by James Axler
Leaving the two women behind, the men followed the guards out and down the scrubbed stone steps, turning left along the main street.
"Lot of folks," Doc Tanner commented.
"No," Ryan said. "Lots of men. No women at all."
It was true. The street was thronged with males of all ages, all neatly but plainly dressed, walking quietly along as if they were going to some sort of religious ritual. Several of them cast glances at the strangers, but nothing was said. None of them smiled or uttered a greeting. Just in front of them a boy about nine years old who had been eating some candy pushed the empty bag into his pocket. But in his haste it dropped out again and fell to the sidewalk.
"Jasper!" the father exclaimed in a voice taut with shock and anger.
"I'm sorry, only—"
The man swung a cracking roundhouse swing at his son, hitting the boy across the face. The slapping sound echoed all across the street, but only a few heads turned. The lad staggered sideways, hands flying to his mouth, blood flowing thick from a cut on his lip and oozing from his nose.
"Pick it up now," the man said, voice easing under control. "And don't ever…"
The boy picked up the crumpled piece of white paper and stuffed it in his pocket. Ryan and the other four watched in silence. The father caught them staring.
"Sorry, all. Please don't report us for… Wife's been ill and if reported we'd—" He stopped and looked more closely at them. "Outworlders! Didn't see at first. Oh, that's all right. Come on," he said to his son, dragging him by the arm along the street.
"Krysty's right, Ryan," Finnegan whispered. "Sooner we get out of this fucking ville the better."
"Yeah, Finn. With you there. Best get us some food and then mebbe hoist a wag and head on north."
They walked on in the thickening crowd. The calm of earlier had been replaced by a tenseness, an air of muted excitement. More and more eyes turned to look at the strangers, and again and again they heard the word "outworlder" repeated, plus the expression "first stone," or something that sounded like that.
The buildings were in excellent repair—far better than any ville Ryan, J.B. and Finn had ever seen. There were several stores, mostly selling plain clothes or food. Also for sale was a newspaper, the Ginnsburg Falls Regulator, whose proprietor, named on a trim board, was Isaac Sissy. That name was obviously quite popular. There was also the Sissy Temperance Hotel and the Rachel Sissy Second Pentecostal Baptist Church of His Last Coming.
"This Sissy family sure has the ville sewn up tight," J.B. said.
"Don't like the feel at all," Ryan replied, keeping his voice quiet so that none of the men and boys surging around them would catch what was said.
"Me, neither," Jak said. "Dumb creepy mutie bastards, all of 'em. Why not go, Ryan?"
"Tomorrow," Ryan said.
There were lights coming on all around the township, with lamps on street corners glowing into golden life. Doc Tanner looked around in delight. "I swear that I have not encountered such a degree of civilization in…in many long years."
"Where's the power plant?" Ryan asked the sec guard, who still walked stolidly along beside them, the heels of his boots ringing on the stone sidewalk.
"West. On Salvation Avenue. Big generators."
"You got radio?"
"Yes. Just for us. No vids. Mayor says one day. Gotta get spares. Folks up north could help. So my father said to me. Said his father 'fore him heard the same."
"That must—" Finnegan began, stopping suddenly when Ryan surreptitiously angled a foot out to trip him. The stout gunman stumbled and nearly fell over. He looked at Ryan in sudden anger, then saw the warning shake of the head and calmed himself. Ryan didn't want the sec men of Ginnsburg Falls to know anything about the faint radio message they'd heard, and Finn nodded his understanding.
"Got vids or teevee?" Jak Lauren asked.
"Said not."
"Said no vids. How's 'bout teevee?"
"No." The word was flat and final.
Ryan was surprised they hadn't been ordered to remove their blasters and leave them with the sec men. All of them had chosen not to carry their heavier guns, relying on side arms. Most of the adult males of the ville wore pistols, many of which looked like remakes.
On some of the side streets small domestic wags were parked, and just beyond the Harold Sissy Memorial High School, close by the lake, there was a big old Kenworth rig with chromed exhaust.
They followed the throng off the main drag and up the narrow slope of Quarry Road.
Several of the older men were smoking pipes, and Ryan wrinkled his nostrils at the familiar smell. He looked sideways at J.B., seeing that the Armorer had also recognized the scent.
"Maryjane, huh?" he whispered.
"How's that sit with that temperance hotel back there?" J.B. wondered. "From the Mayor Sissy Cannabis Plant?"
"Watch the tongue, friend," Ryan warned.
"Fireblast!" exclaimed Ryan Cawdor when they arrived at the quarry. It was possible that more people had gathered here than he'd ever seen in one place. He did a quick count in the gathering gloom, estimating there were something like seven thousand men and boys present.
That meant there was something wrong. Something, somewhere, that was terribly wrong.
"Doc," he said, noting the villefolk had left a circle around the five outworlders as though they were suspected of being plaguies.
"What?"
"You're the man of science."
"Was, my dear boy, was."
"What did that sign say when we came into the ville? The population?"
"Eight thousand four hundred and… and seven. Real big town for these days."
"Do me a rough count on how many's here."
The old man was silent, lips moving as he let his eyes run around the natural arena, ticking off the figures on the different ledges in the quarry. Away to their left there was some sort of disturbance in the crowd, with a phalanx of sec men pushing through.
"Something between seventy-three hundred and seventy-four hundred. Difficult to count a shifting mob of chapped-hand yokels in poor light. I counted legs and divided by two."
Finnegan was listening to the exchange. "Wait a fucking minute," he began. "If there's a total—"
"Keep your voice down," J.B. snapped. "We get the picture, Ryan. Total population eight and a half thou. Man seven and a half thou. Take off some male babies. Can't leave more'n a few hundred women in the whole ville."
All four of them pondered that. The chatter around them had subsided, and the great granite bowl was silent, with only the whistling of the wind to break the stillness. As on the previous evening, it had become bitingly cold, and a chem-storm was raging away to the north, the crimson clouds torn apart with golden curtains-of forked lightning.
There was a ramp that led to a raised podium near the middle of the quarry. The sec men were climbing it, with someone or something at their center. Jak Lauren had the keenest eyes.
"Cripple. They're wheeling."
Ryan saw him then: a tiny, frail man with a head, fringed with silvery hair, that looked too large for his body and a skin almost as pale as Jak's. They were only about fifty yards off, and Ryan could see the little hands, soft and pink, decorated with chunky rings and a golden bracelet. The legs trailed, wasted, in neat, highly polished shoes of black leather. The man wore a tailored suit of light cream cloth. As he was wheeled up to the platform, his head jiggled and rolled on his shoulders.
"Silence for Mayor Theodore Sissy," one of the sec men bellowed unnecessarily, since the crowd had fallen quiet the moment the leader of Ginnsburg Falls had appeared.
There was a microphone at the front of the stage, already adjusted to the height at which Mayor Sissy could speak into it comfortably from his chair. His voice was soft and trembling, like a nervous child.
"Bring them before us."
The stillness was broken by a murmur of sound that slithered around the quarry like some great rustling reptile.
A half-dozen sec men, including the leader of the patrol in the jeep, moved into the center of the quarry with two people in their midst.
"Let there be light," the cripple on the platform breathed. There was the sharp sound of a lever being thrown, and the whole place was flooded by arc lamps that stood on pylons circling the stone arena.
The stark glare made Jak's white hair stand out like spun magnesium. All round them the men and boys backed farther off, muttering and pointing. Fortunately they were distracted by the events at the middle of the quarry.
"Here stand Jolyon Manscomb and the whore. Taken in the act of adulterous lust. It is admitted that the whore lured him, as Eve lured Adam, with her cunt filled with honey. But both pay the price."
The woman was slightly built, with dull brown hair cropped raggedly at shoulder level. She was dressed in a short robe, like a shift, of some coarse material that looked as if it had been used as sacking. It was dyed a vivid, sickly yellow. The man, whose head was bowed and balding, was wearing a similar robe, colored flat ocher. Both of them were barefoot and both had their hands tied in front of them with a thick rope.
Ryan had noticed that he stood on uneven ground. It was covered with a thick layer of stones, ranging in size from pebbles to jagged chunks of granite as large as a man's fist. There were similar piles of stones all about the floor of the quarry, the nearest only a dozen paces from where he waited with J.B., Jak, Finn and Doc Tanner. He licked his lips, finding them suddenly dry as he realized what the stones were for.
"Outworlders, step forward," the little man in the wheelchair commanded, reading slowly from a creased piece of paper that one of the sec men had handed him. "Cawdor, Dix, Finnegan, Lauren and Tanner. All come to stand before me."
Conscious of every man's eyes upon them, the five stepped across the uneven ground, picking their way around the piles of stone. Ryan noticed that the woman in the sack robe watched them, but the man at her side remained with his head bowed, mumbling to himself, shoulders shaking as he wept.
"Welcome, outworlders, to Ginnsburg Falls." The little man had a face reminiscent of pictures Ryan had once seen in an old book of maps—chubby cheeks, pursed as though to blow a great wind across the quarry, eyes twinkling coldly in the flat light.
"Like a damnably evil cherub," Doc Tanner whispered.
That had been the word Ryan wanted. Cherub. But with a darker side of power and evil.
"When we have men in from beyond our borders, we allow them the privilege of aiding our rituals. You are blessed that you have an opportunity to prove your worth on your first night among us."
"Do he mean what I think he fucking means?" Finn said, looking around in disgust.
"Can the talk, Finn," Ryan hissed. "You'll get us all chilled."
Mayor Sissy had stopped, the merry glitter vanishing for a moment. When he resumed, the voice was a shade or two less amicable.
"The punishment of Jolyon Manscomb and the whore is now to begin. The shame is made worse by the help of the outworlders. By their actions shall they also be judged. Sec Commander?"
"Sir."
"Begin. Remember, all present, that you may share the stoning only when one full minute has passed on the counting of the sec commander here. To begin too early would disappoint me."
Ryan reached up and eased the patch over his left eye socket. He rubbed his cheek and found that he was sweating despite the cold.
"Are you ready, outworlders?"
Obviously an answer was required. Ryan coughed to clear his throat. "Yes. We're ready."
"Then begin."
Ryan didn't move. The others at his side tensed like hunting dogs. Without looking, he knew that fingers would be questing for the butts of blasters. He also knew that if they made one wrong move, death was a dozen heartbeats away.
"Begin, outworlders, or join the fool and the whore." Bending slowly, Ryan reached down with his right hand and picked up a large, jagged stone, his fingers tightening around it.
Chapter Ten
ALL FIVE OF THEM had picked up stones and were waiting.
"Now!" Mayor Sissy snapped.
"It were well done quickly," Doc Tanner said, surprisingly taking the lead. He threw his rock with a clumsy roundhouse motion, like a young girl attempting to pitch for the first time. The stone bounced yards short.
"Go closer," the cracking voice from the loudspeakers urged.
Ryan threw next, aiming at the man. The stone hissed through the chilled evening air, hitting Jolyon Manscomb high on the right side of his chest. He cried out, more in surprise than protest or pain, and staggered a little. His head remained bowed. The woman looked across at Ryan and his friends, shouting something flavored with disgust and anger.
J.B. and Finnegan threw together, both aiming at the man. Both their rocks struck home, one on the thigh, the other gashing Manscomb's cheek, sending blood flowing over his neck to dapple the yellow robe. In the brightness of the artificial light, the blood was almost black. There was a murmur of excitement from the watchers, like the sound Ryan had heard in gaudy houses when a pesthole slut was stripping, the moment when she would ease her satin skirt down over her hips, showing the dark vee of hair, revealing the spread lips of her sex.
The sound was the same—a tongue-smacking anticipation of what had been glimpsed, coupled with the knowledge there was much more to be seen.
Jak Lauren threw his stone underhand, like a child playing ducks and drakes on a town pool. It hit the woman on the forearm, just above the binding of the ropes. There was the clear, brittle crack of a bone snapping, and she screamed very loudly once, which brought a wave of laughter from the watchers.
"Mutie bastard," she cried at the boy.
"More," the little man insisted, leaning forward on the platform to see better. "More and faster and harder. It is not enough to cast only the first stones."
They threw a second volley of rocks, then another. Several of them were accurately aimed, one knocking the man clear off his feet. The whore was hit three times, one stone drawing blood from her leg, a hand's span below the right knee.
"Thirty seconds gone, thirty to go," the sec commander called out in a stentorian voice.
When they were felled, both of them struggled patiently to their feet, standing where they had before, waiting for more stones.
Above all, Ryan was a realist. He had sensed that the hunched figure in the wheelchair had been waiting for him to refuse, for one of them to refuse to take part in the obscene rites.
Now, all around the quarry, men and boys stooped, filling their hands with stones. Even the youngest lads picked up round pebbles, hopping from foot to foot in their eagerness to begin.
"Into Thy hands we commend their spirits," Doc Tanner said in a subdued, conversational voice.
One of them—Ryan thought it was probably Jak—hit the man in the lower belly, producing a shrill, womanish scream. The woman was knocked to her knees, but she rose again almost at once, her eyes locked on Ryan's face as if he were the sole aggressor.
"Fifteen seconds. Make ready."
Ryan took aim and threw. They were only about twenty-five feet from the yellow-clad victims, and it was hard to miss. Also, to miss accidentally might be spotted and treated as deliberate by the bright-eyed cripple above them. Out of the corner of his eye, Ryan noticed with a wave of revulsion that Sissy's stubby little fingers were busy in his lap, rubbing at a massive erection that distended the front of the tailored pants.
Since time was nearly up, he knew this could be the last rock he needed to throw. Then his part in the butchery could cease. He aimed at the woman's body, hoping only to strike her a glancing blow. But a clumsy throw from Doc Tanner came wheeling wildly in, hitting her on the foot at a second bounce. She fell to her knees at the very moment that Ryan released his own last rock.
Almost in slow motion he watched it wheeling toward the whore. His own lips began to shape the word no, as if it might change the flight of the missile.
The woman tur
ned, dirt on her slender throat, hair streaked with mud. The bright lights made her eyes look glassy, as though she were blind. The sharp-edged hunk of granite, the quartz glittering like diamonds, hit her on the right side of her face between nose and ear. It found its target with such venomous precision that it cracked her cheekbone, smashing her right eye to a weeping pulp. Blood, mingling with the aqueous humors, poured over her face, soaking the shift she wore. The blow was so savage that it sent her spinning over, unable with hands bound to do anything to save herself.
The crowd whooped and cheered, and the thin little voice over the speakers congratulated him.
"Wonderful throw, Outworlder Cawdor, You will do well here in Ginnsburg Falls."
"Time," came the command from the sec man.
"YOU KILLED THEM!"
Ryan nodded. "No choice, lover. If we hadn't, we'd have been butchered. They were just waiting for it. And the man and woman would have died anyway. What the fuck would the point have been in that? Seven deaths instead of two. Five friends as well as two total strangers."
"There wasn't anything you could have done? You couldn't have argued?"
"With Mayor Theodore Sissy? I tell you, Krysty, if you'd been there…"
They were back at their dormitory. The men had been reluctant to talk about what they'd seen and done, but both Lori and Krysty were eager to hear about it. Both had been shocked into silence at first when they had heard the horrible story.
"Like raining," Jak said.
"I feared for our lives," Doc Tanner added. His face was lined with fatigue, and he sat slumped in a smart armchair.
"Fucking murderous. Only thing I figure is that they died fucking fast. I seen mebbe two hundred rocks hit 'em in the first ten seconds," Finnegan said.
J.B. nodded. "I guess so. Man's skull was soft when he hit the dirt. Like a bag of beans, so many breaks in it."
"What happened after it was over?" Lori asked, holding on to Doc's arm.
"Nothing. Sec men led us back here. Everyone was rolling high in the street. Talking and talking, like they'd been to a great show." Ryan shook his head in disgust. "I feel fucking dirty, I tell you. I killed me a lot of folks in my time, but never because some fucking gimp with a squeaking voice tells me to."