He wasn't alone.
Krysty, J.B., Mildred, Jak and Dean stumbled along beside him, lost in their own inner worlds, raving to themselves.
Something terrible had gripped all of the companions, and it was toying with them.
Ryan knew he had to gather Dean and the others and get out of there while the getting was good. Even as he shook free of the leadenness that still hung upon his limbs, thunder boomed at his back, then came the hot wind, then the sting of the pale-yellow snow.
He stopped walking and turned to face it.
The initial jolt this time, the plunge into the perfume of the flower fields, was less shocking to his system. He slid into it like a well-worn pair of boots. And almost at once, he had a profound sense of well-being. All the wrinkles, the doubts were smoothed away.
He stood there, eye shut, head tilted back, mouth wide open, letting the spores fall on his tongue and dissolve there. They tasted like grains of sugar. Time passed, the snow drifted over his ankles and up to his shins, but he didn't care.
He was happy. He was content.
Trader and his father, Baron Titus, were by his side again.
Passenger Ryan knew this couldn't be. But the body in which he was trapped felt their presence, their physical warmth. It even smelled Trader's cigar smoke. When everyone moved in close to the chair, Ryan's body moved along, too. When they grinned and chanted, it grinned and chanted. It knew that bloody murder was about to be done.
In all his days, in all his battles, Ryan had never seen men fight each other in order to be the first to die. He had never seen men rejoice at the prospect of their own destruction. Passenger Ryan felt the body rejoice, as well, and was disgusted. Not only did he have no control over the emotions that it felt, but also they weren't and never could be his emotions.
He wanted to look at the others, but he couldn't make the head turn; it was locked straight ahead, at the man scrambling into the chair. Ryan sensed that his friends were feeling the same thing that he was, that they were smiling like he was. The insanity was like an infection. Not just out of character. For the companions he knew, it was out of the question. And yet none of them could break free and stop the horror.
The man strapped in the chair was filthy and raggedy, beard matted. His eyes burned like blue coals in his head; he was missing most of his front teeth. With all the dirt that encrusted him, it was hard to guess his age, but he was probably somewhere between twenty and thirty years old.
It all happened very quickly. The black man stepped behind the chair, cocked himself, then brought down more than a yard of metal pipe. The impact drove the man's head between his shoulders. His skull crunched lopsidedly. Brains flew. Blood sprayed. And his right eyeball popped out of its socket and dangled on his cheek.
Along with everyone else, Ryan let out a gasp.
From the cratering wound twinkling points of light streamed upward, circling mebbe five feet above the body, building in volume and turbulence. The light continued to stream until the corpse heaved its last jerk. Then the pinpoints drifted farther and farther apart, until they finally disappeared.
Ryan the passenger was stunned by the detail and realism. Had it been a hallucination? Or had he witnessed the spirit flowing out of the dying body, the soul freed?
After dumping the corpse in the cart, the two men left squabbled and struggled over who would take the seat next. The guy who won was strapped down by the guy who lost. The lucky winner glanced over his shoulder at the waiting black man, a gleeful expression on his face. Then he turned back and shut his eyes as if he was in store for a pleasant surprise.
The black man swung the pipe down again. At the impact Ryan was jolted to the core, as if he had been the one who had been struck. And again, from the devastating wound, he witnessed the streaming of nonsubstance, of ectoplasm, of soul.
"This is the real carny," Trader whispered into his ear.
THE MAGNIFICENT CRECCA grabbed the bloody end of the pipe with one hand and gave Azimuth a hard shove in the chest with the other. "Give it to me," he said. "I want a turn swinging the pipe."
The black man refused to let go of the weapon.
"In case you forgot, you work for me, Azimuth," Crecca said, giving him another hard push. "Me and the Magus." He put a heavy emphasis on the last two words.
"I used to work for you, mon," the carny scout said. "No more. Now I do just what ol' Marley says."
Crecca glared at Baron Kerr, who stood with his arms crossed over his chest. Then, without warning, he ducked forward and head-butted Azimuth. The black man's nose crunched under the blow, and bright blood gushed from his nostrils. As the carny master tried to wrench the pipe away, his scout fought back. Azimuth landed a hard right to the side of Crecca's head, then jammed the end of the pipe into his solar plexus.
Crecca doubled over and went down, but he pulled the off-balance Azimuth along with him. The two big men crashed to the ground and began rolling around in the dirt. Over the next thirty seconds, they each had their moments. Crecca hammered the black man's face with consecutive rights and lefts. Azimuth got his big hands around the carny master's throat and squeezed until his face turned purple. It was the baron who finally broke up the scuffle. He picked up the pipe that Azimuth had dropped and gave each of the men a solid whack in the legs with it.
Crecca got to his feet first. "I want to take my turn on the last guy," he said to Kerr, holding out his hand. "Azimuth has already done two."
The baron stared at him hard for a few seconds, then half smiled in a strange, sad way. "I like how he handles the pipe," Baron Kerr said. "A sweet swing."
With that, to Crecca's fury, he handed the weapon back to the black man. The carny master was then forced to watch with the others as Azimuth wound up and hit another long ball. When the shuddering from the chair had stopped, he shouldered in beside the black man to help him load the last body into the cart.
"You're dead meat," he warned his former scout.
"We're all dead meat, mon," Azimuth said with a laugh.
The baron threw a couple of axes and machetes and a tree-limb saw on top of the corpses. Then he set off across the square, gesturing for the crowd to push the cart after him.
On the north side of the ville was the start of a narrow track that led up the mountainside in a series of winding switchbacks between the fallen blocks of limestone. From the wheel ruts, which were deep and matched the tires perfectly, the cart had been the only vehicle to traverse it in a very long time, and had traversed it often.
Crecca didn't do any of the cart pushing. He walked a short distance behind, and he stopped to look back when the procession was halfway up the slope. What he saw wasn't what Ryan or Mildred or Doc saw.
There were no shabby huts below, no open sewers, no mind-numbing poverty and starvation. What Crecca saw instead was a place of enormous wealth and luxury homes, a suburban development that had apparently, miraculously been left untouched by the fires of skydark and the ravages of the decades of nuclear winter that followed. And for the most part it was deserted.
All there for the taking.
And there was only one person keeping Crecca from taking it: Baron Kerr. The last of Kerr's men lay dead in the cart.
So far the job of baron looked butt simple to Crecca. Much simpler, and much less dangerous than running a carny and mobile gas chamber.
Pick some bounty.
Slam some heads.
And the last bit was especially easy since the folks getting their heads slammed wanted it to happen.
He stared at the low concrete-block building at the foot of the slope. It was the most secure structure in the ville, and where he knew its most valuable treasures would be kept. He recognized the building as a predark pumphouse because he'd come across others like it before. From the oblique and downward angle of view, he could see the huge pipes running down the mountainside to the back of the building. No doubt they had something to do with the pool's water level.
A tug at the ta
il of his ringmaster coat made Crecca turn. He looked down to see Jackson staring up at him with dead black eyes.
"Get away from me," the carny master said.
The naked stickie started to sing and dance, to try to make up for biting the hand that fed it. Jackson did a rendition of the Tiffany music video that they had been rehearsing in the big wag, complete with head jukes and hip thrusts.
The singing sounded like screeching to Crecca, and the dancing wasn't like dancing at all, more like a perpendicular grand mal seizure. The carny master wasn't amused and wanted no part of it. He hauled off and booted the stickie in the backside, sending it tumbling down the road.
When Jackson didn't go away, but rather resumed its irritating caterwauling and pelvic thrusting at a safe distance and with a pleading look on its pale face, Crecca reached down and picked up stones, with which he pelted the creature.
Struck and bleeding, Jackson slunk away over the hillside, still in its choke collar and trailing its chain leash.
With Crecca bringing up the rear, the procession crested the rise, then followed Baron Kerr downhill to the muddy bank beside the pool, where he signaled for them to stop. When the baron handed out the cutting tools, Crecca was first in line to take one of the axes.
The job was messy, but not difficult, because the tools had been honed to razor sharpness.
After the first body had been chunked, Kerr started lobbing the pieces into the pool. Almost at once the huge lungfish rose to the bait, swirling and splashing on the surface as they fought over their dinner.
Crecca enthusiastically returned to the chopping. As he did so, he noticed Kerr staring at him. The carny master smiled at the ville's headman as he brought down the ax.
You're next, Baron, he thought.
Chapter Thirty-One
Baron Kerr had learned not to trust rays of hope. Like everything else in his ever shifting world, they had always proved to be illusions, cast by the burning pool for its own inexplicable ends.
Yet, as he watched the man in the red coat struggle on the ground with the black scout over the right to brain the strapped-down-and-beaming sacrificial lamb, he had the first inkling of what might be possible. While it wasn't unusual for people to fight for the right to be next to sit in the Clobbering Chair, and so to sooner exit the grasp of the pool, no one had ever before demanded the right to be executioner. To test his suspicion, he had given the pipe back to the black man, then studied Red Coat's reaction when it was used shortly thereafter to crush the victim's skull. Kerr saw fury in the man's eyes. Fury at having been denied pleasure. Fury directed at him, the denier.
Which was good.
Which was very good.
If the anger the baron had witnessed was real, and not some figment of his own imagination, it was also a first. The spores and the bounty had always produced slaves who were compliant. Not demanding.
Not impatient. And above all, not envious. They would take up the pipe and wield it joyfully when the time came, but only when ordered to do so.
The black man had only battled to keep the pipe because the pool entity, speaking through Kerr, had commanded him to use it.
Assuming that the pool had absolute control of Red Coat, a safe assumption under the circumstances, it was making him behave differently than anyone else ever had, allowing him an element of personality that it had refused all the others. Whatever his hallucinations were, they, too, had to be markedly different than anyone else's.
The baron kept his eye on Red Coat as he led his flock and the corpse cart up the zigzag trail to the pool. He noticed when the red-haired man paused and looked back at the ville. The expression on the newcomer's face was one of desire, of greed, even.
What was he seeing down there? Kerr asked himself. Or, more properly, what was the pool making him see? It had a way of finding the weakest point in a human being's psychology, and attacking it. How it did this was a mystery. As far as the baron could tell, the pool wasn't capable of thought; it just did the things it did.
It was.
As Kerr moved up the grade, he swam in a sea of the dead. Vague floating specters surrounded him, drifted through him, over his head. These were the innumerable ghosts of the pool; he could see them through closed eyelids. He couldn't match names with faces, but every one of them had drawn his or her final breath in the Clobbering Chair. Every one bore the mark of the iron pipe on their skull.
Although the baron's world and this spectral world of the pool's victims overlapped visually—he could see them, but they could not see him—they didn't overlap tangibly. There was no sensation of contact as the gauzy forms passed through or brushed against him. Kerr had become so used to the horrors of these hallucinations that they had become nothing more than an annoyance. Especially when the sun was going down. The angled, softened light made it difficult to see through the randomly shifting apparitions.
Though the pool could be subtle in its manipulations, it wasn't in this case. His visions of the legions of dead were meant to demonstrate how close the ones who had gone before were, how close freedom was, and yet always just beyond his reach. It was a constant, minute-by-minute reminder that he who wanted more than anything to escape could not. Once Kerr had had a life, though he could barely remember it. Once he had had faith, though that was dead to him. The pool had taken everything. It had taken his soul.
When the procession reached its denuded bank, the pool was quiet. It reflected the peach and turquoise of the sunset, and the black fringe of the trees along the ridgeline above.
The flock looked to Baron Kerr for further instructions.
"The body is never alone," he told them. "It has gathered and keeps a web of creatures around it. A family connected by the chain of life. Each member of the family performs a different task, or set of tasks, all to insure the body's health and well-being. And the body, in return, insures the health and well-being of all its family members."
He pointed at the tools in the cart and the corpses under them. "As loyal members of that family, we have one more job to perform. The dead must be cut up in small pieces, so the fish in the pool can eat them."
Several of the newcomers grabbed the implements and immediately set to hacking up the corpses into chunks. Red Coat showed a particular zeal for the task, and he kept looking up from the gruesome work, wiping the spattered blood from his face with his coat cuff, and shooting Kerr a look of absolute hatred.
"Do you really think that one's your ticket on the last train west?" said a croaking voice from the waterline behind him.
Kerr glanced down and saw a six-foot-long lung-fish bobbing in the shallows. Its back and tail were three-quarters out of the water as it rested on its pectoral spikes, and breathed air. "Could be," the baron answered. "If nothing is possible, then anything is possible."
The lungfish chuckled, lowering its head and making a bubbling noise underwater that Kerr found most irritating. "You've got to be kidding," the fish said. "How many times have you thought you had a way out of this place? A hundred? A thousand? Face facts, the pool is never going to let you go, Baron. You're its A-Number-One Boy, forever."
"What do you know?" Kerr snapped back. "A talking fish? You might not even exist. You might be just another hallucination."
"Well, this hallucination is getting mighty hungry. How about tossing me some chow?"
Kerr walked over to the cart, picked up some of the pieces that had fallen on the ground and flung them as far out into the lake as he could.
"You could have just handed me one," the lung-fish complained. Then, with a swish of its wide tail, it turned away from the shore and swam to join the feeding frenzy that had already begun.
The baron watched Red Coat continue to work on the remaining bodies, and to shoot him more of the evil looks. Despite the lungfish's prediction of another failure, Kerr became more and more hopeful that the man with the red hair had the right stuff for a much more difficult job than quartering a torso, that he had both the homicidal tendencies and
the unique brand of delusion necessary to end his own intolerable suffering.
Standing there, Kerr had a sudden, chilling realization. After killing him, Red Coat would most certainly throw him into the pool.
The baron had never considered the likely consequences of his being chopped up and fed to the fish. All he'd wanted was to be dead and gone. But now that he saw that dying might really be possible, it became clear to him that dying might not mean escape.
The lungfish were the intermediate processors, the predigesters of the pool's food. Their guts broke the tissue and bone into a simpler form. What they excreted, and what drifted down, was what sustained the fungal entity that carpeted the bottom and sent fingers of itself worming down through the mountainside. If his life force was consumed by the pool, assimilated by it, Kerr realized he could still be part of it. Conscripted into the army of ghosts that swirled around him. If that was the case, the fish was right—he would never get away.
When the chopping and feeding were completed, the baron waved the crowd back down the trail to the ville. As they began to move, he cut overland, climbing over the fallen blocks of stone. Kerr had a goal in mind, if not an exact plan. He made for the edge of one of the deepest of the hillside's potholes, a circular opening more than thirty feet across. When he reached his destination, he stopped, picked up a rock from the ground at his feet and dropped it into the hole. It took seven seconds for the stone to splash.
The blackness below him promised what he sought: true and eternal oblivion. If he stepped off the edge, there was no way his body could be recovered by Red Coat and turned into fish food. And even though the filaments of the pool probably decorated the walls of the yawning cavern, they couldn't dine on his corpse. The tendrils had no feeding apparatus; they were the fungis' fruiting bodies, whose only function was to produce bounty. And even if they did have a way of digesting things that he was unaware of, without the intercession of the lungfish, his body was in the wrong form for them to use.
Axler, James - Deathlands 62 - Damnation Road Show Page 22