And if there was nothing—not even himself—then what was the point of continuing to exist?
Jak sank to his knees. For what was possibly the only time in his life, Jak paid no heed to anything around him. There was no need to keep triple red. No need to be aware of any dangers. No need for anything other than to just give in to the darkness that was beginning to envelop him.
Without any resistance, Jak allowed it to take him.
“ANY SIGN?” Ryan asked as he rubbed the aching area over his good eye. Zigzag lines in white crossed his vision, each line accompanied by a searing pain in his skull.
Krysty risked another look beyond the tarp at the swirls of dirt that now seemed to constitute the very air.
“Nothing. Can’t see or hear a thing. Sweet Gaia, I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”
She was finding it hard to think. Those few locusts that had penetrated the tarps were buzzing annoyingly around the inside of the wag. Each time she smacked one down, it seemed that there were two more to take its place. The rain of frogs beat an insistent and arrhythmic tattoo on the roof and hood of the wag. And always, in the back of everything, there was the moaning of the winds that drove dust and dirt at them.
In the midst of all that, how the hell did Ryan expect her to hear the cries of Jak, J.B., Mildred and Doc? Maybe they had found one another. Maybe they were all wandering around, close to one another yet unable to see or hear in the confusion. Maybe they’d all bought the farm…This latter she did not wish to consider, yet it still prodded at her consciousness.
Why had it happened this way? Not the storm: that was just one of those things, the kind of hazard that they encountered almost every day of their lives. No, what she wondered was why, when Doc had wandered off, Mildred and J.B. had been so quick to get after him. Why Jak had followed seemingly without any thought or consideration. Why Ryan had let them. Why she had let them, come to that.
Ryan was concussed, not thinking clearly. Confused at the very least. As she looked at him, she could almost see the struggle manifest itself physically as he moved uneasily, rubbing his head and grimacing in pain.
None of them had acted totally as themselves—even herself—and it was getting worse. Both Ryan and she were trapped in this wag as surely as if it had been a locked room. Unable to move, caught in an agony of indecision.
They would sit it out until the storm abated. Not because that was the best course of action, but because they could think of nothing else to do. While, outside, their friends may be facing the farm on their own.
Krysty tried to move. Nothing. Her limbs were heavy, almost paralyzed. Yet it was a paralysis in which there was still feeling. A heavy torpor washed over her. She had no strength
It was such an alien feeling that it should have terrified her. Yet even this capacity was now beyond her grasp.
She felt all awareness begin to recede into an infinite distance.
Chapter Five
Mildred was aware, first, of the tingling ache in her arm. It stirred her, deep in her slumber, and she moaned softly as she tried to move her arm, to relieve the symptom. But it refused to budge. Penetrating deep into her subconscious, it made her slip from the warm blanket of unconscious and into the cold of the conscious.
And hell, was it cold. As she rose to the surface, she felt the cold that had seeped into her limbs. It was only then that she realized that her arm was beneath her, hand still raised to her face. Not that she could feel it.
She shuffled in the tight constraint of the sheet that covered both herself and J.B. The Armorer was quiet beside her and did not immediately stir as she moved against him. For a moment she wondered if he was alive, but his steady breathing reassured her. For such a small, wiry man he was proving to be one hell of a deadweight.
Heaving, Mildred managed to move him enough to free her arm. She gasped as the tingling fled, a weakness spreading through the limb as she tried to flex it. She paused, counted to twenty, then tried again. This time, it felt more like normal.
She took a chance at sitting up, moving the edges of the sheet from where it was tucked beneath her body. A wan light penetrated the thin material, and there was silence beyond the veil it provided.
One good thing—the storm had ceased. As the sheet slid down her body, she propped herself up on her elbows and looked around.
The sun was on the rise. It had to be morning, she thought. The sky was as it had been the afternoon before, clear, yet tinged with strange coloring. There was no sign that a storm had swept across them.
More importantly, there was no sign of the wag or their fellow travelers.
Mildred got to her feet. Cramp ached and bit into her calves, but she stamped it out. The sound of her feet roused J.B., who mumbled and grumbled his way to the surface of waking while she looked around.
“I’ll tell you something, John. We’re well and truly screwed.”
“I’ve always liked your positive outlook,’ the Armorer husked wryly as he, too, rose to his feet and joined her.
The land that spread in a vista around them was empty and impassive. Flat plainlands spread to all corners of the horizon, broken only by the distant plateaus of hill and mountain ranges, spread unevenly. In between these distant markers and the place where they stood was little except the occasional patch of scrub and rock, and those ridges in the earth that were invisible to the naked eye.
“How the hell did we manage to come so far that we’ve lost sight of the others?” Mildred whispered.
J.B. didn’t answer for a moment. He scanned the horizon, turning a full 360 degrees.
“It shouldn’t be possible,” he said finally.
“Yeah, well, I don’t see anyone else. And what happened to us yesterday shouldn’t have happened, either. But it did. The question now is how we’re going to find them again. Or anything, come to that.”
J.B. was lost in thought, gathering in the sheet that had served them so well. Replacing it in his backpack, he pulled out his minisextant.
“I’ll see if I can work out how much we’ve moved,’ he murmured as he took a reading and ran calculations in his head. Then, after a short pause, he added, “It doesn’t add up. According to my calculations, we must have walked about four miles. And we should still be able to see the wag.”
Mildred stared at him. J.B. was rarely mistaken on such matters.
“How can we have come that far? There wasn’t enough time…at least, it didn’t seem like it was that long.” The more she thought about it, the less sense the previous day was beginning to make. “So where’s Doc? Where the hell can that wag have been hidden?”
J.B. just shook his head. He was as baffled as Mildred. The only thing he could think of was to take action. Experience taught him that action usually started a chain of events.
“I dunno about Doc. Mebbe we’ll find him, mebbe the old bastard really has got himself lost this time. But if we start to go that way—” he indicated a south-southeast direction “—and keep on going, we should hit where the wag is supposed to be. Mebbe Ryan got it going again, and they’ve headed off in the wrong direction trying to find us. If so, then mebbe we’ll find some tracks to follow.’
Mildred shrugged. As a plan, it wasn’t the best she’d ever heard. But right now, she couldn’t come up with anything better.
Stopping only to eat from some self-heats that they carried as emergency rations, and sipping sparingly from their canteens, they began the long trek back in the direction that J.B. had determined had been their point of departure.
With every