Skylock (16 page)

Silence.

As quick as it had come, the cataclysm was gone. In its place settled a vacuum of abrupt, graveyard silence. The ravaged air sifted back. Coalescing pockets of damp heat and dry cold played out their last bits of dying energy in sodden, swirling eddies.

Trennt awoke to a stuffy darkness. The cold was gone, replaced by a curious steambath heat. Aside from the leaden numbness in his extremities, he was unharmed.

Shifting his arms for circulation, his knuckles rapped hard against his blanket. Trennt then realized the material was staying glued in place. Bewildered fingers touched it and felt a wall of ice, cast hard as the toughest iron.

Trennt fumbled about the obstruction. There were no seams. No combination of hands or shoulders could lever the formfitting plug away. He managed to draw up a cramped foot and pump out some anemic kicks. But they had no effect.

The other foot joined, together ramming the bizarre cold glass. Ten, fifteen, twenty times gave no result. Trennt sucked more of the thin, heavy air, capped his breath and fired out twenty more. Still nothing.

Another rest.

Another twenty.

Again and again, until he could do no more.

His leg muscles gone to potter's clay, Trennt leaned back. Little oxygen remained in his pit and no more strength to draw from. But he also felt an odd womblike tranquility in the smothering den. Here, no decisions were required of him, no need for plans or worrying about others.

A gentle, timeless sleep beckoned. He glanced drunkenly about the darkness. Not such a bad way to go. Just doze off and fade to black. Only thing remaining was permission.

"Is it okay, Dena?" he asked of the gloom. "Have I paid enough to be forgiven?"

Trennt surrendered, ever to remain lost in this forsaken and unmarked tomb.

But once again, it wasn't to be. Through the fog of his clouding mind he heard a distant snap. Dense and brittle, it collected another. Then another. Again, and once more. Slow and irritating, a series of faster pops gathered in a random, grating chorus. The moan of something heavy giving way filled his tarlike hearing.

No, he thought. Go away. Leave me be.

But the racket grew even more determined. A staccato of
pops
and
snaps
rose up, pelting Trennt with icy, biting chips.

A final, brittle shudder vibrated about him and the ice wall tumbled away in shattered foot-thick chunks. Freezing, bothersome air invaded the tiny den. It swirled painfully around Trennt, stealing his hard earned solace and driving him out.

He understood. It wasn't okay after all, was it, Dena? No, more payment was required.

Trennt staggered out like a slug rousted from hibernation. His body sweated steam with the lazy resolve of a fresh-skinned carcass. What awaited staggered him fully erect, for all around was a landscape devoid of color or life.

A metallic, monochrome wash of gray stretched earth to sky, as far as eye could see. Still dangling about his neck, the limp blaze-orange life vest stood out in absurd contrast to the overpowering desolation.

Trennt cast dumbfounded eyes above. There, a zinc-colored vault hung speckled in the tattered woolly mantle of post-storm clouds. Low on the horizon, the sun existed as a hazy white orb; dim and distant, offering no warmth or comfort. The universe vibrated with quiet.

Trennt absently touched his fingers to the smattering of scalds and freeze burns dotting his neck and face. He shook out the cobwebs, filled his lungs with the iron cold air and stooped to retrieve his metalized survival blanket. Snapping it free of clumped ice, he draped it about his shoulders in a shawl-like fashion. Then it hit him.

"Baker!"

No answer.

"Baker!"

Trennt ran to the area he remembered the gunman digging at. But any identifying tailings were lost to the gale. And more black ice set plastered over the ground like nothing had ever taken place there.

Trennt dropped to a crouch. He swept spread fingers back and forth over the hard, frigid earth. But his hands found nothing and were soon numb with cold, stiff enough to miss a slight depression in the ice. Only a skidding knee betrayed the tiniest fret in the glassy, adamantine surface.

Trennt dropped to all fours and blew. His breath revealed a solitary crack. It led a tracing finger to other tributaries and to the web of a circular fracture. At dead center was a flattened spring of familiar silver blanket. Yet another plug of the impossible black ice opposed him.

He grabbed the sparse lever and pulled. Beneath, wedged tight as a shotgun wad, the bunched fabric began tearing away. He gathered the scanty outcropping as careful as he could, gingerly rocking its metalized fabric as a kind of handle while jabbing his boot heel into the flinty area around.

Slowly, a ragged, milky white seam leavened in the crust. He kicked harder and maneuvered bleeding, numb fingers between it and the anchoring surface rock. A thick black slab yielded, rising slow as an obstinate manhole cover.

One hand got through. Then a forearm. Scalding every inch of open skin, the frozen, heavy obstruction might have been embers hoisted from a raging fire.

Razored ice slashed Trennt's flesh ever deeper. But he dismissed the pain, forcing both arms downward. Then, at bicep depth his fingers finally rounded the ice block. He clamped its underside and his weary back struggled it free. Beneath were two motionless forms.

Trennt dragged the woman out first. Dazed and gasping, she blinked in owllike confusion as he wrapped her in the ice-speckled bedroll. Then, equally stunned, came Baker. Lifting him from the hole, Trennt never remembered seeing the gunman look so oddly vulnerable.

He quickly set to work, alternately rubbing the chilled, stiff hands and gray face of one, then the other. Switching back and forth many times, Trennt quickly warmed his own chill away. But the asphyxiated people were slow in responding. So he broadened his efforts to include their shoulders and legs, working harder and more determinedly.

Ironically, something long absent stirred uneasy and deep inside the man as he tended the limp female. From the outset he'd suspected what service she offered in the new social order. But she wasn't at all like the thin-lipped, hard-eyed whores he'd seen prowling the world's late-night streets. Nothing like the shot-carded and licensed bubble brains laying tech village high rollers these days.

Neither cheap, nor simple. Instead, a notion of certain grace flooded his senses. High and starkly undercut cheekbones blended with a delicate jaw line. Tiny ears merged with an elegant, sculpted neck. And her reddish brown hair carried a texture and hue much like his own Dena's.

Trennt tore free of the disquieting notion. He didn't know her name, nor did he want to. She was just another hunk of cargo placed in his care for proper disposal. Regrouping, he continued her massage, but with less force and direction.

After many hard minutes the pair regained their rudimentary senses. Trennt got them seated upright and dug the few cups of self-heating coffee from their pit. He popped the tab of one. Its bracing aroma conjured a much needed sense of hope as he guided sips between them and himself. The brew made a half dozen rounds, until its few ounces of precious warming liquid were gone. A second cup was opened and worked about likewise.

While the pair regained their strength, Trennt set to work enlarging their foxhole for nighttime accommodations. They'd spend the evening inside, their combined space blankets and shared body heat sealing out the cold. Tomorrow he'd consider their long-term options.

Baker sat wrapped in his foil blanket, watching the customary emerald and sapphire hues born on each Skylock dawn.

"That pod's emergency transmitter musta got a lick or two out on the way down," he declared. "It musta. Think any friendlies heard it?"

Trennt stood nearby, searching the far horizon.

"If the air was still clean enough, maybe the competition. At the moment, though, I'd say the odds of us winding up in anyone's hands aren't the best."

The shorter man joined Trennt's quiet scrutiny of the western distance. Leagues of piled gravel stretched as far as either could see.

"Damn, Jimbo. The hell you figger we are?"

Trennt kicked at the loose oval pebbles.

"Somewhere in the Barrens. From all the ocean bottom stone, I'd say probably the southwestern tidal wave area. Nevada, California, maybe."

"That far west, ya reckon?"

Trennt shrugged. "Our plane was caught in one strong storm."

Baker nodded, looking skyward. "Yeah, our plane—wherever the hell it went off to."

He dropped his head in a wagging flush of remorse.

"Boy, we sure mucked this one up, start to finish."

"Maybe not."

"Wha'cha mean?" Baker asked.

But Trent's reply was hindered by the young woman's appearance. Emerging from behind a nearby rock pile, she made brief eye contact with the men, then looked away, straightening her belt.

A suggestive grin darkened Baker's face.

"Hey now. Sweet Thang. I plum forgot her. At least the trip wasn't no total loss."

"She's freight," reminded Trennt sternly. "And our job is to get her back, unmolested."

Baker made special note of his tone. "Don't care for her much at all, do ya, Pard? Now that is truly a shame."

Trennt didn't reply. Instead, he knelt, sifting through the pathetic clutch of survival rations and gear gathered at his feet: a spare foil blanket, tube of skin cream, ball caps, and cellophane UV goggles. One two-kilo pouch of freeze-dried trail mix, a few survival crackers, and an eight-pack of canned water.

The meager lot had been designed for people marooned in more civilized times and places. Folks lounging around some temperate zone before their quick and imminent rescue, not ones left to their own designs at mid-desert.

Trennt kept silent as the mathematics of long ago survival schools sifted through his brain. He weighed and adjusted fluid and caloric values for terrain and climate, tossing in a couple of variables for the unknowns of time and distance.

Working with the weather at an easy pace, the larder might stretch to fuel a week's travel, but the water limitations were critical: eight pints—little more than a quart per person—for a realistic daily expenditure easily quadrupling that.

Standing beside him, Baker's silence supported the poor odds. Neither spoke as Trennt lifted the metalized blankets and began making X-shaped cuts at their centers.

"These will double as serapes against the sun and cold," he said to no one in particular. "We'll make a signal in the stones here then start west. Travel in early morning and late afternoon light. Depending on the terrain and heat, we might make ten, fifteen miles a day."

For the first time, looking composed and rational, the young woman approached.

"How many days?" she asked.

"As many as it takes," he replied with obvious disdain.

"And where do we go to?"

"Follow the sun toward the ocean. Then north, along the coast to whatever town we find."

"Then what?"

Trennt stopped his knife work, fast annoyed.

"Then, we get you back to wherever it is you belong."

"Well," she declared, regarding the still raging mudflow. "I say we stay right here and wait. Or follow the river south."

"You're cargo," Trennt replied bluntly. "You don't get a vote. Now start gathering rocks for that signal."

Royce Corealis halted in adjusting his necktie. His eyes glinted hard off the dressing room mirror.

"What do you mean," he said confronting his aide, "they don't have it?"

The young man shrank a bit.

"All reports received by courier to this point claim the plane has neither landed, nor been seen at its planned rendezvous."

The tie remained untouched as the director narrowed his gaze.

"You're saying that three whole days after it should've been well in hand, not one of our field men has yet even spotted it?"

The aide flushed. "No, sir. There's some feeling that it may have been destroyed, torn apart by the storm itself."

The director cinched his tie roughly, then plucked his suit coat from the bed.

"Fabulous. What interval are the updates coming in at?"

"Every fifteen hours."

Corealis shook his head. "Too slow."

The aide dared defend the timing.

"Considering the reports are trucked and hand-carried for almost two thousand miles, that's really not bad, sir."

"Too
slow
," Corealis repeated, looking him in the eye.

The aid dropped his gaze.

"There is no other way at the moment," he offered meekly. "Each group is prepared to link up for a multistation radio relay. But we won't have a rudimentary transmitting window for another two weeks."

"Two weeks of wasted time," snapped Royce. "Besides, I don't like either option. I think it's time I took a much more proactive role in this matter."

The director finished straightening his suit coat.

"At the moment I've got a state funeral to attend and a eulogy to deliver. But immediately afterward we need to start arranging our own transportation out there. We'll make a visit, like Eugene suggested—something in the way of a goodwill tour. We'll announce our beloved president's departure, but assure our isolated countrymen that our hearts are still with them and that we are working toward the country's reconstruction.

"In between, we'll just have to manipulate travel to suit our true purpose."

The aide felt his stomach sink. Travel into the heart of what was almost enemy territory? But he knew if anyone could pull it off, it was the man before him. He swallowed anxiously and turned for the door.

"Yes sir."

Trennt's assumption was right. They'd landed dead center in the Great American Barrens. Three people afoot, amid a thousand square miles of desolate, stony dunes.

Torn from the ocean bed when the entire San Andreas and contributing Newport-Inglewood Faults gave way nearly a decade before, loose ejecta had been rammed far and wide by a series of colossal tidal waves, resulting in this forsaken wasteland.