Red Holocaust

Chapter Sixteen

One of the Trader's sayings came to Ryan as he moved cautiously through the stygian gloom away from the camp of the Russian butchers.

"The will to live is quite simply a matter of your personal courage."

One of the things that the Trader had always insisted on was each war wag having a number of experts: on explosives or first aid or food or armaments or driving — or survival. Finnegan had been the survival expert. Trader had spent a lot of time lecturing Finnegan, using old manuals and books, drilling into him what should be done in heat or cold or a nuke attack or an ambush, a flood or a fire or a fall. In turn, every few weeks, Finnegan would give a talk to the rest of the crew — as would the other experts, checking that everyone knew what to do.

Now, kneeling in the slush, feeling it soaking through his trousers, Ryan recalled some of the things that Finn had told them.

Panic was the biggest threat. Fear made a man move too fast in the wrong direction. He should stop if he could and draw a breath.

Ryan stood, fighting to control his breathing, still hearing the ground rumbling miles below his feet. Also catching the sound of the Russians, running and calling. Now he saw a couple of flaming torches as they started to search for their lost prisoners. He guessed that J.B. and Krysty, if they'd stayed together, would be making for the south to meet with the others. But his fall had put him on the wrong side of the enemy. Now he'd have to try and loop around.

Ryan took stock. Guns and ammo, check. Clothes and knives, check. Health, bruises here and there but nothing too threatening: check. Compass, check. Food and drink.

"No," he said to himself.

Nor heat.

The land was so barren that his chances of finding food were remote. But he knew from experience that he could exist for several days without food, even in the bitter cold. But he had to drink. He stooped and cupped some of the water around his feet, tasting it cautiously. The fact that it was flowing and not frozen was a sign that it originated higher up — probably near the dam that he'd spotted earlier — and had been melted by heat from a volcano. The taste was bitter, iron with a dash of sulfur. If he could drink now and fill his belly, it would last him a couple of days.

If he didn't find the others after a couple of days in the lingering nuclear winter, then he was going to be dead anyway.

He knelt and lapped like a dog, lifting his head every now and again to peer into the gloom. At the bottom of the steep valley he was sheltered from the bitter wind, but he knew that he couldn't stay there long. The Russians would be searching. Judging from what he'd seen of him, their amber-eyed leader wasn't the sort of man who gave up easily.

Far above Ryan, there was a burst of automatic fire that raked the far side of the ravine, bullets ricocheting and whining into the darkness. Someone shouted and Ryan ducked, huddling against the cold rock, wearing his hood so that his face wouldn't show white.

But the shooting wasn't repeated, and the voices moved toward the south. The earth finally ceased shaking, and all he could hear was the faint whistling of the wind.

"Time to move," he said.

Back in the Deathlands, winter had been a time of bitter hardship, with blizzards and fiercely low temperatures. But here in Alaska the long nuclear winter still had the land in its thrall. In places there were deep snowbanks that had been piled up by the endless winds, and in other places, just bare rock, scoured and shattered by permafrost. Gray and dull green lichens clung precariously to the more sheltered places, but life was almost extinct, clinging to the edges of an abyss.

Either a man found protection or he tried to keep moving. After an hour of walking steadily west and then curving cautiously back toward the south, Ryan was feeling exhausted. Much of the time he was battling against a shrieking gale that plucked at his hood, blasting splinters of ice into his eye. Such a buffeting soon cuts away at the senses of even the strongest man. It becomes difficult to think rationally, and all a man wants is to lie down and rest a little, just sleep for a few minutes.

A few long, long, long minutes.

Ryan tried to keep moving, without going too fast. He remembered that Finn had urged care. To sweat was to lose body heat; to lose body heat was, eventually, to die. He knew the signs of frostbite: small, gray-yellow patches on the skin, accompanied by numbness, later leading to the blackening of gangrene and finally to death. That was something he didn't need to fear. Either he'd find the others in the next day or so, or he'd be dead anyway.

To counter the cold on his face, Ryan exercised his muscles, alternately scowling and smiling, so that his cheeks wouldn't freeze and lose all sensation. He checked the small chron on his wrist, finding that he'd been away from the Russians for nearly three hours. Unless they scattered, he figured he was safe from stumbling back into their arms. Once, he heard the distant sound of gunfire. It lasted only a few seconds and wasn't repeated.

With little light, it was hard going. He was constantly slipping and falling, slogging on, pausing now and again to listen. Once there was the sound of running water, but it seemed to come from his left, away from the direction he'd taken.

Ryan knew all the survival tricks of lighting a life-saving blaze using a lens, or even by taking apart a couple of bullets to ignite tinder or paper. But in that desert of ice and stone there was nothing he could burn. No wood at all.

"Shelter," he said, panting hard. A pale sliver of moon danced above him, occasionally visible through the shreds of high, gray clouds. It gave enough light for him to see a big drift of snow banked against the overhanging lip of a ridge of rough stones a hundred paces ahead of him.

With his panga, he began to carve the white bank, cutting eighteen-inch cubes, stacking them to make a wall to break the wind. He worked steadily, creating a tunnel, gradually expanding it until it was large enough for him to climb into. The wall of snow bricks, which had grown higher and higher as he'd carved out the tunnel, was arranged around the entrance. If he'd had better tools, he could have tried to make a full house of snow, or "igloo," as Finn had called it. But he also remembered that there was a danger of such places melting and caving in, trapping the occupants.

Ryan sat down, making sure his coat was tucked beneath him. Immediately he was aware of the shelter that his snow cave provided against the weather. Out of the gale, there was no longer the bitter numbness in his face. Every few minutes he stood up and shuffled his feet, swinging his arms to keep his circulation going.

Around five in the morning, he dozed for a while, waking when the first light of dawn came sliding over the eastern mountains.

"Feels like a stone buried in your flesh," Ryan muttered. He was again slogging relentlessly onward in a great loop south, hoping to meet the others.

His toes hurt and he could feel a faint prickling on his exposed face. His hands were also becoming swollen and tender.

"Stone in your flesh," he repeated. That was how Finnegan had described what the early symptoms of frostbite felt like.

It was nearly midday, but the temperature seemed to be dropping. Off to the north, he could see a great smear of yellow across the sullen sky, where a volcano was erupting. At the top of a ridge, he stared out through the swirling wall of snow, looking for any sign of life, friendly or otherwise. He thought he saw the great dish of the radar installation many miles ahead, but it seemed impossible to reach before evening. And he was beginning to doubt his ability to survive another night without proper shelter and some food.

The mutie polar bear came blundering out of the mists of evening, padding on huge, shaggy paws. Ryan was close to the limits of exhaustion and hunger. His concentration was slipping. Still, he plodded onward, trying to make as much ground as he could before hacking another shelter from the unyielding snow.

"Fuckin' fireblast!" he cursed, stumbling back a few paces, leveling, the Heckler & Koch G12 at the hulking beast that stood less than twenty paces away. Its red eyes glared at him; breath plumed from its jaws. For a few moments, man and beast stared at each other, neither sure of the other's intentions.

"Just fuck off out of my way," said Ryan, finger on the trigger of the automatic rifle.

The creature moved its head back and forth, almost as if trying to hypnotize its intended prey with the regular pendulum swinging.

Saliva dripped from the long, tusked teeth. The head moved faster and still faster. Ryan blinked, fighting against tiredness to hold the gun steady, knowing that one lapse of concentration would be fatal.

Noticing a sudden tensing of the hump of muscle across the bear's shoulders and guessing it presaged a charge, he didn't hesitate any longer. The gun set on continuous fire, he squeezed the trigger, bracing his hip against the recoil. In a crosswind the 4.7 mm bullet was liable to a degree of drift, though the trajectory drop was excellent.

At twenty paces, the stream of bullets tore into the polar bear, bursting its heavy skull apart. Ryan kept firing into the animal's broad chest, sending it staggering to its knees, then onto its side. Its feet kicked and flailed in the bloodied snow. Ryan used the entire fifty-round magazine, knowing that a beast of that size needed to be terminated with utmost prejudice and speed. There wouldn't have been a second chance.

He reloaded, looking into the gloom of the on-rushing night. The sound of the gun would have been so brief that he doubted there was any danger from the Russians.

Its head blasted to pulp, the bear was undeniably dead. But as Ryan bent to touch it, feeling the warmth of the carcass, he was startled to feel the heart still pumping, even though there was virtually no blood left in the whole monstrous body.

He took off his gauntlets, pushing his hands inside the gaping chest cavity, careful to avoid scratches from the jagged ribs and breastbone. The scarlet pool around his feet was steaming. Finn had come off once with a horror story of some trader up in the north, dying of the cold, who'd shot a buffalo on the high plains, hacked its belly open, ripped out the guts and crawled into the carcass and huddled there in the glorious warmth. But during the night, the cold had frozen the soft flesh to an immovable stiffness, and he wasn't able to get out.

And so perished.

Ryan was content to have his hands and arms warmed, feeling inside for the rhythmic pounding of the bear's heart. He brought his smoking fingers to his mouth and licked the salty blood. His stomach heaved with revulsion for a few moments, but he fought against the sickness, lapping at the clotting crimson liquid, taking as much nourishment as he was able.

He sliced away a few thin pieces of the meat, chewing with a grim determination, forcing himself to swallow. Then he took more. From previous experiences of hunger, he knew that to eat too much, particularly such rich meat, would only make him throw up.

The blood dried and began to freeze on his hands, cracking and falling off in dark brown flakes. Ryan rubbed his hands together to remove as much of the blood as possible and felt his circulation reviving. Night was now very close, and it was time once more to build a shelter.

This time there was less snow, and he was forced to struggle with boulders, painstakingly chipping them free of the ice with his panga, piling them into a wall, filling in the cracks with snow.

It wasn't solid enough.

After a couple of hours he began to feel the telltale signs of the biting cold. His feet and hands were growing numb and he was becoming drowsy. It wasn't the usual, healthy desire for sleep after a hard day; it was an insidious, creeping sleeplessness, offering a tempting promise of warmth and relief from pain. It was overlaid with the feeling that he'd done his best and had now earned his rest.

"Fuck that!" said Ryan.

He stood, stamping his feet, pulling up the hood around his ears, then changing his mind and lowering it once more. If he was going to start walking this night, he would be virtually blind. It would be madness to make himself virtually deaf by covering his ears with the hood.

He had decided that his only genuine hope of surviving was to make for the old ruined radar station with its conspicuous geodesic dome. There might be shelter there. And it was the obvious place for Henn and the others to wait for him.

Every few minutes the moon broke through the low clouds, throwing the land into sharp relief. The track toward the tumbled buildings wandered like a drunk man, gradually coming down off the windtorn edge of the escarpment. Ryan's guess was that his destination was about four miles off. At his best normal pace on level ground, that would take him under an hour.

After three exhausting hours he was still less than halfway there.

He began to hallucinate.

Once he saw the Trader. He stood a few yards ahead of Ryan, pointing an accusing finger. His lips moved but Ryan couldn't hear the words. Just a little while later, he fell and slipped into the blackness. His mind told him that he had broken some teeth in the fall, and he reached inside his mouth and found splintered fragments of teeth awash in blood along with feathery pieces of crumpled blue plastic. Yet it seemed to him that this was a perfectly normal thing to find inside his mouth.

Once, on a ridge parallel to the one where he staggered onward, Ryan thought he saw a pack of lean hunting wolves, all facing him, their slavering jaws, glittering in the moonlight. The leader was a huge creature, standing as high as a man's chest. Then the pack vanished behind some boulders. Ryan was not certain they'd been there in the first place.

Dawn brought a spectacular sky of orange and yellow streaked with fiery crimson. But Ryan Cawdor scarcely noticed it.

His snospex were in the ice buggy; without them, his sight was deteriorating. His eye felt full of grit, and everything seemed to be tinted red and was blurred with shadows. But he was closing in on the radar station. Behind him, to the left, he could make out the silhouette of the huge dam, dominating the plain and valleys beneath it.

The night's cold had struck deep, and he kept stumbling. He lost one of his gloves on the descent from the ridge, and his left hand was bruised and swollen. His knees and ribs hurt, as did a cut along his jaw from the jagged edge of a black boulder.

He entered a shallow dip, and for several minutes the radar station was out of sight. When he emerged, it was a scant quarter mile off across level ground.

Ryan knew then that he was going to make it.

Despite his dimmed vision, he suddenly made out a group of people hurrying toward him. They were shouting and waving, but he couldn't quite hear the words. Now, so close to safety, Ryan was able to let go. He slipped wearily to his knees. Finally, like a tired man entering deep water, he slid forward on his face, waiting for the others to come to him.