Chapter Twenty-Eight

 

 

"What?" Jak said. "Not storm?"

 

It was J.B. among the outlanders who spotted first what the cloud was.

 

"It's insects," he guessed. "Locusts."

 

Hideyoshi nodded mutely, turning toward the shogun as if he were waiting for some mystical instruction that would take away the advancing horror.

 

"Will not" Swallowing hard, Mashashige tried again. "Will not harm us. Cover face and mouth. They may land. They may pass by us."

 

The cloud looked to be about a mile or more in diameter, roughly circular.

 

"Seen them in west Texas," Jak said. "Stripped crops in minutes. Starved villes."

 

"I remember seeing predark vids of plagues of locusts out in the East and the Middle East," Mildred said, looking apprehensively at the gathering cloud. "Must be millions upon millions of them in that swarm. Sure they aren't special mutie locusts with a taste for meat?"

 

Ryan grinned at her. "If they are, then it's time to start the prayers. Not even your blaster's going to do much to save us from that many."

 

"Couldn't we hide?" Krysty asked. "Do a runner for that old wrecked train?"

 

Hideyoshi heard her and his eyes widened, and he called to Mashashige, "The fire-haired gaijin suggests we flee to the bullet train, Lord."

 

The shogun didn't waste a minute. "It might be safer. Each man for himself."

 

He turned and led the way, holding the long sword in his right hand, his bare feet kicking up puffs of dust as he ran back, past the slaughtered corpses of the little animals, toward the distant glint of the locomotive.

 

Everyone followed him, though several of the accompanying sec men kept looking back over their shoulders at the advancing cloud of insects.

 

"Goin' to be close, lover," Krysty panted, running stride for stride with Ryan, her hair flowing behind her like a bridal veil of living flame.

 

Jak was right on their heels, J.B. and Mildred few yards behind him. As usual, when foot speed was called for, Doc was trailing back in sixth place.

 

But he was still beating all but one of the sec men and both Hideyoshi and Yashimoto.

 

They were a quarter-mile from the moldering remains of the bullet train. Risking a glance behind him, Ryan's guestimate put the cloud of locusts at less than a mile away.

 

He'd seen something similar, years ago, out on the Idaho panhandle, when he was riding with Trader. Everyone had piled into the war wags, closing all the vents, but some of the locusts still managed to get inside the vehicles. When they'd finally passed on, and everyone had emerged into the blessed fresh air, it was to find that the green oasis where they'd parked had been stripped utterly bare, with hardly a single leaf remaining for a couple of hundred yards around.

 

The rusting metal of the train was only a hundred paces off, but the closest insects were already pattering to earth around Ryan, settling on the twigs and branches of the bushes. The sky had grown darker so that there were no shadows.

 

And the air was filled with an ominous fluttering, humming sound, like the sinister, rhythmic dopplering of chopper blades in old movies.

 

Mashashige was still in the lead, his slight figure seeming to flow effortlessly over the ground. Jak was close second, with the rest of the runners strung out over a hundred yards or more of the narrow trail.

 

As he got closer to the train, Ryan was able to see the extent of the damage. Other than the stained panels, several of the windows were broken, and it was now obvious that it had been derailed, probably during a skydark quake. It was high off the ground, but the corroded remains of several emergency ladders gave easy access to the interior.

 

The shogun was there, clambering up one of the ladders into the cab of the locomotive, reaching back immediately to offer a hand to the albino teenager. Ryan's back was sore from the pounding of the Steyr, and he slowed a little to allow Krysty to climb to safety.

 

Now, the locusts were falling from the sky all around him, several of them landing on his back and in his hair.

 

But Ryan ignored them, concentrating on getting aboard the old train, then helping the rest of the group.

 

The noise of the insects was astounding, drowning out the yells of the sec men, who were laboring in their armor. Most had dropped their blasters, but they still struggled toward safety through the cloud of locusts. There were so many pulped bodies on the track, that it had become slippery and dangerous.

 

Now that he had a moment, Ryan saw that the insects were like large grasshoppers or cicadas, pale green, about three to four inches in length.

 

"Gaia!" Krysty panted. "Living nightmare time."

 

It was becoming difficult to see the rest of the party as they struggled toward the bullet train.

 

J.B. and Mildred had made it, and Doc was just being helped up one of the ladders, his grizzled hair dotted with a dozen of the locusts.

 

"By the Three Kennedys! This is exceeding high on the list of the most disgusting experiences of my long and eventful life," he panted.

 

Yashimoto appeared from the fog of insects, hesitating as he saw that the hand offered to him belonged to Ryan Cawdor. But he finally seized it and was hauled aboard, Hideyoshi right behind him.

 

The sec men were lumbering out of the seething cloud, several of them on the ragged edge of hysteria, brushing frantically to remove the locusts from their clothes and hair.

 

Ryan moved forward into the nose cone of the bullet train, peering out through the smeared armaglass, seeing the land around disappearing under wave upon wave of the voracious insects. He heard a loud cracking and saw a thick branch of a sycamore snap off under the weight of thousands of locusts.

 

Krysty was at his elbow. "It's dreadful," she said, having to raise her voice to be heard above the constant pittering of the tiny bodies striking the metal shell of the locomotive.

 

"Least they aren't killers," Ryan said.

 

"Speak too soon." Mashashige pointed to where one of his sec men had ignored the warning and had stopped about fifty paces off, barely visible, looking as if he'd become terminally disoriented. He stood still, arms flailing at the air, eyes staring wildly, mouth open in a scream of panic and terror.

 

"I'll help him," Jak shouted, but Ryan reached out and gripped the teenager by the arm.

 

"No. Doomed. Stay here, Jak, or you'll go under with him. Too late."

 

The wretched guard was on his knees, his face masked with the locusts, dozens of them forcing their way into his open mouth, crawling up his nose, suffocating him. As the rest watched in horror, he slipped down and rolled on his back, where his whole twitching body became carpeted with insects.

 

Hundreds of the locusts were finding their way inside the wrecked train, but they were only a tiny drop in the vast ocean of hopping, vibrating creatures.

 

J.B. had taken off his fedora, flapping at the insects, brushing them from his clothes. He removed his glasses and wiped them on a white kerchief.

 

"How long they going to stay here?" Mildred asked.

 

Mashashige had recovered his composure. "Normally it only takes an hour or so to strip all vegetation from a region. Once they have fed, then they will move on again."

 

Outside there was the occasional noise of breaking branches as the shrubs and trees collapsed under the unimaginable weight of the swarm.

 

The train was coated with the insects, all of the windows covered in a shifting layer of gray green.

 

"Makes my skin crawl," Mildred said, shuddering. "Like being inside a huge creature."

 

"It was a good idea to run here," Hideyoshi said to Krysty. "We saw what happened to a man caught in the out-of-doors open. It might have been more dying."

 

 

 

IT WAS AN HOUR and thirty-five minutes by Ryan's wrist chron, before the uncountable swarm of locusts completed its feeding and took to the air again, circling and rising, gathering together, blotting out the sun again before moving off in a southwesterly direction.

 

The shogun led the way out of the security of the bullet train, climbing down into a changed landscape.

 

Thousands of the insects had died during their brief stay, their brittle corpses blanketing the earth, crunching underfoot as everyone moved among them.

 

The body of the sec man, his mouth still jammed with dead locusts, lay where it had fallen.

 

For a quarter-mile around, the vegetation had been stripped, leaving only bare, broken branches and peeled stumps of trees.

 

Nothing else remained.

 

Nobody spoke for a minute or more, everyone wandering around, staring at the devastation.

 

Jak suddenly looked around. He knelt and laid the palm of his hand flat on the barren earth. "Quake," he said.

 

Everyone froze. Mashashige stared at the white-haired boy. "I feel nothing," he said.

 

"Nor do me," Yashimoto agreed. "Perhaps it is the trembling of fear."

 

"No." Krysty was standing still, her emerald eyes tight shut. "I can feel it, too."

 

Then Ryan knew that he could detect the faint tremor. It had been there for several seconds, but it just hadn't forced itself into his consciousness. "Me, too," he said.

 

It wasn't a bad one, the familiar roaring, just below the surface of the earth, like a full-throttle wag.

 

A deep rattling rose from the stranded bullet train, just behind them, one of the stressed windows shattering into starring splinters of glass.

 

The land itself moved gently, back and forth, dust flying everywhere, damaged trees toppling over.

 

There was the sound of tortured metal, and the bullet train shifted a couple of feet sideways, settling deeper on the left, more of the remaining windows smashing.

 

Several of the sec men flung themselves onto the ground, hanging on as if they were participating in some sort of nightmare funfair ride.

 

Ryan kept his balance easily, riding the shifting dirt like the waves on a schooner. The noise began to diminish after a half minute, the dust settling, the world quickly returning to what passed for normal.

 

"It is over," Mashashige pronounced. "Collect that body and we will return to the fortress."

 

 

 

NOT LONG AFTER they had passed through the high wire fences and gates to the hunting zone, the ronin attacked again.

 

But it was a poor, halfhearted effort, a sporadic burst of firing, at maximum range. The shooting came from the farther side of a wide-bottomed, shallow valley, the puffs of smoke visible among the dark green trees.

 

There was time to dive for cover, and nobody was hit.

 

Ryan had a look through the scope of the Steyr, using the laser image enhancer. But the range was too great, the would-be assassins too well hidden in the woods.

 

"Should we go after them?" J.B. asked.

 

"They'd just slip away into the back country," Ryan replied. "Soon realize they're wasting ammo at this distance. Best keep our heads down."

 

Yashimoto realized that the bullets that hissed among the leaves were spent rounds, offering very little danger. He stood, waving his drawn sword, screaming out boastful threats in a mixture of Japanese and American, echoing across the valley.

 

"Dung-eating corn rats! Belly-crawling gekokujo! Cowardly metsuke! Yakuza scum who would fuck your own obasan . Which of you will come and fight against Takei Yashimoto, man to man, hand to hand, throat to throat, sword to sword?"

 

One of the spent rounds pinged off the blade of the sword in his hand, almost knocking it from his grasp, making him aware that he was still in some danger. With a final flourish, the samurai made a hasty retreat among the trees.

 

As Ryan had predicted, the ronin realized that they were wasting precious ammo, and the shooting faded away into silence. One by one the Japanese and the outlanders stood, brushing dried leaves and dust from their clothes.

 

"They finished?" Krysty asked.

 

"For the time being." Ryan picked a few twigs from her hair. "But I'd be surprised if that was the last we ever heard from them. Don't strike me like men who are going to just leave and ride around the problem."

 

Mashashige heard him and nodded. "It is truly said, Cawdor-san. But we will return to our humble home. Collect and train more men. And so it will go on."

 

 

 

RYAN COULDN'T UNDERSTAND why such an efficient man as the shogun was so casual about the threat from the landless samurai, the ronin.

 

Hideyoshi had sent out messengers proclaiming that Lord Mashashige was keenly interested in recruiting new sec men for his palace, and at least two hundred of them had arrived, some traveling fifty or sixty miles on foot in less than forty-eight hours.

 

J.B. had watched them as they milled around in the outer courtyard, waiting to be called and given a basic fitness test. "Ten percent of them looked to be over sixty, and another twenty percent looked way below sixteen. About a third of the remainder were visibly unwell. Most had respiratory illnesses, coughing and fighting for breath, even from doing a basic series of three or four short wind sprints. Shogun'll be lucky to eventually find himself twenty good men. And that still leaves him way short against his losses to the sarin gas."