Ryan and J.B. had agreed on what they'd do. The maps showed a large town called Anchorage on the coast. Seemed worth a careful recon to see what remained.
All the maps were loaded; also food, heating supplies, ammo and all the blasters they wanted. Lori's cut had been wiped and disinfected, and she was in good shape, talking excitedly about leaving the stockpile for the first time. Okie was the only one who made her dislike felt. The others simply accepted Lori as one of their own.
The buggies were juiced and ready to roll.
Doc had been unable to open the door to the chambers where they thought bodies might be frozen and stored, so the corpses of Hunaker, Quint and Rachel had been placed outside the door. "Won't hurt Hun now," Ryan had said. Doc had also carefully noted the current reentry code and each of them had it written down and memorized. It was the numbers one, zero, eight, followed by the letter J.
Each ice buggy held three or four people, with plenty of storage room for extra gas and supplies. Ryan was to drive the lead vehicle with Krysty; J.B. would take the second with Lori and Finnegan; Hennings would share the third with Okie and Doc.
The vehicles were already heavily armed with mortars and machine guns. Judging from his encounter with the local muties, Ryan figured they should be more than able to wipe out any opposition.
At the suggestion of J.B. Dix, everyone went to bed early that night to be ready for a dawn start.
Krysty came to Ryan, in the night, whispering that they should go to the next dormitory, where the beds were clean and the smell of death was missing, and where they could make love without being overheard.
They found a bed in the other dorm, and she held him tight, her long hair brushing against his shoulders. "How do you feel about Hun?" she asked.
"Like I lost my blaster," he replied.
"No feeling?"
He shook his head. "No. Hun was good. But she got iced. Maybe you tomorrow, me the next day. Start feelin' sorry and it doesn't never stop."
"Doesn't everstop," she corrected him, feeling a tremor from his chest as he laughed at her.
"Sure."
"If it had been me?"
He leaned over her, his single eye glittering in the dim light. "You're different, Krysty. You know that."
"You're sort of special, too."
Before dawn they fell asleep, tangled in each other's arms, having made love three times.
After they'd driven the buggies onto the small gale-swept plateau beside the redoubt, they gathered for a last word from Ryan.
"We've got radios, so let's keep in touch. We're Buggy One. J.B.'s Two and Henn's Three. Use the radio only if you have to. Should be able to keep in visual touch. J.B.'s got the maps. We're heading toward where the town of Anchorage was. Should get close by evening."
As he spoke, the ground trembled under their feet and some powdery snow came cascading from the cliff above the redoubt's entrance. "Only a little quake," said J.B. "Plenty of those mothers where you've got volcanoes. Taste the sulfur on your tongue."
The gale was gathering force, and Doc nearly lost his tall stovepipe hat; he secured it with an elastic beneath his chin. "This hurricane puts me in mind of a jest I was once told," he said, half-shouting to be heard above the wind.
"A jest? You mean a joke?" asked Krysty. "I recall Peter Maritza back in Harmony using that word for somethin' funny. Said it was a word his grandfather used and he kind of remembered it."
Doc nodded, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. "This damned wind! It appears that many, many years ago, back in Kansas, there was a herd of longhorn cattle."
"Was longhorns some sort of muties?" asked Finnegan, curiously.
"Not really, young man. They were grazing out on the open grasslands when a dreadful gale arose. A positive typhoon, it was. And it began to blow ever more strongly toward these cattle."
"Get to the fuckin' point, Doc. I'm freezin' my fuckin' tits off," moaned Okie, huddling against the chill.
"My apologies, madam, though I hardly feel that my style of discourse merits such foul language from such pretty lips. I will proceed. The wind eventually blew with such ferocity that the entire group of cows were lifted from their feet and whisked away over the horizon. They became known forever after as the herd shot round the world."
It was obviously the punchline, so everyone laughed appreciatively. As they climbed into their buggies, Krysty tugged at Ryan's sleeve. "You get that joke of Doc's, lover?"
He grinned at her. "No. Couldn't understand it." Once everyone was aboard, they set off toward the city of Anchorage.
Chapter Twelve
The Narodniki were on the right road. They knew that because the mutie woman had told them before they used and abused her, finally spilling her tripe in the snow with the curved blade of the bayonet of a Kalashnikov.
"Ank Ridge?" had been the question from Uchitel. "Stoppile and Ank Ridge."
She'd responded to the latter name, gesturing to the south. Her mouth was so misshapen, with only a residual tongue, that she could do no more than nod and point.
So they moved on: a long line of people, heavily furred against the bitter nuclear winter, heeling their ponies and horses toward the rising sun, rifles slung across shoulders, food and ammo weighing down the pack animals. Their eyes were cold as ice, and many of them wore clothes splattered with dried blood.
So far they had seen no signs of the legendary dangers that had for so long prevented anyone from the Russian side crossing the frozen strait. There had been no sign of flaming hot spots or of giant muties fifty feet tall with eyes of fire and claws of steel. Nor was the land utterly barren. Here and there were patches of earth free of snow, pocked and dappled with dark green mosses and stubbly grass.
They had met little opposition to their plans to drive inland. Apart from the loss of Nul, and Stena's unfortunate shoulder wound, there had been few casualties on this trip, and they had lost only two men, both to a single rifleman a day back. The sniper had ridden on a slope overlooking the hamlet they were ravaging and had shot down both men from cover. Then, as the angry guerrillas charged him, he had put a bullet through his own skull.
Two dead, three if he counted the absent Nul, Uchitel thought. Only one injured, two if he allowed for the three toes that Britva had self-amputated.
Their journey to Stoppile was taking much longer than Uchitel had been led to expect. After a two-week southeasterly trek across the Alaskan interior, they'd encountered an impossible mountain range. Changing their course to the northeast, they'd eventually found a trail that led south through the mountains. Unknown to the Narodniki, they were traveling along the earthquake-riven remains of what had once been the main highway linking Anchorage and Fairbanks.
Now that they were finally drawing close to Ank Ridge and Stoppile, Uchitel was well pleased with himself, and as they rode along, he sang an old, old ballad about the stars being the sentinels for mankind. He liked the verse about the importance of order over chaos. It appealed to his sense of the rightness of things.
Far off to the left he glimpsed the skulking shapes of a pack of mutie wolves, their bellies flat to the tundra, shadowing the party. They must be disappointed, thought Uchitel, that there were no weak stragglers in his band as there might be in a herd of caribou — stragglers that they could drag down and rend apart.
There were no weak stragglers in the Narodniki.