Strontium Swamp

by James Axler

  They moved through the glass-inset doors and toward the room where the sec men had left the costumes, checking each room as they passed. They weren’t the only ones on this floor, but those working in the other rooms were too engrossed in their tasks to notice them pass, and too sure of their own security to suspect intruders.

  The companions made it with ease to the room where the costumes were housed, and found that the room was empty. J.B. kept watch while Ryan inspected the costumes. It might be a tight fit for himself and Doc—who was considerably taller than the average ville dweller—to get into the costumes, but the others should be able to manage easily.

  “Hey, there are six of these and only five of us,” Mildred said. “We’re going to have to take one of them with us.”

  “Could be a good thing,” Ryan replied. “We won’t know what to do, so one of them could be a useful guide, ’specially if they know they’re chilled meat for one wrong move.”

  They settled back to wait for the occupants of the costumes to enter. As they waited, they could feel the pitch and hum of activity and tension build outside in the square. Somewhere in this building, they knew that Jak and Marissa could hear it, too.

  J.B. kept watch on the corridor, making sure that although he could note all the comings and goings, he himself wasn’t noticed. It seemed as though these stupes were leaving it until the last moment until they dressed for the ritual, and he was starting to get edgy. So it was with a palpable sense of relief that he saw six people enter the corridor through a set of double doors at the far end. They were talking among themselves, and an armed sec man trailed behind them. They, too, were armed, but their blasters were holstered, which meant they could be taken by surprise. The Armorer relayed this to the others.

  Ryan nodded, and quickly climbed onto a table to take out one of the bulbs illuminating the room. It was small, lit by two sockets, and Krysty followed his lead, rapidly unscrewing the other and blowing on her burning fingers. To knock the bulbs out would cause too much noise, and stealth was their greatest ally.

  “Shit, Frank, the fucking lights are out again,” said the woman in lead of the party as she entered the room and flicked the switch. “Power’s on, as well. Don’t maintenance do anything around here?”

  “All right, all right, I’ll see to it,” the sec man replied wearily, turning to move away from the threshold of the room.

  This was the biggest risk. He was outside in the corridor, and anyone looking would have seen Ryan’s scarf snake out around his neck, lock with the weighted ends and pull him back. The one-eyed man kicked the door closed as the sec man fell back into the room, and all was plunged into darkness.

  Ryan drew the panga from his thigh and wasted no time in chilling the sec man with one swift stroke. “Krysty, light,” he said hoarsely. The Titian-haired woman screwed back the bulb in its socket, and the room was once more illuminated. The stunned ville dwellers took in the four companions with blasters trained on them, and the fifth, who was standing over the chilled corpse of the sec man, Frank. They knew that they had no chance of reaching their own weapons.

  “Okay, we can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” Ryan said simply. “Easy way is that you let us knock you out and leave you for later while we take your place. Hard way is we chill you all like Frank, here.”

  The woman who had been berating Frank as she’d entered the room went for her blaster. “Dr. Jean’d chill us all anyway,” she muttered, a sentence she hardly had a chance to finish as J.B.’s Tekna streaked through the air and took her in the side of the neck. The force knocked her sideways, the blade penetrating skin, tendon and her carotid. The shock rendered her immobile as she began to drown in her own blood, which flowed thick and free down her throat and into her lungs and stomach.

  “Who wants to be next?” Ryan asked. The remaining four backed off, hands clear of blasters. “Rather take a chance, eh? You,” he added, pointing with the blood-dripping tip of the panga at the smallest of the group, “you’re going to help us. The rest of you…” He nodded to the companions, and without warning they launched into four of the group of five. It was a swift, brutal assault using hand-to-hand skills. Before the group had a chance to respond, three of them were unconscious.

  J.B. took the Tekna from the throat of the woman he had chilled and sheathed it before joining the others in binding and gagging the three they had disabled. Ryan sheathed his panga and took the remaining ville dweller by the arm.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Roisin,” she said with a stammer and the hint of a cleft palate. Her eyes were wide with fear.

  “Okay. You do this right, and you’ll be okay. You try to fuck with us and you’ll be joining them,” he said, indicating the two corpses. “Is that clear?”

  She nodded frantically, too frightened to trust her own voice.

  “Good, then let’s get started,” he said, suddenly brisk and businesslike.

  “OH DEAR. I DO HOPE YOU haven’t gone and bought the farm before I’ve had a chance to give you my message to the gods. That would be very inconvenient, to say the least… Wake up, scum!”

  The order was delivered in a harsher, louder tone, and accompanied by a backhand slap that made the teeth in Jak’s jaw feel like they had been loosened. The albino opened his eyes and spoke lazily through a mouth filling with blood. His voice was mushy.

  “You made point.”

  Dr. Jean stepped back and threw back his head, roaring with laughter. Both Jak and Marissa were in a state where nothing much registered: no pain, no sound, no sense of danger. A part of Jak, deep inside, was screaming at him that this was wrong, but there was nothing he could do to break out beyond the torpor. Shortly after Dr. Jean had spoken to them before, the scar-faced sec man had come back into the room and injected them with something that had given an immediate rush. Mebbe it was because it was straight into the bloodstream, or mebbe it was because Jean’s old tech labs had developed a more pure strain than had been known before, but this jolt had hit them straight between the eyes.

  Jak had felt himself slump on the frame, knowing that the pull on his shoulders would strain his muscles, but not caring: he couldn’t be bothered to lift himself up, and anyway his joints weren’t giving him any grief. And if they did at some unspecified future point? Why the hell should he care about that?

  The drug had washed any semblance of care from his mind, had numbed any pain that he might feel, and had left him feeling as if he were floating on a cloud. That part of his brain that was still the ever-alert hunter, sniffing out danger, told him that this was a dangerous way to feel. Some jolt induced speedy, hyperactivity, some gave you visions, some made you feel as though nothing mattered and just lie down and drift. It depended on how it was cut and how it was made. But this was something else entirely. Jak knew that the point was to make Marissa and himself completely subservient, to make them pliable and easy meat for Dr. Jean to sacrifice. And it was working well. He felt on one level as though he hadn’t a care in the world, and that he could just stand there forever.

  He had meant to look over at Marissa to see how she was doing, but somehow he hadn’t been able to motivate himself into doing this, and before he knew what had happened he had drifted into a dreamless sleep, broken only by the soft, sibilant voice of the baron and the sharp blow of his hand.

  Now Jak moved his head so that he could see Marissa off to the side. Her head was lolling uselessly, shaking slightly as she tried to clear it. Her head turned and her eyes met his. He hoped that his own eyes didn’t look as wide and clouded as hers. Wherever she was, he doubted that it was in this room.

  “Good, I’m so glad that you’ve awakened fully. I must admit, that was quite a powerful jolt—if you’ll pardon my little joke—that I had Diamond administer to you. Necessary, as you could be a threat. You think I don’t remember you, Jak Lauren? I was with Tourment when it all fucked up, I saw what you did to him with the help of those other bastards. Fortunately, they seem to have dese
rted you—or perhaps you parted company with them some time back. Who knows—and frankly, who cares? I know I don’t, not now.”

  The baron was dressed in a costume covered with rags and feathers that had been dyed a variety of bright colors. Bones—some obviously chicken others just as obviously human—hung from the costume. He had a top hat perched on his head with a feather plume at the crown, and ribbons tied around. His face was painted a ghostly white, his cheekbones etched out in charcoal. It made his eyes seem larger than normal, the whites of them yellowed and shot with red veins. The pupils were like pinpricks.

  He loomed up in front of Jak so that the albino could smell the crude spirit on his breath.

  “You’ve done me a big favor, really. You’ve offered yourself up to me and taken away the threat of the swamp scum. Played right into my hands—” he clapped them loudly in front of Jak’s face and laughed wildly “—and saved me the effort of clearing out the swamp for myself. And now you’ve come to me to be my messengers to the gods.”

  “You really believe that stupe shit?” Jak asked, aware of how mush-mouthed he sounded, how strung-out and distant the jolt had made him.

  “An interesting point, my little man,” Dr. Jean mused, waving a finger in Jak’s face. Despite himself, the albino found he was following the finger as it moved, and he vaguely realized the suggestibility that had been fed to him by the drug in his system. Jean continued. “You know, at first I thought it was crap myself, just something I could use to control people, mold them to what I wanted. But the strange thing is that after a while I began to see that there were gods out there, and that somehow they were shaping my destiny. Driving me on so that I can move beyond the pest-ridden swamp and to the lands beyond, where I can accrue greater riches, and greater power. Where I can fulfil my destiny.”

  “Bullshit—just jolt talk,” Jak said.

  Dr. Jean brought his hand around in a swing, openpalmed as before. The hefty flesh of his palm slapped Jak on the side of the head, making him spin, opening more cuts in his cheek from his jarred teeth.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Dr. Jean mused mildly, in contrast to his action. “But does it matter, really? If you want something to be so much, then you make it so. Enough—time to go on with the show.”

  Jak spit out a glob of blood and phlegm. It was meant to be a last defiant gesture at the baron as he limped away, but the albino was so weak that it landed almost at his feet, splattering on the concrete.

  Dr. Jean hadn’t noticed. He was already at the door, beckoning the sec men waiting outside and ordering them to take Jak and Marissa down from the racks and carry them out to the shrine in front of the building.

  As his bonds were released and he flopped off the frame of the rack, Jak tried to move. Not too much. He knew he couldn’t fight back right here and now, but he wanted to try to flex some muscles, see what kind of response he got from his drugged limbs. There was no response. No matter how much he tried to use his muscles, they failed to be anything other than jelly.

  He had no choice. He had to let the sec men carry him. Even if he had been offered the chance to go on foot, he could barely have crawled or shuffled his way out of the room. He could see that they were doing the same with Marissa.

  As he let himself be carried through the building, Jak got little more than a series of impressions. The corridors were lit like the redoubts, and the air hummed with the same kind of predark tech that he had witnessed before. There were people moving through the corridors who paid no attention to himself or Marissa, as though this was always happening; he did notice, however, that they were deferential to the baron, who followed a few steps behind.

  They left the corridors and began to descend a staircase, turning right to come out into an airy lobby with a high ceiling. This had to be the front of the old building, before the steps that had been turned into the shrine facing the square. Jak had seen old buildings designed in this style before, and knew they would soon emerge into the night air.

  But it was more than that idle impression. It was something he could feel, a palpable change in the atmosphere as they approached the exit onto the shrine. The chanting had grown louder, and seemed to carry with it a note of humming, vibrant excitement, an electricity that made the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly stand to attention, and made his spine buzz. It started to get adrenaline pumping as he rode the wave of energy coming off the crowd. Mebbe, just mebbe… He tried to flex his muscles, get some life flowing back into them. There was some response, but not enough to be of any use to him. Not yet.

  As they left the lobby of the old building, he noticed that Dr. Jean held back, turning and muttering something to one of his sec men. Jak tried to catch it, but it was lost in the exultant roar that broke from the crowd as the sec men carried Marissa and himself out onto the platform of the shrine. It was a shrill, animal cry that oozed bloodlust and expectancy.

  All else was lost in this consuming atmosphere of lust and hate. He felt himself be lifted onto a stone slab that was decorated with feathers and stones. He could feel the stones press into his back, causing him discomfort, but couldn’t control his own muscles well enough as of yet to move from them. He looked up at the night sky beyond the electric lighting, which was augmented by blazing torches. The naked flames cast warmth into the cold air, streams of which flowed around the slab and contrasted with the occasional bursts of heat from the torches and from the massed ranks of humanity that stood in front of him.

  Jak tried to look across at Marissa. Her slab was to his right, some two yards away, and he could just about see her lying there, inert. The angle was too acute for him to see any more.

  The cheers and exultant cries suddenly gained volume, melding together into one mass chant, a voice of the crowd that was so strong and vibrant that it was almost a physical force, hitting Jak in the stomach.

  They were chanting Dr. Jean’s name.

  The baron had walked out onto the shrine, his arms held aloft in recognition of his people.

  “WHERE ARE THOSE STUPES?” Dr. Jean had asked Diamond, keeping back as his sacrificial victims were taken out onto the steps of the old courthouse.

  Diamond furrowed his scarred brow. “Should be down by now, sir,” he said. “I’ll check ’em out. It’s not like they usually keeping you waiting.”

  “I should hope not. They know what the consequences are,” Dr. Jean said with a mildness that belied his meaning. “Ah, here they are,” he added as another of the doors onto the old lobby opened and six people in costume entered. Five of them were already masked, but the woman in lead had her mask under her arm.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled, “costumes late in arriving.” She was hesitant, sounded terrified. Dr. Jean took this to be a sign that they were worried about their slack performance. After all, they were all masked already.

  “These things happen. I will look into it later,” the baron said magnanimously, little realizing that her fear was caused by Ryan’s SiG-Sauer, trained on the small of her back and concealed in the long sleeve of the costume. “Now get ready, like the others,” he urged, almost avuncular, “we have a ceremony to conduct.”

  He turned and strode out onto the platform, where the sec men were tying down Jak and Marissa. The people cheered at his arrival, and began to chant his name as the sec men finished their task and pulled back into the old lobby.

  Watching the crowd and also their backs, the companions found that their skin began to crawl and prickle with sweat that dripped down their backbones. There was a sense of power and menace in the air that was solid, and was almost like another presence up there on the platform with them.

  Dr. Jean began to chant in a high, keening voice, his tone breaking on the highest notes as he tried to reach them. He held his arms aloft and then gestured at the two prone sacrificial victims with a sweep of his arms. He broke into a garbled chant that was in Cajun French. It was difficult for the companions to understand, as none of them had a firm grasp of the patois, but to Jak i
t became clear. As he lay there, he could hear Dr. Jean call on the gods to accept these messengers and the hopes of the people that they conveyed on their journey. He called on the gods to help him and the people in their search for a better land and a greater life. He began to sing again, setting up a call and response chant that was taken up by the crowd below, the sound swelling into a mighty roar as the people joined with him.

  But it was more than that. Up on the platform of the shrine, and outside of the conditioning that Dr. Jean had placed on his people, it was obvious to see how his effects were achieved. Under the chanting of the crowd, a low humming sound was barely audible. It was unsettling and disturbing to the companions. But more than that, because they were free of the years of hypnosis and drugs, and because they had experienced similar phenomena before, they were able to identify the sound as something emanating from the vid screens around the square.

  Ryan, Krysty and J.B. didn’t know quite how it worked, only that it did. But Mildred and Doc, for differing reasons, knew exactly what was going on. The sound was a trigger to impulses that the old tech had planted in the people of the walled ville over a period of years, augmented by the jolt that they were fed. Even now, they could see people all across the crowd snorting powder. Those who didn’t have their own were helping themselves from bowls of the drug the sec men were carrying.

  All of this was designed to whip the crowd into the fervor and bloodlust frenzy for the ceremony, to spur them on to work harder for the baron and to help him extend his sphere of influence beyond the bayou.

  So now they were five, standing on the platform in disguise, with an armed and frenzied crowd before them and a sec force behind them, hoping to save Jak and Marissa and somehow spirit them out of the square.

  Behind their masks, they exchanged glances. Whatever else this was going to be, easy wasn’t the word any of them would choose to describe it.

  The only member of the ville who didn’t seem to be affected in any way by the events taking place was the woman who had led them onto the platform. She had gestured to them to take their places—three at each slab—as they would if they were the genuine sacrificial priests. Any influence the hypnosis or drugs of the past may have had on her, had been temporarily wiped clean by the rush of her own fear.