by James Axler
One was the size of a small dog with prominent fangs like a Tasmanian devil, bulging reddish eyes and a long, naked, ratlike tail. The pack of starving rat devils threw themselves at the bars of their cages, trying to wedge their bodies through the gaps to get at the spectators.
The next cell contained six norm-looking females, ages roughly thirteen to fifteen. Their mouths were gagged and securely taped shut. Their wrists were bound in front of them with more tape. They looked like virgin wraiths from some predark Nordic myth. They had long, pale blond hair woven into a thick single braid down their backs. Their porcelain-white skin revealed a faint tracery of bluish veins. Their eyelashes and eyebrows were the color of cornsilk. Pink tea roses tinted the centers of their cheeks. They wore long, gauzy white gowns, gathered under their budding breasts by belts of colorful woven rags. Staring up at him from the straw where they sat, knees drawn up to their chests, their piercingly blue eyes radiated lethal hate.
Silam had dubbed them screamies.
An obvious choice, as screams were their primary offensive weapon. Not normal screams that you could actually hear, screams that might make you cringe or shudder, but high-intensity screams that shot up into the ultrasonic. When riled, screamies rolled their eyes back in their sockets, opened their perfect pink lips, revealing black teeth, a black tongue and mouth, and cut loose in unison. The sound they made tore eardrums apart, it burst blood vessels in the eyes and nose, it disrupted heart rhythm. At close range it destroyed brains. In battle, they advanced in a solemn procession, two abreast, palms pressed tightly together, chilling like a scythe.
Though the six screamies sat muffled and gagged, they could still hum through their delicate, upturned noses. Silam knew they were humming because he found himself with a sudden splitting headache. It speared up through the roof of his mouth into his brain pan, like he had eaten something very cold too quickly. Rish groaned and shut his eyes as he, too, was stricken. Jaswinder suffered the worst of all, springing a copious nose bleed. The humming had no apparent effect on Magus or the enforcers. Only when they moved away, did Silam’s pain diminish and Jaswinder’s nose stop bleeding.
The last cage in the corridor was made of clear plastic and sat on a low table against the wall. To the uninformed its contents would have seemed an anticlimax.
It was full of flies.
Buzzing clouds of flies.
Inside the transparent cage was a sort of hive. The hive’s foundation, all but obscured by the mass of black, hairy insects that crawled over it, was a decapitated human head, stripped of skin and flesh down to the crimson bone. The bugs paraded in and out of the nostrils, eye sockets, mouth, ears and neck stump.
They were not house flies, or horse flies or deer flies. They were muties, born of and shaped by the nukecaust. These insects both bit and stung their victims, savagely swarming and attacking anything warm-blooded. Their venom caused massive tissue swelling. After many stings, the accumulated toxins incapacitated the prey, bringing on a partial paralysis, which allowed the flies to bury their eggs in every square inch of the helpless body. The victim was still alive when four days later the larvae hatched out and ate their way to freedom. Once freed, they turned around and ate the nest.
According to Silam’s running script, the flies were to be withheld until a pivotal moment in the combat, when their release would become a complicating factor and make things “even more interesting.”
As showtime neared, the enforcers began stirring up the muties. They used prods and whips on stickies, scalies and swampies. They threw buckets of seawater on the Wazls and rat devils. The screamies they punched and kicked unmercifully. It was obvious they loved their work.
Silam didn’t know where Magus had found the enforcers. They just appeared with him one day on the rocky beach. After years of service, there was so much about his master that remained a mystery. Magus was in the habit of disappearing for extended periods of time, months even, and then returning without warning or explanation. Sometimes he came back less aromatic and more energetic. Sometimes he came back with new servants, like the enforcers. It was entirely possible that the sweating muties had been on the island all along—the upper levels of the secret redoubt, Steel Eyes’s private domain was a veritable cornucopia of predark treasures and unheard-of technology.
How Magus moved about, where he went and what he did was a puzzle that had no answer.
At corridor’s end, beneath a huge, tightly grated roof opening, was a foyer of sorts. The menagerie’s only exit, a pair of heavy steel double doors stood ajar. With Magus in the lead, the parade left the underground chamber, stepping onto the edge of a dish of mostly beige rock, a hundred yards in diameter. The islet on which they stood was roughly two acres of coarse-grained volcanic tuff. To their backs, framing the steel doors, was a low, broad cone of solidified volcanic ejecta.
Nothing grew in the wind-sculpted bowl. The natural arena was surrounded by a flat, gray sea, and overlooked by the towering mass of granite, some 150 yards away.
The islet was a sacrificial altar.
No place to run.
No place to hide.
High in the island’s sheer cliff face, weak sunshine reflected off a rectangle of glass—the window of Magus’s private sky box.
Here and there the islet’s porous rock was stained black from the blood that had soaked into it. The enforcers had already collected the edged weapons dropped during the morning’s show, but were still cleaning up the wide scatter of body parts, gathering them up and tossing them as far as they could toward the granite island, into the smooth sea.
By spinning, discus-thrower style, they could chuck an arm or a leg a very long way.
The distant splashdowns were met with huge boils, eight or ten feet across, with exposed back fins and gaping maws. Between the volcanic cone and the island was a reef of lava. The monstrous residents of its submerged caves and grottoes were rising up to fight over the spoils of battle.
Magus smiled at the sight.
Silam averted his eyes—not from the gorging fish, but from his master’s face. Even from an oblique side view, that grin of white bone and metal, of stainless guy wires and Teflon rivet holes, of slowly dying human flesh, was a thousand times more horrid than the grotesque spectacle that had inspired it.
As Magus limped around the perimeter of the shallow arena, the spin doctor feverishly flipped through the odds sheets, then dictated the entertainment’s final details to his little lackey. Event schedule clutched in a tiny hand, Rish turned back for the underground menagerie. It was his job to see that the program was followed to the letter.
Circling the rim of the dish at a trot, Silam joined Magus at the waterline, where a row-boat waited. A pair of enforcers held it steady while Steel Eyes got in and took a seat on the stern. After Silam braced himself in the bow, the enforcers pushed off and began to stroke for the far shore, and the southerly flank of Devil’s Peak.
There wasn’t enough sun for Silam to make out the pale spine of the reef, bracketed by plunging depths on either side, but he could see the mass of dark purplish shapes hanging in the water just above it.
Attracted by the rhythmic splash of oars, the dark shapes rushed toward them. Mutated dog-toothed pargo, two hundred pounders, peered up at Silam through a foot or two of water, their canine fangs long, straight and pointed, like killing dirks. Dozens of broad backs rolled in front of the boat, the orange-red skin showing through the thick, hornlike plates of scale. The inshore predators began jostling the boat with their backs, bumping into it as the enforcers rowed harder. But for the scrape of scales and back fins against the hull, it was like riding through a whirling, spinning current. For the fish it wasn’t a game. They were trying to tip over the craft and have at the passengers.
The giant pargo bumped them all the way to the shallows. The mass of wide purple backs only turned away when they stepped out of reach onto the narrow, rocky shore.
With Magus in the lead, they walked along the foot of the
precipitous cliff. A cleft had been cut or blasted into one of the perpendicular granite buttresses. The nook was angled so it could not be seen from the water. It concealed a doorway made of dull, gray metal.
The enforcers blocked Silam’s view as Magus did something to a keypad set in the door frame. Something clanked, then the predark door slid back with a whoosh.
Steel Eyes limped into the mountain. The enforcers did not follow, but stepped aside to let Silam pass.
He entered the elevator after Magus, his knees suddenly weak, his heart racing up under his chin. When the door whirred closed, a crushing sense of doom descended upon him. The car was just ten by eight. No windows. No air. No headroom. Just Magus, at arm’s length. As the elevator started up with a jerk, he pressed his back hard against the wall, fighting down towering and familiar waves of panic.
Steel Eyes was not a creature he could kill, nor raise a hand to. He was afraid even thinking that thought that Magus would sense it somehow and strike him down. As the car rocketed upward, the poet laureate frantically rationalized the urge he felt to prostrate himself, to grovel facedown in the tranny drip. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want Magus to vivisect him, to laugh that awful grinding laugh while he peeled back the layers of skin and muscle and fat, yarding out his intestines, playing pitty-pat with his beating heart. Magus could not be battled or bartered with, what he wanted he simply took.
In this confined setting, the ten-by-eight vanadium steel box, with no one to see or hear, their true relationship was revealed.
Silam was in control of nothing, he understood nothing. Ego gone. Intelligence gone. Spine gone. That Magus had one day “discovered” him was base self-flattery, and more bad fiction.
Steel Eyes had turned him out.
Chapter Fifteen
Dr. Antoine Kirby rechecked the mag in his M-16. It was a nervous habit he’d picked up. Too many firefights in too many hellholes had left him with the persistent, nagging feeling that every mag was a bullet or two light, no matter what the round counter said.
Bell noted the dropped clip with a smirk. It faded as quickly as it appeared. Under other circumstances, he would have given his partner grief about the tic, asking him if he was really sure he was topped off, asking him if a round-counter would lie, and if so, why; asking if he wanted to maybe swap mags. From the colonel’s dead silence, he was plenty anxious, too.
And with good reason.
Two-thirds of their escape route was exposed to up-angled fire. The rope-railed path up the cliffside was long, narrow, steep as hell, with a sheer drop-off to the beach, and had more than a dozen tight switchbacks to navigate. If Doc Tanner didn’t come along under his own power, they were going to have to coldcock him and drag him by his bootheels. Either way, unless they got a big jump on their adversaries, they were in trouble.
The freezies’ main advantage was surprise, no one would expect them to bolt in a vertical direction. That and the fact that they more or less knew where they were going.
Because Kirby and Bell’s redoubt had not been looted and ransacked, they had access to vast amounts of predark information, both inside and outside its strategic confines. Its surviving computer banks allowed them to identify other undestroyed redoubts in the global system, and to remotely monitor their mat-trans activity and ambient power levels. Redoubt linkage and communication had been critical to the reestablishment of social and political order, postholocaust. Order that had never come.
After following Doc and his companions to Morro Bay, and learning the direction of the voyage was south, they had a good idea where they were headed. They already had confirmation that the Devil’s Peak redoubt was operational and that its advanced cyber and mat-trans systems were in use. It was also the only functioning facility within range of a three-to four-day sail.
By a strange quirk of fate, Kirby had actually visited the site once before, during a visit home to California while he was on semester break from Princeton. Some mathematician colleagues of his at the University of Mexico who worked at the National Astronomic Observatory had invited him up to the summit to have a look through the installation’s 2.1 meter telescope. Before the nukecaust, the remote Baja mountaintop was the second-best viewing spot in the world, after the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii.
Outside the computers of their redoubt, the freezies’ main source of information was gossip and rumor gathered along the hellscape’s overland trade routes. There was a certain, undeniable consistency to some of the stories about Magus. Steel Eyes was reported to have appeared in a variety of places separated by long distances, distances impossible to span even by wag if the dates were even close to being correct. From this, Kirby and Bell had guessed that the companions weren’t the only ones using the mat-trans system.
There was other gossip, as well, widespread rumors of Magus’s time traveling, of his popping back and forth between the aeons to steal whatever material or weapons or slaves he fancied.
Kirby and Bell had dismissed this tale out of hand, based on their s-t/s models. Their computer simulations had shown the first jump, or trawl, of an individual caused a slight degradation in the time line’s fundamental structure. The second jump initiated catastrophic anomalies. Because Kirby and Bell couldn’t risk creating a mirror image catastrophe, they had used cryosleep to reach Deathlands. Their first time jump—to the past—would be their last, with a minimal disruption to the time stream, at least theoretically.
They did not dare return to the year 2001, or anywhere near their own era. Their conclusions about the laws of s-t/s were derived from a model and therefore not one hundred percent certain. While ninety-five percent reliability was close enough for science, this wasn’t an experiment that could be repeated over and over, this was the whole ball of wax. If they had somehow miscalculated, dropped a decimal point, added instead of subtracted, failed to convert from metric, that one-in-twenty chance of being wrong could come back to kick them and the hope of humankind in the ass. Forever.
Because of the unacceptable consequences of failure, Kirby and Bell planned to enter Tanner’s newly unfolding time line a century after 2001, roughly the same year as in Deathlands. The hundred-year delay would give Bell’s children a chance to grow up no matter what happened, and it would give science a chance to prepare itself for their arrival, and any potential unforeseen consequences.
To this end they had prepared a special blast-proof, heat-proof, radiation-proof capsule for Tanner to take with him. The inch-and-a-quarter-long canister, worn on a neck chain, was not to be opened until the year 1997, before the time-trawling experiments began, and then only by Operation Chronos whitecoats. The freezies had decided not to use computer technology for their vital message to the new past. CD-ROM disks or tape minicassettes or memory chips were too easily damaged and the information lost. They had chosen microfilm, a universal, optically based, hard technology, primitive but virtually foolproof. On the tiny strip of film were details of their work, of the fledgling Chronos technology, of the consequences unregulated time-trawling had wrought, and their planned reappearance down the time stream.
Some of those consequences they had purposefully kept back from Tanner. According to their s-t/s model, a third jump by the same person in the same time line would literally vibrate that string of existence apart. After Doc Tanner made the next jump, Deathlands would suddenly and violently cease to exist; not just from his perspective—from all perspectives. There would be no sound of a tree falling after he departed because there would be no tree, and nowhere for it to land.
The sound of a heated argument down the beach made Kirby, Bell and Tanner turn and look. The trainers and uniforms had surrounded a small group of recruits against the base of the cliff. What was being said was impossible to make out. Too many people were shouting at once. Then the uniforms took point-blank aim at the recruits’ heads and reluctantly, angrily, they started to hand over their blasters.
The rest of recruits got their backs up in a hurry.
&nb
sp; “What the blazes is this about?” one guy demanded.
“You can all keep your blades,” the captain of the uniforms told them, “but the blasters stay here until after the training exercise. It’s part of the drill. They’ll be safe. You’ll get ’em back.”
“Like fucking hell…” the man countered.
There were shouts of defiance up and down the beach. In Deathlands, blasters were the last thing surrendered and the first thing reached for in a pinch. A violent confrontation seemed imminent.
“It’s time to go, Tanner,” Bell told the old man. “While they’re busy with the others…”
Doc slowly rose to his feet. One by one, he looked to his old friends. Jak, the fearless wild child. Mildred, his colleague, his critic, his intellectual equal. John Barrymore, ever dependable and stalwart. Krysty, her beauty and fighting spirit like a blinding beacon. And Ryan Cawdor, dear Ryan, a hero for the worst of times, the new Dark Ages. None of the companions looked back at him, their attention was on the scuffle and impending shoot-out. It was almost as if he had already gone. As if he had already been forgotten.
“Please forgive me, dear friends,” Doc said, “but this intolerable heartache must finally end…” It was an apology they could not hear. Although Doc shed no tears at the one-sided farewell, his throat felt as if it had been pierced through sideways by a dagger.
“Now!” Bell growled in his ear.
With Tanner sandwiched in the middle, the trio ran for the cliff path, then dashed up the grade. The path was only a yard wide and the footing was slick from dripping water. Without the rope to hang on to and to pull on, speed climbing would have been impossible. The braided rail ran along the right-hand side of the zigzag track, passing through stanchion posts on the trail’s outside edge and steel rings hammered into the rock on the cliff side.
“Run, you bastard!” Kirby exhorted Doc from behind. “Run as hard as you can!”