by James Axler
Sprue could understand Cawdor’s mistrusting him, but the whole hood thing seemed excessive unless…he was sitting on a gold mine. The dream of every free-booting trader and scab-assed scrounger in Deathlands.
An untouched redoubt.
He trudged out into the flooded hall, sending wave-lets of brown water rushing ahead of him. The overhead lights flickered wildly, snapping like blaster caps. He sloshed into the open elevator car and pushed a button on the control panel. As the doors closed and the car lurched upward, the water around his feet quickly drained away.
The car doors opened on the next floor. The extra-wide, extra-tall corridor in front of him was bone-dry. All its lights were on, as bright as day. As he stepped out and scanned the hall, he noticed a set of towering metal doors along one wall. Sprue broke into a trot, his heart pounding with excitement. He leaned into the left-hand door, sliding it back on its rollers. As he did so, the banks of fluorescents came on automatically inside.
When he looked in, his knees nearly gave way.
He saw bumper-to-bumper vehicles, semi-tractors and what he knew to be Army Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Dozens upon dozens of them. All brand-spanking-new. And behind them covering the entire rear wall were shelves of spare parts stacked to the ceiling.
For Sprue it was a religious moment, that only got more profound.
On the other side of the vast room was largest wag fuel reservoir he had ever seen. It consisted of immense balloon-like bladders that contained hundreds of thousands of gallons.
With an effort, the convoy master tore himself away.
Farther down the hall, he found the redoubt’s armory. Inside were long wooden crates of assault rifles still wrapped in Cosmoline. There were hundreds of cases of centerfire ammo, towable cannons and mortars.
The huge storerooms next door were stocked with boxes of packaged rations and drinking water, enough to keep a small ville alive for twenty years.
And the redoubt’s nuke power was still operational.
Harlan Sprue, who had just lost everything, was poised to get it back, with interest.
Cannies were the turd in the pudding.
Because of them, moving this vast treasure to another safer site was going to be impossible. Instead, he had to make the redoubt his stronghold, to branch out from it. To do that, he needed trained personnel, recruits to man the Bradleys and shoulder the M-16s. He figured he could draw them from the hard-hit villes along the Highway 84 corridor. The desperate bastards didn’t know it yet, but they were an army waiting for a leader. A leader who could give them hope.
For an instant, Harlan Sprue had a dizzying glimpse of his own future. Everywhere that cannie bands threatened norms, he had more willing soldiers. With this gift of predark technology, he and his army would hunt the cannies down and crush them, and in the process unite the hellscape’s scattered peoples under his control. He was poised to become the most powerful baron in the history of Deathlands.
To take the first step, to venture out of the redoubt on a recruiting mission, he needed a crew of fighters. He had to convince Cawdor and the others do his biding. Three Bradleys would be enough to start with. They could gather volunteers and return them to the redoubt for training. The next time he’d send out six, then twelve, and so on. The crews could then work their way down Highway 84, pacifying it mile by mile with hot lead.
A little farther down the corridor, Sprue found the redoubt’s fully equipped medical bay. Operating rooms. Recovery rooms. Insolation rooms. In an unlocked storeroom, he discovered quantities of drugs and cases of joy juice. He broke open a paper box and took out little vials that read Morphine. The do-it-yourself units each had their own built-in hypodermic needle.
Sprue pocketed a handful of vials, then picked up a glass bottle of century-old, amber whiskey. He cracked the cap and took a sniff of the contents.
“Oh, Mama,” he groaned in delight. “That is sweet…”
The convoy master tipped back the bottle and took a long, thirsty swallow, expecting mellower than mellow.
What he got was not mellow at all.
It was like ground glass mixed with lava, like a blazing flamethrower thrust down his gullet.
The shock to his system was galvanic, every muscle in his body clenched in rejection.
Had he misread the label? Was it mismarked? There was no way to find out. The bottle shattered in his convulsive grip.
Sprue spewed pink foam from his mouth, shedding his throat lining like a second skin. He screamed, high and shrill as the liquid burned through both cheeks, his palate and tongue, and dissolved his teeth.
The convoy master staggered backward, his beard and chest hair smoking as it melted away. The massive swelling of his throat completely blocked his airway. Unable to breathe, he couldn’t yell for help.
Help was too far away, anyway.
Sprue’s pulse pounded in his temples. His lungs screamed. Clutching at his throat, he dropped to his knees. As hard as he tried, he could not pull in so much as a sip of air. As blackness tunneled in on him, he knew he was about to die.
In this case, jump dream and reality were one.
Chapter Eleven
“Get up!” Ryan ordered the convoy master as he nudged him with a boot tip.
Harlan Sprue didn’t respond.
“Is he breathing?” Krysty said. “Ryan, I don’t think he’s breathing.”
The one-eyed man leaned down, grabbed a handful of Sprue’s shoulder and shook him, hard. The obese body quivered, loose and rubbery. There was no muscle tension. And no reaction.
“Fat man’s chilled,” Jak said matter-of-factly as he leaned against the chamber’s dark smoky-blue arma-glass wall.
For a moment Mildred just stood there. This third jump sleep had left her with an odd, jittery sensation in the pit of her stomach. The eerie feeling lingered, occasionally, inexplicably, coursing outward, making her hands and feet tingle. It wasn’t the aftermath of an adrenaline rush. Adrenaline come-downs never lasted this long. It was more like withdrawal from a powerful stimulant drug. Amphetamine. Methamphetamine. Which of course was impossible, since she hadn’t taken anything of the sort. She shook off the sense of unease and shouted, “Turn him over! Turn him over quick!”
Ryan and J.B. strained in unison to roll the limp mountain of flab onto his back.
Mildred unknotted the rope looped around the man’s neck and removed the grain sack hood. Beneath it, Sprue’s face was purple, his bloodshot eyes bulged from their sockets, frozen with terror. His mouth hung open, but his tongue wasn’t protruding from it.
“Did he strangle on the cinch cord this time around?” Doc asked.
“Couldn’t have,” Jak answered. “Tied loose.”
Mildred knelt over the fat man, searching for a pulse at his throat under the tangle of brown beard. There was none. Red-flecked foam ringed his violet lips. She pried his jaws open wider, tipping his head so she could see inside. “Swallowed his tongue during the jump,” she said as she plunged two fingers deep into his mouth. “He’s suffocated himself.”
Adroitly, she pulled loose the fleshy obstacle, unplugging his throat. Mildred immediately began artificial respiration and two-handed chest compressions. She worked furiously on the unconscious man, but gave up after five futile minutes.
“He’s a goner,” J.B. remarked.
“Just like that?” Krysty said.
“Yeah, just like that,” J.B. agreed.
The danger of mat-trans, the incalculable physical and psychological shock of dematerialization and rematerialization, was something Mildred and the companions chose not to dwell on. They weren’t in the habit of looking gift horses in the mouth. After years of hard experience, they knew the hazards of crossing Deathlands on foot or by wag. In the hellscape there were a million ways to die, most of them neither clean nor quick. That said, jumping from redoubt to redoubt with hardware and software that was over a hundred years old was by no means risk-free. What had happened to Sprue was tangible eviden
ce of that. Every time the companions jumped, it was a fresh roll of the dice. A new set of variables. An act of faith. Would they all make it through the next time? There was no way of knowing. And they had jumped three times trying to end up in Louisiana.
Her face flushed with exertion, Mildred stared helplessly at the still form laid out in front of her. There was no resuscitation gear on hand. No defibrillator. Cutting open his chest for heart massage would have been both pointless and messy. Out of sheer frustration, Mildred balled her fist and delivered a tremendous blow to his sternum.
The convoy master’s body jerked from head to foot, his eyes blinked, then he coughed and gasped, filling his collapsed lungs.
“If the fat man’s croaked, let me tear off a hunk…” Junior begged from under his hood.
“I ain’t dead yet, you evil bastard,” Sprue wheezed.
Ryan and J.B. helped the convoy master sit up. After he had regained his breath, Sprue said, “What happened to me? I had this nasty dream. I was all alone and I was choking.”
“It wasn’t a dream,” Ryan told him. “You were choking.” He pointed at Mildred. “She saved your hide.”
Sprue squinted up at her. “That true?”
“It’s true.”
The convoy master soberly absorbed this news as he rubbed his bruised chest.
“Put the hood back on him, Jak,” Ryan said.
“Why, for nuke’s sake?” Sprue asked. “I owe you folks my life. That’s not something I’m gonna ever forget. I always repay my debts.”
Jak jammed the bag back over his head and retied the noose around his neck.
The companions hoisted the bound prisoners to their feet and ushered them out of the chamber, through the anteroom and control center. They headed single file down the redoubt’s pale cream-colored stone corridor.
As soon as Mildred started moving, the odd, jangled sensation returned with a vengeance. And there was suddenly a bad taste in her mouth, too, as if she had been sucking on iron. It was probably nothing, she assured herself. The effect of all the dry heaving she’d done after her rematerialization. She put the back of her hand to her forehead, testing it. It didn’t feel hot.
Ryan saw the gesture and was immediately concerned. “Are you okay?” he asked.
Mildred mentally kicked herself. She was being hypervigilant, inspecting her every sensation under a high-power microscope. It wasn’t diagnosis in any detached medical or scientific sense. She had no real symptoms to work from. If she kept it up, she was going to drive herself crazy. She didn’t want to worry the others unnecessarily. She didn’t want to distract them from the difficult task at hand.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she replied.
The companions led their blindfolded captives out of the small redoubt and sealed the vanadium steel door behind them.
SEVENTEEN HUNDRED MILES southeast of Hells Canyon, day had long since dawned. The dome of sky was a solid mass of sulphurous, low-hanging clouds, the heat and humidity lay over everything in a stifling blanket. Moss-draped trees—cypress, pecan, spreading oak and elm—framed either side of the chem-rain-eroded, two-lane blacktop. Strangler vines spiraled around thick trunks, climbing toward the hazy sun. Greasy-looking, redheaded buzzards sat perched in the highest branches of the canopy, their wings spread out to soak up the withering heat. Here and there between the stands of trees, Mildred caught the sullen glint of coffee-and-cream-colored standing water. The air hung thick with the stench of decay, both vegetative and animal. The high-pitched drone of insects sawed from all sides.
When the companions were well beyond the redoubt’s sec perimeter they unhooded their prisoners.
“Welcome to Louisiana,” Ryan said.
Sprue was rocked back on his heels. “Not possible,” he said, shaking his head. “Couldn’t be…”
But his eyes, nose, ears and skin told him it was.
“I don’t know what you did, or how you did it,” he said to Ryan, “but this is amazing.”
“Let’s get a move on,” the one-eyed man said, “we’re exposed here.”
They were back in Jak’s old stomping grounds again, not far from Interstate 10, which had once connected the southern United States from coast to coast. For much of its length, the predark highway was just a ghostly shadow across the landscape, a ribbon-like imprint only visible from elevation. Unusable for its original intended purpose, it had vanished entirely in some areas.
As they moved through the steamy air, they dripped with sweat.
Half a mile farther on, the pancake-flat roadway was gapped by a wide, brown river. Pink azaleas dotted the muddy banks.
“How deep do you think?” J.B. asked Ryan as he cleaned his spectacles on a scrap of cotton cloth.
“Too deep to wade,” Ryan replied.
Then Jak waved at them from downriver.
When they joined him, he showed them a pair of crude dugout canoes tucked under the brush along the bank.
“Figures the locals would have a way to cross it,” J.B. said.
“We can’t all fit in those canoes,” Mildred said. “It’s going to take us two trips.”
“Three can go in each boat,” Ryan said. “Krysty and Doc take Junior, and J.B. and Mildred take Sprue. After you reach the far side, J.B. can paddle back to get me and Jak.”
The companions put their prisoners amidships and set off across the sluggishly flowing river. Mildred paddled in the bow of the second canoe. Even on the water, the air was oppressively still.
“Hellfire!” J.B. said from the stern. “Over there…”
Mildred looked where he was pointing his paddle. Upriver, the shallows erupted. Amid splashes and swirls, a pair of gators launched themselves from the shoreline. Big ones, about fifteen feet long. They glided downstream with the current, then swung into the wake twenty-five feet behind Mildred’s canoe, lazily following with slow, sinuous sweeps of their tails. They weren’t hungry. Just curious.
The alligators lost interest when the companions reached the opposite bank and beached the canoes. While J.B. turned back to pick up the others, Mildred, Doc and Krysty stood lookout and guarded the prisoners seated on the muddy shore.
“You don’t look so good, Sweet Cheeks,” Junior told Mildred. He was damned pleased with the idea and didn’t try to hide it. “It’s coming on you, isn’t it? You’re getting the itch.”
“What it is, is damned hot,” she said. “And there’s too damned many bugs.” Mildred smacked a mosquito the size of a quarter, leaving a splatter of red on her sweat-beaded brown forearm.
Junior licked his lips with a gray-coated tongue. “Yeah, sure,” he said, unable to take his eyes off the blood smear. “Oozies aren’t burrowing into your brain. It’s just the humidity.”
Mildred wiped her arm on the back of her BDU pants. “Screw you,” she said.
When J.B. returned from the other side of the river with Ryan and Jak, they set off again along the predark road bed. Brown water stretched off in all directions, dotted here and there by stubborn, rotting remnants of drowned jungle. Ahead, on the horizon, was what looked like an earthen berm, only it was string-straight and ran for miles.
“Levee,” Jak said. “Highway on other side.” Although the companions had visited the albino teen’s birthplace several weeks earlier, Jak had no desire to revisit West Lowellton. There was nothing left there for him, no loved ones or close friends. Just bad memories.
The companions moved through swampy, knee-deep water, from tree clump to tree clump. They kept their eyes open, watching for snakes among the looping roots and hostile movement along the upraised strip of land. When they reached the levee, they climbed it, fighting their way through a snarl of underbrush.
From the top of the dike, they surveyed the ruined highway. To the east, it was clear for perhaps 150 yards before doglegging to the left. Fifty yards to the west, a concrete overpass had collapsed across the road. The impact had reduced it to a jumble of massive blocks sprouting twisted, rusting spikes of rebar. The bli
stered metal sign that had once decorated the overpass lay propped up against one of the larger chunks.
White letters on green: Interstate 10.
“Which way to La Golondrina, cannie?” Ryan asked.
“Not gonna say,” Junior told him defiantly. “Not until you feed me.”
“Don’t tell us and you’ll starve, I guarantee it.”
The cannie considered that promise for about half a minute. He had good reason to believe Ryan wasn’t pulling his leg. “We go west aways on this road,” he said, “then head south, down to the Gulf of Mex.”
Junior was no dimmie. He kept the rest of what he knew to himself. It was the only reason he was still alive.
The companions skidded down onto the roadbed, then trudged toward the fallen overpass. They weren’t going have to climb over it; wag convoys had already cleared a wide gap in the dropped slabs.
“Dead ’un over there,” Junior said as they neared the break in the rubble barrier.
A body floated facedown in a water-filled ditch at the edge of the disintegrating tarmac. Above it, fat black flies buzzed in an ever-shifting cloud. The red plaid shirt and dark pants were stretched to the splitting point by the gas-bloated flesh beneath.
“A whopper,” J.B. said, grimacing at the stench.
With a low moan, Junior broke free from Mildred’s grasp and lunged for the ditch. Ryan caught him by the arm before he got there and dragged him back, kicking.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “Look there!”
Doc pointed his ebony sword stick at the road behind them. The companions turned as one. A two-ton flatbed wag rounded the near bend and hurtled toward them along the shoulder of the highway. The cab and the wag bed were crammed to overflowing with dark figures.
Human figures.