James Axler - Deathlands 27 - Ground Zero

by Ground Zero [lit]

  Now they stood in front of the last cage in line.

  It stood in almost total darkness, its stained concrete floor swept bare, the heavy metal door hanging open.

  "At least let me die in the light," she begged.

  "No, here is where you'll stay. If you give me what I need, then I might allow you to be imprisoned within the house. But not yet. The iron fist comes first and then the glove of velvet, my dear little Emma."

  "There is so much death here." She shuddered in his hands. "Dear God, so much death."

  Sharpe smiled at her, the torchlight dancing off his cold milky eyes. "So right, doomie. Think of being imprisoned here. At the end of the world. Sentenced to endless misery. Perhaps I might die in some accident and then you would be forgotten. Oh, yes, such neglect. It has happened before. I have sometimes quite forgotten about my pets through listening to my own private voices, and they have not been fed or watered. One wretch bit off his own hand and drank his own blood to sustain life." He threw back his head and laughed loudly, the echoes quickly fading, muffled by the oppressive weight of the thick walls and ceiling.

  The baron gazed proudly at the empty cage, nodding to himself as he anticipated the pleasure of seeing Emma locked away inside it.

  "I've already told you what I see of our deaths. That shows you can trust me."

  "You to drown in an ocean of red. Me to speak with a tongue of silver and vanish through a mirror into a desert where I shall cease to be. Oh, yes. Yes, I heard all that." He lowered his face close to her. "But you don't think I'd be fooled by your carny medicine show gabble? Oh, no! Lies all lies, woman!"

  He slapped her again, making her nose bleed.

  "It's truth," she protested, swaying in his grip.

  "Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies." He smiled at her. "Let us open up your new home, doomie slut."

  "No!" She screamed loud enough to shatter crystal at fifty paces, then dropped her head and sank her teeth into his wrist, making him curse and let her go.

  Emma turned and started to run away, back toward the main part of the collection, toward the half-open door into the rest of the ville. And a last chance of life.

  Jak, less than a hundred yards away, darting through a maze of narrow passages, heard the scream and began to run even faster toward its source.

  Sharpe caught up with Emma in the main room of the mutie animals and reptiles, just past the doorway that led into the chamber where the vast glass case held the mysterious hidden monster in the warm sand.

  "Stupe bitch," he said, laughing delightedly. "Oh, yes, what a stupe bitch." He paused, posing as he caught sight of his reflection in the mirrored glass.

  "Please," she whispered.

  "No."

  He began a swift, brutal beating, holding her against the wall by one hand, while he punched and slapped at her with the other. Both eyes closed and her mouth split, blood trickling down her chin and over the front of her black dress.

  "Doomies.do.what.they're told." Each word was punctuated by savage punches, knocking her head from side to side like a disjointed doll.

  Emma slipped quickly into merciful unconsciousness, but the baron didn't seem aware of it. Grinning mirthlessly, nodding as if he were agreeing to some whispered instructions from an invisible presence, he continued the beating.

  Teeth splintered and sliced her tongue open, releasing a flood of scarlet.

  "Lie there until you learn sense, doomie!" Sharpe snarled, suddenly throwing her to the floor.

  Emma lay where he dropped her, half in the doorway between the rooms. She was on her back, mouth open, the flow of blood trickling steadily down her throat and into the air passages to her lungs, beginning to drown her.

  RYAN, J.B. AND DOC had suffered another brief delay in their pursuit of Jak, and the baron and Emma.

  Someone had loosed a pack of hunting dogs into the rear of the ville, and they came snarling toward the three outlanders.

  At last Doc had the chance to use the Le Mat, aiming into the middle of the animals, pulling down on the trigger.

  The.63-caliber shotgun round, fired at thirty feet, tore into the dogs with a devastating effect, killing three and injuring half of the rest of the pack.

  The survivors, including the wounded, turned tail and scampered, howling, down a side passage and vanished behind a length of tapestry that concealed a small door.

  "Ace on the line, Doc," Ryan called as they hurried on.

  JAK HAD HESITATED a moment as he heard the thunderous boom of Doc's blaster and the barking of the dogs. But after the shot the noise faded quickly into stillness, and he ran on.

  He was only a few paces now from the half-open door into the collection.

  SHARPE HAD DRAGGED Emma into the middle of the room, beside the big glass case with its strange desert landscape. A trail of blood smeared along the floor, as he pulled her by the feet, head scraping along the concrete, most of it seeming to spill from her sagging, open mouth.

  "Playing dead on me, doomie? We know how to deal with that, don't we? Oh, yes, my precious."

  He let go of her feet and knelt astride Emma, hands gripping her throat, tightening.

  "Wake up, little doomie. Wake up. Don't play sound asleep." He started to giggle, squeezing tighter. "Can't see your silver tongue. Looks big and purple to me, doomie. Oh, no. Oh, no. It was my tongue that went silver. You sank. What was it?"

  The golden eyes were wide open, protruding from the dark, swollen sockets, staring sightlessly over Sharpe's shoulder. Blood still poured between her purpled lips.

  The body shuddered as though possessed by a violent ague, then went completely limp.

  The baron continued to squeeze at the slender neck for several seconds, then he stopped and sat back on the body, his face puzzled. "Doomie's can't die," he whispered.

  He stood and kicked at the corpse, shaking his head when there was no resistance, wiping his hands down the front of his white robe, staring at the crimson smears. He looked at the dead woman, a small ocean of blood around her head, matting her black hair.

  "Dead?" he said in a loud conversational voice. "Drowned in an ocean of crimson?"

  JAK HAD OPENED THE DOOR silently, hearing strange grunting sounds from one of the farther rooms, then a silence.

  "Dead? Drowned in an ocean of crimson?" The voice was unmistakably that of Baron Sean Sharpe.

  Jak tiptoed onward, seeing a single shadow, motionless, thrown on the wall of the room that he was in, coming through the door of the chamber that he remembered held the bizarre mutie creature that lived deep beneath the surface of the pale sand in its cage.

  "So? What the fuck do I care?" It was Baron Sharpe, but who was he talking to? "Plenty of doomies on the beach. And fish in the ocean. Ocean of crimson. Scarlet. Red. Bloodied ocean. Oh, yes, red is the color of my true love's blood. Go down, you bloodred roses. The old song." A peal of wild laughter chilled the heart of the albino teenager.

  He stepped through the door and saw Sharpe standing there, his back to him, wearing a white robe that was streaked with blood. And lying on the floor at his feet was.

  "Emma," Jak said.

  The baron swung around, his right hand falling to the butt of the satin-finish.357 Magnum Ruger GP-160 in his belt. And Jak saw that the crumpled front of his robe was totally sodden with blood.

  Emma was lying still, on her back, arms spread wide, her golden eyes already fading in death. She was surrounded by a lake of blood.

  "Ah, white-hair! See that your friend here is in a trance. She has been telling me such truths about living and. Living and partly living."

  "You sick bastard!"

  For a moment Jak wished that he had taken back his own blaster from Ryan when he'd had the chance.

  Regret was for roads not taken, and it was pointless.

  "Sick murderous bastard!" he spit, feeling grief battling with a bloody rage.

  Baron Sharpe was backing toward the glass wall of the container behind him, with its simulated desert landscape. Ja
k watched the two images of the man, one facing him, the other retreating in the mirrored glass.

  The hand still rested on the butt of the Ruger, but the baron hadn't drawn it. His milky blue eyes were looking at Jak, as though he were someone that Sharpe recognized from some previous incarnation. "Oh, yes, I think. Your name is Jak, isn't it? I know you well, I think."

  "You killed Emma." The voice was flat.

  "No. She was dead when I found her."

  "Liar." The accusation was no louder than a whisper.

  "I am the baron of this ville. I am Sean Sharpe. No outlander child comes in here and calls me a liar."

  "Liar," Jak repeated.

  They were about fifteen feet apart.

  Now, very slowly, like a lover's caress, Sharpe had begun to draw the Ruger.

  "Yes, I hear what. He will be. I will punish him myself. Yes, I will."

  The Ruger was halfway out.

  "She was innocent and meant no harm. No reason chill her. Shouldn't."

  "Hear my silver tongue, boy." A crackle of loud laughter rang out, so loud that Ryan heard it as he approached the door to the mutie collection.

  The Ruger was full-out, barrel questing toward the heart of the albino teenager.

  "Die, mutie." Baron Sharpe's mouth was wide open in a smile of purest pleasure.

  Jak's fingers closed on the taped hilt of one of his delicate throwing knives, whipping it from behind his back with a snap of the wrist, sending the leaf-shaped, polished steel blade hissing to its target.

  It struck home with inexorable perfection.

  Jak had aimed at the laughing center of the baron's face, the gaping, grinning mouth.

  The spinning knife pinned Sharpe's tongue to the roof of his mouth, shining silver between the teeth, the point driving upward.

  There was a hideous gurgling sound from the wounded man, and he staggered sideways. The blaster swung aimlessly around the room, and his finger tightened spasmodically on the trigger, firing one of the.357 rounds. The bullet struck a roof pillar and ricocheted back down and behind Sharpe, smashing the center of the thick glass wall of the container at his back, which collapsed in a tumbling river of shards of mirrored glass.

  The blaster dropped, clattering to the floor, and Baron Sharpe stumbled three paces away from Jak. His hips were just above the level of the bottom of the broken cage and he simply fell backward, slumping into the dry heated desert sand.

  As he fell back, his hands went to his mouth and he tried to remove the knife that had made him dumb. But it was driven home too hard. His eyes were wide with horror as he realized where he was, and he kicked his legs helplessly in the air, the bloodied robe riding up to expose his bare flesh.

  Jak thought he was trying to say something.

  It could have been "He tore it," or "She saw it."

  Yes, that was it.

  The sand erupted in a spray as the man flailed and thrashed, trying to recover his balance and get out of the container that held the mysterious mutie beast.

  Ryan appeared behind Jak in the doorway, with J.B. close at his heels, Doc a few paces farther back.

  All four of them stood frozen to watch the last dreadful scene of the life of Baron Sean Sharpe.

  The sand seemed to be alive, writhing and churning into tiny funnels that seemed to be slowly sucking the helpless man deep into its embrace. Sharpe was still trying to scream, his face contorted in a rictus of fear and agony.

  One arm plunged below the surface of the sand and, when the doomed baron pulled it clear again, the hand was missing. The stump was matted with tiny grains of sand, now crimson, but the jetting wound showed clean and smooth, as though it had been cut off with a surgeon's saw.

  "Lord have mercy on him," Doc breathed, "whatever his sins."

  None of the others spoke.

  Sharpe was sinking deeper, and the eruptions of sand were all flecked with blood and occasional glistening white splinters that might have been bone. But at no time did the terrifying mutie creature show itself, though Ryan thought for a moment that he saw, beneath the flying dust, a number of mouths, as large as a man's palm, each with rows of serrated teeth that seemed to be revolving at high speed, surrounded by sinewy layers of sucking lips.

  But be couldn't be certain.

  Sharpe had almost disappeared, only his head showing, thrown back in straining agony.

  The room was almost soundless, except for a muffled, munching kind of noise, with an occasional crunching snap to it, like a bone splintering.

  A brace of heartbeats later and the broken-fronted case was clear and empty, except for the ruffled surface of pale sand. Even the blood had gone, and it looked again like a stretch of untouched desert.

  "Dark night! I never saw anything. anything like that before," J.B. said, having first noisily cleared his throat, taking off his glasses and wiping them on his sleeve. "And I don't think I ever want to again."

  "He beat up and chilled Emma," Ryan said, stooping to check that she was truly dead.

  "Yeah." Jak looked balefully at the cage. "And I lost knife, too."

  "Why not go in after it?" J.B. asked. "If it matters that much."

  Jak shook his head. "No. Nothing matters now."

  "I am truly sorry." Doc laid a hand on the teenager's shoulder. "She was a good person whom God had given a dreadful burden to carry through life."

  "Best get out of here." Ryan looked around. "Want to take her body along with us, Jak? We can probably give her a decent burying someplace."

  "No. Thanks, Ryan. Emma's gone. What's left is. like suit of clothes."

  "Come on, then."

  They went quickly to the back door and left the ville without encountering any kind of threat. Though there were lights blazing everywhere, not a single shot was fired.

  Dean, Krysty and Mildred were waiting to greet them as they came out into the cool air of Washington Hole.

  "What happened, Dad?"

  "Long story, son. Have to wait the telling. Best we get back to the redoubt right away."

  THE SOLITARY ROOM, inside the stinking depths of the late baron's mutie collection, was quiet again, except for a single odd incident. About a quarter of an hour after the four men had left, the sand belched open and there, on top of it, lay Jak's throwing knife, the polished silver of the steel covered in great scratches and gouges.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  They traveled quickly and safely back to the corpse-filled redoubt, skirting a nameless pesthole as well as the shantytown called Green Hill, reaching the ancient complex near dawn.

  The air was unusually clear and they stood grouped together, looking across at the gigantic crater of fused black glass that was all that remained of the old pre-dark capital of the United States of America.

  "Rad count's still high, up in the yellow band," J.B. observed.

  "Mine shows close to orange." Ryan laughed. "Mebbe the next jump'll take us someplace away from a high rad count."

  "Be good if it took us clear out of Deathlands," Mildred said. "Sometimes I find the shooting and the dying gets me down some."

  "The only time that happened was when we became transported to Russia," Doc said, "and I can't say that was one of the happiest experiences of my life."

  "Least we all got away safe from the big Hole." Dean realized immediately what he'd said and he looked quickly across to Jak. "Hey, I'm real sorry about saying somethin' that was so triple stupe. I didn't."

  The albino shrugged his shoulders. "Guess losing's something you sort of get used to. Wasn't like with Christina and Jenny. Deep. Heart-deep. But still sorry. Emma was. Could have. You know."

  THE SENSE OF DAMAGE was more clear-cut within the redoubt. The cracks seemed wider, the dust thicker. The scent of old, old death lay more heavily in the nostrils and on the senses, an awareness of the futility that had been life in the last years before the nukecaust.

  Doc pointed with his sword stick at a slashed piece of graffiti, carved into the plaster on the wall. "Living is mistak
es not made."

  "I wonder whether our dear old companion Trader might not have passed this way at some time," he pondered.

  "Could be," Ryan agreed. "Sounds like him."

  "You think that we'll ever meet up with Trader again?" Dean asked.

  Ryan flicked dust from his son's hair. "Who knows? All things are possible, aren't they?"