Labyrinth

“Wh-wh-what was that?” Willjay said.

“Shut up and listen!” Ewald growled.

But there was only silence.

After a few moments Dunbar spoke up. “Could just be a busted ventilation fan down there somewhere,” he said. “Breeze might be turning the blades, making them hit something…”

The noise started again, echoing up the stairwell. Only this time, there was a definite pattern. Six quick clicks, each rising in pitch. A pause, then repeat. The hairs on the back of Ewald’s neck stood upright.

It wasn’t a stickie, and it wasn’t a busted vent fan, either, because the sounds were getting louder by the second. Whatever it was, it was coming at them.

And fast.

At his feet lay incontrovertible proof that the stairwell was a piss-poor place to make a stand. “Run!” Ewald shouted as he turned and vaulted back to the landing.

He hit the exit door and the others followed, sprinting for their lives down the pitchdark service hallway. Over the slap of bootsoles on concrete, Ewald strained to hear the stairwell door banging open behind them.

The bang didn’t come.

Ewald stopped around a bend in the corridor, and waited there for the others to catch up. If it hadn’t been for the smell, he might have missed seeing the breach in the opposite wall. Yellow fluid seeped from the bottom of a gash in the concrete three feet high, and three feet wide at the middle.

“What in blazes have you got there?” Tolliver said as he and Willjay hurried up to him.

Ewald couldn’t hazard a guess.

As Dunbar joined them, puffing hard, his face and folds of fat glazed with sweat, Ewald approached the opening from the side, this to avoid tracking through the puddle on the floor. He bent close with the torch. For as far as he could see, which was only five or six feet into the gash, yellow slime greased the walls. He used the butt of the torch to carefully poke at the sides of the hole. The edge of the concrete was soft, mushy even. Under pressure, it oozed like paste.

He’d never seen or heard of anything like it.

Without warning a gust of air blasted from the opening. The concussive force blew out his torch and turned the yellow fluid into mist. He felt the wetness on his fingers a split second before the pain hit. Galvanic pain, head to toe, like he’d thrust his arm into a caldron of boiling water.

As Ewald screamed and spun away, from deep inside the walls of the dam came a frantic scraping, scrabbling sound.

The burrow was a tight fit.

Chapter Three

The smooth pebble clicked against Ryan’s teeth as he shifted it from one cheek to the other. The steady rasp of his breathing matched the scrape of his boot soles on the desert hardpan. He moved in an almost effortless, economical glide, the stride of a man used to walking long distances over broken terrain. Overhead the pale violet sky was cloudless, the last visible stars rapidly fading. On the horizon to his left hung an orange half-disk of sun. A dawn wind shrieked across the ancient plain in buffeting gusts that peppered his face with grit.

It was already hot.

Soon to get hotter.

For the third night in a row, he and his companions had marched, dusk until dawn, by the light of the moon. Not their standard operating procedure by any means. Under more normal circumstances, they would have stopped in a likely spot well before sunset, set up a defensive perimeter and a guard rotation, and then hunkered down with their weapons close to hand until daybreak. Travel in Deathlands was always dangerous, but the nights were the worst time to be on the move; that’s when the big predators came out, the solo chillers and the pack hunters, human and otherwise. In this case, because of the heat, the distance they had to cross and their limited supply of water, they had to take the risk.

No predators had shown themselves, so far, which led Ryan to conclude that there weren’t any. To survive and breed, predators needed a dependable supply of victims. There was nothing in this hell-blasted landscape for large carnivores to hunt.

The uptilted plain of beige gulleys and boulder outcrops seemed to go on forever, to the curve of the world, and beyond. There was no sign of a sizeable body of water ahead. No great crack in the earth, either. As the sun broke free of the horizon, it was like the door of a blast furnace swinging open. In seconds the air temperature jumped twenty degrees.

Ryan glanced over his shoulder. Behind him, Doc, J.B., Mildred, Krysty and Jak still appeared in good shape. Their emergency food had run out the previous day. They had shared the last, tepid sips from their canteens hours ago. Like Ryan, they were all sucking on small stones to quiet their thirsts. The companions were a battle-hardened crew, but even they had their limits. As the morning’s heat increased, to conserve their strength and bodily fluids, the rest stops had to come more frequently.

The one-eyed man called a temporary halt to the march, waving the others down behind the shelter of a big boulder. Krysty, Mildred, Doc and Dix sat with their backs pressed against the base of the rock, in the lee of the wind, out of the sun for the moment. Soon they would have to stop for the day. If they couldn’t find permanent shade, they’d have to create it.

Jak didn’t sit down and rest with the others. He paused only long enough to nod at Ryan before he loped away, his lank white hair flying around his shoulders. He continued in the same direction they were headed, doing a recce. Ryan had known the albino youth for a very long time, but seeing him run like that after a brutal, all-night march, still brought a smile to his lips. Jak was the hardest of the hard, a true wild child of the hellscape.

“How far do you think we’ve come?” Mildred asked.

“Plenty far enough if you ask me,” J.B. said as he wiped the caked dirt from his glasses with his shirttail. “We should be able to see it by now.”

“Mebbe, mebbe not,” Ryan countered. “This end of the canyon looked damned narrow on the map. The way the ground is tipped up, we might not see it until we’re right on top of it.”

“But we’ve got to be close,” Krysty said. “We’ve got to be….”

“I find it distinctly odd that there is nothing green before us,” Doc remarked. “Odd and importune.”

It was an absence they’d all noticed.

Water in the desert meant an oasis, densely clustered weeds, shrubs, trees taking advantage of the scarce resource, a green stripe cutting through the panorama of sunblasted beige.

A green stripe that wasn’t there.

They sat in silence in the shade, sucking on their pebbles, regathering their strength, asking themselves the same questions. How much farther could they go without water? How many more days could they last? How badly would it hurt when the end came?

When Jak returned from the recce, his bloodred eyes revealed no joy, no sadness. Nothing.

“Well?” Ryan asked him.

“Canyon ahead, quarter mile,” Jak replied.

“Good work! Let’s go, then,” Ryan said, rising to his feet.

Jak caught his arm. “No water,” he said.

A two-word death sentence.

“What do you mean no water!” Mildred exclaimed.

Jak shrugged at her. His only response was, “Come, look.”

After they had advanced another hundred yards, the edge of the canyon came into view, a dark line across the ground that grew broader as they approached. It was the far wall of the fissure dropping away sheer. To the southeast, for as far as they could see, an ever-widening gash divided the hammered plain.

When they reached the canyon’s near rim, they looked down a hundred-foot drop.

“Radblast!” J.B. said.

There was no reservoir. No river flowing at the canyon bottom. No plants. As Jak had said, no water.

Only dirt and rock.