"Time's passing," J.B. warned. "Should we be turning around for the boat?"
"Looks like path opens around corner there." Jak pointed.
"There and no farther," Ryan pronounced. "Then it's fast back."
"I just can't believe this place is so poisoned," Krysty said as they walked on. "Tall pines and the freshest stream you ever saw."
"No birds," Jak said.
It was true. Other than the chuckling sound of the small river, the morning was silent. The only life at all was a glittering coppery cockroach that ambled across the trail in front of them. J.B. raised a boot to crush it, but Mildred warned him not to touch it.
"Creatures like that'll inherit the earth. Radiation hardly slows them."
They rounded the corner, and everyone stopped. There wasn't the least doubt that they'd found the source of the massive rad poisoning.
There had been, fairly recently, a huge slippage of earth, and half the hillside had opened up like giant jaws. The tumbled remnants of several concrete buildings clung perilously to the jagged edge of the sheer cliff, two hundred feet above them. But the quake had done more than damage the buildings. It had also torn open great burial pits beneath them, spilling their secret load from the metal-walled, sealed caskets.
The whole slope, hundreds of feet across, down to the river, was a tangled mass of rusting drums and split plastic vats. Whatever they might once have held was now an unbelievable cocktail of hideous substances, mingled together, all leached through to the water. Into the soil. Into the lake beyond and into the food chain for the entire area.
"My God!" Mildred whispered. "It's like opening the curtains on Armageddon. It's worse. Much, much..." She turned to Ryan, her dark eyes wide in shock. "Now, fast! Down the hill and as far away as possible from this devil's brew."
She led the way back toward the lake, stumbling in her eagerness. Ryan was at her heels, the others following closely behind.
"But what is it?" he shouted. "What could be in those drums?"
"Lord alone knows," she panted over her shoulder. "The killers were so many. Radioactive iodine. Carbon 14."
"Uranium?"
"Sure. Strontium 90, radium 226, tritium, radon 222. That's a gas."
"Plutonium, Mildred?" Doc called, jogging along third in line.
"Of course. Oh, I'm losing breath. Can't breathe deep in case... Carbon 14, cesium 134 and 137. Anything! It's all around us."
She wasn't that far from the jagged edge of panic, stumbling and nearly falling into the river at a point where the path doglegged left.
"Slow it, Mildred!" Ryan said. After all the self-control that the freezie had shown since they thawed her, it was a shock to see the state she was in now. The discovery of the ruined rad storage site had freaked her out.
She turned and gripped him by the arm, fingers tightening like a screw trap. "Ryan, that badge in your shirt doesn't show us how bad this might be. The rem count could be massive. Hopefully the worst of the leakage is gone, seeped away when the earth first cracked. But it is appalling."
"Just take it careful. Break an ankle on this trail and it won't help."
"This was the great fear of my generation, you know."
"What?" Krysty asked, taking Mildred by the hand to help her over a steep patch of tumbled stone.
"Chernobyl."
"Your knob'll what?" Jak called, not quite hearing what she'd said.
"A place in Russia," she said, her breathing becoming steadier.
"Upon my soul, ma'am, but I remember that," Doc said. "And there were two more such accidents within a few years. Damnably similar. One was in... Pennsylvania, wasn't? Or Manitoba? And one in Europe. Near Lyons? Or Cardiff. I can't recall."
The beach opened before them, the expanse of the lake narrowed by the enclosing rocks of the headlands on either side.
Mildred had recovered, and climbed into the boat to sit on a thwart, hand pressed against her chest. "If ever I have a coronary," she said, "I'll have it now."
The others got in, and they pushed off, paddling quickly toward open water. Ryan noticed that the rad count had fallen back to red-orange. Still high, but below lethal.
As they rowed past the obscuring headland, they found themselves on top of two of the pursuing Viking dragon-ships.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Their escape had been discovered a little after dawn, and Jorund Thoraldson had immediately ordered out the long ships. He sent two vessels, under the command of Egil Skallagson, toward the west, while he led two more dragon-ships in an easterly direction.
"I had thought we would take you, outlanders," he said, once the small boat had been hauled alongside and the six companions were on the deck.
"And you were right," Ryan replied. "But there's something important we have to tell you about."
"No. Escape is treachery. The karl of Markland will not talk with traitors."
"You damned fool!" Doc exclaimed. "You and your people — every man jack of them — faces a slow and painful death within a matter of weeks unless you move your steading."
"Words, words, words. Like small pebbles rattling in a crab shell. I have said I will not talk. Perhaps when we return to Markland, before you all take the long road without turning, we might talk."
"The flying eagle for the one-eyed outlander," Sigurd said eagerly.
Jorund nodded. "For such treachery... perhaps. We shall see."
He gestured for the prisoners to be taken into the bow of his ship, where they were guarded by a couple of the younger warriors. There had been no attempt to search Ryan or any of the others, but their firearms had all been taken and placed in the stern. One of the guards was Erik Stonebiter.
"What's flying eagle?" Jak asked him.
"You would not wish to know."
"Tell us," the albino boy pressed.
"It is a way of slaying, only to be done by the karl himself. Because you have betrayed his wishes, he may kill your leader in that way."
"What fucking way?" Jak insisted. Ryan, sitting on the gently heaving deck beside the teenager, was beginning to wish he'd stop asking about the flying eagle.
The young Norseman blankly refused to face Jak and stared out across the lake, where the first tendrils of gray mist were already appearing. "It is a hard passing," he finally said.
Jorund had also spotted the threatening bank of fog and was urging his rowers on to greater efforts, beginning to beat out a rhythm with his sheathed sword on the bulwark of the vessel.
With Jak and the others still waiting, Erik Stonebiter eventually told them of the flying eagle. "If the karl wills it, urged by the wisewoman, then you may be bound crossways, wrists and ankles to a frame. The point of the knife will enter here." He touched himself under the short ribs, low on the right side of his chest. "It is thrust in and drawn deep, up to the top of the ribs' curve. Then down again and out on the opposite side. The shape is like that of an eagle, flying high against the sun."
J.B. had been particularly interested in the telling. "And that's it? Doesn't sound anything special to me."
"No. That is but the half of it. Once the chest is laid open, the karl steps in close and reaches within the cavity. He seizes the lungs in his fists and draws them slowly out. I have seen it. The lungs flutter and fill for many minutes."
"A hundred years sure hasn't made folks any sweeter," Mildred said quietly.
The fog closed in, thicker and more blinding than before. It surrounded the two dragon-ships in a cocoon of muffling damp. Jorund ordered the two vessels to make fast to each other to prevent their becoming separated and lost. The oars were shipped, and they drifted in silence. Lookouts were posted at stem and stern. Water lapped and chuckled against the wooden bows. The crew sat around, not talking, made uneasy by the shrouding mist.