Pilgrimage to Hell

by James Axler

  Ryan killed the lights, turning the large cabin into a place of shadows weirdly lit by the driver-control lights and lamps in the bunk-room corridor. He pressed two buttons on a small console beside the door, flicked two long bolts, twisted at the handle with his left hand while stabbing a finger at another button on the panel. A small bulb in the panel remained dark.

  "External lights've gone, or been blown. This could be it."

  He shoved the door open with his boot and sprang back, to be greeted by darkness outside, darkness that was not night darkness but deep dawn-gray. As his eyes became accustomed to the near absence of light he could just make out a jumble of rocks near the edge of the road where nothing moved. His auto-rifle was held two handed, trigger ready. Adrenaline was boosting into his bloodstream. He could hear nothing. Every vehicle in his land wag train had rolled to a halt.

  Then he glanced down. He saw the hand, long fingered and bony, appear as though by magic at the bottom of the doorway, something clutched in it. The hand jerked, unclenched, disappeared. A steel ball clattered fast across the floor toward him.

  Without conscious thought, he reacted so his right boot hit the object on the bounce, sent it sailing back out into the night again, his right finger squeezing off two 3-round bursts of automatic fire that angrily highlighted the face of the man flattened against the wall beside the door. The he was diving to his right and screaming, "They're under us!"

  His yell was lost in the cracking blast of the grenade as it ripped itself apart among the boulders, sending steel shards and bits of rock whistling in through the door.

  Ryan rolled, shot to his feet almost in one fluid movement and lunged at the doorway, his rifle flicked to full automatic and spewing rounds, hot brass clattering against the steel wall nearest him. As he reached the doorway, two shadowy figures vaulted up into the space, only to be punched back shrieking, their chests slug-stitched, their backs spraying blood and bone. Ryan grabbed the handle, pouring more lead down into the road, and yanked on it, slamming the door tight. He shot the bolts, breathing hard, then swung around on Cohn, his brain already working out survival details.

  "Get hold of Four. Tell 'em to abandon ship. Up through the roof and jump for Three. There's probably guys crawling all over the place, so watch the hell out. Tell 'em the last man out must leave a four-minute booby as near as possible to their cargo. Tell Two and Three we're shifting butt right now. Tell the rear trucks to backpedal fast."

  Cohn went into smooth automatic, playing with his switches, muttering inaudibly into his throat mike.

  "Move it, Ches!" snapped Ryan, and grabbed for a handhold as the huge war wag lurched forward with a mighty howl, gathering speed and lumbering onward.

  The Trader said, "Must've been well hidden in those rocks. Didn't see a nukeblasted thing."

  "They were on the road. Crazies!" Ryan told him. "We probably flattened a score before the guy who mattered managed to grab hold of Four. Suicidal fuckers!"

  Now they could hear bullets slamming into their armor, a steady muted rumble of lead on steel as though little men with hammers were drumming up a crazy war dance. The war wag bucked and crashed along, its engine roaring as the slope steepened.

  "Nice place to die," muttered Ches, then yelled, "I don't believe it!"

  Ahead, far ahead, the road had opened up, a part of it revealing red flashes, tracer lines soaring toward them. Rounds hammered over the front of the lurching vehicle, banged on the bulletproof glass of the windshield.

  "Tunnels! Tunnels under the road! When we slowed for the slope, that's when they jumped us, grabbed our underside."

  Now the MG-blister above their heads awoke into deadly life and tracers curved down toward the flapped tunnel trap, smashing into it, ripping it apart, sending it bounding away into the shadows beyond the searchlight's glare. O'Mara poured fire straight into the hole, the angle of fire steepening as they roared nearer and nearer.

  Conn said, "Four's out but seems like there's a hand-to-hand atop Three. It's getting rough out there…"

  Then he broke off as Ches, his voice a hoarse croak of panic, said, "Hellfire, they got stickies!"

  Ryan swung around, saw with a chill of horror four fingerlike appendages appear from out of sight below the windshield, slap hard on to the glass and flatten out slimily, suctioning to the smooth surface. Another four-finger hand whipped up into view, this one clutching a flat black object, which was slammed against the glass. The two hands vanished from sight.

  Ches screamed, "Limpet mine!"

  Chapter Three

  RYAN STOOD LOOKING AT THE OBJECT clinging to the outside of the windshield for only as long as it took to blink an eye, but thought and images torrented through his mind.

  The window was a goner; nothing could be done about it. If he had armor-piercing rounds in his mag he could blast the window, punch the bomb away. But that would still open them up to the outside, and in any case he didn't have APs up the spout and by the time he banged a fresh mag in, that limpet would have blown and they'd be holed anyhow.

  He wondered for an instant whether Ches, one of the newer drivers, only recruited in the past twelve months and lacking the experience of some of the older guys, had, as soon as the alarm had erupted, stabbed a forefinger at one very special button on his console beneath the war wag's massive wheel—and then he bawled, "Back!"

  The Trader plunged past him, Ches and Cohn tumbling after. Ryan's men were already diving for cover. Ryan jumped for the bunk room passage, hit the deck, found himself lying beside Ches.

  "The E-button!" he shouted—but the driver's reply was lost in the roar of sound from up front. Flame bloomed, the shock wave sending debris hurtling through the air.

  Ryan brushed glass shards off himself as he scrambled to his feet and ran for the front of the cabin.

  The screen was out except for thick, jagged ridges of glass poking up through swirling black smoke. The metal surround near where the limpet had been placed was sagging up top, buckled below. Two of the team began spraying foam at the flames, killing them, and Cohn was already at his radio again, throat mike in place, his fingers working switches.

  "She's okay. We're still on line, still connected."

  Ryan crouched in the dying smoke, squeezing short lead-bursts out into the night and downward, at a high angle, trying to clean off any stickies that might still be hanging to the war wag's snout, although he guessed that whoever was hitting them would almost certainly be back underneath, clinging on, waiting to make the next move.

  "Get the gas masks ready, but don't put 'em on."

  The smoke was clearing fast, the flames dead. Ches was back at the wheel again, body armor now buckled over his chest. The spotlights still lit up the road ahead, and now Ryan could see what looked like fireflies dancing up in the rocks to each side—snipers homing in on them. Above, O'Mara's MG began stuttering, trying to keep the bastards' heads down.

  Ches said calmly, "I've been meaning to tidy up that shelf below the window. It was getting clogged up with all kinds of crap. Those guys did a sweet job."

  "You hit the button?"

  "Sure I hit the button—and we're still in business. Far as I can tell the worst damage is to the glass and frame."

  "That figures."

  "Yeah, well you'd better pray it ain't gonna snow, Ryan, because I don't like driving in a blizzard, specially if that blizzard's coming in at me." He glanced around, and Ryan could tell that although the kid had shifted the vehicle into automatic, he was still putting on a show. "Do I clean 'em off now? Fry them out?"

  "No. Not yet. Wait."

  The E-button. A nifty device dreamed up by J. B. Dix for just such an emergency as this. Plate-metal strips around each war wag, topside and underside, were connected to the powerful generators at the rear but insulated from the rest of the chassis and frame. The E-button was a failsafe. Now all it needed was the tug of a lever and anyone or any thing touching those innocent looking rods got instant heartburn. Not to mention everythin
g-else burn.

  But Ryan did not want to blow that one until they had reached a last-ditch situation. It used up far too much power.

  He could hear bangs and cracks outside, short rattling bursts of auto-fire, the hammer effect of rounds pounding the exterior. It wasn't exactly a standoff, but he figured their attackers were conferring somewhere, probably in the tunnels below the road. He idly wondered if they were new tunnels or old tunnels, tunnels maybe dug out by the guys who'd built the Stockpiles. They were more likely new ones, excavated for just such ambushes as this. He half turned, snapping his black-gloved fingers.

  "C'mon, c'mon!" His voice was laced with urgency.

  Two men shoved past him holding a wood frame that enclosed a crisscross of fine steel mesh. They leaned over Ches, ramming it into place over the buckled screen frame, and clipped it.

  "Now let 'em try lobbing a gas can in."

  Everything was smooth, thought Ryan, relaxing slightly. He checked his watch, noted that there still remained two and a half minutes to go before the booby in Four blew.

  "Lint. Hooley. Up top."

  The two men who had carried the wire barrier followed him at the run down the cabin. They threaded into the bunk room passage, waited while Ryan slid open a side door into a ladder well. Ryan mounted the ladder fast but silently, checked out the view ports at the top. Nothing. He began flicking at well-oiled bolt levers in the darkness, slicking them back. Then he slid the hatch sideways softly on its specially fixed runners until it would go no farther, and stuck his head out into the cool air.

  Far to the east the gray twilight was gradually easing into milky dawn, but here a wash of flame from the now fiercely burning truck was the only light that mattered, casting a lurid glare over the scene, causing shadow dances on the blacktop, highlighting lurking figures among the roadside rocks and boulders,

  There was a gap in the convoy. It was now split into two distinct sections fore and aft of the blazing truck. Ryan's war wag had pulled well forward, and Trucks One, Two and Three had followed. Far down the road Ryan could see the snub-nosed bulk of the second war wag, with the rest of the convoy trailing behind it.

  Auto-rifle fire rattled, weaving its high-pitched chatter around single-shot cracks and the roar of the flames. Ryan focused his one eye on the roof of Three and saw that it was clear. Either the guys from Four had managed to tumble down through the truck's roof hatch into comparative safety, or they were dead meat on the road. He could see no one on the other trucks, but that didn't mean there weren't stickies clinging to the sides.

  He crawled out into the roof gully, which ran the length of the vehicle, front to rear, wide enough for two men to lie side by side and be hidden from view except from above. Another idea of Dix's: it enabled a war wag commander under ground attack to slide men up unseen into sniping positions. On each side of the roof, maybe less than a meter in from the edge, were clamped two long metal rods running the length of the vehicle—on the face of it a stupid piece of construction since it allowed attackers climbing up the sides an easy handhold to enable them to pull themselves on to the roof, where a surprise awaited them.

  Ryan crawled to the rear, hearing Hooley follow him. Lint would stay in the ladder well, rifle ready.

  He reached the end of the roof and stared down at Truck One below him.

  Truck One was a big trailer rig, its rear end converted in a very special, but unobtrusive, way. Truck One always followed the Trader's war wag in convoy: Strict Rule A. Strict Rule B was that it closed up tight to the war wag whenever the convoy stopped anywhere. Real tight. Strict Rule C was that Truck Two always pulled well back from One, giving it plenty of space at the rear.

  Just in case…

  Ryan grinned a feral grin. The jump from here was an easy one, no more than a couple of steps. And once he'd landed it would not take two seconds before he'd be sliding through the instantly opened hatch above the rig's cab to drop into the interior.

  Still smiling, Ryan edged himself over the lip of the gully and began to crawl across the flat roof toward the port side of the vehicle. He wanted to get a better look at the roadside, see if there was much congregating going on below. He had an idea there probably was. He half turned his head to check back on Hooley, but the guy was still in the gully.

  He looked back front again—and the smile froze on his face as a head popped into view only meters away.

  A head out of a nightmare.

  Huge eyes, two tiny nostrils in a moist, flabby flesh, no mouth, no ears. Hairless.

  Four fleshy suckers slapped suddenly onto the roof edge, squishing tight. A squealing snort of rage erupted from the nostrils. Another suckered hand whipped up and around, shot toward Ryan's face with the velocity of a striking snake.

  A sticky.

  A severely mutated being with sucker pads for fingers and toes with which it could cling to any surface like a leech so tenaciously that it required main force to pull them off; even in death there was little relaxation. Once those fingers smacked onto flesh and exuded their glutinous ooze there was little chance of being able to tear them off.

  Ryan had once seen a man attacked by a sticky. The guy hadn't known what hit him. The creature had kneed him, clutched him around the throat left-handed, grabbed his face with the right. The finger pads had slapped home, then retracted, taking the man's face with them, the flesh literally suctioned off the bone in bloody, doughy strips as though the sticky was tugging his hand out of red molasses. Eyeballs had popped. Faceless, the man had collapsed shrieking to the ground.

  Bullets hurt them, a heart or head shot could finish them, a razor-keen blade could sure mess them around more than somewhat, but otherwise their wet, rubbery flesh seemed able to absorb the heaviest punishment. And in a battle situation they were like beings possessed.

  No one seemed to know where the hell they came from, how they'd mutated. No one could even figure out quite what bizarre combination of genetic malfunctions had created them in the first place. The first sticky that Ryan had seen, a couple of years back, had been in a traveling carny, a weird and horrifying collection of freaks and savagely mutated beings that rode around the Deathlands ramrodded by a fat ringmaster called Gert Wolfram, something of a freak himself as he weighed well over one hundred and fifty kilos and had to be carried everywhere in a special construction chair born by six giants. The sticky's act had consisted of walking up and down high walls, no hands, and pulling the heads off dogs and wolves. Literally pulling them off.

  When asked where he'd found the creature, Wolfram had zipped his lip, become extremely edgy. Not long after, sticky sightings came in from all over. Soon they became accepted; hell, a mutie was a mutie. Still, how they ate, for instance, was just one of the many mysteries about them discussed by Deathlanders with nothing else of importance to chew the fat over on an evening when the chem clouds were low and it looked as if the acids were about ready to drop.

  Right now, however, the manner in which stickies ate held no interest for Ryan at all. All he could think of, as he rolled desperately to one side, was the incredible sucking power of those oozing pads lunging for his face.

  He rolled so fast, so unthinkingly, that before he knew it he was on his back and lying atop his rifle as the hand squelched down on the roof surface inches from him.

  That didn't panic him. Already his right hand was at his belt, grabbing for the hilt of the deadly panga sheathed there at his waist. Smoothly the blade came out and just as smoothly, just as fast, he was rolling back to his original position, the panga gripped tight then stabbing outward in a savage, power-packed lunge. The blade thudded into the creature's throat, just above the clavicle, or what passed for a collarbone in the rubbery body. It jammed, which was exactly what Ryan wanted.

  Still holding the hilt of the wickedly sharp half sword, he jerked himself to his knees. Two-handed, his muscles cording into cables along his arms, he tugged at the wriggling, squealing creature. Brute force, it was the only answer. With a sloppy, ploppin
g sound one hand came loose from the war wag's roof, then the other. Ryan scrambled to his feet, heaved at the sticky, pulled him over the metal rod, booted the creature in the side of the head.

  The sticky was trying to grab for him, its squeal something like a butchered hog's, but unheard by anyone below because of the chatter of auto-fire. Ryan used all his strength to slam the creature down on the roof. He smashed his boot onto its chest and tugged at the blade. Dark red ichor was squeezing out of the rubbery folds of its flesh, and the panga came out soggily. Ryan danced backward as the beast fluted its fury, its wide blank eyes red rimmed. It sprang at him.

  Ryan swung the panga two-fisted, felt it bite satisfyingly into oleaginous flesh, watched grimly as the head flew off like a kicked ball, sailing away into the surrounding gloom.

  The torso sagged on suddenly limp legs. It collapsed sideways and rolled across the roof before finally slumping against the rail.

  Ryan turned to jump back from the roof gully and cursed savagely. More stickies were hauling themselves up and over the other side of the war wag's roof. A brief glance at his right showed shadowy forms crowding onto the nearest trucks in fluid, rippling waves, arm over arm, seemingly inexorably.

  Hooley, in the gully, was already throwing up his rifle, and flame was stabbing from it in short bursts. A stammer of fire from the ladder well told him that Lint, too, had opened up.

  Ryan scabbarded the panga, then unslung his own piece. No point in silent killing now. He let rip a long jolting burst, left to right, at the bobbing line of heads that had suddenly appeared to his right, over the rear end of the war wag, watching dispassionately as they burst apart like so much rotten fruit. Then he leaped for the gully as more squealing figures came over the side behind him like an ugly tide.

  He thought, this is going to be close. It flickered through his brain that no way was he going to be able to make it to the hatch before he was overwhelmed by the monsters.