Axler, James - Deathlands 62 - Damnation Road Show

by Damnation Road Show [lit]

  Kerr stood on the edge, poised to end his life, but he didn't take the fatal step.

  He couldn't take it. His legs wouldn't move forward.

  If stepping off into one of the potholes and chilling himself had actually been possible, Baron Kerr would have done it long, long ago. It was impossible because the pool would not allow him to injure himself. It kept him safe because it needed him.

  Kerr heard the sounds of rocks shifting and the scraping of boot soles. Someone was coming up behind him.

  "You've got a pretty sweet operation going for yourself here," said a voice to his back.

  The baron turned and faced Red Coat, who was smiling in an unfriendly way.

  "Mebbe it's too much for you to handle," the red-haired man suggested as he moved closer. He reached up and scratched at his scraggly red goatee. "Mebbe you need a partner."

  "I don't need a partner," Kerr said, letting Red Coat get within arm's reach. The pool forced him to shift to the right; Red Coat countered. And when he did that, the baron had no place left to retreat to. His heels were a foot from the edge of the pothole.

  "How about a hostile takeover, then?" the red-haired man suggested, leaning closer still.

  It was then, and only then, that Kerr smiled back. The broadest, most infuriating smile he could muster.

  Red Coat's arms came up, and the heels of his hands slammed into the baron's chest. As he went off balance, the pool made him flap his arms to try to regain it.

  But the push was too hard.

  James Kerr went over backward, somersaulting into the blackness.

  His victory cry lasted exactly seven seconds.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Crecca stood on the rim of the pothole and listened as the echoes of Baron Kerr's final cry and splashdown faded away. Then he did a celebration dance, loosely adapted from the choreography in the Tiffany video, complete with head jukes. Nothing stood between him and the baronship.

  Nothing.

  "I am Baron Magnificent Crecca," he shouted into the cavern below, the words booming.

  He liked the sound of it so much that he shouted it again.

  It was an announcement to the world, a taunt to his newly dead predecessor and a self coronation.

  The triumphant Baron Magnificent Crecca no longer had a human—or partly human—overlord he had to answer to. No more Magus. No one to be afraid of. No one he had to hand over the lion's share of the spoils to. The pool had shown him his heart's true desire, his true mission; his entire life he had been waiting for, and working toward this very end. All he had ever wanted was to rule over his own private kingdom. Not some fly-by-night gypsy tent carny, but a real kingdom, with real territory and real influence that he could build on and expand. He had never had the means to get what he wanted before. He had always had to compromise his desire, to give up dominion in order to seize a small part of his dream. Now he had all the power he needed to make it happen.

  All the power and then some.

  He peered into the darkness of the pothole and couldn't see the bottom, or Kerr's body. It angered him that the former baron's corpse was lost to harvest because the pool was still very hungry. Even with his eyes averted, Crecca could sense its lingering agitation. He felt it as a prickling sensation on the back of his neck and a faint fluttering in the pit of his stomach. Without looking he knew that from the surface of the water, a mist was starting to rise, and mixed in were twinkling bits of silver confetti.

  Another spore fall wouldn't be long in coming.

  Crecca knew instinctively, and with absolute certainty, that the pool's unappeased appetite had to do with its having been semistarved for weeks. He also knew that the previous baron had allowed the ville's human population to slowly dwindle. Of late, Kerr hadn't done a good job of recruiting new residents, and he had phased out the sacrificing of the people that were here. It was almost as if he had wanted the pool to suffer.

  That was all going to change now.

  Under Crecca's stewardship, the burning pool would never be hungry again. If it needed more bodies to satisfy the hunger it had built up under the Kerr regime, it would have them. At once.

  When the new baron looked back to the trail, he saw the crowd had gone on without him and was already almost at the bottom of the hillside. The evening light that surrounded him was turning purple and beginning to fade to night. He traversed the blocks and circled the yawning pitfalls of the slope, regaining the crude road and descending it at a trot. He caught up with the others shortly after they reached the square.

  Azimuth was standing behind the burn barrel, busy cooking the fresh bounty. Flames leaped from the barrel as he rolled the gray globs into position on the grate with a block of wood. The crowd stood in a long, orderly line, waiting for the meal to be handed out.

  They would have to wait a little bit longer.

  The pool demanded to be fed first.

  The former carny master picked up the iron pipe and stepped onto the seat of the Clobbering Chair. He banged the pipe on the chair's arms to get their attention. All heads slowly turned his way.

  "Baron Kerr is dead," he told them. "I have been chosen to be the new baron of this place."

  There was no reaction from the crowd. No groans of shock or sadness upon hearing of the old baron's demise. No cheers or applause at the announcement of a new leader to take his place. Their smiles were the same, before and after the announcement.

  As Crecca reviewed his grinning subjects, he wondered if the information he'd just imparted had even penetrated their spore-and-bounty-befuddled brains. And if it had penetrated, how had their brains translated and interpreted his words? How had the meaning been distorted by their individual delusions? In the end, it didn't matter. The line of people accepted him as their new ruler as they accepted everything else: without blinking an eye.

  "The body isn't satisfied," he said. "The body needs more." He tapped on the arm of the chair. "Who would like to volunteer?"

  Everyone, it seemed.

  The food line broke up, and its members encircled the Clobbering Chair and the baron. From the mountain above came a roll of thunder and faint flashes of green light. Azimuth left a clutch of bounty to burn to cinders on the grill, threw down his block of wood and joined them.

  "You!" Crecca said, pointing at the black man with the end of the yard-long pipe. "Come over here and take the load off."

  The choice of sacrifice had nothing to do with any lingering bad feelings Crecca had over their struggle earlier in the afternoon. In fact, he had no lingering feelings, one way or another, about the incident. The choice was made on the basis of seniority. The choice had been made by the pool itself. Azimuth had been in the ville longer than any other surviving person. He had inhaled and ingested more spores, eaten more bounty; he was the best prepared—having undergone a kind of a mental and physical tenderizing—to meet the very specific needs of the body.

  The carny scout thrust both arms above his head, danced in a circle and cried, "Yes!"

  As if he had just won the big prize.

  Bingo!

  Crecca hopped from the chair, making room for Azimuth to take his seat. As the big man sat down, he rounded the back of the chair and got into position for the clobbering.

  Some of the rousties rushed in to buckle down the wrist and ankle straps. As they did, Azimuth slapped out a reggae rhythm on the chair's arms, bobbing his head and shaking his dreads.

  "I never thought I'd ever get to sit in with you, my brother," he said over his broad shoulder, addressing the new baron. "It's my biggest dream come true. I am so bloody stoked, mon."

  Crecca gripped the length of pipe like a baseball bat. It was much heavier than a bat, though. And when he took a practice cut with it, the thing whistled through the air and slammed into the dirt.

  "Play that tune," Azimuth entreated him with a grin so wide that it showed every one of his hand sharpened yellow teeth. "Wail on me, Marley!"

  Crecca swung from the soles of his boots
, putting the full weight of his body behind the blow. The impact jolted up his arms and deep into his shoulder joints. The pipe sounded a dull clunk as it bounced high off its target.

  Baron Magnificent Crecca stepped nimbly aside as blood from the massive scalp wound he had inflicted jetted in a fine spray three feet in the air.

  Azimuth's body convulsed violently. It jerked so hard and so erratically that it set the chair rocking, then tipped it over sideways. Both the chair and the body hit the ground in a cloud of dust. For a long moment, the unconscious black man spasmed in the dirt.

  Then Azimuth's eyes popped open, and he began to scream. As he fought against the straps, his shrill cries were blood curdling.

  Crecca moved forward and hit him again.

  And again.

  It took a half-dozen full-power blows of the pipe to dispatch the huge man. And by the time it was over, his head from the ears up was an undistinguishable mass of shattered bone, brains and dreads.

  Puffing from the effort he'd expended, the former carny master lowered his head and leaned on the handle of the pipe for a couple of minutes. He was the only one in the audience who was resting. His rousties unfastened the straps holding down the scout's body, then lifted the corpse and dumped it headfirst into the cart. When he'd recovered his breath, Crecca bent, grabbed the fallen chair by an arm and set it upright. Azimuth was a big man, but he wasn't quite big enough to fill the pool's requirements. As the baron looked over his beaming subjects, he said, "Who's next?"

  The crowd edged closer. Everyone wanted to be next.

  Crecca's glance swept past, then returned to the young son of Ryan Cawdor. He was just the right size. He aimed the bloody pipe at the boy. "How about you, then?" he said.

  Crecca didn't have to ask twice.

  Dean raced over to take a seat in the gore splattered chair. He looked very, very happy as the rousties cinched him down.

  Crecca put a hand on the boy's shoulder and said, "I promise to try to do a neater job of it this time."

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Doc hung back at poolside while the others started back down the hill with the empty cart. When they were out of sight over the lip of the slope, he slogged over to where Ryan had dropped his longblaster. He pulled the Steyr from the mud and used the tail of his frock coat to wipe some of the dirt from the barrel, scope and stock. The weapon had gone in muzzle first, so he had to assume the bore was blocked. There was no time to clear it. And he had nothing to clear it with. He slung the bolt-action rifle over his shoulder and hurried down the trail. By the time he caught up the rest of the group, they were lining up in front of the burn barrel to get another ration of the wormy chow. His own stomach growling, Doc carefully hid the Steyr against the wall at the far end of the blockhouse.

  As the old man walked across the square to join the others, the carny master climbed on the bloody chair and banged on its arm with the metal cudgel to get everyone's attention.

  Doc had hoped that the chilling was over for the day. He had counted on having the entire night to work out a plan for getting his companions away from the gruesome horror of this hellhole.

  But it wasn't to be.

  The red-haired carny master announced a coup d'etat and proclaimed himself baron. Looking at the man, Doc had no doubt that he had dispatched the former ruler personally. Because both men were in the control of the pool, because both were coldheart chillers of the lowest order, it didn't matter who was baron. The agenda was the same.

  Doc's heart leaped into his throat when the new headman said the pool wasn't satisfied and called for volunteers. Of which there were plenty, including his own dear friends.

  Doc's window of opportunity was rapidly slamming shut.

  The simplest course of action was to break the spell of the pool, but he had tried that without success. There was nothing he could do to the companions themselves to snap them out of it. He had noticed that their respective dazes seemed to wane at times, that they appeared to be struggling against the reins. He also noticed that their resistance to control ended with the paralysis that followed each spore fall. If this wasn't an illusion on his part, it meant that the confused state of mind was temporary, and maintained only by regular redosing with spores, and perhaps with bounty. From the thunder and lightning coming over the ridge above, another downpour was imminent, as was another meal of fungal nodes.

  If Doc couldn't shake them out of their state, and he couldn't remove them forcibly, then he knew he only had one course left. And that was to try to chill whatever it was that lived in the pool.

  On the face of it, a much more daunting undertaking. The thing was vast and inconceivably powerful. Still, Doc knew he had to try.

  As he racked his brain to come up with something, anything of use in that regard, the carny scout volunteered to sit in the chair.

  The black man was all smiles as he let himself be strapped down. It was difficult to tell for certain, but he seemed to have a change of heart when the first blow landed and it didn't kill him outright. Lying in the dirt, he wasn't screaming words; he was just screaming. Doc had the feeling, though, that the shock had awakened him at the last instant, when it was already far too late to do anything about it.

  Tanner turned away from the follow-up mayhem and stared at the low concrete blockhouse. The blows were still sounding behind him when he started to put the whole thing together.

  He was fairly sure that for whatever reason, for pure science or to develop a new military weapon, predark whitecoats had created the pool and its ecosystem. And that they had done it from the ground up.

  He asked himself why then had the laboratory been sited here, so far below the pool. Certainly, it made more sense to build the lab next to the system they were studying. That told Doc the whitecoats probably knew it was dangerous, and that they wanted to be a safe distance away. Which offered support for the bioweapon hypothesis. But that wasn't the whole story.

  He could see that the laboratory was connected to the pool through the pipes at the base of the slope. As there were no pipes in evidence at the lakeside, at least none that he had seen, they had to be in place under it. Which supported the idea that it wasn't a naturally occurring body of water. The pool had been created. But that didn't explain what the pipes were there for. Could the whitecoats have used them to sample the pool's contents? Doc thought that unlikely. A pipe five feet across was overkill for taking samples. As he examined the base of the hillside, he noticed two other structures that seemed to be artificial. The rounded humps looked like culverts that had been buried by rock and dirtfall. They were twice as big as the blockhouse pipes.

  What was all the underground plumbing for? Doc asked himself. Was it because the whitecoats knew even in the planning stages the potential danger of the pool? Was it because they wanted their fingers on the trigger of a fail-safe device that could deactivate or terminate the project?

  From the position of the blockhouse and the pipe connections, Doc had a clue as to the function if not the exact construction of the device. It involved draining the lake above. Draining it suddenly and completely. The trouble was, they hadn't designed it as a dead man's switch. The nukecaust had taken them by surprise, as it had everyone else.

  Doc grimaced. It was all supposition, of course.

  As he started for the steps leading to the blockhouse entrance, the rousties pulled the body of the dead scout from the chair and pitched it into the cart. When he looked back he saw young Dean taking a seat in the death chair.

  It stopped him cold in his tracks.

  "By the Three Kennedys!" he cried, and he broke into a run, not for the bunker, but for the boy. Doc threw himself between the numbed spectators, trying to reach Dean and drag him free before harm could be done.

  Powerful hands roughly grabbed Doc by the arms and hurled him back. The crowd closed in more tightly around the chair, effectively blocking another attempt on his part.

  Doc gripped the handle of his swordstick, but he didn't draw
the blade. He knew he could skewer more than a few of the bodies before him, but he could never chill enough of them to free Dean in time. And in the process, he would have had to mortally stab his friends, even Ryan, who appeared to be willing to stop him from rescuing the boy.

  The old man reversed course and sprinted across the square. He ran down the blockhouse steps and through its open door. His boots splashed in the faintly glowing puddles on the floor of the central hallway. As he ran, he ducked and dodged the dangling, rusting light fixtures. The smell of mildew and rot was almost overpowering.

  Doc charged into the first room he came to, skidding on the concrete floor. Before him was a row of squat, heavy-looking machines. They looked like pumps of some kind. In the dim light, he quickly examined them. Yes, they were definitely pumps. He located the starter switch on one of them and depressed it. Nothing happened.

  He tried the others with same result. He kicked aside some of the debris from the fallen tile ceiling and saw the thick electrical cable on the floor. They were electric powered.

  There was no generator in the room. The wall opposite the hallway was laced with rows of heavy pipe. He scanned the various dials and gauges set at intervals along the wall. Some had cracked faces and missing indicators. All the others read zero. The system was off-line, either because it was simply broken, or because of the lack of operating power.

  Doc was slammed by a crushing sense of hopelessness. Without a blueprint or a schematic of some kind, how was he ever going to figure it out? He smothered the thought and moved on. If there was a generator in the building, he had to find it.

  And quickly.

  It wasn't in the next room he checked, but in the one after it. There was no mistaking it, either. It was the size of four refrigerators, stacked one on top of the other. Doc located the ignition switch, pressed it and got nothing. If there was a battery in the system, it was long dead. The pull-start rope produced nothing, although the engine did turn over.