Tainted Cascade. James Axler

flies,” J.B. added, trying to smile at the weak joke, but could see that his words had fallen hard on the others. Forty miles through the searing, nuke-blasted heart of the desert on foot. That was tantamount to a death sentence.

      Sloshing through the bobbing swamp of bodies, Ryan climbed onto the muddy shore and stomped his combat boots to dislodge some sticky entrails. “Okay, take only the essentials,” he directed, tugging a water bag free from the pommel of his nameless stallion. “Water, food and brass. Leave everything else.”

      “Even the cyclo?” Jak asked with a scowl.

      Strapped to the rear of three of the horses were bulky objects securely wrapped in heavy canvas. The companions had journeyed long and far to find an undamaged library and recover an encyclopedia. That had been Doc’s idea to give the books to Front Royal in Virginia and help them with the rebuilding of civilization. Front Royal was one of the very few well-run baronies on the East Coast. The ville was still a long way from reclaiming predark technology. The encyclopedia could provide invaluable information.

      “Indeed, it seems that we must, my young friend,” Doc muttered, drying the sword on a sleeve before sliding it back into the ebony stick. “For while knowledge is indeed power, in this particular case it is only a millstone about our all-too-frail necks.” The blade locked into place with a hard click.

      High overhead, a lone vulture was starting to circle the killing field. The first of the scavengers to arrive.

      “Might as well start walking,” Krysty stated, pulling a candle from her pocket and rubbing the wax with a finger before applying it to her lips. The old trick eased thirst and could help keep a person alive for a full extra day.

      “I’ll fill a spare canteen with dirty water in case any more stingwings come hunting for us,” Mildred said, removing the cap and plunging the container into the reeking pool.

      “A hellish perfume, indeed, madam,” Doc said, sniffing in disdain. “But then, it is always advisable to use a long spoon when supping with the devil.”

      Washing as much gore as possible out of their hair and clothing, the companions then plunged some rags into the relatively clean mud along the banks, getting the cloths nicely damp before tying them over their heads as crude protection from the sun. Rummaging through the saddlebags, they took everything useful and left the rest of the supplies behind to start walking in a single file with Ryan in the lead.

      Saving their strength, the companions didn’t talk as they marched through the shifting sand, each lost in his or her own private thoughts. They were fighters, survivors, victors in a hundred battles, but the Great Salt took its toll. In many villes, the name of the desert was a euphemism for death.

      Slowly, the long miles passed under the monotonous trudge of their heavy boots. The sun beat down on the companions without mercy, and the hot air stole every drop of moisture from their parched mouths. Using more wax on their lips, the companions licked the sweat from their arms to help stave off dehydration and wondered if this was the day that they would die….

      Chapter Two

      “I said, out!” McGinty roared, throwing the outlander through the Heaven’s doorway.

      Tumbling across the wooden porch, the man hit the brick street and his head cracked loudly on the stone-work. With a low groan, the outlander went limp, and the giggling children descended upon the unconscious norm to rifle his pockets and carry away anything small of value. The knife and shotgun holstered at his side they avoided like a rad pit. Stealing a weapon was a hanging offence in the ville, even for children.

      “Anybody else wanna try to buy a drink with brass filled with dirt instead of powder?” McGinty snarled, tapping a lead pipe into his palm. But the challenge from the barkeep went unanswered in the tavern, and everybody studiously turned their attentions to drinking or gambling.

      After a moment, McGinty grunted in satisfaction and went back behind the counter to continue serving drinks and swapping lies with the regular patrons.

      “Should have aced the bastard and taken his boots,” Petrov Cordalane muttered, taking a sip of the shine in his cracked mug. Waste not, want not, his mother always used to say. A trader visiting Delta had suggested that his ancestors were probably Russkies. Born and raised in Deathlands, the man took that as an insult and slit the outlander’s throat with a broken bottle. Then Petrov took his belt knife and zipgun. It had been his first chilling, and the weight of the blade made him see the common sense of acing folks only for a profit.

      Nowadays, Petrov owned two knives and a working handblaster called a Webley .44, with fifteen live rounds. His mother would have been pleased to see how far her son had gone from such a simple beginning. What his father thought about the matter Petrov neither knew nor cared.

      “Boots and gun belt. That’s what I would have taken,” Rose DeSilva said with a sneer, chewing on a hard piece of waxy cheese rind.

      The slim woman had yellowish-blond hair, the bouncy curls almost childlike. Rose was covered with scars and missing the pinkie on her left hand from tangling with a stickie in her teen years. The woman had aced the mutie with a rock, but it took her finger first. Afterward, Rose had left the stickie alive while she tied it to a tree, and built a huge stack of dry branches around the creature. The fire had lasted long into the night, and she still remembered the agonized hooting with great pleasure. The big crossbow hanging from the back of her chair had been carved from that same tree, her first crude arrows glued together with the sticky resin harvested from the aced mutie.

      Drinking shine, Thal Dagstrom merely grunted in agreement. Whenever possible, the huge man preferred not to speak. A hulking giant, Thal was a good foot taller than anybody else in the tavern and heavily muscled to the point that some folks thought there had to be a little mutie blood in his veins. But nobody was stupe enough to ever ask. His entire body was bear-like, covered with thick black hair. Only his head was naturally bald. His hair had started thinning when Thal was a teenager. These days, he wore a black wool cap, no matter the temperature outside. A tiny Remington .22 automatic blaster was tucked into his rope belt, the worn silvery finish carefully blackened with a pumice stone. The clip held only four live rounds, two of them homemade varieties of unknown quality, but at his side hung a stout wood club, the tip bristling with rusty nails. In close quarters, it was a formidable chilling machine.

      “Soft, the locals are soft,” Charlie Bernstein added, using a piece of bread to mop up the last vestiges of gravy from his bowl of gopher stew.

      His appetite was legendary, and the angular face of the gaunt man showed the starvation of his childhood, but his arms were thickly cabled with muscle. His clothing seemed to be composed more of patches than original material, but the overall effect was a sort of camo pattern that allowed him to disappear in a forest. Even his boots were pieced together from an assortment of other shoes and such, mostly to hide the short nails sticking out of the toes. More than once, Charlie had kicked a man to death while hooting and laughing. For some reason, he enjoyed pain, giving and receiving, and sometimes, in the deep of the night, Charlie wondered if he was insane.

      The big bore blaster holstered at his side was homemade, just a hunk of steel bathroom pipe reinforced with coils of iron wire. The wire was applied red-hot, and when it cooled, the coils tightened, reinforcing the old pipe enough for it to take the blast of a 12-gauge cartridge. The wooden stock was carved from an apple tree and bore the crude design of a naked woman, the notches along the top showing the number of chills he had done. The actual number was only half as many, but it still represented a lot of folks on board the last train west.

      “Delta is an odd town, that’s for sure,” Petrov countered, taking out a worn deck of playing cards and beginning to shuffle. “But that’s why I like the place. Strange suits me fine.”

      The rest of the crew could find no fault with that. Delta ville sat alongside the Whitewater River that flowed out of the Great Salt like a slashed artery of blue life. The muddy banks were lined with reeds, bam boo, flowering bushes and even a couple of stunted trees bearing tiny bitter-tasting apples. But the farther the river got from the desert, the more the greenery expanded