Strontium Swamp

“If we did it, Mildred and J.B. must have. Mebbe they’re with Doc,” Krysty suggested, hardly daring to voice the opinion that Doc was the least likely to have made it on his own.

“Bastard thing of it is, where would they be?” Ryan asked, scanning the bland and unremitting wastes of the desert.

“You end up there,” Jak mused, indicating the disturbed sands where Ryan had dug himself out, “And us here,” he continued, indicating their own patch of desert. “Figure same radius others. Mebbe spread out, search.”

Ryan agreed. “It’s all we can do, I guess.”

The friends began to spread out and search in an arc, moving in wider spirals from their beginning. In truth, no one knew exactly what they were looking for. The lanes of the desert had been altered then smoothed by the storm, so unless their friends were attempting to dig out—assuming even that they were alive—then there was no way of knowing where they lay. Or even if they were together, or had been separated.

Tired and aching, the search was a struggle. Tired legs tried to deal with the sucking sands that made each step a chore; eyes stung by wind, rain and sand, aching from the same tiredness that beset their limbs, tried to focus on the flat landscape, searching for something…anything.

It was Jak who stumbled on them. His left combat boot hit the harder surface of the backpacks that were being used as a roof for the trench. Expecting his foot to sink into the sand as before, he was surprised when he hit a harder surface, and an uneven one that made his ankle buckle beneath him.

“Ryan, Krysty…” he yelled, waving and beckoning to them in the wan light of the moon.

As they made their way over, battling the sapping desert floor to move as swiftly as possible, Jak began to dig. Eighteen inches of sand had gathered in some places, but only six or seven in others, as the bags revealed themselves to have been steepled on either side of the trench. As he burrowed into the sand, clearing as much as possible on his own, he became aware of some movement beneath the makeshift roof. The angle of the steepling changed as someone stirred beneath the cover.

Relieved that whoever was under there was still alive, Jak redoubled his efforts, and he had made good headway by the time he was joined by Krysty and Ryan, who immediately fell to their knees and helped him to dig. They cleared the backpacks of the sand that had buried them, and made an indent into the area around it.

“Think they’re okay under there?” Krysty asked anxiously as they continued to dig.

“Mebbe. Whoever it is, at least they’re moving,” Ryan grunted as he worked.

The makeshift roof was cleared, and the three companions hurried to clear it away from the trench beneath, making room for whoever was underneath to come out.

“Thank Gaia,” Krysty breathed as the last piece was removed and she saw J.B., Mildred and Doc lying huddled together. Doc was unconscious once more, but still breathing. Mildred was struggling to stay awake, her breathing labored and her eyes flickering, trying hard to focus. J.B. was the most aware, and it was the Armorer who had been trying to move the roofing from beneath as he heard the others dig and felt the weight upon them decrease.

“Thought you’d never get here,” he croaked hoarsely, barely able to speak.

A hot, fetid air had escaped from the narrow trench as they had uncovered it. The air within was almost all that the trio had been able to breathe, the thick layers of sand gathering on top of the roofing making it hard for any other air to filter through. As a result, the heat had been unbearable, and the air had quickly grown foul. On top of their earlier problems with bad air in the redoubt, this had a bad effect on Doc, and the old man had passed out quickly. Mildred and J.B. had tried to keep their breathing as shallow as possible, but had still used the air quickly. If they hadn’t been found, it would have been time for them all to buy the farm. The lack of oxygen combined with the weight of the sand pressing on them would have made it impossible for them to dig themselves out.

Ryan held out an arm, which J.B. took, helping to haul himself out of the trench. He collapsed on the sand beside the one-eyed warrior, gasping for breath as he fought to get some relatively fresh air back into his lungs. Jak plunged into the trench, into the gap that the Armorer had left, and lifted Mildred. As the fresher air of the desert night hit her, she began to stir, and Krysty was able to help her out. Mildred fell to the sands as the Armorer had, doubled over as she began to retch and puke.

Doc was harder to lift out. He was a deadweight, and the companions were exhausted from what they had already endured. It took some time for Krysty and Jak, assisted by Ryan, to lift the old man out and lay him on the sands.

Mildred came over to check him almost immediately.

“You okay to do this?” Krysty asked her.

Mildred fixed her with a stare, then shook her head to clear it as the stare became glassy. “I’m not totally there yet, but it’s enough to see this old buzzard is okay,” she replied.

Doc’s vital signs were good. He had passed out from the continuing lack of oxygen. Mildred hoped that the combined effects of the past few hours hadn’t caused any lasting damage. Hell, right then she felt as though she’d lost a few brain cells herself, let alone someone like Doc, who acted occasionally as if he didn’t have any to spare.

Muttering to himself, lost in some private dream or nightmare, Doc began to surface. He opened his eyes and took in what was around. Remarkably, and with that facility that only Doc had to buck the odds, he seemed to be completely lucid almost immediately.

“By the Three Kennedys, what a day this has been,” he remarked mildly. “Any more like that in a hurry, and I fear it shall see the last of me.”

“That’s not the first time you’ve said that, Doc,” Ryan stated.

“And I fear it shall not be that last,” Doc mused. “But we carry on, my dear Ryan, because we have to… The option is too fearful to contemplate.”

“Yeah, talk shit, you okay,” Jak commented.

Krysty had been surveying the surrounding desert while Mildred tended to Doc, and Ryan joined her.

“Not good, is it?” he murmured to her. “Nothing for as far as the eye can see, and nothing we can use as shelter. The only good thing, as far I can reckon, is that we’re completely alone.”

She shook her head slowly, and he noticed that her hair was waving independently of her sway, the sentient red tresses flicking like an irritated cat’s tail, gathering close to her head instead of flowing free. “There’s something, lover. I dunno what it is, and I dunno where it comes from, but there’s something out there that we really need to beware of.”

“But what? It’s like a vast fucking graveyard out there, a killing field with nothing left alive, everything chilled…” Ryan was bewildered. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her mutie sense. How much trouble had it saved them in the past? How many imminent dangers had it alerted them to? But what could be out there in this emptiness was something that was beyond him.

“Wish I could tell you,” she muttered, drawing closer to him. “All I know is that it’s there, whatever it is…”

CHECKING THAT DOC WAS returning to normal, Ryan organized a camp for the night, setting watches and putting himself and Jak on first watch. They had no materials with which to build a fire, so those that were sleeping huddled together for warmth in the freezing desert night, warming themselves with some of the self-heats they had taken from the redoubt. The cans, with their thermal reactions that were triggered by the act of opening, always tasted foul. But taste wasn’t an issue. It was nutrition, and it was warming. That was all that mattered. They had no time or option to be fussy about the additive-soaked flavors of the ancient food.

Despite the cold and the foul food, the four who were able to sleep soon found themselves falling into slumber, the rigors of the day and night catching up with them.

It left Ryan and Jak alone with the darkness and the void of the desert.

“What chances getting past this?” Jak asked softly, after some time. He had been squatting on his haunches, still and silent, surveying the night around him. Ryan had kept his peace, unwilling to break the incredible concentration of the albino mutie. Now he pondered an answer.

“You tell me,” he said finally. “No way to make a jump, no telling how far this stretches, and which direction to take.”

“Tell you one thing…no, two… We now in southeast, and not alone.”

Ryan looked at Jak, puzzled. “How the fireblasted hell do you know that?”

Jak pointed up at the stars. “Know sky. Not quite same, but not that different. We head out for west in morning, then sooner or later hit swamps and water.”

“How far?” Ryan asked. He trusted Jak implicitly, and felt a sense of relief that was soon quashed.

“Dunno. Not seen this desert before.” Jak shrugged. “Mebbe a day, mebbe two, mebbe more.”

“Have we got enough water and food to last?” Ryan asked. They had used a lot of the water to counter the effects of dehydration after their ordeal leaving the redoubt. There were few bottles left, and already he had known that it would be necessary to ration them. But now? Then something else occurred to him, and he continued. “What do you mean, we’re not on our own?”

Jak grinned. In the moonlight his red eyes glowed and his teeth glinted, the predator in him becoming all too clear.

“Never alone in desert. Come out at night, but driven down by storm. Can hear them, getting nearer. Just wait.”

Ryan frowned, but didn’t push Jak for further explanation. Instead he hunkered down next to the albino and decided to wait. He didn’t have to wait for long.

As the two men crouched, still and silent, their breathing slow and moving into sync with each other, the silence only broken by the snufflings of those sleeping behind them, Ryan became aware of another sound that began to creep into his head, from beyond the limits of normal hearing. At first he thought it was nothing more than the sound of his own nervous system, amplified by the intense silence, then he realized that this was what Jak had been hearing for a long time with his sharpened sense, heightened by years of hunting.

It was a whispering, gentle hissing that grew louder by almost imperceptible degrees until it was clearly audible without his having even been aware of it impinging on his hearing. It was like the whispering of the sands as they moved, but accentuated by more movement within, as though there were several currents moving beneath the surface, making it whisper in different tones, until it built up into an overlap of harmonics that produced strangely shimmering and unsettling sounds.

Ryan inclined his head toward Jak. The albino met his monocular gaze with a vulpine grin that grew ever wider.

The one-eyed warrior was on the verge of blurting out the question. What the hell was this? His answer came to him with a sudden surprise.