Desert Kings

by James Axler

  Stunned, Krysty was speechless. The man couldn’t even look at the symbol.

  “Tell me, Haviva,” Mildred said urgently, licking her lips. “Do these ancient giants…Are they…Do they speak softly?”

  “Yes!” the doomie cried. “You understand! The giants whisper!”

  Jerking back, Mildred recoiled from the words as if physically struck. Doc had told them that the time-trading project had been a division of Overproject Whisper. Did they send people to the future? Were there giants hunting for Delphi, and if they found him it would somehow trigger a second skydark? Did that mean the companions had to save Delphi to prevent another nuclear holocaust?

  “Enough of this shit!” Ryan demanded, taking the hunchback by the shoulder. “Where is the bastard door? Where’s the key?”

  “But you have seen them both,” Haviva whispered faintly, her misshapen body starting to sag. “You see them all the time….”

  “Where? When have I seen them!” Ryan demanded, putting as much force into the words as he could muster.

  “In…your dreams…” she exhaled, strangely slumping over.

  Releasing his grasp, Ryan watched as the woman eased to the floor and went still.

  “Sleep? I wake,” Jak declared, reached out to shake the hunchback.

  “Don’t bother,” Baron Levine said, staying the teen. “When she stops, that’s all you’ll ever hear on the subject again. The strain of seeing the future is becoming too much for her. Every year our doomie says less and sleeps more. Soon…” He shrugged. All things died. Not even a baron could do anything about that.

  Kneeling, Mildred suspiciously placed two fingers on the carotid artery in the throat of the hunchback, checking for a pulse. “Haviva is not asleep,” the physician said, slowly standing. “She’s gone.”

  “What? Impossible!” the baron roared, going to the woman and shaking her hard. “Haviva! Haviva!” But there was no response from the hunchback.

  “I’m truly sorry,” Mildred said, feeling helpless. “I wish there was something I could do.” The canvas med kit seemed to be a slab of cold granite hanging at her side.

  “She died giving you this warning,” Levine muttered. “It’s like Haviva was waiting for you to arrive before she could allow herself to finally…let go.”

  “Pity it didn’t make any sense,” Ryan said evasively, and instantly regretted it. From the dour expression on the baron’s face, he was deeply insulted by the lie. Damn.

  Scowling darkly, the baron pulled a knife and put a small cut into his left sleeve, then sheathed the blade. “Goodbye, little one,” he whispered, giving a tug to slightly rip the material.

  Recognizing the gesture for what it was, J.B. respectfully removed his hat and Krysty said a short prayer to Gaia. The others bowed their heads. Then, going to the wag, Mildred retrieved a blanket and draped it over the dead woman. The hunchback hadn’t been under her care, yet the physician still felt like she had just lost a patient.

  “Enough! Life goes on. I’ll send in some sec men to remove the body,” the baron growled, turning to head for the door. “As for you folks, get to work on your damn wag! I gave you a month, and my word is stone. But after that you’re no longer welcome in my ville!”

  “But, Baron…” Mildred began, then stopped, knowing it was futile to argue to anybody at a time like this.

  Unbolting the door, Levine threw it open and walked outside, then turned to look at the covered form on the floor. “Thirty days,” he growled, and strode away shouting orders.

  “Taking hard,” Jak said, easing his grip on the Colt Python. “Think they kin?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Ryan said, wearily rubbing his face. It had been a long day and it wasn’t over yet. Fireblast, he was tired. “We were planning to leave long before a month passed, so this hasn’t really changed anything. Recce the ville, fix the wag and then go after Delphi.”

  “But if chilling the cyborg will start another skydark…” Krysty began hesitantly.

  Impatiently, Ryan cut her off with a gesture. “The doomie said the person sent by what Doc called TITAN couldn’t chill Delphi. She didn’t mention us at all.”

  “True,” the redhead agreed hesitantly. The predications of a doomie did not always come true. Time flowed like a river, not a concrete road. It was forever changing, flowing, taking on new patterns. The mere fact that they had gotten a hint about what was to come might change the outcome all by itself.

  Nothing was absolute or carved into stone. Time was sort of like plas, soft, malleable and always deadly. Mildred and Doc said that it had to do with free will. Ryan and J.B. believed it was because knowledge was the ultimate weapon. Jak didn’t give a nuke. And as for her, well, Krysty considered the future a gift from Gaia. It could be changed if you were worthy and tried hard enough.

  “Swell. Now it’s a race to see who aces the cyborg first.” J.B. returned his hat to the accustomed position. “Us, or these assholes from TITAN.”

  “If the doomie was telling the truth.”

  “A big if.”

  “True.”

  Pulling out a scrap of paper and a pencil, Mildred licked the stubby point and made a copy of the design. A circle, an oval and a star, the symbol for TITAN. For some reason, the design seemed familiar. She’d seen it someplace before, but where?

  “So, what is this town you’ve been dreaming about?” Krysty asked curiously. “Don’t think you ever mentioned it before.”

  After making sure they were alone, with nobody hidden or listening, Ryan told them all about his reoccurring dream from the Mutie Wars.

  “Dark night, I always did wonder what happened when you fell off that hill,” J.B. said, removing his hat. “Hell of a tale.” He smoothed the brim of his fedora with strong fingers. “Sounds like you saw something that you shouldn’t have and got chased away, like a dog pissing on a ville wall. Whoever these folks are, they could have aced you easily enough.”

  “Just dropping me back in the nuking lake would have done it,” Ryan agreed honestly, crossing his arms.

  “But the only thing you ever saw was the ville,” Mildred added. “Which logically means it must be someplace special. Perhaps a predark fortress, or even the master redoubt.”

  “Where all soldiers go?” Jak demanded in surprise.

  “Maybe.”

  Taking a seat, Ryan frowned. Now there was an unsettling possibility! Tangling with the cyborg was going to be a tough enough fight, but if this was another Anthill, or even a redoubt full of predark soldiers, they’d be walking into a rad pit of trouble. Uneasily, he looked at what remained of the design in the dirt. Just for a second there was a flicker of memory about the white building in his dream, then it was gone.

  Studiously glancing at the flatbed and Mack sitting quiescent only a few yards away, Mildred frowned. “It might even be the laboratory that Doc escaped from.”

  The words hung thick between the companions, filling the air like invisible chains to focus their attention upon the tall, elderly-looking man standing alongside the war wag, his head bowed in somber contemplation.

  “That would explain a lot of things,” Krysty agreed, biting a lip thoughtfully. “Well, the little doomie hung on just long enough to pass us this warning. Sounds like we’d be triple-stupe fools to ignore it. Doesn’t matter if it’s the home base for this TITAN person, or just a hardsite for Delphi. We have to do a recce.”

  “Fair enough,” Jak said resolutely. “If help Doc, kick nuke in ass. Know where is?”

  “Not really, that whole damn journey is blurred in my head,” Ryan answered, sounding angry. “But you were there, J.B. Any chance you recall me falling off a cliff during the Mutie Wars?”

  “Yeah, I do,” J.B. said. “Happened just that one time, about a hundred miles from here, at a place called Lake Powell.”

  Tensely alert, Ryan waited for some internal reaction to the name, but nothing happened. Good. Mebbe the warning from Haviva had somehow freed him from the mind block he seemed to h
ave about the damn place. He had no idea why people from this TITAN group were after Delphi, but the one-eyed man felt certain that the mystery would be answered once they got inside that white adobe building with the symbol for TITAN above the door.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The crackling firelight cast dancing shadows across the sandy street, the reddish glow inside the predark store making it resemble the bloody mouth of some hungry beast.

  Sitting near the campfire, Edgar Franklin tossed another piece of wooden door onto the flames, causing an explosion of hot embers that swirled and danced upward to the smoke-stained ceiling. Twilight had come and gone. Now black night ruled the predark ruins, softening the angular contours until it seemed like a vast stone canyon full of arroyos, buttes and rills. A cold wind blew among the old buildings, softly stirring the loose sand to the sound of distant rain. From somewhere within the concrete maze, an owl hooted, and then a tumbleweed rolled along the boulevard, moving past the gaping storefront as if it were late for an appointment. Franklin added another piece of wood to the fire. Even in death, the great city maintained the precious illusion of life.

  About an hour ago, a couple of mangy wolves had padded up to the store to peer inside, the reflected firelight making their eyes shine eerily bright. Unfortunately, the animals were much too scrawny to be considered a decent threat, so he killed them with the needler and let the screamwings savage the bodies until there wasn’t a trace of them remaining aside from a few dark stains on the dusty sand.

  Picking up a galvanized aluminum pot, the cyborg poured some coffee into a cracked ceramic mug and took a sip. The pungent black brew was strong and bitter. There was a packet of powdered hot chocolate secreted inside the folds of his clothing, but that was being saved for a trade item. In somber retrospect, it seemed to the man that the entire world had become one huge prison where the strong preyed on the weak and food was the only real currency. Well, food and weapons.

  Finishing the mug, Franklin tossed the dregs onto the fire and impatiently rubbed the container in the sand to clean it enough to go back in his pocket. It was nearly midnight and he was becoming quite impatient. The ruins were supposed to be filled with stickies, but he had heard rumors of something called the Metro being used to eradicate most of the muties. Perhaps it was true. Pity. But if nothing of sufficient size arrived soon, he would have to take matters into his own hands, wounding himself with a knife, and staggering to the ville claiming he was attacked by coldhearts. It would be much more believable if he was seen being chased by some stickies, but need drives where the devil must, as the old saying went.

  Just then, something large stirred in the darkness outside the store, and the cyborg strained to hear shuffling steps and then the telltale swish of a tentacle lashing through in the air. A stickie? Tensely, the cyborg waited, but there were no more sounds of movement. Damn, even one stickie would have been better than—

  Throating an inhuman cry, a shambling mockery lurched from the darkness and into the red firelight, a dozen ropy tentacles thrashing around, a billowing white mist obscuring the body of the oncoming creature. For only a brief moment, Franklin vaguely saw the face of the thing, the skull obscenely split in two as if two or more heads had merged together, or perhaps were in the process of separating.

  With a guttural cry, Franklin stood and quickly backed away. Nuking hell, a howler! The bedamned monstrosities were one of the horrors of the Deathlands, and nobody knew what they were aside from death incarnate. The whitish mist surrounding them was a powerful neurotoxin, and even a drop on bare skin paralyzed a person. True omnivores, howlers ate anything they could reach, and only a single one of them had ever been successfully chilled without resorting to a nuclear device.

  As the howler moved through the empty doorway, Franklin drew his needler and fired a long burst at the misshapen thing. The discharged pins hit the howler in the chest, if it had a chest, and punched clean through doing no visible damage. Shit!

  As the beam winked out, the cloudy mutie howled in unbridled fury and charged, the deadly tentacles lashing out in every direction. Stepping to the side, Franklin fired again, sweeping the weapon’s lambent beam sideways to try to cut the howler in two, but with no results. The fléchettes passed through the mist-shrouded body as if it were a hologram.

  Keeping to the middle of the store, its tentacles spreading wide to prevent any possibility of the prey slipping past, the howler moved directly into the campfire, seemingly unaffected by the crackling flames.

  That broke his resolve, and Franklin turned to pelt toward the rear of the store. He had to get outside. He needed room to maneuver! But reaching the fire exit, the cyborg found the metal door would not open, no matter how hard he tried. Then he saw the jamb was bent, warped from the collapse of the upper stories. Firing his weapon at the howler for a moment, Franklin then turned the beam on the door to start cutting out a crude circle. As the beam chewed through the predark steel, the needler in his grip became uncomfortably hot, the weapon designed for single shots, not continuous operation. The noise of the tentacles grew steadily louder, and he felt a painful stinging start on the back of his neck. Curse Coldfire for never sharing the secret of their force fields!

  Glancing nervously over a shoulder, Franklin saw the thing was dangerously close, the white mist billowing outward, discoloring the rubber floor tiles. Pulling the Colt, he fired the two live rounds at the mutie, the muzzle-flash temporarily parting the swirling mist and giving him a glimpse of the creature underneath. No…impossible!

  Gagging on vomit, Franklin threw himself at the portal with all of his strength. There came the sound of tortured metal, and for one terrible second Franklin thought the door would hold, then with a loud crack it swung free, throwing him haphazardly to the ground.

  Scrambling to his feet, the TITAN agent sprinted into the cold darkness, the sand crunching under his shoes as the cyborg propelled himself frantically toward the ville. All considerations of trying to trick his way inside were gone, replaced by the heartfelt desire to get his ass safely behind that big wall.

  Bursting out of the alley, Franklin took the corner at full-tilt and started to charge across the shatter zone. Dodging past the concrete K-rails, the cyborg tucked away the needler and fumbled to empty the dummy shells from the Colt and thumb in live rounds. From behind, the undulating cry of the howler kept coming his way, sending a chill down his spine.

  Taking refuge behind a three-foot-high K-rail, the cyborg rested the blaster on top of the concrete divider and put three booming rounds directly into the cloudy horror. The muzzle-flash lit up the night, and the howler responded by heading toward him faster.

  “Help! Help me! Open the fragging gate!” Franklin screamed, triggering the last three rounds one at a time, before dropping the brass and struggling to reload. Moving backward, he bumped into a divider and dropped some of the brass. Panic seized him and Franklin closed the partially loaded cylinder to click on three empty chambers before firing two thundering rounds at the howler, then turned and ran for the ville.

  Straight ahead, he could see dim shapes moving along the top of the wall, and then there came some flashes of light from the pinnacle of the Citadel. Mirror flashes? Damn, these primitives were more advanced than he’d believed possible!

  Suddenly the sec men on the wall disappeared and Franklin felt a wave of dismay, when there was a flurry of movement in the dark sky above. Hitting the wall, he turned and started reloading the Colt again just as several objects fell to the rocky ground just in front of the grabber, the glass bottles shattering and bursting into pools of flame.

  His hands shaking from the effort to smoothly load the wheel gun, Franklin cursed their abject stupidity. Fire had no effect on howlers! Then more objects came pelting down to land in a rough circle around the shambling creature, each metallic tube tipped with a short length of sizzling string. Pipebombs? The Molotov cocktails had been thrown only to highlight the target!

  A split second later, powerful
explosions filled the night, knocking over a K-rail and sending the howler flying for several yards. As it landed, more pipebombs dropped around it in a precise pattern, and the series of deafening blasts seemed to shake the world.

  Closing the cylinder of the Colt, the cyborg was impressed. Those blasts had been way too powerful for black powder, or even gunpowder. Could they have found a stash of predark dynamite? No, these were better than that, but not quite as strong of TNT or C-4 plastique, which left…He smiled. Guncotton! Fulminating guncotton! It seemed that some unsung genius in the ville had rediscovered the ancient Civil War explosive. And why not? It was only a mixture of cotton filaments and nitric acid. If you knew how, it could be made from bedsheets and silver jewelry. Once again his estimation of the ville went up. Smart. Clearly, these were extraordinary people. Perhaps this ville could be used for some of his own plans. Afterward, of course…

  A fusillade of blasterfire came from the sec men on top of the wall, closely followed by another bombardment of pipe bombs. Lashing insanely, the howler seemed to be trying to attack the explosive charges, its tentacles cracking K-rails and kicking up a storm of loose sand and rocks.

  Then there came the sound of heavy machinery slowly building in tempo, then the night was slashed apart by a sliver of light that slowly expanded. The gate was opening!

  Dashing forward, Franklin snapped off two more rounds at the mutie in passing, then dived through the narrow crack to land on hard ground.

  All around him sec men were shouting orders, blasters discharging, and the thumping motors altered pitch, the massive gate slowing down to now rumble closed. Scuttling away from the ever narrowing crack, Franklin saw the howler reach the opening and thrust out a tentacle just as the gate resoundingly closed.

  The tip nipped off, the piece of ropy length fell to the ground and wiggled around mindlessly until a sec man skewered it with an arrow from a crossbow. Lifting it warily, he swiftly climbed a broad flight of wooden stairs to the top of the wall and tossed it back into the night. An angry cry came from the other side of the gate, then the titanic portal shuddered as something rammed it from the outside.