Mutant Chronicles

by Matt Forbeck

  Mitch resisted the urge to club the man in the chin with the butt of his rifle. As he glared at Juba, the Mishiman pointed to something moving in the distance.

  Mitch squinted and spotted a pack of mutants loping down the street. The creatures hadn’t seen them, but if Mitch had gone charging out into the street, they would have for sure. Mitch nodded his thanks to Juba, then pointed at Duval and motioned for her to take point for a while.

  Duval waited for the mutants to disappear around a distant corner and then moved out. Mitch and the others followed her, once more a few seconds apart.

  They chased Duval through the streets of the city, working their way closer to their goal. As they went, the buildings became newer but no less abandoned. On several corners, Mitch spotted handbills with the faces of missing people. He felt sure none of them would ever be found.

  Eventually, Duval signaled for a break.

  “Check your targets,” she said. “Hey, your two.” She pointed just off to their right.

  Duval squatted on her knees behind a truck overturned in the middle of the street. Juba came up behind her, then Mitch and the rest. He wondered if they were all as tired as he. The trip from the monastery had been long and brutal, and the crash landing had taken a lot out of him.

  If anyone had gotten the worst of it—other than MacGuire—it was Steiner. The Cog panted heavily as he lugged the bomb along, still in the bag on his back.

  “Need a hand with that?” El Jesus said.

  “No, thank you,” Steiner said with a little laugh. He almost sounded human.

  Juba held up a hand. “Quiet.”

  Sounds of movement came from up ahead, on the other side of the car. Mitch craned his neck to see a pack of figures racing down the street away from them.

  Juba swung the barrel of his gun around the side of the truck and took aim, but Duval pushed the gun away. Mitch spotted what Duval had seen. These weren’t mutants. They were living people.

  “Refugees,” Mitch said. “Where the hell they going?”

  The locals rounded the nearest corner and disappeared. Mitch left the cover of the truck to follow them. Then he heard gunfire coming from that direction, and he moved faster.

  Mitch knew he was going in the wrong direction. He didn’t care.

  “Hunter!” Duval shouted his name as if the sound of her voice might stop him in his tracks. She might have been a mother, but he wasn’t anything like her kids, he was sure.

  37

  Mitch rounded the corner cautiously and ducked straight into an open square in the center of the city. A transport ship sat dead in the middle of the place, belching smoke and steam. A crowd of supplicants surrounded it, begging and pleading with a pair of armed men standing at the foot of the transport’s ramp.

  The men fired their machine guns into the air again. This time the mob fell into a terrified silence, and an aisle opened to the north.

  A man in an expensive suit and a gorgeous woman in a beautiful coat made their way up to the ship via the aisle. Behind them a porter pushed a pile of luggage on a huge cart.

  Some of the people protested as the wealthy couple boarded the transport, but they quieted when the bigger of the two men, a chubby bastard who made El Jesus look tiny, leveled his gun at them. Still, the women and children in the crowd wailed and begged for the guards to let them on the ship. Their cries fell on ears that weren’t deaf but blocked by greed.

  Mitch wondered why the people didn’t call the guards’ bluff and charge the ship. Then he spotted the stack of bodies scattered about the foot of the airship’s ramp. The guards apparently had no compunction about firing on innocent people pleading for their lives.

  The rest of the squad slid up behind Mitch. He didn’t turn to acknowledge them as they watched the guards at work.

  While the big guard kept his weapon trained on the crowd, the other—a tall, skinny man who reminded Mitch of the Grim Reaper—barked out an announcement.

  “The current bid is two gold watches, a diamond necklace, and ten thousand gold talents!” He flashed a smile that nearly split his face in two “Going once…Twice…”

  The crowd surged forward a foot, but the big man shouted them down with his bellows and the threat of his bullets.

  “Keep back! Keep back, by God!” he said.

  The skinny man grinned even wider and pointed a long, thin finger into the crowd.

  “Sold! To the skeleton in the monkey suit.”

  A man so ancient he looked like he might fall over dead on his way up the ramp started forward. A beautiful young woman at his elbow helped him along, and another porter lugged a tower of luggage behind them.

  The skinny guard took the goods from the old man and let the woman aboard the ship with a grotesque leer. Then he shoved the old man back into the crowd.

  “One ticket, not two!” the guard said with a cackle.

  The old man sputtered in protest. “I bought it.”

  The fat guard let loose an evil laugh at that. “And she’ll show her gratitude by shining my crack all the way to Mars!”

  “Unless you want to buy another ticket,” the skinny guard said with a lustful look nearly as awful as the one his fat friend had given the girl. He glanced at his friend, and the two cackled with glee.

  “That’s all my money!”

  The fat guard snarled. “Then fuck off!”

  The old man stepped toward the fat guard. “Do you know who I am?”

  The fat guard shot the old man through the chest. He flew backward into the crowd, which backed away as if death by bullets was contagious, leaving him to collapse in a pool of his blood.

  The fat man spit on the corpse. “That’s who you are.”

  The skinny guard crowed in delight. “Ass, stash, or cash!” he said. “Nobody rides free! The next seat starts at five thousand talents!”

  “We need to cut through here,” Juba said to Mitch as much as to the others. He pulled out his gum and stuck it on his helmet, then pointed to a break in the buildings on the opposite side of the square.

  Duval shook her head. “Good place for an ambush.”

  “Can’t be too many mutes,” Juba said, gesturing at the crowd. “There’s too much easy meat.”

  Steiner scoffed at that reasoning. “All the more reason for them to come.”

  Duval pointed toward the break in the buildings that Juba had noted, then circled her arm to show how they could proceed around the mob. “We go through the square, this street here’s a lot harder to get pinned down.”

  Mitch shouldered his rifle. Like the others, he’d strapped his sword to it for easy carrying. The tip of the blade jutted out past the barrel of the gun like a bayonet. He had to make sure he didn’t jab himself with it.

  He started forward, heading for the crowd. If the team wanted to cut through the square, that was fine with him. He meant to take the direct route, though.

  Steiner said something filthy in German, then called after Mitch. “We don’t have time for this.”

  “Make time,” Mitch said.

  As he neared the crowd, the people parted before him, opening a clear path straight to the ship.

  “Hunter!” Steiner said.

  Mitch ignored him. He figured their chances of saving the world were next to shitty, but if he could make some sort of difference here at least, he meant to do it.

  The fat guard was still waving his gun at the crowd, snarling and cursing. “I will shit on the next whore who shoves her brat in my face!” he said. A woman near him fell back, wailing in fear.

  The skinny guard kept up his auction patter, delighted both with himself and with how much money he stood to make. “The bid stands at seven thousand talents and three bottles of very old Scotch whiskey…”

  The man’s voice trailed off as Mitch stepped out of the crowd and stood over the cooling body of the wealthy man the guards had cheated.

  “Let them on,” Mitch said.

  Hopeful that the newcomer wasn’t the trouble he seeme
d, the skinny guard grinned. “You making a bid?”

  Mitch didn’t laugh. He unsnapped the flap over his pistol’s holster. “You take the kids first. Then the women. Then the men, if there’s any room left.”

  The two guards glanced at each other, confused for a moment at the size of the intruder’s balls.

  “Hey, soldier boy,” the fat guard said with as much menace as he could muster. “Ship can only carry so much weight.”

  “Well, what do you weigh?” said Mitch. “Two seventy-five?”

  The fat guard swung his rifle up and put the end of the muzzle right against Mitch’s skull. “Three-ten.”

  Mitch nodded, a grim smile on his lips. By putting the gun that close to him, the jackass had made this almost too easy.

  Snake-fast, Mitch tilted his head to the right and slapped aside the fat man’s rifle with his left arm. At the same time he brought up his gun-filled right fist and blasted a crater in the man’s head.

  The fat guard’s body collapsed to the ground without a twitch.

  Mitch half turned to the crowd. “Three-ten. That’s two women, two kids, right there. Come on, let’s go.”

  Two young ladies, each with a young child clutched in her arms, pressed forward and squeezed past Mitch. At a look from the soldier, the skinny guard let them by. He looked like he would piss himself if Mitch took a step toward him.

  “How much do you weigh?” Mitch asked as he sized up the man with his eyes.

  The skinny guard swallowed hard before answering in a croak, his throat gone dry. “Very little.”

  Mitch fingered his pistol. “Dump the luggage. Take them all.”

  The skinny guard nodded his agreement. Behind Mitch, one of the women reached down and grabbed the fat man’s rifle. She’d make sure the guard kept his word.

  Mitch turned to leave, and a wide aisle opened in the crowd before him. No one said a word of thanks, but he didn’t expect any. They just stared after him in awe.

  When he got back to the squad, the others looked at him in a new light. He realized he’d just blown his image of not giving a fuck, but he didn’t care about that either.

  “You figure out where we’re going yet?”

  Juba grinned at Mitch out of far more than his pride in being able to read a map in this shitty weather and this hell-hole of a town.

  “Good.”

  Without consulting anyone, Mitch took point again. The squad fell into place behind him without any objections.

  Steiner caught up with Mitch and fell into step just behind him.

  “Endanger the mission again and I’ll shoot you myself.” Steiner showed no anger. He only stated a fact.

  “Why wait?” Mitch asked.

  He picked up the pace then, leaving Steiner behind. If the Cog meant to shoot him in the back, he might as well give the bastard a good target.

  38

  Mitch glanced up and saw the cold sun fighting to peek through the angry clouds above. He wondered if its bluish color was the product of some kind of pollution or something else they could blame on the mutants and their Machine.

  Mitch had long thought that humanity had done a perfectly fine job of killing itself off. He’d never guessed there might be something else out there capable of doing it better. He wondered what would happen if they managed to put a stop to this mutant threat the way Brother Samuel seemed to think they could. He figured they’d all be back at each other’s throats within a matter of weeks if not days.

  He glanced back at Steiner. Perhaps minutes instead.

  The moon vanished behind the spires of a Romanesque church. The place’s central dome—what had once been its roof—thrust up from the belly of the wrecked city, lying half-buried in the mud.

  Mitch looked back for Juba. The Mishiman pointed straight at the place and nodded. They were there.

  The center of the dome had a large hole in it, fashioned there when the place had been built centuries ago. Mitch couldn’t imagine it let in much light, but in the days before electricity it had probably been the best thing going.

  Juba and Duval unspooled a pair of nylon ropes from their packs and set about anchoring them to two stone pillars. They then dropped the other ends down the hole in the dome. Mitch heard them slap onto the ground below with a splash.

  All the soldiers clipped their harnesses to the slender strands. Mitch led the way, working his way to the hole, not trusting the ancient dome to hold his weight until it proved itself. It ended up being as sturdy as the earth.

  As he peered down through the hole, the light didn’t show much. Mitch fished out a flashlight and shone it into the vast chamber below. The beam of light reflected off a vast, shallow pool of rainwater that had collected on the floor, running off to the south in a wide rivulet. Otherwise, the place seemed empty.

  His pistol in one hand, Mitch put his feet on the rim of the hole and tied a Munter hitch around the carabiner on his harness. Then he leaped off the edge.

  As he fell, Mitch let the rope play out as fast as he dared. Once he got within a story of the pool below him, he pulled hard on the rope with his brake hand and came to a sharp halt. He swept the room with his pistol, but nothing came at him out of the darkness or made any kind of sound except for the steady patter of rain through the hole above.

  He lowered himself the last few feet and found his boots ankle deep in the chilly water. The place smelled of must and mold but not of fresh death.

  Mitch unhitched himself from the rope and gave the all-clear to the soldiers above. They zipped down next to him, one after the other, in a matter of seconds. As they came, he surveyed the edges of the place with his flashlight.

  Once down, Duval poked around a bit on her own. In the beam of her light, she found a statue of a hooded monk with his arms crossed in front of him in the form of an X. Instead of true arms, though, he had boneblades.

  “Christ,” she said. “What sort of church is this?”

  No one answered.

  A moment later El Jesus touched down on the wet floor. “How do you lose a city?” he asked.

  The water from the puddle ran off toward a tunnel to the south. When the others were down and ready—with their own flashlights on, either in their hands or attached to their guns—Mitch motioned for them to head out. He took point once more. He looked back at Juba for direction, but the Mishiman shrugged helplessly.

  Samuel nodded at Mitch to go forward. “The catacombs lead down to the lost city,” he said.

  Mitch grimaced, then prowled down the corridor, his pistol before him the whole way. The paved sides of the arched tunnel soon gave way to a series of interlocking bones. The path ran directly through the ossuary, it seemed, a place filled with human skeletons stacked tight and deep for untold generations. Mitch wondered how far back from the tunnel walls the bones went, but he had no real desire to find out.

  Duval spoke first, in a hushed, reverent tone. “There must be thousands.”

  “Millions,” Samuel said. “Each new age builds upon the bones of the old.”

  “How many times have they come before?” Duval asked. By “they,” she meant the mutants, Mitch knew.

  Samuel frowned as he shook his head. “They didn’t do this. We did this. We’ve always excelled at killing one another.” His voice got louder as he warmed to his subject. Mitch suspected this had been the source of more than one of the monk’s sermons back at the monastery. He instantly started to tune it out.

  “Perhaps that is the Enemy’s greatest offense,” the monk said. Try as he might, Mitch couldn’t avoid listening. “He would challenge our supremacy as the architects of our own end.”

  As Mitch glanced back at the monk, he spotted Severian cocking her head to the side, listening for something.

  “Halt!” Steiner said in a harsh whisper.

  Brother Samuel bit his tongue, and he and the others stopped moving. From somewhere behind them, back toward the church proper, the sound of rocks falling echoed down the tunnel. It happened only once, then
stopped.

  Mitch held up a hand to signal for everyone to wait and remain silent. It could have been the wind knocking something loose from the rim of the hole down which they’d descended. Probably no one had been in this place for a long while, and even the footfalls of the soldiers might be enough to jar something loose. Or the transport might have passed overhead finally, leaving the world shaking in its wake.

  Or someone might be following them.

  Mitch counted off a full minute. If they had picked up a tail, it was being careful, patient.

  Mitch put a finger to his lips and looked hard at Samuel and Duval. This wasn’t the time or place for a lecture, no matter how inspirational the surroundings.

  Samuel grimaced, but Mitch was more irritated with Duval. She was supposed to be a professional and should have known better. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment, and her lips tightened into a short line.

  Satisfied, Mitch signaled for them to move out. He took point once more.

  The ossuary turned out to also be a labyrinth. Passages split off the main one over and over, often, he guessed, leading to dead ends. Getting trapped in one of them could be disastrous if someone was following them, and making choice after choice put Mitch on edge.

  At each intersection he glanced back at Juba and Samuel. Most times Juba silently indicated the proper direction, based on his calculations. Sometimes he motioned for the monk to consult with him in whispers so soft that Mitch couldn’t hear them.

  Each time they chose well, never winding up facing a blind tunnel filled with bones. Mitch noticed that they consistently were moving lower and lower through the maze, deeper and deeper into the earth.

  As he rounded one corner, Mitch hauled himself up short. He turned and beckoned for Samuel to come forward.

  As Samuel joined him, Mitch examined the tunnel before him. It widened out into a chamber at least the size of an aircraft hangar. The sides to the left and right fell away, and the far wall was the steel and concrete face of a modern skyscraper that over the centuries had sunk into the ground or been buried.