by James Axler
"People pay to come see this, Mildred?" he asked. "Double-dull."
"Wasn't just like you see now. There'd be noises, movements and stuff, and this'd be only a small part of the place. Probably lots of other rides and entertainment. My father brought me to Magic Mountain when I was only…" The memory was suddenly so strong that she almost choked on it. Tears flooded her eyes, and her voice swallowed into silence. "Popcorn and pinon pine…" she said almost to herself.
Dean had finally reloaded his Smith & Wesson and tucked it into its holster. He left the others and walked a few paces around the next bend, calling back to them.
"Hey, there's a shit-evil snake here. Looks as real as life and has bright colors. Big as a subway tunnel back in the ville."
"Wait for the rest of us," Ryan said.
"Sure, Dad, but it's—"
The sentence stopped dead, as though someone had swung a huge machete and sliced the boy into a fourth dimension.
"Dean! "Ryan called.
"Oh, Gaia! Quick!" Krysty gasped, starting to move.
But the one-eyed man was a clear two yards ahead of anyone. He sprinted around the corner, nearly stumbling into the river, where a part of the bank had subsided. His blaster was cocked and ready.
Ryan came to a sliding halt, holding up his hand to stop the others.
"Wait," he ordered, his voice so harsh and grating that it was hardly recognizable. He bolstered the SIG-Sauer. This wasn't one for a pistol.
Unlike the rhino, the lions and the rest of the creatures, the snake wasn't an electronic android creation of the workshop.
This snake was real.
Its overlapping scales shone with a coppery, iridescent gleam. It was impossible to guess at its true length, as much of it was coiled out of sight, around a massive baobab tree. But there was enough to see that it was a mutated giant.
The head was blunt, like a great chisel, and tapered to the narrow lipless mouth, which was half-open to reveal the scarlet forked tongue. It flicked in and out, tasting the air currents around it, the creature's small reptilian brain interpreting the messages and judging safety or the threat of danger.
The body just behind the head was the thickness of a muscular man's forearm, widening until it was bigger than a weight lifter's chest. And held within the twining coils, his feet a yard from the ground, was Dean Cawdor.
The boy wasn't struggling, realizing the utter futility of trying to pit his puny strength against the monster python. One coil was around his ankles, another about his upper chest, pinning his arms down to his sides. Ryan noticed the .22 blaster lying in the grass, showing that the boy had come close to saving himself.
Dean's face was suffused with blood, eyes protruding with the pressure around his body. His mouth was open and he was trying to call out, but the snake was slowly suffocating him.
The only sound in the clearing was the faint rustling of the reptile's dry skin moving against the branches of the tree, and the venomous hissing of its warning breath.
"Poisonous?" J.B. whispered, answering his own question. "Don't think so."
Doc identified the creature. "Must've escaped from a zoo or park or something," he said quietly. "If's a boa constrictor. South American. Indian. Can't tell. Kills its prey by crushing it. Then it devours it slowly and—"
"Enough, Doc," Ryan said.
The snake's head was weaving hypnotically, backward and forward, close by his son's face, making any attempt at a shot incredibly hazardous.
And to put bullets into its body wasn't likely to kill it outright. The odds were that any wound like that would enrage the mutie reptile and make it tighten its enormous length in a convulsive reaction, instantly squeezing the life from the helpless, dangling boy.
Ryan reached for the taped hilt of his panga, the eighteen-inch butcher's knife with the razored steel blade that ended in a sharp point.
The weapon slid from its sheath in a whisper of sound.
"Lover," Krysty cautioned.
Ryan nodded. "I know."
Dean was dying. The python was tightening its grip with an effortless, indifferent ease, paying its victim no more attention than a man crushing a worm under his heel. Ryan could see that his son was sliding into unconsciousness, head lolling. Blood was trickling from beneath the boy's fingernails.
"Right, you son of a fucking bitch," Ryan grated through clenched teeth, fist tight around the hilt of the long knife.
The snake ignored him, its shovel-shaped head moving from side to side, as though it could hear the distant beat of a different drum. Its eyes looked once at the approaching man, then through him and past him, dismissing him as no sort of menace.
Ryan slapped his left hand against the blade of the panga, making the steel ring, attracting the attention of the snake.
"Come on, come on, come on," he chanted to it, shuffling in closer, pushing one foot forward, keeping his balance, his own eye fixed on the reptile's head.
Ryan waved the panga around his head until the honed metal rang, the filtered sunlight dancing off the steel.
Now he was within less than three good paces of the mutie python.
"Come on, come on…"
The tongue darted out faster and the head swayed more quickly, giving the first clue that the monster was becoming concerned at the possibility of a threat to itself. It seemed for a moment that it had also relaxed its crushing hold on Dean. The lad's face was no longer purple, and his tongue no longer protruded from his swollen lips.
It was difficult to judge the right fraction of a second to strike. The snake was above him, in the foliage, but it was lowering its head, bringing Dean down with it, until the boy's feet actually scraped the wet grass.
Ryan started to move his own head from side to side, copying every sinuous sway of the reptile, slowly at first, then faster and faster.
The tiny eyes were fixed now on his face, the jaws open, the hissing louder. He could taste the python's breath on his skin, warm and sour, like rotted flesh.
It had to be the moment when the head of the mutie snake was far enough away from Dean.
"Now!"
Ryan's reflexes had been whetted by an infinity of firefights.
But the snake was quicker.
Chapter Eighteen
THE ATTACK WAS nearly successful. The edge of the panga nicked the skin at the side of the snake's head, drawing a tiny worm of dark blood. But the reptile was dazzlingly fast. It dodged the singing steel and struck at Ryan's head. If it had been accurate, the power of the blow would probably have killed the man.
But the effort of evading the cutting blow took away part of the effect of the python's counterattack.
Its head struck Ryan a glancing blow on the side of the skull, forcing him to take a couple of staggering steps backward. It made him blink, but he didn't fall, and he didn't drop the panga.
The energy of the thrust took the giant snake farther forward than it had intended, and it dropped a loop of coils onto a lower branch. That, in turn, made it relax its hold on the unconscious boy. Dean slumped on the grass, only one single coil around his chest preventing him from falling free.
The reptile's long head weaved back, eyes turning to look down at its victim. Just for a moment the creature's attention wandered from Ryan.
"No shooting!" he called, forcing his muddled brain into action.
He powered his way in, ducking under the reptile's neck, swinging the panga upward, hacking at the pale, soft skin of the exposed throat.
Cold spots of blood pattered onto his face, nearly blinding him, and he was aware of the piercing hiss of pain and rage from the wounded beast.
"Again!" shouted a voice that he dimly recognized as J.B.'s.
Something hit him on the left shoulder, numbing the muscle, nearly knocking him to the earth. But he kept his balance, hastily wiping his face on his sleeve, clearing away the snake's blood, seeing the black shadow of the head driving toward him for a third time. He managed to half duck, half parry the blow, brin
ging the eighteen-inch blade around and down, putting all of his strength into it.
Ryan felt the edge bite, drawing it through the muscle behind the creature's head. The steel grated on something that he knew must be bone. He tugged it free, dodging away to his left in anticipation of another deadly thrust from the snake.
But it didn't happen.
"You got it! One more time!"
This time the excited voice was Krysty's, urging him on.
He blinked away the sticky mix of blood and sweat from his good eye, seeing that the python was seriously wounded. A dark ichor was flowing from the gaping lips of the wound in its neck.
This time Ryan had leisure to measure his attack, take his time, step in with the cautious shuffle of the great knife fighters. He dodged the swinging head and brought the panga up and around.
And down.
The long skull was severed from the trunk, falling to the dirt with a dull, wet, thudding sound.
There was a second, fainter noise as Dean dropped free, landing at his father's feet, his eyes closed, his face like ivory.
The vast length of the giant snake's body began to thrash and flail among the branches of the baobab. Leaves fell, and part of the main bole of the tree split in half. Blood jetted everywhere, and the air seemed filled with an insensate maelstrom of thunderous noise and movement.
Ryan dropped the blood-slick weapon and scooped up his son, carrying him away to safety on the near side of the clearing.
He stooped and laid him on the grass among the friends. The boy seemed no weight at all, and his arms and legs dangled limply.
"Mildred?" Ryan said questioningly.
"Move away. Probably shock." She knelt and felt for Dean's pulse, nodding. "Steady and firm. He'll be fine."
On the farther edge of the glade the headless trunk of the giant boa constrictor still moved in the tree, but more slowly, the coils gradually sliding off, finishing in an untidy mountain of muscle on the trampled, bloodied turf. It seemed that the bright hues of the scales were already fading, the bronze gleam becoming dulled.
By the time that Dean's eyes twitched open, the dead snake was completely still.
"How do you feel?" Mildred asked, gently wiping his forehead.
"Throat's dry. Chest hurts a lot."
The woman unbuttoned his dark blue shirt and pulled it open, whistling softly at the livid bruises that blotched the white skin around the ribs.
"You can see the actual scale marks on his flesh," she said.
"Broken bones?" Doc asked.
"Can't tell yet. Feel like standing up, Dean? Check you out."
"Might want to be sick," he said, his voice sounding hoarse and strained.
"Let me help you, son," Ryan offered.
"You killed that motherfucking snake?" The boy looked up at his father. "Thanks, Dad."
"Sure. Want a lift?"
"Dad?"
"What?"
A trembly hand beckoned him lower so that the others wouldn't hear.
"Something, Dad."
"Injury?"
"No."
"So, what?"
The boy's pale cheeks flushed. "I think I've pissed my pants."
FATHER AND SON WASHED in the turgid waters of the slow-moving river.
It was good to wash off the stinking blood of the snake and to try to cool off a little, though the water was only a little less warm than body heat.
Dean didn't seem to have suffered too much damage from his ordeal. The bruising would soon begin to turn yellow and fade, and Mildred was certain there were no fractures.
"He'll be stiff and sore for a few days." was her only comment.
The boy found his fingers were tender and his neck hurt when he tried to turn his head too quickly to the left.
He swam easily, but Ryan noticed that the boy was careful not to move any distance from him. The experience had taught him a degree of caution, which was no bad thing to learn when you were moving through Deathlands.
"Best get out and put your clothes on."
They'd both stripped out of their top layers, and the boy had also removed his underclothes, washing them hastily in the river before pulling them on again over his pale loins.
The others were all sitting on a fallen log, talking quietly together, and looked up as father and son rejoined them.
"Mildred and Doc reckon this must've been a sort of park. But there might be other parts to it. Could've been a zoo. It'd explain the giant snake."
Ryan nodded at Krysty's words. "Makes sense. Best be careful. Everyone ready now? Then let's go."
A BRIDGE STRETCHED across the river, with the rusted remnants of an iron chain dangling from it. A rotted sign still carried the message: Please Keep Out. Service Personnel Only.
"Looks like the end of the attraction," Mildred commented.
"There appear to be the poor stranded hulks of some pleasure craft lying over yonder," Doc said, pointing with the silver ferrule of his swordstick. "I imagine they carried the seekers of joy around this strange jungle environ."
The boats had been plastic and looked as if they'd once had some sort of awning over them. It was still possible to see that they had all borne numbers on their blunt bows.
"Can still make out names on them," J.B. said, head on one side as he figured them out. "One called Queen of the South. That's Old Man River."
"Listen," Dean said, his voice squeaking upward in excitement.
"Sounded like a shot," Krysty suggested. "Way off, though."
"Could've been an M-16 carbine." J.B. looked around. "Can't tell distance or direction in thick undergrowth like this."
The path wound on.
Ryan was leading, and he was the first to see the huge fallen tree ahead of them. It had been some kind of ornamental redwood, with a massive girth. By its condition it could easily have toppled over during the brief days of nuke-fall.
The path vanished under it, and it was possible to make out a dense growth of trees and bushes on the far side of the great hulk.
It was an effort to scramble over the tree, and Dean had to be helped on both sides. His sore ribs made any kind of physical exertion difficult, though he resented not being able to cope on his own.
"Could jump this, easy," he said. "Fucking snake did me in a bit. That's all."
Ryan caught a warning glance from Krysty. "Try and keep the swearing down, son. Keep using a word like 'fuck' and after a while it doesn't mean anything. All right?"
"Sure, Dad." He looked at the redhead. "Sorry, Krysty," he added.
The traveling became infinitely harder on the far side of the tree. In among the droids it seemed as if the paths had been kept open by animals. Here there was just unbroken undergrowth.
"Botanist's paradise," Mildred murmured, ducking under some overhanging branches dappled with sweet-smelling pink flowers.
"Walker's purgatory," Doc sneered, raising an arm to prevent himself being slapped in the face by tendrils from a thorny bush.
"Hold it."
Ryan had seen light ahead. The bushes and trees seemed to be growing thinner, and he'd spotted what looked like some sort of wider path. The others stopped and waited in silence. He glanced back and beckoned to Krysty.
"Feel anything, lover?"
She closed her eyes and concentrated. Sweat was beading her forehead, but she ignored it. "Yeah. There's something around here. Confused sort of feeling, but I'm sure of it. People. Lot of them. Muddled signal coming through. Sorry I can't tell you any more than that, lover."
"It'll do." He waved the others to join them, and they all squatted in a closed circle on the damp earth under a gigantic bougainvillea.
"Seems like we're close to civilization. Now, we know that most villes are fairly safe. Outlanders get regarded with suspicion, but we should be okay if we stick together." He looked around. "Or we can go back to the redoubt and try another jump someplace else."
"Anywhere's the same as anywhere, isn't it?" Mildred said.
"By th
e three Kennedys! On the scale of all-time facile remarks, madam, yours would stand remarkably near the top."
She pulled a face at him. "What's that mean, you double-stupe old goat?"
"It means that I have personally encountered a number of 'anywheres' that were profoundly wonderful. I have also inhabited some 'anywheres' that would have made the scuppers of a Victorian slaving ship seem like the gates of heaven."
"Doc's right," J.B. agreed. "But there's only one way to find out, and that's to go take a look. Man can get awful tired of always turning his back on the future."
Mildred laid a hand on his arm. "I'll drink to that, John."
Ryan waited. "So it looks like some votes for going on and breaking some ice. Any objections? No? So we'll move on."
IF THEY WERE SOMEWHERE on the outskirts of a frontier ville, it was one of the trimmest and neatest that Ryan had ever seen.
The wide paths were swept and lined with rectangular stones, each painted a shimmering white. Beds of flowers were set out in geometric patterns, and small streams meandered over delicate pebbles. In the first hundred yards they passed four small fountains. In one a little boy held a conch shell. In another a girl danced with a flower. A third had a prancing horse and the last, a warrior on one knee. All were skillfully sculpted and preserved.
"Some place," Dean said, walking at his father's side.
The slopes were gentle, the surface of the interlinked paths smooth. The banks of flowers rose to high walls of yew hedges that blocked off any distant perspectives.
"Someone's watching us, lover," Krysty informed Ryan in a quiet, conversational voice.
"Yeah. I can feel it, as well. Everyone on alert-red. And keep—"
He was interrupted by a strident, amplified voice roaring from the bushes all around them.
"You outlanders lay down the blasters right now, or you get a bad case of lead-shred. Do it now, people. Now!"
"Do it now," Ryan said.
Chapter Nineteen