Homeward Bound

Chapter Ten

Doc Tanner belched and rubbed his stomach. "I beg your pardon. Considering how small those little furry bastards were, they had meat as tough as buffalo." He sat down on the beach, tugging at his right boot. He took it off and shook a handful of grit out of it, then pulled the cracked knee boot back on. The wind had risen, and it snatched his stovepipe hat off, sending it rolling along the sand at a fine pace.

"Why not let it be gone?" Lori asked. "It was old and smelling."

"You think so, my dear dove of the north?"

"Sure."

The others watched, amused, as Doc rose to his feet and set off after the hat, proceeding like a stately galleon under full sail. His coat, an uneasy mix of gray, brown and black furs, billowed about his shrunken shanks. His tangled hair skittered across his narrow shoulders.

"Is he really going to dump that hat?" Krysty asked. "I'll believe it when I see it."

"Must be two hundred years old, that hat," J.B. said.

"Like throwing away part of history," Ryan added.

"Get another easy. Look him go," Jak said, grinning.

The wind was teasing Doc, allowing him to get almost within reach of the black hat, then flipping it away so that it rolled on its battered brim, always just below his grasping fingers.

"Go, Doc!" Lori yelled, jumping up and down with excitement.

The hat spun into the lapping edge of the Hudson, subsiding, giving up its flight and allowing Doc Tanner to pluck it. The old man stood there for some moments in silent contemplation, holding the hat and turning it around and around, slowly, head bowed over it.

"He's saying goodbye," Krysty guessed.

All of them stopped what they were doing. Jak was beginning to untie the mooring rope. The river had risen a foot or more during the night, but the raft was still held securely. J.B. was putting the backpacks on the raft.

"Adieu, old companion!" Doc shouted, his voice loud and clear. Taking the stovepipe hat by the rim and running a hand caressingly over the dent in its crown, he spun it far out into the main stream of the Hudson, where it settled like a wing-broke raven, floating the right way up. The river took it, revolving in a stately manner, carrying it away, downstream to the south. They all watched it until it was only a small black blur against the deep blue-green of the water.

As Doc rejoined them, the other five gave him a round of applause and three rousing cheers. Doc's cheeks cracked into a broad smile, showing his strong white teeth. He bowed in an old-fashioned, elegant manner.

"My dear, dear friends. How can I thank you for your generous reception of my cathartic act. That hat was too much a symbol of my past. My long, long past. And now I look forward." He paused. "When I remember to, that is."

Hordes of pale lilac asters thronged the sides of the river as they drifted south. The water was still as clear as crystal glass, and filled with fish of all shapes and sizes.

But after their feast on the small bears the previous night, none of the six felt hungry enough to try to catch any.

"Must be close to Newyork," Ryan said to Doc. "Light'll be going soon. It's so wide here that we might have problems getting a place for the night. And the city's rubble's supposed to be double-bad. So they used to say."

"I heard that in Mocsin," the elderly scientist said. "The sec boss..." He shuddered.

Ryan pursed his lips in a silent whistle. "I know him. Strasser. Fireblast, but he was a bastard fitted for six feet of mold."

He remembered the man well. It had been when he'd first met up with Doc Tanner. Strasser had been the sec boss in the ville of Mocsin. The ville of Jordan Teague, the baron. Strasser had always worn black, head to toe, and had a fringe of hair around a shaved skull. Thin was the word for Strasser. Thin body, thin face, thin eyes and lips. Lips that Ryan Cawdor had smashed to bloody pulp with a thrown blaster.

"He talked about New York. He'd been there. Traded there. Drugs and children. He said they were all ghouls, cannibals, night crawlers, blood tasters, dark watchers, death lovers."

"From what I hear, Strasser was right for once," J.B. said.

They passed another ruined bridge, its eastern section more or less complete. The shattered remnants of an old passenger wag hung poised on the brink, stuck there since the missiles had burned its driver to a crisp a century earlier. One day the rest of the bridge would rot through and the automobile would plummet down with it into the ever-patient Hudson.

A few minutes farther on the river narrowed down from more than two miles across to less than one. On their right the banks rose high in a series of wooded bluffs that Doc said he thought had once been called the Palisades of New Jersey.

Now, at last, on the left, the six companions began to witness the silent, twisted horror of total urban destruction.

No trees grew on the eastern bank of the Hudson, other than the occasional stunted ash or sycamore. Ryan's rad counter began to cheep softly, the needle creeping inexorably through the orange and holding not far from the red that showed a dangerous hot spot.

The old Cross-Bronx Expressway vanished behind them, swallowed up in the pale gray mist that came drifting in from behind the bluffs. It wasn't possible to make out anything still standing that even vaguely resembled a building. It was a rolling, melted sludge of concrete wilderness. Nothing remained higher than a tall man in that part of what had been the Bronx.

They could only see two kinds of botanical life amid the ruins: banks of nodding magenta fireweed, rising here and there far above the blasted sections of houses, shops and offices, and an ugly, rank weed — a sickly green color with a tough stem that twined around itself as though it sought suicide by strangulation. As the raft drifted toward the eastern shore, they could see more clearly. The weeds had serried bristles, like the skin of a hog, and they bore seedheads that were circular, letting poisonous yellow spores drift to the earth like malignant paratroopers.

"Earth Mother save us all," Krysty whispered, face blanched with the horror of the vanished city. "Is nothing left?"

"Might be some of the big blocks standing. Central Manhattan was zapped, but a few scrapers were mebbe big enough. I seen vids of them, and they couldn't have been leveled." Ryan's voice betrayed his own chilling doubt.

The desolation was so total.

Ryan thought he noticed an unnatural flurry of movement among the rancid weeds that crowded down to the very brink of the water, now only about fifty paces away from where the raft turned slowly on an eddy, moved by a long-submerged obstruction.

"Push it away!" he called urgently, taking one of the branches himself and poling off, trying to shift back to the center of the current.

"What d'you see?" Krysty panted, throwing all her weight against the steering oar at the stern of the raft.

"Nothing. Something. I don't know."

"I heard something. Heard it. Like someone laughing. But someone who didn't have a proper mouth. Does that seem stupid?"

"No. Not down here it doesn't."

"Let's shove off. Be dark soon," J.B. said. "Fog, too."

"Yeah. Doc says we're only 'bout twenty miles or so from open sea. Be good to make that."

"Might be safer night," Jak suggested, his unruly white hair tied back with a ragged length of red ribbon that Lori had given him.

"Could be," the Armorer agreed. "Map shows river gets double-narrow. Could be chilled from either bank in good light."

"So, we keep going?" Ryan called, and he got nods of agreement from everyone.

The mist became thicker, swallowing up the raft in gulps of sinuous gray damp. The long tendrils came in from their right, tasting of cold mud and still, brackish water. The fog had an unpleasant odor that seemed to linger on the tongue as you breathed.

"Where d'you figure we are now, Doc?" Ryan asked, glimpsing a teetering ruin through a sudden clearance of the darkening fog on their left.

Doc rose from where he'd been sitting with his arm around Lori. Pearls of moisture hung in his hair like a chaplet on the brow of a crazed monarch. But his voice was unusually calm and sane.

"Damnably hard to determine, Ryan. No visual clues. Around level with the north side of Central Park, perhaps? Once I sailed clear around Manhattan on a pleasure craft. The sun shone and cameras clicked and whirred. The great buildings like the Twin Towers stood proud and tall, their glass reflecting a thousand bursts of golden light. I felt like a Christian viewing the Eternal City." He stopped speaking for a moment, lost in memory. "And now, it is the valley of the shadow of death. Hobgoblins and foul fiends have inherited the place. It is all despair."

It still wasn't full dark.

The fog seemed to carry its own peculiar light, glimmering like corpse candles in a gruesome mire. The river now flowed so slowly that it was hard to detect any movement at all. Once or twice they heard the shrill metallic calling of seabirds swooping above them. But they flew on with sheathed beaks, not bothering the six travelers.

Krysty told Ryan that she thought she could hear the steady thudding of a gas-powered generator, but the mist distorted noise and she wasn't even able to tell which bank carried the sound.

At one point Ryan was certain he heard a dreadful, shrill, screaming laugh, definitely off the eastern bank, around where West Seventy-second once ran. But nobody else on the raft caught it, and he decided it must have only been his imagination.

"We still going south?" Jak asked a half hour or so later.

"Can't easily tell," Ryan replied. "I'll go to the front and watch the water."

Doc had fallen asleep, his head in Lori's lap, and Ryan stepped carefully over the old man's extended legs, nearly slipping on the treacherous logs. He lay on his right hip, face level with the leading edge of the raft, only a few inches above the dull water of the Hudson. Everyone was quiet, oppressed by the fog and the feeling of desolation all around them.

To his left, Ryan was sure he could make out a rippling noise, like the river lapping on stone. Unable to see either bank, it was impossible to have any idea of where they were in the treacherous currents as they shifted and changed.

The hand that erupted from the water and gripped his left wrist had no nails on its grotesquely long fingers, fingers that had five joints and were webbed halfway along their length. The skin was creased, hanging at the wrist in folds. The touch was cold and slippery, but as tight as a machine wrench.

The face emerging from behind the pincering hand was worse than anything from the deeps of a jolt-spawned nightmare. The jaw protruded eighteen inches beyond the gaping holes of the nostrils. There was no forehead, the naked bones of the skull angling back in pitted ridges. The ears were tiny, pinned flat to the side of the hairless head. The eyes were narrow, protected by blinking hoods of leathery tissue. Even in that insipid light, the eyes burned with a ferocious and demonic glare — less than a foot from Ryan's own eyes.

And the clashing teeth! Row upon row of them, overlapping, sharp fangs that grated on yellow stumps farther back in that wolfish thrusting jaw. The breath was fetid, like an opened grave, and it nearly choked Ryan.

The creature had come up under the bow of the raft in total silence, its attack so stealthy that none of the others had even noticed that Ryan's life was under a desperate threat.

With his left hand pinioned and lying on his right side, Ryan wasn't able to get at either the blaster or the long panga.

The mutie grabbed at the logs with its other hand, bracing itself to lunge at Ryan with its fearsome jaw. Life was a bare handful of heartbeats.

Instead of pulling back, Ryan jabbed his head toward the monstrosity, butting it on the end of the snout with his own forehead. It was a jarring blow. The grip relaxed for a moment, and Ryan was able to throw himself to his side, freeing his right hand. He clawed across for the hilt of the panga, feeling it slide free from the sheath in a whisper of death.

Jak Lauren had spotted the struggling figures and yelled to the others. But help would be too little and too late. Salvation lay in the eighteen inches of honed steel.

The teeth were slashing in at him, and Ryan punched with the heel of his hand, feeling blood gush as the jagged fangs caught the side of his wrist. But the maneuver bought him another precious second, time to swing the panga. He tensed his arm and shoulder, putting all of his power and weight into the downswing.

Instead of aiming at the dripping skull, he slashed at the lean, muscular arm as it rested across the hewn timbers of the raft.

The impact powered clean to his shoulder, and he felt the panga hack through the flesh and bone, burying itself in the wood. The tight fingers on Ryan's own wrist slackened, and he was able to roll free, tugging at the blade as he fell back.

The mutie gave a hissing, bubbling cry of pain, still trying with a manic ferocity of purpose to claw its way onto the raft. Its severed hand wriggled and jerked with an obscene life of its own. Even as Ryan looked at it, the clawing hand toppled over the edge and vanished into the Hudson.

"I've got it!" J.B. shouted, warning Ryan to drop down clear of his line of fire.

But Ryan Cawdor wasn't about to do that. The sudden appearance of the horror had startled him, had frightened him. That didn't happen very often, and the best way of shifting the memory of the chilling, paralyzing fear was to destroy the mutie with his own hands.

"Get down!" Krysty shrieked, appalled at the hideous monster that was now aboard their craft. Blood was coming from the stump of its wrist, but it oozed rather than gushed in sticky gobs of dull brown ichor.

Feeling carefully for balance on the shifting timbers, Ryan readied himself. Feinting at the creature's legs, he altered his aim and cut at the other arm. But the mutie was lightning quick, dodging so that the steel skittered off its reptilian skin, leaving a small gash in the flesh.

"Don't chill it," Ryan snapped over his shoulder. "The fucker's mine. Mine!"

Breath hissing from its snapping jaws, the mutie shuffled forward, its good hand clawing at Ryan. Once caught in that embrace, it would be too late for any of the others to save him.

Ryan ducked and slashed at the thing's legs, barely nicking it below the knee. But his thrust checked the monster's advance, giving another moment of breathing space.

"Shoot it, Ryan," Doc Tanner called in a reedy, trembling voice.

But Ryan's temper had been touched, a temper that he had fought to control most of his adult life.

"Come on you fucking lizard! Come on, you rad-mutated bastard. Come and eat this blade." He beckoned to it with his left hand, watching for some sign of reaction, but the fishlike eyes remained blank and incurious. Even the amputation of one of its hands didn't seem to have disturbed the mutie very much.

The fog was growing thicker.

The mutie slid closer, hand weaving, the elongated fingers opening and closing. Ryan flicked the heavy panga from hand to hand, feinting with the left and then the right. He was growing tired of the standoff.

"Fuck this," he snarled, picking his moment to attack.

He fended off the snapping fingers and dealt a short, savage blow that hit the mutie across the side of the head. The broad blade of the panga gouged a chunk of bone from the upper jaw and snapped off a dozen teeth. Blood seeped from the wound, and the creature staggered back, arms flailing for balance. Ryan moved carefully after it, swinging the panga in a roundhouse blow that severed the end of the snuffling jaws, leaving oozing flesh and torn teeth.

"It's going!" Lori whooped.

"One more," Ryan grated. He tried a last cut at it, but he was short and the blade hissed harmlessly a couple of inches away from the mutie's throat.

The creature seemed to fall off the front of the raft in slow motion, arms waving for balance. Its ruined jaw hung open, and a pale red slime trickled out. The eyes fixed Ryan Cawdor with a basilisk stare.

To his amazement, the creature spoke, even as it was in the act of falling. In a clear, calm voice it said, "Into the long dark."

It didn't make much of a splash as it went into the Hudson, the body vanishing under the water. Though they kept a careful watch for many minutes, none of them saw the mutie reappear.

The raft flowed slowly southward in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean.