Playfair's Axiom

“Doesn’t mean much.” Krysty smiled as she corrected him.

“That’s what sucks about the modern world,” Mildred said, tipping a canteen to shake the last droplets of water into her mouth. “Well, part of a long, long list.”

They huddled in a bowl-shaped depression in yellowish-

gray rubble about forty feet wide and high enough at the sides to shield them from view from street level. Despite being in excellent shape from the never-ending trudge across the devastation wrought by the big nuke, all six were winded by their run. Except Jak; little seemed to bother him.

With little to weigh them down but grubby skins and a few crude weapons, their ambushers had chased them fast and hard. But they hadn’t chased them far.

“They gave up pretty quick,” Ryan said, squinting around at their surroundings, taking in the huge matched stumps of gleaming metal Mildred told him had once joined in an arch hundreds of feet above; the nearby huge building that once had to have been fronted entirely in glass was now a strange open-faced steel skeleton; the strip of dense east-west woods they had crossed to get here; the flooded waterfront district just east of them with ware-houses sticking up out of green-brown water; the intact section of highway overpass to the south.

“We inflicted grievous hurt on them,” Doc said. He was laboriously reloading his huge old handblaster, tamping down a bullet into a chamber over a fresh charge of gunpowder with a special rammer built into the LeMat. He was recovering with surprising quickness, given that he looked like Death got up for a last walk around. Times like these proved his claim that he was nowhere as old as he looked, biologically. “It must have been quite discouraging.”

“There’s that,” Krysty said. “But mebbe they were afraid of what was in the woods. Or this side of them.”

Ryan grunted. “Give us some good news for a change, why don’t you?”

Her smile was like the sun coming out from behind storm clouds. “We’re alive, lover. And we’ve got each other. It’s worked so far.”

He felt his mouth struggling to smile. He still had to say, “Always works. Till it don’t.”

“‘Doesn’t,’” she corrected him.

She had a temper on her, this redheaded beauty. But her mutie hair, sentient and prehensile, lay still across her shoulders. She just smiled more at him and wouldn’t be drawn.

“Nothing here but misery,” J.B. stated simply. “Why don’t we go back?”

“Back where?” Ryan asked.

“To the redoubt.”

“Not remember?” Jak said. “Nothing there, either. No ammo, no water, no self-heats.”

Mildred mopped her forehead with the hem of her shirt. “Never thought I’d see a day when meals refused by Ethiopians tasted like ambrosia.”

“I mean, try the luck of the jump,” J.B. said.

“If we find a place with steak bushes and beer springs,” Ryan said, “it’ll be guarded by ten thousand coldhearts, sure as a dead man cools.”

J.B. gestured around at the jumbled edges and angles and dust-softened mounds of the urban deathscape. “Don’t know if you noticed, Ryan, but every square inch of this place is guarded by muties as crazy as nuked yellowjackets, and it ain’t nothing but hammered dogshit.”

“Boys,” Krysty said softly but firmly, “step back. Fighting among ourselves won’t fill our bottles or our bellies. Makes us more likely to fill cannie bellies instead.”

“At times like this,” Doc said with a grand sweep of his arm, “I find it helps to seek the consolations of philosophy.”

Everyone looked at him. He sat blinking vaguely.

“Why are you all staring at me?” he asked.

“Well,” J.B. said, “out with it.”

“Out with what?”

“The consultations of philosophy or whatever you were talking about.”

Doc blinked in amiable puzzlement. “What?”

For his part Ryan was taking note of how unusually talkative the Armorer was. Normally J.B. said just a little more than an old hickory stump, although when he spoke it was usually to the point and dead-on accurate.

“What’s eating on you, J.B.?” he asked. “You don’t normally say so much in a whole month.”

J.B. slapped his thigh. “Everything, Ryan. I just got bad feelings creeping up on me from every side.”

Mildred frowned. “You wouldn’t think there’d be many people here. The place is a mess, even for taking a nuke west of here.”

“Plenty to scavenge in the area,” Ryan said.

“Those people who jumped us didn’t look like they’d bothered much with that. They barely had loincloths.”

“I surmise they were cannibals,” Doc said, sighting along the barrel of his blaster to make sure the bore was clear before snapping the weapon closed. “When we parted company with them, the other side of these woods, I thought I saw them begin tearing at their fallen kin.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Chasing us probably worked up a double-big appetite.”

“Muties,” Jak said.

“No,” Mildred said, shaking her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Not see? No chins, plus fingers.”

“Typical symptoms of inbreeding, lad,” Doc said.

“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. He’d seen it not far from his birthplace of Front Royal.

“They have to have something to eat besides each other,” Mildred said.

“They probably prey on scavvies,” Krysty said. “Cities usually draw those like flies to jam. Especially as the rads die down.”

“But what do they eat?”

“Game,” Jak said. “Plenty here.”

“In a city?”

He shrugged. “Always.” Then he nodded his pale, pointed chin back the way they had come.

“Forest.”

It was indeed. It wasn’t wide but it was significant. A lush and densely undergrown stand of trees ran in a broad strip from near the river toward the nuke strike a couple miles west.