by James Axler
By the time Ryan got to the bank, the snowfall had already stopped. The earth around the waterline was heaped with foot-high yellow drifts, which seemed to shrink even as he walked through them. The tiny particles crunched like rice underfoot. They were rapidly dissolving into nothing. Over his head, the clouds dissipated into fine cottony wisps. Along the bank, the smell was of a slaughterhouse, of ancient, multitudinous butcheries.
The storm had been short-lived but devastating. All of the companions had been struck to stone, either left standing, riveted to the boggy ground, or facedown in the muck, like Mildred.
His own heart trip-hammering, Ryan checked Dean’s throat for a pulse. As he felt the steady beat under his fingertips, a gunshot cracked from high above. A slug slapped the soggy ground two feet away.
When he looked up, he saw a half-dozen chillers spilling over lip of the summit, charging down the road toward him.
More gunshots rang out from the rim. For the chillers’ short-barreled blasters, the range was extreme. They couldn’t hit the side of a barn. Bullets smacked into the mud, plunking into the water. Ryan glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone had been wounded. It was hard to tell. One thing was certain, though. If the companions were still alive, they weren’t going to be for long. The rousties were rapidly closing the distance.
Ignoring the hot lead screaming by him, Ryan slogged over to the nearest dead tree. He flipped up the lens caps on his scope and used a forked limb as a shooting rest.
Aiming the Steyr uphill, Ryan took a stationary lead on the man running in the middle, holding the sight post way low to compensate for the shooting angle. He tightened down on the trigger, and the longblaster bucked and barked. He rode the rifle’s recoil wave, cycling the bolt action to put another live round under the hammer, recovering his target as it ran headlong into the heavy caliber bullet. The chiller’s arms flung wide and loose. His handblaster went flying as he was hurled backward and down. Ryan glimpsed the soles of his boots as his legs bounced limply in the dirt.
Stone dead.
The rest of the chillers kept coming, as if the danger hadn’t sunk in yet.
Ryan aimed low and fired again.
His second target had to have realized he was in trouble, as he slowed a fraction of an instant before the firing pin snapped. Instead of running into the arc of the speeding bullet and meeting it square mid-chest, he met it square midshin. His right leg buckled under him, the long bones shattered and he sprawled on his face in the road.
The others took cover then, scurrying behind the boulders on either side of the road.
As Ryan cycled the Steyr’s action, he was hit from behind by an intense blast of heat and another wave of rolling thunder. He looked back to see that the strange clouds had already re-formed in the middle of the pool and were rushing toward him, pushed by the hot wind. As the yellow, snowlike substance began to fall over the lake, Ryan rushed to Dean’s side. The boy still stood like a statue, seemingly as dead as one of the stripped trees. Ryan was trying to scoop him up into his arms when the spore blizzard swept over them, making a rattling sound as it bounced off the earth, and off his head and shoulders.
Ryan took a breath.
And he smelled flowers.
A billion flowers.
It was as if he had been dropped into fields of ripe blossoms that stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see. The concentrated sweet perfume overloaded and short-circuited his nervous system.
No longer aware of the flurry of bullets zipping past him, Ryan dropped the Steyr muzzle-first into the mud.
WITH THE ENEMY longblaster controlling the short stretch of road leading up to the summit, Crecca and crew had had no choice but to bust brush. After the carny master split the rousties into two groups, they circled through the trees from opposite sides of the road, coming out on the flat bit of table rock that was the mountain’s peak.
Cawdor and company were nowhere in sight.
Peering over the edge of the summit, Crecca saw their quarry, by now already a good distance away, down by the shore of the little lake. He paid no attention to the clouds, nor to the thunder and lightning. He immediately dispatched six of his chillers to go after the bastards. He kept the best long-range shots with him, and ordered them to fire, but sparingly, from a prone position along the peak, this to keep Cawdor and the others pinned along the shore.
Even though the carny master was expecting the longblaster to bark again, when it came, he flinched at the boom. Out the back of one of the rousties on the road beneath him came a puff of red mist. His shredded lungs and heart gusted from a fist-sized exit hole, spraying over the side of a boulder. The big-bore rifle slug exploded against the sandstone.
Before Crecca could react, before the other men on the road could react, the longblaster spoke again. A second chiller was hit in the leg and fell to the ground. The rousties ducked for cover as the wounded man crawled after them, screaming. Then the sharpshooters Crecca had lined up along the summit resumed firing, with gusto, at the man behind the dead tree. The roar of their weapons drowned out the thunder from below.
Crecca saw Cawdor drop his weapon. The carny master completely misread what was going on beside the lake. Because all of the companions were standing still or were down, he thought they’d given up, that they were surrendering.
“Stop!” he shouted at the men on either side of him. “Stop firing!”
They obeyed, albeit grudgingly.
“But we’ve got ’em cold!” one of the rousties complained. “We can cut ’em to pieces from here!”
“The Magus wants Cawdor and his son alive,” Crecca told the man. “He’s made big plans for them. Do you want to tell the Magus how you spoiled his fun?” The chiller’s face blanched, and he shook his head.
Truth be told, Crecca wanted to take them alive, too. He intended on doing some serious, prolonged, but nonlethal ass-whipping before he turned them over to the whims of old Steel-Eyes.
The carny master yanked Jackson to its feet and led his men down the hill, stepping over bodies of their fallen comrades. The man wounded in the leg had already bled to death. For the first time, Crecca really took in the run-down shanty ville below the lake. It looked deserted, and he wondered why Cawdor and the others hadn’t tried to make it down there. They could have at least made a fight of it then. As Crecca neared the lake, he warned his men to keep their blasters ready and the targets in their sights, in case it was some kind of trap.
Thunder rolled from the clouds over the lake. Crecca ignored it. Jackson, on the other hand, became highly agitated at the noise, more agitated than Crecca had ever seen it. The stickie started hopping about nervously, from one foot to the other, and it strained at the limit of the chain, digging furrows in the mud as it tried to get closer to the water’s edge. It sputtered and coughed on its own outpouring of saliva.
Crecca gave the little stickie a hard, snapping jerk on the choke collar to bring it back in line. By way of answer, Jackson turned and bit him, a single savage, needle-toothed chomp and release.
“Bastard!” the carny master cried, wrenching back his torn and bleeding left hand and dropping the end of the leash. He managed to keep hold of his M-16, but no way could he shoulder it and take aim at the fast-moving little mutie. Jackson made a beeline for the lake, dragging the length of chain behind it. Without a pause, it jumped in, feet first, and then started to run, thrashing into deeper water, toward the minisquall that was forming.
Crecca had never seen the stickie swim before.
And it turned out it couldn’t.
After Jackson had battled its way to neck height in the water, its hairless head slipped under, popped up and went under again, ever farther from shore, as if the stupe creature were trying to continue to walk along the bottom. It was then that big swirls appeared all around it. Brown back and tail fins knifed up through the surface. The smallest of the fish circling Jackson looked to be about six feet long. As Crecca watched, the little stickie was buff
eted and knocked about by lunging fish. Jackson surged backward, its head throwing a bow wave, as it was half lifted into the air by something huge beneath the surface that had hold of it.
“They’re eatin’ the ugly little fuck!” one of the chillers exclaimed. “Tearing the living shit out of him!”
Crecca cradled his injured hand. The needle teeth had punctured the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. It looked as if it had been caught in the gears of a machine. He was lucky not to have lost a few fingers. On the other hand, his investment in Jackson was a total write-off. Only a triple-stupe droolie, or someone contemplating suicide, turned his back on a stickie that had tasted human blood.
“They can have him,” Crecca said. “It’ll save me the cost of a bullet.”
The carny master walked away, leaving Jackson to its fate. As he moved closer to Ryan and the companions, he waved with his assault rifle for the chillers to follow.
“Are they dead, or playing dead, or what?” said the man beside him.
The carny master didn’t answer. His quarry seemed to be frozen in position, but he could see the slight rise and fall of their chests. They were breathing, and they were making little movements of the face: their closed eyelids twitched, as if they were asleep on their feet and dreaming.
“Not dead,” Crecca announced.
He moved in for a closer look at Cawdor.
“What are you and your pals playing at, One-Eye?” the carny master asked.
There was no response.
Crecca jammed the muzzle of the M-16 against Ryan’s cheek.
No response.
“They sick?” a chiller asked. “If not, I’ll make ’em sick.” With that, he slammed J.B. in the lower back with the sole of his boot. The Armorer grunted at the impact, which knocked him off his feet. He fell into the mud near the waterline, but didn’t move.
Out on the lake, another storm was brewing. Green lightning crackled and lit up the bleached trees.
Crecca was so preoccupied with Cawdor that he didn’t bother to look over his shoulder. Because of that, he missed seeing Jackson pushed ashore by the pod of lungfish. The little stickie crawled out of the shallows on its hands and knees, sputtering and gasping.
“Let’s have a peek at what you’ve got under this,” Crecca said, reaching out and flipping up Ryan’s eye patch.
“Rad blast!” exclaimed the chiller peering over his shoulder.
The carny master grinned. “Now that is what I call—”
A wave of scalding heat slammed Crecca’s back. Then it started to snow spores, and the carny master not only forgot what he was about to say, but he also forgot who he was.
SLOWLY, RYAN BECAME aware of his surroundings. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. It could have been a minute or an hour. But no longer than that because the sun was still high and hot.
He remembered the perfume, and remembering brought a flashback of the amazing sensation it had wrought. An instantaneous, almost orgasmlike disconnect of his normal consciousness, as if sheared away by a blow from a longblade. He recalled drifting upward, joyous, freed of his body and all its restraints.
Though he was certainly back in his body now, some of the detachment remained. He felt like a spectator. And he couldn’t summon up the strength or the desire to fight what was happening to him, to return to the way he was, before the perfume.
Ryan’s head turned, though he had no sense of having willed it.
And couldn’t stop it.
He saw the others around him. Not just his companions, but the carny chillers, too. As his head moved, things appeared to him in a series of freeze-frames. Instead of shadows on faces, he saw bands of beautiful pure colors. Lavender. Blue. Yellow. He wanted to pull his SIG from its holster, but he couldn’t make his hand reach for it. The failed effort was exhausting. He didn’t need the blaster anyway. No one was fighting. Everyone looked dazed and barely able to move.
Dean stood right where Ryan had left him. And the little girl was there, too, by his side. Their eyes were open and blinking. They appeared to be all right. A sound intruded on his thoughts, a banging noise, as if a muffled gong was being struck over and over.
As this was happening, he caught a whiff of a wonderful scent riding on the breeze. Not the flowers’ perfume again, but the aroma of food. Delicious food. Until he smelled it, he hadn’t realized how hungry he was. And then the gnawing ache in his stomach was more than he could bear.
Ryan wasn’t the only one so affected.
Companions and chillers alike roused themselves and began shuffling away from the lake. The violent storms over the water had subsided. The lightning was no more. The low-hanging clouds had vanished. Its surface was a gentle, rippleless mirror of sky.
As Ryan walked beside his son, a hand gripped his shoulder from behind. A weathered hand. Doc stepped up alongside him. Words came out of the old man’s mouth in a language that Ryan didn’t understand. They angered him. He shrugged off the hand.
Ryan, Dean, indeed everyone marched in time to the gong beat echoing up from the ville below. Ryan felt disjointed and clumsy, as if he had great soft pillows for feet. Though they were all famished, no one hurried to be first. They all moved at the same rate, which was dictated by the rhythmic banging.
The lake sat on a plateau of sorts. Beyond the mud bank was a long incline of limestone bedrock. Ryan and the others climbed carefully over the moss and tufts of spike grass that rimmed the edges of the deep, crumbling fissures and yawning holes dotting the slope. There was flowing water, too. It seeped steadily from the bottoms of the fissures and the cracks. It was as if the whole face of the hillside leading down to the ville were weeping.
When he and Dean reached the bottom, Ryan ignored the little hamlet. He followed his ears and his nose to the center of the pounded-dirt square, where a black man with dreadlocks was hammering on the side of a fifty-five-gallon steel barrel with a chunk of firewood. As he drummed, he danced, shaking his hips and bobbing the tangled mass of his woolly curls to the backbeat. He had a raging hot fire burning in the barrel, and a metal grate was pulled over the flames.
Heaped on the grate like a stack of cannonballs were the sizzling sources of the delicious aromas.
“Come on, now, doan be shy,” the cook sang as the new arrivals approached. “I got plenty here. It’s real Jamaica jerk, an’ that’s no lie. Getcha good stuff while it’s hot!”
Even though Ryan wanted what was on that grill more than he’d ever wanted anything, he didn’t push. No one did. Everyone seemed to be in the same state.
Able to move, but rockily.
The detached part of him knew that things were very wrong. That he should have long since gone for the eighteen-inch panga sheathed below his knee, and started cutting chiller throats. That his companions should have been doing likewise. But the proximity of their mortal enemies no longer seemed to matter to any of them. The need for revenge and the need to stop the butchery had become irrelevant. They were possessed of only one desire: to eat what was being offered. For all the black smoke coming off the grate, and the folks standing in line in front of him, Ryan couldn’t even see what he was waiting for.
That didn’t matter, either.
The line slowly advanced. Dean reached the head of the line in front of Ryan. The boy shuffled off without a word, juggling between his hands a smoking, char-roasted glob that his father barely got a glimpse of.
It was big, though.
The size of a ripe melon.
Using the piece of firewood, the cook rolled another glob out of the flames, across the grate, this time in Ryan’s direction. It looked like a twenty-pound meteorite that had just crashed to Earth. “There you go, mon,” he said. “Best you’ll ever eat.”
Ryan grabbed it up with eager fingers. It burned him, but he wouldn’t let it drop. He, too, juggled the smoking glob and sat in the dirt beside his son. Dean was already tearing into his food, as was the little girl from Bullard. They were making animal noises
of pleasure.
The first bite made Ryan groan. It was roast beef. And more succulent than any he had ever eaten. The outer part was crispy and tasted as if it had been rubbed with spices. The charred flesh came off in juicy shreds under Ryan’s teeth. Inside, the roast was so tender it melted in his mouth.
The more he ate of it, the more he wanted. The thought that mebbe it was too much to consume in one sitting, of mebbe saving some for later didn’t even enter his mind. Ryan ate the whole thing and when he was done he licked the sweet grease from his fingers. Stomach bulging, he lay back on his elbows. Dean curled up on his side, unable to budge after packing so much into his gut. Everyone else was on the ground, too. Most were flat on their backs with their eyes closed.
Ryan was no longer hungry, but he was getting sleepy. In a disinterested way he took in the immediate surroundings. The only building of note was the low concrete blockhouse across the square, which was obviously predark. The rest of the ville was a shit heap of ramshackle, dirt-floored lean-tos barely tall enough to crawl into. Clouds of black flies swarmed over the open latrines and trench sewer.
In a corner of the square stood a predark metal chair. It had straps looped around both arms, and on the chair back was a dark, broad stain that looked like dried blood. Flies hovered over it, and over the long piece of iron pipe that leaned against it.
Ryan dozed off to the seesaw, droning buzz. He was awakened with a start a few minutes later by a sound that he couldn’t place. He sat up and looked around; others were stirring, as well.
He realized that the noise was coming from a wag engine when he saw the approaching Baja Bug. To him it sounded as if it were underwater. And it had a strange, shimmering halo, or aura around it, a purple-and-rose glow that had nothing to do with its flat gray paint job. When the Bug stopped beside the square and the driver got out, Ryan’s jaw dropped in astonishment. He opened his mouth to speak, but words failed him.
He thought he’d never see Trader again.