Nightmare Passage

by James Axler

  The open-handed slap was stinging, shocking. She stumbled back a pace, rage flaring bright and hot within her. Mildred knew the psychology behind Mimses's display—it wasn't about sex at all, but about control and power. She had only two options at the moment. For the sake of her pride, she could plant her foot where Mimses's hand had been a few moments before, but she would probably die—or end up wishing she had. He would probably enjoy her physical assault so he could indulge his sadistic impulses in either torturing or killing her.

  Or she could feign humility and fear.

  Mildred brought her hand up to her face. "Please…I'll do what you want." She forced a few tears to her eyes, wetting her lashes and spilling down her cheeks.

  Mimses beamed at her. "Of course you will, brown sugar." The grin twisted into a fierce glower. "You better not give me any more of this 'pervert' bullshit, or I'll rip your bowels out and make you feed them to the work gangs. I decide what's per­verted around here and what's not. Understand me?"

  Mildred nodded meekly. "Yes, sir."

  Mimses smirked, as if pleased to be called sir without having expressly ordered it. "Where did you and your friends come from? Where'd you get your blasters?"

  "They're not really my friends," Mildred said. "They had weapons when I joined up with them about a month ago. They kind of just forced me to fall in with them. You know how it is with scav­engers, living off the land."

  She managed to squeeze out a few more tears. "We came across the Barrens. We almost died, all of us."

  Mimses regarded her silently for a long moment, then he pounded his right fist hard into Mildred's bare midriff. She folded over his arm, lungs emp­tying of air with an agonized woof. She was only dimly aware of falling to the cold, slick floor. Mimses nudged her with a foot while she gasped and gagged.

  "You're fucking lying to me, brown sugar," he said in a low croon. "You were in Fort Fubar and killed my Incarnates to get their chariot. Do you have any idea how hard it is to train new recruits?"

  The man's voice grew shrill with outrage. "You and your scavenger friends chilled the cream of the cream. It took three years to train them, and you left them to lie like so much vulture's meat! Worse, you did it in front of the citizens. You've handed me a real—what's the old term?—public-relations night­mare."

  Mimses stopped prodding her. He kicked her hard on her left thigh. She had no breath to cry out. Snarl­ing, he continued, "You were in Pharaoh's tomb, too. I ought to toss you into the Incarnates' barracks so they can have a little fun with you, and if there's anything left of your lovely hide, I'll strip it off an inch at a time…make myself a new pair of sandals with it."

  Raising his voice, Mimses called to the pair of guards. "Get her out of here. Take her to the women's quarters, but keep her isolated. I'll talk to that old bag of bones after supper."

  She heard footsteps, then felt hands close around her upper arms and heave her up to her feet. The two men hustled her away from the terrace and out of the hall. By the time they went through the door­way, she was able to breathe more or less normally again, though her stomach muscles screamed with pain.

  Mildred was escorted into a corridor that led off to the left from Mimses's hall. The passageway wasn't very broad, but it was long. She noted an absence of guards prowling the corridors. She could only presume that Pharaoh was so confident in his power, he saw no reason for security forces other than the Incarnates.

  The men turned Mildred right at an intersection and stopped before a door bound with strips of brass. One of the men hammered on it with a fist. A small wicket in the door slid open, and a dusky face peered out with bland eyes.

  "Open up, Grandmother," the guard said. "Mimses wants this woman looked after, but locked away from the rest of your bitches."

  The wicket snapped shut, and an instant later the door swung wide. From within came an echo of laughter and scraps of feminine voices. Mildred didn't move. The place smelled like a trap. The very air reeked of danger and worse.

  One of her escorts planted a hand between her shoulder blades and propelled her over the threshold. The door slammed shut immediately behind her.

  Mildred whirled, and just managed to bite back a cry of revulsion.

  A woman stood beside the door, her incredibly obese body covered with a linen caftan that covered her from neck to ankle. Only her arms were bare, two shapeless masses of flesh ending in blunt-fingered hands. Her features had long ago blurred into a sagging mass. Her hair was thin and white and hung about her shoulders like a tattered shroud.

  Her eyes were a bright sky blue, and her voice, when she spoke, was surprisingly mild and sugary. "We haven't had a new arrival in a long time. Ev­erybody here calls me Grandmother. What are you called?"

  "Mildred."

  Grandmother smiled. "Well, Mildred, if you do as I say, we'll get along fine. Come with me."

  In a shambling, lumbering gait, she led the way through a series of doorless, box-shaped chambers. Torches burned here and there along the walls, and by their flickering, smoky glare, Mildred saw rows upon rows of narrow cots and many, many women, most of them so young they were still girls. They were engaged in all manner of activities—sewing, sweeping, chatting, scrubbing the floors or stretched out on the cots sleeping the sleep of the utterly ex­hausted.

  She saw very little modesty among the sea of girls—most of the women walked, worked and talked in the nude. Mildred wasn't surprised, inas­much as the standard articles of women's clothing were so scanty or diaphanous they might as well not wear anything at all. Aten was a patriarchy in every sense of the word, a sexist pig's fantasy world come to life. The whole atmosphere was charged with an anything-goes kind of erotic energy, wicked yet dis­turbingly arousing at the same time.

  Mildred understood she was in the dormitory for the female servant class of the city, not the hand­maidens of ranking citizens such as Mimses, but the drudges, the cooks, the scullery maids. Their situa­tion probably wasn't as extreme as slavery, but it wasn't very many notches above that state, either.

  Mildred followed the jiggling bulk of Grand­mother down an aisle formed by two parallel lines of large wooden tubs. A few women soaked in them, while others sponged an oily brown substance over their bodies.

  Grandmother wheezed, "At least you won't need a treatment before you're sent out to perform your duties."

  "What is that stuff?" Mildred asked. "Some kind of vegetable-derived stain?"

  Grandmother shot her a steely glare over one sloping shoulder. "It is the color of Aten, the people of Pharaoh. That is all you need to know."

  Mildred couldn't help herself. With a derisive chuckle, she argued, "Granny, you don't have the color of Aten. Is that why you're down here, as the serving-girl wardess?"

  "A good guess," Grandmother responded. "We serve Pharaoh when and where we can. You'll come to appreciate that."

  Mildred eyed the woman surreptitiously, gauging her age and combining it with her slovenly appear­ance. "You're one of the original crew of Fort F-bar, aren't you?"

  Reprovingly, Grandmother said, "We don't speak of that blasphemous half acre of hell, child. It's for­bidden."

  Mildred started to say something else, then shut her mouth.

  Grandmother stopped before a low, open door­way. It was hardly tall enough for Mildred to step through without stooping, and that made it very low indeed. Gesturing with one hand, Grandmother an­nounced, "Here's your room, child. It's all yours, you don't have to share it with anyone else—at least until I'm told otherwise."

  It was very dark inside the cell, but Mildred took a determined breath, bent her head and walked in. The door shut behind her, and a locking bar rattled and clanked. A small, barred grille at eye level on the door allowed a feeble sort of light to filter through.

  The cell was about eight feet wide and twelve long. There was no cot or pallet to sleep on, but it did have a toilet and tank in one corner. She sat down on the hard stone floor and rubbed her eyes.

  Mildr
ed had visited a lot of strange places, been in many a bizarre situation since Ryan Cawdor had revived her from cryogenic stasis, but this place and this situation was so strange, so utterly bizarre, she wondered if she were still in the throes of a jump nightmare.

  A murmur of lilting voices reached her through the door grille. Though she couldn't know for sure, she doubted the women's dormitory was part of the original movie-set blueprints, despite DeMille's leg­endary reputation as a strict taskmaster.

  Sixteen years was more than enough time to build additions and tinker with the original specs. But the building materials had to come from somewhere, es­pecially the stone used in the pyramids.

  The walls threw back her heavy sigh. She won­dered about Jak, about Krysty and what Mimses would do when Doc started to quote Dante or Lewis Carroll. If he spoke the truth about his origins, and Mildred's, then their lives were probably forfeit. She feared for him. She feared for them all.

  She couldn't work off her stress by pacing the cell, so eventually she lay on the floor, pillowing her head on her arms. In spite of her anxiety, she fell asleep.

  She was jarred awake, almost immediately it seemed, by the rattle of the door's locking bar. She sat up, blinking, stiff and aching from sleeping on the hard floor. The door swung open, and a slim girl in a white frock came in, carrying a wicker tray containing a bowl of some kind of soup, a wooden spoon, a thick slice of darkish bread and a jug of water.

  The girl kneeled, carefully placing the tray on the floor in front of Mildred. Like all the rest, she had black hair and a dusky-hued complexion. However, her eyes were pale, perhaps gray or a light blue. A touch of pink lipstick brightened her mouth.

  Stifling a yawn, Mildred asked, "What time is it?"

  "The dawn bell has just been rung. Here is break­fast."

  The girl cast a swift glance behind her and said softly, "My name is Kela. Nefron sent me to bring you word of the one called Jak."

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jak Lauren couldn't read, write or cipher very well, but he excelled at calculating the odds.

  He came out of his handspring in time to see J.B., Mildred, Krysty and Doc writhing under the com­bined energy assaults of four metauh staves. He watched as they slumped unconscious, J.B. tumbling limply out of the chariot, his beloved fedora falling to the dust.

  Though shouting, running pandemonium ruled the plaza, Jak was able to focus on several sights more or less simultaneously, all of them occurring within heartbeats of one another.

  Ryan spun in the direction of the chariot at the precise instant a giant of a man, like a bronze statue given life and mobility, stalked out of the press of the milling Incarnates. The V prongs of the silver rod in his hand thrust toward the one-eyed man's back. A shout of warning rose in Jak's throat, but before it left his lips, Ryan crashed heavily to the ground, to lie motionless on his face.

  Three animal-helmeted men turned savage eyes on him, and Jak saw three more racing to flank him. Ryan had long ago impressed on him the importance of counting bullets in a firefight, and he knew he had only four rounds for six rapidly moving targets.

  Jak pivoted on his heel, put his head back and started to run. He heard a deep voice shout, "Take him alive!"

  "Easy to say, stupe," Jak whispered.

  A raging chorus of orders and counterorders erupted behind him. He raced across the plaza, feel­ing as if his feet scarcely touched the ground. He ran down the narrow side lane that J.B. had fol­lowed, then up a narrow alley hardly wide enough to accommodate his slight frame. The much larger Incarnates would find it difficult and painful to ne­gotiate.

  Emerging into a broad street, he spotted a stone stair leading to the roof of a building. He loped up the steps, taking three at a time. Though he was the smallest in stature of his companions, except for Dean, he was the fleetest of foot and arguably had the deepest reservoir of stamina.

  Running at full sprint across the flat surface of the roof, he took an alleyway yawning before him in a single leap. He misjudged the distance of the adja­cent building, came down too low, fumbled his one-handed grip on the edge, scraped skin from his wrist and pulled himself onto the other side. He dashed across the top of the building and jumped over an­other alley, down a few feet to a tiled rooftop.

  Only then did he pause to look back and catch his breath. Though the early-morning sun wasn't even at midpoint in the sky, the blazing heat and the exertion had already drenched him in sweat. His shock of white hair was a soaking mass, and salty, stinging trickles slid into his eyes. He considered removing his camouflage clothing, not only because of its weight but because there was nothing in sight to use as decent cover. At any rate, his white skin and ruby eyes couldn't be disguised.

  He listened intently, but he heard very little aside from a distant shout. He had lost his pursuers. Swinging over the edge of the roof, he dropped down into the street below, landing lightly in a crouch. He moved along the street warily, trying to stay close to the sparse shadows.

  The street funneled into a lane, then narrowed to an alley. The short, squat buildings hemming it had recessed doorways and windows covered with wooden shutters. It was fairly shady there, not yet exposed to the direct blast of the sun.

  As Jak walked, he encountered no one, not even a dog. He crept along the alley, holstering his blaster and unsheathing one of his flat, leaf-bladed throwing knives. If he ran into trouble, he didn't want to pin­point his position by firing the Colt. A blade was just as quick, just as deadly and it was silent.

  Jak had no plan except to evade capture. Escaping the city and leaving his friends behind never entered his mind.

  A voice suddenly wafted to him on the air, a fe­male voice lifted in a lilting song. A very small space, fifteen inches wide, between two of the build­ings was the only bolt-hole available. As thin as he was, it was a struggle to cram himself in sideways, pushing himself back from the alley. He waited, staring out with slitted eyes, his thumb resting on the razor-keen edge of his knife.

  A nearly naked girl strode down the alley, her slender body draped in the filmiest of coverings. Her heavy black hair was as shiny as a raven's wing and rested on her shoulders. Impudent breasts swayed beneath the thin material. She carried a water jug in one hand and she sang as she walked.

  "The evening river's calm and still

  The evening flowers drink their fill

  The north wind comes to cool the night

  And put the river's waves to flight."

  Jak stared, entranced by the girl's grace, sensual beauty and sweet voice.

  Lingering grief over the deaths of his wife, Chris­tina, and their infant daughter had frozen the softer emotions in him, particularly toward members of the opposite sex. That ice had thawed a bit during a brief sojourn in Japan a few months earlier, when he had been deeply attracted to a young geisha. But Issie had apparently perished in an earthquake, and the ice had slowly formed again.

  The singing girl with her glossy black hair, soft pink lips and petite figure reminded him strongly of Issie.

  She passed out of sight, still singing.

  "The ripples wash the moon away,

  And will not let the starlight stay."

  The sound of a door slamming cut off the song, and silence fell over the alley again. Jak released a slow, pent-up breath of mingled relief and regret. He worked his way back out of the opening. Because of the scrape of his clothing on the walls, he didn't hear the faint scrabbling of feet until he poked his head out. A hand closed over his long hair in an agonizingly tight grip, and a tremendous, muscle-wrenching jerk catapulted him out into the alleyway. Through the tears of pain that sprang to his eyes, he caught a fragmented glimpse of a scowling bull's head.

  Jak kicked himself off the ground, flowing into the momentum of the heave. He slashed backward and blindly with his knife, feeling the tip drag through flesh.

  The hand tangled in his hair opened, he heard a grunt and Jak flung himself into a forward somer­sault. He came out of it on on
e knee, blade held between thumb and index finger, arm cocked for a throw.

  He stared into the double prongs of a metauh rod, the V only inches away from his face. He didn't hesitate—his leg muscles propelled him in a side­ways lunge to the left, his body angled parallel with the ground. His arm and wrist snapped out and down in perfect coordination of eye and hand. He wasn't able to see if or where the knife struck because his optic nerves were suddenly overwhelmed by a flare of light.

  Jak hit the ground with all the grace of a piece of cordwood. His entire left side was numb, the only sensation a dull, prickly creeping under the flesh. His heart thudded slowly, lurching in his chest. Breathing took such a deliberate, conscious effort than he didn't bother with it for what seemed like a long time.

  His vision cleared fast, though, and he saw the Incarnate staring with foolish eyes at the knife hilt vibrating in his breast. A red line of blood shone on his ribs where Jak had nicked him.

  Slowly, the bull-helmeted man dropped to his knees, the metauh rod falling to the street dust. He gazed beseechingly toward Jak and in an aspirated whisper, said, "I am the incarnation of Serapis. Tell me this is not happening to Serapis."

  Then he fell forward on his face, expiring very quickly and quietly for such a big man.

  Jak tried to speak, found he couldn't.

  He sucked in a noisy, rattling gasp and clawed himself forward by the strength of his right arm. His head pounded, like sharp hammers were beating on the inside of his skull.

  He fought, wrestled and cursed his way to his knees, then to his feet. The buildings tilted and spun all around him. He staggered, fell to hands and knees, forced himself erect again, face glistening with sweat. His left leg shook violently in a tremor, and he dragged it behind him like a sack of flour, the toe of his boot gouging a furrow in the sand.

  "Stupe," he husked out. "Triple stupe."

  He fixed his eyes on the nearest doorway, six yards or six thousand miles away. He stumbled, reeled and fell into it, leaning his entire weight against the door.