Hellbenders

by James Axler

  So where was the pack now? Holed up somewhere, waiting?

  Jak figured that this was a distinct possibility. He couldn’t hear or see them, but he knew that they were there. And even if the rest of the recce party didn’t know it yet, at least he’d be prepared for them.

  The recce party had been marching for a little over three hours without a break when Lonnie held up a hand and stopped them. The line had straggled out a little over the past few miles, with fifty yards between Lonnie and Dean.

  “’Kay, I figure we need a rest and water break,” Lonnie husked through a cracked and parched throat, which attested to the truth of his statement. “See that crop over there? I reckon that’ll give some shade. C’mon,” he finished, keeping his words to a painful minimum. He turned and began to walk to the northeast of their chosen path, deviating slightly to reach the small outcrop and scrub about half a mile away, which would give them a minimal shelter while they rested.

  The rest of the group followed, except Jak. The albino waited until the last of the group—Danny, inevitably—had passed him and stood facing the rocks.

  The albino slowed his breathing, filtering out the sounds of his own nervous system and concentrating everything he had on the rocks ahead. He could hear little other than the sounds of his own companions as they walked and respired, but there was something underlying that he could barely make out. A scrabbling noise, as of small mammals moving with care. He could see nothing, but then again, his eyesight was poor at the best of times, let alone in such bright light. No, the important thing was smell.

  Jak had a superb olfactory sense, and as he sniffed the air, he became certain that there was something lurking in the shelter of the rocks. Something musky and animal, something more than one or two in number. A pack, in fact, to judge from the confusion of odors that underlay the scent of the recce party.

  Could it be that the pack he had noticed the day before somehow had the intelligence to work out their route and then ambush them? It seemed far-fetched, but any animal with enough sense to survive in this hostile environment would have learned behavior patterns that would ensure food, shelter and water. If other parties, on foot or in wags, had gone this way, then the animals—whatever they were—would have learned this.

  So they were waiting for the recce party in the shadows and shelter of the rock—and the unsuspecting party was heading straight for them.

  Jak was a few paces behind by now, and his lagging back had been noticed. Both Danny and Dean had turned to question his sudden halt. Danny had no way of knowing, but Dean knew the albino hunter well enough to realize that something was seriously wrong. He saw the way Jak was standing and the poise of the albino as he took in what was happening by the rocks.

  Even as Dean watched, Jak sprang into action. From a standing start, he began to sprint toward the front of the party. He knew he couldn’t yell, as the noise and the tone of his voice would alert the waiting creatures that something was wrong, and yet he couldn’t let Lonnie walk into a trap.

  The sound of Jak’s feet pounding on the hard desert surface, raising clouds of dust in the late-morning air, alerted the recce party leader that something was amiss. He turned, as did the others, on hearing Jak approach.

  “What—” he began.

  It was then that Dean made a serious error of judgment. Not realizing in the heat of the moment why Jak had not alerted Lonnie by yelling at him, the young Cawdor raised the alarm.

  “Watch out! Something’s wrong!” he cried.

  As soon as the first syllable escaped Dean’s lips, Jak changed his tactics. Knowing that the creatures would now be alerted, the albino hunter drew the .357 Magnum Colt Python blaster from out of the depths of his jacket.

  “Waiting behind rock,” he yelled in a clipped, terse tone, hoping that he hadn’t wasted precious fractions of a second by having to explain his actions. Wasted because, even as his mouth opened to utter the first sound, the creatures had begun to swarm from behind and over the rocks, alerted by Dean’s cries.

  Lonnie began to turn back to the rocks, his hands gripping the H&K he carried slung over his shoulder as he shrugged it into position with a practiced ease. What he saw made him freeze for a vital half moment. And in that time, the creatures were upon him.

  For what he saw was a swarming posse of wild cats, more than he could ever recall seeing in one place. They had obviously evolved a kind of group or pack mentality that enabled them to communicate and work together in some fashion, for it was only by such a manner could they have contrived to have held their peace so well while waiting for the party to approach the rock. Come to that, knowing that they would approach the rock—or were at least likely to—was in itself a sign of an evolved group intelligence.

  Although this flashed through Lonnie’s mind, it wasn’t the thing that impressed itself upon him the most. As he got the H&K into his hands, he was almost frozen to the spot by the sight that he beheld. What had been an empty expanse of rock a scant few moments before was now a heaving mass of multicolored fur, the surface of the rock seeming to ripple as the undulating mass of flesh and fur scuttled down and around the rock face, heading for the group.

  They were wild cats, mostly dark-gray-and-black tabbies, with long fur that was matted and in some places bald, the pale gray skin showing through. A few of the cats showed white patches or touches of ginger in their coloring, which, en masse, just made the whole carpet of fur seem more amorphous and sinister. And the noise was immense. They yowled in fury and hate as they moved, a hunger seeming to permeate the very tone of their massed voice, the previously quiet desert air now rent asunder by the sounds of a hungry pack in full cry.

  For, make no mistake, these were creatures in a feeding frenzy. From the look of those few that it was possible to pick out from the pack, either because of some different marking or because they rose from the pack to look around, the pack hadn’t fed well for some time, and now they saw their opportunity.

  For a moment, the entire recce party, apart from Jak, was frozen in awestruck horror by the sight. It was fortunate for their collective well-being that the albino hunter had his wits fully about him and was focused, as always, on survival.

  Taking a combat firing stance to one side of where Lonnie was standing, the H&K frozen in his hands, Jak raised the Colt Python and fired into the pack. He aimed for the center of the front ranks as they poured off the rock and onto the desert floor. He squeezed the trigger until the blaster exploded deafeningly, the slight echo of it resounding against the rocks, but being deadened by the wall of fur that now covered the outcrop.

  The powerful handblaster cut a swathe through the front ranks of the cats, ripping through thin flesh, splintering bone, and turning organs into a bloody mush. A couple of the cats took a full impact in their heads, skulls exploding in a shower that adhered to the matted coats of the animals around them.

  It stopped the cats for a fraction of a second, as confusion spread through the pack, the smell of death hitting them strongly. Their collective purpose was for a moment lost as they scattered, a small gap on the rocks forming around the chilled animals.

  That fraction of a second was enough. The sound of Jak’s Python was enough to shake the recce party from the stunned inaction that the sight of the cat pack had caused.

  “Nukeshit bastard—chill them now!” Lonnie yelled, beginning to fire with his H&K into the cat posse.

  Mik and Tilly also opened up with their blasters—Tilly was carrying an Uzi, and Mik had a H&K like Lonnie. Danny also carried an Uzi, but showed his ineptitude in yet another inopportune moment by jamming the Uzi as he began to fire. Cursing, he fiddled awkwardly with the blaster while Dean stepped back to cover him, concentrating on precision shooting with the Browning Hi-Power that would keep the pack well back from them, even though his blaster alone couldn’t put much of a hole in their numbers.

  Doc, on the other hand, was more than able to do some serious damage. The older man stepped forward, his eyes glitter
ing with anger as though the attack of the cats was in some way a personal affront. It would have been baffling to the others if they had noticed—if their attention had not been focused on the pack in front of them—but to Doc it truly was a personal matter.

  In his head, Doc was no longer standing in the middle of the New Mexico desert after skydark, but was in the backyard of his home in Vermont, some two hundred years before. Young Jolyon was standing to one side of him, crying in pain and fear, his arm scratched hideously by a feral cat that had wandered from the nearby woods—the same creature that had been responsible for the death of Rachel and Jolyon’s pet cat Matilda a few days before—and had responded to the young boy’s desire to pet him with a vicious rake of the claw. That wild cat had been killed with a single shot from the Remington that Doc kept in the house for emergencies.

  That cat; young Jolyon, whom he would never see again and who had probably died well over a century before and may never even have seen adulthood for all he knew; the danger posed by this motley crew…all of these things went through Doc’s mind as he stepped forward and fired the shot chamber of the LeMat into the posse of wildcats.

  The shot from the percussion blaster spread through the pack, ripping into them and generating high-pitched and terrible yowls of pain as more of the animals were wounded or chilled. Yet the fact that they were confused, and now were either in a feeding frenzy or a panic over the danger, made them disperse from pack movements, and made them harder to fire upon, their actions harder to predict or second-guess.

  Some of the cats had turned upon themselves, either beginning to sate their hunger on the chilled animals, or sensing injury, fear and near death in others who had been hit, turning on them as easy targets. Others had taken fright at the sudden explosions of the blasters and the molten death that had passed among them. Driven wild with hate, hunger and fear, they were moving erratically, running between the legs of the recce party but not attacking, while others were trying a concerted approach to their actions, their claws and teeth attempting to scratch and bite through the tough material of the clothing worn by all the party members.

  “Shit, they’re feisty little fuckers!” Mik exclaimed, shaking one cat loose from his leg and then following through to kick another in the head as it tried to leap at him, the force of his combat boot dislocating the animal’s jaw so that it sagged uselessly as the creature hit the ground.

  “Yeah—watch jaws, though,” Jak yelled back.

  Dean, hearing this, took a closer look at the creature that approached him before taking a shot that cleaved the head of the creature. As it came toward him, while he took aim, he noted that the jaws of the cat were slightly enlarged in order to accommodate larger than usual fangs. And these fangs dripped with a viscous fluid that suggested they were designed for combat in some manner.

  It was something Doc needed to hear and take heed of, but the older man was no longer in the New Mexico desert.

  “Harm my child, you pernicious and ugly beast?” he yelled in a hysterical tone. “Nothing can come between me and my family ever again, not even a mangy scrap of fur like you, do you hear me?”

  He tried to fire again at the cat that was making directly for him, but the LeMat had discharged both the ball and shot chambers, and the hammer clicked on a dead charge. Holstering the pistol with one hand, Doc decided on a hands-on approach to the problem of the charging cat. As it leaped at him, he thrust out his free hand and with a display of timing that would have been spectacular and damn near impossible if he had intended it, he caught the beast by the throat in midleap. The animal hissed and yowled at him, drool and viscous fluid dripping from its jaws, the noise slightly distorted by the way in which his grip was beginning to choke the beast. Its body writhed and twisted with a preternatural strength as it sought to free itself, a strength matched by Doc’s own maddened grip. Its front paws lashed, the back legs coming up as it squirmed, kicking at him with sharpened claws. But all it hit was the thick cloth of his jacket, his exposed wrist and hand frustratingly out of reach for the creature.

  His grip tightened, then squeezed. The cat’s neck broke, life dying in its suddenly dull eyes. And yet, even in its death throes, it took one last chance. Aided by the manner in which its neck was distorted by snapping, its dying move was to sink its fangs into his wrist. It was a feeble bite, not painful as it broke the skin, but enough to deposit some of the viscous fluid into Doc’s bloodstream.

  Doc’s arm burned, then numbed, and he screamed in pain as he dropped the chilled cat, suddenly pulled back into the world of the Deathlands by the burning sensations sweeping through his body, followed by the numbness of sudden paralysis.

  Jak saw the dying cat bite Doc and saw the stricken man fall to the ground. He immediately knew what had happened and knew that he had to get to Doc and get him clear before the remains of the cat pack fell upon the prone man.

  By now, the Uzi and H&K fire was beginning to tell on the cat pack, and those that weren’t injured or chilled were beginning to thin out and scatter, their courage and pack instinct now shot to pieces by the continuous blasterfire that had decimated their numbers. But there were still enough to attack Doc where he lay, with enough venom in their fangs to chill him before they ripped him apart.

  “Cover me—get Doc out,” the albino hunter yelled, moving toward Doc before he had finished barking out his instructions. As he moved, he holstered the Colt Python and palmed two of the leaf-bladed throwing knives, which he would use to fight off the surviving cats at close range. Stooping low as he ran in, Jak flicked his wrists so that the knives became whirring blurs that caught the flesh and fur of the cats that had clustered around Doc, closing in for the kill.

  But then again, so was Jak closing in for the kill—and he was a far more experienced and ruthless hunter and killer than anything the posse of cats would have previously faced in the desert. As he stooped in and ran, the whirring blades made short work of the cats around Doc. Jak kept an eye on the cats, keen to make sure that none of them got another bite in at the prone man, always angling his blade to drive them clear as much as chill them. Behind him, the rest of the recce party kept the immediate area clear by firing at any of the posse that were still in the area. Those of the cats that Jak cut that weren’t chilled by his razor-sharp blades ran, their terror and pain deflecting their attention away from the food that Doc represented.

  The blasterfire echoed away in the desert air to silence as the last of the living cats disappeared, melting into the desert as though they had never existed. The only signs that there had been a cat attack were the vast number of mutilated cat corpses and the prone Doc.

  Jak dropped to his knees beside him, pulling at the old man’s arm and exposing the bite wound. It was swollen and red, with a buildup of venom in the lump that surrounded the two fang marks. Although the venom had been swift acting, the fact that there was such a large lump surrounding it suggested that there was more still contained within. It was imperative for Jak to remove it. Slipping one of the knives back into its hiding place, Jak kept hold of Doc’s arm and transferred the remaining knife to his free hand, immediately slitting the red lump, which spilled out a pressurized mixture of blood and venom. Doc tried to scream in pain, but his vocal cords were paralyzed enough for him to produce little more than an agonized squeal.

  Jak bent his head and applied his lips to the open wound, sucking out the poison that remained in Doc’s wrist, then spitting it out onto the dust—once dry, but now moistened by the blood of the chilled cats.

  Dean was by Jak’s side immediately with a canteen of water. The albino swilled the remainder of the blood and venom from his mouth and spit it out onto the earth.

  “What do you think?” Dean asked.

  Jak shrugged. “Doc live, but mebbe have to carry while. Take time poison sweat out—give him water.”

  Dean bent and forced some water into Doc, even though the old man’s paralyzed throat found it hard to accept the liquid.

  “F
uck, I thought this was going to be a rest stop,” Mik said with a sardonic manner that verged on tired hysteria.

  “Rest up for a while, then we should get going,” Lonnie said softly, running his hands over his closely cropped head. “We can’t lose time now, especially if we need to carry Doc.”

  While they took a rest break, keeping away from the scene of the carnage, Dean and Jak constructed a makeshift stretcher from parts of the lightweight tents. Tilly and Danny agreed to take the first leg carrying Doc. The only good news during the rest period was that Doc already seemed to be regaining some use of his muscles, as his legs were already beginning to twitch involuntarily.

  Finally, they were ready to begin again. Tilly and Danny lifted the stretcher, and Lonnie took the lead.

  The sun overhead was past the halfway mark of the day, and they still had a lot of ground to cover. The plan was to be on the edge of Charity by nightfall, using the cover of darkness to bypass the irregular patrols of Baron Al, and to camp overnight before staring their recce mission properly when the dawn broke, by which time they could only hope that Doc would be back to full mobility.

  Chapter Nine

  Dawn broke with a rapidity that caught them all by surprise. Jak was on watch, and roused the rest of the recce party, including Doc.

  “I feel a little stiff in the muscles, but otherwise ready to take on anything,” he reassured them, although the deathly pallor of his skin told another story.

  “Well, you do know that we can’t carry passengers when we’re in there,” Lonnie told him, but with a sidelong glance at Jak and Dean just to let them know that he was sure they would be loyal to Doc, but his people couldn’t afford to be if they found themselves up against it.

  “Okay,” he continued after they had agreed. “We need to scout the whole ville, see if there’s any big sign of sec activity, find the base where the convoy will set off from, and assess the amount of wags and armory being used.”