Sunchild

by James Axler

  The sec man covering Ryan, who was obviously the man called Harvey, and sec chief, laughed mirthlessly. "Don't think they're anything to do with the Sunchildren," he replied.

  Then he directed his attention to Ryan. "You'll have to excuse the boys there, but Ant and Dee lost their balls to the mutie fuckers when they were just kids. Being twins, they would have been better for sacrifice. It's only 'cause they're such feisty fuckers that they escaped—nearly unscathed."

  "Hate that shit, though," one of the twins muttered.

  Doc cleared his throat noisily. "If you'll excuse me, gentlemen, that would seem an eminently reasonable point of view. I wouldn't be averse to chilling a few of those scum-suckers myself," he said quietly.

  "You?" One of the twins laughed, his voice rising to a screech. "Old man, you couldn't fart your way out of a vine leaf!" He prodded at Doc with the barrel of his blaster, a dirty and grease-covered shotgun that even J.B. couldn't recognize in its seemingly poor condition.

  In relieving the party of their blasters, the sec men had been slack enough to leave Ryan his panga, J.B. his Tekna knife, and Doc his lion's-head swordstick, making the mistake of assuming it was to aid his walking. A mistake the twin was to regret, as Doc stepped back, sweeping the big sec man's feet from beneath him with the stick and then drawing the sword in one fluid motion, the speed of which took the sec men by surprise.

  "Could I not?" Doc asked softly, the point of the sword pressing into the grounded man's throat.

  Ryan tensed, sensing the sudden increase in tension around him. The blasters of the sec men rose just a fraction, fingers almost audibly tightening their grip. Harvey's smile vanished, to be replaced in a fraction of a second by a roaring laugh.

  "I'll be damned," he roared. "Can't remember the last time Dee was bested like that, let 'lone by someone like him," he added, indicating Doc with a nod of the head. "Guess you people are as hot as I thought." The laugh vanished, and his tone dropped almost to a whisper. "So tell me why I shouldn't just chill you all right now."

  "Because it'll waste your time. You want to go after those fuckers who've got your kids," Ryan replied.

  "Good answer. But to chill you will take just a few seconds."

  Ryan smiled, slow and with a vulpine grace. "You sure about that?"

  Harvey shook his head. "No. Tell you what, Cyclops, I don't reckon on you being part of that scum. I'll worry about why you're here later. Give you a straight choice—a firefight now, or help us track that scum and mebbe not get chilled later. Sound fair?"

  "No," Ryan answered slowly, his gaze traveling over his friends and the gathered sec men. "But I don't see that we've got a say."

  "Knew you'd see it my way," Harvey said.

  "Just as well. Take you anytime," Jak said softly, but with an underlying menace.

  Harvey eyed the albino speculatively. "You know, mutie, I reckon you're just about mean enough to pull it off. Which is why I want you with us rather than against us."

  "Feel good 'bout that?" Jak asked in the same tone. "How you know we not turn?"

  "Would you, Cyclops?" the sec chief asked Ryan.

  "Mebbe. Mebbe not right now," the one-eyed warrior replied carefully.

  "Mebbe when not look," Jak added.

  Harvey gave a rueful grin. "I really like your spirit, especially as the odds are less than even."

  "Usually that way," Jak said, his red eyes unwavering on the sec chief.

  Harvey considered that. "You people got a lot of balls. Just mebbe we'll get along fine. But we've got unfinished business. With us?" He waited until Ryan, casting his eye around his companions, nodded assent. "Good," the sec chief murmured quietly, almost to himself.

  Under his direction, with a guard still covering them, the companions retrieved their blasters from where they had been forced to let them drop, and the party assembled on the path. Under Harvey's lead, with Ryan and Jak close behind, a sec blaster still half-raised toward them as a deterrent, they set out at a rapid pace.

  "They've got some lead on you," Ryan told Harvey, continuing with what they had seen and when. The sec man listened in silence.

  Finally, he said, "Those poor kids'll be chill meat by now anyway, Cyclops. But the least we can do is give the poor lil' fuckers a decent burial. Not to be burned and eaten by that mutie shit…no offense," he added, nodding toward Jak.

  "No," the albino answered in a neutral tone belied by his expression.

  "Tell us what you know of this ville Samtvogel," Doc said to the leading sec man.

  Harvey turned sharply. "How do you know about that, old man?"

  Ryan told him they were outlanders looking for a better life, and as they traveled toward Seattle they came across a deserted diner, neglecting to mention the attacking party from the war wag. That could come later. He then produced the map.

  "Shit," Harvey breathed, "if I ever find out which fuckwit left that to be found. You'll have gathered that the old place is a staging post for us," he continued, "So you know where we're going."

  "Only as a name on a map," Ryan replied.

  Harvey paused, walking in silence for some time, Ryan waiting patiently for an answer. By now they were out of the old ville and onto the blacktop, leaving the heavy forest behind and headed out to the scrub.

  It wasn't until they had cut away from the blacktop and were headed across the bare and rough terrain, with the setting sun lending a coolness to the previously humid heat, that Harvey outlined what his people knew of the Sunchildren and Samtvogel.

  The Sunchildren were a band of inbred muties descended from a predark cult led by a man named Sunchild, who believed that the nukes were a cleansing fire from the gods and that they should make their base in the wilderness, ready for the Judgment Day, when the gods would come to deliver them. They had, according to the legend that he had tortured from a captured mutie, welcomed the times of the dark, looking upon their mutations as a blessing from the gods, adapting their bodies for the new world to come.

  The gods demanded sacrifices of children, the new lives replenishing the energies of the gods. The eating of flesh transferred that energy to the cultists. As they had become more mutated and inbred with each succeeding generation, so their lust for flesh had grown to the point where the current Sunchild was a drooling idiot whose only joy was the snatching of children from the underground ville, which Harvey revealed was called Raw.

  He then went on to explain that his ville was run by a baron named Alien, and consisted of some survivors from the old ville of Seattle along with the descendants of people called the Illuminated Ones, who had emerged from an underground installation which they believed had been destroyed by a bomb after they left.

  Listening, each of the companions wondered if the bomb had been in charge of the suicide they had found with the journal, but all elected to stay silent on the matter for now.

  "… and they do say that there are other Illuminated Ones out there somewhere. Been some weird shit seen around here from time to time, which is why I'm so pissed at whoever left that mother map in the way station. We don't want our ville left exposed like that." He paused. "Of course, Cyclops, if you and your people had seen some weird shit on your way toward us, you'd tell me now, wouldn't you?"

  Ryan fixed the sec chief with a steely blue glare.

  "No, of course you wouldn't," Harvey murmured. "You're far too smart for that."

  THE SACRIFICIAL FIRES lit the sky a brilliant white and orange, shining like a small sun in the blackness of the descended night. The ville itself was a collection of old ranch houses in a small valley, the original buildings in a state of disrepair and ruin, daubed a myriad of colors that flickered in the firelight. Around the ruined houses were shacks constructed of metal, wood and any raw materials that could have been found, pulled together rather than constructed, in a haphazard and flimsy fashion. And scattered among the shacks were tents made of rags and blankets strung over poles, offering scant protection to the muties who inhabited them.

>   The ridges of the valley were fenced off with rusty barbed wire strung around the dusty, unstable rock, stretching around for a distance of two miles. At irregular intervals were dead birds, hawks like the one that attacked Doc Tanner, mutated birds that resembled woodpeckers with grotesquely enlarged and toughened beaks, even some creatures that may, once in their genetic history, have been chickens—impaled on the wire and in varying states of decay and corruption.

  The party of eight sec men and the seven companions had walked straight to the head of the valley, with little attempt at concealment.

  "Interesting idea of decoration they've got," Ryan remarked. "And an interesting idea of not being seen that you've got."

  "Yeah, where are their sec forces?" J.B. added, peering into the gloom and voicing the unease felt by the others.

  "Ain't got any sec forces. They don't need them," Harvey answered, poking at one of the bird corpses with the snubbed barrel of his blaster. The rotten carcass fell off the wire and landed in the dust. "The only thing that wants to come anywhere near this pesthole is the wildlife. Come to that, even that ain't so keen."

  "Why don't you wipe them out once and for all, if they're such a problem?" Mildred asked.

  Harvey shrugged. "We've got other things to do. Besides, they don't bother us much, and that's all we ask. Guess we just don't like visitors."

  Doc eyed the sec chief speculatively. Now why would that be? he wondered. On reflection, he decided to save that question for another time.

  Krysty had other ideas. She had kept silent for some time, but there was something about the sec chief that made her hair crawl close to her neck.

  "Why don't you like visitors?" she asked. "Why do you keep the entrance to your ville so well hidden you don't even mark it on your own maps?"

  "Privacy," Harvey said shortly. "It's a rare thing, and we prize it."

  "Especially if you have something to hide."

  Harvey's eyes momentarily blazed, but Krysty didn't flinch under his glare. She could feel his men tense around them, and saw from the periphery of her vision both Ryan and J.B. tense also, expecting trouble.

  The sec chief won the struggle to control his temper and said quietly. "Our business is our business. Mebbe you'll find out later…if we want. Meantime, we've got work to do."

  The fifteen-strong party looked down at the ville of Samtvogel. The inhabitants, clearly and unmistakably visible against the light of the fires and the dull colors of the valley, were moving slowly toward the center of the ville, which was a circular courtyard between the two largest ranch houses in the valley. It was here that the fire blazed. Standing between the two houses, and completely blocking one entrance to the yard, was a squat object, painted in a multiplicity of colors and standing malevolently over the unfolding scene.

  "What's that?" Doc asked, gesturing with his stick.

  "Who knows?" the sec chief answered in a bored tone. "Some kind of totem left over from the old days. I'll bet as how most of the mutie scum are so dumb they don't even realize it's there, let alone what it is."

  "Perhaps…" Doc replied in a faraway tone that made Ryan look at him sharply.

  There was no time for the one-eyed warrior to ask Doc what was on his mind, as Ant spotted something in the melee below.

  "There they are… Shit, what a bunch of sick fucks," he whispered, pointing to the center of the ville.

  The multicolored muties, chanting tonelessly and incessantly, had taken the three poles and upended them, so that the corpses of the children sat one on another, sinking down the poles into heaps of dead flesh. Some of the muties were laying kindling around the feet of the bottom children.

  No one could tear their gaze away, wanting to, but unwilling to believe what they were seeing and needing confirmation.

  "Those are our dead," Harvey whispered, "and they ain't gonna burn them."

  "So how do we attack?" J.B. asked. He wanted to ask why it was so important to get back some chilled kids, risking their own necks for nothing, but figured at that point it was more practical to figure out how they could mount the attack and get out in one piece.

  "The way I see it is like this," Harvey said after pausing to gaze around the circumference of the valley edge.

  JAK SLID DOWN the loose stones and patches of scree that constituted the sides of the valley. He knew that it would appear pitch-black in the area immediately outside of the gathering of huts, shacks, old ranch houses and ragged tents that made up the ville of Samtvogel. The intense light of the fire would only carry so far, and mutie eyes wouldn't be able to adjust to the sudden change in light levels. As his flowing white hair and pale skin shone out against the dark of his camou clothing and the dark earth, he was pleased about this.

  The raucous chanting, growing in volume and intensity as the ceremony approached, also served to mask the sound his party made while descending the sides of the valley. With the looseness of the earth, it was impossible for even Jak to maintain a complete silence. For the people with him, however, it seemed to be a case of how much noise they could make.

  "Don't see why we couldn't just march in," grunted the small, nut-brown and wizened figure who slid down beside the albino, slowing his descent so that he was level with Jak. He managed to blend in with the landscape, only the whites of his hazel eyes shining in the dark. His name was Blake.

  "You'd like them to have any inkling we're coming?" came a laconic voice from behind, indicated only by the flickering firelight that caught his spectacles. J.B. was slowing his descent with solid footfalls, reasoning that any noise he made was more than masked by the chanting. "We walk in and announce ourselves, just makes things harder," he added.

  Blake grunted noncommittally.

  There was one main track in and out of the ville. It took the shallowest incline out of the valley, and consisted of beaten earth and the remnants of a bitumen road. Two poles, once probably part of a sign hanging over the road, or perhaps a gate system, stood stark against the bare earth around.

  The surrounding incline took a sharp turn upward, until at the rear of the ville it formed an almost vertical wall. This made it easy for Harvey to split the group into two separate parties and assign one to take each side of the valley. Jak, J.B. and Blake were joined by Mildred, Ant and Dee and Doc. The latter was picking his way down with infinite care, and the others waited for him to join them.

  "Old man's too slow if you ask me," Blake grumbled.

  "Wouldn't say that," Ant replied, his twin nodding agreement. "He can move fast enough when need be."

  "Why, thank you, kind sir," Doc answered, settling himself beside the others. "When do we move?"

  "Harvey signal," Jak told him.

  ON THE OTHER SIDE of the valley, Harvey and Downey picked their way down to a spot about twenty yards from the first ranch house. Dean and Krysty followed, joined by the rangy sec man with receding hair, who was named Rankine. They were a few yards in front of the next pack, with Ryan behind the bear-like Jake and the fat sec man, whose name was Bodie. For his size, Bodie was surprisingly nimble, and the one-eyed warrior noted this, in case he should ever come up against the sec man. His reason for taking the rear position was partly to keep a watch on the Raw sec men, partly to keep an overall view on Harvey's tactics.

  If Samtvogel had no sec forces or no blasters, then an attack from the sides, using the contrast between the dark hillside and the bright light of the ceremonial fires, should stand a good chance of success. Ryan had attempted a quick head count of the Sunchildren, and although there was too much movement for him to be certain, there seemed to be about seventy-five to eighty of them—five to one. Not good odds generally, but the blasters would even that up considerably.

  Hit hard, hit fast, attain the target and retreat. The theory was sound, although the logic of carrying out the attack just to win back some chilled flesh was skewed. Better to do that than face the firefight in the forest, though. The odds were marginally better, and this could make them some progress towar
d their ultimate goal.

  The one-eyed man joined the rest of the party, and they sat for a second watching the obscene celebrations beneath. One mutie, in a flowing and tattered robe dyed in many colors, had taken the center of the arena and seemed to be leading the chanting. The sound changed, a high keening note of blood lust now entering the massed voices.

  "Think the others are in position?" Downey asked. His question was directed at his chief, but it was Dean who answered.

  "With Jak leading, they'll have been waiting for us and getting bored," he whispered.

  Harvey spared the youth a grim smile. "Hope you're right, boy, 'cause it's chilling time."

  The assembled party readied their blasters, checking that chambers were full, magazines loaded, without even consciously thinking.

  Harvey took a flare from the small leather bag he wore attached to his belt. He cast a glance over the seven people around him, eyes dwelling for a moment on Krysty—Raw women didn't join sec attacks, and he was still of two minds about Krysty and Mildred— before he nodded, almost to himself, and lit the flare. Standing, he threw it high into the air, describing a parabola that let it fall onto the roof of the semi-derelict ranch house, landing sputtering on the flat surface.

  Harvey hollered, psyching himself up, and launched himself forward.

  ON THE OTHER SIDE of the valley, J.B. was the first to react, rising as he saw the flare arc through the darkness, like a shooting star on the edges of the firelight.

  "Go," he yelled simply, barking out the word.

  Mildred was close behind him, with Jak streaking down the slope at an angle, spreading the line of attack. Ant and Dee took position between Jak and the Armorer, while Doc and Blake moved off to the other side, the seven warriors fanning out to dilute and confuse any concerted attempt at defense.

  While they did this, Harvey was followed by Downey down the slope, while Ryan and Krysty moved off to form the farthest point of the line, with Bodie, Rankine, Dean and Jake taking the points in between.

  On both sides, the attacking parties held fire until they could be sure of making all their shots count. Harvey's men carried only one blaster each, and of the companions, only J.B. and Ryan had more than the one blaster. J.B. had the Uzi in his hands, set to fire short, controlled bursts; Ryan grasped his SIG-Sauer, with his Steyr in reserve, while the Armorer had his M-4000 to fall back on. At the back of his mind, he considered it would be a useful weapon to scatter the crowds in front of the ceremonial fires.