IT WAS LIKE an air lock, a small room set between the double sets of doors, the outer, looking almost as if they were made of sec steel, with massive bolts and triple locks. The inside doors, where Joaquin and the others waited, weren't quite as impenetrable, but they were still solid, with steel bolts and a double sec lock.
"The place is built rather more like a fortress than a zoological collection," Doc observed.
"Right." J.B. looked around the anteroom. "Dark night! What are you trying to keep out of here, Joaquin?"
"Not trying to keep anyone out."
"Then why." The Armorer nodded. "Yeah. I get it. Not stopping anything from coming in here. The doors are to stop anything getting out."
"Right." He pushed them open.
The first thing Ryan noticed was the smell, a bitter, acrid stench. The second thing he noticed was the noise.
Chapter Twenty-One
The smell of the baron's collection was vaguely familiar to Ryan. It was only afterward, in the calm of remembering, that it came to him.
There'd once been a time when he'd holed up on a ledge at the back of a large cave, not far from the wilderness of Canyon de Chelly, down on the Colorado Plateau. A combination of ill luck had left him ill clothed and unarmed, and he'd stayed up on the ledge for four days and nights, unable to come down for the family of mountain lions who regarded the cave as home. They couldn't quite reach the ledge, no matter how they tried.
And by the Lord, they tried!
The smell of that cavern was graven in Ryan's nose forever and a day-bitter, gripping the back of the throat, overlaid with a feral taint of fearsome hatred.
The noise wasn't like anything that he'd ever heard before, not like anything that any of them had ever heard.
"By stone and water!" Emma exclaimed her golden eyes rolling in their sockets as she stumbled. She would have fallen to the damp stones if it hadn't been for Jak's lightning reflex in catching her.
"Affects some women like that," Joaquin said. "Best take her out of here into the fresh air. It only gets worse. You need a hand, son?"
"No. Manage."
He picked the woman up in his arms as though she weighed only feathers and carried her effortlessly out through the double set of doors.
"Strong little bastard, ain't he? Can't be much over a hundred pounds, skinny-dipped," Joaquin said admiringly. "I never seen hair like his. Noticed that Baron Sharpe saw it, as well."
"Let's get on," Krysty said, wrinkling her nose at the fetid air.
"Fine. Most people see this, they don't like to talk much. Most of things in here sort of speak for themselves. Don't need labels or nothing. But if you got questions."
None of them had any.
RYAN'S MEMORY of that low, dimly lighted building was confused and blurred.
If you lived and traveled in Deathlands, then you were constantly aware of the rich variety of mutated life that the nukecaust and the long winters had left behind. But it was a bizarre and unsettling experience to see so many extreme genetic deviations all gathered in that single building.
One thing that crossed Ryan's mind was the extreme danger that had to have been endured to capture some of the more lethal examples and safely cage them.
There was the scorpion, nearly a yard long, its barbed sting as long as a man's finger. It sat crouched in a stone-filled container, lined with wired glass for security.
A colony of red ants was shown in an earth-filled cross-sectional tank, the smallest of which was two inches long.
Several snakes, the largest of them a mutie rattler, fully twelve feet in length, lay coiled in its cage, seeming asleep, the remains of several rabbits rotting near it. Krysty moved close, and it reared and struck at her with murderous ferocity, the blunt head striking the armored glass like a sledgehammer, leaving a slimy trail of milky poison eighteen inches long.
"Gaia!"
"Told you keep away," Joaquin said.
One of the odder exhibits was a seemingly normal family of beavers in a tank that had been half filled with muddy water and a few logs.
"They don't look mutie," Dean said, peering cautiously at the animals.
"Watch!" Joaquin went toward a series of metal boxes with slits in their tops. He opened one and pulled out a handful of white mice, tossing them into the beaver's tank, so that they landed on the dirt.
The nearest of the beavers, lazily preening its glossy fur, turned slowly to look at the scared rodents.
"By the Three Kennedys!" Doc exclaimed, watching the horrific transformation.
It was as if the animal had skulls within its own skull. Its nostrils curled back and its mouth opened. A second set of razored teeth moved slowly outward, with a third set of dripping fangs emerging from within those. There was a faint hissing sound from the mutie beaver, before it lunged with its hideously elongated skull, snapping up the nearest mouse and sucking it into the slimy pit of its mouth.
A second beaver moved over with a sickening, graceful speed, unlike the normal amiable waddle of the breed. The same change took place, and the mouse was gone. Moments later the muddy water boiled as the rest of the tribe of mutie animals surged out and devoured the remainder of the mice.
Once they were devoured, the retractable jaws slid back into place, and all that sat there in the tank was a family of harmless beavers.
Ryan and the others stood still, watching them, paralyzed by the horror of it.
J.B. broke the silence. "Who collects these things for the baron?"
"Trying to get us sec men to do it, but I'm opposed to it. Don't mind patrolling around the ville and listening for word of strange new muties. But we pay jack-good jack-for outsiders to bring them in here. They get money and they take the risks. Way it goes."
"High price," Mildred said.
"Right there, lady," Joaquin agreed. "I believe those flat-tailed little boogers in that tank there took the lives of eight men before they were installed safely in here. One of the baron's very special favorites. Stands and watches them, he does, hour by hour."
Ryan was beginning to feel dizzy, the warm, moist stinking air wrapping itself around him like a noisome shroud, as was the bedlam of noise racketing about the concrete-walled building-barking, hissing, screeching, clicking and howling, all going on endlessly.
Joaquin demonstrated a monstrously bloated spider, covered in a sickly yellow fur. Larger than the biggest dinner plate, it lay still on a bed of white sand. The sec man dropped in a bright crimson finch, first breaking its wings. It fluttered helplessly to the floor of the tank, aware of the lethal menace of the spider.
"Sure it's alive?" Ryan asked. "Seems like. Fireblast!"
From some hidden orifice below its belly, the creature sent out a tiny thread of sticky silk, trapping the bird, spinning it at dazzling speed, binding it into a cocoon until only its straining head was uncovered.
Only then did the spider deign to move itself toward its prey. Its long legs articulated like crooked fingers, lifting it from the sand and carrying it slowly across the tank.
"I don't think I want to see any more of this," Mildred said. "I'll go outside and check how Emma is. Catch the rest of you later." The door clanged behind her.
The spider lowered itself, huge eyes fixed on the struggling little bird. Bringing the serrated pincers nearer, it neatly nipped the beaked head off, a tiny spray of blood dappling its prickling fur.
"Think I'll join Mildred and the others," Krysty said. "Limit to what I can watch. See you later, friends." Again came the sonorous boom of the door shutting.
For the price of two new pins, Ryan would have given it up and followed her. But Dean was still endlessly fascinated, running from cage to tank, calling out for his father to come look at some fresh aberration of Nature.
He swallowed hard, tasting the bitterness of bile at the back of his throat and followed Joaquin and the boy, J.B. and Doc trailing behind.
Amid all of that demonic collection, Ryan only noticed some of the more gross exhibits
, the rest passing in a haze of horror and disgust.
There were three-headed sheep and ten-legged pigs; a furless bear, endlessly pacing up and down a tiny, cramped enclosure, banging its head against the wall, leaving a trail of blood wherever it stepped; a vulture, raw-necked and crimson-eyed, with leathery scales instead of feathers; a flock of tiny, cheeping jays, with vicious, hooked claws lining the fore edges of their wings; a boar, with the longest tusks that Ryan had ever seen. Curved and needle-tipped, they were so heavy that the poor beast could hardly lift its head from the urine-sodden straw.
Many of the mutie creatures in Sharp's zoo were in surprisingly poor condition, many of them galled and covered in scaly sores and raw ulcers.
"Why doesn't the baron bother to have them cared for?" Ryan asked.
"You fancy going in to clean them out?" Joaquin answered his own question. " 'Course you wouldn't. Sharpie uses prisoners now and again for it. Offers them life if they look after the collection. Trouble is, no matter how much care they take, the odds are stacked against them. On average, they don't survive more than two or three days. Just look in that next cage, for instance."
It was better than twenty feet across, half-filled with more of the fine white sand, its surface smooth and undisturbed. A few broken branches lay jumbled in the corner, but there was no sign of anything living.
"What is it?" Dean asked, keeping a healthy distance from the thick glass front.
"Watch." A broad grin split the sec man's face. "I'll put in a couple of fine big rabbits."
He vanished around the back and they saw a white-painted hatch slide open at the rear of the cage. Joaquin's hand appeared, holding a couple of black-and-white rabbits by their floppy ears. He dropped them in. Both the animals seemed paralyzed with terror, their fur twitching.
The sergeant came back to join the others, looking in, seeing that the rabbits hadn't moved at all, huddled together for comfort, watching the shining sand.
"Speed things up a little," he said, rapping sharply on the glass with his knuckles.
"Dark night," the Armorer whispered.
Ryan realized that his mouth was hanging open, and he closed it slowly.
Dean took a couple of steps back, hands going up in front of himself as if he feared for his life.
Doc half drew the rapier from its ebony sheath, his eyes widening in shock.
It had all been so quick.
The surface of the sand rippled, then, just for a fraction of a second, a funnel seemed to open below the rabbits, and they totally disappeared. Another faint disturbance of the sand, then all was completely still.
"What the fuck was that?" Ryan said.
Joaquin laughed out loud. "Truth is, we don't know what it is. Wizened old guy arrived with it in a steel barrel, about a year ago. Told us how to build the cage and fill it with the sand. Went in himself and opened up the barrel. Fed it some rabbits and Sharpie fell in love with it. It's one of his favorites. Calls it 'Rupert.' No idea why. Man took his jack and we never saw or heard of him again. Claimed he brought it all the way from Mexico, but we don't know."
"I think we've seen enough, thanks, Joaquin," Ryan said. "Come on, Dean."
"Aw, Dad, there's more."
"More of the same, son."
Joaquin didn't seem all that anxious to continue with his guided tour of the collection. The light in the long narrow building was dim, but it looked to Ryan that the sec man's face was noticeably more pale than it had been.
"I would cast my vote for departing from this seventh circle of the inferno," Doc stated. "And I would further propose that we do not hasten back here again. Not ever. May the Lord have mercy on the souls of these poor benighted creatures, cast into eternal darkness by the madness and ambition of mankind."
"Hear, hear, Doc," J.B. said.
They were standing next to a narrow glass tank that held dozens of small fish that seemed to be all jagged teeth and mouth. Ryan recognized them as being voracious piranhas.
"We'll go then," Joaquin said.
"Wait a minute."
"What is it, Cawdor?"
"This the whole of the collection?"
"What do you mean?"
"Simple question. This building. What we've seen here. Is this all there is?"
"Sure."
"What's through that other exit, down at the far end? Double-locked sec doors?"
"Mind your piss-ant business, outlander!"
"More of the collection?"
The sec man shook his head, hand dropping to the butt of an indeterminate revolver on his hip.
"Nothing for you to see," he insisted.
Ryan decided not to push it.
"All right, stay cool," he said, turning to lead the way toward the main exit.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The air outside the thick-walled building tasted like the finest nectar. J.B. hawked and spit, again and again, trying to clear his mouth and throat from the vile taste and smell.
Doc waved his hand in front of his face. "If only one could obtain such a thing as a pomander, scented with fresh cloves. But one cannot."
Ryan looked up at the sky, seeing that heavy clouds were again hanging over the ville, carried on a gentle northerly wind. Though it was still only the midpart of the afternoon, the light was dismal, fading fast.
"Could do with a drink to wash that filth out of my mouth," he said. "Water in your rooms." Joaquin locked and bolted the doors. "Supper's at six. You got chrons? Yeah, I saw them. Don't be late. Baron doesn't care for late."
Dean was the only one who didn't seem to have been at all affected by the horrors that dwelled within the baron's zoo, and he kept up a ceaseless flow of chatter, all the way back into the main house.
"That lizard with about a dozen tails, Dad! How about that? Not as good as the beavers, though. Way all those sets of teeth came sliding out like on gear wheels. That thing in the sand that chilled those rabbits. What about that, Dad? Huh?"
Ryan gave the boy back mumbled monosyllables, locked away into his own thoughts. His uneasy concern about the collection was made stronger by the sec man's refusal to allow them to see the rear part of the big building. He wondered whether it would be worth the risk to try to get into it that night, or safer to play the cards close to the chest.
Should they get away from the ville at the first opportunity?
He couldn't decide.
KRYSTY WAS WAITING for them in the corridor, looking anxiously to see if any of the sec men had kept them company.
"Trouble, lover," she whispered.
"Where?"
She beckoned them all into the end room of the corridor, which had been given to Jak, Doc and Dean.
Emma lay on the bed, as waxen as a corpse, eyes closed tight.
She was barefoot, her dress spread out over her legs. Jak sat on the bed at her side, holding her right hand in his left.
"Bad, Ryan," he said.
"What's happened? She fainted?"
Mildred had been bathing the young woman's forehead with water from the flowered china washbowl. "Not a faint. Been talking but not making sense. Could have been going close to that disgusting building and those freaks inside it."
"She's a sensitive." Krysty carefully closed the door behind them, having checked that the passage was still deserted. "Easy to lose balance."
"Oh," Jak gasped, as the fingers tightened around his, turning his flesh even whiter.
"The waxwing has been slain, brethren," she said in a piercing whisper.
"Fever?" J.B. asked.
"No, John. Pulse is slow, around forty. Temperature feels a tad low, if anything."
Her eyes flicked open, the golden light seeming to illuminate the whole room with their intensity. For a moment they weren't focused, then they sought out Ryan, settling on his face. Emma sat up, without any help from Jak.
"Feeling better?" Ryan asked.
But she ignored him. Though her eyes drilled into him, Ryan had the uncomfortable feeling that the dark-haired
woman wasn't actually seeing him.
She was looking through him, past him, within him, beyond him.
When she began to speak, Emma's voice was oddly flat and strained, as though she were being forced by someone to deliver a speech that she'd barely managed to learn.
"I stand upon a beach and the mists close about me. I cannot breath for the fumes, and the noise of the sea beats in my ears. They confront me in this place of death and darkness. But I do not fear them."
James Axler - Deathlands 27 - Ground Zero Page 16