Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass

by James Axler

  The cannie queen smiled.

  “Why, for the pleasure of doing it, boy. Why else? Haven’t you experienced the joy of making something no one else has, with your own mind and hands? What my spies saw tells me that you do relish that. I’m no different.”

  Glancing over his shoulder, Ryan saw Ricky visibly shivering at the comparison. He wondered, not for the first time, how the inarticulate, bestial coamer soldiers had relayed such detail about his band’s daily activities to their crazy queen. It was one of those mysteries they would never know the answer to.

  “Anything else you would like to know?” she asked.

  “Are we free to go?” Ryan asked.

  She laughed. It was a surprisingly pleasant laugh. He doubted her sense of humor was half as nice as the sound of her laughter.

  “Are you not eager to claim your prize, which you have so richly earned?”

  “What we want most is out of here,” Ryan said. “But sure. Go ahead and tell us what we’ve won.”

  He felt Krysty’s hand slip into his.

  McComb the Mother brought a hand to her chin and tapped a finger against her withered cheek.

  “Let me see. You have performed a heroic service in destroying the great enemy of my children. And—you have also destroyed a great many of my children yourselves. Not least the ones chilled when the lava broke through into our home.”

  She smiled sweetly and snapped her fingers. “I know what I shall give you!” she declared. “I give you—death!”

  “Death!” echoed a thousand cannies with a single voice.

  So they got a two-word vocabulary, Ryan thought. Aren’t they just full of surprises.

  Suddenly Ryan’s Steyr longblaster was in his hands, shouldered and aimed at the cannie queen, likewise with Krysty’s Glock, Mildred’s ZKR 551, Doc’s LeMat replica and Ricky’s trusty DeLisle.

  And just as suddenly, a score of naked white bodies swarmed over the throne rock from behind to wall her off from their blasterfire.

  The cannie queen’s musical laughter rang from behind the phalanx of dangling white dicks.

  “Oh, do twist on the hook!” she exclaimed. “I do love it so! It’s too rare to have a good show down here.”

  “The show hasn’t even begun!” Krysty’s voice rang with challenge.

  “Oh, you mean you can shoot down my human shields? More stand ready to replace them the second they start to fall. And then the others will swarm you. Kill as many of us as you like. My breeders will make more, until we overrun the Pennyrile and the world! And they won’t stop coming until I watch them strip your living flesh from your bones with their teeth!” Then, screaming, “Now, my children! Kill the intruders!”

  Around them Ryan could feel a thousand pale cannie bodies coiling themselves to spring.

  From somewhere rang out a loud, flat bang. The coamers froze in place.

  From both sides of the cavern came arcing, smoking comets. They fell amid the ranks of cannies and immediately began to billow gray smoke.

  “Watch out!” Krysty screamed at the top of her lungs.

  “Poison gas!” Mildred added her voice to the warning cries.

  The response was electric: the coamers began screeching in unmistakable fear. Those near the dense smoke cloud, which was heavier than air and rapidly spreading, fled in all directions as fast as they could. They jostled those in their way, shoving them aside, throwing them to the stone floor, or simply clambering over them in their panic. The panic spread outward from the two smoke fountains as more smoking objects were hurled into the cannibal throng.

  The jostled coamers either starting trying to escape themselves, or turned snarling on their assailants with snapping jaws and slashing nails. Blood flew. Ryan and his people were forgotten in the instantaneous riot.

  Ryan took a shot toward where he had last seen the cannie queen. It struck one of her guards right at the arch where his lean belly met his prominent sternum. That one slumped, his heart blasted apart, an instant chill. He slid down the face of the humped rock. Another fell wheezing and kicking, lung-shot by the blow through. It rolled down the stone after the first one with pink froth welling from his nostrils and bloody slobber drooling from his mouth. All Ryan saw of Mother McComb was a swirl of the skirts of her elegant gown as some of her better-focused bodyguards bundled her to safety down the throne rock’s far side.

  She had clearly lied about what would happen if the companions opened fire, which came as no surprise. For a flash Ryan wondered again if there was at least a third, somewhat more intellectually capable caste of coamer.

  He was already turning and slinging his longblaster. Doc fired his under-barrel shotgun into the mob between them and the passageway by which they’d originally been carried by their captors—the way back to the surface, and freedom—if freedom was what lay waiting for them back at their former dig site, and not another form of death…

  Pallid bodies cringed from the flame and blast of the LeMat’s shotgun blast. A fusillade of lead balls lanced into them, bringing red flowers into bloom on white skins.

  Ryan charged in among them, swinging his panga diagonally. It bit through a white shoulder and flung the owner, arm flapping loosely, into several of the others. As Ryan waded forward, clearing coamers from his path as he might dense bush, Ricky joined him on his right, using his stoutly built DeLisle carbine as a riot baton. He levered cannies from the path with barrel jabs, staving in ribs and faces with savage strokes of the steel-shod butt, crushing larynxes with two-handed thrusts of the weapon held horizontally before him.

  Behind Ryan’s left shoulder came Doc, the slim steel blade of his rapier darting like a rattlesnake’s tongue to elicit shrieks and sprays of blood. His other hand fended off clawed cannie hands with the sheath.

  They had unearthed a store of short-handled, Swiss-made entrenching tools in the sunken buildings. Following the men, Krysty and Mildred each held one of the tools, spade blades honed sharp. The women swung them one-handed in vicious arcs. They did almost as much damage as Ryan’s broad-bladed panga to cannie limbs and faces.

  Still, the exit they were running for seemed impossibly far away, across a sea of churning, screeching, snapping bodies. Smoke erupted in their path. Coamers flew away from it like panicked birds. Whether they had understood Krysty and Mildred’s cries of “gas!”—whether they even knew what poison gas was—they instinctively feared the thick, choking smoke that blossomed among them and quickly spread.

  The smoke-spewing comets were just smoke bombs homemade by J.B. and Ricky, using the same black powder the locals burned in their blasters. They were basically harmless, but they stung eyes and throats and were as alien as opera down here in the torch-lit depths of the royal cave.

  As fear-ignited confusion spread through the cannies, short full-auto bursts of 9 mm slugs sleeted through coamer bodies. Thunderous shots from a .357 Magnum blaster blew out chunks of flesh and bone and fans of blood when they struck.

  The black powder in J.B.’s bombs put out a prodigious quantity of smoke in a dazzlingly short amount of time—it was how black powder weapons worked, the explosive release of the smoke being enough to propel bullets. And the heavy smoke stayed low.

  The coamers did not know how to deal with it—such profane intrusion into the holy sanctum of their queen. For all their usual savage ferocity, they broke and fled from the advancing party.

  “Took your time,” J.B. said laconically as his companions joined him, almost overwhelmed from exertion and smoke exhalation. Across the cave mouth from him Jak stood grinning and looking highly pleased with himself as he twisted a speed-loader off the six fresh cartridges he’d stuck into his Python and snapped the cylinder shut.

  “Enjoying the view,” Ryan said.

  From behind them rose a chilling howl of rage. They looked back as it echoed throughout the enormous cavern.

  It was the cannie queen, rallying her people to vengeance. She stood surrounded and shielded by her bodyguards, off past the boulder
throne. Heartened by her unswaying courage, many of the coamers were evidently finding their terror turning to anger. White bodies were congregating around their monarch as if drawn by a powerful magnet.

  “The blackguards will be after us in no time,” Doc gasped. He had sheathed his sword, stuck his cane through his belt, and now stood bent over with hands on his knees, sucking air. Higher than most of the cave floor as the portal was, the air here was clearer than below, and it was better-smelling even before the charcoal-sulfur-saltpeter mix in the bombs had started cooking off.

  Ryan’s eye narrowed. “I could take the shot,” he said.

  “But why bother?” J.B. asked. “I’ve got us covered.”

  “After them!” they heard the shrill, thin voice of Mother McComb scream, the words throbbing with hate. “We shall devour them by inches, my children!”

  The mob surged forward like a wave, baying. Cannies who had scrambled to get out of the invaders’ way now snarled and turned back to the attack.

  J.B. drove home the plunger of his handheld detonator. The impulse traveled along the last of their high-speed fuse at twenty thousand feet per second.

  At the apex of the royal chamber, the ceiling was punched in as if by a giant hand. Hundreds of tons of rock tumbled down in an inverted funnel of dust. The coamers froze in place, staring upward with their queen at the doom descending on them.

  Dust obscured the scene as the almost unitary crack of the last of their plas-ex charges reached their ears from the cavern directly above the throne room. The time the party had spent dodging coamer patrols to reconnoiter the area had paid off with a jackpot.

  The cannies had gotten complacent, over the decades alone and dominant down there. The only real threat they’d known was their old nemesis, the Digging Leviathan, returned for reasons known only to itself to wage war from below upon them. But it never occurred to them that there in the very heart of their nation they might face a threat from a surface world that didn’t even acknowledge their existence except in whispered, half-believed horror stories, even though the royal cavern did not lie that far from the surface itself.

  The rumble of a huge chunk of ceiling falling in on the cannie queen and her brood went on and on.

  J.B. stuck out his chin and nodded. “I didn’t think the C-4’d be that effective,” he admitted.

  “You did well, John,” Mildred said.

  “Yeah, well, there’s still a horde of the red-eyed bastards in these caverns,” Ryan said, his voice roughened by the smoke that had been their salvation. “And they’re all going to be lusting after our blood in short order.

  “You can gloat on the move.”

  * * *

  KRYSTY WAS LOST, but Jak, carrying a lantern burning the last of their turpentine oil, was confident he was leading the way toward freedom. And in fact Krysty did summon vague memories suggesting this might be the route by which their cannie captors first carried them to meet their queen.

  “So she was really over a century old,” Ricky said wonderingly. “She was well preserved.”

  “Just because she knew some of the same stuff we got out of your book,” Ryan said, “that still doesn’t prove she was the Angela McComb.”

  “But she said—” Ricky protested.

  “Crazy people say crazy things.”

  “If she had kept her end of the deal, would you have dropped the ceiling on her?” Ricky asked.

  “We’d have no reason to,” Krysty said.

  Ryan glanced at J.B. “There never was a chance that McComb, whichever one she was, was aiming to keep her end.”

  “But why did you make the deal, then?”

  J.B. chuckled. “Got us our weapons and gear back. Plus freedom of movement.”

  “She never did have eyes on us tight as she claimed,” Ryan said. “If she had, she’d have known Jak and J.B. were still among the living—and they’d never been able to plant the charges above her throne.”

  “But there was no way we could just walk out, either,” Krysty said. “And speaking of which—”

  From below the sounds of wrath came echoing after them: howls, screams, chitterings of rage. Ryan had been right, Krysty knew. Regardless of their queen’s fate, the majority of the cannie nation survived the fall of the cavern’s ceiling. And now they were coming, fast.

  “Better mosey,” J.B. suggested.

  “What’s waiting for us up above?” Ricky asked.

  “Nothing good,” Mildred said.

  “But better than what’s coming,” Ryan stated dryly.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Conn! Conn! Conn!”

  Tonight is the night I achieve my destiny, Mathus Conn thought as his army chanted his name.

  Standing on a dais made of log pilings hammered into the ground, with a platform of split logs to top it, he raised his hands with palms beneficently opened toward the throng.

  “Conn! Conn! Conn!”

  All of his life, he now realized, with the waves of sound beating on cheeks flushed with adulation of the multitude, had been leading up to this. It had been preamble. The decades spent working his way from the bottom of the gaudy trade to its top: preparation. He knew what motivated men. He knew their hearts—they’d spilled them to him across his own countertop for years, after all.

  “Conn! Conn! Conn!”

  And what did it matter that the chant had first been raised and was being led by Potar’s bully-boys, dotted among the crowd? And that many of those who had first taken it up with the shills had done so for fear of getting a sound beating, or worse, if they did not? The chanting was infectious. More and more of those who hadn’t been chanting were caught up as it went along, and joined their voices to the rest. And those who were chanting found themselves swept up by their own emotions, and carried forward—

  Toward the man on the platform and his destiny, which now was theirs.

  It didn’t matter at all whether the enthusiasm he saw growing on so many faces by the light of pine-splint torches had started out authentic or not. When the stories were written of this night—or if no one read anymore, then the songs that were sung by campfires, the tales passed on by wrinklie grandparents to their rapt descendants—all that would be remembered was the passion and the acclamation that had greeted the launch of Mathus Conn’s campaign of conquest.

  He reached down, picked up a funnel-shaped megaphone made out of papier-mâché and held it to his mouth.

  “My friends,” he said.

  The chant continued. Forcing himself to smile through his agony of impatience, he raised both hands and made tamping-down gestures with his palm and the megaphone.

  The crowd began to pipe down on command. A few overenthusiastic types tried to continue on their own. Conn saw knots of brief convulsive activity dotted here and there throughout the mob as Potar’s sec men beat down the ones who wouldn’t take a hint fast enough.

  “My friends,” he began again, and this time his words prevailed. “Tonight I announce the beginnin’ of our real campaign of vengeance for the blood of our murdered loved ones—the war against the traitors of Maccum Corners, who sell us out to the cannie coldhearts and have refused to join our cause!”

  A moment of silence followed the announcement. The upturned, fire-tinted orange faces went blank.

  From somewhere in the middle of the army a voice was raised. “But they ain’t done nothin’ to us! The cannies are chillin’ us right here! This is where we signed up to fight! This is—”

  His words ended in a flurry of club blows delivered from behind by a flying squad of sec men, cutting through the crowd like a wolf pack through sheep.

  “Their hands are red with the blood of our friends, our children!” Conn cried, as a limp, bloody figure was hoisted off the ground by wrists and ankles and bundled off into the night. “They help those who chill us. So what shall we do to them?”

  He paused, pretending to listen. From the front row of the mob Potar Baggart bellowed like a buffal
o bull, “Chill them!”

  A dozen of his goons, well-briefed, instantly picked up the new chant: “Chill them! Chill them!”

  Conn turned his head to one side, held his hand to cup his ear, miming as if he couldn’t hear.

  And hundreds of voices began to roar at him.

  “Chill them! Chill them! Chill them!”

  * * *

  “NOT WHAT I signed up for,” Frank Ramakrishnan heard one laborer mutter to his companions as they dug at dirt piled up in the bottom end of the small-frame annex. “Signed up to fight the cannies that’re chillin’ us, not this shit. Not to grub around in this stuffy old hole in the ground looking for loot to make Conn richer!”

  “I know,” another man said. His eyes shifted nervously left and right in a ratlike face. “My wife needs me. My kids. I—”

  As if casually, the cloth-maker looked around. His team of two sec men were standing just outside the door of the wildly canted room, talking to one of their comrades who had come in on some pretext.

  “Hey, boys,” he called to them, “why don’t you head topside for a breath of air, a quick smoke break.”

  One frowned. “You know we can’t do that, Mr. R. Potar told us to stick right by you. These bastards would hit you over the head and light out for the hills, soon as look at you.”

  Frank looked at the half-dozen workers, who were stripped to the waist. Their bodies glistened with sweat and dirt streaks in the lamplight.

  “You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

  “No, sir!” they answered fervently.

  The second member of Frank’s detail grabbed his partner’s sleeve. “Come on, Quint. Don’t be a dickwad.”

  Quint shrugged. The three picked their way back up to the humid but fresher nighttime air.

  “Now, listen up,” Frank told the conscript workers. “You can’t let a sec man overhear that kind of talk, or Potar will make an example of you. Am I clear? Be careful.”

  Their shadowed faces went ashy under their coatings of grime.