Desolation Angels
Ryan was fairly sure they ate humans. Those pointed teeth were meant to rip flesh, and the instantaneous eagerness with which the muties attacked them on sight suggested appetite was a strong motivating factor. Although they could simply be outraged homeowners defending their violated castle, he supposed. Cannies usually were norms.
No reason they can’t be both, he thought. Doesn’t matter much. We’ll be done with them in a few minutes, anyway. One way or another.
“Don’t slow down to admire your handiwork!” Mildred yelled from the rear by the door at the last set of stairs. “A whole bunch is coming right after us!”
That warning was punctuated by the characteristic bark of her ZKR 551.
Jak stood with his back to the wall by the handle side of the heavy door with the grated window. He had his trench knife in one hand and his Colt Python in the other. His white hair flew as he swiveled his head sharply left and right to look both ways down the corridor that ran along that wall perpendicular to the one his friends were running down.
A pair of muties lay still at his feet.
“Clear?” J.B. called to him.
“Clear!”
“Secure the stairs,” Ryan commanded.
The corridor had emptied miraculously ahead of them. As Jak yanked on the door and rushed through the opening, J.B. increased his pace to full speed. Such as it was. Ryan had to keep his own steps throttled back to keep from overrunning his friend with his much longer legs.
“Be careful passing the open doors,” he yelled for the benefit of his friends behind him.
“We know that, Ryan!” Krysty called back. She sounded exasperated. “Just go, all right?”
He followed his own advice, cranking his head rapidly left and right to check each yawning door as he passed to make sure none of the muties had become emboldened enough to join the attack. He caught glimpses of knots of the creatures huddled back as far from the door as possible. Clearly they’d had enough of fighting for now.
They’ll be on our heels quick enough when the sewage starts to gurgle up around those black-nailed toes of theirs, Ryan thought.
J.B. reached the end of the corridor. He stopped and turned briskly left to peer that way with the longblaster presented at his shoulder. “Clear,” he called, then looked back over his shoulder.
He repeated his assurance.
“Move!” Ryan yelled to him.
He did. He flashed across the crossing corridor, hauled open the door Jak had disappeared through and followed.
Ryan barely broke stride to check the cross passage was still empty of threats. He caught the heavy door as it closed and threw it wide. A long arm in a black coat sleeve reached out to catch it and hold it.
“Ladies first,” Doc announced as Ryan dashed in to turn to look up the next stairs.
“Your ass, old man!” Mildred shouted. “Just keep moving!”
Ryan pounded up the steps to the landing. Jak was crouched at the next level, which Ryan could see was the top. Of this stairwell, anyway. J.B. stood on the steps right behind him, shotgun ready.
“Way out,” Jak said. “Clear.”
“Go,” Ryan ordered. It was getting repetitive. But it was still needed. Just because the situation they’d been dropped face-first into kept hitting them with simple yes-or-no choices didn’t mean the answer was ever clear. And as lead wolf in the pack, it was Ryan’s call to try to guess which alternative was bad and which was worse, every time, with no time to think.
He smiled, briefly and grimly, as he remembered a predark phrase Mildred sometimes used: “That’s why I get paid the big bucks.”
Jak popped out the door with J.B. right behind him. Ryan hastily followed.
As he did, he heard Krysty shout, “All the muties in the world are coming up after us!”
The first thing Ryan saw when he emerged from the open door to the stairwell was sunlight streaming in from tall, narrow, broken windows onto a concrete floor littered with fragments of tables and chairs and, incongruously, a scattering of dry, gray leaves.
He stepped quickly to one side. A doorway was a bad place to linger. It was set flush to the back wall of what had obviously been a store or restaurant, as if it gave onto a utility closet. There was no front door. The light was that of morning by color alone. He saw surprisingly lush trees across the street. Through the leaves he glimpsed yellow stone and a hint of some kind of tracery of stone or metal. It reminded him of the leading used to hold stained glass in predark churches.
J.B. had taken a position on the other side of the door to the hidden stair. Finding the room empty, he had switched to his Uzi. Jak slipped cautiously toward the window.
“No time!” Mildred yelled as she came bursting out the door on Doc’s heels. “They’re right behind us!”
Ryan heard the boom of Ricky’s Webley handblaster echo out of the stairwell and started moving toward the window.
“Looks clear,” Jak said, peering around the edge of the empty window. He promptly slipped around and onto the street.
Deciding that securing escape was more important than helping discourage the long-armed muties from following too fast, he went for the front door. The others came hot behind, starting with J.B.
Ryan burst out onto the street. The first thing he noticed was the humidity that hit him in the face like a wool blanket soaked in hot water. The second was how profuse the vegetation was—grass and flowers were pushing up through big cracks heaved in the pavement, and there were trees all down the block that extended to his left.
The third thing he noticed was a tall, skeletally thin woman with an electric-green Mohawk casually strolling around the corner of the building across the street to his right.
But there was nothing casual about the way she whipped up the M16 she’d been carrying in patrol position and aimed it at Ryan.
Chapter Three
“Get down!” Ryan shouted to his companions. He snapped off a shot and threw himself back toward the door to the redoubt.
He bumped into Doc. That had been half his intention—to keep those behind from blundering out into the unexpected enemy’s field of fire. The other half was to try to back out of it himself.
The black longblaster snarled out a burst of full-auto fire. Ryan didn’t know where the bullets hit. He only knew they didn’t hit him.
Then J.B., who had come out right behind Ryan and taken a reflex step to his right, ripped off a short burst of his own. The woman dropped onto her buttocks. The front of her grimy gray T-shirt was already showing darker, redder stains overwhelming the old ones.
“More!” Jak yelled from his position crouched before the window to Ryan’s right.
Ryan had caught himself on one knee in the doorway. Now he saw more men and women fanning out diagonally across the street. They sported variations of partially shaved heads and spiked, outlandishly colored hair. And a nasty assortment of weapons.
“Pull back!” he yelled. He turned and scrambled into the cool dimness of the derelict room.
“But, Ryan—” Mildred began.
“Shut it! Get back in the corner.” He gestured toward the far rear corner where they’d come out. “Now!”
Shots were crackling outside with a sound like a big, dry tumbleweed going up in flames. By sheer bad luck the companions had come up against a sizable local faction. One with itchy trigger fingers—and the blasters and bullets to give them a hearty scratching. Bullets clattered off the stone exterior and whizzed through the vacant windows or snapped with tiny sonic booms. They ricocheted off the back wall and tumbled, whining, in random directions.
J.B. hunkered just inside the doorway, leaning out—randomly varying high, middle and low—to rip off quick rounds, two-shot bursts and singletons. It took a good blaster man to make the Uzi do that. J.B. was the best—a master. Ryan snapped a shot from his own 9 mm handblaster at a figure with a black leather vest open to show a fish-belly-white washboard torso, aiming a sawed-off double-barreled scattergun. Fortunately it was clear across the street and unlikely to hit much at that range. Or not with many pellets, anyway. Though as Ryan knew well, they all hurt.
He never saw whether he hit the dude or not. He was already turning away to follow his advice and sprint to the rear corner of the dimly lit room, well back in the shadows. He heard Jak’s big Python crack. The albino had simply jumped back in through the window and was crouching to shoot out over the sill.
“Tables!” Ryan yelled. He sheathed his panga. “J.B., come on! Give me a hand.”
J.B. loosed a lengthy burst out the door as he wheeled away to obey. Then he and Ryan were each manhandling a pair of tables with tops a yard or so square toward their friends, who were already hunkered down in the corner. Jak joined them dragging a detached tabletop. Ryan decided the place had to have been an eatery of some sort.
“Hoist them up!” Ryan yelled. “Barricade yourselves behind them!”
He hurried into the corner with the others, right next to Krysty. She helped him shift the table so that one edge rested on the floor, whose covering had long since eroded to bare concrete, with the legs pointing into the room. His other friends did likewise.
Not an eyeblink too soon. The door to the secret stair puked muties. They gushed out in a blue-gray, squalling, whistling horde, waving their long-taloned arms in the air. At once they made for the open front door.
It took a moment before any even noticed the norms, huddled off in the shadows as they were. A pair turned toward them menacingly. Since that had been expected— he’d wanted the improvised tabletop barricades for cover—Ryan wasn’t too worried. He fired a couple shots from his SIG into one mutie. Krysty and Mildred blasted the other. One fell on its face. The other staggered back into the violent flow of its companions.
They flung it ruthlessly aside. Whether they were especially squeamish about getting soaked in the sewage, or just concerned with not drowning, Ryan couldn’t know and couldn’t care less.
The rest of the stream of oddly rubbery-fleshed muties shot straight out into the street. And into the faces of the gang of locals, who had deployed into a skirmish line and were advancing on the diner to mop up the intruders.
Through a window Ryan saw their jaws drop and their eyes widen in shock. “Fuck us,” somebody yelled. “It’s clayboys!”
The muties ran right into them and commenced to rip at them with their claws. Blood and bits of flesh and guts flew. Blasters roared. Men, women and muties screamed and flailed at one another. The locals who weren’t instantly overrun or caught up in the wild melee pulled back to fire into the geyser of panicked muties. Ryan saw a couple turn tail and run.
Though muties were still coming out of the stairwell, Ryan stood up from behind the table. None of the muties so much as glanced his way. Clearly they had something more urgent on their minds. The sulfurous stench that suddenly filled the room gave him a good clue as to what that was.
“Let’s power out of here,” he ordered. “Out the window and left down the street.”
Krysty jumped up. The table fell with a slam.
Ryan let her go out first. She was his woman after all—though as capable as a man in a fight and better than most. He followed, darting a few steps to the left as soon as he cleared the opening, then turning back to cover his friends’ escape.
They came popping out in surprisingly good order. Beyond them a pitched battle between locals and muties filled the street and claimed everybody else’s attention.
“You’d better move, Ryan!” Mildred called as she raced past.
Ricky was last out the window. He stumbled and almost fell on his face getting out. The youth caught himself, picked himself up and started running up the block away from the scrum. As he passed, Ryan did likewise.
The others sprinted past an alley and rounded the corner of the next building. As he flashed past the alley mouth, some instinct made Ryan glance over his shoulder—just in time to see a green-brown gusher of sewage blast out the door and windows of the redoubt’s surface false front and swamp the battling humans and muties in a reeking torrent.
“That’s not something you see every day,” J.B. remarked as Ryan reached the others.
“Keep going,” the one-eyed man said. “Unless you want to get wet again. We don’t know how far that stuff’s going to flood.”
They trotted down the cross street. From the angle of the sun and the time of year, Ryan knew they were heading southwest. What mattered most now was that they were heading away from the shit-flooded death trap the redoubt had become.
Turned out, the sewage didn’t reach far at all. Glancing back from a block or so away, Ryan saw a brown puddle flow out into the intersection and then stop. Apparently the pressure had finally equalized.
Which was a good thing. The very next block up the street from the hidden redoubt was effectively dammed by a skyscraper that had fallen to the east, knocking down the opposing building like a giant domino. Had the sewage continued to rise, things might’ve gotten way too interesting in a hurry.
“I don’t think they’re following us,” Krysty said.
Mildred laughed. “Understatement of the day.”
Ryan directed the group into a gutted corner building on the right side of the street. Its interior showed sign of a major fire, but from the lack of smell or even soot, it had burned out long ago. There was no furniture or serious trash buildup in the corners. Everybody sat on the floor to take a breather and a pull from their water bottles.
“I know where we are,” J.B. said as he stepped into the shade. As hot as it was inside it was still a relief after the blast of sunlight. He was tucking away his minisextant. “Detroit.”
“Outstanding,” Mildred said. “I’ve been here. It was crappy before the balloon went up.”
“Did you check your rad counter, J.B.?” Krysty asked. “Something busted the ville up pretty well.”
“Already on it,” Ryan said, looking down at the small rad counter pinned to the lapel of his coat. “Rad levels are high, but not enough to be a real problem in the short run. We’ll just have to keep our eyes skinned for fallout hot spots.”
Mildred shrugged. “Somehow the idea of dying of cancer in thirty years doesn’t really terrify me,” she said.
“I daresay that when you visited Detroit before,” Doc said, looking out a window to the southwest, “it looked substantially different from this. And I do not refer to the obvious damage.”
“I didn’t expect it to be this overgrown,” Mildred said. “I mean, it’s pretty humid here. This is Great Lakes country after all. There’s a river not far south and a smaller lake somewhere not too far east. But usually urban desolation is more, uh, desolate.”
“That may suggest where the water pressure came from to drive the flooding of the late redoubt,” Doc said.
“What could’ve cracked its shell like that?” Ricky asked.
“Mebbe shockwave from a ground burst,” J.B. said. “Or some of those big earthquakes they had everywhere before the bombs even stopped falling.”
“Been over a hundred years of hardship and bad times since,” Ryan added. “A lot can happen in that time. Even to a redoubt.”
He gestured out the window Doc had been gazing through. “And I don’t know if you’ve noticed. It’s not all just overgrowth busting up through the pavement and whatnot. That’s an actual open field right there next to us, though it’s a small one. And that’s not random weeds and brush, either.”
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “It’s a truck garden! They even have growing frames.”
“Well, we know people are here,” Mildred said. “They have to eat. It makes sense they’d grow food where they could.” She laughed. “So that gives us an idea where all that poop came from. But why so much of it?”
“Mebbe a lot of people live in these ruins,” Krysty said. “Might be plots like this all over the place.”
“But why would they all be pooping into the old sewer system?” Mildred demanded. “I mean, I know gravity still works. Without power to pump it to treatment plants, it’ll all just flow down to the river. And God help the poor bastards downstream. But why do they bother?”
Ryan scratched an ear with his forefinger.
“Mebbe we don’t live as refined as people did back in your time, Mildred,” Ryan said, “but we still remember the old saying, ‘Don’t shit where you eat.’ And why bother digging latrines if you got sewers?”
“You’re right, Ryan,” Mildred said, instantly contrite. “I didn’t mean to imply everybody these days is a barbarian.”
Ryan chuckled. “Mostly we are. Just not that kind.”
“So where do we go from here, lover?” Krysty asked.
“There’s a big structure another few blocks, the way we were going,” J. B. said. “Looks half-trashed. You could still fit a respectable ville’s worth of folks inside by the looks of things.”
“Downtown seems to be behind us,” Ryan said. “And to the north from what I could see as we were leaving the redoubt. Not that I looked hard at anything but a way out of there.”
“Do we want to potentially meet a whole ville’s worth of people?” Mildred asked. “That first bunch seemed anything but friendly, and I’m not even counting the muties. What’d they call them again?”
“Clayboys,” Ricky said. He had taken up station beside a front window, keeping an eye on the way they’d come. He had his DeLisle unslung. Jak crouched by the southwest window like an alert dog.
“Yeah. Look,” Mildred added, “if I recall correctly, Windsor’s right across the river. It used to be part of Canada. The only part of Canada south of a big U.S. city, at least in the old lower forty-eight, I think. And if we’re south of downtown, or close to it, we’re near the river. Maybe we should head that way.”
“Mebbe not everybody’s as hostile as that first crew,” J.B. said.
“And here I thought you were the reliably paranoid one, John,” she replied.
“I just reckon that if we took people by surprise in their own backyard, naturally they’re gonna react.”
“Who’s growing the food?” Krysty asked suddenly. “Those punk types didn’t strike me as the farming sort.”
“More like enforcers,” Ryan said. “Or raiders.”
He rubbed his jaw. Quick-growing stubble rasped his palm.
“Why did we want to be in a hurry to shake the dust of this place off our boot heels?” he asked.
Everybody looked at him.
“I presume that was not a rhetorical question,” Doc said slowly. “Inasmuch as you have notoriously little patience with such.”
“No. Practical. Why do we think we’d get a better reception in this Windsor ville, anyway? Seems like they’re in pretty much the same boat as Detroit. And let me remind everybody, although we’ve got lots of ammo at the moment, we’re starting to run low on rations.”
“Then what’s your plan?” Mildred asked. “It doesn’t look as if the beans and corn across the street are near ready to be picked and eaten.”
“Not to mention they’ll be guarded,” Krysty said. “Either by the bunch with the pink Mohawks or those against them.”
“And that’s it,” Ryan said. “You got food here. You got people growing the food. You got people with blasters. That means you got trouble.”
J.B. shrugged. “Could have stood pat with just, ‘You got people,’” he said.
“Yeah. Well. What I’m saying is, there’s trouble for us to fix. And food to pay us with for fixing it. I’m not sure a better deal’s liable to just come strolling along.”
“It’s a big city, Ryan,” Krysty said. “Isn’t that kind of a tall order?”
He grinned.
“When isn’t it?”
* * *
THEY HEADED OUT. Ryan decided to keep going the way they had been, southwest, in the general direction of the immense half-collapsed rectangular structure.
Krysty had misgivings about that. She was in her own way even more attuned to the natural world than their former wild child Jak, who was now ranging out in front of the rest scouting for danger—a job he insisted on doing despite his discomfort in urban surroundings. Being in the middle of the steel-and-concrete corpse of a great predark city felt unnerving enough, though the greenery bursting out through cracks in the rubble as if to reclaim it in so many places kept her from feeling cut off from Gaia.
The corner they approached was apparently an entrance. It consisted of blocky shapes tiered outward and upward from a corner cut out of the giant building. The doors had once held glass, long since blown out, leaving rusting metal frames like cage walls.
A colonnade ran down the building face along the street to their left. The street itself remained more or less intact. It was still passable, anyway, in spite of being heaved and broken in a crazy quilt of angled planes. And still passed, she reckoned, to judge by the fact that little more than sprouts and tufts showed through the network of innumerable cracks.
The space between it and the facade had obviously been a broad walkway. Now the pavement was gone, replaced by neat rows of cultivated plants—potatoes, beans twining up stakes, green vegetables, rows of shoulder-high corn along the edge closer to the structure where they wouldn’t deny the other crops light. It all looked terribly vulnerable to Krysty.
“I wonder where everybody is,” Ricky said from behind her.
As they approached the vast derelict—or ruin, she corrected herself, because somebody pretty evidently still occupied it—they had fanned out into a V formation, with Ryan at the point, Krysty at his left side and J.B. to his right. Mildred walked just behind J.B. Doc followed Krysty. Jak zigzagged cautiously ten yards ahead of Ryan. Ricky brought up the rear in a line behind Ryan.
“Somebody’s spent a lot of time tending that garden,” he said. “Like the one behind us. And somebody keeps the junk from building up in that place we took our break. So where are they?”
“Laying low,” J.B. said. “They likely heard blasters. Decided to duck and cover until whoever was having the disagreement sorted things out.”
“Think they’re inside that thing?” Mildred asked uneasily.
“Seems likely,” Ryan said.
Jak crouched up the concrete steps to the entrance, well over to the right so he wasn’t walking right up to the open, Cubist cave mouth. He glanced inside.
“See nothing,” he called back softly.
“Ryan?” Krysty asked.
“Drive on,” he said firmly.
“You sure that’s wise?” Mildred asked.
“No. If we were wise, we wouldn’t be here.”
“Where else would we be, then, Ryan?” Doc asked.
“If I knew that,” Ryan gritted, “we’d be there. Right. We walk in like we own the place.”
“Won’t somebody spot us?” Ricky squeaked.
“Son,” J.B. said, “somebody has. You don’t think people survive in a place like this without keeping close watch on everything that goes on in their immediate area? Especially intruders coming into it.”
Ryan led the way boldly up the steps. Jak slipped around and inside the building, trusting his superior senses and reflexes to alert him to any lurking dangers—especially ambushers—and get him out of the jaws of any trap before they slammed shut.
Inside was cool and dark, especially after the hot dazzle of the downtown street. Coils of razor wire were positioned at both sides of the entrance, at angles to leave the way in and out clear.
“Looks like somebody likes to be able to shut the place up tight,” J.B. remarked. “Keep unwanted guests out.”
“It is not working on us,” Doc said.
J.B. shrugged. “Mebbe we’re not what they had in mind.”
“Huh,” Mildred said, sniffing the air. “It doesn’t smell like sewage. Much. Other than us, I mean. We have got to get cleaned up. I know everybody these days has a super immune system, but if we don’t want any little scratch to give us pseudomonas, so that our legs swell up and go gangrenous and have to be cut off—”
“Enough,” Ryan said. He halted them just inside the lobby.