Homeward Bound

Chapter Eleven

Around midnight the fog cleared away, like a curtain drawn at the opening of a play, revealing the sharp moonlit vista on both banks.

The raft floated on, like some stately royal barge, with Jak Lauren able to keep it easily on course with the steering oar.

On the New Jersey shore they saw no signs of life among the waterlogged wharves and jetties of the old docks. It was obvious that the water level had risen since the old days, with less being taken out for power and industry. Now the surface lapped over the rotting concrete of the walls.

The skyline of Manhattan changed as they moved ever so slowly toward the tip of the island and upper New York harbor.

Now, at last, there was evidence that the lower parts of some of the scrapers had survived even the megadeath nuking of 2001. Doc strained his sight and his memory to try to identify some of the towering hulks that dotted the weed-wrapped wilderness of the city. But there were no landmarks, nothing to judge by. Two monoliths, each at least a hundred feet high, jostled each other close to the southern spur of the vanished metropolis.

"The Trade Center. Has to be. I flew into New York myself, and I would deduce the year must have been just before the second millenium. We circled over Manhattan, just above low cloud. I saw the flat roofs of those great towers jutting above the bank of stratus, and there were tiny people walking on them. I swear that it was one of the most bizarre hallucinations that I have ever suffered from."

At that moment the moon vanished behind banks of sailing clouds, and the remnants of the city were plunged into darkness.

"Look!" Krysty cried. "Lights! I can see some lights."

She pointed at the flattened debris, almost level with where Canal Street had once run. All five of the others were on their feet, peering into the blackness.

"I see 'em," Ryan said. "Like points of pins. A dozen or more."

"Yeah. Flickering. More a hand's spread to the right." J.B. pointed.

"Like oil lamps," Jak said. "Kind of a gold look to 'em."

Those tiny spots of lights, moving painfully among the rubble, touched every one of the six.

Doc Tanner dredged deep into his raddled memory for a suitable quote. Eventually he said, very quietly, "And whatever walked there, walked alone."

After the attack of the amphibian mutie, no one on the raft felt much like sleeping. The dark water carried them along, now slower than walking, moving toward the dawn.

"What's that?" Lori asked, breaking the predawn stillness.

A small island had loomed out of the opaline mists that hung toward the sea. And there was a building, partly ruined, that stood at its center, bleached to the palest of greens.

"Missile silo," the Armorer said.

"Lookout post for Newyork," Jak Lauren suggested.

"Pretty house, Doc?" was Lori's guess.

"I think I know," Krysty said. "I've seen vid pix from before the long winter. I think I know what it was."

"More'n I do. My guess'd be along the lines of J.B.'s and Jak's." Ryan turned to Doc Tanner. "Come on. Tell us."

"It was a statue. A great statue of a woman, holding a torch in her hand to light the path for the hordes of immigrants who flocked to the land of liberty." He shook his head sorrowfully. "I disremember the words, but it carried a message. Something about bringing huddled masses from the old world to the new. I don't... By the three Kennedys, but the wheel turns and turns again and again. He that is first shall surely be last. And the present one day will be the past."

The sun was rising behind the tombstones of the skyscrapers of the city, painting the remnants of the statue with a soft pink light.

"Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair," Doc Tanner said.

The wind had veered, strengthening with the dawning, raising whitecaps as it poured in from the southeast. It rushed through the gap that men before the long winter had called the Verrazano Narrows.

The current of the Hudson had weakened until it seemed the raft was held motionless, moving neither forward nor backward.

"We'll never make it out to the open sea and down the coast on this heap of shit," J.B. said.

"Best put in. There's low land to the right." Hanging on to the short mast for balance, Ryan stared out to where beaches broke the force of the waters. "Give it another half hour. Wind'll mebbe fall."

It would have been better if the fresh wind had continued to blow.

It didn't just ease; it dropped away completely, leaving them bobbing, becalmed, riding a sequence of sullen, swelling waves.

The sun came up like burnished copper from a sky that showed red-purple from corner to corner. Ryan dipped a finger into the water, then spit the liquid out in disgust. The spun-glass clarity of the Hudson upriver was gone. There was the taste of salt, and iron, flat on the tongue. A bitter nitrate and oil flavored the water.

And they were beginning to see things on the water around the raft. Jak Lauren was the first to notice anything, spotting a jellyfish, its skin a leprous yellow spotted with green patches. Its tentacles trailed behind it for better than a hundred yards. Ryan shouted a warning to the albino boy not to touch the creature as it wallowed near them.

"Heard of a man out in the California lagoons who saw a trailing firefish like that. He touched it and died double-crazed. They said 'fore he bought the farm he started't'bite off his own fingers from the pain."

Almost immediately after that they all clung to the raft as something immeasurably vast moved sinuously under them, just scraping the bottom of the logs with the top of its spine. Lori stuck her head over the side, trying to see what it had been, but the deeps had swallowed it.

They had heard gulls, shrieking and crying, all the way from Manhattan Island, sounding like demented souls condemned to fly the skies for eternity. Now the birds started to come closer, gathering above the raft, beginning to swoop toward the six friends.

It was Lori Quint who noticed them first. "The birds is coming," she cried.

Doc glanced at her, as though he were about to correct her grammar, as he sometimes did. But she shouted again, "The birds is coming." His face wrinkled, as though he were trying to recall something half-forgotten, but he shook his head and let it pass.

The threatening gulls had fifteen-foot wingspans and nine-inch beaks like hooked brass. But Jak pulled out his trusty .357 and blasted off at them. The boom of the handgun was flat and menacing in the open sea and loud enough to scare the birds away. One of their number was left behind, flapping its broken wing, bleeding, in the water fifty yards off. As the six watched its death throes, something came up from beneath it, with jaws as big as a dragline excavator, and sucked the gull down.

Krysty stood up, mopping sweat from her forehead. "Gaia! I'm starting to stink like a Texas gaudy whore at three in the morning. Gotta face it, Ryan, we're stuck here. We have to start paddling this clumsy mother to that beach."

She shaded her eyes with her hand, irritably pushing back the long hair that seemed to want to press against her face. Far ahead, just a blur on the horizon, her keen sight could make out something strange. It looked as if the land were creeping in, almost meeting in the middle. She couldn't make out whether there was a gap there or not. Krysty called to Doc, drawing his attention to it.

"Should be the plainest of sailing out yonder. Nothing beyond the Narrows. If there'd been an offshore wind, I feared a little that we might be carried the whole way to France."

By now they were all standing together in the center of the raft. During the time they'd been on their makeshift craft, they'd all learned caution, finding that a sudden movement to one side or the other would make it appallingly unstable.

"Lift me, lover," Krysty said.

"What? Why do?.. Ah, I get it. Give you height to look ahead."

"Right. Bend down."

Ryan stooped, dipping his head. Krysty, helped by J.B., swung a leg over his back and settled herself astride his neck, tightening her thighs. She tucked her legs under his arms, locking her boots in the middle of his back.

"Now," she said.

Though the girl weighed in at a muscular 150 pounds, Ryan lifted her in the air without any noticeable effort. He steadied her with his hands on her legs and balanced himself against the pitching of the raft.

"Try and... Yeah, that's..." Krysty then fell silent. Eventually she tapped Ryan on the head as a sign to let her down again.

"What d'you see?" he asked her.

There was a worried expression on the girl's face. "Not good, friends," she said. "Looks like there's been some bastard great upheaval that's blocked off most the water. Brought up the floor of the ocean, back in the long winter. This isn't open sea no more, Doc."

"What? You mean it's a kind of lake? No way past for us?"

"Can't see it. Look at the water around us now. It hardly moves and has a kind of skin on top, like a sort of scum."

It was true.

Though the sea still rocked with an oily swell, they had totally lost any feeling of forward momentum. They were becalmed.

Krysty was singing quietly to herself, her pure voice the only sound in the stillness.

"A maid again, I ne'er will be, Till peaches grow on a cherry tree."

Doc smiled across at her. "I haven't heard that tune in... I guess a coupla hundred years. There's a damned odd thought. It's lovely. You learn that from your kin back in... What was the ville called?"

"Harmony. Herb Lanning the blacksmith knew lots of real old songs. Way prechill. It was his son, Carl, who plucked my cherry. That's when I learned the words."

"Must have been a real good ville."

Krysty smiled at the old man. "Yeah, it was. But all things change. That was why we... why we were moving on."

"Your ville a good place, lover?" she asked Ryan.

"Seemed so, then. Until I saw the skull that was hid under the smiles."

"Life's a deal of hard traveling," J.B. said sagely, surprising everyone. Homespun philosophy wasn't normally what you heard from the Armorer.

Jak and Lori were working with the stern steering oar, slowly propelling the raft toward the western shore, now only a couple of miles away. It was backbreaking, soul-destroying work, and they'd found from painful experience that it could only be done in pairs. Any more and chaos followed with everyone knocking and pushing into everyone else.

It took them close to four hours to move roughly half the distance they needed to reach the land.

The waters around them had gotten more and more polluted. Dead fish and birds hung suspended, rotting and half-eaten, bones coated with a yellow grease. An hour back they'd poled past the corpse of a massive shark — a great white, at least fifty feet from porcine snout to the mangled tip of its tail. It hadn't been dead long, and its flat little eye still rolled incuriously toward the rich violet sky.

"Jaws," Doc muttered, enigmatic as ever.

The beach, sand dunes rolling back toward a line of low scrub, was now less than a half mile off. The sun had sunk well behind the hazy bulk of the land. In the last quarter mile they'd finally broken clear of the stickiest of the watery dreck, but the bitter labor had taken its toll.

Doc Tanner had collapsed, muttering feverishly about painted ships and painted oceans. Lori had fainted fifteen minutes later, slumping on the timbers, banging her head again. Despite her reserves of mutie strength, Krysty had given up, sitting down in a heap, her face white and drained. "Sorry, folks," she said, hoarse with exhaustion. "I've paid all I can find. Got no more. Sorry."

It had been left to Jak Lauren, with seemingly bottomless reserves of stamina in his slight body, J.B. and Ryan, to keep working on the clumsy steering paddle. Heaving it backward and forward, each stroke making the muscles of shoulder and spine scream in protest. Each stroke pushed the raft a scant couple of feet nearer to land.

Now the worst was over. Lori, Doc and Krysty had recovered a little, relishing the cooler breeze coming off the beach. Jak and the Armorer were at the oar.

Krysty smiled weakly at Ryan as they sat together. "I felt awful about stopping."

"Don't be stupid."

"Could have used the power of the Earth Mother. But it..."

Ryan squeezed her hand. "No. I've seen you after you've done that. Not worth it. Only 'bout another half hour and we can get off this bastard raft."

"You know we were talking 'bout Harmony? And your old ville?"

"Front Royal?"

"Yeah. If we get there and you kick Harvey Cawdor's ass out of the land... what happens then?"

"Do I get to be the baron? Take over the line? Is that what you mean?''

"Course. Would you take it on? Give up all these mat-trans jumps? Give up all the killing? Settle? That's why I left Harmony in the first place."

Ryan looked around them. "We've talked 'bout this before. I don't know, lover. That's the fucking truth. I just don't know."

"Want to spell me, Ryan?" J.B. called.

"Right. One minute."

"Answer me, lover," pressed Krysty. "I want to know what I'm getting into when we get down to the Shens and your ville."

The jagged cut the mutie had inflicted on Ryan's hand seemed to be healing. He picked at a small piece of rough skin around it, trying to sort out how he wanted to answer Krysty's question.

"A baron holds his ville by his weapons and by fear. That's always been the way of it. I don't know if that's the way I want to live, Krysty."

"It can change."

"You can never turn your back when you're the baron. I was old enough and saw enough before I left Front Royal to know that. You never sit, unless you've got your back 'gainst a wall. You never sleep long and easy. You never trust a smile, Krysty. You have too many enemies and no friends."

With that he stood up and took the place of J.B. at the steering oar, leaving Krysty Wroth with her own thoughts.

A half hour later, with a grating sound, the raft beached on the New Jersey shore.