Deathlands 51-Rat King

by Axler, James

  "You realize that you are in that state that most people ascribe to me? The state of insanity, I mean?" he asked Wallace in a soft, almost disbelieving tone.

  Wallace looked genuinely puzzled. "But, Doctor, even with your record of awkwardness and dissent, I would have believed that you would be astounded in these postskydark times that the Totality Concept still operated, still clung to its meaning."

  "Meaning?" Doc's voice rose to a screech as he whirled away from Wallace toward the glass partition that separated the Moebius MkI from where they stood. He flung out an arm. "You really believe that has meaning?"

  He stood, not expecting an answer of any coherence and not really listening, his eyes glued to the monstrosity that he couldn't truly comprehend.

  The slack-jawed, moronic tech stood beside him, still tapping in the codes and keeping the mechanism ticking over. That had to surely be all that it could do. What else was there now? The military-industrial complex for which it was designed had long since crumbled to dust, and any answers it might come up with were for questions that were no longer asked.

  Doc pressed his face against the glass, breath misting and obscuring the image that seared on his retina. But not enough…no, never enough.

  Behind the glass lay the rat king. At last he understood why Wallace—and the hellish whitecoat minds that had conceived the Totality Concept—had used the term.

  In the middle of the sterile floor space stood a master computer. Its terminals were attached to a series of cables that snaked across the floor in six different directions. The screen attached to the mainframe was constantly filled with a series of 3-D images and strings of words that Doc's eyes were unable to translate from blinking lights into coherent sentences. Although, looking at where the images and words had surely to emanate, coherence was the last thing that occurred to Doc.

  For the six different directions terminated in six padded chairs. In each chair was something that had once been human, but was no longer—six very old men, their clothes almost perfectly preserved in the sterile atmosphere, but hanging off them where they had become emaciated. They were fed and watered by a series of intravenous tubes that coiled away toward a central bank of a smaller mainframe, located in an antechamber of the room, presumably, Doc imagined, to try to cut down the amount of outside interference in the sterile room.

  The six once-human men were blank eyed and staring, their mouths fixed in rictus grins of what could have been agony or ecstasy…or some inhuman mix of the two. Muscle wastage made it hard to tell, as their faces were little more than skulls with skin clinging, papery and thin, to them. Their wrists and hands were painfully thin as they poked from the end of immaculately laundered and starched sleeves.

  Two of the men wore Air Force uniforms, one an Army uniform, another the attire of a general in the Marines, and the last two were garbed in suits that were conservatively but tastefully cut in a preskydark fashion. Doc recognized the style from some of the high-ranking security and government officials who had visited him during his brief sojourn in the late twentieth century.

  The most horrific sight, however, wasn't their emaciated forms, but what had been done to their skulls above the brow.

  Tn his native Vermont, Doc had been familiar with the practice of trepanning, whereby a Jiole was drilled in the skull, or some portion of the skull removed, in order to relieve pressure on the brain. It was a medical practice of dubious worth, and was also used by some cultists and followers of ancient religions as a path to release the mind and induce euphoric states. Often, it resulted merely in drooling idiocy, which was, Doc supposed, a euphoria of sorts.

  What had been done to these men looked like trepanning on a larger scale. The snaking cables that ran from the mainframe terminals ended in electrodes that were directly attached to portions of each man's brain. It appeared to Doc that the cables disappeared into a network of small holes drilled in the skull.

  "And this is what you have in store for me, is it?" he asked, turning back to Wallace.

  The Gen nodded. "Uh-huh. You see Secretary of Defense Sethna?" He indicated a figure in a suit whose only defining characteristic left was that he was of a darker skin than the others, possibly an Asiatic origin. "Well," Wallace continued, "he's dead…basically."

  "Are not they all?" Doc queried.

  Wallace smiled. "Depends what you mean, Doctor. We try and keep them going, as it's the interaction of them all that makes the mechanism work. We recycle body parts, but in this one it just looks like the brain finally gave out. Now, there's no way we could find any part comparable to that…until you arrived."

  Doc turned back to the glass and looked at the rat king. "Madness," he muttered. "Sheer folly and madness."

  Whether it was a comment directed toward Wallace's plans, or the minds that had originally conceived the rat king was lost as Doc felt a needle plunge into his arm.

  He turned to face the drooling, cretinous tech, hypodermic still in hand, as the blackness and welcoming respite of unconsciousness overwhelmed him.

  Chapter Twelve

  The two-lane blacktop came to a sudden end where the tarmac rose into the sky for a height of twenty feet at an angle that suggested a sudden eruption from the earth had pushed it upward. The ground on either side was divided by a chasm that yawned to a width of twelve feet or so at its widest, narrowing to three or four feet in places.

  "End of the line?" Ryan asked as they came to a shambling halt.

  "Hell, no," Mac said, gesturing across the divide with his blaster. "We just jump it."

  Jak gave him a questioning look, particularly at his drooping stomach.

  Mac laughed without humor. "Mebbe I'm just fitter than I look."

  "I'm not sure that I'm that fit," Mildred said uncertainly, peering over the edge of the chasm. It descended into a darkness that suggested no small depth.

  Mac shrugged. "It's okay by me, missy. You fall down there and get chilled, it just means one less for the ritual. No skin off me."

  "Nice to know you care," Mildred muttered laconically.

  The giant with the homemade blaster gestured down the divide, swinging the giant pieces of metal as though they were weightless.

  "No way we're jumping here. If we go down a little, then it'll be easier."

  "Suits me," Mildred replied. "Lead the way, big man."

  Much to her surprise, he did. Turning his back on them, he wandered along the edge of the chasm like a man leading a Sunday-school outing.

  J.B. and Ryan both furrowed their brows, exchanging puzzled looks. Their captors were certainly a contrary mixture. On the one hand, they had kept the group under a close guard with their blasters, yet they were seemingly slapdash about such elementary precautions as turning their backs on their prisoners. Like the sec men in the redoubt, they had spent too long in an enclosed atmosphere—one underground, one trapped by the valley and the freakish weather conditions—to have any conception of outside enemies and their tactics.

  Ryan surveyed the surrounding area. The storm had died down to a bluster at this point, the dust on the ground stirring in the small eddies and whorls of the wind. Denser clouds obscuring parts of the valley bespoke of areas where the storms still raged. There was no sign of life, and little cover. The trees were few and far between, stripped bare of life and standing starkly in the landscape. The earth was flat; if not originally this way, then it had been pared down years of storms and harsh hurricanes and zephyrs scouring its surface.

  "How do people live in this?" Krysty asked softly, mirroring Ryan's thoughts.

  "They don't," he replied quietly. "They exist."

  "Isn't that what we all do?" Mildred queried.

  Ryan's face cracked in a grimace that could have been grim humor. His scar was puckered white by the elements.

  "Some mebbe exist more than others," he said.

  The only reply was a shove in the back. The one-eyed warrior, acting on instinct, spun. Tilly stood in front of him, the tip of a long and wickedly j
agged hunting knife touching the end of his nose.

  Her voice was sibilant and all the more threatening for it. "Philosophy doesn't grow crops, doesn't appease the gods. It does nothing but make you sit on your spreading ass all day doing jackshit. And it may get you cut up if you don't shut up and follow Tod."

  If nothing else, at least Ryan now knew that the giant had a name. The one-eyed man held up his hands in a gesture of surrender and turned to follow the giant along the lip of the chasm.

  Mac laughed in the humorless, grating way that was beginning to act as an irritant, and gestured with his blaster that they should follow Ryan.

  Dean and Krysty fell into step, followed by Mildred and J.B. Jak stayed back to last, dragging his heels and eying Mac with barely disguised hatred.

  Two of the other captors exchanged looks over their blasters, one of them shivering. Mac grinned wryly.

  "You don't say much, whitey," he directed at Jak.

  "Action better," Jak replied.

  "You ain't shown much," Mac said shortly.

  Jak shrugged, then turned his back and followed his companions. It left Mac with a turning stomach and a foreboding that things weren't perhaps to be as simple as he had hoped.

  Farther down the way, Tod had come to a halt. The giant waved the heavy blaster in the general direction of the gap between the two sides of earth.

  "Guess this is about the narrowest stretch," he said, spitting over the edge. "It's no ravine at best, but this is as narrow as it gets."

  J.B. took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt. He peered over the edge and across at the far side.

  "What's to stop us going across first and then waiting to attack you on the other side?" he asked.

  Tod grinned lopsidedly, revealing a row of broken yellow teeth. "This…" he said simply before turning and taking aim with his giant blaster at a small piece of scrub that was twenty yards across the gap.

  The blaster exploded with a deafening roar that drowned out the background howl of the storms for a second. It belched blue smoke and flame as it discharged a load of shot from the large barrel. The recoil from such a charge had to be enough to break an average man's arm if the blaster was held one-handed, as Tod held it, J.B. thought.

  The giant didn't even seem to notice that the weapon had fired.

  Twenty yards away the scrub disappeared in a puff of what might have been dirt, but might simply have been the splintering wood of the bushes disintegrating as the mixed load of the charge hit it with tremendous force. The width of the barrel showed in the wide spread of the charge, which pockmarked the ground around the small scrub area.

  Some of the debris that made up the load could be discerned as pieces of metal glittering in the weak sunlight that filtered through the dust and chem clouds. Nails, pieces and shards of metal from other weapons, household objects from predark times…anything that could be pared down to pieces small enough to load in the blaster.

  Dean whistled, low and soft.

  "Point made," J.B. said simply. He had deliberately asked the question in order to try to provoke such an action. Casting an eye around the other captors and their homemade and home-repaired blasters, he made a rough mental assessment of their collective firepower.

  It was always useful to know. There was never such a thing as wasted information. You never knew when your life might depend on the minutest scrap of knowledge.

  "Cool," Tod said, grinning inanely through his broken teeth as he plucked another cartridge from one of the large pockets on his coat. He snapped open the large blaster, which operated on a simple hinge, like a modified shotgun, and pushed the cartridge into the breech. It was a lumpy concoction of metal wrapped in bulging cardboard that shouldn't, in all logic, have worked. J.B. figured that one day the blaster would just explode in the giant's face.

  "Let's cut out the target practice and showing off, and just move," Tilly said flatly, her eyes burning contempt from her layers of rags.

  Krysty stared at her defiantly. "Lady, you've got a real problem. You're calling all the shots here, so why don't you lay off? What is it with you?"

  "Oh, shit, bad question," Mac whispered to the other two men with blasters. Still they didn't break their silence, just shaking their heads sadly while keeping their blasters ready and aimed.

  "You want to know my problem?" Tilly roared, springing forward with a suddenness, violence and grace that took Krysty by surprise. Before Krysty had a chance to move, Tilly had thrust her face into hers.

  Ryan stiffened, keeping his eye on the men with blasters. Mildred shook her head almost imperceptibly.

  She, for one, would be interested to see what happened. Like J.B., she believed that all information was useful. It was just that sometimes she wanted different information.

  "You want to know what's the matter with me? You really want to see why I hate you and your kind?"

  "My kind?"

  "The insiders," Tilly spit back. "You want to see what your kind has done to me? Just because I didn't fit what you wanted from your gene pool—not that it stopped your sec men fucking me afterward, like pigs."

  Tilly began to unwrap the rags around her head. Her eyes burned brightly with hatred, and also with something that Krysty felt sure was self-loathing.

  As the rags came away in her hand, a dirty and multicolored bandage that unraveled onto the earth, Krysty could see that Tilly had no hair to speak of, just small tufts of down that appeared on a red raw scalp. It looked as though someone had taken her by the hair and roughly sliced away the skin. Her forehead was heavily lined and crisscrossed by scars.

  Around her eyes, the skin was baggy, making her burning eyes seem ancient and old when fully revealed. Her face was scarred with the remains of old burns, her lips almost gone and her nose hollow and devoid of flesh.

  "They set me on fire after taking my scalp. They wanted the hair and skin for DNA tests. The burns were for tests on antibiotics. When I was thrown out to die, the sec men took me because they hadn't been allowed to mate and felt the urge…" She uttered the last part with as much of a sneer as she could muster from her broken face.

  Ryan kept his gaze steady on the woman, noticing that Krysty didn't flinch in her face. From the corner of his eye, Ryan could see that the other guards weren't moving. There seemed to be an unspoken assumption that Tilly, if not actually outranking them, was certainly of a higher standing.

  Ryan had been at the mercy of psychotics in charge of sec forces many times. It was never a good experience.

  Krysty was breathing shallow and fast, trying to stop herself from appearing shocked or disturbed by either Tilly's appearance or her actions.

  "Take a good look, bitch," Tilly breathed, her voice reduced to a harsh, venomous whisper. "Take a good look, 'cause you'll end up like this, too. You and the black bitch."

  "Tilly don't like women much," Mac said. It didn't escape anyone's notice that the irritating humor was gone from his voice.

  "Of course she doesn't," Mildred said quietly. "We remind her too much of what she used to be."

  Krysty breathed a sigh of relief as Tilly whirled away from her, trailing rags like banners behind her in the now gentle breeze. With a few strides that seemed to float her across the surface of the ground without touching, Tilly was in front of Mildred, waving the knife in her face.

  "Shut the fuck up," she screamed, an edge of madness seeping into her tones. "Just shut the fuck up, or I swear I won't wait until the ritual. I'll chill you now, and it won't be quick. It'll be slow and—"

  She was cut off as Mildred snaked out a hand and gripped Tilly's knife wrist. The ragged woman was taken by surprise, a blank look of incomprehension crossing what was left of her face as Mildred twisted her arm. With her free hand she snatched the knife from the weakened grip, at the same time twisting farther so that Tilly had to turn or risk dislocation of her elbow or shoulder joint.

  "Hold it right there," Mac snapped, raising his blaster. With an indication of his eyes, he made s
ure that the other two covered Dean, Krysty and Ryan while he covered Jak, whom he trusted least.

  J.B. flicked his eyes toward the lip of the chasm. Tod had Mildred and Tilly in his sights, and a quick estimate told J.B. that the spray from the gigantic blaster would almost certainly chill him, as well.

  "Okay, it's okay," Mildred said coolly, dropping the knife and pushing Tilly away from her so that the woman fell into the dirt. "I was just making a point." She looked at her companions and shrugged. "There's nowhere to run yet, anyway," she added.

  Tilly picked herself up, claimed her knife and hastily rewrapped the bandages around her head until she was completely swathed. She stood back, a little apart from her fellow valley dwellers, her eyes flashing loathing from within the shadows.

  Tod looked up to the skies and sniffed. "I'd say we better get across real soon. There's a change in the air, and we don't want to get caught out here when it happens."

  Mac nodded. "Okay. You and Tilly get across and stand guard on the insiders as they come across."

  Ryan watched with interest as both Tilly and Tod crossed the divide. The ragged woman was no surprise, bounding across the three-yard gap in the chasm with a lightness of foot and a grace that landed her safely on the other side. Tod, on the other hand, was a revelation. Despite his height, considerable bulk and the size and weight of his homemade blaster, Tod made the leap look like a step into the void, covering the distance with ease.

  "Your turn," Mac said when Tod and Tilly were facing them across the gap, the annoying grate of humor returning to his voice.

  "Me first," Jak said simply. He took a short run and launched himself into space, arms and legs bicycling to gain those precious few extra inches. He landed on the other side with a puff of dust around his feet.

  Ryan looked around at his companions.

  "I'll go next, lover," Krysty said, looking less than enthusiastic. She psyched herself up by taking deep breaths, calling on Gaia to give her the strength to propel herself across the gap.

  Her concentration was so intense that she didn't even realize that she had made the run-up until she was in midair, sailing across the divide. Her limbs felt weightless, buoyed by the air currents around and beneath her.