by James Axler
Ricky noticed that some of the creatures had blue eyes. He crossed himself and begrudged the second or two it required him to take his hand off the foregrip of his longblaster.
So mesmerizing was the sheer horror of the mob of frog muties that it took Ricky—a healthy adolescent male who liked the opposite sex—a good half minute to notice that in the middle of the stone-floored circle were two naked women.
For some reason Ricky’s first thought was a terrified, I hope one of them’s not the baron’s daughter!
But he quickly realized neither could be. They were both fuller-bodied, thus obviously older, although neither was what he’d call overfed. Each showed ribs down her bare sides. The blonde one had pink skin and nipples. The rangier redhead had olive skin.
Both were done up like gaudy sluts, eyes staringly outlined in black and showing hints of green and purple, cheeks unnaturally pink and mouths painted as red as fresh blood. For gaudy sluts, though, they looked surprisingly young and fresh. Not that Ricky had...intimate experience of such. But in the time he’d spent crisscrossing the Deathlands with Ryan and his companions he’d seen his share of them.
And they were both busy pleasuring a naked young man spread-eagled face-up on a stone or probably concrete slab set between the bonfires.
Ricky turned to look at Jak, who crouched beside him peering over the stone rail. He felt oddly relieved to see the albino was watching the scene with ruby eyes as avid as Ricky’s. But they were still attuned to the slightest flicker of peripheral motion; the foxlike white face turned instantly to his companion’s.
“So why is he chained down like that?” Ricky mouthed. He knew he wouldn’t need to be restrained to let himself be pleasured by two girls like that. Despite the scrotum-tightening existential dread of so many man-eating muties packed together—some almost within reach of his arm over the railing, and stinking horribly of fish—a raging hard-on threatened to explode the fly of his jeans.
Jak nodded as he turned his attention back to the scene. He wasn’t tunnel-visioning on the naked girls, though obviously he was as aware of them as Ricky was.
A tall and rather narrow-looking frog stood on the far side of the altar. With another gut-shock Ricky realized that was the only thing the slab could possibly be. Around his neck the frog had a big gold medallion decorated with a weird staring-eyed face surrounded by wiggles like tentacles. Ricky remembered that symbol suddenly: it was the same one he’d seen daubed on the front of the church by the town square.
The one they were hiding beneath.
The frog mutie was chanting something in a deep and sibilant voice. The mob of excited muties croaked responses in ragged unison.
The young man had his eyes closed and was tossing his head side to side as the women worked on him.
And then the mob fell silent. The only noise was the beguiling moans of the women and the captive youth’s answering and increasingly urgent groans.
Another creature stepped from the shadows on the far side of the sunken temple. It was tall and also somewhat gaunt for a frog mutie. It possessed a pair of small but unmistakable breasts protruding from either side of its keel-like breastbone. The green nipples were erect.
“Santo Niño de Atocha,” Ricky breathed.
As she approached the altar a pair of naked—and obviously male—frogs came from both sides to seize the naked human women around the waists and drag them away from the young man. They struggled and screamed.
The young man’s eyes were still shut, his head whipping back and forth.
Climbing onto the pedestal, the frog-woman mounted the young man and the mating ritual continued.
As the young man clearly spent himself in the frog-mutie woman, she threw her head back and uttered an ecstatic roar. The onlookers went crazy, hopping and dancing and shaking their talons in the air as if they were all getting off, too.
As the spasms of his orgasm subsided, the captive opened his eyes and uttered a shattering scream.
The frog-woman swung her body around so that now she straddled his bare, hairless chest. She bent down toward him. He stared up at her with eyes bulging from his young face. She thrust her face toward him as if to kiss him.
At the last instant she opened her huge jaws and bit his face off with an audible crunch. His body spasmed.
Ricky’s mouth filled with sour vomit. He tried to raise his DeLisle. His only thought was to blast the frightful creature.
Jak placed his hand across the built-in silencer that shrouded the barrel, stopping Ricky. As cryptic as the albino usually was, Ricky had grown adept at reading his friend’s expressions and body language, which could be downright eloquent.
One upraised white eyebrow loudly told him, You aren’t triple-fucking-bright, are you?
He lowered the longblaster.
The nude women were struggling futilely and screeching shrilly, also without effect on their burly captors. Their bare breasts flopped in a way that almost distracted Ricky from the awfulness of what he’d just seen—and was continuing to see.
“You promised when you bought us you’d let him go when you were done with him!” shrieked the blonde.
Ricky’s heart, trapped in mid-throat like a pigeon flapping frantically to fly out his mouth, plummeted to the bottom of his stomach like that same bird shot full of lead buck.
Bought! he thought. They’re trading with the slavers!
The frog priest turned an unmistakable and ghastly smile on her. “We lied,” he said in his sonorous bass croak.
The blonde glared at him defiantly. She opened her mouth to say something furious.
Then her blue eyes shot wide and her companion’s scream blasted out fit to shatter glass. Ricky realized the male frog who held the blonde had just reached around to slash her throat.
“The hell with this,” Ricky said to Jak. The frogs were croaking fit to bring the low-domed ceiling down. Jak could barely hear him.
“Go now,” Jak agreed.
He turned and rabbited back the way they’d come. Ricky gulped and followed.
* * *
THERE WAS NO one on watch when they burst back into the corridor from the unoccupied room where they’d entered the tunnels.
“Oh, no,” Ricky moaned. “We’re too late.”
Jak trotted down the hallway to the door of the room Ryan shared with Krysty. As he reached it Ricky sprinted to his side and raised a fist to hammer frantically on the door.
Jak turned the knob and opened the heavy hardwood door.
Their friends were standing in the middle of the floor by the empty, rumpled bed, shrugging into their well-stuffed backpacks. All except one.
“Where’s Ryan?” Ricky yelped.
He found himself thrust out of the door he stood blocking by a hard hand on the shoulder. “I was arranging a little diversion,” the one-eyed man said.
“You found the fish-oil stores, then, Ryan?” asked Doc, who stood with his huge LeMat in one knobby hand.
“Affirmative,” Ryan said, as Krysty swung his heavy backpack off the bed as if it were as light as a newborn baby and held it up to his back.
Ricky stared with his mouth hanging open. As he threaded his arms through the backpack’s straps, Ryan grinned at him wolfishly.
“What?” he demanded. “Did you think J.B. was the only one who could improvise incendies?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Consciousness landed on J.B. like an anvil. It brought with it a skull-busting headache and awareness of a gut that tossed like storm-blasted sea.
Then terror and loss and rage.
“Rance!” he croaked, snapping up to a seated position.
His head reeled. The back of it banged against the door, which he’d been knocked against, he recollected now. His head was still sore.
His stomach turned over. He only just managed to stop himself from puking.
Dark night, he thought. I got a nukin’ concussion.
His eyes, now open, cleared to the sight of an empty ro
om. That much he could make out without his glasses.
Feeling sick fear—laid atop the nausea—that the frog mutie might’ve busted his glasses and left him just a little less blind than a bat, he groped around for them. Almost at once his fingers felt the familiar hardness of cool curved wire and ground glass. He fumbled the specs onto his nose.
He let out the anxious breath he’d been holding. The lenses were intact, though the frame needed a bit of careful warping to fit correctly on his face. But at least he could see.
The floor looked intact again. He might have believed the whole episode had been some kind of hallucination, cooked up by his brain after he’d tripped and addled it by banging it against the door frame, if not for the sight and smell of the dead body lying just past an arm’s reach away.
Digging with his heels, he pressed his back up the wall and away from the chill, who obviously had crapped his pants when he bought it.
For a moment he just leaned back. While his blood sang with urgency to rescue Rance—and his other companions, too—the very dizziness that made it obviously unsafe to move forced him to focus his aching brain and think.
First: observation. One man had been chilled and four people taken from their beds without much sign of struggle, which meant they’d all been caught sleeping except for Slammer: Gonzalez, a wiry little Indian-looking guy who was an electronics wizard who usually worked comms and sensors in War Wag One. Under Ace he had taught J.B. the rudiments of electronics as well as weapons-control and sighting systems. The others were a couple of Trader’s burliest cargo-handlers, who doubled as drivers—along with most everybody else—named Zap and Stang. And, of course, Rance.
He noticed there were wet patches on the wooden floor. Some gave a vague impression of footprints, from the front ends of clawed feet. He remembered the creatures seemed to stand on their toes. So the weird froglike muties had come from water. Reasonable enough. Maybe the sea, which was just a few hundred yards past the town hall?
They hadn’t bothered to ransack the room. J.B. could see his own pack, as well as a Remington 870 pump 12-gauge lying on the floor beside Joe Slammer’s body.
Experimentally he pushed off from the wall. His head still hurt like hell and his legs seemed to be made out of boiled noodles. But after a little swaying back and forth his legs solidified some, and his stomach at least started acting as if it meant to stay put.
Now: action.
Keeping his mind focused, he went quickly through the things Rance and the rest had left behind when they were taken. There were some things he needed, including Rance’s EAA Witness handblaster and a pair of spare double-stack mags of .40 S&W rounds. And, of course, the shotgun. He was never going to be a long-range marksman, not with his weak eyes. But he always favored the heft and firepower a longblaster gave him.
As he got ready to leave, he spotted Rance’s fedora lying under her bed. He bent and picked it up. He tried fitting it experimentally on his head.
Surprisingly, it did fit him. Though Rance was taller than he was, he’d always had a big head for his frame.
He didn’t delude himself she’d take him back for bringing her her cherished hat. He was beyond that now. If rescuing her didn’t do the trick, the thing could not be done.
Of course, first he’d have to rescue her. And hopefully his other friends.
And, he was realizing—mebbe even Trader himself. J.B. distrusted coincidence, and that the same ville Trader had chosen to do a secret deal was just incidentally also home to a tribe of horrible fish-frog-human muties who had a secret tunnel network connected to hotel rooms by trapdoors was just way too much to swallow. That meant that Trader, Marsh, Tully and the convoy’s two ace blaster-handlers, Sciabarra and Morrison, were either captives, too, or chills—or in immediate danger of becoming one or the other.
As for the convoy itself, J.B. dismissed it. The majority of the crew were still with the wags. They wouldn’t go down without a bastard fight, and they were just the bastards to lay one down. They could take care of themselves.
He went to stand beside the trapdoor. Then he squatted. The light in the room was too dim to make out detail, least of all with his eyes, glasses or not. But he had a small flywheel flashlight that was powered by squeezing the handle to generate juice. It was one of the things Trader apparently bought from the Science Brothers; they did do some pretty fair fabrication, whether or not they sometimes decided to go into the grand larceny end of things.
He took it out now and began to pump it with his palm. It made a sort of wheezy grinding sound along with a spatter of faint light the color of old piss. Then it lightened and brightened.
The light was enough for him to make out where the trap was fitted. That was good work, he had to admit. Though he also had to admit he was no kind of carpenter. He wouldn’t think that fine a separation would allow the door to open easily and without making much noise, as obviously it had to take even the watchful Slammer by surprise. Though obviously the sentry was focused on the door when the frogs took him down by stealth. But it took all J.B.’s fabricator’s knowledge and intuition to make out the hair-thin lines where the door was cut out crosswise to the run of floorboards.
With his pocketknife he pried up the door. As expected, it came readily and quietly. No frog monster sprang out to rake his face off with its claws.
He eased the door down beside the hole. Cautiously he shone the flywheel light inside.
A ladder with wide and double-sturdy wooden rungs led down about six or eight feet to a floor of polished flagstones. He could actually see some puddles of water at the bottom where the muties had dripped.
He needed a plan, but without more information he had no grounds to make one. So taking a deep breath, he lowered himself into the hole and pulled the lid shut above his head.
He was well and truly stuck in it now. With no clear idea of what it really was.
He only knew it was bad, and that it’d probably chill him.
But he never thought of backing out. Setting the hat firmly on his head, he swept the flashlight beam around his new surroundings. It was a tunnel, not a sewer, and it seemed to run along the line of rooms.
The wet patches and marks of frog-mutie feet led toward the area beneath where the lobby was. He headed that way.
Quickly he found himself in a larger chamber, low but much wider. Other tunnels opened off it.
A larger one led in a direction that, if he was oriented right, went under the square toward the town hall. The wet marks led that way.
By the entrance he spotted something dark. He knew right off it was unusual. The tunnel and subterranean chamber were clear of trash, even any accumulation of dust and muck, although some of the crates and casks stashed toward the back showed dust.
He went to it and hunkered down. He primed the flywheel light, which squeaked. He was glad his hands were strong, though the truth was he felt his palm muscles tiring. His hands, capable and used to doing as they were, weren’t accustomed to doing this.
He reached for the dark item on the ground. It was a little scrap of black. Brown fragments fell out of it as he picked it up with his free hand.
He thought he recognized it. A sniff made him sure. It was a piece of one of the cheroots his boss and former lover smoked.
Rance, he thought. Stuffing the chunk of cheroot in his pocket, he steeled himself and walked into the tunnel’s black mouth.
* * *
“UGLY,” RYAN SAID, as Ricky finished gasping out the story of his and Jak’s exploration and their horrifying discoveries.
And it was. Ugly even by the standards of what Ryan had seen and heard in his travels.
Weapons in hand, they were trotting through the ville toward the bridge inland. Not down the main street, but down a cobbled side street so narrow Ryan felt as if he could stretch out both arms and brush the soot-smeared brick and stone facades with his fingertips. He didn’t like moving through surroundings that made things this easy for would-be ambushers, but he
was relying on what lay below the yellow glow that was visible behind them, down by the waterfront, to give the frogs something better to do than chase them.
All a man could do was all he could do. Trader had said that, often enough. And like many things Trader habitually said, Ryan lived his life by those words.
“But don’t you see?” Ricky gasped.
He and Alysa were bringing up the rear. He clutched his longblaster in both hands. At the very tail of the line, the Stormbreak sec woman had her saber in her hand and her pale eyes were wild in her paler face.
“The ville is full of muties!” Ricky said. “And they’re dealing with the slavers!”
From right ahead of him in their single file Mildred shushed him.
“We figured something was dirty, kid,” she told him—gently, given how the stress she was under was amping up her normal grumpiness. “Why else do you think you found us getting ready to bolt?”
“We didn’t know the details,” Krysty said from right behind Ryan. “But we knew our hosts planned something.”
“Ryan suspected,” Doc said. “He smelled out the trap. Our white wolf, Jak, is not the only one with that gift, either. A sly, black wolf is Ryan.”
“When we came in across the bridge the only sec they had on the one and only land route into the ville was guarded by a fat middle-aged dude and a weedy teenage boy,” Ryan said. “And if Tavern Bay didn’t have some kind of top-notch defenses against attack from the sea, the slavers would own this place. The locals weren’t staying off the streets because they were afraid of outsiders invading. They had reason not to want to be seen.”
“Ryan went out for a quick recon,” said Mildred, who was right ahead of Ricky in their single file. “And what should he see but frogs. Hopping across the square right out in front of God and everybody, headed for that boarded-up old church of yours. Like they had no reason to give a shit if anybody saw them or not.”