by James Axler
Hell’s circus.
Only one creature in all of Deathlands could have recruited and assembled such a gathering.
The ringmaster.
Magus. Steel Eyes. The thing that wouldn’t die.
Once he had been one-hundred-percent, flesh-and-blood human. How long ago that was, or where he had come from was not known. As his organic parts—limbs, organs, sensory arrays—failed due to age or damage, he had used inorganics such as nanotech circuit boards, memory chips, servos, pumps and titanium struts, to make the necessary repairs to himself. The melding of mechanical and biomechanical subsystems had prolonged Magus’s life, but the result was not a pretty sight. Blood, machine oil and pus seeped from the joins of angry flesh to gleaming metal, erratic clicking sounds, like a box of cheap wind-up clocks, came from inside his torso, and he was enveloped in the rank odor of his own putrefaction.
Over the years Ryan and his companions had crossed the creature’s path more than once, witnessing the unspeakable cruelties he wrought on the innocent and unwary. Ever the puppetmaster, Magus relied on norm and mutie minions to do his wet work, and to cover his retreat into the shadows. Steel Eyes had long ago cut out his own humanity; if he still had a heart, that organ was made of plastic and Kevlar. Animated by a seemingly bottomless evil, this reeking, lurching contraption terrified and awed even Deathlands’ most degenerate human trash. He attracted lesser villains like moths to a black flame.
In the past, Magus had toyed with randomly selected, living game pieces, amusing himself by sowing localized horror, apparently on a whim. Attacks on remote, poorly defended villes required relatively small hit crews, which could be assembled from the front porch of almost any gaudy in the hellscape. His slavery/natural resource extraction operations used the same breed of enforcers. Magus was never out of pocket for any of his criminal enterprises. Slave laborers worked for free and mass murderers were paid in the spoils of carnage.
Something new and infinitely more menacing had drawn Ryan and the others halfway across Deathlands to the pier on Morro Bay. In the last month or so, groups of drifters, traders and refugees had passed the word along the network of eroded predark interstates, through roadside and dry river bottom campsites, shanty villes, skeletonized major cities, from gaudy to gaudy all the way to the eastern baronies. Steel Eyes was recruiting an army of blackhearts. The call had been sent across the whole of the hellscape. Those who signed on were guaranteed jack, jolt and joy juice in unlimited quantities, and the opportunity to indulge in savagery unheard-of since nuke day.
Magus had never shown any ambition for conquest before. He had been content to play on the margins of Deathlands’ disjointed feudal system, squabbling baronies separated by vast, lawless territories. He seemed as interested in concealing his whereabouts, his motives and the true extent of his power as he was in wreaking havoc on the defenseless. Until now the location of his home base was anybody’s guess—that it would be in the West Coast’s most nuked-out zone, in a place no one would dare look, made perfect sense.
The captain gestured for Ryan to approach the interview table. Wide-set, heavy-lidded brown eyes took in his battle-worn face.
A face impossible to disguise.
A knife slash from his brother had cost Ryan his left eye and had marked his eyebrow and cheek with a jagged scar. A black eye patch covered the empty socket. Losing an eye was a common enough injury in Deathlands, where fighting was often hand-to-hand with edged weapons. Other men were as tall, with similar rangy builds and long dark hair. Few had an eye so blue. Fewer still carried an eighteen-inch panga in a leg sheath and a scoped Steyr SSG-70 longblaster. But there was no sign of recognition from the islander captain. Which was just as well because diving off the pier was not going to save life and limb. Either the captain had never heard of the one-eyed man’s exploits, or he failed to identify Ryan without his constant companions at his side.
Ryan stared at the man’s heavily scarred forearms. This was no decorative disfigurement. The oval-shaped, long-healed wounds were three and a half inches across. He had lost great divots of flesh, clear down to the bone.
Bite marks.
“Why’d you waste a good centerfire bullet on that cannie?” the captain asked. “He was gonna be dead meat in five minutes, tops.”
Ryan would’ve shot a rabid stickie in that condition, but Magus wasn’t in the market for mercy chillers. “Had a clear shot on the rad bastard,” Ryan told him. “Wanted to get in my licks while I could.”
“You solo?”
“Always.”
“Mercie?”
“Sec man. Came up under Baron Zepp.”
“Down Florida way.”
Ryan nodded. “Greenglades.”
“Old Zepp got himself chilled.”
“He was still breathing when I moved west.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“Needed a change of climate.”
The captain didn’t ask for his name—names had a tendency to change, before and after wet work—but he looked hard at the bolt-action Steyr slung over Ryan’s shoulder. “You any good with that longblaster?”
“Good enough to keep it.”
It was the kind of rare, high-end weapon that most folks would chill for, given the opportunity.
The mountain of brown stared up at Ryan’s face. “But not good enough to keep your eye?”
Ryan smiled. “One’s all I need.”
“Here,” the captain said, shoving the yellow bucket across the table at him. “Spit.”
Ryan obliged. When the mixed sputum and blood poured out red, the crewmen let the aimpoints of their AKs drift away from his chest.
“Call me Captain, or Captain Eng,” said the seated man. He picked a token from the pile, wrote down the number in his log, then tossed Ryan the disk. “From now on you are called 46. Wear that tag around your neck at all times. Don’t lose it. Without it, you won’t be fed or paid. Go down the gangway and wait on the dock. You’ll be told what to do. Make no trouble, and you’ll have no trouble.”
Ryan nodded, although trouble was exactly what he had in mind. He and his friends had missed the chance to chill Magus before.
If they missed this time, all of Deathlands would pay the price.
Chapter Two
Doc Tanner leaned hard against his oar, putting every ounce of his skinny, six-foot-three-inch frame into the effort. He sat on the right half of the eighteen-foot boat’s middle thwart, facing the stern and the hulking, brown-skinned man at the tiller, a man with heavy brows and squinty, slitted eyes. A wispy black chin-beard hung down his chest, between pendulous bare breasts. Intricate blue-black tattooing, like a filigreed cape, shadowed sloping shoulders.
“Pull!” the tillerman ordered his conscripted crew as he steered into the steady breeze. A remade AK-47 with a steel skeleton stock lay across the tops of his thighs. An extra 30-round magazine was taped upside down to the weapon’s clip. In the edge of the wooden seat beside him, he had stuck a machete, blade-first, its handle within easy reach. A plastic bailing can floated in the bilge water between his bare feet.
After some initial clumsiness and disorganization, the ten passengers had their oars moving more or less in sync, and the boat made smooth, gliding progress toward the anchored frigate.
As Doc dipped his oar, he recalled a more pleasant sea voyage, roughly two centuries ago. It, too, had been a journey via sailing ship. There had been no rowing required. He had been returning home to the United States from Oxford University in England, where he had earned a PhD degree in science. Shortly after his repatriation, he had met and married the lovely Emily Chandler. Their union had been blessed with two children, a girl Rachel, born in 1893, and a son Jolyon, born in 1895. The Tanners began a happy domestic life in Omaha, Nebraska. Their joy was cut short by an unimaginable turn of events. A world stood on its head in a single, terrible instant. One afternoon in November of 1896, blind fate had torn Dr. Theophilus Tanner from the bosom of his young family.
&nbs
p; Blind fate and human cruelty.
Out for a stroll with his wife and children, he had been time-trawled against his will by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos, vacuumed up and drawn forward to the year 1998. After almost two years of close confinement, constant interrogation, physical and psychological testing, of torture in the name of a twisted, morally bankrupt science, he had been hurled forward in time again, farther still from those he had loved.
In a strange and terrible world, he had been adopted by a new family. No wife had he. No offspring. But rather, brothers and sisters of battle, fighters bound together by a common thread: survival.
As the boat drew away from the pier, Doc thought he saw Jak Lauren’s shoulder-length white hair gleaming among the milling crowd. Jak was a red-eyed albino, a wild child of Deathlands, skilled with leaf-bladed throwing knives and his Colt Python handblaster, a young man of few words and great, selfless bravery. The Armorer, also known as John Barrymore Dix, was farther back in the throng, his fedora hat lost behind much taller heads. J.B. brought up the companions’ rear with a 12-gauge Smith & Wesson M-4000 pump shotgun. The rest of Doc’s extended family—Ryan, Krysty and Mildred—were already onboard the white ship.
Doc took in the other rowers around him. A motley crew, to be sure. Some had used strips of black plastic bags and winds of duct tape to repair tears in their boots, jackets and trousers. Their centerfire and black-powder weapons were mostly well-worn, missing handblaster grips replaced with layers of silver tape. Their knuckles were scarred, and their faces grimy and gap-toothed. Even the steady head wind couldn’t blow away the smell of unwashed funk, spilled joy juice and the stink of intense fear. None could predict what they might encounter on the road to promised riches. Or if, in fact, any riches lay ahead. They kept rowing, though, heads down, backs bent. These were men accustomed to big risk and small rewards.
Only a certain kind of Deathlander would consider signing on with the likes of Magus—someone stuck at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. Someone with a taste for chilling and the desire to claw his way upward, over the bodies of others, to the light and air. It required a willingness, indeed an eagerness, to do anything, at any time, to anyone, an amoral mentality that in Tanner’s Victorian Era had been ascribed to “primitive” peoples in distant lands, and to the criminally insane.
Alone in a small boat in such company, Doc felt considerable unease, himself. His ebony sword stick leaned against the thwart, its silver lion’s-head handle pressing into the side of one of his tall, cracked leather boots. Under his black frock coat hung a massive, holstered black-powder pistol. The LeMat represented a high point in Civil War weapons technology—two sidearms in one. A .63-caliber, single-shot scattergun barrel was married to a 9-shot .44-caliber revolver. Properly angled from the rowboat’s bow, the LeMat’s “blue whistler” barrel could incapacitate the entire crew and tillerman in one horrendous, stem to stern blast.
Despite the undeniable appeal of that course of action, Doc put it out of his mind. When it came to evil, these were minnows.
The man rowing on the thwart in front of him had four sections of black PVC pipe strapped to his back. Connected in a crude rope frame, the pipes were two feet long, four inches in diameter, and securely capped at both ends. Air holes had been drilled along the sides every few inches. Leaning over the gunwhale a little, Doc managed to catch sight of the side of his face. It was painted a flat white from forehead to neck, ear to ear. A grizzled short beard stuck through the crusted pigment. Where the paint had flaked off, Tanner could see tiny, scattered whorls of red. It appeared the man had taken a load of birdshot full in the face.
Looking more closely at the plastic pipes, Doc saw clustered yellowish feet sticking through the air holes.
Crisp, hairy, insect feet.
“For lack of a proper name, we call them scagworms,” said the black man rowing beside him. He was the same height as Doc, but the dreadlocks gathered on top of his head, sprouting up like the jutting leaves of a great pineapple, gave him another eighteen inches. He had a hugely muscled back and corded neck. He, too, wore a rack of PVC pipes.
“With a plethora of appendages, it would seem,” Doc remarked. “Pray tell, precisely how many creatures am I looking at?”
“One organism per tube,” the black man said.
“I am unfamiliar with the species,” Doc admitted.
The face-painted man chimed in over his shoulder, “So is everyone else. That’s why they’re worth large jack.”
“All we know about scagworms we learned the hard way,” the black man said. “They’re armored, bullet-headed, venomous, ill-tempered, oversize mutie millipedes. When we keep them head down and in the dark, it puts them right to sleep. They don’t seem to need food or water. Just air.”
“Inversion and light deprivation induces a state of hibernation,” Doc speculated.
“Logic would so indicate.”
The old man turned to stare at his seatmate. Logic—or even a pretense to same—rarely showed its face among the gaudy porch crowd. The black wild man wore a big, friendly smile, which also seemed a bit odd.
“That isn’t the only reason we carry them butt-up,” said the painted man. “Ugly mothers shit all over the place when they’re the other way around.”
Doc reached over and tapped one of the tubes.
And was rewarded by a shrill hiss and the rasp of a thousand clawed feet.
“That’s not a good idea,” the black man said. “They get testy when you wake them up.”
“Are they fully grown?” Doc said.
“We’re pretty sure these are just babies,” the black man said. “We found an untended nest in an arroyo south of Phoenix. Snatched up a few before mama worm got back.”
“How large do they get?”
“We didn’t stick around to find out. The entrance to the nest was nearly three feet in diameter.”
Tanner noted that both men wore desert camou BDU pants rimed with dirt and patched at the knees with duct tape. Their weapons—M-16 1-A rifles and military-issue Beretta handblasters—were of the same vintage and fine condition, which was unusual. In Deathlands, armament was almost always catch as catch can, a jumble of calibers and blaster types. They had either stumbled onto a well-stocked redoubt or they had traded away something very valuable.
“You two are mutie hunters,” Doc said, dipping in his oar.
The black man nodded.
Of all the blackheart professions in the hellscape, mutie hunter was one of the most profitable, and the most loathesome. It involved supplying freaks to fill barons’ mutie zoos and Deathlands’ traveling carnies. Seeing and ridiculing something obviously mutated made the “norms” feel more “normal,” more secure in the purity of their own genetic makeup. The collection process required kidnapping not just the clearly inhuman, like scagworm larvae, but the nearly human. The two-legged. The one-headed. The scaled. The dwarfed. The misshapen. Beings that could think and talk. And love. If the unlucky parents objected to losing their children, they were beaten senseless or chilled. Generally speaking, mutie hunters targeted the very young because they were more easily controlled and transported. That meant the victims would spend their entire lives behind bars.
“We were in the middle of selling our worms to a zoo master when we heard about the bounty being paid for extra-freaky freaks,” the black man said.
“To what end?”
“Don’t know. We changed our plans in a hurry, though.”
“For all we care, Magus can roast them over a charcoal grill,” said the man sitting in front. “Long as we get our jack.”
“You didn’t have to leave shore to do that,” Doc said. “You could have sold the worms on the dock.”
“For less than half of what they’re worth,” the black man said. “Besides, we want to find out what Steel Eyes has got going on down south. Figure it could be a gold mine for enterprising types like us. What about you? You got a specialty?”
“I’m just a mercie,
” Doc said. “In search of some new scenery and paying work.”
“Better keep your eyes open, mercie, and your blaster in reach,” the black man said.
The rowboat slowly approached the moored ship. The frigate was more than 150 feet long. It had three masts, and the main mast was at least eighty feet tall. Its riveted iron hull had been painted and repainted in thick layers of white. Rust streaks ran from the scuppers, down the sides, like bloodstains. As they rounded the ship, they could read the name emblazoned on its battered stern: Taniwha tea.
“What kind of tea is that?” one of the few literate rowers asked.
“Not tea,” the tillerman growled back at him. “Tee-ahh. Taniwha tee-ahh.” He put his palm on the machete handle, daring someone to crack wise. “She is my mother.”
The black man leaned over to Doc and whispered, “It’s in the Maori language. It means white monster.”
Chapter Three
As J. B. Dix climbed the rope ladder to the ship’s gangway, the yelling across the water crescendoed. He was one of the last of the prospective passengers to get a boarding token. The people left behind on the pier were making a loud fuss, jeering and booing, shouting profanities, but they kept their weapons holstered and slung. Before the captain had taken his leave, he had warned the crowd that if anyone opened fire on the departing rowboats, the ship’s four-inch guns would broadside them with grapeshot. If the left-behinds still wanted passage south, they were going to have to wait for the ship’s return, a round trip of seven days or more, depending on sea conditions.
J.B. grimaced, thinking about the already cowering citizens of Morro Bay. They had an unpleasant week ahead.
Like the ship’s hull, its main deck was made of riveted iron plates, canted on either side of the midline, this to speed seawater runoff into the scuppers. A gauntlet of islander crewmen funneled the passengers along the starboard rail, toward the bow. Block-and-tackled lattices of heavy cable supported the steel masts, and the jib and boom on the bowsprit, providing the crew with ladders to reach the high cross members. Dented sheet-steel awnings along the yard arms shielded the sails. These same crude, battered roofs protected the ship’s wheel and the fore and aft companionways.