No Man's Land. James Axler
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One
“Well,” Mildred Wyeth said, staring into the low, pallid blue and yellow flames of their campfire, “this sucks.”
They had pitched camp in a low patch of the rolling countryside that, according to the sighting J. B. Dix had taken on his minisextant before the sun went down, had to be part of what in her day they called southeastern Iowa. They liked low ground because it kept them from being silhouetted to prying eyes. Even sometimes allowed them to build a small fire without much concern the light would betray them.
The fuel didn’t produce much light nor heat. Nor did the dried cow flop impart a flavor Mildred found pleasing to the brace of prairie dogs Jak Lauren had roasted over the fire while his new best friend Ricky Morales kept watch.
Her companions scarfed them down, of course, as if they were slices of predark chocolate cake slathered with thick icing. Mildred had to admit that she had eaten worse, so she helped herself to the stringy, shit-smoked rat meat.
“Why, my dear Dr. Wyeth,” Doc said, “we have found ourselves in much more pressing straits, as surely you recall.”
Doc Tanner had an excuse for talking like a professor out of the history books: he was one. He was even older than she was, chronologically, although in years actually lived through, awake and aware, not so much, though she looked to be in her late thirties and he seemed to be crowding seventy. She had been put into experimental cryogenic sleep when something went wrong during exploratory abdominal surgery—right before the U.S. and the Soviet Union had at last gone to war. Doc had been trolled from his happy family in the 1890s by a cadre of scientists from Mildred’s own day, and cynically dumped into the future when he proved to be a difficult subject.
“More urgent, yeah,” she said. “But it’s the irony that’s pissing me off.”
“What irony’s that, Mildred?” Krysty Wroth asked. The redhead had her long, strong, shapely legs bent beneath her in what Mildred could clearly see was far too graceful to go by the name of a squat. Her green eyes took in the dingy light of the flames and cast them back as glints of emerald radiance. Her long red hair stirred about her shoulders in a way that bore no relationship to the restlessness of the spring night air.
The night was cool to the crisp edge of chilly. The breeze that stirred the low dim flames like a ladle stirring flavorless gruel would bite deep and hard if it came any fresher. The night insects hadn’t found their voices yet. Some cows lowed off in the distance.
“This broken world can hardly muster a ville bigger than a hundred people,” she said, “much less a good, solid war. And here we’ve gone and landed ourselves right smack-dab in the middle of the real deal.”
“Shit happens,” Ryan Cawdor said.
The tall, rangy man stood with his back to the fire, the breeze flapping his shaggy black hair, and his coattails around his calves. His lone eye, she knew, was gazing off across the rolling countryside. He wasn’t comfortable with their setting and circumstances, either. Not that anyplace in the here and now could be called reassuring for a man or woman born into the times, any more than relative newcomers like Mildred and Doc.
She did reflect, bitterly, on how it was just her luck that one of the lamer catchphrases from her own day would survive the intervening century.
“Sometimes it happens to us.”
They had jumped into a redoubt that afternoon from Puerto Rico, courtesy of the mysterious mat-trans network. They and only a few others knew of the device’s existence. Mildred had long since decided not to cling to those memories. They were nothing she cared to cherish. And there were so many of them...
The redoubt had been thoroughly gutted. Like some, it didn’t seem to have successfully weathered the storm that had blown away the world Mildred had known. What had left it with its door jammed open she couldn’t guess; the only nuke hot spot she knew of in the vicinity was near what had been Des Moines, miles in the northwest. There didn’t seem to have been a lot of other nukes going off in the immediate vicinity. The colossal earthquakes that accompanied the missiles’ fall might have done the trick.
Some animals had ventured inside. Small skeletons lay among scattered debris that had long since itself decayed to a sort of compost in the echoing, sterile concrete corridors. Soil and rock slipping from the hillside beneath which the redoubt was buried had covered the entrance long ago. They’d had a hard job working with knives and a folding Swiss-made entrenching tool J.B. carried strapped to his pack before digging their way out into what remained of the day’s light.
They’d been rewarded by the sounds of shots and shouts and screams coming their way, fast.
By running flat-out they’d made it to the shelter of a stand of saplings by a small stream that meandered through a valley amid low round hills. Fortunately the spring bloom had leafed out the brush that was clumped around and between the skinny trees enough to offer concealment for the companions.
The two men who were carrying on a running fight on horseback raced over a nearby ridge. From the thick green-gray smoke cloud that traveled along with the skirmish, the companions could tell they were firing black-powder blasters, something prevalent in parts of the Deathlands where stocks of predark ammunition were starting to run dry. About twenty other riders seemed to be trying to kill one another, as well.
The fighters had managed to do little apparent damage to one another before their running fight headed up the far slope of the little valley and away out of sight. Still they left a couple of men lying on the ground behind them. One lay stone-still. The other moved and moaned.
The key thing was, one was dressed all in green, and the other all in blue, as were some of the riders who’d made it past, if not intact, then fit enough to stay in the saddles of their sweat-lathered mounts. The rest, Mildred had seen as they splashed through the stream not forty yards away, all wore cloths of either blue or green tied around their upper arms.
When the last horse’s tail vanished over the green grassy rise, Ryan led his companions from their cover. They sprinted along the stream, at right angles, more or less, to the skirmishers’ axis of travel. It was neither the way the combatants had come from, nor where they were going.
None had spared so much as a thought to giving some kind of help to the wounded man. To her shame, even Mildred—a physician born in the twentieth century gave it no more than a flicker of a thought before joining the others in a run. Now was not the time; giving aid might jeopardize her friends.
She’d get used to it all. Someday. She hoped.
* * *
THE SUN WAS ALREADY sinking into blood and fire to the west when Ryan selected the campsite. They were as far away from where they’d encountered the cavalry battle as they could take themselves before they had to stop for the night. Whether it was far enough—only time and fate would tell.
Somewhere out in the night a fox barked to his mate. Mildred stiffened; it wasn’t a call Jak used with them—they favored bird calls for those undecipherable warnings and signals—but it didn’t mean some other party might not. And even if they weren’t in a war zone, “outlander” these days was just another word for danger.
But the others showed no sign of tension. So Mildred, with a sigh, let go of her own. Sometimes a fox was just a fox, she reassured herself. They’d probably be nursing cubs in their den now, she knew.
“How the hell can they even field a whole army, anyway?” she asked when conversation turned to the battle. “Much less two?”
“This is rich country,” Krysty said. “Lush and vibrant.”
“But most villes we’ve visited, even the better-off ones, can barely muster enough sec men for one of those patrols we avoided today,” Mildred said. “And something tells me that little set-to was just a sideshow to the main attraction.”
“The uniforms,” Doc said, “and their arms suggest both are part of far larger organizations.”
“Don’t get stuck thinking in