"Trains?" the freezie asked.
J.B. answered him. "Sure. Often get trains of wags rolling together. Safer that way. Hold off the muties."
"No. I mean trains, like Amtrak. On rails." Seeing the blank looks, he said, "No, I guess there aren't any. How about planes?" Again, he answered his own question. "Stupid. If there's no trains and there aren't many cars, there sure as little green apples aren't going to be any airplanes."
"Wrong," Ryan replied. "I've never seen any flying wags, but the Trader saw one, once. Out East, he said."
"Flying?" Rick asked.
"Crashing," the Armorer said with a short, dry laugh.
"That's what Trader said. Got hauled out some old shed. Already gassed up. Baron's oldest son said he'd try it. Up, up and... down again. Body finished in one field. Head in another. Never found the legs, way I recall it."
Though the land had looked fairly even from high above, it was actually seamed with innumerable narrow ravines and dry riverbeds. Doc surmised that this was all a result of the unimaginably catastrophic forces that had shifted the land a hundred years earlier. Since the old Golden State had always been a place of earthquakes and landslides, it wasn't surprising to see the flat desert ripped and patched.
Krysty's feeling that there might be a ville on the far side made them cautious about approaching carelessly. Also, there were sinister tracks in the soft red dust.
"Sidewinder," Jak suggested, pointing to an odd swirling pattern in the sand. There were also peculiar marks, as though large wag tires had been rolled ceaselessly around.
The light breeze through the shoulder-high scrub produced a constant dry rustling that would cover the approach of any creature. Ryan felt the short hairs raising on his nape.
"Bad place," he muttered, almost to himself.
But Krysty, at his side, heard him and nodded. "I got that feeling, too. Best we get across it as fast as we can."
"Not easy, towing the freezie. The way he looks, a half mile'll put him down and out."
"Could go back, lover?"
"Yeah. Nobody ever gets anywhere by going back, do they? Let's go on."
Once they had plunged into the sagebrush, dotted with elegant saguaros, it became difficult to see more than ten paces ahead. The switchbacking terrain was exhausting, even for the hardier members of the group. For Rick Ginsberg, the effect was devastating. After less than twenty minutes he collapsed, eyes rolling up into their sockets, a thin froth dribbling from his cracked lips.
"Cruise up Mulholland after dark and just watch the lights," he mumbled.
The other six gathered around him. Lori dropped to her knees, breathing hard, wiping dusty sweat from her forehead, brushing away her tangled hair. Doc also knelt down.
"By the three Kennedys! This heat quite debilitates one, does it not? I fear that our frozen comrade is not quite up to it. Should we not return to the redoubt and jump elsewhere?"
"I'll give him some water," Krysty said, kneeling beside the prostrate man.
Ryan looked around. They were in a shallow saucer-shaped depression, but ahead of them the land seemed to be rising. "Jak?"
"Ryan?"
"Go up and see if you can get high enough to check how far to the edge of this desert."
The boy returned in less than five minutes, his white hair tinted pink with the fine sand. He jumped down the last bit of the slope.
"Not far," he said.
"Hour? Two?"
"Three. With freezie?.. Ten hours. Mebbe more."
Rick was, once more, asleep. Krysty looked up from giving him a drink, her green eyes meeting Ryan's stare unflinchingly.
"Nobody said it'd be easy," she whispered accusingly. "Man's sick, tired, been lying with a dark mind for a hundred years. What'd you expect, lover? Got to be slow with him."
"I know it."
Oddly it was Doc who first heard the distant sound.
He stood up, putting his hand to his ear, listening hard. Apart from the dozing freezie, the others all looked curiously at the old man.
"What is it?" Ryan asked, his ears filled by the noise of the wind hissing through the scrub. He could just catch the sounds of a chem storm, rumbling and crackling, miles to the east, beyond the mountains.
"For a moment I thought I could hear the sound of... But that is midsummer madness. The folly of an old fool, they always say, you know."
Ryan was about to relax again, deciding it was one of Doc's fantasies, when he heard it, too. When all of them heard it.
A distant, regular humming noise, like an errant wasp, buzzing across the desert, coming from where Krysty claimed there might be a ville. The sound was growing louder.
"Mighty big insect," J.B. observed, cradling his new blaster, and looking anxiously up at the cloud-speckled sky.
Rick opened his eyes and gazed blankly upward, blinking through the pebbled glasses. "What's?.. It's an airplane? By God, but it's..."
"Everyone down," Ryan shouted, setting an example by diving beneath a stunted clump of ocotillo. Krysty landed at his side, with J.B. beyond her. Ryan could see that the others were also taking cover.
The noise was louder, hiccuping occasionally, rasping and whining. He peered up through the sparse protection of the brush.
And saw it.
The freezie had been right. It was aplane. Two wings on each side, with circles of red, white and blue painted on them; a stubby body, with twin cockpits. It was about a hundred feet above the ground, swaying from side to side, the racket now quite deafening to the people below it.
It had a single revolving propeller set on the point of its nose. Blue smoke coughed from the engine. Ryan could make out only one flier, his round, helmeted face hidden behind an enormous pair of glinting goggles. As far as he could make out, the flying machine carried no blasters.
It dipped and swooped overhead, carrying on toward the lower slopes of the mountain. Jak started to get up, then ducked down again. "Coming back," he shouted.
It passed about two hundred yards to the south of them, again apparently not noticing them. Finally the plane vanished away across the desert in the direction it had originally come from. As the sound faded, everyone stood and dusted themselves off.
"I've seen pix of old planes in vids," Ryan said, "but not one like that. Looked real old."
"Bless my soul," Doc said. "That was a Sopwith 1 1/2-Strutter, or I miss my guess. I studied the first World War during my imprisonment by the Cerberus dogs. Yes, indeed. A trusty biplane. A Sopwith 1 1/2-Strutter. Such a coincidence after we'd been talking about if there were any planes left in Deathlands."
Rick stood up, looking shaken. "What kind of world is this?" he said slowly. "It's a crazed mix of the past, my present and your future. It's all bloody madness."
"Yes," Ryan agreed. "It is."
It was now obvious that there must be a ville beyond the arid wasteland, so they pushed on at top speed, taking turns helping the frail man.
Each dusty arroyo was like the next one and like the previous one. Small clusters of cactuses with steely thorns made walking difficult. Despite Jak's estimate of how far away the edge of the desert was, the hours drifted by and it didn't seem to get much closer.
"Looks like a trail here," said Lori, who'd been leading the way, stumbling and cursing in her spike-heeled boots.
"Hold up," Ryan called, joining her and taking the lay of the land. They were in a broader-sided valley, and the bottom did seem to be trampled flatter. He knelt and examined the earth closely, seeing marks of some kind of wags. J.B. and Jak knelt beside him.
"Two wheel wags," the Armorer observed. "Look at the pattern. Not four-wheelers."
"Watch your step," Krysty warned. "Good place for an ambush."
"Can we rest?" Rick panted. His neat jacket and pants had been torn by the thorns of the innumerable cactuses and covered in a patina of orange dust. Blood dappled the man's hands where he'd fallen, and his face beneath the mask of dirt was pale and lined. He seemed to have aged ten years in the past twenty-four hours, and Ryan yet again pondered on their wisdom in reviving him.