Chapter 48- Leaving for Gomorrah(1)

Chapter 48: 48- Leaving for Gomorrah(1)

By morning, the concrete bunker smelled of cold grease and wood-ash.

Sol sat near the barred steel door with a flat river stone between his knees, slowly running the grit along the five-inch bearded edge of his hatchet.

Even without eyes, his fingers knew the shape of the metal down to the last nick.

When his thumb traced the center of the eighteen-inch steel tang, he could feel the jagged lip of the fracture where the Silt-Serpent’s jaws had nearly bitten the handle in two.

In his thermal sight, the crack looked like a dark blue fault-line cutting two-thirds of the way through the warm gray iron.

"Stop rubbing it," Valera said from the pile of furs in the corner, where she was lacing up her patched boots. "You’re not going to rub the crack out of the steel, Sol."

Sol set the river stone aside and sliding the hatchet into the iron ring at his hip. "It’ll hold for a few more swings if I don’t use the flat to block anything heavy."

"It won’t hold if we run into another Crowned beast," Valera stood up, walking over to the pine drag-sled where thirty slate-gray Level 2 serpent scales, three bone-ice horns, and the two four-inch fangs were lashed down under a cured elk hide.

"We need to reach Gomorrah, it is dangerous, but for now for all we know, the Vane might come looking for us."

Sol rolled his stiff shoulders until his spine popped. At 14% Peak-Stage, his body felt like a tightly held spring, heavy, dense, and humming with a quiet, constant heat that kept the damp chill of the bunker five feet away from his skin.

"Then we have to take a decision" Sol said, reaching for his patched wolf-fur coat and throwing it over his bare shoulders.

"We’ve got two hundred pounds of smoked meat on the sled and three Peak-Stage Blighted shards left in the bag. There’s nothing in Marrow’s camp we need."

Valera paused with her hands on the sled ropes, looking up at him. "We have to head straight west, that’s the quickest route to Gomorrah."

Sol picked up a strip of dark linen from the floor and tyed it snugly around his head to cover his glowing eyes, just in case they crossed paths with trappers on the open road.

"And more importantly, we’re both in the Peak-Stage now. You’re at twenty-eight percent. If we find two more Level 2 beasts over the next month, we’re going to hit the ceiling of Level 1."

Valera’s fingers tightened on the hemp rope. "Sol, the people in Gomorrah don’t have an Academy. They don’t have libraries full of old scrolls sitting in marble halls."

"No, they’ve got warlords who dig through pre-collapse military bunkers at the bottom of an iron mine," Sol replied, leaning down to grab the main drag-rope of the sled with one hand. "And they’ve got Level 2 Masters who got there by eating raw cores in the dirt instead of sitting in silk bathtubs drinking tree sap. If anybody knows how a freak like me can build Level 2 meridians without freezing his own heart, it’s going to be some half-dead old bastard in Gomorrah."

Valera stared at the linen blindfold wrapping his brow, then let out a short breath through her nose.

"Two hundred miles across the Dead-Line," she said, pulling her fur hood up and tying the ragged cloth mask over her nose and mouth so only her pale blue eyes showed.

"The first eighty miles along the ruined highway isn’t just beast territory, Sol. The southern roads from the Sanctuary, the White Choir join the western highway at the Salt-Wind Overpass. Their tithe-wagons use that road in the spring to hunt strays."

"The crazy ones?" Sol asked, sliding the heavy steel blast-door of the bunker open with a loud, grinding screech.

"Crazy is a polite word for them," Valera muttered, stepping out into the freezing gray fog beside him as he hauled the two-hundred-pound sled out onto the snow like it was an empty basket.

"In Hearth City, if a guard kills you, it’s because you broke a law or he wants your wallet. If a Choir priest sees you breathing on the road, he thinks he’s doing your soul a favor by opening your carotid artery so the Moon can eat you before you sin again. If we see white robes, we hide in the ditch until they pass. Understood?"

"Hide in the ditch," Sol repeated dryly, adjusting the hemp rope across his broad chest. "Got it. No heroic speeches."

For three days, they pushed west along the broken spine of the old world.

The four-lane highway was a graveyard frozen in time.

Every few miles, they had to drag the sled around rusted walls of pre-collapse vehicles fused together into solid mounds of oxidized iron and gray ice.

To Sol’s thermal vision, the landscape was a vast, flat expanse of cold blue stone broken only by the occasional warm yellow flash of a snow-hare or a flock of mutated crows picking at frozen moss on the highway signs.

On the second night, they ran into a pack of four Level 1 (High-Stage) Blighted hyenas nesting inside a collapsed concrete tunnel.

They didn’t even use their cores. Valera froze the tunnel floor into a sheet of black ice so the beasts couldn’t get traction, and Sol waded into the middle of them with the square hammer-poll of his hatchet, crushing four skulls in ninety seconds flat to save the cracked cutting edge.

They took the four shards, left the stringy, foul-tasting hyena meat behind, and kept walking.

"Well, that was boring" Val said, her smile making Sol’s heart beat a little faster.

"We’ll have more fun later, don’t jinx the journey" Sol winked at her, making her frost face blush a little.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, the terrain began to rise toward the Salt-Wind Overpass, a massive, three-tiered concrete highway interchange that stood eighty feet above the frozen salt flats like the ribcage of a dead giant.