Damnation Road Show

by James Axler

  Chapter Eleven

  The Magnificent Crecca chained Jackson to one of the tent’s steel stakes, then raised a flap at the rear of the candy-striped enclosure and ducked under it. Before him was a short tunnel made of the same airtight fabric as the main tent. The passage ended in a flight of metal steps that led up to a door set in a sheet-steel wall. A heavy rubber gasket and metal plate sealed the seam between the wall and the edge of the tunnel.

  As he mounted the steps, the carny master felt that special unease once again. Fighting back a combination of vertigo and nausea that accompanied absolute dread, he knocked twice on the door.

  From the other side, the familiar, thready voice called for him to enter. Crecca opened the door and looked in on the Magus’s private viewing box. The twelve-by-eight-foot room sat on a trailer inside the perimeter of the main tent. The box wall that faced the crowd was made of one-way mirror glass, painted around the edges of the frame with a scene of predark clowns and lion tamers. The center of the picture window was clear; beyond it, in the bright lights of the main tent’s floods, the people of Bullard ville were filing in to their doom. Seated before the window in a fully reclined reclining chair, his metal-and-flesh legs comfortably crossed, was the steel-eyed monster.

  “Don’t just stand there,” the Magus barked. “The light’s ruining my view. Come in and close the door.”

  The carny master did as he was ordered. Being trapped in an airtight box with the creature was much, much worse than being in the same wag salon with him. The unusual smell given off by the Magus—scorched machine oil and fleshly decay—was a thousand times more concentrated. That, coupled with his proximity and the fact that there was nowhere to run, made Crecca go soft in the knees. Conscious of that fact that the last time he had been in the Magus’s company his body had betrayed him, the carny master made an extra effort to maintain a tight sphincter.

  On the other side of the mirror window, Ryan Cawdor and his party were being ushered down to the front row by a pair of nearly naked female roustabouts. There were no seats. The audience sat on plasticized tarps spread on the ground. This made the cleanup much easier. The red-haired beauty sat next to Cawdor. On his right sat his son and a young girl from the ville. Beside the girl was the albino, then the black woman, the man in the fedora and the old one.

  The Magus swiveled in his recliner. As he turned to face Crecca, his wide smile, half white bone and half stainless steel, curdled the carny master’s blood.

  “I want this to be a very special performance,” the Magus told him. “I want the entire crowd on its feet, cheering at the moment the lights go out and the music swells.”

  Crecca knew the Magus could see in the dark. He had had some kind of microminiature infrared sensors built into his steel eyes. So as not to miss a thing. Even the Magnificent Crecca, a born chiller, a leader of other chillers, a man who had personally opened the nozzles on the poison-gas canisters more than once, couldn’t stand to watch the final agonies of so many. The times he had been forced to remain in the viewing box, to stand beside the laughing thing in the recliner, to wear a pair of predark, Soviet night-vision goggles, he had shut his eyes tight against the horror. Because of the goggles’ lenses, the Magus couldn’t see his lack of enthusiasm.

  The carny master had often wondered about the source of the Magus’s horrendous appetites, which were as much a mystery as everything else about him. Did they spring from his being able to move back and forth through time? A consequence of some expanded, vengeful-godlike perspective he had acquired? Or were they the result of a progressive dementia brought on by the physical changes of decades of such travel? And then again, Crecca knew, it was possible that they had nothing whatsoever to do with time jumping. But rather, with the replacement of his various human parts with gear boxes and servo mechanisms. It was possible that as the Magus became less human physically, he became less human spiritually.

  That the creature demanded the carny audience always received a rocking good show before they were chilled was a case in point.

  Crecca knew there was no strategic need for this deception, this extra effort on the part of his crew. As soon as all the residents were seated, the tent entrance could have been sealed and the gas released. No pain, no strain. But because the Magus understood, and it seemed to the carny master, even fed off the dark, dark energy of human despair, he insisted that the exits remain open, even though the rousties not involved in the show were already systematically looting the ville; he insisted that the crowd be lifted up to the heights of joy before being dropped into the abyss.

  Only at the grand finale, when the floodlights in the tent suddenly went out, when the canisters were opened, when the center-ring performers made their hasty exits; only when Mozart’s Requiem began to boom at deafening volume from dozens of surrounding speakers, would the stunned audience realize it was all a trap.

  And that there was no way out.

  With glee, the Magus rubbed his palms together, his steel fingers clicking like castanets. “Oh, this is going to be good,” he said. “This is going to be very good.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Leeloo Bunny looked up at Dean, who sat close beside her, cross-legged on the ground. As the carny folk rushed around making last minute checks of their equipment, the boy seemed to be scanning everything and everyone with those intense eyes of his. She sensed a coiled tightness in him that she didn’t really understand and couldn’t put a name to. His mood under the circumstances seemed strange to her, though. For sure, it wasn’t the same wild excitement she felt in the big tent with the big show about to begin.

  Dean caught her staring at him, and smiled.

  Oh, my, she thought as her heart melted into a small, throbbing puddle in the center of her chest.

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said.

  Leeloo felt a twinge of confusion. Since when was there any question that things were going to be fine?

  Then the recorded overture started up. Through surround speakers, “Tah-Rah-Rah-Boom-Ti-Ay” blared forth. No one in the audience knew the long history of the song, nor did anyone recognize this particular version as belonging to the Grateful Dead.

  The red-haired carny master jumped over the low bumper of the center ring and into the spotlight. Behind him trailed a naked baby stickie on a long chrome chain fastened to a choke collar.

  “Huzzah!” the Magnificent Crecca shouted a greeting to the crowd, throwing his arms open wide. “Welcome, Bullard ville, to Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny!”

  The Dead’s shambling, sour-note-filled opus swelled deafeningly, then faded to a whisper.

  “This afternoon,” the carny master went on, “you will be treated to miracles and wonderments beyond compare. You will experience sights and sounds that you will take with you to your graves. Bullard ville, I give you the Fearless Flying Stickies!” Music up. Through the tent’s loudspeakers, a live-recorded Jerry Garcia noodled up the chromatic scale, more or less, while eight male stickies in a line crossed into the center ring. They were all naked, except for broad, limp, brightly colored plastic collars that draped over their shoulders, chests and backs. The stickies did three turns of the ring, high-stepping in unison, skinny arms pumping in unison, genitalia flopping in unison. While they were strutting, roustabouts lowered a trapeze bar from the tent’s peak. It wasn’t lowered very far—just enough to allow it to swing freely.

  “What is that?” Leeloo asked Dean, pointing at the wheeled contraption being pushed forward from the wings by a half-dozen roustabouts.

  “A cannon,” Dean told her. When she still looked puzzled, he added, “Like a giant longblaster. Shoots big slugs.”

  Not in this instance, it turned out.

  The smallest of the eight stickies raced over to the muzzle and climbed down it, feet first. The music suddenly stopped and was replaced by a loud, recorded drumroll as the roustabouts used a hand-wheel to crank up and aim the barrel at the tent’s peak.

  “Should we do it
?” the carny master asked the audience. “Should we blow the little mutie bastard straight to hell?”

  The answer from the assembled residents of Bullard ville was a resounding “Yes!”

  Leeloo flinched when the cannon roared and flashed. Out of a cloud of dense gray smoke shot the little stickie, its spindly arms thrust forward. The pale, living missile arced high in the air. When the stickie’s sucker fingers made contact with the trapeze bar, they locked on. It hung suspended, seventy-five feet above the center ring.

  “Hoopa!” the Magnificent Crecca said, again throwing his arms wide. “If one was fun, folks, how about three?”

  Bullard ville was all for that.

  As the trio of muties climbed, one by one, down the cannon barrel, packing themselves in on top of one another, the carny master baited the crowd. “I have to warn you, good people,” he said, “this trick doesn’t always come off exactly as planned. A little too much blaster powder. A bit of a breeze. Too much humidity in the air. Those of you sitting in the front row should be ready to move quickly if it starts to rain stickies.”

  Leeloo flinched again when the cannon discharged. Even though she knew it was coming, she couldn’t help herself; it was that loud. To her amazement, the three muties came out of the barrel in a living chain, the second and third stickies having fastened their sucker hands onto the pair of ankles in front of them. As the trio rocketed up into the air, the audience let out a single gasp.

  It didn’t look as if they were going to make it.

  It looked as if they were going to come up mebbe a yard short.

  But the lead stickie stretched and stretched and somehow made contact with the feet of the little one hanging from the bar, and then all four of them swung from the trapeze, connected at the ankles.

  “Whew, close one!” Crecca proclaimed, flicking an imaginary drip of perspiration from his forehead. “Shall we go for four?”

  The audience shouted its assent.

  “Lower the sights,” the carny master commanded his gun crew.

  The remaining naked stickies scrambled down the still smoking barrel as the roustabouts changed the point of aim to the legs of the lowest of the four suspended muties, some fifty feet above the center ring.

  Again, the cannon boomed and jolted, and another living chain of bodies vomited from its muzzle and hurtled toward the tent’s peak. The crowd groaned in unison as the first stickie missed the legs of its target by a good five feet. The groan stretched on as the four-car, runaway mutie train arced past the steel tent pole and, veering off to the right, crashed sideways into the far wall of the tent. Still stuck together by sucker and secretion, the stickie quartet crashed in a heap on the ground. For a long moment, none of the muties moved. Then, one by one, they stirred, untangling and unsuckering themselves.

  Stickies were bastard tough to chill.

  A few in the Bullard ville audience—perhaps those who had lost loved ones to this particular subhuman species—actually booed the miraculous survival, but everyone else cheered the spectacle. Some folks rose to their feet to clap as the entire acrobatic troupe took their waggle-weenie bows in the spotlight.

  As thrilled as Leeloo was by the performance, in the pit of her stomach was a small knot of dread. She couldn’t tell if the cannon miss had been on purpose or not, but she thought it hadn’t. And that gave her the distinct feeling that the outcomes of the carny’s acts weren’t set in stone. That anything at all could happen, at any time, this afternoon. It was scary, but the fear made it all the more exciting.

  The carny master waved an arm toward the wings. Grunting from the strain, masked roustabouts pulled and pushed a trailer bearing a tarp-covered cage into the center ring. Alongside the trailer, four beautiful, long-legged women danced and mugged for the crowd. From the rear, their nearly invisible costumes made it look as if they were naked but for thigh-high, high-heeled, black leather boots.

  “Lesser carnies drag around carloads of snakes,” the Magnificent Crecca bellowed. “They brag about how many deadly reptiles they’ve got and expect you to part with your hard-earned jack. I’ll tell you this for free. Numbers don’t matter. It’s size that counts. There’s only one snake in this carny. It’s been here since the very first ticket was sold. Bullard ville behold, Wolfram’s Worm!”

  The tarp was thrown back, revealing the twelve-foot-long, three-foot-wide mutie rattlesnake. Worm slithered into a vast, diamond-backed coil and, hissing like a volcanic steam vent, struck at the inside of the bars. At the impact, the cage rocked on its trailer. The snake’s dripping fangs looked like a pair of back-curving, yellow scimitars jutting from its upper jawbone.

  “The good thing about Worm,” the carny master said as he jumped on the front edge of the trailer and tiptoed along it to the middle of the cage, “is that he only eats twice a month.” He had to shout the last part over the buzzing roar made by the snake’s huge rattles.

  Leeloo sucked in and held her breath as Crecca took hold of the pin that held shut the cage door.

  Everyone in the audience saw him grip the pin, and everyone knew what was going to happen next.

  They couldn’t believe their eyes, but they knew it was going to happen.

  “The bad thing,” the carny master said, “is that it’s a week past his dinnertime.”

  With that, he jerked the pin from the hasp and leaped out of the way as the barred door swung open. Worm was a lot faster than he looked. He was out of the cage and on the ground before anyone could even scream.

  Then everybody was screaming.

  Bullard ville’s mothers grabbed for their children; Bullard ville’s menfolk went for their blasters.

  The folks closest to the rear started to run for the exit.

  Dean was up in the blink of an eye, thrusting his body between the huge snake and Leeloo. With his feet shoulder width apart, he held the cocked, nine mill Browning in both hands.

  “Don’t shoot!” the carny master yelled over the din. “Everyone stay right where you are! Stay where you are and no one will be hurt. Everything is under control. The snake charmers are in position.”

  With that, the recorded music changed to something slow and sinuous, flutes and drums, drums and flutes.

  Even the spectators halfway out the door stopped and turned to look.

  Leeloo grabbed hold of Dean’s arm; she couldn’t help it.

  The four beautiful norm women had surrounded the giant rattler, which now sat coiled in the middle of the center ring, its yard of rattles raised, buzzing mightily, its flat boulder of a head shifting as it tasted the air with a black forked tongue as long as a bullwhip. The snake charmers never stopped moving, never gave Worm a solid target to lock on to.

  Even so, perhaps out of anger and frustration, the snake struck anyway. It launched itself forward, mouth agape, hollow fangs oozing thick streamers of poison.

  The charmer that Worm had targeted did a hip feint and reverse, and with long legs jumped well out of the way.

  The crowd cheered the clean miss.

  Worm regrouped in the center ring, rattles buzzing even louder. The four women then took turns rushing at the flat, scaly head, drawing gaping strikes, and as they dodged and ducked the fang points, gasps rose from the audience. If there was so much as a stumble, if there was the slightest hesitation, one of the lovely women was going to die before their eyes.

  Every time the snake struck, it extended itself to its full length on the ground. As it lay outstretched, after a dozen or more futile launches, a pair of the charmers ran right up the middle of its back. The one in front held a contraption made of chain link and padlocks. Before the snake could draw its body back beneath itself, the women had their long legs astraddle its neck, and with their combined body weight drove its chin into the dirt.

  The crowd jumped to its feet, cheering.

  The charmer in front slipped the chain muzzle over Worm’s broad snout, the muscles in her back jumping as she dug her heels in the ground and hauled back hard to seat the dev
ice behind his eyes. She locked the muzzle in place and dismounted with a flourish, pirouetting away hand in hand with her sister charmer.

  They got out of range just in time.

  Unable to open its mouth and free its lethal weapons, Worm went crazy, rolling and thrashing like a flesh-and-blood cyclone. It took many minutes for this display of animal power and fury to wind down. When the great snake had finally exhausted itself, with help of four burly roustabouts, the charmers dragged the defeated Worm back to its cage by the tail.

  As the cage rolled away, the carny master vaulted over the center ring’s bumper and cried, “Bring on the swampies!”

  Leeloo had never seen a real swampie before, only heard tell. How dirty they were. How bad they smelled. How bastard mean they were. She was surprised at their small stature. They were heavily built for their size, though, with stout, stumpy legs, wide, blocky hips, stocky torsos, thick arms and hands, and big, bony heads. The weight of the bone of their foreheads and brows gave them all, male and female, a perpetually sour, scowling appearance.

  Even as they tumbled and rolled around the ring to sprightly, upbeat music of clarinets and cymbals, there was nothing playful or lighthearted in their performance. Somersaults, cartwheels, handstands, headstands, mutie pyramids, all were delivered with the same dour distaste.

  Crecca let the mirthless gamboling continue for a few more minutes, then stepped back into the center of the ring and waved his arms. The swampies stopped tumbling and circled around him. “Time for some juggling!” he announced. “Not red-hot coals. Not flaming torches. Not razor-sharp swords. But these…”

  He held aloft in either hand a clutch of small, round, flat-black-painted metal objects.

  “Frag grens,” Leeloo said. “Those are frag grens.”

  “Probably not real, though,” Dean told her.