Plaguesville, USA

by Jim LaVigne

  “We can’t just leave him,” he said. “Can we? I mean, even if those creatures don’t get him, he might die from his injuries. We have to bring him along.”

  “Eh,” said Lampert, coughing. “I guess so, if you wanna stick with the whole altruistic, humanity’s worth saving kinda shtick. Me? I still ain’t so sure, but there ya go.”

  “Yes, well,” said Justin grimly, “for a moment there I almost had my doubts.”

  “Yeah?” the Old Man smirked. “Heh. Well, welcome to my world, Doc.”

  They were interrupted by the approach of the powerfully-built Hispanic man and the other two surviving would-be victims. The first of these was an older man, maybe sixty, tall and thin, bearded and wearing only a sort of loincloth, with flashing gray eyes and a big, toothy mouth. The other was a small woman, maybe twenty-five years old, with tangled brown hair, a very pale complexion, and a generally filthy appearance, who very warily followed along. The Hispanic man rushed to the side of the Small Man and knelt across from Justin.

  “How is he?” he asked, flicking a party favor from the Small Man’s chest. “Is he dead?”

  “No,” said Justin. “He’s not dead. But he’s not in very good shape, either.”

  The man eyed Justin for a moment. “Who are you, man?” he finally asked. “What the fuck you doin’ here?”

  “I, that is,” Justin gabbled. What was he doing here? And, for that matter, who was he? Finally, he swallowed hard and frowned. “My name is Kaes,” he said. “And we were captured by these creatures.”

  “Huh,” said the man. “Same as us. Well, my name’s CJ. This here,” he gestured at the older man, who nodded back, “is Seymour.”

  “Well, uh,” said Justin, “it’s nice to meet you. What about her?” he asked, meaning the small, dirty woman lurking behind him. CJ looked at her and shrugged.

  “No idea,” he said. “Just laid eyes on her today, when they was tyin’ us to them poles. “Hey, you!” he called to the woman. “You got a name?”

  The woman glared back at them, her eyes darting from face to face, but she said nothing. CJ looked back to Justin and shrugged.

  “Guess not,” he said. “But then, if I hadda be down here with these deformo pendejo freaks much longer, I might be kinda shook up, too. You know?”

  “Indeed,” said Justin. “I feel a bit lightheaded myself.”

  CJ nodded and, after another long look at the Small Man, stood up and looked around. Then he stripped a checkered tablecloth from a nearby table and began to tear it into strips, obviously for bandages.

  “Gotta patch this dude up,” he said. “Get him stable.”

  “I can do that,” said Justin hesitantly. “If you’d like.”

  CJ eyed him again. “Why, you some kinda doctor? A nurse or somethin’?”

  “Or something,” Justin said. “Not exactly an expert, but yes, I have some training.”

  With a grunt, CJ handed over the torn tablecloth. “Suits me. Anyway, we gotta have us a look aroun’ this place. At least find the way out!”

  Justin thought for a second, but his mental bicycle was hitting an icy patch again. All he knew was that he needed to treat this man for his more obvious injuries and get himself, the Old Man, and the others out of here as soon as he could. Staying, for even a short while, was about as appealing a prospect as having his head nailed to the wall. But then, he had to admit that, given the maze of tunnels and chambers, he had no idea how to leave. Woodenly, he nodded at CJ.

  “That sounds good,” he said. “You go have a look around.”

  Teresa (and the Kid, just at her heel) stepped forward and proclaimed that she was going to go with CJ and Seymour.

  “Fine with me,” said CJ. “You’re sure as shit good in a fight!”

  “Hey, wait!” said Justin; he didn’t like the sound of this. Desperately, he looked up at Teresa. “What if we need you here? What if those things come back? Or what if you find more of them? These tunnels go on forever; who’s to say what you might run into? No, I think you should stay here.”

  She looked at him and her features softened and she smiled. “You always lookin’ out for me, huh, Case? But here’s the think: I gotta get my stuff back, all the gear they stole when they grabbed us, hey? My satchel, my boomstick, they’s gotta be aroun’ here somewheres.”

  “Yes, but,” Justin tried and then gave up; there was just no use in arguing with her. “Well, alright,” he sighed. “Go find your things. But please, be careful. And don’t waste any time. The sooner we’re out of this place, the better.”

  “Trackin’ that,” nodded Teresa. “We be back before ya know.” Decorously, almost girlishly, she knelt and kissed him on the cheek. “You jus’ sit tight, Case, an’ watch yer Ol’ Man. We be back right zip.”

  With that, she, CJ, Seymour, and the small, angry, dirty woman trooped off into one of many tunnels that led out of the big chamber. With a fresh new lump in his throat, Justin finished bandaging the Small Man as best he could and found that while the man’s injuries were extensive and numerous, none seemed fatal. Obviously, what he lacked in size he more than made up for in toughness. After doing all he could with the very limited resources at hand, Justin wiped his hands on his pants, stood up, and looked around.

  After a time, sick of the sight of them, he went over and covered the horrible gory blotch where Johnson had died and unlashed and covered up the maniac’s unfortunate victim. Then he sat at a table, off to one side, and, as the minutes dragged into hours, tried to collect his thoughts. It was neither pleasant nor easy.

  Chapter Fifty-One

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  He’d thought that maybe they’d start out small, but when the Reformist Council told him that their first order of business was to assassinate Chief of Police Hanson Knox, Lumler knew that this was not to be. These people wanted him to help kill his former boss. And, thinking it over, he had to admit, it was a pretty good idea. Remove the head and the body will die. Besides, the crazy psycho bastard had it coming, big time.

  “But it ain’t gonna be no cakewalk,” Lumler told them. “This dude is one shifty fucker.”

  They were assembled at the group’s headquarters, the basement of a former recording studio, now heavily reinforced, barricaded, and stocked with weapons, with a set of city maps spread before them on a table. Over the past two days Lumler had been shown around, so to speak, and had met all kinds of members of the Reform. Now he was back with the seven leaders.

  “An’ anyway,” he continued, “what the hell does whackin’ the Chief do towards stoppin’ the deformos? You said you had a plan for that, something to end the War, right?”

  “That’s right,” said the Professor. There was something familiar about this older, dignified-type man, Lumler had decided, but he couldn’t quite place where or when he might have met him. “And this is part of it.”

  “How?” asked Lumler, his thick brow knitting. “I mean, the Chief’s got nothin’ to do with the Army. Sure, you take him out, you’re gonna have a lot easier time with the PF, but if the Army don’t hold off the muties, what then?”

  “Haven’t you noticed?” said the woman called Stiletto, whom he’d come to grudgingly admire.

  “Noticed what?” said Lumler.

  “No fighting!” said Stiletto, waving an arm. “Think about it. Have you heard anything for the past two days? Anything other than the odd gunshot?”

  Lumler frowned; come to think of it… “Yeah,” he said, “you’re right. So what’s up with that?”

  “It’s the Emperor’s B
irthday!” said the Professor, as if this made all the sense in the world. “They’re all busy with his party.”

  Lumler scowled angrily. “Look,” he said, “if you guys are just gonna talk shit and jerk me around, I can just go sit over here in the corner and have a nap. I mean, what the fuck?”

  Santiago intervened, laughing. “Oh, take it easy,” he said. “Don’t get all pissed off. We know a lot more about the deformos than you might expect. See, the Professor here was in charge of a kind of special project the Governor set up to study ‘em. Know your enemy and all that.”

  “Huh,” said Lumler. “And?”

  “Well,” said the Professor, taking over, “I was able to examine quite a few deceased specimens and even a couple of living ones. It was most enlightening. In fact, it’s quite a fascinating phenomenon, really. That is, if my theories are true.”

  “Yeah, like how?” said Lumler.

  “Well, as I see it,” said the Prof, warming to the subject, “these beings are actually nothing less than an offshoot of human evolution. A subterranean race, perhaps as old as mankind itself, that has evolved completely beneath the surface, maybe at depths that we couldn’t conceive.”

  “No shit?” said Lumler. “But come on, how come we didn’t know about ‘em? Before, I mean. Hell, if they’re like, a whole race of people, wouldn’t there have to be a whole lot of ‘em? How come nobody ever saw one before the Fall?”

  “They were too deep,” said the Professor. “And they kept out of our way, which was easy enough, considering that even our deepest mines and drillings penetrate only a fraction of the Earth’s crust.”

  “But what did the they eat? What did they do down there? And why did they come up and attack us?”

  “Good questions,” said the older man, nodding. “But I fear I don’t have all the answers. As far as why they’ve surfaced, I have to think that it’s because of the Fall. Somehow they sensed that something had happened, something that had killed off all of the surface-dwellers. Something had opened the door to the world they’d known but never been able to explore. In other words, they saw we’d all died and have come up to have a look around.”

  “And that ain’t all!” said Stiletto. “Freaky bastards.”

  “Yes, well,” continued the Prof, “to return to your questions, we have no clue as to what exactly their society or organization, if any, is like, as they do not speak anything like English. Or any other human language, for that matter. Personally, I think that they are of the most primitive nature, probably with very little culture as we know it, self-predatory, and violently cannibalistic. Of course, they’re photo-sensitive, almost blind above ground, which explains why they only attack at night.”

  “Hey, great,” said Lumler wanly, “cannibal humanoids from the deep, huh? Some kinda creepy mole people? Is that what I’m hearing?”

  The Professor frowned and then shrugged. “More or less, if you want to be simplistic about it. But as I said, it’s really quite an amazing phenomenon! After all, just think about it—thousands and thousands of them, down in the deep crust of the Earth, for hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. And why not, really? After all, the earth’s surface is only the mere skin of the entire planet. The interior, while not terribly hospitable for us, may have spawned all manner of life! What if there are more life forms such as this down there? Even among the specimens I’ve seen, I’ve been able to identify at least a dozen distinct permutations of what we call mutants. There is the lagomorph group—the short, fat ones—and then the endomorph group, which can be further divided into the pseudo-pod or tentacle subsets and—”

  “OK, OK,” said Lumler, interrupting. “I get it. There are whole swarms of these things. I mean, the whole thing sounds like something out of a shitty science fiction book, but what the fuck, you know? These days, there’s all kinda weird-ass shit like that, so maybe you’re right. And maybe you’re out of your fucking mind. But whatever. Can we get back to the issue here? What does all of this have to do with somebody’s birthday?”

  “Ah, well,” said Santiago, “that’s where the Emperor comes in. See, for some reason, this one man, some total nut-job survivor named Johnson, managed to hook up with the muties. Maybe they liked him, maybe he did something for them or gave them something they wanted or whatever, but however it worked out, he ended up as these things’ leader. Every other normal person on earth, they just want to kill and eat, but this guy? They love him.”

  “Why?” asked Lumler.

  “Nobody knows,” said Still. “An’ most likely? We never will.”

  “Huh, OK,” Lumler said. “So anyway, they got a leader. A human leader. And what? It’s this dude’s birthday? So what?”

  “So,” explained Santiago, “they’re all busy with the party. See, Johnson did this last year, too, and the year before, it just took us a while to figure it out. But then we noticed that, for like a week or so, the muties laid off and there was no fighting. So when we finally learned about this Emperor character and how they celebrated his birthday, we put it together.”

  “Some kinda mutant holiday,” said Lumler. “Right?”

  “Exactly,” said Santiago. “It’s like they all get the week off. Almost like a cease fire.”

  “Huh,” Lumler said. “OK, that’s nice to know, I guess, but what’s this got to do with the Chief?”

  “OK, well,” said Stiletto, taking over, “as long as there’s fighting going on, as long as the bullets are really flyin’, the Chief sticks pretty damn close to home. Like, you know, safe in one of the IC’s or holed up in the Governor’s mansion. Ain’t that right?”

  Lumler nodded right away. “Yeah,” he said. “He’s a real chicken-shit when it comes to that, alright. And I think I see where you’re goin’ with this. When there’s no fighting, like now, for example, the Chief is out and about. On the street, where you can get to him. Right?”

  Stiletto grinned wickedly. “You got it. You said yourself that a lot of his bodyguards have been drafted, right? So security will be light. Lighter, anyway.”

  Getting a headache, Lumler made a face. “Hey, it all sounds great. And, tell the truth, I think you’d stand a pretty fair chance of killing the guy. But I still don’t have a fuckin’ clue what this all has to do with the War! So you whack the Chief. The Governor’s still just gonna replace him. Get somebody else to do the searching and interrogating and shit. What’s that got to do with the deformos? I mean, when they’re done with this fucked-up party of theirs, won’t they just go right back to tryin’ to kill everybody? Or am I just too fucking stupid to see the connection? Huh?”

  “Ah, well,” said Santiago soothingly, “that’s sort of another story. See, we want to deal with the Chief now, while we can. And then? Well, then, when we don’t have to worry about being raided and arrested and tortured to death, at least for a while, we have some little surprises for our deformo friends. Some very nasty little surprises.”

  Most of the Council chuckled ominously at this and nodded knowingly.

  “Like what?” said Lumler. This sounded promising.

  “Oh, you’ll see,” said Stiletto coyly. “But first, we need to take care of Hanson Knox. Now, what can you tell us about his routines?”

  Lumler smiled, a thin line slightly upturned at the edges. Maybe these folks weren’t so crazy after all. Maybe they knew what they were doing. Nodding, he sat forward at the table and started to tell the others all about where and when they could most easily kill his former superior officer. The strange thing was, compared to all of the other little nuggets of information he’d been asked to digest today, this seemed almost mundane.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

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  In the rear of the little group of explorers, with the Kid never more than two feet away (but somehow never underfoot), Teresa was beginning to wonder if maybe she should just abandon her things and get the hell out of here. Could be that even her beloved boomstick wasn’t worth having to see this kind of crazy ploop.

  As it turned out, the monsters were human-eaters after all. The big room full of bones, most of which had teeth marks on them, had told them all they needed to know about the matter, and the other room, with the chopped-up arms and legs, also with bite marks, had just confirmed it. Retching and holding their noses, they’d quickly fled these chambers.

  There were other rooms, other caves and little cells and big open spaces, a whole great big hive of these horrible smelly things, and most of them held similarly nasty things. Generally, they’d just made sure that there wasn’t anything they could use and then moved quickly on, but in one of them Teresa paused and looked more closely at something that had caught her eye.

  Bending down and holding her nose, she peered at a particular corpse, one of several, until it hit her that she was looking at what was left of Bowler. Plaid shirt, long dark hair, one cowboy boot. Yes, even though the face was all but obliterated and the chest and abdomen had been opened and cleaned of guts, she was certain it was him. Frowning, feeling a confusing mixture of disgust, pity, and latent anger, she’d stood up and shook her head at the poor dead thing.