Dark Carnival

by James Axler

  "Get on with it."

  "Just… can't help it, Ryan." The voice was breaking like a rotted branch.

  "Sure."

  "Doc. Taking dreem. Girls and boys." The huge head trembled from side to side, and tears coursed over the vast furrows of the cheeks. "And Kelly. Poor Kelly."

  Ryan leaned closer. "What about him?"

  "Who?"

  He nearly slapped the baron across the face. "Kelly. What's wrong with him?"

  Zapp sighed like a beached whale at tide turn. "Couldn't help it. Traven asks and Traven gets. That's new rules. Kelly tried to—"

  He stopped as the slight, mincing figure of Adam Traven danced into view.

  "Not gone yet, Ryan?"

  "No. Going now."

  "I heard the name of Kelly. You and your friends can come to see it. Noon. Paraglide Paradise. A high riser, Kelly."

  Ryan turned and walked toward the elevators, following by the doomed whisper of Boss Larry Zapp. "Couldn't help it, Ryan. Sorry."

  BACK IN THE MOTEL ROOM there was little discussion. "But don't you think that Traven is planning to kill you, Ryan?" Mildred asked, the most innocent of the four.

  "Sure he is. Then he'll take out the rest of you. No doubt."

  "Why not attack and rescue Doc, then make a jump down to New Mexico and join Jak and his wife? Is it very difficult?"

  Ryan was sitting on the edge of the bed, tapping his toes on the floor. "Difficult? Traven's got most of the sec men on his side. Well armed and trained. And he's holding Doc up on top of the tower."

  "Thought Kelly might be planning something," J.B. said.

  "Sounds like he got caught with his dick in the door," Ryan replied. "We have to go to Paraglide Paradise at noon."

  " Why?" Krysty asked.

  "Find out when we get there. But it isn't going to be good."

  Mildred persisted. "How is going with Traven and his gang going to be a better chance?"

  Ryan shrugged. "Who knows? Get outside, and you can do some damage with people who aren't trained in night combat. Close combat with blades. I don't know, Mildred, and that's the damned truth."

  TEN MINUTES BEFORE NOON they heard the now-familiar sound of combat boots in the corridor and a fist rapping on the door of the room. Mildred and J.B. had retired to their own suite for an hour or so, but now they were all back together.

  Ryan had also tried the radio again, picking up nothing but a confused mumble of hissing and crackling. For a half second he thought he heard a voice, but so far away and faint that it was worse than useless to them.

  It was Rainbow again.

  "Show time," she said.

  But there was a difference. They were "asked" by the chubby girl to leave all their blasters behind in the room.

  The paths of the ville were busier than they'd ever seen them. Some of the sec men seemed particularly edgy, with holsters open and hands playing with the butts of their Colts.

  Rainbow strutted alongside Ryan, thumbs hooked into a wide snakeskin belt. "Going to see the reward for loyal service," she said.

  Ryan ignored her.

  He'd already noticed the young woman's eyes. Her pupils were dilated like those of a hunting cat, linked to a fast blink-rate. Sure signs of heavy drug use. The fact that Traven kept his posse doped out of their vacuous skulls was one of the few things that Ryan felt might give him a chance during the proposed dark snaking.

  The winding walkways opened up into the area around Paraglide Paradise.

  "Oh, Gaia!" Krysty breathed, half turning her head away.

  Rainbow heard her and grinned delightedly. "More to come, Copperhead."

  Ryan stared impassively at the scene of butchery, knowing that nothing he could do or say would make the least difference to what had happened.

  Or to what was about to happen.

  There were four bodies.

  Maybe five.

  Or only three.

  One lay at a little distance from the others, presumably having fallen at a slightly different angle or velocity.

  The others had landed more of less on top of one another, a jumble of dislocated and tangled arms and legs, skulls buried in chests and pelvises embracing ankles. Blood had drained away down the slope of the path, soaking into the edge of a large flower bed.

  The bodies seemed to be all male, and from what remained of their clothes, had probably been sec men.

  "Kelly?" Mildred whispered.

  "Can't be sure. I figure—" Ryan stopped as the woman's question was answered.

  The sturdy figure of the noncom, four silver stripes glistening on his left arm, appeared through the small silent crowd. He was bareheaded and had obviously been given a bad beating.

  Both eyes were swollen nearly shut, hidden beneath purple bruises, capped with crusted blood. His nose had been broken, and there was more black blood around his cut lips. He walked with a limp, his wrists cuffed behind him.

  Rainbow clapped her hands excitedly. "I missed the others," she complained to Ryan. "Least I'll see Kelly flying."

  J.B. caught Ryan's eye and allowed his hand to stray significantly toward the hilt of his own Tekna knife. But Ryan shook his head.

  "No point," he said quietly.

  Kelly, walking unsteadily between two young sec men, had nearly reached them.

  It was obvious that he was almost blind, but he paused as he passed Ryan, looking up. Head on one side, he tried to peer out through the curtains of puffy flesh.

  "Be seeing you," he mumbled past broken teeth.

  Ryan nodded, biting his own lip to contain his raging anger. "Yeah." He dropped his voice so that only Kelly could hear him. "Be sending some of them after you."

  The noncom almost succeeded in a grin. Then his keepers pulled him away into one of the metal cages beneath the flamboyant parachutes. The three men climbed in and, at a signal, began to ascend slowly into the air.

  "I want to go back to the Gator Motel," Mildred said.

  Rainbow looked at her. "Take more than one little itsy-bitsy, tenny-weeny steplet, bitch, and you get to flap your arms up there. With Kelly. You read my lips?"

  Mildred narrowed her eyes, and J.B. laid a hand on her arm, restraining her. "It's fine, John," she said quietly. "Wouldn't foul my hands with…"

  Ryan was looking to the side, at the top of the Centerpoint Tower. There was a balcony around the revolving outer wall, and he could see several figures standing there. The sunlight danced off what he guessed must be the mirrored jacket of Traven. A huge shapeless mass stood between two smaller figures.

  "Looks like Traven's dragged Boss Larry out to watch his handiwork," he said to Krysty.

  She glanced around. "Yeah. No sign of Doc up there."

  "Keep him snug inside."

  "His head still together?"

  Ryan nodded. "Far as I could tell. Don't think they've tried him out with any dreem yet. If they did…" He allowed the sentence to drift away on the rising westerly with its scent of the swamps.

  The faint shrilling of the moving wires ceased, and the cage, now a tiny speck above them, hung motionless in space. Ryan turned and saw Traven raise a puppetlike arm and drop it smartly.

  Mildred looked down at her feet; Krysty closed her eyes; J.B. was staring fixedly at the blasters in the guards' holsters.

  Ryan watched the execution from beginning to end, wanting to remember it so that he could recall it when the time came to try to settle up the account books with Adam Traven and his posse.

  The two sec men were struggling to lift up Kelly, ready to drop him over the side. But he wasn't making things easy for them.

  The cage was rocking, the supporting wires jangling against each other. Even from the ground, the waiting crowd could hear shouts and cursing.

  "They got him now!" someone bellowed.

  "Drop the bastard!"

  Ryan had never met a popular sec man, and Kelly obviously wasn't any exception.

  It looked as if the end were a second away. But the bound man kicked out
and fell inside the cage, bringing one of his guards down with him. Someone cheered, but others started to boo and hiss.

  "Go for it," J.B. mouthed, joining Ryan in watching the aerial conflict.

  But with his hands cuffed, and one against two, Kelly couldn't hope to hang on for very long.

  Moments later they again lifted him. One locked his arms around the helpless man, going on tiptoe to lift him. The other seized Kelly's shoulders and bent him back.

  Back and over.

  "Yaaaaay!" screamed an elderly man to Ryan's right, waving a beret in the air.

  "Taken one with him," J.B. said.

  The cage, swaying from side to side, held only one figure. Kelly had managed, at the final moment of beginning his deathly fall, to lock his legs around the waist of the smaller sec man, his own weight and momentum taking him over the safety rail.

  There was a single scream. The dual figure became two as Kelly released his grip. It seemed as if the wailing man were trying to run on air, legs pumping, arms working.

  Kelly dropped like a stone, motionless, his body tipping so that it eventually landed headfirst, about ten feet away from the sec man.

  The sounds of the twin impacts were almost simultaneous, an odd mixture of the dry and the wet, the brittle snap of bones cracking and the soggy thump of impacting flesh.

  Both men died instantly.

  There had been a yell of delight from the spectators, turning into an "ooooh" of surprise.

  "God rest his soul," Mildred whispered.

  "Could be worse ways to go," J.B. said, putting his arm comfortingly around her. "It was fast, and he took an enemy with him. Could be worse."

  RAINBOW HAD BEEN so eager to gloat over the pulped remains that Ryan and the others were allowed to make their own way back with only a pair of sec men for company.

  They left them at the entrance to the motel. "Don't forget you got to go with the posse tonight," one of them reminded.

  "Yeah. They said it'd be at midnight. Wear dark clothes."

  The guards went off together, laughing at a shared joke.

  "Midnight," J.B. echoed. "Dark clothes."

  "I know." Ryan looked across to Centerpoint, where the circular balcony now stood empty. "I know."

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  "GETTING TIRED OF farewells."

  J.B. and Mildred had gone back to their own room, promising to come back before midnight to wish Ryan luck.

  At first it had seemed as though Ryan and Krysty were going to make love, lying together in the bed, naked, embracing. But somehow the lust slipped away almost unnoticed, and what remained was love.

  They held each other close, arms tight, snug as spoons in a drawer.

  "We aren't apart for long," he protested.

  "It isn't that, lover."

  "Then what?"

  "It's being separated and the constant fear that I'll never see you again."

  "I always come back safe."

  "Apart from the occasional knife or bullet wound. And the day'll come when you don't. When I sit and wait and keep looking at the door."

  "It's the way it is."

  Krysty pulled away from him, shuffling to the far side of the bed, leaving a huge aching gulf between them.

  "That's such shit!"

  "Krysty, I just—"

  "There's that ice-hearted little bastard himself. Half a dozen of his posse crazies. Maybe some sec men along, as well."

  "I don't reckon—"

  "All right," she said, her voice tight with her anger, "mebbe there'll only be the seven of them, all with blasters. And you with your panga. Good odds, lover. Real good odds!"

  "Seen worse."

  Krysty sat up, the sheets failing away from her body. "You're like a little boy, Ryan. There's times I think Dean's got more sense than you. We could've gotten out of this ville, clean and away. But you wait. Wait until time slides by, and then it's too late."

  "Can't leave Doc," he said, aware of the rightness of her anger and the weakness of his own moral position against it.

  "Doc would've been dead a dozen times in the last couple of years if it hadn't been for you. We both know that. But there are plenty of those times that he needn't ever have been in danger in the first place."

  "Yeah, I know that."

  Krysty caught the note of apology. "I know you do. But this can't go on forever. Maybe tonight'll be the time you don't win through. Maybe tomorrow. Next week. Next month."

  "Maybe never."

  She slid back toward him. "You know that isn't true, lover. Because one day… one day it will happen to you. And then what do I do? I'm lost if you die, Ryan."

  "We'll find a place. Like Jak has."

  "Sure. I've seen it. You told me. Clean water and good earth. Fresh food and as near peace as you can find in Deathlands."

  "Want me to tell you again?"

  "Yeah. And hold me, lover."

  Once again they cuddled close, and Ryan began to talk in a quiet, even voice about the spread in New Mexico, painting a picture for her of the beauty and serenity of the land.

  After a few minutes he was aware of her breathing becoming slower and steady. He stopped talking and quickly joined Krysty in sleep.

  RYAN HAD THE ABILITY to bring himself awake whenever he wanted to. He didn't even need to glance down at his wrist chron to check that the time was within a couple of minutes of midnight.

  He rolled out of bed and silently got dressed, checking that both the panga and the slim-bladed flensing knife were in their respective sheaths. During the evening they'd discussed the possibility of trying to conceal a blaster, but all of their guns were too large to use as a hideaway.

  He glanced over at the bed, where Krysty seemed to be fast asleep.

  Rather than wait to be summoned, he decided that he'd go out of the motel and walk to Centerpoint. They'd already found that Traven had placed sec men at the front and back of the building.

  He took the pocket radio out of his coat and put it in a drawer. The faint noise woke Krysty.

  "I'll come outside with you," she said.

  "Sure?"

  "Yeah. Only take me a minute to get dressed."

  They went out of the room together.

  Ryan hadn't noticed that he'd set the radio control onto Receive.

  In the confines of the closet drawer, it suddenly came to tinny life.

  "Jak calling Ryan Cawdor. Come in, Ryan. Jak calling Ryan. Urgent…repeat, urgent. Come in, Ryan. Are you there? Come in, Ryan."

  After three or four minutes the radio fell silent again.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  RYAN WAS SLIGHTLY surprised to find that there were no sec men accompanying them on their expedition to the Zapp's Rainbow's End Retirement Complex. Then he guessed that this was probably because Adam Traven didn't want any outside witnesses around to what was going to happen.

  One of the young men searched Ryan, hands probing into the small of his back, under his arms and into his groin.

  "Clean, Traven," he said. "One big knife and one small one."

  The leader of the posse had changed his clothes. Now he wore black pants tucked into knee-high black boots with some kind of ribbed rubber sole. A black T-shirt with a Mex-looking picture on it of white skeletons. Over that he now had a jacket of midnight blue suede, fringed at the elbows and wrists. Small pieces of dark glass were sewn all over it, but they didn't reflect any of the moonlight that filled the ville.

  On his head Adam Traven wore a black beret, pulled down over his right ear at a rakish angle. The pearl-handled Beretta was on his right hip, and a long bayonet on the left. Ryan had never seen a knife quite like it. It was much longer than the usual M-16 bayonet, and it had a silver swastika pattern on the ornate hilt.

  His girls and boys were all decked out in the colors of darkness—five young women, three in tight black jeans, and the other pair in short black skirts, all five in boots similar to those of their leader. They all had on black sweaters and either berets or, in
a couple of cases, dark maroon ski masks with embroidered eye holes.

  Both men were dressed more like Traven, but without the flashy jacket. They had on long-sleeved black sweaters instead.

  Apart from Traven's Beretta, the rest of the group of devoted apostles all carried the sec man's weapon, the Government Model, 8-shot Colt .45.

  And each was wearing a knife, but not just any battered old hunting blade with a taped-up hilt.

  They were top-quality weapons with graphite-titanium blades and finger-molded permagrips. All matching, like the blasters, all with their own scabbards.

  "How good of you to come and join us on our dark snaking," Traven said.

  "Cut the crap. Let's get on with it. Sooner we start, the sooner it's over."

  "The sooner it's over," the little man echoed. "How very true. In so many ways, for so many, it really is nearly over."

  Ryan ignored him. He stood quietly, drawing in deep breaths of the night air, relishing the coolness after the oppressive, damp heat of the Florida days.

  "We going?" asked one of the girls in the masks. From the build Ryan suspected that it might be the one called Rainbow.

  "Of course. Ryan, I do believe that I've forgotten to introduce you to all of our group. Wouldn't you like to know the names of your companions?"

  For a moment Ryan remembered a stone-faced trading man he'd met about fifteen years ago, somewhere down near the border country on the Grandee. He'd had a dappled pony and someone off War Wag One had asked him what it was called. He'd replied that he didn't want to know the name of something he'd probably have to chill one day.

  "Don't want to know their names," he said.

  "No?"

  "No."

  "HOW FAR?" Ryan asked.

  Traven was in the lead and he turned around. "Not far, Cawdor. The wrinklies' heaven has to be close to protection."

  "Need protection," said one of the two men, his teeth showing white in the gloom as he grinned at his own joke.

  Minutes later they reached the complex.

  It was a compound of about fifty small, single-story homes—mostly painted white—which was surrounded by a high wall, topped with razored sec wire.