Chapter 10

The army scout opened his eyes and looked around. He couldn't see much from his prone position. His heart was pounding, forcing blood through his veins so hard he could hear the slush ... slush ... slush ... sound throbbing through his head and neck. As he tried to move, he realized that he was lying on a slant, his head halfway down into the entrance of the underground way station.

Desperate for air, he gasped heavily, the hot, acrid atmosphere burning his throat and lungs as he inhaled. He coughed, and the jerking motion made him realize that he was at least partially pinned down by something. Forcing his eyes open, he gazed up into the bloated afternoon sun, partially obscured by low flying clouds.

As he gazed upward, he began to remember what had happened. This collapsed structure he found himself in was the entrance to an underground way station ten miles outside of Nashville. He was on his way back to the capitol after a yearlong exploration of the northeastern states. He'd spent the day underground, protected by the gentle earth from the ravages of the cruel sun (not that he really needed it – when he was by himself, he traveled by day or by night as it suited him since he remained magically unaffected by the lethal radiation).

He remembered that it had been early in the evening. He was the last man climbing out of the dirt tunnel. His mind was filled with images of that dead world north of the Confederacy, of all those magnificent, ruined buildings and highways that would never be used by anyone ever again when the bomb went off, right over the center of the city.

Of course, it blinded him completely, and he staggered backwards and fell over something. Then a tremendous rush of searing hot plasma whooshed through, burning everything and collapsing the roof down on top of him.

The fact that the sun was shining now meant that it had been at least a day since that notable event – maybe several. But, once again, his unusual constitution had interfered to save him. He remembered his skin burning in the hot fiery wind, but it was healthy and tan now, though most of his clothing was burnt off, and there was new stubble on his head where his hair had burnt off. That simple fact proved to him that the nuclear destruction of Nashville had been no dream.

He thought briefly of his mother, whom he'd not seen for a year or so. She had been living in Nashville, a consort to the President, Colonel Sattersby himself, so she was probably dead, along with the rest of anyone who had lived in what was now Ground Zero. He sighed with a deep sadness as he remembered her lessons on how to hide his unusual ability to heal quickly. Those lessons had stood him in good stead as an adult and a member of the Confederate Army, and now she was gone. He doubted that even she could survive being compressed into that superheated crater that took up most of his view to the southwest despite her special healing abilities.

'Go to the mountains, ' she'd told him when, at fourteen years of age, he'd been sent to military school with the other children his age. 'If anything happens, go to the mountains in Colorado. You will find friends there.'

There had been an image imprinted in his mind with those words. The image was bright in his mind even now. If there were any survivors in this mad world of death and destruction, they would be deep in the Colorado mountains.

He decided to travel by day despite the hot sun. In that manner, he could avoid any human survivors, as they would only appear at night to scavenge and hunt for sustenance. The sun played too harshly on their frail bodies for any of them to disturb his daylight travels.

It took almost four months to walk from Nashville to the mountains of Colorado. When the distant mountains became visible, radioactive craters that burned and sickened even his robust constitution seemed to completely surround the place where he knew he needed to go.

Circling around to the south, he discovered a freshwater sea that let him go around the radioactive areas, so he was able to swim along the poisonous landscape until it was behind him. Once on dry land again, he had to cross over the steep mountains, again discovering several nuke craters that he had to find a way around.

The obvious concentration of missile strikes told of a terrible war that had been fought here. Evidently others had known about this secret hideaway his mother had imprinted on his mind so many years ago, and had either tried to get in, or had attempted to destroy it completely.

At long last, he came to the entrance, or at least, within visual sighting of where it had once been. An intensely radioactive crater, where he knew the entrance had been, brought the finality of mankind's destruction home to him.

He gave out a great cry, both physical and mental, desperately needing someone to answer him. For a brief instant, he was certain that he'd felt a response, a mental recognition of some sort. But it was just an echo of his grief bouncing off the mountain as did his voice.

Except for a few pathetic survivors hiding away underground, there was no one left anywhere. He could feel in his mind that no one lived inside that mountain. If anyone ever had, they were long gone by now, or they had died, there.

He watched the sun move down and cleave itself against the jagged edges of the land as it set behind the mountains. A deep purple cloud layer formed as the light disappeared, and swallowed up the few stars, the moon and the dancing lights of the aurora borealis as it swept from west to east.

He walked in the near darkness until he came to an abandoned house he had noticed earlier in the dead forest, and spent the night there, listening to the wind and a short rainstorm. There was the sound of crickets before the rain, but no coyotes or wolves. They were gone, too. Only the insects thrived in this radioactive wilderness.

The next morning, he left the way he had come – across the mountain and back to the inland sea. He camped on the shoreline against the shelter of a cliff face and stared out at the soothing, almost unnaturally calm body of water for many hours.

Dani awoke to the sounds of someone tramping along through the dry, dying forest. Lying perfectly still, she delicately reached out and mentally brushed the mind of the strange traveler. She clamped down hard on her emotions as she realized that the man walking by only a few yards away was like her – a lost soul searching with a great longing for whoever or whatever had been inside these mountains.

From Montreal, Dani had felt the violence and the mass killing that had occurred here several months earlier and had come to investigate. She had been orphaned for as long as she could remember, and owed no allegiance to those who had been sharing her living quarters in the last city on the continent.

Why had she come here? She distinctly remembered the powerful mind that had (only momentarily) invaded hers – one that she'd felt once before – before all the strangeness began in her life. The first time had been in a dance club in Montana; a girl she picked up and had sex with right out on the dance floor. The two girls' minds had magically merged together so that she felt every touch, every erotic sensation in her sexual twin. The sex had gotten so intense that she distinctly remembered actually biting the dark girl's hairless pussy and sucking her sweet, invigorating blood from the soft, torn folds of her labia. Their mutual orgasms had been so intense that she passed out completely. When she awoke a few minutes later, the girl, and her companions, were gone.

Over the next few days, Dani had been sick and weak as (she determined this later) her body expelled all the candy she'd become addicted to. Almost a week later, she woke up drug-free and mentally refreshed. She spent a long time trying to find that dark-haired girl again, even going so far as to stalk that slut-bod and her rich boyfriend who had accompanied the girl to the club that night. But she never found her, or found out who she was and, in a day where information on absolutely everything and everyone was available via the Internet, that was extremely frustrating. It was like the girl had simply dropped out of existence.

After a time, she was forced to give up. The slut-bod's career came to an abrupt termination with 'Tootsie' impaled on the wrong end of a suicide-programmed sex robot, leaving Dani with absolutely no leads as to the whereabouts of that 'special' girl.

During her long search, Dani had also discovered that she now was, more or less, a Supergirl of sorts. Any injuries she incurred healed rapidly – almost instantaneously, in fact. After giving up her search, she experimented on herself quite dramatically, even shooting herself in the stomach, and came to the conclusion that the only way she could be killed was by decapitation (which she decided not to try).

Over the next thirty years, she became very, very wealthy as Dani Dham – Super Spy. She sure gave that Tomlin Corporation a run for their money. She'd even gotten killed a few times, but that was of no consequence, of course, with her newfound powers.

However, that was all behind her, now, as was the civilization that had supported her in her exotic lifestyle. That mind she'd searched for decades earlier suddenly made itself known to her again – in its death throes high over these very mountains, protecting something that it desperately believed needed protecting.

Stealing one of the last working flitters, she made her way from Montreal to Denver before the thing ran out of fuel. Waking up after the crash, she had to walk the rest of the way, and had spent the last two months searching through these mountains for some clue as to what had been here that was important enough for that mystery girl to be willing to die for.

Among other clues, she'd found the wrecked remains of a solar panel and followed the wiring as deep into the mountain beneath her as she could. She'd also found the wreckage of a two-mile-long launch ramp that was obviously used to fire large vehicles into space. She figured that space was where everyone had gone – unless, of course, they were all dead and buried forever inside this mountain, which was just as likely, judging from all the radioactive craters surrounding this place.

The mountain people were either all gone or all dead or some of each. That didn't seem to matter. They weren't here. That mattered.

As the strange man who had no more trouble with the sun than she did walked further along, Dani decided to follow him. She didn't have anything else to do, and his very existence intrigued her. She had thought that she alone, except for the dark girl she never found, was made the way she was. But she could feel in the stranger's mind that he was like her. Not knowing if he would become friend or enemy, she was certain of one thing: others like her existed, which meant she was no longer alone.

Dani followed the stranger's movements more with her mind than with her body, seeing no need to keep the traveler in visual range. She could feel where he was without having to see him. She felt his deep despair when he realized that his mission had failed, and there was no one here to find. She felt the half-formed thought of his mother's people never knowing about her and her offspring, gone forever into the irretrievable past.

As she felt his mind sweep over the mountain longingly searching for an answer to his mental cry, she carefully quieted her own mind down so that he wouldn't detect her. It was more than a little difficult to do, as she had a desperate need to confront this stranger face to face, or rather, mind to mind, and find out if he was truly the answer to what she had spent the last century searching for.