by James Axler
The swampies, stickies and scalies watched the unfolding chaos, but did not join in. They were waiting for something else to happen.
Mildred caught a high-pitched whine overhead, which quickly became a buzzing so loud it half drowned out the roar of the Wagner. Looking up, she saw a widely dispersed cloud of flying insects. As the bugs swirled around and around, they flew closer and closer together until they were a churning black mass that instilled fear and dread in the stickies and swampies. They backed up in a hurry. Even the scalies got off their butts. Mildred didn’t like the look of it, either, but had nowhere to back up to.
The cloud of insects zeroed in on two islanders standing shoulder to shoulder. The set-upon crewmen tried to beat the bugs out of the air with the flats of their swords, to no avail.
The swarming flies landed all over their heads and tattooed torsos, and then they started stinging. Deathlands had some wicked biting bugs, but from the way the islanders screamed and hopped these were triple extra nasty. The crewmen slapped themselves, squashing the insects with the flats of their hands, but the stingers’ poison was already taking effect. Their flesh began to balloon up, eyelids squeezing shut, great angry welts popping out everywhere. The bugs clung doggedly to their skin, letting themselves be crushed rather than withdraw their pumping stingers.
Blinded, the sailors staggered backward. They managed only a few steps before they fell to the ground, and lay there gasping for breath. Unable to defend themselves, they were easy pickings for the scagworms which homed in on their feeble struggles. Before any of the norms could intervene, the islanders’ ribs were snapping between bolt-cutter jaws and the two-foot-long worms were boring into the dark warmth of their bellies.
No one tried to end their torment. There wasn’t time. A new hazard was almost on top of them. Moving much faster than the worms, and leaping in high, energetic bounds, was a chill pack of gray, hairy creatures.
They were jumping like they were on springs.
Only when they got closer did Mildred get a clear look at them. They were the size of a terrier dog, with a vicious set of fangs and a naked, ratlike tail.
These rat muties leaped horizontal distances of twenty feet or more in a single bound. Mildred saw one go airborne much closer than that and just had time to raise her bayonet point to catch it. She speared a fat two-pounder through the middle; the true edge of the blade had clipped its spinal cord. Its back legs hung down limply, the front legs were going to beat the band. It had bulgy red eyes, shaggy mouse-gray fur tipped with yellow, and pointy ears. Though it was half paralyzed, bleeding and crapping, its naked tail wrapped around the blade, it snapped its fangs, trying to get a piece of her. She flipped it off to one side.
Down the perimeter, things weren’t going nearly so well. Two rat devils were tearing out an islander’s throat while a third rode the back of his neck, trying to bite through into his brain. Ryan and J.B. tried to kill the things with panga and tomahawk, but their blows never made contact. The little muties were too quick, and they could jump too far. The islander was beyond help, bleeding out from massive wounds to both sides of the neck.
To her left, Harawira let out a shrill cry. A rat devil had sunk its fangs into his thigh, just above the knee. The mutie was hanging on, shaking its head, trying to tear out a hunk of flesh. The islander reached down and snatched hold of the creature, squeezing on its neck until it opened its jaws. Harawira then hoisted the rat devil up and, gritting his teeth, squeezed some more. The mutie’s torso popped like a rotten tomato in his fist, turning to bloody scrap of hair with legs.
When another islander went down with a terminal case of scagworm, the stickies and swampies surged forward. With the norms reeling, their formation shaken, the time had come to close the deal.
“Pull in, pull in!” Ryan shouted. “Close ranks!”
Mildred saw him glance over his shoulder, back the way they had come. Something in his expression, a realization, perhaps, made her look in that direction, too. The path they’d forged from the rim of the dish led nowhere but the water’s edge.
And there the boats full of uniforms waited.
They had drifted much closer to shore, perhaps so the passengers could get a better view of the show. They were within forty feet of the beach and all the oars were shipped. Men with autorifles looked on the carnage and smiled toothlessly.
There was no way to win.
No place to retreat to.
No way off the stinking rock.
Even so, Mildred would not admit defeat. She was an optimist, first and foremost. She believed that where there was a will to survive there was a way to survive, especially in the company of courageous warriors. She knew she was getting tired, that her reactions were slowing down. The bayonet felt like it weighed ten pounds. She didn’t know how much longer she could effectively fight, but she clung to the belief that she could fight long enough to get through this.
Then the music stopped again.
The steel doors banged back.
And Mildred felt her hope sputter and fail.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Rish was still wearing his protective gear when the music from the big island stopped again, giving him the signal to release the next wave of combatants. He had just turned loose the rat devils and Silam was already calling for the screamies.
The diminutive man stripped off his heavy leather gauntlets and the screen mesh, full-head, fencing mask. A smile twisted his hangdog jowls.
Things were going wrong, just the way he had hoped.
A cohesive, seasoned fighting force was much, much more difficult to deal with than onesies or twosies. Not that the individual recruits were triple easy to chill. They died taking muties with them, which reduced the mutie numbers and increased the odds in favor of the organized norm units.
It appeared that even the self-deluded, king of pomposity was beginning to see the scope of the problem. Rish got a warm feeling as he imagined Silam trapped in the sky box with the likes of Magus, helplessly watching the disaster unravel, which spelled his own doom.
Was the poet laureate trying to repair the damage? Of course, he was. The screamies were Silam’s mutie trump card. They were also the next-to-last resort before he called in the uniform death squads.
The screamies had only been released into combat once before, and that had been a limited field test. The consequences of that release gave everyone pause. Only the enforcers and Magus himself could withstand their hypersonic attack. From the test, norms and other muties had no chance against them. Turning the five wraiths loose on the islet was tantamount to admitting that things had gotten out of hand. Once they were released, they were uncontrollable, indiscriminate chillers. The idea of losing all his muties in one fell swoop wouldn’t sit well with Magus. There was the cost and the trouble of restocking his zoo, and of course the lost time.
If the screamies failed to bring down the curtain on Cawdor and the islanders, it would be up to the men in the boats, using their assault rifles on foes armed with blades and axes. It wasn’t the kind of high-quality entertainment Magus sought. If it all came down to blasters versus knives, Silam might as well pick up blade himself and cut his own throat.
Question was, would he live long enough to cut Rish’s throat first? The man he had relied on to edit his art, to fine-tune his inspiration. The spin doctor’s spin doctor.
“Why is he calling for the screamies?” Jaswinder said as he removed his fencing mask and threw down his gauntlets. He mopped the perspiration from his balding pate with the palm of his hand, then shook it off. He seemed struck by the strange expression on Rish’s face and his forehead furrowed in concern. “What is going on out there?”
Rish let his smile melt back into the drooping, downturned folds around his mouth. “I think Silam may have miscalculated the resilience of some of the recruits,” he said. “The afternoon show isn’t going exactly as he planned. There’s no time for questions, Jaswinder, not unless you want to die today. Come on, give
me a hand, and be quick about it.”
With Jaswinder on his heels, Rish trotted down the menagerie corridor to the screamies’ cell.
The five muties turned to look up at him as he reached on tiptoes for a stone shelf beside the door. From the shelf he took two pairs of Bull’s Eye Ultimate 10 Hearing Protectors and two pairs of Lexan, wraparound goggles. It was the gear they used during feeding and periodic hose downs.
After he and Jaswinder put on the muffs and goggles, Rish waved over the zoo’s contingent of enforcers.
When they opened the cell, the gagged and bound screamies just glowered at them from the straw. Seeing the ear and eye protection, they didn’t bother giving voice. They looked like five very unhappy teenage girls, though what they really were Rish had no clue. Were they even human? Based on their abilities, he guessed not. They appeared to be related and the same age. They could have multiple births, sisters or even clones. The screamies had just turned up in a cargo of muties, already bound and gagged, with written instructions on their care and handling. There were specific instructions on safety procedures, lethality ranges and the like. Rish had heard the rumor that Magus had paid dearly for them in wags and high-test fuel.
At Rish’s signal the enforcers entered the cage and, gripping the girls by their upper arms pulled them to their feet. The wraiths visibly recoiled at the creatures’ sweaty touch.
Rish found himself looking up at them, and they looked down their pert noses at him, radiating contempt for the gnarly runt who had control of their destinies. The screamies were a good head and a half taller than he was.
“You’re going to be good girls, now,” he said in an affirmative tone. He couldn’t tell whether they understood him or not. Their pretty faces seethed with rage. He made a calm down gesture with his tiny hands. “Take it easy. Just take it easy. We’re going to let you out for some fresh air. And a little choir practice.”
They didn’t respond to him, but they looked at one another, sharing a sisterly moment.
Rish and Jaswinder cut the tape loose from their hands, then they removed the tape wrapped around their heads, sealing their jaws shut. The norms stepped back as the screamies pulled the wet, wadded rags from their mouths and threw them down onto the straw.
Then two things happened, very quickly.
It had all been planned, of course, while they’d sat bound in their cell. Rish could see that from their triumphant expressions, a plan worked out in eye movements, head nods, perhaps even mental telepathy.
One of the screamies reached out and with a single swipe of her hand tore the ear muffs and the goggles from Jaswinder’s head.
All five of the muties opened their mouths, showing the black lining, and cut loose with a ten-megawatt, super-high-frequency chorus.
Rish didn’t actually hear the noise. But it hurt, oh baby. It hurt like a steel bit drilling up through the roof of his mouth. The side of his body facing the muties was blasted by heat, like he had stepped too close to a bonfire. He tasted blood.
Not his own.
It was Jaswinder’s.
Poor Jaswinder jolted backward, thrown against the bars as if hit by a wag.
“Stop them!” Rish cried to the enforcers as the wraiths’ nubile bosoms heaved, gathering air for a second blast.
Before they could intervene, blood gushed from Jaswinder’s ears, eyes and nose. Not in pulsing arterial jets, but fountaining like a busted water pipe. The skin of his bald head rose up in great, watery blisters. Jaswinder took one breath, choked and spewed gore halfway across the cage.
That breath was his last. The screamies moved in and wreaked close-range devastation. Their assault cooked his brains like a microwave oven. Jaswinder’s eyeballs bulged, smoking, then they exploded. Brains bubbled out his emptied eye sockets like pink gravy. He slumped to seated position on the floor, chin resting on chest.
Rish could feel and smell their sweet breath on his face as they aimed a torrent of destruction at him. Despite the protection he was wearing, the drill bit spun faster, bored deeper, augured wider. Rish whimpered and backed away as the enforcers grabbed them from behind and clapped hands over their open mouths.
Sweaty fingers squeezed off pert noses, as well.
The muties kicked wildly and tried to scratch the knobby skin. All they managed to do was break their nails. Slowly, their faces turned red, then purple, then they stopped struggling.
Only when they went limp did the enforcers let them breathe through their noses.
Rish looked down at Jaswinder. His face was a bloody mess. Steam rolled out of his eye sockets and ears. Rish couldn’t imagine what it had to have felt like to die that way. The building pressure and heat inside the skull. Eyeballs bursting. The explosion of pain that was not a release but a door opening to even greater agony. Jaswinder hadn’t deserved such a horrible death.
“Let them go,” he told the enforcers.
When the creatures obeyed he saw that the pressure of their hands had left red marks on the milk-white skin and glistening smears of sweat.
Despite himself, Rish was taken aback when the wraiths started laughing and giggling, pleased that their affronted dignity had been revenged, for the moment.
They flipped their long braids over their shoulders with a practiced toss of the head. Again the small, perfect noses went up in the air, the blue eyes flashed behind cornsilk lashes. So haughty. So defiant.
So infuriating.
Jaswinder still lay twitching in the straw, his brains running into his lap.
Rish had the urge to order the enforcers to regag and rebind the screamies and send them out into battle. That way, the other loosed mutie species would pull them apart. As powerful as the impulse was, he thought better of it. His hand could not be apparent in the disaster.
“Get those bitches out of here!” Rish shouted at the enforcers.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Doc Tanner fought his way up a curving, narrow passage. While the steeply angled floor had substance—it looked like black marble—the walls and ceiling did not. They were smoke, impenetrable gray smoke that churned around and under the free-floating platform. It was like being inside the belly of a tornado. He touched the wall with his hand and the smoke swallowed it up. Though the air appeared to be moving in a clockwise swirl, he could feel no wind.
Above him was the strange passage’s end. A single floor-mounted spotlight shone on a wooden door thickly painted apple-green. As he continued to climb toward that goal, the effort caused his legs and solar plexus to ache. Ignoring the pain, he put one unsteady foot in front of another.
When Doc reached the barrier, he turned the knob. The door slammed back on its hinges from a powerful suction, sending him skidding in reverse. He had to drop to his knees and put his hands flat on the marble to keep from losing all the ground he had gained. The wind through the doorway was blowing directly into his face, and it was so strong that it was difficult to breathe, so strong that he had to lean forward and drive with his legs to hold his own against it.
As he hung on there, things began blowing past him, swept downward by the rush of air.
Maple leaves in fall colors, red, gold, orange.
Shreds of paper.
Browned rose petals.
Dead birds, sparrows and robins somersaulted limp winged around his ears.
Dropping lower to his belly, he crawled forward, pulling himself to the door jamb. When he reached over the jamb, he could no longer feel the floor. It ended on his side of the jamb.
Before him, beyond the reach of the spotlight was pitch darkness. After a moment a pinpoint of brightness appeared in the center of the black, growing wider and wider, like the iris of a great eye opening.
Doc choked on a flood of tears, certain that he was looking at the backside of very same oculus that his daughter Rachel had glimpsed November of 1896, glimpsed more than once and could not forget. How it had frightened her. An eye hanging in space. God’s eye, she had called it.
At the tim
e Doc had been very concerned by the girl’s reports. He had enough medical knowledge to realize that hallucinations were not always the result of an overactive, childish imagination. They could also caused by tumors of the brain or poisons in the environment. He had no way of knowing that what Rachel had witnessed were tests of the time-trawl machinery from the distant future, a maw opening and closing.
Through the iris he could see bright gray, but it wasn’t fog and it wasn’t smoke. It didn’t drip like a mist; it had no moisture to it. It didn’t burn his nose and eyes; it held no choking ash. When he turned his head, the blur of gray moved with it. It seemed to be something internal, like his own vision was failing, clouding over with cataracts.
More stuff was sucked or driven past him.
A St. Charles spaniel with leash.
A lady’s hat, widebrimmed with gray and white feathers. With a start, he recognized it as Emily’s.
Then came an open parasol.
A wicker baby carriage tumbled sideways over his back, followed by the spilled contents of a trash can: wads of greasy newspaper, half-rotted vegetable matter, empty tin cans, broken bottles, beef soup bones. All of it rattled past him.
Then something much larger shot by. Though he saw it only for a fraction of second, the image stuck in his consciousness. It was the image of himself sucked headlong down the churning tunnel. He saw the terror and disbelief in his own eyes, the long frock coat with small gold buttons, the diamond stick pin in his cravat. The hair not yet streaked with gray.
Gone.
To a future that didn’t want him.
To a landscape of pain and regret.
A moment or two later, the wind currents changed, like a tide going slack. As he rose to his feet and stood on the edge of the jamb, the fog parted and he saw his little family standing huddled before him on the misty Omaha street. They were just as he remembered them—Emily holding their infant son Jolyon, Rachel standing close to her.