Baptism of Rage

by James Axler

  Annie’s whining voice came from the barn doors. “Fuckers ruined all the fun, honey. I can’t see shit now.” With a tinge of satisfaction, Ryan ignored her and turned back to the matter at hand.

  Jak’s voice came out of the darkness behind Ryan’s left shoulder. “’Nother,” he said.

  Damn. This party was becoming overcrowded.

  The two men listened as the grunting and snuffling sounds came from around them, trying to locate multiple swine in the enclosed space of the barn.

  BACK AT THE CONVOY, the travelers were becoming restless. They had journeyed for most of the day, and this unplanned stop had made them tired and anxious. Several had left their wags, against the advice of Ryan’s team, to stretch their legs and get some fresh air.

  “Stay in sight of the road,” J.B. had instructed. He was keeping one eye on the horizon, wishing for Ryan and Jak to hurry back. It didn’t do to be waiting around like this, a whole damn brace of sitting ducks waiting to get shot.

  Mildred had joined the personnel in the second wag, where Nisha Adams had taken the wheel from her husband, and was dressing Paul Witterson’s wound from the night before. The wound was scabbing over nicely, and his arm seemed to be working fine. Nisha seemed dignified, almost stately in her mannerisms, but held no edge of snobbery. Mildred chatted to her a little as she dressed Witterson’s wounds.

  “Oh, we didn’t come from a ville,” Nisha explained as her husband dozed in the seat beside her. “Just farmland where we were. Had a smallholding, did our best but that soil out west is tough and unyielding. Tough to grow much, year in and year out.”

  “It wasn’t always like that,” Mildred said wistfully. “Tennessee used to be all farms, when I was a girl. Cattle as far as the eye could see.”

  Nisha peered querulously at her, and Mildred became aware that the other members of the vehicle were watching her, too.

  “I, um,” Mildred began, “that’s how I heard it anyway.” She didn’t want to explain how she was a freezie, awakened a hundred years after the end of the world. She got back to tending to Witterson’s wounded arm.

  Standing with one foot resting on the front bumper of Torino’s 4WD, J.B. tilted his wrist to check his chron in the starlight. The sun had set, and the area around the stalled wags was almost entirely hidden in the darkness.

  “You need a light, brother?” Charles asked, leaning his head out of the driver’s window. “The head beams run off a little battery pack if you need to see.”

  J.B. shook his head, thanking the man solemnly. “Best we stay hidden,” he explained. “I don’t like the thought of what’s out there so much.”

  “Me neither,” Charles agreed with a throaty laugh. He drew back from the window and reached for the glove box by Doc’s seat, pulling out a stubby cheroot from among the amassed possessions therein.

  In the passenger seat, Doc eyed the contents of the glove box in the near-darkness. It contained a handful of stubby cigars and a tinderbox, which Charles reached for to light his stogie. Doc also detected the glint of metal, and realized that there was also a small handgun tucked in the compartment, its barrel about half the length of Doc’s forearm.

  “I see you’re carrying a little strategic defense,” Doc whispered to Charles as the man lit his cigar.

  The man looked at him, the creases around his old eyes showing in his scarred face as he smiled. “A smart man doesn’t go looking for trouble, Doc,” he said, “but he also doesn’t run away when it comes knocking.”

  Doc agreed with the sentiment. “Wise words, Mr. Torino,” he said.

  A little way from the horse-drawn automobile, J.B. worked his way down the line of waiting wags, a grim expression on his face. He made his way to Krysty, who was standing close to the lead wag, examining the entrenched wheels with Jeremiah Croxton and the young-old Daisy.

  The Armorer gestured to his watch. “That’s ten minutes,” he said, “and I can’t hear their engine making its return trip.”

  Krysty looked anxious. “Ten minutes isn’t much,” she reminded him. “That’s how long the guy said it would take.”

  “I’m not feeling much patience for these dirt farmers,” J.B. growled. “It just doesn’t feel right.”

  Krysty agreed but she didn’t tell J.B. that. “Ryan will handle it,” she said firmly.

  IN THE DARKNESS, Ryan began to make sense of what he was looking at, discerning shadowy shapes around him as he stepped lightly across the hard floor in a slow, circular pattern. Off to his left, making a similar circular pattern, Jak emerged, just a dark silhouette against a slightly darker background. Ryan saw the dark, hard-edged mound of the farming equipment across from him, wondered if he might somehow use it to his advantage.

  The laughing outside had stopped. Presumably Mitch and Annie had become bored by the new events now that they could no longer see them.

  “Why have you stopped laughing, Mitch?” Ryan taunted. “Why don’t you and your woman come in here and we’ll all play ‘chill the pig’? Afraid we’ll mistake her for one of them?”

  There was no answer from beyond the doors, just a grim silence.

  And then they heard the scrabbling on the floor, and Ryan saw one of the boars flit across his vision as the creature charged at him, squealing as it ran. This one was smaller, still just a piglet really, but it had already grown large enough and powerful enough to force a man to the ground, Ryan was sure.

  “It’s a mother and her brood,” Ryan told Jak as he ran to one side, out of the angry creature’s path. “No wonder she’s so bastard riled up.”

  Ryan blasted a shot from the SIG-Sauer, then another as he saw the monster in the flash of light. There weren’t just two of them—there were six, maybe seven, and they had surrounded Jak and himself as they waited in the darkness. Intelligent pigs, stalking their prey. It was lunacy, but a kind of lunacy that made a perverted kind of sense; pigs had long been proved to be intelligent animals. Probably a whole lot smarter than the laughing pair outside, Ryan thought bitterly.

  Behind Ryan, Jak was loosing shot after shot from his Colt blaster, watching the bullets rip into the tusked swine and cursing that they just kept coming. As Jak fired a fifth shot, one of the younger boars charged into him, knocking the teen off his feet. He staggered, spinning in place before crashing to the hard floor of the barn.

  Hearing his comrade fall, Ryan turned, watching in horror as the boars swooped down at him in the lightning flash of his gunshots. The bullets are having no effect on these hard-skinned bastards, he realized. Ultimately, they were just going to wear him and Jak down, wait until they had run out of ammo and then kill them unless the companions took some drastic action.

  On the floor, Jak was rolling out of the path of the attacking boars. One of the animals stepped on him, high on his left arm, and Jak bit back a cry of pain as the boar’s full weight dug into him. He rammed the muzzle of the Colt under the monster’s jaw and pulled the trigger. The recoil drove through Jak’s hand, pushing his forearm back so that his elbow slammed painfully against the wood boards of the floor. Above him, the young boar squealed once more as a mush of blood and brains and flesh exploded from the top of its wide, fat head.

  Jak saw a flash of blasterfire as, standing over him, Ryan fired another shot at the encroaching pack of animals. Then the big man was next to him, wrestling the boar away with his bare hands. He saw that Ryan had grabbed another length of chain from somewhere—one of the hooks, perhaps—and now he whipped it around the monster’s neck, cinching it tight as he straddled the foul animal. With a strained grunt, Ryan yanked the chain toward him, pulling the boar backward, up off its feet, as the other squealed and butted at him. The boar struggled against the length of chain, grunting and whining as the metal links dug into the thick folds of flesh around its neck.

  Ryan continued to pull at the chain, dragging the boar backward against its will, hefting it away until it was out of reach of Jak’s supine body, while its enraged brethren squealed and grunted maniacally.
Jak seized the opportunity to blast further shots from his Colt Python, spitting bullets at the surrounding mother and brood as they closed on Ryan and the piglet.

  Then, as Jak watched, something flashed in Ryan’s hand in the darkness, and he realized that the foreboding, muscular man was using the razor-keen edge of his eighteen-inch-panga blade to carve a deep cut into the squealing boar’s side. A moment passed, and Ryan’s figure was suddenly standing in the darkened barn, the mutant pig flopped lifelessly at his feet, a trail of guts and blood spewing from the wound in its side and the hole in its head. All around, the monstrous mutie pigs were squealing louder and louder, but whether it was in fear or anger, it was impossible to tell.

  “Come on, Jak,” Ryan bit out, breathless, “let’s get out of here.”

  Jak rolled his left shoulder, feeling the pain of the forming bruise as he struggled up from the floor. They were surrounded, and these creatures were so bundled in their rolls of fat that they appeared near-impervious to bullets. “How?” Jak asked.

  With a light shove, Ryan pushed Jak toward the silhouette of the rusting plow that his eye, now adjusted to the darkness, could make out lurking in the barn. “Up,” Ryan explained, and Jak stepped onto the raised surface of the plow, just two feet off the ground. Behind Jak, the one-eyed man was blasting another clip of bullets at the angry pigs as they stomped toward the retreating men. A moment later, Ryan was with Jak, balancing atop the plow.

  The pigs snarled and snuffled, bashing into the plow with their sharp tusks, making the rusted, rotten piece of equipment shake. Ryan and Jak swayed, managing to keep from falling back to the floor. For a moment, as he balanced atop the plow, Ryan thought back to the game of “pirates” he would play as a child in the vast rooms of Front Royal, leaping from sofa to armchair, onto the rug then grabbing the mantel and hanging from it, Harvey at his side, trying to keep from the sharks they imagined were swimming all about the floor. That was a long time ago, back when Harvey was still some kind of brother to him, before the madness had set in.

  After a while, the boars gave up on their attacks, turning their attention instead to their fallen colleague and, though it was hard to discern in the darkness of the barn, Jak and Ryan were sure that they were eating the corpse.

  Crouched up there, tottering on the narrow bar of the plow, Ryan whispered instructions to Jak while they reloaded their blasters. Ryan indicated the lengths of chain that hung from the hooks on the wall as he outlined his plan. Jak nodded in agreement, his eyes fixed on the boars, watching their dark, bulky shapes as they feasted on their brother, the mother on her son.

  Once he felt certain that the boars were occupied, Jak stepped very lightly back onto the floor of the barn, placing one foot silently down on the wooden planks. The boars continued at their awful meal, barging one another aside as they tore away bloody hunks of the warm flesh. Slowly, silently, Jak walked across to the chains that hung against the wall, the Colt Python back in its holster. Standing there, watching the boars, Jak weaved his left arm behind the chains, wrapping one around his wrist and getting a firm grip upon it. Then, with a remarkable economy of movement, he pulled himself from the floor, muscles straining as he took his whole weight on one arm. Once he was off the floor, Jak kicked his feet forward and scrambled up the wall, his legs running to power him up until he could reach the little wooden ledge that ran around the barn, roughly eight feet above the ground. Below him, the strange mutated boars circled, grunting and squealing, feasting on their fallen sibling.

  The crossbeam that Jak found himself on was very narrow, barely half the width of his foot. Jak remained composed, his innate sense of his surroundings kicking in, calmly balancing as he made his way along the ledge toward the barn doors.

  Two or three minutes passed, and the boars began to quiet down. From outside, Annie’s screeching voice came loudly to their ears. “I think they may be chilled,” she said.

  Then they heard the sound of a slap coming from beyond the door, flesh on flesh. “You see how I’m laughing, Annie? No way,” Mitch’s voice replied. “Those boys’ll take more punishment than that. They just bought themselves a tempor’y breather is all.”

  Standing atop the rusted plow, Ryan waited in the silence, his SIG-Sauer gripped firmly in his hand. He could see the rotting double doors to the barn. And there, above the doors, his boot heels flush against the wall on the narrow wooden ledge, Jak waited with the Colt Python glinting in his pale hand. The light of the fire from Mitch’s wag could be seen through the cracks and knotholes in the doors, fizzing and spitting with the inconstant redness of living flame, casting a slight, eerie glow into the barn itself.

  A shadow appeared across one of the knotholes, blocking the light, and Annie’s whining voice came through the doors once. “I can’t see nuthin’ in there,” she said, keeping her voice quiet but still audible to Ryan and Jak. “I think it’s just the pigs that are a-living.”

  Mitch’s voice came through the door then. “You think? Shame about them dousing the light. Was a good show while it lasted. Not as much fun as a scalie fight. Them dumb sons of bitches don’t bust our light. Guess even muties know good entertainment when they sees it.”

  There was some rustling from outside, and Ryan waited, keeping his breathing steady as he watched the illuminated holes in the doors for further movements.

  “Don’t gimme that look, woman,” Mitch said, his voice rising in anger. “I ain’t opening up. Not till morning now. Make sure they’re good and dead. I ain’t no idiot.”

  “But I want to see,” Annie whined. “I want to see what the pigs did to the big one, I reckon he put up a hell of a fight.”

  “I reckon he did, too, Annie,” Mitch said, and there was something in his voice, an edge that was like a taunt.

  Ryan watched the doors as shadows crossed the knotholes once more, and then the barn doors shook. They’re opening them, after all, he thought. But no, the doors weren’t moving. They shook a little with the pressure as a body was pushed against them, and Ryan realized, with a twinge of disgust, that the couple were making out, right there, against the door; turned on, presumably, by the thought of the bloodshed, the sadistic play they had created by locking Jak and himself in the barn with these savage carnivores.

  Both Mitch and Annie were busted in the head, Ryan knew, the flame of their mutual concupiscence only sparking when they hurt others. Whatever the nuclear eschaton and the rise of the Deathlands had done to humanity, it was no excuse for people like this. In any world, on any day, they were sick—corrupt in their thought processes, corrupt in their very souls.

  The sounds of kissing, the murmurings of lust, of wanting, drifted through the doors. Without another second’s thought, Ryan squeezed the trigger of his blaster, driving a 9 mm Parabellum bullet through the rotten wood of the door and into the human body that rested against it.

  There was an agonized scream, and the shadow figure fell away from the door. Below, on the floor of the barn, the boar mother and her children began snuffling, agitated by the sudden explosion of light and noise.

  “Saint holy crap—” Mitch’s voice was raised in shock “—what the hell just happened? Annie? Annie!”

  Annie’s voice sounded weak, and Ryan couldn’t make out the words.

  Mitch was cursing then, calling Ryan and Jak every name he could think of as he tried to recover. Ryan and Jak silently waited. Then, things outside went quiet once more.

  Standing atop the farm machinery, his lone eye locked on the barn doors, Ryan whispered his instructions for Jak into the darkness. “He’ll come now,” he said. “Get ready.”

  Standing against the wall, Jak bent and unbent his knees, keeping the circulation going, preparing himself for the final assault.

  It took about two minutes, but finally they heard the engine of the boneshaker wag that Mitch drove splutter back to life. The engine of the heavy wag rumbled louder, and then the pitch changed and Ryan waited for the inevitable. In a moment, the light grew brighter thr
ough the splits in the wooden doors, a shotgun blast drilled through the door, creating another split in prelude to what would happen a moment after. Then the doors caved in as the wag crashed into them, knocking the rotten doors aside as Mitch plowed his wag into the barn. The boars squealed, running from the colossal crashing shape of the vehicle as it drove through the splintering doors. Ryan could see two figures lit by the fires of the engine. Mitch was in the high driver’s seat again while Annie was slumped in the passenger chair, the shotgun resting awkwardly in her hands.

  As Ryan watched, Annie raised the weapon and began blasting, but the assault lasted less than a second. Above her, Jak leaped from the crossbeam ledge that ran high over the barn doors, the ball of his booted right foot crashing into the barrel of the shotgun, knocking it free of the woman’s grip.

  Running, Ryan kicked off from the rusty, rotten plow, pouncing forward, letting gravity feed his momentum as he barreled at the approaching wag. He landed on the high front plate of the awkward-looking wagon, charging forward as Mitch raised his Colt Anaconda and snapped off a shot. The bullet flew wide, and Ryan gave him no chance to try another. He was already upon him.

  With a powerful grip, Ryan pulled the scrawny sadist from his seat, slapping the blaster out of his hand. Mitch was muttering some words in complaint, but they seemed nonsensical now, as if he had lost his ability to comment, to speak properly.

  “You should have stayed outside,” Ryan barked at the disheveled driver.

  Across from the driver’s side, Jak reached up and un-hooked one of the lengths of chain from its place on the wall as the old, patched-up combine harvester trudged past them. The fight appeared to have left Annie, and a bloody wound could be seen on the right side of her chest just below her collarbone—Ryan’s bullet had driven through her from the back, and she was losing a steady stream of blood now.