by James Axler
“Canady and Edson stay here,” Grundwold barked hoarsely. “The rest of you come with me.”
He headed down the stairs, padding softly on the steps so as to avoid causing any noise that might alert the sleeping outlanders. When he reached the other end of the second-floor hallway, Fillinger and Kauderer were just finishing tying up the redheaded woman. They had replaced the clip in the doorway with a knife that had been wedged into the door frame. It kept the door open and unlocked and was in no danger of being kicked loose.
“Good work!” Grundwold said. “Do you know which room she came out of?”
“Second one on the left,” Fillinger answered.
Grundwold turned to face the rest of the sec men who were lined up on the stairs. “Two of you take her to the tower and wait for us there. If I’m not there in one hour, take her back to the farm and make your report to the baron.”
Two sec men grabbed Krysty by the arms and led her away.
“And don’t mess with her,” Grundwold called down the stairwell. “I want her handed over to the baron in good condition.”
He turned to the sec men directly behind him. “Follow me,” he told Lewis. “The rest of you cover the hallway. If the outlanders discover us, I don’t want any of them coming down the hall. All right, let’s go.”
Grundwold stepped back from the door, and a sec man opened it for him. He and Lewis padded into the hallway, moving quickly toward the second door on the left. They kept a close watch on the man guarding the far door, but he didn’t stir.
They stopped just outside the door to the room, and Grundwold peered through the doorway. There was a man on the bed, asleep. They would chill him and move onto the next room in search of the other woman.
Grundwold entered the room, went around to the far side of the bed and leveled his blaster on the back of the man’s head. On the other side of the bed, Lewis drew his switchblade, pressed the silver button at the top of the handle and the knife snicked open.
The man on the bed suddenly stirred, and in a single quick and fluid motion, he had a huge knife in his hand and was slashing it across Lewis’s belly. The sharp edge of the monster blade cut through the sec man’s jacket and abdomen, spilling blood and entrails onto the hotel-room floor.
Lewis stood there with wide eyes as his hands reached down in an attempt to keep his guts from sliding out of his body.
Grundwold leaped onto the bed, grabbed the prone man’s arm with one hand and jammed the barrel of his Persuader up under the man’s ear with the other. “I’ve got sec men all over the hall. If you make another move, or make a sound, I’ll chill you and the rest of your friends where they sleep.”
The man’s body tensed, as if he were going to try something despite the warning. “We’ve already got the redhead. If you want to see her alive, you’ll do what I say.”
That seemed to convince the man that putting up a fight wasn’t a good idea.
The man slowly got off the bed.
“You can get dressed, but I’ll chill you and your friends in a heartbeat if you try anything.”
The one-eyed man nodded, seeming to accept his fate, or perhaps realizing that fighting back at the moment would be futile. Whatever the reason, he cooperated with them and began putting on his pants and boots. When Ryan was dressed, Grundwold picked up the man’s knife and blaster and led him out of the room, then down to the end of the hallway where a half-dozen sec men were waiting. As soon as they were in the stairwell, the door closed behind them and the sec men who’d been waiting on the stairs began tying the one-eyed man’s hands behind his back.
“Tie his legs, too,” Grundwold ordered. “Give him enough slack to walk, but not to run.”
“Where’s Lewis?” one of the sec men asked.
Grundwold shook his head.
The sec man, a friend of Lewis, stepped forward and threw a hard punch into the prisoner’s stomach. Ryan doubled over slightly, but recovered quickly. The sec man threw a second punch, fully catching the one-eyed man’s jaw. His head snapped left from the force of the blow, but he showed no signs of pain or fear.
Grundwold swung his arm in an arc and caught the sec man with the butt of his blaster before he could throw another punch. “Take it downstairs, before you wake up the rest of them,” Grundwold hissed. “We’ve still got one more breeder to catch.”
The sec man unclenched his fist and grabbed Ryan by the arm, pulling him hard down the stairs. The rope between the prisoner’s legs caused him to stumble, then fall down a whole flight of stairs.
The sec men picked him up by the arms, then dragged him the rest of the way down the stairs and out of the hotel.
“Fillinger!” Grundwold said. “Come with me.”
Grundwold and Fillinger reentered the hallway and began searching rooms for the other outlanders. Grundwold checked the third room on the left and found it empty. He looked back along the hall where Fillinger had just finished searching the second room on the right.
Fillinger shook his head. The room was empty.
Grundwold waited in the doorway of the room he’d just searched, his lovingly maintained Persuader 500 trained at the man guarding the far door, who still hadn’t moved.
Fillinger opened the door to the third room on the right, directly across from where Grundwold was providing cover. He had the door halfway open when he stopped in his tracks and looked over at Grundwold and jabbed his thumb in the direction of the room.
Someone was sleeping in there.
Grundwold kept the Persuader trained on the guard as he moved across the hallway to join Fillinger. Then they entered the room together, with Grundwold again moving to the far side of the bed. When they were in place, Fillinger lowered the barrel of his remade longblaster onto the head of the sleeping outlander while Grundwold reached down to pull back the sheet covering the sleeper’s head.
It was truly Grundwold’s lucky day. Sleeping on the bed was the other breeder.
“Make a sound and you’re chilled,” Grundwold whispered in her ear.
She opened her mouth to let out a scream, and Fillinger pressed the blue-steel tip of his blaster even harder against the side of her head.
She closed her mouth and held her tongue.
“If you want to try your luck, you should have gone to the casino next door. We don’t play games,” Grundwold said. “Put on your boots. You’re going on a little trip.”
Flashing him a murderous look, but without making another sound, Mildred put on her boots.
Although she was fully clothed, Grundwold enjoyed the view of the breeder’s full, voluptuous figure, but didn’t allow the sight to make him careless. “We’ll take your blaster, thanks,” Grundwold said, picking up the target revolver from the table and tucking it into the waistband of his pants.
Grundwold and Fillinger each took hold of one of the woman’s arms and led her to the door. There was something about the look on the woman’s face that Grundwold didn’t like. She seemed to still want to fight back, and there was a good chance she might do something stupe like try to warn the others.
“Hold it!” Grundwold said.
Fillinger paused at the door, and Grundwold took the rag he used to keep his blaster clean out of a jacket pocket. He wrapped the ends of the rag around each of his hands and pulled it taut between them. Then he pressed the rag between her lips until she opened her mouth and he could push it past her teeth. Finally he tied the rag around her neck, preventing her from uttering a sound.
“You say a word or try to make a sound, the head of the guard outside the door will be turned into wallpaper,” Grundwold said. “Understand?”
Mildred nodded.
“All right,” Grundwold said. “I think now she’s ready. Let’s get out of here. And keep it quiet.”
Together the sec chief and the sec man quickly ushered the prisoner out of the room and down the hallway. The guard was still there on his chair, his eyes never wavering from the door at the other end of the hallway.
&nb
sp; As they reached the stairwell, the door was opened by an attentive sec man, and the three of them were able to pass through the doorway without a sound.
“Get her to the tower!” Grundwold ordered.
At once a pair of sec men escorted Mildred down the stairs and out of the hotel.
“Fillinger, go around to the other door and tell the men there to pull back.” Grundwold looked at his wrist chron. “I want everyone at the base of the tower in ten minutes.”
The sec men scattered without another word.
Grundwold lingered behind, making sure to give Fillinger enough time to go downstairs, through the lobby and back up to the second-floor landing to inform the others their mission had been successfully completed. When he was sure the sec men had pulled back from the door at the other end of the hall, Grundwold reached down and pulled the knife holding the door in front of him open.
The steel fire door swung closed…and locked, the sound of the locking mechanism echoing through a suddenly empty stairwell.
THE HUGE MUTIE CREATURE was on him. It looked very much like a lizard, but was as big as a horse. Its skin was made up of orange-and-green scales, and each of its forward arms ended with a set of three razor-sharp talons.
The Armorer had confronted the beast before and had lost. This time would be different. This time he was going to chill it, blasting it into a hundred different pieces.
The mutie beast neared, its three-inch fangs dripping gore left from its last meal. J.B. took several steps backward, giving him some time to draw his Smith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun. In a few moments there would be a hole in the creature’s chest big enough to drive a wag through, and the whole episode would be little more than a bloody memory.
J.B. leveled his blaster at the beast, squeezed the trigger and heard the terrifying sound of a metallic click of the hammer falling on an empty chamber.
The beast lunged—
And J.B. awoke from his dream before it tore his limbs from his body.
He sat on his chair, gasping for breath. His eyelids still seemed heavy, as if he had been awakened from another mat-trans jump, and hadn’t simply dozed off for a few minutes.
Had it been a few minutes?
J.B. glanced at his wrist chron. “Dark night!” he exclaimed. According to the chron, he’d been on watch for more than three hours. How could that have been? While there was no excuse for falling asleep while on watch, why hadn’t Mildred or one of the others relieved him?
He ran down the hall to his room to check on Mildred.
She was gone.
He went across the hall to check on Ryan and Krysty…and found a dead sec man from the farm in their room, his belly slashed open, most likely by Ryan’s panga.
Ryan and Krysty were gone, but Ryan’s Steyr SSG-70 longblaster was still tucked safely under the bed.
What in dark night had happened to them? J.B. wondered. What had happened to him that he could sleep through it all?
He ran out into the hallway, shouting. “Doc, Jak, Dean!”
In moments the three friends appeared in the hallway, blasters in hand.
“What is it?” Dean asked.
J.B. stood in the middle of the hallway with Ryan’s Steyr in his hand. “Ryan, Krysty and Mildred,” he said. “They’re gone.”
Chapter Nine
“I can see the head!” the healer cried, sweat dripping off his nose. He’d wanted to call in an assistant hours earlier, but Baron Reichel had forbidden it, not wanting any more people than were necessary to see his wife in such a compromised state.
Reichel ville, on the southern shores of Erie Lake, hadn’t been blessed with a newborn for many, many months. Things had been born, but they bore no resemblance to children. The baron could ill afford to let it be known that such monsters were born into his family. His bloodline was pure, and his heirs needed to be full norms. If his wife bore him a mutie, the fewer who knew about it the better.
Baron Reichel sat on a bench out in the hall just on the other side of the door to the healer’s room. He had been in the room for the longest time, but his constant concern over his wife’s agonized shrieks had prompted the healer to ask him to leave, allowing the healer to do his work without the interference and misguided concerns of an impassioned observer.
“You must push,” the healer said. “Push harder!”
“I can’t,” the woman gasped, nearing the point of exhaustion.
The healer believed her. In all his years he had never seen such a lengthy and painful birth. Everything about the delivery of this child was slow and complicated when in truth there were absolutely no signs warranting complications, or even pain for that matter. But here was the baron’s wife, in labor half the day and still hours to go before the child was born.
“You must try,” the healer urged, his voice showing far more compassion than normal. Usually he was very hard on women during birth, forcing them to work harder in order to end their ordeal more quickly. But Gayle Reichel had already suffered too much, for too long.
She cut short a moan and pushed.
The child’s head moved slightly, no more than the width of several hairs. “Yes, that’s it! Very good! Again!”
“It moved?” Gayle asked, her breathy voice filled with both surprise and relief.
“Yes, it’s coming…. Now, push again.”
She grimaced and tightened her body, tensing her stomach muscles and trying to squeeze the child through a birth canal that was far too small.
“I see an ear!” the healer exclaimed. “Keep going!”
Gayle was almost laughing now. She probably felt the child beginning to move a little more each time. After so many hours, she was happy to see it finally coming out of her body. She closed her eyes, pressed her lips together and grabbed at the wooden rails on either side of the roughly made bed.
Then she groaned sharply…and pushed.
Her fingernails cut into the hard, polished wood of the rails. The child’s entire head appeared, followed quickly by its shoulders, neck.
And then…
The rest of its body slid out into the world, almost in a gush. The healer moved quickly, managing to catch the child, then inhaled a gasp. With his eyes closed, he held the child in his hands and for the longest time his mouth moved, but he uttered no sound. Finally he said in a whisper, “Father Death, have mercy on this soul.”
BARON REICHEL HAD BEEN waiting for what seemed like hours. The screams of his wife had pained him, and now that they had stopped, he feared the worst.
But as he continued to wait in silence, not knowing what had happened to his wife was far worse than hearing her constant cries of pain. At last he stood and bravely opened the door to the healer’s chambers.
The room seemed even quieter than the hall had been. His wife, Gayle, was lying on the bed, her chest rising and falling in a deep and regular rhythm. The healer sat at a desk with his head in his hands, no doubt exhausted by the lengthy birthing.
The baron looked around for the child but didn’t see it.
When he closed the door behind him, the healer jumped and looked over at him, his face pale and his eyes wide and full of fear. As the baron moved closer, he noticed the healer looking even more aged and haggard than he remembered.
“Is she all right?” the baron asked in a whisper.
The healer nodded. “Your wife is resting. She will recover in a very short time.”
“And what of the child?”
“It is resting, as well…in the bassinet over there.” He pointed to a small wooden cradle made of tree branches and lined with straw.
The baron looked at the healer for a long time, knowing something wasn’t right. If the child was doing well, the healer would be overjoyed, and his wife would be holding the child to her breast, even in her current state of exhaustion. And then there was the word the healer had used. It was resting, he’d said. Not he or she, but it. Something was definitely wrong.
“Can I see—” he wondered which word to
use “—it?”
“Perhaps it might be best if—”
“I said, can I see it?” the baron said, much more forceful this time.
Gayle stirred at the sound of her husband’s voice. “Is that you, love?” she asked.
The healer knew better than to defy the baron’s wishes a second time. “Of course.” He got up and walked over to the bassinet, reached into the cradle and took out the bundled child, wrapped tightly in a scarlet blanket.
He handed the bundle to the baron.
Baron Reichel found it awkward to hold the bundle properly, but he eventually managed a firm but gentle grasp. He hadn’t held all that many babies in his lifetime, but this child felt different from the ones he’d held before. Its body seemed hard and bony, wrong somehow.
The healer turned away, taking up a position near the baron’s wife.
Baron Reichel pulled aside the blanket and looked upon an abomination.
The child’s eyes were open wide, shining black and glassy in the dim light of the room. There were hard nubs of bones along the crown of its head, almost as if it were the offspring of some mutie lizard.
The baron swallowed, his body shuddering in shock. He pulled the blanket farther aside and saw that the child’s two arms were on the right side of its body and a leg was where the other arm should be. A second leg was positioned in the center of the lower portion of the trunk, looking much like a tail.
Baron Reichel felt his knees go weak and his heart begin to pound in his throat, choking him.
This was no child of his.
It was a child of the rad-blasted Deathlands.
He took another glance at the creature and grimaced.
It wasn’t even a child.
It was a monster.
He wrapped it back in the blanket and held it at arm’s length.
“Have you seen him?” Gayle asked, her voice soft yet proud. “Is he beautiful?”
“Yes, very,” the baron said, taking the child out of the room.
“Where are you going with him?”
Her words fell on deaf ears, fading into silence.