by James Axler
In Deathlands, weakness of any kind spelled doom. Weakness therefore had to be stamped out. Crushed before it could spread. Hellish beasts and hellish human bands prowled the ruined earth, all waiting for a chance to grab up an easy pound of flesh.
On their travels, the companions had seen the buzzards lined up shoulder-to-shoulder on the berm tops, so overstuffed with carrion that they couldn’t fly. Inside, the ville huts and lean-tos were abandoned, bloated bodies left unburied. And the flies. Millions of them buzzing, swirling up from the sprawled corpses like dense black smoke.
In front of the entrances to many of these putrid chill zones, crude plywood signs had been left behind, propped up with piles of rocks. Under childlike renderings of skulls and crossbones was written the dreaded word: PLAIG.
Mildred Wyeth had been exposed to a different sort of sickness. If what she had said was true, the oozies didn’t just make a person ill. They made a person into a cannie. Krysty saw flesheaters as the hellscape’s most debased humanity. Worse than common droolies, homicidal sec men, and deranged barons. In the pecking order of the despised, cannies were the bottom of the human barrel.
Ryan opened his good right eye and looked at her. “You okay?” he asked huskily.
“Yeah, I guess.”
He kissed her lightly on the mouth.
“Better?”
“Mmm-mmm,” Krysty said, opening her lips to receive the probing tip of his tongue.
As they kissed, she escaped into the sensation, relishing a moment of forgetfulness locked in her lover’s embrace.
Ryan’s hands slipped inside her coat, cupping her breasts through her shirt. Rosy heat bloomed in her cheeks as he teased her nipples erect. She put her palm flat against his groin and felt the already straining stiffness.
Ryan unbuckled her belt and turned her over onto her stomach. As she rose onto her hands and knees in front of him, he peeled her trousers from over her buttocks and down around her thighs.
Doc and Sprue were snorting, growling, steam-whistling in their sleep.
“No one’s going to hear us over that,” Ryan whispered as he undid his fly and nosed his hardness into the wet warmth of her.
“I don’t care if they do. Give it to me, now.”
Ryan surged inside, completely filling her in a single thrust. Her mutie vagina gripped him in a maddening, fluttering caress. He groaned softly as the powerful, rhythmic contractions pulled him in even deeper. Ryan’s hips bucked violently, slamming into her again and again. She braced herself on elbows and knees to keep from being pushed off the bench and onto the floor. Every savage slam shot a tingle to the core of her being, tingles growing stronger and stronger until the dam broke for them both in the same delicious instant. Krysty collapsed onto her stomach, Ryan lay upon her back, panting. He brushed aside the coils of her prehensile, mutie hair and kissed her neck and ears, gently grinding his hips into her bottom. She held him inside until he softened, then reluctantly she let him go.
When Ryan rolled off, Krysty pulled up her trousers and nestled back into his sheltering arms.
As she started to drift off to sleep, the sounds of running footsteps echoed from the cave entrance, followed by shouts of alarm.
At once, Ryan and Krysty jumped to their feet. J.B., Doc and Sprue rose from the floor, reaching for their weapons.
“Where’s Mildred?” J.B. asked as he flipped the M-4000’s sling over his shoulder.
“Not here, apparently,” Doc said.
“Jak’s gone, too,” Krysty said.
The tramp of running feet grew louder. Torchlights bobbed down the hallway toward them.
“Perhaps that is the absent pair coming…” Doc suggested.
It was not.
Cheetah Luis entered the doorless chamber, flaming torch in hand. Behind him in the hallway, heavily armed men and women ran deeper into the belly of the hillside. “Come with me,” the Cajun said. “Cannies are here.”
“We’ve got two people missing,” Ryan said as he slipped the scoped Steyr’s sling over his shoulder. “We’ve got to find them first.”
“If they’re out of the cave,” Cheetah Luis said, “they’re a whole lot safer than you are. In a minute or two this place’s gonna be a shooting gallery. Come on!”
The Cajun waved them on with his torch.
From outside the cavern came the hard clatter of autofire. Dozens of blasters were cutting loose at once. The battle was joined.
There was no time for argument, and nothing really to argue about. The Cajun was right. If Mildred and Jak were fighting cannies in the woods, they had room to maneuver and a damned good chance to survive.
“All right, let’s go,” Ryan said.
The companions followed Cheetah Luis out of the chamber and across the cave’s central corridor. Down the narrow, straight stretch of hall, Cajun men and women were running close to the left side, next to the limestone wall. At its far end, the hall bulged and widened before it doglegged right. In front of the opening, other Cajuns were frantically pulling together a barricade of timber and rocks. From the sounds at the cave mouth, the fighters there were doing the same thing.
Cheetah Luis led them into another wide, doorless chamber. The lack of doors and the large entries allowed air to circulate in the cave. In the flickering torchlight, they hurried to the back of the room and a large, floor-to-ceiling bulge in the rock. The protrusion concealed a man-size, transverse cleft in the wall, impossible to see from the doorway.
The Cajun stepped into the narrow passage and they all moved in behind him. The ceiling was high enough so that Ryan didn’t have to duck his head, but the passage was hardly more than two and a half feet wide in places, and in places the walls were curved in an S-shape. Krysty had to advance sideways, scraping her hipbones and knees against the rock. Convoy master Sprue had real trouble getting through the tightest spots. She could hear him grunting behind her as he sucked in his massive gut and pushed himself forward.
Krysty realized at once that the passage was bending back toward the cave entrance, running roughly parallel to the main corridor.
From outside the cave, rocking booms from frag grens interspersed between sawing bursts of full-auto blasterfire, which started to rage inside the cave as Cajuns tried to hold out the cannies.
Cheetah Luis stopped moving, bringing the line behind him to a halt. His torch hissed in the claustrophobically close tunnel.
A cluster of grens exploded much closer at hand, shaking loose bits of rock and dirt from above their heads. As the debris rained down on them, the torch sputtered and nearly went out.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed.
The explosions were inside the mouth of the cave.
To Krysty it sounded as though the defenders were giving ground, letting the cannies penetrate their stronghold. It wasn’t a happy thought.
“Your fighters are pulling back mighty quick,” Ryan said. “Something wrong?”
“Cajuns know what to do,” Cheetah Luis said.
They listened as foot by foot, the hated enemy drove deeper into the heart of the cave. The sounds of the horrendous firefight continued, but grew more and more muffled.
“Now comes the fun part,” Cheetah Luis said, knocking out the torch on the ground. The tunnel was plunged in darkness. “Stay close.”
Ryan moved right behind him. Krysty had her hand on her lover’s lower back.
They pushed out of the side passage and into a chamber just inside the cave entrance. Light came from a few torches still burning in wall stanchions and the red flares the cannies had dropped. The fight continued out of sight, deep inside the hill; outside the cave, the shooting had stopped. The silence from the woods was eerie.
The Cajun tapped Doc and Sprue on the shoulders with the muzzle of his M-16. “You two cover the entrance while the rest of us take care of business…”
Krysty, J.B. and Ryan followed Cheetah Luis along the cave wall, blasters up and ready. There was no cannie rear guard. Because
they could see into the wide-mouthed, doorless chambers, they were confident they had cleared away all opposition, eliminating the possibility of a backside attack.
It was a fatal mistake.
At Cheetah Luis’s hand signal, Krysty and J.B. crossed to the opposite side of the hall. She saw the cannie attackers bunched up on either side of the entrance to the narrow section of hall. They were pouring fire on the barricade at the far end. They were disturbingly disciplined. They took turns shooting, emptying their mags, then stepping aside to let a fresh gunner blast away while they reloaded.
Two cannies rushed from a chamber to the right of the shooters. Between them they hauled a limp body by its arms. They were coming the companions’ way.
The Cajun held up his closed fist. Wait. Then he shifted his M-16 to his left hand and with his right unsheathed his machete.
As the cannies drew closer, Krysty could see their victim was a woman. She could see they were laughing as they dragged her along.
Cheetah Luis waited until they were practically on top of him before he struck with the machete. As Jak had said, the Cajun was a stone chiller. With a single, two-handed stroke, he beheaded the nearest cannie. The severed head leaped from the man’s neck, hitting wall and rolling onto the ground. Dead eyes stared upward, baffled for eternity.
As the other cannie opened his mouth to cry for help, the one-eyed warrior swung his panga crossways. The razor-sharp blade split open the cannie’s face, slicing through tongue and cheeks and both jaw hinges all the way back to his gray-dripping ears. Ryan ripped the blade out, then forehand-slashed under the scraggly chin beard, driving the blade through the front of his throat. The cannie’s head flopped over, ear resting on shoulder, blood sheeting from the massive neck wound.
While Krysty and J.B. covered them, Ryan and Cheetah Luis dragged all three bodies into the nearest chamber, out of sight.
Meanwhile, the cannies’ rain of bullets had beaten the defenders back around the hallway’s bend. Seizing the opportunity, the flesheaters leap-frogged down the narrow stretch of corridor, keeping up a one-sided stream of automatic fire.
Cheetah Luis and the companions dashed forward to take up the positions the cannies had just abandoned.
The flesheaters broke and ran the last thirty feet, charging the barricade. Screams replaced gunshots as a wide section of the cave floor gave way under their combined weight. In the blink of an eye, a dozen cannies disappeared down the dust-belching hole.
“Now!” Cheetah Luis cried, stepping out from cover and opening up full-auto with his M-16.
Krysty and Ryan fired their handblasters side by side, pouring lead into the remaining cannies’ backs. J.B.’s pump gun boomed over and over. The massed fire scattered bodies the width of the corridor.
As Cheetah Luis and the companions rushed forward, Cajun fighters appeared around the bend, then jumped the barricade.
Krysty looked down over the edge of the pit trap, over the ends of the buckled and splintered cover that stuck up from the hole. Cannie men and women lay fifteen feet down, impaled on multiple rows of two-inch-thick, four-foot-long green wood spikes. The spikes had punched through necks, chests, limbs and bowels. Those still alive wailed, kicking their legs, moving their arms, their mouths gushing blood. Some tried to pull themselves free, raising up on the gore-greased poles, only to lose their grip and fall, skewering themselves even deeper.
Cheetah Luis watched, grinning as the flesheaters struggled in their own mess. He paused to light up another fat ganja stick and sucked down the pungent, potent smoke. In the torchlight, his eyeballs looked pink, his eyelids drooped to slits. The Cajun stripped away his M-16’s spent mag, inserted a full one.
They weren’t dying fast enough to suit him.
“Chill ’em all!” he shouted to his fighters.
They obeyed, with gusto.
From both sides of the pit, the Cajuns opened fire, streaming hot lead into the defenseless, dying cannies. Heads exploded and bellies burst open from close-range, full-auto hits. Even the bastards who were already dead were bullet-chewed to hamburger. When the Cajuns were done, the floor of the pit was awash in spilled blood and guts.
The companions didn’t participate in the grotesque coups de grace. Nor did Sprue. It seemed a waste of time and good ammo, not to mention the splatter factor.
Cheetah Luis led his fighters and the companions back to the cave entrance. The Cajuns were buoyed by their success, not exuberant, but charged. It didn’t last. As they filtered out into the Louisiana night, their mood changed in a hurry.
An unnatural quiet hung over the woods. No bug sound. No frog sound. At the edge of the clearing, tree trunks had been blown apart by high explosives. Dropped branches littered the ground. Some were still burning.
There were no bodies, cannie or Cajun.
Mildred and Jak were nowhere in sight.
“How many did we lose?” Cheetah Luis asked one of his female subordinates.
“Could be more than twenty,” the hefty woman replied. “We had almost that many sentries set out, and some of our folk ran out of the cave to fight in the woods.”
“Cannies tracked us all the way from the road,” the Cajun said. “That’s where they’ll be heading back to.”
Something moved behind the screen of trees to their left.
Three dozen assault rifles took aim.
“Hold it!” someone shouted. “It’s one of ours!”
A wounded man staggered forward, then fell. The Cajuns and their guests rushed to his side. Krysty grimaced at the bloody bullet hole. It was low in his belly. A gutbuster.
Cheetah Luis knelt over the fallen fighter. “What happened to the others?” he said.
“Cannies took ’em all. The living and the dead. Dragged off into swamp…”
“Did you see the live prisoners?” Ryan asked. “Did you see them get taken away?”
The dying man nodded, but as he did so, his eyes fluttered shut and his chest stopped heaving.
“He’s checking out on us,” J.B. said.
“Not yet,” Ryan said. He leaned down and grabbed hold of the man’s chin. When he squeezed hard, digging in his fingertips, the fighter opened his eyes wide.
“Did you see a black woman and a pale-skinned man? Were they taken prisoner?”
“Cannies took ’em both. Man in bad shape.”
Chapter Sixteen
Before Mildred and Jak could turn back for the cave, a flurry of rifle shots from the forest whined past them, slamming into the limestone slope at their backs, cutting off their retreat to the cave mouth.
Cannie fire.
Two of the fleeing Cajun sentries were cut down in midstride as they crossed the clearing, their backs riddled with bullets.
Jak grabbed Mildred’s arm and pulled her away from the entrance as more well-aimed fire clipped at the bedrock, pelting them with limestone shards. The danger wiped away concerns about fever and weakness. Powered by pure adrenaline surge, she ran hard on the albino’s heels along the base of the hillside, sprinting for the cover of the bordering trees. Mildred drew her target pistol and skidded to a stop on the leafy carpet behind a tree trunk.
She could see the winking muzzle-flashes of the cannie weapons. They were concentrated directly opposite the cave entrance. In the dim light, shadowy forms moved quickly through the woods around her. Not cannies. These were Cajuns. No longer in a panicked retreat, they were heading for already-prepared defensive positions.
Some of the fighters immediately shinnied out of sight into the mature elm trees, to what Mildred supposed were shooting stands hidden in the high branches. Others disappeared with their weapons down into the ground, presumably into hardened bunkers. Though she could only see her side of the clearing, and that just barely, she guessed that the same thing was happening on the other side. The sentries were setting up a delaying action to keep the cannies from charging straight into the mouth of the cave, giving their comrades time to prepare their defense.
From
positions high in the trees and low around their bases, the Cajuns’ crossfire would slow or turn back any cannie advance across the open space. From the bunkers deeper in the trees, they were protecting the snipers’ backs and stopping the cannies from encircling the clearing.
As Cajun return fire clattered back through the woods, Jak took Mildred’s hand and led her away from the tree. Keeping low, moving from trunk to trunk, they slipped deeper into the forest, to meet the cannie advance head-on.
Suddenly, Jak stopped and dropped into a fighting crouch. Mildred knelt beside him.
She strained to see ahead in the dark. The trees were black, the earth was black, the night sky veiled by leafy branches. Jak raised his Colt Python and prepared to fire. A moment later Mildred saw the faintly reflected starlight tracing the outlines of sweaty human faces and arms moving toward them. A skirmish line of crab-crawling cannies.
To her right, at the base of a tree perhaps fifteen yards in front of them, something flashed silver. A long knife or short sword.
With a loud crack one of the massive trees groaned and toppled over. The precut deadfall came down on the row of creeping cannies with a horrendous crash and raised a cloud of dust and debris. The combined weight of the tree, easily thousands of pounds, flattened the enemy.
A pair of dark forms scurried out from cover to the felled tree. Again and again, single blastershots rang out. The muzzle-flashes illuminated down-pointing handblasters and Cajuns firing point-blank into the heads of the pinned, struggling cannies.
From high in the trees behind them, staccato bursts of autofire rang out. The cannies trying to drive forward into the clearing were meeting solid resistance.
Heavy-caliber slugs clipped and chipped at trunks on all sides. Rounds screamed through the limbs. The cannies were spraying the woods with automatic fire.
Then came a different sort of scream.