Axler, James - Deathlands 62 - Damnation Road Show

by Damnation Road Show [lit]

  Taking hold of his broad shoulder, Doc said in a pleading voice, "Ryan, dear boy, can you understand me? I fear we are all in terrible danger. We must get away from this place at once. Can you hear what I am saying?"

  The one-eyed man roughly pushed his hand away. The expression on Ryan's face made Doc draw back. Ryan had never given him a look like that. It said Touch me again and I'll chill you.

  As hurt to the core as he was puzzled, Doc let all the others shuffle past him like zombies. Why was he alone unaffected? he wondered. He could come up with no answer to the question.

  Bringing up the rear, Doc followed the ragged line down the mountainside. The steep limestone slope had fractured into huge, smooth blocks, and it had been eroded from within, hollowed and honeycombed by centuries of seeping groundwater. As Doc descended, he kicked loose an avalanche of rock that tumbled into one of the gaping potholes. After a few seconds, he heard splashes and clunks as the stones hit bottom. It was a long way down, and a hard landing.

  At the base of the slope was a ville of sorts. To Doc it looked like a trash midden heaped up around an ancient concrete blockhouse. Ahead of him, the others crossed the dirt square and lined up in front of the flaming burn barrel and the wildman pounding on its side with a round chunk of firewood. Doc stepped wide to the right and moved closer so he could get a better look at the goings-on.

  Shouting and dancing to his own erratic rhythms, the black giant bent to pick up a big gray glob from a pile sitting in the dirt, and threw it on the grate where other globs sizzled and smoked. The objects being seared were the size and shape of predark bowling balls. Or adult human heads. The black flies seemed especially partial to the ones on the ground.

  When Doc's turn came to partake, he quietly gathered up his share of the charred stuff. He wasn't hungry, just curious. Moving away from the others, he used his swordstick to cut the glob in two. Even on close inspection of one of the halves, he couldn't identify the material as animal or vegetable. It had a slippery, rubbery texture like raw liver, and it was laced with branching veins and tough sheets of sinew. The powerful aroma of urea it gave off so turned his stomach that he had to hold it at arm's length.

  Then something moved on the cut surface.

  "By the Three Kennedys!" he exclaimed. "What have we here?"

  With the edge of his fingernail, Doc pried loose a translucent, wormlike creature. Eyeless and spineless, it was eight inches long when fully stretched, and when released, it sprang back into a tight coil.

  Doc dropped the parasite in the dirt and with difficulty—it was tougher than it looked—crushed it to a pulp under his heel. He pushed the two halves of the glob back together and rolled them into the doorless entry of a lean-to made of tattered, opaque plastic sheeting.

  Turning back to the square, the sight of his dearest friends eagerly gorging on the contaminated food made his skin crawl. He hurried over to Krysty and tried to take her half-eaten meal away from her.

  "It's full of parasites!" he said as she mightily resisted.

  For his concern, Doc received a quick, hard punch in the solar plexus that doubled him up and sent him staggering away. As he gasped for breath, Krysty tore off another greasy chunk with her teeth and poked it into her mouth with her fingertips.

  Chastened and humiliated, Doc retreated to the scant shade along the front of the blockhouse, where he could observe and absorb, and perhaps form a plan of action. It appeared that his companions were suffering from some kind of sudden-onset mass mental illness. They all presented the same symptoms, which could have been caused by a shared trauma or by exposure to some infectious agent. Doc knew he had to uncover the cause before he could come up with a cure.

  After the huge, if monotonous meal, everyone in the square except for Doc and Jackson fell asleep where they lay. As it turned out, the only other creature who wouldn't eat the awful stuff was the young stickie, which was most curious. A picky stickie was something Doc had never seen nor heard tell of. The naked mutie stood resolute guard over its snoring, red-coated master.

  After a few minutes, Doc heard the sound of a wag approaching from the north, apparently traveling a different route than the one he and the companions had taken.

  A battleship-gray Baja Bug rumbled over a rise and roared over to the square. Like a pack of dogs, the sated diners stirred from their beds in the dirt. They rose to their feet as the Bug stopped. Its doors opened and four men piled out. Doc's attention was drawn and held by the driver, a tall thin man in a tattered straw cowboy hat and scratched wraparound sunglasses. He wore his dark hair in a long braid and had a snaggly goatee beard. His clothes were ripped and filthy. His hands were filthy, too.

  From the way the black cook prostrated himself in greeting the driver, Doc assumed that he had to be the hammered-down ville's headman.

  Doc was struck by the way the faces of the companions and chillers lit up in his presence. Everyone seemed thoroughly delighted to see the man for no reason that Doc could fathom. As far as he knew, none of them knew him from Adam.

  If Ryan beamed at the driver as if he were a lifelong hero, Mildred's response was even more surprising, and unsettling. The middle-aged black woman sidled up to the man in the cowboy hat and slipped her arm around his lanky waist. She fawned on him in an overtly sexual way that was absolutely contrary to her nature, as Doc thought he understood it. The Dr. Mildred Wyeth that he knew was a self-contained and self-sufficient human being, whose stoic and clinical reserve was the stuff of legend, and she never fawned over anything or anyone.

  While Doc pondered this development, the crowd moved away from the Baja Bug, leaving it unguarded. With no one to stop him, the old man wandered over to the driver's door and looked inside the open window. There were no keys in the ignition. Keys weren't needed. The ignition had been pulled apart, leaving the ends of two bare wires hanging under the dash.

  Doc straightened and looked over the Bug's roof. Before anyone could stop him, he knew he could easily slip behind the wheel, start it up and drive away. And once he got rolling, he was free. Doc had the means to escape, but he made no move to do so. He couldn't abandon his friends to whatever fate had in store. No more than they could leave him when he was out of his mind.

  The situation he faced was much more difficult, however. He couldn't simply lasso the companions and tow them away. There were too many of them. And it appeared from recent events that they would resist his intervention, and do so with all their might. His predicament was colossal, yet he was determined to succeed. From the middle of the square, the driver addressed the rapt crowd in a soothing voice. "My name is Kerr," he said. "I am baron here. Now that you have been fed and rested, there is work to be done. Most rewarding work, as you will soon discover. Follow me."

  The throng set off to the foot of the limestone slope. Everyone but Doc was animated, even cheerful at the prospect.

  Baron Kerr stopped at a wide gash in the rocky hillside, the entrance to a natural tunnel. "Everything comes from the burning pool above us," he said. "It is the wellspring of our existence here. Its flesh becomes our flesh, and our flesh becomes its flesh. Our meaning and destinies are intertwined.

  "Everything you will see inside the caves belongs to the pool. It lives both inside and outside the mountain. Its miraculous filaments wind through solid rock. Growing. Nourishing. Enlightening."

  From his academic experience at Harvard and Oxford, Doc guessed that they were being treated to a stock speech that had been given many times before. The baron was like an aged professor droning out the same lecture for decades. Kerr's deadpan delivery didn't bother any of the others; on the contrary, they hung on his every word and appeared eager for more.

  Kerr removed his sunglasses and seated them firmly on the brim and crown of his straw hat. It was then that Doc noticed the man's eyes were different colors, one yellowish-brown, the other blue, which gave him a decidedly deranged look as he waved his arm and led the flock into the huge grotto.

  Jackson refused to
enter the cave. No one tried to coax the stickie in. No one seemed to care or notice his extreme agitation. Doc found it difficult to feel sympathy for the creature, knowing full well its genetic predilection for violence and bloodshed. Like the others, he wished the stickie would just go away.

  Inside the cave, what with the white limestone walls and the fissures in the ceiling, there was plenty of light to see by. Water steadily trickled across the floor; in the depressions it pooled ankle deep. Along the right-hand wall, caught in a shaft of sunlight, was a stack of wooden implements. They reminded Doc of flensing knives, the tools used in the whaling trade to carve blubber. Only these had short handles. The outwardly curving, scimitar-like blades were sharpened on one edge.

  "These are your tools," Baron Kerr said. "With them you will tend the bounty of the pool. They are made of wood because the touch of metal taints the bounty and makes it unfit to eat. Take one and come with me."

  Doc was the last to pick up a tool. He tested the edge, which was barely sharp and nicked in many places. Whatever it was meant to cut was very soft indeed. He and the others tracked the baron deeper into the hillside. The passage grew narrower and much darker. So dark that Kerr paused to light a torch, one of many that lay on a ledge well above the waterline. After more torches were lit, they proceeded down the winding tunnel.

  Beads of strange, faintly luminous moisture appeared on the cave walls. Doc felt a tightness building in his chest that had nothing to do with the torch smoke or the dank-smelling cave or the rapid rise in the air temperature. He sensed that he was walking into the core of something more powerful and more evil than his mind could grasp. An evil that cast a shadow in the darkest corners of the dripping cave.

  The only thing that kept him from turning and running for daylight was the knowledge that his companions walked ahead of him, unaware, perhaps bewitched, and at the mercy of that selfsame evil.

  Deep under the mountain, the cave widened into a low-ceilinged antechamber that was roughly circular. It was there that Baron Kerr stopped and gave instruction on the harvesting of the pool's "bounty."

  Only when the baron actually pointed out the tendrils did Doc see them. They were mottled gray, and in the dim and flickering torchlight, they blended in with the colors of the stained and shadowy bedrock. The glistening, interlacing, tapering growths pushed through splits in the stone; they encased the walls and roof of the antechamber. Some were as big around as a man's waist, others the size of little fingers.

  At least at present they were immobile, and Doc was thankful for that.

  "Go on and touch them," the baron urged the crowd. "Feel the pool's majesty."

  When Ryan, Krysty, J.B., Mildred, Jak, Dean and Leeloo laid hands on the tentacles, they uttered gasps of delight The carny chillers had exactly the same reaction.

  Doc touched one, as well, to satisfy his scientist's mind. He got no particular thrill from the contact. He found the tendril moist to his fingertips, either from something secreted through its pores or from the water dripping down the wall, and the outer skin was coarse, like shark hide. When he pressed on the tendril, the flesh beneath yielded, but it didn't contract or in any other way respond to his touch. From this, he concluded that it was either vegetable or fungal in nature.

  The baron brandished his wooden flensing knife and said, "This is how we tend the bounty."

  Carefully he used the edge of the knife to pry a thigh-sized tendril free of its grip on the rock. He lifted it up and draped it over his shoulder in order to show his audience the thousands of tiny, hairlike, adhesive-coated fibers on the underside that allowed it to cling to and grow along the solid surface. Thin strands of clear liquid drooled from the broken fibers, soaking through the back of his shirt. At the place where the tentacle exited the rock there was a large nodule. Doc recognized it as one of the globs.

  "For the bounty to form and fully ripen," Kerr continued, "the filament must be freed. Part of your work is to search the caverns for mature filaments of this size and loosen them from the rock."

  Heads nodded all around.

  "The other part of your work is to harvest the bounty," the baron said. "In doing this, you must be careful not to damage the filament. The edge of the blade should slide in this way." He placed the knife along the underside of the tentacle he had freed, then pushed its edge against the join of nodule. "If the bounty is ripe," he continued, "it will come off easily. Like this."

  With a wet pop, the glob separated from the tendril and Kerr caught it in his free hand.

  A sudden waft of highly concentrated urea filled the antechamber. Doc averted his head and smothered a cough with his fist, but the sharp, unpleasant stench brought smiles to the faces of the others. Clearly, Doc thought, something had altered their most basic perceptions.

  The baron held up the tentacle and showed the throng how the circular wound seeped the same viscous, clear liquid, then gradually puckered closed, sealing itself.

  "Take only one ripe bounty for yourself," Kerr told them. "It is your ration. Spend the rest of your time in these caverns identifying and tending the filaments."

  That was the end of the training session.

  The baron didn't invite questions from the floor. He simply turned and walked away, leaving companions and chillers to fend for themselves.

  Though there were many things Doc wanted to ask him about the pool, the snow and the tendrils, he knew better than to open his mouth and draw attention to himself.

  His hard experience at the hands of the predark whitecoats, and at hands of Jordan Teague, told Doc how to lay low until the right time came.

  If it ever came…

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Ryan's face hurt from smiling as he listened to Trader's explanation of how things worked in the caverns. Trader had been like a second father to him. He had taught him leadership, discipline and how to surpass his own limits.

  Now Trader was teaching him the way. The way that answered all questions. It was so clear. So clean. So simple.

  Even as Ryan took in the details of the harvesting, of his responsibilities to the burning pool, the shrunken, the virtually incapacitated part of him— Ryan Cawdor the indomitable fighter, the hard-eyed realist—insisted that the Trader he knew and loved was lost to him, mebbe chilled. Trader and Abe. That diminished Ryan insisted that he couldn't be seeing him or hearing his voice.

  But the evidence of his single eye told him that he was.

  And the light that shone from Trader's face was like a beacon in the darkness.

  It wouldn't be denied.

  Ryan took up his wooden flensing knife and a lit torch and set off down a passage that twisted and narrowed until it was barely wide enough for his shoulders. All along the corridor, the filaments hung from the dripping walls, as gray and thick as tree trunks.

  The larger part of him saw that Trader was right, that there was much important work to be done here. Much love to impart. Much care. Being in the caves was like being in fields of blooming flowers.

  So much beauty.

  On all sides.

  Ryan chose a mature filament and began loosening its grip on the cave wall. The hairlike fibers made faint snapping sounds as he broke their connection with the limestone with the blade. The gray tentacle came free from its delicate, pointed tip to the wide root that exited from the rock face. The severed hairlets bathed his hands in their ooze.

  He lifted up the freed tendril, but there was no ripe bounty at its widest spot, the place where it emerged from the stone. Instead he found a small, hard nodule no bigger than his fist. The fruit of the pool needed time and room to grow.

  As Ryan the cruise ship stood there admiring the bud, Ryan the passenger, the spectator, had a sudden sense of the burning pool as an individual creature, of its mountainous vastness, of its hundreds of miles of intruding, interlacing filaments.

  Of its infinite hunger.

  Of its infinite evil.

  "There is nothing to be afraid of, Ryan," said a famil
iar voice behind him.

  A gruff man's voice.

  Ryan smelled cigar smoke. He turned and Trader was standing there beside him. His old friend's face seemed younger than Ryan remembered. The hair wasn't quite as grizzled.

  "You're not dead," Ryan said. "Thought Abe and you might have bought the farm."

  "Mebbe I am dead," Trader said.

  Ryan picked up the torch and held it closer to get a better look. "You're a ghost?"

  Trader laughed, but he didn't answer. "I brought you here for a reason. I brought you here to show you that there is joy beyond all the hard living. That beyond the gate, joy awaits you."

  Ryan's cheeks suddenly felt as if they were going split, his grin was that wide. Why in rad blazes am I smiling? Passenger Ryan thought. None of this is real.

  "We are all here to show you…" Trader said, gesturing down the narrow tunnel behind him.

  Ryan saw then that Trader hadn't come alone.

  Behind Trader in the passage were many figures, half in shadow and half in dancing torchlight. All of them were smiling; all of them he knew. Some were people Ryan had loved, while some were people he had chilled. Friends and enemies alike. His father, Baron Titus Cawdor, was there, as was his mother, Lady Cynthia, and his brothers. Lori Quint. Cort Strasser. Bessie and Cissie Torrance. And so many others. A line of familiar faces that stretched off into the darkness.

  All dead.

  All very happily dead, it seemed.

  He could tell from their expressions that none of them blamed him for anything that he had done to them or hadn't done for them. They forgave him completely. They understood him completely. They had overcome the shortsighted yearnings and judgments of the flesh.

  In their gleeful faces was an invitation to join them, an invitation that held the promise of ultimate redemption.

  Until it was actually offered to him, Ryan hadn't known that he even desired such a thing. But now, while searching the eyes of those who had gone before him, he felt the same sort of intense, uncontrollable yearning that he had felt for the roasted globs: a marvelous scent on the wind drew him closer and closer, like a puppet on a string, to death.