by James Axler
“It’s the only way, boy. She holds the secret to your woman’s recovery. I shit you not. But I don’t envy you. This is your hardest test of all!”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Dressed only in his camou pants, Ryan stood tall in the dawnlight. The grass was dew-wet beneath and on his bare feet. His only armament was his panga in a sheath at his waist.
His friends stood behind him, including a taciturn Bluebottle. Rameau was still passed out, and no one had had the heart to rouse him. Ryan couldn’t help noticing that the swampies hadn’t seen fit to trust any of the others with their weapons. And they were well surrounded by a fence of spears, even if those didn’t happen to be pointed at them at the moment.
“Remember, boy,” Papa Dough said, “you’ll have to fight even to reach Maman Fucton. Then you must penetrate her moist, capacious, mossy cave and please her.”
Ryan tried not to wince at that description.
“Now,” the swampie monarch said, holding up a gourd to Ryan’s face, “drink the drink.” He wore a circlet of red berries and a ceremonial robe of black fur that showed the faintly darker shadows of rosettes. Ryan guessed it was the skin of a black jaguar.
“What is it?” he asked, accepting the gourd. Its fluted surface was smooth and hard, mottled green and pale yellow.
“Necessary. Drink it fast. It goes down easier that way.”
Still giving the short, wide monarch the fish eye, Ryan raised the gourd to his lips. He decided to hold his breath, in case that helped, and chugged the contents.
It didn’t help. Probably nothing would, including a complete surgical excision of all his taste buds. The flavor affronted his very being.
But he drained it to the ultimate drop. For Krysty.
“Gah!” he said, doubling over as the vile stuff hit his gut like a mule kick. “It tastes like distilled ass, sweat and sulfur!”
“That’s how you know it’s strong medicine,” Papa Dough assured him.
Ryan straightened. He looked at him suspiciously as he handed back the gourd. “What medicine?”
“You got to be electric to face Maman Fucton, boy. Trust me on that! Now, run. Your woman waits and daylight’s a-wastin’!”
Ryan ran.
HE FIRST REALIZED something was wrong when the green monkeys started hooting his progress from the trees as he dodged among their wavy boles. He was pretty sure monkeys didn’t live hereabouts. Even green ones. With pink feather crests, like cockatiels.
Bands of color tracked across the sky like a malfunking vid screen: lemon yellow, sour-apple green, purple, pink, tangerine. Pretty much the colors you’d see glowing on a tomato gone seriously around the bend.
Dosed, he knew. He wasn’t much surprised. For reasons of his own Papa Dough was choosing to treat this whole fandango as a weird backwoods ritual. And Ryan had been through plenty of those before. Luci drinks or smokes or other forms of mind alterants were standard operating procedure.
His path was clear at least. Then again the way it was behaving made the old Irish toast he’d heard somewhere, someplace—possibly on a different planet, at least from the one he was seeing now—of “may the road rise up to meet you,” look like the perilous and nauseating idea it actually was.
Ahead of him rose a hill. It probably really did look like a huge breast. Papa Dough had told him to find and steer for such. A deeply buried part of his rational mind begged to doubt it actually had a crown of brush shaped like a huge dark-green nipple, though.
He saw the cave entrance, oval and surprisingly narrow, with moss and brush tufts sprouting from rock all around it, awaiting fifty yards ahead. Then he came into a clearing carpeted with grass and yellow and purple and polka-dot wildflowers and stopped.
The guardian of Maman Fucton’s cavern stood waiting for him.
He was like a dozen swampies rolled into one. He had to have stood nearly eight feet tall and about as broad. His hair was golden and smoothed back. His skin was gold, too, but from the way it sparkled in the morning sun it suggested he’d been painted or dusted with actual gold powder. He wore only a green-dyed leather loincloth.
At least Ryan hoped the leather was dyed. From the smell that washed over him from the creature, there was plenty room to doubt.
“So, I don’t reckon there’s any way I can convince you to step aside and let me pass?”
In response the monster beat a glittery gold man-boobed chest as wide as Ryan stood tall with fists bigger than Ryan’s own head. He leaned forward perilously, given a gut that suggested he’d swallowed an oldie Volkswagen Beetle wag for breakfast, and roared. Thirty feet away the reek of his hot breath suggested something that came out of a dragon. And not necessarily its front end, either.
Casually, Ryan strolled to his left. How agile can the nuke-sucker be? he thought. The creature flexed its legs, which were like tubers, the same width from thigh to where they sort of spilled over the tops of splay-footed, crack-nailed feet. He turned in place to keep facing him.
Ryan darted right.
He had no awareness of the monster backhanding him. He was just suddenly flying backward into the air. He had just come to terms with the fact, more or less, when a shaggy-barked tree trunk hit him square in the back. He fell like a sack of grain into some bushes that broke his fall. Some of it.
“Fireblast!” he croaked. Brush crackled as he pushed himself up on hands and knees. He coughed, then spit, and was relieved to see no red in the spittle that gleamed on the grass. “You’re quicker than you look. Guess you’d have to be.”
He picked himself up. The gigantic golden swampie stood waiting for him. His orange-size bug eyes glared, his nostrils flared.
“So I get the notion that, if I hit you and you find out about it, I’m in deep shit.”
He drew his panga. “So we do it this way, big boy.”
Despite the way the drug he’d drunk tugged at the edges of his vision and twisted the world into fantastic shapes and vomitous colors around him, Ryan’s tactical mind was sharp and racing. He hoped that wasn’t another illusion.
He circled counterclockwise around the giant. The creature had to weigh half a ton, he judged. It was bastard tough killing a normal swampie who barely came up to Ryan’s armpit. If they had doubled organs, this thing might well have four sets. Plus wads of fat and muscle sheathing its body, and a thick round skull, that he wasn’t sure 9 mm round from his SIG-Sauer handblaster would even pierce. If he’d had the piece along. He judged it likely he could drive his panga with all his strength and weight into that immense gut and not even force the tip to the tough membrane of the body wall.
But structurally, he knew, any humanoid creature had its weak points. He’d have to attack one of those. And he’d have to make it stick.
He reversed to orbit clockwise, slowly closing with the creature. The swampie clenched and unclenched his hands. Just the joints working made sounds like walnuts cracking.
He ever gets those meathooks on me, Ryan thought, all he’ll have to do is squeeze and I’ll crumble like a dry leaf.
He feinted left again. The monster committed his weight to his right. Ryan changed course to dart straight toward the behemoth swampie, transferring his panga to his left hand. Ducking under the startling swift swipe of an arm, he hit the ground just to the mutie’s left in a forward roll. He struck for the tendons at the back of the chubby left knee. Severing those would bring anything bipedal crashing down. Nor was that spot armored by either muscle or fat. If he could immobilize the creature, he’d have a lot better chance of chilling it.
Somehow he now knew that he had to defeat the monster. He couldn’t merely dodge past it. Not that he’d managed that so far.
The giant swampie swatted backward with his left hand. It caught Ryan’s wrist a glancing blow, numbing it. The panga flew out of his hand. The mutie’s backswing continued to clip the side of Ryan’s head.
Yellow sparks shot from temple to temple. Ryan was knocked sideways. He hit on his right shoulder and roll
ed over and over before fetching up stunned on his back.
The sun shone hot on his upturned face as his vision spun, then a cloud blotted the sun. Vaguely the one-eyed man realized the cloud was shaped a lot like a colossal bare foot. Upraised to stamp his head flat like a June bug. A lot like that.
He snapped out of his mental fog at once. The swampie stood astride him, his funk almost suffocating.
But there was another spot that wasn’t armored, and on any male mammal was particularly vulnerable.
Ryan brought his knees to his chest and kicked with all his strength, straight up. He felt something big and dangly and soft squash beneath his bare heels.
The mutie emitted a shrill squeal through cavernous nostrils. He doubled forward, clutching at his wounded parts.
Ryan scooted butt-forward along the grass, which was helpfully slick with morning dew. He grabbed the rear flap of the stained leather loincloth, trying not to think about how soggy it was. Much less with what. The garment began to slide down the vast doughy buttocks as Ryan yanked himself to his feet by means of it.
However many lungs he had, the giant mutie was having no success getting air into any of them. He was trying to inhale in short gulps, each one of which sounded like a stepped-on frog dying. Ryan yanked the loincloth down to the mutie’s thick ankles. Then, bending, he grabbed hold of a forward-angled lower leg. Hauling upward with all his power, he threw his weight sideways against the exposed buttocks.
The gigantic mutie toppled forward with the majesty of a falling building, ending in a thunderous face-plant into the sod.
The behemoth moaned. Leaving it no time to recover, Ryan yanked the loincloth the rest of the way free, then jumped onto the mutie’s back as if he were scaling a spongy boulder.
The mutie had managed to drag in some breath. He let it out in a roar of rage, pushing himself off the ground with a seismic surge of his muscles. But Ryan dropped to his knees between the giant’s golden shoulder blades, whipped the loincloth over his head and under his chin. Then he began to pull back with all his strength.
Don’t roll, he silently begged the creature. For Krysty’s sake, don’t roll!
The loincloth’s reek was exquisitely foul, like a cesspit a skunk had drowned in. The previous week. It made Ryan’s head swim and his stomach try to crawl right up his esophagus and out his mouth to escape. He bit down hard and clenched every fiber of every muscle he possessed.
One thing the immensely powerful and durable mutie wasn’t was smart. One arm pushed his blubbery upper body off the ground while the other groped blindly and ineffectually over his shoulder for Ryan. He wasn’t flexible, either. Fat and muscle bound his joints, restricting their motion.
Then belatedly the mutie hit on the right answer. His arm flexed, then he reared upward and heaved his weight right, to roll onto Ryan and crush him beneath his bulk.
Ryan hung on as long as he could, strangling the mutie. At the last instant he leaped free and rolled. He wound up on his own belly this time, breathing like a steam engine with the throttle stuck wide open. He expected to be smashed into a pink rug at any instant.
But after he managed to pull in a lungful of air, smelling as sweet as honey after the horrible stench of the mutie and his ooze-drenched loincloth, he raised his face from the grass and looked around.
His foe lay on his back, arms and legs splayed. His eyes were closed and his tongue lolled from his open mouth like a giant dead slug. His chest quivered to continued breathing, but barely.
“Nuke-sucking bastard,” Ryan muttered, climbing painfully to his feet and casting around for his panga.
His eye lit on his panga, lying a few feet away in the grass. He went and picked it up. Then he stood straddling the great upturned face with the long blade held point down in both fists, high over his head. He reckoned stabbing through its eye into its brain for a sure chill. Whatever organ arrangements swampies had, they definitely didn’t have two of those.
He sucked in three deep breaths to strengthen his own arms, which trembled with exertion and complete adrenaline overload, then he stretched up on his toes to strike.
The eyes opened. Up close they were golden, huge and somehow innocent.
“Pwease,” the monster croaked. Instead of the boulder splitting roar of before, it now spoke in a child’s voice.
Ryan froze. It was so completely unexpected.
“Unca,” it said, high and thin. “You win. Pwease, no kill.” Tears as big as Ryan’s thumbs welled up over its thick lids and rolled down its vast cheeks.
Ryan crushed the hilt in his hands so hard the panga shook.
The vision of a beautiful woman, scarcely higher than his waist, nude and lush and inviting appeared in front of him. “Do it,” her voice commanded in his head. “Do it, or you fail the test.”
Still Ryan failed to strike home and end it.
“Pwease.”
Trader’s face appeared, lean and scarred and grizzled, hanging in air right in Ryan’s own. “Do it,” he rasped. “’Member how I taught you, Ryan. Chill your enemies, today and tomorrow. Chill them fast and chill them good.”
“Yeah,” Ryan wheezed. “That’s right!” But he still didn’t strike.
Another face appeared. Its splendor blanketed both Trader’s disembodied vision and the full-bodied image of the naked golden woman.
“Krysty?”
“Ryan,” she whispered. “Lover, do me proud.”
She vanished. All he could see was that fat face, eyes pleading, lips blubbering, crying like a frightened child.
Ryan took another deep, shuddering breath. He tossed the knife away.
“He’s no threat anymore,” he said to the naked woman and his long-gone mentor, “and one of Trader’s first rules was, no chilling for chilling’s sake. If that doesn’t suit you, then fuck you. I won’t kill him to amuse you, fail the test or not.”
Then the sick feeling hit him like an avalanche. He dropped to his knees, vomiting so hard he fell onto all fours.
After everything he’d eaten ever, and probably at least one lung, came up, Ryan took a breath.
The beautiful woman’s outline glittered, wavered. Changed. It widened to become at least as wide as it was tall: still nude and female, with wild hair the color and texture of moss, breasts like watermelons with aureoles like brown plates. She was vined around and around with garlands of orchids. Dozens of fat little infants played in the dirt at her feet or peered cautiously past her short, elephant legs.
“That’s my front yard you’re puking up in, boy,” she said mildly. Her voice, though soft and fluid, was a full octave deeper than his.
He raised his head and blinked at her through nausea-induced tears. “It’s not…like I got…much choice.”
She laughed musically. If by “music” you meant a stand-up bass. “You got spirit on you, boy. Maman Fucton likes that. Can you stand?”
He could. Barely. She didn’t move to help him.
His body felt like one huge bruise. The good news was, he hardly noticed the itching and ache of his stung cheek anymore. The bad news was, it was because the rest of him hurt worse.
Sudden knowledge turned his head to lead. Much too heavy for the boiled celery stalk his neck had become. His chin dropped to his collarbone.
“So I failed the test,” he said.
“Au contraire, cher. You passed with colors flying.”
“How do you reckon that?”
“It’s my test, for starters. Look upon the one whose life you spared.”
He turned his head. No giant warrior lay there like a beached whale. Instead it was a swampie child, young and slim. By comparison. He was unconscious, with tear trails shining on his cheeks. He showed no sign of golden coloration, only the usual swampie near-albino.
“It was the drug,” she said. “You and he fought in the dreamworld, the World behind the World. You prevailed.”
“Against a kid!”
“In the dreamworld, he was as you saw. Had you lost, yo
u would have died, sure as pointing the bone.” She shrugged. “It was really you against whom you fought, and you whom you mastered.”
“And if I’d chilled him?”
“You would’ve wandered in the luci-dream until your body starved and you died. And Krysty Wroth would meet a terrible fate.”
“Why did you put me through this?”
“What reason has your kind given us to do nice things for you?”
“But I’m not part of whatever’s been done to your people. Krysty sure isn’t.”
“I wanted you to prove you could show mercy to a despised enemy,” she said. “Specifically, one of my children.”
“That’s your own child I fought?”
“It is a harsh world we inhabit. I think you’ve noticed. He volunteered for the task. He was proud.”
It still made no sense. It occurred to him it didn’t have to.
“So,” he said. “When do we start?”
“Start what?”
“Papa Dough said to save Krysty I had to please you. So, uh, how do you like it?”
“Like what? Oh. Oh.” She laughed uproariously. It made her huge breasts jiggle on her huge belly, and the tiny toddlers around her feet to scatter like quail.
“You poor boy. That fat rascal put bad ideas in your head. You cannot please me that way, cher. You got to sport one like a stallion to scratch Maman Fucton where she itch. And I mean that just exactly.”
Feeling stung, Ryan opened his mouth to defend his impugned manhood, then he shut his mouth. He realized that any argument that started out along the track of “my dick is, too, big enough!” meant he’d already lost big time.
“I could, uh, you know—”
She laughed again. “Poor boy. Don’t you know I’m tryin’ to let you down easy? You’re just not my type.”
He dropped to his knees. “How am I supposed to please you, then?”
“But, you already have! You have proved your complete love and devotion to your woman, and thereby given her an anchor to return to the waking world! She can come back now. It’s so romantic. It makes me happy.”
