Nightmare Passage

by James Axler

  Struggling to his hands and knees, Ryan looked up and thought he spotted their salvation. Beneath a shading hand, he squinted through the haze of the skyline at a collection of structures. They looked far away, blurred by the heat shimmer. Distance in the desert couldn't be measured by the eye alone, but he was certain the buildings were closer than they appeared. Or they could be mirages, fabricated by his brain slowly boiling away in the pressure cooker of his skull. Even so, the sight of the structures gal­vanized him, raised him quickly to his feet.

  Looking back behind him as his companions topped the low dune, he called, "Jak! Do your eyes still work?"

  "Halfway," came the albino's dour response. "Why?"

  Ryan gestured. "What do you see out there?"

  Jak cupped both hands around his eyes, protecting them from the dazzle. He stared. At length, he de­clared, "Shade."

  Chapter Nine

  The settlement, if it could be called that, looked like the rough sketch of a shanty town someone in­tended to build one day.

  Two dozen shelters made of splintering wooden siding and rotted canvas formed a horseshoe shape around a spacious central area. At the apex of the horseshoe, several of the ramshackle structures con­verged, leaning into one another. The suggestion of a stockade fence was barely identifiable in the drifts. Nothing stirred in and around the structures except wind-driven swirls of sand.

  On the far side of the settlement, down a short embankment, a thin stream of water trickled, curv­ing around the farthermost outbuilding. A line of gray peaks could just be made out on the distant horizon—mountains or clouds. If they were moun­tains, it could only be the foothills of the Sierra Madre range. Or it could be a new range, birthed by the Russian earthshaker bombs that had resculpted much of the West Coast.

  The seven companions cautiously approached the perimeter of the settlement, not that one was clearly defined. A square wooden sign hung crookedly on a tall post. The words painted on it were nearly in­decipherable due to long exposure to the harsh ele­ments, but Mildred was able to read it.

  "Fort Fubar," she said. "Members Of Kiwanis And Rotary Clubs. Population Who Gives A Shit."

  Her teeth flashed in a grin. "Whoever lived here had a sense of humor, at least."

  "Fubar?" Dean repeated. "What kind of word is that?"

  "Old acronym, dating back to World War II," she answered. "Fucked Up Beyond All Repair."

  Everyone was too hot and tired to expend much energy on laughing. The sun was higher, and the heat increased with every passing minute. Under other circumstances, one or two of their party would enter the potential killzone for a recce. There was no time for that now. Sunstroke was a very real pos­sibility, particularly for Jak.

  Drawing his SIG-Sauer, Ryan cycled a round into the chamber. He was dismayed by the gritty, grating sound made by the slide mechanism. All of their blasters needed to be stripped and cleaned of sand before they were one hundred percent reliable again.

  "Lock and load," he said lowly. "Move in fast and quiet."

  The seven people fanned out in a V formation, Ryan taking the point of the wedge. They crept into the perimeter of the settlement, alert for any move­ment or sound. All they heard was the eerie hum of the wind, singing through the grains of sand.

  The stillness was uncanny. Ryan repressed a shiver, despite the blazing heat, feeling the hairs on his arms and neck stir uneasily. It seemed to him that a silent host of invisible watchers regarded them curiously.

  Glancing over at Krysty, he mouthed, "Any­thing?"

  Her sun-reddened face was troubled, her green eyes darting back and forth. Although her head was swathed in a linen fold, Ryan saw the shifting mo­tions of her hair beneath it.

  "Yes," she whispered. "Not danger to us, ex­actly. Fear. Curiosity. Someone lives here."

  He peered at the ground for some sign and saw nothing. "Search the houses. Stay on triple red."

  They spread out over the settlement, peering into shacks, checking outbuildings, no matter how small or ramshackle. Quite a few people had lived here at one time, but they had disappeared. All the struc­tures were empty. The population of Fort Fubar was simply gone, all their tools and belongings and cooking utensils left where they had last been used, as if the people had only stepped away for a second and intended to return in the next second. Moreover, it appeared as if the people had vanished a long time ago, and any clues to their whereabouts had been erased by the merciless passage of years. Several of the huts and squats were strewed with rubbish, as though a single someone had lived in them until they were so full of trash he or she was forced to move on.

  One of the buildings was larger than the others, which wasn't saying much. Its long-ago construction crew had tried to make it two-storied and called it quits after propping up a sagging loft-type contri­vance with crudely hewed square beams. Ryan pushed aside the square of canvas hanging in front of the doorway and made a quick visual circuit of the interior.

  It had been designed as a storage facility. Crates, boxes and dirty cloth bundles were stacked to the ceiling. The loft was weighted down with cartons and junk of all sorts. Ryan stepped in, his nose lead­ing his eye to a covered galvanized bucket in a cor­ner. He didn't have to lift the lid to check its con­tents. The stale air was redolent with the acrid odor of urine and excrement. On a makeshift table, he found a fat candle in a saucer. The melted wax col­lected at its base was fairly soft. An opened can of tuna lay on the ground. The little remaining in it didn't smell ripe.

  Ryan back-stepped out of the building and ges­tured for the others to join him. When they were clustered around him, he whispered, "Somebody's living in here. J.B., you, Krysty and Jak come with me."

  They entered the building, and Ryan approached the loft. A ladder made of hammered-together two-by-fours stretched from the ground to a dark open­ing. Motioning for the others to remain where they stood, Ryan put his foot on the first rung. The old, dry-rotted wood broke beneath his weight with a crack that sounded unnaturally loud. That sound was instantly followed by another—a terrible masculine scream of utter wordless fury erupting from above.

  A dark, ragged shape plummeted from the open­ing in the underside of the loft, all flailing limbs and screaming sound. The scream ended abruptly as if a volume-control knob had been turned down. The sound replacing it was a shrieked, "Get on out of here, you hairy sons of whores!"

  He was a wiry, craggy man, incredibly grimed and browned. His mouth worked in a snag-toothed snarl beneath bewhiskered lips. A foot-long sharpened shard of metal was gripped in his right hand, with strips of cloth wrapped around the handle.

  Though shock and surprise had rooted everyone to the ground, the man was moving. He made a clumsy, stabbing motion, but Ryan was faster, blocking the thrust with his left forearm and knock­ing the knife from the man's hand with a slashing swipe of his blaster.

  Jak and Krysty lunged forward, pistols questing for a clear target, even as the two men grappled. Ryan didn't use his fists on the man, and he resisted the instinct to shoot him dead. He seized the man by the frayed collar of his ragged coverall and piv­oted deftly. The man flipped over Ryan's outthrust hip and slammed full-length to the floor. A cloud of dust mushroomed up around his body. He lay groan­ing and gasping, trying to regain the wind the impact with the ground had driven out of him.

  Ryan kneeled beside him, quickly joined by J.B., Krysty and Jak. "Who else is with you?" he snapped, prodding the deeply rutted forehead with the bore of the SIG-Sauer.

  The man had no breath to answer, but he shook his head vigorously, flinging fine particles of dust from his salt-and-pepper hair.

  "Get the others inside," Ryan said to Krysty. "The place isn't much, but at least it's out of the sun."

  By the time Mildred, Dean and Doc had entered the storage building, the man had regained enough air to talk. His gray eyes passed over everyone, then fastened on Ryan. His gaze became fierce, and he reached up, one hand closing tightly over Ryan's forearm. His mouth worked.
"Cawdor? You come to take me back?"

  Ryan stared at the man for a numb, silent second.

  The gray eyes shifted to J.B. "Dix? Is Trader with you?"

  Ryan and J.B. exchanged blank glances. "Who are you?" the one-eyed man demanded.

  Leathery, bristled lips peeled back over rotten stumps of teeth. "Don't recognize me. Been a long time. A long time, yeah."

  "What's your name?" J.B. asked.

  "Danielson. Gunner. War Wag One."

  The name was only vaguely familiar to Ryan. He dredged his memory for a face to put to it. J.B. made the connection before he did.

  "Dark night!" he exclaimed. "Danielson!" He turned toward Ryan. "Remember? Trader gave him the boot for holding out on some stuff from a stock­pile we found around Detroit."

  Danielson husked out a raspy laugh. "Yeah. Old field telephones. Weren't worth a crap to anybody. Obsolete before the nuke, even. Trader threw me out, anyhow."

  Ryan strained at his memory and came up with nothing, but he accepted J.B.'s words at face value. Trader had only a few rules, but he strictly enforced them. If Danielson had been kicked out of the or­ganization for violating one of them, he was only one of dozens over a period of many years.

  "How long ago was that?" Ryan asked.

  "Long time, like I said. Seventeen, eighteen, mebbe nineteen years. I'm no clock-watcher. What are you doing here in the Barrens?"

  "We might ask you the same thing," J.B. re­torted.

  Danielson grunted. "Can I sit up?"

  Ryan trained the blaster on him. "Do it slow."

  Groaning, the man hitched himself up on his el­bows, then onto his backside. He looked past J.B. and Ryan to the rest of the group.

  "Don't see Trader," he said. "Where is the hard-assed son of a bitch?"

  Ryan ignored the question, asking one of his own. "You live alone here?"

  Danielson nodded. "Yep. Last citizen of Fort Fubar. The only Farer town in the Barrens, if that means anything."

  "Don't," Jak grated.

  Farers were a loosely knit but far-flung conglom­eration of nomads who traveled Deathlands trading goods, tech and even themselves to villes. However, Farer territory was usually confined to the Midwest.

  "You're a long way from your stomping grounds," J.B. said. "Where's everybody else?"

  Danielson sucked in shuddery breath. "Taken."

  "Taken where?" Krysty asked.

  "The First Kingdom."

  "Talk sense," Ryan growled.

  "The city of Aten." Danielson's tone was matter-of-fact. "I lived there, too. For a long time. I was a trusted member of Pharaoh's court. But after Connie died, things changed. I wanted out. I came back here."

  J.B. gave Mildred a baffled look. "You have any idea of what he's rambling on about?"

  "Yes," she said tersely. "Let him talk."

  "I escaped Pharaoh's power, you see." Danielson tugged open the front of his coverall. Hanging from his weathered neck by a loop of rawhide was an amulet the size of a man's hand. Made of a dull, nonreflective metal, it was shaped like a cross with the traverse arms squared and the top rounded.

  "An ankh," Doc spoke up.

  "Yeah," Danielson replied. "Keeps Pharaoh's mind out of mine. Not that he noticed he couldn't get in there anymore. Guess even a god-king's heart can break. They left me alone out here. Lately, though, the Incarnates started nosing around, like they were hunting for something. Or somebody."

  "You, mebbe?" J.B. asked.

  Jak suddenly stiffened. "Hear noise."

  The others waited tensely, expectantly, as the teenager turned his head to the right and to the left, like a hound casting for a scent.

  "Not sure what it is," he stated. "Coming closer."

  Ryan arose and went to the doorway. Pushing aside the hanging, he looked up and down the sand-swept avenue between the shacks. The dry air vi­brated with a low-pitched hum, like a distant swarm of bees, undercut by a steady mechanical clicking. The others peered through the cracks and chinks in the wall boards.

  Two shapes hove into view from the far end of Fort Fubar. Ryan stared, screwed up his eye and stared some more. Almost unconsciously, he mut­tered, "What the hell."

  A pair of two-wheeled vehicles rolled from the direction of the desert, but they didn't resemble in configuration or form other wags he had ever seen. Boxlike wooden chassis were overlaid with intricately worked borders of brass, copper and bronze. The vehicles were two yards long, shaped roughly like upside down, elongated U's. They sat on low-slung platforms atop heavy axles, positioned be­tween two very large spoked wheels. The wheels were of some dark wood and rimmed with metal. No power source was visible, though sunlight flashed dazzlingly from a reflective surface at the rear of the platforms. They looked like carts, but they obviously had some artificial source of power.

  "By the Three Kennedys," Doc muttered, gazing over Ryan's shoulder. "Horseless chariots."

  Ryan realized Doc's description was fairly accu­rate. He had seen pix in books of those ancient modes of wheeled transportation. The absence of harnessed horses or other beasts of burden had con­fused him.

  As the chariots hummed and clicked closer, Ryan saw that each one carried three man-figures and none of the six looked human at first, or even second glance. Muties, was his first thought. A moment later, he was forced to reassess his snap judgment.

  "Gaia!" Krysty breathed in a trembling tone. "What are those things?"

  Each of the six men in the chariots was similar in build and clothing. They were naked except for loosely woven white linen kilts. Glittering collars of beaten gold rested on their broad shoulders and en­closed the bases of their necks. All of them were dark skinned, deeply tanned by long exposure to the merciless desert sun. In height and breadth, they looked enormous, with heavily muscled arms and legs. Each one held a long, slender silver rod, tipped by V shaped prongs.

  Only their heads differentiated them from one an­other. The men wore jeweled helmetlike headpieces, which were secured snugly beneath their jaws by an interlocking arrangement of leather straps.

  One man wore the stylized image of a dog's head, with pricked up ears and a canine snout. Another headpiece resembled the horned skull of a bull, an­other a ram and yet another a scaled, blunt-nosed serpent. A beaked face represented a hawk; another helmet looked like the head of a crane or a stork.

  In a voice hushed with awe, Doc whispered, "The major deities of ancient Egypt—Anubis, Serapis, Khnum, Set, Horus and Thoth."

  "Stupes in costume," Jak growled.

  Quietly, Danielson said, "They are the Incar­nates."

  "What are they doing here?" Krysty asked fear­fully.

  Danielson smiled a sad, almost pitying smile. "Looking for you, I imagine."

  Chapter Ten

  The chariots rolled and clicked to simultaneous halts in the center of the compound. The humming noise ceased abruptly. As the big, helmeted men disem­barked, Ryan noticed how they carefully stepped over or around some object at the rear of the vehi­cles. Their gait was an arrogant, self-confident swag­ger. High-strapped sandals encased their feet and muscular calves.

  "Osorkon!" Jackal-headed Anubis roared. "Where are you, you demented old prick?"

  "Who's Osorkon?" Dean asked.

  "Me," Danielson answered. "My Aten name."

  Danielson shuffled toward the doorway, but Mil­dred restrained him with a hand. "What do you mean they're looking for us?" she demanded.

  "They probably seen your tracks," the man re­plied calmly.

  "And if you're asked about us, you'll simply point us out to them?" Doc inquired.

  Danielson blinked owlishly, as if the question contained a hidden meaning. "Sure. They're the In­carnates. You don't lie to them."

  "Osorkon!" Anubis bellowed peevishly.

  "What do they want us for?" Dean asked.

  "To bring you to Pharaoh." Seeing several sets of eyes glare at him suspiciously, he added, "They probably have need of you in the work gangs. You won't be hurt�
��'less you take the notion into your heads to resist."

  "Funny thing," Ryan said grimly, stripping off the sheet. "That's exactly the notion I've taken into my head."

  Jak hefted his Colt Python. "Take out. Not armed, except for frog giggers."

  Danielson's face paled under its layer of grime. "Not armed? Boy, they've got metauh rods! They'll drop you like fried flounders!"

  "Osorkon! Get out here or we'll burn this shit-heap down!" The deep voice throbbed with an un­mistakable note of menace.

  Grimacing, Ryan made a move to fling aside the door flap. J.B. stepped forward. "Hold a sec. I got an idea."

  "I am delighted that somebody does," Doc mut­tered.

  ANUBIS, SERAPIS, SET, Thoth, Khnum and Horus all turned at the rustle of coarse cloth. From beneath their helmets, they stared imperiously at the two men shuffling out of the storage shanty. They ig­nored the ragged figure of Danielson and focused their attention on the slightly built, sallow-faced man timidly edging out into the hot blast of sunlight. His thin, mousy hair was uncombed, his clothes shabby, and he gaped goggle-eyed from behind the lenses of round, steel-framed spectacles. In the kingdom of the nondescript, this little gnome was the heir ap­parent to the throne.

  Anubis pointed to him with the metauh rod. "Who's this feeb, Osorkon?"

  Ducking his head respectfully, Danielson said, "He arrived here from across the Barrens, O mighty incarnation of the guardian of the underworld."

  Hawk-headed Horus demanded shrilly, "What's your name, feeb?"

  "Name's Dix," J.B. replied meekly. "Lost my way from a trading party. Wandered for days. Ended up here."

  "Who else was with you, Dix?" ram-horned Khnum growled.

  J.B. shook his head dolefully. "Couple more. They died in the desert."

  "We found the tracks of at least five people," Thoth declared, the long, curving bird beak casting a goateelike shadow on the human chin beneath it. "Maybe more."