Moonfeast

“Watch,” Krysty replied, reloading once more.

Seconds later, the riders encountered the bear. Bellowing a strident roar, it reached out with both paws and slammed two of the sec men out of their saddles to start mauling them. The other riders slowed for only a moment, then resumed their pursuit of the outlanders in the bus. But the gap between the two was significantly wider now.

The rapidfires in the towers spoke again, louder and longer this time, then stopped as the thick greenery of the forest closed over the companions, removing them from sight.

“Okay, give some cover, Doc,” J.B. snarled, biting the fuse on a pipe bomb in two, then flicking alive a butane lighter.

Surging to the rear of the vehicle, Doc yanked aside the locking bar and lifted the rear shutter, then fired the LeMat twice, the booming reports vomiting forth a dark cloud of gunsmoke. Safely out of sight of the riders for a single instant, J.B. quickly lit the fuse and simply dropped the bomb in their wake. Then both men ducked as a fusillade of blasterfire came from the riders, their assortment of handblasters, predark blasters, longblasters, scatterguns and zip guns making them sound like an army. The lead hit the louvered shutters like a hailstorm, rattling them hard and chewing the green wood into splintering ruination. More than one slat broke apart and simply fell away, leaving a wide gap in the protective shield.

“Bah, wooden armor,” Jak snorted, swerving around a tree stump and crashing through a bush to just avoid slamming into an oak tree. There was no road, or even a path, in this direction through the forest, which was both good and bad. The companions would have thicker cover faster, but it also meant they would be traveling a lot slower. Jouncing over a hole, Jak heard a headlight shatter, but kept his boot pressed hard against the rubber floormat. Speed was their only hope now.

“Herd them in!” Ryan yelled, and started shooting from the right side of the bus. Krysty was close behind him doing the same thing, and everybody else went to the left.

Assailed from the sides, the sec men rode their horses a little closer together, then a sec man shouted a warning and they began separating once more. But it was already too late. In a thunderous blast, the pipe bomb violently detonated, throwing aside ragged pieces of men and horses in a boiling hellflower of fiery destruction. A dozen sec men were aced in the explosion and several more thrown from their mounts to slam into the nearby trees, their bones breaking.

Whinnying in terror, the remaining horses reared high, throwing additional sec men to the ground before bolting away, leaving their former masters sprawled unconscious among the dead and the dying. Then the bushes parted as the griz bear arrived, its long teeth shining brightly in the dappled forest.

As the bus rattled away into the greenery, the screaming began and didn’t stop.

“Okay, that should do it,” Ryan stated, working the bolt on the Steyr to clear a spent brass from the breech. “But keep a watch for any stragglers. There were too many of the bastards to count. I have no idea if we got them all.”

“Not catch,” Jak said confidently, turning on the remaining headlight. “They on horseback, we in wag!”

The blue-white light of the halogen beam stabbed into the murky forest, brightly illuminating the trees and bushes. A score of inhuman eyes blinked in surprise at the intrusion, then quickly disappeared, leaving the wag to rattle through the wild greenery in relative peace.

“Hatred always makes a man fast,” J.B. countered, pulling an empty clip from the pocket of his leather jacket to start thumbing in live rounds from the loops on his gunbelt. “And these boys have a real hate-on for us.”

“Then more the fools they,” Doc replied, his hands already busy in the laborious process of reloading his black-powder blaster. A stiff brass brush first purged each chamber in the cylinder, the spent powder sprinkling down like black snow. Next, he began to carefully charge each chamber.

“We’re probably the first people to ever leave the ville in ages,” Krysty added, leaning back in the seat, her hair moving against the wind blowing in through the louvered shutters. She was still rather tired from the single instant of mentally sensing the unseen danger of the bear. Gaia offered her followers many gifts, but afterward the woman was always exhausted. Krysty really wanted to catch some sleep, but that would have to wait until they were inside the underground redoubt, safe behind the nukeproof blast doors.

“Yeah, we’re gonna have to do something about Hobart one of these days,” Ryan stated, taking down a canteen and unscrewing the top to take a long drink. The water was warm, but it cut the tang of the gunsmoke from his throat.

“Derby Joe?” J.B. asked, holding out a hand.

Nodding, Ryan passed over the canteen. If Baron Harrison was turning into a slaver, that was bad enough, as Hobart was fairly close to Front Royal. However, Joe had also run with the Trader, the same as Ryan and J.B., and the man might know where their former boss had hidden his caches of predark supplies—weapons, wags, fuel, even some nerve gas. Front Royal was heavily defended, but those predark mil supplies could easily tip the outcome in favor of Harrison if the man ever decided to expand his territory.

“Don’t want to ace Joe,” J.B. said, taking a drink, then putting the cap back on with a twist. “But if we have to make a choice, my vote goes to Front Royal.”

“Indeed, sir, as does mine,” Doc intoned, finally holstering the LeMat. “Blood must be defended. Your nephew, my dear Ryan, is family.”

“Speaking of blood, is anybody hurt?” Mildred demanded, looking over the companions. They were slumped in their seats, loose brass rolling on the floor-mats under their boots. But nobody was showing any red, or seemed to be cradling a wounded limb. Good enough.

Softly a wolf howled in the distance, and then quite unexpectedly the forest ended. Flat grassland stretched ahead of the wag, the single halogen beam bobbing along to illuminate tufted tops of the low weeds and reeds.

“Where now?” Jak asked, relaxing slightly in his chair.

“Tell you in a sec,” J.B. answered, pulling a compass out of his munitions bag. Impatiently the man waited for the spinning needle to settle down. “Okay, we’re heading due west toward the Sorrow River, so head to your right. We should see the foothills in about fifty or sixty miles.”

It was closer to a hundred miles, and dawn was tinting the eastern sky when the tired companions encountered the foothills of the Rockies. Before skydark rearranged the topography of much of the world, these mountains had dwarfed the Darks. But the rain of nuclear bombs had hammered the Rockies down to merely rolling hills, occasionally adorned with a live volcano.

Retracing their original route down from the hills, the companions found the small section of predark road that still existed along the edge of a ragged cliff. The crevice was deep, the bottom lost from sight by the mist of a nameless river not on J.B.’s predark map. Just more nuke-scaping, as Mildred liked to call it. A hundred cars and trucks were piled in jumbled heaps on the road, some of them in fairly decent condition, the all-destroying acid rain cut off from reaching them by an overhang of solid granite that extended from the hills like the eager hand of a beggar.

This was where the companions had found the necessary parts to assemble the bus in the first place for the long journey to Front Royal. Now, it was where they had to leave it. If Baron Harrison sent more sec men after the companions, or worse, those mountain hunters, the tire tracks could easily lead them someplace the companions didn’t want anybody else alive to know about—a redoubt.

Buried deeply underground and powered by nuclear reactors, the massive military bunkers were proof to the killing radiation of the ancient bombs, but more importantly were interconnected with a series of mat-trans units, top secret machines that allowed people to jump from one redoubt to another in a matter of seconds, no matter how far apart they were located. Sometimes Ryan and his people found clothing, tools or edible food in the rooms of the subterranean bases. Occasionally there were caches of condensed fuel and working vehicles, or even better, military weapons, a vital necessity for maintaining life. But most importantly, the mat-trans units gave the group mobility, the ability to quickly escape a dangerous area as they searched for some small section of America that could someday again be called home.

“Everybody out,” Jak said, pulling the lever to open the door.

It resisted at first, the frame bent slightly from the ride through the forest, but the albino teen put some muscle into the task and the door finally yielded, squealing loudly as it cycled aside for the very last time.

Gathering their belongings, the companions clambered outside, adjusting their clothing against the morning chill. Winter was coming soon, even though it was early August.

“Hate to let her go,” Mildred said, affectionately patting the battered machine. “Took us a week to build her.”

“Can’t leave it for the others to use,” Ryan said, his breath visible in the cold air. “Remember when we were attacked by the Leviathan? I’m not going to let that happen again.” Lifting a louvered shield, the man reached in through the window and yanked the gear-shift into neutral, then released the handbrake. The bus rolled back a few inches, then stopped.

“Okay, put your shoulders to it, people!” Krysty ordered, flexing her hands.

All together, the companions started pushing and soon got the wag creeping along. Slowly, it began to build some speed along the slight incline, and they promptly let it go. Steadily gathering speed, the homemade war wag rattled and clattered as it jounced along the cracked pavement until reaching the end of the cliff. Sailing off the edge, it began to tumble end over end, and they watched as it vanished into the white mists below. If there was an explosion when the wag crashed, nobody could hear it over the murmur of the unseen river.

“Now we walk,” Ryan said, shifting his backpack to a more comfortable position.

It was noon by the time they reached the small arroyo set amid a craggy span of outcroppings. There was nothing to mark any of them as special in any way.

Drawing their weapons, the companions assumed combat formation and eased into the arroyo, half expecting to be ambushed at every step. It had happened once before, and they were grimly determined that it would never happen again. Jak stayed in the rear and used a tree branch to erase their footprints.

At the end of the arroyo a huge black door towered more than twenty feet high, the metal as smooth and perfect as the day it had rolled out of the foundry more than a hundred years earlier.

An old enemy of the companions had boasted that nothing known to modern science could damage the blast doors of a redoubt. Ryan and J.B. had no reason to doubt the statement, but privately they had discussed whether an implo gren might do the trick. However, that was an experiment neither man wished to try unless it was absolutely necessary, and even then they’d want to be very far away from the event.

Going to a small keypad set into the jamb, Ryan tapped in the access code. There was a pause, then the colossal door rumbled aside to the sound of smoothly working hydraulics. Now exposed was a long, dark corridor, the terrazzo floor clean of any dust or dirt, much less scratches or wear.

A warm breeze wafted over the companions as they stepped through the opening, and at the touch of their boots on the floor, the overhead lights flickered into life bathing the entryway and showing the first of many turns. Ryan quickly pressed the required code to close the blast door.

Warily, the companions watched for the strings they had rigged just before leaving the redoubt to see if anybody, or anything, had gotten inside the subterranean fortress. But the strings were intact.

“We are alone,” Doc said with a sigh, holstering the LeMat. “It would seem that the only real danger in this redoubt is hunger.”

Ruefully, the others agreed. The contents of each redoubt were different, and this one had been particularly annoying. The arsenal had been well stocked with automatic rifles, but no ammunition whatsoever. There were hundreds of pairs of combat boots, without laces, while the pantry was full of condiments—salt, pepper, catsup, mustard and such—but no actual food, and the freezers were working perfectly, endlessly making ice cubes.

“At least Millie didn’t have to make some more of her infamous boot soup.” J.B. chuckled, nudging the woman.

Trying to hide a smile, Mildred nudged him back. “Don’t complain, John. It kept us alive long enough to find real food.”

“Tasted like used sock.” Jak snorted, then felt his stomach flip at the realization that that was an accurate description.

Past the last turn, the companions finally entered the top level of the redoubt. The garage was huge, fully capable of parking dozens of civilian wags, or half that number of bulky military vehicles. Except that the rows of parking spaces were empty, devoid of even an oil stain. Workbenches lined the wall, the pegboard covered with the silhouettes of tools to show exactly where each one should go. But the board was empty, along with tool cabinets and drawers. There wasn’t a spare fuse in the garage, much less any engine parts. Even the supposedly limitless fuel depot had proved dry. The pumps worked fine, but only delivered a stale air that smelled faintly of chems. Whether the stripping of the base had occurred when the military personnel departed, or long afterward by some intruder, nobody could say. It didn’t matter. Empty was empty, the details of who and when were thoroughly unimportant.