by James Axler
“Doc no triple stupe.”
That, too, was true.
Living in Deathlands a person either acquired a feel for picking out the bullshitters and the con artists, or he or she didn’t live past age ten. It was guaranteed that every third human being you came across was going to be some variety of shit hook, hell-bent after your blaster, your jack, your jolt, or the hole in your ass. Surviving to breeding age wasn’t a question of smarts; it was a question of gullibility.
“Scrub mission?” Jak asked.
“No way,” Ryan said, leaning into his oar. “We don’t even know where he went.”
“Top of mountain.”
“Maybe. And maybe there’s a gateway up there and he’s already long gone. Without blasters we can’t follow him and find out. The uniforms would cut us down, or the enforcers would catch us. We’re going to do this training, whatever the hell it is, and hope to get our shot at Magus before it’s over. If we live through all that, we’ll see about catching up with Doc.”
Under the leaden, oppressive sky, the flotilla of small boats steadily worked its way around the island. Ryan was sweating from the effort, but not as much as the trainer who just sat there on the stern, looking ugly and smelling like new fallen chem rain. At the extreme eastern tip of the island there was no beach. The sea lapped up against a vertical wall of rock, four hundred feet of it without so much as a fingerhold. As they rounded the corner, another, much smaller island came into view.
A flat, buff-colored plate of volcanic rock. Topped at its southern end by a low cinder cone. Not a twig, not a blade of grass grew on it.
The training ground, Ryan had no doubt.
He looked up at the larger island, which loomed above the islet like a skyscraper. Its back side was even more sheer than the front. There was no path, no rope rail up its face. No dwellings along its narrow beach, just wag-size boulders of fallen granite.
As they approached the islet’s shallow northern shore, the uniforms and trainers ordered their crews to run the bows of the boats up onto the rock shelf. This done, the uniforms forced the recruits out of the boats and onto the shore. Ryan and Jak jumped down and moved closer to Mildred, Krysty, and J.B. Without a word of explanation, all the boats were relaunched, stranding the recruits. The uniforms rowed the trainers away, stopping about fifty yards off the beach. Because they were in the big island’s lee, the boats didn’t drift after the oars were shipped. They just hung there, dead still on the flat gray sea.
The uniform captain stood on the bow of his boat and shouted across the water through cupped hands. “There are weapons waiting for you over the rise. Help yourselves!”
There was no headlong rush to do that. The ex-mercies and sec men hung back, wary of what might be waiting unseen on the other side.
The companions and the islanders took the initiative. Astride the lip of the shallow bowl, they looked down on a big pile of edged weapons had been dumped there.
Ryan recognized some of the bayonets: AK-47, L1A1/F, M5-A1. But there were much older ones, too, designed for turn-of-the-twentieth century Mauser and Enfield bolt guns. They were like short swords, handguards and all.
Most of the other stuff was flashy crap meant to hang on a wall. Nothing you’d ever want to bet your life on: a Khyber knife, the base of its wide blade chipped out at the choil; sword canes with bent and hand-re-straightened double edged blades, absent their scabbards; nicked cheapie Tanto knives and Bowies; thirty-five-inch-long, Calcutta-reproduction 1860 Cavalry sabers with ten-karat-gold-plated handguards. There was even a tomahawk/peace pipe with a triangular splitting point.
Except for the collection of sledge hammers, hand axes and splitting mauls, it looked like an import cutlery house’s garbage bin on pickup day.
The companions and islanders without edged weapons, or those who wanted bigger ones, started rooting through the pile.
Eng and his crew went for the sabers. The weapons were bloody and sticky, their edges nicked by impacts on bone and rock. The islanders didn’t seem to care. A yard of steel was a big selling point. They carried their swords back to the sea and carefully rinsed off the gore.
Ryan was surprised when J.B. beelined for the tomahawk. He took a couple of practice swipes with it, looking very pleased with himself. Ryan had to admit, the pointy end was triple wicked. Krysty and Mildred picked up the circa 1900 bayonets, excellent choices because the blades were respectively fifteen-and-a-half and seventeen-inches long, and made of high-quality, tempered steel. Jak tested the eight-inch blade of the AK bayonet on the ball of his thumb. Satisfied with its edge, he tucked it away.
The companions stared across the bowl at the cinder cone on the opposite side. Smack dab in the middle of it was a pair of steel doors.
“The volcano’s dead,” Mildred said. “That’s the good news.”
“The bad news is,” J.B. went on, “the only ‘training’ we’re going to get is in how to die.”
Ryan turned toward the big island. He drew his panga from its leg sheath and pointed. “Up there,” he said. “Magus is watching. You can be sure of that.”
On cue, the sepulchral music boomed down on them from the island’s cloudy heights. A raging, funereal storm of strings, brass and drums. Ryan didn’t recognize the piece, but Mildred did.
“Wagner, now that’s original.”
Nobody said how much they missed Doc at that moment.
They didn’t have to.
Chapter Seventeen
“Louder!” Magus entreated his spin doctor. “Make their fucking bones shake!”
Silam cranked the redoubt’s sound system up to the max. The “Flight of the Valkyries” raged from massive speakers concealed in recesses all along the cliff face. Even inside the bosom of the mountain the thundering, rhythmic vibrations could be felt. A fine dust of rock filtered down on them, shaken loose from the sky box’s chiseled granite roof.
Magus stood with his back to Silam, looking out the broad, floor-to-ceiling window. The silhouette was all lopsided, with odd angles where struts and braces supported or replaced its limbs. The half-steel head was studded with electrical inputs and hose bibs, festooned with brightly colored wires and silicon tubing filled with pink fluid. Even with the Wagner playing at top volume, Silam thought he could hear him ticking, like a box of cheap clocks.
If the bulletproof window hadn’t been there, would he have risked all to step forward and give the monster a push? About four strides and a shoulder strike and the reign of terror would have been over, as would his nightmare of fear and loathing. The short answer was never. Never. Never. Never.
His paralysis had nothing to do with panic or lack of resolve; it had everything to do with status. Without Steel Eyes, Silam was just another con man/itinerant poisoner, traipsing the hellscape with a hokey statue in the back of his oxcart.
Like it or not they were joined, though not at the hip as equals. Silam was an addendum to the master, a footnote, a big-headed mole on what little remained of Magus’s human backside.
Or perhaps a festering boil nestling in the hairy crack.
The propagandist accepted the relationship’s precipitous downside to keep from becoming less than a boil.
Moving to the extreme edge of the window, as far from Magus as he could get and still see out, Silam gazed down upon the training ground from a lofty height. Beyond the flat patch of sea, he surveyed the spotted beige dish of rock, the recruits milling on the shore, still ignorant of what was to come, the mini-battlefield, its array of monsters hidden, waiting, ready to attack. He thrilled to a sense of godlike power.
This was what it was all about.
Thanks to Magus’s patronage, his dark fantasies came to life, fantasies of revenge against a cruel world, against a cruel people. It allowed him to recast himself as dead gorgeous, dead smart, dead creative. Magus had given him an army of coldhearts and turned him loose to work his worst. Deathlands was his canvas, his marble, his ream of blank paper.
The sad truth was, Silam
had only one painting in him, one sculpture, one bit of verse. And he painted that same picture, sculpted that same statue, wrote that same epic poem over and over again. Only in his narcissistic fantasy did the work mature, evolve, outdo itself.
If Magus was aware of this, if he even cared, if it was part of his plan, there was no way of telling. Steel Eyes was inscrutable; trying to read his mind was like trying to read the mind of a wag engine. His goals, his pleasures, were never quite what they seemed. At times he appeared to be running amok; at times he seemed completely calculating.
With Magus, appearances were always deceptive.
Silam could not make out the faces of the recruits; they were a bit too far away. With his enhanced, artificial eyes, Magus didn’t have that problem. He could count their missing teeth.
“My goodness!” he exclaimed. “What have we here?”
“What is it, Magus?”
“A very special guest,” Steel Eyes replied. “You have outdone yourself, today, Silam.”
The PR man accepted the compliment without knowing why it had been given. “In what way, Magus?”
The half-man–half-machine turned on him. Silam took a step backward and his shoulders hit the skybox wall. There was nowhere to retreat. The pinhole pupils in the chrome eggs dilated, peering deep into his soft and squishy soul.
“You don’t know, do you?” Magus said.
“Know…know…know what?” Silam stammered, as panic clawed up into his throat.
“You have delivered Ryan Cawdor to me,” Magus said. “Him and his companions.”
“Cawdor?”
“One-Eye.”
“The butcher of Willie ville!” Silam exclaimed before he could stop himself. “He’s among the recruits?”
“This is a most glorious day, Silam. There will be no escape for the cyclops this time. I have him and I will crush him.”
He raised his steel hand to Silam’s face. It was less a hand than a motorized vise. The metal fingers closed in a tight fist, their servos whining. That inhuman grip could turn rock to powder.
“Open the gates,” Magus said. “Let the games begin.”
Chapter Eighteen
J.B. cleaned his spectacles on the tail of his shirt, slipped them back on, then screwed down his fedora until it was touching the tops of his ears. He picked up the tomahawk from the ground at his feet and slipped his hand through the wrist thong. It had a nice balance. And once it started moving, it sang through the air. The handle was made of very hard wood, hollowed out its entire length. A small bowl was machined into the ax head. A replica peace pipe, tribe of origin lost in the thirty-five-hundred-degree nuke wind.
The Armorer took another whistling cut with the ax. He wouldn’t be smoking tobacco with it. He’d be smoking heads.
The stains on the rock and the bloody weapons told him that whatever was coming through those twin steel doors was triple bad. That rad-blasted music made his head ache and his skin crawl. It reminded him of the carny chilling tent they had barely escaped in Bullard ville. Old Steel Eyes liked to score his slaughter fests with what Mildred called “predark, symphonic classics.” He thought it was rollicking good fun to mix great oldies with great butchery. Magus was a disease, a blight on the landscape that had to be cut out and burned. J.B. gave the tomahawk a quick forehand-back-hand slash and smiled. The weapon had some real heft to it.
Skull-cracking heft.
J.B. glanced at Ryan. His old friend stood with panga in hand, relaxed, his breathing even and slow, conserving his energy. Most of the other recruits were doing just the opposite. They were yelling obscenities at the uniforms and trainers in the drifting boats, stomping around the shoreline, waving their blades, working up their shrinking courage and venting their pants-pissing, mortal fear of what was in store for the rest of the afternoon.
Like Ryan, the islanders held their own counsel and let no emotion show. The way they gathered behind their scar-faced captain, sabers poised, gave J.B. the feeling they knew exactly what they were going to do and how they were going to do it.
If Magus had a crew armed with full-auto blasters hidden behind those steel doors, the recruits were about to be mowed down, as helpless as a field of corn before a thresher. The Armorer immediately pushed that unpleasant idea out of his head. It didn’t fit at all with what he knew about Steel Eyes. Most times Magus liked his entertainment to stretch on and on, for the suffering of the players to build, for his victims to die pleading for his mercy. An attack with blasters against blades would be more like a mass execution. And he could have done that on the campground beach, and saved a lot of bother.
Whatever was coming it was going to be something special.
Spectacular, but not in a good way.
And thanks to Doc, they were one man short.
Though it was difficult, J.B. refused to let himself dwell on Doc’s apparent desertion. This wasn’t the time or the place to waste energy getting bent out of shape over something that couldn’t be changed. He tried breathing slow like Ryan, from deep down in his lungs, letting the tension ooze out through the soles of his boots.
He thought it was just starting to work when the music suddenly stopped. The echoes of string section and kettle drum died away, leaving a terrible void. No one moved as the long silence dragged on, no one spoke as they waited for the ax to fall.
When the steel doors banged back, the music started up again, from the beginning. A shrieking fanfare of Valkryies.
J.B. squinted hard, trying to see inside the shadowy opening.
Dark brown, long-necked, featherless creatures burst through the doorway. They leaped into the air, their seven-foot-long wings flapping.
Wazls. Full-grown Wazls. Five of them.
A shudder rippled through the massed recruits.
Half gator, half condor, Wazls usually dropped out of the night sky like precision-guided bombs upon the unsuspecting, the slow, the sleepy. Though they preferred to hunt after sundown, when starved they took their meat any time they could find it.
Dark night had become dark day. Their blood curdling screams ripped through the intertwining layers of Wagner like a rusty knife.
Instinctively, the fighters closed ranks as the Wazls struggled to gain altitude. After climbing to about fifteen feet above the ground, they began to circle around and around the islet.
J.B. saw the ragged rents in their wing leather, crude mutilations that prevented the lizard birds from flying higher. Normally they would have used their seventeen-foot wing spans to catch the thermals off the cliff face of the big island, riding them, spiraling up through the cloud bank and out the other side. Like condors they were master gliders, capable of rising to impossible heights, then coasting on the wind currents for hundreds of miles.
These were landlocked Wazls, and they were not happy about it.
As they flew past, the wind they made buffeted J.B.’s face. They shifted into an attack formation, with the biggest bird in front, then three abreast, and the smallest one bringing up the rear. Their reptilian heads pivoted on their long necks as they sized up their prey. They screamed a final warning.
Death from above.
The recruits screamed back. They cursed. They booed. They shook their weapons in defiance. Some threw knives, which either missed their targets or hit sideways, or were deftly plucked out of the air by the Wazls’ long beaks. Flying lower, circling closer, the lizard birds dipped and darted, wheeling, snapping, clawing at the unprotected heads without actually making contact, almost in a teasing, testing way.
Under the pressure, many of the recruits withdrew from the perimeter, moving down into the depressed center of the bowl, edging closer to the cone and its open doors.
A bad idea.
The companions and the islanders maintained their distance from the cone, ducking under the reach of the halfheartedly slashing, black tri-talons as they swept overhead.
The music stopped abruptly again, but only for a moment this time. When it restarted, booming out
that same, nerve-grating introduction, a torrent of pale, two-legged forms poured from the doorway. Stickies by the dozens rushed down the shallow slope, waving their skinny arms, making the frantic kissing sounds that always signaled a mass chilling.
At that moment the Wazls attacked, diving into the fringes of the crowd, their talons outstretched.
Knives and even short swords were of little use against the lizard birds. They were too fast, too agile, and the reach of their necks and claws was too long. In their sweeping circuits of the islet, in the seemingly playful feints and mock slashes, they had picked out their victims, the easiest meals.
Not ten feet in front of J.B., the lead Wazl slammed into a sec man’s back. The impact drove him to his knees, sending his blade skittering across the rock. The recruit shrieked as the talons sank into his shoulder blades, and shrieked louder as the Wazl tried to carry him off. Wings beating, it raised him a yard or so off the ground. With slashed wings, it couldn’t lift him higher. Then a second bird joined the attack, sinking its claws into the man’s chest. Together, the Wazls bore him up. The sec man kicked and punched to no avail. As they climbed to fifty, sixty, seventy-five feet, they fought, snapping, dodging, flapping, pulling and twisting their prize in opposite directions. If they’d had some decent leverage to work with, somewhere solid to plant their feet, they might have torn him in two, but as it was, the second bird ripped out a double helping of pectoral muscle and abandoned the rest, leaving the first bird to bear the man’s full weight. The overloaded Wazl hurtled downward like a faulty parachute, then its grip slipped and the struggling sec man fell free.
The hovering bird screeched in fury as its prey plummeted onto the rocky shallows, landing with a tremendous full-length splash. The sec man didn’t move after that. His head was submerged facedown, past the ears. The water around him turned cloudy red.
In the middle of the bowl, norm and stickie collided in a howling, screaming din. The muties drove an eight-abreast column into the middle of the mass of recruits. A wedge intended to split the norm force. The recruits gave ground, yielding to the pressure and then tried to flank and surround the headlong charge. The stickies’ rampage was unstoppable. While the muties along the wedge’s front row did battle, the ones behind jumped over their backs and onto the stunned recruits. Once a stickie grabbed hold with those sucker fingers and its adhesive secretions, it never let go. By the sheer weight of numbers, the muties pinned their foes to the ground.