Chrono Spasm

by James Axler

  “Look,” Marla said, pointing to a patch of sparking sky.

  Symon and his daughter peered up. The sky was fluttering with colors, and amid them a dark cloud of solid forms swarmed toward the ground. “What is it?” Tarelya asked.

  “Crow feast,” Marla explained. “They’ve found a weak spot in the discharge. They’ll keep working at it until it breaks away.”

  “They’re drawn to them,” Piotr added by way of explanation. He was working the door of one of the ramshackle little buildings; it wasn’t locked, but the door had begun to frost over and it took a moment to clear the ice away.

  Symon and Tarelya followed him inside, their two companions bringing up the rear. Inside, the building had been partitioned over and over to create a series of smaller rooms, presumably easier to heat than the larger building it had started life as, an old supermarket with shelves now draped in material.

  “What is this place?” Symon asked.

  “Here? This was a house once,” Piotr told him. “Still is, I guess. There was a military base near here, and this community served it. Nothing fancy, just a few stores and a bar.”

  “How did you end up here?” Tarelya asked with all the abruptness of a child.

  “When whatever it was that happened, happened,” Piotr told her, “me and Graz there were caught up in it. We’d been fishing a little to the north and we got trapped. Marla came later.”

  “Riding accident,” she explained, lifting the goggles to reveal two hazel eyes. “Horse slipped on the ice while I was crossing paths to the east, I fell and when I woke up I was on the wrong side of the barrier with no way back.”

  “You mean the Tall Wall,” Symon said, explaining it to his daughter. “What is it, do you know?”

  “Nah,” Graz said. He seemed younger than Piotr, with a ginger beard streaked with white and pale eyes that displayed a definite squint as if he was peering into the sun. “Can’t get close enough to find out. No one can. What we know we pieced together since we got here.”

  “And in answer to your question, miss,” Piotr continued, “we don’t rightly know how long we’ve been here. Feels like one day. One bastard long-long day. A hundred years of a day.”

  “You called it...End Day,” Symon recalled, “when you found us.”

  “Yeah, End Day,” Piotr agreed. “A day without end, which I figure means when it does end we won’t get another.”

  “Like purgat’ry,” Graz said. “Big ol’ limbo. You heard of those places, Symon?”

  He nodded. “The waiting rooms for Heaven and Hell. Before my wife died she said about them—”

  “Maybe she’s here,” Marla said flippantly. A moment afterward, she apologised, admitting that the comment was uncalled for.

  Piotr and Graz stood at the window, pulling back a heavy curtain. Outside, the snow was still falling. Amid it, the swarm of black shapes could be seen, mouths rushing out of nowhere like a stream, pouring toward an unseen marker across the snow less than a mile from the building. In the air above the epicenter of the swarm, the sparkles seemed to have grown more intense. Creatures flitted through the air right above the building they were in, disembodied mouths with twin sets of needlelike teeth that shone in the twilit air.

  “We’ll have to move soon,” Graz said, “if they keep coming like this.”

  “Where can we go?” Piotr asked him. “There’s nowhere left. They keep eating at the rents, making it impossible to cross the pockets of broken time.”

  Symon had stopped behind them, and he peered over their shoulders at the feasting creatures. They looked like nothing more than mouths, and only occasionally did he get the suggestion of something behind those wicked grins, a substance, a shape, a form drawn in darkness. Just what new Hell had they escaped into?

  Chapter Eleven

  In His Ink Orchard, Jak reared away from the strangely disembodied jaw as the needle-sharp teeth clacked together again, snapping for his throat. He could feel the creature that was connected to those teeth, had grasped it around the throat—or maybe belly—as it squirmed in his grip. Its unseen body felt cold against his hands, a fierce, penetrating chill that ached into his skin and down to his bones in a matter of seconds.

  This close, Jak could smell the thing’s breath, too. It smelt musty, like dust burning in the sunlight, and of things unborn. The jaws snapped again, driving Jak back against the ground. The back of his head slammed against the snow as he pulled himself away.

  Ricky brought up the knife, staring at the strange disembodied mouth that was lunging at Jak’s throat. The Deathlands was full of muties created from the radioactive fallout of the nukecaust, and growing up in a place called Monster Island Ricky had seen his fair share of abominations. But this thing, with no discernible body nor eyes to see with, well, it creeped him out. As for the stolen hunting knife in his hand, Ricky was suddenly reminded of the words of wisdom J.B. had imparted just a few hours before—about bringing a knife to a blaster-fight.

  In the fraction of a second it took to acknowledge them, Ricky had already dismissed his fears, leaping at the eerie mouth and thrusting the tip of his blade at it. He plunged the blade into the only part of the creature that he could see, driving it between the front teeth and pushing with all his strength.

  Still clasped in Jak’s hands, the mouth creature pulled away from him, the jaws snapping together as they tried to dislodge Ricky’s blade. Jak used the thing’s own momentum to toss it to one side and it went flying over Ricky’s shoulder as he let go of the knife. The friends watched as the disembodied mouth went spinning through the air before slamming against the soil with a great whumph, spitting the knife free.

  Ricky moved swiftly, galloping across the ground and snatching up his knife as the strange creature writhed in pain. They could both see it now, the full figure of the thing. It slithered against the snow, kicking up an S shape in the frosty white carpet as it twisted back and forth. Its body was snakelike but fatter, more like an overgrown grub. Four tiny eyes came into view above the vicious teeth, as black as a widow’s cape, watery like the eyes of a spider. The lower set of eyes touched the top lip of the creature where those hideous jaws snapped, and the lips themselves were colored a deathly gray, like a dead thing. Between the wide-set eyes, two thick nostrils lay flat to the curving face, and behind that the body protruded in its ghastly, wriggling totality. The body was segmented like an insect’s, with thick rings of fat protruding between each armored plate. It had been those armored plates that Jak had grasped when he had tried to hold back the creature, their cold alienness sending goose bumps up and down his arms.

  “What the hell is that?” Ricky asked, staring at the creature but not daring to step any closer.

  Carefully, Jak reached for his blaster, not taking his eyes from the writhing wormlike thing. “Not know,” he admitted. “Hungry grub.”

  “Yeah,” Ricky agreed, horrified, “but if that’s the grub what do you think the adult looks like?”

  Holding the Colt Anaconda before him, Jak held the creature in the blaster’s sights for a moment before easing pressure off the trigger. “Got your blade?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s move. Not want find out what mamma grub does when pissed.”

  With his eyes fixed on the writhing creature, Ricky walked backward, slowly backing away from the hideous, hungry thing. “Where are we going, Jak?” he asked. “We should turn back, right? Help J.B. and the others.”

  Jak looked behind them, the way that they had come. Cold mist clung to the ground like a blanket, masking the path he and Ricky had taken. Finding their way back wouldn’t be easy.

  * * *

  “FUCK, BUT THE BARON is a lucky bastard,” Bascha muttered as he watched the two women plod up to the door he was guarding. Stripped naked, both women shivered as they walked before the armed sec men who had dragged them from the cell. Stripped and washed, they were being delivered to the baron’s quarters deep in the heart of the ice ville.

&
nbsp; “Sure is,” Bascha’s partner, the occasionally loudmouthed Serb, agreed. “Mercy, Bascha. What I wouldn’t do to get fresh flesh like that delivered to my dorm.”

  “Yeah, but only the baron of the ville gets to do that,” Bascha said. And man was the baron a lucky bastard. He watched as the doors to the baron’s quarters pulled back, admitting entry to the two gaudy sluts. Neither of them could have been much over twenty, Bascha reckoned—in fact he knew one of them from just a few days before, when he had jabbed the tip of his knife into the back of her neck while they had been engaged in foreplay. Kirima? Was that her name?

  Baron Kenojuak’s quarters were located in a tower at the highest area of the ville, part of the old structures that had once been a tiny town before the nukecaust. Now all that remained were the ice-coated interior walls, their outsides blasted away by earthshakers, leaving them little more than ruins that the locals had adapted for their use. The aged internal doors and serving hatches of the tower had been given a second life as windows, staring down to the courtyard that served as the “theater of spectacle” on those days it was used.

  Bascha was a sec man, and this day he and Serb had pulled shift guarding the baron. Serb had a big mouth on him, but Bascha kind of liked him—even if he did get them into trouble sometimes because he didn’t know when to shut up.

  Bascha watched as the two women were marched naked into the baron’s quarters. The one on the left had enjoyed his company a few days ago. He had got off on that, seeing the helpless woman squirm while he pushed his short blade against the tendons of her neck, her lithe body covered in a sheen of sweat. The other one was a petite blonde called Narja, pretty and wide-eyed, and Bascha figured he would have her maybe once the baron was done.

  The doors to the baron’s quarters peeled back, and both women trembled with cold as they strode inside, two more sec men following behind them with blasters poised should either of them try anything. Bascha’s eyes roved over the svelte forms of both women, thinking about how much better they would look if they wore something different. That was an obsession with him, women’s clothes.

  The doors closed behind the women, leaving Bascha with his thoughts of what the women should wear.

  Inside, the baron’s quarters were warm, flickering gas and oil lamps hanging at regular intervals around the vast entry room where he met his nightly brides. Baron Kenojuak was thirty years old and a handsome man, ruggedly so with a square jaw and dark hair slicked back from his forehead with oil. He wore a simple robe that left his chest bare and his dark eyes played delightedly over the forms of his visitors. They stood before him, Narja more timid that Kirima, this being her first time in the baron’s company. He was working an apple in his hands, stripping the peel off using a short-bladed knife, working the juicy flesh around in his mouth.

  Baron Kenojuak’s eyes never left the women as he addressed the two sec men who had escorted them. “You may leave,” he commanded.

  The sec men turned and left without a word, leaving their baron with his women.

  They had been brought here naked for two reasons—to ensure they were not armed and to hasten the process should the baron desire them immediately. He looked them over in delight, instructed the younger one to come to his side. Narja looked at Kirima for reassurance.

  “It’s okay,” the older woman whispered. She had seen the baron hurt girls before, and angering him was a sure way of making that occur.

  “Come, sit,” Kenojuak instructed again.

  Narja joined him, watching as he continued to peel the apple with the blade.

  “Are you hungry?” Kenojuak asked.

  Narja nodded. She was afraid to speak.

  “Do my people not feed you?” Kenojuak asked, his eyes flicking to the fruit in his hands, then up to the girl. From the corner of the room, Kirima watched fearfully, hoping that the new girl would remember to say the right thing and not anger the baron.

  “They f-feed us,” Narja stammered. “But it’s not nice food. Sometimes I don’t—”

  “Don’t what?” Kenojuak snapped, bringing his face close to the girl’s. She shied away, terrified, but he tossed the apple aside and grabbed her by the wrist. “Don’t what?” he repeated.

  Narja looked at him fearfully while Kirima took a step forward.

  “My baron, please...” Kirima begged, but the baron silenced her with a look.

  “Fruit,” he said, his grip tight around Narja’s wrist, “can be peeled to reveal its flesh.”

  Narja watched as he brought the little paring knife closer to her, raising it close to her face.

  “Other things have flesh, too,” Kenojuak growled. “Even nasty, ungrateful little brides who believe they should be treated like princesses.”

  “Pl-please, my lord,” Narja stuttered, her eyes fixed on the shining blade.

  “With an apple,” Kenojuak continued, ignoring the girl’s pleas, “one sometimes finds a flaw, just beneath the skin.” He brought the knife down, tapping it against her nipples. Narja felt the blade touch her navel, playing across her skin. At the edge of the room, Kirima was trying to look away, but something inside her demanded she watch.

  “The only thing one can do,” Baron Kenojuak said, “other than to throw the whole fruit away, of course, is to cut around that flaw that offends and consume all that remains.”

  Narja shrieked as she felt the blade pierce her side, crying out in pain.

  Outside the baron’s door, Bascha heard the shriek and he smiled. The baron was getting the best out of these two girls. He always did.

  * * *

  MORNING CAME with all the charm of a smoker’s cough. J.B. estimated he had had maybe three hours’ sleep in total, and that had been interspersed with bouts of wakefulness as the cold of his ice cell got to him, turning his bones to frigid sticks inside his flesh and driving wedges into the cuts and bruises he had suffered at the hands of the vicious mining guards.

  He was awakened by a sec man wearing gray furs in a sort of layered series of leaves, like a topcoat and cape, his face uncovered and displaying an impressive gridwork of scars as well as an indigo tattoo down past his left eye. The Armorer had been awake the very moment that the wide door had begun moving, his catlike senses alert to the sounds of the movement. There was another noise, too, the sound of a mob, its echoes coming up from the open window overlooking the circular courtyard. J.B. sat up, bringing himself into a ready crouch as the door was drawn back.

  “You’re awake then, eh?” the sec man began, a cruel smile appearing on his face around the stub of his cigar. The smile revealed a missing canine tooth in his upper set, two more gaps in his lower front teeth.

  “Early bird chills the worm,” J.B. acknowledged and the sec man smiled wider at that before jabbing J.B. in the gut with a swift-as-hell rabbit punch. The lack of space in the cell forced J.B. to carom against the nearest wall, clutching at his gut and struggling for a few seconds to catch his breath.

  “You better hope that’s the case, prick,” the sec man told J.B. with a puff of smoke from his cigar, “’cause, brother, you got a rat’s-piss-short life ahead of you.” And then the sec man laughed, a great booming sound like a blaster. Idly, J.B. matched the timbre of the man’s laugh to the boom of a Winchester 1300 Defender in his mind’s eye.

  The sec man reached forward and pulled J.B. roughly by the arm, slinging him toward the open doorway. “You can walk?” he asked, but it seemed more like a statement of fact.

  “Yeah,” J.B. murmured, pushing at the brim of his hat where it had become crooked on his head. With his other hand, he shoved the cigarette lighter he had palmed into his shirt, pushing his fingers between the open shirt buttons and feeling the hard, cool metal press against him.

  J.B. was led at blaster-point through another set of ice tunnels. “What happened to my friends?” J.B. asked as he shuffled down an incline, his hand grasping a safety rail made of a knotted rope wedged into the ice wall.

  “They’ll have a good view, don’t
you worry,” the sour-faced sec man told him, slapping him across the back of his head with his open palm. J.B. reeled forward at the blow, stumbling down the icy slope.

  The Armorer didn’t exactly know what the sec man meant, but he could guess it was nothing good. He continued to follow where the sec man guided, trudging through ill-lit tunnels that stank of gas heaters and climbing down a series of short internal ladders until he guessed he was near the bottom level of the strange ville. After a while J.B. became conscious of the sounds of a great many voices coming from up ahead, the cheering and baying of an excited crowd.

  They turned a corner and the sec man indicated a short staircase that ran five steps down to a narrow walkway, metal glinting in the roof above it. The walkway was just three strides long and at its end J.B. could see sunlight and falling snow. People crowded either side of the walkway, raised above it behind high walls that twinkled where sunlight caught the ice crystals. The people wore heavy clothes, with dark winter tans, and most of them had the black hair of the Inuit.

  The loud cheering was emanating from beyond the open mouth of the tunnel, and J.B.’s heart sank as he heard the all-too-familiar sounds of violence, of metal striking metal, blade cutting flesh. Suddenly something came flying past the opening, hurtling at some velocity. For a moment, J.B. took that object for a ball, and he watched as it thumped against the side of the tunnel entrance with a wet splat before sinking to the floor. The rumble of the crowd’s cheers grew louder, and J.B. saw what the round thing was—it was a man’s head.

  Adjusting his glasses, J.B. walked forward, his eyes fixed on the mouth of the tunnel. One of the people sitting above the abbreviated staircase noticed J.B. walk past, reached out and knocked his hat from his head.

  “New meat!” the man shouted with a triumphant shrill.

  J.B. reached down to pick up his fedora, and when he glanced up he saw that all eyes had turned to him, watching from the high walls that overlooked the walkway. There were over a dozen people watching J.B., cursing and making obscene gestures. One man was pissing over the wall, directing the yellow stream of urine at J.B.’s head. Behind him, something clanged and J.B. turned to see what it was. A grilled metal gate had been pulled down over the far end of the tunnel, just above the top step.