"Come here," Ryan said. "Put a few drops of that water on my rad counter."

"What?"

"Do it."

The boy reached out a finger and allowed a single drop of the spring water to fall on the tiny button, which immediately went from the orange-red color to a dazzling, flaring scarlet.

"Holy shit!" Mildred breathed. "Do that mean what I think it do?"

Doc nodded. "It do."

Mildred was vehement. "We don't have a choice. We go farther along the coast or we go back toward the Viking village. We cannotstay here!"

"If we go upriver and over the mountain, we'll be there and gone fast," Krysty said. "We won't be exposed to the rad for that long."

Mildred turned to face Krysty, her hands on her hips. "You got any brains in that pretty head, lady? The count here at the edge of the lake's hot enough to fry a side of pork. What d'you think it'll be like higher up, where the radiation leak has to be stronger? While we're here jawing about it, the sickness is settling on us like fine ash from an erupting volcano."

Ryan nodded. "All right, all right! No point going farther. Must be close to the ville of those muties. Have to be back. Take the boat and keep close in to the shore. Hope to spot any pursuers before they're close enough to hit us."

"Then let's go," Mildred said.

Doc coughed. "One brief moment, if I may, Ryan?"

"What, Doc?"

"It seems likely there's been some slow seepage around here for some years. Witness the appalling mutations we witnessed in the attackers. But the illness that is now striking at the Viking people seems to me to indicate some new and drastic increase in the radiation potential. The water. The fish. My interest as a scientist prompts me to ask whether we might take a half hour and go a short way up the river to see what we shall see."

Ryan looked at the others. Mildred shook her head firmly. So did Jak. J.B. shrugged his shoulders.

Krysty looked behind her into the clean-smelling pine trees. "Half an hour can't hurt much. I'd like to know."

"Fine. We leave now. And we're back in the boat in precisely forty minutes. Anyone wants to stay here can. Mildred?"

She grinned. "I'm not letting that old goat boldly go where no scientist's gone before. But we don't touch or eat or drink anything."

It took less than fifteen minutes. A clear path meandered along the left-hand side of the river, which they followed. The water flowed through a gorge, and fresh scars along its flanks testified to recent earth falls. Mildred pointed them out to the others, commenting on the minor quake they'd all experienced.

"I assume that nuking during the war was so intense that it triggered movements of some of the less stable tectonic plates. You said that most of California had slid into the Pacific, Doc."

"Right."

"So, bearing in mind a lot of the nasties were buried underground, lead-lined vaults and all that so-called 'safety' bullshit, major tremors could open them up like a hot knife through butter."

"Mildred," Ryan said as he walked beside her on the trail, "I never read anything that told how rad sickness works. I mean, I know about what it does. The rash and puking and all that. But howdoes it do that? You can't see it or anything."

She paused. "Not my specialty, Ryan. But I guess I know a little. Gather around, students." Everyone stood closer. "You won't know much about negatively charged electrons, ions or free radical molecules, right? No, I thought not. Me neither. Radiation has alpha and beta particles and they have a charge of electricity. They screw up the electrons and molecules in the body. Send them ape-shit wild. I know that structural proteins, like collagen, get smashed around. The DNA... No, you wouldn't know that, either. The tiny cells can reproduce themselves perfectly in a healthy body. Radiation messes that up."

"The cell blueprint is ruined?" Doc asked. "Is that it?"

"Sure. And the cells that reproduce fastest are the ones that get hit first and hardest. Blood, of course. And skin and hair. So, you get leukemia and your skin starts falling off and goodbye hair. More serious mutations are slower to show, but just as deadly in the long run."

"Thanks, Mildred. I just... well, it's all way beyond me."

"Radiation kills, Ryan. That's all you need to know. A man who gets a bullet through the brain doesn't need to know all about high-energy physics or ballistics. Just that he's been shot and he's going to die."

"Time's passing," J.B. warned. "Should we be turning around for the boat?"

"Looks like path opens around corner there." Jak pointed.

"There and no farther," Ryan pronounced. "Then it's fast back."

"I just can't believe this place is so poisoned," Krysty said as they walked on. "Tall pines and the freshest stream you ever saw."

"No birds," Jak said.

It was true. Other than the chuckling sound of the small river, the morning was silent. The only life at all was a glittering coppery cockroach that ambled across the trail in front of them. J.B. raised a boot to crush it, but Mildred warned him not to touch it.

"Creatures like that'll inherit the earth. Radiation hardly slows them."

They rounded the corner, and everyone stopped. There wasn't the least doubt that they'd found the source of the massive rad poisoning.

There had been, fairly recently, a huge slippage of earth, and half the hillside had opened up like giant jaws. The tumbled remnants of several concrete buildings clung perilously to the jagged edge of the sheer cliff, two hundred feet above them. But the quake had done more than damage the buildings. It had also torn open great burial pits beneath them, spilling their secret load from the metal-walled, sealed caskets.

The whole slope, hundreds of feet across, down to the river, was a tangled mass of rusting drums and split plastic vats. Whatever they might once have held was now an unbelievable cocktail of hideous substances, mingled together, all leached through to the water. Into the soil. Into the lake beyond and into the food chain for the entire area.

"My God!" Mildred whispered. "It's like opening the curtains on Armageddon. It's worse. Much, much..." She turned to Ryan, her dark eyes wide in shock. "Now, fast! Down the hill and as far away as possible from this devil's brew."

She led the way back toward the lake, stumbling in her eagerness. Ryan was at her heels, the others following closely behind.

"But what is it?" he shouted. "What could be in those drums?"

"Lord alone knows," she panted over her shoulder. "The killers were so many. Radioactive iodine. Carbon 14."

"Uranium?"

"Sure. Strontium 90, radium 226, tritium, radon 222. That's a gas."

"Plutonium, Mildred?" Doc called, jogging along third in line.

"Of course. Oh, I'm losing breath. Can't breathe deep in case... Carbon 14, cesium 134 and 137. Anything! It's all around us."

She wasn't that far from the jagged edge of panic, stumbling and nearly falling into the river at a point where the path doglegged left.

"Slow it, Mildred!" Ryan said. After all the self-control that the freezie had shown since they thawed her, it was a shock to see the state she was in now. The discovery of the ruined rad storage site had freaked her out.

She turned and gripped him by the arm, fingers tightening like a screw trap. "Ryan, that badge in your shirt doesn't show us how bad this might be. The rem count could be massive. Hopefully the worst of the leakage is gone, seeped away when the earth first cracked. But it is appalling."

"Just take it careful. Break an ankle on this trail and it won't help."

"This was the great fear of my generation, you know."

"What?" Krysty asked, taking Mildred by the hand to help her over a steep patch of tumbled stone.