enabled them to go over any kind of terrain. But for this brief excursion, Ryan had chosen to go on foot.
Repeating to himself, 'Five, nine, six,
The landscape was as bleak as anything he'd ever seen. The redoubt was set into the side of a mountain. A long trail wound toward a steep valley below. There was no sign of vegetation anywhere.
He wore his thermals, with a thick sweater and his trusty long coat. The LAPA 5.56 mm was on his right hip, the steel panga on the left. The SIG-Sauer was holstered under the coat.
There were jagged peaks all around, vanishing into the murk, all of them layered with snow. The cold was intense, making him think that the rumors of the persisting nuclear winter were true. The sky was a sallow color, streaked like bile, showing occasional flashes of silver brightness from the chem debris that still permeated the heavens. Far off to the west, Ryan could make out a tall mountain with a smear of orange smoke trailing from it, indicating an active volcano.
For an instant, the ground vibrated beneath his feet from a minor earth tremor. Ryan steadied himself, rubbing his right eye to clear the irritation from the ocher clouds.
Squinting with his good eye, he spotted movement on the far side of the valley beneath an overhang of gray rock. It looked like a pair of huge bears, their coats of dirty white marked with yellow mud. As he watched them, they turned toward him.
Although the bears showed no sign of becoming a threat, Ryan drew the LAPA, holding it at the ready. They were probably a good half mile away as the mutie gulls flew, probably five miles by the shortest trail. Ironically, the two animals probably saved his life. Without them he wouldn't have drawn his gun.
The attackers came from above and behind. They dropped on top of Ryan and sent him crashing to the icy ground. He scrabbled to his feet, but just as he was upright again, one of them hit him behind the knees and he went flying to one side. But even as he fell, he snapped off a burst from his LAPA, the stream of lead stitching two of the five diminutive muties. They went spinning away, mouths open with screams, blood and intestines spilling from their torn stomachs.
As Ryan hit the ground, his gun struck rock with a solid cracking noise. His elbow and shoulder were jarred by the fall, but he was quickly up on one knee, steadying the gun at the three remaining dwarfs, who were shrouded in furs so that only their slit-eyes showed. One had obscenely long monkey arms that trailed in the snow as he moved. Another seemed to have a residual third leg sprouting from his left thigh. Ryan assumed that they were men, though there was no evidence either way. All three carried long spears tipped with barbed ivory points. Communicating with one another in grunts, they pointed at their two dying comrades and stamped their feet on the rocky ground in obvious rage.
'Come on, you little fuckers,' said Ryan, holding his gun steady.
One of them waved his spear, shuffling nearer to the lone man. Still keeping them covered, Ryan slowly rose glancing around in case more muties were sneaking up behind him.
He held his fire as long as he could, though not out of any foolish milksop ideas of mercy or kindness. It was always good to know as much as possible about your enemies. Anyone not a friend was always an enemy. If Alaska was filled with these bloodthirsty muties, then it was as well to know what their weapons were. Did they have only spears?
They came closer, hissing menacingly, thrusting their wooden lances forward.
'Close enough,' said Ryan, tightening his finger on the trigger.
There was a metallic grating sound, and nothing else happened. The fall had jammed the LAPA.
'Fireblast and shit!' snarled Ryan.
Chapter Eight
I hear that grim tyrant approaching,
That cruel and remorseless old foe,
And I lift up me glass in his honor,
Take a drink with bold Rosin the Beau.
The lyrics floated over the bare rocks, reaching the ears of the Russian guerrillas. The words made no sense at all to them. Had they understood them, they would still have been baffled, for the song came from distant antiquity. It dated centuries before the nukes fell from the skies, bringing the long darkness to all the world.
Zmeya came snaking back fromthe ridge, his clothes stained a dull green from the lichen that clung stubbornly to the lee of the boulders. He scurried to where Uchitel stood, holding his stallion quiet.
'One man alone, a trapper laying lines below the ice of a stream. Shall I kill him?'
'He is the first American. I would see him myself.' Uchitel turned to the rest of the band. 'Mount up, brothers and sisters. Let us to war.'
The trapper, Jorgen Smith, was thirty-three years old and lived in a hamlet a few miles inland. His wife had been killed two years earlier by a pack of mutie wolves. They had had no children. Now he was content to venture out each morning — if the wind wasn't blowing to flay the skin off a man — and lay his traps for the beaver that still lived in the streams that ran fast and clean toward the sea. The water was saved from freezing only by the warm slopes of the live volcanos where the streams began.
Kneeling in the snow, he sang to himself as he worked, fighting the loneliness and isolation. His battered Remington M-700 sporting rifle was at his side in its sheath of caribou skin. The gun, a family heirloom, showed the scars of a hundred years of constant use. It fired 7 mm cartridges of which the community now had less than one hundred rounds left. Soon they would either have to barter for more, or rechamber the rifle. The Garand-type ejector — a spring-loaded plunger tucked in the bolt face — had broken in Jorgen's father's time, and a manual ejector had been rigged up by an itinerant blacksmith who visited each hamlet in the far northwest every two or three years.
'Remember me to one who lives there, for once she was a true love of mine,' he sang.
Tying thin strips of rawhide, Smith fumbled with a stubborn knot, considering risking the removal of his gloves. He'd already lost his thumb and two fingers from his left hand by getting them wet and frozen the day he'd tried to rescue Jenny from the wolves.
He caught a glimmer of movement out of the corner of his eye where his goggles were cracked. Quickly pushing them up on his forehead, Jorgen reached for his rifle, dropping the trapping lines in the snow.
On the ridge behind him, silhouetted against the pallid sky, there was a man on a horse: a huge black stallion, much bigger than the little ponies that most folks ride. A gun of a design that Jorgen Smith could not identify, was slung across the man's shoulders.
The stranger was joined by a second rider, then a third and fourth, then more than Jorgen could count.
Holding his Remington, he stood up, waiting as they approached. To see so many strangers was something utterly beyond his experience. They could only be traders, with their goods on the pack horses at the rear of the column. But with their guns, they looked very threatening. Perhaps they were worried about muties. Guns were what kept muties away from the scattered villages.
Uchitel halted his stallion a dozen steps from the man, staring at him curiously, disappointed in a strange way that this American looked so like the wretched peasants on the Russian side of the Bering Strait. He wore torn and ragged furs, and boots that seemed to be no more than strips of cloth and leather wrapped around his feet.
'Hi, there,' called Smith. 'You tradin'? I've got some skins.'
'What does he say, Uchitel? Should I kill him?'
'No, Pechal. Wait. I have a book that teaches how to talk to these Americans. It is here.' Fumbling in his saddlebag, he pulled out a dog-eared volume.
On the front cover it said: 'Convenient conversations for the traveler for any eventuality.' It was written by G. Duluoz and offered easy translations from the Russian tongue to the American and vice versa in seventy different social causes, with full index.' It was published by Strafford Books in 1925.
