Chapter One
The ruins lay smoldering in the valley below them. Worn down by the fight, caught by the searing heat of the fires that had spread through the ville on the wings of the swirling zephyrs, there were few survivors. Not many that were people. A few mules and horses, some dogs—those that had managed to slip their bonds and scrabble their way up the steep slopes, their fear powering their limbs as they attempted to outrun the devastation.
Ryan Cawdor, Jak Lauren, J. B. Dix, Mildred Wyeth and Krysty Wroth had prevailed, with them, Doc Tanner—or possibly not Doc Tanner. Who could tell, in his currently unconscious state, whether he would wake to once more be Dr. Theophilus Tanner, or if he would be Joseph Jordan, the reincarnated or transferred soul of a Scottish trapper from the centuries before the nukecaust?
For now, it didn’t matter. Like all of them, Doc was beyond caring about such matters. While he was still wrapped in the velvet oblivion of unconsciousness, the others began to stir. They had managed to escape from the holocaust that raged beneath them, but the effort had rendered all of them too exhausted to take another step, all sinking into their own sleep of exhaustion.
Yet this wasn’t the place to succumb to such measures. The heat rising on spiraling air from the inferno beneath was enough to warm the air around and the earth beneath them, to take the edge from the ever present howling gales that swept unfettered across the barren plains of rock and ice that surrounded them. It was enough to keep them from freezing to an early chill. But it wouldn’t sustain them for long: the cold would bite, the fires below subside. When that happened, then the sudden drop in temperature would take a swift and exacting toll.
Should they even survive this, then there was the greater problem: where did they go from here?
First things first. The most important thing was to survive as long as possible, from one moment to the next, until these moments ran together to make a long stretch of time. And to survive, they had to be on their feet and moving.
Ryan was the first to surface from the blackness. Something deep inside him nagged and impelled him to come around from the comfort of oblivion. He was tired, aching, and felt as though he could settle into the arms of Morpheus forever, never to be bothered again by the rigors of having to survive. And yet still there nagged a voice that told him to face the pain and the cold. It wasn’t just about him. When he became the leader of his small group, then he undertook the duty to try to guide them through adversity to whatever it was that they had spent so long searching for. That obligation wouldn’t allow him to take the easy way out.
Ryan dragged his aching limbs, his legs still suffused with lactic acid burn from their flight, and used his less battered and more responsive arms to propel himself upward, into a kneeling position. It took a moment for him to gain his bearings. He looked out over the empty plain, the daylight already beginning to fade, then back toward the valley, the air around the rim glowing as though casting a benign radiation into the darkening skies.
But there was no mistaking the odor that drifted across the short distance. Cutting through the ever present sulfur burn that always made the air taste sour, there was the smell of roasted flesh, sickly sweet and mixed with the ashes of the woods and brick that had once constituted the ville of Fairbanks.
A glorious folly. Doc had used those words once, when he was Doc. He had been quoting some kind of old song or poem at them, something to do with six hundred men riding into a valley. Mebbe that was why he could think of it now, why it cut through the fog that still partially clouded his mind.
Not knowing what else to do, Ryan hauled himself to his feet and half walked, half stumbled across the short distance to the rim of the valley, so that he could see what was happening below.
Nothing.
Not, at least, in terms of action or life. There were still tongues of fire that whipped across the remains of the ville, crisscrossing over the rubble that was all that remained of the streets and buildings. If anything had managed to stay alive in there, it was trapped and buying the farm in a long, slow, agonizing way.
Not that Ryan cared. Those mad Inuit bastards would only have chilled them after they’d burned the inhabitants of the ville. With only a very few left back at the settlement, he guessed that this meant the end of the Inuit tribe.
Fuck them, they would have taken out his people.
His only concern about who lived was based on the assumption that any still down there may come after them. And if his friends felt anything like he did right now, then they were in no fit condition to take on anyone.
He turned his back on the mayhem below and trudged wearily to where the rest of the companions lay on the ground, some now beginning to show signs of life.
Mildred and Jak had managed to reenter the real world and were no longer blearily staring around them, struggling to make their aching limbs respond to the messages their befuddled brains were sending. By the time that they were able to lift themselves to their feet, J.B. and Krysty were also beginning to respond to their surroundings.
It left only Doc, blissfully unaware of the perils from which he had been rescued, and the perils in which he now reposed, oblivious on the cold, hard ground.
The shock of the cold beginning to hit them as the night crept on and the fires in the valley subsided rapidly, casting up less heat, was enough to focus their minds.
Mildred checked Doc. He was unconscious, but seemingly unharmed apart from a few contusions and cuts, which was no more than the rest of them had suffered during the brief and brutal battle. There was no reason that she could define to explain why he was still unconscious while the others had all managed to recover sufficiently to function.
‘What the hell do we do now?’ J.B. asked Ryan as the two men stood surveying the wasteland around them. ‘Can’t go on to Ank Ridge. We don’t know where it is, don’t know how far and mebbe couldn’t even pick up the trail.’
‘Even if we could, they’d have some idea of what’s been going on, and how the hell could we explain away the trail of devastation the Inuit left behind them? We’re