Desert Kings

by James Axler

  “Nice try, feeb.” J.B. sneered contemptuously.

  Turning its massive head, the mutie glared directly at the norm, then walked slowly back into the waving bushes and disappeared. The other muties did the same, and the jungle slowly came to life once more, the birds twittering and the insects chirping.

  Staying on the alert, the three companions retreated to the waterfalls, and climbed back into the tunnel. None of them relaxed until the blast doors were closed.

  To the concerned expressions of the others, Ryan explained what had happened outside.

  “Hunters!” Jak cried. “Shit, what do?”

  “Well, we’re not going through that jungle on foot, that’s for triple-damn sure.” Krysty sighed, shaking her head. “Those things would ace the lot of us in minutes, no matter how much ammo we were carrying.”

  “You can load that into your blaster,” J.B. agreed wholeheartedly.

  “Pity we can’t ride out of here,” Mildred said wistfully, looking sideways at the white wag.

  “Why can’t we?” Ryan said, starting to smile.

  The physician frowned. “I thought you said that thing had been completely gutted?”

  “It is,” J.B. answered. “But there are lots of civvie wags in the garage. “I’m sure we can do something with them.”

  “They’re useless,” Krysty said. “Those muties would rip off the doors easily.”

  “Not if they are surrounded by a protective grille,” Doc stated thoughtfully. “Remember those bikes that Silas used in Tennessee? They had a cage around them for protection. Mayhap we can do something similar.”

  “Only one bike in garage,” Jak replied, then added, “but lots of trucks. Those work good. Need cage.”

  “We can make them,” Ryan stated, starting along the tunnel. “The redoubt had plenty of power, so the electric arc welders will be working. All we need is some steel bars.”

  “Where get?”

  “The armory!” Krysty replied. “That has all the hardened steel we can possibly use.”

  “Blasters?” Jak asked. “We gut longblasters?”

  “Why not?” Mildred said. “We have more than we can use, and the barrels are perfect for what we need. Strong and light.”

  “But ruin blasters…” the teen whispered, as if even contemplating such a thing was an unforgivable sin. Weapons were something you fought and chilled for, risked your life to get hold of, and held on to no matter what. To destroy dozens and dozens of working blasters seemed wrong.

  “Come on,” Jak said, brushing back his snowy hair. “If needs done, best do quick.”

  “Good man,” Ryan said over his grumbling stomach. “But first we eat.”

  “Afterward, Jak and I have to defuse this,” J.B. said wearily, scowling at the egg-shaped war wag. “There’s no way for us to get another wag through this tunnel with this thing blocking the way. And one hard shove will set off a blast louder than skydark.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Turning away from the blast doors, the companions walked slowly into the redoubt already mapping out their work for the next few days.

  Outside the redoubt, the hunters gathered in growing numbers along the edge of the forbidden pool, thumping their chests and howling in savage fury over their dead brothers floating facedown in the dirty water. They all knew the laws given to them by the god Delphi. Blood spilled must be paid in blood taken. The urge to kill burned in their minds, but they would have to wait for a little while longer.

  Soon enough the two-legs would come out again, and then the feasting would truly begin.

  Chapter Six

  Softly, the digital clock chimed the hour.

  Damn. Rising to his feet, Dr. Edgar Franklin smoothed down his hair and straightened his collar. TITAN expected him to perform certain duties, and this was the day he’d chosen to inspect the Rhode Island redoubt. Appearances always mattered to him. His usual attire was hospital scrubs and sneakers. Loose and comfortable, they let a man breath and think. But for this day’s chore he’d decided to wear combat fatigues, a wide gunbelt holstering a military-issue pistol and knee-high jackboots. Couldn’t be more uncomfortable if I was wearing a straitjacket, he thought.

  Leaving the galley of the redoubt, the man took the elevator down to the middle level and walked into the waiting mat-trans chamber. Consulting his personal digital assistant for the correct code, Franklin tapped in the sequence of numbers and letters.

  Instantly, the electronic mists rose from the ceiling and floor, masking his sight. There was a brief moment of disorientation, then the mists receded, revealing a different redoubt. But stepping from the unit, Franklin stopped in puzzlement. Where the hell was this? He wasn’t in Rhode Island. According to the colors on the wall, this redoubt was located in Antarctica! How was that possible?

  Leaving the unit, the man cross the antechamber and went into the control room. Pressing a palm to a blank section of the board, he accessed the secondary systems and ran a quick diagnostic of the unit to see what was wrong. Had there been a major malfunction? Had Whisper lost another redoubt? Several had been volatized in the nuclear war, an expected and accepted loss. Then a few were damaged by natural disasters, earthquakes, volcanoes and the like. Incredibly, one had been flooded, of all things, and another was nuked out of existence only a few years ago. Yet there was no scientific explanation of how a nuclear warhead from the war could have waited that long to finally detonate.

  Some fool in TITAN security had suggested that a handful of survivors from the outside had used a tactical nuke to destroy the base, which was patently ridiculous. As if their uneducated brains could possibly learn how to operate a portable nuclear weapon, much less gain entry into a redoubt! The savages roaming the so-called Deathlands barely knew how to make fire. Their pitiful, ragtag civilization was reduced to the level of wooden clubs. Which were hardly capable of causing damage to a hundred-billion-dollar fortress. Still, it was a puzzling problem.

  A light flashed on the console, announcing the diagnostic was completed. Leaning toward the monitor, Franklin chewed the inside of a cheek as all of the programs reported that the matter-transfer unit was functioning normally, every primary computer system in the green and every defensive subsystem fully operating within normal parameters. Strange. Very strange.

  Consulting the PDA strapped to his wrist, Franklin returned to the mat-trans unit and slowly tapped in the Rhode Island destination code once more, double-checking that he made no mistakes. Once more the mists rose, fell, and he checked the walls. God Almighty! Now he was in a redoubt at the Panama Canal.

  “Son of a bitch,” Franklin muttered uneasily, then tapped in the code for the main TITAN base.

  The mists came and went, and this time the man found himself exactly where he was supposed to be. It seemed that only the redoubt in Rhode Island was somehow blocked. All right, logically, there were only three distinct possibilities. The first, and most likely, was that the redoubt had suffered a technical problem of some kind, dysfunction or malfunction. Or two, the redoubt had been destroyed. Not at all likely, but theoretically possible. Unfortunately the third option was the most likely, and the most unsettling. There was something blocking the mat-trans chamber at the redoubt.

  Checking the files in the PDA, Franklin finally found the command sequence that he needed to impart whatever blocked his jump, and spent a good minute carefully tapping in the alphanumeric code. Stepping into the antechamber, he patiently waited, his pistol up and ready.

  A few minutes later the white mist filled the chamber and then faded away to reveal a stack of wooden cases.

  Curiously, Franklin holstered his weapon and entered the gateway to examine the odd boxes. Prying one open with his bare fingers, the man scowled at the spongy excelsior stuffing and impatiently brushed it aside to reveal a human arm with silvery wires dangling from the shoulder joint. Instantly he recognized it as an artificial limb used for battlefield repairs and to create cyborgs. But that was impossible. Every cyb
org had been decommissioned by Coldfire. Except for one. The great traitor. The sworn enemy of TITAN.

  “God help us, he’s back,” Franklin whispered, his face tightening into a rictus of blind hatred. “Delphi is back!” And then he realized he had a new duty to perform.

  WHILE THE OTHERS WERE preparing dinner, Ryan got Mildred and Krysty alone for a few minutes in one of the officer’s quarters by pretending his ribs were especially bad. That really didn’t require a lot of faking on his part. When his shirt came off, dark purple and black bruises were encircling his entire torso, and on his back were the clear imprints of four inhuman hands.

  Staying near the door to keep a watch out for Doc, Krysty frowned at the sight of the discoloration, but said nothing. Nothing she said would help the man heal any faster.

  “And this happened after you shot the hunter?” Mildred said in amazement, running fingertips along his sides. “I’ve seen worse, but not on anybody who survived.”

  Ryan grunted at her touch. “Just glad I got in as much brass as I did. The son of a bitch was strong.”

  “More than you, that’s for sure,” the physician commented, shaking her head in disbelief. “Much stronger than any normal gorilla, and those are way stronger than humans already.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Guess you do at that.” Getting the med kit, Mildred rummaged inside. “I can give you some aspirin to help you sleep tonight,” she said, retrieving the bottle.

  Taking a small bandage from her bag, Mildred wrapped the man tight to help his ribs heal faster, fetched a glass of water from the bathroom and gave him the pills. Ryan dry-swallowed the aspirin, then drank the water.

  “Okay, now that’s done, let’s get to the real reason we’re here,” he said in a controlled tone. Looking at the women, he met their gazes. “What the nuking hell was the problem with Doc? He starts talking about something called Titan then goes blank, like the man never heard of the people he was just talking about.”

  “He mentioned Coldfire, too,” Krysty added. “But he’s talked about them before. Only this Titan was new.”

  “Well, it could be some sort of a mental block,” Mildred said, leaning back in her chair. “Maybe something happened to him that was so horrible he’s blocked it from his memory.” But even as she spoke the words, the physician began to frown. “No, that makes no sense. I know he was brutally tortured by Cort Strasser before you busted him loose, and he remembers every damn minute.”

  Although the two of them clashed sometimes, Mildred had the highest respect for the old scholar. He had survived experiences that would have destroyed lesser men, and she thought Doc was tougher than a boiled horseshoe when the chips were down.

  “But if that’s true, this is something else,” Krysty said, her hair tightening protectively around her face. “Not a block, but more like…” She made a vague gesture. “Oh, I don’t know, like a bungee cord. He’s free to move about, say and think what he wants, but if Doc goes too far and mentions Titan, then it snaps him back hard.”

  “Depending upon how wide the perimeters of the block are, this might explain a lot about his odd lapses of memory.”

  “True.”

  “Could this be that stuff you told us about?” Ryan asked hesitantly. “Hypnotism?”

  After a moment Mildred shook her head. “No, that’s only a tool for psychoanalysis. The doctor induces a state of monomaniac to the patient, but it’s easily broken. Hypnotism has been used a lot in movies to turn people into robots, but that doesn’t work in the real world. Heck, hypnotists can barely make folks stop smoking, much less turn them into slaves!”

  “Good to know. So, is there anything we can do?” the Deathlands warrior asked, feeling helpless. A knife wound he could stitch closed, set a busted bone, dig out a bullet, but with this sort of invisible wound, something inside the mind, that was beyond the man, and he had no problem saying so. This was Mildred’s specialty so she was in charge.

  “Unfortunately, no,” Mildred replied, crossing her arms. “Damn it to hell, I wish there was something to be done! Oh, I’ve read several books, attended lectures, taken some mandatory classes, but still…” She shrugged. “Even if I had the proper psychotropic drugs, I’m only an amateur. If I tried digging around in Doc’s head, I might make him worse, a lot worse.”

  “Great.” Doc had always been a tremendous asset to the group, but if his mind was finally going, well, Ryan would do what he hoped the others would if he was going insane. Put two rounds behind his ear and remember him in a toast every now and then.

  “Then we do nothing for the moment,” Krysty said.

  “Nothing, except offer him our friendship and support.” Mildred sighed. “And listen closely if he ever mentions Titan again. With enough pieces of the puzzle we might have a chance of finding a solution. But until then…”

  “It’s like planning a nightcreep,” Ryan muttered thoughtfully, trying to get a handle on the problem. “Until we know more about the enemy, what kind of sec men they have, are there dogs, boobies, and the like, any recce is just going to get us aced.”

  “And that’s a pretty fair analogy,” Mildred said with a wan smile.

  From down the hall, they heard Jak call them for dinner.

  Ryan and Krysty helped Mildred gather her med supplies, and the three of them walked from the room lost in their somber thoughts.

  Heading to the kitchen, the three companions were greeted by a delicious smell. Inside the fragrant kitchen, J.B. was standing at one of the many stoves stirring something in a softly bubbling pot.

  Taking warm plates from the steamy interior of a dishwasher, Ryan and the women joined the others at a long dining table, and dug into the simple meal, gray mil cheese on crackers, beef stew, canned bread with what passed for butter, freeze-dried coffee with sugar and powdered cream and pressed cherry-nut cake for dessert. The military rations were not particularly savory as durability and longevity, not taste, had been the prime considerations in designing the predark MRE food packs. But the food was hot, was somewhat tasty and everybody cleaned their plates.

  Afterward, the dirty dishes were unceremoniously dumped into an empty dishwasher, and the tired people trundled off to the barracks to choose rooms for the night, with Doc and Jak getting comfortable in an office to stand the first shift of guard duty. Normally, that wasn’t necessary locked deep inside a redoubt, but this night it seemed a logical precaution.

  With their Kalashnikovs nearby, the two men settled down at a wooden desk with large mugs of black coffee and a pack of playing cards. Personally, Doc would have preferred a game of chess, however, the uneducated, barely literate albino teen kept winning, and so the old man had abandoned the noble pastime of kings and emperors for the more dubious pleasures of gin rummy.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the companions decided to raid the stockpiles of clothing. Ryan took several pairs of thick socks and a pair of boots, Krysty replaced her worn fatigues, J.B. found a shirt in his size and Mildred acquired a new fatigue jacket, along with several sets of bootlaces. Made of resilient nylon, the laces made surprisingly good trade items and could be exchanged for a plethora of goods and services at most villes. They all chose a few pairs of underwear, and Mildred found a box of combat bras and tried to find garments in the correct size for her and Krysty.

  Moving to the laundry complex, the companions grabbed four of the bath towels on a shelf above a sink, quickly stripped, eyes averted, and donned a towel. They found that most of the bottles of bleach and detergent had only dried residue at the bottom. But some of them contained a scant few ounces of liquid that proved to be more than enough for the small loads. While all the clothes were tumbling in the dryers, the two couples hit the showers, finding stalls at opposite ends of the huge lavatory for a few minutes of privacy. It took a while for the dusty bathroom pipes to deliver anything but rusty sludge, but eventually, that cycled through and they luxuriated in a cascade of unlimited clean water. There was no soap or shampoo in sight, but t
he MRE packs had yielded tiny bottles of all-purpose cleanser, along with toothbrushes, tiny tubes of mint toothpaste and plastic combs. The men shaved using their knives while the women watched in amused fascination.

  Clean and refreshed, the four weary people, wrapped in towels, reclaimed their clothing and trundled off to the barracks. Choosing separate rooms, they barricaded the doors, checked their blasters and settled in for the night. In a couple of hours, Doc and Jak would wake up J.B. and Mildred, with Ryan and Krysty taking the final shift until dawn.

  Removing his towel, Ryan eased himself onto the soft bed, and was soon sound asleep. Studying the dark bruises on her muscular partner, Krysty decided he needed sleep tonight more than anything else and settled in beside him under the thick army blankets.

  Across the hall, J.B. checked the heavy dresser jammed against the door for a second time, then finally nodded in acceptance.

  “Come to bed, John,” Mildred said from across the room, her voice low and sweet.

  Hearing something in her tone, J.B. slowly turned. The lady physician was already in bed covered only by a cotton sheet. Seductively, she raised a shapely knee. With the light streaming from behind, he could see the delicious outline of her full figure through the thin material.

  Immediately, J.B. started to respond to her sultry beauty. He had been with several women in his life, but she was the most beautiful, not only because of the face and figure, but for the person inside. Mildred had fought by his side through fire and blood, earning more than his friendship. She was inside him, bonded to his very soul. Lacking the right words, the man had never told her, but she was his world.

  “Tired?” Mildred asked huskily, allowing the sheet to slip down a little, revealing her generous cleavage.

  “Never that tired,” the man responded eagerly, sliding the munitions bag off his shoulder.

  Depositing it on the floor, the Armorer placed the Uzi on top of a metal desk, then laid the S&W M-4000 scattergun alongside. He let his towel tumble to the floor, then removed his wire-rimmed glasses and put them on the desk near the blasters. But starting forward, he saw her smile turn into a scowl.