps sight, but more likely smell. It rose on its hind legs and roared: a warning to him, a rallying call to its fellows. If J.B. hadn’t already awakened the others, this would sure as hell suffice. Meanwhile, Jak assessed the creature.

J.B. was wide of the mark. This evil-looking bastard was at least six, maybe seven hundred pounds. Its fur was matted and bare in some places, dark markings on its skin under the moon glow looking like sores or scars. Even in the pale, yellow-tinged light it was possible to see the strings of mucus and saliva that extended the length of the jaws, dangling off the sharp incisors and catching the light to gleam dully their threat. The tiny eyes, buried in the folds of muscle and fur, were dark specks that betrayed no hint of what may be going through that primeval mind.

Jak was pretty sure, though. He had slipped his Colt Python into his palm as he made his way forward. But even the briefest of visual assessments told him that the weapon would be next to useless unless he could get a direct hit in a vulnerable area. For a .357 Magnum bullet to be so ineffective meant that they would have to use some serious blasterfire against this pack.

Jak turned and ran, knowing that the movement would cause the bears to increase their own speed, to give chase, but knowing that he had the speed and head start to get back to the cinder block hut with time to spare.