Much of the blame for his current predicament he laid at the feet of the creature who sat coiled across from him in the Winnebago's duct-tape-patched shotgun chair. The Magus was arrogant, parasitical and evil beyond imagining. And it had been his hubris and lust for the pain of others that had allowed Cawdor to turn the tables and beat him.
The steel-eyed monster's calf muscle continued to spasm intermittently, despite their disconnecting the damaged leg sensor. The contortions of his half-mechanical face in response were gruesome indeed. A once-human spirit was trapped in layers of metal and plastic, layers that seemed suddenly fragile. Yet, even wounded, he couldn't be disregarded.
The Magus was still in control of the situation. Crecca knew he had the capacity to replace all that had been lost. The wags. Gear. Muties. Chillers. But the Magus could also just limp away, jump into the past, or wherever it was that he disappeared to, and leave the Magnificent Crecca to a less than magnificent fate. As much as Crecca wanted to, he couldn't take his rage out on the Magus.
He didn't dare.
His was not the only anger boiling over in the Winnebago's driver's compartment. The Magus didn't like to be thwarted, in even the smallest, the least important of things. One-Eye Cawdor had been a thorn in his side for a long, long time. That Cawdor had out thought and outfought him, even though he and his friends had been trapped in the death tent, that Cawdor had perhaps managed to cause the Magus some permanent physical damage, wasn't something that would ever be forgotten or forgiven.
It was something that demanded retribution. ASAP.
It had been the Magus who, after they had escaped Bullard ville's perimeter, had ordered Crecca to turn and chase the hijacked wag toward Paradise ville. It had been the Magus who had ordered the rousties to begin firing on the RV ahead, even though he had known it was out of range.
Old Steel-Eyes had wanted to let Cawdor know a pack of wolves was howling up his backside. Wanted to make him and his companions afraid. It was more of the same, Crecca realized. It was the same primitive urge. Answered in the same way. The carny master was no whitecoat, certainly. He had no education whatsoever. And he possessed only the most rudimentary understanding of human psychology. But having dealt with robbers and chillers, and having been one himself for most of his life, the Magnificent Crecca thought he knew what drove the creature to do what he did: the Magus had to instill fear in others in order to quiet his own. Crecca found himself wishing that Ryan Cawdor had nailed the monster in the head with that sideways rain of full-metal-jacketed slugs, turning the brains and gears inside to a pile of bloody metal shavings.
"Rad blast!" the carny master said as a couple of hundred yards in front of him Cawdor nearly ran head-on into the concrete barricade across the highway. Crecca tapped his brakes, slowing in plenty of time to keep the wags behind from plowing into his rear end, and to make the hard right turn. As he did, he saw the white signal rock below the detour sign.
So did the Magus.
"Your scout's been up the detour and back, and left his mark," the monster said. "Which means there's probably a way out for Cawdor. Go faster! You've got to catch him!"
The big wag was a tight fit down the two-rut, dirt road. And things got even dicier as the track started to climb through a series of tight switchback turns. And as Winnebago gained altitude above the valley and the interstate, as the road grew ever steeper, Crecca's hands began to sweat on the steering wheel. Beads of perspiration ran from his wiry red hair, down the sides of his face and along the scar on his cheek. Wet marks appeared under the arms of his ringmaster's coat.
There was no going back. There wasn't enough room on the track for even the smallest of the four wags to reverse course, let alone turn. The drop-off at the edges of the unpaved road was precipitous. And there was nothing to stop the big wag if it tumbled over and started to roll. The RV and its occupants would be turned to scrap by the time it stopped at the bottom of the slope.
Jackson sensed its trainer's terror, even if it didn't understand the reason for it. Sitting between the driver's and front passenger throne chairs, it gazed up at Crecca with black, dead eyes and began to whimper softly. Clear snot bubbled and popped at its nose holes.
"Shut that thing up, Crecca," the Magus said, "or I'll damn well strangle it."
Crecca had no doubt that his boss could and would do just that. "Jackson!" he snapped at the little mutie. "Get in your bed!"
With a chastened, hangdog expression, the stickie retreated to the pile of stiff rags behind the driver's seat.
The trio of rousties sitting on Winnebago's bench seat gave Jackson their full attention, hands on pistol butts. The needle-toothed critter was wearing its choke collar, but it wasn't chained up.
"Where is this blasted road going?" the Magus said. "We're headed up over the bastard mountain! I swear I'll cut out Azimuth's heart if he foxed us on this."
You'll have to stand in line for that privilege, Steel-Eyes, Crecca thought. He'd already started to wonder if his scout had even tried to tackle this road before setting down the all-clear marker. In the back of his mind, the carny master had begun to envision a further narrowing of the already too narrow track. And somewhere up ahead, mebbe just around the next turn, a collapse of the roadway, brought on by wash water from the chem rains and the weight of Cawdor's RV. Mebbe Cawdor and company were already down at the bottom of a ravine? Mebbe the RV was lying on top of Azimuth's crushed Baja Bug.
That would end the chase, but leave them in a sorry fix. They'd have no way to retreat, except on foot.
Which meant the stinking Magus would have to be carried.
Crecca knew he'd have to do the nasty job himself. The Magus would demand it of him, because he knew how much touching him filled Crecca with fear and loathing.
The carny master gave the creature in the shotgun seat a quick sidelong glance. He looked away before the Magus could catch the flat, murderous expression in his eyes. Before he'd touch that hideous contraption of metal and flesh again, he vowed he'd put a .223-caliber tumbler in the back of its skull and boot it off the side of the mountain.
"Shit! Shit!" Crecca exclaimed as he negotiated a hairpin and suddenly came upon the stolen RV, turned sideways with its front wheels hanging off the road. He braked hard. "Could be an ambush!" he shouted over his shoulder to the rousties. After setting the parking brake, he reached up and deftly dropped the steel louvers that protected the Winnebago's cab.
There was no blasterfire.
It wasn't an ambush.
It was a blockade of the road, and it was perfect.
"What are you waiting for?" the Magus demanded of him. "Go on, clear the road. Push that damn wag over the edge."
Crecca released the emergency brake and crawled the huge RV up the grade. There was no question of his building any real speed to bump the other wag. There wasn't enough distance between them, and he couldn't back up any farther because of the turn and the wags stopped behind. On top of that, the grade was too steep, and the road surface too loose to get good traction. So Crecca merely crept up and nudged the smaller wag. His front bumper bit the middle of the cargo box. The back end of the wag tipped a bit, but not the front, which was sitting on its axle. He gunned the engine and the abandoned wag moved a little, its undercarriage scraping over the sandstone bedrock. Then it stopped. The back wheels of the big wag started to spin, and its rear end swerved toward the drop-off.
Crecca let off on the gas.
"What are you waiting for?" the Magus howled. "Ram it!"
Much easier said than done.
Crecca let the RV roll back fifteen feet, as far as he could go without hitting the wag behind, then he tromped the gas pedal. The Winnebago struggled up the slope, banged into the wag, deeply denting the sidewall, but didn't budge it out of position even an inch. If anything, the blocking RV seemed to be wedged more firmly into the face of the uphill road.
"Get out!" the Magus cried. "Get out and find a way to move the damn thing!"
Crecc
a ordered the three rousties out first. They exited with their blasters ready. The carny master waited a minute or two, then followed with a chain-clipped Jackson at his side and an M-16 in his hands.
Crecca carefully watched his young stickie, who stretched out its neck and sniffed at the air. From Jackson's lack of blood lust, he knew that Cawdor and his pals were nowhere around. He waved for the other drivers and rousties to exit their wags. All in all, just fifteen chillers had survived Bullard ville, not counting the Magus.
A brief look-see told Crecca that they couldn't use the other wag to push or pull the obstacle out of the way. He climbed into the abandoned wag's driver's compartment and tried to start the engine. It cranked over, but when he put it in gear and tried to power forward, all he managed to do was dig holes in the road with the back wheels. Then the engine died, and he couldn't restart it. The gauges on both fuel tanks read empty.
The Magus wasn't happy when he got the news that pursuit of Ryan Cawdor would have to proceed on foot. With his bad leg, he couldn't walk, let alone run to keep up with the others. And if they carried him it would only slow the chase.
It meant he would miss the fun, unless the fun was brought to him.
Standing in the RV's open passenger doorway on his good leg, the Magus gave Crecca his marching orders. "I want three rousties to stay here with me. Take the rest and all the excess ammo, and track down Cawdor and the others. I don't care what you do to his friends, but I want you to bring Cawdor back here alive, even if he's barely breathing." He paused for a pain spasm to pass, then added, "And his kid, too."
Crecca chose three men to stay behind. As twelve of his rousties hurried to gather up the surplus ammo, the carny master stared at the lucky ones who weren't going ahead on foot. They were trying hard not to look too relieved. Though it had gone unsaid, he knew their job was going to be carrying the Magus to safety if he and the others didn't make it back. If Ryan Cawdor chilled them all, the monster left himself an exit option.
With Jackson securely leashed, the carny master led his men past the roadblock and up the road. He could see the wall of blue dark forest ahead, and above the tops of the nearest trees, the savage looking ridge of the mountain.
Tactically speaking, Crecca knew the situation had changed. In the terrain ahead, the rousties' advantage in numbers was negated. Once inside the woods, they would be open to ambush. To hit-and-run strikes. To that scoped longblaster Cawdor carried.
Crecca payed out the full length of Jackson's chain, letting his mutie bird dog enter the forest first. Jackson strained hard at the leash, sniffing the air. Long strands of drool swayed from its chin as it made soft kissing sounds.
The stickie had caught Cawdor's scent.
Chapter Twenty-Four
From his vantage point, some six hundred feet above the ruined interstate, Baron Kerr watched and waited. The secondary fire road on which he hunkered ran over the top of the mountain and down its west-facing slope, intersecting the ancient freeway a quarter mile from the barricade, on the Paradise ville side. Parked in the shadows behind a large sandstone boulder a short distance uphill was the Baja Bug Kerr had commandeered from the carny scout. From the direction of Bullard, he could make out a series of dust devils, twisting high into the windless afternoon sky.
The promised convoy approached the barricade.
The baron looked over at his three helpers, men whose names he had never bothered to learn. He had long since given up such formalities. Their hair, their faces and their hands were black with encrusted grime. As were his.
Their clothes hung in greasy tatters, showing peekaboo filthy knees and elbows. As did his.
All three were grinning at the line of onrushing wags, but in the backs of their eyes was a terrible, hooded fear.
Kerr didn't ask himself if the terror he saw in their faces was real or whether he was just imagining it. He knew it was real because he felt it, too, the fluttering in the depths of his heart. It was the same paralyzing fear that kept him from taking the Baja Bug, which had more than enough gas to get him to the safety of Paradise ville, from just driving away and leaving the burning pool and all its horrors behind. The part of him that had been born James Kerr, the pre-burning pool James Kerr, wanted more than anything to make his break while he had the chance, or failing that, to simply die. But that part of him no longer had control over the body it inhabited. That James Kerr had shrunk in size and influence, until it had become like a lone passenger on a cruise ship commanded by someone else. By something else. The something else could steer the ship. Could make it run faster or slower. Could, on a whim, run it aground on some rocky shore, or scuttle it over bottomless seas. And it did all this by manipulating reality.
Or to be more precise, by manipulating the glandular secretions that determined his reality.
Kerr understood none of this, and not just because he was ignorant of the complex biological principles that were involved. His brain had been permanently rewired by its long term exposure to the spores' mutagenic chemicals. This rewiring had dug deep circular ruts in his already limited powers of thought.
The surviving scrap of the original James Kerr saw the burning pool as a conscious, malevolent force that had swallowed him alive, a whirlpool of impossible power and perfect evil that had held him trapped, that had manipulated him like a puppet for longer than he could remember.
The larger portion of himself, the vast fleshy ship that carried him and that he observed with what seemed to be some degree of emotional detachment, had a much different view of the situation. The SS James Kerr found indescribable peace and contentment in living close to the pool and its lovely, twinkling spores. That James Kerr found serenity in tending the fungus in its moist grottoes, in following the pool's grisly, unspoken commands, in being one with its infinite majesty.
It was this larger James Kerr who, standing on the edge of the fire road, felt the crushing fear of separation and loss. He longed to be back in the pool's all-encompassing embrace.
Though passenger Kerr could only vaguely remember it now, there had been a time when he had been a whole, undivided being. He remembered traveling from Paradise ville to the pool and the blockhouse and the shanties. He had come on purpose, and he had brought many others with him. Like minded others. Kerr had belonged to an extended family-religious cult of nearly a hundred members who had migrated from the east in a handful of rusted-out school bus wags. They came in search of a new eden, unpolluted land and water, freedom from the moral depravity that typified Deathlands, and personified Paradise.
In their view, the thriving ville, with its rows of scabrous, twenty-four hour gaudies and its lice infested flophouse shacks, with its thieving, murderous residents, was nothing short of hell. After many weeks of enduring the indecencies and indignities of this postnukecaust Sodom, Kerr had located and purchased a crudely drawn map that, according to the traveling trader who had sold it to him, purported to show the way to exactly the sort of place the members had come looking for: isolated, protected, unsullied.
Kerr had then taken the map around the better sections of Paradise, in search of someone trustworthy who they could pay to lead them to the hidden high mountain valley.
No one trustworthy in Paradise would have anything to do with the journey. On seeing the map, most of the prospective guides just spit in the dirt and walked away. The few who would talk to Kerr repeated gruesome campfire stories about what went on in those cruel, dark mountains. About people going up there and never being seen or heard from again.
Because Kerr and his fellow cult members believed they were righteous in their faith and that their god wouldn't lead them astray; because they were desperate to leave Paradise, they chose to ignore the ominous signs and set out to find the place marked on the map on their own.
Inside of ten minutes of their arrival at poolside, the green lightning began to crackle and the spores fell upon them in a pale yellow blizzard. It was so beautiful, so remarkable that the people cheered and rejoiced on
the bank, taking it for a sign from God. Afterward, they had wandered down to the deserted shacks, to the ready-made, if shabby, little town. Within half an hour, the Clobbering Chair had been dragged out of the blockhouse and into the center of the ville's pounded-dirt square. The first victims had laughed as they pushed and shoved one another to win a seat and be strapped down. There was more cheering and rejoicing from these morally upright folk as the lead pipe smashed down and brains began to fly.
That day Kerr himself had swung the bloody pipe and led the cheers, and had supervised the butchery that followed on the muddy banks. His curse from the very beginning had been his receptivity to the pool's needs. It was what kept him alive. Even when he no longer wanted to be.
"Only five," one of the men standing near him said.
The words snapped Baron Kerr out of his dismal reverie. He refocused his eyes and saw that that was true. Just five wags. One was a ways ahead of the others. It was a much smaller convoy than the scout had described, but there was no way of knowing how many people were inside each one. There was room for sixty, for sure, if they were packed in tight.
Once all five wags had taken the detour and turned up the main fire road, Kerr led the three men back to the Baja Bug. He drove them down to the valley floor, then to the barricade across the interstate. At his command they got out and started dismantling the barrier, throwing the chunks of concrete onto the shoulder. It was the work of a couple of hours to pull it apart.
The baron didn't remember how many times he had temporarily diverted traffic in this way, but he had always diverted just enough to fill the pool's needs. Only so many could be accommodated in the ville. Only so many could be nourished by the fungus.
How long would sixty fresh souls last in the hidden valley? Kerr no longer tried to predict such things. Survival time was different for every individual. And sometimes, for reasons beyond his understanding, the pool chose to gorge shamelessly, taking a dozen or more unto itself in a single day.
Axler, James - Deathlands 62 - Damnation Road Show Page 16