Nightmare Passage

by James Axler

"Don't know nothin' about that. Mebbe you mis­calculated. Terrible fierce storm last night. Mebbe messed up the ground."

  "We know all about the storm, pissant," Set hissed. "Osorkon, was there a red-haired woman with him?"

  Danielson fidgeted for a hot, silent moment, shift­ing his weight from one foot to the other.

  "Answer us, you old fool," Serapis ordered. "Who else was with him?"

  Before the old man opened his mouth to answer, a deep, flat voice announced, "Me."

  The Incarnates pivoted on their heels. A big, scar-faced man with a black patch over his left eye stepped from a narrow alley between two shacks. The autoblaster in his fist was as rock steady as his voice.

  "And me," another voice said. A slender figure emerged from behind another shack, his body swathed in white linen folds. Intense ruby red eyes stared out from an unnaturally pale face. The satin finish of the six-inch-long barrel of his revolver re­flected the sun in dancing pinpoints.

  "Me, too," another voice added, this one with a husky yet undeniably feminine lilt to it. A sturdily built dark-skinned woman sidled into view, a long-barreled pistol held in a two-fisted grip.

  "And last—and perhaps the least, though that is purely subjective—is my humble self." A skinny, silver-haired scarecrow of a man stepped into the street, the hollow bores of his double-barreled blaster fixed on them like hollow, dead eyes.

  J.B. made a casual move as if to adjust his cloth­ing, and an Uzi connected to his neck by a lanyard appeared in his right hand.

  The Incarnates were surrounded, outflanked by unwavering blaster barrels. They stared in disbelief, in something more than disbelief. They were shocked into speechless immobility.

  J.B. indulged in a low, laconic chuckle of self-congratulation. His hurriedly concocted plan to di­vert the helmeted men while his friends went out the back of the storage building and took up positions around them had been accomplished very smoothly. Knowing that Krysty's Smith & Wesson and Dean's Browning Hi-Power were trained on the so-called Incarnates from inside the building made him feel even better.

  "This isn't necessary," Horus squawked. "We mean you no harm."

  "Right," Jak said, his single word heavy with irony.

  "You're sec men," Ryan stated. "Sec men for Hell Eyes."

  All six of the Incarnates visibly flinched at the last two words.

  "Heresy," Khnum bleated. "We are the servants in the city of truth, sworn to serve the First Kingdom and the glorious dynasty of Akhnaton."

  "A glorious dynasty," Horus interjected, "you are invited to play a part in its destiny."

  "Not a very significant part, of course," Anubis said, "but it's far better than being left out of it altogether."

  Ryan wasn't sure if the dog-headed man was se­rious or trying to defuse the situation with sarcasm. Nor did he much care at the moment. "Take off those helmets," he said sharply. "Drop your giggers."

  The Incarnates didn't move. Anubis said, very matter-of-factly, "That we will not do. You will put up your arms and come with us. You will not be harmed. My word of honor on it."

  The arrogant, self-confident tone sent prickles of anger rushing through Ryan. "Do what I say, or I'll chill you where you stand. My word of honor on it."

  The V of the slim rod in Khnum's hand shifted slightly. Ryan blinked as a puff of wind tossed a pinch of grit into his face. In the tiny tick of time before and after the blink, Ryan's eye registered a flash of light, like an errant reflection of the sun.

  The shock of the blow, which wasn't just a phys­ical impact, picked him up, flung him back and bowled him over. He fell as limp and cold as a corpse to the sandy ground.

  Before his body had fully settled, the air shivered with a scream of rage from Krysty, followed a shaved fraction of an instant later by the ear-knocking report of her handblaster.

  The .38-caliber round fanned cool air on the right side of J.B.'s face as it drove from the doorway behind him and struck Khnum in the center of his bare back. The ram-headed man flailed forward, as if he had just received a kick, a small, blue-rimmed hole sprouting in the hollow of his spine. The bullet exited just above his pelvis in a splattering welter of scarlet liquid ribbons and blue-pink intestinal tis­sue.

  The metauh shafts in the hands of the Incarnates flicked back and forth, spitting little white flares of light. Doc twisted his lean body in a painful con­tortion as a thread of miniature lightning passed very close by him. He squeezed the trigger of his Le Mat, and a clump of deadly 18-gauge grapeshot ripped into the flat-muscled abdomen of Set. His lower torso flew apart in a greasy explosion of blood and bowels. The snake-headed man went over backward, bent double, voicing a very unreptilian howl of ag­ony. The silver rod spun from his hand.

  J.B. depressed the trigger of his Uzi, but nothing happened. He instantly realized that sand had worked its way into the blaster, fouling the trigger and firing pin. The double prongs of a metauh rod swept toward him. What saved him from ending up like Ryan was a wild jostle from Danielson, who waved his arms and shrieked, "No! Stop this!"

  At the same second, Krysty and Dean bolted from the doorway of the building, pushing Danielson out of their path. Light flashed, but the energy bolt cleaved nothing but air.

  J.B. tucked and rolled across the ground, snatch­ing up Set's fallen rod. He raised it hastily, surprised by its light weight. He sighted down it, framing Anubis between the V tip. As with the Uzi, nothing happened.

  Serapis began a charging run toward the nearest chariot, yelling wordlessly in panic. Jak, Mildred, Krysty and Dean all fired at him more or less si­multaneously, the combined gunshots making an ex­tended thunderclap of noise. Four rounds of different grains and calibers struck Serapis in the chest, in the ribs, in the hip and the side of his helmeted head. The horn on the right side sheared away as he stag­gered and jerked from the multiple impacts. He twisted this way and that before crashing headlong to the ground.

  The pair of bird-headed Incarnates, Horus and Thoth, screeched and swept their rods in left-to-right arcs. Krysty and Dean lunged in opposite directions, each squeezing off a shot as they did so, and missing with both.

  A nimbus of wavery blue sprang from Danielson's chest. He husked out a loud "Ah!" before careening backward, fetching up against the splin­tery wall of the storage building and sliding down it to the ground.

  Sighting down the barrel of her ZKR target re­volver, Mildred triggered a shot at Thoth. A splash of blood bloomed on the back of his right hand, and the silver shaft dropped from suddenly nerve-dead fingers.

  The crane-head pivoted toward her, the human mouth beneath the long beak opening to utter a shriek of pain and anger. Krysty shot him through the heart. Arms flung wide like a pair of featherless wings, he lifted up on his toes and fell face first to the sand, a banner of blood trailing from the hole in his left pectoral. The long beak of his helmet dug into the ground, propping up his head and neck at a grotesque angle. Immediately after, five blaster bar­rels trained on Horus.

  "Enough!" Anubis's maddened yell rolled and echoed through the air. "No more or he dies!"

  The jackal-headed man stood over Ryan's pros­trate form, one sandaled foot on his chest, the prongs of his rod touching the hollow of his throat, as if he were planting a victory flag.

  The five fingers tensed on five triggers, the blaster bores dropping slightly. The broad shoulders of Ho­rus sagged briefly in relief, then straightened. He gestured with his silver rod. "Drop your weapons, or my brother will send this heretic into the care of the ushabti."

  The jeweled hawk eyes turned toward Krysty. "You—red-haired woman. You are the guest of Pharaoh and will be treated as such."

  No one moved. The scene in the blood-spattered, corpse-littered street froze like a three-dimensional diorama. The steady, unremitting blaze of the sun added to the dreamy, unreal quality of the tableau.

  "Did you not understand?" Anubis snarled, dig­ging the prongs into Ryan's neck.

  "I understand perfectly," Ryan said. Then he sho
t the jackal-headed man three times between the legs.

  Anubis howled, releasing his metauh rod so he could clasp at the tatters of his testicle sac. Blood from the bullet-severed femoral artery squirted out in a long stream between his clutching fingers.

  While the arid air still vibrated with the sound of the triggered rounds and Anubis's agonized scream, Jak, Krysty, Dean and Mildred all fired in perfect synchronization at Horus. The hawk head flew away in fragments, the bullets tearing through neck liga­ments, cartilage and cervical vertebrae. The human face dissolved in a wet, red blur. By the time he fell sideways, there was nothing identifiable remaining of either the hawk or human head.

  Ryan struggled to rise, but he only shambled to one knee. His face was covered with sweat, his lungs felt shriveled and he labored for breath. Al­though his vision was shot through with swimming gray spots, he saw the death convulsions of Anubis. Blood gushed from the wounds in his groin as he lay on his side, cutting a crimson runnel through the sand beneath him. As he watched, the jackal-headed man's struggles to cling to life ceased, and he jerked in postmortem spasms.

  Then the medley of his friends' voices filled his ears, and hands pulled him to his feet. Krysty fought back sobs, clinging to him. Ryan's face was pale and drawn, glistening with perspiration.

  "I'm all right," he said, stroking her hair with trembling fingers. He reached out for Dean, who took and placed his hand on his shoulder for sup­port.

  They led Ryan to a wedge of shadow and lowered him into a sitting position. Jak offered him a jug of water, and he drank from it long and gratefully. J.B. scowled at the metauh rod in his hands, revolving it between them.

  "What kind of crazy bastard weapons are these?" he demanded. "No trigger, no power source. I couldn't get it to work."

  "That's because you don't have the training."

  They stared in surprise as Danielson approached them, stepping over the eviscerated body of Set. He looked down at the corpse and said, "You chilled them all. Jesus."

  "That's what happens when you bring frog giggers to gunfights," J.B. responded.

  Mildred said to Danielson, "I saw you take a di­rect hit with one of those things. You're not hurt?"

  Danielson fingered his ankh amulet. "This ab­sorbed and redirected the nerve-traumatizing effect of the mena energy." He looked keenly at Ryan. "Cawdor, I always knew you for a nervy bastard, even when you were just a sprout. Your nerves must be made of steel cable."

  "What do you mean?" Ryan asked.

  "I mean you should be lying there chilled—or at the very least, comatose and paralyzed."

  "I didn't miss that last by much," the one-eyed man replied. "It was like having a live wire con­nected to a suction pump jammed up my ass. All my strength felt like it was sucked away."

  Danielson nodded sagely. "The discordant-resonance effect. Your bioenergy harmonies were disrupted. You were stronger than the Incarnates fig­ured. And very lucky."

  Ryan passed a shaking hand over his sweat-pebbled forehead. "Oh, yeah," he said sardonically. "That's exactly how I feel."

  Krysty swung her head toward the ragged man, green eyes blazing with a fury. "You've got a story to tell us, old man."

  "Yeah," J.B. said stiffly. "Like how did these overdressed stupes know about Krysty?"

  Danielson shook his head. "I can't answer that question, but I'll give up what I know. First, we'd better get the bodies out of sight. There's some damn big buzzards with damn big appetites around here."

  Chapter Eleven

  Krysty and Ryan accompanied Danielson into the storage shed while J.B., Dean and Jak dragged the corpses of the Incarnates into an outbuilding at the far end of Fort Fubar. The bodies were placed in shallow graves and covered in shrouds of canvas. On close examination, the helmets proved to be con­structed of cunningly crafted wood, inlaid with col­ored ceramic tiles. The craftsmanship was of a very high order, bordering on the artistic.

  Mildred and Doc sifted handfuls of sand over the puddles of gore on the ground and policed the area, picking up metauh rods and spent shell casings.

  J.B. gave the horseless chariots a quick inspec­tion, feeling a grudging admiration for the design which was both ornate and functionally elegant The conveyances were steered by a simple guide bar, the speed controlled by a joystick lever projecting from a very simple gearbox. It took him a minute to figure out the vehicles' motive power—a stacked array of concave mirrored squares occupied an open box at the rear end of the chassis platform. The angle of the mirrors was controlled by a small crank winch.

  J.B. knew that some predark industrialists and en­vironmentalists had experimented with ways to con­vert the sun's energy to electricity with solar cells. The little reflective squares were semiconductor chips and provided power to drive the vehicles. De­spite himself, he was impressed with the technology. Still, he couldn't even hazard a guess at the opera­tion of the metauh rods.

  Dean pulled sentry duty in the street while the adults returned to the storage building. Krysty spread out one of the sheets, and while J.B. and Ryan fieldstripped their blasters, meticulously oiling and cleaning their moving parts, they posed ques­tions to Danielson.

  "You built Fort Fubar?" Mildred asked.

  Danielson nodded. "Yeah, about eighteen years ago. After Trader gave me the heave-ho, I hooked up with some Farers. Rather than scrape around in a barony, I convinced them to come out here with me."

  "Why?" J.B. demanded. "There's nothing out here but sand and sun."

  A sly, almost abashed smile played over Danielson's whiskered face. "I'd made copies of some of Marsh Folsom's maps, y'see."

  Everyone understood. Marsh Folsom had been the Trader's partner and the primary reason why he had been so successful in ferreting out predark stock­piles. Folsom had a collection of old military maps that at best specifically pinpointed stockpile loca­tions and at worst provided clues to areas of possi­bility.

  "So you thought there was a stockpile out here in the Barrens," Ryan said.

  "Yeah," Danielson replied. "If not a stockpile, then some sort of installation I could use to build a power base. I figured I wouldn't have any compe­tition out here."

  It was the old Deathlands dream of empire, of carving out a substantial piece of territory and build­ing a personal fiefdom to extort tribute from the sur­rounding areas.

  "By the time we got out here and built this place," Danielson continued, "there was about fifty adults, ten, twelve teenagers and some kids. A cou­ple of babies. I organized us like the way Trader had done. Connie Harrier was my woman and my sec­ond-in-command. My first lieutenant was Mel Stockbridge. And after him was old Javna."

  Danielson's eyes seemed to cloud over as he looked into the past, his voice growing hushed with the weight of memories. "After we got the fort built, we spent a few months searching the Barrens, look­ing for the place on the map. By that time, our food was running low. We had to find it, or we'd starve. Then one day we found the place. The redoubt. And we found him. Or he found us. Don't know which is which no more."

  "Found who?" Krysty asked. Although her voice was crisp, her eyes were narrowed.

  "Akhnaton, our pharaoh. Our god." Danielson laughed bitterly. "He'd been waiting in his tomb for his people, you see. We strolled up and we became his people. Just as simple as that."

  "And you just let him take over?" Ryan asked.

  "Didn't have much choice. Javna tried to throw down on him, and he chilled the old fart as easy as swatting a fly. He took Connie into his tomb and did something to her insides so she could bear him children."

  "Did Connie have red hair and green eyes, by chance?" Mildred asked.

  "No, her hair was dark. Blue eyes. I think. Hard to remember now." Danielson's voice sank to a slur, his eyes going vague as he looked back over the years to a time that still caused him anguish.

  He spoke of Akhnaton arriving in Fort Fubar with ration packs from the redoubt, which he distributed among the strongest of the Farers and the healthiest chi
ldren. No one resisted him. Rather, they wor­shiped him almost immediately, their former loyalty to Danielson evaporating like a drop of water in the desert at high noon.

  Later, when the chosen Farers had regained their strength, Akhnaton led them farther into the Barrens, to excavate his royal city, the city of Aten.

  "Hold it," Mildred snapped. "Excavated? You mean there was a city already out there?"

  Danielson nodded. "Oh, yeah. Buried in the sand, but most of it was still intact, even all the statues—"

  "Wait," Mildred interrupted again. "You expect us to believe the city of Aten was out there in the desert, waiting for him?"

  Impatiently, Danielson retorted, "That's what I said, isn't it? Anyhow, once the sand was all cleared away, Pharaoh set about making the city livable, re­pairing it, fixing it up, establishing our society. He knew ways to irrigate the plains and grow crops, he designed the chariots and the metauh rods. He shared all the ancient arts of the people of the Nile with us."

  A slight smile tugged at the corners of the old man's lips. "It was a happy time, productive and busy. He named me and Stockbridge as high coun­selors. He took Connie to wife in a ceremony that lasted a week."

  Doc eyed him keenly. "And you did not resent having your woman stolen from you?"

  Danielson's face screwed up in contemplation. "I've thought about that off and on for the last six­teen years. I sure as hell should have been jealous. I remember feeling jealous for a little while, then it went away…it was like I couldn't feel jealous, no matter how hard I tried."

  He exposed his discolored, broken teeth in a las­civious grin. "What the hell, though. I had three wives and three kids myself. Kind of hard to be too jealous with that kind of diversion."

  "How many women for Pharaoh?" Jak inquired. "A hundred?"

  "Not hardly. He stuck with Connie. He truly seemed to love that woman. When their daughter, Nefron, was born, the celebration lasted two weeks. For a long time after that, we dwelt in peace in the city. Oh, there were a few medleys with some no­mads and Roamers who stumbled into our territory. The ones that we didn't chill joined up with us, ab­sorbed by our society. Yeah, for years we dwelt at peace in Aten, doing damn little but eating, drinking, making love and making babies. It was kind of like paradise."