It was a mighty expedition. Seeing it, even Jordan Teague got broody. But then it had to be, because others had heard the summons — the siren call that drifted into men's minds from the Darks. Others had hit the road on the hundred-klick or so journey under the sulphuric skies, across the parched earth, through the leprous forests that grew around the foothills of the Darks.
And none had ever come back.
Which meant there must have been a strong contingent of maniacal muties barring the way to it.
Dolfo Kaler knew how to deal with crazies. Blow 'em away. He bartered, he finagled, he called in every long-term debt he had out, and in the end every man jack of his team had an automatic rifle of some description and a stack of rounds. He also acquired seven MGs, four flamethrowers and a supply of precious fuel and two bazookas. Not to mention a box of grenades and a launcher.
And then he set out.
There were six big steam trucks, snorting and grinding and belching black smoke, and they shifted butt one fine spring morning when the skies were not as yellow as usual and a hazy red fireball of a sun was doing pretty well in its struggle to penetrate the haze. There must have been half of Mocsin on the edge of town to see them off, waving crudely fashioned flags and whooping and hollering fit to burst. Maybe three thousand souls to watch the biggest thing to happen to the town in decades.
Kurt remembered it. He remembered it very well. It had happened on his birthday, and his ma and pa had taken him to see the cavalcade as a birthday treat. Kurt remembered yelling with the rest of them. He didn't really know what he was yelling for, except that just seeing those huge, lumbering steam trucks lurching out of town was exciting enough — the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him. And the guys in the trucks, yelling, too, caught up in the glamour of it all, waving their pieces above their heads, all clearly itching to fire a few shots to finish the celebration off but not daring to because ammo was ammo then, and you didn't waste one single round of it.
And Kurt remembered the payoff. The horror of that day, maybe four months later, with the late summer sun blistering down through the haze, a light wind whipping up the dust into the heavy air in thin spirals — and the single raggedy man crawling toward him, blind eyes staring out of a gaunt and blackened face, one desiccated hand clawing and twitching in the air like a mummified insect come to dreadful life. A human skeleton, his clothes in rags and tatters, inching his way laboriously along the ruined blacktop. Muttering and mumbling to himself as his knees and bony legs scraped faintly along the dusty road, he pulled himself wearily forward with the sound of old parchment being gently squeezed.
Dolfo Kaler, a man of considerable will.
Kurt remembered turning and running in blind panic back into town, his bare feet hammering at the hot, dusty ground. He remembered the confused aftermath, the deputation of eight armed men, led by Jordan Teague himself carrying a pump-action, Teague striding out of town toward the blackened, sticklike figure rustling its way along the rutted blacktop. He remembered how they kept their distance from Kaler, well out of reach in a half circle, watching him drag himself slowly toward them. How they glanced at each other, shook their heads, faces showing a mix of horror, boredom, grim ruthlessness. How they all, as one, each of the eight, lifted their pieces and fired.
Kurt remembered that, all right.
He remembered it was Jordan Teague who aimed at the head and blew it off with an ear-cracking roar of sound, automatic fire and pistol single-shot clattering in echo, rounds jerking and smashing the stick man up and down and back along the blacktop in a flailing scramble of limbs and blood and flesh chunks.
They said they had to do it because it was a stone-cold cinch that Kaler was contaminated in some way; maybe he had the Plague itself. That was a popular theory because guys who caught the Plague found themselves driven to the limits of their endurance and beyond before they finally fell apart.
But Kurt knew the sun-crisped ruin of a man did not have the Plague. Even at the age of ten he knew that. Knew for sure. A classic symptom of Plague was that you could not talk, could not articulate words, you could only gargle and growl and foam at the mouth. And Kaler might have been mumbling and muttering when Kurt found him, but there were words coming out of his mouth: most were garbled, incomprehensible; a few were chillingly intelligible.
Kurt could hear the rasping croak now, the words creaking out through those blackened lips: "Fog...fog devils... tear you... apart..."
McCandless's voice cut through his dark musings.
"I said, what do you think, Kurt? You listenin' to me?"
And now there he was, trekking through this savage land at McCandless's heels, following Dolfo Kaler's trail and the trail of all those other poor bastards who had never made it back to Mocsin. Never made it back to anywhere.
Sure he was mad. But come to think of it, not half as mad as Jordan Teague would have been if Teague had gotten his fat hands on him. Hiring on with McCandless had been the perfect escape — except of course for McCandless's lousy rep and McCandless's lousy destination. If only he'd headed off elsewhere on the road to the Darks, managed to sneak away on foot or stolen the truck. If only. But there'd been no time, no opportunity. McCandless had already been able to claw some gas from somewhere, enough to fill the tank of the beat-up, rickety truck that had only just managed to get them here before seizing up completely in the foothills. That was where McCandless had iced the fifth member of the party, Denning, and that was where they'd bedded down for the night, and that was where, burn it all to Hell, he should have split.
But he hadn't. And he still wasn't entirely sure why.
Maybe the vision of riches or weaponry beyond his wildest imaginings had held him to this course: an infatuation with power.
Maybe it, was just as simple as a belief that when the chips were down he could get shot of McCandless and Rogan and maybe Reacher, too — but maybe not Reacher; Kurt felt a vague kinship with Reacher — and take what was there all for himself. Simple greed. Maybe that was it.
Kurt shrugged, his face still masklike.
"Yeah."
"Yeah what?" rasped McCandless. "Yeah, ya listenin' to me, or yeah, we're all gonna get lucky?"
The thought struck Kurt anew that there was no way McCandless was going to share with him if they struck it lucky. Or with anyone. He had in fact been aware of that all along, right from the start, right from the moment when McCandless had grabbed him.
McCandless — sharing? Even an eighth? Fat chance.
He said, his voice lifeless, his mind filled with the sudden image of Denning with just a bloody mush were the back of his head had once been, "Both."
"Fine," said McCandless, with a grin. "So let's do it. Let's move, huh? Let's get us some of that good fortune."
They stumbled up the road, Reacher in front, McCandless next, then Rogan. Kurt took up the tail.
He gripped his old Armalite auto-rifle with both gloved hands, left under the stock, right around the trigger guard. Every so often he glanced back, but there was no one there. They'd seen no one since they'd left Mocsin. No muties, no mannies, no norms. Nor had they seen much fauna, come to that. The odd snake, nothing much else, nothing that looked at all as if it could wipe out a party of fifty men and all the men who had gone before.
Nor had they seen any sign of the steam trucks. No rusted hulks, no nothing. So unless the area they still had to reach, the high side of the mountains, was inhabited, it looked as if the only thing that could have dealt death to all those pilgrims of the past was the fog.