Devil's Vortex

by James Axler

  The .44-caliber upper barrel of Doc’s revolver spit yellow flame and crashing noise. The man’s head snapped back and he crumpled into the snow.

  “Offer accepted,” Ryan said, lowering his weapon.

  “Maybe we should’ve tried to keep him alive,” Mildred said as Ryan cautiously approached the fallen man. She wasn’t doing it just to be contrary—although she was perfectly capable of that. She, like Doc, had been taken out of her own time in the distant past by science. But in her case the motivation was the opposite of Doc’s: doctors had put Mildred into cryosleep when a routine abdominal operation had gone terribly wrong, hoping that she could be cured sometime in the future.

  “It might have been helpful if he could’ve told us what happened here,” she continued. “And who did it.”

  Ryan began to see signs of what had inspired Doc’s original call-out: ruined buildings and scattered trash on the ground beyond the man they’d chilled. Some of that trash, he saw, was bodies. Much of it appeared to be body parts.

  Ryan grunted. “Abstract knowledge doesn’t load many magazines,” he said.

  “I’m a big fan of not getting my skull split by an ax,” J.B. commented.

  Then he frowned and stepped up to kneel by the chill, pointing the muzzle of his M-4000 shotgun skyward.

  “Look at this,” he said, while Jak, who had appeared at the fringes of visibility when the blasterfire erupted, vanished back into the blowing snow. Ryan thought about warning him not to get too far from the group lest he lose sight of the rest. But then he knew how ridiculous that was. The albino would find a way to track them through a sealed-up cavern at midnight. As long as Jak lived, his companions would never have to worry about finding him. He’d find them.

  Also, Ryan knew the danger in giving orders he knew might not be obeyed. The albino accepted Ryan’s leadership. But he had his own notions of how to do his job as scout. And since he was the best there was, Ryan had learned to give him his head in such matters.

  Instead he allowed himself to take his eye off the surroundings, where he saw little but still-vague shapes in the blown snow anyway, to look at the man. As expected, he was dead. His remaining eye, bright blue, glared at the keening white void above.

  His other, his right, was a bloody socket rimmed with semiliquid aqueous humor. He’d suffered its loss recently, along with the other wounds visible on his face and chest through his ripped-open plaid flannel shirt.

  The Armorer pointed to, without touching, red-rimmed rings on his cheek and jaw. Sucker marks.

  “Stickie,” Ryan muttered. “Ace on the line.”

  He looked up and around. What little he could make out through the wind-blown snow and grit suggested structures that had never been much to start with but were probably worse now.

  “Eyes skinned,” he commanded, straightening. “We don’t know if the muties are still around.”

  “Some are,” Mildred observed, sounding grim. “The bodies I can see from here are stickies. Or stickie parts, mostly. They’re everywhere.”

  “It looks as if a bomb went off in a stickie colony,” Krysty stated.

  Ryan moved on from the chill. Almost at once he came close to stumbling over a lump that he quickly realized was a green stickie torso—headless, limbless, about the size of a ten-year-old norm’s body. It was partly covered with drifted powdery snow.

  “Could they have been fighting?” Ricky asked warily. He’d had to make some adjustments to his outlook on muties when joining up with Ryan and his group. His homeland, Puerto Rico, was called Monster Island, not just because it was overrun with savage monsters—it was—but also because large colonies of humanoid muties, including stickies, lived side by side with the human majority in perfect amity. Whereas on the mainland mutation was considered a taint—such that even the gorgeous Krysty Wroth faced discrimination or even violence whenever it was found out that she was, though nearly perfect in face and form, a mutie.

  Of course, on the mainland, stickies had earned their reputation as monsters a thousand times over.

  “Mebbe,” Ryan said.

  He was starting to wonder himself. Abstract knowledge might not load many blasters, it was true. Which was why he’d long since learned—the hard way—to suppress his own lively natural lust for knowledge for its own sake. Staying alive took all the brain power even a man the likes of Ryan Cawdor could bring to bear.

  But this was shaping up into a mystery whose answer might well affect their survival.

  “Or maybe that dude we chilled killed them all with his ax?” Mildred suggested.

  Ryan grunted. “Mebbe,” he said.

  “That’d be an irony,” Mildred stated pointedly. “If that guy’s reward for heroically taking out a whole colony full of stickies was for us to blast him out of his socks.”

  “Spilled blood won’t go back in the body, Mildred,” Ryan said. “You of all people should know that. Anyway, you might remember he thought we were stickies and was fixing to proceed accordingly.”

  “True,” she said.

  As Ryan cautiously advanced among the scattered stickie bits with his blaster ready, details of the handful of buildings became apparent. Clearly this had been a farm. Like so many others, buildings seemed to have been thrown together and rudely nailed in place from whatever could be scavvied, traded for or stolen. Planks. Timber scraps. Flattened tin cans. Cracked and sun-discolored plastic sheeting. A few rare chunks of corrugated metal. Sad and sagging but no more than most to be encountered in the Deathlands. And the farm had to have been relatively prosperous, judging by the number of structures.

  Ironically, their number and size suggested that this had been a prosperous location. Relatively. A marginally better style of hardscrabble life.

  “Looks like a sizable group lived here,” Mildred said. “Normal people, that is.” Stickie colonies could take numerous forms—like the rubbery-skinned little humanoids themselves—from massive piles of rubbish to what looked like outsized wasps’ nests. But never as orderly as this place was.

  Even now.

  “Might’ve been an extended clan,” Krysty said.

  Ryan had seen no sign of norms other than the man he’d helped chill. But as Krysty spoke he saw a little girl lying facedown on the ground. Snow had already half drifted over her. She was clearly dead.

  Neither Ryan nor any of the others made a move to examine her more closely. Her rough smock was torn and bloodied on the back. That she’d died by violence told them what they needed to know. And despite all being hardened survivors of years in the Deathlands, none of them wanted to see more horror than they had to. Not even Ryan, and he was reckoned a hard man.

  They came across other chills, adults, both men and women. All bore the telltale sign of stickie violence: the red sucker imprints on their flesh left by mutie fingertips that could peel skin from muscle and muscle from bone with their terrible adhesive power. Some bore bite wounds, as well, divots scooped from sides or limbs, throats torn out. Some varieties of stickies lacked external mouths. Others had mouths filled with needle fangs.

  These were that second kind. Or had been. Ryan saw a couple more or less intact stickie chills, one with a lower face and throat obliterated by what had to have been a point-blank shotgun blast, another with an ax still embedded in its round head.

  “Blasters up, and stay ready, people,” Ryan called softly to his comrades.

  A beat later Jak called out from somewhere, lost in the snow-swirl, “Hear something.”

  Ryan crouched, handblaster at the ready. Beside him he saw Krysty and Ricky do likewise—the redhead with her full-auto capable 9 mm Glock 18C, the youth with his old Webley revolver, rechambered for .45 ACP.

  Then Jak said, “Girl crying.”

  Krysty’s pale and beautiful face, which had been an ice sculpture a moment before, softened.
She straightened, lowering the boxy muzzle of her blaster.

  “Don’t let your guard down, lover,” Ryan growled. “We don’t know it’s not a trap.”

  She cocked an incredulous brow at him. “What? A stickie crying out in a little girl’s voice to lure us in?”

  “Other muties have been known to do that trick,” J.B. reminded her. “Who knows what stickies might come up with. Some of them are bastard smart.”

  Krysty’s other eyebrow arched up to match the first. She nodded. “Good point. But we still need to check. Just carefully.”

  “It’s not our problem anyway,” Ryan said. He was talking to the woman’s back as she moved purposefully ahead among the eerie cluster of farm buildings. She had a mind of her own—it was one reason he loved her. And she had as keen a survival sense as he did. After all, she’d met the same brutal and deadly challenges he had across their years together on the Deathlands. Some he even hadn’t, when they were split by circumstance or necessity. She knew what she was doing.

  But he also felt concern that her big, soft heart might dull the edge of her wits.

  At this point the only thing to do was follow. He heard a rustle and glanced over his shoulder to see J.B. slide in behind him, his M-4000 riot scattergun held slantwise before his hips in patrol position. The little man flashed him a quick grin.

  Getting my back, Ryan thought. Automatically. As usual. They were all sharp-eyed and sure shots, and none of them compared to Jak Lauren in the sensory-keenness department. But Ryan just felt better when it was his best friend and right-hand man in particular who was watching their asses. Especially going into an unknown situation.

  He grinned to himself. Every situation in this life is unknown, he thought. And forgetting that little fact is one of the best and quickest ways to end up with dirt hitting you in the eyes.

  The main structure was one story, big—half a dozen rooms or more. It had a peaked roof to shed snow as it fell. Now the wind was spooling the powdery stuff off its battered galvanized and corrugated metal in swirls and skeins, flinging it at their eyes. A screen door, hanging open and sagging, banged against the frame periodically as it got kicked by vagaries of that killing wind.

  But the sobbing was coming from a much smaller side building. Sounds like a kid, Mildred mouthed to Ryan. He nodded.

  Jak crouched outside, covering the door with his Colt Python revolver. The albino loved knives and preferred them over blasters. But given what had happened to the farm folk here, if there was a nasty surprise waiting for him in that shed, he wanted to be able to answer it straightaway with a bigger, louder surprise of his own.

  And shed it was, Ryan judged. His first glance suggested it might be an outhouse—the cold sucked his sense of smell away, and if the farmers had had sense to lime it, it probably didn’t give off an eye-watering, knee-buckling stink except on the hottest days of a Black Hills summer. But it was too big for a one-holer and not proportioned right for two or three. The structure had to be used for storage, he thought. Mebbe tools.

  The door opened outward. It hung invitingly, just a hand span ajar. As he approached, J.B. slid past him, as smooth as an eel.

  “Let me,” he said with an upward tip of his shotgun’s barrel.

  “Go right ahead,” Ryan said. The 12-gauge was an even bigger surprise than Jak’s .357 Magnum blaster for lurking bad things. Lots of strange predators or scavengers could follow behind a marauding stickie clan. Some of them not even muties.

  Standing well clear of the doorway proper, the Armorer reached forward, gingerly grabbed hold of the door, then whipped it open. Neither a lunging feral form nor a blast of blasterfire greeted the sudden movement. Holding the M-4000 leveled from his hip, he sidestepped quickly across the doorway, left to right, staying outside. He wanted to clear the fatal funnel of the door without plunging into a completely unknown environment.

  “Easy, little lady,” Ryan heard him say. “We’re not here to hurt you.”

  Cautiously Ryan joined his old friend. He saw that J.B. had been right not to do the usual room-clearing drill, stepping quickly inside and then immediately sidestepping left or right out of the doorway, to make a perfect target of himself for as short a time as possible. They were in a toolshed, and the tools were in some disarray, scattered here and there. Had the Armorer driven ahead, he might’ve tangled up his feet and pitched face-foremost onto the packed-dirt floor. Or worse.

  A little girl huddled inside, just visible in the gloom of the far side of the crowded little room.

  * * *

  “HOW’D IT GO, BOSS?” Hammerhand’s chief lieutenant asked as he strode into camp. Joe Takes-Blasters’s big broad face showed a frown of concern. “Reckoned you’d stay at the Crow camp longer.”

  “No need,” Hammerhand said.

  “So, you decided you didn’t need to go chasing visions after all, eh?” Mindy Farseer asked with her usual half-mocking tone of voice and one eyebrow arched.

  “No. I did. I got what I wanted.”

  The Blood encampment was a collection of about one hundred “lodges,” tepees of hide or canvas, yurts standing up from carts. It was the standard dwellings of Great Plains nomads. The brutal wind had subsided to a breeze that came and went, snapping their flaps occasionally like little whips. A few skinny children chased one another, sending chickens squawking from their path.

  A handful of assorted battered trucks, modified to burn alcohol as fuel, were parked in the center of the camp, along with a selection of motorcycles, from dirt bikes to powerful but stripped-down choppers. Most of their transport took the form of a substantial herd of horses.

  Hammerhand thought that they looked like a sorry-ass bunch of draggle-tail coldhearts, not the kind of people with whom he could build an empire.

  But he meant to do just that. With them. And this morning he had received a clear and compelling vision of how to accomplish that.

  It was time to kick ass.

  And whatever Power it was—he didn’t know or care because the fact that it was a big and badass Power was enough—had anointed him as the chosen one to do it.

  Now he had concrete goals and the beginning of a plan.

  “The Crow elders are still here,” Joe said. He sounded uneasy.

  He pointed with a jerk of his chin toward the group of four who stood expectantly nearby, at camp’s edge. Three men and a woman, with gray in their long braids, were wrapped in colorful blankets against the wind’s chilling touch. Their weathered faces showed strong bone structures and jutting noses, with skins the color of old leather. No doubt as a reproach to the mixed-breed Hammerhand, the Council had sent four elders to speak to him and urge his return to the fold.

  As if.

  After the Big Nuke, most bands of the Blackfoot Confederacy had taken in numerous refugees from fried-out cities, as had many of the First Nations groups that survived the war and skydark. And as most continued to do. The Blackfoot had thrived in doing so and now were preeminent north of what had once been the US-Canada border.

  But while they had accepted their share of refugees, and continued to adopt new members regardless of heritage, the stiff-necked Blood people had chosen to maintain an unusual form of discrimination within the tribe—not against mutants, but ceding social standing on the basis of supposed purity of breeding. It was a policy they termed Traditionalism. And one that younger fire-bloods, many but not all mixed race like Hammerhand, disdained as “Trad.”

  He looked at them now, standing there all mock humble but really demanding his submission—whether in renaming his band, or better, disbanding it and crawling back on his belly to beg the Council for forgiveness. Arrogant pricks.

  He knew in his heart what the dazzling figure from the top of Harney Peak would tell him to do. And although obedience was not in his nature, no more to glowing, floating sky people than the grubb
ier terrestrial kind, he would follow its words. Because that was the vision he had sought and had gained. And because he knew in its heart it was righteous.

  Black Bear, the shortest and stockiest but most senior member of the group, extended the ceremonial coup stick, hooked and feathered, toward Hammerhand.

  “Return with us, and become once more one with our land and blood, young man,” he said.

  “It’s not too late for you, boy,” said John Tall Person, who as might be expected, was the tallest of the group. Had his back still been straight he’d have been only an inch or three shorter than Hammerhand, which made him a tall man indeed.

  Hammerhand’s anger at their arrogant imperiousness was beginning to smoke. “And if I don’t?”

  Deer Woman scowled. “Then we shall make you! It will be war.”

  “Your answer?” demanded Crow Legs, the final member of the group. His gray hair had been braided into a sort of unicorn horn jutting from the front of his head. Hammerhand thought it made him look comical.

  “My answer?” Hammerhand gave them a long, hard look.

  Then he turned to his lieutenant, Joe Takes-Blasters.

  “For my answer, send their hides back to the Council,” he said. “Without them inside.”

  Chapter Three

  Krysty’s heart melted as a whimper escaped the form lying on its side in the fetal position on the dirt floor. She felt an overpowering impulse to run to the girl and hug her.

  But she fought it down. She was a seasoned campaigner, almost as much as J.B. or Ryan. She knew the girl could be bait in a trap. Or even, unlikely as it seemed, a danger in herself.

  She scanned the corners of the cluttered toolshed. There was little to see but shadows. The structure seemed sturdily made, with no cracks to let even the feeble light from outside leak in.

  “No danger,” Jak said, then vanished from Krysty’s side into the blowing white clouds of snow. He knew his companions could handle whatever menace a sobbing, freaked-out girl with black pigtails might pose.