by James Axler
“We’ve got to get into the redoubt while the ville folk are still busy at the dam,” Krysty said.
“No time to tarry, then,” Doc said, reaching for a backpack.
They divided up the extra weapons and gear. Krysty couldn’t carry her full share because her knees were still too wobbly. She took Ryan’s sniper rifle and an ammo satchel. In addition to his own gear, Jak slung J.B.’s 12-gauge pump.
The four of them slipped out of city hall without seeing another soul. No one was moving on the sidewalk that bordered the park, or along the visible storefronts, so they crossed the cracked street to the square, slipping into the line of trees. They followed the cover of the trees, until they were directly across from the front of the redoubt. Light of day revealed the aftermath of the battle that had taken place the night before: scorch marks left by the gren detonations. Shallow craters blasted into the sward. Burned and blackened trees, bark and limbs savagely blown off.
“It looks like we won’t have to move a ton of rocks this morning,” Mildred said.
The area in front of the redoubt entrance was still littered with the boulders Ryan and J.B. had carried.
With Jak in the lead, they ran single file across the grass. When they reached the steps, Mildred, Krysty and Doc descended while Jak stood at the top, keeping watch.
The last rock was right where J.B. had left it, still blocking the door. Mildred and Doc took hold of either end, lifted it and swung it out of the way, onto the steps.
As they did this, Krysty moved to the keypad lock beside the door. Before she could tap in the entry code, a flurry of gunshots rang out from above.
At the head of the steps, Jak dived to his left as slugs pelted the earth and whined off the tops of the boulders. He came up on one knee with his Python blazing.
Mildred, Doc and Krysty cut loose a withering volley of fire, aiming at the edge of the roof as they backed up the stairs.
The cat was most definitely out of the bag.
Chapter Nineteen
“No, please,” the blinded man moaned as he clung to the edge of the hole. His body from the armpits down was already inside; his feet were on the third set of rungs. He hung on to his last hope with every ounce of his strength. “Please, shoot me,” he said.
He wasn’t just begging the robed and bearded pilgrims who stood over him. He was pleading to every person on the dam, everyone he had ever befriended, everyone he had ever toiled beside, for an act of human kindness and mercy.
He was asking the wrong favor.
In the wrong place.
Of the wrong folks.
Pilgrim Plavik put the sole of his boot on top of the man’s head and pressed down with all his weight, forcing him all the way into the hole. “Close it,” he told the pilgrims standing by with pry bars.
Plavik kept his foot on the man’s head until the very last second, pulling it away as the pilgrims dragged the heavy steel plate shut.
“Praise Bob, praise Enid, the offering is made!” he shouted to the throng. “Let us show our joy, and do them honor.”
At his words, the ville folk formed two lines facing each other across the dam crest road. Plavik walked to one end of the gauntlet, clapping his hands as he did so. The people picked up the infectious beat, and by the time he turned, they were all clapping with him.
Because he was head pilgrim, it was his duty and his right to show first joy.
Plavik began to dance. He capered between the ragged rows of people, moving from one side of the road to the other, spinning around and around with his arms in the air, shaking his shoulders, extending his tongue, rolling his eyes, waggling his head.
His performance was greeted by peals of delighted laughter and shouts of “Glory to Bob and Enid!” and “All praise to Bob and Enid!”
He worked the crowd to a fever pitch as he progressed toward the manhole. By the time he got there, they were all yelling, all swaying and bobbing, and eagerly dancing in place.
It wasn’t until he actually set foot on the manhole that he let loose with his best steps. A modified buck and wing with frantic shoulder shimmies and eye rolling.
The crowd roared its approval.
Then every person on the dam, starting with the pilgrims, then the wives, then the children, then the field slaves, took turns dancing down the cheering gauntlet to the manhole cover, and there performed their most spritely and energetic jig.
Dancing on someone else’s grave.
Plavik melded into the slowly moving chorus line, keeping time with his hands, and shouting encouragement to the dancers and hosannas to Bob and Enid. The ceremony was all about stalling the inevitable. Watching someone else be taken instead of you. Knowing you dodged the bullet this time. Staying alive in the short term was all that was possible. A philosophy subscribed to by pilgrims and wives, and by the field hands. A philosophy created out of whole cloth by Bob and Enid, so that the ville might survive.
The demons would surely be pleased this day. It had been a very fruitful week when it came to offerings.
And to wives.
Plavik scanned the line on the other side of the road, picking out Wicklaw’s former mistresses and making sexy eyes at them. The new widows gave him shy but sexy eyes right back, whispered something to one another, then stifled giggles with their hands. Sometime later in the day, according to the laws of Little Pueblo, Wicklaw’s women and the two newcomer females would be divided up among the five surviving pilgrims. As head pilgrim, Plavik would claim first and second choice.
Two new wives.
All glory to Bob and Enid.
The crackle of blasterfire from the direction of the ville drove all the romantic fantasies from Plavik’s head and put an equally sudden end to the dancing and cheering. Strings of blaster shots popped off, the booming single reports and canvas-ripping autofire chatter overlaying each other, echoing off the canyon walls.
The people of Little Pueblo rushed to the lake side of the dam, and stood there rigid and horrorstruck, staring toward the city center, while an intense battle raged out of sight in the square park. After fifteen seconds it shut off, as if by a switch.
There was no way of telling whether the guards the pilgrims had posted had won or lost the skirmish. If they’d lost, the unthinkable might still be averted.
“They’re breaking into the tomb!” Plavik cried to his flock. “We must stop them!”
“Vengeance!” someone shouted as the ville folk broke ranks and ran to defend their most hallowed shrine.
Chapter Twenty
Ryan walked with the breeze in his face, the assault rifle in one hand, the torch in the other. The flickering flame cast bizarre shadows over the corridor’s windowless walls and low ceiling. The extreme limit of the light was perhaps twenty-five or thirty feet ahead; beyond that was the void.
The land of monsters.
J.B. matched him stride for stride. He, too, had a torch in one hand; in the other he carried the best of the two handblasters he’d found, the Llama semiautomatic, hammer back, safety off, finger resting outside the trigger guard. The battered Smith was tucked in his trouser waistband.
Ryan could feel Jubilee’s hand twisted in the back of his shirt. She was holding on for dear life. Ryan didn’t know if he could save her. He didn’t know whether he could save J.B. or himself. At this point the situation was totally out of control. He and the Armorer didn’t know what kind of enemy they faced, they didn’t know its capabilities, or its number. Or if there was a way out of the dam. All they could do was rely on their survival instinct, their foot speed, their reaction time and their fighting skills.
In the end, that was all they ever had.
And it had carried the day before.
The wounded men drove themselves unmercifully to keep up the pace. Steeped in the superstition surrounding the dam, they were dry-mouth terrified of what lay waiting for them in the dark. Every breath they took reminded them of the proximity of death. The breeze did nothing to disperse the pall of decay
, which seemed to cling to every surface. Shuffling, groaning from the effort and pain, they stayed close behind.
As they rounded the gentle curve of the hallway, the smell suddenly got much worse. Eye-watering, nose-watering worse. Like a hydrocholoric acid spill.
In the torch light, Ryan saw a crumpled shape on the floor of the corridor ahead. To the left was an open doorway.
J.B. saw it, too. “Another corpse,” he said.
Like the others, it lay on its back in a puddle of yellow slime. But this one was different. There was still flesh on the bones.
To get close, Ryan had to breathe through his mouth. The fumes coming off the body burned his throat.
“Looks fresher,” J.B. said, grimacing.
“The acid isn’t finished doing its work,” Ryan said.
Standing close to the corpse was like leaning into an open, raging furnace.
The victim was way past caring. His eyes had been melted out of their sockets, which now swam with yellow acid. His lipless mouth gaped in a silent scream, chin jutting upward. But for the branded goatee that decorated his chin, his face was stripped of skin. In some places, the flesh was entirely missing; in others it sagged like wet crepe. Both cheeks were gone, as were the ears. Below the stout neck, his torso had been split open and plundered of all its soft organs. A pool of faintly bubbling acid filled the gaping cavity, spilling over onto the concrete. The verges of the horrendous wound were bracketed by the ends of broken rib bones and showed claw or tooth marks where the flesh had been pulled to shreds.
“Your demons sure do make a mess,” J.B. said to Pilgrim Wicklaw. “Now I’m glad you didn’t give us breakfast.”
“Got another blaster over there,” Ryan said, pointing along the join of the wall and floor with the Galil.
“Now, we’re talking,” J.B. said as he hurried over to pick up the autopistol. He found the release and stripped out the Uzi’s stick mag. “Empty,” he said. He looked around on the ground for a second, then added, “No spent casings here.”
There weren’t any around the pool, either.
Ryan noted the dead man’s trousers had been saturated with acid and ripped to tatters, but not completely torn off. He still had his boots on.
“I recognize that one,” Wicklaw told them, his voice muffled by the hand that covered his nose and mouth. “He called himself Starr. He was offered to the demons two days ago.”
“What do you think, Ryan?” J.B. asked. “Could that be our water thief, come to a bad end?”
“Could be,” Ryan said. “His boots are the right size for the prints we were following. Don’t see many chin brandings like that.”
“Yeah. Only the most hard-core, freelance mercies get themselves decorated like that. Gotta hurt like radblazes.”
“Not as much as getting covered in acid.”
“From the way he’s laying, I’ll bet he came out that door. Didn’t get very far.”
Ryan untwisted Jubilee’s fingers from his shirt. “Stay out here with J.B.,” he said. “I’m going to check the room.”
With the Galil selector switch set on automatic fire, he poked his torch into the half-open doorway. He could see metal lockers along the back wall, and a row of empty metal shelves to the right. He kicked the door open wider and stepped inside. The demon stench was chokingly thick, and mixed with the odor of urine.
One of the tall cabinets had been tipped facedown on the floor. In the wall above it was a yard-long, elliptically shaped gash. Over the pounding of his heart, Ryan heard the hissing and spitting of the torch flame. Oily smoke gathered along the ceiling.
Wherever the gash led, it didn’t lead to the outside. There was no air moving in the room.
Spent brass was scattered on the floor around the fallen locker. Ryan picked up one of the casings. It was a 9 mm. They were all nines. Most likely from the dead man’s Uzi. He’d emptied the mag in here.
“It’s clear,” he said over his shoulder to J.B.
Ryan moved closer to the gash, careful not to touch any of the yellow fluid that dripped from it and smeared its edges. Holding out his torch, he peered inside.
“What do you make of that?” J.B. said to his back.
“Looks like some kind of a tunnel,” he said. He stuck the end of the torch into the hole. “Can’t see how deep it goes. Makes a turn or dead ends after a little ways.”
J.B. peered into the gash, too. “Whatever it is,” he said, “it definitely wasn’t part of the original construction. This hole was dug out by something. The inside surface’s coated with that yellow acid stuff. Almost like it’s been lubed with it.”
“The corpse was in here,” Ryan said, pointing out the shell casings. “From the scatter of his empties it looks like he was firing straight into the hole. Didn’t do him much good, though.”
“Whatever chilled that bastard,” J.B. said, “it can dig through tempered concrete.”
“From the width and height of the hole it’s got some size to it, too.”
“Some kind of mutie gopher or mole, mebbe,” J.B. suggested. “Grown giant. Turned man-eater.”
“If it’s a mutie, it’s meaner and faster than anything we’ve ever come across. From the looks of all those hulls, it can outrun Parabellums fired point blank. And that doesn’t explain the yellow stuff eating away the corpses. You ever hear of that before?”
J.B. shook his head.
“Whatever’s doing the chilling is carrying that fluid around with it,” Ryan went on. “I think it’s some kind of body juice, like stomach acid. This critter likes to soften up its food before it sits down to a meal.”
“You two still don’t understand,” Wicklaw protested from the doorway. “The demons didn’t come into being because of skydark. They’re not like stickies or scalies. They were here before.”
“And you know this because Bob and Enid told you so?” J.B. queried.
“Yes.”
The other wounded men nodded in the affirmative.
“Can you believe these triple stupes?” J.B. said to Ryan. “They’re tightrope walking over hell but they won’t let go of their superstition.”
“Look at them,” Ryan said. “It’s all they’ve got.”
“If the both of you weren’t so hardheaded,” Wicklaw said, “you’d let yourself see the proof that’s right under your nose.”
“Such as?” J.B. pressed.
“Everybody who was here before us is dead. Even though they had blasters and plenty of ammo. For more than a hundred years, those who have come in the dam haven’t come out. You’re up against something more powerful than any human being, or any groups of human beings, something that can’t be killed.”
“It’s impossible to prove that something can’t happen,” J.B. countered.
To Ryan, he added, “Doc taught me that.”
“If this thing can dig through solid walls,” Ryan said, “it can pop out anywhere, at any time. I suggest we move along quick-like before it gets wind of us.”
As he pushed past Wicklaw’s bulk into the hallway, Jubilee reattached herself to the back of his shirt. She was as white-lipped scared as the men, and for the same reason. Deep down in her soul, she thought the critter was unchillable. Ryan wouldn’t let himself consider that possibility. As long as he had rounds in his mag and his hands and feet free, he had hope. He just wished he had more solid facts to work from.
At this point it seemed like there might be more than one of the creatures, but he couldn’t be sure about that. From the evidence left behind so far it was acting like a solo hunter. The bodies weren’t pulled apart, which is what a pack of animals fighting over spoils would do. In fact, it appeared that each kill lay untouched except by the killer, as if the puddle of yellow bile marked the food as its and its alone. That kind of marking was only done by highly territorial and competitive predators.
This one made its kills in the halls, using the darkness and yawning open space to its advantage, attacking victims from undefended angles and unlikely h
iding places. It had to be able to see or sense body heat in the dark. Maybe it even had infrared vision. It was very fast on its feet, apparently too fast to track with an autoweapon. Some of the clean misses had to do with the element of surprise it had going for it. But certainly not all of them.
It had formidable offensive weapons, either portable or part of its body, which could incapacitate a person in seconds. It had to be triple strong to take a man out like that, and to dig through the solid walls. Its other abilities were a mystery. There was no way to tell how intelligent it was. If it could strategize. Or if it was merely an instinctive hunter, like a rattlesnake or a bear.
See it, stalk it, kill it, eat it.
Jubilee gamely kept up the fast pace Ryan set; he hardly felt her tugging on his shirt. The wounded slowed them down much more than she did. Wicklaw brought up the rear, hopping and limping on his bad foot, swinging his torch around to keep his balance.
They followed the slight breeze as the corridor continued to curve, ignoring the occasional closed metal doors they came across. After forty yards or so, they reached a crossing hallway, and stopped to recce.
Ryan watched the flame of his torch bend over to the right. The stream of air was flowing from the left, from the intersecting hallway on that side, which was the direction of the lake.
“Breeze is definitely coming from that way,” J.B. said. “It could be from the crack in the dam. If there is one, it’s got to be at this end.”
“If it’s the crack, it’s going to be a dead end,” Ryan said. “We’re too high up.”
Either way, they had to find out. Ryan and J.B. entered the much narrower corridor with Jubilee in tow. The ceiling was lower, too. It was as black as the pit of hell inside, but the wind was steady in their faces. The wounded men shuffled along behind, coughing from the torch smoke blowing back at them.
The hallway took a sharp right turn and as they rounded it, they saw a bright crack of light ahead. J.B. and Ryan’s torches revealed a jagged, floor-to-ceiling fissure in the wall.
Ryan held his torch close to the two-and-a-half-foot-wide crack. There was no sign of the caustic yellow slime. This gash was man-made, and more than a century old, caused by incoming Soviet warheads on nukeday.