by James Axler
Or what they had to hide, Mildred thought. There was something that was nagging at the back of her mind about the corpses, and why they needed to be retrieved. She tried to steal a look at them as she walked beside the pole carried by Bodie and Rankine. But the chilled corpses were too distorted by the manner of their chilling, and the way in which they were hanging, for her to get a good look without somehow stopping the party and causing suspicion.
Doc wouldn't be the only one with something to say to Ryan, she mused.
Her musings were cut short by their arrival at a hidden entrance to the ville of Raw.
"Pull up here, people," Harvey commanded for the benefit of the companions.
The one-eyed warrior looked around. It seemed as though they had arrived on an old street corner that was marked by three derelict and overgrown buildings and a stand of mutated trees growing out of the rubble where once a fourth had stood. The creeper was thick beneath their feet, and he couldn't see how they could get beneath it easily.
"Over here," Downey said with a sly smile, moving to the small copse of trees. The companions followed him, to find that the silver-haired sec man was reaching into the bole of a tree. He contorted his face with effort, tugging at something within.
A section of ground to one side of the copse shuddered and began to move upward, hinged at one side so that it flipped over. Leading off from the opening was a flight of stone steps, roughly hewed from rock and concrete blocks that had been primitively mortared together.
"After you," Downey said, indicating the opening.
Jak grinned admiringly. "Nice hide."
Harvey grunted as he and Ryan led the way down. "Takes us down to an old basement, tunneled through to an old mail subway line. But it's kept to a simple winch system so's we can use it if we lose what power we have."
"You've got power, fuel?" Ryan asked, wondering if this was part of the hidden stores of the Illuminated Ones.
"Some. We do some trading, sometimes. Most of our power is wood, oil from the plants for lamps and stuff. The creepers're really good for that. Any real power is used by the tech people…" He trailed off, seemingly unwilling to continue, aware that he may already have said too much. He was spared any questions by a sec man appearing from the shadows at the bottom of the stairs.
Ryan started at the sudden appearance, shifting the pole weight to one shoulder while his now free hand snaked down to the holstered SIG-Sauer.
"It's okay, Cyclops, he's one of mine," Harvey stated laconically, feeling Ryan's weight shift to his rear and guessing what the one-eyed warrior's move would be.
"You got them back," the sec man said in a flat voice, still hidden by shadow. He had a blaster in his hands that Ryan could tell was an Uzi from the shape and the way he was holding it. As he stepped out, Ryan could see that his eyes were blue, and his hair long and blond, framing a face that was lean with a hard, cold harshness.
Ryan marked him down as dangerous. He wasn't an enemy yet, but caution was always a necessity.
"Chilled, but at least we can give them a decent send-off," Harvey replied.
"Jenna will be way pissed," the blond sec man said, shaking his head before stepping back into the shadows and letting the group pass with only a word of greeting to his fellow sec men, and a look of suspicion for the companions.
"Jenna?" Ryan asked as they proceeded down empty, winding tunnels dimly lit by oil lamps.
"Baron's wife. Some say the real power. Now I wouldn't be the one to spread that, Cyclops, but I would pay heed if it reached my ears."
Ryan said nothing, not sure if the sec chief was giving him a warning or a threat.
The lights grew more regular and brighter as they progressed through the tunnels, which were obviously a serviceable entrance into the heart of Raw. As they walked along the rail tracks of the old mail line, they found that there were more and more signs of habitation: small shacks sprung up along the way, with a few small fires outside them and children running and playing. Children who, in the darkness up above, would have been sleeping. But here there was no day and night, only the perpetual half light of the lamps. In many ways, this was no different from if they had lived in the twilit forest up above.
"Hey, Jak, notice anything?" Dean whispered to the albino as they entered another, more heavily populated zone of the ville.
"Mebbe," Jak replied carefully, with one eye on the sec men surrounding them.
"A lot of these people look the same?" Dean continued, forgetting the proximity of the sec force with whom they had hunted.
"People all same anyway," Jak said pointedly, flashing a warning glance at the young Cawdor.
"Yeah, mebbe," Dean said slowly, too lost in thought to be noticing Jak's true meaning.
"Nice ville you got," the Armorer said, taking in the surroundings. "Good guard system—especially the tunnel complex."
"Yeah, we like to keep it tight and safe," Harvey answered, warming to a theme close to his heart. "There's a shitload of tunnels and basements in this old ville, but we keep ourselves pretty much to one sector, making sure that the others always have a watch on. There's not many folks about these parts, but we like to keep ourselves to ourselves."
"Yeah, so you've said before," Krysty replied, trying to keep the note of suspicion out of her voice. But she couldn't stop the curls of her hair coiling tight to her throat and collarbone.
They continued through the populated area. Some basements leading off of the tunnels had been converted wholesale into living units, or areas where vital survival trades were practiced. There was a cobbler and blacksmith, an area that seemed to act as a communal kitchen and dining area for at least that sector, and an armory. J.B. caught this in passing, and could see that there were two women at work dismantling and cleaning blasters. There were boxes lining the walls, and the smell of oil and cordite hung in the air around the cordoned-off area.
"We don't have as many blasters as some villes, stranger, but we like to keep them in good working order. You never know when you may need them, right?" Bodie murmured to the Armorer, a hint of warning in his voice.
J.B., taking it for now, said nothing.
Looking around, Ryan could see that they had quite a crowd following them, and other people appeared from tunnels leading off their route as word spread that they had returned with the chilled young.
By the time they reached the central hall, they had a crowd behind them that had to have constituted most of the ville.
"Just how many people you got under here?" Ryan asked Harvey, casting a look over his shoulder.
"Two-fifty, mebbe three hundred," the sec chief replied. "Not much mutie business, either. We get enough people traveling through to keep us pretty mixed in the old gene pool."
Ryan's eye narrowed, even though he said nothing. It was more than a little unusual to find such a knowledge of genetics expressed so casually in any ville in the Deathlands, let alone one that was relatively isolated.
They came to a halt in the center of the large room.
It was circular, draped in somberly colored swathes of old material that lent it a shadowy, dusty air. At the far end a long wooden table, with high-backed chairs, stood on a small dais, imposing over the rest of the arena. The hall itself had to have been part of a deep foundation, as it had a rough earthen floor, yet, the walls visible through the gaps in the drapes were of concrete. Through one such gap, Ryan could see the ragged edge of a floor that had been torn down— or had fallen—at some point in the past. That accounted for the surprisingly high and impressive ceiling.
The sec party put the poles down in the center of the hall. Harvey's sec men stepped back from the bundles of chilled and stinking flesh; Ryan's people did likewise. Casting a glance over his shoulder, Jak saw that the rear of the hall was now full of ville dwellers, yet there was an eerie silence among them, with not even any sobs to break that silence.
"What now?" Ryan asked Harvey, noting Jak's unease.
The sec chief said nothing, but gestured toward
the table and the high-backed chairs.
Two people had somehow slipped into the room from some secret entrance. One was a large, thickset man who was just under six feet, and looked like his muscular frame was beginning to run to fat. He wheezed slightly under his long, flowing gray hair and long gray beard, but his eyes were still sharp, moving with a deliberate slowness over the chilled children and then over the outsiders among the sec group.
Krysty shivered, a wave of nausea sweeping over her. Her hair coiled tight, then sprang loose, and for a moment she thought that she may pass out. She slowed her breathing, willing the wave of nausea to pass. What, she wondered, had caused that? It wasn't the old man, so it had to have been…
Glittering, raven-black eyes bored into her. Krysty felt the wave begin to swell once more and fought back, fighting at the tendrils of fear that began to wrap themselves around her mind. Her mind! That was what was happening: the woman accompanying the baron was attempting to reach into her mind. Krysty could feel that same doomie, feelie instinct that she herself possessed to a small degree: the woman in front had sensed that in her, but had a stronger ability and was trying to gauge Krysty's strength.
The flame-haired woman fought back mentally with all the willpower she possessed, closing off sections of her mind as she felt the tendrils of the other touch them. She used every trick she had learned from her mother.
"Krysty, are you okay?" Mildred whispered urgently. Standing just to the rear of her, the older woman had noted with alarm the sudden tension in her friend's body, and the minute muscular contortions as Krysty's mental struggle was reflected in microcosm.
The raven-eyed woman standing beside the baron abruptly looked away as she saw Mildred lean toward Krysty, and the link was broken.
Krysty suppressed a gasp, and whispered over her shoulder, "Okay now. I'll tell you later."
The ville's baron sat on the highest of the chairs, the woman seating herself at his right hand. She looked younger, with long raven hair to match her eyes, and sharp features that would have been classically beautiful if not for the hint of something sadistic around those eyes. She appeared to be temperamentally opposed to the baron, who now spoke.
"So, Harv, you couldn't bring them back alive this time," he said softly, with a warmth and sadness in his voice.
"'Fraid not, Alien," the sec chief replied. "Bastards have got blasters, too. Good thing we ran into these here folks. Cyclops here is a good fighter. So're his people."
"Really?" the woman said in a voice that was silky, but with a biting undertone that hinted at sarcasm. "Not up to the job yourself, then?"
"Stop riding him, Jenna," the baron said softly, with a hint of indulgence in his voice. "Harv usually does okay. Averages means we lose a few."
It wasn't lost on Ryan or any of his companions who the real power and ruthlessness may be in the ville of Raw. For Krysty, this was particularly alarming, she needed to get the others where they could talk.
But not yet. While she pondered this, the baron confirmed what they had already gathered. He introduced himself as Alien, and the woman as his wife, Jenna. Her smile on being introduced was cold and saurian. She came out from behind the table, stepping delicately past the pile of chilled flesh on the floor, and walked among the sec party, examining the newcomers.
She stopped when she was in front of Mildred. "Interesting," she said to herself, then louder,
"We've never had a black here. It'll be interesting to talk. How many of your sort survived skydark, I wonder? Have you little communities?"
Mildred was less than inclined to discuss her past, let alone her racial origins. It was all she could do to stop from punching the lights out of the baron's wife. From the corner of her eye, she caught J.B.'s warning glance.
"I was on my own when I joined my friends," she said shortly, through gritted teeth. "It's a long story."
"Well, later, then," Jenna replied, losing interest. "Are we going to cremate now, dear?" she asked, turning to the baron. "The poor things will start to stink us out otherwise."
"Good point, my dear," Alien replied indulgently.
To the companions, he said, "Please, after the ceremony you must join us. I want to know more about you."
He turned to Harvey. "Get the fires ready."
The sec man nodded and directed his party to activities they obviously knew too well for their liking.
"We'll help," Dean said suddenly, moving in front of Rankine to help Bodie lift one of the poles.
Dean was the only one of the companions to offer, and in fact the only one who could now, as the sec men had the poles under their control. Ryan noted with interest the look of alarm that crossed Harvey's face as he looked at Jenna, and the flash of anger that crossed hers. Alien, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to this exchange.
"Thank you, son," was all the baron said. In the face of this, Harvey had little option other than to let Dean continue, although it seemed to make him considerably jumpy.
The sec men, with Dean, made off the way they had come, the crowd parting to let them pass.
They took the first junction and headed off for some time. The atmosphere grew hotter, and Dean felt the sweat bead on him, his clothes begin to cling.
"What's that?" he gasped, the hot air searing his lungs.
"Furnace," Bodie replied in a short breath, the fat sec man also feeling the heat.
They arrived at the furnace room, a system of old boilers looted from the remains of aboveground and linked together to form a system of lighting and hot water. By the careful use of a piping system, it was feasible to run the boilers at a high temperature and yet use very little fuel. They used the trees from the forest above as wood, and it seemed that the wood fibers were densely packed in the mutie stumps…
Dean was aware that Harvey's lecture was intended to distract him from the task of taking the chilled children from the poles and placing them in the fires. This was done via a metal palette that led into an oven probably taken from a predark crematorium.
Dean would have looked on the sec man's lecture as an attempt to distract him from the horror in front of him if not for the fact that the sec chief had to surely have been aware after the raid that Dean had seen such things before. The youngster thus reasoned that it was a distraction for something he wasn't supposed to see. But what?
Dean had his suspicions and feigned interest while the sec men took the corpses from the poles. It wasn't an easy or pleasant task, as the poles were impaled through the entirety of each body, and it took a considerable effort to pull the poles from the corpses. Several times, the sec men stopped to vomit, and at those moments Dean was glad for Harvey's distraction, even if that wasn't his original intention.
When the corpses were all removed, the six of them were laid on the palette, and Dean took the opportunity to help Jake and Bodie push the palette into the fires.
For the first time, laid out as they were on the metal surface, Dean was able to get a good look at the bodies. All of the children had blond hair and blue eyes.
It struck a chord, something he had learned at the Brody school. Something his father and Mildred had talked about from predark days.
It was that something that had made him want to accompany the sec men here, to confirm what had been bugging him the whole way back, when the corpses had been too dark, too distorted, too contorted to view properly.
Blond hair. Blue eyes.
The image of the corpses disappearing and charring in fire was somehow horribly familiar.
Chapter Nine
"So you have been inside the place of legend," the gruff and amiable baron said with a twinkle. "Never held with the way all those old stories were turned to myths. Old tech is what led us to skydark. Why be so crazy about something that got us into shit like this?"
Ryan indicated a certain degree of agreement. "Thing is, Baron its not what happened then…it's what we can do with it now if we can get our hands on it. If a baron like yourself had access to it."
<
br /> The one-eyed man left the phrase hanging in the air as he took a bite from the cooked bird's leg that he held. They were now all seated at the long table, Alien and Jenna holding court while Harvey and Downey sat with them. On the other side of the table were lined the companions, Dean having returned with the sec men from the furnaces and so far holding his tongue on what he had seen.
Alien had dismissed his people from the hall after the corpses of the children had been taken away, and they had returned to their homes within the tunnels in a manner that suggested Alien didn't need force or the heavy hand of a sec force to rule. He had ordered food to be brought to the table, and when it had arrived had bid the others to join him.
After nothing but self-heats for some while, it was a relief to have fresh food, even if the forest environment aboveground made them feel dubious about some of the vegetables. Doc also made a point of avoiding the meat, wondering if it was the kind of hawk that had attacked him.
Ryan's point hung in the air for some time, the baron chewing thoughtfully before answering.
"I'll tell you this," he said finally, "for we've nothing to hide here. Some of us are the descendants of those who came out of the underground base. It doesn't matter shit now, but there was a disagreement down there between those who wanted to make a new life, and those who thought there still might be a way to set up predark systems of government that could link up so-called alternative communities…least, that's what they called them. But alternative to what? How can it be an alternative when what there was before just ain't there anymore?"
"So they went their separate ways. Some ended up here, along with some people they'd picked up along the way. Sunchildren weren't much of a problem, but the forest was. So when they found the tunnels and basements could be linked up, I guess it was almost second nature to get tunneling, 'specially after living underground for so long anyways. The rest, well, guess we try to keep ourselves to ourselves, live peaceful and get richer."
"Everyone would like that," the Armorer interjected, "but it's not that easy."