Nightmare Passage

by James Axler

  A chain of rocky hills rose behind the city, curv­ing across the horizon like the fossilized vertebrae of some prehistoric monster. Green pastureland rolled to the south and they could make out several flocks of either cattle or sheep or both.

  Above the west wall a vast, pyramidal structure shouldered the blue sky. It was composed of count­less fitted blocks of stone, the top flat and irregular, like a row of broken teeth. The early-morning light played along the white facade of the monstrous monolith. Ryan tried to estimate its size by using the city walls as a reference point. He could only hazard a feeble guess—a forty-story building rising angularly from a thirteen-acre base was the best he could come up with.

  He realized the pyramid was of such staggering proportions as to make its true distance from the city difficult to gauge. He also realized he was so stu­pefied by what his eye was seeing that he was in a mild state of shock. Danielson's words of Aten and the pyramid hadn't prepared his mind to grasp it all.

  Doc was the first to find his tongue. "By the Three Kennedys, this isn't Deathlands. This isn't even our time!"

  Not removing his gaze from the city, J.B. shook his head doggedly. "My readings were true. We're exactly where I said we were."

  "How can this be?" Krysty's voice was hushed with awe. "I saw pix of places like this in books. There hasn't been a city like that in thousands of years…and never in America."

  Mildred suddenly uttered a screechy little laugh and slapped her forehead, startling them so much she broke the mesmeric spell the vision of the city had woven. They turned toward her questioningly.

  "Not thousands of years, folks," she claimed with a relieved chuckle. "More like close to 180."

  "Talk sense," Jak snapped.

  "Remember when I said this area had been pop­ular with filmmakers?" She gestured to the city walls. "The holy city of Aten is a movie set, built by Cecil B. DeMille back in the 1920s for the first, silent version of The Ten Commandments."

  J.B. eyed her skeptically. "Come on, Millie. How could a movie set have survived for so long in such good shape, weathering the nukecaust and sky-dark?"

  "I remember reading about this place," Mildred replied. "Unlike later movie sets, which were made of plaster and papier-mache and plastic, old DeMille built this thing to last—out of concrete, plaster and limestone. When the filming was over, he figured it was cheaper to bury the whole shebang rather than dismantle it and cart it back to Hollywood. The site was lost for over sixty years. It was relocated back in the early 1990s with ground-penetration radar. Best as I remember it, plans were under way for a full excavation. Guess those plans were put on hold until Hell Eyes came along."

  "A movie set," Ryan said slowly. "If it was bur­ied, there's no reason why it couldn't have come through all the geological changes since skydark fairly intact. How did Hell Eyes know about it?"

  Mildred shrugged. "The redoubt had an extensive database. The story about finding the site was fairly well-known, so he probably came across a reference to it while he was file-browsing."

  "Do we ride or walk from here?" Krysty asked.

  Jak shook his head. "Expecting us anyhow. Make easy on selves. Ride."

  Doc shook his head in disbelief at the teenager's placid audacity. "Whatever we choose as a convey­ance—the horseless chariot or our feet—let us pro­ceed with all due caution."

  Ryan hitched his gun belt and climbed back into the chariot. "Let's travel in style. If Pharaoh is going to chop our heads off, he might as well do it before the real heat of the day begins."

  Once everyone was back in the vehicle, J.B. let it creep forward along the tree-lined road. Ryan kept consulting Krysty's hair, but it hadn't stirred, so she wasn't detecting any immediate danger.

  They rolled past the outlying buildings, then to­ward the four identical statues of seated men, sculp­tures Doc identified as replicas of far larger pieces in Egypt's Abu Simbel Valley.

  There were sentries on the walls, and though they watched their steady approach, none of them raised an alarm or hailed them with a challenge.

  As they drew closer to the open gate, Doc fidgeted with the lion's head of his swordstick and mur­mured, "Interesting how necessity forces mature hu­man beings to do things against their better judg­ment."

  Mildred overheard him and cast a sidewise glance at Krysty. Under her breath, she muttered, "And maybe against their wills."

  With no fanfare and just as little notice, the char­iot entered the city of Aten.

  The marketplace wasn't particularly busy so early in the morning. The merchants hawked fruit, vege­tables, woven linens, pottery and wooden kitchen utensils. There were wines and spices and even hand-loomed rugs.

  The merchants wore simple tunics, and their hair was cut and styled in a strange fashion, some of them sporting completely shaved pates except for a long braid and others with long, plaited hair. They were similar in their well-fed physiques and eyes that didn't once look in the direction of the rolling chariot.

  The women were all black haired, their eyes out­lined by equally black mascara. They walked with sensuous, graceful strides, their diaphanous ankle-length robes slit to the thigh. Some wore few or­naments, and others were so weighted down with bracelets, rings and necklaces they seemed like am­bulatory bangles.

  Other people thronged the plaza, all lean and dark. In fact, everyone they saw had swarthy skin and jet black hair. In all of the marketplace there was no sound; no voices spoke, shouted or laughed. There was only a serene silence from the citizens of Aten, and that in itself was a bit frightening.

  A fountain bubbled and sparkled in the center of the plaza, surrounded by stone decorated with hiero­glyphics. Nearly naked children drank from it, and women filled earthenware jugs. Like everyone else, they ignored the six people as they rode past.

  J.B. drove the chariot out of the plaza and along a boulevard by the bestial statues Ryan had glimpsed earlier. They were sphinxes, anthropomor­phic creatures with the bodies of lions and the heads of noble-looking men. A great, rambling, multiterraced building loomed at the far end of the boule­vard. It looked as if its walls were faced with marble and the fluted columns inlaid with gold. Ryan stud­ied the broad steps leading up to a massive door of beaten bronze. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that Hell Eyes waited and watched from behind that heavy portal.

  Aten was beautiful and exceptionally clean. All of the companions had difficulty believing that it was nothing more than a huge play set, constructed for predark entertainment purposes. Regardless of its origin, Aten possessed a heart and a soul, beating with a pulse of life, very strong and sensual.

  J.B. found a side lane that paralleled the boule­vard of sphinxes and he turned the chariot down it. Braking to a slow halt, he said, "This is too weird. We don't belong here, certainly not in one of their wags. Nobody's paying any attention to us. Like we're invisible…or ghosts."

  "I'm not going to complain," Mildred said.

  "They're playing some kind of game with us," Ryan stated. "Pretending we're not here."

  Doc quirked an eyebrow. "What would be its point?"

  "To disorient us," the one-eyed man answered. "Confuse us, throw us off balance. Make us doubt."

  Doc pursed his lips contemplatively. "If that is so, the cooperation on the part of Aten's citizens is truly extraordinary—and an unsettling example of Pharaoh's hold over them."

  Ryan looked toward the top of the terraced build­ing, pondering the tactical wisdom of simply bang­ing on the bronze door and demanding an audience. He quickly dismissed the idea. Without an ace-on-the-line to play, such a brazen confrontation had too many possible outcomes—all of them gloomy.

  Krysty suddenly stiffened, her long tresses lifting as if riding a wind. She raised her fists to her tem­ples, and her lips worked. "J.B.!" she shrilled. "Get us out of here!"

  The Armorer's reflexes were lightning swift. The chariot lunged forward with a whine. He steered it down another side lane that ran at right angles along one w
all. He followed it until they emerged back at the marketplace, at its inner end. Only now it was a marketplace without merchants and shoppers. It was completely deserted.

  "Now what?" J.B. growled, looking this way and that. He saw the gate, and the heavy barricade of painted wood spanning its length.

  "Now they're paying attention to us," Doc said grimly.

  From behind them came the quick scuff and scutter of many running feet. Men wearing the heads of animals efficiently fanned out in a ring around the chariot, sunlight glinting from the pronged shafts gripped in their dusky hands. The companions saw duplicates of the helmets worn by the Incarnates in Fort Fubar, but new ones, as well—a hippopotamus, a crocodile, a donkey, even an insect.

  Between clenched teeth, J.B. warned, "Hang on."

  He manipulated the chariot's controls, and it spun on one wheel in a complete circle, revolving as if on an axis. As it rotated, the Uzi fairly leaped into his hand, and flame and noise lipped from the short barrel. He played the stream of 9 mm rounds over the encircling Incarnates like water from a high-pressure hose.

  The first half-dozen bullets sewed bloody little dots across the broad chests of three Incarnates, smashing them backward into screaming, tangle-footed sprawls.

  In the same instant as the Uzi began its deadly stutter, Ryan and Jak leaped from the pirouetting chariot, rolling with the momentum, hitting the flag-stoned ground with their blasters out and working.

  Light flared from the tip of a metauh rod just as Ryan went into a sideways lunge. He felt a pins-and-needles tingle on the top of his left shoulder. He didn't know from which Incarnate the energy bolt had come, so he shot the nearest, a triburst that drilled Anubis's twin in the midsection. The triple impacts swatted him double, slapping him off his feet.

  Jak's Colt Python boomed, and the heavy .357-caliber slug broke a crocodile head and the human skull supporting it. Blood gushed down the Incarnate's face as he flailed over backward, arms windmilling.

  A metauh rod swept toward him, and the albino's steel-spring legs propelled him into a one-handed cartwheel. As his feet spun over his head, the Colt belched flame and thunder again, the recoil only slightly affecting his balance as he landed lithely in a crouch.

  The bug-headed Incarnate shrieked, slapping at his right shoulder as the bullet bit a chunk of meat and muscle out of it amid a spray of blood.

  Ryan kept moving, never still for a microsecond, ducking and weaving, dodging the flashing crackiles of energy. The metauh rods flailed at him like whips, and the helmeted men wielding them cursed in frus­trated anger.

  His eye caught a flicker a motion from behind him, and a double-pronged tip stabbed toward the barrel of his blaster. Just as it touched the steel, wreathing it in a momentary shower of sparks, Ryan opened his hand. Before the SIG-Sauer hit the ground, he snatched the eighteen-inch panga from its sheath.

  The long, razor-edged blade, a flash of silver in the sun, slashed in a flat horizontal arc, his whole body powering the stroke. The shock of impact shiv­ered up his right arm into his shoulder socket, and a head encased in a bird-beaked helmet tumbled like an awkward ball to the flagstones.

  As the blood-spouting trunk of the Incarnate top­pled forward, Ryan whirled to face a hippopotamus-headed man who gaped at him in open-mouthed hor­ror.

  "Come and die," Ryan invited, beckoning to him with the crimson-streaked knife.

  J.B.'s Uzi suddenly stopped chattering, and Mil­dred shouted out wordlessly in fear and anger. Ryan spun on his heel in the direction of the chariot, then he was flat on his face in the dust, wondering aloofly what he was doing there.

  His arms and legs were filled with half-frozen mud, and his thoughts stumbled and staggered, fi­nally succumbing to the brief, almost subliminal im­age of a nimbus of energy jumping from metal prongs.

  Something hard and unyielding insinuated itself between Ryan's ribs and the ground. He felt no pain, only a steady pressure. He realized a foot was lifting him, turning him, rolling him onto his back.

  A mahogany giant towered over him, a conical jeweled headpiece bisecting the sun and adding an­other six inches to his height. The hard beauty of his face had none of the softness of youth left in it. He wore a magnificent, gem-encrusted leather har­ness over his muscular torso. Sunlight gleamed from the golden threads worked into the white fabric of his short kilt.

  The giant's eyes, under straight black brows, were like drops of hot blood.

  "So," he said in a deep, melodic voice, "I didn't frighten you away, after all. Perhaps I'll have to try harder next time."

  The sound of his voice touched off sweet vibra­tions somewhere deep inside of Ryan. He was hun­gry to hear more of it.

  Then, smiling, the bronzed giant kicked him in the head, kicked him down into a spiraling black hole.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ryan opened his eye and at first saw nothing. He felt a surge of panic, wondering if he had been struck blind, but when he shifted his head, he caught a yellow glimmer of dim light. He stirred feebly, and the motion sent a hot bore of pain drilling through his chest to his back. Sweat broke out on his forehead. His mouth was dirt dry, he felt feverish and nausea was a clawed beast trying to tear its way out of his stomach.

  Gritting his teeth, he lay quietly for a long time, listening to the slow, steady thud of his heart. Then, by degrees, he turned his head and again caught the glow of light, and by it, he squinted at his surround­ings. He was in a tiny, bare-walled chamber, hardly large enough to accommodate the narrow, very hard cot he was lying on. It was made of woven reeds that exuded a musty vegetable odor. Craning his neck, he saw that one wall of the room was covered by a latticework of wooden bars, the crosspieces bound with rawhide thongs. The door was hinged on the outside and secured by a crude padlock and hasp. He smiled humorlessly. Not a room—a cell. The floor and walls were of old stone. A bucket occupied one corner.

  The light peeking in between the bars was pro­vided by a guttering torch jammed in a wall sconce in the corridor beyond. With a trembling hand, he fingered the tacky patch of drying blood on the right side of his head. Sharp pain drove through his head at the touch, and he couldn't repress a curse.

  From the corridor beyond, he heard Doc's anxious voice. "Ryan, good fellow, are you awake? John Barrymore, can you see if he is awake?"

  "Ryan? Are you all right in there?" J.B. asked.

  "No," he managed to say, dismayed by how weak and hoarse he sounded. "But I can manage."

  Slowly, he levered himself to a sitting position and, after enduring a wave of vertigo, he realized he was naked.

  "Krysty," he called. "You okay, lover?"

  His only response was the faint echo of his ques­tion. Doc coughed uncomfortably. "I regret to say she is not among us. Nor is young master Lauren."

  Ryan groaned. "Where are they?"

  "No idea," Mildred said. "All of us in the chariot were knocked on our collective asses by those metauh weapons. We came to a few minutes ago. You must have been hit harder than the rest of us, or you were still weak from the shot you took yesterday."

  Ryan forced himself to his feet. His arms and legs felt rubbery, and his heart beat with great, erratic poundings in his chest. Slowly, painfully, he man­aged to stumble over to and use the barred door as support. "Or Hell Eyes kicked me in the head, as an added little bonus for not being scared away."

  Gazing through the bars, he saw Doc, J.B. and Mildred all in identical cells and all naked. Doc, always tall and skeletally lean, looked pathetically vulnerable. His rib cage protruded from beneath his pale skin, and his hipbones jutted out as sharply as his ribs. His stomach was concave. He kept both hands clasped discreetly over his groin.

  J.B. looked a bit ludicrous, too, wearing nothing but his sallow skin and spectacles. He gripped the wooden bars tightly, his knuckles white.

  Mildred stood with one arm crooked over her breasts and her hand spread at the juncture of her thighs.

  The four cells formed the transverse bar of a T. J.B.'
s cell faced the juncture corridor. Ryan leaned his forehead against the bars, swallowing painfully. His throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper. "Was Krysty in the chariot with you?"

  "Yes," Doc answered dolefully. "It is safe to assume she and Jak were separated from us for some reason."

  Ryan inhaled slowly. Strength was returning to his limbs, the fierce pain in his chest fading to only a persistent ache. "Any idea where we are?"

  "No," J.B. said. "Came to in here, as naked as a newborn babe."

  "We could be in ancient Egypt for all we know," Doc commented. "Buried in a hidden chamber in the pyramid of Giza."

  "Don't go jolt-brained on us," J.B. ordered.

  "I have no intention of doing so," Doc retorted irritably. "However, you may have noticed how the citizens of Aten appeared to be of Egyptian ori­gin… all dark haired and dark skinned. Not an An­glo-Saxon in the bunch. The odds of Pharaoh finding only that physical type in the Barrens are so astro­nomical that they are not even worth discussing."

  Mildred chuckled lowly. "You're forgetting where we are."

  "I believe that was my topic, Dr. Wyeth."

  "We're in a movie set, Doc. In some remnant of California, not Egypt, ancient or otherwise. And if it's a movie set, it's basically an illusion. And there­fore, the so-called Egyptians we saw are probably the product of hair and skin dyes, to maintain the illusion for Pharaoh's benefit."

  Doc uttered a "Hmph" of interest. "Pray proceed."

  Mildred started to gesture, as was her habit when talking, then kept her hands where they were. "I got a good look at the citizens of Aten. Regardless of their coloring, their body and facial structures are not the Egyptian norm. I saw a few blue eyes in the mix, too."

  "So," Ryan said, "this is just some big play­acting set for Hell Eyes. Is that what you're say­ing?"