Hellbenders

by James Axler

  Krysty didn’t look over her shoulder. She knew how Ryan would react. It was imperative that she fight this battle herself, and that he be seen openly to give her no support. All the companions had to prove to the Hellbenders that they stood by themselves, and that although they were together there were no free rides. They also had to show—if possible—that they were better fighters, and stronger.

  “He’s got nothing to do with this,” Krysty replied calmly. “This is you and me. I win, you stop playing the fool and work toward winning the real battle, not showing off like a triple-stupe kid.”

  “And if I win—which I will?”

  “Then you can chill me if you like. No one, and I mean no one, will stop you,” Krysty answered.

  “Then it begins,” Juan said simply.

  He moved forward, crouched low, his gaze needle sharp to spot the slightest movement of muscle that would betray her intentions in terms of direction and action. Sensing this, Krysty stayed still, the only thing that moved being her hair.

  “Ya know,” Juan muttered in a menacing undertone, “the only thing I hate more than a smart-mouth is a mutie. And you’re nothing more than a smart-mouth mutie bitch, which puts you lower ’n the lowest gaudy slut.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that if you want to rile me,” she replied.

  Now! Before she even had a chance to finish the sentence, Juan had made his move, stepping forward on his right foot and feinting a chop with his right hand. Her speech should have been enough to slow her defenses for that vital second for him to break through, especially as he wished to deceive her over the actual direction of the blow. In theory, she should have moved late to stop a right-hand blow and left herself open to a left-hand attack.

  At least, that was what Juan expected. What he got was an entirely different matter, as Krysty moved in the opposite direction and then bent into the now misplaced left-hand punch, grabbing his wrist and using the momentum to throw the Hispanic off balance. Juan was thrown forward, and as his rib cage passed her, she brought her foot up in a vicious kick, the pointed silver toe of her boot catching him beneath the last rib and driving the breath from his body. He screamed with the pain and tried to turn and fall well as she released him, her parting gesture being to viciously twist and sprain his wrist as she let go.

  The Hispanic was unable to fall correctly from this hold, and his shoulder jarred painfully as he hit the mat.

  “Shit, the mutie bitch is hot to trot,” said an unidentified voice in the gathering crowd.

  “Fuck it, can’t trust them,” breathed another.

  Ryan had stayed up on the rope, believing it best to stay well away and let Krysty win this one on her own—as he was sure she could. But he scanned the crowd gathered around the mat, trying to identify who had uttered the last sentences. The last thing he wanted was for there to be problems because the Hellbenders were suspicious of Krysty’s mutie genes.

  Krysty, for her part, heard the comments and saw red. Mebbe that was Juan’s problem. The Hispanic was trying desperately to scramble to his feet, but he was badly winded, and his wrist let him down when he tried to put weight on it, causing him to collapse again.

  She took another step over to him and lifted him by the hair, slamming her fist into his cheekbone as she did so, then letting him fall before he had a chance to flail back at her. He slammed back onto the gym mat, blood pouring from the shattered inside of his mouth.

  “Is that it?” she asked, breathing heavily and yet speaking with an ominous calm. “Is that why you felt the need to prove yourself? Because I’m just a mutie to you and therefore inferior? You stupe bastard, we’re all the same here, even those of us who’ve just joined you. We are one because we have one target. It’s Charity that’s the enemy, not me. I ought to really finish you off, in case you get any bright ideas about settling scores later.”

  Juan had struggled onto his elbows while she said this, and she took advantage of that to take a kick at him, placing her foot under his rising body so that her toes connected with his breastbone, jolting his heart and making him yelp with intense pain. The momentum of her kick drove him farther upward, and she grabbed him by the hair, pulling him to his feet with one hand while she drove a succession of jabs into his face with the other. By the time she stopped, he was nearly unconscious, and his face was a mess of bruised and swollen flesh.

  She let him fall to the mat and then looked at the gathered Hellbenders, her eyes flashing defiance.

  “He’s not worth chilling. Neither am I. Save that for the attack. Nothing is stronger than a blaster at a distance, but remember I know that, too, if you think about settling his score for him.”

  With which she pushed her way through the crowd and stormed out of the gym room.

  Ryan slid down the rope. He observed the stunned crowd and smiled with a vulpine lack of humor.

  “Think about what she said…and just be glad she’s on your side when the attack comes.”

  Chapter Eight

  “By the Three Kennedys!” Doc breathed, “surely not…”

  The old man lay a few feet from the giant wormhole, gathering his thoughts and regaining what breath he could. Dean was on his haunches, breathing heavily, while Jak still lay facedown, frozen by his close attention to the rumbling, which grew louder by the second.

  Mik, Danny, Lonnie and Tilly stood close by, also frozen as they listened.

  “What…is that?” Danny asked slowly, in the tones of one who actually knew the answer but didn’t wish to make an acknowledgment of that knowledge.

  “Mutie worm,” Jak barked, jumping to his feet. “Disturbed burrow, made fear danger.”

  “So it’s coming to investigate?” Mik yelled in disbelief. “Why doesn’t the stupe fucker just run away, like any other intelligent dumb creature would?”

  “Apart from the inherent contradiction in that last statement, I would say it was a pointless question. Better just to get the hell away from here ourselves,” Doc answered him, scrambling to his feet and making tracks to run away from the hole.

  “Doc’s right,” Dean cried. “That thing’s going to make a bigger hole when it comes out than when it went in, and what’s more it has all that disturbed cast to push out of the way.”

  “Great, a worm-shit shower,” Mik said.

  They were all on their feet now and running in the same direction. They were headed back toward the path they had been taking, bringing them back on course for Charity and away from the giant cast that had attracted their attention in the first instance.

  “How do we know that this isn’t where the worm is going to surface and we’re running right into it?” Danny yelled breathlessly as they ran.

  Dean would have yelled back that the creature was most likely to come back up its own tunnel rather than create a new one, but was stayed from this by a gigantic shudder that rippled through the earth and threw them from their feet.

  “Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck—”

  Dean could hear Mik swear over and over like a mantra, forming an undertone to the rumble and then explosion as the worm surfaced, throwing the dry desert earth into the air with an explosive force, showering them with dry dust and particles of hard-packed earth. It was fortunate that most of the topsoil in this region was so devoid of moisture, that the dry earth scattered and parted so easily, with only the densely packed pieces being hard but small enough not to cause anything other than the slightest abrasions and discomfort.

  The rain of dry soil was followed the dull whump of packages of damper soil that rained down—the cast from the tunnel, thrown up by the rapid exit of the worm, which had been flung high and far on a trajectory that brought some of it down to the point where they lay prone on the ground. The cast was heavier, and the larger deposits were more dangerous. At such speed, they were likely to cause a more serious injury if they hit home.

  “Hot pipe,” Dean exclaimed, rolling onto his back, “watch out for that!” A large lump of damp soil hit the ground where he had l
ain but a moment before, the damp cast spreading as it splattered into the dry topsoil, making an impression where his head would have been and raising enough dust to suggest that it would at least have concussed him.

  By this time, the others had also turned, and were trying to judge where the larger deposits of cast would fall as they moved around on the ground, wriggling from side to side. There was no time to actually get up and run, only to try to avoid the possibly damaging lumps of cast while still prone.

  But it was because they were in such a position that, when the initial rain had ceased to fall, they were able to comprehend in its full and awesome glory the sight that confronted them.

  The disturbed mutie worm had come straight up from the hole and was now erect, perpendicular to the sand and awesome in its length. At a glance, Dean judged it to be about fifty feet long, the tail end disappearing into the hole. It waved and undulated in a rippling motion, the continual movement of its segmented body the manner in which it was able to keep aloft. The end segment that acted as a head—although, as with all worms, this was arbitrary—moved around as if trying to detect the recce party. Of course, this was patently absurd, as it had no sensory organs with which to see or hear them as they lay on the desert surface. But it did have a mouth, just like the specimen that Jak, Dean and Doc had seen at the redoubt, and the strange rows of fleshy teeth rippled and undulated in its open mouth like a miniature version of the whole body. It had no vocal cords, but the movement caused resonances that ran through its whole body, amplified and then directed outward by the open mouth.

  It was an eerie and disturbing sound, a high, keening wail that had a bass note running beneath that was only semiaudible, so that it could have been imagination that added it. The sound had waves of rippling notes and glissandi in it that echoed the worm’s moving body. It was almost hypnotic, freezing them where they lay.

  The creature was gigantic, its sheer size somehow magnified by the luminous nature of its body as it stood in the encroaching darkness. If it should, by chance or design, cause to fall across them and come down onto the desert floor, then it would crush them beneath the mucus-covered flesh of its body.

  The thought of this caused Doc to snap out of his reverie. It was curious that it should be Theophilus Tanner, but on consideration, perhaps not so strange. Doc was used to drifting in and out of states where the real and the imaginary interacted and overlapped, leaving him in a space where it was difficult to judge the real. So when a real state that seemed hallucinatory occurred, then why should it not be Doc who would instinctively grasp the nature of the real?

  None of which mattered to him then, although he would perhaps ponder it later. Now all that he could do was to take action to try to save his life, and the lives of his companions.

  Doc moved with a swiftness remarkable in someone who appeared so old. He reached across to Mik, who was carrying a supply bag, and took it from him. Mik had been placed in charge of carrying spare ammo, grens and plas-ex. Doc opened the bag and picked out a gren. For good measure, he took a lump of plas-ex and wrapped it around the gren, hoping its sticky properties would make it hold to the smooth gren surface for long enough.

  Scrambling to his feet, Doc launched himself toward the monster mutie. Somehow, the creature detected the movement and turned toward them, seeming to focus on the moving Doc. Its head section tilted, the teeth moving with a fearful viciousness within the otherwise bland and expressionless mouth, and the keening note changed again with the shape of the creature against the darkened skyline.

  Crying out with the effort, Doc pulled the pin on the gren, drew back his arm and threw the explosive toward the open mouth. The head section lifted slightly as it detected the motion of the gren through the air, moving with the arc of the small object as the mouth opened and welcomed it.

  The gren, still with the plas-ex wrapped around it, entered the mouth of the giant mutie worm, the sudden appearance of a foreign object changing once again the note emanating from its body.

  “Down—duck and cover!” Doc yelled, dragging the phrase from somewhere within his unconscious, from something he had once heard.

  All the members of the recce party threw themselves onto the desert floor, covering their heads from the rain that would inevitably follow, and to stop the noise making their eardrums ring too much.

  The gren exploded inside the body of the giant mutie worm, the plas-ex wrapped around it boosting the power of the explosion so that it was at least doubled in intensity.

  If they had been facing it, they would have marveled at the fact that one second the worm seemed to be rearing up in all its awesome glory, and the next it had simply disappeared, to be replaced by a rain of white, luminous flesh and mucus that seemed to radiate from one central point. The explosion spread down the worm, the shrapnel in the gren ripping the segments in such a way that it would make it impossible for them to survive as anything other than the smallest creatures. Even if they did possess a mutated version of the older worm genetics that would enable a chopped-up worm to regenerate into smaller, separate entities, then these would be so small as to not cause the recce party any problems. As the explosion spread, so the particles of exploded mutie worm rained out, too small to cause harm but uncomfortable as the flesh and mucus landed on their legs, backs and arms.

  As the gren exploded, the noise was at first contained within the body, a dull roar that grew within a fraction of a second into a deafening clap as the wet, sickly sound of flesh slapping on flesh with extreme force blended into the sounds of destruction. The last high, keening notes of the undulating voice were also blended in with this before being subsumed by the sounds of the gren and the plas-ex.

  It was over as quickly as it began, the last echoes of the explosion dying away on the night air, the last, far-flung particles of worm flesh falling to earth. Lonnie raised his head.

  “Shit. That I could easily have done without, my friends,” he said with a remarkable understatement.

  Jak, always practical when it came to such matters, ignored this and asked, “How far from ville? Any chance hear that?”

  Tilly considered this. “It’s an empty old space between here and there, but I reckon it won’t reach that far. Even if it does, you get trading parties traveling across this desert. They might expect a wag in a few hours at the most, but they won’t expect us in about a day.”

  Jak nodded. “Good.” He sniffed the now cold night air. “Should move on some, then set camp. Too cold travel now.”

  Lonnie agreed. “A half hour’s walk should get us well out of range of that bastard hole—just in case there are any other of those mutie bastards ready to poke their ugly heads out. Let’s move out.”

  The members of the party assembled, checked that they had everything they needed and nothing was left behind in the confusion—Doc handing the ammo bag back to Mik—and they began to march back onto their prescribed route to Charity.

  A few miles passed before they felt safe enough to pitch camp in the partial shelter of a dried scrub oasis. Jak set a fire for warmth and they erected their tents, Lonnie allotting a watch rota.

  Now calm after their encounter, they settled down to rest until morning, hoping that the remainder of the journey could be quick and incident free.

  THE SUNRISE next morning was sudden, the night dissolving into day in a matter of minutes as the engorged orb of the red sun rose in the rad-blasted sky. Jak was on watch, and woke the others as the light infused the atmosphere.

  “Eat, then go, yeah?” he said. “Make good ground before sun hot.”

  Lonnie agreed with the albino, and after they had breakfasted on their rations and taken as much water as they could to keep them going until their next break, they packed the tents and were ready to leave.

  “Let’s hope we don’t have any more problems today,” Danny remarked in a weary tone.

  “Don’t be such a baby,” Tilly admonished. “We just keep our eyes open and deal with what comes…no more, no less, ye
ah?”

  “’Spose…” Danny agreed reluctantly.

  Lonnie took his bearings with the minisextant, and they began the long march to Charity. At present, although they were exposed, there was enough space around them for any distant wags to be spotted long before they would be spotted on foot. So it was safe for them to march in the open, although they all kept a watch for activity on the horizon, and for any shelter that might be close enough to provide them with shade from the burning sun when they rested.

  The march was tedious, like the day before, and although they endeavored to keep alert, it was all too easy to fall into the stupor of following the beat of their footsteps and walking and thinking to that rhythm and that rhythm alone.

  The only one of the party who avoided this was Jak. The albino teen’s hunting senses told him to keep alert. Something was warning him that there was danger ahead, but he couldn’t tell as of yet what that may be. So, as he walked, he kept all his senses on triple red, his eyes scanning the horizon and to all sides, no matter how much the harsh, bright light may hurt his pigmentless irises; he listened above and beyond the tramp of their feet and the sound of their breathing, filtering that out so that all other sounds came within his provenance and were analyzed for any possible signs of danger. More than that, he allowed his whole body to become attuned to the environment and the elements. Years of hunting in the bayou and after were brought into play by his subconscious mind.

  He didn’t know what it was, but something was bothering him. And while all this was operating on an unconscious level, his conscious mind was focusing on the events of the previous day, trying to remember anything that may give him a clue as to why he was feeling this way.

  At one point, keeping their distance to an extent that he wasn’t sure whether they were wild dogs or cats of some kind, there had been a pack that seemed to trail them for a while. Then they had simply disappeared. But Jak knew that creatures that took the time and trouble to track didn’t just disappear. They faded into the shadows and bided their time. All creatures, including man, were the same.