Baptism of Rage

by James Axler

  Doc stepped forward then, his ebony cane in his hand. “How does it work?” he asked.

  Eddie met Doc’s gaze, considering his question. “How does it work, friend?” he repeated. “What am I, a whitecoat? It works.”

  “But there must be a reason,” Doc insisted.

  Michelle stepped forward, smiling at Doc. “Could I ask your name, friend?”

  “Of course,” Doc replied. “It’s Theophilus Algernon Tanner.”

  “Theoph—” she began and stopped as she struggled over the syllables of Doc’s name. “Mr. Tanner, not many people remember, but do you believe in God?”

  Doc nodded. “I would say that I do, to an extent.”

  “The pool works,” Michelle assured him. “It’s magical. It’s the work of God. That’s how it works.”

  Doc was about to challenge this, for it was no explanation at all, just circular nonsense, but he checked himself. “Maybe it is,” he said agreeably. He realized that he would need to see it in action to get to the bottom of this mystery.

  Standing together at the back of the group, Ryan and J.B. watched Eddie and Michelle’s performance dispassionately. Both of them were also watching for the sec men all around, wary of what could happen in this enclosed space. The other companions remained on guard as well, observant to everything around them.

  Finally, questions from the crowd finished and Michelle and Eddie led the way to the magical pool of which they had spoken. The forty-strong group made its way out of the courtyard, down a wide alley between two accommodation buildings, one of which was still being constructed. Six young workers toiled at the building, hammering floorboards in place, laying guttering from the flat roof down to the ground.

  The group didn’t rush, moving, Eddie assured them, as slow as the slowest member of the party. There were several very elderly people there, old and frail, who seemed permanently out of breath and with barely the energy to stand. Mildred watched them, amazed. How had these people survived in the Deathlands at all? How, with no organized medicine, no proper community to shelter them, could people possibly get like this and still live? She remembered television news reports from her day, showing the wise men of tribes who seemed a million years away from civilization and yet still lived into their nineties and beyond, surviving on a diet of leaves and whatever the tribes’ hunters found. What she saw now was a stark reminder that civilization, whatever that meant, wasn’t the only way to survive.

  Walking beside Ryan, J.B. jabbed his thumb in the direction of the building and offered a cynical smile. “Lot of work going on around here,” he said.

  Ryan nodded agreement. “I guess this place is becoming something,” he suggested. “A community mebbe, like the old days before it all fell down.”

  J.B. pulled the spectacles from his nose and wiped the lenses. “You really believe that?”

  Ryan shrugged. “One day somebody’s got to build something permanent again. Something new that offers a real future.”

  “Mebbe so,” J.B. grunted as he replaced his glasses, “but you really think it’ll be built around a magical fish pond?”

  Ryan’s lone blue eye searched all around, taking in the construction work inside the ville’s colossal walls. “I guess it’ll be built wherever people end up,” he said. “Here’s as good as anywhere else.”

  As the bulk of the group continued past the living quarters, Daisy, Alec and another young man who had come with a different group of travelers, peeled off and headed toward the main buildings of the compound. They didn’t require proof of the magical pool, nor to dip themselves in the water with its magnificent restorative powers.

  Jak slowed his pace and knelt on the cobblestones, as though to adjust his boot. He fidgeted with the boot, watching the trio of young people depart, aware of the crowd moving ahead of him. As he pulled at the top of his boot, a youthful sec man in a hard helmet sauntered over, acting casually but clearly watching what Jak was up to. “You had better get moving, friend,” the sec man prompted. “You don’t want to miss the show.”

  Jak smiled, standing up and brushing at his pants’ leg. “Right,” he agreed, trotting forward in a little five-step run before he reached the very rear of the group once more.

  At the back of the tour group, Jak could feel the sec officer’s eyes on him, and he relaxed, walking normally, resisting the urge to look behind him, trying not to draw any further attention.

  Following Eddie and Michelle, the party moved onward, a hubbub of interested conversation coming from them. As they passed another building, still only partly constructed, Jak slowed his pace again and slipped into the shadows beneath an awning, letting the group carry on without him. He wanted to find out where Daisy and the others were going. Most likely they had old friends here, people they had seen when they had last used the pool. Even so, Jak’s instincts told him it was worthy of investigation.

  Michelle and Eddie led the party through the compound in the direction of the watermill. The mill had two stories aboveground, with a further, lower story abutting the narrow but fast-flowing stream that ran beside it. A huge wheel was at the side of the mill, eleven feet in diameter with a shaft disappearing into the structure of the building itself just below a little stairwell that led to a door on the second story. The wheel spun as the clear stream rushed through it, and the constant shushing-and-crashing noise of the water disguised the sound of the gears turning inside the mill, grinding wheat into flour.

  “This is where we make our bread,” Michelle told the visitors. “You’ve already been allowed to partake in eating it, now that you are our friends.”

  Amid the crowd, Mildred gave Krysty a suspicious look. “Hand over everything and in return you get bread and water,” she said, her voice low. “What is this place? A monastery?”

  The group passed the mill and continued onward, following the course of the stream for another fifty yards. There were several trees along the riverbanks, and one grew in the stream itself, its branches drooping down so low that they brushed the water when it caught the breeze. Then Eddie, leading the party, signaled for them to stop. “If anyone is thinking of turning back, now would be the time to do so,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the rushing water.

  “Once you see this,” Michelle added, “that’s it.”

  The couple waited for a half minute, to see if anyone would turn away. It was all for show, of course, just to bring the tension to the boil. Doc admired their showmanship skills.

  Abruptly, Eddie turned and started striding onward, with Michelle herding the anxious party along. He led the way over a small wooden bridge that crossed the stream, just wide enough for two people or a single cart. Beyond the bridge, there was an inlet off the stream, naturally hidden from casual glances by the rocky terrain and the trees all around, while, off in the other direction, there were fallow fields and the beginnings of a further exterior wall being constructed for safety. Eddie strode along the curving edge of the inlet, and they saw that the current of the water here was slower, the inlet almost still. Unlike the main stem of the stream, the water in the inlet was slower, silty and it smelled of sulfur.

  As they walked farther along the course of the narrow inlet, it became its own little river, bending in a U-shape off the main stream before rejoining it thirty yards distant. Trees were dotted here and there, autumnal leaves clinging to their branches in shades of red and brown. In the stream’s inlet there were rocks beside which came a steady flow of bubbles that sat on the surface of the water in fat, wide blobs until they finally popped or flowed away with the current. There was something else in the water as well: five people, ducked down so that only their heads bobbed above the surface, men and women. As the visitor party stopped at the edge of the water, the group in the pool began pulling themselves out and drying themselves off on towels and blankets that they had left on the rocks. They were young and each was blessed with a beautiful, flawless body.

  Paul’s easy humor broke the silence. �
��I do believe we have died and gone to heaven. And no one has told us that the angels would be so beautiful.”

  The crowd laughed, and one of the girls from the water looked up, smiling at him. Eddie called her over.

  “Why don’t you tell our new friends how you came to be here, Tress,” Eddie said.

  Her damp, strawberry-blond hair clinging to her pert, naked breasts, Tress wound a blanket around her and strode over to the group. “My name’s Tress O’Dowd,” she said, “and I am fifty-three years old.”

  A gasp came from the gathered crowd; Tress looked no older than nineteen or twenty, her hair and skin was vibrant, her eyes bright.

  “I been here for four days,” Tress continued. “Dipping in the pool every daylight hour of every day. And, I have got to tell you, I am starting to think there may just be something in this.”

  The group laughed.

  WHILE THE GROUP he had traveled with were admiring the fabulous pool, Jak was making his way around the half-built building, alone and sticking to the shadows. His chalk-white skin and hair made hiding difficult, but his clothes were dark and he made sure to keep out of people’s line of sight as the four-man construction team continued its work around the area.

  There was an open wall to the side of the building, where a window or door was presumably to be placed, and Jak ducked through it as two of the construction workers walked toward him carrying a long wood beam on their shoulders. Within, the building was warm, its brick walls retaining the heat of the morning sun. Jak was in a corridor that ran the length of the building, with a slight kink in its route at the midpoint. Swiftly, he silently moved along the corridor, making his way to the far side of the building.

  At the end of the corridor, Jak stepped past a stack of wooden planks and out into the main area of the ville. He was close to where the sec man had hurried him along a few minutes before, and he looked around, scanning for Daisy, Alec or the other young man. He couldn’t see them. Just two dogs chasing one another, barking happily at their game, a goat mewling as the hounds ran past it.

  Looking this way and that, Jak walked past a wooden cart stacked high with blankets. A mule was reined to the front of the cart, and it snorted as Jak peered at it.

  The albino youth walked aimlessly around the ville, the thoughts turning over in his head, the sun rising slowly in the sky. There was a lot of construction work going on here, buildings being set out and foundations being laid. Right now there were just five buildings, several still in midconstruction, but Jak could see plots marked out for at least another six, and there was space for more. The unattended wag park over near the main gate held plenty of vehicles and Jak walked through it, examining the condition of the wags. Some looked solid enough, old and worn maybe, like the ones he and his companions had traveled here in. Others were falling apart, wrecks that were now only useful for spares.

  When he looked up, the tall main gate to the ville filled Jak’s vision, a solid barrier within the high wall surrounding the ville. He hadn’t realized that he had got so close. He wandered up to the gate, considering what he had seen on the dirt approach to the ville. Just fields, cereal grain being coaxed to life, some vegetables, including a field with rows of leafy cabbages.

  As Jak neared the gate, two sec men stepped forward to bar his way.

  “Where do you think you’re going, mutie-boy?” one challenged.

  “No,” Jak said, realizing they had mistaken his peculiar appearance for mutation. “Not mutie.”

  Another sec man spoke up, his eyes fierce as he glared at Jak. “Get away from the gate,” he said. “No visitors are allowed beyond this point.”

  “Not outside?” Jak asked.

  “Not outside, mutie-freak,” the man told him.

  Jak turned and walked away, his ears sharp as he listened to the men’s comments.

  “We shouldn’t be letting muties like that inside,” one of the sec men grunted. “Is Monica on the gate? Did she vet these people?”

  “They brought a lot of stuff,” his companion replied.

  Their body language alone had made it clear to Jak that they wouldn’t allow him past. Could it be that once you were in Babyville you were never allowed to leave? What gain could there possibly be in that?

  Something was going on here, but he would have to keep his wits about him if he was to find out what it was without getting himself hurt.

  Jak nodded when he saw the same cart he had passed just a few minutes ago, the one piled with blankets and pulled by the mule.

  The handler tugged on the hide reins, encouraging the mule toward the mill, where the great waterwheel turned in the stream. The cart bumped away along the cobblestones and onto the track that led to the wooden footbridge, and, as it did so, something caught Jak’s keen eye. It was a hand. A hand in the back of the cart, dropping out between the pile of blankets. Just two fingertips and the thumb with its ball-like joint, in fact, but enough that Jak recognized what it was. Someone was under those blankets. Perhaps they had become trapped?

  Jak picked up his pace, following the cart as it bumped along the path toward the bridge.

  MICHELLE SPOKE UP from the rear of the group standing by the stream inlet. “There’s room for twenty people in the pools,” she announced. “Those who got here first can go take a dip now if they like, but we promise that everyone here will get a turn.”

  Several of the crowd stepped forward, unbuttoning shirts and shirking their pants despite the chill of the winter air. Jeremiah Croxton was among them, ever the leader.

  Shaking her head in disbelief, Mildred leaned close to Doc and whispered in a low voice, “These idiots are going to catch pneumonia if they’re not careful.”

  Shirking his long, frock coat, Doc turned to look at her, and Mildred saw that there was a fervid excitement in his clear, blue eyes. “No, they will not,” he said. “They’ll come out of that water young and strong.”

  “Young and strong and with pneumonia,” Mildred grumbled.

  While the first two people bravely dipped into the clear waters of the inlet, Eddie pointed to the youngsters who had vacated the pool when they had arrived. “Look at them,” he said. “They are the proof that our friendship never leaves you. Our friendship never dies.”

  Unbuttoning his shirt and stepping out of his pants, Doc Tanner made his way toward the bubbling pool. “Well, in for a penny…” he said as stepped into the water.

  Chapter Fourteen

  There were bushes and trees around the banks of the stream that Jak used for cover as he made his way along its length, following the departing cart. Where the companions had turned right toward the fabled pool, the cart veered to the left and trundled along a tree-lined pathway that led to more fields.

  Although the buildings of the ville were concentrated in a small area, the walls of the ville hemmed in quite a large tract of land, much of it unused.

  Occasionally, Jak saw what he took to be a sec man patrolling the banks of the stream, and he obscured his face, looking away or ducking behind the cover of bushes with seeming casualness so as not to be questioned.

  When he reached the far wall, Jak was surprised to find how poorly guarded the stream itself was. The people of Baby had constructed high security walls to shut them off from the outlands beyond, but the necessity of the stream had meant that they had left a whole section of wall open. The gap in the wall reached two feet aboveground and was a little wider than the stream itself, perhaps twelve feet across. The low opening had a gauzelike grate over it, with steel bars reaching into the water itself, but, under the surface, their wavering lengths only reached down another foot or so, not all the way to the streambed. If required, Jak thought, he could swim underneath those spikes to freedom.

  As well, there were no sec men way out here; it was clear that the villefolk assumed the walls protection enough. Short of driving a flaming wag into them, Jak figured that was a safe assumption.

  DOC CAME FROM ANOTHER ERA, a time when nudity was taboo, and for
all the sights, both terrible and wondrous, that he had seen in the Deathlands, he had never really sloughed that old morality. Now, however, as he disrobed before this group of friends and strangers and tentatively dipped his right foot into the bubbling water of the pool, he left his old embarrassment behind. Even to Doc himself, his foot looked pale, a sunless, tanless white with thick blue veins visible just under the skin. As he watched his foot enter the water, he wondered why anyone would ever wish to look at his ancient body with anything other than contempt. His prematurely ancient body, he reminded himself; the very thing, the very curse, that had led him to Babyville and its promise of renewed vitality. He looked up then, a crooked smile on his old, lined face, and saw that his presumption had been right—the other people in the group ignored him, ignored the “show” he was putting on. They were far too busy removing their own clothes, or staring at the mysterious contents of the bubbling pool.

  The five youths who had been in the pool when they got here—Paul’s “angels”—were leaving, making their way back to the bridge, wearing the loose clothing that they had left beside the pool, the blankets wrapped over their shoulders. The women used towels to dry their hair as they walked.

  The water of the pool was wondrously clear and it appeared to be clean, despite the sulfurous reek that it gave off. Trails of bubbles scurried to the surface, obese, see-through globes bigger than a man’s hand, with smaller circles foaming around them. To Doc’s surprise, the water itself was warm. Not hot, certainly not of a temperature that his dear Emily would have run for a bath, back when he had been with her in Nebraska, but warm nonetheless. Something below the surface was heating it, in some unspecified way; perhaps the thing that bubbled from under the rocks. Doc peered at the water, looking through the darkness of his own shadow on the surface, trying to discern whatever was underneath, down by those rocks. Magic, perhaps?