by Axler, James
"Fucking idiots, is more like it," Sheffield growled. "Now that we're alone, how do you wish the sergeant punished for the failure?"
"For being illiterate? No. We're short on men as it is. More the fool I for not remembering when it is that I now live."
When, not where, Sheffield noted privately. The whitecoat often said such things, and he was starting to believe the idea. It certainly explained where the military blasters came from. His palm print opened doors everywhere across the complex, except for the warehouse. Whatever was inside, the old man hoarded it like a virgin did her cunny. Which only made Sheffield want it that much more.
Pausing at a control board, Silas checked the voltage on some dials, then turned to the officer. "Major, do you know the alphabet or how many continents there are? How many planets? What a gerund is? The name of the moon, or any of the laws of thermodynamics?"
The sec man scowled. "The moon has a name?"
"Since the 1965 International Conference of Astronomers. Its official name is Luna, and the sun is Sol."
"Interesting," he admitted. "But that doesn't put bullets in a blaster. Just a pretty song, nothing more. I'm a practical man, sir. Taught myself to read labels so I could steal food and not chems. I learned to chill a man with just a knife in nine different ways, or skin him alive to make him talk. I know how to cook dynamite, avoid rad pits, raid a ville and fix wags. Do these other things matter in the real world?"
"The real world," Silas repeated with a sigh. "No, I suppose they don't. As a scientist, I must concede the logic of your argument."
Unexpectedly, Silas laid a hand on the man's shoulder. "However, if you are to be my successor, they soon will. We shall start your lessons with the most important one of all."
"The warehouse?" the major asked eagerly, naked avarice shining on his face.
Smiling, Silas hobbled for the doorway. "That and much, much more. Come with me."
APPROACHING THE SPORTS ARENA, Ryan called for a halt. The building stood five stories tall, the outer wall ringed with clusters of lights. Some small windows, or vents, were noticeable, but no doors.
"Jak, stay here as anchor," Ryan said cautiously. He had a feeling they were being watched. "Krysty and I will sweep around the building on a recce."
"No prob," Jak said, putting his back to the concrete wall of the arena so he could see in every direction. Weeds and desolation filled his vision. Predark ruins were nothing but unburied cemeteries to him.
Patrolling along the side, the man and woman soon found the front entrance, metal rings in the concrete showing where a line of turnstiles had to have once been. An iron grate was pulled off to the side, and Krysty tugged on the barrier to see if it could move. Rust had welded it into a solid mass.
"Nobody's used this for a while," she commented.
Ryan merely nodded, unable to shake the feeling of being scrutinized.
The interior Plexiglas doors were wide open, debris keeping them from closing.
"Could be a trap," Krysty said, easing back the hammer of her revolver.
"Could be anything," Ryan countered, then added, "What's that smell?"
Her hair flexing, Krysty sniffed. "Flowers?"
Moving deeper into the structure, they found the front hallway completely filled with flowering plants of a thousand different colors, the air rich with their sweet perfume.
"Don't see anything moving," Krysty said, watching for traitorous intent among the leaves.
"Perfect place for the greenies to go camou," Ryan noted. The hallway resembled a jungle with blossoms clustering thick on the walls, yet the floor was bare, as if inviting visitors.
"How can they grow without sunlight?" he asked.
"Mebbe some of it is still outside," Krysty guessed. '"These could be just the roots."
"Roots seek nourishment," Ryan noted grimly.
A short flight of wide stairs went up a level, the steps and railings festooned with hanging leaves that offered no resistance to being pushed aside. Bracing himself, Ryan experimentally tore off a leaf. It came loose in a normal manner, and nothing else happened. They both relaxed.
The perfume smell thickened as the hallway opened onto a sports field, the ground covered with wags of every kind—cars, trucks, wooden wagons, bicycles, motorcycles, Jeeps, vans and even a few Hummers. Strewed among the vehicles were countless backpacks, suitcases, duffel bags, swords and blasters of every description.
"Thank Gaia!" Krysty cried out. "There's our stuff!"
"What the hell is going on here?" Ryan demanded softly as they approached the backpacks and saddlebags. "The greenies rob travelers and just toss the stuff here to rot? That doesn't make any sense."
"Not to rot, as offerings," Krysty said, pointing with her blaster. "I think this is their temple."
Standing majestically amid the piles of tributes was a huge flower, its stalk thicker than a tree trunk. Rainbows marked in hypnotic swirl patterns spread skyward from the plant. Oddly, there seemed to be no pistil or stamen, and Krysty wondered how the plant reproduced without pollination.
There was a funny tickling in his throat, and Ryan coughed on the thick smell of the plant. However, it was remarkably pleasant, and he felt his heart beating faster, a familiar tingle starting in his groin. Fireblast, this was no place to think about sex, Ryan chastised himself. Concentrate on the job, man!
Feeling woozy, Ryan tried to speak, but Krysty turned toward him, her eyes moist with emotion, her face flushed red. The fiery heat of lust welled within him, and Ryan crushed the redhead in his arms. Her lips so soft and warm beneath his own, their tongues intertwined in a long soulful embrace.
Something shouted a warning in his mind, but it was already too late.
As he murmured tender words, his hands roamed across her yielding body, savoring the womanly curve of her firm buttocks as her hips thrust against him in a delicious manner. Hands removed her coat—his or hers, he had no idea—as somebody undid his gun belt and pants. Krysty knelt before Ryan and took him full into her mouth, her fingers stroking and caressing. He grabbed her hair and thrust himself harder toward her, striving to get deeper into the sucking wetness. Her nails raked across his muscular thighs, the pain shattering the wild delirium for a split second.
That was when he noticed the bones on the ground, skeletons and clothing covering the dirt, which was filled with tiny roots. It was a carpet of death. Icy adrenaline flooded his body as the realization came that they were in a terrible trap. This plant wasn't ambulatory like some mutie foliage. Instead, it lured in victims with a sweet perfume and drugged them into a sexual fervor until they had to mate. Probably doing so on and on until they eventually died of starvation, still trying to blindly copulate. Their rotting bodies would feed the roots in the ground, and the death flower would blossom in hellish beauty.
"No," Ryan whispered, trying to push Krysty away. "Trap…we gotta…go…"
She pulled away from him, her face distorted in animal need. "Take me," Krysty commanded, starting to remove her clothes.
The blood was pounding louder than cannons in Ryan's ears, and he heroically struggled to fight the drunkenness of unfettered desire by thinking of dead friends and torture. He knew that once started, there would be no stopping until they collapsed from exhaustion, and in that weakened state, they would never again be able to resist until death claimed them both. It was now or never, and the Deathlands warrior forced himself to act.
"Wake up!" he cried, slapping her across the face as hard as he could. "We're being drugged. Horses for them, humans for their god!"
In frustration, Krysty shoved Ryan backward and he fell to the ground. Dropping her pants, the redhead sat astride him, tearing at his shirt, uncaring of the long furrows her nails dug into his chest. As she started to blindly hump against him, the electric velvet of entering the woman almost shattered his last resolve of sanity.
Using his last ounce of strength, Ryan threw her off. She rolled aside onto her hands and knees, rubbing her buttocks
against his bare stomach.
"Now!" she yelled at him, spreading her legs. "Inside me! Now!"
Ryan grabbed her, and with a guttural cry he climbed on top and inside. The sensation was maddening, and Ryan bit his own tongue to stop the sweet perfume from claiming him. Pain was the answer. Only pain stopped the siren call of the plant's perfume. Then his memory flared, recalling Krysty's special muscles, and how she used them as no norm woman could to pleasure a man. Ecstasy worth dying for, pleasure beyond understanding. Die inside her, yes, yes! That was worth any price!
Ryan rammed his cock all the way inside her to bring him as close as possible to her, then slapped the barrel of the SIG-Sauer across the base of her skull. Krysty gave a gasp and slumped over unconscious.
A fresh wave of perfume flooded the arena as the flower spread wide its glorious petals. It was fighting for its next meal.
Raw fury boiled inside Ryan at the concept, and he focused his rage in order to survive.
"Die!" he roared, firing his blaster at the plant. Holes were punched in the lush petals, and vines snipped, greenish sap oozing from the small openings.
Standing on shaky legs, the mostly nude man grabbed his gun belt and reloaded, his whole world reduced to the ammo clip and the gun.
Grabbing Krysty by the hair, knowing that to pull on the living tendrils was agony to her, Ryan dragged the woman along behind him across the feasting bower, sheer willpower placing one foot ahead of the other. Whenever his will seemed to lag, Ryan fired the blaster close to his face, the sting of the muzzle-flash shocking him back to reality for a few precious moments.
Once past the doors, the perfume seemed to thin, but the desire still raged within the man. The steps wavered under his sight, but he plowed ahead, unstoppable in his determination to live. Sweat pouring off his body, Ryan staggered through the hallway of flowers, raging at the world, screaming curse words, doing anything he could think of to keep his anger fully fueled. Another yard was crossed, and still another.
Suddenly, reaching outside, Ryan stumbled to the concrete and kept moving forward on his knees, dragging Krysty behind, firing his blaster. A cool breeze blew over him, every breath taking away the rutting madness from his mind and body. Overcome, he slumped to the sidewalk and lost consciousness.
Minutes later, greenies rose from the weeds in the rubble and started dragging the exhausted man and woman back inside the temple of their living god.
Chapter Fifteen
Storm clouds filled the atmosphere above the planet Earth, and sheet lightning flashed constantly while hurricanes and tidal waves savaged the continents. And sterile deserts slowly spread across the world like a plague of dry rot.
The burned-out hulks of numerous satellites circled the tortured planet, some bristling with antennae, others smooth armored spheres of unknown purpose or design. Stationary above the former state of Tennessee floated a great black satellite, a slim ferruled cylinder with enormous shiny wings outstretched. Raw sunlight fell upon the millions of tiny glass squares composing the wings, and smooth pulses of electricity fed down the central supports and into the cylinder. There, computers hummed as accumulators stored the power, then from the bottom of the cylinder a concave dish extended into view and began beaming invisible rays at the ruined world below.
The beams spread outward in a cone formation as they bathed the polluted air, making the storm clouds dissipate until there was only a clear azure sky.
The rays descended until reaching an area in the desert where strands of bare wire had been strung in yard-wide squares across miles of dead land. The cone washed over the wire, and now tiny waves of electricity flowed into a series of transformers that unleashed the harnessed power in a network of high-tension lines toward a crumbling city on the horizon.
The ruins seemed to stretch for miles, tilting skyscrapers threatening to topple over, fires burning in gutted houses, rats feasting on bloated corpses strewed along the streets. Blast craters dotted the ground, their fused-glass bottoms glowing with deadly rads. A layer of frost covered the city like a death shroud, and what few bridges remained were eaten by blisters of red rust, just barely hanging over polluted rivers full of dead fish and decomposing ship hulls.
As the cables reached the decimated metropolis, slowly lights flicked to life inside the buildings, and the picture began to change. Window cracks sealed, and roofs straightened into proper alignment. The frost melted away, and the weeds withered and died. The hordes of rats ran shrieking into the sewers as the graffiti flowed off the sides of the strong buildings, and grass began to grow in yards and trees began to blossom. The roads smoothed as the potholes were filled, painted lines racing into existence along the clean macadam. The bridges became level, the rust falling away like autumn leaves, exposing the shiny steel underneath. A car rolled around a corner, then another and another until traffic flowed through the bustling city streets as in the days before the nukestorm.
But the restoration didn't stop there. A tumble-down shack rose again as a brick school, the field full of graves transformed into a ballpark and a playground. The junkyards and bomb craters became fields of golden wheat that reached into the distance. Factories disgorged machinery and clothing into softly humming electric trucks. Machines rolled out of warehouses and thrust electric prods into the rivers. Soon the water boiled and began to run clear again, all the way to the blue ocean. The prods were withdrawn, and fish jumped from the waters, rejoicing in their newborn life.
Outside the city, hordes of slavering muties touched the electrified fencing and withered into ash. Stalking the perimeter was a black dog with writhing tentacles sprouting from its shoulders, accompanied by a puma-like beast with a scorpion tail and insect mandibles. The beasts moved like well-oiled machines, but they, too, bumped the fence and vanished like flash paper in a candle's flame.
First one, then a dozen people appeared on the sidewalks, smiling and not carrying blasters. Soon they become a hundred, a thousand. Far away, farmers rose from the wastelands, the electric fences repelling the muties, as tractors plowed the land, planting more crops. Then the skies gently rumbled, and a soft clear rain fell on the world. Children rushed outside to play in the falling water as forest turned green and the world began to gradually turn into a blue-white sphere from the view in space.
Then the television screen turned blue.
"And that is our weapon?" Major Sheffield asked, sitting back in the chair, reeling from the amazing deluge of bizarre sights and sounds.
"Yes and no," Silas said, turning off the television and VCR.
"Unlimited electricity is merely one aspect of the Kite. The device is actually simplicity itself, as you saw. Solar cells in a high Earth orbit turn direct sunlight into electricity, which is gathered in transformers and broadcast to Earth as low-frequency microwaves."
"Like the microwave oven you showed me?" the sec man asked in horror.
"Different frequency, but the same principle. However, these beams cannot harm a fly, and are easily harnessed by those squares of wiring, which can be placed above croplands or cattle-grazing fields. Doing no harm to the cattle or crops, I might add. And then you have electricity, free, clean power. Gigawatts upon gigawatts."
Silas hobbled over to the television and got the tape out of the VCR. He slid the cassette into a box and stored it in a drawer along with his other videotapes. "A single Kite was designed to supply enough energy to run predark New York City and most of its suburbs. However, nowadays that's enough for all of the North American continent."
"Incredible!" Sheffield exhaled, chaotic thoughts swirling in his mind. "And this machine exists?"
"You have already seen it used against the slaves," Silas stated, reclaiming his hardwood chair. His bad leg was stiffening, and it was becoming difficult to rise from soft chairs without assistance. A simply intolerable condition. "Unfortunately, its military applications were also its doom. There is absolutely no way to stop such a microwave satellite from being converted into a deadly
weapon of war. Simply change the focus, and you have a microwave beamer capable…" He smiled. "Well, you know what it can do."
The grotesque vista of what had been found after opening the doors to the bunker that night was a sight the officer would never forget. "And you created this, sir?"
"Good Lord, no," Silas snapped, annoyed for some reason. "It was invented by a fellow American, Paul Glaser of Boston, back in 1970, but the United Nations would never allow the power stations to be built. Partially because of business and politics, but mostly because whoever got one in space first, could stop everybody else from building the second power station. Thus, only one was ever built, and that was done secretly. The Pentagon had planned for the coming war by building a Kite, the mat-trans network…and other things."
Sheffield waited eagerly, but Silas didn't oblige with more information. The sec man wasn't ready to learn of the redoubts. He was already clearly reeling from the video. The silly thing was just a promotional tape made to try to sway politicians. Silas easily changed a few of the scenes to make the material more relevant Nothing could explain the function and promise of a working Kite better then simply seeing the device in action.
The officer rose and went to the barred window of the lab, staring at the dark skies. "Why, with this satellite we could cook the rad pits clean, or bury them under molten rock! Burn the rads and chems from the atmosphere!"
"Correct." Silas smiled. "That is, once we achieve complete control. At present, we have only a focus for a few minutes a day."
"Why is that?" the major asked.
Sensing danger, Silas grew cold. "Technical problems," he demurred. "But those will soon be solved. All I need is more time to finish creating software to master the Kite. Its security systems are quite good, but can be beaten. Already I am up to five minutes a day before being booted off-line by the onboard systems."
The major turned from the window. "Five minutes of the Kite could stop an army!"
"If I do not miss."