Damnation Road Show

by James Axler

  Chapter Fourteen

  When the Magnificent Crecca opened the door to the Magus’s private viewing booth, a crack of light from the tunnel speared the gloom, flaring off the wall of glass. Before the carny master could get the door shut behind him, the half-metal monster who was his lord and master snapped around in his recliner, steel eyes glaring.

  “Sorry,” Crecca said. His words hung in the air, the half-whispered apology unaccepted. He kicked himself for saying anything at all. Over the years he had learned that silence was always the best response. Contrite silence.

  With the viewing booth’s door closed and darkness surrounding them, the one-way mirror again became transparent from their direction.

  “I see you brought your goggles, as I requested,” the Magus said. “Go on, put them on.”

  Crecca hefted the massively overbuilt ComBloc infrared sensors by their wide head straps. They were powered by a radium battery, and came installed with a small warning plate in Russian that the carny master couldn’t read. Translated, the warning said: Extreme Radiation Hazard. He placed the heavy instrument on top of his head, with the stubby goggle lenses pointing up at the ceiling like antler buds.

  On the other side of the glass, roustabouts were pushing the Wazls’ cage out of the tent. A moment after they disappeared through the lone exit, another trailer entered, this one tightly tarped over and dragged forward by men in black masks that covered their heads from crown to throat.

  The masks protected them from the effects of a chemical gas, the death-producing agent known as Zyclon B.

  How the Magus had discovered the stockpile of lethal gas was unknown. Crecca presumed that he had found the canisters during his wanderings back and forth through the timescape. Somehow he had arranged to steal it, and had left it in a place where it could be recovered more than a century later. There was no way to prove this, of course. However the Magus had come by the information, he had led the carny right to the burial spot.

  The carny master watched the one-eyed man stare at the cage and at the masked men pushing it. His blood ran suddenly cold.

  “He knows!” Crecca exclaimed. “Cawdor knows!”

  “Of course he knows,” the Magus said, chuckling.

  The noise grated on Crecca’s nerves, like stripped gears grinding.

  “That doesn’t worry you?”

  “No,” the Magus said, “it doesn’t. What it does is make what is about to happen all that much sweeter. The one-eyed man knows, and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. Nothing he can do to save the good and innocent people of Bullard ville. Nothing he can do to save his traveling companions, his own son or even himself. Ryan Cawdor has a date with death today that he isn’t going to miss.” After a pause, the Magus said, “I hope you impressed on our looting teams the need for speed and selectivity.”

  “They know what to take, and they’re already taking it,” Crecca assured him. “By the time we’re filling in the burial pit, they’ll be done with the sacking, and all the booty will be safely packed away.”

  In the tent’s center ring, one of the masked roustabouts loosened the edge of the tarp that covered the trailered cage. He ducked out of sight under the flap to open the nozzles of the pile of poison-gas canisters.

  “Get ready to cut the lights and bring up the Requiem,” the Magus told his carny master.

  As Crecca reached for the switch box beside the door, the creature added a warning, “And if I catch you closing your eyes this time, I’ll pluck them out and feed them to the Wazls.”

  On the other side of the center ring, at the front row of spectators, there was a blur of movement, then came star-burst muzzle-flashes and staccato blasterfire. Before the Magus could move from his recliner, the mirror glass wall before him exploded in a wild spray of bullets.

  Crecca threw himself out the door and down the steps, nearly crushing Jackson, who sat chained to the foot of the rail.

  Chapter Fifteen

  At the signal from Ryan, Krysty and Mildred broke ranks from the cheering crowd and sprinted for the tent’s exit, which was guarded by three big, bare-chested men in full-head, black masks. All three carried blue-steel 9 mm KG-99s on lanyards. As the two women bore down on the exit, one of the guards stepped up to meet them, his empty hands raised with palms out, pressing forward.

  A slow-down-and-stop gesture.

  Mebbe because of the mask’s narrow eye slits, mebbe because he was looking at Krysty’s long, scissoring legs, mebbe because he had started to take the outcome of these special performances for granted, the roustie didn’t notice what she had in her right hand until it was too late.

  As she charged, Krysty raised the short barrel of the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson and pointed it between his hairy pecs, straight at his heart.

  The Model 640 cracked twice, and the man staggered backward, fingers clutching frantically at his chest as if trying plug up the small, dark holes to keep the gout of blood inside.

  Behind him, the other masked men were already untying the flaps of the exit, getting ready to seal the death chamber nice and tight. The sounds of the blastershots made them freeze. Blastershots weren’t part of the show, not until later when there would be a few survivors to dispatch.

  As Krysty vaulted the masked man’s slumping form, a blaze of blasterfire erupted from near the center ring. Blasterfire and breaking glass. The flurry of rounds could have been either Ryan or Dean, or both. The baritone boom-boom-boom was definitely J.B.’s pump shotgun, and the mind-numbing roar of Jak’s .357 Magnum blaster was likewise unmistakable.

  Mildred had meanwhile dropped to one knee. With her gun hand braced, she squeezed off two groups of two shots, quick but well aimed. The first pair of jacketed .38 slugs caught the guard on the left just under the point of his chin, and turned him. He twisted sideways into the tent wall and, leaning against it, hands to his throat, slid to the ground, kicking and jerking.

  The second guard was already moving, already halfway out the exit, when Mildred brought her Czech target pistol’s sights to bear. The first shot hit him in the left shoulder; the second smacked into the tent fabric.

  It plucked mightily at the rubberized cloth, but made no through-and-through hole.

  As she had thought, it was Kevlar.

  By the time Mildred was up and running, Krysty was already at the exit. They both knew they had to control the way out, and they had to control it now. There would be no second chance. Their commitment to the task at hand was total. Without slowing, without considering what might have been waiting for her on the other side, the redhead dived through the opening, hitting the ground in a low shoulder roll, and came up kneeling with her blaster tracking in the direction the wounded roustie had fled.

  He wasn’t moving very fast, and his left shoulder hung down like the broken wing of a bird. He had his blaster clutched in his good hand. Hidden around the curve of the tent in the direction he was going were the circled carny wags. Reinforcements.

  Krysty didn’t hesitate. She shot him in the back once, below the shoulder blade. A clean chill shot, right through the center of the heart. He fell on his face in the dirt and didn’t move again.

  From inside the tent came the sound of a raging gun battle, a battle sawing back and forth, and people screaming.

  As Mildred and Krysty knelt beside the opening, the folks of Bullard ville started spilling out into the daylight, their eyes wide with terror.

  They didn’t understand what was going on, what had been about to happen to them, how close they had come to horrible death. All they knew was that some strangers in the audience had opened fire on the carny crew, and that the crew had returned the favor.

  And that they were caught in the middle.

  THE MOMENT RYAN SAW the men in the black, hoodlike masks enter the tent, he knew the waiting was finally over and the time for action had come. He knew because he’d personally looted antichem warfare gear from stockpiles when he was traveling with Trader.

  When push ca
me to shove, there wasn’t all that much you could do to disguise a mil-spec gas mask.

  Ryan glanced over at J.B., who was looking at him. The Armorer knew, too. He had seen it at the same instant Ryan had. He put his hand on Jak’s shoulder and the albino nodded.

  Dean noticed this gesture and response, and immediately looked up at his dad, concern on his face. Ryan gave him a smile, which the boy instantly returned. Whatever happened next was in speed of hand, and in the hand of fate.

  And what flowed between father and son in that second before battle was wider than the widest river. A great, brawling planet and its circling, perfect moon.

  There was no reason not to smile.

  He who had everything, who wanted nothing, had nothing to fear.

  When the tarp-covered cage was in the center of the ring, one of the masked rousties loosened a tie-down, raised the edge of the tarp and ducked his head and shoulders under it. The other masked men waited, their arms crossed over their chests, for him to finish.

  The Bullard ville audience waited for the Magnificent Crecca to reappear before them and in his dulcet tones to announce the next amazing act, to tear back the tarp and reveal the caged wonders concealed beneath.

  In the trailered box on the other side of the ring, behind the wall of mirrored glass, a creature half of flesh, half of steel waited for his victims to start dying. Ryan Cawdor waited for no one.

  With his shoulders squared on the chosen target, he cleared the SIG-Sauer P-226 from its holster.

  A pair of .38-caliber blastershots popped from behind, from the direction of the tent’s exit. The heads of the masked men in the center ring jerked around in surprise. At the same instant, the predark weapon in Ryan’s fist bucked as it fired.

  The bulge of tarp concealing the head and torso of the masked roustie took three tightly spaced rounds at its upper end. A millisecond later, the half-concealed man dropped out from under the flap, dropped as limp as jelly to his knees, and then fell forward. Inside the black hood that could fend off the terrible corrosive power of Zyclon B but that offered no protection from full metal jackets, what little remained of his head rested against the hub of the trailer’s wheel.

  Without pause, even as the last of the trio of 9 mm slugs thumped flesh and bone, Ryan swung his aimpoint and to the right and fired repeatedly.

  As fast as he could pull the trigger, he poured round after round into the front of the mirrored box, hoping to nail the unspeakable spectator, the force behind the evil that was planned for Bullard ville. The creature known as the Magus. Bullet holes stitched across the mirror’s silver surface.

  From across the center ring, the tiny dark holes looked like pinpricks. Pinpricks that cracked and crazed into each other, dropping and shattering huge pieces of glass.

  Under his ravening fusillade, the entire mirror wall crashed from its frame, allowing him to see inside. Among the litter of silver shards, there was an overturned armchair, its backrest pocked with many slug holes, the stuffing blasted out the back in handfuls. The door to the rear of the viewing box stood open. No corpses littered the floor.

  Beside him, the other companions opened fire, the din of the simultaneous shooting making his head reel. Dean had the little girl standing behind his back. She clung to his narrow hips as he blasted away, scattering the masked rousties. Jak bowled over one of the running men with his .357, sending him flying end over end.

  The rousties were more disciplined than Ryan had figured. They didn’t try to make a beeline for the exit, spraying random fire to clear the way. With their blasters out, they dashed behind the cover of the tarped trailer.

  The plan was obvious: release the gas, chill the opposition and everyone else in the tent.

  Ryan couldn’t let that happen. He turned and shouted to the astonished audience, “Everybody out! Everybody out, now!”

  J.B.’s scattergun roared, drowning out the one-eyed man’s words before he could repeat them.

  It didn’t matter.

  Bullets from the concealed roustabouts whined over his head. From the back of the crowd came a high, shrill cry of pain.

  In seconds, the 150 or so residents of Bullard ville were madly stampeding for the exit.

  Ryan signaled for Jak to circle wide, while he charged the near corner of the cage. J.B. kept blasting the dirt under the front of the trailer’s frame, with his scattergun, keeping the rousties from firing at them from beneath its undercarriage. Dean likewise provided steady covering fire as Ryan closed on his targets.

  If there hadn’t been poison gas in the tarped cage, Ryan would’ve shot right through it to hit the men on the other side. But as it was, he couldn’t risk blind fire. He had to wait until he rounded the end of the trailer.

  One of the rousties was hoping he’d do just that.

  As Ryan neared, the man stepped out, his KG-99 barking. The stick mag held a lot of rounds, and the roustie was trying to burn them all. He took wild, barely aimed shots that sailed high over Ryan’s head or skimmed the dirt at his feet. The one-eyed man didn’t slow, didn’t blink.

  Sometimes the first shot didn’t win the contest.

  Sometimes not even the tenth shot.

  Ryan put a single slug from the P-226 into the middle of the black mask. The roustie crashed to his back and stayed there.

  The other gas-masked men crouching behind the cage had thrown up the tarp in back. They couldn’t get inside the barred box because the cage door was on the other side, and exposed to J.B.’s and Dean’s fire. As Ryan cleared the corner of the trailer, he saw two of the men frantically trying to pull around the nozzle ends of the pile of long, gray canisters so they could open them.

  Before Ryan could fire, one of the two men took a ricochet hit off the dirt from a load of double-aught buckshot. The blast shattered both his shins. Howling in pain, he fell away from the cage and tried to crawl away. The other man had his arm through the bars. His hand was on a nozzle, and he was turning it.

  Jak’s Colt boomed twice from the other end of the cage. Two of the rousties jerked as if flicked by a giant finger, and were slammed sideways and down. Ryan drew a bead on the man who had his hand inside the cage. Hand in the cookie jar. Hand drawing back. Ryan couldn’t see the roustabout’s smile because of the mask, but he knew the chiller was smiling. He couldn’t hear the hiss of the deadly gas escaping from the canister, or see it in the air, but he knew that’s what was happening. Both he and Jak shot the last roustie at the same instant, their shots angled so no matter how the bullets deflected off bone, neither of them would be hit by friendly fire. The combined impact ripped the man off his feet and sent him crashing to his face on the ground. His legs were still kicking as Ryan closed the gap to the canisters.

  “No!” he shouted at Jak. “Stay back! The poison is loose! Get out! Get everybody out!”

  The albino stopped, and for a moment it looked as if he were going to protest or defy the order, but he thought better of it. He turned and ran back the way he’d come.

  Ryan sucked down a quick breath and rushed over to the spot where the roustie had been standing. What with the screaming and shouting in the tent, he couldn’t detect the hiss that might have told him which canister had been opened. Standing with his chest pressed against the bars, he reached through and ran the palm of his hand in front of the nozzles turned toward him.

  Nothing from the first.

  Nothing from the second.

  Cold.

  Cold that burned like a blowtorch.

  He jerked his hand back. Ignoring the blisters that had been instantly raised on his palm, ignoring the growing, burning pain in his chest, he screwed down the wheel that sealed the nozzle.

  Then he spun away, running around the trailer for the exit. He could see the tent was almost empty of people. Dean and the little girl, J.B. and Doc and Jak were bringing up the rear, driving out the stragglers.

  How far did he have to run to be safe?

  How much gas had escaped?

  How much wou
ld it take to chill him?

  Hand of fate, he thought. Hand of fate.

  He ran until his legs gave out, and that wasn’t far. Fifteen steps. Mebbe twenty. Just over the center ring’s bumper, he dropped to his knees. Should have taken a deeper breath, he told himself. Then he gasped for air and choked on a lungful of razor blades.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Strong hands reached under Ryan’s armpits and pulled him to his feet.

  When he opened his eyes, he stared into irises the color of blood.

  Jak ducked his head under the one-eyed man’s left arm. J.B. did the same on the right, and they half carried, half dragged him to the exit. As Ryan labored to breathe, it felt as if Baldoona the scalie were jumping up and down on his chest.

  Outside the tent, while he sat on the trampled earth beside the entrance, Mildred quickly looked him over, testing his pupils, pulse, and examining the inside of his mouth.

  “Your mucous membranes are blistered from some kind of corrosive poison,” she said. “If you’d gotten a little bit bigger dose, it would have turned your lungs to rags.”

  As Ryan fought to catch his breath, he focused on the berm wall opposite the tent entrance and about 150 feet distant. On this side of the big top, the people of Bullard ville were nowhere to be seen. And there weren’t any carny chillers in evidence, either.

  From the ville, out of sight on the far side of the tent, came a sudden crackle of blasterfire. The hollow booms of black-powder blasters mixed with the sharp, rapid reports of automatic weapons. People started yelling and screaming. Then a gong sounded, over and over.

  The Bullard ville call to arms, Ryan had no doubt.

  He knew a running firefight when he heard one. So did the other companions. And this battle quickly increased in intensity.

  “What’s happening?” Leeloo asked Dean, her eyes wide. If the little girl wasn’t afraid before, she was afraid now. The blasterfire wasn’t part of any show. It was real.

  In a few clipped phrases, Dean explained it to her. The poison gas. The mass chilling that had been in store for every man, woman and child, all to allow the robbing of the dead.