Apocalypse Unborn

by James Axler

  This beast belly-slashed for a living.

  And it didn’t work alone, which was odd. Mutie-norm collaborations were rare in Deathlands. As a rule, muties were either hunted for sport or worked as slaves by their pure-gene betters. A creature as large as the enforcer was something you might see caged and chained in a mutie zoo or a carny show. It was too big and too powerful to control with threats of physical pain or deprivation.

  Too big to control with voice commands. Or hand gestures.

  Although the guy with the double-stack forehead was doing just that.

  As Jak stepped up to the barrier, the enforcer showed him its tongue. It licked at the air, eyes narrowed, like it was concentrating real hard, memorizing the molecular signature of his scent.

  Ever since Jak was little, butt-ignorant people had treated him like a mutie. The white skin and hair, and the ruby-red eyes made them jump to the wrong, the easy, conclusion. Even though Jak was purebred albino, people saw what they wanted to see, and as a result he’d spent some time in a baron’s mutie zoo as a featured attraction. He had that same sense of being penned in now, with the sea at his back and a looming pile of rock in front of him. Jak Lauren was born to live in the wide, boundless spaces. His worst fear was being caged, trapped, a fear he forced himself to face down and crush for the sake of the mission.

  Magus was worse than the worst of Deathlands’ murdering, raping, robbing barons. Even the vilest baron had a spark of humanity. Magus was a black hole that trapped all light. Jak wanted to take him apart, bolt by bolt, strut by strut, wire by wire, and quick-lime the debris.

  The tongue lashing stopped, the sweating continued at a steady rate. The enforcer stayed put.

  After Jak showed Eng his tag number, he was let through the barrier. As he passed, the captain said, “Good luck, little korako.”

  Jak didn’t know what a korako was, but he gathered it was not an insult. He instinctively liked the man. Both were free wild spirits, fighters, Jak on land, Eng on sea.

  “That’s the lot?” the guy with the blond hair said.

  There was a kind of mocking, superior laugh in his voice. It made Jak stiffen, then pause and turn.

  “Yeah, that’s the last one,” Eng said.

  “In that case, I want you and all your crew on the beach, as well.”

  “What?”

  “Your presence is required on the beach.”

  “Why?”

  “You didn’t bring me enough recruits this time. You’re at least twenty bodies short.”

  Eng carefully tucked the logbook into the back of his trouser waistband, freeing up both hands. The shoulder-holstered Government Colt was practically lost in the fleshy folds of his left armpit. “Look, Silam,” he said, “a lot of people got chilled on the trip down. Way more than usual. I do my best to keep them all alive, but I can’t control everything that happens between here and Morro Bay. I’ll make up the difference next time. You know I’m good for it.”

  The man he called Silam smiled a little smile with his too little mouth. “You have to make up the difference now,” he said.

  Jak watched Eng’s facial scars suffuse with angry blood, like crimson tiger stripes. “I am an islander,” he growled, showing every one of his filed teeth. “I am captain of my own ship. I will sail on the next tide with all my crew. Whether you pay us for this trip or not.”

  “You will sail when I tell you to,” Silam replied. “Until then you will do as I say. Or I will have your precious ship scuttled while you and your crew watch.”

  Eng’s right hand crept toward the butt of his .45-caliber Colt.

  Silam raised a single finger and the enforcer responded. As Jak suspected, it was quick. Before the captain could yank the blaster from its holster, the enforcer stood between him and Silam, blocking his shot. The islander and the mutie were roughly the same height and weight. There the resemblance ended. The enforcer leaned forward and extended its tongue, waving it in Eng’s furious face. The captain did not retreat, but he did not draw his weapon, either. Behind him, uniformed soldiers raised their assault rifles and took beads on his crew. The other enforcers left the beach and ran onto the pier.

  “Make another move, Captain,” Silam said, “and that ship will be your coffin, and the coffin of all your crew.”

  Jak expected Eng to fight to his last breath. After all, he hadn’t shied away from battle with the taua. But the captain hesitated. He looked at the exposed razor-sharp crescents of amber horn, carefully weighing the odds that he could clear leather and get a shot off before his insides were flopped down around his bare feet.

  Meanwhile the enforcer’s sweat drip-drip-dripped onto the ground, starting a brand-new puddle.

  How fast was the thing really? Jak wondered. How accurately could it strike with those talons?

  Too fast for the captain, apparently. Eng let his right hand fall from the gun butt and shouted to his crew, waving them off the ship and onto the pier.

  As Silam and his two-man entourage led the procession of uniforms and crew toward the island, the captain stepped up beside Jak.

  “There’s an important lesson here, little korako,” he said bitterly. “A lesson I already knew, but chose to ignore for the sake of a nice profit. It’s the same lesson everyone in Deathlands is taught at their mother’s knee.”

  “Lay down with devil, wake up fucked.”

  “Bright boy,” Eng said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ryan stuck his head under the plywood-and-sheet-plastic roof of the cook shack and held out his bowl. The bare-chested, hairy-shouldered cook wore sagging, stained longjohn bottoms with makeshift, twine suspenders that kept the overstretched elastic waistband from falling down around his knees. His oily face and salt-and-pepper chin stubble were dusted with soot from the roaring driftwood fire. He stopped stirring the contents of a tall, blackened metal caldron, and carelessly slopped a portion of lumpy, brownish soup into Ryan’s dish.

  The one-eyed man carried his steaming dinner to a nearby flat rock. After taking a seat, he gingerly held the bowl up to his nose. It didn’t smell that bad, he decided. Kind of like stewed mushrooms with a hint of prune. Anything hazardous lurking in it had been boiled to death, which was comforting as the soup looked like a bad case of Montezuma’s revenge: dark flecks of seaweed and nameless chunks of gray flesh floated in a watery mocha gruel. And as he investigated deeper, he found other stuff in it, too, rubbery stuff that wasn’t animal flesh. Not abalone, either. Or clam. Or even squid. Ryan picked a piece out with his fingers and examined it.

  A translucent, pebbly gristle strip.

  He tried chewing it. It was like trying to eat a wag head gasket. The gristle maintained its shape, refusing to be torn or pulverized, even when he attacked it with his back teeth. He had a choice, spit it out or swallow it whole. He chose to spit.

  Lower down on the beach, the islander captain and his crew were huddled together in a circle, speaking in low voices and eating their soup. All of it, Ryan noted. He hadn’t expected them to sign up for Magus’s new army. From their expressions, they hadn’t, either. If the islanders appeared standoffish and arrogant on the ship, on land they looked downright hostile, ready to lash out at anyone or anything.

  The conscription of the captain and crew was not Ryan’s first clue that something was very wrong with the setup. So far, nothing fit with his own military experience. On close inspection, the story about Magus recruiting an army to take over Deathlands had more holes than the seat of the cook’s longjohns.

  The naked, sweating “trainers” apparently couldn’t talk, but looked strong enough to rip off a person’s head off. They acted more like prison camp guards than drill instructors, ready to slap down—or chill—anyone who even thought about stepping out of line. They, not the armed uniforms, kept order on the beach, with hard looks and unspoken threats. Ryan figured the trainers would go into action, soon enough. When things started getting tough, examples would be made of the stragglers.

  R
yan couldn’t decide whether the trainers were human, reptile or bear, but they didn’t need blasters or blades. They came equipped with thumb talons that looked like amber scythes. With a couple of swipes, those hooks could clear out a body cavity all the way to the backbone. There was something unclean about them, too, and it wasn’t just the buckets of sweat they oozed, or the knobby skin, or those slitted yellow eyes. They reminded him of the trannies the companions had battled at Pueblo Dam: beneath the trainers’ surface calm Ryan sensed a frenzied jumble of competing, mismatched instincts.

  Maybe a case of too many gene donors spoiling the stew?

  The trainers kept a good distance from the cook shack, standing upwind as they watched the recruits wolf down their dinners. Ryan counted six of them on the beach. He wondered if the army’s officer corps was made up of similar creatures. Which raised the question, how could they lead norm troops into battle if they couldn’t talk?

  There were other glaring questions, too. Where was the weaponry needed to break into the barons’ fortified villes? The cannon? The armored wag fleets? The heavy MGs? Aside from the uniforms’ assault rifles, the only weapons on the beach were the ones the recruits had brought with them. Likewise they carried the only ammo.

  The island was like no boot camp Ryan had ever seen or heard tell of. There was no training facility. No exercise or endurance course. No target range. No contingent of recruits in residence who were further along in the training. Shipping small groups of fighters to some other staging point made no sense. Why start here and then move the troops to another location?

  Another thing, Magus couldn’t successfully tackle the eastern baronies with less than three thousand men. And four thousand would be more like it. There was room for maybe seventy in the rat holes dug on the beach, with another thirty uniforms in the barracks. Looking around, Ryan saw a little more than forty recruits had survived the trip south.

  A hell of a long way from the magic number.

  He fished around in the soup with the point of his panga, flicking away the clear strips of gristle. Then he picked out the gray meat and ate it. It had the texture of overripe banana, and went all to mush in his mouth. He washed the mush down with the brown liquid, all but the dregs of it. The dregs had sand in them. He wiped his tongue on his sleeve to get rid of the grit.

  While Ryan sat there, listening to his belly grumble over what he had just poured into it, the long-haired guy left the pier in a small rowboat with his two pals. The smaller pair struggled with the oars while Silam lay stretched out in the bow, his ankles crossed, his forearms cradling his oversize head, like the queen of Sheba.

  Ryan watched them disappear around the point, heading in the same direction that the mutie cargo had been taken. He had Silam pegged as a talker, a bullshit artist. Definitely not a fighter. If he had a weapon under that baggy shirt, he kept it hidden. But it was obvious he controlled the trainers, and that put him squarely in charge of the whole beach show.

  In Ryan’s experience, Magus always put people like Silam—weak-willed, foolish, internally twisted—into positions of authority. They were living buffers between Steel Eyes and his victims, and easily sacrificed if the natives got restless and wanted some payback. Not that Magus was adverse to getting his own hands bloody, but he considered large-scale wet work to be manual labor, and therefore beneath his virtuoso talents. If the chilling had nothing to do with him directly, with his secret experiments, or with personal revenge, he kept his distance. Distance was required to soak in the full effect of a mass slaughter.

  Magus hadn’t put in an appearance, yet, and the companions couldn’t make their move until they had a visual on him, or at least some better idea of where he was. Ryan had no doubt that Steel Eyes lurked somewhere close by; it was in his nature to spectate. And this operation had all the trappings of a made-for-Magus extravaganza. There was psychological as well as physical suffering on the program. Magus enjoyed nothing more than wringing the emotions of his intended victims, playing with their hopes, and force-feeding them nothing but horror.

  All Ryan knew about the vast block of granite to his back was that it was highest point on the Baja before the nukecaust, and at that time there was an astronomical observatory sited on the peak. He suspected there had to be a mat-trans unit, as well. It was a likely spot for a redoubt. It was extremely isolated. It was made of impervious rock. Prior to Armageddon, it was ten thousand feet above sea level, and it had a whitecoat installation already in place.

  No way would Magus undertake a dangerous and unpredictable sea voyage to get here. That wasn’t his style. A mat-trans unit would provide him with personal transportation, and a quick exit if need be. Ryan guessed he either was on the other side of island or somewhere in the dense, dark clouds above.

  Magus would reserve the ordeal and hazard of sea travel for his intended victims, to soften them up prior to their arrival.

  Even though everyone on the beach was armed, even though everyone probably already suspected the worst, there was no uprising. It wasn’t just due to the intimidating presence of the trainers. The recruits—and the sailors—were still clinging to the hope that they’d get something out of the deal. The hardships of the voyage had etched away some of their bluster, but having swallowed the bait whole, and though it sat like a leaking sack of poison in their guts, they were reluctant to puke it back up. Besides, it was evident that they were trapped, stuck on a lifeless piece of rock in the middle of a hostile sea. If the ex-mercies, sec men, and mutie hunters knew they’d been righteously had, they couldn’t fully admit it to themselves.

  On the other hand, Ryan and the companions were fully aware of their predicament. They were awaiting their window of opportunity. Counterpunching, thinking and fighting on their feet was what they did best. The only way they could get close enough to Magus to chill him was to let themselves fall into his clutches, to step into the jaws of his closing trap. He was too quick, too elusive to be caught in someone else’s snare. He could only snare himself. Magus would be there to watch the jaws snap shut, to enjoy the final throes of his victims. That was guaranteed. All this effort, this orchestration, this expense would be wasted if he wasn’t here to see it.

  Once again Ryan checked the position of each of the companions on the beach. Everyone looked okay except for Doc.

  The old man was definitely not okay.

  Alone on his knees on the wet rocks, Doc faced the empty sea. He was talking a blue streak, gesturing animatedly to no one and nothing. Ryan gritted his teeth and looked away. Doc’s mind, wrecked by unthinkable grief and loss, ripped from its own Victorian element, dragged through the hell of Deathlands, always teetered just on the edge of madness. It only took a nudge to send it toppling over.

  Ryan stifled the powerful urge to go to his friend’s side.

  There was nothing he could do for him. No comfort. No repair.

  Not now. Not ever.

  DOC WASN’T TALKING to himself. He was praying for guidance from a God he once adored, but now by turns doubted and despised. It was measure of his internal turmoil that he had reverted to that basic core of belief. Dr. Theophilus Tanner was caught in a moral tug-of-war, a battle of mutually exclusive responsibilities and desires, one of the most difficult choices he had ever faced.

  On one hand, there was the promise of seeing his beloved Jolyon and Rachel again, of watching them grow up and bloom; the promise of once more sharing a bed with his dearest Emily; of stepping back into a safer, cleaner, simpler, saner, more hopeful world; of undoing the nukecaust, the greatest tragedy in human history, and thereby saving the lives of billions upon billions of people.

  On the other hand, he would be abandoning his treasured friends moments before a terrible battle, betraying them like Judas Iscariot after a vile last supper. Not for thirty pieces of silver, but for the return of his stolen life and most precious lost loves. Doc knew Ryan and the others could and would survive without him. They were arguably the best fighters in all of the hellscape. It was a
question of his turning tail in a crisis, of deserting them like a coward, that stuck deep in his craw.

  Doc did not doubt Bell’s bonafides. The man had to be a freezie, and he had to be in the predark ultrasecret loop, otherwise he couldn’t have known about Emily or the children, or any of the details of Operation Chronos. Bell even knew the name of the whitecoat bastard who supervised his abduction and torture—Dr. Herman Welles.

  While Doc, Bell and Kirby sat on the beach, waiting for their supper, the freezies had carefully explained the crucial elements of their theory of supra-time/space, which defined existence as an infinite number of simultaneously unfolding, parallel chronologies or time lines, untold possibilities and permutations existing side by side, but hidden from one another.

  According to the hypotheses of s-t/s, if Doc returned to his original time line at the precise moment of his departure, it would start a new unfolding, with its own, self-driven, evolving consequences. The Deathlands experience would remain in his memory, but Deathlands itself would cease to exist because Doc was no longer part of it—such was the prison of human perception. We each see ourselves as the center of the universe.

  “Will the Deathlands time line move on without me?” he had asked the whitecoats-turned-mutie-hunters. “What will happen to my companions?”

  Kirby had said, “Does a tree falling in a deep forest make a sound if no one’s there to hear it? The problem as stated is circular and unsolvable. There is simply no way to know.”

  “What if I meet myself when I return to my time? What are the consequences of such a paradox?”

  “Nothing will happen because the paradox is an illusion of perspective,” Bell had replied. “You can run into the other Tanner but you can’t meet ‘yourself.’ You aren’t the same man who was trawled against his will in November 1896—you’ve lived several years longer than he has. Your body consists of different molecules, arranged in a different order. You don’t occupy the same space. Your perceptions are not identical. His destiny is not yours.”