by James Axler
No. It was too late for faith to strike him. Not now. He had to trust in his gut feeling to save what was left of the tribe, rather than place his trust in a madman who may or may not be sent from a Lord who no longer gave a shit about them.
The shaman moved through the crowds of Inuit who were sweeping toward the burning center of the ville, driving back those who were to be the sacrifice. McPhee increased his speed, elbowing and pushing his way past fellow tribe members who took his sudden enthusiasm for a flowering of his revelation. Let them think that, it would make his task easier. As he pushed his way through, he turned the rifle in his hands so that he brandished it like a club, the heavy stock ready to strike.
The laughing, yelling Jordan came into range. He was facing away from the medicine man, his white mane shaking as he cackled in the throes of madness. McPhee raised the rifle high above his head, bringing it down with the added momentum of the last step to take him close to his target. Thompson, standing beside Jordan as the blow began to fall, turned suddenly. Perhaps it was instinct, perhaps it was just something in his peripheral vision… His face, normally inscrutable, showed a sudden shock as he realized what was happening. Despite his views on the stranger being brought into doubt by his seeming insanity, the man was still a figurehead. He was the reason they were in the middle of an inferno, and Thompson knew that if he was struck down, then all meaning would be lost.
He knew this in less time than it took to blink an eye. Knew it and reacted. He tried to reach up to block the blow. But even the reactions of a hunter couldn’t stop the blow entirely. His arm deflected the momentum a little and he felt his elbow jar heavily as the bones between that point and his wrist took the impact, shattering or cracking according to size. The mass of skins and furs covering his arm couldn’t prevent it. McPhee’s determination fed a fire to his actions that gave him incredible strength.
The deflected blow couldn’t chill Jordan. Delivered straight, it would have shattered his skull, driving bone fragments into the brain and pulping it. The last-ditch effort of the chief had done enough to insure that that wouldn’t take place, but nonetheless the blow was strong enough to push Jordan forward, splitting the thin layer of skin between hair and bone and rendering him unconscious. He pitched onto his toes, falling flat on the sidewalk.
All around the shaman there was confusion and anger. Those closest to the incident couldn’t understand why their spiritual leader had turned on the man he had proclaimed as sent from the Lord. They also knew that their chief had been injured from his involuntary howl of pain as his arm was rendered useless. What should they do? Help the chief, or help the stranger, or chill the medicine man? Farther back, Inuit warriors knew something strange and very amiss had happened, but their view was obscured by those in front of them. They pressed up on those in front, who in turn were trying to stop themselves and others from trampling over Jordan as they attempted to lift him from where he had landed.
The moment had chosen itself.
FROM THEIR POSITION toward the rear of the Inuit, Ryan saw the movement as McPhee began to move forward. The shaman had been visible among the tribe as he still had his ritual vestments, which stood out against the heaving sea of furs and skins. He had been a useful landmark as to where Doc may be. Ryan knew that wherever McPhee was, then Thompson and Doc would be close.
The one-eyed man wondered what was happening as he saw the surge, then realized that it could be nothing good as he saw the shaman raise his rifle, try to fire, then turn it around like a club.
Without pausing to inform the others why, he began to move forward, attempting to push his way through toward the front of the crowd. He couldn’t explain exactly why he knew the gestures of McPhee were aimed at Doc, only that some sense of danger told him that he had to act right now.
He wasn’t alone in that. Krysty was already ahead of him. She couldn’t see as well, but she sensed that the situation was changing rapidly. Her sentient hair wrapped itself around her skull and her neck, clinging to her in the manner that it only did in times of triple red danger. Jak, Mildred and J.B. couldn’t see what was happening ahead of them, but they were clued into the fact that something was going down by one look at Krysty.
By the time that Doc had pitched forward, devoid of consciousness and with blood pouring from the wound on his head and down over his shoulders and hair, matting the white mane, the companions were fighting their way through the crowd.
J.B. kept one eye to his rear, trying to judge their chances of escape and to gauge what kind of route they could take. Things were going from bad to worse. Inside the skins and furs he was sweating, the air hot with the fires that raged around. Although the wind factor had been cut down by the fact that they were in a valley, still there was enough to spread the fires from building to building, street to street. Soon the whole ville would be nothing more than an inferno and they’d be trapped in the center of the blaze.
Dark night, they’d be lucky to get out of this one. But first they had to try to get Doc…
The sudden confusion had made this section of the Inuit invasion party seemingly forget all about the inhabitants of Fairbanks. They were jostling one another in confusion, trying to find out what was going on. For them, it was perhaps as well that the few survivors of their relentless onslaught had now drawn back toward the center of the ville, as they would have presented an easy target.
In truth, they were so distracted by their sudden halt that it was relatively easy for the companions to individually push their way through to the front of the crowd. They were not the enemy, even though they may have incurred some suspicion, so they were allowed to pass almost unnoticed.
Thompson was leaning over Doc. The old man was still and silent on the sidewalk. Ryan reached them first.
“What’s—” he began to say, but was cut short by Thompson, who pointed to McPhee, now being held by two Inuit warriors.
“Him,” the chief said simply. “He hit the messenger.”
“Why?” Ryan questioned.
Thompson shook his head. “Think I know that? We’ve nearly achieved our goal, and then this.”
“Nearly achieved what?” McPhee yelled, struggling against the two men who restrained him. “Achieved chilling the whole fucking tribe? In case you haven’t noticed, this place is like a funeral pyre, and for more than just the people we came to sacrifice. If this is like a big wicker man, then we’re trapped in the belly of the beast, as well. And it’s all down to him and whatever he purports to be.” McPhee, unable to gesture in any other way, spit at Doc Tanner’s prone form.
Thompson stepped forward and struck the medicine man across the face with a back-handed blow that snapped the shaman’s head back.
“Shut up. It was on your word that we started out here. You told me that it was the only way to appease the Lord.”
“Me! You asshole, I was the one who had the doubts.”
As the two men began to argue, and the Inuit looked on in complete confusion, the companions took the opportunity to slip closer to Doc. Mildred knelt beside him and examined the area of the blow as rapidly as she could.
“Hasn’t fractured, by the feel,” she murmured, running her fingers nimbly and expertly over the blood-slick skull. “He’ll have a hell of a concussion and won’t be able to move by himself.”
“Fireblast and fuck it, it would have helped if he could have saved us carrying him,” Ryan muttered as he settled beside her. “This is going to make it hard. What we really need is a bigger diversion than just those two arguing.”
“Heads up, I think this might be it,” Krysty said softly.
McIndoe appeared from out of the smoke, a couple of his most trusted sec men in tow. He took a long look at what was going on—the prone stranger surrounded by his friends, the chief and the medicine man arguing—and spoke in a tone that suggested he was less than happy with what greeted him.
“What the fuck is going on here? All parties have driven the survivors back to the center. They�
��re all holed up on one street, a line of buildings. We’ve got them all pinned there. They can’t get at us and they can’t get out without being chilled. It’s perfect for what we want. If we don’t blast them, the fires’ll get them. We just need the ritual. When you didn’t arrive with the rest of the parties, we didn’t know what to expect, so…” He shrugged, indicating he felt it was time for an explanation.
“I’ll tell you what’s going on,” McPhee exploded. “We’ve run into a trap—a trap of our own making. Our own stupid idea, and we’re caught like a deer in a pit. The fires will get more than the people of Fairbanks.”
“But this is to save the tribe. To offer these people to the Almighty so that he can make us fertile again—” McIndoe began.
McPhee cut him short. “We’re finished. All of us. We listened to a lunatic, and now we’ve got to face the fact that we’re history. This isn’t the rebirth of the tribe, it’s our funeral pyre.”
“Dark night, I wish he hadn’t mentioned Doc,” J.B. muttered as the attention of McIndoe—and, by extension, those others who heard McPhee—turned to where Doc had now been lifted up, supported by Krysty and Mildred. He was barely conscious, his eyes rolling in his head and only the faintest incoherent mumblings escaping his lips.
Jak, J.B. and Ryan flanked the women. They had hoped to at least start moving from the front of the crowd while attention was focused on the arguing sec leader, the medicine man and the chief. But McPhee’s words had chilled those chances. If they could have just moved another twenty yards they could have tried to escape down a side street. As it was, they were backed up against a building that was uncomfortably hot from the fires that were reaching it, with no escape route.
“I knew you were trouble,” McIndoe said, raising his Sharps rifle.
“Wait—what good will chilling them do?” Thompson yelled.
“None, but it can’t hurt to take them with us if we’re on the way out of here,” McIndoe snapped back.
A wave of fear and anger swept through the Inuit at these words—as though it were no longer conjecture, but cold, hard fact that they were chilled meat—and Ryan could see his companions helpless before an onslaught of enemy fire, with nowhere to run.
They needed a miracle. They got something that was partway between miracle and disaster.
A loud rumbling filled the air. Already alive with the sound of yelling and screaming, and the crackling of both fire damage and blasterfire, it should have been almost impossible for anything else to be heard. But this was a deep, dark sound that seemed to swell from beneath whatever noises were going on above, until it felt as though it was making the very air itself vibrate.
“Oh, shit—it’s all coming down,” Mildred whispered. Ryan could barely hear her above the noise, but he was about to ask her what she meant when the sound—and its source—overtook them.
Desperation had fuelled one last act of defiance from the Fairbanks inhabitants who were trapped in the center of the burning ville. They had fired up the buildings in which they were now cowering, using all the fuel they could find, all the ammo and weaponry they possessed. It meant their own demise, but they knew that they were chilled anyway. It was only a matter of whether it was a quick chilling or one that was slow and painful.
Faced with such a stark choice, it was no contest. They had turned the street in which they were holed up like rats into a giant bomb. Once detonated, it had set off a chain reaction among those buildings burning nearby, the rubble strewed from the blast hammering into buildings made unstable by their own blazes, rendering them to the ground in their turn. Like a string of dominoes, once one building collapsed into another, it set those around it into a state of collapse.
The thick smoke was now overpowered, in its turn, by dust. Clouds of choking darkness began to engulf the Inuit and the companions as the buildings shattered to rubble around them and Fairbanks was razed to the ground.
The last they saw of McIndoe—or Thompson and McPhee—was the Inuit’s surprised expression as his gaze was taken from his leveled rifle to the rubble that flew toward him.
Now it was all they could do to outrun the chain reaction. J.B. and Jak were off like rabbits escaping a snare, making for the street twenty yards to their left before the domino effect claimed it. Ryan helped Krysty and Mildred carry Doc, allowing Jak and J.B. to run ahead, scouting the route.
The Armorer had the layout of the ville as they had passed it in his head, and Jak was able to move more swiftly, telling him where once-open streets had already been claimed by fire and collapse.
With the roar of collapsing streets ringing in their ears, and the dust and heat making it hard to breathe, the three carrying Doc didn’t know how they made it to the edge of the ville. There was no time to think, just to do. They kept running, somehow keeping their balance when stumbling, somehow breathing when the air seemed too thick with dust and smoke to be inhaled. It was blind instinct for survival that drove them. There were times when they couldn’t truthfully say that they had seen Jak and J.B. guide them, only that they somehow knew where they were supposed to run.
Past the gates they had entered by; over the wreckage of the crow’s nests; hitting the steep incline of the valley wall, now safe from the flying rubble but still trapped in the spumes of choking dust and smoke. They had to get up the side of the valley, to where the air was cleaner.
It was a blind struggle, one that seemed to take forever and no time at all. There was no meaning to time, only striving to survive.
Ryan had been flat on his back, gulping in clean air and hacking up smoke-polluted phlegm for some minutes before he realized where he was. He looked around. The others were with him, all in a similar state of collapse. All except for Doc, who was still unconscious but now had the sweetest, most innocent smile on his face.
Ryan raised himself to his feet, feeling unsteady as the oxygen beginning to course once more around his system made him feel light-headed. They had ended up several yards from the lip of the valley, and they were fortunate that the winds were taking the smoke and dust away from them.
The one-eyed man staggered the couple of paces to the edge of the valley, so that he could see the devastation below. It was hard to make out through the smoke, but it seemed as though the whole ville had been flattened by the chain reaction. It was doubtful anyone else could have made it out alive. How they had, he couldn’t tell.
He turned back to the others. They looked in no fit state to move as yet, but it was freezing up on the ridgeline, and they’d soon have to seek shelter. The early afternoon sun was already beginning to sink.
Shelter. Food. And a place to go from here.
Those would have to be attended to, and soon, but now, it was all he could do to stop from sinking to his knees and letting oblivion claim him.
ISBN: 978-1-4603-7335-4
RITUAL CHILL
Copyright © 2005 by Worldwide Library.
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