Chrono Spasm

by James Axler

  “Well,” J.B. muttered, eyeing the opening to the tunnel, “guess it’s a mighty fine day for a stroll.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The tunnel opened out into a small circle, roughly twenty feet across, set amid the towering walls of the glacier. J.B. stepped out from the tunnel entrance, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun reflecting from the icy walls and ground as snow drifted from the clouds in languid flurries. Above, the sun sat low on the horizon, a gray-white orb that resembled a cataract. It had risen as much as it was ever likely to up here in the northern climes, and it gave off little heat.

  J.B. shivered, taking another step into the round, past the decapitated head of his unfortunate predecessor. Blood had pooled on the ground, but it was already freezing, a sheen of frost running across it like a custard skin.

  The Armorer stood at the edge of the circle, ignoring the jeers of the people behind and about him, snow settling on his shoulders. There was a figure standing at the other side of the circle, an imposing man, over six feet tall with the broad shoulders and impressive reach of a prizefighter. The man wore animal skin breeches, and a fur jerkin over his mighty chest that left his arms bare and his rippling muscles on display. His body was impressively tooled, the kind of body it took a lifetime’s dedication to truly achieve. The fighter’s feet were wrapped in strips of animal hide that came up past the level of the breeches; and he wore something else, too—a helmet that wrapped around his head, cinching his face into a narrow gap between protective strips. The helmet had two mighty stag horns protruding from its top like the branches of a tree, each one adding another foot and a half to the man’s already impressive height. The man held a chain saw in both hands, wielding it like a sword. Its blade was pointing toward J.B., eighteen inches of whirring death. The man smiled grimly between the cinching lines of the helmet as J.B.’s eyes met his, wrinkling the flattened, broken nose at the center of his scarred face.

  J.B. tipped a hand to his fedora, giving the man a nod, impressed that the man had access to precious fuel to run the chain saw.

  All around, people had crowded in seats at the lowest level of the round, watching the early-morning spectacle. There were seats or standing room—J.B. couldn’t be sure which—arranged behind sheer walls that stretched twelve feet high. The walls were constructed of metal and further protected by a line of metal barrels, their sloping sides glistening with frost, which guaranteed they would be near impossible to climb. To J.B.’s keen eye they looked like old oil canisters, laid down on their sides, Deathlands recycle-and-make-do once again in operation.

  Higher, above the rows of spectators, the ville itself reached upward, towering eighty feet into the air. Windows, ladders and walkways were visible along its walls, and J.B. could see more people watching from up there, transfixed by the death games below, women holding babies to their breasts as they watched. This was where both of his cells had been, he realized, looking out onto this courtyard that served as a theater of blood. This ring was the center of ville life, a stage where death was dished out on a regular basis.

  The courtyard was sealed now, its ground dotted with snow and ice that clung there in little patches like wedding confetti. Beneath the settling snow, the floor was painted with blood, dried streaks of it running the whole length of the circle, a great mass pooled at one wall. A lot of people had been killed here, J.B. realized, and a whole lot of them had wound up dying right there at one specific spot by the wall, close to where his chain-saw-wielding opponent waited.

  Behind J.B., the crowd of Russo-Inuit was baying like rabid dogs, hurling abuse at him over the chugging sound of the chain saw. J.B. tuned them out, scanning the distant section of wall where the blood had most noticeably amassed. Like the rest of this savage arena, the sheer wall behind reached twelve feet in height, its occupants sitting above it so that they could look down on the vicious action. A man sat there, with a wind-tanned face and wearing a Pschent hat atop his head, his dark hair greased back with oil. J.B. guessed the man was in his twenties or early thirties. The towering hat added another eight or nine inches to the man’s height with decorative streaks of silver and copper running through it. Got to be the baron, J.B. thought as he eyed the man. He sat on a chair with a raised back, several subservient types busying themselves about him, a woman with long dark hair kneeling on the ground before him. She clutched her sides, shivering in the cold air, her breath hanging in a bloom before her mouth.

  J.B. took all of this in in just two seconds as his eyes roved about the circular enclosure. There were several more tunnels set back like the one he had entered through, one of them with a heavy barred gate drawn across it, behind which J.B. could see three or four dogs snuffling and bearing their teeth. The beheaded body of a man was on the ground close to the baron’s throne, blood pumping like a geyser from the open neck, the seminaked body twitching where it lay. But there were no weapons, nothing that J.B. could envisage using against an opponent.

  Ahead of him, the man with the stag-horn helmet issued a howling battle cry, his chain saw moving almost of its own volition in his hands as he began to charge at the newcomer. Time seemed to slow for J.B. as he watched the hulking figure come charging at him, the chain saw cutting through the air with its angry snarl.

  Timing things to the last possible second, J.B. ducked aside, his feet skipping across the ice-strewed ground as he weaved out of the path of that lethal whirring blade. The chain saw cut empty air in a diagonal sweep, but already its horned wielder had shifted his own position, stomping a foot down to pivot to come at J.B. again. The crowd hissed and booed as J.B. scampered backward, the soles of his boots whipping rapidly across the frosty ground.

  * * *

  DOC CAME OUT of his sleep speaking, as if he had never been asleep at all. “Of course, I could not bake to save my life,” he explained randomly, as if in midconversation. “I had on one occasion been asked to bake a cake for some visitors while Emily ran some other errands before they arrived. Of course the whole thing had burned black, smelled terrible and no one dared taste the ghastly concoction.”

  Ryan shot the old man a look, ordering him to silence. He was poised along with cellmate Hurst at the open window of the cell he shared with Doc, Hurst standing on tiptoe to better see what was happening in the circular atrium below.

  “Something’s happening down there,” Ryan said as the icy wind brushed against his numb cheeks.

  “What, pray tell?” Doc asked, rubbing his face with the heel of his hand as he tried to rouse himself from sleep. He could feel the cold aching in his bones already, like a dull throb running through every muscle, evidence of the hard work he and Ryan had been forced to do the day before.

  “’Nother beheading maybe,” Hurst suggested. “Can’t be sure from up here.”

  “Another...?” Doc muttered, still playing catch-up.

  “I can hear the crowd getting excited,” Hurst said, “which means a new opponent, but it’s hard to see. Looks like some little guy in a dumb-ass hat.”

  Ryan shoved the man aside and cranked his head out the window. “Shit! That’s J.B. down there.”

  “By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed as he joined Ryan at the one-eyed man’s side, peering down into the courtyard. “Ryan, we have seen the like of this before. It looks for all the world to me like a gladiatorial contest, a popular pastime of both the Roman Empire and many a baron.”

  Ryan nodded. “Yes, and J.B.’s up as the next challenger,” he said, “whether he likes it or not.”

  “In Roman times,” Doc mused, “a victorious gladiator was granted his freedom once he had served in a sufficient number of contests.”

  Ryan turned to the old man with a fearsome expression on his scarred face. “I suspect that won’t be happening here. I can’t quite see but I’m sure J.B.’s opponent is armed with something.”

  Beside them, Hurst nodded, a broad grin on his dirty face. “Champ’s in session.” He chuckled. “Someone’s going to taste the wrong
end of his chain saw.”

  “Well, now, that could pose a problem,” Doc admitted as he reached for his swordstick. He eyed Ryan with grave seriousness. “Are you thinking mayhap we should go down and assist our colleague?”

  “You read my mind,” Ryan told Doc with a firm nod.

  The courtyard was two stories down from their cell, but the window was too narrow to pass through. Ryan turned to the cell door and drew a deep breath. “Get behind me, Doc,” he said as he booted it with a powerful kick. Under the force Ryan struck it with, the door shuddered, but it still held.

  From the rear of the cell, Hurst was back at the window, trying to see what was happening in the courtyard. But he didn’t know where to look—the contest outside was just starting to heat up, but what his cellmate was doing was just as entertaining. “So long as I i’nt on the receiving end,” he muttered, chuckling softly to himself.

  Like an out-of-control engine, Ryan struck the door again, using both hands to lever it away. Outside, beyond the door itself, he could hear someone calling excitedly, ordering him to stop in a language he didn’t know. Ryan ignored the order, cinching his shoulder up against the door and pushing again. His booted feet scraped against the icy floor, struggling to find purchase.

  “Come on, damn you,” Ryan cursed between gritted teeth. “Move.”

  The door shuddered an inch on its treads, revealing just the tiniest of gaps between the lintel and the heavy wood of the door itself.

  * * *

  “SOMETHING’S COMING,” Krysty said. She was sitting cross-legged on the silk-draped floor of the cell, her body so still that she had slipped into a meditative trance.

  Mildred turned from the window at the sound of Krysty’s voice. She had been watching the proceedings in the courtyard, but the view was so obscured that she hadn’t yet seen who the chain-saw-wielding madman’s opponent was. As she turned, she caught her first glimpse of J.B. and did a double take. “What’s coming, Krysty?” she asked, distracted by the sliver of battle that flickered across the narrow slit of window.

  “Men,” Krysty said. “Angry men. They wear their rage like a shirt.”

  “That’s J.B. out there,” Mildred cried, indicating the window. “Looks like he’s about to get massacred.”

  Krysty opened her eyes and met Mildred’s worried gaze. “The time’s now,” she said. “Get ready.”

  Ignoring the other women who crowded in the gas-heated cell, Krysty and Mildred took up positions on either side of the heavy, rollback door. Mildred reached into her bag of meager medical supplies.

  Nyarla watched them. “What are you planning on doing?” she asked.

  “What I always do,” Mildred told her, pulling a scalpel from the hidden pocket of her pants. “Treat the sick.”

  As she spoke, the door began to pull back.

  * * *

  BARON KENOJUAK looked at the little man in the battered brown hat who stood in the arena and he sighed. Compared to the champion, the man looked positively dwarfish, and his little dance-step maneuvers were already becoming tiresome. Surely his men had only chosen this bespectacled idiot because there wasn’t enough meat on him to eat. It was ridiculous. Chewing on a tough hunk of meat, Kenojuak spit it in the woman’s face where she kneeled before him. He ejected the flavorless hunk with such violence that she jumped back before wiping the detritus from her cheek. The baron snapped his fingers and pointed her down. She was blocking his view. Kirima settled back down and began eating the half-chewed morsel, her flesh raw with the cold.

  * * *

  IN THE ARENA, J.B. dodged another attack from his opponent. The chain saw was heavy and it slowed the man. Maybe that could give J.B. some advantage here, he realized. As the blade came whirring past six inches from his outstretched left arm, J.B. wondered if he would have time to press any advantage before he ended his life carved up worse than a turkey at a drunken eat-off.

  * * *

  AS THE CROWD cheered, Baron Kenojuak turned away from the action, tearing another hunk of charcoaled meat from the spit roast. The meat on the spit was the sharpshooter who had tried to shoot Jak and Ricky two days before. Food was precious out here in the frozen wastes—nothing was wasted, not even colleagues. With the increasing loss of land to the north thanks to the energy fluctuations there at the spot known variously as the edge of the world and His Ink Orchard, now more than ever it was time to conserve and recycle what limited resources they did have.

  The little man in the arena skipped backward, a grim smile plucking at the corners of his mouth. He didn’t realize—as a stranger to the ville, how could he?—that the champion was shepherding him toward this spot, the imaginary altar where sacrifices were made to the baron and the gods of the ice. It was so obvious that it was becoming boring; the champion was simply too proficient.

  Languidly, the baron raised one hand and snapped his fingers. “Cut his head off,” he drawled between a mouthful of hot flesh. “Let’s make something of this.”

  * * *

  THE TUNNEL WAS LIT by gas lanterns, and they stank to high heaven in the enclosed space, yet they cast little illumination, too widely spaced to adequately light the area. As such, it took a moment for the two sec men to realize what was happening, that one of the prisoners had actually managed to shove their cell door back an inch and a half on its solid treads.

  “Back away from the door, prisoner,” one of the sec men hollered, pulling the Smith & Wesson Model 60 from his armpit holster and waving it at the gap.

  Inside the cell, Ryan turned to Doc and gave him a nod. Doc had already snapped open his swordstick to reveal the blade within. In a flash of tempered steel, he whipped the thin blade through the narrow gap that Ryan had created, rapping it across the knuckles of the sec man. With a cry of surprise as much as pain, the sec man dropped his blaster to the ground and watched in horror as the weapon skidded toward the open cell. Ryan’s hand snapped out in an instant, snatching the blaster and pulling it back through the tight gap.

  The sec man’s partner stared at the gap, then at him with increasing annoyance. “Buffoon! What did you just do?”

  Before the first man could reply, Ryan sent a single bullet through his forehead from his position flat against the large wooden door. Behind Ryan, Doc was working his sharp sword across the slight gap that had been created between the door and outside. He ran the blade along the top edge, left and right, until he snagged the rope that operated the cantilever that, in turn, worked the door.

  As the first sec man dropped to the ground, a perfect red circle in the center of his forehead, the cell door swung back and Ryan and Doc emerged. The remaining sec man turned, drawing his holstered blaster. Ryan took a pace forward and shot the man in the head, an explosion of blood and brains bursting across the back wall in a terrible instant.

  Ryan leaned down and snatched up the second man’s blaster—a 9-shot Stechkin pistol—from his dead hand, passing it back to Doc. “Keep close,” Ryan instructed. Already, they could hear the shouts of other sec men and locals responding to the sounds of blasterfire.

  Automatically Doc checked the new weapon, slipping off the safety. The blaster was finished in matte black and fitted with a suppressor that stuck out from it like a snout, adding considerably to the eight-and-three-quarter-inch barrel. Blaster in one hand and swordstick in the other, Doc followed Ryan through the narrow, icy tunnels as more figures began to emerge into the light.

  * * *

  KRYSTY’S GUESS WAS RIGHT on the button. The door rolled back to reveal two men with long dark hair and squashed, ugly features on their weather-beaten faces. Even this early in the day, the two men stank of rotgut and had the leer of the oversexed. They were men used to taking whatever they wanted, and the captive women had suffered their depredations before.

  “Bascha,” one of the women gasped.

  Bascha—a dim-witted slob with more interest in women’s shoes than in their intellect—laughed, rubbing at his crotch with one meat-stained hand. “Get me s
ome livin’ bird,” he growled around the charred drumstick of a gull, “to go with the dead one.”

  Beside him, Bascha’s partner, a similarly repellent piece of human detritus called Serb, laughed with all the comprehension of a rotten tree. “Bird,” he said with a throaty chuckle.

  They had been celebrating during the gladiatorial tournament, their shift over, and right now all they wanted was easy sex, the kind that confirmed their imagined superiority. In their ardor, neither man had noticed Krysty and Mildred standing as they were flush to the wall. And neither man realized what was happening when Krysty and Mildred launched their attack.

  Mildred ducked low and swept one leg out to trip Serb, the shorter of the two, hooking his feet out from under him. He slapped against the floor like a discarded rag. He was fast, though...the alcohol burning in him and fuelling that bubbling rage he always had buzzing through his head. He turned, flipping Mildred off his back as she struggled to hold him down.

  Beside her, Krysty booted Bascha in the groin with such force that he felt something rupture. He sagged to the floor on his knees, the whites of his eyes turning pink. Krysty kicked him again, driving the heel of her cowboy boot into his jaw. Bascha crumpled backward, lolling out the open door of the cell, his flabby arms sprawled out at his sides. Krysty stood over him, a steely look in her eye.

  “Anything to say for yourself, rapist?” she demanded.

  Bascha tried to focus his eyes on the voluptuous redhead, such was the agony he was feeling from her attack. All he could think was how nice her boots looked with their silver falcon design on each side.

  Krysty drove her heel into the man’s throat in a savage strike, held it there and pushed as he hacked against the pain.