Time Castaways by James Axler Page A

new clothing. The spare denim pants and sneakers had come from Mildred, the socks and shirt from Krysty. The clothing was a little tight in some spots and a tad baggy in others, but it was still the finest clothing she had ever worn.
    Adjusting his eyepatch, Ryan scowled darkly. Red Mountain, that was the local name for what had to be a major volcano. The woman had told them about that after dinner. The volcano was huge, probably a series of volcanoes, the lava flow boiling the lake for several miles and generating the eternal fog that was already starting to creep across the landscape once more.
    Oddly, Liana had also said that was the direction that most of the muties on the island came from, and that anybody traveling toward the mountains soon died coughing blood with their hair falling out. That strongly indicated the chain of volcanoes was not natural formation, but had been caused by skydark. The whole bastard world had been changed forever by the bombs of the last war. Mildred called it nuclear landscaping, or nukescaping for short.
    Red Mountain. A rad mountain was more likely, Ryan thought. “Not much of a choice here,” he stated. “Canada is closer, but fragging unreachable. Which makes the only safe way to travel being south to Michigan.”
    “Across two hundred miles of open sea,” Doc rumbled, smoothing down his unruly hair.
    Suddenly there came a faint cry from the trees on the rill of a nearby cliff, and a stingwing lanced down to splash into the lake, and then reappear almost instantly with a wriggling fish impaled on its needle-sharp beak. Flying back to the trees, the stingwing tore the fish apart, blood and entrails raining out in a hellish contrail.
    “Looks like we use Jak’s plan,” J.B. stated, shifting the munitions bag on his shoulder to a more comfortable position.
    “Looks like,” Ryan agreed. “We either buy or steal a boat from some ville.”
    “Only Anchor and Northpoint have boats large enough to carry seven people,” Liana started, then paused nervously. When nobody objected, or corrected her math, she continued with an excited feeling in her stomach. Except for her father, the young woman had lived alone her whole life. Now to have companions made her feel different somehow, bolder, more alive.
    “Think they’d be interested in doing some biz?” Ryan asked, turning her way.
    Addressed directly, like an equal, Liana almost lied, wishing to please the big man, then paused and told the brutal truth. “Not Northpoint, they don’t want anybody else to own boats,” she said. “But…Anchor might. The baron is a fool.”
    “That is where you formerly served as a slave?” Doc asked gently, leaning on the ebony stick. The previous night, Liana had been given a blanket near the fire, but sometime during the night she had moved it closer to him, right alongside, almost touching. That both pleased and troubled the scholar, his mind awhirl with conflicting emotions.
    “No, I was a slave at Northpoint,” Liana stated. “But by now the birds have spread the word of my escape, and I’m worth a full pound of metal to any ville that takes me live so that Baron Wainwright can strap me to the learning tree.” Involuntarily she shuddered at the possibility, and the rest of the companions clearly got the idea of what would happen—death by slow, public torture.
    “Then you’ll just wait in the hills with everybody else until we return,” Ryan stated, sensing the fright in the woman. “If they think you’re a mutie because of those eyes, they’ll think the same thing about Krysty and Jak.”
    “There is nobody like them in any of the villes,” Liana agreed.
    “Nobody good as, ya mean.” Jak grinned confidently.
    “And is there anybody like me?” Mildred asked pointedly.
    Liana blinked. “There’s plenty of women in the ville,” she answered, unsure of the question. “Do you mean the beaded hair?”
    “Never mind.” Mildred smiled. If the girl didn’t even understand the