by James Axler
“Oh, Emily,” Doc muttered, “why did Chronos choose me?”
THE SECOND DOOR THAT Ryan tried turned out to be an upstairs bathroom, with a scarred bathtub and a toilet that had been nailed shut. There was evidence that a basin had once been here, too, plumbed into the wall, but all that remained now were the rusting water pipes, their outlets stuffed with rags. The room stank of human detritus, and Ryan coughed, as the stench assaulted his nostrils and the back of his throat. Beside him, Krysty held a hand over her mouth and nose and took shallow breaths, feeling her eyes sting with tears.
The candle sparking in his hand, Ryan stepped back into the corridor and nodded to Croxton where the grizzled, old farmer waited at the top of the stairs. “Tell Daisy we’ve found the latrine,” he said, indicating the room with the muzzle of his pistol.
A moment later, Daisy appeared on the landing, pushing past Croxton, her eyes flickering with the flame of the taper. “Can I get some privacy?” she asked Ryan as she strode past him and Krysty and into the bathroom.
“I can stay with her,” Krysty assured Ryan, but Daisy was already in the bathroom, shoving the door closed behind her.
And then Daisy shrieked. Krysty tapped at the door and pushed it open. Daisy stood in near-total darkness, glaring at the toilet.
“It stinks of shit in here and the fuckin’ stool don’t open,” Daisy yelped. “How’m I s’posed to…?”
“Use the tub,” Ryan instructed, standing in the doorway behind Krysty. Then he pulled Krysty out of the room. “Let’s keep checking,” he said, leading the way past the stairs toward the other end of the corridor. “Croxton, stay with Daisy, shout out loud if there’s any sign of trouble. Okay?”
Scratching at his beard, Croxton stepped onto the landing, nodding at Ryan as he passed him. “Loud and proud, don’t you worry,” he assured the one-eyed man.
CONFIDENT THAT THE downstairs was secure, J.B. and Jak made their way back to the main corridor that led to the front door. In the flickering flame of his lighter, J.B. looked at the door that was set into the structure of the staircase, feeling certain that it had to lead to the basement.
Standing at J.B.’s elbow, Jak peered not at the door but toward the far end of the corridor. Intrigued, J.B. lifted the lighter in that direction and tried to penetrate the darkness with his gaze. There was a figure there, a tall man, standing beside the front door. J.B. automatically reached into his coat for his mini-Uzi, but he came up short when Jak breathed a single word. “Doc.”
Cursing his tired eyes, J.B. followed as Jak strode forward, meeting with the older man standing alone in the darkness. It was Doc all right, but the man seemed to be oblivious to them.
“Doc?” J.B. began. “You okay?”
Doc seemed to take a moment to react. Then, he looked up and acknowledged his companions, the light of the flame playing across his fine white teeth. “I am well, John Barrymore,” Doc said. “Just a little lost in my own thoughts.”
“I hear you.” J.B. nodded. The encounter with the scalies and the subsequent retreat to this old, ramshackle house had left them all a little spooked, himself included. “You should get yourself in there with the fire, warm up.”
Agreeing, Doc made his way back to the main room where the majority of the travelers were now either sleeping or trying to.
J.B. turned, dismissing the old man from his mind as he made his way back to the door under the stairs. Jak followed.
“Doc okay?” Jak asked, his words abrupt and to the point as ever.
J.B. couldn’t answer. “Let’s just make sure we are,” he said, pushing at the basement door.
DAISY SQUATTED OVER THE bath, relieving herself in the darkness. She could hear noises all about, the rustling and chirruping of insects hidden behind the wallboards and inside the pipes, the low thrumming of birds as they nested in the rafters of the house above her and in the broken rooms beside the bathroom. The bath itself stank, the combined smell of oil and vomit and feces and piss. Something dripped, the plip-plop sounds coming erratically, distracting Daisy as she forced herself to urinate into the tub. Beneath her feet she could feel a horrible slush, like standing in the stewed goat that she had eaten at the Traid n Post.
Once she was done, Daisy hitched up her pants and spit into the gunk in the bath, trying to get rid of the foul taste in her mouth that the almighty stench had brought in its wake. She pulled the door open and popped her head outside, spying Croxton standing there.
He tilted his head toward the far end of the corridor. “Our new friends are busy,” he whispered. Then he pushed the door wider and stepped into the decaying bathroom with Daisy, pushing the door closed behind him and leaning with his back against it in near-total darkness.
Daisy retched, the awful stench irritating her throat. “They blowed up our wag,” she said, an annoyed edge to her words.
Jeremiah harrumphed. “There will be other wags, Daisy,” he said, his voice low. “Barry’s got one, a nice-looking rig.”
“Yeah, I seen it,” Daisy drawled, but she didn’t sound happy.
“Something will come along,” Croxton assured her. “Just you wait.”
“And these sec men.” Daisy sounded incredulous. “You see them use their blasters? I don’t like these people. They’re scary trouble.”
Standing in the darkness, the old farmer stroked Daisy’s hair gently, pulling her close to him. She was shaking with the cold, and welcomed his comforting arms. “They’re well-armed, but they won’t be a problem,” he whispered, his mouth close to the crown of her head. “Besides, they’re what we need right now, if we’re to get back to the ville.”
Croxton felt the girl nod beneath him.
THE BASEMENT DOOR swung inwards at J.B.’s push, requiring no force at all to open. “Unlocked,” he muttered, warily stepping forward. He ran the flame of his light right and left before him, trying to make out details. All he could see was the low ceiling and a flight of rotting, wooden stairs that ran down to the cellar of the old house. “Come on, Jak,” he said, placing one foot on the first step, “and stay sharp.”
Jak followed in a semicrouch as J.B. led the way down the decaying staircase, the wooden treads groaning at their weight. Jak held the Magnum Colt Python in one hand, a leaf-bladed knife in the other. His nose wrinkled, twitching as he scented the air. Jak could smell things down here. Dead things.
The last three stairs were missing, just broken splinters on the risers marking what had once been there. J.B. jumped ahead, ignoring the break in the stairs and landing solidly, his boots echoing on the stone floor beneath. He looked down and saw that the floor was part slabs of stone and part earth, and he was conscious that things were moving at the periphery of his vision, scampering to get out of the illumination that his cigarette lighter cast. Just bugs, he thought.
There had been a moment, back with the convoy, when he had become aware of the scalies surrounding them in the darkness, just like bugs. They had been there, creeping through the shadows, almost—but not quite—noiseless, assessing their prey. J.B. had wondered why he couldn’t see them. He thought about this on his way to the farmhouse, sitting in the back of the canvas-covered wag, removing his spectacles and wiping them on his shirt. Before replacing them, he had run his free hand over the bridge of his nose, feeling suddenly old and tired.
Maybe this quest to Baby, to the Fountain of Youth or whatever the hell it was, maybe J.B. needed it more than he was ready to admit.
“J.B.?” Jak asked, his voice a penetrating whisper in the basement.
J.B. turned and saw the chalk-skinned young man crouching on the last remaining stair, staring at him. J.B. nodded, turning back to the task at hand, pushing the thoughts of his own mortality away.
Together, they made their way into the basement area, poised for attack.
WHILE DAISY TOOK CARE of her business, Ryan and Krysty checked the remaining rooms off the landing. There was a master bedroom with a grand four-poster in its center. The bed was old but serv
iceable, its coverings moth-eaten and stained. Krysty smiled as Ryan examined the bed, checking around and beneath it, even clambering up to check that nothing was hidden above the canopy.
“Mebbe we’ll get a little sleep after all, lover,” she said in a playful tone.
“Mebbe,” Ryan grunted, preoccupied. After he had checked under the bed, he looked inside the cavernous wardrobe that lined one wall, but all he found were old clothes, rat droppings and the white splotches of bird feces.
Several pieces of old furniture had been used to barricade the windows, including an old sideboard and a cabinet, both of them piled with candles, books and firewood. One window had been left free, although it was boarded with thick slabs of wood up to two-thirds of its height. The top third remained unblocked, however, and the sliver of moon could be seen through the dirt-streaked glass.
Krysty watched as Ryan walked back around the bed, staring at it, his mouth a grim line in his face. “What are you thinking?” she asked.
“That mebbe they had the kid here,” Ryan replied. “Made it here.”
“What had happened to it, Ryan?” Krysty asked gently.
Ryan looked up, his single eye locking with Krysty’s, a haunted expression on his face. “I think they probably starved it, mebbe they’d just forgotten about it.”
Krysty gasped. “Who would ‘just forget’ about their own child? Their own flesh and blood?”
“Mebbe they had to forget,” Ryan suggested. “You see the way this house is, the way they protected themselves. This isn’t a ville with walls to protect its people, it’s a single house in the middle of a war zone. Mebbe they were locked in for a while. Mebbe they had to decide who was going to eat.”
“And a newborn child…” Krysty began, then stopped herself.
They remained in the room, in silence, for a minute or more, and when the candle in Ryan’s hand burned down, he placed its flame against a candle that sat on a tray beside the bed, the fire starting anew.
Finally, Krysty spoke once more, her voice low, concerned. “I know you think about Dean,” she told Ryan. Dean was Ryan’s son, spirited away from his side by a once-upon-a-time lover, Dean’s mother.
Ryan nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “every day. Sometimes I think I hear him, but it’s something else.”
Standing before Ryan, Krysty placed her arms around him, pulling herself close. “If we had a child,” she asked, “would it be like this? Would we have to decide if it was worth feeding?”
“Never,” Ryan assured her, his arm reaching around to stroke her back. “They were psychopaths, Krysty. Brother and sister, hooped up on insanity. Not parents.”
Krysty was shaking in Ryan’s arms. “Life was good in Harmony. The Deathlands makes terrible people of everyone,” she said sadly.
“Only if they let it,” Ryan told her. “Only if they let it.”
TO HIS OWN EARS, J.B.’s footsteps seemed loud in the stillness of the basement, as he and Jak walked within the cone of light cast by the lighter in his hand. There were other noises, true, the little scritching of insects scuttling across the stones, burying themselves from the light, a dripping of water from somewhere, other low noises that would normally fade into insignificance. In the near-total darkness, these noises seemed loud, seemed ominous.
The basement was a cavernous space excavated from right under the house, mimicking its proportions almost exactly in what initially appeared to be one large, low-ceilinged room. The room was full of junk, stacks of wood and paper, several buckets of steeping mushrooms, stacked tins of food dating back to before the nukecaust, raided from who knew where. A large, coal-fired boiler occupied a position roughly below the kitchen.
They were looking around in an ever-widening circle when Jak hissed to get J.B.’s attention. Even in the darkness beyond the illumination of his lighter, J.B. could see Jak’s ghost-white arm pointing to the far side of the cellar. The Armorer stepped closer, brushing past a tottering stack of old magazines that reached higher than his belt buckle.
There were three rooms over there, he saw now, small, cell-like spaces used for storage. They were on the side of the cave-in and the ceiling bowed above them where the house had crumbled in on itself. Together, J.B. and Jak made their way to that first door. Holding the flickering flame of the lighter high, J.B. peered through a small, square window at roughly head height on the door. The window was obscured by a simple grille covering, screwed to the outside. Inside, as he had surmised, was a small square storage room, not much bigger than a coffin, reminding J.B. of a prisoner’s cell. It was empty.
The Armorer moved across to the next cell and, warily, peered through the grille in the window. There was a body in there, lying on the floor in a crumpled fetal position.
ON THE LANDING, the fourth door opened onto a small cupboard containing a water tank. When Ryan tapped his SIG-Sauer against the tank, a hollow metallic clang echoed back. “Empty,” he muttered, closing the door and making his way to the final door in the corridor.
The last door opened onto a midsize bedroom that had been converted for storage. It contained ammunition for several different gauges of shotguns and handguns, along with a selection of blades arrayed in glass-fronted cabinets along the wall. Shelves lined the room, and almost fifty glass jars had been arrayed on them, each containing something sealed inside. Some contained preserves and jam, others bullets, nails and screws. One held what appeared to be a set of human teeth.
Krysty shrugged, replacing the jar of teeth on the shelf. “Collector types, I guess,” she said.
“Not anymore,” Ryan growled, exiting the room and pulling the door closed behind him. “J.B. might want to take a look-see, once it gets light.”
J.B.’S HEART JUMPED when he saw the body, thudding beneath his rib cage, making him totter two pigeon steps backward before he even knew what he was doing, the lighter extinguishing in his hand. Standing to the side of the closed door, Jak raised his blaster and watched in the darkness.
“Okey?” the albino youth whispered.
J.B. had recovered himself and flicked at the warm ignition wheel of the lighter until the spark caught and a new flame appeared. “Someone’s in there,” he said, his voice low. “Mebbe asleep.”
Without a word, Jak turned and peered into the cell window, standing on tiptoes to see inside. He assessed the contents of the claustrophobic room. “Dead,” he concluded after a short while. There was no malice or judgment in the way he said it; it was simply a conclusion he had reached.
J.B. shook his head. “What the hell were these people doing?” he muttered, stepping forward and steeling himself to look in the third cell.
The third cell had a small, grilled window like the other two, and J.B. put his face up close to peer inside, the lighter held near to the opening. In the flickering firelight, he saw another figure, hunched in on itself where it had slumped on the floor. It looked human, about the size of a well-proportioned man.
And then it moved.
Chapter Ten
Moving in darkness, the thing in the cell powered forward, slamming a driving hand against the grille that J.B. was peering through. The grille shook in its frame, ringing with a metallic clang as the prisoner’s arm crashed against it with bone-jarring force.
J.B. skipped back, moving away from the cell door, the flame swaying as the lighter shook in his hand. He stood there, Jak beside him in the insubstantial pool of light, as the occupant of the cell crashed against the door a second time, the knocking sounds that much louder in the closeness of the low-ceilinged basement.
In the flickering light, J.B. saw Jak look at him, a querulous expression on his chalk-white face.
“I don’t know,” J.B. answered. “Only got a glimpse before it moved.”
With a firm nod of his head, Jak stalked forward, holding his blaster ready at his side, making his way to the cell door on silent tread. The thing inside, man or critter, continued pounding on the locked door, worrying at the handle, shoving bodily against
the solid slab of wood.
At just five foot six, Jak had to stand on tiptoe to get a proper look through the window grille. J.B. stood beside the door, holding the flame for Jak to see better.
Inside the tiny cell, Jak saw the figure retreating from the door, head low, snuffling and grunting in a series of sharp, angry bursts. In the semidarkness, it looked to be a human male, stripped of clothing and very muscular. Jak’s ruby eyes watched, emotionless, as the thing rushed at the door once more, spitting and cursing as it slammed it with a powerful shoulder, pumped its fists against the solid hunk of wood that barred its way.
Jak could smell it now, so close to him on the other side of the barricade. It stank of sweat and bodily waste, but there was something else beneath those scents, something familiar to Jak. “Scalie,” he uttered, his lips pulling back in a snarl.
“You sure?” J.B. inquired.
Jak stepped away from the cell and raised his Colt Python blaster at the grilled window. His eyes flicked back and forth as he watched the shadow moving against the grille. Then, without a word, Jak pulled the trigger of his blaster, driving a single bullet through the small window, the flash of gunpowder illuminating the basement for a single, spectacular instant.
There was a thump as the bullet hit flesh, then the creature within the cell shrieked in pain, followed a second later by a crash as it fell to the floor.
J.B. stood before the window, holding the flame of his lighter at the grille and peering inside. The occupant was lying on the dirty floor of the cell now, its head dark with oozing blood, a pool of scarlet forming beneath it. It lay motionless, either dead or dying, and now that it was still J.B. could see the protrusions of callused skin all over its flesh, evidence of its mutie nature.