Prophecy. James Axler

of Mildred and J.B. as they followed.

      Jak looked to Ryan. In the dim light, the one-eyed man could see the tension written in Jak’s scarred and weathered visage. He nodded, almost imperceptibly.

      The albino youth needed no second bidding. Before Krysty had a chance to realize what was going on, Jak had opened the wag door a sliver and squeezed through. Ryan reached out and closed it behind him.

      “Who’s next, you or me, lover?” she questioned, her voice dripping disbelief at the way in which they seemed to be breaking all their own rules.

      “Whatever it takes. Sometimes we’ve just gotta stand or fall as one.”

      Chapter Four

      “Doc, Doc…” Mildred’s tone was half imprecation, half resignation. Her words were choked and strangled by the dust that swirled around her, frogs battering her head and shoulders, locusts buzzing and swarming around her, singing in her ears as she batted them away. She could feel the occasional plucking of a locust as it came close to her, experimentally prodding and poking to see if she should be a good source of food.

      Why the hell had she and J.B. left the shelter of the wag to come out here after the crazy old buzzard? If he wanted to act like some fire-and-brimstone preacher and wander into the wilderness to meet his maker, then what business was it of theirs? Too many times he had endangered the group; too many times he had—

      Even as the angry thoughts passed through her mind she knew that she already had the answer. Doc was like her: cast adrift on the choppy currents of time and fate, with no options as to when and where he would finally hit land. Hell, there were times when she had envied him his insanity. Sometimes it seemed a much more pleasant place to live than where they had actually come to rest. Like all of the people she traveled with, Doc was an outcast who had sought some sort of sanctuary among those who also sought survival with some kind of moral boundary.

      When was the last time she had consciously thought of morality? She guessed that it was something that had informed her actions in the time since she had awoken, but to stop and consider would be madness. She became all too aware that these thoughts were a symptom of the terrible weariness that now swept over her, enveloping her like a blanket. It was warm, fuzzy, and she wanted to lie in the sand…

      It felt soft and yielding beneath her, like something that rippled pleasantly. She remembered a water bed that Ed Stasium had. She was at college then, so that had to have been the late 1980s? She wondered what Ed was doing now. Yeah, he’d be chilled. Like everyone she knew….

      Mildred realized that her mind was beginning to wander, and at the very back of her brain a survival instinct was screaming at her to get the hell up, shake her head clear and find shelter. Or Doc. Preferably both. But her body didn’t want to obey.

      Why the hell did the plains feel like a water bed? Through her clogged nostrils there was a dank, earthy smell. Then one of the frogs croaked, loud and sonorous as it lay near her ear.

      Mildred cursed and, still feeling like she was in a strange dreamworld, tried to scramble herself to her feet. The frogs were slippery, moving under the grip of her boots. The palms of her hands felt the cold skins slip and slide as those frogs that survived the fall from the sky sought to move from under the weight of her hands. Every time she thought she had purchase, she found herself slipping and falling once more to the ground.

      And then she felt a hand grip her upper arm, an iron band around her biceps that squeezed tight as it pulled her up. She winced at the pain but appreciated the assistance. She had a scarf wrapped around her face, as much as was possible, so that she could keep out the worst of the flying grit. Still she had to squint. Was that Doc?

      No, it couldn’t be. The grip was too firm, the momentum of the lift too strong. She could see J.B. standing beside her. His glasses were almost entirely obscured by dirt, although areas of his face had remained clean, protected by the brim of his battered fedora. In that way the dazed and confused had of putting inconsequence before all else, she wondered how it was that he had managed to keep the hat secured to his head. She opened her mouth to ask and somehow—by bizarre chance—a locust managed to penetrate the mask of her scarf and fly into her mouth. She choked and bit down hard. The buzzing, which she had felt amplified in the cavern of her jaws, ceased suddenly as she clamped down and bit the insect in two. A foul, bitter taste filled her mouth, and she spit it out. Part of the insect became trapped in the scarf, and she pawed frantically to pry it loose.

      J.B. pulled the scarf away, shaking the partial insect remains loose, and then he slapped her sharply across the face.

      Instinct told her to hit him back, yet as she made to raise her arm another part of her kicked in—that which had remained alert and yet trapped at the back of her mind, screaming, now burst through the barriers.

      “Doc,” she said simply.

      J.B. shrugged and indicated in the direction from which she assumed he had appeared.

      “Gone,” he said simply. “Too much shit. Shelter.”

      She nodded. It had been misguided to try to find Doc, no matter what their motives. All they could do now was to try to find somewhere to sit out the rest of the storm. To try to work out direction right now would be pointless. In this world of dust, frogs and locusts there was little indication of what was up or down, let alone east, west, north and south. Doc could be anywhere. So, for that matter, could be the wag in which the others were waiting for them.

      The only thing they could really hope for right now was that this bastard storm would soon abate.

      Still clinging to J.B., her own limbs jellied and refusing to respond to her command, Mildred moved through the whipping storm. It occurred to some part of her that the locusts were nowhere near as destructive as she would have expected. She recalled stories from her predark days of fields stripped within minutes. From more recent times, she could remember animals and people stripped to the bone by postskydark mutie locusts. If these, too, were muties, then thank God that the mutation had made them seemingly less vicious and harmful. Although it did seem so contrary to the way of the world as to be remarkable.

      The frogs still rained down on them, enough to form a slithering cover across the ground, yet not enough to drive Mildred and J.B. down with sheer weight of numbers. Still, the battering was enough to make shoulders and necks sore, to hit with such force as to occasionally make them stumble. Balance was also disrupted by attempts to swat away the locusts that still buzzed in and out. And there was the dust and dirt, still moving in crosscurrents. That was another puzzle: surely the weight of dust that clogged nostrils and throats should have suffocated them by now? Yet still they were able to breathe, labored though it was.

      By now, they had no idea of direction. J.B. was leading her blindly, she realized, just hoping that, by sheer blind instinct—and maybe luck—they could find something or somewhere in which they could find shelter.

      They almost stumbled over it. The swirling, dark brown to black atmosphere made it impossible to see more than a yard or two in front of them, if that. Distance was something for which they now had no yardstick. Under their feet, the carpet of amphibians ceased, replaced by a ledge of something hard and jagged.

      Remembering what she had observed shortly before the storm came down on them, she realized that if they had reached the scant cover of small rock outcrops, then they had to have strayed some distance from the wag. Could they have really trudged that far, in this kind of storm?

      Guided by J.B.’s hand, hardly able to even see him as the winds howled around them and the dust whipped and scoured at their skin, Mildred found herself being laid down in the shallow shelter of the outcropping. Even lying flat, feeling the jagged edges of rock bite through her clothing, she was barely below the parapet formed by the uppermost points of the rock. She felt J.B. lay down beside her, pulling some kind of sheet over them. Following the lead of his touch, she tucked the edges of the material under her body, as some kind of attempt at anchoring it in place. She felt the material go taut as he did the same.

      Like a tightened drum skin, the material reverberated as frogs bounced