by James Axler
Chapter Sixteen
Ryan’s last instructions to his friends before they lay down and feigned unconsciousness—alongside Ricky and their guide, Alysa, who hadn’t understood the warning passed from Jak not to trust the pudding—had been to wait for his word or move before flashing to action.
Now he was glad Doc had disobeyed and kicked off the party on his own.
By covert sight, sound and, regrettably, smell, Ryan had worked out there were at least eight of the cannies in the room, as the clan worked its way around scoping out what was apparently the latest in a long line of intended victims. With Papa and Mama Bear came three of the weird doglike figures; one short, fat one; a tall, gawky one; a more or less middle-size one. It was clear to Ryan that along with long-term inbreeding the Bear clan carried some kind of bizarre mutie taint.
They all seemed to like to smell their victims. Ryan had been forced to grit his teeth and endure the crawling of his skin as one of the near-quadrupedal cannies bent a distorted, drawn-out face down to sniff the side of Krysty’s seemingly sleeping face.
Ryan had taken the bed at the room’s far end. He had Doc by his side, then the somnolent Ricky, and Jak. Then came Krysty and Mildred, who had taken those beds to buffer Alysa from the menfolk. She had mentioned her discomfort in close proximity to males in situations like this.
When Doc had stabbed Mama Bear through the neck, the normal-size cannie had been bending over Ryan. Up close, he didn’t look like a norm. His jaws were a fairly standard size and shape, although his teeth were filed pointy, too. But he had barely any visible chin, and a giant bulge of forehead made him look as if he had a double-size brain, which Ryan doubted he had.
As the cannie turned his face away to see his mother staggering, spurting blood and screeching, screaming, Ryan came to life. He whipped out the panga he had under the scratchy wool blanket pile behind his back and with a long over-body stroke planted the wide, heavy blade in the side of the inbred’s neck, right along the line of such lower jaw as the inbred could boast.
For all the full-body strength of the blow, the panga didn’t sever the neck. It may have broken the bone. It certainly cut the carotid artery. Part of the black arterial fan that jetted out caught Ryan’s cheek.
The cannie fell.
At the next bed Ricky fell off the back of the inbred he’d been wrestling and landed heavily on the floor. The creature spun to bite him. Unfolding off his own bed, Doc whipped out a long leg to catch the creature in the ribs with the toe of one of his cracked knee boots and send it sprawling and mewling against Ricky’s bed.
Slow in reacting to the sudden ambush, Papa Bear lumbered from the doorway to Alysa’s bed, bellowing, “I’ll save the virgin! Chill the rest!”
“Oh, no you don’t!” Mildred yelled. She bolted from her bed. With an agility that belied her stocky build, she did a somersault over the sleeping girl, barely brushing her. She came down on the far side of the bed. With that to brace her muscular buttocks, she fired both booted feet into the onrushing fat man’s belly with all the strength of her thigh muscles.
Caught by complete surprise again, the immense cannie chieftain fell back against the wall with a crash. His head hit the logs behind him with a sound like an ax splitting wood.
As Doc loomed over the cannie he’d kicked off Ricky, Mama Bear staggered toward him. One plump hand clutched her spurting throat. The other, dripping her own gore, reached out toward Doc.
“I won’t let you hurt my baby, you oldie bastard!”
His response was to haul up his burly LeMat revolver with his left hand. With the muzzle of the long .44 barrel pressed almost to the spot between her mad, close-set eyes, he touched off the shorter, wider shotgun tube fixed beneath.
Ryan actually saw the charge of Number 4 buckshot begin to implode her fat face like a screaming moon. Then the muzzle-flame washed over it in a sizzle of crisped fat and burned hair, and she collapsed.
Ryan had also told his party to hold off using blasters unless absolutely necessary, to avoid hitting each other if it came to a fight in close quarters. He reckoned Doc had.
The one-eyed man stood alone by the stove at the end of the long room, which was still radiating heat despite showing only a red glow of embers through the grate. He saw Ricky dive under his own bed. The skinny cannie Doc had given the boot to stirred and swiped at him with long arms.
Ricky came up on his knees, whirling his upper body with crazy ferocity. The buttplate of his DeLisle longblaster cracked under the cannie’s canine jaw in an upward stroke. The creature’s head snapped around. A long thread of bloody saliva streamed away from it.
In the gloom all was chaos. Ryan moved forward to join the fight. As he did, he saw the cannie Ricky had knocked down jump up again to all fours with considerable energy. Ricky, for his part, was vulnerable; he’d overbalanced and fallen against his bed. He was visibly still somewhat under the effects of the knockout drops Mama Bear had dosed their desserts with.
Before Ryan could arrive, Doc stepped into a fencer’s lunge and thrust the tip of his swordstick right behind the crouching cannie’s left forearm. The creature shuddered and went down as if its bones had dissolved.
Across the room the third doglike inbred had leaped up on the bed behind Mildred, straddling the still-thoroughly knocked-out Alysa. Ryan shouted a warning.
Apparently sensing her danger, Mildred spun clockwise. She led with her right elbow, which caught the cannie in the face and knocked him off the bed.
With a roar, Papa Bear launched himself off the floor toward Mildred with his great arms outspread and his mouth wide open to display his own shocking shark teeth. Like his namesake, he showed agility that belied his bulk.
Krysty, standing between her bed and the one Mildred had feigned sleep in, pushed out her snubby Smith & Wesson 640 with both hands and squeezed three quick shots into the charging behemoth’s belly. His bellowing went up an octave as he clutched his violated paunch and fell down, rolling side to side and drumming the floorboards with the heels of his taped-together boots.
Mildred kicked him in the head to keep him down.
The fat inbred son grabbed Krysty from behind in a bear hug. He lifted her off the floor with her arms trapped at her sides.
“Got you!” he screeched in a high voice. “Fuck you! Chill you, bitch!”
Ryan didn’t even try to draw his SIG-Sauer. He had Jak fighting the tall gawky cannie in the way, as well as Doc. Plus, there was no way of knowing whether Ricky might pop into his line of fire—or if the inbred might push Krysty in front of a bullet. He vaulted Doc’s bed.
Krysty’s hair suddenly swung back to clutch the cannie’s face like an octopus with a thousand scarlet tentacles.
The inbred screamed in a voice gone eunuchoidally shrill. “Mutie, mutie monster!”
As Ryan came down, Krysty smashed the back of her head into the inbred’s face. His grip slackened. She flung her arms up, breaking his grip, and whirled away from him.
Ricky laid his carbine across his bed and fired. With its built-in suppressor and firing a subsonic round from a sealed breech, the DeLisle made no sound Ryan could hear in the tumult. But the huge fat cannie stiffened and grabbed over his shoulders with his hands as the .45-caliber slug took him right between the blades.
From between him and Krysty came a flash. The noise her snub-nosed .38 made was definitely audible.
The cannie fell.
Jak was slashing at the beanpole cannie with both a trench knife and a butterfly knife. Ryan vaulted Ricky’s bed, right past the kid. He hoped the youth had more sense than he was showing, and wouldn’t shoot again with Ryan in the way. But the need to help Krysty filled Ryan with irresistible fury.
The last dog-cannie sprang for Ryan’s face. He met it with a savage overhand sweep of his panga. The blade crunched into the juncture of the inbred’s neck and left shoulder.
The cannie fell, squealing and snapping his jaws. Ryan kicked the lower jaw, then crushed the cannie’s thr
oat with a vindictive twist of his boot heel.
The last inbred was thrashing around on the floor squalling like an angry catamount and trying to stuff his guts back into his narrow belly. The entrails glistened greasily in the faint light.
With a shock, Ryan realized he couldn’t see Krysty. “Krysty!” he shouted.
She popped up from behind her own bed as briskly as a prairie dog, as if the heavy pack now strapped on her back weighed nothing.
“I’m fine, lover!” she called back. “Grab your stuff and let’s power out of here!”
“Ace on the line,” he said. “Jak, chill that cannie bastard so he doesn’t trip anybody on his fireblasted intestines. Anyway his screeching is getting on my nerves!”
The group recovered the gear they had stashed beneath their beds and started out of the annex, through the kitchen and out through the main room where they’d eaten dinner. Jak led off, followed closely by Doc, with both LeMat and swordstick at the ready. Next, Ricky helped Krysty mostly carry Alysa. The ice-blonde Stormbreak sec woman was showing signs of returning to life, rolling her head and moaning, but her legs still had the consistency of boiled noodles and she wasn’t actually responsive. After them came Mildred, looking more pissed off at the world than usual. Ryan brought up the rear.
He’d barely gone through the door into the kitchen, which was still hot and steamy from Mama Bear’s cooking dinner and washing the dishes after, when he was tackled from behind.
He slammed into a pushcart of some sort that held a stand with an ominous assortment of big knives. It also held the fish-oil lantern.
It promptly fell on the floor, which was either ceramic tile or stone, and shattered. Blue and orange flames raced across the floor and enveloped Ryan’s right arm.
They spared his hand for the moment, and that still held his panga.
He looked back. Papa Bear had seized his lower legs from behind. Now he glared nuke-hot hatred from eyes that seemed to burn bluer than the oil spill from a mask-of-gore face.
“Fucker!” he slurred. “Take you...t’hell wif me!”
Ryan noticed some gaps in his sawtooth snarl that hadn’t been there before. But apparently Mildred’s stomping hadn’t done any more permanent damage than dental.
Feeling the hair on his hand crisp and the fire bite, Ryan swung his flaming arm frantically backward. The broad blade of the panga bit into the side of Papa Bear’s great head.
The cannie collapsed to the floor with a thunk. From the door to the main room, Mildred and Krysty, still supporting Alysa’s dead weight, screamed contradictory advice. Mildred called for Ryan to roll out the flames. Krysty just shouted at him to run.
The kitchen was full of heavy wood fixtures, and the place was catching fire fast. So was the right half of Papa Bear’s now-limp bulk. Spurred by the pain in his burning arm, Ryan yanked his panga from the side of the cannie patriarch’s skull and eeled out from under him.
“Go!” he shouted as he got both hands beneath him and launched himself into a sprint for the door.
* * *
“NOT VERY BRIGHT, Ryan,” Mildred lectured as she examined his right arm by the light of the now-blazing house.
They stood out in the yard formed by the clearing surrounding the stone-and-timber structure. By its inferno glare they could also see that a pair of ruts suggesting a road used by wheeled traffic ran past it, from dark woods to more dark woods. They had approached blind from a different angle and never spotted the road.
Mildred had cut off Ryan’s right sleeve, which had mostly burned off anyway. Now she was cleaning his arm with a nominally clean cloth from her backpack that had been well rubbed in snow and clucking like a disapproving mother hen.
“When you’re on fire,” she said, “you put the fire out first.” She scrubbed at some grit embedded in a raw patch with what Ryan was double-sure was more vigor than necessary.
“Just reckoned the giant crazed cannie looking to gnaw his way up my legs’d chill me ’fore a burning sleeve did,” he said. “Anyway, it’s only skin.”
She actually growled. He grinned, knowing as well as she did the desirability of keeping one’s hide intact and the dangers of infection.
But the fact was, he already knew the burns, while painful, weren’t serious. A cleanup, some of Mildred’s homemade salve and some clean bandages would keep infection at bay.
The rest of the group stood in the yard before the front door, which gaped open to shoot forth yellow flames. Shafts of fire were starting to lick up through the roof.
“Whole thing’s coming down soon,” Krysty observed. She sounded a trifle wistful. Ryan wasn’t sure whether her essentially gentle heart felt bad for the need to chill the whole clan of awful inbred cannies—or if she was mourning the loss of a warm, soft, relatively safe place to pass the remainder of the icy Northeastern night.
Well, we knew that last was a no-go when Jak sniffed something in the pudding, Ryan thought. He grunted as Mildred dug a chunk of grit from an open burn.
Alysa had come back to her senses enough to get to her feet and even shake off a helping hand from Ricky. The youth was always eager to help out a pretty girl, Ryan noticed with amusement. Not that there was anything wrong with that. So long as he didn’t let it get in the way.
Krysty moved in close to their guide, as if accidentally. Alysa didn’t move away.
Ricky looked around as if just becoming aware of the general situation. His pal, Jak, was patrolling the woods around the burning house for possible dangers drawn by the blaze beacon. Doc squatted with his long, stiltlike legs to one side, propped on his swordstick, which once more had the sword concealed in it. He seemed to be staring into the fire moodily.
“So, what just happened?” Ricky demanded.
“The usual,” Mildred muttered. She had finished cleaning Ryan’s burns and was surveying them with frowning clinical thoroughness. “Bunch of crazy inbred cannibals tried to eat us. We escaped. They died. Just another day in the Deathlands.”
“Okay,” Ricky said, in a tone of voice that made it clear it wasn’t. “So how did that happen? I mean, specifically, how did Alysa and I wind up sound asleep, while everybody else was apparently wide-awake?”
“Jak smelled something funny,” Krysty said “That’s why he squeezed your knee when Mama Bear brought out the bread pudding.”
Mildred began to daub healing salve on Ryan’s arm from a clay pot with a carved-cork stopper. It was a pungent herbal mix; despite Mildred’s mistrust for the general state of modern healing, it was a common enough recipe because it worked to diminish the chance of infection. It also did diminish the pain—though it hurt like hell when it was going on.
“What did you think he was doing?” Mildred asked without looking up.
Ricky’s olive face flushed red to the tips of his ears.
“Good thing I nudged Krysty to make double-sure she got the message,” Ryan said.
“So that was a warning?” asked Ricky, finding his voice.
“Yeah,” Ryan said.
“We pass along nonverbal signals when one of us spots something we don’t like,” Mildred said. “Pretty much anything serves to spread the alert. Then Jak nodded a couple times toward the pudding bowl. Didn’t you see? The rest of us worked it out.”
“Except Alysa,” Krysty said. She put an arm out to steady the ice-blonde young woman when she swayed slightly. She still didn’t seem to have returned mentally to the here and now. “She had no way of knowing.”
“You know who else is new and had no way of knowing about your super-secret danger signal? Me! I’m new. Remember?”
“You didn’t figure it out on your own?” Ryan said as Mildred began to wind gauze on top of the stinging, minty-smelling ointment. “You thought mebbe Jak had gotten fonder of you than you knew? Haven’t you been with us long enough to figure some things out?”
“Ryan,” Krysty said sternly. Then, more gently to the outraged boy, “We’re sorry. In the stress of the moment we just never
stopped to think we hadn’t told you about that.”
“Welcome to the learning curve, kid,” Mildred told him.
He pressed his lips together so hard they disappeared. His cheeks seemed to swell as with the internal pressure of his outrage. But his anger quickly passed and he folded his arms and walked a few steps off by himself.
Alysa had come awake. Now Krysty had her crimson head next to the almost-white one and was quietly and calmly filling her in.
The Stormbreak sec woman frowned at one point. Krysty touched her arm and spoke more urgently. The frown smoothed away—mostly. Ryan reckoned they’d come to the part of the story where she blamed herself for missing the signal she had no reason to expect or recognize, letting herself get knocked out and rendered unable to carry out a key part of her mission.
Alysa shook her head as if puzzled.
“We hear...stories,” she said, speaking haltingly. “Tales of a cabin in the woods, where wayfarers are welcomed with open arms—and come to terrible ends.”
She drew in a deep and shuddering breath.
“They say it changes locations, and is never seen in the same place twice, which is why the occupants were never stopped.”
“Not likely,” Mildred muttered, tying off the end of the wrap. It ran pretty much from Ryan’s wrist to mid-biceps. Fortunately his elbow hadn’t gotten too badly scorched, so she was able to leave it clear and thus freer to move. She straightened. “More likely nobody ever got out alive once the cannies got them in their clutches.”
“Until today,” Krysty said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said as a section of the now fully involved roof caved in with a negative shower of red sparks. “Well, it’s not going much of anywhere now. Except down in a heap of ashes in another couple minutes, max.”
In the bottom of the fire-belching front doorway, a shadow appeared. Like a mobile mountain of char and hard-baked core, it actually emerged into the frigid night air.
