"It is an axiom of some veracity that a good guard dog never sleeps. Cerberus was assuredly of the best, Mr. Dix."
"Every piece cocked," instructed Ryan. "Round under the pin. Fingers..."
"On triggers," finished Okie, unsmiling. "We know that, Ryan."
They went on.
The road, if that's what it had once been, wound and twisted like a broken-backed adder, clinging to the edge of the ice-sheeted cliffs, a dizzy abyss plunging away to their left. At one bend Ryan held up a gloved fist, halting the party, waving them forward.
"What do you see?" asked Hennings, his dark skin pallid against the black fur hood.
"Down there," replied Ryan, pointing to where the tumbling waters of a river in flood tore over gray boulders. Visible now and again through the gusted clouds of snow were the red and brown metal bones of several vehicles. Torn and twisted, spotted with ice and blown spume. It was impossible to make out what they might once have been, but there could have been three or four of them. One large rusting chunk of iron might have been the rear suspension members of a large truck.
"Someone didn't make the turn," said Finnegan.
"Dolfo Kaler," suggested J.B. "Kurt talked about broken trucks an' all. They're what's left of Kaler's expedition after the Redoubt up here."
"Which means the fog that has teeth and claws is around just a couple more corners," said Krysty Wroth. She stood close against Ryan, shivering at the cold.
She was nearly right.
It was only one corner.
Waiting, quiet and immense. As Ryan cautiously waved the others forward to his side, the words of Doc came back to him. It waslike some gigantic, patient guard dog. Crouched on the rutted surface of the track, among the snow-filled pits and hollows, it throbbed.
"There is Cerberus," whispered Doc. Behind them the wind still howled and the air was still filled with needled chips of ice swirling from the leaden sky. But on this stretch the wind was gone, echoing behind them but not before. Here it was preternaturally quiet.
Ryan gazed at it, filled with an awe that came close to fear. In all his life he had never seen anything like it. The fog squatted on the road, at least the forward part of it did, and behind it rose vastly above them until it merged with the sky. It was impossible for Ryan to guess its height. Despite the wind all around them the fog did not move, beyond a gentle rocking, pulsing movement that seemed to be generated somewhere within its enormous bulk. It looked as though a light glowed somewhere within it, like some settlement glimpsed at a great distance through mist.
He took a few cautious steps toward it, and the swaying increased. The whole mass moved the equivalent paces toward him. Tendrils came creeping from its base, edging along the road in his direction. They stopped moving as he did.
Hunaker threw back her hood, ice gathering immediately on her short, green hair. "Let me waste this shit with my rifle!" she shouted.
Immediately the fog reacted, swooping with its sinuous fingers down toward them, sending them all scurrying quickly back along the trail, back toward the bend. The fog reached to within a few steps of where Hunaker had been standing, then seemed to gather itself together and resume its previous condition, swaying smugly within.
"If I might proffer a small suggestion, Miss Hunaker?" began Doc.
"What? How 'bout, don't make any fuckin' noise or threaten it or even go close to it?"
"Those were my thoughts, dear lady. Those were indeed my thoughts."
While it had been just Kurt's ravings, or the mythic words of Krysty and Doc, it had not seemed as if it would be such a problem. Ryan had somehow thought that they'd walk through it or climb around it. Confident that once he saw it, assuming it really existed, it would just be a minor problem like hundreds of others, and with an easy solution. Now that he stood so close to it, he realized that this was in fact a form of primal force that functioned in ways that he had no idea about.
"Now what?" J.B. muttered.
Ryan unzipped his coat. Despite the ice and the bitter wind, he found that he was sweating freely. "Who knows," he said angrily.
Dix widened the question. "Anyone? How about you, Doc? You know about this bitching thing?"
"Not to put too fine a point upon it, young man, I am as much in the dark as you. I believe this is here to keep malefactors away from the Redoubt and the gate."
Ryan noted the word gateand filed it away as something to ask about later. If there got to be a later.
"We could try some grenades," suggested Okie.
"Could do," Ryan said. "Gotta think. No other trail. Not one that we could ever hope to find. It's this or nothin'. And there's no way under it. It hangs over the edge of that sheer cliff. There's no way over it. So you want to know what I think? I think one of the Barons out east's got him a chopper. If we just had that..."
"If we had a balloon we could float up and over it," said Koll. "But we don't."
So they tried grenades.
High-ex and incendiary looked the best bets. No point in wasting shrap or nerve against a fog.
The hand bombs made a load of noise and some fire. The flames seemed muffled by the fog and the high-ex did nothing at all that anyone could make out. Some rocks and ice from high above them came rolling down, pattering on the road. The fog retreated about as far as a man could spit, then came back. Back toward them, stopping at the bend of the trail, becoming a huge wall, almost as if it had been cut clean with a giant's cleaver.
Doc had sat down, drawn and pale, looking as though the confrontation with the fog had exhausted him. He felt Ryan's eye on him and clambered up, pulling himself to a standing position with his hands on the rock face.
"My apologies, sir, but all the noise and fire has quite..." The eyes cleared as though a veil had been ripped from them. "Antimatter, Mr. Cawdor. I believe that might do the trick. Implode, and the foul fiend will be undone — it will separate from its source."
J.B. banged one gloved fist into the other. "Implosion grenade. Turn that chiller inside out. Yeah. Koll?"
"What?"
"You got the implo?"
"Yeah. Couple."
"Go hurl them into the middle of that bastard fog. Right in, far as you can throw."
"Sure," said Ryan. "You got about the best arm, Koll. Go close as you can, then get the heat out of there."
Koll lowered his hood, wiping tiny gems of steel-gray ice from his long mustache. He unhooked the two implosion bombs, with their distinctive scarlet and blue bands around their dull tops.
"Chill it, Koll," whispered Hunaker, patting him on the arm.
The towering mist, with the strange pale light throbbing at its center, had retreated once more until it hung precisely where they had first seen it, countless small tendrils creeping from its base as though tasting the air for the scent of an enemy.
Koll crouched like a runner readying for a sprint, a grenade in each fist. He drew in a number of deep breaths, composing himself. Ryan stood at his heels.
"Not tooclose, Koll. No dead heroes on War Wag One, remember."
Koll nodded his blond head. Five more breaths, faster and more shallow. He powered himself up the trail, boots sending chips of stone and ice flying back into the watching group. For some seconds the fog showed no sign of awareness of the threat. Then it began to move.
Faster than before.
Koll skidded to a halt less than fifty steps from the nearest tentacle of the fog, looking up at its shimmering bulk for a second or two, as if he was hypnotized.
"Now!" yelled Ryan Cawdor at the top of his voice. Breaking the spell.