Neutron Solstice

by James Axler

  Again there was an insect brushing at his hair, making him twitch with irritation.

  He moved his head to precisely the right position.

  De la Tour cursed fluently, slapping his hand to the point just below the right ear where the bastard moustique had stung him. Sharp and painful, where the big carotid artery carried the blood from the aorta to the brain.

  In the darkness of the forest, the Cajun heard rain pattering on the leaf-mold around his worn boots. That was strange as it wasn't raining. Somehow it was hard to concentrate on why that should be so peculiar.

  It was definitely raining. Henri could feel rain soaking through the collar of his shirt on one side, running over his skin. Warm.

  "Chaud?" he muttered, puzzled by the heat, of the rain.

  He felt his lips move, heard the faint whisper of his own voice. But all of it was happening a long, long way off. Happening to someone else.

  With a labored slowness he reached up to touch the place where the insect had stung him, feeling for the lump of the bite. It wasn't a lump at all. It was a tiny mouth, set in his throat. Pouting lips that intermittently spat blood into the night air.

  The Cajun's left hand, opened, and the musket dropped away to be caught by Ryan Cawdor before it could reach the ground.

  Then the Cajun understood.

  Through the murky slowness of his fading mind, he knew what was happening. He wanted to shout a warning to the others, busy at their ritual, but a hand, strong as a steel clamp, shut over his mouth, helping him as he felt his legs start to falter.

  Ryan steadied the dying man, laying down the blaster with one hand, lowering the blood-splattered body to the earth. He actually sensed the moment that life departed.

  The last cogent thought of Henri de, la Tour was that he had, shamefully, lost control of his bowels.

  "Pays the debt, Henn," said Ryan quietly, wiping his hands on the stubby grass that grew around the base of the trees.

  IN SOME DOUBLE-POOR COMMUNITIES, out in the deserts, Ryan had seen ceremonies, sacrifices, hoping to bring some sort of fertility or rain or freedom from plague.

  They'd all been poor, shoddy events.

  This was different.

  The air tasted of fear. Followed by Krysty Wroth, the one-eyed man picked his way with exaggerated caution, closing in on the fringe of stunted bushes that hid them from the fire and the people around it.

  There were eighteen: fourteen men and four women. All were naked to the waist, and sweat glistened on their bare flesh. What fueled the fire was rough-hewn logs, piled loosely in front of a broken block of concrete around eight feet long and four feet thick.

  Spread-eagled on the makeshift altar was a huge boar, its skin pink in the light. A hemp cord was bound tightly around its long muzzle, muffling its shrill cries. It lay on its side, its legs and neck stilled with wire. Leaning against the stone rectangle was a long-hafted logger's axe, its edge glittering orange.

  "They going to kill it?"

  Ryan nodded. "Yeah. Got to be. I heard of some crazies out west kill like this. Trader said he once seen them slitting the throat of a girl child."

  "What did he do?"

  "Asked 'em first. They said it wasn't a girl. They said it was a goat. A goat without horns. I never forgot that."

  "But what did…?" she began.

  "Iced them all."

  "How about them?" she asked, pointing through the trees at the group of dancing Cajuns as they circled and shuffled through the trampled mud to the slow beating of the drum.

  Ryan patted the butt of the gray Heckler & Koch G-12. "Could freeze the lot of them." He paused. "Mebbe. And mebbe that's not enough."

  "There's others back at the ville."

  "Sure. Could be other villes close by. No, best get our heels clean of here. Join the rest where we said now we know what's going down."

  "You figure we could've been next, Ryan?"

  He shook his head. "Mebbe, Krysty. Let's go."

  They turned their backs on the fire and the bizarre ceremony in the deeps of Atchafalaya and carefully began to walk toward Moudongue.

  They'd gone about a hundred paces when they heard the drumming reach a swift crescendo, then stop. The stillness was eerie. A man, his voice high and cracked, sang out some words in a foreign language. It sounded like "Je suis rouge,” whatever that meant.

  The words were echoed by the rest of… Ryan almost thought of them as a congregation, like some of the church-belt crazies in Deathlands. There was a moment of awful teetering silence, as if the world around licked its lips in lascivious anticipation.

  The faintest whistle of a steel blade sliced the air.

  There was a solid, wet thunk.

  Both of them heard the stifled squeal of mortal shock from the tethered pig. But they kept their faces turned and continued toward the ville and their friends.

  AFTER THE EXCHANGE of whistled signals, Ryan and Krysty rejoined the others. Doc and Lori were sitting quietly together along the faint trail that they hoped led toward West Lowellton. Finnegan and J.B. stood watching the immensely tall Cajun woman. She leaned against a live oak, with little trace of animation on her heavy, brutish features. She was wearing only a coarse brown blanket across her brawny shoulders.

  "They're butchering a pig back, there at the fire," said Ryan.

  "A pig?"

  "Yeah. Better'n a goat with no horns." Only the Armorer would have understood the allusion; Ryan wrinkled his mouth in distaste.

  "We going?"

  "Yeah, J.B., I guess so. Why d'you bring the woman with you?"

  "He wanted to fucking ice her while we was still fucking fucking," spat Finnegan angrily.

  "You said…" J.B. started to protest, looking across the small clearing at Ryan.

  “So why's she here?"

  "She knows all 'bout this fucking Baron Tourment," said Finn.

  The woman showed little interest in their discussion, busying herself with digging something from her cavernous nostrils, examining it closely, then popping it into her mouth and chewing with stolid relish.

  "Mebbe she can show us a way out of here," suggested J.B.

  The paths were tortuous in the darkness; Ryan realized that once the Cajuns discovered them gone, they'd be able to move faster and farther. Perhaps the womancould help. "Tell her to show us the fastest way to West Lowellton," Ryan ordered Finnegan. "We going to keep her?"

  "Far as it takes."

  WHILE THEY MOVED, quietly and in single file, through the dank wilderness, Finnegan walked alongside the towering woman, trying to converse with her. Now and again he turned to relay something to Ryan.

  "Says it's about two hours. Says there's some pack of killers there. Led by a snow wolf. Don't know what that means. Fucking English isn't so good."

  Somewhere deep to the left there was a rippling sound, as if some huge creature had moved gently from land to water. Everyone heard it, and everyone made certain a finger was on a trigger. Doc moved closer to Lori and put his arm across her shoulder.

  "She says the buildings are still there from before. She calls it the 'great sleeping.' Says that West Lowellton is 'bout the only place this cocksucking Baron Tourment doesn't run."

  "Ask her 'bout him," said Ryan, falling back a little way, gesturing for Krysty to take point so he could listen to what the Cajun had to say.

  "Says he runs the dead and alive. Those got the death without ending, she says. Baron got a fortress not far off. Runs the ville's all around. She says he's ten foot tall with a…" He laughed. "With a prick so long he ties it to his knee."

  "What sort of power's he got? Sec men?"

  Finnegan muttered the question. "Says he don't need that. Got the power. Makes it sound like some kind of wizardry, Ryan. Says he's the walking death himself. Says he can't be killed."

  J.B. caught that, bringing up the rear of their small column, and he snorted. "Put him in front of my Steyr blaster and see if he's still walking and talking after six rounds go into him."
<
br />   The towering woman heard him and giggled. It was a strange, thin, feeble sound, like that made by an ailing child, amazingly out of proportion to her build. Finnegan said something, and she leaned down to listen, one hand resting lightly on his arm. The other hand, Ryan noticed, stayed under the blanket.

  "She says the baron would eat a little man like him," Finnegan said, gesturing toward J.B. "And shit him out for the… I think she means the gators." Ryan found it all like a bewildering puzzle. Gradually they were putting together some of the pieces. The whole region looked as though it had been nuked with neutron missiles that devastated people and left buildings intact. There was this mysterious Baron Tourment, who seemed to be a very big fish in a medium-size pond. Maybe used voodoo to keep his people in line. And there was this equally odd resistance group somewhere around West Lowellton, where they were heading. Led by a white wolf.

  "A white wolf?" he muttered to himself.

  Chapter Eleven

  RYAN HAD TRULY INTENDED to let the hulking Cajun woman go free.

  If he'd felt that she'd been any threat to them, then he'd have given Finn the nod to put a bullet through the base of her skull. He'd have given the word and not had a moment's unease about it. That was the way it was in the Deathlands.

  But she wasn't a threat. She'd brought them through the swamps, into the pale glow of dawn, right to the edge of what had to be the suburb of West Lowellton. It didn't matter to them that she would tell Ti Jean and the other Cajuns. It was obvious that they preferred the dark, mazy wilderness to the open spaces of the town. Ryan didn't figure there was any real danger of their being pursued.

  So why not let her go?

  Finnegan looked at him, beneath the grove of stunted elms dripping with the leprous moss, where they waited. The woman's left hand was scratching where an early rising mosquito had raised a weal above her swollen, freckled breast. Her right hand was still beneath the torn blanket, where it had been every single time that Ryan had looked at her. That bothered him a little. Even when she'd stumbled on a couple of occasions, she'd used only her left hand to steady herself.

  "How 'bout…?" asked Finn, gesturing to the Cajun. His dark blue sweater and pants were splattered with mud, some patches drying, some still dark and wet. The steel toe caps of his combat boots were slick with the gray-brown slime.

  "Let her go," said Ryan. "She's told us 'bout all there is. We best watch out for this Baron Tourment and the snow wolf. Tell her she can go free."

  Standing beside her, virtually in her shadow, Finnegan beckoned to her. Doc grinned at the sight of the tubby little man and the looming woman.

  "She stands like a sow that hath o'erwhelmed all her litter but one,'" he said. "Henry Four." Cackled with laughter at the looks of total bewilderment on the faces of all his colleagues. "But let it pass, my brothers. Oh, let it pass."

  "Hurry it up, Finn," called Ryan, staring at the oddly matched couple.

  "Fucking all right," snapped Finnegan, looking away from the Cajun for a moment.

  Ryan's good eye opened wide.

  Just as Finnegan half turned away from the woman, gesturing with his arm toward the dark desolation of the swamp behind them, she finally began to take her right hand from under the blanket.

  "Fireblast," breathed Ryan, but before the word hung in the air, the drama was played.

  The G-12 coughed, the triple burst sounding like a single shot.

  Finn jumped, the Model 92 Beretta pistol jerking into his fist. J.B. raised his Mini-Uzi, searching for the threat. Doc was fumbling for his Le Mat. Lori squeaked her dismay, and Krysty Wroth had drawn her H&K P7A-13 9 mm handblaster.

  The Cajun woman lurched sideways as all three bullets stitched into her, all hitting within a hand's span, under the ribs on the left side of her body. Despite her great size and strength, the three bullets sent her staggering. The blanket fell away, revealing her nakedness. Blood came from the j bunched wounds, dark and thick, dappling her thighs as she tottered, fighting for balance.

  "Bastard," she said, in a normal, quiet conversational voice, sinking to her knees, then sliding in the dirt on her face, both hands clutched beneath her, holding the triple wound.

  "Ryan! Ryan?"

  "What is it, Finn?"

  "You said she could go. You fucking said…" His voice was rising.

  "Look in her hand, Finn."

  She still lived—if the residual nervous twitching and jerking of the body could be called living. Finn kicked her over with the toe of his boot, staring down as the corpse rolled on its back, breasts sagging, blood and urine trickling across the thighs and belly. . "In her right hand," said Ryan. The fingers were clenched, and the man bent down and' pried them open. Then he stood up and shook his head at what he saw, at what they all saw.

  It was an open cutthroat razor, honed down over countless years until it was only a sliver of steel, hardly as wide as a man's fingernail. The handle was of dull white bone, broken and mended with twine.

  "Fucking double-poor crazy bitch," said Finnegan, spitting into the staring eyes of the dead Cajun woman. Lori took a few steps away from the body, looking toward the nearest buildings, all shrouded with thick vegetation. "We go in there? Food? Shelter?"

  "Shelter, yeah," replied Ryan. "After a hundred years or so, I'm not so damned sure 'bout any food. Let's go see. And let's take care."

  THE FOUR MEN and two women moved out of the deep, lush greenery, picking their way along what had once been the farthest outpost of West Lowellton. They passed a partly completed suburban development of medium-priced housing that once pushed the sprawling frontiers of Lafayette deeper into swampland. Nearly one hundred years ago, in the remote past.

  "MOUDONGUE?"

  "Oui, Baron. Moudongue."

  "They are becoming of interest to me, my dear and loyal compatriot, Mephisto."

  "We'll take them."

  "Such confidence. What of the teams of sec men out in the green?"

  "Pecker said they'd gone."

  "Why were they not kept for me?"

  "They were…" The sec boss hesitated, wiping a hand down the leg of his white pants. He noticed that his fingers left a sweaty trail.

  "Yes?" asked the baron, his voice as gentle as a maiden's whisper. Mephisto found himself sweating a little more than before.

  "They were taking a pig."

  "A ritual?"

  "Yes."

  The exoskeleton creaked and groaned as Baron Tourment pulled himself upright, towering over the sec boss as he strode around the motel room, seeing himself reflected again and again as he passed the mirror over the oyster-pink washbasin.

  "Had I given my permission?"

  Mephisto had known the question was coming and had anticipated it from the moment one of the patrol teams in the swampwags had reported back to him.

  "I had one in five blasted, Baron."

  "Only one in five?"

  "They are useful to us, so close to the part of West Lowellton where the boy runs."

  The great leonine head nodded slowly, and Mephisto knew that he'd guessed right: he would live for another day.

  "Truly spoken. One in five? Good."

  "The outlanders took out one man."

  "Who?"

  "Be la Tour. The one with the beard forked as if lightning had struck it."

  "Was he not the one who shot the black in the buggy a day back?"

  "Yes."

  "Revenge?"

  Mephisto nodded. "I believe so.' We can ask when we take them."

  "And they will tell you, my dear Mephisto?"

  "They will tell me," he replied, ignoring the irony in Baron Tourment's voice.

  "Where are they now?"

  That was the one question that the elegant sec boss had been dreading. His patrols had returned within the hour from their search, and he knew that the baron would have heard the rumbling engines as they ground into the ville. "One woman was missing from Moudongue."

  The striding stopped, and the baron's eyes turned
toward him. "Who?"

  "Marie Laveaux."

  "Who?"

  Mephisto hissed through his teeth. "Marie. Jeanine was her younger sister, the one that you ordered to be…"

  "I know. Watch your careless tongue, Mephisto. There are many who would welcome your fall. It was Marie? The large woman? I remember her." There was something that could have been a smile.

  "She was…" Caution sealed his lips and made him reconsider his description of the Laveaux woman as a giantess. It would not sit well with the baron, whose head scraped the ceiling of the bridal suite at the Best Western Snowy Egret Motel.

  "Was a fine strong woman. She took me and wept for more. Not like some of these fucking little tight-cunted bitches who scream and bleed, shrieking that I'm tearing them apart. No, she… she is dead, you said, Mephisto? The toll rises for these strangers."

  "She was shot three times at close range. Sec-patrol leader said the slugs were strange."

  Tourment sat down, the bed sinking under his weight. On the wall behind him was a painting that seemed to show a murky orange sunset and a pale blue sky streaked with fiery chem clouds.

  "Strange? Stra-a-a-a-ange… ?" He drew out the syllable until it almost snapped.

  "Caseless small bore. High impact. Never seen anything like them."

  "This was near where the snow wolf lives?"

  "Yeah."

  "Are they to be allied 'gainst us, Mephisto? Is this the root of the tree? The kernel of the fruit? Will the two blades be forged as one?" He lay back, and his voice became thin and singsong. "Shall the sky and earth wed? Will water marry fire? Will the wolf cleave to the panther?"

  He was silent for a long moment, then sat up and pointed at his sec boss.

  "Go get that fucking ice-suit dirty. Track 'em and take 'em. That's all. No more words, or I'll reach into your flicking chest and part the ribs and tear out your lungs."

  Mephisto carefully closed the door of the suite and stood in the narrow corridor, his eyes squeezed shut, trying to control himself. He nearly wiped his hands on his pants again. Licking his dry lips, he ran his fingers through his tight, pomaded curls.