Damnation Road Show
Damnation Road Show
James Axler
In the ruins of a nuke-shattered America, every man, woman and child of the apocalyptic frontier makes a perilous journey to the future. But there is a fork that divides the path toward humanity reborn…and the road deep into the hell that is Deathlands. Ryan Cawdor made his choice long ago, in this barbaric new world that conspires against hope…Eerie remnants of pre-Dark times linger a century after the nuclear blowout. But a traveling road show gives new meaning to the word chilling. Ryan and his warrior group have witnessed this carny's handiwork in the ruins and victims of unsuspecting villes. Even facing tremendous odds does nothing to deter the companions from challenging this wandering death merchant and an army of circus freaks. And no one is aware that a steel-eyed monster from the past is preparing a private act that would give Ryan star billing.… In the Deathlands, all you get is a one-way ticket.
The rider removed his steel mask and bowed deeply
The crowd jumped to its feet, cheering.
Amid the tumult, something on the far side of the center ring caught Ryan’s eye. Something flashed behind the mirror wall of the facing trailer. And for a fraction of a second, the silver reflective glass became vaguely, hazily transparent, as if through a pall of oily brown smoke.
Then it was over.
In that frozen moment Ryan glimpsed a ghostly figure whose afterimage was burned deeply into his brain. Spindly-limbed. Slouching. Menacing. Even if he hadn’t seen the glare of the light on the steel, he would have known who it was.
The Magus.
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Pilgrimage to Hell
Red Holocaust
Neutron Solstice
Crater Lake
Homeward Bound
Pony Soldiers
Dectra Chain
Ice and Fire
Red Equinox
Northstar Rising
Time Nomads
Latitude Zero
Seedling
Dark Carnival
Chill Factor
Moon Fate
Fury’s Pilgrims
Shockscape
Deep Empire
Cold Asylum
Twilight Children
Rider, Reaper
Road Wars
Trader Redux
Genesis Echo
Shadowfall
Ground Zero
Emerald Fire
Bloodlines
Crossways
Keepers of the Sun
Circle Thrice
Eclipse at Noon
Stoneface
Bitter Fruit
Skydark
Demons of Eden
The Mars Arena
Watersleep
Nightmare Passage
Freedom Lost
Way of the Wolf
Dark Emblem
Crucible of Time
Starfall
Encounter: Collector’s Edition
Gemini Rising
Gaia’s Demise
Dark Reckoning
Shadow World
Pandora’s Redoubt
Rat King
Zero City
Savage Armada
Judas Strike
Shadow Fortress
Sunchild
Breakthrough
Salvation Road
Amazon Gate
Destiny’s Truth
Skydark Spawn
Damnation Road Show
DEATH LANDS®
James Axler
O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
O life, no life, but lively form of death;
O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds.
—Thomas Kyd,
1558-1594
THE DEATHLANDS SAGA
This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.
There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.
But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.
Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.
Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.
J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.
Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.
Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.
Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.
In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….
Contents
Prologue (#uc68827aa-efe0-570d-9898-6dac5d11a1f3)
Chapter One (#u48cf8e0a-b1e9-5b9d-a6e6-5c83ac19f790)
Chapter Two (#ub5cc76cd-29e4-54ed-9373-3be697dc9f91)
Chapter Three (#ue72194d6-1ece-576b-9933-b21cd97fc46a)
Chapter Four (#u8ae28a5f-9f0d-55db-b261-6ed5babe7928)
Chapter Five (#u544b96af-3bd1-5e0b-86e2-9a76e029615a)
Chapter Six (#uc822a8ff-4941-51f7-9f37-14f3f1785d6a)
Chapter Seven (#ub7530300-da62-5562-ad9a-1de02a241896)
Chapter Eight (#udddc3a35-8708-5a74-ac94-accadc736d5e)
Chapter Nine (#u79b09e65-89a6-510a-9831-d4605729719d)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
Evening hung dead still and oppressively humid over the shallow, five-acre, seep-fed lake, the lavender dome of sky perfectly reflected in its mercury-smooth surface. Encircling the muddy bank was a fringe of stripped, bleached skeletons of trees. The intense quiet was neither peaceful nor serene; the very air seemed to vibrate in anticipation and dread. Terrible forces of nature were about to make themselves known.
Swish-swish.
Swish-swish.
From the north end of the lake came a rhythmic sound.
Not a bird, not an insect. Sensing the impending hell show, the birds and insects had gone to ground.
A tall human figure stood on the bank in hip boots, waving a nine-foot-long, flexible rod back and forth. And as he did so, he sailed a bright-yellow line through the air, forward and back, forward and back, in a tight loop, out over the purple mirror of sky. The man wore a long, pointy, black goatee and his black hair was loosely tied in a ponytail, which hung to the middle of his back. On his head was a tatter-brimmed straw cowboy hat. His eyes were hidden behind wraparound sunglasses.
What face was visible was long, gaunt, perhaps tragic, certainly suffering, certainly world weary.
As the man cast, the water in front of him swirled and gurgled. The head of a huge mutie lungfish appeared in the middle of the ripples. The fish looked up at the man, then struggled out of the pool, walking on the bony spikes of its pectoral fins. Greenish-gray on the back with a light cream-colored belly, the mutie was easily five feet long and weighed more than sixty pounds. As it dragged itself from the world of fish into the world of men, its large, rubbery lipped mouth and its gill covers opened and closed, breathing air. Grunting from the effort, the lungfish crawled up beside the man. An odor rose up along with it—the smell of a slaughterhouse in August.
“You have no fly on the end of your line,” it said in a strange, gravelly voice that was half croak, half belch. “You can’t catch anything that way.”
“I’m not fishing for anything,” the bearded man said as he continued to cast far out over the smooth water, in the direction of the evening star.
“You’re fishing for nothing?” the lungfish said.
“That’s right.”
“Are you catching any?”
“I’m catching and releasing nothing,” the man replied.
As he continued to cast, to his left, a two-wheeled cart drawn by three men appeared over the rim of the slope. The lake sat on a stair-step rise in the land. Above it was mountainside; below it, the ground—mostly bare, eroded limestone—angled three hundred feet down to a broad flat spot between surrounding peaks. There, in a grove of low, scrubby trees, stood the remote ville. Even by Deathlands standards, it was a scab-assed place: dirt-floor shacks and lean-tos built up against the outer wall of the ville’s only permanent structure, a predark concrete blockhouse. Most of these shanties were big enough to house one or two people, and not tall enough to stand in.
The three men took axes and a heavy-bladed machete from the cart and started hacking away at its contents. They laughed as they sprayed one another with flying gore. After a few minutes of extreme effort, they paused to catch their breath, then started throwing human arms, legs and quartered torsos into the water. The erratic splashes broke the metronomic swish-swish, swish-swish of the fly rod.
The lungfish turned back from the commotion and asked the bearded man, “Am I real to you?”
The man let his line fall and settle. He pushed his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose, looked at the talking fish and said, “Nothing is real.”
As more body parts landed in the pool, swirls appeared in the water near the splashes. Other lungfish were rising to feed.
“That dinner looks pretty real to me,” the fish said. “Eat my body, become my body…”
“Yeah, yeah,” the man muttered distractedly.
As the lungfish slithered back to the water and to its share of the chow, it half turned and said, “Try some bait next time, Baron Kerr.”
The bearded man remained silent and threw a loop into his floating line that allowed him to sweep the entire length of it back into the air.
Swish-swish.
Suddenly the entire surface of pool shivered before him, the lavender mirror shattering into a billion fragments. Like glittering confetti, the first spores of the evening lifted gracefully into the air. It was just the overture. In seconds, dense clouds of the freed genetic material boiled up from the water. Pale-green fingers of fire crackled and sparked from the pool’s undulating surface, making the clouds glow and shimmer from within.
As the ministorm grew in intensity, the blood-spattered men hurried down the slope with their empty cart, determined to get under cover before spore fall.
Swish-swish.
Swish-swish.
The heat from the electrical discharge made the air temperature jump twenty-five degrees and sent the spore clouds billowing upward. The higher they rose, the more ferocious the strange lightning storm became: blistering, eye-aching bolts fired up from earth to sky, their prodigious thunder rattling the ground.
Baron Jim Kerr quickly wound in his line and headed downhill for cover. He recognized the evening’s ominous signs. The much heavier than normal spore hatch. The absolute frenzy of bioelectric discharge. That told him the food supply was dwindling, even now barely sufficient for survival. Something would have to be done, and soon. He knew better than to frustrate the burning pool. He remembered what had happened the last time.
Chapter One
A little girl in a faded cotton dress sat atop Bullard ville’s dirt-and-concrete defensive berm, watching distant plumes of yellow dust spiral up from the vast, barren flood plain—man-made tornadoes backlit by the hard glare of the late-afternoon sun. She sat with her skinny, sun-browned legs drawn up, her elbows propped on scabbed knees. The hand-me-down garment she wore was way too big for her. Every time she moved, it slipped off one or the other of her thin shoulders.
During the hour that Leeloo Bunny had been keeping vigil, the ville’s other children had joined her at intervals, scrambling up the back side of the berm for a look-see. After less than a minute of quiet reconnoiter, the pushing and pinching started. Squealing, they raced back down to resume an extrafrantic, extrashrill game of Chill the Mutie.
Only Leeloo had the patience to stay, to sit in silence and allow the promised miracle to unfold. She wanted to be first to see it, and to be able to remember every second as long as she lived.
Nothing this exciting had ever happened in Bullard ville.
It was without a doubt one of the two most dramatic moments in Leeloo’s eight years of life.
It towered above sneaking peeks through the windows of the gaudy house to see the mostly naked men and women fight on the pallets laid on the floor. Leeloo had sometimes watched her own ma, Tater Bunny, fight men on those mattresses. It was a safe bet that one of Tater’s adversaries was Leeloo’s father; there were a lot of candidates for the distinction, but no one had ever stepped forward to claim the little girl as his own.
Because Leeloo didn’t fully understand the aim of the gaudy house mattress fights, she had yet to figure out how to judge winners and losers. To her it seemed the combatants usually parted on friendly, if not affectionate terms. Some of the women fought ten or twelve men a night, and didn’t seem the worse for wear, at least not any place that showed.
It was a different story for her ma. Tater Bunny had died more than a year ago when a drunken drifter choked her a bit too hard.
That was Leeloo’s life-changing, dramatic event number one.
The man who’d chilled her ma had tried to run away afterward, but the ville’s menfolk caught him and dragged him back. They hung him from an old basketball stanchion with his pants pulled down around his boot tops and his willy sticking out. Leeloo had sometimes gone to look at the man who chilled her ma, to look through the hot, blurry screen of her tears and throw rocks at him as hard as she could. After a while, she had to stand upwind because the smell got so bad. The ville’s men cut down and buried the corpse only when they needed the stanchion to hang someone else.
Leeloo Bunny had no interest in eventually following in her ma’s professional footsteps. Not because of the nature of the work, which held no particular stigma in Bullard ville, or the danger of injury, which was considerably less than other jobs to be had, but because of the required confinement. Leeloo liked to be outdoors in the sun, not indoors, lying in tangled, sticky bedding. She liked planting seeds in the raised beds under sheet-metal awnings and tending the young plants until they grew big enough to eat. She liked picking bouquets of the bitter-tasting, little wild daisies that seemed to pop up everywhere. She made delicate ornaments for herself out of them by knotting the stems together. This day, she was decked out with a daisy circlet on the crown of her head, and tiers of bracelets dangled from her slender wrists.
Her anticipation of specialness on this day had begun three weeks earlier, when the carny’s advance scout had roared up to the berm gate in an armored Baja Bug.
The little wag had outsized knobby tires and a roll cage around the driver’s seat made of heavy pipe. Over the empty front, rear and side window frames were hinged, blasterproof metal shutters that could be dropped during an attack, leaving only a view slit for the driver to steer by.
The carny scout had called himself Azimuth. A giant with cascading woolly dreadlocks, every muscle and sinew was visible beneath his glossy ebony skin. He wore a sleeveless vest of mutie coyote pelt, turned hair side out, and gray army pants tucked into the tops of scuffed and scraped, steel-toe-capped, lace-up, shin-high, black leather boots. Grimy goggles hung around his wide, muscular throat.
Leeloo could close her eyes and recall how the man smelled: a sweet, feminine perfume mixed with sharpish body odor. Azimuth had either slathered himself with great quantities of the flowery scent, or he had been in a prolonged fight with a gaudy slut who had. Leeloo also remembered the way his front teeth were filed to points, top and bottom, and that the inside of his mouth was as red as blood, as was his tongue and the insides of his nostrils.
Azimuth had been greeted by Bullard ville’s most important people, including its headman, the lumbering, overweight, perpetually sweating Wilbur Melchior, who had adopted Leeloo right after her ma died. The black giant’s mission was to determine whether the ville would be willing to pay for the privilege of seeing Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny Show. If so, Azimuth said, the troupe would stop there for a night or so en route to another engagement. He quoted them a steep price for this entertainment, in water and fresh food.
When asked by Melchior what the show consisted of, Azimuth threw back his head and let out a howl that so startled the delegation of dirt farmers, they stepped back and grabbed for their blaster butts.
But there was no threat.
It was a howl of sheer exuberance.
When things calmed down, Azimuth assured them that Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny offered genuine miracles and wonderments, gathered at great expense and hazard from the farthest corners of the Deathlands and beyond, all for their private amusement and edification. On his long, thick fingers, he listed some of the various, incomparable attractions: singing, dancing stickies; fantastical mutie beasts trained to do amazing tricks; feats of norm superstrength and daring; the most beautiful norm women this side of Hell walking around in next to nothing; unparalleled exhibitions of music, comedy and drama.
Something to tell your grandchildren about, Azimuth said. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
At that point, Melchior and the other leaders of the ville withdrew to the shade of a nearby sheet-metal awning and conferred. Leeloo edged close enough to overhear their conversation. Her adoptive father said it was a matter of pride, that Bullard ville deserved this admitted luxury. Their hosting the World Famous Carny would indicate to anyone with half a brain that the remote agricultural enclave had finally come into its own. Around the circle, heads nodded in agreement.
The only word of caution came from the gaudy master, Skim O’Neil. He said there could be a big risk in letting so many strangers inside the berm at once. The protest fell on deaf ears. Melchior spoke for the rest when he bragged that Bullard ville wasn’t afraid of anything that walked. Mopping his sweat-beaded jowls with a big wad of cotton rag, he reminded O’Neil how they had turned back the attempted takeovers of two different barons and chilled their sec men.
A vote was taken, and it was unanimous.
When they returned to where the scout waited, Melchior put his hand out and told him that he had a deal. They shook on it. Then Melchior and the other leaders took Azimuth on a guided tour of Bullard. Leeloo tagged along behind, unnoticed.
As was common in Deathlands, the isolated ville had sprouted up at the edge of a ruined interstate highway. The overpass that had once connected high-speed travelers with an oasis of fast food and fast gas had collapsed across four lanes of traffic on the day the world changed. The center of Bullard ville was formed around the shambling remnants of those predark fast-food franchises. Their dilapidated plastic signs still beckoned: Mergen’s Family Restaurant, Taco Town, Burger Stravaganza, Fish ’n’ More—now the gaudy house.
The four-lane highway had once paralleled a lush river valley that stretched for many hundreds of miles, bordered by rugged, steep, dark mountains to the east and rolling hills to the west. The flat valley, postnukecaust, was parched, burned yellow, turned to dust by sun and chem rains. Postnukecaust, the slow, meandering river that had watered trees and grass and cultivated fields decided it no longer liked the looks of things and burrowed deep underground.
The river’s disappearance saved Bullard ville from extinction. Of course, there were no more pre-breaded steaks, fish fingers, burger patties or ice-cream novelties to lure tired, hungry travelers to Bullard. Yet the travelers still came and stopped and parted with whatever valuables they had, because there was water. The underground river ran right under the ville. Hand-operated pumps provided water for drinking, for very occasional bathing and for travelers to take away.
Grub could be had, but it was whatever was on hand. Travelers ate whatever bush meat the residents could chase down and kill. Usually mutie jackrabbits, or snakes, or birds of all sizes, from sparrows to turkey vultures. These were either spit-roasted over an open fire or parboiled in caldrons made of salvaged, fifty-five-gallon oil drums.
With the virtually endless supply of clean water, the ville folk grew a variety of edible crops year-round, under the shelter of metal awnings to keep off the chem rain. For fertilizer, they composted and used their own excrement. They cultivated beans, hot peppers, onions and garlic. They grew corn primarily for the sugar, which was used to make joy juice. There wasn’t enough surface area inside the defensive berm to produce food for mass export. And there weren’t enough people in Bullard to defend an expansion of crop growing outside the barrier.
Considering the miserable, hammered-down state of the world, the little hamlet was doing quite well. During the tour, Melchior hinted as much to Azimuth, but as Leeloo noticed, he gave no specifics.
As she well knew, the treasure of Bullard was safely locked away in the basement of Mergen’s Family Restaurant, under twenty-four-hour armed guard. It consisted of miscellaneous objects of value traded for water: weapons, ammunition, canned food, predark medicine, first-aid supplies, wag fuel, oil, grease, batteries, transmission fluid, antifreeze, tires, matches, clothing, boots and shoes, hand tools, auto parts, various bits of repair material, duct tape, bailing wire, nails, screws, rope and electrical wire. There was no jolt, though. The ville leaders drew the line at hard drugs.
The contents of the warehouse were tangible proof of the water’s worth. And anything worth more than a few drops of piss in Deathlands was worth chilling someone over. Two barons had tried and failed to annex Bullard ville, which stood in disputed border zone at the edges of their respective territories. Neither baron could muster and transport a large enough force to defeat the villagers. Every person over the age of twelve carried a loaded blaster all the time, whether working on the crops or sleeping. The youngest ones packed well-cared-for .36-caliber, black-powder, Italian-reproduction Colts. They wore the 5-shot, 1862 Police models in canvas, snap-flap hip holsters. The entire volunteer sec force trained regularly in marksmanship and tactics.
Leeloo Bunny was too young and still too physically frail to control a blaster that weighed more than a pound and a half, unloaded. But she was very much looking forward to the day when finally she got her own blaster. Not because she wanted to shoot anything in particular, but because it was a symbol of her growing up.
After the guided tour, the ville’s leaders fed Azimuth a massive meal, got him stinking drunk and then let him fight three women at once in the gaudy.
All free of charge.
Melchior had called this extraordinary generosity “the famous Bullard ville hospitality.”
As the dust plumes on the plain grew closer, Leeloo could just make out tiny, dark shapes at their bases, and her heart leaped. The shapes became more and more distinct until she could see the gaily painted wags, racing with strings of bright pennants whipping from their radio masts.
A man standing at the berm gate shouted, “The carny’s here! The carny’s here!”
Every man, woman and child dropped whatever they were doing and rushed to the ville’s entrance, forming a dense double line, a gauntlet of well-armed Bullard ville welcome.
The fifteen-wag caravan slowed to a crawl as it approached the defensive berm. Leeloo saw that some of the wags were towing big tarp-covered cages on flatbed trailers.
Then the music started.
Taped music, scratchy with age and thousands of playings. Loud enough to wake the nukecaust’s dead, a powerful male baritone boomed above the insistent crash of cymbals and drums. The words he sang rolled like thunder. Leeloo had taught herself to count to a hundred, so she knew what “76” signified. She wasn’t sure whether a “trombone” was animal, vegetable or mineral, but the raucous, cheerful beat of the predark music thrilled her to the core.
As the dust clouds drifted away to the south, with the convoy slowly advancing, men began to jump out of the wags. They threw back the tarps covering the trailered cages, revealing the collection of creatures within.
Leeloo sucked in an astonished breath. It was more wonderful than her wildest imaginings! Behind the bars of the first cage lurked a two-headed scalie. One head was normal sized; the other looked like a baby’s. The next trailer cage held a gaggle of stickies, naked but for plastic collars in bright colors, like open flower petals.
They showed their needle teeth and dilated their flat nostril holes as they took in the scent of the ville. Another cage contained a huge mutie mountain lion with scythe-shaped horns jutting on either side of its neck. It raised its head and yowled balefully along with the marching song. On the trailer behind the mountain lion was the biggest desert rattler Leeloo had ever seen. The thing was mebbe ten feet long, and its body was as big around as her waist. Its flat, triangular-shaped head was even wider, and the mouth could have easily swallowed two of her whole.
There were lizard birds with leathery wings and fangs so sharp they scored the steel bars of their cages.
Leeloo turned her attention to the carny folk walking alongside the trailers. The men wore slitted masks over their eyes. Their leather jerkins and shorts exposed bulging arm and leg muscles. They all carried bullwhips, which they smacked against the bars of the cages, making the mutie creatures howl in complaint. The carny women were long legged, their faces and heads concealed by brightly sequined hoods. But for thigh-high, high-heeled boots and a tracery of string over their privates, they were naked. The women also used whips to stir up the rolling menagerie.
Once inside the berm, the caravan of wags circled twice, to Leeloo’s way of thinking, most majestically. Then it stopped.
A tall, muscular man in a worn red satin tailcoat, and with tight white pants tucked into hard-used black riding boots, climbed out of the largest wag. On one hip he wore a holstered, blue-steel, .45 Government Colt blaster; on the other he carried a coiled black bullwhip. His short, wiry hair was a rusty red, as was his six-inch-long goatee. A jagged ring of scar marked the left side of his face, perhaps made by a broken neck of a bottle, or Leeloo thought, by an attack from one of his ferocious muties.
As the tailcoated man walked toward the ville’s leaders, a tiny stickie, not more than four years old, trotted along at his left heel. It was naked and barefoot, and there were bruises all over its pale body. Around its neck was a choke chain dog collar that wasn’t tethered to a leash.
“Welcome to Bullard ville,” Melchior said, extending a damp, callused hand to the carny master. “A pleasure to have Gert Wolfram and his famous troupe as our guests.”
“I speak for my entire company,” the tailcoated man stated, “when I say we are most honored to have the opportunity to entertain you.”
The young stickie, eyes as dead as black stones, sniffed through the two holes in its face, taking the measure of the overweight Melchior. And having done that, the baby mutie made soft kissing noises in his direction, and began to drool copiously. Melchior’s right hand reached across his pendulous chest and came to rest on the rubber butt of his shoulder-holstered Ruger Single Six.
“Oh, don’t worry about Jackson,” the carny master said, stroking the creature’s hairless skull. “Unless you corner the little tyke, he’s not the least bit dangerous.”
At the hand-to-head contact, the immature stickie closed its eyes with pleasure; its jaw gaped, exposing tightly packed rows of needle teeth.
“When is the show going to start?” Skim O’Neil asked.
This question was met with wild cheers and whistles from the assembly.
“It takes us a while to stake out and set up the main tent,” the carny master said.
“I’m afraid it’s already too late in the day to get started on it. With your permission, we’ll set up camp inside the berm tonight, then start raising the tent tomorrow morning. That will give my people a chance to rest up, too. They need a break before they perform. We’ve been on the road three days getting here.”
Leeloo was crushed to hear this. She wasn’t alone. A chorus of groans rippled through the crowd.
“Couldn’t you give us a little taste of what’s to come?” Melchior asked. “We’ve all been waiting for this day for weeks and weeks.”
The carny man scratched his red chin beard, briefly considering what taste he might offer. “All right,” he said, “I’ll give you fine folks a preview of what’s in store for tomorrow. But I warn you now, once you see it, you won’t sleep a wink tonight.”
He looked down at the baby stickie and said, “Sing!”
As the order echoed off the berm walls, the people of Bullard ville blinked at one another in amazement. It was common knowledge that the mouth parts of stickies were so primitive, so unevolved, that most could barely make mewling noises, let alone make music.
Yet, at its master’s command, the little stickie opened its round, practically lipless mouth, threw back its bald head and sang, in perfect pitch, in a high, clear soprano, a predark song even older than the one caught on tape. “Ave Maria” burst forth from between rows of mutated needle teeth.
Most of the folks in the crowd closed their eyes and simply listened to the exquisitely pure tones, like bell chimes. Each word of the lyric was perfectly formed and enunciated.
There were no cries of sacrilege because no one understood the words, which were in Italian. Even if the Deathlands dirt farmers could have translated the lyric into English, its meaning and references would have been a mystery to them. Despite the yawning gap in the audience’s understanding, the music itself was so moving that by the time Jackson finished the a cappella performance, there were tears of wonder in the eyes of men and women alike.
While Bullard ville rendered wild applause, the carny master patted the little stickie on the head, and it nuzzled its cheek against the side of his riding boot, leaving behind a shiny smear of saliva.
After the tumult had died down, a beaming Melchior pointed out a likely spot for the company to spend the night. The carny master thanked him, then returned with Jackson to the biggest wag, which pulled out of file to lead the convoy to the campsite. The marching music started up again as the wags and trailers rolled forward. Dust boiled up from their tires, swirling in thick, yellow clouds through the open gate of the berm.
Out of the corner of her eye, Leeloo caught more movement on the plain. Shadowy figures advanced through the man-made dust storm, making for the ville’s entrance. They were hard to see with the all dust and the sunlight slanting hard behind them.
She counted seven.
Mebbe stragglers from the carny? she thought.
When they stepped out of the cloud, Leeloo knew at once they weren’t carny folk. They were hunters. The man in the lead carried a scoped longblaster on a shoulder sling. He was tall, with dark hair falling to his broad shoulders. A black patch concealed his left eye socket. As he came closer, she noticed the color of the other eye.
It made her think of a cloudless morning sky.
Infinite blue.
Infinite cold.
Chapter Two
Ryan Cawdor shifted the sling, transferring the weight of his scoped Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle from his right shoulder to his left. Six dusty companions followed single file behind him, heading for the crude gate cut into the twelve-foot-high berm wall. For the last third of a mile, they had been breathing and eating the drifting grit thrown up by the wag caravan. For the last third of a mile, they had been listening to the predark marching music, its sprightly cheerfulness like a dull dagger jammed in their guts, then twisted. For the last third of a mile, it had taken every bit of Ryan’s self-control not to break into a dead run. Just as it not took all of his inner reserve not to sprint up the face of the perimeter barrier, drop belly down on the summit with the 7.62 mm longblaster and start bowling over the carny folk.
Suicide wasn’t part of the plan.
The plan was to make damn sure what they all suspected was true, and then to act in stealth, lowering the odds from eight to one against before showing their hand. The mechanics of the operation had been hatched over four days of one of the hardest forced marches Ryan and the others had ever endured. They had approached Bullard ville from the west, cross-country, over seemingly endless rolling hills and scrub forest, breaking their own trail, sleeping only a few hours each night. They had pushed themselves mercilessly because they didn’t want to risk arriving too late and uncovering another horror.
For the thousandth time, the image of the hand came into Ryan’s mind. A grisly, ruined, black hand jutting from the earth in the middle of long patch of churned-up ground. The flesh had been torn away by teeth or beak, or both. Three fingers were missing down to the knuckles. Right off, he knew it was a woman or a child’s hand because it was so small and slender. Somehow, whoever it was had survived long enough to claw up through the smothering clods of earth. It had to have taken a superhuman effort.
They had discovered why after they had carefully scraped back the top layer of soil.
Cradled in the young woman’s other arm was a dead infant.
Her strength had come from desperation.
The companions peeled back more dirt, exposing other bodies. Many, many bodies piled on top of one another. Both sexes, old, young, strong, weak. As soon as Ryan saw the tangle of limbs and torsos, he sent his twelve-year-old son, Dean, away from the pit to recce the rest of the ville. The boy left gratefully, but he would have remained to prove to his father and the companions that he was made of the same rock-hard stuff that they were. Ryan had no doubt about the boy’s stuff; as far as he was concerned, Dean had nothing to prove.
There were close-range blaster wounds on a few of the corpses, but most were unmarked by obvious acts of violence. They never did find the bottom of the mass grave. The stench of death rained like hammer blows against the sides of their heads, and they staggered from the trench, bent over, retching.
“Bastards chilled the whole ville,” Krysty Wroth gasped as Ryan put a strong, gentle hand on her shoulder. The titian-haired, long-legged young woman was his lover and soul mate. They had seen many hard things during their wanderings over the hellscape, but rarely had they seen such wanton wholesale slaughter as this.
“Not all, mebbe,” said Jak Lauren, pointing at the cluster of shabby dwellings. It was a false hope. And from the expression in the albino’s ruby red eyes, he knew it. But Jak, like everyone else, wanted to be away from the pit and its rotting horrors. A thorough search showed the nameless little ville had been looted of everything of value, just like the dead folk buried in the ditch. The huts and lean-tos had been stripped, the underground storage pits emptied. All that remained was the trash in the ville’s midden too heavy to be blown away by the howling wind.
Uncovering the mass grave had flipped a switch in Doc Tanner’s head. He had stopped talking the moment they found the bodies of the mother and child. Which was unusual, because normally Doc never shut up. At the time, Ryan figured the discovery had triggered memories of Doc’s own terrible loss of his long-dead children and wife, of the time-trawling whitecoats from the future who had snatched him from the natural course of his life in the year 1896, then played with him before bumping him further down the timeline, to the living hell called Deathlands.
Doc hadn’t participated in the speculation about what had happened in the ville, about who could have committed such a bastard evil deed, and how the deed was done. Nor did Doc vote when it came time to decide what in rad blazes they should do about it—if anything.
Some hours later, as Ryan and the companions tracked the overlaid tire prints of many heavy wags leading out of the ville, Doc had suddenly started walking stiff-legged, like a tall, scarecrow zombie in his frock coat and high boots. After he had taken several hard falls, despite the support of his swordstick, J. B. Dix had safety-lined him to his waist with a fifteen-foot length of rope to keep him from wandering off and breaking his neck.
A week had passed since they came on the looted ville and the mass grave. A week of walking, first in the wheel ruts of the presumed chillers to the ville of Perdition, then overland to try to intersect the path of the already departed convoy. In that time, Doc hadn’t improved, and J.B. still towed him, out of duty and friendship.
The peeling sweat on J.B.’s face cut stripes of clean skin through the caked yellow grime; his wire-rimmed spectacles were smeared with a mixture of both. The stocky man wore his precious fedora hat screwed down on his head as he strained forward. Seeing the determination on his face made a flicker of a smile cross Ryan’s lips. He had known John Barrymore Dix since their wild and woolly days with the legendary Trader. J.B. had been that operation’s Armorer, a nickname that had stuck. They were best friends then, as now.
J.B. never said he was sorry when he wasn’t.
And he never gave up.
As Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was dragged along, he railed at a god who was either absent, or oblivious, or malevolent. Or some of each. Doc was an educated man. He used big words. Complicated arguments chased his thoughts, rather than vice versa, like angry wasps trapped inside his skull. He made leaps in logic, dropping out pivotal points, speaking from opposite points of view. At times he seemed to be taking on the persona of his own grand inquisitor.
The only companion with the background to unscramble his philosophical ravings was Mildred Wyeth, and she had long since given up the game. The solidly built black woman was a medical doctor, and aside from Doc, had the most formal education of any of them. She had been cryogenically frozen after a botched surgery just before skydark, and reanimated by Ryan and the others nearly a hundred years later.
Mildred’s diagnosis of Doc’s current condition was grim. She had said his overwhelmed mind had twisted in on itself. Anger reflecting anger, which led to agonizing flashbacks, which reduced him to sobbing into his palms. The man was suffering from an unspeakable, unending ordeal—a price paid for no crime of his, other than the exquisite bliss of his former life. The life he had been born to live, and had been denied. In Mildred’s medical opinion, Doc’s rambling, often shouted, diatribes to imaginary gatherings of Oxford dons allowed him to flee the crushing reality of the present, where he was doomed to exist without his beloved wife and children.
Though Mildred sometimes acted as if she had little love for the old man, it was plain to Ryan that she found it hard to watch and be helpless to slow his further mental and physical disintegration.
The one-eyed man remained cautiously confident that Doc would come out of the tailspin eventually. As he always had before.
As they neared the ville entrance, Ryan saw a little girl in a loose-fitting, faded cotton print dress staring at them from inside the gate. A very pretty little girl with a headband of daisies. Her gaze swept past Ryan to rest upon Dean. The boy sensed he had a rapt audience of one. Though exhausted, he drew himself to his maximum height and flashed a smile at the girl. Ryan was amused to see that his son managed a bit of a manly swagger, with the 9 mm Browning Hi-Power blaster prominently strapped to his hip.
Krysty gave Ryan a nudge. “Like father, like son,” she commented.
A trio of armed men in bill caps stood behind a pile of concrete boulders and rubble that served as both a checkpoint and traffic barrier. Beyond them, Ryan caught his first glimpse of Bullard ville: an oasis of brilliant green that sprouted miraculously from the sunbaked yellow earth. In rows of raised beds, under slanting, corrugated metal roofs, the crop plants grew lush and tall. On the far side of the beds, simmering in the valley heat, predark plastic-and-metal signs on tall poles dangled precariously above a line of low buildings.
“Man, oh, man, could I ever go for a cheese-burger and a strawberry shake,” Mildred said.
Ryan grinned. “We’ll be lucky to get a plate of beans and a swig of green beer.”
“I know, I know. But a girl can still dream, can’t she?”
As they stepped up to the checkpoint, one of the bill caps shouted in an unpleasantly high voice, “And just who might you folks be?” Without giving them time to answer, he asked a second question. “What is your business here?” The two other sentries held sawed-off, 12-gauge, double-barreled shotguns at waist height. The range was such that, by discharging all four stubby barrels at once, they could cut the strangers not so neatly in two.
Ryan showed the guards open hands. “We’re just travelers on the long road north,” he said. “Come to water and rest, and willing to pay for it.”
The head sentry, a very short man with a full brown beard, gave them a hard once-over. He looked especially long at their complement of weapons, appraising them for possible threat and commercial value. When he came to Doc, he couldn’t help but notice the slack rope that connected him around the waist to the man with the smeared eyeglasses.
“What’s with the geezer?” the guard leader chirped. “He sick? He looks sick to me. He better not have the fucking oozies!”
Ryan and the companions knew he was referring to an incurable, mutated brain virus, much feared and believed to be transferred by cannibalism.
“He’s just old,” Krysty said. “Very, very old.”
“Oughta leave him to meet his maker, then.”
“Ain’t his time, yet,” Ryan said, the look on his face telling the guard to mind his own bastard business.
Unable to contain himself any longer, one of the shotgunners excitedly blurted out, “We got a carny come to town.”
“That so?” J.B. said.
The sentries shared wide grins.
“Best rad-blasted carny in all the Deathlands,” the head guard added. “Big show’s tomorrow.”
“We’ll have to stick around, then,” Ryan said. “Something like that you don’t see every day.”
“You’d better believe it,” the shotgunner said. “Gert Wolfram’s carny only plays the most important, big-time villes.”
“You can stow your gear over where the carny is putting up camp,” the head guard said. “As long as you got something to trade, you got the run of Bullard ville. There’s food, water, joy juice and the best damn gaudy house this side of Perdition. When you run out of trade goods, we will escort you out of the berm. We don’t give no charity here. And we don’t take no guff from those who don’t belong.”
With that warning, the guards lowered their scatterguns and allowed the companions to enter Bullard ville.
Once inside, there was no mistaking the proposed campsite. Not with fifteen wags parked in a broad circle on the baked yellow dirt. On the side of the largest wag was a crudely painted sign that read Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny Show. Lots of ville folks were standing around gawking while dozens of carny roustabouts worked to set up camp. The heavy protective tarps were pulled back from the trailered cages so the gawkers could see in. Only from a goodly distance, though. The newcomers appeared to have set up a kind of invisible perimeter that the ville folk weren’t crossing. Mebbe they’d been warned to steer clear? Mebbe they didn’t need to be.
As they approached the mob of spectators, a strange sound split the air. Two very loud tones, a high note sliding to low. Only Mildred made the connection to a foghorn; none of the others had ever heard one. To them it sounded like a baleful howl.
Beside Ryan, Jak cranked his head around and stiffened, as if ten thousand volts had just shot through him. The youth’s reaction surprised the one-eyed man. It was just an animal noise. A very large animal.
Before Ryan could raise a hand to stop him, the albino took off, running at full tilt for the cages. Some of the carny folk saw him coming and tried to block his way with widespread arms, but he feinted, swinging his white head one way, then squirted past them. Staring at his rapidly accelerating back, the empty-handed roustabouts yelled for someone to get him.
“Dark night,” J.B. muttered, “we were supposed to go in nice and quiet, and recce first.”
“Better back his play,” Ryan said, waving the companions after him.
J.B. pulled Doc along like a stubborn calf.
Suddenly the howling got a whole lot louder, and it changed in timbre. Instead of coming from deep in a huge set of lungs, it came from high in the throat.
It went from misery to absolute joy.
Then it stopped altogether.
There was no one left to try to turn back the companions. All the carny folk had rushed over to one of the trailered cages.
And with good reason.
It appeared that the agile intruder was getting eaten alive.
Jak had his head stuck between the bars of the cage, holding on to them with both hands. For a split second, Ryan’s heart dropped in his chest. He thought the young albino was a sure goner, his head half inside the great carnivore’s open maw. But then he saw Jak wasn’t getting chewed.
He was getting licked.
The mutie mountain lion’s tongue slathered his face so hard that even holding on to the bars with all his might, Jak couldn’t keep his boots on the ground.
The great cat made a loud purring sound, like a wag’s big diesel engine fast idling, as it scrubbed the albino’s face and neck with a wide pink tongue that had to be a foot and a half long.
“What the nuking hell?” J.B. exclaimed as he came to a stop beside his one-eyed friend.
“It’s the lion, J.B.,” Ryan said. “They’ve got the lion.”
The companions—except Doc, who was still wearing the thousand-yard stare—needed no further explanation. Some time ago, Jak had been made a prisoner in Baron Willie Elijah’s mutie zoo. He had been caged up with a mutie mountain lion. After an initial, violent and lengthy misunderstanding, the two had got on famously. They were both wild things, so well matched physically and spiritually that they could communicate without words, with their eyes and with touch. Brother beasts of the hellscape.
Once freed, the big lion hadn’t run off, but had followed Jak and the companions. Only when it refused to enter a mat-trans unit was it left behind. This, it seemed certain, was that selfsame noble beast.
“A captive again,” Mildred said glumly.
“Unlucky,” Krysty said.
“Mebbe,” J.B. stated. “Mebbe not.”
“What do you mean?” Krysty asked.
“Found Jak again, didn’t he?”
“Step back from the cage, mutie,” one of the roustabouts shouted as he shouldered up to the bars. He was a big, thick-bodied man with a heavy blue-black shadow of beard stubble, and matted black hair on the tops of his shoulders and the backs of his arms. He outweighed Jak by more than a hundred pounds.
The albino paid him no mind.
“I said, step back!”
With no one to stop them, the ville folk pressed forward for a good view of the action. The show was starting a day early.
Jak pulled his head out from between the bars but didn’t move away. His fine, shoulder-length white hair was plastered to the side of his head.
“Let cat out,” Jak said, his ruby-red eyes glittering.
“Yeah, right,” the roustabout replied sarcastically.
Then he turned to address the gathered carny people. “Turn loose a thousand pounds of man-eater on your say-so.”
This remark was met with peals of laughter from the ville and carny folk alike.
“Let him out,” Jak repeated. His voice was flat, calm, controlled.
The smile melted off the hairy man’s face.
“Get closer,” Ryan told the others.
Even as they began to move, the hairy guy snarled, “You’re begging for a major ass-kicking, Snowball.” He looked around to make sure he had backup, then added, “And by skydark you’re gonna get it!”
Before the hairy roustabout and his pals could take a step forward, the albino’s right hand was up and full of .357 Magnum Colt Python. He showed them all the dark hole in the crowned muzzle, the hole where death slept, until called.
Jak spoke again. This time it wasn’t a polite request; it was a threat. “Open cage now….”
Ryan lunged and used his momentum to throw a shoulder into the hairy man from behind. The blind-siding impact sent the roustabout stumbling to his knees, hard. He cursed as he immediately jumped back to his feet. He was very nimble for a big man.
In the next instant, weapons were out all around.
The carny folk waved nine mill semiauto blasters, mostly KG-99s and Llamas. Blue-steel, high-capacity cheapies, in excellent condition.
Ryan held his scoped Steyr SSG-70 rifle at waist height. Krysty had her Model 640 Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver in a double grip. Dean likewise braced his Hi-Power. Mildred one-handed her .38, a Czech-built, ZKR 551 target pistol. J.B. balanced his 12-gauge Smith & Wesson M-4000 pumpgun against his hip. Seeing the deadly turn of events, the ville gawkers turned and ran, scattering for the cover of the plant beds like so many jackrabbits.
The tense moment stretched on and on.
No one on either side wanted the shooting to start. They were standing way too close to each other to miss. Once the blasting began, there weren’t going to be any survivors.
Nobody moved.
Nobody even blinked.
Then, from over by the circle of wags, someone shouted, “What in the rad-fucking-blazes is going on here?” A tall man in a red tailcoat stormed out of the side door of the biggest wag. At his side was a naked, three-foot-tall, immature stickie.
The tailcoated man and his little shadow slowed their charge as they approached the fracas.
With his KG-99’s sights locked on Ryan’s chest, the hairy roustabout explained the deadly stalemate. “Snowball there,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, “wants us to let the nukin’ lion out. Started waving his blaster in our faces.”
As if it understood what the albino was trying to do, the mountain lion reached a huge paw between the bars and placed it lightly on his slim but powerful shoulder.
“Not gonna happen, son,” the red-haired, red-goateed carny master told Jak. “That’s one smart cat. The smartest, meanest, damnedest mountain cat in all of Deathlands. He’s playing you for a triple stupe. Open that cage door and he’ll gut you from windpipe to goobers with one swipe of that big old friendly paw of his. Then he’ll carve up the rest of us, just for fun, before we can do jack shit about it. Same way he chilled three of my best handlers over the past two months. One second they were alive, and the next they were torn clean in half—legs here, the rest of them way the fuck over yonder.” To illustrate, he gestured over his shoulder with a hooked thumb.
Ryan sidestepped over to Jak and whispered in his ear, “It’s not the time for this fight…we got other business first.”
The albino youth didn’t give a flying fuck for the wishes of most other human beings, but he always paid close attention to Ryan Cawdor, whose battle smarts had never proved wrong, and whose courage never failed.
Ryan stared hard into the bloodred eyes and nodded, to underscore his point.
Jak smiled, then swung the ventrib sights of the Python across the chests of his adversaries, counting and marking targets, left to right. Prep for a rapid-fire, cylinder-emptying fusillade.
A visible shudder passed through the pack of roustabouts.
Having made his point, Jak holstered his blaster.
After a pause, all weapons were lowered.
“You ain’t Gert Wolfram,” J.B. said to the man in the tailcoat.
The baby stickie started making kissing sounds at the Armorer, who shifted and planted his back foot, bracing himself to swing up the shotgun and take the sucker-fisted squirt’s spongy little head off at the neck.
“What makes you say that?” asked the carny master.
“Gert Wolfram is fat, fifty and fucked,” J.B. replied. “Last time we saw him, he had two broken ankles and his stickie slaves were pulling him apart like a sweet dough pudding.”
“Even if Wolfram survived the appetites of his pets,” Mildred added, “he couldn’t have lost twenty years in age, two hundred pounds in weight and gained six inches in height.”
“You got me there,” said the red-haired man with a disarming grin. “Actually I never claimed to be old Wolfram. People just assume that it’s so. Sure doesn’t hurt the business to let them keeping thinking that. I’m committed to keeping the show’s original fine reputation. I’m called the Magnificent Crecca, for obvious reasons.” He reached down to adjust the soft but prominent bulge in the front of his white pants. Then he leered at Krysty.
“Do we call you Magnificent, or just Crecca?” she asked.
“I answer to either, or to M.C., or carny master, or in your case—” he leaned closer to her to add “—to lover man.”
Krysty’s prehensile hair reacted to the unwanted advance, drawing up into tight coils.
Crecca’s eyes widened when he saw this. “My, my,” he said, “aren’t you the special one?” He pulled at his chin beard, looked her up and down salaciously, then said, “Wonder what else you’ve got hidden away for me?”
Krysty put her hand on the butt of her wheelgun. “I’ve got six hollowpoints, all for you,” she said, staring him down.
For a second Ryan thought things were going to escalate out of control again, but Crecca just looked amused. “I hope you’re all going to be here tomorrow so you can see the carny show,” he said. “You’ll never forget it. I promise you that.”
Neither will you, lover man, Ryan thought. Neither will you.
Chapter Three
“Ain’t you never heard about the man with the black eye patch?”
From the luxury and comfort of an executive office chair bolted to the sheet metal floor—the rips in the brown leatherette on the arms, seat, and head-rest repaired with overlapping strips of frayed duct tape—the Magnificent Crecca gestured impatiently for the big man breathing wolf-nasty in his face to take a step back. Something more easily ordered than obeyed.
Floor space in the carny master’s cabin in the big wag was at a premium, largely because its side walls were lined with built-in, sway-proof racks and shelves. Jammed on these shelves were select items taken either in trade for performances, or looted after a mass chilling and burial. Among the more important trinkets were unfired, Brazilian-made handblasters still wrapped in their protective Cosmoline; several .223-caliber, full-auto, military carbines; a scoped Remington 700 longblaster; and factory-loaded ammo in their original metal boxes. There were tall bottles of the very best joy juice and plastic bags of uncut jolt. There were lidded glass jars packed with bright bits of jewelry and dozens of cardboard boxes full of single-serving-sized containers of predark candies. There was also a barely functioning mini-TV and VCR, a small number of video-and audio-tapes and a black boom box. The electricity to power the carny master’s home entertainment center came from movable solar panels on the wag’s roof.
Along the front wall, below the room’s only decoration, a quartet of flyspotted, discolored, girly magazine centerfolds, was Crecca’s narrow bunk. Jackson lay curled up in the corner in a nest of rags. A pale, sleeping pillbug. His choke collar was chained to an eyebolt in the wall. The cabin smelled strongly of unwashed male, cigar butts and paper-trained stickie.
Of course Crecca had heard about the man with the eye patch.
Every triple-stupe droolie who wasn’t deaf had heard about him.
The gaudy houses up and down Deathlands were full of stories about that particular coldheart. About how he had run with Trader in the bad, bad old days. About how he had matured into a full-blown, human chilling machine. Norms. Muties. It didn’t matter to him. Rumor had it, because of that rad-blasted single blue eye, he could only see things one way: his way. Not a man to cross, unless you were looking to book a quick ride on the last train west. More convincing than the always exaggerated whore-shack gossip, Crecca knew that even the Magus, Gert Wolfram’s steel-eyed, half-mechanical former business partner, wanted no part of him.
Showing no emotion, the carny master said, “So, you think he’s One Eye Cawdor?”
“Damn straight!” Furlong exclaimed. “Right down to the zigzag scar on his eyebrow where the knife cut took his peeper!”
His outburst disrupted the rhythmic, wet snoring coming from the corner behind him. Furlong jerked his head around at the sound of chain rustling on the floor, making double-nuking-sure he was out of reach of the little stickie’s needle teeth and sucker fists. The relief on his face when he turned back was almost comical.
Crecca had to admit that the latecomer fit Cawdor’s description. “What would he want with us?” he asked.
“Mebbe he knows what we’ve been doing,” Furlong suggested. “Mebbe he wants to take our booty.”
“With a force of seven?” Crecca said incredulously, stroking his red chin beard. And seven was being real generous, considering one was old and brain-fucked, and another was so young his balls hadn’t even dropped yet. On the other side, the carny master had a virtual miniarmy, fifty-nine-strong, all hand selected and personally trained by him, hardened, efficient chillers who took pride in their work.
Only one creature in all of Deathlands had the power to make that bloodthirsty bunch wet their pants. And do his bidding.
The Magus.
The Magus had done things to people that gave even Crecca’s chill crew wake-up-sweating nightmares. Things that made the objects of his unwanted attention squeal like pigs and offer their own children’s lives in exchange for a quick and merciful death.
If the Magus had ever had an ounce of mercy in him, he had had it cut out a long time ago. Cut out and replaced with clockwork metal gears.
The new and improved carny operation was large scale, large profit and held together by fear and greed—the hellscape’s twin wellsprings of motivation.
That someone was after the accumulated spoils of mass murder came as no surprise to the Magnificent Crecca. With a setup as sweet as this one, he’d known it had to happen, sooner or later. It had happened later rather than sooner due to the fact that Deathlands folk generally kept their heads down and minded their business. They had more than enough trouble just making it through another night, without looking for a little something extra that belonged to strangers.
“I think we ought to take them out tonight,” Furlong said, his dark, close-set eyes eager beneath bristling black eyebrows. “I can send a couple of my best boys to chill them all while they’re sleeping.”
Being the head roustabout in the most famous carny in Deathlands didn’t require much in the way of smarts—just straightforward, dependable brutality. The Magnificent Crecca sometimes wondered if Furlong could tie his own bootlaces, or if he had to bully someone else into tying them for him.
For years prior to his promotion to carny master, Crecca had worked for the late Gert Wolfram, but never as a roustabout. He had been an advance scout and collector of specimens for the fat man’s menagerie of living oddities. He trapped wild muties in the Darks, using rope snares or pitfalls. In and around the villes, he bought or kidnapped the tame ones. He’d find a particularly disgusting freak that he knew old Wolfram would like, then he’d shove a bag over its head and steal it from the bosom of its loving family. If the family caught him in the act and objected too strenuously, he chilled the whole lot of them. He was paid by the pound in those days. Wolfram had a thing about the size and weight of his attractions, said “the big uns” drew better crowds—a rule of showmanship that the new carny master still followed. While on the road, Crecca often had to force-feed his severely depressed captives at blasterpoint to maintain their redemption value. If they still wouldn’t take nourishment, he ditched them to make room for more profitable cargo. Dumped them in the middle of nowhere to starve or be eaten. Their lives weren’t worth the price of a centerfire bullet or the trouble of resharpening a bone-nicked knife blade.
“What are you going to do with the bodies afterward?” Crecca asked his head roustabout.
“Drag the pieces of shit outside the berm and bury ’em on the plain.”
“And tomorrow morning nobody’s going to notice seven people who upped and vanished?”
Furlong shrugged. “Somebody might notice, but there’d be no proof, so what could they do?”
“What if one of them yells out as your boys attack or gets hold of a blaster? What then?”
Furlong was silent under knit brows, straining to come up with a good answer. He might as well have been trying to explain gravity. But he was too stupid to see the futility of the effort.
“Bullard ville’s gonna be the best pickings we ever had,” Crecca told him. “If we try anything on One-Eye and his crew and it goes sour, it will queer the whole deal. And I won’t risk that.”
The hairy man started to restate his case for a surgical strike, but Crecca cut him off. “Do nothing,” he said. “Do absolutely fucking nothing. Understand?”
It took a long moment for this to sink in, but Furlong finally, reluctantly nodded.
“Get out,” Crecca said, dismissing him with a wave of his hand.
After Furlong left, the carny master assured himself that even if One-Eye had come to pay them a visit, that even if he knew about the spoils of mass murder, it didn’t matter. Cawdor didn’t know how the chilling was done. He couldn’t know because there had never been a single survivor left to tell the tale. Cawdor and his six fellow travelers would die like dogs along with the rest of the Bullard ville hayseeds.
Crecca twisted the ends of his goatee into a point. It was too bad about the bitch, though. Her mutation—the squirming strands of flame-red hair—wasn’t flashy enough for her to make a sideshow attraction, but she had real potential as a sex slave. Ah, well, the carny master thought, sex slaves, even ones with legs as long as hers, could be had anywhere.
He reached in his tailcoat side pocket and took out a small beige cardboard box. On the box were printed the words Choco Duds. He shook a few of the predark candies onto his palm. They looked like ossified rat turds. Their milk-chocolate coating had crystallized to a floury white. More than a century of storage had turned once soft caramel centers to amber glass, unchewable by norm teeth and jaws.
Crecca flicked one of the Choco Duds across the cabin. It hit Jackson on the cheek with an audible whack. The stickie’s eyes popped open at once. It sniffed the air, mewled in delight, then rooted in the heap of rags until it found the treat.
Jackson had no trouble eating the pellet. The dead eyes begged for more.
“First we’ve got work to do,” Crecca said, getting up from his chair. He put a videocassette in the player and powered up the TV.
Jackson watched his every move with rapt attention.
Loud, hard-driving, backbeat-heavy music erupted from the speakers, and bright colors and dancing females appeared on the screen. Crecca fell into step with the lead singer-dancer—a dewy-eyed, teenage blonde with a bare midriff—and her troupe of four bare-bellied dancers. Their moves were complex and violent. And there wasn’t much room to work. Tails of red satin coat flapping, the carny master pivoted left and spin-kicked right.
“Come on, Jackson,” he called, teasing the creature with the offer of another treat. “Let’s go!”
The stickie began to follow along with its master. Singing, sort of. Unable to precisely vocalize the new words, which dealt with virginal angst, Jackson soprano-droned along with the video’s megastar. Dancing, sort of. The stickie waved its spindly arms, snapped and ground its narrow hips, a hair behind the beat.
“Good stickie,” he said, smacking the creature on the forehead with another well-aimed Choco Dud.
It was part of the Magnificent Crecca’s job, and the real, chilling-robbing operation’s cover, to keep audiences in the larger villes coming back every time the company circuited through Deathlands. This required the invention of new and ever more spellbinding acts. The carny master’s latest idea for a big-top finale was an all-stickie rock-dance number, with music and routines lifted from the video, and Jackson singing and dancing in drag—long blond wig, bare belly, tight miniskirt. As a Tiffany-imitator, the stickie had a long, long way to go.
“That’s okay, Jackson,” Crecca said patiently, after the little creature’s spin move went awry, and it crashed into the wall. “Let’s take it from the top….”
Chapter Four
The Clobbering Chair smiled and waved at Baron Kerr, beckoning him to come sit. To take the load off.
The plain piece of metal office furniture stood in the middle of the ville’s tiny, pounded-dirt, central square. It had been dragged out of the low blockhouse across the way. Leather straps hung from the armrests and looped around its front legs. Leaning against its back was a club made of three and a half feet of heavy iron pipe, one end wrapped with strips of rag to form a handle.
For a shimmering instant, the baron could see a smiling victim seated there. A smiling executioner, standing behind, club in hand. A smiling audience surrounding all, patiently waiting its turn.
Baron Kerr had long since given up trying to keep the faces of any of them separated. For him the individual members of the army of the dead blurred into one another, and into the few still living, who were just as eager as those who had gone before to feel the weight of the falling club.
Kerr never had visions of the ghosts of those carted up to the pool, quarter sawn and chucked in. But often, living people appeared to him—indeed, everything that he saw, heard, touched, tasted and felt—as puffs of colored smoke rising up in front of a wall of infinite blackness. At other times, the baron experienced just the opposite perception, that everything that existed was unified, a universe-spanning, living singularity that invaded and permeated the void like the tendrils of a rad cancer. When in this latter mode, as he was now, the clear divisions between objects, the boundaries between animate and inanimate, between human and tree and stone no longer existed.
He dimly remembered that there had been a time—or he imagined that he dimly remembered—when his perception of things had been different, when he was someone else, somewhere else. Though the details were beyond him, he could recall that creatures like those of the pool and surrounding woods hadn’t always spoken to him in his own language, and that the earth and water and sky hadn’t always heaved and shuddered with stirrings only he could see and understand.
The world, itself, hadn’t always been entirely alive.
The pale-yellow snow of spore fall, as fine as table salt, lay in scattered drifts as Kerr trudged across the square, toward the dirt-floor shacks and lean-tos built against the outer wall of the blockhouse. A half-dozen people stood around a fifty-five-gallon fire drum, watching their dinner cook on a red hot steel grate. One of them turned over the sizzling, pale, roast-shaped blob with a sharp-pointed stick. The baron’s grimy, raggedy, bright-eyed subjects all grinned and nodded a subservient greeting to him as he passed.
Kerr didn’t acknowledge their presence. He walked down the short, narrow flight of concrete stairs to the below-ground-level blockhouse entrance. The door, a massive, welded-steel bulkhead, had been twisted and wrenched away from the frame by crowbar and chisel. Scraped back on its sprung hinges, it no longer closed; it had never closed for as long as Kerr had been resident royalty in the blockhouse palace.
Though there were no windows, it wasn’t dark inside. Greenish light coruscated from the beads of condensation sweat on the concrete-block walls. It glowed from the accumulated puddles along the floor seam of the central hallway. Most of the acoustic tile ceiling lay scattered about on the floor. The low ceiling’s fluorescent light fixtures dangled lopsidedly from rusting chains and rotten wires.
Four of the seven small rooms off the main corridor were packed with squat, yellow-enameled, inoperative machines of unknown function. These machines were lagbolted into the floor. Thick nests of pipes of varying diameters fed into and out of them, and vanished into holes cut into the block. Dials and gauges with cracked faces and missing indicators dotted the walls of these rooms.
Kerr’s quarters were in the largest of the blockhouse’s three offices. He made his baronial bunk on the gray plastic laminated top of the built-in desk that ran the full length of the back wall. His pallet was a duct-tape-patched, flaccid, plaid-flannel-lined Coleman sleeping bag that hadn’t been cleaned since skydark. The work space’s computers, printers and monitors had been pushed off onto the floor and left there in a shattered heap.
Though the building looked like a pump house complex connected to the shallow lake on the mountain ledge above, it had been much more than that. The baron couldn’t read a lick, but even he realized the framed diplomas and certificates screwed into the walls of the offices meant whitecoats had worked there. Heavy-duty whitecoats. And the machines and electronic gear and miles of perforated computer spreadsheet covered with rows of numerical data meant government research jack. The bales of used printout paper were just about gone. For many years, the ville residents had used sheets of it to start their cook fires. Because of this, the site’s original purpose would probably always remain a mystery.
The baron hung his straw cowboy hat on a wall hook next to the neatly arranged predark fishing gear he had found in a metal cupboard. He figured it had belonged to one of the whitecoats. Rods. Reels. Aluminum boxes of tiny flies. Wiped down. Oiled. Polished. Cased. They were the only items in the place so meticulously tended.
His evening meal had already been set out on a crude wooden platter on the end of the desk. The mound of sliced, roasted fungus was crispy and brown on the outside and still white, creamy, almost molten in the center. From it arose a delicious and intoxicating smell of cardamom and cinnamon spice.
Kerr wasn’t hungry, but he ate. He ate every bite. And as he ate, he looked down at himself from somewhere near the ceiling, watching as his body satisfied the hunger that wasn’t his own. It was eating of the body by the body—its flesh, his flesh, inseparable.
After he was done, he felt the familiar weight of exhaustion descend, infiltrating his limbs, his torso and finally his brain. On the desktop, his sleeping bag quivered in anticipation of holding him. The surrounding walls of concrete block maintained their slow, steady breathing. Kerr let himself fall back onto the pallet, and there began to weep. Tears spilled out from under his wraparound sunglasses and trickled into the edges of his beard. Overhead, the partially collapsed ceiling flinched and grimaced in sympathy.
If the baron, too, yearned to sit in the Clobbering Chair, he had learned long ago that the burning pool would never let him. Of all those it had drawn unto itself, he was different.
Chosen.
Pampered.
Held apart.
For reasons that were unfathomable, James Kerr had been made baron of an ever changing, joyous, obedient flock that was oblivious to its cruel poverty, its physical suffering and the absolute certainty of its doom.
There was nothing his subjects wouldn’t do for him.
Except chill him.
And for as long as he could remember, that was all he had ever wanted.
Chapter Five
Ryan and the companions laid down their packs and bedrolls in the slanting shade of one of plant bed awnings, a good distance from the carny’s campsite. Doc knelt on the ground, tethered by his waist to one of the awning’s support posts. The old man’s eyes were vacant, and his fingers raked furrows in the yellow dirt. As Ryan watched him, he felt a growing sadness in his heart. If the old man didn’t snap out of his stupor, there would come a time for a mercy chilling. And he would have to be the one to do it. It was his responsibility as the undeclared leader of this group of friends.
A sound from the circled wags behind them made Ryan look over his shoulder. Blocked from view by the angle of its cage and trailer, the lion began to yowl mournfully—strange, high-pitched, flutelike noises.
Ryan glanced at Jak, and his stomach tightened into a hard knot. The albino was staring in the direction of the mutie cat. He stood flat-footed and rigid. The sinewy muscles in his dead-white, bare upper arms twitched from the strain; his hands were clenched into fists. The shock of each piercing cry rippled through his whipcord body like a wave. Ryan sensed that if the tension wasn’t released, and quickly, his young friend was going to shake apart.
“I go…” Jak announced to no one in particular.
With that, he loped away from the companions, crossing the pounded dirt in long, easy strides, making for the ville’s defensive perimeter. When he reached it, the slope didn’t slow him. The sun flashed once on his mane of white hair as he disappeared over the top of the berm.
“What’s with him?” Mildred said in dismay. “Where’s he off to now?”
Ryan shrugged as he smoothed out his bedroll and carefully set down the Steyr SSG-70. “Got some private business to attend to, I guess.”
“Are we going to have trouble with Jak?” Mildred asked him point-blank, hands braced on her sturdy hips. “Is he going to lose it on us? Has he already lost it? That’s the last thing we need.”
“Mildred, keep in mind that Jak has saved your life more than once,” Krysty cautioned her.
“And vice versa,” the black woman replied. “Jak and that mutie mountain lion have a connection that’s downright spooky. It’s been so long since we parted ways with that horn-necked monster, I’d almost forgotten just how spooky. It reminds me of the psychological case studies I’ve read about the psychic bonds between human twins. Only in this case it involves creatures of very different species. It isn’t natural, Krysty. It doesn’t make sense, biologically or physiologically.”
“You’re talking like a whitecoat.”
“I can’t help that,” Mildred said. “I was trained to think like a scientist. And the scientist in me says, we have no way of predicting with any sort of confidence what Jak is going to do next. Think about it. We no more than got inside the berm and he had us facing off against a dozen blasters…all over that mutie cat.”
“She’s right about the trouble,” J.B. told Ryan as he took off his glasses and polished the lenses with the hem of his shirt. “The big question is, can Jak keep to the plan we made? Or is he going to blow it for all of us by trying to get that critter out of its cage?”
“As it stands,” Mildred added, “this whole deal is balanced on a knife edge.”
J.B. nodded in agreement. He slipped his glasses back on. “Every one of those carny chillers over there has a centerfire blaster,” he said. “The odds were bastard bad even before we lost Doc. If the rest of us aren’t at one hundred percent, and on the same page, we don’t have a chance in hell here. We’re all gonna end up in a shallow hole with dirt in our faces. Mebbe the smart thing would be to slip over there once it gets dark and put a slug in the back of that big cat’s head.”
“Jak won’t let us down,” Ryan said with conviction. “He never has and he never will. He knows what we have to do, and why.” The hard edge to his voice said for the time being the discussion was over.
Inside, Ryan was as concerned as Mildred and J.B., and for the same reasons, but he couldn’t show it. His confidence had to shore up theirs; it was a simple matter of survival. He had to be the calm in the eye of the storm.
He sat cross-legged on his bedroll and with a scrap of lightly oiled rag began to brush the dust from the scope and action of his treasured predark longblaster. In silence, the others started going through the contents of their packs, sorting and gradually assembling a small pile of trade items so they could all eat and drink at the ville’s hostelries.
Ryan’s hands moved over the rifle automatically, his fingers programmed by countless repetitions of the same vital task. Trader had taught him that a fully functioning weapon was the difference between being dead and cold by the side of the road, and walking on. As he worked, Ryan thought about their long journey, about how they had followed the wheel tracks from the looted hamlet to Perdition ville. The trail ended on the outskirts of Perdition where they found a wide circle of deep holes pounded into the ground, holes made by carny tent’s massive stakes. Exactly the same circle they had found in the looted ville.
From a stooped old man poking around in the pile of worthless, half-burned trash the show had left behind, the companions had learned that the Gert Wolfram show had spent three days and nights entertaining the good folks of Perdition. The trash picker had described the strange and wonderful acts, the rousing music, the feats of strength and daring. There had been a terrible joy and satisfaction in his rheumy eyes as he told them about his favorite part of the show: the part where the two-headed scalie ate a live goat from both ends at once.
Legs first.
If the troupe hadn’t stopped over for those extra days, Ryan and the companions never would have caught up to them. The question was, why were the folks of Perdition still breathing air, and not buried in a ditch?
Compared to the unnamed ville where the mass chilling had been done, Perdition was a major metropolis. Which led Ryan to speculate that mebbe it was just too big for the chillers to tackle, and that’s why they had left it alone. Or mebbe they just skipped some villes along their route to throw any possible pursuit off the track.
The carny’s performance schedule had been posted on the side of a fire-gutted, semitrailer near the circle of tent holes. It turned out that the circus company was heading to a large ville several days southwest of Perdition before moving up the long, dry valley to an engagement at another big hamlet at its northern end.
The companions had taken the difficult, cross-country shortcut to try to intersect the caravan’s route. The hills and mountains that framed the dry valley were impassable by wags; once the carny entered at the southern end, the only exit was far to the north. When Ryan and the others had seen the towering spirals of dust in the distance, they knew they had found their quarry.
By the time Ryan had finished detailing his longblaster, the mound of trade goods on Mildred’s bedroll had grown impressively. She had put in a few .38-caliber cartridges. J.B. had added two empty mags and a minitoolkit for an M-16—a weapon they didn’t carry. Krysty had tossed in a pair of compact binocs with a cracked left lens, and Dean had given up a plastic-handled can opener that was near mint.
J.B. scowled at the carny’s circled wags and said, “Mebbe the Magus himself is hiding over there. Like a nasty old spider, waiting for the fun to begin.”
“Be just like him,” Krysty said. “Crouching in the deep shadows while his puppets do all the dirty work.”
“The Magus may not have anything to do with the carny anymore,” Ryan said. “Not since Wolfram went west.”
“From what it looks like the carny is doing,” J.B. said, “it seems right up his street to me.”
“Mebbe,” Ryan said. “But looting the odd, shit-poor ville would be a big step down for him. The Magus has always been into mass slavery of muties and norms, mostly to support his mining operations and his jolt factories, but also for breeding stock.”
The companions all knew the Magus was into animal husbandry. He specialized in the careful crossbreeding, and perhaps bioengineering, of new mutie races. Rumors abounded that he had “made” the first stickies. It was also rumored that he had acquired the power to travel forward and backward in time. That he had done evil deeds long before any person now alive had been born, and would do evil long after they were dust.
Deathlands was a place of little certain truth and much wild speculation. The only thing anybody knew for sure was that the Magus was a league of chiller above and beyond the run-of-the-mill, gaudy house backstabber.
“He’s back!” Dean exclaimed, pointing at the berm gate. “Jak’s back.”
The albino trotted across the compound at the same easy pace. Over his shoulder, its short front and long back legs trussed, was a skinned, dressed-out, thirty-pound mutie jackrabbit.
There had been no gunshot echo rolling over the valley. Ryan figured Jak had used one of the many leaf-bladed throwing knives hidden on his person to dispatch the rabbit.
“Why did he bring us dinner?” Dean asked his father. “I thought we were going to eat at the gaudy?”
The lion let out a blood-curdling roar that put an end to conversation.
It became clear that it wasn’t their dinner the albino had brought when he turned hard left and made a beeline for the row of trailered cages. Ignoring the crudely lettered Danger: Don’t Feed The Muties sign, Jak passed the fresh carcass through the bars to his brother beast.
The mountain ate the offering greedily, crunching up the bones with no more effort than he used to chew the flesh. A thirty-pound jackrabbit was a mere snack for an animal his size—it was gone in a few seconds. But it had to have been mighty tasty if the diesel-wag purring noise the cat made as it licked the blood from its huge paws was any measure.
“Say, Dean,” Ryan said, nudging his transfixed son with a gentle elbow. “I think someone’s trying to catch your eye….”
Dean turned to look. Instantly, a wide smile lit up his face.
Standing at the far end of the plant bed was a sun-browned little girl in a too big cotton dress with a crown of daisies in her golden-streaked brown hair. She smiled back at him, tooth for gleaming white tooth.
Chapter Six
“My name’s Leeloo. What’s yours?”
The twelve-year-old boy beamed down at her. “Dean,” he said.
“That’s a great blaster you’ve got, Dean.”
He glanced at the blue-steel weapon strapped to his hip. “It’s a 15-shot, nine mill Browning. Want to hold it?”
Leeloo nodded enthusiastically.
Dean dumped the staggered-row magazine onto his palm. Then he cracked back and checked the breech for a chambered round. After making sure the weapon was safe, without a second thought, he handed over what she knew had to be his most prized possession in all the world.
Leeloo very carefully took the Browning Hi-Power from him and held it in both hands, making a shaky, wavering attempt to aim. “Oh,” she said in dismay, “it’s heavier than I thought.”
Dean stepped around behind her and helped her raise the blaster to firing position. “You want to hold it about here,” he said.
Something new happened to Leeloo Bunny as young Dean reached his arms around her, enfolding her. In kindness. She felt suddenly safe and protected; she felt the urge to lean back against his chest, to feel the strength and the energy he gave off.
It was an urge she didn’t allow herself to give in to.
With great patience, Dean showed her how to work the Hi-Power’s safety. He made her adjust her stance to brace herself for the recoil. And he showed her how to hold her finger outside the trigger guard until she was ready to fire.
Nobody had given her any blaster training before. And certainly not with such a sophisticated and deadly predark weapon. She wasn’t old enough. Dean Cawdor, whose long, dark hair tickled the back of her neck as he leaned over her, thought she was. He cocked back the hammer with his thumb and told her to dry-fire the Browning.
“Go ahead,” he said, “squeeze the trigger.”
The firing pin made a twig-snap sound.
“Does it make a lot of noise when it really shoots?” she asked him.
“Sure does.”
He took back the blaster, lowered the hammer with his thumb, put the safety on and reholstered it.
“My ma got chilled,” Leeloo told him.
Dean looked at her for a long minute. She wasn’t sure whether she had said something bad without meaning to. Something that would make him not like her anymore.
She was about to apologize when he said, “Mine, too. She died of cancer. She was sick a long time. What happened to your ma?”
“My ma got choked in the gaudy while she was wrestling.”
“Wrestling?” Dean said, puzzled.
“On the bed.”
“Oh,” Dean said.
Leeloo stared at him closely, and as if she could read his mind—or heart—said, “Did your ma wrestle in the gaudies, too?”
“Sometimes,” the dark-haired boy said, staring down at his dusty boot tops. Though his lips moved, his face was expressionless. “But only when we didn’t have anything to eat, or nowhere safe to sleep. She was so pretty she could always find work in a gaudy.”
“They strung up the geezer who chilled my mom,” Leeloo told him. “I saw them do the whole thing. They yanked his pants down first. When his neck broke, it made a loud crack and his willy stuck out, like in wrestling. One time, before they cut him down, I clonked it good with a rock.”
“What about your dad?” Dean asked.
“Never had one that I know of. You’re lucky ’cause you’ve got one. And a good one, too. I can see that from the way he looks out for you.”
“Who takes care of you, then?”
“Fat Melchior, the headman of the ville. He took me in after Ma got chilled.”
“Is he nice to you?”
“Sure. But there’s not enough nice to go around. He has too many other kids of his own and the cabin is small.”
“You sound sad, Leeloo. Are you sad a lot?”
“I try not to be. I do things that make me happy, mostly by myself.”
“Me, too,” Dean said. “I like scouting ahead for the others when we’re on the move. Jak, he’s the one with the white hair, he’s teaching me how to read signs. He doesn’t say much, but I think I’m starting to get good at it.”
“You must have wonderful adventures with your dad and your friends. I’m still too young for adventures, I guess.”
“You’ll have some, though. Mebbe even better ones.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I’m sure of it.”
From the other side of the compound came the sound of her name being called. “Leeeee-looooo Bunny!”
“Dinnertime,” she said, destroyed at the prospect of being pulled away from something so exciting and extraordinary by something so boring and ordinary.
“You’d better go, then,” he told her. “Don’t want to be late, not with all those other kids at the table. You won’t get anything to eat.”
“Are you staying for the carny?” she asked him.
“Sure.”
“Then mebbe I’ll see you tomorrow?”
He smiled at her. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll look for you in the morning.”
With a totally mystifying combination of pain and joy sitting upon her heart, Leeloo Bunny descended the berm. She had never had a crush on a boy before. Had never wanted to kiss a boy before. In part, this was due to the awakening of her physical self; in part it was due to the fact that none of the ville boys interested her in the least. And for good reason. After watching the goings-on through the gaudy windows, the older ones got all panting and grabby handed, trying to insinuate their dirty fingers into very private places. Other girls in the ville, some even younger than Leeloo, let them do that, and more. Not Leeloo, though. The younger boys in Bullard ville were even more dismal crush prospects. They all had snot caked on their cheeks, and their breath smelled like creamed corn.
When she got back to Fat Melchior’s cabin, the chaos of dinner for ten was well under way. She didn’t compete for food, hardly ate any to speak of, and later, when she finally curled up on her tiny cot, she found she couldn’t sleep a wink. And the cause, strangely enough, wasn’t her excitement over the carny.
Chapter Seven
With Jackson trotting at the heels of his jackboots, the Magnificent Crecca headed back to the rear of the big wag, down the narrow, windowless, low-ceilinged corridor.
As the carny master approached the closed metal door at the far end, he felt a wave of the familiar, powerful unease he always felt just before entering the Magus’s lair. Gert Wolfram had been afraid of the Magus, too. At the time, Crecca had thought it hysterically funny to see that huge mountain of blubber tiptoeing around, trying to avoid even the most incidental contact. Wolfram had never shown his fear to the Magus’s face, if what he had could even be called a face—more like the jumbled contents of butcher and machine shop trash cans. The Magus loved to induce terror. And when he saw its first tender sprout, he nourished it and made it grow.
Crecca was much more comfortable when the puppet master wasn’t along for the ride. The carny picked him up and dropped him off at different locations on the route. No explanation was ever given. They never knew where he went or how he got back. All they knew was that he was privy to ultrasecret, predark whitecoat technology, and that he had developed some unique refinements of his own.
The Magus had a distinctly unpleasant smell. Crecca had always figured it had something to do with the unnatural combination of flesh and stainless steel. The worst thing by far, though, were the eyes. Like a pair of chromed hen’s eggs, with pinhole pupils. You could never tell for sure what they were looking at.
Crecca ordered Jackson to sit and stay outside the door. The Magus had been known to bite the heads off baby stickies on a whim, and Crecca had put in far too much time on this one to start over. He raised his balled fist and pounded on the door.
“Come!” said a strange, thready voice from the other side.
When Crecca entered the wag’s rear salon, he was slammed by the odor of machine oil, fried brake linings and spilled blood. The dim, smoky room was surrounded by one-way, blasterproof, glass windows. It was five times the size of his cabin, and it had a hundred times more junk in it. Unsorted junk. Littering the floor were piles of gears, pipe, wire, housings, glass beakers, lamps, conduit, parts of wag engines and computer motherboards. Sitting on the salon’s built-in rear-window sofa was living nightmare cast in decaying flesh and stainless-steel struts.
One of the rules of survival with the Magus was to not let him catch you staring.
Crecca tugged hard at his red chin beard, pretending to study with interest the vivisection that had been left abandoned on a crude wooden table. It was impossible to tell whether the half-dissected body was norm or mutie, as its layers of skin and muscle were now peeled back and tacked down to the tabletop, exposing a great yawning hole in the middle of its chest, lungs that still labored, a heart that still beat desperately.
“What do you want?” the Magus demanded. “As you can see, I am fully occupied at present.” He was screwing together a contraption made of plastic tubing and metal fittings. He kept turning the thing over in his hands, then holding it up to the gaping chest as if measuring its fit.
What the gizmo’s angles and ridges might do inside that tortured anatomy the carny master had no clue. He shifted his boot soles and felt the stickiness underfoot. Gear grease or guts, he couldn’t tell. Crecca cleared his throat before he spoke, afraid his voice might break. “I just wanted to let you know that the valve problem on the canisters has been repaired,” he said. “It was a rubber gasket that failed. We jury-rigged replacements. You said you wanted to be kept informed.”
The Magus got up from the sofa. Lurching forward on knee joints made of Teflon and titanium, he wasn’t a pretty sight.
Even though the carny master knew that to turn and run would have meant the end of him, it took every ounce of nerve to stand his ground. And as the creature clicked past him, he couldn’t help but let go a sigh of relief.
The Magus had to have heard the exhalation.
He stopped in midstep, his head rotating as if on massive ball-bearing swivels, his eyes spearing the carny master’s very soul.
Crecca opened his mouth, but no sound came forth. All he could see was the pupil holes in the chrome eggs narrowing to tiny pinpoints. He felt as if he were falling into them, drawn down as if by a whirlpool into spinning metal blades.
“So One-Eye has come for the world-famous show, has he?” the Magus said. “And brought his spawn to see it, too? How very, very convenient for me. To finally dispense with both the infuriating cyclops of a father and the annoying simp of a son. Poof!”
Crecca said nothing.
“Make sure he gets a good seat,” the Magus ordered. “Make sure his son is sitting beside him. And make sure they don’t get out of the tent.”
“Of course, Magus.”
“Death comes to all of us,” the Magus said brightly as he moved to the dissection table. “Well, most of us, anyway.” Then he threw back his head and made a noise.
Because Crecca had been the creature’s pawn for so long, he recognized the racket as laughter and stifled the urge to cover his ears. To anyone else, it would have sounded like a wag engine throwing a piston rod—shrieking, clanking, before rattling to a stop.
The Magus reached a steel-claw hand into the chest cavity and took hold of the beating heart.
“This ville is fat and ripe for the plucking,” the Magus said, weighing the pound of wet muscle on his palm. “There can be no mistakes.”
Crecca nodded.
“Mistakes will be costly.”
To prove his point, the Magus crushed the heart in his fist, making hot blood squirt in all directions. The body made a grunting noise, then its heels began to drum on the tabletop. Working in an absolute frenzy, the Magus fit the plastic-metal contraption into the ravaged chest. Muttering to himself, he seized a soldering iron and plunged the red-hot tip into the cavity. The smell of scorched flesh and burning plastic billowed from the gash.
He had no more time for carny masters, or canisters.
As the Magus began to hum—not from his throat, as a flesh-and-blood person might do, but from his round, spider belly—Crecca carefully and quietly backed over the piles of junk and out of the room.
As soon as he shut the door, Jackson jumped up and started licking the spatters of blood from the toe of his boot. Still a bit dazed, Crecca watched the little monster feed for several moments before backhanding it hard against the wall. Jackson ended up on its butt on the floor, face slack, vacant eyes slowly blinking.
Stickies had to be treated with firmness, and all instructions had to be repeated countless times before they sank in. Crecca was in charge of when, how and what Jackson ate. Left to its own primal instincts, the immature mutie would have chewed right through the tip of the boot, and once it tasted his blood, Crecca would have had to put a slug in its head to stop the chomping jaws and needle teeth.
Safely back in his own quarters, the carny master rushed to a waiting jar of joy juice and had a long, steadying pull. It was only then that he realized he had crapped himself.
Chapter Eight
Ryan and the companions were among the throng of ville folk watching the roustabouts lay out rolled sections of the big tent on the ground. Predark music blared from a row of black speakers on the roof of one of the wags. It was the same raucous show tune Ryan and the others had marched to the day before.
The head roustabout shouted orders over the insistent drumbeat. One of his men made measurements using a long piece of chain bolted to a stake that had been driven into the yellow dirt. The fixed length of this device allowed him to draw a great circle. As he moved the chain around the center-stake, at even intervals he tapped in perimeter stakes. When the floor plan had been laid out, two other men began digging a narrow, deep hole at the midpoint to act as a footing for the tent’s main upright support.
When this was done, the roustabouts hauled the tent sections into final position, like the spokes of a wheel, and began snapping them together and folding the double, overlapping seams. From the strain and sweat on their faces, the rolls were very heavy.
In a matter of minutes, the big tent began to take shape on the ground. Easily two hundred feet across, it was striped in gay red and white, and made of some heavily coated fabric.
The cheery music and the festive colors made Ryan’s skin crawl and his trigger finger itch. As did the expressions of delight he saw on the faces of the onlookers.
Like lambs led to slaughter.
Ryan was by no means a do-gooder, and life in Deathlands was survival of the fittest. But some things just had to come to a stop.
A worker with a wheelbarrow passed out tent stakes to men who waited at the perimeter markers with sledgehammers. The thick, cylindrical metal spikes were almost four feet long. The roustabouts grunted and swung in time to the music. The twenty-pound heads of their hammers sent showers of sparks flying as they slammed the spikes deep into the earth. When the broad ring of side stakes was set, ropes were tied, loosely connecting them to the tent’s lower wall. A seventy-five-foot-long steel pole, also made up in shorter sections, was assembled, then eight men crawled inside the flattened bag with it.
At the hairy roustabout’s direction, a heavy rope was attached to the tent’s peak. A dozen workers then yarded it over the top of the tallest wag as the men inside the tent angled up the center pole in a series of steps timed to the music’s beat.
The crowd of bystanders sent up a wild cheer as the pole’s butt slipped into place and the tent was finally raised. Red-and-white pennants on the peak of the roof and around the top of the side wall hung down limply in the still, already scorching air.
“There’s only the one exit,” J.B. said to Ryan. “And no window vents that I can see.”
“It’s like we thought,” the one-eyed man said. “Whatever it is that they’re doing to folks, it all happens inside the tent.”
“And nobody’s getting out,” Krysty added.
“From the looks of the fabric,” Mildred said, “the tent could be a Kevlar weave, or something like it. But with a plasticized coating on the outside. If it is made of Kevlar, even blaster slugs won’t tear it. With those double seams, it’s got to be virtually airtight.”
“A candy-striped, portable death house,” Krysty said softly.
“All the evidence we’ve seen points to an inhalant,” Mildred went on. “They’ve got to be using some kind of poison gas.”
“Mebbe we don’t want to go in there, Dad,” Dean said, his voice tight with concern.
“The boy’s right,” J.B. said. “Once we’re inside that tent, we’re trapped along with everybody else.”
Ryan grimaced. They had gotten themselves in a bind; that was for sure. But it wasn’t unexpected. They had known that once they entered the ville, circumstances would be fluid. That whatever plan they had hatched over the long march might have to be thrown out.
A key part of it already had.
The original idea had been to take out some of the chillers in the night, using their knives to quietly reduce the odds. But once they were on-site in Bullard ville it became clear that plan wouldn’t work. For one thing, the caged sideshow muties acted like an army of watchdogs, alerting the carny folk with squeals and bellows when anyone approached their circled wags. For another, the dispatched roustabouts would have been missed on the work crews that morning. Search parties would have been sent out. Perhaps the shallow graves would have been discovered. Either way, the companions’ hands would have been tipped. Outnumbered as they were, without the element of surprise, they had no chance at all.
Having caught up with the traveling troupe at last, and having gathered a sense of the people involved, Ryan had no doubt that it was the carny doing the mass chilling. The moment he had looked into the Magnificent Crecca’s eyes, all other possibilities vanished.
To loot an entire ville down to the pots, pans and shoelaces called for manpower, which the carny had. To loot an entire ville required heavy-duty transportation for all the stolen goods. The only tracks of sufficient number and size leading from the place had belonged to the carny. To chill that many people at once called for confinement, isolation, no escape.
Which the tent provided.
After they had examined the bodies in the unnamed ville, Mildred had guessed that a poison had been used, but she couldn’t tell what kind or how it had been administered. Though some of the victims had been shot in the head, most had no evidence of wounds. The bullet holes were either mercy shots or the result of a pack of chillers taking random target practice on a pile of corpses. It made sense that the lethal weapon would be a gas, although where it came from and how it was delivered was still a puzzle.
There was, of course, also still the possibility that the carny would just do its show and move on, without chilling anyone. As it had done in Perdition, and elsewhere.
Ryan thought this outcome was unlikely, as did the other companions. Bullard ville was made-to-order for another mass wipeout. It was isolated. It was unknown, except for being an established water stop along a very long, very dry road. If all the residents vanished overnight, the travelers up and down the valley would just conclude that the water supply had finally dried up, forcing folks to abandon their huts and disperse. No one would care one way or the other. No one would look any deeper.
Once more, Ryan took in the excited faces of the crowd. It wasn’t just made up of kids, but people of all ages, and the leaders of the ville, too. Dirt farmers, cooks, housewives and sluts had deserted their work in order to gawk at the wonder of Wolfram’s World Famous Carny. Their rapt expressions said this was the biggest thing to ever hit Bullard ville.
Unless something was done, it was also probably going to be the last thing to ever hit Bullard ville.
“We’ve got to go in,” Ryan told the others. “We’ve got no choice. We’ve got to go in with everyone else, just like nothing’s up. It’s the only way to make sure we get everyone out alive. We’ve got to keep a low profile until the time comes to make our move.”
“If we wait just a tetch too long, Ryan, things could get bastard ugly in a hurry,” the Armorer said.
For a long moment there was silence between them.
The silence indicated a mutual understanding of the situation, and a mutual consent to proceed as exactly as Ryan suggested.
It was only broken when Dean looked around, and said, “Where’s Jak?”
OUT OF THE COMPANIONS’ direct view, around the curve of the sideshow trailers, Jak once again had his head thrust through the bars of the mountain lion’s cage. Once again that great, hot tongue lovingly washed his face and neck.
The pale, ruby-eyed youth had few words to describe even the simplest moments of his violent and tragic life. For Jak, things were good or they were bad. He was happy or he wasn’t. Hungry or not. Loaded or reloading. The complexity of his feelings at that moment was impossible to translate into a neat, black-white duality.
Only the lion understood what he felt.
And that was because he and the lion shared.
Everything.
Without words.
Jak pushed back from the bars and wiped the viscous slobber from his cheek with the back of his forearm. He took in the enormity of dense, soft, beige fur; the long, lashing tail as big around as his bicep; the fat, black-fringed ears, rounded beautifully at the tips. Jutting from the sides of the creature’s massive neck was the pair of curving, pointed horns that served to protect the throat against attack from the sides, and as offensive weapons. The canine fangs exposed by the lion’s wide grin were longer than the blade of Ryan’s panga; the lion’s claws were cruel black gut hooks, fully extended in pleasure now, cutting shallow, bright grooves into the steel floor of its cage. The smell of meat breath and musk gusted over Jak’s face.
He couldn’t explain how the creature’s thoughts and emotions came into his head, or how he knew that likewise the lion experienced what he experienced. It was as if an invisible tunnel connected them, and through the tunnel ran a torrent of exquisite tenderness.
The albino gripped the bars again and stared into the beast’s huge, pleasure-slitted, yellow eyes. The sound of its purring rattled the steel in his hands like an earthquake. The tremendous heat given off by its body blasted him like a black basalt boulder sitting in the midday sun.
You free soon, he thought. Then we hunt.
Jak’s mind was slammed with gratitude and joy, and then a caress, a voiceless voice, a soundless sound that resonated in the very pit of his stomach: I know you will free me, Little Brother. I know you will.
Chapter Nine
After the companions’ meeting broke up, Dean went looking for Leeloo Bunny. He found her standing in front of one of the trailered sideshow cages.
“Hi, Leeloo,” he said as he walked up.
“Hi, Dean.” From the light in her eyes, she seemed real glad to see him. She had put a crown of fresh daisies in her shining hair.
“What’re you doing?” he asked.
“Just looking at this one,” she said.
The painted nameplate on the bars read Baldoona, The Two-Headed Scalie. The male mutie inside the cage sported a pair of heads that sprouted side by side in the middle of its wide shoulders. Shoulders that seemed to stoop from their combined weight. One head was full-sized, as if from a grown-up person. It looked mebbe forty years of age. Its coarse, gray-blond hair was matted and greasy, its face florid, beardless and unlined. Bloodshot eyes glowered at them from beneath a heavy, eyebrowless ridge of bone.
The other head was a baby’s, small, bald and perched on a short neck. Its skin was flushed with infantile frustration. The eyes on the little head were black and glittered behind squinty, puffy eyelids. The scalie was exhibited stripped to the waist. It had a massive torso, wide and thick, and there were big muscles under the layers of sagging fat. As it moved slightly, the angled light caught the rows of tiny scales that covered its skin, giving it an iridescent grayish cast.
The cage was fouled by the smell of urine and excrement; brown mounds of the latter lay clumped along the cage’s rear wall. Clouds of flies buzzed amid the miasma.
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James Axler
In the ruins of a nuke-shattered America, every man, woman and child of the apocalyptic frontier makes a perilous journey to the future. But there is a fork that divides the path toward humanity reborn…and the road deep into the hell that is Deathlands. Ryan Cawdor made his choice long ago, in this barbaric new world that conspires against hope…Eerie remnants of pre-Dark times linger a century after the nuclear blowout. But a traveling road show gives new meaning to the word chilling. Ryan and his warrior group have witnessed this carny's handiwork in the ruins and victims of unsuspecting villes. Even facing tremendous odds does nothing to deter the companions from challenging this wandering death merchant and an army of circus freaks. And no one is aware that a steel-eyed monster from the past is preparing a private act that would give Ryan star billing.… In the Deathlands, all you get is a one-way ticket.
The rider removed his steel mask and bowed deeply
The crowd jumped to its feet, cheering.
Amid the tumult, something on the far side of the center ring caught Ryan’s eye. Something flashed behind the mirror wall of the facing trailer. And for a fraction of a second, the silver reflective glass became vaguely, hazily transparent, as if through a pall of oily brown smoke.
Then it was over.
In that frozen moment Ryan glimpsed a ghostly figure whose afterimage was burned deeply into his brain. Spindly-limbed. Slouching. Menacing. Even if he hadn’t seen the glare of the light on the steel, he would have known who it was.
The Magus.
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Pilgrimage to Hell
Red Holocaust
Neutron Solstice
Crater Lake
Homeward Bound
Pony Soldiers
Dectra Chain
Ice and Fire
Red Equinox
Northstar Rising
Time Nomads
Latitude Zero
Seedling
Dark Carnival
Chill Factor
Moon Fate
Fury’s Pilgrims
Shockscape
Deep Empire
Cold Asylum
Twilight Children
Rider, Reaper
Road Wars
Trader Redux
Genesis Echo
Shadowfall
Ground Zero
Emerald Fire
Bloodlines
Crossways
Keepers of the Sun
Circle Thrice
Eclipse at Noon
Stoneface
Bitter Fruit
Skydark
Demons of Eden
The Mars Arena
Watersleep
Nightmare Passage
Freedom Lost
Way of the Wolf
Dark Emblem
Crucible of Time
Starfall
Encounter: Collector’s Edition
Gemini Rising
Gaia’s Demise
Dark Reckoning
Shadow World
Pandora’s Redoubt
Rat King
Zero City
Savage Armada
Judas Strike
Shadow Fortress
Sunchild
Breakthrough
Salvation Road
Amazon Gate
Destiny’s Truth
Skydark Spawn
Damnation Road Show
DEATH LANDS®
James Axler
O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
O life, no life, but lively form of death;
O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds.
—Thomas Kyd,
1558-1594
THE DEATHLANDS SAGA
This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.
There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.
But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.
Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.
Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.
J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.
Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.
Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.
Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.
In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….
Contents
Prologue (#uc68827aa-efe0-570d-9898-6dac5d11a1f3)
Chapter One (#u48cf8e0a-b1e9-5b9d-a6e6-5c83ac19f790)
Chapter Two (#ub5cc76cd-29e4-54ed-9373-3be697dc9f91)
Chapter Three (#ue72194d6-1ece-576b-9933-b21cd97fc46a)
Chapter Four (#u8ae28a5f-9f0d-55db-b261-6ed5babe7928)
Chapter Five (#u544b96af-3bd1-5e0b-86e2-9a76e029615a)
Chapter Six (#uc822a8ff-4941-51f7-9f37-14f3f1785d6a)
Chapter Seven (#ub7530300-da62-5562-ad9a-1de02a241896)
Chapter Eight (#udddc3a35-8708-5a74-ac94-accadc736d5e)
Chapter Nine (#u79b09e65-89a6-510a-9831-d4605729719d)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
Evening hung dead still and oppressively humid over the shallow, five-acre, seep-fed lake, the lavender dome of sky perfectly reflected in its mercury-smooth surface. Encircling the muddy bank was a fringe of stripped, bleached skeletons of trees. The intense quiet was neither peaceful nor serene; the very air seemed to vibrate in anticipation and dread. Terrible forces of nature were about to make themselves known.
Swish-swish.
Swish-swish.
From the north end of the lake came a rhythmic sound.
Not a bird, not an insect. Sensing the impending hell show, the birds and insects had gone to ground.
A tall human figure stood on the bank in hip boots, waving a nine-foot-long, flexible rod back and forth. And as he did so, he sailed a bright-yellow line through the air, forward and back, forward and back, in a tight loop, out over the purple mirror of sky. The man wore a long, pointy, black goatee and his black hair was loosely tied in a ponytail, which hung to the middle of his back. On his head was a tatter-brimmed straw cowboy hat. His eyes were hidden behind wraparound sunglasses.
What face was visible was long, gaunt, perhaps tragic, certainly suffering, certainly world weary.
As the man cast, the water in front of him swirled and gurgled. The head of a huge mutie lungfish appeared in the middle of the ripples. The fish looked up at the man, then struggled out of the pool, walking on the bony spikes of its pectoral fins. Greenish-gray on the back with a light cream-colored belly, the mutie was easily five feet long and weighed more than sixty pounds. As it dragged itself from the world of fish into the world of men, its large, rubbery lipped mouth and its gill covers opened and closed, breathing air. Grunting from the effort, the lungfish crawled up beside the man. An odor rose up along with it—the smell of a slaughterhouse in August.
“You have no fly on the end of your line,” it said in a strange, gravelly voice that was half croak, half belch. “You can’t catch anything that way.”
“I’m not fishing for anything,” the bearded man said as he continued to cast far out over the smooth water, in the direction of the evening star.
“You’re fishing for nothing?” the lungfish said.
“That’s right.”
“Are you catching any?”
“I’m catching and releasing nothing,” the man replied.
As he continued to cast, to his left, a two-wheeled cart drawn by three men appeared over the rim of the slope. The lake sat on a stair-step rise in the land. Above it was mountainside; below it, the ground—mostly bare, eroded limestone—angled three hundred feet down to a broad flat spot between surrounding peaks. There, in a grove of low, scrubby trees, stood the remote ville. Even by Deathlands standards, it was a scab-assed place: dirt-floor shacks and lean-tos built up against the outer wall of the ville’s only permanent structure, a predark concrete blockhouse. Most of these shanties were big enough to house one or two people, and not tall enough to stand in.
The three men took axes and a heavy-bladed machete from the cart and started hacking away at its contents. They laughed as they sprayed one another with flying gore. After a few minutes of extreme effort, they paused to catch their breath, then started throwing human arms, legs and quartered torsos into the water. The erratic splashes broke the metronomic swish-swish, swish-swish of the fly rod.
The lungfish turned back from the commotion and asked the bearded man, “Am I real to you?”
The man let his line fall and settle. He pushed his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose, looked at the talking fish and said, “Nothing is real.”
As more body parts landed in the pool, swirls appeared in the water near the splashes. Other lungfish were rising to feed.
“That dinner looks pretty real to me,” the fish said. “Eat my body, become my body…”
“Yeah, yeah,” the man muttered distractedly.
As the lungfish slithered back to the water and to its share of the chow, it half turned and said, “Try some bait next time, Baron Kerr.”
The bearded man remained silent and threw a loop into his floating line that allowed him to sweep the entire length of it back into the air.
Swish-swish.
Suddenly the entire surface of pool shivered before him, the lavender mirror shattering into a billion fragments. Like glittering confetti, the first spores of the evening lifted gracefully into the air. It was just the overture. In seconds, dense clouds of the freed genetic material boiled up from the water. Pale-green fingers of fire crackled and sparked from the pool’s undulating surface, making the clouds glow and shimmer from within.
As the ministorm grew in intensity, the blood-spattered men hurried down the slope with their empty cart, determined to get under cover before spore fall.
Swish-swish.
Swish-swish.
The heat from the electrical discharge made the air temperature jump twenty-five degrees and sent the spore clouds billowing upward. The higher they rose, the more ferocious the strange lightning storm became: blistering, eye-aching bolts fired up from earth to sky, their prodigious thunder rattling the ground.
Baron Jim Kerr quickly wound in his line and headed downhill for cover. He recognized the evening’s ominous signs. The much heavier than normal spore hatch. The absolute frenzy of bioelectric discharge. That told him the food supply was dwindling, even now barely sufficient for survival. Something would have to be done, and soon. He knew better than to frustrate the burning pool. He remembered what had happened the last time.
Chapter One
A little girl in a faded cotton dress sat atop Bullard ville’s dirt-and-concrete defensive berm, watching distant plumes of yellow dust spiral up from the vast, barren flood plain—man-made tornadoes backlit by the hard glare of the late-afternoon sun. She sat with her skinny, sun-browned legs drawn up, her elbows propped on scabbed knees. The hand-me-down garment she wore was way too big for her. Every time she moved, it slipped off one or the other of her thin shoulders.
During the hour that Leeloo Bunny had been keeping vigil, the ville’s other children had joined her at intervals, scrambling up the back side of the berm for a look-see. After less than a minute of quiet reconnoiter, the pushing and pinching started. Squealing, they raced back down to resume an extrafrantic, extrashrill game of Chill the Mutie.
Only Leeloo had the patience to stay, to sit in silence and allow the promised miracle to unfold. She wanted to be first to see it, and to be able to remember every second as long as she lived.
Nothing this exciting had ever happened in Bullard ville.
It was without a doubt one of the two most dramatic moments in Leeloo’s eight years of life.
It towered above sneaking peeks through the windows of the gaudy house to see the mostly naked men and women fight on the pallets laid on the floor. Leeloo had sometimes watched her own ma, Tater Bunny, fight men on those mattresses. It was a safe bet that one of Tater’s adversaries was Leeloo’s father; there were a lot of candidates for the distinction, but no one had ever stepped forward to claim the little girl as his own.
Because Leeloo didn’t fully understand the aim of the gaudy house mattress fights, she had yet to figure out how to judge winners and losers. To her it seemed the combatants usually parted on friendly, if not affectionate terms. Some of the women fought ten or twelve men a night, and didn’t seem the worse for wear, at least not any place that showed.
It was a different story for her ma. Tater Bunny had died more than a year ago when a drunken drifter choked her a bit too hard.
That was Leeloo’s life-changing, dramatic event number one.
The man who’d chilled her ma had tried to run away afterward, but the ville’s menfolk caught him and dragged him back. They hung him from an old basketball stanchion with his pants pulled down around his boot tops and his willy sticking out. Leeloo had sometimes gone to look at the man who chilled her ma, to look through the hot, blurry screen of her tears and throw rocks at him as hard as she could. After a while, she had to stand upwind because the smell got so bad. The ville’s men cut down and buried the corpse only when they needed the stanchion to hang someone else.
Leeloo Bunny had no interest in eventually following in her ma’s professional footsteps. Not because of the nature of the work, which held no particular stigma in Bullard ville, or the danger of injury, which was considerably less than other jobs to be had, but because of the required confinement. Leeloo liked to be outdoors in the sun, not indoors, lying in tangled, sticky bedding. She liked planting seeds in the raised beds under sheet-metal awnings and tending the young plants until they grew big enough to eat. She liked picking bouquets of the bitter-tasting, little wild daisies that seemed to pop up everywhere. She made delicate ornaments for herself out of them by knotting the stems together. This day, she was decked out with a daisy circlet on the crown of her head, and tiers of bracelets dangled from her slender wrists.
Her anticipation of specialness on this day had begun three weeks earlier, when the carny’s advance scout had roared up to the berm gate in an armored Baja Bug.
The little wag had outsized knobby tires and a roll cage around the driver’s seat made of heavy pipe. Over the empty front, rear and side window frames were hinged, blasterproof metal shutters that could be dropped during an attack, leaving only a view slit for the driver to steer by.
The carny scout had called himself Azimuth. A giant with cascading woolly dreadlocks, every muscle and sinew was visible beneath his glossy ebony skin. He wore a sleeveless vest of mutie coyote pelt, turned hair side out, and gray army pants tucked into the tops of scuffed and scraped, steel-toe-capped, lace-up, shin-high, black leather boots. Grimy goggles hung around his wide, muscular throat.
Leeloo could close her eyes and recall how the man smelled: a sweet, feminine perfume mixed with sharpish body odor. Azimuth had either slathered himself with great quantities of the flowery scent, or he had been in a prolonged fight with a gaudy slut who had. Leeloo also remembered the way his front teeth were filed to points, top and bottom, and that the inside of his mouth was as red as blood, as was his tongue and the insides of his nostrils.
Azimuth had been greeted by Bullard ville’s most important people, including its headman, the lumbering, overweight, perpetually sweating Wilbur Melchior, who had adopted Leeloo right after her ma died. The black giant’s mission was to determine whether the ville would be willing to pay for the privilege of seeing Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny Show. If so, Azimuth said, the troupe would stop there for a night or so en route to another engagement. He quoted them a steep price for this entertainment, in water and fresh food.
When asked by Melchior what the show consisted of, Azimuth threw back his head and let out a howl that so startled the delegation of dirt farmers, they stepped back and grabbed for their blaster butts.
But there was no threat.
It was a howl of sheer exuberance.
When things calmed down, Azimuth assured them that Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny offered genuine miracles and wonderments, gathered at great expense and hazard from the farthest corners of the Deathlands and beyond, all for their private amusement and edification. On his long, thick fingers, he listed some of the various, incomparable attractions: singing, dancing stickies; fantastical mutie beasts trained to do amazing tricks; feats of norm superstrength and daring; the most beautiful norm women this side of Hell walking around in next to nothing; unparalleled exhibitions of music, comedy and drama.
Something to tell your grandchildren about, Azimuth said. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
At that point, Melchior and the other leaders of the ville withdrew to the shade of a nearby sheet-metal awning and conferred. Leeloo edged close enough to overhear their conversation. Her adoptive father said it was a matter of pride, that Bullard ville deserved this admitted luxury. Their hosting the World Famous Carny would indicate to anyone with half a brain that the remote agricultural enclave had finally come into its own. Around the circle, heads nodded in agreement.
The only word of caution came from the gaudy master, Skim O’Neil. He said there could be a big risk in letting so many strangers inside the berm at once. The protest fell on deaf ears. Melchior spoke for the rest when he bragged that Bullard ville wasn’t afraid of anything that walked. Mopping his sweat-beaded jowls with a big wad of cotton rag, he reminded O’Neil how they had turned back the attempted takeovers of two different barons and chilled their sec men.
A vote was taken, and it was unanimous.
When they returned to where the scout waited, Melchior put his hand out and told him that he had a deal. They shook on it. Then Melchior and the other leaders took Azimuth on a guided tour of Bullard. Leeloo tagged along behind, unnoticed.
As was common in Deathlands, the isolated ville had sprouted up at the edge of a ruined interstate highway. The overpass that had once connected high-speed travelers with an oasis of fast food and fast gas had collapsed across four lanes of traffic on the day the world changed. The center of Bullard ville was formed around the shambling remnants of those predark fast-food franchises. Their dilapidated plastic signs still beckoned: Mergen’s Family Restaurant, Taco Town, Burger Stravaganza, Fish ’n’ More—now the gaudy house.
The four-lane highway had once paralleled a lush river valley that stretched for many hundreds of miles, bordered by rugged, steep, dark mountains to the east and rolling hills to the west. The flat valley, postnukecaust, was parched, burned yellow, turned to dust by sun and chem rains. Postnukecaust, the slow, meandering river that had watered trees and grass and cultivated fields decided it no longer liked the looks of things and burrowed deep underground.
The river’s disappearance saved Bullard ville from extinction. Of course, there were no more pre-breaded steaks, fish fingers, burger patties or ice-cream novelties to lure tired, hungry travelers to Bullard. Yet the travelers still came and stopped and parted with whatever valuables they had, because there was water. The underground river ran right under the ville. Hand-operated pumps provided water for drinking, for very occasional bathing and for travelers to take away.
Grub could be had, but it was whatever was on hand. Travelers ate whatever bush meat the residents could chase down and kill. Usually mutie jackrabbits, or snakes, or birds of all sizes, from sparrows to turkey vultures. These were either spit-roasted over an open fire or parboiled in caldrons made of salvaged, fifty-five-gallon oil drums.
With the virtually endless supply of clean water, the ville folk grew a variety of edible crops year-round, under the shelter of metal awnings to keep off the chem rain. For fertilizer, they composted and used their own excrement. They cultivated beans, hot peppers, onions and garlic. They grew corn primarily for the sugar, which was used to make joy juice. There wasn’t enough surface area inside the defensive berm to produce food for mass export. And there weren’t enough people in Bullard to defend an expansion of crop growing outside the barrier.
Considering the miserable, hammered-down state of the world, the little hamlet was doing quite well. During the tour, Melchior hinted as much to Azimuth, but as Leeloo noticed, he gave no specifics.
As she well knew, the treasure of Bullard was safely locked away in the basement of Mergen’s Family Restaurant, under twenty-four-hour armed guard. It consisted of miscellaneous objects of value traded for water: weapons, ammunition, canned food, predark medicine, first-aid supplies, wag fuel, oil, grease, batteries, transmission fluid, antifreeze, tires, matches, clothing, boots and shoes, hand tools, auto parts, various bits of repair material, duct tape, bailing wire, nails, screws, rope and electrical wire. There was no jolt, though. The ville leaders drew the line at hard drugs.
The contents of the warehouse were tangible proof of the water’s worth. And anything worth more than a few drops of piss in Deathlands was worth chilling someone over. Two barons had tried and failed to annex Bullard ville, which stood in disputed border zone at the edges of their respective territories. Neither baron could muster and transport a large enough force to defeat the villagers. Every person over the age of twelve carried a loaded blaster all the time, whether working on the crops or sleeping. The youngest ones packed well-cared-for .36-caliber, black-powder, Italian-reproduction Colts. They wore the 5-shot, 1862 Police models in canvas, snap-flap hip holsters. The entire volunteer sec force trained regularly in marksmanship and tactics.
Leeloo Bunny was too young and still too physically frail to control a blaster that weighed more than a pound and a half, unloaded. But she was very much looking forward to the day when finally she got her own blaster. Not because she wanted to shoot anything in particular, but because it was a symbol of her growing up.
After the guided tour, the ville’s leaders fed Azimuth a massive meal, got him stinking drunk and then let him fight three women at once in the gaudy.
All free of charge.
Melchior had called this extraordinary generosity “the famous Bullard ville hospitality.”
As the dust plumes on the plain grew closer, Leeloo could just make out tiny, dark shapes at their bases, and her heart leaped. The shapes became more and more distinct until she could see the gaily painted wags, racing with strings of bright pennants whipping from their radio masts.
A man standing at the berm gate shouted, “The carny’s here! The carny’s here!”
Every man, woman and child dropped whatever they were doing and rushed to the ville’s entrance, forming a dense double line, a gauntlet of well-armed Bullard ville welcome.
The fifteen-wag caravan slowed to a crawl as it approached the defensive berm. Leeloo saw that some of the wags were towing big tarp-covered cages on flatbed trailers.
Then the music started.
Taped music, scratchy with age and thousands of playings. Loud enough to wake the nukecaust’s dead, a powerful male baritone boomed above the insistent crash of cymbals and drums. The words he sang rolled like thunder. Leeloo had taught herself to count to a hundred, so she knew what “76” signified. She wasn’t sure whether a “trombone” was animal, vegetable or mineral, but the raucous, cheerful beat of the predark music thrilled her to the core.
As the dust clouds drifted away to the south, with the convoy slowly advancing, men began to jump out of the wags. They threw back the tarps covering the trailered cages, revealing the collection of creatures within.
Leeloo sucked in an astonished breath. It was more wonderful than her wildest imaginings! Behind the bars of the first cage lurked a two-headed scalie. One head was normal sized; the other looked like a baby’s. The next trailer cage held a gaggle of stickies, naked but for plastic collars in bright colors, like open flower petals.
They showed their needle teeth and dilated their flat nostril holes as they took in the scent of the ville. Another cage contained a huge mutie mountain lion with scythe-shaped horns jutting on either side of its neck. It raised its head and yowled balefully along with the marching song. On the trailer behind the mountain lion was the biggest desert rattler Leeloo had ever seen. The thing was mebbe ten feet long, and its body was as big around as her waist. Its flat, triangular-shaped head was even wider, and the mouth could have easily swallowed two of her whole.
There were lizard birds with leathery wings and fangs so sharp they scored the steel bars of their cages.
Leeloo turned her attention to the carny folk walking alongside the trailers. The men wore slitted masks over their eyes. Their leather jerkins and shorts exposed bulging arm and leg muscles. They all carried bullwhips, which they smacked against the bars of the cages, making the mutie creatures howl in complaint. The carny women were long legged, their faces and heads concealed by brightly sequined hoods. But for thigh-high, high-heeled boots and a tracery of string over their privates, they were naked. The women also used whips to stir up the rolling menagerie.
Once inside the berm, the caravan of wags circled twice, to Leeloo’s way of thinking, most majestically. Then it stopped.
A tall, muscular man in a worn red satin tailcoat, and with tight white pants tucked into hard-used black riding boots, climbed out of the largest wag. On one hip he wore a holstered, blue-steel, .45 Government Colt blaster; on the other he carried a coiled black bullwhip. His short, wiry hair was a rusty red, as was his six-inch-long goatee. A jagged ring of scar marked the left side of his face, perhaps made by a broken neck of a bottle, or Leeloo thought, by an attack from one of his ferocious muties.
As the tailcoated man walked toward the ville’s leaders, a tiny stickie, not more than four years old, trotted along at his left heel. It was naked and barefoot, and there were bruises all over its pale body. Around its neck was a choke chain dog collar that wasn’t tethered to a leash.
“Welcome to Bullard ville,” Melchior said, extending a damp, callused hand to the carny master. “A pleasure to have Gert Wolfram and his famous troupe as our guests.”
“I speak for my entire company,” the tailcoated man stated, “when I say we are most honored to have the opportunity to entertain you.”
The young stickie, eyes as dead as black stones, sniffed through the two holes in its face, taking the measure of the overweight Melchior. And having done that, the baby mutie made soft kissing noises in his direction, and began to drool copiously. Melchior’s right hand reached across his pendulous chest and came to rest on the rubber butt of his shoulder-holstered Ruger Single Six.
“Oh, don’t worry about Jackson,” the carny master said, stroking the creature’s hairless skull. “Unless you corner the little tyke, he’s not the least bit dangerous.”
At the hand-to-head contact, the immature stickie closed its eyes with pleasure; its jaw gaped, exposing tightly packed rows of needle teeth.
“When is the show going to start?” Skim O’Neil asked.
This question was met with wild cheers and whistles from the assembly.
“It takes us a while to stake out and set up the main tent,” the carny master said.
“I’m afraid it’s already too late in the day to get started on it. With your permission, we’ll set up camp inside the berm tonight, then start raising the tent tomorrow morning. That will give my people a chance to rest up, too. They need a break before they perform. We’ve been on the road three days getting here.”
Leeloo was crushed to hear this. She wasn’t alone. A chorus of groans rippled through the crowd.
“Couldn’t you give us a little taste of what’s to come?” Melchior asked. “We’ve all been waiting for this day for weeks and weeks.”
The carny man scratched his red chin beard, briefly considering what taste he might offer. “All right,” he said, “I’ll give you fine folks a preview of what’s in store for tomorrow. But I warn you now, once you see it, you won’t sleep a wink tonight.”
He looked down at the baby stickie and said, “Sing!”
As the order echoed off the berm walls, the people of Bullard ville blinked at one another in amazement. It was common knowledge that the mouth parts of stickies were so primitive, so unevolved, that most could barely make mewling noises, let alone make music.
Yet, at its master’s command, the little stickie opened its round, practically lipless mouth, threw back its bald head and sang, in perfect pitch, in a high, clear soprano, a predark song even older than the one caught on tape. “Ave Maria” burst forth from between rows of mutated needle teeth.
Most of the folks in the crowd closed their eyes and simply listened to the exquisitely pure tones, like bell chimes. Each word of the lyric was perfectly formed and enunciated.
There were no cries of sacrilege because no one understood the words, which were in Italian. Even if the Deathlands dirt farmers could have translated the lyric into English, its meaning and references would have been a mystery to them. Despite the yawning gap in the audience’s understanding, the music itself was so moving that by the time Jackson finished the a cappella performance, there were tears of wonder in the eyes of men and women alike.
While Bullard ville rendered wild applause, the carny master patted the little stickie on the head, and it nuzzled its cheek against the side of his riding boot, leaving behind a shiny smear of saliva.
After the tumult had died down, a beaming Melchior pointed out a likely spot for the company to spend the night. The carny master thanked him, then returned with Jackson to the biggest wag, which pulled out of file to lead the convoy to the campsite. The marching music started up again as the wags and trailers rolled forward. Dust boiled up from their tires, swirling in thick, yellow clouds through the open gate of the berm.
Out of the corner of her eye, Leeloo caught more movement on the plain. Shadowy figures advanced through the man-made dust storm, making for the ville’s entrance. They were hard to see with the all dust and the sunlight slanting hard behind them.
She counted seven.
Mebbe stragglers from the carny? she thought.
When they stepped out of the cloud, Leeloo knew at once they weren’t carny folk. They were hunters. The man in the lead carried a scoped longblaster on a shoulder sling. He was tall, with dark hair falling to his broad shoulders. A black patch concealed his left eye socket. As he came closer, she noticed the color of the other eye.
It made her think of a cloudless morning sky.
Infinite blue.
Infinite cold.
Chapter Two
Ryan Cawdor shifted the sling, transferring the weight of his scoped Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle from his right shoulder to his left. Six dusty companions followed single file behind him, heading for the crude gate cut into the twelve-foot-high berm wall. For the last third of a mile, they had been breathing and eating the drifting grit thrown up by the wag caravan. For the last third of a mile, they had been listening to the predark marching music, its sprightly cheerfulness like a dull dagger jammed in their guts, then twisted. For the last third of a mile, it had taken every bit of Ryan’s self-control not to break into a dead run. Just as it not took all of his inner reserve not to sprint up the face of the perimeter barrier, drop belly down on the summit with the 7.62 mm longblaster and start bowling over the carny folk.
Suicide wasn’t part of the plan.
The plan was to make damn sure what they all suspected was true, and then to act in stealth, lowering the odds from eight to one against before showing their hand. The mechanics of the operation had been hatched over four days of one of the hardest forced marches Ryan and the others had ever endured. They had approached Bullard ville from the west, cross-country, over seemingly endless rolling hills and scrub forest, breaking their own trail, sleeping only a few hours each night. They had pushed themselves mercilessly because they didn’t want to risk arriving too late and uncovering another horror.
For the thousandth time, the image of the hand came into Ryan’s mind. A grisly, ruined, black hand jutting from the earth in the middle of long patch of churned-up ground. The flesh had been torn away by teeth or beak, or both. Three fingers were missing down to the knuckles. Right off, he knew it was a woman or a child’s hand because it was so small and slender. Somehow, whoever it was had survived long enough to claw up through the smothering clods of earth. It had to have taken a superhuman effort.
They had discovered why after they had carefully scraped back the top layer of soil.
Cradled in the young woman’s other arm was a dead infant.
Her strength had come from desperation.
The companions peeled back more dirt, exposing other bodies. Many, many bodies piled on top of one another. Both sexes, old, young, strong, weak. As soon as Ryan saw the tangle of limbs and torsos, he sent his twelve-year-old son, Dean, away from the pit to recce the rest of the ville. The boy left gratefully, but he would have remained to prove to his father and the companions that he was made of the same rock-hard stuff that they were. Ryan had no doubt about the boy’s stuff; as far as he was concerned, Dean had nothing to prove.
There were close-range blaster wounds on a few of the corpses, but most were unmarked by obvious acts of violence. They never did find the bottom of the mass grave. The stench of death rained like hammer blows against the sides of their heads, and they staggered from the trench, bent over, retching.
“Bastards chilled the whole ville,” Krysty Wroth gasped as Ryan put a strong, gentle hand on her shoulder. The titian-haired, long-legged young woman was his lover and soul mate. They had seen many hard things during their wanderings over the hellscape, but rarely had they seen such wanton wholesale slaughter as this.
“Not all, mebbe,” said Jak Lauren, pointing at the cluster of shabby dwellings. It was a false hope. And from the expression in the albino’s ruby red eyes, he knew it. But Jak, like everyone else, wanted to be away from the pit and its rotting horrors. A thorough search showed the nameless little ville had been looted of everything of value, just like the dead folk buried in the ditch. The huts and lean-tos had been stripped, the underground storage pits emptied. All that remained was the trash in the ville’s midden too heavy to be blown away by the howling wind.
Uncovering the mass grave had flipped a switch in Doc Tanner’s head. He had stopped talking the moment they found the bodies of the mother and child. Which was unusual, because normally Doc never shut up. At the time, Ryan figured the discovery had triggered memories of Doc’s own terrible loss of his long-dead children and wife, of the time-trawling whitecoats from the future who had snatched him from the natural course of his life in the year 1896, then played with him before bumping him further down the timeline, to the living hell called Deathlands.
Doc hadn’t participated in the speculation about what had happened in the ville, about who could have committed such a bastard evil deed, and how the deed was done. Nor did Doc vote when it came time to decide what in rad blazes they should do about it—if anything.
Some hours later, as Ryan and the companions tracked the overlaid tire prints of many heavy wags leading out of the ville, Doc had suddenly started walking stiff-legged, like a tall, scarecrow zombie in his frock coat and high boots. After he had taken several hard falls, despite the support of his swordstick, J. B. Dix had safety-lined him to his waist with a fifteen-foot length of rope to keep him from wandering off and breaking his neck.
A week had passed since they came on the looted ville and the mass grave. A week of walking, first in the wheel ruts of the presumed chillers to the ville of Perdition, then overland to try to intersect the path of the already departed convoy. In that time, Doc hadn’t improved, and J.B. still towed him, out of duty and friendship.
The peeling sweat on J.B.’s face cut stripes of clean skin through the caked yellow grime; his wire-rimmed spectacles were smeared with a mixture of both. The stocky man wore his precious fedora hat screwed down on his head as he strained forward. Seeing the determination on his face made a flicker of a smile cross Ryan’s lips. He had known John Barrymore Dix since their wild and woolly days with the legendary Trader. J.B. had been that operation’s Armorer, a nickname that had stuck. They were best friends then, as now.
J.B. never said he was sorry when he wasn’t.
And he never gave up.
As Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was dragged along, he railed at a god who was either absent, or oblivious, or malevolent. Or some of each. Doc was an educated man. He used big words. Complicated arguments chased his thoughts, rather than vice versa, like angry wasps trapped inside his skull. He made leaps in logic, dropping out pivotal points, speaking from opposite points of view. At times he seemed to be taking on the persona of his own grand inquisitor.
The only companion with the background to unscramble his philosophical ravings was Mildred Wyeth, and she had long since given up the game. The solidly built black woman was a medical doctor, and aside from Doc, had the most formal education of any of them. She had been cryogenically frozen after a botched surgery just before skydark, and reanimated by Ryan and the others nearly a hundred years later.
Mildred’s diagnosis of Doc’s current condition was grim. She had said his overwhelmed mind had twisted in on itself. Anger reflecting anger, which led to agonizing flashbacks, which reduced him to sobbing into his palms. The man was suffering from an unspeakable, unending ordeal—a price paid for no crime of his, other than the exquisite bliss of his former life. The life he had been born to live, and had been denied. In Mildred’s medical opinion, Doc’s rambling, often shouted, diatribes to imaginary gatherings of Oxford dons allowed him to flee the crushing reality of the present, where he was doomed to exist without his beloved wife and children.
Though Mildred sometimes acted as if she had little love for the old man, it was plain to Ryan that she found it hard to watch and be helpless to slow his further mental and physical disintegration.
The one-eyed man remained cautiously confident that Doc would come out of the tailspin eventually. As he always had before.
As they neared the ville entrance, Ryan saw a little girl in a loose-fitting, faded cotton print dress staring at them from inside the gate. A very pretty little girl with a headband of daisies. Her gaze swept past Ryan to rest upon Dean. The boy sensed he had a rapt audience of one. Though exhausted, he drew himself to his maximum height and flashed a smile at the girl. Ryan was amused to see that his son managed a bit of a manly swagger, with the 9 mm Browning Hi-Power blaster prominently strapped to his hip.
Krysty gave Ryan a nudge. “Like father, like son,” she commented.
A trio of armed men in bill caps stood behind a pile of concrete boulders and rubble that served as both a checkpoint and traffic barrier. Beyond them, Ryan caught his first glimpse of Bullard ville: an oasis of brilliant green that sprouted miraculously from the sunbaked yellow earth. In rows of raised beds, under slanting, corrugated metal roofs, the crop plants grew lush and tall. On the far side of the beds, simmering in the valley heat, predark plastic-and-metal signs on tall poles dangled precariously above a line of low buildings.
“Man, oh, man, could I ever go for a cheese-burger and a strawberry shake,” Mildred said.
Ryan grinned. “We’ll be lucky to get a plate of beans and a swig of green beer.”
“I know, I know. But a girl can still dream, can’t she?”
As they stepped up to the checkpoint, one of the bill caps shouted in an unpleasantly high voice, “And just who might you folks be?” Without giving them time to answer, he asked a second question. “What is your business here?” The two other sentries held sawed-off, 12-gauge, double-barreled shotguns at waist height. The range was such that, by discharging all four stubby barrels at once, they could cut the strangers not so neatly in two.
Ryan showed the guards open hands. “We’re just travelers on the long road north,” he said. “Come to water and rest, and willing to pay for it.”
The head sentry, a very short man with a full brown beard, gave them a hard once-over. He looked especially long at their complement of weapons, appraising them for possible threat and commercial value. When he came to Doc, he couldn’t help but notice the slack rope that connected him around the waist to the man with the smeared eyeglasses.
“What’s with the geezer?” the guard leader chirped. “He sick? He looks sick to me. He better not have the fucking oozies!”
Ryan and the companions knew he was referring to an incurable, mutated brain virus, much feared and believed to be transferred by cannibalism.
“He’s just old,” Krysty said. “Very, very old.”
“Oughta leave him to meet his maker, then.”
“Ain’t his time, yet,” Ryan said, the look on his face telling the guard to mind his own bastard business.
Unable to contain himself any longer, one of the shotgunners excitedly blurted out, “We got a carny come to town.”
“That so?” J.B. said.
The sentries shared wide grins.
“Best rad-blasted carny in all the Deathlands,” the head guard added. “Big show’s tomorrow.”
“We’ll have to stick around, then,” Ryan said. “Something like that you don’t see every day.”
“You’d better believe it,” the shotgunner said. “Gert Wolfram’s carny only plays the most important, big-time villes.”
“You can stow your gear over where the carny is putting up camp,” the head guard said. “As long as you got something to trade, you got the run of Bullard ville. There’s food, water, joy juice and the best damn gaudy house this side of Perdition. When you run out of trade goods, we will escort you out of the berm. We don’t give no charity here. And we don’t take no guff from those who don’t belong.”
With that warning, the guards lowered their scatterguns and allowed the companions to enter Bullard ville.
Once inside, there was no mistaking the proposed campsite. Not with fifteen wags parked in a broad circle on the baked yellow dirt. On the side of the largest wag was a crudely painted sign that read Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny Show. Lots of ville folks were standing around gawking while dozens of carny roustabouts worked to set up camp. The heavy protective tarps were pulled back from the trailered cages so the gawkers could see in. Only from a goodly distance, though. The newcomers appeared to have set up a kind of invisible perimeter that the ville folk weren’t crossing. Mebbe they’d been warned to steer clear? Mebbe they didn’t need to be.
As they approached the mob of spectators, a strange sound split the air. Two very loud tones, a high note sliding to low. Only Mildred made the connection to a foghorn; none of the others had ever heard one. To them it sounded like a baleful howl.
Beside Ryan, Jak cranked his head around and stiffened, as if ten thousand volts had just shot through him. The youth’s reaction surprised the one-eyed man. It was just an animal noise. A very large animal.
Before Ryan could raise a hand to stop him, the albino took off, running at full tilt for the cages. Some of the carny folk saw him coming and tried to block his way with widespread arms, but he feinted, swinging his white head one way, then squirted past them. Staring at his rapidly accelerating back, the empty-handed roustabouts yelled for someone to get him.
“Dark night,” J.B. muttered, “we were supposed to go in nice and quiet, and recce first.”
“Better back his play,” Ryan said, waving the companions after him.
J.B. pulled Doc along like a stubborn calf.
Suddenly the howling got a whole lot louder, and it changed in timbre. Instead of coming from deep in a huge set of lungs, it came from high in the throat.
It went from misery to absolute joy.
Then it stopped altogether.
There was no one left to try to turn back the companions. All the carny folk had rushed over to one of the trailered cages.
And with good reason.
It appeared that the agile intruder was getting eaten alive.
Jak had his head stuck between the bars of the cage, holding on to them with both hands. For a split second, Ryan’s heart dropped in his chest. He thought the young albino was a sure goner, his head half inside the great carnivore’s open maw. But then he saw Jak wasn’t getting chewed.
He was getting licked.
The mutie mountain lion’s tongue slathered his face so hard that even holding on to the bars with all his might, Jak couldn’t keep his boots on the ground.
The great cat made a loud purring sound, like a wag’s big diesel engine fast idling, as it scrubbed the albino’s face and neck with a wide pink tongue that had to be a foot and a half long.
“What the nuking hell?” J.B. exclaimed as he came to a stop beside his one-eyed friend.
“It’s the lion, J.B.,” Ryan said. “They’ve got the lion.”
The companions—except Doc, who was still wearing the thousand-yard stare—needed no further explanation. Some time ago, Jak had been made a prisoner in Baron Willie Elijah’s mutie zoo. He had been caged up with a mutie mountain lion. After an initial, violent and lengthy misunderstanding, the two had got on famously. They were both wild things, so well matched physically and spiritually that they could communicate without words, with their eyes and with touch. Brother beasts of the hellscape.
Once freed, the big lion hadn’t run off, but had followed Jak and the companions. Only when it refused to enter a mat-trans unit was it left behind. This, it seemed certain, was that selfsame noble beast.
“A captive again,” Mildred said glumly.
“Unlucky,” Krysty said.
“Mebbe,” J.B. stated. “Mebbe not.”
“What do you mean?” Krysty asked.
“Found Jak again, didn’t he?”
“Step back from the cage, mutie,” one of the roustabouts shouted as he shouldered up to the bars. He was a big, thick-bodied man with a heavy blue-black shadow of beard stubble, and matted black hair on the tops of his shoulders and the backs of his arms. He outweighed Jak by more than a hundred pounds.
The albino paid him no mind.
“I said, step back!”
With no one to stop them, the ville folk pressed forward for a good view of the action. The show was starting a day early.
Jak pulled his head out from between the bars but didn’t move away. His fine, shoulder-length white hair was plastered to the side of his head.
“Let cat out,” Jak said, his ruby-red eyes glittering.
“Yeah, right,” the roustabout replied sarcastically.
Then he turned to address the gathered carny people. “Turn loose a thousand pounds of man-eater on your say-so.”
This remark was met with peals of laughter from the ville and carny folk alike.
“Let him out,” Jak repeated. His voice was flat, calm, controlled.
The smile melted off the hairy man’s face.
“Get closer,” Ryan told the others.
Even as they began to move, the hairy guy snarled, “You’re begging for a major ass-kicking, Snowball.” He looked around to make sure he had backup, then added, “And by skydark you’re gonna get it!”
Before the hairy roustabout and his pals could take a step forward, the albino’s right hand was up and full of .357 Magnum Colt Python. He showed them all the dark hole in the crowned muzzle, the hole where death slept, until called.
Jak spoke again. This time it wasn’t a polite request; it was a threat. “Open cage now….”
Ryan lunged and used his momentum to throw a shoulder into the hairy man from behind. The blind-siding impact sent the roustabout stumbling to his knees, hard. He cursed as he immediately jumped back to his feet. He was very nimble for a big man.
In the next instant, weapons were out all around.
The carny folk waved nine mill semiauto blasters, mostly KG-99s and Llamas. Blue-steel, high-capacity cheapies, in excellent condition.
Ryan held his scoped Steyr SSG-70 rifle at waist height. Krysty had her Model 640 Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver in a double grip. Dean likewise braced his Hi-Power. Mildred one-handed her .38, a Czech-built, ZKR 551 target pistol. J.B. balanced his 12-gauge Smith & Wesson M-4000 pumpgun against his hip. Seeing the deadly turn of events, the ville gawkers turned and ran, scattering for the cover of the plant beds like so many jackrabbits.
The tense moment stretched on and on.
No one on either side wanted the shooting to start. They were standing way too close to each other to miss. Once the blasting began, there weren’t going to be any survivors.
Nobody moved.
Nobody even blinked.
Then, from over by the circle of wags, someone shouted, “What in the rad-fucking-blazes is going on here?” A tall man in a red tailcoat stormed out of the side door of the biggest wag. At his side was a naked, three-foot-tall, immature stickie.
The tailcoated man and his little shadow slowed their charge as they approached the fracas.
With his KG-99’s sights locked on Ryan’s chest, the hairy roustabout explained the deadly stalemate. “Snowball there,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, “wants us to let the nukin’ lion out. Started waving his blaster in our faces.”
As if it understood what the albino was trying to do, the mountain lion reached a huge paw between the bars and placed it lightly on his slim but powerful shoulder.
“Not gonna happen, son,” the red-haired, red-goateed carny master told Jak. “That’s one smart cat. The smartest, meanest, damnedest mountain cat in all of Deathlands. He’s playing you for a triple stupe. Open that cage door and he’ll gut you from windpipe to goobers with one swipe of that big old friendly paw of his. Then he’ll carve up the rest of us, just for fun, before we can do jack shit about it. Same way he chilled three of my best handlers over the past two months. One second they were alive, and the next they were torn clean in half—legs here, the rest of them way the fuck over yonder.” To illustrate, he gestured over his shoulder with a hooked thumb.
Ryan sidestepped over to Jak and whispered in his ear, “It’s not the time for this fight…we got other business first.”
The albino youth didn’t give a flying fuck for the wishes of most other human beings, but he always paid close attention to Ryan Cawdor, whose battle smarts had never proved wrong, and whose courage never failed.
Ryan stared hard into the bloodred eyes and nodded, to underscore his point.
Jak smiled, then swung the ventrib sights of the Python across the chests of his adversaries, counting and marking targets, left to right. Prep for a rapid-fire, cylinder-emptying fusillade.
A visible shudder passed through the pack of roustabouts.
Having made his point, Jak holstered his blaster.
After a pause, all weapons were lowered.
“You ain’t Gert Wolfram,” J.B. said to the man in the tailcoat.
The baby stickie started making kissing sounds at the Armorer, who shifted and planted his back foot, bracing himself to swing up the shotgun and take the sucker-fisted squirt’s spongy little head off at the neck.
“What makes you say that?” asked the carny master.
“Gert Wolfram is fat, fifty and fucked,” J.B. replied. “Last time we saw him, he had two broken ankles and his stickie slaves were pulling him apart like a sweet dough pudding.”
“Even if Wolfram survived the appetites of his pets,” Mildred added, “he couldn’t have lost twenty years in age, two hundred pounds in weight and gained six inches in height.”
“You got me there,” said the red-haired man with a disarming grin. “Actually I never claimed to be old Wolfram. People just assume that it’s so. Sure doesn’t hurt the business to let them keeping thinking that. I’m committed to keeping the show’s original fine reputation. I’m called the Magnificent Crecca, for obvious reasons.” He reached down to adjust the soft but prominent bulge in the front of his white pants. Then he leered at Krysty.
“Do we call you Magnificent, or just Crecca?” she asked.
“I answer to either, or to M.C., or carny master, or in your case—” he leaned closer to her to add “—to lover man.”
Krysty’s prehensile hair reacted to the unwanted advance, drawing up into tight coils.
Crecca’s eyes widened when he saw this. “My, my,” he said, “aren’t you the special one?” He pulled at his chin beard, looked her up and down salaciously, then said, “Wonder what else you’ve got hidden away for me?”
Krysty put her hand on the butt of her wheelgun. “I’ve got six hollowpoints, all for you,” she said, staring him down.
For a second Ryan thought things were going to escalate out of control again, but Crecca just looked amused. “I hope you’re all going to be here tomorrow so you can see the carny show,” he said. “You’ll never forget it. I promise you that.”
Neither will you, lover man, Ryan thought. Neither will you.
Chapter Three
“Ain’t you never heard about the man with the black eye patch?”
From the luxury and comfort of an executive office chair bolted to the sheet metal floor—the rips in the brown leatherette on the arms, seat, and head-rest repaired with overlapping strips of frayed duct tape—the Magnificent Crecca gestured impatiently for the big man breathing wolf-nasty in his face to take a step back. Something more easily ordered than obeyed.
Floor space in the carny master’s cabin in the big wag was at a premium, largely because its side walls were lined with built-in, sway-proof racks and shelves. Jammed on these shelves were select items taken either in trade for performances, or looted after a mass chilling and burial. Among the more important trinkets were unfired, Brazilian-made handblasters still wrapped in their protective Cosmoline; several .223-caliber, full-auto, military carbines; a scoped Remington 700 longblaster; and factory-loaded ammo in their original metal boxes. There were tall bottles of the very best joy juice and plastic bags of uncut jolt. There were lidded glass jars packed with bright bits of jewelry and dozens of cardboard boxes full of single-serving-sized containers of predark candies. There was also a barely functioning mini-TV and VCR, a small number of video-and audio-tapes and a black boom box. The electricity to power the carny master’s home entertainment center came from movable solar panels on the wag’s roof.
Along the front wall, below the room’s only decoration, a quartet of flyspotted, discolored, girly magazine centerfolds, was Crecca’s narrow bunk. Jackson lay curled up in the corner in a nest of rags. A pale, sleeping pillbug. His choke collar was chained to an eyebolt in the wall. The cabin smelled strongly of unwashed male, cigar butts and paper-trained stickie.
Of course Crecca had heard about the man with the eye patch.
Every triple-stupe droolie who wasn’t deaf had heard about him.
The gaudy houses up and down Deathlands were full of stories about that particular coldheart. About how he had run with Trader in the bad, bad old days. About how he had matured into a full-blown, human chilling machine. Norms. Muties. It didn’t matter to him. Rumor had it, because of that rad-blasted single blue eye, he could only see things one way: his way. Not a man to cross, unless you were looking to book a quick ride on the last train west. More convincing than the always exaggerated whore-shack gossip, Crecca knew that even the Magus, Gert Wolfram’s steel-eyed, half-mechanical former business partner, wanted no part of him.
Showing no emotion, the carny master said, “So, you think he’s One Eye Cawdor?”
“Damn straight!” Furlong exclaimed. “Right down to the zigzag scar on his eyebrow where the knife cut took his peeper!”
His outburst disrupted the rhythmic, wet snoring coming from the corner behind him. Furlong jerked his head around at the sound of chain rustling on the floor, making double-nuking-sure he was out of reach of the little stickie’s needle teeth and sucker fists. The relief on his face when he turned back was almost comical.
Crecca had to admit that the latecomer fit Cawdor’s description. “What would he want with us?” he asked.
“Mebbe he knows what we’ve been doing,” Furlong suggested. “Mebbe he wants to take our booty.”
“With a force of seven?” Crecca said incredulously, stroking his red chin beard. And seven was being real generous, considering one was old and brain-fucked, and another was so young his balls hadn’t even dropped yet. On the other side, the carny master had a virtual miniarmy, fifty-nine-strong, all hand selected and personally trained by him, hardened, efficient chillers who took pride in their work.
Only one creature in all of Deathlands had the power to make that bloodthirsty bunch wet their pants. And do his bidding.
The Magus.
The Magus had done things to people that gave even Crecca’s chill crew wake-up-sweating nightmares. Things that made the objects of his unwanted attention squeal like pigs and offer their own children’s lives in exchange for a quick and merciful death.
If the Magus had ever had an ounce of mercy in him, he had had it cut out a long time ago. Cut out and replaced with clockwork metal gears.
The new and improved carny operation was large scale, large profit and held together by fear and greed—the hellscape’s twin wellsprings of motivation.
That someone was after the accumulated spoils of mass murder came as no surprise to the Magnificent Crecca. With a setup as sweet as this one, he’d known it had to happen, sooner or later. It had happened later rather than sooner due to the fact that Deathlands folk generally kept their heads down and minded their business. They had more than enough trouble just making it through another night, without looking for a little something extra that belonged to strangers.
“I think we ought to take them out tonight,” Furlong said, his dark, close-set eyes eager beneath bristling black eyebrows. “I can send a couple of my best boys to chill them all while they’re sleeping.”
Being the head roustabout in the most famous carny in Deathlands didn’t require much in the way of smarts—just straightforward, dependable brutality. The Magnificent Crecca sometimes wondered if Furlong could tie his own bootlaces, or if he had to bully someone else into tying them for him.
For years prior to his promotion to carny master, Crecca had worked for the late Gert Wolfram, but never as a roustabout. He had been an advance scout and collector of specimens for the fat man’s menagerie of living oddities. He trapped wild muties in the Darks, using rope snares or pitfalls. In and around the villes, he bought or kidnapped the tame ones. He’d find a particularly disgusting freak that he knew old Wolfram would like, then he’d shove a bag over its head and steal it from the bosom of its loving family. If the family caught him in the act and objected too strenuously, he chilled the whole lot of them. He was paid by the pound in those days. Wolfram had a thing about the size and weight of his attractions, said “the big uns” drew better crowds—a rule of showmanship that the new carny master still followed. While on the road, Crecca often had to force-feed his severely depressed captives at blasterpoint to maintain their redemption value. If they still wouldn’t take nourishment, he ditched them to make room for more profitable cargo. Dumped them in the middle of nowhere to starve or be eaten. Their lives weren’t worth the price of a centerfire bullet or the trouble of resharpening a bone-nicked knife blade.
“What are you going to do with the bodies afterward?” Crecca asked his head roustabout.
“Drag the pieces of shit outside the berm and bury ’em on the plain.”
“And tomorrow morning nobody’s going to notice seven people who upped and vanished?”
Furlong shrugged. “Somebody might notice, but there’d be no proof, so what could they do?”
“What if one of them yells out as your boys attack or gets hold of a blaster? What then?”
Furlong was silent under knit brows, straining to come up with a good answer. He might as well have been trying to explain gravity. But he was too stupid to see the futility of the effort.
“Bullard ville’s gonna be the best pickings we ever had,” Crecca told him. “If we try anything on One-Eye and his crew and it goes sour, it will queer the whole deal. And I won’t risk that.”
The hairy man started to restate his case for a surgical strike, but Crecca cut him off. “Do nothing,” he said. “Do absolutely fucking nothing. Understand?”
It took a long moment for this to sink in, but Furlong finally, reluctantly nodded.
“Get out,” Crecca said, dismissing him with a wave of his hand.
After Furlong left, the carny master assured himself that even if One-Eye had come to pay them a visit, that even if he knew about the spoils of mass murder, it didn’t matter. Cawdor didn’t know how the chilling was done. He couldn’t know because there had never been a single survivor left to tell the tale. Cawdor and his six fellow travelers would die like dogs along with the rest of the Bullard ville hayseeds.
Crecca twisted the ends of his goatee into a point. It was too bad about the bitch, though. Her mutation—the squirming strands of flame-red hair—wasn’t flashy enough for her to make a sideshow attraction, but she had real potential as a sex slave. Ah, well, the carny master thought, sex slaves, even ones with legs as long as hers, could be had anywhere.
He reached in his tailcoat side pocket and took out a small beige cardboard box. On the box were printed the words Choco Duds. He shook a few of the predark candies onto his palm. They looked like ossified rat turds. Their milk-chocolate coating had crystallized to a floury white. More than a century of storage had turned once soft caramel centers to amber glass, unchewable by norm teeth and jaws.
Crecca flicked one of the Choco Duds across the cabin. It hit Jackson on the cheek with an audible whack. The stickie’s eyes popped open at once. It sniffed the air, mewled in delight, then rooted in the heap of rags until it found the treat.
Jackson had no trouble eating the pellet. The dead eyes begged for more.
“First we’ve got work to do,” Crecca said, getting up from his chair. He put a videocassette in the player and powered up the TV.
Jackson watched his every move with rapt attention.
Loud, hard-driving, backbeat-heavy music erupted from the speakers, and bright colors and dancing females appeared on the screen. Crecca fell into step with the lead singer-dancer—a dewy-eyed, teenage blonde with a bare midriff—and her troupe of four bare-bellied dancers. Their moves were complex and violent. And there wasn’t much room to work. Tails of red satin coat flapping, the carny master pivoted left and spin-kicked right.
“Come on, Jackson,” he called, teasing the creature with the offer of another treat. “Let’s go!”
The stickie began to follow along with its master. Singing, sort of. Unable to precisely vocalize the new words, which dealt with virginal angst, Jackson soprano-droned along with the video’s megastar. Dancing, sort of. The stickie waved its spindly arms, snapped and ground its narrow hips, a hair behind the beat.
“Good stickie,” he said, smacking the creature on the forehead with another well-aimed Choco Dud.
It was part of the Magnificent Crecca’s job, and the real, chilling-robbing operation’s cover, to keep audiences in the larger villes coming back every time the company circuited through Deathlands. This required the invention of new and ever more spellbinding acts. The carny master’s latest idea for a big-top finale was an all-stickie rock-dance number, with music and routines lifted from the video, and Jackson singing and dancing in drag—long blond wig, bare belly, tight miniskirt. As a Tiffany-imitator, the stickie had a long, long way to go.
“That’s okay, Jackson,” Crecca said patiently, after the little creature’s spin move went awry, and it crashed into the wall. “Let’s take it from the top….”
Chapter Four
The Clobbering Chair smiled and waved at Baron Kerr, beckoning him to come sit. To take the load off.
The plain piece of metal office furniture stood in the middle of the ville’s tiny, pounded-dirt, central square. It had been dragged out of the low blockhouse across the way. Leather straps hung from the armrests and looped around its front legs. Leaning against its back was a club made of three and a half feet of heavy iron pipe, one end wrapped with strips of rag to form a handle.
For a shimmering instant, the baron could see a smiling victim seated there. A smiling executioner, standing behind, club in hand. A smiling audience surrounding all, patiently waiting its turn.
Baron Kerr had long since given up trying to keep the faces of any of them separated. For him the individual members of the army of the dead blurred into one another, and into the few still living, who were just as eager as those who had gone before to feel the weight of the falling club.
Kerr never had visions of the ghosts of those carted up to the pool, quarter sawn and chucked in. But often, living people appeared to him—indeed, everything that he saw, heard, touched, tasted and felt—as puffs of colored smoke rising up in front of a wall of infinite blackness. At other times, the baron experienced just the opposite perception, that everything that existed was unified, a universe-spanning, living singularity that invaded and permeated the void like the tendrils of a rad cancer. When in this latter mode, as he was now, the clear divisions between objects, the boundaries between animate and inanimate, between human and tree and stone no longer existed.
He dimly remembered that there had been a time—or he imagined that he dimly remembered—when his perception of things had been different, when he was someone else, somewhere else. Though the details were beyond him, he could recall that creatures like those of the pool and surrounding woods hadn’t always spoken to him in his own language, and that the earth and water and sky hadn’t always heaved and shuddered with stirrings only he could see and understand.
The world, itself, hadn’t always been entirely alive.
The pale-yellow snow of spore fall, as fine as table salt, lay in scattered drifts as Kerr trudged across the square, toward the dirt-floor shacks and lean-tos built against the outer wall of the blockhouse. A half-dozen people stood around a fifty-five-gallon fire drum, watching their dinner cook on a red hot steel grate. One of them turned over the sizzling, pale, roast-shaped blob with a sharp-pointed stick. The baron’s grimy, raggedy, bright-eyed subjects all grinned and nodded a subservient greeting to him as he passed.
Kerr didn’t acknowledge their presence. He walked down the short, narrow flight of concrete stairs to the below-ground-level blockhouse entrance. The door, a massive, welded-steel bulkhead, had been twisted and wrenched away from the frame by crowbar and chisel. Scraped back on its sprung hinges, it no longer closed; it had never closed for as long as Kerr had been resident royalty in the blockhouse palace.
Though there were no windows, it wasn’t dark inside. Greenish light coruscated from the beads of condensation sweat on the concrete-block walls. It glowed from the accumulated puddles along the floor seam of the central hallway. Most of the acoustic tile ceiling lay scattered about on the floor. The low ceiling’s fluorescent light fixtures dangled lopsidedly from rusting chains and rotten wires.
Four of the seven small rooms off the main corridor were packed with squat, yellow-enameled, inoperative machines of unknown function. These machines were lagbolted into the floor. Thick nests of pipes of varying diameters fed into and out of them, and vanished into holes cut into the block. Dials and gauges with cracked faces and missing indicators dotted the walls of these rooms.
Kerr’s quarters were in the largest of the blockhouse’s three offices. He made his baronial bunk on the gray plastic laminated top of the built-in desk that ran the full length of the back wall. His pallet was a duct-tape-patched, flaccid, plaid-flannel-lined Coleman sleeping bag that hadn’t been cleaned since skydark. The work space’s computers, printers and monitors had been pushed off onto the floor and left there in a shattered heap.
Though the building looked like a pump house complex connected to the shallow lake on the mountain ledge above, it had been much more than that. The baron couldn’t read a lick, but even he realized the framed diplomas and certificates screwed into the walls of the offices meant whitecoats had worked there. Heavy-duty whitecoats. And the machines and electronic gear and miles of perforated computer spreadsheet covered with rows of numerical data meant government research jack. The bales of used printout paper were just about gone. For many years, the ville residents had used sheets of it to start their cook fires. Because of this, the site’s original purpose would probably always remain a mystery.
The baron hung his straw cowboy hat on a wall hook next to the neatly arranged predark fishing gear he had found in a metal cupboard. He figured it had belonged to one of the whitecoats. Rods. Reels. Aluminum boxes of tiny flies. Wiped down. Oiled. Polished. Cased. They were the only items in the place so meticulously tended.
His evening meal had already been set out on a crude wooden platter on the end of the desk. The mound of sliced, roasted fungus was crispy and brown on the outside and still white, creamy, almost molten in the center. From it arose a delicious and intoxicating smell of cardamom and cinnamon spice.
Kerr wasn’t hungry, but he ate. He ate every bite. And as he ate, he looked down at himself from somewhere near the ceiling, watching as his body satisfied the hunger that wasn’t his own. It was eating of the body by the body—its flesh, his flesh, inseparable.
After he was done, he felt the familiar weight of exhaustion descend, infiltrating his limbs, his torso and finally his brain. On the desktop, his sleeping bag quivered in anticipation of holding him. The surrounding walls of concrete block maintained their slow, steady breathing. Kerr let himself fall back onto the pallet, and there began to weep. Tears spilled out from under his wraparound sunglasses and trickled into the edges of his beard. Overhead, the partially collapsed ceiling flinched and grimaced in sympathy.
If the baron, too, yearned to sit in the Clobbering Chair, he had learned long ago that the burning pool would never let him. Of all those it had drawn unto itself, he was different.
Chosen.
Pampered.
Held apart.
For reasons that were unfathomable, James Kerr had been made baron of an ever changing, joyous, obedient flock that was oblivious to its cruel poverty, its physical suffering and the absolute certainty of its doom.
There was nothing his subjects wouldn’t do for him.
Except chill him.
And for as long as he could remember, that was all he had ever wanted.
Chapter Five
Ryan and the companions laid down their packs and bedrolls in the slanting shade of one of plant bed awnings, a good distance from the carny’s campsite. Doc knelt on the ground, tethered by his waist to one of the awning’s support posts. The old man’s eyes were vacant, and his fingers raked furrows in the yellow dirt. As Ryan watched him, he felt a growing sadness in his heart. If the old man didn’t snap out of his stupor, there would come a time for a mercy chilling. And he would have to be the one to do it. It was his responsibility as the undeclared leader of this group of friends.
A sound from the circled wags behind them made Ryan look over his shoulder. Blocked from view by the angle of its cage and trailer, the lion began to yowl mournfully—strange, high-pitched, flutelike noises.
Ryan glanced at Jak, and his stomach tightened into a hard knot. The albino was staring in the direction of the mutie cat. He stood flat-footed and rigid. The sinewy muscles in his dead-white, bare upper arms twitched from the strain; his hands were clenched into fists. The shock of each piercing cry rippled through his whipcord body like a wave. Ryan sensed that if the tension wasn’t released, and quickly, his young friend was going to shake apart.
“I go…” Jak announced to no one in particular.
With that, he loped away from the companions, crossing the pounded dirt in long, easy strides, making for the ville’s defensive perimeter. When he reached it, the slope didn’t slow him. The sun flashed once on his mane of white hair as he disappeared over the top of the berm.
“What’s with him?” Mildred said in dismay. “Where’s he off to now?”
Ryan shrugged as he smoothed out his bedroll and carefully set down the Steyr SSG-70. “Got some private business to attend to, I guess.”
“Are we going to have trouble with Jak?” Mildred asked him point-blank, hands braced on her sturdy hips. “Is he going to lose it on us? Has he already lost it? That’s the last thing we need.”
“Mildred, keep in mind that Jak has saved your life more than once,” Krysty cautioned her.
“And vice versa,” the black woman replied. “Jak and that mutie mountain lion have a connection that’s downright spooky. It’s been so long since we parted ways with that horn-necked monster, I’d almost forgotten just how spooky. It reminds me of the psychological case studies I’ve read about the psychic bonds between human twins. Only in this case it involves creatures of very different species. It isn’t natural, Krysty. It doesn’t make sense, biologically or physiologically.”
“You’re talking like a whitecoat.”
“I can’t help that,” Mildred said. “I was trained to think like a scientist. And the scientist in me says, we have no way of predicting with any sort of confidence what Jak is going to do next. Think about it. We no more than got inside the berm and he had us facing off against a dozen blasters…all over that mutie cat.”
“She’s right about the trouble,” J.B. told Ryan as he took off his glasses and polished the lenses with the hem of his shirt. “The big question is, can Jak keep to the plan we made? Or is he going to blow it for all of us by trying to get that critter out of its cage?”
“As it stands,” Mildred added, “this whole deal is balanced on a knife edge.”
J.B. nodded in agreement. He slipped his glasses back on. “Every one of those carny chillers over there has a centerfire blaster,” he said. “The odds were bastard bad even before we lost Doc. If the rest of us aren’t at one hundred percent, and on the same page, we don’t have a chance in hell here. We’re all gonna end up in a shallow hole with dirt in our faces. Mebbe the smart thing would be to slip over there once it gets dark and put a slug in the back of that big cat’s head.”
“Jak won’t let us down,” Ryan said with conviction. “He never has and he never will. He knows what we have to do, and why.” The hard edge to his voice said for the time being the discussion was over.
Inside, Ryan was as concerned as Mildred and J.B., and for the same reasons, but he couldn’t show it. His confidence had to shore up theirs; it was a simple matter of survival. He had to be the calm in the eye of the storm.
He sat cross-legged on his bedroll and with a scrap of lightly oiled rag began to brush the dust from the scope and action of his treasured predark longblaster. In silence, the others started going through the contents of their packs, sorting and gradually assembling a small pile of trade items so they could all eat and drink at the ville’s hostelries.
Ryan’s hands moved over the rifle automatically, his fingers programmed by countless repetitions of the same vital task. Trader had taught him that a fully functioning weapon was the difference between being dead and cold by the side of the road, and walking on. As he worked, Ryan thought about their long journey, about how they had followed the wheel tracks from the looted hamlet to Perdition ville. The trail ended on the outskirts of Perdition where they found a wide circle of deep holes pounded into the ground, holes made by carny tent’s massive stakes. Exactly the same circle they had found in the looted ville.
From a stooped old man poking around in the pile of worthless, half-burned trash the show had left behind, the companions had learned that the Gert Wolfram show had spent three days and nights entertaining the good folks of Perdition. The trash picker had described the strange and wonderful acts, the rousing music, the feats of strength and daring. There had been a terrible joy and satisfaction in his rheumy eyes as he told them about his favorite part of the show: the part where the two-headed scalie ate a live goat from both ends at once.
Legs first.
If the troupe hadn’t stopped over for those extra days, Ryan and the companions never would have caught up to them. The question was, why were the folks of Perdition still breathing air, and not buried in a ditch?
Compared to the unnamed ville where the mass chilling had been done, Perdition was a major metropolis. Which led Ryan to speculate that mebbe it was just too big for the chillers to tackle, and that’s why they had left it alone. Or mebbe they just skipped some villes along their route to throw any possible pursuit off the track.
The carny’s performance schedule had been posted on the side of a fire-gutted, semitrailer near the circle of tent holes. It turned out that the circus company was heading to a large ville several days southwest of Perdition before moving up the long, dry valley to an engagement at another big hamlet at its northern end.
The companions had taken the difficult, cross-country shortcut to try to intersect the caravan’s route. The hills and mountains that framed the dry valley were impassable by wags; once the carny entered at the southern end, the only exit was far to the north. When Ryan and the others had seen the towering spirals of dust in the distance, they knew they had found their quarry.
By the time Ryan had finished detailing his longblaster, the mound of trade goods on Mildred’s bedroll had grown impressively. She had put in a few .38-caliber cartridges. J.B. had added two empty mags and a minitoolkit for an M-16—a weapon they didn’t carry. Krysty had tossed in a pair of compact binocs with a cracked left lens, and Dean had given up a plastic-handled can opener that was near mint.
J.B. scowled at the carny’s circled wags and said, “Mebbe the Magus himself is hiding over there. Like a nasty old spider, waiting for the fun to begin.”
“Be just like him,” Krysty said. “Crouching in the deep shadows while his puppets do all the dirty work.”
“The Magus may not have anything to do with the carny anymore,” Ryan said. “Not since Wolfram went west.”
“From what it looks like the carny is doing,” J.B. said, “it seems right up his street to me.”
“Mebbe,” Ryan said. “But looting the odd, shit-poor ville would be a big step down for him. The Magus has always been into mass slavery of muties and norms, mostly to support his mining operations and his jolt factories, but also for breeding stock.”
The companions all knew the Magus was into animal husbandry. He specialized in the careful crossbreeding, and perhaps bioengineering, of new mutie races. Rumors abounded that he had “made” the first stickies. It was also rumored that he had acquired the power to travel forward and backward in time. That he had done evil deeds long before any person now alive had been born, and would do evil long after they were dust.
Deathlands was a place of little certain truth and much wild speculation. The only thing anybody knew for sure was that the Magus was a league of chiller above and beyond the run-of-the-mill, gaudy house backstabber.
“He’s back!” Dean exclaimed, pointing at the berm gate. “Jak’s back.”
The albino trotted across the compound at the same easy pace. Over his shoulder, its short front and long back legs trussed, was a skinned, dressed-out, thirty-pound mutie jackrabbit.
There had been no gunshot echo rolling over the valley. Ryan figured Jak had used one of the many leaf-bladed throwing knives hidden on his person to dispatch the rabbit.
“Why did he bring us dinner?” Dean asked his father. “I thought we were going to eat at the gaudy?”
The lion let out a blood-curdling roar that put an end to conversation.
It became clear that it wasn’t their dinner the albino had brought when he turned hard left and made a beeline for the row of trailered cages. Ignoring the crudely lettered Danger: Don’t Feed The Muties sign, Jak passed the fresh carcass through the bars to his brother beast.
The mountain ate the offering greedily, crunching up the bones with no more effort than he used to chew the flesh. A thirty-pound jackrabbit was a mere snack for an animal his size—it was gone in a few seconds. But it had to have been mighty tasty if the diesel-wag purring noise the cat made as it licked the blood from its huge paws was any measure.
“Say, Dean,” Ryan said, nudging his transfixed son with a gentle elbow. “I think someone’s trying to catch your eye….”
Dean turned to look. Instantly, a wide smile lit up his face.
Standing at the far end of the plant bed was a sun-browned little girl in a too big cotton dress with a crown of daisies in her golden-streaked brown hair. She smiled back at him, tooth for gleaming white tooth.
Chapter Six
“My name’s Leeloo. What’s yours?”
The twelve-year-old boy beamed down at her. “Dean,” he said.
“That’s a great blaster you’ve got, Dean.”
He glanced at the blue-steel weapon strapped to his hip. “It’s a 15-shot, nine mill Browning. Want to hold it?”
Leeloo nodded enthusiastically.
Dean dumped the staggered-row magazine onto his palm. Then he cracked back and checked the breech for a chambered round. After making sure the weapon was safe, without a second thought, he handed over what she knew had to be his most prized possession in all the world.
Leeloo very carefully took the Browning Hi-Power from him and held it in both hands, making a shaky, wavering attempt to aim. “Oh,” she said in dismay, “it’s heavier than I thought.”
Dean stepped around behind her and helped her raise the blaster to firing position. “You want to hold it about here,” he said.
Something new happened to Leeloo Bunny as young Dean reached his arms around her, enfolding her. In kindness. She felt suddenly safe and protected; she felt the urge to lean back against his chest, to feel the strength and the energy he gave off.
It was an urge she didn’t allow herself to give in to.
With great patience, Dean showed her how to work the Hi-Power’s safety. He made her adjust her stance to brace herself for the recoil. And he showed her how to hold her finger outside the trigger guard until she was ready to fire.
Nobody had given her any blaster training before. And certainly not with such a sophisticated and deadly predark weapon. She wasn’t old enough. Dean Cawdor, whose long, dark hair tickled the back of her neck as he leaned over her, thought she was. He cocked back the hammer with his thumb and told her to dry-fire the Browning.
“Go ahead,” he said, “squeeze the trigger.”
The firing pin made a twig-snap sound.
“Does it make a lot of noise when it really shoots?” she asked him.
“Sure does.”
He took back the blaster, lowered the hammer with his thumb, put the safety on and reholstered it.
“My ma got chilled,” Leeloo told him.
Dean looked at her for a long minute. She wasn’t sure whether she had said something bad without meaning to. Something that would make him not like her anymore.
She was about to apologize when he said, “Mine, too. She died of cancer. She was sick a long time. What happened to your ma?”
“My ma got choked in the gaudy while she was wrestling.”
“Wrestling?” Dean said, puzzled.
“On the bed.”
“Oh,” Dean said.
Leeloo stared at him closely, and as if she could read his mind—or heart—said, “Did your ma wrestle in the gaudies, too?”
“Sometimes,” the dark-haired boy said, staring down at his dusty boot tops. Though his lips moved, his face was expressionless. “But only when we didn’t have anything to eat, or nowhere safe to sleep. She was so pretty she could always find work in a gaudy.”
“They strung up the geezer who chilled my mom,” Leeloo told him. “I saw them do the whole thing. They yanked his pants down first. When his neck broke, it made a loud crack and his willy stuck out, like in wrestling. One time, before they cut him down, I clonked it good with a rock.”
“What about your dad?” Dean asked.
“Never had one that I know of. You’re lucky ’cause you’ve got one. And a good one, too. I can see that from the way he looks out for you.”
“Who takes care of you, then?”
“Fat Melchior, the headman of the ville. He took me in after Ma got chilled.”
“Is he nice to you?”
“Sure. But there’s not enough nice to go around. He has too many other kids of his own and the cabin is small.”
“You sound sad, Leeloo. Are you sad a lot?”
“I try not to be. I do things that make me happy, mostly by myself.”
“Me, too,” Dean said. “I like scouting ahead for the others when we’re on the move. Jak, he’s the one with the white hair, he’s teaching me how to read signs. He doesn’t say much, but I think I’m starting to get good at it.”
“You must have wonderful adventures with your dad and your friends. I’m still too young for adventures, I guess.”
“You’ll have some, though. Mebbe even better ones.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I’m sure of it.”
From the other side of the compound came the sound of her name being called. “Leeeee-looooo Bunny!”
“Dinnertime,” she said, destroyed at the prospect of being pulled away from something so exciting and extraordinary by something so boring and ordinary.
“You’d better go, then,” he told her. “Don’t want to be late, not with all those other kids at the table. You won’t get anything to eat.”
“Are you staying for the carny?” she asked him.
“Sure.”
“Then mebbe I’ll see you tomorrow?”
He smiled at her. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll look for you in the morning.”
With a totally mystifying combination of pain and joy sitting upon her heart, Leeloo Bunny descended the berm. She had never had a crush on a boy before. Had never wanted to kiss a boy before. In part, this was due to the awakening of her physical self; in part it was due to the fact that none of the ville boys interested her in the least. And for good reason. After watching the goings-on through the gaudy windows, the older ones got all panting and grabby handed, trying to insinuate their dirty fingers into very private places. Other girls in the ville, some even younger than Leeloo, let them do that, and more. Not Leeloo, though. The younger boys in Bullard ville were even more dismal crush prospects. They all had snot caked on their cheeks, and their breath smelled like creamed corn.
When she got back to Fat Melchior’s cabin, the chaos of dinner for ten was well under way. She didn’t compete for food, hardly ate any to speak of, and later, when she finally curled up on her tiny cot, she found she couldn’t sleep a wink. And the cause, strangely enough, wasn’t her excitement over the carny.
Chapter Seven
With Jackson trotting at the heels of his jackboots, the Magnificent Crecca headed back to the rear of the big wag, down the narrow, windowless, low-ceilinged corridor.
As the carny master approached the closed metal door at the far end, he felt a wave of the familiar, powerful unease he always felt just before entering the Magus’s lair. Gert Wolfram had been afraid of the Magus, too. At the time, Crecca had thought it hysterically funny to see that huge mountain of blubber tiptoeing around, trying to avoid even the most incidental contact. Wolfram had never shown his fear to the Magus’s face, if what he had could even be called a face—more like the jumbled contents of butcher and machine shop trash cans. The Magus loved to induce terror. And when he saw its first tender sprout, he nourished it and made it grow.
Crecca was much more comfortable when the puppet master wasn’t along for the ride. The carny picked him up and dropped him off at different locations on the route. No explanation was ever given. They never knew where he went or how he got back. All they knew was that he was privy to ultrasecret, predark whitecoat technology, and that he had developed some unique refinements of his own.
The Magus had a distinctly unpleasant smell. Crecca had always figured it had something to do with the unnatural combination of flesh and stainless steel. The worst thing by far, though, were the eyes. Like a pair of chromed hen’s eggs, with pinhole pupils. You could never tell for sure what they were looking at.
Crecca ordered Jackson to sit and stay outside the door. The Magus had been known to bite the heads off baby stickies on a whim, and Crecca had put in far too much time on this one to start over. He raised his balled fist and pounded on the door.
“Come!” said a strange, thready voice from the other side.
When Crecca entered the wag’s rear salon, he was slammed by the odor of machine oil, fried brake linings and spilled blood. The dim, smoky room was surrounded by one-way, blasterproof, glass windows. It was five times the size of his cabin, and it had a hundred times more junk in it. Unsorted junk. Littering the floor were piles of gears, pipe, wire, housings, glass beakers, lamps, conduit, parts of wag engines and computer motherboards. Sitting on the salon’s built-in rear-window sofa was living nightmare cast in decaying flesh and stainless-steel struts.
One of the rules of survival with the Magus was to not let him catch you staring.
Crecca tugged hard at his red chin beard, pretending to study with interest the vivisection that had been left abandoned on a crude wooden table. It was impossible to tell whether the half-dissected body was norm or mutie, as its layers of skin and muscle were now peeled back and tacked down to the tabletop, exposing a great yawning hole in the middle of its chest, lungs that still labored, a heart that still beat desperately.
“What do you want?” the Magus demanded. “As you can see, I am fully occupied at present.” He was screwing together a contraption made of plastic tubing and metal fittings. He kept turning the thing over in his hands, then holding it up to the gaping chest as if measuring its fit.
What the gizmo’s angles and ridges might do inside that tortured anatomy the carny master had no clue. He shifted his boot soles and felt the stickiness underfoot. Gear grease or guts, he couldn’t tell. Crecca cleared his throat before he spoke, afraid his voice might break. “I just wanted to let you know that the valve problem on the canisters has been repaired,” he said. “It was a rubber gasket that failed. We jury-rigged replacements. You said you wanted to be kept informed.”
The Magus got up from the sofa. Lurching forward on knee joints made of Teflon and titanium, he wasn’t a pretty sight.
Even though the carny master knew that to turn and run would have meant the end of him, it took every ounce of nerve to stand his ground. And as the creature clicked past him, he couldn’t help but let go a sigh of relief.
The Magus had to have heard the exhalation.
He stopped in midstep, his head rotating as if on massive ball-bearing swivels, his eyes spearing the carny master’s very soul.
Crecca opened his mouth, but no sound came forth. All he could see was the pupil holes in the chrome eggs narrowing to tiny pinpoints. He felt as if he were falling into them, drawn down as if by a whirlpool into spinning metal blades.
“So One-Eye has come for the world-famous show, has he?” the Magus said. “And brought his spawn to see it, too? How very, very convenient for me. To finally dispense with both the infuriating cyclops of a father and the annoying simp of a son. Poof!”
Crecca said nothing.
“Make sure he gets a good seat,” the Magus ordered. “Make sure his son is sitting beside him. And make sure they don’t get out of the tent.”
“Of course, Magus.”
“Death comes to all of us,” the Magus said brightly as he moved to the dissection table. “Well, most of us, anyway.” Then he threw back his head and made a noise.
Because Crecca had been the creature’s pawn for so long, he recognized the racket as laughter and stifled the urge to cover his ears. To anyone else, it would have sounded like a wag engine throwing a piston rod—shrieking, clanking, before rattling to a stop.
The Magus reached a steel-claw hand into the chest cavity and took hold of the beating heart.
“This ville is fat and ripe for the plucking,” the Magus said, weighing the pound of wet muscle on his palm. “There can be no mistakes.”
Crecca nodded.
“Mistakes will be costly.”
To prove his point, the Magus crushed the heart in his fist, making hot blood squirt in all directions. The body made a grunting noise, then its heels began to drum on the tabletop. Working in an absolute frenzy, the Magus fit the plastic-metal contraption into the ravaged chest. Muttering to himself, he seized a soldering iron and plunged the red-hot tip into the cavity. The smell of scorched flesh and burning plastic billowed from the gash.
He had no more time for carny masters, or canisters.
As the Magus began to hum—not from his throat, as a flesh-and-blood person might do, but from his round, spider belly—Crecca carefully and quietly backed over the piles of junk and out of the room.
As soon as he shut the door, Jackson jumped up and started licking the spatters of blood from the toe of his boot. Still a bit dazed, Crecca watched the little monster feed for several moments before backhanding it hard against the wall. Jackson ended up on its butt on the floor, face slack, vacant eyes slowly blinking.
Stickies had to be treated with firmness, and all instructions had to be repeated countless times before they sank in. Crecca was in charge of when, how and what Jackson ate. Left to its own primal instincts, the immature mutie would have chewed right through the tip of the boot, and once it tasted his blood, Crecca would have had to put a slug in its head to stop the chomping jaws and needle teeth.
Safely back in his own quarters, the carny master rushed to a waiting jar of joy juice and had a long, steadying pull. It was only then that he realized he had crapped himself.
Chapter Eight
Ryan and the companions were among the throng of ville folk watching the roustabouts lay out rolled sections of the big tent on the ground. Predark music blared from a row of black speakers on the roof of one of the wags. It was the same raucous show tune Ryan and the others had marched to the day before.
The head roustabout shouted orders over the insistent drumbeat. One of his men made measurements using a long piece of chain bolted to a stake that had been driven into the yellow dirt. The fixed length of this device allowed him to draw a great circle. As he moved the chain around the center-stake, at even intervals he tapped in perimeter stakes. When the floor plan had been laid out, two other men began digging a narrow, deep hole at the midpoint to act as a footing for the tent’s main upright support.
When this was done, the roustabouts hauled the tent sections into final position, like the spokes of a wheel, and began snapping them together and folding the double, overlapping seams. From the strain and sweat on their faces, the rolls were very heavy.
In a matter of minutes, the big tent began to take shape on the ground. Easily two hundred feet across, it was striped in gay red and white, and made of some heavily coated fabric.
The cheery music and the festive colors made Ryan’s skin crawl and his trigger finger itch. As did the expressions of delight he saw on the faces of the onlookers.
Like lambs led to slaughter.
Ryan was by no means a do-gooder, and life in Deathlands was survival of the fittest. But some things just had to come to a stop.
A worker with a wheelbarrow passed out tent stakes to men who waited at the perimeter markers with sledgehammers. The thick, cylindrical metal spikes were almost four feet long. The roustabouts grunted and swung in time to the music. The twenty-pound heads of their hammers sent showers of sparks flying as they slammed the spikes deep into the earth. When the broad ring of side stakes was set, ropes were tied, loosely connecting them to the tent’s lower wall. A seventy-five-foot-long steel pole, also made up in shorter sections, was assembled, then eight men crawled inside the flattened bag with it.
At the hairy roustabout’s direction, a heavy rope was attached to the tent’s peak. A dozen workers then yarded it over the top of the tallest wag as the men inside the tent angled up the center pole in a series of steps timed to the music’s beat.
The crowd of bystanders sent up a wild cheer as the pole’s butt slipped into place and the tent was finally raised. Red-and-white pennants on the peak of the roof and around the top of the side wall hung down limply in the still, already scorching air.
“There’s only the one exit,” J.B. said to Ryan. “And no window vents that I can see.”
“It’s like we thought,” the one-eyed man said. “Whatever it is that they’re doing to folks, it all happens inside the tent.”
“And nobody’s getting out,” Krysty added.
“From the looks of the fabric,” Mildred said, “the tent could be a Kevlar weave, or something like it. But with a plasticized coating on the outside. If it is made of Kevlar, even blaster slugs won’t tear it. With those double seams, it’s got to be virtually airtight.”
“A candy-striped, portable death house,” Krysty said softly.
“All the evidence we’ve seen points to an inhalant,” Mildred went on. “They’ve got to be using some kind of poison gas.”
“Mebbe we don’t want to go in there, Dad,” Dean said, his voice tight with concern.
“The boy’s right,” J.B. said. “Once we’re inside that tent, we’re trapped along with everybody else.”
Ryan grimaced. They had gotten themselves in a bind; that was for sure. But it wasn’t unexpected. They had known that once they entered the ville, circumstances would be fluid. That whatever plan they had hatched over the long march might have to be thrown out.
A key part of it already had.
The original idea had been to take out some of the chillers in the night, using their knives to quietly reduce the odds. But once they were on-site in Bullard ville it became clear that plan wouldn’t work. For one thing, the caged sideshow muties acted like an army of watchdogs, alerting the carny folk with squeals and bellows when anyone approached their circled wags. For another, the dispatched roustabouts would have been missed on the work crews that morning. Search parties would have been sent out. Perhaps the shallow graves would have been discovered. Either way, the companions’ hands would have been tipped. Outnumbered as they were, without the element of surprise, they had no chance at all.
Having caught up with the traveling troupe at last, and having gathered a sense of the people involved, Ryan had no doubt that it was the carny doing the mass chilling. The moment he had looked into the Magnificent Crecca’s eyes, all other possibilities vanished.
To loot an entire ville down to the pots, pans and shoelaces called for manpower, which the carny had. To loot an entire ville required heavy-duty transportation for all the stolen goods. The only tracks of sufficient number and size leading from the place had belonged to the carny. To chill that many people at once called for confinement, isolation, no escape.
Which the tent provided.
After they had examined the bodies in the unnamed ville, Mildred had guessed that a poison had been used, but she couldn’t tell what kind or how it had been administered. Though some of the victims had been shot in the head, most had no evidence of wounds. The bullet holes were either mercy shots or the result of a pack of chillers taking random target practice on a pile of corpses. It made sense that the lethal weapon would be a gas, although where it came from and how it was delivered was still a puzzle.
There was, of course, also still the possibility that the carny would just do its show and move on, without chilling anyone. As it had done in Perdition, and elsewhere.
Ryan thought this outcome was unlikely, as did the other companions. Bullard ville was made-to-order for another mass wipeout. It was isolated. It was unknown, except for being an established water stop along a very long, very dry road. If all the residents vanished overnight, the travelers up and down the valley would just conclude that the water supply had finally dried up, forcing folks to abandon their huts and disperse. No one would care one way or the other. No one would look any deeper.
Once more, Ryan took in the excited faces of the crowd. It wasn’t just made up of kids, but people of all ages, and the leaders of the ville, too. Dirt farmers, cooks, housewives and sluts had deserted their work in order to gawk at the wonder of Wolfram’s World Famous Carny. Their rapt expressions said this was the biggest thing to ever hit Bullard ville.
Unless something was done, it was also probably going to be the last thing to ever hit Bullard ville.
“We’ve got to go in,” Ryan told the others. “We’ve got no choice. We’ve got to go in with everyone else, just like nothing’s up. It’s the only way to make sure we get everyone out alive. We’ve got to keep a low profile until the time comes to make our move.”
“If we wait just a tetch too long, Ryan, things could get bastard ugly in a hurry,” the Armorer said.
For a long moment there was silence between them.
The silence indicated a mutual understanding of the situation, and a mutual consent to proceed as exactly as Ryan suggested.
It was only broken when Dean looked around, and said, “Where’s Jak?”
OUT OF THE COMPANIONS’ direct view, around the curve of the sideshow trailers, Jak once again had his head thrust through the bars of the mountain lion’s cage. Once again that great, hot tongue lovingly washed his face and neck.
The pale, ruby-eyed youth had few words to describe even the simplest moments of his violent and tragic life. For Jak, things were good or they were bad. He was happy or he wasn’t. Hungry or not. Loaded or reloading. The complexity of his feelings at that moment was impossible to translate into a neat, black-white duality.
Only the lion understood what he felt.
And that was because he and the lion shared.
Everything.
Without words.
Jak pushed back from the bars and wiped the viscous slobber from his cheek with the back of his forearm. He took in the enormity of dense, soft, beige fur; the long, lashing tail as big around as his bicep; the fat, black-fringed ears, rounded beautifully at the tips. Jutting from the sides of the creature’s massive neck was the pair of curving, pointed horns that served to protect the throat against attack from the sides, and as offensive weapons. The canine fangs exposed by the lion’s wide grin were longer than the blade of Ryan’s panga; the lion’s claws were cruel black gut hooks, fully extended in pleasure now, cutting shallow, bright grooves into the steel floor of its cage. The smell of meat breath and musk gusted over Jak’s face.
He couldn’t explain how the creature’s thoughts and emotions came into his head, or how he knew that likewise the lion experienced what he experienced. It was as if an invisible tunnel connected them, and through the tunnel ran a torrent of exquisite tenderness.
The albino gripped the bars again and stared into the beast’s huge, pleasure-slitted, yellow eyes. The sound of its purring rattled the steel in his hands like an earthquake. The tremendous heat given off by its body blasted him like a black basalt boulder sitting in the midday sun.
You free soon, he thought. Then we hunt.
Jak’s mind was slammed with gratitude and joy, and then a caress, a voiceless voice, a soundless sound that resonated in the very pit of his stomach: I know you will free me, Little Brother. I know you will.
Chapter Nine
After the companions’ meeting broke up, Dean went looking for Leeloo Bunny. He found her standing in front of one of the trailered sideshow cages.
“Hi, Leeloo,” he said as he walked up.
“Hi, Dean.” From the light in her eyes, she seemed real glad to see him. She had put a crown of fresh daisies in her shining hair.
“What’re you doing?” he asked.
“Just looking at this one,” she said.
The painted nameplate on the bars read Baldoona, The Two-Headed Scalie. The male mutie inside the cage sported a pair of heads that sprouted side by side in the middle of its wide shoulders. Shoulders that seemed to stoop from their combined weight. One head was full-sized, as if from a grown-up person. It looked mebbe forty years of age. Its coarse, gray-blond hair was matted and greasy, its face florid, beardless and unlined. Bloodshot eyes glowered at them from beneath a heavy, eyebrowless ridge of bone.
The other head was a baby’s, small, bald and perched on a short neck. Its skin was flushed with infantile frustration. The eyes on the little head were black and glittered behind squinty, puffy eyelids. The scalie was exhibited stripped to the waist. It had a massive torso, wide and thick, and there were big muscles under the layers of sagging fat. As it moved slightly, the angled light caught the rows of tiny scales that covered its skin, giving it an iridescent grayish cast.
The cage was fouled by the smell of urine and excrement; brown mounds of the latter lay clumped along the cage’s rear wall. Clouds of flies buzzed amid the miasma.
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James Axler
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: In the ruins of a nuke-shattered America, every man, woman and child of the apocalyptic frontier makes a perilous journey to the future. But there is a fork that divides the path toward humanity reborn…and the road deep into the hell that is Deathlands. Ryan Cawdor made his choice long ago, in this barbaric new world that conspires against hope…Eerie remnants of pre-Dark times linger a century after the nuclear blowout. But a traveling road show gives new meaning to the word chilling. Ryan and his warrior group have witnessed this carny′s handiwork in the ruins and victims of unsuspecting villes. Even facing tremendous odds does nothing to deter the companions from challenging this wandering death merchant and an army of circus freaks. And no one is aware that a steel-eyed monster from the past is preparing a private act that would give Ryan star billing.… In the Deathlands, all you get is a one-way ticket.