Labyrinth

by James Axler

“Everybody got grens?” he asked.

  “You want stunners, fog, or frags?” J.B. asked.

  “Frags.”

  Mildred’s eyes widened. Detonating a half-dozen antipersonnel grenades in a crowded room was some serious, undifferentiated ugly. A head-on train wreck. A plane crash. A twenty-car pile up. “They could be friendlies,” she protested. “Just a bunch of butt-simple dirt farmers.”

  “Yeah, and we’re going to give them every chance to prove that’s all they are,” Ryan told her. “But we’ve got to be ready if they aren’t. There could be a couple hundred people in there, easy. If they rush us, either we lower the odds in a hurry, or we get overrun. Let them see your blasters going in. Don’t let them see the grens until I show them mine.”

  “There’s a good chance they’re packing all the weapons and ammo we couldn’t find,” J.B. said. “They see us with our blasters drawn, things could fall apart, big-time sudden.”

  “If things fall apart like that, you can be sure we’re going to mess up somebody’s wedding night,” Ryan said. “Jak, you and Doc go around the back of the building. There should be an exit or two there. The rest of us will go in through the front.”

  Before splitting up, they shrugged off their packs, and filled their pants pockets with extra clips and speedloaders, and their jacket side pockets with predark grens.

  While they waited for Jak and Doc to move into position, Mildred clamped a lid on the medical doctor part of her brain, the part that recoiled at mayhem and suffering, and let the battle-hardened soldier in her take command. Though they’d survived the brutal desert crossing, they were a long way from safety. And the mood of the ville folk toward strangers was a huge unknown. As Ryan said, there were way too many of them to take chances. Once the companions made contact, anything less than total committment to the frag plan was an invitation for the townsfolk to attack. In order to avoid a bloody horror show, they had to go in strong, hard, and ready to prime and toss.

  On Ryan’s signal, they rolled through the door, blasters up, safeties off. The noise was much louder inside. The floor shook from the stamping feet, and plaster dust fell in clouds from the ceiling.

  Unless the celebrants were careful, something much worse was about to rain down.

  Like the buildings on the other side of the square, the movie-house lobby had been stripped to the concrete. The candy counter was gone, as were the wallpaper and carpet. It had all the mystery and magic of a warehouse. Scavenged lumber and fifty-five-gallon drums were stacked along the facing wall, with room left for three sets of double doors, all of them closed, all of them leading into the theater.

  As Ryan put a two-by-four through the handles of the middle doors, the singing and stamping stopped, and the clapping died away. They could hear a man’s voice. He was talking loud, but his words were muffled by the walls.

  Mildred and J.B. took the right-hand set of doors; Krysty and Ryan took the left.

  “Don’t go too far into the room,” Ryan reminded them. “And don’t let anyone get behind you until we’re sure about these people.”

  J.B. eased through the doors with the M-4000 pump gun braced at hip height. Mildred followed with her Czech wheelgun. No one noticed their entrance, which was just as well because it took a few seconds for their eyes to adjust to the broad room’s torchlight. The floor sloped down to an elevated stage. There were perhaps twenty rows of plastic seats on the slope, every one occupied. Close to the stage, people were sitting on the floor in the aisle.

  The familiar music, if not its performance, had made century-old memories resurface in Mildred’s head: a long, elegant white dress and veil, an exchange of vows, floral bouquets, proud parents and in-laws. What was taking place in the El Mirador was something very different.

  Teenaged girls lined the bare stage, clothed in baggy, homespun robes. The man doing all the talking was tall, slope-shouldered and similarly dressed. His long black beard grew up over his cheekbones, almost to the sockets of his bulging, black eyes. Wild black hair sprouted around his head, as if he’d been struck by lightning. Beside him at the edge of the stage stood a young blond girl with her robe drawn off her shoulders.

  “Just thirteen summers and look at the set of hips on her,” the bearded man told the audience. “Jubilee Wicklaw will bear fifteen children, just like her mother, and her sisters.”

  At his command, little Jubilee, doe-eyed, a smile frozen on her face, started performing a mechanical, hip-gyrating dance more appropriate to a woman twice her age.

  And a woman who wasn’t six months pregnant.

  In that instant, Dr. Mildred Wyeth would have shot somebody dead if she’d known who to shoot. Raised in the second half of the twentieth century, when civilization was at its peak, she found many parts of the new reality difficult if not impossible to stomach. Where there were no laws to defend the weak, the weak invariably suffered. But of course suffering was a relative term. As was exploitation. And in Deathlands, there was always something worse. Always. At least the girl looked well-nourished, and there were no obvious bruises or scars on her arms or breasts.

  “Jubilee’s only been married the once,” the bearded man continued. “She’s hardly even broken in.”

  “What about the one in her belly?” shouted a man down in front.

  “That goes along as part of the deal,” the bearded man said. “Isn’t that right, Pilgrim Wicklaw?”

  Someone in the center of the bank of folding seats called out, “I’m trading all my claim.”

  As the bearded man scanned the audience for takers, he spotted Ryan and Krysty, first, then Mildred and J.B.. He clapped his hands, threw back his head and cried, “Glory to Bob and Enid! We have guests!”

  Everyone turned in their seats to see, and upon seeing, stood up.

  For Mildred, staring down a couple of hundred people with just a six-shooter and a pocket full of grenades was a moment to remember.

  A very long moment.

  “Once again the lost are found!” the bearded man exclaimed. “Guided out of the desert by the hand of Providence. Strangers, we are bound to welcome you, even as we ourselves were welcomed. Praise Bob, praise Enid!”

  The tension broke and the ville folk gave them a tumultuous welcome, with cheers and applause.

  When the clamor subsided, the bearded man waved the crowd back to their seats, and gestured for the newcomers to approach the stage. “Come on up here,” he said, “let’s get ourselves properly introduced.”

  “We’ll stay right where we are,” Ryan said.

  Where they were was in control of all the exits, with blasters in hand, but the audience seemed too excited to notice.

  The bearded man didn’t seem to care, either. Without pause, he proceeded with the introductions. “I’m Pilgrim Plavik,” he said. “Pilgrim Wicklaw, stand up. Pilgrim Baxter. Pilgrim Dennison. Pilgrim Ardis. Pilgrim Matthews.”

  The men rose as he spoke each of their names. They reminded Mildred of predark, heavyweight boxers, of club fighters not contenders, their brows, ears and cheeks scarred from years of hand-to-hand combat. Like the man on stage, they were dressed in floor-length, homemade sackcloth; they all wore their beards and hair untrimmed. Pilgrim Wicklaw’s hair hadn’t been combed for so long that it had turned into a lopsided mass of brown felt. A single, butt-nasty dreadlock.

  Seated around each of the men were lots of women, with lots of young children. Pilgrim Plavik didn’t bother to introduce any of the women, and Mildred couldn’t help but notice the way they beamed up at the men. In her experience, every remote population enclave in Deathlands had its own social structure. A product of isolation and grim necessity. Mildred was already getting a picture of the new Little Pueblo. A picture she didn’t like.

  From the seating arrangement and the adoring looks, all the females and children belonged to the half-dozen pilgrims, which left more than a hundred single men in the back rows and aisle. They didn’t get introduced, either. Lean and furtive, they looked like whipped dogs. Gr
inning whipped dogs. From the family groupings, and the sheer size of the successful husbands, Mildred figured the single guys weren’t getting any, except maybe from each other.

  “I’m called Ryan,” Ryan said. “This is Krysty, and Mildred and J.B. are on the other side. We’re pleased to meet you.”

  Ryan didn’t see fit to mention Doc and Jak, who were waiting for his signal in the darkness just inside the exit doors.

  “Welcome to Little Pueblo, one and all,” Plavik said.

  The pilgrims took this as their cue to sit down, all but Wicklaw, who remained on his feet, his gaze shifting back and forth between Krysty on the left, and Mildred on the right.

  His interest made Mildred’s skin crawl.

  Turning to Ryan, Wicklaw said, “As a gesture of respect and friendship, in the name of Bob and Enid I offer you a trade.” There was neither respect nor friendship in his crafty, squint-eyed smile. “I’ll swap my wife Jubilee there, for your dark one. Straight across trade. You keep the baby.”

  J.B. looked back at Mildred and winked. She scowled at him. It wasn’t funny. Not by a long shot.

  Wicklaw pointed at Mildred and said, “Come down here and sit beside me so we can get better acquainted.”

  Then he addressed Jubilee, “Go on, go to him, girl.”

  The child-mother started for the stage steps, eyes full of dread.

  “Hold on right there,” Ryan told her.

  The girl stopped in midstep, looking to her hulking brute of a husband for direction.

  But Pilgrim Wicklaw was already pushing his way out of the row of chairs. Mildred hadn’t moved an inch in his direction, so he was coming to her.

  Up close, he was even bigger. More like a super-heavyweight. His hair and beard looked like he’d been asleep in a cave for four or five months; from his expression he had awakened pissed off. His sweat-reek was monumental, almost stratified.

  “I treat my wives good,” he boasted to her. “You’re never gonna do better than me. Go on, ask the others.”

  Over in the Wicklaw family’s seats, his five spouses were smiling and nodding in eager agreement. A polygamy pep squad.

  Mildred thought about telling him how old she was chronologically, but knew he’d never believe it. “Sorry, but I’m not the marrying kind,” she said.

  Wicklaw moved toe to toe with her, leaning over, trying to intimidate her with his size and strength. He didn’t notice that she held her double-action ZKR aimed at the instep of his booted right boot. She was holding her breath to avoid taking in the big bastard’s stink, all the while thinking, one in the foot, one in the balls and one between the eyes.

  “You’re wrong about that, Mildred,” Wicklaw said. “You’ve just never had a real man take care of you. You’re going to love every minute of it, I swear by Bob and Enid.”

  When he put his callused hand heavily on her shoulder and squeezed, J.B. moved in. He jammed the barrel of his 12-gauge against the base of the man’s spine, between the top of his buttocks. “Take a step back from her, pilgrim,” he said, “or you’ll never walk again.”

  It was a triple-stupe thing to do, under the circumstances.

  But Mildred loved him for it.

  Wicklaw backed away, his hands raised.

  “Cull!” a woman’s voice shrieked.

  Others took up the cry. In seconds the hall rang with the chant, “Cull! Cull! Cull!”

  Whatever it meant, it didn’t sound like fun.

  Doc and Jak stepped out of the shadows, their blasters up.

  Plavik raised his arms and called out to the crowd, “Stop it, now! Stop it right now! Remember, these folks just got here. They’ve been through a lot. They don’t understand our ways.”

  “Don’t matter what they’ve been through or what they understand, and you know it,” Wicklaw said. “What matters is that they follow custom from the minute they set foot here. What’s right is right, praise Bob.”

  At the “right is right” bit, everybody in the theater stood up, purple-face outraged that newcomers had dared to challenge the rules they lived by. There were no blasters showing. Given odds of better than thirty to one, they didn’t need them.

  When the men, women and older children started to push into the aisles with bloody murder in their eyes, Ryan shouted, “Wait a fireblasted minute!” He pulled a fragger from his pocket and holding the safety lever down, yanked the ring pin.

  Push had come to shove.

  “Shit!” Mildred hissed under her breath as she and J.B. followed Ryan’s lead, holding armed explosive devices up for all to see.

  With primed frags at every corner of the room, the crowd froze. And it got very quiet in the El Mirador.

  Seconds passed and the stalemate stretched on and on.

  No one questioned the companions’ resolve to use the grens. No one dared call their bluff. But the youngest kids were already beginning to fidget and whimper. Something had to give. Good. Bad. Or ugly.

  Ryan broke the awful silence. He turned to Pilgrim Wicklaw and said, “Isn’t there another way for a real man to settle this?”

  Chapter Seven

  “Trade or blade!” Pilgrim Wicklaw bellowed back at Ryan. “Trade or blade!”

  The crowd roared and stamped its approval, greatly relieved that the conflict might be resolved at the cost of only one life, and a life that belonged to a complete stranger, at that.

  “It is the custom here,” Pilgrim Plavik told Ryan as the noise died down, “to work out our trading disputes with cold steel, one on one.”

  Ryan knew the people of Little Pueblo might not honor the outcome of the fight if he came out on top, but it was the only chance to avoid a wholesale slaughter of the women and children. There was nothing to lose by trying.

  “Until the fight’s over, nobody moves,” he said. “Your people stay in their seats. My people stay where they are.”

  Plavik nodded. “That is agreed.”

  Ryan slipped the ring pin back in the gren, repocketed it, then unslung his Steyr and handed it over to Krysty. As he passed her the weapon, he whispered in her ear, “If I go down, frag them.”

  “He’s the one going down, lover,” Krysty whispered back. “Going down hard.” Though there was confidence in her voice, her mutie hair had drawn up into a mass of tight, anxious ringlets. “And if the ville folk don’t like it?” she asked him.

  Her question only had one answer, and it was the same one he had just given her. He said it again, “Frag them.”

  Pilgrim Plavik quickly ushered the girls off the stage and waved for the two would-be combatants to come up and join him.

  Ryan and Wicklaw mounted the stage from opposite sides and walked to its center, where Plavik waited.

  “The rules are, there are no rules,” said the wildhaired, robed master of ceremonies. “Last man standing is the winner, however long that takes.”

  Wicklaw was staring down at Ryan’s black eye-patch and scar, turning his big, blocky head this way and that to take in the view from every angle. As he did so, an ugly grin peeked through the tangle of his beard. “Looks like you already lost a knife fight, Ryan,” he said. “This one’s gonna last three minutes, tops, then I’m gonna take that eye you got left.”

  Ryan didn’t rise to the bait. He stared back without expression, willing to let his panga do all the talking.

  “All right, both of you step back, now,” Plavik said, spreading his arms wide to separate them. When the two men were ten feet apart, he cried, “Blades out!”

  Wicklaw barked a command to his cheering section.

  One of his wives hurried forward, to the foot of the stage. She skittered her husband’s weapon across the stage floor. Wicklaw stopped its course by stepping on it with his boot, then bent and picked it up by the wooden handle.

  A farm implement.

  Wicklaw slashed at the air with the cruel, two-foot-long, quarter moon of razor sharp steel. The hooklike blade of the scythe gathered in and sliced, all in one motion, using the weight and iner
tia of whatever was being harvested to make clean, sweeping cuts. In combat, it was no stabbing tool, but it could make deep wounds to muscle, and sever blood vessels and tendons.

  Incapacitation.

  Leading up to the kill stroke.

  Ryan drew his own weapon from its leg sheath. The panga was eighteen inches of tempered, predark vanadium steel. Longer than a bowie knife and shorter than a short sword, it had a steel crossguard and pommel. With its heavy-backed blade, an expert knifefighter could cut through a one-inch-diameter bone with a single swipe. Although it could be used for stabbing—it had a razor point and deep blood gutters along both sides of the blade—because of its weight and balance, the panga was primarily a hacking weapon, designed to produce massive, cleaving wounds to flesh and bone.

  “When I drop my arm,” Plavik said, “the fight is on.”

  “Got any last words, One Eye?” Wicklaw asked, shifting his weight easily from one foot to the other.

  Ryan had no words, last or otherwise. Nor did he have a fighting plan, a “strategy” that anyone else would have recognized as such. Knife fighting was instinctive. Reactive. Because of the speed of attack and counterattack, it bypassed thinking and logic— “if he does this, I’ll do that”—and moved into a much more primitive and mysterious realm. Some blademasters visualized positive and negative energy flowing back and forth between them and their adversaries. As much as possible, Ryan visualized nothing. He emptied his mind, preparing it to receive whatever came his way.

  Wicklaw on the other hand thought he had his game plan all worked out. A seasoned fighter, he had undoubtedly hamstrung dozens of inept opponents by going for the heels, right off the bat.

  When Plavik dropped his arm, that’s exactly what Wicklaw did. He hopped forward, squatting low, reaching out and sweeping his arm through a short arc that hooked the blade behind Ryan’s feet.

  Ryan jumped in the air to avoid the strike, and as he did, he lashed out with his right boot. The straight snap kick caught Wicklaw in the side of the neck as he leaned forward, a solid blow that jarred Ryan all the way to his hip. Wicklaw felt it, too. He groaned and tumbled away.