by Axler, James
It was only with some effort that Doc remembered that this was a simulation, a virtual Moscow, where there would be no need for him to fear running across Zimyanin.
Besides which, there were no people around. The city was freshly nuked, too hot for any pockets of survivors to crawl from hiding. Or for most…
Doc felt bile rise in his gorge, an instinct of revulsion as he spotted the mewling, puking thing on the steps of the Kremlin. It was naked apart from a few charred rags. As they drew nearer, he realized that the rags weren't clothing, but strips of skin and charred flesh. It had no face, no hair, and very little in the way of skin. It crawled on the steps, dirt and dust blowing onto the exposed flesh in the storm that was brewing in the aftermath of the bombs, in the beginnings of the nuclear winter that had formed the Deathlands.
The thing that had once been human kept crying voicelessly and incoherently, not noticing the filth that blew into its flesh, all nerve endings stripped away with the epidermis, maddened beyond pain by the experience of being nuked and yet still living.
"Interesting. The fact of survival is in itself a superb demonstration of human tenacity. If this thing—" the voice of the rat king paused, momentarily at a loss whether to describe the now genderless creature as male or female. "—is able to survive on ground level, compute the possibilities of underground bunker survival."
"If our resources for a postholocaust survival factor are stronger, then ultimate victory is assured."
Doc found himself agreeing, his mind and intellect being sucked out of him by the greater power of the computer. Remembering Emily; remembering his beloved Rachel and Jolyon; remembering the sweet Lori; remembering the strength of Ryan, J.B., Krysty, Mildred, Jak and Dean; remembering others like Finnegan and Hennings, Abe, Trader and Michael Brother, who had been lost along the way. Remembering all of them, Doc fought to retain a vestige of his own identity.
"No," he screamed, "no. This is all wrong. You— collectively—are mad. A senile, grumbling old machine that remembers battles never fought. Condemned by fate to run down slowly, maintaining a redoubt full of fools, never fulfilling your task. Frustrated by fate, spinning out fantasies of pornographic destruction to appease your impotence."
"No. Our time will come. You will see. You will be."
The voice of the rat king was calm, implacable, as though it expected this outburst and didn't care. Doc was terrified by hearing—he was sure—his own voice in the blended tones.
"You will be one."
He didn't know whether to surrender or fight, whether to hope for the best or give up hoping.
His mind began to slip into the madness of Moebius, to lose the slender thread with which he kept a grasp on his sanity.
He was tired of fighting and tired of giving in.
If only something—someone—would make the decision for him.
"We will. If you let us. Join and be one. Without all the links, we cannot survive."
Chapter Eighteen
Taking the small population of the ville, training them and waiting for J.B. to improve was a slow and painful process. It took almost a week, and a day didn't fail to pass where they all thought of Doc and what had happened to him.
Abner had some old dilapidated predark books salted away in the rusty metal chest that lay under his bed. As a token of his trust in them, he let Mildred and Ryan look at what he kept in this time capsule.
"This is my heritage," he said proudly, in a tone of voice that suggested his father had said it to him and his father to him, and what the word heritage meant had long ago been forgotten.
The papers were fragile, yellowing and crumbling with age and neglect. Mildred lifted them out with a delicate touch, hardly daring to breathe. Ryan stared over her shoulder in the dim light of the room, his eye glittering as he strained to see what relics of the past would be revealed. He had always relished the chance to catch a part of the past, to read about the old days.
The first thing Mildred retrieved was a Hustler magazine. The pages were stiff and stained, and she looked at Abner with an arched eyebrow.
"Don't look at me, missy. They're all too old for my liking."
She laid the magazine aside with distaste. The next magazine was an old National Enquirer for January 1998, with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee on the cover. She smiled as she remembered the soap-opera lives of the rich and famous. She hoped that they had perished quickly in skydark, as they would never have been equipped to survive in the days after. The Enquirer joined the skin magazine on the bed, and she came to a pile of crumbling paperback books.
"Stephen King—I've seen some of his books before," Ryan said quietly, gently taking the book with a reverence and gentleness that surprised Mildred.
"That's his analysis of horror on film and in books," Mildred remarked. "Danse Macabre indeed. I wonder what he'd make of all this."
"Real terror springs from the same well the storyteller draws from," Ryan stated, remembering the stories he had heard as a child in Front Royal, and how they had scared him more than his first taste of battle.
Mildred said nothing. Ryan wasn't the sort of man to say something so profound unless he had drawn on something deep. She wanted to leave him with those memories, whatever they might be.
"This guy was quite some King fan," she observed, gently lifting out several paperbacks by the author. There were also some old science-fiction paperbacks about a character called Simon Rack and some books about the Hell's Angels.
But the real treasure lay at the bottom—a guidebook to Kansas City, annotated in a spidery hand, the black ink faded to a purple indentation by age and neglect. The trunk had a small hole at the bottom, and some damp had started to seep in, causing the back pages of the book to stick together.
Mildred pried them open as best she could, but soon found that it was at the front that the real prize lay.
"Well, look at this," she breathed.
Ryan peered over her shoulder and saw a map of the state. Scrawled in pen was a roughly circular shape, shaded in with cross-hatching. "We are here" was written in, with a page number. Mildred delicately turned the pages until she came to the right one.
It was an in-depth map of the part of the state shaded in on the previous page. It showed that they were fairly near to Kansas City itself, and the nearest town was Tonganoxie. Outside the town, in the scrub country, small farms and settlements of self-built houses stood along the main roads. There were photographs of some of them. Outside one stood a couple with a small child. The girl was angelic, with golden curls that tumbled over a solemn face with just the hint of a hidden smile in her large blue eyes. The couple was leaning into each other in the way that only those in love could do. He was tall, with short hair and a full beard, a rifle casually canted over his shoulder. The woman was almost as tall, with a full figure, a shining, smiling face and incredibly long, chestnut-brown hair that was whipped around her in the breeze.
They looked blissfully happy.
The photograph was so evocative that it took a little while for either of them to realize that it was the map that was the reason for the page being indicated. It was a relief map of the area around Tonganoxie, and had been altered in the faded purple-black ink to indicate the way that the earth had moved after the upheaval of nuclear war. The valley, the lip of which they were currently inhabiting, had been formed out of a shallow basin, seeming from the scribbled map to have dropped at least a hundred feet, more in places, with the underground construction of the redoubt causing an instability that had led to an additional small drop that formed the enclave.
"Now we know where we are," Ryan said, indicating the area with a chipped and calloused finger, "this'll be a bastard place to move through without a wag of some kind. We need to get back into the redoubt for transport or a jump. Otherwise we're stuck here, and it's a long haul out."
Mildred looked over her shoulder. Abner was making a poor show of trying not to eavesdrop.
"But we don't move until we're throu
gh here," she said slowly and firmly.
Ryan guessed whom she was looking at, and smiled wryly. "We've got unfinished business, and so have they. A bargain's a bargain."
MILDRED WASN'T SURE if it was the antibiotics or the poultices that Krysty had slaved over, marshaling the ville dwellers into the collection of herbs before boiling and straining them to make the stinking poultice. Something, though, had been working. In two days J.B. had come out of his fever, slept so much that they feared he would never wake and had opened his eyes to show a glittering, biting edge to his gaze.
"Ryan," he murmured softly, catching sight of his old friend first, "what's been going on?"
Ryan filled him in. The Armorer, more taciturn than usual in his just awakened state, contented himself with a muttered "Dark night!" as his only comment. On Mildred's recommendation, he didn't try to get out of bed right away, although it was obvious from his restlessness that he was itching to get into action.
By the following morning, J.B. could stand it no longer. Yelling at Dean to help him until the youngster gave in, J.B. got up and hobbled out of the shack and into the center of the ville, where he sat on an upturned box and watched in disgust as Jak attempted to teach some of the local fighters the finer points of hand-to-hand combat. Even pulling his punches, Jak had in the past hour injured two of them enough that it would take them several days to recover.
The Armorer pulled his fedora down so that the snap brim shaded his glasses from the ever present swirl of dust. Watching Jak, and remembering something Dean had said to him as he assisted him into the wan sunlight, J.B. commented, "Now do you see why Mac was allowed to live?"
Dean nodded. "I do now, seeing this bunch of stupes." He kept his voice low so as not to antagonize the ville dwellers, but it didn't change the way he felt. "It just seemed weird, 'cause Dad's drummed it into me that you never leave enemies alive. And don't tell me the story of the little girl who ripped out someone's jugular with her teeth, 'cause I've heard that one too many times," he added with a grin, preempting J.B.'s launch into a Trader story.
The only advantage of J.B. telling it rather than Ryan was that the Armorer was more terse in the telling, and it was a much shorter story.
"Trader was right, though," J.B. said softly in reply. "Then there's always one exception to any rule. Being too rigid can be as dangerous as being too slack."
Without answering, Dean knew what the Armorer meant as he watched Mac take on Jak.
The fat man outweighed the slender Jak by almost double, and was several inches taller. His head was still scarred by the blow he had taken outside the shack, and from the look on his face he was expecting to get some revenge in a one-on-one fight.
They circled each other, watched by the crowd of men and women who were there to learn. The tension grew as they circled, until it seemed that no one in the crowd could draw breath until the first strike.
It came from the blue, still unexpected despite the close attention and anticipation of the crowd. Jak feinted to the left, drawing Mac's attention, then followed up to the right with a kick that took the sec man's legs from under him.
Instead of falling heavily, as would be expected, the awkward-looking sec man let himself flop to the ground, relaxing his muscles to avoid the rigidity that broke bones. He rolled as he hit the dirt, out of the range of Jak's follow-up kick. Instead of connecting with his jaw, the albino's foot carved a space in nothing but air. It was only Jak's immense control and balance that stopped him falling flat. Instead he used the momentum of the kick to pivot, taking him out of range of the thundering roundhouse blow Mac aimed at his body. The sec man was more powerful and agile than he looked, but his notion of fighting was basic—he aimed for the body with a succession of kicks and blows designed to cause maximum damage.
Jak avoided all of those with twists and turns of his body, staying out of range and letting Mac expend energy. Then, when the sec man was puffing and blowing, slowing slightly, Jak darted in beneath one of the blows and delivered a hard jab with his extended fingers, sinking them into the soft flesh above the sec man's ribs.
Mac shot backward through the air as though a jolt of electricity had been forced through him. He tumbled over, falling naturally by instinct. Jak stood back, waiting for the sec man to get up.
"Less…more," he said simply as Mac shook his head to clear it.
The sec man gave him a vulpine leer that passed for a smile. "I hear ya, whitey," he grated, his breath still coming hard.
They closed on each other, circling tightly, neither willing to make the first move. Jak feinted, then lunged. Mac second-guessed him and blocked the straight-fingered blow by trapping Jak's arm in both of his own, crossed to strengthen them. He stepped back, allowing Jak's momentum to carry him forward. The albino sailed past Mac, hitting the dirt face first.
Like the sec man, he allowed himself to relax as he hit, but Mac had anticipated that and followed up in the millisecond while Jak was prone and—momentarily— defenseless. His heavy boot thudded into Jak's face, splitting the albino's lip and causing blood and spit to fly into the dust.
"Water the earth, you mutie bastard," Mac whispered, his anger expended. "We're quits."
He stood back, allowing Jak to get up. The albino wiped the blood from his face, hawked up a bloodied glob of phlegm and spit it into the earth.
"Yeah, quits." The albino laughed. "Learn quick, fat man. Why think I let live?"
Mac laughed, a big guffaw that stunned the crowd and Dean. But not J.B.
"Always a reason to break your own rules," he said. "Except that it has to be a good one."
MILDRED AND KRYSTY were given the thankless task of trying to teach the ville dwellers to shoot straight. It seemed almost alien to them that anyone in the Deathlands could survive without any kind of shooting skills. Blasters were second nature to the postskydark generations.
Nonetheless, the dwellers of this pesthole that didn't even have a name—"what do we want names for, friend? We know where we are," Abner told them— had few blasters, and they were in poor condition. Most of them relied on explosive power rather than accuracy, and it was dispiriting for a crack shot like Mildred to have to train such an inept group of fighters.
So she was glad when J.B. hobbled into the fray to offer his services. The Armorer still couldn't get around at great speed, but the ankle was healing as he was resting it. Ironically the time of his fever and semicoma had been beneficial to his damaged ankle, allowing the initial sprain time to mend. The reticent Armorer had once again muttered an oath and little more when Dean had shown him the tumbledown shack that passed for an armory. His response to taking a look inside had been to moan gently and to shake his head sadly.
There wasn't much J.B. could do to assist them. Most of the time he was under orders to do little except sit all day. However, having cursed the way in which the ville dwellers looked after their blasters, J.B. decided that the best thing for him to do would be to try to lick the armory—such as it was—into shape.
A small group of women and children gathered around J.B. as he sat on an upturned box, stripping the blasters and polishing them, greasing them as best as he could and putting them back together. Along the way he found that some of the blasters were entirely homemade, while others were comprised of separate parts that had been forced and welded together to make a complete blaster. Why these hadn't exploded in the faces of those who fired them was a complete mystery to him.
J.B. cleaned the weapons and explained to his audience why it was important to keep the blasters clean and oiled. He tried to explain to them the concept of different calibrations on weapons, the differences in ammo and their respective firepower. His eyes shone behind his glasses, and he didn't notice that some of the women and children looked at him blankly, not understanding him.
It didn't matter. He told them all that he could, hoping that enough would penetrate to keep the blasters in good working order for the final confrontation.
While he did that,
Jak and Dean took turns to coach people in unarmed combat; Krysty and Mildred tried to improve the shooting of the ville dwellers. As all this was going on, Ryan was far from idle.
The one-eyed warrior had been thinking and planning. He could see that his forces, even swollen by the ranks of the ville dwellers, would be no match for Murphy's men once they were inside the redoubt. Outside they had matched the well-equipped sec men by virtue of their being adapted to the conditions. Inside they could hit big trouble.
Ryan spent most of his time with Abner, learning all that the old man knew of the redoubt forces, all that he knew of the surrounding terrain. They called in Mac, who had been in more expeditionary raids on the territory than any other sec man in the ville. Ryan picked their brains, put forward his plans, making sure that Abner and Mac thought that they had come up with half the ideas themselves.
Finally the baron called together his people in the rough ground they called the center of the ville. He outlined the plan he and Mac had come up with to help the outlanders. Krysty, knowing Ryan, smiled to herself as Abner claimed Ryan's best strategies as his own. It didn't matter, as long as they got the result they wanted.
Ryan listened to Abner and looked at the ville dwellers. They were muties, inbred, and not used to hard, hand-to-hand fighting. He felt a twinge of conscience, briefly. Did they realize what they were getting into?
It would be difficult, hard and bloody. That much Ryan knew. But it was necessary, for their long-term survival as much as that of Ryan and his people.
And they were ready. Or as ready as they'd ever be.
Chapter Nineteen