by James Axler
The remaining flesheater lunged toward the children through the swirling dust, his knife blade drawn. Leading him, Ryan squeezed off two shots with the SIG-Sauer. And hit the ten-ring. A pair of tightly spaced, 9 mm rounds in the head blew the cannie off his feet before he could cut throats. He crashed into a pile of bones at the base of the wall, and lay there, twitching.
Doc rounded the firepit and covered the wounded cannie with his double-barreled LeMat. Krysty gathered up the children, who were bawling with relief.
Drawing his eighteen-inch panga from its leg sheath, Ryan stepped over to Mildred. There was blood on her chin. The glistening stripe ran down the front of her neck and onto her T-shirt, which was speckled with pink bits of bone. She reeked of vomit.
As Ryan cut her bonds he said, “Are you okay?” When she didn’t answer, he added, “Are you wounded?”
Mildred shook her head minutely, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze.
Ryan had fought side by side with this woman in countless pitched battles. Under fire, Mildred was intense, determined, fearless. He had never seen her like this in the aftermath of combat. Numbed. Shellshocked. What had the bastards done to her?
He wasn’t the only one who noticed the change.
There was concern on J.B.’s face as he returned Mildred’s revolver to her. “You did good,” he assured her. “It all worked out.”
Mildred holstered her revolver. She let her arms drop to her sides. Then she slumped back against the wooden post, utterly deflated.
“Mildred?” J.B. said. He stared helplessly at the dazed, blood-smeared physician.
“For nuke’s sake, Jak,” Ryan snarled over his shoulder, “drag the chill out of the fire. Stop that rad-blasted stink.”
The albino grabbed the corpse by the heels and pulled it from the blaze. Then he kicked dirt on its smoldering head.
“Who was he?” Ryan asked the woman. He put his hand on her arm and gave it a gentle shake. “Mildred?”
“Cannie I shot,” she replied in a barely audible voice. “The others decided not to let him go to waste.”
Doc loomed over the sole cannie survivor, holding the LeMat’s shotgun barrel against his temple, and down angling the load of bluewhistlers so as to empty his cranial vault, top to bottom. As the old man cocked the black-powder blaster’s hammer, Alpha twisted his head around so he could look his executioner in the face.
“Prepare to meet your maker, Devil spawn,” Doc said.
The wounded cannie pursed his lips and blew Doc a juicy, gray-smeared kiss.
Suddenly, Mildred came to life. “No!” she cried, lunging forward with arms outstretched. “Don’t chill him!”
Chapter Three
“Forgive me, my dear,” Doc said, decocking his antique weapon. “I didn’t mean to presume. You will, of course, wish to do the honors yourself.” As he stepped away from the wounded cannie, he made a sweeping gesture with his ebony swordstick, gallantly inviting her to have at her revenge.
Mildred advanced on the monster with gun drawn.
Ryan was gratified to see her back in action.
His relief was short-lived.
“When you gonna tell ’em, Mill-Dred?” cannie said, sneering at her. “When you gonna tell ’em our little secret?”
Instead of immediately shooting the cannibal through the head as Ryan and the others expected her to do, Mildred braced her feet, and, grunting from the effort, started pistol-whipping him with the barrel of her ZKR 551. She literally beat the evil grin off his face, in the process knocking out several of his filed teeth, and cutting deep slashes in both his cheeks with the Czech blaster’s front sight.
No one said a word. Her longtime companions looked on in astonishment. In the space of a couple of minutes, Mildred had gone from devastated to near-demonic, and in the process, turned her physician’s oath on its head.
“Get him up on his feet!” she shouted to J.B. and Jak.
The two men scrambled to hoist the cannie from the cave floor.
Raising her arm, threatening to continue the beating, Mildred backed the monster against the post. “Tie him tight, Jak,” she said.
The albino teen cinched wrists and ankles to the rough-hewn pole.
When the cannie was immobilized, Mildred’s fury seemed to ebb. She viewed the blood on her gunsight with deep, deep disgust; she scooped up a dead man’s rag of a shirt and quickly wiped the muzzle clean.
“I need to talk to Ryan,” she told the others.
“So talk,” J.B. said.
“I need to talk to him alone.”
“We’ll wait outside the cave, then,” Krysty offered.
“No,” Mildred said. “Ryan and I have got things to do here, just the two of us. It’s going to take a while, and it’s going to get loud before we’re done. I don’t want the children to hear and be scared all over again.”
Jak stared at the battered, bound cannie, his ruby eyes glittering with menace, certain that rough justice was on its way.
“Take the kids back to the ville, Krysty,” Ryan said. “Find their parents, if they’re still alive. Jak, Doc, J.B., go with her.”
“Not a good idea for you two to stay here by your-selves,” J.B. said.
“I concur most emphatically,” Doc said. “We either should all go, or all remain, for safety’s sake.”
“We’ve got plenty of ammo,” Ryan said. “Daybreak’s not far off. We’ll be fine. We’ll catch up with you in the valley.”
The companions didn’t like leaving them behind, but there were no more protests. Mildred had earned herself a private face-to-face, and private payback, if that’s what she wanted.
“We’ll see you back at the ville, then,” J.B. said. With a wave of his arm he led the others out of the cave.
Krysty touched Mildred on the hand as she herded the wide-eyed children past her. “You saved them,” the redhead said. “You saved them, and you survived. You did great, Mildred.”
After the companions had filed out, Ryan threw another hunk of wood on the glowing coals and watched it slowly ignite. “What’s going on, Mildred?” he said.
“Something real bad.”
“Figured that.”
“I wanted to tell you about it first,” she said, her voice tight, her words clipped. “I need you to make me a promise. I need you to give me your word on something.”
“Of course.”
“Before you and the others got here,” Mildred said, “the bastards force-fed me cannie brains.”
Ryan felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. The puzzle had been solved, albeit horrifically. Now he understood why she had acted with such uncharacteristic savagery.
“They were infected brains, Ryan,” Mildred said. “Terminal stage oozies. Three of them ganged up after they had me tied to the post. They made me swallow a plateful. Afterward I vomited up as much as I could, but chances are I’m infected.”
Ryan reached out to comfort her, but she backed away.
“I don’t know how long it’ll take for the oozies to manifest,” she told him. “I don’t know what will happen when the infection starts to spread through my brain.”
“You didn’t have to keep this from the others.”
“Yes, I did,” she insisted. “We’ve been together too long. Covered too much ground, been through too much hell. I trust every one of them with my life, Ryan, but not with my death. I’m afraid they might wait to do what needs to be done, out of friendship or love or misplaced sympathy. I won’t risk that. I don’t know how long I can fight off the disease. I may not know I’ve lost the battle until it’s too late for me to do anything about it. What I’m saying is, I may be too weak or too crazy to eat my own gun. Ryan, I want you to promise me you’ll do the job when the time comes. Without hesitation or mercy. Will you do that for me?”
It wasn’t a deed Ryan wanted on his conscience, it made his head reel to even contemplate it, but he couldn’t refuse her. He concealed his reaction behind a mask of stone, looked her straight in
the eye and said, “You got it, Mildred.”
“And there’s something else. It’s the reason I stopped Doc from chilling that one.”
“I wondered why you stepped in like that,” Ryan said. “After what the bastard did to you, why you didn’t shoot him yourself?”
“When they had me tied up,” Mildred said, “the cannies started talking about their ‘condition.’ They claimed they had medicine for the oozies. They didn’t elaborate on what it was or where it came from. They said it kept them alive, even though they had been in final stage for over a year.”
Ryan turned and addressed the filthy, scarred man tied to the pole. “Is that true?”
The cannie cackled and spit a big crimson gob in the dirt.
“It probably was idle talk,” Mildred said. “Something they made up to mess with my head. Or maybe they came across some carny show snake oil, drank it down and are hoping against hope. On the other hand, it just might be something real. Ryan, I know it’s a hell of a long shot, but I’ve got a short list of options. I’m looking at a triple nasty ride on the last train west. It’s a journey I surely don’t want to make.”
Ryan said nothing. He’d seen a few victims of end-stage oozies in his time. Based on that experience, if he’d been the one infected, he knew he’d have been grasping at straws, too.
“I’ll tell you everything,” the cannie offered, “if you just snip off one of them nice, crispy ears and pass it over to me.”
“Shut up,” Ryan said, “or I’ll saw off your rad-blasted foot and make you eat that, boot and all.”
The one-eyed cannie grinned back, showing off the bloody slivers of his fractured incisors. “You can’t do anything to me that I won’t purely enjoy.”
“You’re wrong there,” Mildred assured him. “If we do absolutely nothing, you’re going to purely hate it, and sooner or later you’ll tell us everything we want to know.”
The cannie spit again.
“You got a name, shitbag?” Ryan said.
“I got two names. My born name and my hunting name.”
“Take it from me,” Ryan said, “your hunting days are done. What name were you born with?”
“Georgie Tibideau Junior,” the cannie said. “From the Siana line of Tibideaus, though if you asked my ma and pa about me, I suppose they would deny I was ever born.”
“You’re a long way from home, cannie,” Mildred said.
“Been walking the Red Road for years.”
“What road?” Ryan asked.
“You never heard of the Highway of Blood? It’s the path all cannies take, the path we make. It stretches from here to there.”
“‘There?’” Cawdor said.
“The homeland.”
“And where might that be?” Ryan asked.
Tibideau squinted his good eye up at Cawdor’s face, then said, “You know, I should get me a patch like that. Got some style. Bet it keeps dirt and crap from falling into the hole, too.” Having delivered a transparent compliment, the cannie tried to reap an undeserved reward. “You know you folks broke in before I could finish my morning snack,” he told them. “Come on, brother, use that big, sharp blade of yours and hack me off a hunk of one them dead ’uns. Don’t let that good meat go to waste.”
It was Ryan’s turn to hawk and spit.
Interrupting the cannie’s calorie intake was the whole idea.
Ryan and Mildred took seats on flat rocks near the fire and propped up their boots, settling in for an extended rest.
At first, Junior Tibideau remained sullenly quiet. Unable to backhand away his nasal excretions, he let them trickle down his unshaved upper lip; when they spilled over onto his mouth, he spit.
Ryan and Mildred didn’t have to discuss the interrogation strategy. They both saw the same weakness in their enemy, and the same way to exploit it. When infected cannies neared death, they reaped so little energy from their food that they had to eat almost non-stop. No matter how much they ate, they were in state of perpetual near-starvation.
Junior Tibideau was a tough nut. He didn’t buckle under the psychological pressure, the anticipation of the terrible agonies to come. It took almost six hours on the post for his hunger pangs to become unen-durable. Mildred and Ryan watched him sweat, squirm, shiver head to foot; they listened as his high-pitched whimpers turned to guttural moans. And when Junior couldn’t stand it anymore, it was like a dam breaking. The cannie started talking, fast and furious, chatter-boxing like a jolt addict coming off a two-week binge.
“Do you really think this is how I dreamed of ending up when I was little?” Junior said. “Tied to a pole in a stinking cave with my shoulder shot and my belly on fire? Mebbe I deserve to die triple hard because of what I’ve done, but I had no choice. I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be a cannie. I woke up and I already was one. Mebbe you don’t want to believe it, but I’m as much a victim as the stupid bastards I’ve made my meat.”
Although Ryan and Mildred didn’t respond to his plea for sympathy, Junior pressed on. “That very first night, years ago,” he said, “when cannies came through our swamp, they could’ve butchered me on the spot, but they didn’t do me that favor.
“I was night fishing by myself down by the river. I’d just set my snag line when I heard them sneaking through the mangroves along the mud bank. It was too late to get away. I can’t swim a stroke. They had me sandwiched, all of them with blasters and long blades ready. I thought for sure they were going to eat me then and there. But that wasn’t what they had in mind. Turned out that they needed another hunter to fill out their crew. If I’d said no to joining the pack, they would have sundried strips of my flesh on the bushes and turned me into jerky.
“I didn’t taste human being that night, though there was plenty of eating going on. I ran with the pack, hanging back a little and watching what they did. How they hunted the tiny, shit-scrabble farms on the edges of the swamp, how they swept through the ramshackle buildings, chilling as a team. Some cannies ate way more of the bounty than others. They were the sick ones.
“I was back in my bed in my folks’ shanty before sunup, with no one the wiser. It was triple hard getting to sleep. All I could think about was running free and wild. I’d seen a different world through different eyes. I woke up feverish and dripping sweat the next morning. Through the heat of the day my whole body throbbed. It felt like it was going to explode. I just laid there on my straw and panted like a dog. The coolness of evening eased my fever but not the pressure inside me.
“At dark, when the cannies came back for me, I was shivering I was so ready to join the hunt. When they asked about easy pickings close by, I told them about a little dimmie boy I knew who lived with his pa on the other side of the swamp. I told them the dimmie was blond-haired and freckled—a couple weeks later I would’ve just called him a ‘hundred pounder.’ That’s gutted, hanging weight.
“I tricked the dimmie boy into coming out of his shack by standing at his window and calling his name real soft. He knew me from night fishing, so he didn’t suspect anything. I got him over to the edge of the woods and when his head was turned I whacked him on top of the head with a steel hatchet. I split his skull wide open with the first blow, before he could yell for help from his pa who was sitting in the shack, sipping joy juice, not fifty feet away. The dimmie was still twitching a little when me and the others dragged him deep into the thicket. We picked at his bones until dawn.
“One taste of long pig and I had to have more. I never went back home. Never saw my kin again. I’ve been on the Red Road ever since, with this pack and that.”
“Along the way looks like somebody managed to royally fuck you up,” Ryan said.
“Brother, the way you look, you must’ve pissed somebody off, too.”
Ryan shrugged.
“I got this face three years ago,” Junior said. “Dirt farmer heard our pack coming through her corn field and took her kids down in the root cellar to hide. We shot holes through the wooden door until we fig
ured we must’ve nailed her. When I opened the hatch everything was quiet below, so I jumped down for a looksee. About then her oldest son cut loose with a black-powder handblaster. He got off one shot before I had hold of him. His pistol ball missed my head by a gnat’s ass, but the muzzle-flash caught me square in the peeper. Felt like hellfire burning into my brain. I screamed, but I didn’t let go. The others had to pry my fingers off the kid’s busted neck so they could fry him.”
“Maybe I should just go ahead and kill this filthy bastard,” Mildred said through gritted teeth.
“That’s your call,” Ryan said.
“Brother, your woman there isn’t telling you the whole story,” Junior informed him.
“About what?” Ryan said.
“The oozies.”
“Mildred, what’s he on about?”
“According to Junior, the oozies does more than chill,” she replied. “He claims it turns norms into cannies. The infection comes first, then strict cannibalism, and finally the array of debilitating symptoms leading to death.”
“Either of you ever see a norm with the oozies?” Junior added.
Ryan couldn’t say that he ever had. “Is that even possible?” he asked Mildred.
“Hypothetically, I suppose it is. If the oozie virus permanently alters the brain chemistry of its victims, it could affect sensory perception, ideation and ultimately behavior.”
“Nukin’ hell!” Ryan exclaimed as he followed that premise to its logical conclusion.
“You got it,” Mildred said. “If what Junior says is true, sooner or later, and long before I’m dead, I’ll end up just like him.”
“Not going to let that happen,” Ryan said. “No fucking way.” Rising to his feet, he unsheathed his panga. He leaned over one of the dead cannies and smeared the heavy blade with congealing blood.