James Axler - Deathlands 27 - Ground Zero

by Ground Zero [lit]

  "We all die some time," Doc offered. "Just a matter of where and when."

  "I shall die within the next two days."

  "No," Jak said, almost shouting.

  "Yes, dear friend," Emma stated gently. "I see you alive and safe. And Doc the same."

  "Do you see whether we manage to escape from this durance ville?" Doc asked. "And what of Ryan and the others? Do you see their fate?"

  Emma shook her head. "No. I think that you and Jak will escape safely, but I can't make out any details. I see the death of Baron Sharpe."

  Jak let go of her. "What?"

  "Oh, yes. My death is linked with his. We go together into the blackness. Almost hand in hand. Perhaps an hour will pass, but not longer."

  Jak suddenly opened his arms and took the young woman, embracing her tightly, his mane of stark white hair mingling with her short black locks.

  "Won't let it happen," he said.

  "I die and then the baron," she insisted.

  "So, I'll chill him first. Then you won't die at all." Jak's voice was cracked with the tension.

  "It doesn't happen that way, my dear. Oh, Jak, I want to live. I've met you and I think I'm falling in love with you. And there could have been some happiness. But it won't happen."

  Nobody said anything.

  "WE WAITING until it's full dark, lover?" Krysty asked.

  Ryan was crouched in deep undergrowth, a hundred paces from the main entrance to the ville. "Mebbe. I know I said it looked like an easy egg to crack, but having been inside, I'm not sure. Might be worth a look around the back."

  J.B. was lying flat on his stomach, glasses pushed up on his forehead, peering through the leafy cover. "That zoo collection sort of place is around the rear. Could be there's another door for supplies and stuff like that."

  "We all going in, Dad?"

  Ryan shook his head. "Probably not, Dean. And don't pull that miserable face at me."

  "Sorry."

  "Just me and J.B. is all. Best chance of moving fast and quiet. Rest of you wait here and get ready to give us cover when we all come out."

  "If you come out," Mildred said quietly.

  "We'll do it."

  "Sure, Ryan. Just like you did last time and the time before. But there's going to be a day coming when you won't do it. If Emma was here, she'd probably be able to tell you if that day's coming now."

  "She isn't and she can't, love," J.B. said, turning to Ryan. "Let's go recce."

  "YES." THE WORD HISSED out from Ryan. "That's what we need."

  It was a rear entrance to the ville, a double door, made from wood, about ten feet high, topped with rusting barbed wire. A dirt track wound away from it, toward the north. A single sec man paced slowly up and down in front of the doors, a musket on his shoulder. There was no sign of any other sentry anywhere around.

  It was late afternoon, the copper bowl of the sun sinking slowly out of sight toward the far west. A few high, thin clouds streaked across it, tinted purple and pink.

  "We'll go back tell the others," J.B. said. "Then get ready to go in after full dark."

  SHARPE WAS WEARING a dark suit with narrow pinstripes of lighter gray. Beneath it he had on a T-shirt with a picture of a revolver, and a message that said New York-Kansas It Ain't. His own satin-finish Ruger GP-160 double-action revolver was jammed casually into his belt.

  "Pretty vest, Baron," Doc said. "Guess that must be a predark replica."

  "Why?" The voice sounded tired.

  "Because it's a sort of reference to The Wizard of Oz and there haven't been any yellow brick roads since the nukecaust, have there, Baron?"

  "I have no idea what you're droning about, old man. The shirt was brought to me by Joaquin a month ago from some newly discovered ruins. What you say might be true. I don't know. And I don't care."

  "I always said that conversation was killing the art of eating," Doc muttered.

  Not that the food was any better than the rest of the meals they'd been offered in the ville. The meat in an overcooked stew had disintegrated into a dark sludge, and most of the vegetables had melted into the liquid. It was utterly impossible to try to guess what sort of animal had provided the base for the stew.

  There was a side dish of chopped greens that had barely been shown the steam from a cooking pot and were inedibly raw.

  Doc had sliced into his blackened roll to find that the inside of it was a runny, watery dough that trickled out onto his plate.

  For dessert the women servants brought in platters of fruit: waxen apples that looked wonderful and tasted like cotton; plums whose interiors revealed tiny mealy grubs, white with crimson eyes.

  The beer in pitchers was warm and sour.

  During the meal, with Joaquin seated at one end of the long table opposite his master, and the others placed along the sides, there had been no conversation at all. Jak had chosen to sit next to Emma and held her hand throughout the dire supper.

  Each door to the dining hall had a pair of armed guards, and four more had escorted the trio down from their locked room to the first floor.

  Sharpe suddenly threw his goblet across the room, where it smashed in the vaulted fireplace.

  "I had thought that the redhead woman was possibly a mutie. There was something about her that whispered to me of a power lying close beneath the skin."

  His meltwater eyes turned to Jak. "An albino. Rare as unmined gold. White hair and skin, and eyes like rubies. Surely someone that would grace my collection. And perhaps you still will, boy."

  "Don't call, 'boy,'" Jak said quietly.

  "Call you what I like, boy. Call you 'mine,' if I want, so shut that white-lipped mouth. I'll decide soon enough what I want of you."

  Emma stood, the legs of the carved beechwood chair scraping on the stone flags of the floor.

  "I won't tell you," she whispered.

  Sharpe smiled, his brutally handsome face relaxing for a moment. "Very good, my dear," he said. "Oh, that is so good. You knew what I was about to ask you?"

  "Yes."

  "Joaquin?"

  "Baron?"

  "It was a tornado?"

  "Biggest twister I ever seen, Baron. We were lucky to avoid it. Came swooping down like the wrath of God."

  Sharpe smiled at Emma. "The wrath of God. The seventh seal was opened. A darkness upon the face of the earth. The horsemen bringing pillage and pox and plague and. Destroyers of worlds. And you, little lady, saw it all."

  Emma had hardly touched any of the food. Now she sat slumped, not looking up, seeming unaware that Baron Sharpe was talking to her.

  Joaquin called a warning down the table. "Baron's speaking to you, Emma."

  Sharpe glowered at his sec man. "I expect that visitors prefer to listen to the organ-grinder and not to his monkey, Joaquin. No need for interruptions!"

  "Sorry, Baron."

  Jak stood, confronting Sharpe. "Emma doesn't care speak you. Nor me. Not Doc. Let us go or be chilling. Ryan be around soon as knows you holding us. Bad move, Baron."

  "Cheeky whelp. Good flogging for the white-hair, Joaquin. Next time he speaks without being spoken to. Strip the pallid flesh from his white ribs. Set the white blood flowing."

  "Leave him alone." Emma was standing, still holding Jak's hand in hers.

  Sharpe's milky blue eyes locked with her golden stare. "Ah, yes, well. A true doomie and seer. I have seen men and women and puling children who claimed to be doomies. They saw through a glass darkly. You are pure, Emma."

  "Let Doc and Jak go and I'll do what you want. Stay with you and tell you what you want to know."

  "What do I want to know, little lady?"

  "Same thing everyone wants to know."

  "And that is."

  "The manner of your death, Baron."

  "Don't talk to him, child," Doc warned. "Your gift is from the Almighty and shouldn't be brought into town and peddled cheap off the back of a wagon."

  Sharpe stood and pointed an accusing finger at the old man. "Your life rests on a
steel blade, Dr. Tanner. The only way to save yourself is to close your mouth and keep it closed." He turned to Emma. "If I release these two, then you'll be content to stay with me?"

  "It is for such a short time." Her voice had gone flat and toneless, and her eyes seemed to be looking within herself. "Such a short time."

  "But you'll tell me anything I want to know? Anything at all? Will you?"

  "No," Jak whispered.

  But Emma smiled at the baron, a smile of empty menace. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I will."

  Chapter Thirty

  By the time the uncomfortable supper had dragged its way to an ending, the torches were burning and the water-powered generator was thumping rhythmically, bringing electric light to the corridors of the large mansion.

  Beyond the reflecting windows, Jak could see that it was already full dark. His guess was that Ryan and the others, assuming that they had survived the murderous twister, would probably make their play during the hours of night.

  He had briefly entertained the small hope that he might see a sliver of a chance to try to escape, taking Doc and Emma along with him, at least getting away into the farther rooms of the house to try to draw some of the guards away and make it easier for Ryan to break in.

  But Joaquin and his men were too well trained, too alert. And there was only Doc's rapier and his own hidden knives against the array of firearms.

  After the meal, Sharpe had walked to the main door from the dining room without a backward glance, paused and looked across at Joaquin.

  "Time has come to show them the rest of my collection. Don't you think? Well?"

  "Sure, Baron. All three of them?"

  "Why not? Why should be knotted? Cut the knot is best. All of them. Yes, all. Jak for his hair. In place of my son and heir. Doc for his mutie way of talk. And the prize in my collection. Ace on line. The diamond in my crown. Emma, the finest doomie in all of Deathlands."

  Oddly, after his intense interest in the question of his own death, Sharpe had totally dropped the subject. He had sat down, head to one side, as though he were listening to a small voice talking into his ear.

  As they walked out after him, Joaquin bringing up the rear with three sec guards, it occurred to Jak that they were soon going to run out of time.

  "COULD EASY RUN out of time real double quick," J.B. whispered.

  They were crouched close together, flattened against the back wall of the ville. The darkness had covered them so far, but there was still the pacing sentry and the locked door.

  Ryan had drawn the panga from its soft leather sheath and gripped it in his right hand. If there was silent chilling, then he would do it. J.B. had the Smith & Wesson scattergun unslung and cocked. If there was any close-contact noisy chilling to do, then it was an ideal weapon with its twenty-inch-long Remington flechettes in each of the eight rounds.

  "Don't know what's inside the door." They had been waiting patiently, watching the change of guard, seeing that there was an exchange of words with someone within the ville. But if it was a password, they had no way of learning it.

  "Go like we said." The Armorer straightened, pulling down his fedora to shadow the whiteness of his face.

  Ryan was at his side. "Yeah."

  He led the way along the wall, keeping close to it, dropping to hands and knees every time the sec man reached the far end of his beat and turned toward them.

  Luckily the moon was only a fingernail of fresh-minted silver, partly shrouded by a bank of cloud, covering the ville in an impenetrable veil of darkness.

  The sentry was a young man, married only three days earlier to one of the maids who worked in the big kitchens of the ville. He wasn't due off the night shift until three in the morning, which seemed an eternity away. Knowing that his Molly was sleeping in a warm bed, less than fifty yards from where he was on patrol, only made it worse.

  The walk-fifteen paces out and fifteen paces back again-had become a mindless routine. His attention had drifted away to the warm body in the warm bed.

  He was so locked into the thoughts of his young wife that he was totally confused by the dark figure that rose from the undergrowth near his feet. There was only one person that he could think it might be.

  "Molly?" he whispered.

  Within a heartbeat he knew that he'd made a lethally stupe mistake.

  The figure was a tall and powerful man, who was holding a long, bladed knife to his throat, the needle point pricking the skin so that a small worm of warm blood inched down his neck, under the collar.

  "Not a sound," the voice whispered.

  There were two of them, one shorter, with the watery moonlight glinting off a pair of spectacles.

  Then he knew who they were-the one-eyed leader of the outlanders and his heavily armed companion. There had been talk in the ville that Joaquin had brought in three of the gang as prisoners-the old man, the white-haired boy and the young woman, the one they said was a true doomie.

  "Is there a password?" The man's mouth was so close that the guard could feel it tickle the hairs in his ears. "Tell me quiet as a mouse fart."

  "Just have to say my name."

  "What is it?"

  "Jerry McCaffrey. Only been married three days. Please don't-" The words were cut off by a gasp as the steel was pushed a little deeper into his flesh, turning the worm of blood into a steady trickle.

  "Don't talk less we ask you. How many behind the door? Truth!"

  "One. Just one." He was trying to get up onto the tips of his toes to stretch away from the questing knife.

  "We're going in," Ryan said.

  "Sure. Sure."

  BARON SHARPE STOOD about ten feet away from Ryan and J.B., on his way back from showing his "guests" around the more private part of his collection.

  It hadn't been a very successful visit.

  They had gone through the mutie animals, fish and reptiles, pausing in front of the large glass window opening onto the expanse of desert where the hidden monster called Rupert lived in its own mysterious seclusion.

  Sharpe had tapped on the glass, but nothing stirred. "One day I'll find out what Rupert is really like," he said.

  Emma's fingers had tightened on Jak's hand, but she had remained silent.

  The door through to the rear of the private zoo was opened by Joaquin, who left it unbolted as they passed through.

  "By the Three Kennedys! But that's a foul and noisome stench," Doc muttered, gripping the lion's-head hilt of his sword stick.

  It was a sorry and dismal place, smaller than they had expected.

  The dozen or so iron cages held only four occupants. Once the visitors were inside the section, the baron seemed to slide off into one of his withdrawn depressions, hardly bothering to talk about his prizes. , A small woman, less than four feet in height, showed all the classic characteristics of the stickies. Sharpe poked at the bars with a broom handle, making her show her hands with the circles of suckers on palms and fingers. But the mutie hardly stirred, returning to a pile of straw in a corner where she lay and coughed.

  "Seen stickies all over Deathlands," Jak said. "That one triple sick."

  The next occupant of the collection was in even worse physical condition. He was elderly and squatted in a corner of his cell, his head shaking back and forth in a rhythmic swaying. As the baron reached his cage the man rose and started to pace up and down, brushing his shoulders on the stone walls at either end, leaving a smear of blood at every turn.

  His body was covered in suppurating sores.

  "What they call a scabbie," the baron said. "Prime specimen of the type."

  "Why don't you let it die like it wants?" Emma asked, near to tears.

  "Perfectly happy, you know. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Nothing wrong with it. Fed and watered and kept dry. Seems fine to me. Oh, yes, fine."

  Doc's face had become suffused with anger. "This is a disgrace, Baron Sharpe! I have read of zoos during the twentieth century where captured beasts showed a similar pattern of grossly disturbed behavior. P
acing and mutilating themselves. Just as that poor wretch does."

  Joaquin touched a warning finger to his lips behind the baron's back, trying to warn the old man to be quiet, who wouldn't be quieted.

  "No! This is a sickly and debased commentary on you, Baron Sharpe. In the ancient days of ignorance and barbarism, decent men and women would pay a handful of coppers to go along into the lunatic asylums and bedlams and laugh at the antics of the poor demented devils held prisoner within those dank walls. It was a fine sport for a Sunday afternoon! But those times are long gone. I thought that they were long gone. I see now that I was wrong. Can we leave this foul place?"