James Axler - Deathlands 27 - Ground Zero

by Ground Zero [lit]

  "Probably a store, or a garage," Mildred suggested. "Reckon they're old oil stains on the floor over there by the door. Entrance is wide enough for that."

  Ryan looked at the front wall, where they'd come in. But most of it had been reduced to rubble, making it impossible to speculate any further on what the place might've been.

  "Been a lot of things," Emma said very quietly. "It was a store for food at the end. Had been a garage." She stared up at the exposed beams. "Man hanged himself from there. Little man. Family died in the first strike. He had rad cancer."

  "Jesus," Mildred whispered. "That is one very scary talent, lady."

  "I BELIEVE that Jupiter Pluvius has finally relented on us poor mortals," Doc said, peering out of the building into the early-evening gloom.

  "You mean it's stopped raining, then say that, Doc, instead of your damned archaic old quotes."

  He bowed to Mildred, unable to hide his pleasure at having got a reaction from her. "I had forgotten that most women have small Latin and less Greek, ma'am."

  Ryan broke up the pending argument, standing and putting the Steyr onto his shoulder. "Let's move it, people. Be dark in a couple of hours."

  Everyone got to their feet, adjusting their baggage and their blasters. Krysty was first to the entrance when she suddenly stopped as though she'd been poleaxed. Emma was walking close at her heels, and she, too, stopped in her tracks, giving a small gasp of shock.

  Krysty spun and the two women stared at each other, inches apart.

  "Yes," Emma said, though Krysty hadn't said a word. "I feel them, too."

  "What?" said Ryan. "Danger?"

  "Stickies, I think." Krysty shook her head. "Very close. Coming this way."

  The doomie closed her eyes a moment. "They were hidden. Mebbe in a building, like us. There's about a dozen of them, and they have three norms with them."

  "They prisoners?" Jak was immediately at Emma's side.

  "Mebbe."

  "You carry a blaster, Emma?" Ryan asked.

  "No."

  "Best borrow one."

  J.B. unslung the Uzi, offering it to Dean, much to the boy's delight. "You have this and give your Browning Hi-Power to Emma."

  "Thanks, but no thanks."

  "You have to carry a weapon in Deathlands."

  Emma shook her head, brushing her bangs back off her eyes. "I've never found it necessary."

  Ryan looked at her. "How long have you been out and about, Emma?"

  "How do you mean?"

  "I don't believe someone your age, looking as good as you do, can possibly have been walking loose in Deathlands for all that long. Not staying untouched. Tell me I'm wrong."

  She blushed and lowered her golden eyes. "In your way, you can 'see' as good as me, Ryan. Tell you later. But now there's no time. Muties are getting closer."

  "Take my gun," Dean said eagerly. "Easy to use. Point it and squeeze the trigger."

  J.B. offered more advice. "But brace your wrist with your other hand. Powerful blaster and it'll kick some. Don't want you with a broken wrist or damaged tendons from being careless."

  "All right. Under protest." She took the offered 9 mm blaster and tucked it into her leather belt.

  "Better to have a gun." Ryan began.

  "And not need it," J.B. continued.

  "Rather than need a gun." Krysty said.

  "And not have it," Jak concluded. "Favorite saying Trader."

  Emma's attention had wandered, looking out into the dusk. "They've stopped," she said quietly.

  "Close?" Ryan glanced at Krysty, who shrugged.

  Emma replied. "I think so. That way." She pointed with a long forefinger.

  "Camping for the night," J.B. suggested.

  "Probably. If we're lucky we should be able to circle clear past and backtrack them. Find somewhere in the next hour to camp ourselves."

  "They got prisoners!" Emma exclaimed. "Surely there are some things that a person can't just walk around?"

  "Twelve or so stickies against seven-or eight-of us. In poor light. Not great odds."

  J.B. agreed with Ryan. "And we don't know who the prisoners are. The first rule of all for survival in Deathlands is to look out for yourself and your close friends. Rest of the world has to look out for itself."

  "What coldhearts you are!"

  "Realists," Krysty said.

  Then, in the distance the screaming started, high and thin, like a stallion under the gelding irons.

  Ryan took a slow, deep breath, looking at Emma, "All right."

  Chapter Seventeen

  "What's the big water to our left?" Ryan whispered. "Is it Lake Potomac?"

  Jak was at his side. He had tied his hair back, minimizing the startling flare of white. "Must be," he said.

  "There was a warehouse or something like that in this direction. I saw it before the storm started and we took cover. Guess they're in there."

  Jak had the best night vision of anyone in the party, though his pigmentation problem meant that he saw much less well in bright sunlight.

  Now he stopped, steadying himself on the uneven muddy ground, peering into the dark. "Think I can make out the glow of a fire," he said.

  "Sounds like stickies. Torture and a fire. Nothing makes the mutie sickos happier."

  Krysty nudged him, pointing with a toss of the head toward Emma. "Lay off muties, lover."

  "Oh, yeah, sure. Sorry."

  The first burst of screaming hadn't been repeated, but they had caught the sound of raucous laughter.

  "One's chilled," Emma said as they crept closer to the ruined building. "Can't tell how." Her neat, round face was as white as parchment.

  "That is probably a merciful blessing for you," Doc said solemnly.

  "Everything was blurred by his pain." She shuddered. "So many times I wish this curse could be lifted from me."

  AFTER SOME CONSIDERATION, and a discussion with J.B., Ryan decided to split his small force, sending half one way around the wrecked warehouse, the rest coming in from the opposite direction.

  He took Krysty and Dean, along with Jak. "Emma, go with J.B., Mildred and Doc."

  "Mind if change with Doc?" Jak asked. "More equal divide."

  "I don't see why." He stopped speaking as Krysty touched him gently on the arm. "What?"

  "Doesn't make much difference, lover." He lowered his voice. "Then why?"

  "Use your eye. See how Jak's been sticking closer to the woman than wasps to honey."

  "Oh. Yeah."

  He turned to Jak. "Sure, that's fine. You can go with Emma. With Emma, J.B. and Mildred."

  "Go in together," the Armorer asked. Ryan thought for a while. The wind was blowing toward them from the building, carrying the scent of wood smoke. And of burned meat.

  "Looks like an entrance around the far side. You go for that. Give you.three minutes. At that point we'll pour it in through the broken window on this side. All right?"

  J.B. nodded. "Sure. Three minutes from-" he checked his wrist chron, "-now."

  THE FIRE WAS BRIGHT, indicating that the muties had brought some dry wood with them. Ryan counted fourteen of them, mostly sitting around the blaze, two of them holding a struggling naked male norm between them. All of the stickies were also male, which meant a hunting or a killing party.

  A corpse lay in the shadows close by the black hole of the front entrance. It wasn't possible in the gloom to see what precisely had caused its death, but the screams had told their own story.

  Ryan held up two fingers to the others. But Krysty shook her head, showing three fingers, then cutting one in half with her other hand.

  That meant she saw two living and one dead.

  Where was the other living prisoner? Then he spotted him. The movement of the stickies near the fire had hidden him for a moment. He was a tall man with a full beard, wrists tied behind him. The flickering of the firelight showed the livid marks on his skin, left by the hundreds of tiny voracious suckers that lined the hands and fingers of stickies, the biz
arre mutation that had given them their feared name.

  Ryan glanced at his chron, angling it toward the light, seeing that there was still thirty-five seconds to go before their synchronized attack.

  In that moment of inattention he missed the brutal slaughter of the second of the norms.

  He was thrown to the ground, and a burning branch thrust into his mouth. A piece of stick had been forced between his jaws to hold them apart.

  There was a soft, muffled explosion and a burst of yellow-white fire from his parted lips. The whole body writhed as though possessed of demons, while the stickies all whooped and clapped their suckered hands together.

  "Holy fuck!" Dean breathed, clutching the Uzi tighter, as if it were a lucky totem against the unholy evil that he'd just witnessed.

  "Oh, the horror, the horror," Doc said, his voice trembling with disgust and anger.

  "Black powder poured down his throat." Ryan's finger tightened on the trigger of the SIG-Sauer. "Time to go and make Deathlands a little bit cleaner."

  "I'm for that," Krysty whispered. The hand on the chron ticked to the three-minute mark.

  "Now," Ryan said.

  "A MASSACRE OF THE MOST satisfactory kind," Doc boomed, his smoking Le Mat in one hand, the unsheathed rapier in the other. The ancient Civil War blaster had taken out three of the stickies with its single shotgun round. And another had gone down to the needled point of the sword.

  Dean had jumped in, the automatic Uzi machine-pistol braced at his hip, scattering all twenty rounds on full-auto, the 9 mm bullets toppling over the unsuspecting muties like fish in a barrel.

  Ryan and Krysty had shot five between them, while J.B. and his assault party had taken out any survivors and the wounded.

  Everyone had played their part-everyone except for Emma.

  Now she stood shaking, Jak's arm around her shoulders, her borrowed Browning Hi-Power still tucked into the belt around the black skirt, not just unfired-undrawn.

  She was trembling like an aspen in a hurricane, eyes brimming with unshed tears, fingers knotting in front of her. If Jak hadn't stepped in and put his arm around her, it seemed likely that the young woman would have fallen to the bloodied dirt.

  "So much killing since we first met," she stammered. "All my fault."

  "That's crap," Ryan said briskly, knowing there was little point in offering softness and sympathy to someone so close to the edge of a breakdown.

  J.B. had quickly moved, light-footed, from stickie to stickie, checking that all were dead, using one of his pair of stilettos to slit open the throat of the only mutie that still showed any sign of life.

  He went to kneel by the semiconscious prisoner, carefully slicing through the whipcord that bound his wrists and ankles together.

  Ryan moved to join him, while the others gathered around Emma, whose golden eyes had rolled back in their sockets as she subsided into Jak's arms.

  The Armorer glanced back, seeing the tableau in the bright light of the stickies' fire. "Passed out," he said. "Never fired the blaster. Can't walk without stopping all the time. What kind of a useless life did the girl have before we ran into her? Answer me that, Ryan. She's a total liability. Like riding with a hoof-split burrow."

  "I'm interested in how and where she lived," Ryan admitted, "but this isn't the time. How is he?" He pointed with the SIG-Sauer to the naked prisoner.

  The bearded man blinked his eyes, wincing at the pain from the dozens of tiny, raw sores that covered his body. "You done the fuckers?"

  J.B. nodded. "We did."

  "All?"

  "Every last one."

  Ryan knelt by the man. "Just take it easy," he said. "Safe for now."

  "What happened to the rest of my friends?"

  "How many were there?" Ryan asked.

  "Six of us to start. Sec men from the ville of Baron Sharpe. On patrol."

  J.B. and Ryan exchanged glances across the top of the man's head.

  The sec man coughed. "Got any water, friends?"

  "Not much." J.B. offered him a sip from his own canteen. "Could do with fresh."

  "I'll show you. When I'm fit. Plenty when you know where to look."

  "Likely all your friends are chilled." Ryan sat back on his heels, reloading the blaster while he spoke. "There were only two more of you here when we arrived. Both done for."

  "Others could have escaped," Krysty offered, joining the three men.

  "No. Stickies ambushed us and." He looked up at her, his eyes widening at the sight of her brilliantly bright hair. "Ye gods! You're a woman!" His hands covered his groin.

  Krysty grinned at him. "Last time I looked I was. You hide whatever you got, mister. Doesn't bother me. Won't be anything I haven't seen before."

  Ryan looked over his shoulder. "Dean!"

  "What is it, Dad?"

  "Find the tallest of the stickies and peel off his shirt and pants. Long as they aren't too bloody."

  "Sure thing."

  The man had laid back, fingers cupping his genitals. His face was long and narrow, with prominent teeth, like the skull of a horse. He looked on the ragged side of exhausted.

  "Was saying. Stickies came at us when we stopped for a noon break. No warning. No word of muties in the vicinity of the ville. Nothing."

  The Armorer stood, reaching out to take the Uzi from Dean, who'd just arrived with a ragged red shirt and white pants, splattered with a ripple of crimson.

  "Best I could get, Dad," Dean said.

  J.B. started to reload the automatic pistol, tutting at the boy. "Full-auto, boy! You think bullets grow on trees? Twenty rounds gone in a couple seconds." The firelight danced off his glasses as he lowered his head to check the blaster. "Still, not many wasted."

  One eye on Krysty, the man wriggled into the clothes, turning the cord that had bound him into a makeshift belt. "Better," he said.

  "How far's the ville?" Ryan asked. "Can we make it tonight from here?"

  "Not sure where 'here' is, mister. Got a blow on the head first off. Dived deep into the black pool, if you take my meaning."

  "Wait for dawn," Krysty suggested. "Not a bad place to rest for the night. Roof, walls and a fire. There's some fresh wood by the entrance."

  Ryan uncoiled himself, walking over to where Jak, Mildred and Doc were gathered around Emma. She was conscious, and Mildred had found a half-full canteen by the body of one of the stickies.

  "Sorry," she said quietly. "I'm like a gull around your necks, aren't I?"

  "Albatross, dear child," said Doc, who was fiddling with the task of reloading the Le Mat and realigning the scattergun hammer.

  "How's that?" she asked.

  "The bird. 'And a good south wing sprung up behind, the albatross did follow.' From "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The ill-fated bird was an albatross hung around the neck. Not a gull."

  "Sure," the young woman said. "Tired. Sorry for letting you all down." She closed her eyes and lay back again, her head cradled in Jak's lap.

  Ryan raised his voice. "We'll stay the night here, people. First job is to get all the bodies outside. Let the scavengers have them. We'll set a double watch. Might be more of the stickies around here."

  Mildred had gone over to the wounded man, using some of the water and a torn length of shirt to bathe the weeping, circular sores.

  "Hope they're not infected," she said.

  "Have a good bath when we get to the ville tomorrow. Baron Sharpe'll be pleased and make you all welcome. But all of those dead."

  "Five dead and one living's a lot better than six dead," Ryan pointed out.

  "Specially when I'm the one living. Look, I'm Sec man Joshua Morgan. And I haven't thanked you yet."

  Mildred looked at Ryan, addressing the sec man. "No trouble. Some things a man just doesn't ride around," she said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  "The interesting thing is what the dogs did during the night," Doc said.

  "The dogs didn't do nothing," Dean replied, puzzled.
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