Moon Fate

by James Axler

  The sunshine danced off the gold medallion around Charlie's neck as he turned disbelievingly to his pris­oners.

  "What the fuck are they?" he asked nobody in particular.

  "God crazies," Harold replied, "bringing the word of the Almighty to the heathen."

  "Amen," muttered the traveling minister, closing his eyes piously.

  The chanting was louder, but it was still only pos­sible to pick out an occasional few words, or the windblown remains of a single line.

  To Ryan, it sounded as though they were singing about making someone's day, tonight. But that didn't seem to carry a lot of sense.

  Words like "God" and "salvation" seemed to oc­cur quite often.

  Now they could actually all see the whips, short lashes, tipped with something that glinted as they were raised and then brought down, which explained the odd, slapping sounds that they'd been hearing.

  The stickie guards that Charlie had been at such pains to conceal among the trees and brush along the valley above the shrunken river were a total waste of time.

  The fladgies had obviously seen the camp fires from a distance and must have quickly suspected that they were coming into a stickie community, with all of the danger and risk that such a place always represented.

  But they never checked their yelling, moaning and whipping.

  The sentries appeared behind and around them, forming into a threatening escort. But the five tatter­demalion figures ignored them.

  While Ryan and the others watched in silence, the bizarre tableau moved down the path, over the bridge and approached Charlie.

  Four men and a woman.

  Probably a woman, Ryan thought, though the stubbly white hair along the line of her jaw gave him pause for doubt.

  All were long-haired, filthy, matted hair clotted with grease, sweat and blood. They were clothed in shreds of rags that dangled around their ankles. Every one of them was barefoot.

  Each carried a short-thonged whip. The stock was hand-carved and covered in stained and torn leather, studded with brass pins. Each whip had several plaited lashes, and as they drew closer everyone could see what had been glinting in the sun: tiny splinters of broken glass and twisted wire, with splinters of ra­zored steel at their ends.

  "Sick bastards," Bob Leonard breathed. "Look at the blood on 'em."

  The quintet stopped when they were a few steps away from Charlie, ignoring the crowd of stickies that was gathering around them.

  Their leader was nearly as tall as Charlie, but his mane of wild hair made him somehow more impres­sive. His eyes were dark pits in the sunken caverns of discolored ivory. He had torn furrows down his cheeks with his own nails, and they brimmed with crusted pus and dried blood.

  "We bring salvation!" he cried in a cracked, in­sane voice.

  "We already have it," the stickie replied.

  "This is the salvation of the blessed ones through suffering and pain."

  "Yeah, we got that too."

  Now it seemed to penetrate to the fladgie that he was in a situation that might be way beyond his control. His bugged eyes blinked, and he ran a blood-smeared hand across his forehead, smoothing back the hair.

  "You a stickie?"

  "You a norm?" The absurdity of the question amused Charlie, and he suddenly threw his head back and bellowed with laughter. "A norm!" He turned to his captives, hands spread in disbelief. "You hear that, Ryan Cawdor? I called this…this thing a norm. How about that, huh? They norms?"

  The other crazies had dropped to a squatting posi­tion, their whips trailing in the dirt. None of them seemed very interested in what was going on around them, ignoring the crowd of stickies that were press­ing closer to them.

  "How come a stickie got houses like this? And who the bloodied savior are those?" He pointed with his lash at Ryan and the others.

  "They are seekers after light," Charlie replied, ca­sually unslinging the Uzi from his shoulder. "Little like you."

  "We seek light through dark. Happiness through misery. Health through pain. Day through night."

  It was obviously one of their ritual chants. The fladgie's voice rose higher, like a screech owl. The other four filtered erratically in like a demented cho­rus.

  "Right through left. Riches through poverty. Wis­dom through madness."

  Charlie raised his voice to interrupt the seemingly endless threnody.

  "How about life through death?"

  "Amen to that. Oh, yes, amen to that. Life through death." The fladgie collapsed on the red rocks and rolled around in a delirious fit of ecstasy, legs kick­ing, his matted hair becoming coated in dust.

  "Here it comes," Ryan said to Krysty.

  "Life through death," Charlie shouted in his reedy voice, turning to his people. "They want life through death."

  The sound of a mob is one of the most deadly and obscene noises in the world, a mixture of sullen anger and vicious anticipation, spiced with an eager taint of perverse, guilty lust. It swells as every member of the crowd gains power from the multiheaded monster.

  Charlie pointed at the five fladgies with the muzzle of the Uzi. "They want to suffer. What are we goin' to do about that?"

  Now the stickies were cheering, fists pumping the air, mouths sucking air.

  The leader of the flagellants stopped rolling and moaning, sitting up, looking around in bewilder­ment. "No," he said.

  "Yeah." Charlie grinned.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  THE TORTURE AND execution of Red Folsom had been done with a vile skill, making the suffering last as long as possible to prolong the pleasure of the watching stickies.

  The deaths of the flagellants were handled in a different way.

  It only took a matter of minutes for five triangular whipping frames to be set up and for the fladgies to be stripped of their caked rags and bound to the frames by wrists and ankles.

  Since Folsom's escape attempt, Abe had fallen into a strange, almost catatonic trance. He'd ignored Ryan's attempt to talk about any plans for getting away from the stickies, sitting with his head slumped on his chest, refusing to respond to any effort to make him stir.

  Now, suddenly, he seemed reborn. He shook his head like a swimmer emerging from deep water, look­ing around him with eyes bright.

  "Hey, I been real out of it, haven't I?" he said qui­etly. "Happens now and then. Saw a doc a year back. He said I was a narco or something like that. Been like it since I dropped some left-field jolt when I was in my teens. Not often… like once a year or so. Big shock can bring it on."

  "You okay now, Abe?" Ryan asked. "We're going to have to take some triple-red action real soon and it'll need you."

  "Sure, sure. I'm fine. Just sort of lost a day, that's all."

  The activity at the center of the camp drew Ryan's attention away from Abe.

  An incessant moaning came from the five new "visitors," a wailing that was being parodied and mocked by the whole camp of stickies.

  Charlie strutted out to stand by the large fire at the center of the open space and held his hands up for si­lence.

  "Thanks, brothers and sisters. Thank you. Just got something to say."

  The fladgies' leader, his back already a ghastly mass of old scar tissue and fresh, weeping wounds, called out to Charlie.

  "Spare me."

  "Why?"

  "Got some news for you."

  "What?"

  "Let me live."

  "All of you?"

  "Yeah."

  "No."

  "Then me. Just me."

  "How about all these others? Your four fine friends? How about them?"

  "Chill 'em." The word were flat and final.

  Oddly none of the other flagellants seemed at all bothered by their leader's attempts to save his life by pawning theirs. They just hung where they were, oc­casionally moaning.

  "Save you. Kill them." Charlie raised his voice. "That's a norm for you, friends."

  "Has a point, doesn't he?" Helga said.

  "I'll
tell you about the big gang of lepers," the fladgie yelped.

  Charlie's smile dropped like a stone off a cliff edge. "You say a leper gang?"

  "Sure." His next words tumbled over one another in his panicked eagerness. "We seen them three nights ago. North over rim where there's a big fall before the rains came and trail goes like break-backed snake. We smelled smoke and kept clear. Seen a body a way back that made us know they was lepers with the hands, nose, and stumps and all."

  "How many?" Charlie had glanced behind him, up to the far side of the wooded ravine, where every one of his guards had been pulled back into camp to watch the killings.

  "Fifty. Hundred. Don't know numbers too good, mister."

  "But a lot." Charlie pointed with the Uzi at a half dozen of the older men, ordering them immediately onto watch, snarling with a sudden rage as they hesitated. "Get the fuck up there, you stupes! And keep a good look out."

  The flagellant had slumped. Now he straightened, trying to look around at the leader of the stickies.

  "I told you. Now can I go free?"

  "No."

  "No?"

  "No."

  "But you said—"

  "I didn't say word one, norm."

  "I told you about the lepers. Saved you from a sneak attack!"

  "Sure you did."

  "You bastard!"

  "That's right, norm. Accident of birth with me. What's your excuse?"

  "We are the people of God."

  "That don't mean shit." Charlie glanced toward the Very Reverend Joe-Bob Jarman. "Doesn't mean shit, does it, preacher?"

  Jarman lowered his head and wouldn't meet the eyes of the stickie chieftain.

  "Leave him," Danny muttered, not loud enough for Charlie to hear.

  "You agree with me, preacher?" The stickie pressed him, but there was still no answer. Charlie laughed and did a little tap dance. "Well, you don't disagree with me."

  The woman flagellant screamed out, startling ev­eryone, her voice clear as a silver bell.

  "Tonight I dine in the halls of Elysium, at the right hand of the Almighty power of celestial wonder! Am­brosia and wild honey shall be both meat and drink. White samite shall be my raiment and of chalcedony and onyx shall be my…plates and things. Through what some call death, I shall inherit what all call life eternal."

  Charlie lost interest. "Whip the triple-crazie norm fuckers to death," he said. "Take it in turns and make it last."

  Once again the line of prisoners had to sit as mute spectators to the stickies' acts of senseless cruelty and brutality.

  The whole camp jostled and pushed to get at the fladgies' whips and have a turn at torturing the naked quintet.

  Though Ryan would never have admitted it, even to Krysty, he appreciated that there was a certain grim irony in the punishment that Charlie had chosen to terminate the miserable lives of the five flagellants.

  For a group who took such lunatic delight in flog­ging themselves to get nearer to their idea of the god­head, being whipped to death should have been close to paradise.

  But it didn't seem that they appreciated the benev­olent mercy of the stickies.

  As the afternoon drifted toward evening, the cut­ting sound of whips on human skin grew muted by blood-sodden flesh.

  Even the little children took turns at the flogging, though some of them were unable to direct their blows higher than their vicrims's knees.

  The stickie women were the best and most inge­nious at using the multithonged whips.

  One of the younger ones had gotten first go at the leader. Standing staring at his already lacerated back, she reached forward and touched him down between his spread thighs, very gently, with the butt of the whip. He screamed and tried to move, straining against the tight cords.

  The woman turned to the chained prisoners, con­centrating on Krysty, Helga and Dorina, and rubbed at the crotch of her own jeans with the whip in an un­speakable gesture. Then she spun and delivered a cru­elly aimed blow at the helpless fladgie, the metal and glass tips slicing upward between the tops of his legs.

  This time his scream was piercing and he fought against the knotted rawhide so hard that blood burst from the tips of his fingers.

  The laughter of the watching stickies drowned out the cries of pain and plaints for mercy from the other four flagellants.

  Everyone was allowed to strike about ten blows. Blood splashed on the ground and onto the clothes and faces of those doing the flogging. Ryan had wit­nessed ritual whippings, often administered by fron­tier barons' sec men. He wasn't that surprised to see how quickly the dark relief of unconsciousness came to the five crazies.

  The fact that their victims were slumped against the makeshift flogging posts didn't deter the stickies from carrying on with their sport.

  The woman died first, her bowels and bladder opening in the relaxation of death.

  Three of the men followed soon after, but the leader clung to the last remnants of his agonized life for at least a quarter of an hour longer.

  It was the same woman who'd discovered the suc­cess of whipping at his exposed genitals who finally pulled the plug on him.

  She reached again between the blood-slick thighs, groping for a proper grip with the strong suckers on her fingers and palm, whooping in triumph as she found a hold.

  "Oh, Gaia!" Krysty whispered, closing her eyes at the spectacle.

  There was a moment of thrilled expectation from the crowd of stickies. In that stillness, the noise of the brutal castration was grotesquely loud, the sound of ripped flesh.

  As the mutie woman flourished her limp, draggled prize, the last of the flagellants gave the loudest scream that Ryan had ever heard in his life. It seemed to flood out between his lips, carrying his soul with it. Out into the valley of the Anasazi and beyond.

  Far beyond.

  DOC SAT HEAVILY in a patch of luxuriant moss, close to the edge of the narrowing river. "Let us pray with all our hearts that the dreadful sound we have just heard did not emanate from either of our dear, lost friends."

  "Amen to that, Doc," Mildred said. "Just remem­bering it makes my blood curdle."

  "You don't think that was Dad, do you?" Dean looked around at the grown-ups. "Or Krysty? It wasn't them, was it?"

  Christina put a hand on the boy's arm and squeezed it gently. "You think that sounded like either of them, son?"

  "No. But it didn't sound like anyone…like any­one human."

  "Then it wasn't Ryan or Krysty."

  "But it was like someone dying in horrible pain, wasn't it?"

  J.B. answered Dean. "Yeah, I believe it was. Means we must be close to hear it that clearly. Human voice won't carry more than a couple of miles or so. Except at night, over water."

  Doc fanned flies away from his face, looking around at the gathering dusk. "I recall something from my days of English history. Edward the Second, who was notoriously homosexual, was murdered by his barons. They inserted a white-hot iron poker into his…" He looked at Dean and dropped his voice. "His fundament. It was said that his dying screams were heard better than five miles away."

  Jak shook his head. "Thanks for story, Doc. Just what we wanted."

  They all listened, but there were no further cries from higher up the valley. J.B. pointed out that eve­ning was closing in and they'd better get moving on toward where they thought the stickie camp was situated

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  DORINA BROKE THE silence after the prisoners had been herded back into the dark, damp kiva.

  "We gotta fucking try."

  Ryan sat quiet and waited to see what effect her pebble would have on the pool, how big the ripples might be and whether anyone else was ready to chuck in their own stone.

  Helga was first. "She's right. All of you. They can't do more than chill us and we know, sure as God makes little chickens, that the bastards are going to do that."

  "Not just kill us quick and easy." It was Abe. "We seen that they get real good at making it long, slow and hard. Rat
her take a bullet in the head and try and take a stickie with me on the last train west."

  Danny clapped his hands softly. "Get me close enough, and I'll strangle one of the sons of bitches before they butcher me. That'll be better than biting their bullets."

  Bob moved uneasily, the faint light that filtered through the grille gleaming off his bald head. "You got friends, Ryan. One who escaped and there's oth­ers."

  "Yeah."

  "Could be they're on their way to try to spring us."

  Ryan was cautious. "I sure wouldn't want to try to stake my life on them getting here before tomorrow night. From what Charlie said, that's likely to be when we all get hit."

  "You in or not?" Dorina did something that made Bob squeal.

  "Hey, don't do—"

  "Well, stop pussying and stand up like the man you aren't."

  "I couldn't stop them when…"

  "When they raped me sixty-seven times. Well, Bob Leonard, you could mebbe do something now."

  "Sure, sure. If everyone wants to go for it, then I'll be right there."

  His wife's little voice was tight with anger. "Sure. Right there at the back!"

  "Keep your voices down," Ryan warned. "Last thing we need is some stickie going running to his boss with what we're going to do. Me and Krysty are going to go for it."

  He'd already noticed that two of the other prison­ers were keeping quiet—fat Harold Lord, the com­plaining candy salesman who looked like he'd spent too much of his life sampling his own wares and the traveling preacher, white-haired Joe-Bob Jarman.

  "Nine of us," Ryan said. "Though I only heard seven saying they were for fighting, not dying. Two didn't speak."

  "I need time to think."

  "Sure, Harold. You got thirty seconds. How about you, Reverend?"

  A cough. Silence. Ryan was about to try again when Jarman answered. "It goes against my being a man of peace. A man of God."

  "Stickies'll likely crucify you, Reverend. Painful way of passing the dark river."

  "But, if it is the will of everyone to try to escape the wrath of the unbelievers…"

  He didn't finish the sentence, but Ryan guessed that it was the best they'd get. "Thirty seconds are up, Harold."