"No. Let's get out," Ryan called. "Doc? Push us off with that steering oar."
"Consider it done," the old man replied.
"Throw it, lover," Krysty said, face white with shock at their narrow escape.
"Sure." He looked up at the horde of cowled figures hanging from the network of creepers and shouted, "Here, have the bastard back!"
Once, about eight years ago, Ryan had been with the Trader when they'd broken into a small redoubt, a long way west, in a valley of the Rockies. They'd found some old vids stashed away and a sealed battery player. Most of the tapes had rotted and crumbled, but they'd watched a few minutes of one of them. It had been a film of a football game. Ryan couldn't recall the names of the teams or the players, but he still remembered the grace and power of the man who'd thrown the football, flexing his arm and letting it go, soaring upward and on.
He hefted the implo-gren and heaved it toward the watchers on the bridge, hoping to hit one of them and maybe even pitch him into the river. The raft was already starting to roll uncontrollably down the Mohawk, and it wasn't worth wasting any ammo.
He watched the scarlet and blue bands revolving in the cool, damp air.
The sound of the grenade detonating was unmistakable: a muffled, inward, whooshing sort of noise, as the implosion sucked everything into itself. The gren had been at its highest point, hanging in the air only a few yards from the bridge, when the fuse finally worked.
The frail structure of knotted creepers disintegrated instantly, its strands spinning toward the whirling circle of air that had been the implo-gren. And the hooded figures were tugged with it, tumbling into screaming space, into the waiting river, which received them gratefully.
Ryan and his friends watched the destruction of their enemies with disbelief. The small bodies splashed into the fast-flowing water, most of them not even resurfacing, dragged down by their heavy robes.
Doc and Lori abandoned the steering, allowing the heavy raft to find its own direction and speed. All six of them stared behind at the spectacular results of the malfunctioned gren. On either side of the river they could see the dangling cords, snapped off short, that had held the bridge. But the whole center section had disappeared, floating past them in torn and fragmented sections.
Only one of the muties made it to the surface and tried to swim toward the raft. Its clothes were gone, and it resembled the muties they'd seen higher up the Mohawk — short arms and legs, and skin like a reptile. This one had no hair at all on its wrinkled skull, and they were shocked to see a vestigial third eye, staring wildly at them, in the center of its brutish, low forehead.
As it floundered along, closing in on the slow-moving raft, its lipless mouth stretched open and it screamed to them in a feeble voice.
"Elp, elp, elp, elp!"
Its fingers groped for the rough-hewn edge of the logs, near where Lori stood.
"I'm helped you," the girl shouted, still trembling from the shock of their brush with death.
Before anyone else on the raft could move, the slender girl hefted one of the ten-foot-long branches that served as paddles, lifted it and brought it down on the bobbing face. The stump of wood pulped the man's nose, splitting his lips, breaking off several of his teeth. Blood jetted, flooding his throat, making him choke. His hands slipped off the side of the raft and he bobbed away, a tendril of crimson trailing from his smashed face.
The last they saw of him was a hand clutching at the cold air.
Before evening the Mohawk was joined by another, wider river, coming in from the north. Doc Tanner pronounced that it was the Hudson. Even Jak Lauren had heard of that name.
"Runs by Newyork?"
The old man sighed. "Time was it did, my snow-headed young colleague. But what remains of that great metropolis now I wonder?"
"When I was a kid, folks talked of it as a hot spot, full o'weeds," Ryan said. "Only ghouls lived there, eating each other."
Doc smiled. "Sounds much as it was back in my day, Ryan."
The light was fading and an evening storm threatened. Ryan pointed toward a low spit of land, jutting out, with the shattered remnants of a building just visible at its end. Because of its length and narrowness it would be easy to defend against a sneak attack from the land side.
"Bring us in there if you can," he called to Jak, who was manning the steering oar with Krysty.
The farther south they drifted, the slower and wider the river became, with none of the gushing rapids they'd encountered higher up, near the abandoned redoubt. The water was amazingly clear, with the rocks on its bottom looking close enough to reach down and touch, though a quick measurement with a length of cord and J.B.'s Tekna knife showed them a depth of about fifteen feet. Doc kept wondering at how unpolluted the Hudson appeared.
"Back when I knew it nobody would place a hand in the water, for fear the acids and chem filth would scorch it to the bone."
The raft grounded with a soft crunch on the shingle, and they all leaped gratefully off it, stretching their legs. Jak tied the remnants of the mooring rope around a rusted girder that stuck vertically out of some crumbling concrete. The boy stooped and lapped at water from his cupped hands, wrinkling his nose.
"Tastes of salt," he said.
"Salt?" Ryan queried. "Must be close to the sea. I haven't seen the sea for... for too many long years. Is that right, Doc?"
"We must go down to the sea again, and do business in great waters," the old man chanted. "The wonders of the Lord, my dear Ryan, is what we might all share, one day hence."
"But are we close to the sea?" J.B. pressed.
Doc shook his head, the light wind disturbing his gray locks. He smiled and showed his peculiarly fine, strong set of teeth. "What is close, John Barrymore Dix? How when is up? How meretricious is now? Riddle me that, my friend."
They dropped the question of how close they were to the sea. In fact, it was approximately one hundred and fifty miles from their stopping place to the open ocean beyond Manhattan.
Ryan set guards, giving everyone a two-hour duty during the time of darkness, and left the last watch for himself. The rest of the group huddled together in the open, eating from their self-heats, using the water from the Hudson for drinking despite the faint hint of salt it held.
"Be better in the trees for shelter?" J.B. suggested.
"We haven't seen any sign of life for hours. Not since the crazies on that bridge."
It was true what Krysty said. The banks of the Hudson seemed deserted. Ryan had been taking regular readings with his rad meter, but it hadn't gone seriously across the orange and into the red. The land was warm, but no longer hot.
"Because we don't see 'em, it don't mean they aren't there," he replied.
"Yeah," the laconic Armorer said.
They stayed where they were.
It was a beautiful night, warmer than it had been farther north. The moon was untroubled by clouds, sailing above them, sharpening the edges of all the shadows.
Lori was on watch a little after three in the morning. When the stickies came, they beat the girl to the ground before she could give any warning.
Chapter Five
Nobody knew a whole lot about stickles. They were found in small, vicious colonies, generally in parts of the Deathlands that had been particularly heavily nuked. Some said that the missiles that spawned the genetic horrors that were stickies also held some secret chromo-somic deviator that accounted for the peculiar nightmare that they had become.
Some blamed grossly contaminated water supplies in a mysterious process that involved nitrates leached from the soil.