Seedling

by James Axler

  Bluff hiccuped and took another swig of the hal­lucinogenic liquor. "Course not. Said I didn't see them tonight, didn't I?"

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  RYAN PUSHED BLUFF backward with a hard, jabbing blow, the flat of his hand against the man's narrow chest. The little figure stumbled into the cellar, arms waving for balance, the bottle falling and splintering on the cold flagstones.

  "Hey…"

  The murderous rage totally possessed Ryan, blind­ing him to everything else. If anyone had come be­tween him and his victim, he would have struck them down without a nanosecond's consideration.

  Anyone.

  He followed Bluff into the arched warmth and se­curity of the basement, moving instinctively on the balls of his feet, light and ready. His blaster was unholstered, the panga unsheathed.

  "Hey, listen, Captain!" The little man was hunched, hands up over his face, seeing a marble-eyed nemesis advancing toward him through the half-light. "Why are…?"

  Ryan spoke only once, a single, ice-cold word. "Betrayer."

  "You don't-"

  One blow was all that it took. Ryan clenched his fist, leaving the first joints of the index and middle fingers protruding, giving a sharpening thrust to the attack. He drew back his arm a few inches, then jabbed out, exhaling as he did so. He didn't aim at Bluff's head, directing the punch instead at the solar plexus up under the rib cage, tearing into the soft, unprotected area of the old man's stomach. Though Bluff was frail and thin, Ryan's blow buried his fist up to the wrist. He even felt the jar of the vertebrae.

  The one-eyed man stepped back quickly, face im­passive, watching as the old man commenced dying. He doubled forward, head dropping almost to his waist. Then his knees gave, and he collapsed slowly onto the floor. His mouth dropped open, revealing a half-dozen broken, stained teeth. Breath burst out in a sour explosion, rancid and fouled with bile. The joltsky he'd just drunk sprayed out, splattering nois­ily on the cold stones.

  Bluff's hands folded and clutched his guts, as though he were trying to hold himself together. His eyes protruded from sockets of bruised bone, as if someone were pressing them out from within the skull.

  "Jesus," Mildred said quietly.

  The nervous damage by the ferocious punch caused vagal inhibition, literally stopping the heart and lungs from functioning. A low, unearthly moaning came from the old man's gaping jaws, loud enough to wake up Doc.

  He sat up, seeing Bluff down and done. "What the deuce are… ? Are we under attack?"

  The keening ceased, and the only sound, apart from the crackling of the wood on the fire, was the scrabbling of Bluff's shoes. Then the lines finally went down and he was still.

  Doc was on his feet, staring at Ryan. "I've known you long enough, my friend, to have trust in your ac­tions. But was it necessary to butcher this poor, help­less man?"

  "He was a traitor, Doc. Betrayed people to the scalies. Gave them up for drink and his own misera­ble life. He gave them my son, Doc."

  From the corner J.B. spoke, surprising them all. "And the bastard had it coming, Doc. If I felt a little better, I'd have up and chilled him."

  Doc nodded. "I see. I did mention that I thought you would have had a cogent reason. And, by the three Kennedys, there can be few reasons more co­gent than that."

  Ryan stooped over the shrunken corpse, wrinkling his nose at the stench where Bluff had fouled himself in his passing. He locked his fingers into the loose skin at the back of the old man's neck and dragged him across the cellar, up the stairs and out into the open, where he heaved the body into the gutter. "More rotting meat for the gators," he said.

  "SHOULD HAVE WOKEN ME UP, Ryan. I could stand my turn."

  J.B. was very angry. He was sitting up, with the re­mains of a gray blanket around his shoulders. He wasn't wearing his glasses, and there were spots of hectic color on his pale cheekbones. His voice was high and strained. The insect bite was very pro­nounced on the side of his face, pulling at the edge of his mouth.

  "Thought you needed a rest. Enough of us to take care of it."

  "Not the point, Ryan, you bastard. Cheat me like that again, and you'll wake up with a big red mouth carved across your fucking throat."

  "Hey, now you…" Ryan stopped as he caught the warning glare from Mildred.

  "Yeah, what, you stupe prick?"

  "Leave it lie, J.B. Just leave it."

  "Time I can't stand my watch is the time we part company, Cawdor."

  Ryan turned away, seeing the concern on the faces of Doc and Krysty.

  "Don't show me your back, Cawdor!"

  Ryan froze at the unmistakable sound of a ham­mer clicking back over a loaded chamber. Very, very slowly he looked over his shoulder at the Armorer, who was holding his Steyr AUG in both hands, pointing it toward him.

  "I said you wasn't to… What did I say, Mildred? You heard me."

  "You said you were tired, John."

  "Tired."

  "Said you had a headache. Throat felt hot and dry. Sort of sweating and icy all at the same time. You re­member?"

  He scratched his nose with the barrel of the pistol. His hands were shaking, knuckles white. Ryan had a dreadful, momentary vision of him squeezing the trigger and blowing away his face. But J.B. eventually laid the blaster down on the blanket, sighing.

  "That's the way I feel. Why's that? Think I got the mutie flu, Mildred?"

  "Could be, John. But it might be some kind of infection introduced by the insect bite. If I had some antibiotic, I'd have you well and up in no time at all."

  "Lie down, J.B.," Krysty directed, stooping over him, her cascading torrent of blazing hair seeming to tumble and fold itself around the sick man. She put her hand on his forehead, rubbing gently with the tips of her fingers. "Lie back and sleep. Feel better soon, after a sleep."

  The Armorer stretched out his slim body and lay on the floor, tugging the blankets around himself. Doc moved to help him, arranging the covers with careful, solicitous hands.

  J.B.'s eyes closed, and he was instantly asleep. Ryan beckoned to the others to join him near the entrance to the cellar, where J.B. wouldn't be able to overhear them, even if he woke up. "Getting worse fast."

  Doc looked at Mildred. "The medical authority in our little group is entirely vested in you, ma'am. What are your thoughts about our poor ailing companion?"

  "Don't know. Not a virus. Something triggered by that damn insect that stung him."

  "How long before he gets better?"

  Mildred hesitated before answering Ryan's question. "Not honestly sure."

  "Day? Two days? Longer?"

  "I told you, Ryan. I don't know."

  Krysty read the words, unspoken, from the worried black woman. "How bad might it be?"

  "Might be as bad as it could be. I don't know! But I don't have any drugs at all."

  "Dred said something about a trader somewhere in the ville." Ryan closed his eye as he concentrated. "Harry… Stanton. Yeah. King of the Underworld, Retha called him. Said he had everything. Might have drugs."

  "It's serious, Ryan. John's strong. Tougher than any man I ever met. But there's diseases in Deathlands that come at you, and there's no…what's called an immune system to deal with them. If we're lucky, he'll fight it himself and be better in maybe thirty-six hours."

  "If we're not lucky?"

  Mildred shook her head. "Can't tell you that."

  Ryan simply didn't believe her. "J.B. seems better this morning. Bitching temper. Doesn't look to me like someone ready for his six feet of dirt."

  Krysty spoke. "I hate to say this, lover, but I sort of feel what Mildred's saying. J.B.'s burning up."

  Doc coughed. "Might I suggest that you, friend Cawdor, and I should go out and about these teem­ing highways? Perhaps to seek this trader and his world of Hades and obtain drugs to help poor John Barrymore? And also cast a net for news of your lad?"

  "Makes sense, lover."

  Ryan looked up the stairs, breathing in the early-morning smell of we
t stone and clean air. "Not too much choice. J.B. can't move like he is. If we leave him, he'll need guarding. More blasters the better. I like the idea, Doc, but I'll go alone."

  "Ah… An old man would slow you down and get in the way."

  Ryan slapped him on the shoulder. "Don't be the weeper, Doc. Man alone moves quicker, and that cannon of yours is going to do more good protecting J.B. in here."

  Doc gave a beaming smile, his double row of per­fect teeth gleaming like polished ivory. "Very well. And we will not let you down."

  "Antibiotics, Ryan," Mildred said. "You know what to ask for?"

  "Penicillin, isn't it?"

  She shook her head. "Not just that. John's got a bit of paper in one of his pockets and a stub of pen­cil. I saw it. I'll write down the names for you."

  "Tell me, Mildred. I'll remember them all right. Go on."

  She started to recite the list, ticking them off on her fingers. "Tetracyclines. They'd be good ones to get. Cephalexin. Erythromycin. Streptomycin. Colistin. Parom—"

  "All right, all right." Ryan held up his hand. "Write them down."

  It only took her a couple of minutes, and she gave him the folded piece of paper. "Good luck."

  "Yes, the very best," Doc added.

  "Come back safe, lover," Krysty chimed in.

  "I'll try. I'll aim to be back here before dusk, but if I don't, put up the door and keep watch."

  He climbed up the stairs. Krysty was holding the G-12 caseless, watching him. The last thing he heard as he stepped into the ville was a faint echo of J.B.'s voice.

  "Keep your back to the sun, Ryan."

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  IT WAS AN unusual experience for Ryan to be alone. His childhood had been largely a lonely one, often isolated and threatened. Then had come the dark years, when he roamed Deathlands with no friends and very few enemies.

  Few enemies?

  Alive.

  Once he threw in his lot with the Trader, he became part of a team, a highly efficient, superbly trained team.

  So many of them now dead. Maybe all dead.

  For a moment Ryan had a flash of friends chilled— in mud, in desert, in rain, in fog, in snow, in light, in dark. So much blood. The Trader always tried to make sure corpses were recovered and given as de­cent a burial as was possible.

  "Can't leave a man or a woman to be a rat's sup­per," he used to say.

  You lived, slept, crapped and fought with the whole crew in the war wag. The massive old battle wagons the Trader had discovered in a hidden cache were lumbering brutes. The conditioning was unreliable, and you often baked in the summer and froze in the winter. Though Ryan also recalled a memorable eve­ning up in the Darks with a temperature outside around fifty below. And every vent and ob-slit wide open while the crew sweated in singlets and pants.

  Since their first discovery of a redoubt that con­tained a gateway, Ryan and his companions had been more or less alone, traveling through a largely hostile land, dependent on one another.

  Now he was on his own.

  He walked on, looking behind him only once. The rubble-strewn street was deserted, except for the stiff body of the old man, which, surprisingly, hadn't been dragged away. At the entrance to the cellar there was the flash of flaming red hair, and he lifted a hand to acknowledge Krysty.

  One of the problems of walking alone through ter­ritory like the ruined ville was that you had nobody to watch your back. Ryan was so used to having someone in a skirmishing line behind him that his spine crawled at being so exposed.

  Though he'd accommodated over the years to only having one eye, it was still an undeniable handicap. It halved his peripheral vision, meaning he had to keep on turning his head from side to side.

  The 9 mm SIG-Sauer blaster was in its holster, and his fingers itched for the butt.

  He was aware that his biggest danger came from the gangs of scalies that seemed to control much of the region to the south and west of him. But from what they knew so far, he hoped the rigid and noisy regimentation of the mutie patrols would allow him sufficient warning.

  The layout of the streets and the ruined buildings made it classic ambush country. It was impossible at any one time to see more than seventy yards in any direction. And generally that came down to about thirty yards.

  The air was cool and damp, with the flavor at the back of the throat of burning wood. Somewhere not too far away meat was being roasted and bread being baked.

  Ryan proceeded cautiously, trying to keep to the sides of the highways, yet not so close to the piled bricks and stone that someone could jump him. He began to see movement. Now and then, in the dis­tance, figures scuttled over the sidewalks and van­ished into the urban labyrinth.

  Someone was shouting what sounded like a warn­ing, and Ryan checked his stride, moving into the shelter of a demolished storefront. Broken glass crunched, brittle under his combat boots, and his hand fell to his pistol.

  Directly across from him he saw a stout bald man appear and waddle a few steps into the open, moon face turning to the sky. He glimpsed Ryan standing in the shadows and called to him in a glutinous, slow voice. "Better run, outie! The birds is coming."

  In Deathlands you didn't live long if you ignored that kind of shout.

  Ryan flattened himself against the wall, his good eye scanning the slate sky above him. Others were shouting, and he heard a woman scream a child's name. He remembered a tiny hawk, no bigger than a woman's hand, that had once attacked them with de­monic speed and venom. And a condor in the high Sierras with a wingspan that J.B. had sworn was bet­ter than fifty feet. The mutated inheritors of the rad-polluted earth had developed in all sorts of bizarre ways.

  Now he could see them—white bodies with black-capped heads, wings about six feet across and dag­gered beaks the color of splintered amber.

  Gulls. Four of them.

  "Five," he amended as he spotted another bird swooping low over the buildings to the south.

  They circled, almost as though they could sense him in the shadows. Then, to Ryan's concern, one of the birds dived toward him, wheeling away at the last moment as he waved his arms at it. In that moment he noticed that the bird didn't have the usual webbed feet of a fishing gull. It had great claws, bigger than those of a bald-headed eagle.

  He distinctly heard the hiss of the claws as they ra­zored through the air toward him, missing by less than a foot. The SIG-Sauer was out in his hand, but he realized almost immediately that it wasn't the best weapon to try to hold off a quintet of murderous, fast-moving hunting birds.

  For a moment Ryan wished he had Mildred with him. Her talent with the Czech target pistol was the finest he'd ever seen, and he guessed she could have picked off the circling creatures with five well-placed bullets. He was good, he knew, but he wasn't that good.

  The blaster went back into its holster, and he reached for his steel panga.

  "Fireblast!"

  Two of them attacked him from opposite direc­tions, angling away at the last second, as if they were trying to force him to break and run from the partial shelter of the ruined building.

  He was buffeted by the powerful wing tip of the nearer gull, making him blink. A claw snagged at the white silk scarf around his throat, nearly plucking it away from him.

  "You bastards are fucking dead," he whispered, though more to boost his own confidence.

  He unwrapped the light, thin, strong scarf, hold­ing it in the center, the weighted ends dangling loosely. With that in his right hand and the panga in his left, he balanced himself and waited.

  It didn't take long.

  Ryan hadn't figured on the birds being fightwise enough to all come at him in a multiple attack, wings flailing, harsh screeches bursting from their throats. His attempt to strike them down with the scarf was a total failure, and he made only a skipping, skating contact with the panga, nicking the smallest of the gulls and drawing a thread of blood.

  An old-fashioned phrase of Doc's came to him, describing drawing blo
od in a fight. "Tapped his claret," he'd say.

  One of the murderous birds had certainly tapped his claret.

  He'd felt the claws scrape at his scalp as he low­ered his head to try to protect his face from the at­tack. Now he could feel the warmth of his own blood as it trickled down the side of his face on his blind side.

  While they gained altitude, squawking angrily, Ryan had a moment to look around to see if there was any better place to be. To run out into the open street would bring the birds down at him from all sides. At least they couldn't get behind him if he stayed with his back to the rough bricks.

  This time the gulls chose to come at him one after another, pecking and clawing. But Ryan had recov­ered from the initial shock of the attack and was ready. He parried the first two, then made his own sudden counter. He swung one weighted end of the narrow white silk, grinning mirthlessly to himself as he felt it tangle and tighten around the bird's body. While the wings fluttered in a beating panic, he used the eighteen-inch blade in a short, slashing blow.

  The head, with the blank eyes staring and beak still opening and closing, dropped to the glass-strewn ground. Blood jetted from its neck, and Ryan was conscious of the strong stench of rotting fish.

  With a flick of the wrist he released the flapping body, kicking it away from his feet. "Come on, you bastards," he said through bared teeth.

  But the gulls had had enough. In the desolate wasteland of Newyork they could easily find alter­native prey that wouldn't strike back with such lethal violence. Still shrieking, they circled once, then flew off toward the west and the river.

  As Ryan moved on, the body of the dead bird still moved, in weakening, fluttering movements, the long flight feathers smeared and clotted with its own thick blood.

  IT TOOK HIM ALL OF THE morning and the first part of the afternoon to locate the headquarters of the scalies. Ryan was never the sort of man to quickly admit defeat, but he was finally forced to retreat.

  There were more scalies than he'd suspected, run­ning into the hundreds, all wearing berets or head­bands with the silver lightning flash to identify them as part of a uniquely efficient mutie force.