by James Axler
What the gizmo’s angles and ridges might do inside that tortured anatomy the carny master had no clue. He shifted his boot soles and felt the stickiness underfoot. Gear grease or guts, he couldn’t tell. Crecca cleared his throat before he spoke, afraid his voice might break. “I just wanted to let you know that the valve problem on the canisters has been repaired,” he said. “It was a rubber gasket that failed. We jury-rigged replacements. You said you wanted to be kept informed.”
The Magus got up from the sofa. Lurching forward on knee joints made of Teflon and titanium, he wasn’t a pretty sight.
Even though the carny master knew that to turn and run would have meant the end of him, it took every ounce of nerve to stand his ground. And as the creature clicked past him, he couldn’t help but let go a sigh of relief.
The Magus had to have heard the exhalation.
He stopped in midstep, his head rotating as if on massive ball-bearing swivels, his eyes spearing the carny master’s very soul.
Crecca opened his mouth, but no sound came forth. All he could see was the pupil holes in the chrome eggs narrowing to tiny pinpoints. He felt as if he were falling into them, drawn down as if by a whirlpool into spinning metal blades.
“So One-Eye has come for the world-famous show, has he?” the Magus said. “And brought his spawn to see it, too? How very, very convenient for me. To finally dispense with both the infuriating cyclops of a father and the annoying simp of a son. Poof!”
Crecca said nothing.
“Make sure he gets a good seat,” the Magus ordered. “Make sure his son is sitting beside him. And make sure they don’t get out of the tent.”
“Of course, Magus.”
“Death comes to all of us,” the Magus said brightly as he moved to the dissection table. “Well, most of us, anyway.” Then he threw back his head and made a noise.
Because Crecca had been the creature’s pawn for so long, he recognized the racket as laughter and stifled the urge to cover his ears. To anyone else, it would have sounded like a wag engine throwing a piston rod—shrieking, clanking, before rattling to a stop.
The Magus reached a steel-claw hand into the chest cavity and took hold of the beating heart.
“This ville is fat and ripe for the plucking,” the Magus said, weighing the pound of wet muscle on his palm. “There can be no mistakes.”
Crecca nodded.
“Mistakes will be costly.”
To prove his point, the Magus crushed the heart in his fist, making hot blood squirt in all directions. The body made a grunting noise, then its heels began to drum on the tabletop. Working in an absolute frenzy, the Magus fit the plastic-metal contraption into the ravaged chest. Muttering to himself, he seized a soldering iron and plunged the red-hot tip into the cavity. The smell of scorched flesh and burning plastic billowed from the gash.
He had no more time for carny masters, or canisters.
As the Magus began to hum—not from his throat, as a flesh-and-blood person might do, but from his round, spider belly—Crecca carefully and quietly backed over the piles of junk and out of the room.
As soon as he shut the door, Jackson jumped up and started licking the spatters of blood from the toe of his boot. Still a bit dazed, Crecca watched the little monster feed for several moments before backhanding it hard against the wall. Jackson ended up on its butt on the floor, face slack, vacant eyes slowly blinking.
Stickies had to be treated with firmness, and all instructions had to be repeated countless times before they sank in. Crecca was in charge of when, how and what Jackson ate. Left to its own primal instincts, the immature mutie would have chewed right through the tip of the boot, and once it tasted his blood, Crecca would have had to put a slug in its head to stop the chomping jaws and needle teeth.
Safely back in his own quarters, the carny master rushed to a waiting jar of joy juice and had a long, steadying pull. It was only then that he realized he had crapped himself.
Chapter Eight
Ryan and the companions were among the throng of ville folk watching the roustabouts lay out rolled sections of the big tent on the ground. Predark music blared from a row of black speakers on the roof of one of the wags. It was the same raucous show tune Ryan and the others had marched to the day before.
The head roustabout shouted orders over the insistent drumbeat. One of his men made measurements using a long piece of chain bolted to a stake that had been driven into the yellow dirt. The fixed length of this device allowed him to draw a great circle. As he moved the chain around the center-stake, at even intervals he tapped in perimeter stakes. When the floor plan had been laid out, two other men began digging a narrow, deep hole at the midpoint to act as a footing for the tent’s main upright support.
When this was done, the roustabouts hauled the tent sections into final position, like the spokes of a wheel, and began snapping them together and folding the double, overlapping seams. From the strain and sweat on their faces, the rolls were very heavy.
In a matter of minutes, the big tent began to take shape on the ground. Easily two hundred feet across, it was striped in gay red and white, and made of some heavily coated fabric.
The cheery music and the festive colors made Ryan’s skin crawl and his trigger finger itch. As did the expressions of delight he saw on the faces of the onlookers.
Like lambs led to slaughter.
Ryan was by no means a do-gooder, and life in Deathlands was survival of the fittest. But some things just had to come to a stop.
A worker with a wheelbarrow passed out tent stakes to men who waited at the perimeter markers with sledgehammers. The thick, cylindrical metal spikes were almost four feet long. The roustabouts grunted and swung in time to the music. The twenty-pound heads of their hammers sent showers of sparks flying as they slammed the spikes deep into the earth. When the broad ring of side stakes was set, ropes were tied, loosely connecting them to the tent’s lower wall. A seventy-five-foot-long steel pole, also made up in shorter sections, was assembled, then eight men crawled inside the flattened bag with it.
At the hairy roustabout’s direction, a heavy rope was attached to the tent’s peak. A dozen workers then yarded it over the top of the tallest wag as the men inside the tent angled up the center pole in a series of steps timed to the music’s beat.
The crowd of bystanders sent up a wild cheer as the pole’s butt slipped into place and the tent was finally raised. Red-and-white pennants on the peak of the roof and around the top of the side wall hung down limply in the still, already scorching air.
“There’s only the one exit,” J.B. said to Ryan. “And no window vents that I can see.”
“It’s like we thought,” the one-eyed man said. “Whatever it is that they’re doing to folks, it all happens inside the tent.”
“And nobody’s getting out,” Krysty added.
“From the looks of the fabric,” Mildred said, “the tent could be a Kevlar weave, or something like it. But with a plasticized coating on the outside. If it is made of Kevlar, even blaster slugs won’t tear it. With those double seams, it’s got to be virtually airtight.”
“A candy-striped, portable death house,” Krysty said softly.
“All the evidence we’ve seen points to an inhalant,” Mildred went on. “They’ve got to be using some kind of poison gas.”
“Mebbe we don’t want to go in there, Dad,” Dean said, his voice tight with concern.
“The boy’s right,” J.B. said. “Once we’re inside that tent, we’re trapped along with everybody else.”
Ryan grimaced. They had gotten themselves in a bind; that was for sure. But it wasn’t unexpected. They had known that once they entered the ville, circumstances would be fluid. That whatever plan they had hatched over the long march might have to be thrown out.
A key part of it already had.
The original idea had been to take out some of the chillers in the night, using their knives to quietly reduce the odds. But once they were on-site in Bullard vil
le it became clear that plan wouldn’t work. For one thing, the caged sideshow muties acted like an army of watchdogs, alerting the carny folk with squeals and bellows when anyone approached their circled wags. For another, the dispatched roustabouts would have been missed on the work crews that morning. Search parties would have been sent out. Perhaps the shallow graves would have been discovered. Either way, the companions’ hands would have been tipped. Outnumbered as they were, without the element of surprise, they had no chance at all.
Having caught up with the traveling troupe at last, and having gathered a sense of the people involved, Ryan had no doubt that it was the carny doing the mass chilling. The moment he had looked into the Magnificent Crecca’s eyes, all other possibilities vanished.
To loot an entire ville down to the pots, pans and shoelaces called for manpower, which the carny had. To loot an entire ville required heavy-duty transportation for all the stolen goods. The only tracks of sufficient number and size leading from the place had belonged to the carny. To chill that many people at once called for confinement, isolation, no escape.
Which the tent provided.
After they had examined the bodies in the unnamed ville, Mildred had guessed that a poison had been used, but she couldn’t tell what kind or how it had been administered. Though some of the victims had been shot in the head, most had no evidence of wounds. The bullet holes were either mercy shots or the result of a pack of chillers taking random target practice on a pile of corpses. It made sense that the lethal weapon would be a gas, although where it came from and how it was delivered was still a puzzle.
There was, of course, also still the possibility that the carny would just do its show and move on, without chilling anyone. As it had done in Perdition, and elsewhere.
Ryan thought this outcome was unlikely, as did the other companions. Bullard ville was made-to-order for another mass wipeout. It was isolated. It was unknown, except for being an established water stop along a very long, very dry road. If all the residents vanished overnight, the travelers up and down the valley would just conclude that the water supply had finally dried up, forcing folks to abandon their huts and disperse. No one would care one way or the other. No one would look any deeper.
Once more, Ryan took in the excited faces of the crowd. It wasn’t just made up of kids, but people of all ages, and the leaders of the ville, too. Dirt farmers, cooks, housewives and sluts had deserted their work in order to gawk at the wonder of Wolfram’s World Famous Carny. Their rapt expressions said this was the biggest thing to ever hit Bullard ville.
Unless something was done, it was also probably going to be the last thing to ever hit Bullard ville.
“We’ve got to go in,” Ryan told the others. “We’ve got no choice. We’ve got to go in with everyone else, just like nothing’s up. It’s the only way to make sure we get everyone out alive. We’ve got to keep a low profile until the time comes to make our move.”
“If we wait just a tetch too long, Ryan, things could get bastard ugly in a hurry,” the Armorer said.
For a long moment there was silence between them.
The silence indicated a mutual understanding of the situation, and a mutual consent to proceed as exactly as Ryan suggested.
It was only broken when Dean looked around, and said, “Where’s Jak?”
OUT OF THE COMPANIONS’ direct view, around the curve of the sideshow trailers, Jak once again had his head thrust through the bars of the mountain lion’s cage. Once again that great, hot tongue lovingly washed his face and neck.
The pale, ruby-eyed youth had few words to describe even the simplest moments of his violent and tragic life. For Jak, things were good or they were bad. He was happy or he wasn’t. Hungry or not. Loaded or reloading. The complexity of his feelings at that moment was impossible to translate into a neat, black-white duality.
Only the lion understood what he felt.
And that was because he and the lion shared.
Everything.
Without words.
Jak pushed back from the bars and wiped the viscous slobber from his cheek with the back of his forearm. He took in the enormity of dense, soft, beige fur; the long, lashing tail as big around as his bicep; the fat, black-fringed ears, rounded beautifully at the tips. Jutting from the sides of the creature’s massive neck was the pair of curving, pointed horns that served to protect the throat against attack from the sides, and as offensive weapons. The canine fangs exposed by the lion’s wide grin were longer than the blade of Ryan’s panga; the lion’s claws were cruel black gut hooks, fully extended in pleasure now, cutting shallow, bright grooves into the steel floor of its cage. The smell of meat breath and musk gusted over Jak’s face.
He couldn’t explain how the creature’s thoughts and emotions came into his head, or how he knew that likewise the lion experienced what he experienced. It was as if an invisible tunnel connected them, and through the tunnel ran a torrent of exquisite tenderness.
The albino gripped the bars again and stared into the beast’s huge, pleasure-slitted, yellow eyes. The sound of its purring rattled the steel in his hands like an earthquake. The tremendous heat given off by its body blasted him like a black basalt boulder sitting in the midday sun.
You free soon, he thought. Then we hunt.
Jak’s mind was slammed with gratitude and joy, and then a caress, a voiceless voice, a soundless sound that resonated in the very pit of his stomach: I know you will free me, Little Brother. I know you will.
Chapter Nine
After the companions’ meeting broke up, Dean went looking for Leeloo Bunny. He found her standing in front of one of the trailered sideshow cages.
“Hi, Leeloo,” he said as he walked up.
“Hi, Dean.” From the light in her eyes, she seemed real glad to see him. She had put a crown of fresh daisies in her shining hair.
“What’re you doing?” he asked.
“Just looking at this one,” she said.
The painted nameplate on the bars read Baldoona, The Two-Headed Scalie. The male mutie inside the cage sported a pair of heads that sprouted side by side in the middle of its wide shoulders. Shoulders that seemed to stoop from their combined weight. One head was full-sized, as if from a grown-up person. It looked mebbe forty years of age. Its coarse, gray-blond hair was matted and greasy, its face florid, beardless and unlined. Bloodshot eyes glowered at them from beneath a heavy, eyebrowless ridge of bone.
The other head was a baby’s, small, bald and perched on a short neck. Its skin was flushed with infantile frustration. The eyes on the little head were black and glittered behind squinty, puffy eyelids. The scalie was exhibited stripped to the waist. It had a massive torso, wide and thick, and there were big muscles under the layers of sagging fat. As it moved slightly, the angled light caught the rows of tiny scales that covered its skin, giving it an iridescent grayish cast.
The cage was fouled by the smell of urine and excrement; brown mounds of the latter lay clumped along the cage’s rear wall. Clouds of flies buzzed amid the miasma.
“Do you think they like each other?” Leeloo asked Dean.
“You mean the two heads?”
“Uh-huh. They don’t look like they like each other at all.”
When Dean examined the creature more closely, he saw that it was true. The baby head was scowling. The normal head was scowling. And they were glancing sidelong at each other, out of the corners of their nearest eyes, which were separated by no more than eight inches.
“I wonder if they both get hungry at the same time?” he said. “Do you think if one head eats, the other one gets full?”
“If one has to pee, does the other one, too?” Leeloo added, grinning.
The adult head glared at her. “Pipsqueak gets hungry every four hours,” it said, its voice deep and liquidy in the wide chest. “Wakes me up in the middle of the night with his squalling. And then thanks me by pissing and shitting in my pants. A pain in the ass that you wouldn’t believe. I’d have had so
meone take an ax and chop him off me years ago, but the shock of doing that would chill me, too. Our nervous systems are all grown together.”
Dean and Leeloo stood there, flatfooted, stunned that the thing before them could actually talk and make sense.
“Close your mouths,” it said. “You’re going to catch flies…and you know where they’ve been.”
When neither of the children said anything, the creature continued, ever more irritated. “What are you two looking so surprised for? Just because my captors keep me sitting in my own shit and feed me with a shovel, do you think I’m some kind of wild animal?” Baldoona held up its powerful but flab-encased arms and let the sunlight play and flash on the rows of tiny scales. “My brain isn’t mutated,” it said, “just my skin.”
Dean couldn’t help but glance at the baby head, which was like a huge, purpling mushroom springing from its shoulder.
The scalie noticed what he was looking at. “Of course there’s the other head,” it said, “but that’s something that could have happened to anyone—even you—under the right conditions.”
Dean wondered if Baldoona knew about the mass chilling. The only way it could keep from knowing was if the cage was covered up with a tarp during the murdering and burial.
As one of the roustabouts came down the line of cages toward them, the scalie shut up and slumped into a sullen slouch.
“Keep a good ways back from them bars, you two,” the carny man warned them. “That lizard-skinned piece of nukeshit ripped the arm off a kid in Perdition, sat there and ate it in front of the parents while the poor little critter bled himself to death.”
Dean looked at the scalie, who shrugged sheepishly, as if to say, “Ah, well…there you go….”
After the roustabout had moved on, Leeloo said to the mutie, “You’re a mean thing to have done that to a child. A cruel, mean thing.”