At any rate, he and Brigid never spoke of their shared vision, although Kane often wondered if that spiritual bond was the primary reason he had sacrificed everything he had attained as a Magistrate to save her from execution.

The possibility confused him, made him feel defensive and insecure. That insecurity was one reason he always addressed her as Baptiste, almost never by her first name, so as to maintain a certain formal distance between them. But that distance had been shrinking every day, particularly after the head injury she had sustained in the Antarctic.

Sighing wearily, he returned the Sin Eater to the holster and levered himself to his feet. Wet boots squishing, he began picking his way carefully along the narrow concrete track atop the channel wall, looking for an opening in the fence. He walked less than twenty yards when he came to a gap, a rent where the galvanized metal links had separated. It was a tight squeeze, and the jagged ends of the wire caught at his clothes, but he managed to struggle through it.

The ground beneath his feet was brown mud, liberally splashed with pools and puddles of water. There was a great deal of deep gra.s.s, and in the shallow depressions floated a soup of slime and decomposing vegetable matter. Flying insects like dragonflies darted low over the gra.s.s, preying on the gnats.

Circling one of the brick-and-concrete-block buildings, he paused at a corner and took a comprehensive look at the compound. Many of the roofs of the buildings had collapsed, and the ravages of time had completed the job begun by the nukecaust and the skydark. The only structure that appeared more or less intact was the largest, with a white domed roof. He had no idea what the complex had been. It could have been the ruins of a school or even a penitentiary.

Kane didn't approach the dome boldly. One never knew what kind of menace lurked in predark ruins or what devices were on alert for intruders such as himself. As far as he knew, he was already being watched, although his sixth sense had yet to signal an alarm. He scanned the blind windows and tangles of undergrowth, but nothing moved. Turning, he went to the building's rear, looking for an open window or doorway. He found a metal-sheathed door equipped with a push bar. A stenciled legend in faded black paint proclaimed it an emergency exit.

Gingerly, he applied pressure to the bar and shouldered the door open gradually.

The hinges squeaked in faint protest, but he heard nothing else. Before he entered, he tossed the sha-dowsuit and visor into a clump of gra.s.s sprouting from the base of the building. He didn't want his hands enc.u.mbered when he crossed into dark territory. Holding the door open so as to admit light, he carefully stepped inside.

The floor was slippery with moss and algae, and puddles of stagnant water had acc.u.mulated in corners.

The interior had been totally gutted of anything useful, probably within the first few weeks of the onset ofskydark.

Looking down, Kane saw a shard of brick on the floor and he toed it over to the door, jamming it beneath the bottom edge to keep it propped open. The light filtering into the interior was feeble, but since he had lost his dark-vision gla.s.ses, it was better than nothing. He took a few steps forward, unconsciously walking heel to toe as he always did when entering a potential killzone.

His ears registered a sudden slight noise some- where to his left. From the gloom he heard a woman's voice, vibrating with barely leashed terror, say, "Don't move or I'll blow your f.u.c.kin' head off."

Before Kane could even begin to respond, either in words or actions, he heard the tolling of a bell.

Chapter 7.

A tsunami of foaming water poured into the pa.s.sageway with a rumbling roar like that of a great-wheeled machine. Bits and pieces of masonry pelted down from overhead, and Grant pushed DeFore backward with a sweep of his left arm. Chunks of stone and debris rained from the ceiling with splintering cracks and crashes. The entire roof seemed to be in downward motion.

Grant grabbed DeFore by the sleeve and wrestled her down the shaft in the direction they had come.

She shouted something, but he couldn't hear what she said. The walls trembled around them, riven with ugly, spreading cracks that spewed brown water.

The life of a medic hadn't trained DeFore as a sprinter. Within a few yards, she was reeling in her gait as behind them the rumbling gave way to crashing, and the entire length of the corridor began collapsing in on itself. Grant's arm around DeFore's waist half lifted her from the floor. She resisted Grant's help when she realized he intended to run outside, back into the storm.

With a ferocious scowl, Grant pushed her a few feet ahead of him, bent over and heaved her onto the broad yoke of his shoulders without breaking stride. She cried out in alarmed anger at the indignity of the forced fireman's carry, but she could do nothing about it. The flat medical kit hanging from her shoulder bounced against his lower back as he ran.

As they reached the door, Grant heard an earsplit-ting roar behind him. He didn't need to look to know ceiling had fallen in. He sprang out into the open piazza, staggering a little under DeFore's weight. She wasn't a particularly large woman, but she was solid.

Grant's boots slipped on the layer of sludge coating the floor tiles. As he staggered, he tried but failed to put down DeFore. Both of them hit the piazza floor with great splashes and bone-jarring impacts. They stayed where they had fallen for a moment, though DeFore struggled into a sitting position, sputtering curses and looking fearfully skyward.

Although the black maelstrom of the funnel cloud had been sucked back into the ma.s.sed thunderheads, the wind was still strong and rain fell in sheets. However, when it struck their exposed flesh they didn't feel an acidic sting.

The braids in her hair had come undone, and she raked the wet strands out of her face with sharp,impatient gestures. "I don't appreciate being lugged around like a sack of G.o.dd.a.m.n potatoes!"

Grant climbed quickly to his feet. "Then you shouldn't have moved like one."

He extended a hand to her, but the medic ignored it. She stood, wincing at the twinge of pain in her hip.

Even as she regained her feet, the downpour ebbed to a steady drizzle. The roar of the wind all but died.

Although the sky remained the color of verdigris-eaten pewter, the sudden cessation of the storm's fury made it seem as if they had entered a vacuum.

Grant glanced into the rubble-choked corridor and made a wordless utterance of disgust. "No point to looking for them that way."

Despite the fact she was already soaked to the skin with her shirt plastered to her ample bosom, DeFore placed the flat case on top of her head as a makeshift umbrella. "You're a.s.suming they're still alive?"

Grant cast a swift glower in her direction. ' 'Why the h.e.l.l wouldn't I?"

DeFore rolled her eyes in exasperation. "I don't know. Maybe because half of Lake Michigan broke its banks and washed them away?"

Grant strode purposefully across the piazza, his boots sending up splashes of foul water. "It washed them somewhere, but it didn't necessarily drown them. As far as I'm concerned, until I see their bod- ies they're still alive. If you don't feel the same way, you can either stay here or go back to the Cat. Domi would probably be glad of the company."

DeFore didn't respond, but she glared at his retreating back. After a few seconds of standing uncertainly in ankle-deep water holding the medical kit on top of her head, she hurried to catch up with the big man.

"I didn't say I thought they were dead."

Grant only grunted.

"And if they're not," DeFore continued, "how do you figure we'll be able to find them?"

Grant stopped at the collapsed wall and fished around in his pants pocket, withdrawing his trans-comm unit. He thumbed up the cover and keyed in the broad-band frequency to connect to both Brigid and Kane's radiophones at the same time. His face showed no emotion when all he received was static. He tried the Sandcat's channel with the same result.

He exchanged the trans-comm for a small compa.s.s. Holding it in the palm of his hand, he frowned, moving slowly a few paces to the left, then to the right and then half turning. Finally, he gestured to the northeast. "The filtration plant is over there, about two klicks. We went off course only a little, but we were still headed in roughly the right direction before we came in here."

DeFore removed the case from her head. "So you think if they're still alive, both of them would go there?" she ventured.

Grant shrugged. "Since it's our destination, yes, I do. Both Brigid and Kane would head there to rendezvous with us rather than wandering around Chicago hoping we'd all b.u.mp into each other by chance."DeFore nodded in reluctant agreement. "That makes sense. I guess."

Grant gusted out a sigh. "I know you're not a veteran of field missions. I'm glad you volunteered for this one. But you've got to learn to leave the tactics and strategy to the more experienced members of the team. In this instance, that's me. Understand?"

DeFore's full lips pursed in disapproval at the mild rebuke, but she said only, "Understood."

By the time they reached the street, the rain had tapered off completely, leaving behind pools of standing water and mud-clogged gutters, all of which smelled faintly sulfurous. The two of them tramped side by side. Grant couldn't in good conscience really blame Reba DeFore for covering her nervousness with asperity.

He sympathized with her apprehension and appreciated her decision to accompany them on the journey.

During her nearly five years as an exile, DeFore had only twice ventured from the safety of the Cerberus redoubt. The first time was part of a rescue party to retrieve an imprisoned Lakesh from Cobaltville. The second mission was months later, and it was a truly nightmarish experience to the dark bayous of Louisiana. Since then, she didn't even like to walk outside the sheltering vanadium walls of the installation on the mountain plateau. From what he had heard of her sufferings down South, Grant was surprised she hadn't fused out completely.

As for himself, he had never enjoyed strolling through the ruins of predark settlements. In fact, he hated the oppressive sensation of walking through a desecrated graveyard. He always suspected he was being watched, and the feeling ate away at his nerve ends like acid. As he led the way through the ugly landscape of rubble, he felt a cold fear and even some anger.

Here was a city that had to have vied with all the great metropolises of humanity. The network of streets was still visible, though the buildings that had lined them were leveled by the double team of con-cussive shock and time. He could see the avenues, roadways and squares, and here and there was the single tower of some surviving structure. Now and then they saw the sagging framework of an elevated transportation system and occasionally a charred, high-ridged bomb crater.

After about twenty minutes, Grant and DeFore followed a trail up the deeply furrowed outer wall of a crater. Since it was the diameter of a city block, it was easier to walk up the slope, then around the rim, rather than find a way to avoid it altogether.

The ridge top, which reared about twenty-five feet above street level, ran all the way around the puncture wound in the earth. It was uneven with numerous broken-off pinnacles.

Below it, in a shallow declivity, a group of squat structures was arranged in a semicircle. They were small, little more than huts or shacks, and they had about them an indefinable aura of desolation and abandonment. The crater floor was barren except for the litter of trash and decayed bits of wood and fabric that once could have been anything. Grant and DeFore crept around the perimeter of the settlement, alert for any movement or sound. All they heard was the eerie hum of the wind.

The stillness was uncanny. Grant repressed a shiver, feeling the hairs on his arms and neck stir uneasily.

It seemed to him that a silent host of invisible watchers regarded them curiously.

DeFore fingered her nose and made a face of disgust. Grant cast a quizzical glance toward her. "What?""Don't you smell that?" she demanded.

Grant didn't answer immediately. His sense of smell had been impaired for years. His nose had been broken three times in the past and always poorly reset. A running joke during his Magistrate days was that he could eat a hearty dinner with a dead skunk lying next to his plate.

Inhaling deeply through his nostrils, he caught first an unpleasant whiff, then the cloying stench of something dead, something a long time dead. The bottom of the crater seemed saturated by the charnel-house reek. Queasmess settled in his stomach, and his mouth filled with sour saliva.

"Dead bodies down there," he murmured. "Animal or human or otherwise, they're most thoroughly dead."

DeFore nodded uneasily. "Should we investigate?"

Grant shook his head. "I don't see why we should."

"Because someone might need help."

"That looks like the camp of scavengers," he replied, forcing a reasonable note into his voice. "Roamers, Farers, maybe even Dregs. If anybody is still alive down there, they would just as soon kill us as accept help from us."

After a moment of thoughtful silence, DeFore retorted a little bitterly, "I guess you're the expert on outlanders."

"That's right," he declared flatly. "I am."

Outlanders, or anyone who chose to live outside ville society, or had that fate chosen for them, were of a different breed. Born into a raw, wild world, they were accustomed to living on the edge of death. Grim necessity had taught them the skills to survive, even thrive, in the postnuke environment. They may have been the great-great-great-grandchildren of civ- ilized men and women, but they had no choice but to embrace lives of semibarbarism.

In the Ouflands, people were divided into small, regional units, communications were stifled, rivalries bred, education impeded. The people who lived outside the direct influence of the villes, who worked the farms, toiled in the field, or simply roamed from place to place were reviled and hated. No one worried about an outlander, or even cared. They were the outcasts of the new feudalism, the cheap, expendable labor forces, even the cannon fodder when circ.u.mstances warranted. Generations of Americans were born into serfdom, slavery in everything but name. Whatever their parents or grandparents had been before skydark, they were now only commodities and they cursed the suicidal foolishness of their forebears who had brought on the nightmare.

Grant had come to realize that the outlanders, sneered at by the elite of the villes, were possibly the last real human beings on the planet, and they were an endangered species. As a Magistrate, he had killed dozens of outlanders in the performance of his duty, but he had murdered more than their bodies. He had destroyed their spirits, as well.

"You're right," DeFore said softly. "As far as we know, they died of a communicable disease. There's nopoint in endangering ourselves just so I can play doctor."

''You're not playing doctor," Grant told her mat-ter-of-factly. "You are one. I understand how your first impulse is to help those who may be in need. I admire you for it. I always have. But in a place like this, helping is sometimes nothing more than prolonging some poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d's agony."

She raised her deep brown eyes to his. "You sound like you're speaking from experience."

He started walking along the ridgeline again. "I'm afraid I am."

When they reached the mouth of a path that twisted down into the ruins again, Grant paused to remove the compact set of microbinoculars from a clip on his web belt. He brought them to his eyes, peering through the ruby-coated lenses. As he swept them over the rubble-strewed terrain, the binoculars'

magnifying power brought into sharp relief the broken buildings jutting from the overgrown streets.

Far in the distance, he glimpsed a city block with a cl.u.s.ter of buildings that appeared to be intact, and he tightened the focus. They were ugly structures of brick and concrete block, completely utilitarian. Rising from the center of them, like the cap of a mushroom, he made out a white dome. Behind the complex, ribbons of water gleamed dully, either a river or a ca.n.a.l.

Slowly, he shifted his focus away from the complex, scanning several other buildings. He barely made out the steeple of an old church. Just as he slid the binoculars away, a blur of movement caught his gaze. He tried to find it again and was on the verge of deciding he had glimpsed only a trick of light and shadows when a clot of blackness appeared in an alley between two structures.

He squinted through the eyepieces, and the clot resolved itself into a number of black-clad figures marching along the narrow pa.s.sageway in the general direction of the church. Grant studied them only for a couple of seconds before they were hidden from view, but he was positive he saw a head topped with matted red-gold hair among the shadow-shapes.

DeFore noticed his back stiffen and his posture turn tense. "What is it?" she asked.

Grant didn't answer for such a long moment, DeFore almost repeated the question, but he lowered the binoculars and announced grimly, "I think I found Brigid."

DeFore's eyebrows crawled up toward her hairline. She opened her mouth to voice another question, but before she could speak Grant's trans-comm trilled. The sound was so unexpected, so startling Grant jerked in reaction and nearly lost his balance.

Grunting an embarra.s.sed curse, Grant s.n.a.t.c.hed the unit from his belt. "Grant here."

For a second only fuzzy crackles filtered from the receiver, then Domi's faint, childlike voice said, "This is Domi. I'm still with the Cat. What's going on?"

The reception was poor, but if she hadn't been using the Sandcat's more powerful transmitter, a connection could not have been established at all. The handheld comms only had a range of a mile, perhaps two miles on flat terrain and in exceptionally clear weather. Although the storm had moved on, the weather was anything but clear and the landscape certainly wasn't level."We've lost Kane and Brigid," he said, raising his voice. "Stay where you are until I tell you otherwise.

We'll be trying to find them, so stand by."

No response came from the trans-comm. If Domi replied, her words were completely smothered by a jumble of squeals, snaps and hisses. Growling in wordless frustration, he closed the unit's cover and returned it to his belt.

A faint line of consternation appeared at the bridge of DeFore's nose. "Do you think she heard you?"

Grant shook his head. "I don't know. Even if she did, that's no guarantee she'll follow my orders."

DeFore forced a smile. "She's been a little on the disobedient side lately, hasn't she?"

Grant glared at her. "What's that supposed to mean?"

The woman wasn't intimidated. "It means what I said. She's not exactly toeing the mark you set for her.

Kind of like a child defying parental authority."

Grant snorted in derision. "Save the sandbox psychoa.n.a.lysis. Let's go."

As they climbed down the face of the crater, the medic's observations circled within the walls of Grant's skull, stirring up unwanted and confusing emotions in their wake. Almost since the day they met, Domi had claimed to be in love with him, viewing him as a gallant black knight who rescued her from the shackles of Guana Teague's slavery. In reality, quite the reverse was true. Teague was crushing the life out of Grant beneath his three-hundred-plus pounds of flab when Domi expertly slit his throat.

Regardless of the facts, Domi had attached herself to him and made it fiercely clear to everyone that Grant was hers and hers alone. She had even evinced jealousy of DeFore, suspecting the woman of having designs on Grant. He was fairly certain the medic had no such intent, but he made sure there was nothing between them but a guarded friendship.

Of course, he reflected, he had fought hard to make sure there was nothing but friendship between him and Domi, too. He had no idea of Domi's true age, and neither did she. She could be as young as sixteen or as old as twenty-six, but either way, he was pushing forty and felt twice as old.

Always before he had tried to make the gap in their ages the reason he didn't want to get s.e.xually involved with her. He knew how lame the excuse was, since Domi was certainly no stranger to s.e.x, not after spending six months servicing the gross l.u.s.ts of Guana Teague.

In truth, she represented a simple kind of innocence, a waiflike winsomeness he didn't want to complicate. And hovering always at the back of his mind and emotions was the memory of Olivia, the only woman who'd truly claimed his heart.

Although he hadn't seen her in many years, the image of her light brown, cafe-au-lait complexion, black plaited hair and big eyes was always with him. Her eyes were her most memorable and haunting feature-wise eyes, yet innocent, deep and brown. He still remembered with a painful clarity the last time he had looked into those eyes, more than six years ago.

They had submitted a formal mating contract application. It was summarily reviewed and rejected andonce that happened, he and Olivia had drawn attention to themselves. Their relationship became officially unsanctioned and could not continue lawfully. Although matrimony and child producing were considered the supreme social responsibility by the baronial government, it was also considered only a temporary arrangement.

Children were a necessity for the continuation of society, but only those pa.s.sing stringent tests were allowed to bear them. Genetics, moral values and social standing were the most important criteria.