Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass

by James Axler

  Chapter Twenty

  “Too bad the smell’s not enough to drown out the stink of these bastards,” Ryan commented.

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll piss them off?” Mildred said.

  “Do they understand speech?” Doc asked.

  “We didn’t think they used rope, either,” Mildred pointed out. “Or tactics.”

  “I don’t care if I piss them off,” Ryan said. “They’re pissing me off.”

  He was mostly mad at his own powerlessness. He wasted not a second on regret, and less feeling guilt at them all being captured so quickly. They hadn’t even had the chance to fall on their swords, so to speak, much less fight to the death. It had been that sudden and complete.

  Despite himself, he was impressed at their surroundings. Turning his head this way and that, he could see the chamber was a good two or three hundred feet across, with big clumps of pillow-like flow rock and thick stalagmites sticking up from a mostly level floor. The ceiling was high enough even the tips of the longest stalactites were lost in the impenetrable shadows beyond the reach of even so many torches.

  But mostly he was impressed by the fact there were hundreds of the unwashed, red-eyed cannies thronging the place. From the midst of the bad-smelling crowd rose a hump of melted-looking stone that had had a sort of seat carved out of the middle of the top of it, and on it sat a single figure who looked, even at this distance, far more human than the rest.

  Their bearers carried them beeline toward the stone throne. The hordes of cannies melted away on either side before them. Looking down past his boots—Ryan was being carried on his back and headfirst—he saw that many of the huge but lesser horde that had swarmed them were spreading out to join the assemblage.

  As they were borne into the avenue of living, death-reeking flesh, the cannies threw their clawed fists into the air and began to chant: “Muh-tha! Muh-tha! Muh-tha!”

  Even the ultra-laconic J.B. was moved to shout, “I thought they couldn’t talk!”

  “They’re just full of surprises,” Ryan called back.

  Still, he thought they were barely a step above animals, and not a long one. But that they had some degree of human intelligence was becoming more and more obvious.

  As, he thought, was the fact they followed direction from some single, greater intelligence. He hung his head back to get a better, if inverted, look at the solitary person on the throne.

  Even with her sitting down, Ryan could tell she was tall, gaunt to the point of emaciation, and though dead pale, and though the hair piled in a swirl atop her head was also white, it wasn’t clear to him that she was an albino. She was definitely old, he thought, as the lines of her narrow, high-cheekboned face came into monocular focus.

  Her eyes, which regarded him steadily, were of a pale color, green or blue or even white. But one thing they surely weren’t was red.

  “Down,” she called in a clear, sharp voice as the captives were carried near her throne. The rock was a good ten feet tall, without steps in the front. Ryan briefly wondered how the nuke she got up in it. “Put them down!”

  The reverential chant died away. Hundreds of cannies went to their knees all around, in a ripple effect that emanated from the smooth rock as if it had just been thrown into a pond. As Ryan was lowered to his feet with precision and gentleness, alike amazing, it occurred to him she could get them to form a human—or cannie—pyramid and climb up them to her seat, if she ordered them to.

  He shook his shaggy, sweaty black hair from his face and stared at her with defiant arrogance. He realized that around her skinny neck she wore a bracelet of strung-together finger bones, adult-human-sized. As a pendant, she wore a small, bizarre skull, with a cranium like a human’s, if lower and longer, but a snout like a baboon’s. He realized it had to have belonged to a coamer infant.

  That’s cold, he thought.

  “You’re not a coamer,” he told her.

  “Ah, but you’re wrong,” she said. “I am Angela McComb. I am, you might say, the coamer. And these—” she spread elegant, spider-leg hands “—are my children!”

  “Mutha!” the cannies cried, surging to their feet as one, each thrusting his or her right fist in the air.

  Do they practice this shit? Ryan wondered.

  “And you,” she said, leaning forward with her hands on skinny thighs covered in a mostly clean white linen gown, “are Ryan Cawdor, and these are your friends.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I know many things,” she said. “I have eyes and ears throughout the region. You have reason to know how stealthy my children can be.”

  “But they scarcely seem capable of forming coherent speech, madam,” Doc said. “Hardly enough to convey even the rudiments of such intelligence—to call it that—as they gather in their reconnaissance. Much less convey our names and descriptions in detail.”

  “It’s true they do not speak frequently, nor well. Much of the power of speech was lost in the…changes that have made them as they are today. As to how I know what I know…” She smiled thinly at him. “You will allow me my secrets, surely, Dr. Theophilus Tanner? Especially since you don’t have any choice.”

  “You don’t talk like most people in the Pennyrile,” Ryan said. “Much less these things.”

  “I am different than they,” she said with a haughty sniff. “I am above them, as befits a queen.”

  That brought out another joint shout of “Mutha!” so out-of-nowhere that it was all Ryan could do to keep himself from jumping in surprise.

  She’s got some means of signaling them, that’s for sure, he thought. Or, more likely, she’s got helpers who do. He suspected the caste system of this bizarre cave society had more layers and complexity than was apparent. On admittedly short observation.

  “So they aren’t actually your children,” Krysty said.

  “Goodness, no,” McComb the Mother said. “Not of body. Figuratively, yes. They are actually birthed by specially chosen breeders in dorm caves below.”

  Ryan frowned. Krysty was usually too sensible to waste what might yet prove to be some of the last of her air yapping about random bits of information with this demented freak, who was somehow all the more freakish for looking so normal, here surrounded by her “children,” with their stooped postures and their fang-filled, doglike muzzles.

  Then he pushed the thought aside. While Krysty had a sentimental streak Ryan mostly lacked, and definitely her own perspective, at base she was no more likely to talk to hear the sound of her own voice than Ryan was. He realized such information did have value—any fact about how these twisted creatures lived, and more to the point kept living, could prove vital to their survival. Potentially.

  “I brought them into being,” McComb the Mother said. “So naturally, I rule them.”

  “How old are you, anyway?” Mildred asked.

  “The knowledge that created my children sustains me,” the queen said. “That is all you need know. More, perhaps.”

  “You didn’t chill us,” Ryan said, before Mildred and Doc could ask the questions he could hear them drawing breath to ask. “Or, you didn’t have your children do it. That means you got plans for us.”

  “Perhaps I mean to have you killed before my eyes to amuse me.”

  “I don’t reckon so.”

  “Your reckoning about me and my people does not have a conspicuous record of success, Mr. Cawdor. Make few assumptions.”

  He felt someone step up beside him. From the scent and sense of presence, he knew it was Krysty.

  “But he’s right,” she said forthrightly.

  McComb the Mother nodded. “I have a task for you.”

  Ryan uttered a grunt that his companions would know to take for a short, wry laugh. “What kind of deal are you offering us?”

  “I need make no deal,” she said, “beyond refraining from killing you as a reward for your success.”

  “But you’ll chill us if we fail!” Ricky piped up.

  The kid’s got
balls, Ryan thought. Unfortunately, they tend to overcome his brain at the worst bastard times. He reassured himself with the knowledge that this crazy cannie queen and her brood had to need him and his companions bad. She’d have to be far crazier than she’d shown so far to have them chilled for saying the wrong thing.

  “If you fail, young Master Morales,” McComb the Mother said, “I shall have no need to punish you at all. Nor indeed the ability to do so, unless you believe in an afterlife. I do not.”

  She sat back up erect in her chair.

  “I believe in what I can see, and hear and touch!” she declared.

  “Mutha!” shouted the naked multitude.

  “I am prepared to offer you a substantial reward for your assistance, however,” she said.

  “What kind and how much, exactly?” Mildred asked.

  “Substantial,” McComb the Mother repeated. “My children bring many treasures down from the surface. Others make their way here in…other ways. Much of that we have little use for. You shall have it—if you do what I demand.”

  “Ace,” Ryan said. “We accept.”

  “But, Ryan—” Mildred began.

  The one-eyed man didn’t so much as glance her way. She was out of his field of view, as it happened, somewhere behind his left shoulder. He merely extended the forefinger of his right hand, whose wrist was tied crossed over his left. Merely a flick.

  Mildred abruptly shut up.

  McComb the Mother nodded. “Of course you do. We sized you up well.”

  “So that’s why your folks kept shadowing us, and occasionally throwing stuff at us,” J.B. said. Ryan knew that wasn’t a rhetorical question.

  “Indeed.”

  “Testing us,” Ryan said.

  She nodded. “You demonstrate the sort of facility for which you have been chosen to serve. And—potentially—to walk out of here alive.”

  “You seem to have spent liberally of your ‘children’s’ lives in these tests,” Doc pointed out.

  “Their lives are short and lived only to serve the community, which means, for all practical purposes, me. Even in all our numbers, we lack the strength to save ourselves from the doom that rapidly overtakes us. You have proved, by the very hurt you inflicted upon our flesh, that you may have the ability to succeed where we have failed.”

  Ryan rubbed his chin.

  “I probably shouldn’t say this, but you got the better of us triple quick there, a little while ago. What makes you think we can do what your people can’t?”

  “You and your people possess not just skills but tools that we lack,” the cannie queen said. “Bluntly, if throwing bodies at the menace could end it, it would have. It didn’t. So here we are.”

  “So that last cann—uh, wave attack was just, like, a final test?” Ricky asked.

  The cannie queen nodded.

  Ricky said no more, which wasn’t exactly characteristic of him. But Ryan heard him make a “whoo” sound through pursed lips.

  “So if we failed—” Mildred said.

  “You would have proved unworthy, and my people would have enjoyed special meats at the ensuing feast.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Ryan said. “So what is it you want killed?”

  McComb the Mother laughed. “You come so easily to the conclusion that is what we require?”

  “I don’t reckon you selected us for our digging and scavvy-trading skills. Those and fighting were pretty much the ones you would’ve seen us display.” Well, not including certain partnered nocturnal activities, on the part of him and Krysty, and Mildred and J.B., but he didn’t want to pursue that line of thought.

  “You’re correct, Ryan Cawdor. As I have told you, we face a terrible menace. Something evil and huge, long forgotten except in our whispered legend, has awakened in the depths far below. It now seeks to come—up.”

  “The Balrog?” Mildred and Ricky asked simultaneously.

  “Nothing so fanciful,” the cannie queen said. “But no less terrifying. Or formidable.”

  “What is it, then?” asked Ryan, who’d read those books, too. The baronial palace in Front Royal where he’d grown up had a well-stocked library and as a baron’s son, Ryan had been taught to read.

  She shook her fine head. The pendants of human finger bones hung from either pierced earlobe tinkled like dull chimes. Somehow Ryan knew they were norm-human bones, not those of coamers.

  “It’s big,” she said. “It digs great tunnels. It eats. It destroys. And it reappeared months ago.

  “Our people have spread far and wide. Not merely down, though we have done that, too. The caves are vastly more extensive than we—than was ever guessed at, even by whitecoats, before the Nuke War. The monster first showed itself miles to the east of here, driving our people before it. Those who survived.”

  She paused for a moment and passed a hand wearily across her eyes. Even by the light of torches, abundant but not bright, Ryan almost thought he could see the bones of her hand through her age-thinned white skin.

  I can almost believe she’s as old as she claims to be, he thought. Sort of.

  “The thing dived deep when it reached our heartland, here in these caves,” she continued. “We are not without defenses, but it is as if it toys with us. It has been working its way up, slowly, slowly, devouring our breeders and devastating our grub farms.”

  “Wait,” Ricky said. “Grub farms? You mean you raise food?”

  “It is not a rare practice, after all. Even in this brutal, desiccated world of today.”

  “But I thought your, uh, children ate people.”

  “Don’t be stupe, son,” J.B. said matter-of-factly. “They can’t very well live off eating each other. And if they hunted humans for their main food, they’d have been at war with the surface years ago.”

  “You are correct, Mr. Dix. The flesh of norm humans is a delicacy among us, you might say. Its taste and texture highly prized. It is a consequence of their creation.”

  Ryan noticed she didn’t say “accidental” or “unintended.”

  “Yet we refrained from foraging aboveground, except on the rarest occasions, until the monster left us no choice. And as for dining on one another, it’s true that tradition calls upon us to return our flesh to the family when we are dead. But we could no more subsist by that than you and Mr. Dix could build a perpetual-motion machine.”

  “So why didn’t you try to recruit the locals, instead of us?” Mildred asked.

  “You made a quick impression upon me. You possessed an air of competence, especially with weapons, the inhabitants of the district do not generally possess. And your weapons are much superior to theirs. You’ve fought them. Would you have faith in them as champions against a monster that’s a force of nature?”

  “They saw us off quick there, last time we ran into them,” Ryan said. “Or, rather, they ran into us.”

  “They prevailed by sheer force of numbers. Surely you did not forget I said what little use mass attacks have already proved against our great enemy? We can bring far greater numbers against it than were assembled against you. And their crude black-powder firearms lack power to do our enemy any great harm.”

  “You judge ours have the power, though,” J.B. said.

  “I have faith in your ability to use them,” the cannie queen said. “And in your resourcefulness. But if those are not enough to defeat our great enemy after all…”

  For the first time her smile widened to show her teeth. They looked surprisingly normal. Except, perhaps by a trick of the light, or even Ryan’s imagination, her eyeteeth—her fangs. These looked as long and unnaturally wicked-sharp as those of her canine-snouted children.

  “Then we’ll know when you fail to return and claim your reward, then, won’t we?”

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “We need action!” the man with the food-stained beard hanging well down the front of his shabby overalls declared. “Somethin’s gotta be done!”

  His crowd of a dozen or so listeners
nodded sagely. “Yeah,” one of them shouted from the rear of the clump. “Somebody’s gotta do somethin’!”

  “But we hunted down like half a dozen collaborators already,” insisted a sturdy middle-aged woman with a greasy bandanna around her mouse-colored cap of curls.

  “And the attacks ain’t stopped yet,” the bearded orator declared. “We need to do something that works.”

  The group had gathered on the fringes of Mathus Conn’s camp, near the excavation site. The sun was low, though it had not yet dropped behind the rise whose crest had fallen in on itself to swallow what was proving to be a still-unexhausted treasure trove of scavvy. Conn halted his small party, returning from a walk near the camp, in the deep shadows gathered in the bushes between a pair of red maples, at the clearing’s edge.

  Potar growled low in his throat. “Henry Harkens,” he said, then spit. “Want me to put a stop to that stupe-talk?”

  “Not yet.” Conn considered briefly. The unsuspecting men nearby continued to gripe about the ongoing cannie attacks—and their own fear.

  “It wasn’t these drifters from over by Sanders Gap we hanged yesterday done it,” said a short, squat man whose features were totally obscured by a floppy hat and bristling facial hair. “No loss, ’cause they was just petty thieves and robbers. But they didn’t have nothin’ to do with all the cannie killin’ and eatin’ people. That’s them coamers, sure.”

  “Wymie says it’s all them outlanders,” a second woman said. “Them and their helpers. And there ain’t no such thing as coamers.”

  “Wymie did a great job of gettin’ us massacred,” someone else said.

  “We’re not doin’ nothin’ now that works,” the woman said. “Chillin’s still goin’ on.”

  “It’s gotta be the coamers,” the hidden-faced man insisted. “What the outlanders said they looked like was right out of the old stories. And they only come out at night—just like the stories.”

  “They are just stories!”

  “They stole the chills straight off the gallows, soon as nobody was lookin’!” a gaunt man said. He looked nervously around as if the fabled cannies might jump out of the bushes at any moment. “It’s gotta be the coamers!”