by James Axler
Guard towers loomed over each corner, but all showed signs of serious decay. Ladders were rusted, and one of the structures tilted ominously to the left.
Ryan also spotted the broken remnants of what had once been searchlight towers.
"Why'd they set this place up like a high-sec prison?" he asked.
Traven again halted their small procession. "Because that's what it once was. Florida was one of the great carnage capitals, and they built several small units like this for killers nearing the ends of their sentences. Boss Zapp happened along and saw the chances to bring in some serious jack. Collected the oldies and got them to pay long and well for his protection. Most are double-rich."
"How?"
"Whores, drugs and blasters. How does anyone get rich in Deathlands, Cawdor? What a real stupe question!"
A large sign was posted about fifty yards ahead of them, near a brightly lit guards' hut, and it read Zapp's Rainbow's End Retirement Complex.
From where they were standing, it was possible to see a couple of uniformed sec men sitting together, playing cards.
"You going to chill them?"
Rainbow giggled. "No need, outlander. We got better ways, don't we, Adam?"
"We do, little peach." He pointed to the right then hesitated, turning back to confront Ryan. "Just before we go in and start the dark snaking, remember that Doc dies quicker than a moth in a candle flame if you try and play clever."
"Sure."
THE GROUND WAS WETTER as they looped around to the west of the complex, the undergrowth thicker. A gnarled mangrove rose alongside the wall, with some of its branches crawling across the top of the weathered masonry. As soon as Ryan spotted it, he knew that this had to be the easy way into the compound.
The posse crept up and over with a practiced ease, Ryan going in at number four. The tree was slippery with moss, and he nearly fell.
On the far side they were in a surprisingly neat garden, with trimmed lawns and ornamental flower beds. A stone-rimmed pond was just to their left, and Ryan could see the water rippling as fish came to the surface.
The houses were on the farther side, presenting blank walls, with not a single light showing in any of the windows.
"Which one?" a young man whispered.
"One we've been saving," Traven replied, "for this special visit."
Ryan caught his eye. "Why do you do this, Traven? The chilling and the stealing? Or just to prove you can do it?"
"Reasons are for little people, Cawdor. Not for me."
At a wave of the hand from Traven, they all ran silently across the damp turf, flattening themselves against the nearest home.
Beyond the old folks' compound the first of the great swamps began, primeval wastelands that ran almost clear to the ocean on the other side of the Florida peninsula. Ryan could taste the salt and the ooze.
Traven was breathing faster, and his voice was a notch higher with excitement. "Everyone ready to go dark snaking?"
He was answered by a chorus of whispered agreement.
The little man turned to Ryan. "This is what we do, and this is the funning part. We go in one by one. Break a window and slip the latch. Tour around the place, creeping and crawling. Real quiet."
"Yeah, real quiet," someone echoed, giggling.
"What about the folks inside the house? You know who they are?"
Traven nodded, moving so close to Ryan that he could smell the feral hunting scent.
"Sure. Old couple who collect weapons. Got some real nice knives, they say. Got a couple of sons staying with them. One's around seventeen. Other a year older. Sleep at the back. Wrinklies sleep that room." He pointed to the far side of the door.
"What happens to them?" Ryan waited a moment, then answered his own question. "You chill them?" Another pause. "Yeah, you chill them."
"If the gods of chaos hadn't wanted them turned into bacon, he wouldn't have made them pigs," Traven replied.
"We going in or talking all night?" asked the taller of the young men.
"Going in. Check the windows and report back."
One of the boys went to the left, the other to the right. Ryan passed the time by trying to size up the young women, deciding which he'd try to kill first.
THEY WERE GOOD AT IT. One had brought some sticky tape, which she crisscrossed over the glass. Another rapped it once with the butt of the Colt, creating a crack. A third pulled the tape away, bringing the splinters of glass with it.
The room beyond gaped at them, as dark and silent as a tomb.
Traven did a little capering dance, clicking his heels together. "Dark snaking time, boys and girls."
Chapter Thirty-Nine
RYAN NOTICED THAT Traven was so sure of his power that he didn't even bother to post anyone outside on watch.
Once they were all inside, the tension and excitement was heightened. He could hear everyone breathing faster, and all the blasters were drawn. The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke and the remains of a fried meal.
Traven held up three fingers and pointed to the left, then repeated the gesture toward the right, which left himself and one girl with Ryan in the living room.
"Sit down." Traven pointed with the glittering muzzle of his Beretta to a long sofa visible in the filtered moonlight that broke into the room.
Ryan did as he was told, leaning back against the floral cushions, looking calm and relaxed, though every fighting nerve in his body was honed and ready. The chilling would start any moment now. His assumption was that Traven had brought him along for his own perverted reasons, and that should mean keeping him alive until close to the end of the dark snaking.
But with a crazy like Traven, nothing was certain.
Nothing.
Minutes drifted by.
Traven juggled his pistol, smiling to himself, occasionally humming a tune. He caught Ryan looking at him. "Wondering what's happening? Sure you are. This is real dark snaking. You move around in the blackness. Go in their rooms. Sniff the soap. Pick up their discarded clothes. Maybe try them on. Brush your hair in their mirror. Wave to them, all sleeping tender like babies. That's what they're doing now." There was a faint sound from the room to the right. "Ah, looks like our hosts are waking up."
Traven moved to the wall and switched on the lights.
The room was smaller and tattier than Ryan had supposed, with furniture that looked as if it mostly dated from before sky-dark. The two chairs were of similar design to the sofa, but one was in green vinyl, the other in blue velvet, patched and torn. One of the low tables had only three legs and was propped up on a couple of red bricks. There was a TV-vid, probably wired into the ville's output.
In a couple of cases on the far wall were a number of edged weapons. Ryan started to look at them, but his attention was distracted by a burst of noise from deeper in the building.
A man had raised his voice, questioning. Then came the thud of a blow and a different voice, louder and angry, followed by a woman's scream, which was cut off as abruptly as if someone had clamped a gloved fist over her mouth.
Traven laughed quietly.
Ryan stood, aware of the muzzle of the Beretta moving to keep him covered.
The posse came back in, hauling four people.
"Let me introduce you to Leo Johnson, his wife, Laura, and his sons, Jerry and Benjamin."
For the first time Ryan realized that the young men and women had all been carrying sec cuffs, locking plas-strips that snapped shut around the wrists of their victims.
The family was pushed down onto the sofa.
"Please don't hurt us," the old man moaned. He was wearing a T-shirt and loose pants, his white hair ruffled. There was a deep gash across his scalp that was leaking a trickle of blood.
"Don't beg the sick swampies. You know it don't do no good." Laura was in a long cotton robe, with bare feet and bony ankles showing beneath it. Her face was flushed with anger, and her lip was bleeding. She had no teeth.
One of the sons had been clubbed and was s
carcely conscious. He was wearing just a pair of drawers. His brother was naked under his T-shirt and was crying quietly.
The shortest of the women stepped in and smashed the butt of her pistol into his face. There was the clear crack of teeth splitting, and blood jetted from his pulped lips.
"Give you something to cry for, you baby bastard," she snarled, turning to Traven and receiving a nod of praise from her leader.
"We don't have much jack," Leo Johnson said, his teeth chattering so hard it was almost impossible to understand him.
"Never mind," Traven replied smiling reassuringly at him.
"What?"
"Jack isn't why we're here, Leo."
"No?"
"No, Leo."
Ryan noticed that the moon had vanished behind a bank of thick cloud.
"Swampies!" the old woman spit.
"Can I?" asked one of the young men in the posse.
"Soon. We aren't swampies, Laura."
"Then who are you?"
"Friends of the baron."
Minding his own business, Ryan had traced the electric lines around the room, seeing that there appeared to be some kind of junction box on the wall of the hallway.
"Baron Larry? You ain't no friends of him!" The woman tried to spit at Traven, but her mouth was too dry.
The little man smiled vaguely at her.
Ryan could almost taste the killing that was going to happen.
There was something about men of unusual evil, like Adam Traven, Cort Strasser and the Russian, Zimyanin, some flaw that made the hairs creep at the back of the neck. Strasser was dead. Zimyanin might be dead. Traven was still alive.
"Traven."
"What do you want, Cawdor?"
"Thought you were interested in the collection of swords and knives."
The little man minced across to peer at the glass cases of weapons, looking at them for all of ten seconds. "Fifth-rate shit," he pronounced.
Ryan had to admit that he was correct. The collection included a Civil War saber with a new hilt badly fitted; a half-decent Spanish cinquedea from the nineteenth century, but its precious stones had been replaced with cheap glass; a modern replica of a poniard and its matching rapier that looked rusty. One of the cases held three bayonets, all from the Second World War. Not one of them was worth the price of a good meal in a frontier gaudy.
"You knew that before we set out from the ville," Ryan accused.
"Sure."
It was only seconds away.
Ryan pretended that he had an itch in the small of his back, feeling for the little knife, checking one more time the location of the main electrical control box.
Rainbow was panting like a bitch in heat.
"Come on, Traven. Please let's start. Please, master, please."
The rings on the little man's fingers sparkled as he waved his hand with a negligent dismissal, like a monarch agreeing to some small request.
"You may start."
The Beretta was steady on Ryan's stomach, making any move instant death. Traven's brown eyes fluttered beneath the long lashes, and he smiled at his prisoner.
"Witness to my power, Cawdor," he drawled.
Few men in Deathlands were more hardened to the sight of death than Ryan Cawdor. Yet even he was sickened and appalled by the joyous way the posse began its bloody butchery.
He had to keep his concentration focused on Traven and the blaster that menaced his life, so that he bore witness to the slaughter only by peripheral flashes of violence, glimpsed from the corner of his eye.
The overwhelming image was of blood, splashed in dynamic patterns across the ceiling and over the walls, so much blood on the floor that it made movements treacherous. All of the posse was soaked with the blood of the murdered Johnsons, laughing and screaming in delight, licking it off their own blades and deliberately smearing it in handfuls over one another's faces.
Everywhere Ryan looked there was blood.
Images frozen in his memory—Rainbow sitting astride the naked father, Leo Johnson, kissing him repeatedly on the face and mouth, while her sharp little blade pecked repeatedly into the side of his stomach and chest; the screaming, pain-contorted faces; two of the girls yelling to Traven to look as they slit open the belly of the older son, dragging out ropes of entrails and threading them around the dying boy's neck.
"We're the fucking best, Traven, aren't we? Best posse you ever had!"
The little man, beaming like a psycho Buddha, turned to watch his darlings at play. As he moved, his high-heeled boots slipped in a lake of spreading blood, making him stagger sideways.
"Now," Ryan breathed to himself.
He powered off his left foot, crouching as he ran toward the hall.
"Can't escape, Cawdor! And we got Doc to—"
Traven's voice broke off as he suddenly realized that the one-eyed man wasn't trying to escape.
Ryan was making for the electrical junction box, leaping toward it and kicking out with all of his savage strength.
There was a shuddering impact, and a shower of silver sparks floated to the floor.
The house was plunged into instant pitchy blackness, filled only with the noises of shock. And of dying.
Ryan landed with practiced silent agility, drawing the panga in his right hand, the flensing knife in his left.
Chapter Forty
FIVE HOMICIDAL YOUNG women, all carrying blasters and knives, two murderous young men, their blood-lust flaring, similarly armed; Adam Traven, their leader, cunning and lethally in love with violence. Against them was Ryan Cawdor. No blaster against eight. His weapons were two knives.
The odds were unfair, but Ryan had one overwhelming advantage over the members of the posse— he'd done this sort of thing many times before. They'd done the chilling before, creeping and crawling into the homes of the weak and the elderly, cuffing them and butchering them. None of them had ever fought back.
Ryan had memorized every detail of the room that had become a stinking shambles, knowing where every stick of furniture was, having a clear picture in his brain of the dimensions, down to the life-or-death inches.
He also knew that the young killers would be standing around like frightened sheep for several heart-stopping moments while they tried to work out what had happened in the house.
And what was happening.
Ryan moved among them like the living spirit of death, slitting the throats of three before anyone realized he was back in the room. His night vision was good enough to be able to pick out their huddled silhouettes, like dark gray ghosts in a midnight world.
"He's here!" Rainbow screamed, inches from him, hearing one of her friends kicking and frothing in her own blood.
"Yes," Ryan whispered in her ear.
He drove the narrow blade of the skinning knife into her stomach, just below the navel, steadying her with his right hand on her shoulder while he pushed it inward and upward. He grunted with effort as he lifted Rainbow off her feet, ramming the knife under her ribs, tearing open her lower lungs.
It was an automatic reaction for Ryan to twist his wrist as he withdrew the blade, for maximum damage. But Rainbow's end had come, and it was an unnecessary postscript to her passing.
Inevitably someone was going to lose his nerve and start shooting.
It came from near the window, the flattened sound of the shots revealing it was one of the Government Model Colts. Three shots were fired and none went anywhere near Ryan.
But the muzzle-flash was enough for him to find the shooter and nearly decapitate him with a single slashing cut of the eighteen-inch panga.
By now there were something like sixty pints of blood sloshing around on the floor of what the Johnsons had once called, with a bitter and unconscious irony, their "living room."
Now Ryan paused, standing near a bureau, recovering his breath. He wiped both blades, the broad and the narrow on the leg of his pants.
He listened to the noises of the dying gradually fading away into stillness. Three were
alive, and he was sure they all remained in the room—Traven, a boy and the last of the young women.
It crossed through Ryan's racing brain that he should try to locate one of the dropped blasters. To find one wouldn't notably strengthen his position. To fumble for one and fail would immeasurably weaken it.
"Traven?"
It was the last girl, kneeling at the farther end of the sofa. The single word enabled Ryan to visualize where she was, as clearly as a great flash of lightning.
There was no reply, but Ryan thought he detected a flutter of movement close by the broken window.
"Traven, I think they're… I think he's… You there, Traven?"
Ryan slithered through the darkness, ready to take her.
But at the very last moment she moved, suddenly and convulsively, toward him. They collided so hard that Ryan almost lost his footing and fell into the lake of spilled blood. The young woman shrieked and squeezed the trigger on her Colt .45, the bullet scorching the back of Ryan's left hand and nearly making him drop the flensing knife.
As he grappled with her, Ryan heard the noise of breaking glass and splintering wood, and a wordless cry in a voice that he thought was probably Adam Traven's.
The blood was so thick that he could feel it lapping around his boots. The girl tried to fire again, but he had her arms pinned to her sides.
"Bastard prick…" she panted.
For a moment it was a frontier standoff. He couldn't let go to stab her, and she couldn't shoot him. They swayed back and forth, feet slipping in the pooled blood.
"Spray the room!" Traven ordered.
"What about Redwing?" asked the other survivor from the posse.
"Just do it!" A note of panic soared high into the night.
Ryan managed to hook his foot around the young woman's ankle, pushing her over. He landed on top, digging his knee into her stomach, driving the air out in a sour whoosh of breath.
She went limp beneath him, and he rolled to one side, feeling for her neck, ready to slice open the jugular when the room filled with bullets.
Lead poured in through the broken window. Ryan didn't count the shots, but he heard the sudden noise of hammers clicking on empty chambers, which meant they'd both fired the full eight rounds.