Axler, James - Deathlands 62 - Damnation Road Show

by Damnation Road Show [lit]

  Crecca saw Cawdor drop his weapon. The carny master completely misread what was going on beside the lake. Because all of the companions were standing still or were down, he thought they'd given up, that they were surrendering.

  "Stop!" he shouted at the men on either side of him. "Stop firing!"

  They obeyed, albeit grudgingly.

  "But we've got 'em cold!" one of the rousties complained. "We can cut 'em to pieces from here!"

  "The Magus wants Cawdor and his son alive," Crecca told the man. "He's made big plans for them. Do you want to tell the Magus how you spoiled his fun?" The chiller's face blanched, and he shook his head.

  Truth be told, Crecca wanted to take them alive, too. He intended on doing some serious, prolonged, but nonlethal ass-whipping before he turned them over to the whims of old Steel-Eyes.

  The carny master yanked Jackson to its feet and led his men down the hill, stepping over bodies of their fallen comrades. The man wounded in the leg had already bled to death. For the first time, Crecca really took in the run-down shanty ville below the lake. It looked deserted, and he wondered why Cawdor and the others hadn't tried to make it down there. They could have at least made a fight of it then. As Crecca neared the lake, he warned his men to keep their blasters ready and the targets in their sights, in case it was some kind of trap.

  Thunder rolled from the clouds over the lake. Crecca ignored it. Jackson, on the other hand, became highly agitated at the noise, more agitated than Crecca had ever seen it. The stickie started hopping about nervously, from one foot to the other, and it strained at the limit of the chain, digging furrows in the mud as it tried to get closer to the water's edge. It sputtered and coughed on its own outpouring of saliva.

  Crecca gave the little stickie a hard, snapping jerk on the choke collar to bring it back in line. By way of answer, Jackson turned and bit him, a single savage, needle-toothed chomp and release.

  "Bastard!" the carny master cried, wrenching back his torn and bleeding left hand and dropping the end of the leash. He managed to keep hold of his M-16, but no way could he shoulder it and take aim at the fast-moving little mutie. Jackson made a beeline for the lake, dragging the length of chain behind it. Without a pause, it jumped in, feet first, and then started to run, thrashing into deeper water, toward the minisquall that was forming.

  Crecca had never seen the stickie swim before.

  And it turned out it couldn't.

  After Jackson had battled its way to neck height in the water, its hairless head slipped under, popped up and went under again, ever farther from shore, as if the stupe creature were trying to continue to walk along the bottom. It was then that big swirls appeared all around it. Brown back and tail fins knifed up through the surface. The smallest of the fish circling Jackson looked to be about six feet long. As Crecca watched, the little stickie was buffeted and knocked about by lunging fish. Jackson surged backward, its head throwing a bow wave, as it was half lifted into the air by something huge beneath the surface that had hold of it.

  "They're eatin' the ugly little fuck!" one of the chillers exclaimed. "Tearing the living shit out of him!"

  Crecca cradled his injured hand. The needle teeth had punctured the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. It looked as if it had been caught in the gears of a machine. He was lucky not to have lost a few fingers. On the other hand, his investment in Jackson was a total write-off. Only a triple-stupe droolie, or someone contemplating, suicide, turned his back on a stickie that had tasted human blood.

  "They can have him," Crecca said. "It'll save me the cost of a bullet."

  The carny master walked away, leaving Jackson to its fate. As he moved closer to Ryan and the companions, he waved with his assault rifle for the chillers to follow.

  "Are they dead, or playing dead, or what?" said the man beside him.

  The carny master didn't answer. His quarry seemed to be frozen in position, but he could see the slight rise and fall of their chests. They were breathing, and they were making little movements of the face: their closed eyelids twitched, as if they were asleep on their feet and dreaming.

  "Not dead," Crecca announced.

  He moved in for a closer look at Cawdor.

  "What are you and your pals playing at, One-Eye?" the carny master asked.

  There was no response.

  Crecca jammed the muzzle of the M-16 against Ryan's cheek.

  No response.

  "They sick?" a chiller asked. "If not, I'll make 'em sick." With that, he slammed J.B. in the lower back with the sole of his boot. The Armorer grunted at the impact, which knocked him off his feet. He fell into the mud near the waterline, but didn't move.

  Out on the lake, another storm was brewing. Green lightning crackled and lit up the bleached trees.

  Crecca was so preoccupied with Cawdor that he didn't bother to look over his shoulder. Because of that, he missed seeing Jackson pushed ashore by the pod of lungfish. The little stickie crawled out of the shallows on its hands and knees, sputtering and gasping.

  "Let's have a peek at what you've got under this," Crecca said, reaching out and flipping up Ryan's eye patch.

  "Rad blast!" exclaimed the chiller peering over his shoulder.

  The carny master grinned. "Now that is what I call—"

  A wave of scalding heat slammed Crecca's back. Then it started to snow spores, and the carny master not only forgot what he was about to say, but he also forgot who he was.

  SLOWLY, RYAN BECAME aware of his surroundings. He had no idea how long he'd been unconscious. It could have been a minute or an hour. But no longer than that because the sun was still high and hot.

  He remembered the perfume, and remembering brought a flashback of the amazing sensation it had wrought. An instantaneous, almost orgasmlike disconnect of his normal consciousness, as if sheared away by a blow from a longblade. He recalled drifting upward, joyous, freed of his body and all its restraints.

  Though he was certainly back in his body now, some of the detachment remained. He felt like a spectator. And he couldn't summon up the strength or the desire to fight what was happening to him, to return to the way he was, before the perfume.

  Ryan's head turned, though he had no sense of having willed it.

  And couldn't stop it.

  He saw the others around him. Not just his companions, but the carny chillers, too. As his head moved, things appeared to him in a series of freeze-frames. Instead of shadows on faces, he saw bands of beautiful pure colors. Lavender. Blue. Yellow. He wanted to pull his SIG from its holster, but he couldn't make his hand reach for it. The failed effort was exhausting. He didn't need the blaster anyway. No one was fighting. Everyone looked dazed and barely able to move.

  Dean stood right where Ryan had left him. And the little girl was there, too, by his side. Their eyes were open and blinking. They appeared to be all right. A sound intruded on his thoughts, a banging noise, as if a muffled gong was being struck over and over.

  As this was happening, he caught a whiff of a wonderful scent riding on the breeze. Not the flowers' perfume again, but the aroma of food. Delicious food. Until he smelled it, he hadn't realized how hungry he was. And then the gnawing ache in his stomach was more than he could bear.

  Ryan wasn't the only one so affected.

  Companions and chillers alike roused themselves and began shuffling away from the lake. The violent storms over the water had subsided. The lightning was no more. The low-hanging clouds had vanished. Its surface was a gentle, rippleless mirror of sky.

  As Ryan walked beside his son, a hand gripped his shoulder from behind. A weathered hand. Doc stepped up alongside him. Words came out of the old man's mouth in a language that Ryan didn't understand. They angered him. He shrugged off the hand.

  Ryan, Dean, indeed everyone marched in time to the gong beat echoing up from the ville below. Ryan felt disjointed and clumsy, as if he had great soft pillows for feet Though they were all famished, no one hurried to be first. They all moved at the same ra
te, which was dictated by the rhythmic banging.

  The lake sat on a plateau of sorts. Beyond the mud bank was a long incline of limestone bedrock. Ryan and the others climbed carefully over the moss and tufts of spike grass that rimmed the edges of the deep, crumbling fissures and yawning holes dotting the slope. There was flowing water, too. It seeped steadily from the bottoms of the fissures and the cracks. It was as if the whole face of the hillside leading down to the ville were weeping.

  When he and Dean reached the bottom, Ryan ignored the little hamlet. He followed his ears and his nose to the center of the pounded-dirt square, where a black man with dreadlocks was hammering on the side of a fifty-five-gallon steel barrel with a chunk of firewood. As he drummed, he danced, shaking his hips and bobbing the tangled mass of his woolly curls to the backbeat. He had a raging hot fire burning in the barrel, and a metal grate was pulled over the flames.

  Heaped on the grate like a stack of cannonballs were the sizzling sources of the delicious aromas.

  "Gome on, now, doan be shy," the cook sang as the new arrivals approached. "I got plenty here. It's real Jamaica jerk, an' that's no lie. Getcha good stuff while it's hot!"

  Even though Ryan wanted what was on that grill more than he'd ever wanted anything, he didn't push. No one did. Everyone seemed to be in the same state.

  Able to move, but rockily.

  The detached part of him knew that things were very wrong. That he should have long since gone for the eighteen-inch panga sheathed below his knee, and started cutting chiller throats. That his companions should have been doing likewise. But the proximity of their mortal enemies no longer seemed to matter to any of them. The need for revenge and the need to stop the butchery had become irrelevant. They were possessed of only one desire: to eat what was being offered. For all the black smoke coming off the grate, and the folks standing in line in front of him, Ryan couldn't even see what he was waiting for.

  That didn't matter, either.

  The line slowly advanced. Dean reached the head of the line in front of Ryan. The boy shuffled off without a word, juggling between his hands a smoking, char-roasted glob that his father barely got a glimpse of.

  It was big, though.

  The size of a ripe melon.

  Using the piece of firewood, the cook rolled another glob out of the flames, across the grate, this time in Ryan's direction. It looked like a twenty-pound meteorite that had just crashed to Earth. "There you go, mon," he said. "Best you'll ever eat."

  Ryan grabbed it up with eager fingers. It burned him, but he wouldn't let it drop. He, too, juggled the smoking glob and sat in the dirt beside his son. Dean was already tearing into his food, as was the little girl from Bullard. They were making animal noises of pleasure.

  The first bite made Ryan groan. It was roast beef. And more succulent than any he had ever eaten. The outer part was crispy and tasted as if it had been rubbed with spices. The charred flesh came off in juicy shreds under Ryan's teeth. Inside, the roast was so tender it melted in his mouth.

  The more he ate of it, the more he wanted. The thought that mebbe it was too much to consume in one sitting, of mebbe saving some for later didn't even enter his mind. Ryan ate the whole thing and when he was done he licked the sweet grease from his fingers. Stomach bulging, he lay back on his elbows. Dean curled up on his side, unable to budge after packing so much into his gut. Everyone else was on the ground, too. Most were flat on their backs with their eyes closed.

  Ryan was no longer hungry, but he was getting sleepy. In a disinterested way he took in the immediate surroundings. The only building of note was the low concrete blockhouse across the square, which was obviously predark. The rest of the ville was a shit heap of ramshackle, dirt-floored lean-tos barely tall enough to crawl into. Clouds of black flies swarmed over the open latrines and trench sewer.

  In a corner of the square stood a predark metal chair. It had straps looped around both arms, and on the chair back was a dark, broad stain that looked like dried blood. Flies hovered over it, and over the long piece of iron pipe that leaned against it.

  Ryan dozed off to the seesaw, droning buzz. He was awakened with a start a few minutes later by a sound that he couldn't place. He sat up and looked around; others were stirring, as well.

  He realized that the noise was coming from a wag engine when he saw the approaching Baja Bug. To him it sounded as if it were underwater. And it had a strange, shimmering halo, or aura around it, a purple-and-rose glow that had nothing to do with its flat gray paint job. When the Bug stopped beside the square and the driver got out, Ryan's jaw dropped in astonishment. He opened his mouth to speak, but words failed him. He thought he'd never see Trader again.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  When Doc awoke, he was standing by the fetid lakeside, tethered by the waist to John Barrymore Dix with a length of nylon rope. He felt that a terrible burden had been lifted from his shoulders, if only temporarily. It wasn't the first time that he had shaken free from a nightmare of grief and personal tragedy.

  Nor the hundredth.

  Even when he was fully functional, Dr. Theophilus Tanner walked an emotional tightrope.

  The whitecoats of Operation Chronos had trawled him from the bosom of his family, from his wife, Emily, from his young children, Rachel and Jolyon, in November 1896. They had removed him against his will to the year 1998, and had kept him prisoner while they experimented with him. He was never to see his loved ones again or to know their fates.

  After two years of poking and prodding, of drawing blood and giving him electrical shocks, the whitecoats had decided to be rid of him and his infuriating truculence. In December 2000, just before the world flamed out forever, Doc was sent forward in time to a destination unknown. The grim future he found himself trapped in was called Deathlands.

  In terms of his own biological age, Doc Tanner was still in his thirties, but he looked twice that old. A man could only take so much pain, so much loss, so much truth about the real nature of existence. The lack of control over anything that mattered. Once that limit was reached, the only refuge was the abyss of madness. And it was over that bottomless chasm that Doc's tightrope was stretched.

  Though his memories of the most recent events were largely blurred, he retained a few clear images. He recalled the nameless ville the companions had happened upon, and the pit of the dead marked by the upraised hand of the female corpse. He recalled the infant and its mother, whose final, desperate agonies had shocked him into reliving his own mind-shattering loss.

  Less clearly, he remembered the start of the companions' long overland pursuit of the carny villains, and how with every step along that trail, his anger at being trapped in a universe so infinitely perverse seemed to build, and finally to turn inward. More vaguely, he recalled J.B. towing him and caring for him like a child.

  Gradually, over the next few minutes, Doc's full power of thought returned to him. He was a man with a classical education. A highly accomplished scholar of the nineteenth century, a trained scientific observer. As such, he saw that all of his companions seemed to be stricken by the same malady: Ryan, Dean, J.B., Jak, Krysty and Mildred appeared dazed and confused, as did the little girl. And the others, the coldhearts from the carny, were in the same state. The immature stickie was in the worst shape of any of them. Doc had never seen a terrified stickie.

  It was an unnerving sight.

  He untied the rope from his waist and reached down to help J.B. up from where he lay sprawled in the mud. For his trouble, he was roughly shoved away.

  "What's wrong, John Barrymore?" he said with concern. "Are you injured?"

  As he rose, the Armorer pointedly turned his back on Doc.

  Doc tried to thank the man who had saved his life, who had protected him, but the Armorer refused to acknowledge his existence. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, J.B.'s eyes were narrowed to slits, and his jaw was set hard. Doc looked at Mildred and Krysty, hoping to get a more friendly reception, if not some sympathy or an explanati
on for the rejection.

  "Dr. Wyeth, Krysty, what in heaven's name has come over John Barrymore?" he asked.

  Evidently the same thing had come over them.

  Neither of the women would speak to him. Not a word. They looked through him as if he weren't even there.

  Muttering to himself, Doc bent and retrieved his precious ebony swordstick. J.B. had dutifully carried the antique weapon for him this far, only to let it drop on the bank when he felt its ornate silver lion's-head handle had landed in the mud along the waterline. He carefully wiped it clean on the hem of his frock coat. Doc then removed himself from the company of his infuriatingly silent friends and leaned against the trunk of one of the stripped trees. For a painful moment he considered the possibility that what he was experiencing was just another mental aberration, another waking nightmare, that this time he had perhaps slipped even more deeply into madness. He was jolted by the memories of seeing the yellow snowfall and the bizarre storm on the lake—snowfall and storm that no longer were in evidence. Memories that supported a diagnosis of insanity.

  Doc had to know whether he was still dreaming. He unsheathed the sword hidden in his stick and drew its razor edge ever so lightly across the back of his middle finger just above the knuckle. The blade tugged at his skin, then cleanly sliced through. He grimaced at the pain. And the wound bled.

  He wasn't dreaming. This was all real, all horribly real.

  From the distance there came an insistent, repetitive banging. It was accompanied by an odor that Doc couldn't place, but something unpleasant was burning. The combination of stimuli seemed to animate both the companions and the carny chillers. Everyone started moving slowly away from the bank, in the direction of the banging and the caustic smell.

  Doc caught up with Ryan as he, too, fell into line.