by James Axler
For one thing, he was among the group left behind in the ville proper while Trader took four of his top people with him, including Marsh Folsom. They were meant to back up Trader some way, somehow, when the deal was done. Whatever the nuke it was. The rest of the crew was laagered in with the wags on the solid ground where the valley started to widen out at the base of the ravine. In the meantime, all Trader’s second-string could do was hole up in the room they’d been given in the hotel across from the town hall and grab some shuteye so they’d be fresh when Trader’s call came.
For another thing, one of the men Trader had picked to accompany him, his top aide, and two of his ace sec men to his meet with his mystery trading partners was the man who’d taken Ace DeGuello’s job as chief armorer for Trader’s convoy. It was Tully, a rat-faced redheaded guy not much bigger than J.B., the guy who had straw-bossed the crew Rance had stopped in the middle of gang-stomping J.B. to lifeless mush.
As with the other armorers, Tully had accepted J.B. as a comrade once Ace recognized his skills. While he could nurse a grudge as well as any, J.B. had at least some idea of when to let bygones be that. Or, anyway, was glad enough to have his abilities acknowledged that he was willing to let some of the rage and resentment that smoldered in him go out.
And Tully was good enough at what he did. No question of that. One thing J.B. never had a problem with, temper or not, was summing up a ’smith’s skills and according him the respect those entitled him to.
But good wasn’t great. J.B. also knew he was better than Tully, who was near to twice his age. Which meant better than Tully would ever be.
In his mind he knew why things had happened as they had. Trader was not about to reward the person who’d gotten Ace DeGuello chilled by handing him the man’s job. Not when Ace had been doing his duty and double-well at the time. Johnny’s brain accepted that.
His balls didn’t. And like an alcohol-lamp, their heat kept the resentment in his gut at a constant simmer.
And the other thing was Trader apparently saw nothing wrong with sticking him in a room with his former lover, Rance. Yeah, there were four others bunking with them in the big dorm-style room, and one rotated out of the sack every couple of hours to keep watch. But that didn’t make young J.B. yearn less for the woman who had once been his bed partner.
He paused at the door to the room, down at the far end of the hallway near a window.
That had been perhaps the purest, most unalloyed pleasure of his life, the sex with his boss. At least, aside from when he was making something or fixing something with his hands, or figuring out a clever repair or fiendish booby. But Rance had shut him off cold and kept him in the cold.
He gritted his teeth and shook his head. He still wanted his gig with Trader. He needed more than ever to show everybody how good he really was. How valuable he really was.
Maybe then Rance would take him back.
He reached for the knob, which seemed outsized by way of layers of enamel painted on it over the years, the most recent coat being a white that was stained yellow as a smoker’s teeth by hand grease.
Funny, he thought. I don’t remember that fish smell so bastard strong.
The door opened.
Because there were two windows in the long room, the light was better there, though still dim. The first thing he saw by the star-glow, since he had his eyes down to the doorknob and hadn’t yet raised them, was a body sprawled facedown on the floor almost jamming the door. A flash glance registered that it was male, tall, pretty spare, with a bald spot in the middle of dark hair. That made him Joe Slammer, the ace driver who’d been standing sentry when Johnny left to hit the pisser.
The back of his head under the bald spot seemed kind of sunk-in and gleamed as if with moisture. A black pool spread out around his head like a halo in some predark religious print.
J.B. looked up, and his gut constricted to a fist.
There were things standing in the room. Hunching, more like. They weren’t much taller, if any, than he was, but much more massive, with giant deep chests and massive huge-jawed heads thrust forward from stooped shoulders without visible benefit of necks. Their legs were bowed but unnaturally muscled. Their eyes were huge and glittered like gelatin in the starlight.
Two stood by a hole gaping in the floorboards of the room. One was helping a third who had big clawed-flipper hands wrapped around Rance Weeden. One was clamped over her mouth. Her eyes rolled wildly as she struggled. But strong as she was, the mutie monster’s power was clearly too much for her.
The other beds lay empty. One was actually overturned. Everybody was gone, down that hole to horror.
Rance’s wild eyes lit on J.B. standing like a simp in the doorway. Somehow they got bigger. She managed to wrench half her mouth clear of the muffling claw.
“J.B., run!” she screamed. “Warn the others!”
That was the smart thing to do. No doubt about it. There was clearly no helping her otherwise—one lone kid against hulking, shambling monsters, with only a lock-back folder knife for a weapon.
Hollering, “Rance!” Johnny launched himself to the attack.
The nearer frog-shaped mutie met him with a brutal backhand sweep of his right flipper-hand. He didn’t even bother to look at the lunging youth.
The impact on the side of J.B.’s face caused his world to go darker and distant and blurry. He had the sense of floating backward.
Then his skull cracked hard against the doorpost, red lightning lanced through his brain and that was that.
* * *
RICKY CAME AWAKE to a hand on his mouth.
“Rrmph!” he said urgently as his eyes snapped open to darkness. He tried to sit up on the bed in the room he shared with Jak and Doc.
A weight came down his chest. By the moonlight through the frost-furred window he made out a pale glow floating above his face.
Jak Lauren grinned at him.
Ricky rolled his eyes down over the snow-white hand muffling it. He squealed in outrage.
“Not talk,” Jak commanded firmly.
When Ricky nodded, Jak removed his hand.
“You’re sitting on me!” Ricky said in outrage.
“Stop jumping and acting like feeb,” Jak said.
Like the rest of them Ricky had gotten used to Jak’s bizarre shorthand speech. Or at least learned to extract meaning from it. It was still annoying to him sometimes.
The hand went away. So did Jak’s narrow jeans-clad ass. Ricky belatedly sat up.
He looked around. They were alone. The third bed lay empty.
“Doc on watch,” Jak said.
“And you’re waking me, why?”
Though they were alone now, Ricky kept his voice low. They were sandwiched between the room Ryan shared with Krysty and the one where Mildred and Alysa slept. From what Ricky had heard of Ryan and Krysty’s activities before he pulled his pillow over his head and sheer exhaustion finally pulled him down to sleep, the walls were not soundproof.
He still wasn’t sure where two people that old got that kind of energy.
Jak’s grin got wider. His white brow creased hard above eyes showing hints of ruby glint to the moonlight.
“Explored,” he said. “Found something.”
Instantly Ricky nodded. He knew whatever Jak had in mind was probably not a good idea. At least for Ricky, though the way Jak could move through any setting like the ghost he resembled meant he’d likely get away with whatever bad craziness he had in mind.
But even after weeks with the companions, Ricky was still thrilled that his pal Jak wanted to include him in his escapade. And despite growing up sheltered and pampered, as he now realized, in the little ville of Nuestra Señora—a seaport town much like this one, except neater, more lively and smelling much less nastily of must and decomposing mollusks—he found he had a taste for adventure.
Perhaps because of that sheltered life.
“What?” he asked quietly.
Jak held up Ricky’s utility belt, wit
h his Webley handblaster hanging from it in its flap-covered holster, and Ricky’s silent-shooting DeLisle carbine.
“Follow, see,” the albino said.
* * *
“NOW,” JAK SAID softly. He slipped out into the hall.
Walking as lightly as he could in his socks, with his boots slung around his neck by their tied-together laces, Ricky followed. He was almost trembling. He was so keyed up he forgot even to be cold.
He glanced right. A tall, narrow shadow was walking deliberately away down the threadbare runner carpet, silhouetted by moon-glow from the window at corridor’s end. Doc was pacing up and down the corridor, possibly to stay awake.
Ricky wasn’t sure how much difference that might even make. Doc had a tendency to wander off inside his own head when left alone. Who knew where he was now?
Still, Ryan let Doc take his turn on watch, as he was doing now. And they were all still alive. So Ricky wasn’t about to question his adored leader’s wisdom.
Jak, meanwhile, was creeping the other way, toward the T-juncture where another corridor crossed this one. In one direction it led to the door to the lobby at the front of the run-down hotel. In the other it headed to a door into a dining room that had probably been closed since before the Big Nuke, so far as Ricky could tell.
Jak went down to the very end, just before the cross-passage, and turned to his right. He disappeared inside a room.
Ricky followed.
“Shut door,” Jak commanded.
Ricky obeyed, as quietly as he could. He winced when the door mechanism engaged with an inevitable metallic clack.
Jak was hunkered in the middle of the floor. This was a two-bed room. Both beds were empty. The bureau and single chair weren’t deep in dust, so Ricky gathered it saw use fairly recently. Not this night, though.
“Smelled something funny,” Jak said. “Tried door. Then found.”
He tapped the floor. In the faint light from outside, Ricky, by straining, could make out a line along the floor. It was darker than the normal ones between the bare polished hardwood planks.
Then he made out a right angle in the black line. He was looking at a trapdoor improperly shut.
“Smell came out here,” Jak said. “Sea, dead sea stuff.”
Ricky couldn’t smell anything more than the usual nastiness of the ville itself, which at least was muted in here. Admittedly, it was muted by the hotel’s stuffiness, as well as the general smell of mildew, dust and age. But he trusted Jak’s nose. He had a wild animal’s keen senses.
Ricky came over to squat beside him, studying the trapdoor. “Shall we open it?” he asked.
Jak gave him a look.
“Okay,” Ricky said. “Dumb question.” He started feeling to see if he could start the trap open with his fingertips. Though his hands were still relatively soft, lots of detail work on metals had made them strong.
Jak stopped him with a couple of fingers on his forearm. “Boots first,” he said.
The albino youth already wore his customary sneakers. Johnny nodded. He sat down, pulled on his boots, quickly tightened the laces and tied them.
Then Jak helped him pry up the trapdoor. It made surprisingly little noise.
Even Ricky could smell the saltwater in the breath of air that rolled up from the blackness and hit him in the face. It felt so warm he thought they might have opened a passageway to a furnace, although there was none in evidence in the hotel. It didn’t even have radiators, those obviously having been salvaged for scrap decades before. Then Ricky realized the air was warmer because it was insulated by the Earth itself from the chill that made his nose numb and his breath mist white before his eager face.
He reached to his belt to unlimber the flywheel flashlight he carried in a small holster there. It had been made by hand by his Tío Benito, who sold them on the side to augment his income as armorer and general tinker.
“No,” Jak said. He nodded down the hole. “Light.”
Ricky frowned. Then his eyes picked up a faint glimmer of yellow.
“Follow,” Jak said, and eeled down into the hole.
Ricky followed. There was a wooden ladder there. He pulled the lid shut behind him, trying to make sure it seated properly this time, then he descended to stand beside his friend on a damp floor of cut stone.
He was able to see now, just a little. The tunnel, which was just high enough that the two not-very-tall young men could stand upright, obviously continued along parallel to the building front. That meant, he realized, that it ran under the other rooms on that side of the corridor.
“You mean our room—?” he asked in an alarmed whisper.
“Shut,” Jak said sternly.
Ricky shut. The glow came from the other direction. He realized that it had to intersect beneath the cross-passage, then open into a larger chamber directly underneath the lobby.
Jak stalked toward the light. He carried a hunting knife with a clipped point and a five-inch blade, not the trench knife or one of the butterfly knives he usually favored for battle—and, of course, not one of his specialized leaf-bladed throwing knives. Ricky had no idea where he carried all those damn knives, concealed on his wispy frame. He never quite got up the nerve to ask, either. It just seemed too personal.
After a moment Ricky unslung his DeLisle from across his back. Unlike Jak he wasn’t a master of the stealthy blade, but he trusted himself and that blaster. And the fact was, its locked-up action and subsonic projectile made it little louder than a knife was.
Crouching, Jak peered into the large chamber, then he stepped out. Ricky followed without hesitation. For all his propensity to do balls-out-crazy shit like this, Jak retained the paranoid instincts of an old tom alley cat, as well as its senses.
It was a big empty room with ladders leading down from the lobby and where Ricky judged the kitchen had to be. There were a few old crates and barrels stashed by the back wall, near that second ladder. He couldn’t make out much of them since they lay too far from the single lantern hung from a bracket in the wooden ceiling, which was a little higher here. Enough a tall man like Ryan or Doc might be able to stand upright without braining himself.
Ricky saw that another tunnel opened up toward the back. The rooms on the other side of the corridors had to host concealed trapdoors, too. He shuddered.
“Shouldn’t we warn the others?” he asked, realizing it was even now probably a little late to be asking.
“And say what?” Jak asked. Then without waiting for the answer he knew was not coming, he padded off into another, wider tunnel that led out past the front of the hotel.
Ricky followed, glancing back nervously over his shoulder. His nutsack was trying its level best to crawl up inside his belly, and Jak seemed to be leading them into the utter lightless dark of underground.
“Not look back,” Jak said. “Spoil vision.”
Ricky set his jaw for fear of somebody—something—creeping down the tunnel after them. He followed Jak by the light that came from behind. Ricky realized quickly there was more faint glow shining from ahead.
They came to a place where another wide tunnel crossed this one. To the right lay total blackness. From the left came a faint yellow glow—and a hint of moving air.
Before them the tunnel continued. Clearly it ran on beneath the town hall. And to the sea, judging by the way the smell had gradually gotten stronger.
Jak headed to his left. About forty yards ahead another fish-oil lantern hung from a bronze bracket sunk in the dressed-stone walls.
As they neared the lamp, Jak stopped. He held up a slim white hand.
Ricky frowned. Then he heard.
“Is that someone chanting?” he asked, remembering to speak in a low voice rather than whispering. As J. B. Dix had taught Ricky, a whisper actually carried far, and was more liable to catch the notice of the very people, or other creatures, you didn’t want to hear you.
And speaking of other creatures, Ricky realized there was something wrong with the distance-muf
fled voice he heard and the chorus of other voices that rumbled a low response.
Jak moved forward. He was crouched, going slower and more cautiously. Shaking off a pang of fear and lonesomeness for his wounded, missing mentor, Ricky followed.
They came to some stone steps that were wide, slick with condensation and led down.
Ricky tapped Jak’s shoulder, gingerly, since he was afraid of what his friend and that knife might do if he startled him.
But Jak merely glanced back.
“We’re under the old church,” Ricky mouthed.
Jak nodded once, then he put a white finger to lips so pale they were barely pink.
He led them down the stairs. Past him Ricky could see that at the bottom was some kind of landing, apparently unlit. From behind, as they reached the bottom, came the dancing glow of nude flames.
Jak slipped onto the landing and to his left, so that his slight form wouldn’t be lethally silhouetted against the light at the top of the stairs. Ricky had almost reached the bottom himself when he caught a glimpse of what lay beyond the landing.
There was a vast chamber lying perhaps a story below the landing, which turned into a kind of gallery. It was full of light from two bonfires and a number of torches—and a myriad of hunched bodies shadowed and swaying against the light.
“Santa María, Madre de Dios,” Ricky breathed. “Frogs!”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ricky almost shrieked in reflexive terror when a hand grabbed his left arm. Then he realized it was Jak, leaning back into the opening to pull Ricky’s stupe ass out of the light. He’d have been clearly visible if any hostile eyes had turned his way.
Actually reassured by the gallery’s darkness, Ricky overcame his urgent desire to run screaming back to their friends. Bent low over the reassuring heft of his longblaster, he followed Jak forward to the rail that ran along the gallery.
The lower level was full of frogs. The man-size muties hunched or swayed in place, waving their long misshapen arms above their heads. There were at least a hundred of them packed into a rough circle around the open, man-high fires.
The ones with their backs to the young men in the shadows were shadows themselves, grotesque and horrible. The ones on the far side were worse. Ricky could see their faces—their sunken cheeks and lantern jaws filled with long, curving needle teeth, their enormous eyes, the vertical slits that almost completely supplanted noses. What was worst about them was that, underlit like this by capering flames, those faces clearly showed the human in them.