Apocalypse Unborn

by James Axler

  “I could kill him, then? With no harm to myself?”

  “Perhaps you could,” Kirby had said. “The theory of s-t/s also predicts that individual time lines are similar to living organisms in that they are constantly repairing themselves within finite limits.”

  When Doc had expressed concern that his friends would grieve his sudden disappearance, Kirby said that was just another tree falling with no one to hear it. In Doc’s new time line the companions would never know him because he would never be trawled. He would be dust long before they were ever born. If as the result of his return, the nukecaust never happened, Deathlands would not exist. Ryan and the others would live out their lives in a lush green world, a world of relative peace and stability, thanks to him.

  Doc took some comfort from that, even though he knew that the consequences of a jump back in time couldn’t be predicted with any certainty. Though his mind was reeling, his scientific training had not deserted him. The vantage point of s-t/s was mathematical, imaginary, the product of time-imprisoned human brains, and, by the theory’s own definition, suspect.

  Infinite lines of parallel time, like guitar strings vibrating at the touch of an invisible hand.

  Entire universes completely oblivious to one another, yet closer than the atoms that made up his own skin.

  If Doc Tanner hadn’t already seen evidence of the existence of parallel worlds with his own eyes, he never would have bought into Bell and Kirby’s story. But what they proposed seemed entirely possible. A while back, he and the companions had broken bread, rattlesnake actually, with black-suited warriors from an overpopulated, doomed shadow Earth—something he chose not to mention to the freezies.

  As Doc weighed his options, his lips moved and he whispered to himself. If he did nothing at all, his future was clear. He would spend the rest of his life in torment, wandering the hellscape in mourning, raging at the unfairness of his fate. No drug, no liquor existed here that could ease his pain. No frenzy of chilling or orgy of sex could still his terrible anger. He either remained in this strange, brutal world or risked all, abandoned all, to return to the peace and civility of Nebraska. To home. To his real life.

  He weighed the sweat and blood he and his companions had shed over the years, the shared danger, the constant battle and hardship. He owed them everything, a debt so large it could never be repaid.

  Ryan, Krysty, Mildred, Jak, and John Barrymore had kept him alive long enough to see and seize this final opportunity.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Kill it!” The thready voice of doom echoed along the narrow corridor.

  As the enforcer-trainer rushed into the dank stone cell, Silam backed deeper into the hallway to avoid the possibility of being hit by flying gore.

  It was culling time in the menagerie.

  They already had more than enough scalies for the afternoon performance. Even though this one was exceptionally big, about six hundred pounds in its crusty stocking feet, it had to go.

  In captivity, scalies ate like hell-spawned demons, and complained with equal ferocity if so much as a shovelful of food was withheld. In unscripted mortal combat they provided little in the way of action or suspense. By nature, they were pouncers. In the wild, scalies sat still for long periods of time behind cover, waiting for prey even dumber than they were to stumble past. The biggest specimens were capable of quick movement only in very short bursts, and over very short distances. In an arena where they did not have the advantage of cover or surprise, they were largely a set dressing that could be relied on to bleed profusely and die on Magus’s command.

  As the six-hundred-pounder did now.

  With a blindingly quick upward slash of its razor sharp thumb talon, the enforcer unzipped the scalie’s torso from hip point to opposite armpit. As the mutie shrieked and staggered backward, the enforcer plunged its arm deep inside the diagonal wound, clutching then crushing the still-beating heart in its fist like a ripe grapefruit. The scalie’s bowels explosively released. Dead on its feet, its eyes bugging out, the slack-jawed mutie slid down the wall.

  Magus turned down the corridor, leaving the enforcer to clean up the considerable mess. Overhead, in the volcanic rock ceiling, a series of rebar-grated openings let much-needed sunlight and fresh air into the subterranean maze of mutie coops.

  Silam walked five strides behind his lord and master. Twelve feet away was his minimum comfort zone. Any closer and Steel Eyes’s aura seemed to invade the very marrow of his bones, sucking away his energy, making it difficult for him to breathe.

  Magus had a shambling, lurching gait because his right leg was a good deal shorter than his left. Muscle and bone had been more heavily trimmed on that side to remove gangrenous bits. The remnants of living flesh could only be stretched so far between the titanium struts. To keep his balance while walking, Magus had a habit of throwing his left arm in the air on every right-footed stride. He looked like a ghastly, life-size marionette animated by an unseen, spastic puppetmaster.

  The island’s saltwater environment had worsened Magus’s range of motion problems, stiffening his artificial knee and hip joints. The corrosive atmosphere attacked even the hardest steels, and the high humidity promoted bacterial growth and sepsis. The joins of meat to metal were particularly vulnerable to weeping sores. As a result, a lengthy and thorough cleaning was part of Magus’s daily toilette.

  Magus was very secretive about his bodily functions, even his eating and drinking. Silam knew he used various machines, remote robots and video cams, set up in his “play room” to perform hygienic tasks and make repairs and modifications to himself.

  Silam disliked visiting any part of the island’s redoubt, and had never been invited into its upper reaches. He had seen the play room, though. It was the abbatoir-cum-machine shop where Steel Eyes relentlessly searched for self-perfection. A more efficient mechanical heart. More sensitive internal gyros. A better fit between his various human and cybernetic components. All this required constant experimentation upon living subjects.

  It was getting harder and harder for Silam to tell where the Magus the mechanism ended and Magus the living being began. Harder to say what, if anything, of the original creature remained.

  Whether Magus was improving himself with his incessant tinkering was difficult to decide, as well. Silam was neither whitecoat nor physician; he was an artiste, a visionary. He could only judge success by the pungency of the aroma his lord and master gave off. Magus lacked the faculties to measure his own stink—his olfactory sense had been destroyed during the implantation of his chromed steel replacement eyes.

  Of late Magus had been smelling particularly sickly sweet and funky, a very disturbing sign. The reek reminded Silam of his Uncle Lester on his deathbed, a man who had started out triple smart and finished up triple stupe, with shit running down the backs of his legs. It wasn’t rad cancer that did him in. He had poisoned himself by accident, while working the Hammurabi grift.

  Uncle Lester had made up Hammurabi years before Silam was born, on Day Seven of an eight-day jolt binge. By the time he started augering in—but before he took to plucking every hair from the left side of his head—he had drawn a highly detailed sketch of the graven idol he named Hammurabi. It had seven skull heads on long, snakey necks, heads representing Fire, Plague, Pestilence, Radiation, Mutation, Flood and Chem Rain.

  It was more of a commercial than a religious revelation.

  Silam’s uncle took to traveling the hellscape by oxcart, showing off a homemade statue of his hideous god with its seven, bobbling skull heads, and spreading the new gospel according to Lester. To all who would listen, he made predictions of impending disaster and calamity. At night, before moving on to the next ville, he poisoned selected farm fields and wells. A process he called “Getting the buzz going.”

  When he circled back around three or four weeks later, the buzz was going strong. And the people still alive were primed for the bottom line: only by sacrificing valuable goods and services to Hammurabi thro
ugh its chosen intermediary, Uncle Lester, could anyone hope to escape the god’s wrath.

  Abandoned at a tender age by a family that considered his skull shape a threat to their norm standing, Silam began riding in the back of the Hammurabi oxcart. On a daily basis, the boy witnessed the power of even the most mediocre fiction on a slow-witted, ignorant and laughably gullible audience. People were afraid of Uncle Lester because of Hammurabi, his jolt-binge fraud. That fear allowed him to separate the hicks from their gold, from their gear, and if possible, the virginities from their teenage daughters. It was an important life lesson for the narrow-shouldered, mutie-headed whelp.

  Part of Lester’s pitch included the retelling of stories about other farmers, traders and gaudy-keepers laid waste by the vengeful god because they refused to kick in tribute, or because they didn’t kick in enough. As Silam matured to manhood, it became obvious that he was much more gifted at making up scary stories than Uncle Lester, whose generally weak line of bullshit constantly needed human intervention—poisonings, kidnappings and murders—to get and keep converts to the faith. For Silam, hands-on was always a last resort.

  When Uncle Lester’s health started to fail due to the all toxins he had sown in the service of his make-believe god, Silam inherited the oxcart and the pitch-man job. His descriptions of plagues of boils and burrowing mites kept his hayseed audiences itching until they bled. They cringed at his stories of invasions of rats and fleas carrying mutated diseases that ate the eyes and tongue from the inside out. They blanched at tales of midnight visitations by packs of hungry cannies and stickies.

  Silam had quite a little operation going, and he knew how to control even the smartest of his victims.

  “Why does god only do bad things to people?” a dirt farmer had asked him once.

  “’Cause that’s what gods are about, or haven’t you noticed?” Silam had replied.

  “I heard about a place called heaven?”

  “I don’t know anything about heaven. You’re missing the point. The idea is to do something about the here and now. To make our lives less horrible. Which is why we sacrifice to Hammurabi.”

  Although the farmer backed down, the other stump pullers seemed to take what he’d said to heart. And the collection plate suffered.

  Overnight the smart-mouth bastard swelled up so big he couldn’t get out of bed. So big they couldn’t carry him through the cabin door. Silam was two villes away when he heard that the man had actually exploded. He had let out a great belch and the open flame from a candle set him off, chilling him, his wife and one of their three kids.

  A bit too much of Uncle Lester’s tried and true recipe, that time.

  Months later when Silam awoke from a sound sleep and saw those steel eyes looking down at him, lit by the embers of the dying campfire, he knew at once who it was. As a youngster, he had hung around gaudy back doors, listening to bragging, drunken stories of mayhem and revenge while Uncle Lester got his whistle wetted and his gopher petted. At the time, he had thought the tales about the steel-eyed half man-half machine were fables, primarily because the facts were so disjointed and contradictory. He didn’t understand until he was much older that therein lay their strength and their terrible fascination. Magus personified unintelligible science and mindless human hubris. He was a living symbol of the hellscape.

  In the flesh he was the scariest fucking thing Silam had ever seen.

  While he lay trembling in his bedroll, Magus had informed him that he’d been watching the Hammurabi show from the shadows, and that he liked it very much. He set Silam at ease by talking at length about what he considered to be the best parts. Farm folks begging the pitchman’s forgiveness and his intercession after he had poisoned them. It was too late for the fools to get religion, but not for the relatives and neighbors who had to watch them die in agony.

  “I could use a brain like yours,” Magus had said.

  Words that had made Silam’s sphincter seize up. He thought Steel Eyes intended a transplant. That turned out not to be the case. It was an offer of gainful employment. A grander, living god to serve. And he had served faithfully.

  In the menagerie’s next mutie coop, shiny-black, cylindrically shaped creatures scuttled through the deep piles of straw on the rock floor.

  “Now, those definitely look promising,” Magus said, peering through the cell’s steel bars.

  Silam could hear the shrill whine of the servos in his metal eyes as he focused on the two-foot-long muties.

  “Catch one so I can examine it more closely,” Magus told an enforcer.

  Catching was the easy part. Holding on proved much more challenging. The segmented armor back-plates were as slick as snot, and there were all those scrabbling, rasping, bug legs underneath. As the baby scagworm squirmed to get free, it simultaneously hissed and shat, its blue-black jaws snapping like bolt cutters.

  “Beautiful!” Magus exclaimed. Then he turned on Silam and said, “I trust you lined up some hardier norm stock for the afternoon’s entertainment. The group this morning put on a truly pathetic performance. I’d rate it one star out of a possible five. The muties tore their opponents to shreds well before the final act, so there was no final act. It was all build-up and no crescendo. Very, very disappointing.”

  Silam knew better than to make excuses to his master, or to ever look him straight in the eye. Every time he stared into those chrome hen’s eggs, he felt like he was being sucked into the pinpoint pupils, drawn down into spinning metal blades.

  Lowering his top-heavy head, Silam accepted the negative criticism, even though he knew there had been nothing wrong with the previous group of norm fighters. The screams from this side of the island got very loud at times. And depending on the wind direction, Magus’s blaring recorded music didn’t always drown them out. Left waiting on the beach too long, their firearms already confiscated, the recruits had guessed their fates. The uniforms had had to use blasters and cudgels to drive them from their driftwood hovels and into the rowboats. It was understandable that they hadn’t gotten into the joyous spirit of the morning’s contest.

  Understandable to him, if not to his lord.

  “I’m getting bored with this diversion of yours, Silam,” Magus said. “Frankly, it’s not living up to its initial promise. It’s all complication and no substance. It’s wheel spinning. Directionless. Redundant. It has become a hollow mockery of itself. What else can you offer me?”

  Not a question, but a command.

  And one that Silam had anticipated. Knowing Magus’s taste and attention span, he figured the army recruitment scam had just about run its course.

  “Would you be interested in a grand finale, Magus?” he asked.

  “Anything grand and final interests me.”

  “I’ve added an outlandish twist to the afternoon’s performance,” Silam said. “Something I hope you’ll find appealing.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’ve conscripted our islander captain and crew. As you know, they are renowned throughout the hellscape as savage and determined fighters, a tightly knit band of brothers, cousins, fathers. They will do themselves great honor in the arena, you can be sure of that. And when the final act comes, it will be brother against brother, and father against son.”

  Steel Eyes’s tie-rod-throwing laugh made Silam flinch. That clanking, grinding noise was something he could never get used to, no matter how many times he heard it. As his master rattled with glee, the spin doctor noticed a spreading wet spot on the floor between the metal strutted legs. Magus had sprung another pinhole leak in his tranny.

  Rish and Jaswinder noticed the stain, as well, but said nothing. At the first crash of that unnerving laugh, they had both taken three giant steps backward. Rish buried his long, miserable face in his clipboard and resumed frantically scribbling. He was keeping track of the number of muties and their fighting capabilities, just as he had with the newly arrived recruits. The data was indispensable for staging the upcoming contests; and for developing the char
ts of victories and defeats, woundings and chillings he used to predict outcome probabilities. The oddsmaking was not for gambling purposes but to ensure Magus got the very best in live theater.

  The entourage continued down the underground corridor, following the lurch and jerk of their master. Silam glanced into the cells and cages that lined both sides of the hall. Some of the races of captive muties had been given names by the people of Deathlands. Stickies. Scalies. Swampies. Wazls.

  The menagerie’s stickies were chained together at the ankles and necks, this to keep them under control at all times. As Silam passed their cell, the naked muties made soft kissing sounds at him, and sniffed through the holes in their faces where noses should have been. They showed him their needle teeth and drooled, playfully reaching out between the bars with sucker hands. Their idea of “play” was not his.

  The cannon fodder scalies were unchained and caged in same-sex pairs, squatting amid mounds of their own dung. As Magus walked by, they banged empty slop buckets against the bars. From every scalie cell came the same whine about how long it’d been since they’d been fed.

  Scalies fought better hungry. As did all the others.

  Starvation was a motivational tool.

  The five Wazls seemed particularly agitated. The leather-winged, reptilian muties gnawed and clawed at bars of their wheeled cages, deeply scoring the metal with serrated teeth and curving black tri-talons, pausing only to unleash sawing cries of bloodlust. Their long, tapering wings had been clipped on arrival, so they could barely fly. Next to the cages lay the steel mesh nets and prod poles necessary to pacify them.

  Much more subdued than the Wazls were the swampies, a race of sour, squat, hairy, blockheaded humanoid muties. Their beards and arms were still spattered with blood from the morning’s fight. Crude clubs in hand, their dark, squinty eyes carefully measured their captors for a murderous bludgeoning.

  There were other muties, too. Species specially imported by Magus. Species no one had ever seen before.