Sunchild

Still keeping his handhold on the scrub—for in truth his shredded flesh was too numb to move with any speed—Doc moved the arm that had been flung protectively across his face.

It seemed to him that it moved in slow motion, but with a relentless inevitability. He didn’t take his eyes from the bird as it hovered, and could see in the glittering dark eyes the recognition that he had made himself vulnerable to it. It wheeled in the air, rotating its body to swoop back and attack the unprotected face.

All the while, Doc’s free arm moved across his body to the LeMat, which he kept in his belt. The heavy double-barreled percussion pistol came up in his hand, leveled at the bird as it flew toward him.

The black creature filled his vision, the heavy dark feathers gleaming in the light and rain with an oily, almost metallic sheen. The screech of the bird’s cries were almost symphonic, so close to Doc that he could hear strange and wonderful voices in the cacophony that filled his ears. The razor-sharp, armored beak opened, exposing the red maw and fetid breath that was close enough to hit Doc in hot waves as it cried out. Underneath the bird’s body, its claws were raised, ready to grip, tear and rend.

It took an almost arrogant patience to wait until the barrels of the LeMat were nearly touching the beak as it closed in, a perfect grasp of timing as his strained arm muscles were trembling, causing the pistol to waver slightly. Just a moment too soon, and some of the shot may have missed the bird. A moment too late, and the talons would have caused serious—perhaps fatal—injury before he had discharged his shot.

But Doc’s timing was perfect. As the pistol touched the tip of the beak, his fingers tightened, gripping the stock of the pistol and squeezing the trigger. First one barrel, then the other, in succession so rapid that it almost sounded as one shot. A shot muffled by the explosion’s enclosure in the bird’s mouth.

Ball and grape at enormous velocity discharged into the maw of the mutie bird. Although its outer feathers, and possibly the skin underneath, had become hardened and mutated to protect itself against the acid rains of the area, the inside of its body was still soft and fleshy. Even the armored beak could prove no protection against ball and grape at such close range.

The bird screeched a high, almost inaudible note that was choked short as its throat disappeared in a spray of tangled flesh, blood and feather. The beak was ripped into sharp ribbons that whipped up into the glittering eyes, tearing them as it had torn at Doc and all its prey. The eyes, perhaps, registered surprise at its own natural advantage being turned against itself. But it was only brief, as life had already begun to flicker and die as the brain was pulped and mashed by shot that ricocheted around the skull, breaking through the top and spreading fine splinters of bone and feather into the air.

For a split second, the rain became red, and the bird hovered at the apex of its flight, the body hanging in the air, bereft of a head. For the beak had become detached from the skull, which itself had imploded into thousands of fragments.

The silence after the muffled explosion and the high-pitched cry was heavy and oppressive for that fraction of a second, broken only when the bird fell heavily, plummeting toward the bottom of the sheer rock face, hitting the incline where it began only a few feet from Jak. The weight of the bird pulled it to earth with increasing velocity, breaking the once fearsome body upon the rocks.

While the others were still watching the bird fall, Ryan was edging toward Doc.

“Doc,” he said softly, “you ready to move?”

Doc looked at Ryan.

“I fear that I may still be paralyzed by fear, my dear…Oh God, I’m so sorry, my friend, but I fear your name has temporarily escaped me.” Tears welled in the old man’s eyes as he pushed the LeMat into his belt.

“Don’t worry about it, Doc,” Ryan soothed, “it’ll soon come back. You’ve done the hard part. Now, let’s get out of this rain.”

“Yes, I fear that it may be a great mistake to stay out in the rain. One could always catch pneumonia.”

Although still trembling, Doc was able to descend from the rock face with a greater ease than any of the others would have thought possible, perhaps because there was still enough adrenaline flowing in his veins to give him the extra strength and sureness of foot needed to make the descent.

Ryan kept close to the old man, just to make sure that he was able to make the descent, and was relieved when they were all on the flat earth.

The corpse of the mutie hawk, already crawling with insects, caught his eye. “Did I do that?” he asked absently. “I seem to recall—”

“I wouldn’t worry about that right now,” Mildred said gently, taking Doc by the arm. “Right now we just need to get to shelter.”

Covering the exposed areas of their flesh as best they could, they set out on the hike to the old roadhouse.

“Mebbe we would have been better staying in the shaft,” Dean complained as they trudged across the bare terrain, with hardly any scrub to provide shelter between the bottom of the hill and their destination.

“Couldn’t risk it, son,” Ryan replied. “What if there had been another slide, either trapping us or forcing us out? Then we would have had to make the trek anyway. You don’t like my calls? You try making them sometimes.”

The one-eyed warrior didn’t like having his decisions questioned, especially by his own son. But if the boy could learn why a certain call was made, then Ryan was prepared to accept the occasional complaint.

Besides which, the rain was getting harder, stinging his eye as it blew across the flat earth. It was more important to set a strong pace and reach the shelter of the roadhouse.

Chapter Five

The diner looked deserted, but looks could be deceiving. There had been no signs of life from the roadhouse while they were hiking across the three miles of plain between the hill and the two-lane blacktop, and certainly they had been in a position where they would have been open and easy prey if anyone in the building had wanted to mount an attack. Even so, there was no way that they were going to walk straight in without doing a recce first.

While the others adopted defensive positions as best they could on the arid plain around the old road, Ryan and Jak went forward to carry out a quick survey of the building.

Keeping low to the ground and fanning out to divide any possible fire, they approached the building from the side that had the fewest windows.

Ryan took the front. There were double glass doors, with the glass still intact. One of the long windows was broken, but the other was still in place. Ryan dived to the duckboarding veranda tacked on to the front of the building to give it an old-world look. He crawled along under one of the windows, SIG-Sauer in hand. He had left the Steyr with J.B.

He took the double doors at a roll, landing beneath a table that he flipped up with a hefty kick of his left foot. He was now in cover and able to survey the inside of the building.

Empty. And layered with undisturbed dust, enough to suggest that it was a long time since the diner had been in regular use.

“Jak?” he called.

“Clear out back.” The albino slid through the kitchen door, the .357 Magnum Colt Python still in his fist, red eyes still darting side to side, aware of any movement in his peripheral vision.

Ryan rose to his feet. “Guess we’re okay to rest up here, then.”

He went to the side of the diner and opened the window. He could see the rest of the group, plainly visible despite their best attempts to seek cover in the sparse scrub. He gestured to them to come on, thankful that the diner hadn’t been occupied. He judged that the weather had to be harsh in this part of the country, as the land was wind and rain blasted. The forest on the gentler slope of the hill could only have grown because the sheer rock face acted as a weather break.

Truly a rock and a hard place.

The others had now gained the safety of the diner, and were glad to be out of the rain, which had increased in volume from a gentle spray to a hard shower that beat on the duckboard exterior of the building.

“It’s just as well this was here,” Mildred said as she divested herself of the outer layer of her clothing. “I’d guess we’ve all had a few layers of skin softened. It’s just a matter of how long we had until it started to peel.”

“Or how long it’ll take until it starts right now, unless we can wash it off,” Krysty added, shrugging off her coat and pulling her hair back from her face. The sentient red tresses clung tightly to her, and not just because they were damp. They could sense the damage being caused by the rain.

“We have attained shelter. To hope for ambrosia and nectar would be too much, would it not?” Doc asked wearily, seating himself at a padded bench seat by the window. No one replied directly, and it wouldn’t have mattered, as the old man was off in a reverie, distant from his friends.

“Mebbe not that, whatever means.” Jak smiled slyly. “But one thing for sure—this place not that deserted.”

Ryan furrowed his brow and cast a curious glance at Jak. “Meaning?”

“Someone use place sometime. Why else running water?”

“You’re kidding,” Mildred said. “That would be too much to hope for.”

She headed past Jak for the kitchen area at the back of the diner, while J.B. called cautiously, “Watch what kind of water it is, Millie. If the supply is rainwater, well…”

Mildred poked her head from the kitchen door, good-natured annoyance puckering her features. “Give me some credit, John. Of course I’ll test it first…on you, if you like.”

As a joke, it wasn’t even that funny. But the tension of the passing day needed some kind of diffusion, and Mildred had supplied the safety valve.

On examining the water supply, Mildred found that a water-purification unit had been rigged in a storage tank that stood in an attached outhouse. It was a system cobbled together from pieces of salvage, but the filters appeared to have been changed recently, as there were only a few crystals attached to the copper pipes used to electrolyze the acid from the water.

Ryan agreed with Mildred that this suggested a ville somewhere near, and one that had a good working knowledge of predark tech. Certainly, someone with a good knowledge of chemistry had rigged the filtering system and kept a mains supply maintained from a nearby reservoir or river, which suggested a small pumping system of some kind. The water pressure was erratic, but constant enough to indicate good maintenance on the pump.