Axler, James - Deathlands 62 - Damnation Road Show

by Damnation Road Show [lit]

  He found the generator's gas tank and discovered the root of the problem. It was empty.

  "Hell's fire!" he cursed, slamming his fist on top of the tank.

  He knew that whitecoats sitting on a biological time bomb wouldn't leave themselves a single way to deactivate it. They wouldn't completely depend on electrical power that could be shut off at a critical moment by any number of mechanical failures. There had to be a more direct method. He thought about the lake above, and the pressure of thousands of tons of water. Perhaps the deactivation system was gravity powered. Perhaps it could use the water pressure to physically or hydraulically move a barrier out of the way.

  Doc rushed on. Now that he had a clue what he was looking for, he wasted no time on the offices where it appeared people had been living. The last room in the corridor had more of the squat pumps, and the pipes along its wall were much bigger in diameter.

  When he saw the red steel wheel, and the sign above it, he knew he had found the drain plug. The wheel was part of a massive valve set in a bend in a thick pipe. The peeling red-on-white sign was stained with rust but it was still legible. It read: Extreme Danger: Emergency Use Only! System Test and Certification Required Every Thirty Days. Secure Escape Route And Evacuate All Downstream Personnel Before Operating Valve.

  There was a dusty clipboard hanging on a hook below the valve. The faded top page was a maintenance record. It'd been almost a hundred years since the system had been checked and certified.

  Not that that mattered. It either worked or it didn't.

  And there was no way to evacuate anybody.

  Doc untwisted a loop of steel wire that locked the rim of the wheel to the valve. When he tried to turn the wheel, it wouldn't budge. He jammed his sword-stick through the spokes and used it like a lever.

  With a crack and a creak the wheel moved an inch or two, then the turning became easy. From somewhere on the other side of the wall came a squeal. The squeal grew louder as he spun the valve open.

  Then something boomed. The floor rocked violently and the air was ripped by a deafening noise. The roar sounded as if he had just unleashed Niagara Falls.

  Everything continued to shake, and as it did, to shake apart. Concrete dust streamed from the ceiling above him; he knew it was going to come down, and before he could reach the doorway, it did. Doc lost his grip on his swordstick as the debris buried him.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Ryan the passenger watched from the wheelhouse of the S.S. Cawdor as Baron Crecca beat the scout's head to a pulp. He was standing close enough to be hit by some of the back splatter, brains or blood, or both. He could feel it dripping down the side of his face, but he couldn't make his hand move to wipe it away.

  The hallucinations of his father and Trader had faded into the gathering darkness, so he knew that the combined effects of the spores and the bounty were wearing off. However, the odor of the bounty that was roasting unattended on the burn barrel was making his mouth water. His body wanted its share. Passenger Ryan fought against the urge. Fought successfully.

  Thunder rolled and flashes of green lit the slope above the ville. The sky started to spit a few tentative spores.

  It was coming again, he knew. The pool was about to reestablish control over its slaves.

  Ryan forced his fingers to move. A twitch was all he could muster, but it was a start.

  Then Crecca called for another volunteer, and Dean stepped forward. Ryan wanted to cry out a warning, but couldn't. His hands closed into fists at his side. Dean took a seat in the chair and allowed himself to be strapped down. There was a commotion to his left. He managed to turn his head far enough to see Doc Tanner fighting to break through the crowd and save his son from execution. Ryan tried to help, but only got a step or two in the right direction before the rousties seized Doc and threw him back.

  The other companions were struggling as he was; Ryan could see that from the strain and anguish in their faces.

  Ryan turned the full force of his effort to reaching the chair and the red-coated chiller before he could bring down the pipe. It was like walking through molasses. He had to beat back the heaviness and lethargy that infused his limbs. But with each step, it got a little easier.

  The new baron watched his slow-motion approach with amusement. "What do you think you're doing, Cawdor?" he said. "Do you think you can get here in time to stop me?"

  Ryan didn't answer. He didn't want to waste his energy or divert his focus from what he had to do.

  "Well, you'd better hurry up, then," Crecca told him. "Get a fucking move on."

  It took minutes for Ryan to cross the short stretch of ground. Minutes while the former carny master watched and waited with a leer on his face, confident that he had the upper hand, confident that he could smash the boy's skull with a single blow, even as his father reached out to save him.

  Sweat poured off Ryan's face, chest and back. Though it hadn't started to snow in earnest yet, the tiny granules were peppering the square, and the thunder was an almost constant rumble.

  He was still ten feet away, and moving at a crawl, when Crecca lightly tapped the top of Dean's head with the end of the pipe, measuring the range to his target. Then he reared back, cocking the bludgeon over his shoulder, coiling himself to swing for the center field fence.

  A deep growl shook the ground, making Crecca stagger and lose his balance. He caught himself on the chair back to keep from falling.

  Earthquake! Ryan thought as he continued to move.

  But it wasn't.

  With a howitzer-like boom, water and dirt exploded from the base of the mountain, about one hundred yards from where they all stood. Ahead of the twin plumes of black water, flying through the air like artillery shells, were chunks of broken limestone. As the rock crashed down and bounced around them, the water's howl grew much louder. Seventy-five feet from the mouths of the hidden culverts that had unleashed them, the two torrents coalesced, funneling, twisting together, plowing headlong into the earth with their combined might. They blasted through, sending a wall of water and debris ten feet high racing downhill toward the square.

  Baron Crecca was no longer intent on caving in the back of Dean's head. Riveted by the sight of the onrushing wave, he didn't seem to notice Cawdor closing the distance between them, either.

  Ryan could feel his strength and his physical control returning. For the last few feet, his legs drove forward with real power, as if their overdrive had suddenly kicked in. His right hand did his bidding, unsheathing eighteen inches of panga from its scabbard below his knee.

  As the one-eyed man reached the foot of the chair, Crecca bolted away from it and the boy, cutting across the square toward the blockhouse entrance, well ahead of the leading edge of the flash flood.

  There was no time for Ryan to hack through the four leather straps that held Dean pinioned. Grunting from the effort, he picked up the chair by the arms and started lugging it and Dean away. He'd gone no more than few yards when J.B. caught up to him and grabbed one of the arms. The two of them then ran with the chair and the boy between them.

  Mildred and Krysty ran ahead, as did Jak, who had picked up the girl, Leeloo, and was carrying her in his arms. The companions raced to their left, away from the water, beyond the far end of the square, and along the curve at the base of the mountain.

  When they were far enough away to be safe, Ryan and J.B. stopped, put down the chair and looked back.

  The wall of water had gouged its own deep channel in the dirt, dividing the square and separating its occupants. The rousties who could run had gone the opposite direction and were out of sight. Those still partially paralyzed by the spores managed to move away, but slowly, like their legs were encased in ice—a feeling Ryan and his companions would never forget. The edge of the flood-choked channel eroded away at the chillers' heels. As the undercut bank gave way beneath them, their bodies twisted and fell, disappearing into the churning blackness. The main thrust of the torrent had swung past the front of the
blockhouse, missing it entirely. But it was rampaging full-tilt into and through the hammered-down shanty ville. With falling darkness, it was impossible for Ryan to see clearly, but it looked as if the entire place had already been washed away, scoured off the landscape. He looked up at the sky and saw that the spore fall had stopped; the threat of blizzard was gone. The thunder, if there was any, was drowned out by the roar of the draining lake.

  Beside him, Jak and J.B. were busy unstrapping Dean from the chair. Mildred and Krysty were comforting the little girl. Ryan was relieved to see them working as a team again.

  "Is everybody all right?" he yelled over the noise of the cataract. He counted heads as they each nodded, and came up one shy.

  "Where's Doc?" he shouted at them. "Did anybody see what happened to Doc?"

  BARON CRECCA STOOD transfixed by the sight of two monumental gushers exploding from the hillside. Twin streams of water ten feet in diameter jetted through the air before burying themselves in the earth, sending dirt and spray flying. The sound it made was like some gigantic engine running wild. It took a second or two for the full import of what he was seeing to sink in.

  Then a cold finger touched the center of his heart.

  The source of the water was the burning pool.

  It had to be.

  The pool was being emptied.

  Without the protective layer of water, without the lungfish who lived in it, the entity at its bottom couldn't survive. Without entity's continued existence and assistance, Crecca's was going to be one of the shortest lived baronies in Deathlands history. He had to stop the drop in water level, before the pool was completely drained.

  Crecca left the boy in the chair and sprinted toward the blockhouse. He was almost there when a ripple passing through the earth made him stumble over his own feet and fall. As he scrambled back up, to his right he saw the flash flood rip a fifty-foot-wide trench in the ground.

  Somewhere behind him in the fairing light, his handful of subjects were running for their lives. If they were screaming in terror, he couldn't hear it over the water's roar.

  Crecca dashed down the stairway and into the corridor. Inside the hallway, the effect of the ground shaking was much worse. Plaster and concrete dust rained on him from the remains of the collapsed ceiling. As he ran down the corridor, splashing through the puddles, the back-and-forth tilting of the floor made him careen into and bounce off the walls.

  The baron had known from the get-go that this catastrophe couldn't have been an accident. Hallucinations or not, massive floodgates didn't just open by themselves. Not suddenly, after a hundred years. Someone had to have done it on purpose. Since he hadn't seen anyone come out of the blockhouse, he was fairly sure that the someone was still inside. He had to find him or her and reverse whatever had been done.

  Pipe in hand, and ready to clobber, he ducked his head inside the first few rooms along the hall. The dim light was made even dimmer by the airborne dirt and dust, but he saw no one.

  In the last room, ninety-five percent of the ceiling had fallen onto the floor. It lay in a jumbled heap, from wall to wall. In a far corner something caught his eye.

  Something bright and reflective along the back wall.

  He climbed over the piles of rubble to reach it. The silver lion's head was on the end of a wooden walking stick that had been thrust through the spokes of a red metal wheel. The kind of a wheel that opened or closed a valve. Crecca read the warning sign.

  Or a floodgate.

  He pulled out the stick and flung it aside. Then he started to crank the wheel over clockwise, shutting the valve.

  "Not the best of ideas," said a loud voice to his right.

  Crecca whirled to face a glaring scarecrow of a man. He recognized him at once as one of Cawdor's party. It was the old, babbling bastard who had to be led around on a rope. The baron's laughter was muffled by the dull roar coming through the walls.

  "So, old man," he shouted back, "looks like you've got your brain on straight…just in time for me to beat it in." To demonstrate he bashed the end of the pipe into the concrete wall.

  His adversary scampered over the rubble and out into the hall. He had picked up the stick Crecca had tossed aside.

  "You aren't going to get away from me!" the baron called to him as he followed.

  The old man was waiting for him in the corridor. "If you think I am trying to escape, you are sorely mistaken, sir," he yelled. "I just require some room to work." With that the old bastard did something to the silver handle, and the wood sheath of the stick came away in his left hand, revealing a long, tapering, double-edged blade of steel.

  "I don't have time for games," Crecca shouted. And then he charged, holding the pipe out in front of him like a lance.

  The tremors that still rippled the floor made his course erratic at best. As he veered toward his target, a fluorescent light fixture hanging by a thread gave up the ghost and crashed down in front of him, spoiling his aim.

  The old man was more agile than he had any right to be. He sidestepped the charge and pivoted, and as Crecca rushed past him, the baron felt something molten-hot lance through the back of his tall boot and into his left calf.

  "First blood!" the old man cried. With a back-and-forth slash of the sword, he cut down the light fixtures that blocked his view.

  He now stood between Crecca and the room with the wheel. To reach it and stop the draining of the pool, the baron was going to have to go through him. The former carny master realized he had been outmaneuvered and outfoxed. Infuriated, Crecca made a blind thrust with the end of the pipe, aiming for the old man's face.

  The sword parried the blow, metal scraping metal, then before the carny master could withdraw, he felt the sharp bite of razor honed steel deep in his right shoulder. "Fucker!" he howled as blood flowed down his arm. He banged the pipe on the floor in frustration.

  "Is something wrong, sir?" the old man demanded. "Would you like to pass by me?"

  Crecca charged again, this time swinging. He brought the pipe around at waist height, slashing from right to left, figuring the bastard couldn't possibly escape the blow.

  The end of the pipe threw a shower of sparks as it hit the concrete wall.

  The wall was all it hit.

  The old man stepped back into the doorway, out of range, and as he did, with an ease that a man of his apparent age shouldn't have been able to muster, he squatted low and thrust upward with his sword.

  The point plunged into Crecca's right thigh, a quick in-and-out stab that wrung a scream from his throat. He staggered back, flailing with the pipe to keep his opponent from following up with a second thrust.

  "You look surprised, Baron," the old man yelled.

  The Magnificent Crecca clapped a hand over his most recent injury and scowled at him.

  "Why should it surprise you," Doc hollered, "that a man carrying a weapon like this—" he paused to flourish it "—could actually use it?"

  Time was running out.

  With his good leg, Crecca kicked the fallen light fixture into the old man's chest and lunged with the pipe. His opponent blocked the hunk of metal and glass with his sword, sweeping it aside, but before old man could bring the blade's point back, Crecca was on top of him.

  The former carny master never saw the blow that felled him.

  He was within a few inches of getting his big hand wrapped around the old man's scrawny throat when he caught a flash of silver from below, as the sword's heavy carved metal handle snapped up in a crisp, accurate, backhanded strike that he couldn't deflect.

  He heard the crunch of his own cheekbone shattering and felt hot blood spraying down his suddenly numbed face. Falling forward as his knees buckled under him, he took another blow from the sword's pommel, this time on the crown of his head. For a second it made him see black. He crashed to the floor on his knees, knowing there would be more, and much worse to come, and unable to raise his arms to defend himself.

  The third blow nailed him square in the back of the h
ead. Everything went black.

  Crecca toppled to the floor on his face.

  DOC CRADLED the palm of his right hand, which bled from a long, shallow cut that he'd given himself by gripping the swordstick barehanded. There had been no time to get the blade's point around, so he'd had to make use of the pommel.

  Effective use.

  And once he'd gotten started, he'd had to follow up with successive, similar blows before the baron could recover.

  Doc took a soiled linen handkerchief from the pocket of his frock coat and tightly bound his wound, then knelt beside the fallen man. There was blood everywhere. Crecca's blood. His blood. He tried to locate a pulse in the man's neck and couldn't find it.

  As he leaned over the baron, the ceiling tiles on the floor around him started to move. They were floating, bobbing. The water in the corridor was no longer standing in puddle; it was flowing in a current. It was already an inch deep. Doc looked toward the hallway's entrance and saw the steps had been turned into a series of low, feeble waterfalls. The river he had created was starting to flood the blockhouse. He dashed into the room behind him and spun the red wheel, reopening the emergency drain valve as far as it would go.

  When he returned to the hallway, the water had risen over the prostrate baron's mouth and nose.

  The Magnificent Crecca wasn't blowing any bubbles.

  Doc splashed down the corridor and up the stairs. As he climbed out of the entry well, he glimpsed the destruction he had wrought. A deep, dark torrent had gouged away the ville and the square and was undermining the near edge of the blockhouse. He could see no one moving, and a terrible thought struck him: had he drowned the very people he had been trying to save?

  He drew his Civil War-era handblaster from its holster, the LeMat, and ran along the face of the building, away from the rushing water. Doc found the Steyr longblaster where he had hidden it. As he shrugged into its shoulder strap, he saw shadowy figures hurrying toward him from the base of the mountain. He primed the LeMat's shotgun barrel, ready to spray any enemies with smoking shrapnel.