End Program

by James Axler

  And then the back of Ryan’s knees struck the low wall around the well, forcing him to an abrupt and unbalanced stop. But his momentum carried him, and his knees bent under the impact, sending his body dipping backward as though he was trying to sit down.

  J.B. drew back awkwardly as Ryan continued to fall, and in a moment his oldest friend collapsed behind the wall of the well, issuing a yelp of pain and surprise.

  Ryan’s hands scrambled for the edge of the wall, dropping the SIG Sauer as he did so. J.B. watched the blaster drop to the ground beside the well, and he ran toward it. Once there, J.B. kicked it a few inches clear of the well and kept his foot on it as he peered over the edge. Ryan was still there, clinging on with his arms and legs outstretched, like a turtle struggling on its back. He was wedged tight.

  “J.B.?” Ryan gasped, and there was surprise in his breathless voice.

  J.B. pulled his mini-Uzi from its strap beneath his coat and pointed it at Ryan, keeping his distance. “What’s going on here, Ryan?” he asked. “You want to tell me?”

  Ryan’s wide eyes absorbed the barrel of the blaster pointing at his face then switched to fix on J.B.’s. The Armorer saw the haunted look there.

  “Ryan?” J.B. urged.

  “You’ve got to help me,” Ryan said, as his fingers began to slip from the edge of the well. If he let go he would fall, J.B. knew, and that was a nasty drop with no easy way to get back out.

  “Why don’t you tell me what the nukeshit you thought you were doing first?” J.B. pressed, not lowering his weapon nor moving to help his friend.

  Ryan looked at J.B. and his face was a tortured mask of pain. “I can’t stop it, J.B.,” he said. “You have to help me.”

  “Stop what?” J.B. demanded, confused by Ryan’s words.

  “The voice inside me, telling me to chill,” Ryan said.

  “What voice?” J.B. asked, his aim never wavering.

  Ryan looked at his old friend, fear clear in his scarred face. “My voice,” he replied. “It’s my voice telling me to chill everyone. My own voice.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The aftermath of the biker attack was grim. The night before, Heartsville had been home to 314 people before the incident, including Ryan, Trevor and their respective entourages. By dawn it was home to 122 living and 192 corpses not including the bikers, many of whom were in urgent need of burial. Of those 122 survivors, less than thirty had got away without any serious wounds, and that included Ryan and his team.

  J.B. bore a superficial graze down his right cheek and a cut on his chin, as well as a handful of abrasions on both arms where he had wrestled one of the invaders to the ground from a moving quad bike.

  The others had suffered similar wounds, but they had, at least, all survived. Right now Krysty was lying down, trying to regain her strength after channeling the Gaia power, and Mildred tended to her.

  Doc meanwhile continued to tend to the numerous wounded who had been housed not just in the bivouacs but also in several of the surviving buildings that made up the ville.

  Of those buildings, three had been entirely gutted by fire while five more had sustained significant damage, two of them rammed by the burning remains of bikers when they had been wounded too badly to do anything else to create more havoc. And havoc, it seemed, had been the intention of the operation—the whole attack had been calculated not to take over the ville but to destroy it.

  The gang’s leader, Niles, had been captured by a brave team of sec men who had drawn a chain across a street as Niles sped toward it, pulling it taut and whipping him and his lover from the back of the bike. With the speed that they were traveling at the time, the pair had suffered terrible injuries including a number of broken bones, and the woman—Amanda—could no longer stand up straight due to the serious damage inflicted on her spine in the fall.

  The sec men had captured Niles and Amanda, using the same chain to tie the man to one of the broken streetlights that dotted the old complex and that had not worked in a hundred years. His woman, meanwhile, had been taken away to a storeroom in one of the building’s basements, where she had been locked away and left to cry out her pain, paralyzed. Medical attention was reserved for the ville’s residents, which meant Amanda would get nothing, not even sympathy. The best she could hope for was a quick death at the hands of her captors, second best to be released back into the outlands.

  Baron Hurst was dead, chilled by a biker waving an ornamental sword, the kind ancient Japanese warlords had their executioners use to behead people. Hurst had not been beheaded, just stabbed clear through the chest with enough force that both lungs had been pierced. He had died trying to take another breath; trying and failing.

  Now the ville was aching to recover from all that had happened. There were so many wounded, so much death. Walking down the main street was like walking through Hell on an especially bad day, burned-out buildings, vehicles, corpses and the air heavy with the tang of burning human flesh. It was terrible.

  J.B. sat on the wall surrounding the well, working the screw back in one arm of his glasses where it had come loose during the attack. He looked up as Ricky stepped across the sunlight, casting a shadow on his work. “That you, Ricky?” J.B. asked, squinting.

  “Yeah,” Ricky said, a resigned sigh in his voice. “How’s Ryan?”

  J.B. sensed his upset. “Guess we all survived, at least,” he said, working the screw with a tiny-bladed screwdriver until it caught the thread. “Krysty okay?”

  “She’s lying down,” Ricky explained. “Like we all should be. Hell of a night.”

  “You’ve been with us long enough to know the score out here, Ricky,” J.B. said, checking over his handiwork. “Everyone wants what they haven’t got yet, and they’ll chill for it sooner than discuss it.”

  Ricky nodded slowly, eyeing the ville. The place was smoldering with smoke, protective walls holed and ruined, buildings turned into funeral pyres. Fires still sputtered in a few of the gutted buildings, sparks trying to catch alight once more and continue their busy work.

  “But why, J.B.?” Ricky asked. “Can you tell me that?”

  “Destruction for the sake of destruction,” J.B. opined, shaking his head. “Chilling for the sake of chilling. Trust me, Ricky, I’ve seen enough of everything in my travels that there aren’t any bastard surprises left. Not from coldhearts like these anyhow.”

  “How did you know to blow up the bikers, J.B.?” Ricky asked. “When we first saw them at the farm, I mean.”

  “Sometimes you choose a side, boy, but most times the side chooses you,” J.B. replied.

  Ricky nodded thoughtfully, mulling over J.B.’s words. He looked up to J.B., trusted the man to steer him right in the hellscape of the Deathlands. It was a wild world out there, one where even the rain would try to chill you if you were dumb enough to let it. Companionship was all they had, and trusts had been betrayed over that long night.

  * * *

  AS THINGS IN the ville wound down, J.B. and Doc pulled Ryan from where he had become dangerously wedged within the well. Ryan’s moment of lucidness passed as rapidly as it had appeared, and he became consumed with rage as Ricky secured a rope for Ryan to climb up.

  Ryan ascended, hand over hand, but when he emerged his face was red with fury and he barely made sense as J.B. tried to talk to him. Ryan had lost none of his misplaced anger. He seemed more driven by it now; more insane.

  “Chill you, fucker,” Ryan spit as he emerged, reaching out for J.B.’s neck with clawed hands.

  J.B. dropped, felling Ryan with a leg sweep. Ryan slammed against the dirt, noisily expelling his breath through clashing teeth. Even as he fell, Ricky stepped forward with a second rope, lassoing it around Ryan’s legs using a slipknot and cinching it tight. Ryan lay on his back, bellowing with nonsensical rage. Whatever had given him those brief moments of l
ucidity had passed now—he was nothing more than dark anger held within a human form.

  Whatever had possessed Ryan had taken away his ability to reason, J.B. realized. All Ryan seemed to want to do now was fight, hissing curses at his one-time friends. Eventually, J.B., Doc and Ricky managed to tie Ryan securely enough that he could not easily escape, taking his weapons for safekeeping. Then Doc asked one of the surviving locals—a man sitting on the curb while Mildred tended to a cut on his head—whether there was anywhere to hold a prisoner captive.

  “Law office,” the man explained, pointing in the direction of a single-story building located close to the baron’s hall.

  Mildred left her charge to check on Ryan. He strained at his bonds as he tried to take a swing at her, and when this was unsuccessful he spit in her face.

  J.B. took Mildred by the arm and pulled her away a few steps. “He’s not Ryan right now, Millie,” J.B. said as the woman wiped spittle from her face. “I don’t know how, but he’s seeing things the rest of us isn’t. Mebbe he’s seeing himself in a way he shouldn’t either.”

  Mildred nodded solemnly. “He needs to be helped.”

  J.B. brushed her cheek gently, a flash of the deep concern he felt for Mildred crossing his face. “We’ll do what we can,” he said. “For now, we need to calm him down and get him out of this street. It won’t do for the locals to see one of us like this. Trust is in short enough supply out here as it is. It’s not good to be seen to be harboring a crazy.”

  Glancing back at Ryan, Mildred nodded grimly. Ryan was still straining at his bonds while Ricky and Doc kept their distance, holding the ends of the ropes from either side the way one would hold a leash on a savage animal. “I have some tranquilizers in my bag,” Mildred told J.B. quietly. “They’ll calm him down.”

  “Go get them,” J.B. said.

  Then, the three men made their way to the so-called law office, dragging Ryan with them. The law office was a small building made up of two rooms including a disused toilet. At some point in the past, J.B. guessed it had served as a sec station for the industrial park that had become Heartsville. Now, it served as a staging post and meeting house for the ville’s sec men, with local maps pasted along one wall accompanied by rosters and a carefully kept ledger of the weapons and ammo held by the ville. At a glance, J.B. could see that the sec men had kept a record of every bullet they had fired—presumably one reason why the ville had been so successful until this latest devastating night attack. Ryan struggled and fought every step of the way, trying to bite J.B. when he came close.

  There were six chairs in the center of the main room, beside a bank of low desks like a counter. Ignoring Ryan’s complaints, J.B., Doc and Ricky worked their companion into one of those chairs and tied him there. They used the leather reins from a horse to wrap around Ryan’s torso, and several lengths of rope and chain to tie his wrists and ankles as he fought.

  Ryan was made to sit in one chair with his hands secured behind him, while his legs were hoisted up and tied to another chair. That way, if he tried to escape he would likely tip one or other chair and land in a more difficult position to free himself from. Ryan cursed the whole way, a stream-of-consciousness rant at J.B., Doc and Ricky. He called them “a blight,” over and over, repeatedly stating how they should be eliminated.

  Doc and J.B. stayed on guard while Ricky located Mildred.

  “What do you think all of this is about?” Doc asked J.B. as Ryan babbled furiously at them both.

  The Armorer shook his head wearily. “Beats me,” he admitted. “I’ve never seen Ryan in this state. I don’t know what triggered it.”

  “He keeps talking about chilling humans,” Doc said. “Did you notice that?”

  J.B. nodded.

  “Doesn’t that strike you as peculiar?” Doc suggested.

  J.B. pushed at the bridge of his nose where the glasses had started to pinch; it had been a long night with no sleep. “Ryan’s chilled a lot of people in his day,” he said. “Nothing too unusual about what he’s saying.”

  “I disagree,” Doc argued. “This is not the rantings of a man with a specific target in mind. This is the cry of one who is angry with the world and everyone in it.”

  “Lot of world to be angry at, Doc,” J.B. said.

  * * *

  AT THAT MOMENT, Ryan was consumed by hate. He could not see the room’s walls or door, the countertop or the chairs that dominated the little space. All he could see was the two figures standing just out of reach, discussing his fate in grunts and coughs. To his mind, Ryan saw J.B. and Doc not as friends but as evil red scars on the world, burning cancerous holes in reality, destroying everything they touched. Humans.

  When Ryan had left Front Royal as a youth, he had entered a world filled with muties, twisted caricatures left in the wake of a destroyed world. The muties were humans deep down, humans gone wrong—or maybe fixed from the evil that they had been, the evil that had brought about the nukecaust and so destroyed everything that had been, everything that humankind had worked to create. The muties were humans at heart, their spite and limitations made flesh, bubbling to humankind’s surface in telling revelation of man’s true nature. Men and muties—worthless, hateful things. They should all be chilled.

  And then there were humans themselves. All of them fueled by sick desires, the need to dominate and to destroy. Humans were at fault, humans were to blame. It was all so obvious.

  In those moments of red rage, everything had become clear to Ryan.

  * * *

  “HE’S OUT,” MILDRED SAID, standing over the long counter in the sec room.

  While Doc and J.B. held him, Mildred had administered a tranquilizer shot to Ryan’s arm, jabbing the needle into his vein as he strained against his bonds. The medication was old, and there was a chance that its potency had ebbed.

  Ryan had thrashed against the chair for almost a minute before his body had finally become slack, in the way a balloon will deflate with a slow puncture. Now he sat forward in the chair, his head dipped low, his chin on his chest, the ropes and chains holding him upright.

  “How long will that last?” J.B. asked.

  Mildred replied as she replaced the hypodermic syringe in her satchel. “Ryan’s built with the constitution of a horse,” she said. “He’ll start to come around in two hours, maybe less.” After securing the syringe in an inside side pocket away from her other medical supplies, Mildred buckled the satchel closed. Hypodermics were hard to come by in the Deathlands, and while it wasn’t ideal she would sterilize the needle using boiling water so that it might be used again.

  “So, what do we do now?” J.B. asked. removing his hat and scraping a tired hand through his thinning hair.

  Doc shook his head. “’Tis a grim business this,” he said. “Whatever has possessed our friend may just as swiftly come for us. Any of us. And then, where would we be?”

  Chapter Thirty

  As nominal leader of the companions in Ryan’s absence, J.B. gathered the group for a meeting in one of the buildings lining the west wall, within sight of the law office. The building had once been divided into office units, but these had been repurposed under Baron Hurst’s rule to be shared between living quarters and small workshops where tools and equipment could be constructed and serviced. Two whole rooms were turned over to storing ammunition that had been salvaged from various military bases, gun shops, target ranges and hunting clubs. Ammo was a crucial part of modern life, and thriving villes would frequently have dedicated teams who conducted salvage missions, investing numerous hours in what was seen as a way to guarantee their safety.

  This particular room had been used for entertainment, and incorporated a theater stage area—not raised, but left clear for performances, with a few boards of painted backgrounds that served as sets. J.B. stood on the stage while the companions took up seats in the audienc
e. Krysty looked exhausted as she joined the others, slumping in a seat at the rear of the small room, near the doors, as though she didn’t have the strength to get any farther. After calling on Gaia three times in a short period, the woman was spent. Mildred took a few moments to check on her, while J.B. explained the Ryan situation.

  “Now we’re not sure what happened to make Ryan wig out like that,” J.B. finished, “but just now Mildred is keeping him under sedation to make sure we don’t see a reoccurrence. I’d just as soon not get into another fight with Ryan.”

  Jak ran his hand through his alabaster hair in confusion. “It catching?” he asked.

  J.B. shook his head. “Can’t say for certain, Jak. It could be that all of us have got infected with the same thing. Mildred?”

  “It’s hard to say,” Mildred opined. “On one hand, Ryan seems very clearly to be not in his right mind. On the other, there was no clear trigger that any of us saw.”

  “Ricky? Krysty?” J.B. asked. “You were with him when this all started. You see anything to make you think that mebbe—?”

  “He wasn’t bitten or anything,” Ricky said while Krysty shook her head. “I had to wake Ryan up when the alert went out, but that was all. He seemed just like Ryan to me then.”

  Doc harrumphed at that before taking the floor. “Young Ricardo here makes a valid point. Is this man actually Ryan or has he, mayhap, been possessed in some fashion.”

  “Ghosts and spirits?” J.B. asked doubtfully. “I don’t believe in things I can’t shoot, Doc. Let’s try to keep this within the bounds of reality.”

  “Not a ghost,” Doc said. “I was thinking that it may perhaps be something more...man-made. A hypnotic suggestion, mayhap, the kind that the military are known to have dabbled with in the twentieth century.”