COVENANT WITH DEATH
Danger in the desert. It seemed to seep up from the ground like vermin, and sometimes the vermin was the danger. Scorpions and lizards, ants and snakes and enormous gophers that glided on hot air currents, leaping from the tops of tall dead trees. A man might walk the length of the Wasteland and never see another soul unless he bent to drink from a pool of water and saw his own reflection in the probably poisonous water. Other times wanderers might not be able to travel the length of an old city block without being interrupted by scavenging bandits, deranged cultists, or mutated wretches. This was the way things were, unlikely to change.
A lone man was braving the peril of the Wasteland, a single soldier whose army was for all practical purposes dead. The soldier, the leader of men, John Covenant, had begun his journey.
He had started in his home state of Minnesota, where he had returned after being a little too personally involved in the end of the world. He had come to find his older brother David, and they had fought. That was all it reduced to, the lowest common denominator. David had fled from his own home to a nearby abandoned survivalist camp, and Covenant had taken up residence in his brother's home. The elder Covenant was an egghead, no soldier, and John had decided to look out for him, estranged though they might be. Time wore by, and the man who had been Lieutenant Colonel John Covenant slowly shed what remained of his history. Fruitless shortwave radio scanning had occupied some of his time at the cabin, and at last eight months after the accident, he picked up a transmission. The high quantity of radiation interfered with signals, but this one came through loud and clear.
"—Ranger Center, calling all inhabitants of New Nevada and outlying areas. If you are survivors who wish to assist in the rebuilding, please wait until the end of the message for directions to Ranger Center." The message continued, and Covenant began the process of activating his ham radio.
A week later he had packed and was on his way to join the Desert Rangers.
Meanwhile in the desert.
There is a man lurking in the cool shadows of strange rock. A broad based piece of limestone narrowed upwards into a thin needle, upon which was perched an enormous boulder of basalt. It was just too weird to be naturally occurring, but that was how the desert was.
The man was old, quite ancient in fact. He bore traces of malnutrition in the harsh lines of his body, which poked through his clothing here and there. Though exhausted, starved, and baking slowly in the desert heat, he was strangely euphoric. Times had been hard, but they were nearing their close. The old man, who had been famous and loved before the war, was now a philosophical hermit, wandering for days from period of dehydration to period of dehydration. He hallucinated aplenty, and had more than his share of run-ins with deadly animals and wild humans. His time in the desert had given him a holy purpose, and it seemed the beasts of the earth and the children of God could sense that. He was largely unmolested in his periods of greater insanity.
Resting in the shade, he seemed nothing more than a skeleton. A beatific smile perched on his lips, and he scanned the area around him as it shimmered hotly in his vision.
A vulture squawked from somewhere nearby. The ugly birds had been following the old man around all day. It was just one more confirmation of what he already knew.
The old man spent the better part of six hours dying beneath the improbable rock, and had almost finished when he had a visitor. A man stepped around the rock and faced the hermit.
"Greetings, Mr. Heston." The old man snapped his leonine head up in a flash. The man who had addressed him was clad in an impractical suit of black leather, and trailed a long cape of dark maroon. A number of sacks were tucked into it. His face was pale, far too pale, with drawn lips and deep-sunken eyes. His hair was a light blonde, shaven almost down to the skull. He held a rifle resting against his shoulder.
The hermit, who felt far too holy (and weak) to reply, merely fixed a piercing blue eye on the newcomer. "It's hot, wouldn't you say?" The man in black was not angered by lack of response and simply crouched on the ground and began to expertly fieldstrip the rifle. The old man watched him intently, and at last opened his dry mouth.
"You should oil it."
"Ahh, you can speak. Would you care to oil it yourself?" He proffered the halfway-disassembled rifle and a small can of oil.
"Go away. I'm dying."
"Come now, Mr. Heston. I'm sure you'd like to help me out."
"How do you know my name, anyway?" His voice was hardly more than a croak. Suddenly something registered, and his face lit up, the craggy lines behind the white beard accentuating his age. "You're him! Finally."
The man in black smiled, and pressed the rifle and oil into the old man's hands. With amazing slowness, the hermit descended to his knees and began oiling the rifle. After a few moments, he had reassembled it, and then slumped to the ground with the rifle on his chest.
"Mr. Heston, I know you are resigned to the end, and you wish me to take you now. Unfortunately…"
"My god, man!" The old man shouted with surprising ferocity, though he moved nothing beneath his chin. "You're the angel of death and you can't get the job done? If I were younger, I…"
"I know, sir. I wish to tell you a little something of the future. Though your body is ready, it will not die for another day. The vultures will begin picking at you within minutes, until they are scared away by some… creatures from those hills you passed yesterday. They have disgusting tastes, and a nature of cruelty, so the end will be long and terrible…"
The old man exhaled loudly through his nostrils. "I'm not afraid."
"It's not a matter of fear or weakness. I will tell you now," the man in black said, taking off his cape and sacks, laying them on the ground, "that I will take your place if you will take mine. I will take your death if you will take my responsibility. Would you do that? Do you want the chance to live again?"
"I'm not afraid. It would be a favor to you?"
The man in black smiled as if humoring a child. "I would be very indebted. Eternally indebted."
"Throw in the rifle and it's a deal."
The man in black grinned, now removing his clothing. He lay down on the ground next to the old man, who felt a wave of disorientation rise over him. After a moment the old man rose. He felt strange, tingly. He looked down onto the ground, where the pale man, no longer dressed in black, lay breathing shallowly. He seemed near to dying, and the old man felt much better. He hefted the rifle, and it seemed to weigh almost nothing. He checked and found that it held cartridges.
"There you go, sir. Take my clothes as well. There are all the provisions you might need in the sacks. You'll just know where and when to carry on the work." The old man, who had a sneaking suspicion he was no longer old, looked perplexed.
"Does this mean that…"
"Yes. You're the angel of death now, in my place." He sighed, a long wheezing sigh that terminated in a visible state of aging. The former angel of death was now as old and decrepit as the new had been before. "You'll find out how it is soon how enough."
"I'm not afraid. I told you that already. It'll be good to get these old bones out on the town again." He had been old, and now was tall and strong. His long white hair had disappeared, leaving a clean-shaven man with rugged good looks, holding a rifle in strong fingers. He was tan, and a slight sheen of sweat had appeared on him, giving the image of long-lost health found again.
"Thank you, Mr. Heston."
"Call me… Chuck."
"Now I can die, since you've given me your death."
"My death, eh? Don't thank me yet," he muttered, and looked into the distance. "Vultures and mutants, you say? I'll at least do what you should have done for me." He shouldered the rifle, aimed it down at the figure on the ground, and fired three times into the heart.
Putting on the clothes and taking up the sacks, Death walked on through the desert with a light tread.
Covenant drove through the desert. He was escaping his past, running headlong into the future. There was plenty for him in New Nevada, he felt: chances to right some wrongs and settle things within himself. This was reason enough to hurry. He had packed everything possible into his truck and its trailer, all the necessities of travel and survival, as well as the valuable items he thought would be useful to a rising government, such as instrumentation, a series of technical how-to manuals, and many many tools for the making of weapons. It was optimistic, true, that he could help save the world in this way, but he was a man of honor and determined to make up for the grave errors of his past.
The truck sped on through the desert.
There had been very little of interest as he drove southwest from Billings into Wyoming. He had stopped at Yellowstone, thinking to replenish his supplies from the Ranger stations there, but in the brief span of time since the war, the wilderness had almost completely reclaimed the manmade spaces. The new man that Covenant had become appreciated such happenings. There was a sort of rough justice in Yellowstone becoming frontier again, as many parts of the country were already. The sad thing was that some never would heal, and would forever be a Wasteland.
He continued through the mountains, and passed into Utah, widely skirting SLC and the Salt Lake itself, as he knew from a horrifying few moments during the end of the world that it was, for some reason, a major missile target. He continued from there in an almost straight line south until he hit Price, Utah. It had been a large city before the war, but for some reason was now uninhabited. Likely rioting, disease, famine, and fallout had contributed to its emptiness. There were probably a few remaining souls, but they were certain to be destitute and dying of radiation related cancer and leukemia. Covenant's experience with medicine was of the fast field variety: triage and toetags rather than clinics and chemo, but he was sure of the effects of nuclear war.
His truck was installed with an excellent array of sensors that monitored nearby radiation and other hazards. He was able to avoid irradiated zones and was very conscientious about staying safe. He used an air compressor and spray nozzle to keep dust particles off himself and his equipment. He also used water purifiers and a respirator. It was just common sense.
It was with that common sense and a relatively clean reading on the sensors that Covenant explored Price. As Covenant made his way through the nondescript city, he left his common sense behind and picked up a hitchhiker.
She was beautiful, a dark-skinned girl, extremely short. She had long black hair that was straight and thick and everything about her seemed precious and healthy, except the look of despair on her face.
Covenant had no idea of how she could have survived, barring simple luck and hardiness. She almost seemed some swart angel that had just now flitted into existence to please his eye and (perhaps, dear God!) warm his bed. He found that he was already smiling at the sheer joy of her presence, and his mind had raced already to thoughts of what she meant that it ignored all the little details about her that might sometime be important.
He slowed the truck and pulled up towards her; she was already running towards him, her hair bobbing against her small shoulders, which were covered with a faded green tunic-type dress. His eyes were drawn downward to her slender legs covered in thick tan stockings, and terminated in a masculine pair of well-worn combat boots whose incongruity only helped to heighten her sex appeal.
Yowza, he thought with uncharacteristic gusto. Then she opened the door.
"Oh, help me please… tell me you can take me away."
"Take you away… oh miss, please don't get in just yet!" He intercepted her motion to jump in the cab, turning off the engine as he did so. He jumped out and rounded the truck to where she stood.
She looked up at him, far up, since he was taller than she was by a foot and change. Her eyes were so dark as to be almost black, set like onyx in her beautiful face. Covenant felt himself wanting her to jump right in already. But precautions had to be followed. He pulled on his respirator and dialed in a feed of air, then yanked the Geiger counter from the pocket of his cargo pants.
Her dark eyes widened at the device, but she said nothing, though Covenant seemed to sense urgency in the set of her full mouth. A flick of a toggle caused the device to click and crackle, a small LCD screen displaying the level of radiation, which was high for normal life, but relatively low in this case. He swept the chrome wand of it towards the girl, and was rewarded with a level of radiation no higher than the surrounding area. He grinned, though he was sure she couldn't see anything but his eyes through the full facemask.
He raised one finger to tell her to wait, then pulled the nozzle of the air compressor hose from its reel. Covenant then proceeded to blast her with the air. A cloud of dust blew itself from her hair and clothing, blowing back behind her towards the city. She was leaving it behind, it seemed.
Minutes later they were driving out of the city and into the Wasteland, and had it not been for circumstances, they might have been young lovers out for a drive in the country. The truck sped over dusty flatlands and barren defiles, with nary a word passing between the two. The girl remained strangely silent, and Covenant, though he was desperately wanting to ask her something, anything, did not for about ten miles, when at last they reached a strange sign that had burned beyond recognition, save the very top portion which read NOW LEAVING…
"Miss, I… can't help but be curious, that is, about how you have survived all this time. I'm sure it's been traumatic, but how?"
"Do you know anything about luck?"
Covenant swallowed hard. Something in her tone indicated the mystical, the oracular. He had never been a man to put much stock in those things, and the sparkle in her dark eyes promised more. He listened.
"No, miss, I've never believed in it. Or fate," he added hastily. "Either one."
"There are some who would say that luck is everything now. That we are lucky to have survived, that we have what we need to continue in some places. There are some that would say that luck is drawing us together, as well. Where are you headed?" She snapped her full gaze at him, and held him at the eyes. John Covenant, accounted a hard, tough man by most, was enthralled.
"South, so far. I've heard from someplace called Ranger Center, in Nevada. I'm hoping to find some people who can help me rebuild." He took a chance. "What are you hoping to find?"
She held him, eyes dark and unblinking. A moment passed before she responded. "I need to go to Las Vegas." The words came slowly, as if each one had to be formed perfectly. "I'm looking for the luckiest man alive."
And then she was silent again.
The town was tiny, had been since before the war. It had been barren and dusty then, and was just shy of oblivion now. As the Angel of Death entered, it became plain to him that there were twenty men living there. He could feel them like indistinct pinpoints behind the desiccated walls of nearby buildings, and… there was something else. It was like a hint of scent, but it was deeper in the chest than it was in the nose. His mind kept chasing it, and it was only when he relaxed and stopped thinking did he realize what it was.
Someone had poisoned the waterhole.
He ambled down the only street that remained, and eventually came to a well. It looked like new construction from various recycled parts. Here was the stink, so bad it made his chest ache. The Angel of Death leaned over the well, and inhaled. He inhaled again, and then a shock went through him. There was no odor at all.
Still, the stench was stronger here than anywhere, and as he stood in the full power of it, things became clear. Someone had yet to poison the waterhole, but it held the potential for death and displayed its stench like a preview of coming attractions. Every man jack in the town would be dead within twenty-four hours. A vision came to him of wracking stomach cramps, bleeding from every orifice, and screaming that would never be answered by any human succor.
His reverie was interrupted by a hand on his shoulder. He spun, not even thinking, and delivered a powerful two-fisted punch downward onto his enemy's neck. Bones snapped loudly and the man dropped without a sound, instantly dead.
"He didn't suffer," the Angel of Death muttered to himself. The man's face, now peaceful, still bore the fateful marks that meant he would be poisoned, invisible marks only Death could read. Yet, he had ended it now.
Something tugged at him, a feeling that was he was doing was not his purpose, that it was wrong. Nature was screaming that he was not helping the process. The universe continued to reject his actions even as he banged with his rifle butt on the tin lean-to over the well.
"HELLO!" he bellowed. "Everyone please come outside!"
They began pouring out of the buildings, armed, dangerous men accustomed to a life of banditry, who would die like dogs after drinking water from their own well. He wasn't going to let it happen.
"Who the hell are you?" shouted an enormous bearded man with an axe.
"I'm the Angel of Death," he announced to a few snickers, "but you can call me Chuck."
The first bullet bounced right off of him, as did a knife that came flying when the gang of men decided to annihilate the lone stranger that had killed their comrade. The Angel of Death would have guided them into the demise that fate had chosen for them, suffering and all, but he was Chuck.
He began to fire.
Eventually they had to make camp. Covenant had never had sisters, or much of a steady girlfriend, but he understood that women had a great need to go to the toilet. When he felt that they had made good time and were comfortably away from any inhabited areas, he stopped. Before the truck had even finished bouncing on its tires, the girl had jumped up and sprinted along the dry gulch and into a treeline.
Covenant suppressed a curse. Not everyone was combat trained, and even then not everyone could keep a cool head. Still, for a girl who had survived as long as she had, she sure didn't have much regard for caution.
Taking advantage of her absence, Covenant shouldered his NATO assault rifle and began to pace the length of the dry gulch, looking for points of defense, points of weakness
For about the hundredth time that day he wondered why he was tooling through the desert with this mystery woman who was jeopardizing everything he had believed to be journeying for. When his brother had said the harsh things he did back in Montana, Covenant decided that his lot was to be cast with those who wanted to help the world, not hide from it. After the radio messages from Nevada, he knew that his journey had begun. Now he was flouting all the ideas he had thought he had…
And all for a dame, as the guy in True Police Stories used to say.
Covenant had made a full perimeter check, and speaking of dames, where was she? It had been far too long just for an empty bladder.
In the Wasteland, anything even something slightly wrong could mean danger, and Covenant knew something was wrong.
Rifle ahead, Covenant made speed towards the treeline with a silence almost supernatural over the gravel and sticks of the gulch. The trees were a specimen of grayish evergreen, almost spruce-like. The gulch took a sharp swing and dipped down into a sharp grade. He noticed a number of broken twigs and fresh scuffs on the earth, so he decided to follow the girl's trail. It led a little further up to the darkness of a thick copse of trees. Covenant peered into the blackness, and was intrigued to see a faint glow from beyond the trunks. He held up the probe of the Geiger counter, and found that there was quite a bit of radiation.
His brow furrowed over this disturbing revelation, when suddenly the rad levels dropped back down to normal. He cursed silently, because it meant his counter might be going, and then he'd only have his spare. The glow was gone, anyway, so maybe he had imagined it. He put away the probe and readied his assault rifle before entering the copse.
Covenant slipped around the last tree to find that he was in a dim clearing. There was the girl. Her stockings were around her ankles, revealing beautifully toned legs, though luckily for his composure they revealed nothing else. She was standing stock still, and looking at him nervously.
"Snake…" she said, barely moving her lips. He looked a branch above her head and saw a snake. Big one, too, and not venomous, so far as he knew. Covenant looked closer, then laughed. She gave him a strange look as he stepped forward grabbed the snake, holding it out to her.
"Dead snake," he said. She put on a brave smile for him.
"Would you turn around, please?"
"Oh, sure. I'm sorry, miss." Covenant turned around and took a few paces forward to give her some privacy. He noticed that the snake felt strange in his hand- it was positively hot. Turning it over, he looked at the head. Its eyes were white with cataracts. Very strange.
He heard the girl clear her throat, and he turned around. She was standing in front of him, stockings pulled up, holding her hand out. He took it, and she smiled. They began to walk out of the clearing like two lovebirds. The sun was shining through the trees, and he could almost hear birds singing… then he snapped out of it. I am just not thinking on this trek, he thought. Embarrassed, he withdrew his hand from the girl's and took hold of his rifle again. "I'm sorry. I need to have my hands free. If there's trouble, you know?" She nodded, though her expression said she was not happy. They walked in silence back to the truck, with Covenant keeping a sharp watch.
Once back to their site, Covenant began setting up camp, and preparing to bivouac for the night. There now seemed to be a chilly silence between himself and the girl, and he struggled to not say things that would no doubt embarrass him. Throughout, the girl didn't help, just sat on a dry stump watching him with a predatory glare, which was starting to annoy him somewhat. Eventually he chuckled to himself. As beautiful as she was, and lonely as he was, he should have been ready to drink her bathwater, not give her a kick in the pants. The war really had screwed things up.
He had the tent set up, and was about to make a fire for what no doubt was to be a doubly cold evening, when he felt a hand on his shoulder. The girl had grabbed him, and put her face close to his. The look in her eyes had changed to one of desperation, and her lip was trembling. "Look…" he started, but she shushed him with a kiss.
It was powerful, and Covenant felt everything melting away, all care and worry. She was so hot! Her lips burned his, and her hands did too as she started unbuttoning his shirt. He bent down and began to kiss her smooth neck, and he could taste her sweat, which inflamed him further. She sighed, then put her lips to his ear.
"Please… I don't care if you're cruel. Just promise to protect me, and take me…" he pulled her close. "Take me all the way to Las Vegas." Her tongue flicked out and licked his ear, and he shuddering, mumbling his agreement the whole time. He was lost in her, head swimming, when suddenly she tensed and grabbed him convulsively. He stood straight and looked at her. There was a bullet hole in her head.
Covenant snapped out of it, and heard the echoes of a gunshot. Confused, he could not react as the girl's face turned to a wicked grimace. Blue light streamed from the wound in her forehead, and her eyes glowed with the same radiance. Her skin began to glow a dull red, as if she were molten inside, and with disarming speed she swatted Covenant aside like a minor pest.
The terrific blow slammed him into the truck, and he lay there in what felt like a state of rib breakage. He could hear the Geiger counter in the truck screaming. As he tried to marshal himself he watched as the girl, like some terrible radiation angel, ran towards her attacker.
A man stood at the edge of the trees, dressed in black leather and a dark cape. He was holding an old rifle, which he frowned at and then discarded. He ran forward and met the girl halfway. He leveled a haymaker at her, which knocked her stumbling backwards. The man shuffled forward to close the distance, but as he did the girl reached out with both hands and her glow brightened, surrounding the rifleman. He paused, his hair standing on end and his cape bursting into flame, but soon recovered. Now a number of very straightforward jabs followed his previous blows, and she was reeling. The man grinned, revealing thick, horsey teeth, and hit the girl with a two-fisted punch. Something crunched sickeningly, and the girl dropped.
Covenant watched in awe as, with a final flare of light, the girl crumpled into a pile of clothing filled only with a lightly glowing blue dust
The man had grabbed Covenant's shirt and easily pulled him upright. Up close, he was handsome in an old-fashioned way, despite the teeth and high hairline. He seemed familiar, as well, and when he spoke, Covenant suddenly knew who he was but didn't believe it.
"I don't believe in hitting women. That was no lady, though. It was a monster!" Covenant thought suddenly of the snake. He gulped. "How could a warrior like you," grated the man as he released Covenant, "lose all your senses because of a… a… bosom?" He smiled then. "I'm sorry, son. She was probably a breath of fresh air. Or seemed like it, but believe me, it would have been miserable if I hadn't come for you early."
"What?"
"Never mind. Look, you're absolutely filthy with atoms. Go get cleaned up before your hair falls out."
Covenant did just that, blowing himself off with the air hose, then downing a few doses of Rad-away, which he had hoarded for just this purpose. He took off his clothes, which he left lying on the ground and changed into a clean coverall before getting ready to jump into the truck.
The man rounded the back end of the truck, then stopped short. "I've been a little too close to the remains to get much closer to you, but I'll show you what I found." He held up a thick envelope, well creased, with 'Anitra' written on the cover. He opened it, and removed a paper. "It's some kind of writ of free passage, signed by 'Faran Brygo.' Next item," he said, holding up another paper, "is a handwritten note. It says 'Ace Maloney,' and it's followed by a description." Covenant peered forward as the man held it up, and he memorized Maloney's description. "Signed 'Charmaine.' There's also this." He held up the last item, a hypodermic needle and ampule sealed in plastic.
"Look, I don't know why you're doing this…"
"I can see into your heart, John. I know that you are going to do what needs to be done even if it gets you killed. Or worse, if you have to break the rules. Like I'm doing now. I don't think you'll be able to change all this-" he made a sweeping gesture at the wasteland around them- "but you'll try. When I see you next, I want you to tell me you tried."
With that he turned and wandered off into the wilderness.
Covenant shook his head and whispered at the retreating figure. "Thanks, Mr. Heston."
Time had not treated John Covenant well.
Forty years of fighting with the Desert Rangers, to no appreciable success, had reduced him to a brittle collection of scars, physical and mental. One day he had left his armor, his weapons, and most of his pride, and just walked.
Eventually he came to a place called Canvas Butte, an out-of-the-way village left relatively untouched by the world around it. The people were quiet, friendly, and mostly illiterate, so they welcomed the grizzled stranger who could make medicines and teach their children stories of days past. It was good, but of course it didn't last. Onto all the pain in his joints and muscles, old age added a problem with his heart. Now he moved slow, when at all.
The peace couldn't last either. One day the village graveyard became invaded by mutants, called shambling ghouls by the superstitious villagers who refused to go near the graveyard. Soon the deceased went into the smokehouse, which was simply unacceptable to John Covenant. He summoned what strength remained to him and removed the village's treasured artifact, a .50 Desert Eagle, from its home in his hut. There were four clips, and he took them all.
Once past the graveyard gate, he had no time to worry about what was to come. The ghouls were upon him, slow but steady, and he began to slaughter them. It took a lot of bullets, because his aim was not at all steady and the shots knocked his withered arms back like a cannon. He reloaded when he could, though his hands shook as he did it.
Finally, it was done. He slumped against a gravestone, the pistol limp in his fingers. A fire leaped in his chest, stealing his breath. Then a shadow loomed over him, and he looked up. Death was there in his leather suit, looking exactly the same as forty years ago. Covenant tried to speak, but could not.
"Those things aren't all gone you know." As he said this a ghoul appeared and grabbed a leather-clad arm. "Get your hands off me, you damn dirty mutant!" He gave the ghoul a punch that tore its head off. "There are more coming, and they'd eat you alive if you could. It's a terrible way to go."
"I tried…" It was all he could say, as the pain in his chest burned him to ashes.
"I know, John." Death leaned forward and felt Covenant's chest. "Don't worry. I'll finish the ghouls for you. Just a few moments of heartburn, then peace. You've earned it." When the frantic heart stopped beating, Death closed the staring eyes and removed the pistol from the still hand. He slapped a fresh clip in and turned towards the last of the ghouls. "You've earned it."