"You don't understand," Rick said wearily, barely holding back the tears. "This isn'tmy world!"
"It is now," the Armorer replied. "And we're all wasting time."
Ryan had examined the massive sec doors to the redoubt very carefully before the group started down the blacktop, checking that there hadn't been any serious effort to force them.
Any signs of bad damage often meant a potential threat from local muties. But the doors were untouched, with just the usual evidence of weathering.
They found one possible reason for this when they were a couple of miles down the track. There had been a huge earthslip and the remainder of the road, clear into the forest, was gone.
Now there was just a great expanse of scree, dotted with scrub and sparse thimbleberry bushes. A tiny stream meandered through it, opening up its own little valley between the loose stones. There was about a half mile of nothing before the first shadowed trees. The forest covered a sizable piece of land, eventually filtering down into a terrain of semidesert, dotted with sagebrush and mesquite.
"Get warmer," Jak observed, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his camouflage canvas jacket.
"Soon be evening, Ryan," J.B. said. "We're making slow time with the freezie. Best we can hope is to reach the wood and make a night camp there."
"Sorry to slow you all down. It would be better if you left me. Better you never reactivated me. Best would have been if you'd walked on by and..."
"Rick?" Ryan said.
"Yeah?"
"Shut your damned mouth!"
"Yeah. Sorry."
"No fire," J.B. ordered.
"It'll be coldest!"
"No fire," he repeated.
But Lori was equally insistent. "I don't want cold!" She stamped her foot, the spurs tinkling prettily.
"The forest is exceedingly dry, my dearest little moonstone, and the brush beyond looked like positive tinder."
"What d'you know? You got thick old skin to kept you warmer. Not like me!"
Doc shrank from her venomous anger, shaking his head. Krysty felt sorry for him and stepped into the argument.
"Don't be a stupe, Lori. You know what a danger a fire could be out here. Wind'd raise it in minutes. Not worth it."
"Bring muties," Jak added.
"You're all against me! Always fucking mob up on me. Not fair," she yelled, her voice swallowed by the dark trees surrounding them.
Nobody took any notice, except for Doc, who took a hesitant half step toward the sulking girl. He stopped abruptly when his eye caught Krysty and saw her shake her head.
Rick had taken no part in the conversation. As soon as they had stopped in a small clearing he'd laid down on the soft, dry bed of dead leaves and fallen into a deep sleep.
The six companions took turns keeping a sec watch. It would have been utterly absurd to think about the freezie keeping guard. Ryan was already having serious reservations about Rick Ginsberg, a weak, enfeebled and miserable depressive whose mind was fragile. The only thing that was in his favor was the news that he had once worked in some capacity on the gateways. That alone justified the trouble of keeping him with them.
But only for the time being. The night passed by peacefully.
Chapter Twelve
After a sparse breakfast from self-heats and ring-pulls of water, everyone sat around for a few minutes, resting, preparing to move on. Ryan was next to Rick, and he realized the freezie was muttering to himself, something about "tomorrow."
He listened more carefully.
"All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to a dusty death. Life's a tale told by an idiot, filled with sound and fury and signifying..." Ginsberg stopped.
"Signifying what?" the one-eyed man asked curiously.
"Nothing, Ryan," Rick replied with a deadly bitterness. "Absolutely nothing."
Lori's good nature had returned, and she led the group, dancing, light-footed, between the gnarled trunks of the mature live oaks. The bells on her spurs jingled merrily, and she sang as she ran, an old hymn that Ryan had heard in some of the fundamentalist Christian villes.
"Watch your step, precious," Doc called, but the girl ignored him, blond hair flying behind her.
Rick seemed in better health and spirits, walking without the aid of a walking staff that Ryan had cut for him with his panga.
"I used to like hiking," he said. "Until I got ill. It became harder going then."
"How d'you feel?" J.B. asked.
"Better." He grinned. "A whole lot better. You know, the air tastes cleaner. Perhaps I'm imagining it, but it does. Fresher. I suppose all the industry being blasted in the war helps that. No more sulfur, acid rain and holes in the ozone layer that used to worry everyone in the... in the old days."
"Your muscles feel stronger?" Krysty asked, brushing an errant crimson curl back from her eyes.
"Yeah. I think so. You know, I can't remember. Funny. I think a century of freezing's addled my brain. There are things I can remember vividly and some that have gone. I can't visualize my mother's face. Silly, isn't it?"
Ryan shook his head. "Doc has the same kind of trouble, Rick. Tell me something you remember well. Anything?"
"Moments in never," he replied. "I can... when I was about fourteen, going to New York with my father. We'd gotten tickets to see the Giants play the Forty-Niners. And we had a day in Manhattan. We went to an art gallery, which had lots of glass and open spaces. Wonderful paintings by Georgia O'Keefe, Hopper, Wyeth and... so many. All nuked. What a... But it wasn't that. It was a warm October day and we wanted something to eat. We were around Fifth and Fiftieth, by the old Saint Patrick's Cathedral."
"Reaching the edge of the tree part!" Lori called from some distance ahead of them.
The others were entranced by Rick Ginsberg's story. He was like a living time machine, painting a picture of a long-ago scene that none of them, except Doc, could imagine with any kind of reality.
"We decided to get some fast food. There were lots of burger stalls and fries. But there was an old Chinese guy who had a stall with pictures on the side whatever he was selling. I can still see it, and almost smell how good it was fried shrimp, crab and fish with some rice and a soda. We sat on the steps and watched New York flow by us. I felt real close to my dad at that moment. I don't think I'll ever forget it. Even if I live to be a hundred."
Jak sniggered. "You're more hundred now, freezie. Lot more."
Rick didn't rise to the bait. He simply nodded at the boy. "True enough. So don't be so rude to your elders!"
The albino threw him the finger and darted off to join Lori at the fringe of the desert brush.
Now they were at a lower level, and it was possible to look back up the mountain slope. They could see the scar of the scree-fall, but no trace of the hidden redoubt tucked under the lip of the peak above.
"Think there's a ville over there," Krysty said, pointing across the expanse of orange-gray sand. "And I can smell... not sure what."
Ryan stopped, still just within the shade of the forest, and took several deep breaths. There was something. Very faint but...
"Gas!" he exclaimed. "It's gasoline! Fireblast! If we can smell it such a long way off, then it must be a big field. Or a store so big that... If there's gas, then there's wags. Am I right, J.B., or am I right?"
"Could be. Sure is strong. This gas country, Doc? California?"
"Never used to be, but I suppose that the shifting of the great plates of the earth could push oil-bearing strata for hundreds of miles."
"If you got jack, you're fine," Ryan said, "but if you got gas, then you're even better."
Ginsberg sighed. "What's transport like? If gas is that rare and difficult?"
"There's some. Most villes have stocks. There was a huge store that the Trader found, about two hundred miles north of where Boston used to be. But it got blown. Now there's wags. Transport and war wags. Kind of rough."