by James Axler
Plavik shrugged. “Why not?” he said. He hitched up the hem of his robe and unstrapped the leg sheath. He slipped the panga into the scabbard and handed it over.
Ten blasters held steady aim on Ryan’s head as he fastened the sheath to his calf.
“It won’t do you any good, you know,” Plavik said. “Not down there.”
Ryan looked in the hole. Standing next to it, he could see ten rungs on a flat wall before everything faded to black.
“There are blasters down there, too, if you can find them,” Plavik said. “Guess what? They won’t do you any good, either.”
To the other pilgrims, he said, “Light the torches.”
Torches were ignited and tossed down the hole.
Ryan listened for the sound as they hit bottom. It took a long time.
“Someone has to go first,” Plavik said. “Do you want to choose, or shall we do it for you?”
“I’ll go first,” Ryan said. He looked at J.B. “Then comes Jubilee, and you come after her.”
J.B. nodded.
“The hole awaits,” Plavik said.
“You think this is over,” Ryan told him, “but you’re wrong.”
“You mean you’ll be back?” Plavik exclaimed, throwing up his hands and arching his bushy eyebrows in mock surprise.
The crowd found his antics most amusing.
To the sound of their laughter, Ryan eased himself into the hole. The rungs were made of tubular steel and they hadn’t corroded. As he climbed down below the level of the road, he could see that the vertical channel was much bigger than the manhole opening. A rectangular passage. Looking over his hip, he saw the dim light cast by the heaped torches far, far below him. He climbed down a few more rungs, waiting for Jubilee to get started.
“Take it slow,” he told her as she stepped down into the hole. “Keep your eyes on the rungs. Don’t look down. You’ll be fine. I’m right here. I won’t let you fall.”
She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t freeze. She started putting one foot after another, one hand after another.
J.B. came after her.
“Watch your speed, J.B.” Ryan warned him. “Don’t step on her hands.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
As they worked their way down the sheer wall, they could hear the wounded men being forced through the manhole above them. As they descended, the light from up there got dimmer and gradually the light from below got brighter.
“Ryan, can you see anything down there?” J.B. called out.
“Nothing’s moving in the light.”
Outside the ring of light, there was only black.
When they were almost at the bottom, Ryan said, “Wait a minute. Hold it there.”
Jumping to the floor, he pulled out his panga and crouched, ready to fight. When nothing attacked him from out of the gloom, he picked up a torch and held it high overhead. There were tunnel entrances to the right and left of the rung wall. The one of the right led back through the heart of the dam. When he turned the other way, straining to see more than ten yards down the corridor, he noticed the torch smoke was flowing along the ceiling, driven by a faint breeze to his back, from the direction of the spillway.
For the moment at least, there was no danger.
“Come on, Jubilee,” he said. “Come on down.” He helped her negotiate the last few rungs.
“That’s one hell of a long climb,” J.B. said as he dropped beside them. He bent and grabbed one of the torches.
“Must be close to two hundred feet,” Ryan said.
They heard a metallic scraping sound from above and the tiny spot of light up there winked out. The ville folk had pulled the manhole cover closed. Everybody who was supposed to be inside was inside.
They couldn’t see the other four prisoners descending. Their torchlight didn’t penetrate that far. Wicklaw appeared out of the darkness, moving very slowly. Ryan recognized him thirty feet up by his injured, foreshortened foot. The bandages were seeping blood.
There was fear in the ex-pilgrim’s eyes, fear and hate, as he stepped to the ground. Fear of his new surroundings and hate for Ryan Cawdor, who had put him there. He stooped quickly to claim a torch.
Wicklaw wasn’t the only one bleeding.
The exertion of the descent had reopened the shotgun pellet wounds of the next man down. Blood streamed from holes in his right biceps and forearm, dripping from his fingertips. He picked up the last torch with his good arm.
The third man was right behind him, factoring the arm and side that had taken a load of gren shrap. “Brewster’s coming,” he said as he cleared the final rung. “He’s moving real—”
A shrill scream from above made him look up.
Ryan lunged forward, grabbed him by the back of the collar and jerked him off his feet.
An instant later a falling body crashed to the concrete beside the rungs. It hit so hard that it bounced four feet in the air. Blood mist sprayed over them all.
Wicklaw cursed and spun away.
But not too far.
Ryan held his torch over the still form. It was the blinded man. Broken open like a watermelon from head to crotch. Either he had panicked and lost his grip on the rungs, or he had decided to go to end it all.
“Bastard got the damn thing over with, nice and quick,” Wicklaw said, moping the side of his face with the cuff of his robe. “Couldn’t face meeting the demons blind.”
“Why’d you let him come down the wall last?” Ryan said.
“Figure it didn’t matter,” the gren-wounded man said. “With no eyes, he was bound to die first, anyway.”
“Well, you almost came a close second.”
J.B. looked up and down the identical tunnels. “What do you think, Ryan?” he said.
“We’ve got a little breeze coming through from that direction.”
“I noticed. It could mean there’s an opening of some kind outside, but the wind currents are tricky to figure. A giant honeycomb like this has temperature and humidity differences from top to bottom, and side to side, that could be pushing the air around all on their own. If there is an opening, it look like it’s way the hell on the other side of the dam.” He paused, then said, “The opening might be a hundred feet up.”
“Could be,” Ryan said. “You got a better idea?”
“Nope.”
“Then we’d better get a move on.”
Wicklaw blocked their path with his bulk and outstretched arms. “You two are crazy,” he said. “There aren’t any ways out. This place has been sealed since the days of Bob and Enid.”
“If you want to stay here, that’s fine,” Ryan said. “J.B., me and Jubilee are going.” He turned to the other men. “You can come with us or stay, it’s up to you.”
“We’ll come,” the bleeding one said.
Wicklaw moved out of the way to let them pass, his face twisted into a scowl. He stood alone with his torch for no more than two seconds before he hobbled after them, groaning each time his bad foot hit the ground.
The service corridors’ ceiling was lined with pipe and bundles of electrical conduit; the walls were blank concrete and curved slightly to the left, following the bend of the dam.
As they walked into the light breeze, Ryan started to pick up an unpleasant mixture of odors. Rotten meat. Latrine. Swamp gas. Bear pit. Faint at first, it got stronger. And stronger. “Smell that?” he said to J.B.
“How could I miss it? Damn nasty.”
“Mebbe we shouldn’t be going this way?” the gren-wounded man said. “Mebbe we would turn back?”
“Whatever that is, partner, it’s been dead awhile,” J.B said.
The source of the stench was a small pile of debris that lay beside the right-hand wall. Covering their mouths and noses with their hands, they approached it. The light of four torches reflected off the pool of liquid in which the debris sat.
“Bones,” Ryan said, carefully leaning over the puddle. “Those are human bones.”
He and J.B. had seen corpse
s galore, but never quite like this. The flesh and internal organs appeared to have dissolved into the liquid. The stubs of the plundered rib cage, and the points of the hip girdle stuck up from the pool of yellow slime. The skull was missing. A wad of fluid-soaked rags, presumably the victim’s clothing, lay to one side, along with a completely skeletonized leg and foot.
“Demon’s work,” Wicklaw announced. “Bob and Enid protect us.
“Damn that stinks,” J.B. said. “Burns, too. Up inside my nose. Better not touch it barehanded, Ryan.”
The one-eyed man searched the floor for an alternative. At the base of the wall, he found a foot-long scrap of heavy, insulated wire and poked it into the liquid. When he pulled it out, the fluid stuck to the end, sagging in a long, wobbly strand. He poked the wire deeper, testing the pool’s depth. He felt resistance after four inches, and when he pressed harder the wire sank in another couple of inches.
“Looks like some kind of acid,” he said. “Eats through the meat.” When he prodded the rib cage, the bones crumbled and fell into the puddle. “It turns the bones to mush. Looks like it’s eaten down into the concrete, too. There’s a depression where the stuff is sitting.”
“Where did it come from?” J.B. said.
“If Mildred was here, she could tell us.”
“I’m glad she’s not here,” the Armorer said.
“It came from the demons,” Wicklaw told them.
J.B. turned on him bringing the business end of his torch within singeing distance of his long beard. “What the hell have you got trapped down here, Wicklaw?”
“Things that chill, but can’t be chilled, praise Bob, praise Enid.”
Whatever the demons were, Ryan thought, they weren’t spirits. Spirits didn’t spray acid over their victims.
“Plavik told us there were blasters down here,” he said.
“There are, but they won’t do you any good.”
“Yeah, he said that, too. Where are they?”
“Good question. The guns were left behind by Bob and Enid, and the other first pilgrims. After they forced the demons into the dam, they took weapons and ammo down to finish them off. And found it couldn’t be done. When none of the fighters made it out, the rest of the ville followed Bob and Enid’s instructions and sealed up the place.”
“Plavik told us the building in the park was Bob and Enid’s tomb,” Ryan said. “Now, you’re telling us they never came out of the dam. One of you is a liar.”
“Not necessarily. The building in the park was Bob and Enid’s tomb, but they aren’t buried in it because their bodies were never recovered. The tomb is their holy shrine.”
“Is there an armory or storehouse in here where they would’ve cached the weapons?” J.B. said.
“I don’t know. Like I said, nobody came out. The blasters probably aren’t in one place anymore, anyway. It’s been a hundred years since the offering began. Some of the people who got put down here found the blasters, carried them around, and used the blasters to try to defend themselves. From time to time we still hear shots fired after we make an offering.”
“So you’re telling us the blasters and ammo could be anywhere?” J.B. said.
Wicklaw nodded.
“If there’s weapons down here, let’s find them,” Ryan said.
As they followed the hall, they came across a few other puddles, all with floating bones. The kill sites seemed randomly scattered. Some were near the walls, some in the middle of the corridor. There were no blasters.
Ryan’s torch lit up a shallow alcove set in the left-hand wall. On the floor, in the largest puddle they had seen, were four sets of stripped human remains. To Ryan, it looked like a group of prisoners had been trapped, then chilled in the blind alley. It occurred to him that four smaller puddles might have run together into one big one. Some of the victims’ clothes had been ripped off and tossed aside, beyond the pool’s perimeter. He lifted the corner of a pile of rags with the panga’s point and discovered a prize beneath.
A steel skeleton stock.
Sheathing his blade, Ryan picked up the Galil. “J.B., take a look at this,” he said.
The Armorer gave him a thumbs-up.
The predark assault rifle was Israeli-made and modeled after the Soviet AK-47, with a folding stock, select fire, open sights, detachable 30-round box magazine and shoulder sling. He dropped the mag and examined its contents. This Galil was chambered for .308 caliber, the NATO round. He counted the bullets. Nineteen, including the one in the chamber. There were no spent casings on the floor.
As he slapped the magazine back in place, J.B. said, “I got two more over here.”
Ryan slipped the Galil over his shoulder and joined J.B. beside the wall. Wicklaw was holding his torch.
“Not as nice as yours,” J.B. said. He showed Ryan the pair of handblasters he’d found in the back corner of the alcove—a Smith and Wesson Military and Police revolver in .38 caliber, and a 9 mm Llama semiauto pistol. The Smith looked like it had been through a couple of world wars. No blueing remained and a layer of rust coated on the barrel and cylinder.
J.B. spun the cylinder, then snapped it shut, tucking the pistol in his waistband. He quickly cleared the Llama’s mag and chamber. When he worked the slide back and forth, he grimaced. “Llama’s got a little hitch in getalong,” he said. “Dinged up. A burr on the slide rail, mebbe.”
“Will it shoot?”
“It’ll shoot. Got fourteen rounds for it. Five for the Smith.”
“Grand total of thirty-eight.”
“Not so bad.”
Ryan patted the Galil’s receiver. “The poor bastard who carried this last never even got off a shot,” he said.
“Does that make you feel better or worse?” Wicklaw asked him.
“Better,” Ryan said.”More bullets for me.”
“How about letting me have one of those handblasters?” the ex-pilgrim said.
“Don’t think so,” Ryan told him.
“Why not? I can shoot good.”
“Don’t feature taking a slug in the back.”
“I would never shoot you in the back, Ryan. That would be too much of a mercy.”
“Forget it,” Ryan said. “We keep all the blasters.”
J.B. took back his torch, the Llama cocked in his right hand.
“How often have you been putting folks down here?” Ryan asked Wicklaw.
“Depends on circumstances.”
“Guess.”
“Mebbe a couple a month.”
“How many people a year?”
“Twenty or thirty.”
“For a century? That’s three thousand people.”
“I never gave it much thought. I suppose that must be right.”
“There aren’t enough bodies,” Ryan said. “All those other bodies are somewhere else. Mebbe they got dragged off by whatever it is that did that.” He gestured at the puddle and bones.
“There’s got to be more than one,” Ryan said. “Only a predator competing for food would bother finding a safe place to eat.”
He made Jubilee take hold of the back of his shirt. “You’re going to have to stay real close to me from here on,” he told her. “Hang on tight and don’t let go, no matter what happens.”
Chapter Seventeen
From the vantage point of the silo dome, with the sun angling up over the horizon, Jak and Doc watched the procession snake through the corn fields below, heading for the lake.
“The people of Little Pueblo have come together for a celebration of some kind,” Doc said. “With our friends as unwilling participants.”
“Chill Ryan and J.B.?”
“If that’s their plan, they certainly seem jubilant at the prospect.”
“Can’t save Ryan and J.B.,” Jak said, the edge in his voice betraying anguish and frustration. “Too many blasters.”
“We can only do what we can do, my boy. If our dying would free them, both of us would gladly surrender our lives. Under these circumstances, our death
s would accomplish nothing. We have to trust that our companions will endure until we can effect their escape. Mildred and Krysty are not with them.”
“No. Not there.”
“Then they are either already dead or being held captive back in the ville. If the good ladies are still alive, we have an excellent chance of freeing them, as the township is most certainly deserted.”
“Stop talk. We go.”
They climbed down the long, rusting ladder. When the procession had passed, they left the cover of the silos and ran back along the predark highway toward the city center. As usual, Jak set the pace and picked the route.
With the sun slanting above the canyon rim, they made much better time on the return trip, despite the slight uphill grade. Cutting across the abandoned lots wasn’t a problem when all the ankle-twisting junk and the chest-deep, water-cut gullys were visible.
Jak led them through what in predark times had been neighborhood backyards. The wooden privacy fences that had once separated the properties had washed away, rotted, or been used as firewood. Only the metal wire fences remained, and they were largely flattened. Here and there, rusting hulks of predark wags, primarily pickup trucks, lay on their caved-in sides or roofs. Not all remnants of the previous culture had been uprooted and swept away. Tiny brick patios still bordered gutted foundations. There were driveways leading nowhere. There was even a basketball half-court, missing its backboard and stanchion. The reservoir’s runoff had undermined the plate of concrete; it was crazed with settling cracks. Similar cracks marked the exposed concrete slab foundations and cinder-block basements.
The albino headed for the cover of a precariously leaning cinder-block wall.
Darting around a coil of detached metal fence, he jumped a yawning ditch and two strides later, dropped down behind the short section of wall. Doc made the jump as well. He knelt down beside Jak, breathing hard. Over a low spot in the cinder block, they could see one story down into the basement, where a rusted-out, full-sized SUV, with no seats, windows or doors, sat up to its wheel wells in fine silt.
“How much farther?” Doc said, when he stopped puffing.
“Halfway there,” Jak said. “Ready?”
“By all means proceed, dear boy.”