Labyrinth

by James Axler

  “Science Blows.”

  “Jolt Is God.”

  “So many muties, so little rope.”

  And across the wall in a banner of rusty ink that was most likely blood: “I want to eat your liver.” To Ryan the letters looked like they had been applied with a mop. Or perhaps a neck stump.

  Below the graffiti was a postscript so tiny and cramped that he had to lean close to the wall to make it out. It said, “I’m right behind you.”

  He didn’t turn and look, of course, but for an instant he thought about it, just as the writer had intended.

  With a resounding clunk all the lights went out, plunging the companions into pitch darkness.

  From Ryan’s left came the scrape of a chair and shit bucket being kicked over. “By the Three Kennedys!” Doc moaned in dismay.

  Heart pounding, Ryan cleared his SIG-Sauer pistol from shoulder leather. If the blackout was a prelude to an ambush, at least they were in a good defensive position, with the closed end of the alcove at their backs. Dropping into a fighting crouch, he let his eye adjust.

  After a few seconds he could see the fire’s faint orange glow at the doorway on the other side of the room. He smelled caustic smoke. Then a turbine started to whine on a floor far below them, and the lights came back on, only this time much weaker and with a more pronounced, almost strobelike flicker.

  There was no ambush; they were alone.

  “There’s no point in our searching the storage levels,” Ryan said as he reholstered his side arm. “This bird’s been picked clean.”

  Successful looting of predark caches boiled down to two things: luck and timing. The luck was in finding them, as the redoubts were well-hidden, usually deep underground, often in remote areas. Though the companions’ access to the mat-trans system gave them a big advantage over the competition, it didn’t guarantee piles of booty at the end of the day. Booty required timing; in other words, getting there first. They had faced this disappointment many times before, and they took it in stride, now. Coming up empty-handed was part of the game.

  To locate their position in the complex, and find the quickest way out, the companions started searching the adjoining rooms for a copy of the redoubt’s floorplan. They found it in a ransacked office, behind a sheet of Plexiglas screwed into wall. J.B. shattered the plate with his shotgun’s steel butt plate, and Krysty freed the paper map, which laid out and labeled the stronghold’s levels, and all the exits.

  From the other side of the room, Mildred called out to the others, “Hey, take a look at this.” She stood before a three-dimensional, injection-molded, plastic relief map that covered a section of wall, almost floor-to-ceiling. Though the map had been defaced and damaged, it was still readable.

  “From the lat-lon grid, that must be us,” she said, indicating a small red circle nestled between a pair of desert mesas at the upper left corner. Halfway down the map was the start of a long, diagonal stripe of blue, a stripe that grew wider and wider until it necked down and abruptly stopped, blocked by a narrow white barrier.

  The label on the barrier read: Pueblo Canyon Dam and Reservoir.

  “I was there on vacation once, about a hundred years ago,” Mildred said.

  “A boating holiday?” Doc asked.

  “No, it was before the dam was put in,” she said. “I remember there was a big stink over its getting built. The reservoir flooded a small town on the canyon floor, and Native American prehistoric sites along the cliffs were lost. For the right to build the dam, the federal government paid reparations to the Hopi tribe, and there was a land swap, too.

  “Not everyone was happy with the amount of money that changed hands, or with the relocation site. Supposedly because of the number of threats, during construction the area for hundreds of square miles was turned into a top security, no-fly zone. Military ground and air units kept out protesters and potential saboteurs. A lot of questions about the Pueblo Canyon project never got answered, such as, why it was necessary in the first place. And why approval for the funding and land trade was rushed through Congress. Once the dam was completed and the reservoir filled up, the fences came down, the military left and the controversy fell off the media radar.”

  “What do you make of this?” J.B. asked. He pointed at another red symbol, though smaller, in the middle of the swathe of blue, a short distance from the dam.

  “Could be another redoubt,” Ryan said.

  “In the middle of the reservoir?” Krysty said.

  “Mebbe an island?” Dix suggested.

  “Then it’d have to be man-made,” Mildred said. “The canyon is five hundred feet deep at that point.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s got a name,” Dix said, leaning closer to read the scratched lettering. “It looks like ‘M-i-n-o-t-a-u-r.’”

  “Does that mean anything to anybody?” Krysty asked the others.

  A beaming Doc provided the answer, delighted at the opportunity to put his classical education to use. “The name refers to a mythical monster of ancient Greece,” he said. “According to legend, it was the half-human offspring of a great bull and Pasiphae, wife of Minos, the king of Crete. The bull was a gift to the king from the sea god, Poseidon, who wanted Minos to sacrifice it to him. When the king didn’t kill the animal as directed, Poseidon punished him by making his wife fall in love with it. Minos kept the monstrous product of their union, known as the minotaur, and built a maze to contain it. The king exacted tribute from conquered lands in the form of human victims, which he sacrificed to the minotaur. Ultimately, the murderous beast was defeated by the hero Theseus, with the help of Minos’s daughter, Ariadne.”

  “Humans can’t make babies with other kinds of animals,” Krysty said.

  “Not in the usual way,” Mildred said. “And not in ancient Crete. But in a test tube, late twentieth century, with gene-splicing techniques…”

  With another loud clunk the light banks failed again, and again the companions found themselves surrounded by blackness.

  Two minutes passed, then five, while they waited with weapons drawn. This time the lights didn’t come back on.

  After igniting the torches they pulled from their packs, the companions followed the predark map, which turned out to be full of blind alleys. Most of the exit stairwells were blocked by floor-to-ceiling avalanches of concrete and steel. From the structural damage to the floors above, it was clear something disastrous had happened. The higher they climbed, the greater the destruction. Though they were only eight levels underground, it took them close to an hour to reach the surface. And in the end, they had to track the looters’ route through the air ducts.

  Standing outside in daylight, they could see why they had been beaten to the treasure trove. The redoubt’s secret entrance had been uncovered by a massive landslide, which had tumbled house-sized blocks of sandstone onto the desert valley. There was no way of telling if the earthquake had been natural, or caused by the shock wave of a distant nuclear strike.

  Ryan shielded his eye from the sun’s brutal glare, surveying a landscape of pale brown mesa and pancake-flat plain shimmering in 120-degree, midday heat. For as far as he could see in every direction, it was just rocks and sand. Sand and rocks.

  “Dear friends, I fear Judgment Day is upon us at last,” Doc remarked. “Our myriad sins have finally landed us in the pit of hell.”

  “Or on the moon,” Mildred added.

  Krysty knelt in the shade cast by a fallen sandstone block. From a crevice at the base of the rock, she plucked a withered scrap of plant. The delicate white petals broke off in her fingers; the yellow center fell to fine dust on her palm. If Deathlands’s brave little daisy was a testament to adaptability and survival in the most hostile of environments, it was also a canary in a coal mine. “If we stay here long, we’ll die,” Krysty said.

  Jak squinted into the glare. “Go that way,” he said, pointing south across the desolation.

  “Can’t miss the reservoir if we walk in that direction,” J.B. agreed.
<
br />   “Too hot to break trail, now,” Ryan said. “We’ll start after sunset. Check your canteens. Whatever water we’ve got, it has to last until we get there.”

  Chapter Two

  Shielding his nose and mouth with his hand, Ewald Starr held the torch at arm’s length. Firelight danced over the corpse’s blackened rib stubs and caved-in breastbone, over a skull cratered from forehead to lower jaw. One leg was missing all the way to the hip. The body cavity had been plundered of its organs; the bones stripped of flesh and left mired in a sticky-looking, yellowish puddle. The fluid had splattered low across the corridor’s concrete wall.

  Whatever the yellow stuff was, it stank, thermonuclear.

  A combination of bearpit, toxic chemical spill and rotting meat.

  In the close quarters of Pueblo Dam’s service hallway, the rank odor hung like an acid fog.

  Ewald listened hard, but all he could hear was the chorus of hissing torches—the greasy black smoke they gave off billowed along the low, pipe-lined ceiling, driven by a steady, gentle breeze.

  Three other men stood with their backs against the opposite wall, faces pale and pained, torches clutched in trembling hands. Paralyzed.

  Ewald scowled at them.

  Fear was the enemy.

  The preamble to defeat.

  Tall and dark-skinned, he wore his waist-long black hair woven into a thick braid and coiled on top of his head. This rat’s nest was held in place with a pin contraption made of twists of bailing wire. A spiral of decorative branding encircled his chin, creating an angry, welted goatee. The scars of healed blade slashes and bullet wounds on his massive forearms, bare chest, and neck were lost amid larger masses of discoloration, signs of his having survived prolonged torture and punishment by burning and whipping.

  Ewald hunkered down next to the body, holding his breath against the caustic fumes. The victim’s clothing was a wadded mass of wet rags at the foot of the wall. Examining the jutting hip bones more carefully, he saw that when the missing right leg had been severed, a corner of the pelvis and the entire hip socket had been cut away. The clean, down-angled slice looked like a sword or ax strike. It took a hell of a sharp blade to do something like that. A hell of a powerful swordsman, too. As to what all the nasty yellow goo was, or where it had come from, he had no clue.

  When he straightened, something glinted at him from the tangled rags. A single, spent, centerfire shell casing.

  “Here, take this,” Ewald said, passing his torch to the closest man. The whip-lean graybeard named Tolliver accepted the burden, his rheumy gaze never shifting from the mess on the floor.

  “Give me your shirt,” Ewald said to the big man standing on Tolliver’s right.

  Though they were the almost same height and weight, where Ewald was all muscle, Dunbar was all flab—a slope-shouldered blob. This morning’s sudden, shocking reversal of fortune had silenced his constant, annoying chatter. Meekly obeying Ewald’s command, he stripped off his tent-sized, desert camo BDU shirt. His pasty white skin hung in loose, floppy rolls around his waist, like a suit of clothes three sizes too big.

  Wrapping his hand in a corner of the garment, Ewald carefully shifted the remains. The skeleton came apart at his touch, ribs and spinal column separating. As he started lifting and tossing the loose bones aside, he saw that they sat in a shallow depression in the concrete, a depression concealed by the elongated puddle that filled it. Under the broken sternum lay a stamped steel prize.

  When Ewald fished out the Uzi subgun, its fixed wooden butt and forestock sloughed off the frame like so much soggy cardboard. The plastic pistol grip seemed undamaged. He shook slime from the barrel, then mopped the weapon clean with Dunbar’s shirt. The blueing had been stripped from the metal, its surface left faintly pitted.

  Ewald pulled back on the cocking knob. The action stuck for a second, then came free, ejecting an unfired, 9 mm cartridge that skittered across the floor. He detached the staggered row, stick mag from the butt of the grip and did a round count. Including the ejected bullet, there were twenty-nine Parabellum bullets left in the clip. He unloaded the mag, wiping down and checking each round for corrosion. Before he slapped the reloaded clip back in place, he locked the action open and looked down the barrel. In the torch light he could see pits but no obstructions or cracks. He dry-fired the Uzi, and the pin snapped crisply.

  The sound startled the man on Tolliver’s left, making his narrow shoulders jerk. Willjay was still in his teens, tall, gangly, with a skanky mop of brown dreadlocks. From his expression, he was on the verge of bawling for his mother. Something that Tolliver and Dunbar, preoccupied with their own self-pity, failed to notice.

  The dimmie trio had been part of a convoy that had tried to cross the great desert from the south. Tried and failed. One after another, their wags had broken down. And when the last wag gave up the ghost, they’d abandoned their possessions and started walking. Two dozen of them. In a few days the food ran out, then the water. After that, the heat quickly took its toll.

  Tolliver, Dunbar and Willjay, the convoy’s sole survivors, thought they’d found the Promised Land when they’d accidently stumbled onto the canyon.

  As had Ewald Starr, when he showed up two days later, fresh from his own ordeal to the northwest.

  Ever the wolf among sheep, Ewald had wide experience in scheming and backstabbing—and in murder for profit. In this case the sheep wore ankle-length, homespun robes the color of scorched porridge. From the moment he saw the triple stupe grins of the canyon’s permanent residents, he figured he’d own the place in a couple of weeks, tops. All he needed was a few like-minded individuals to help with the initial round of wet work. Once he had things well in hand, he’d make sex slaves of the suitable women and men, and field slaves of the rest.

  All hail Baron Ewald Starr.

  Caught up in the potential of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, there was no denying he had let his guard slip. Not that his customary vigilance would have guaranteed a different outcome. Pilgrim Plavik and his flock kept their plans well-concealed. Ewald had seen no weapons, other than hoes and shovels, until that morning. Rudely awakened by his hosts, he stared into their massed gunbarrels, and was relieved of his own. Escape was impossible. When they marched him outside into the street, he saw that the other three travelers had been likewise overwhelmed and disarmed.

  Protests and demands for an explanation fell on deaf ears.

  The entire ville turned out for the procession, men, women, children, all grinning and chanting nonsense while the pilgrim himself led the way to the top of the dam. With blaster muzzles pressed to their heads, Ewald and the others had been forced through an open manhole, and onto a series of rungs set in the wall, rungs leading down into impenetrable gloom. As they clung there for dear life, lit torches were tossed in, then the manhole cover slid shut, and the light from above went out.

  Honored guests had become prisoners in a vast, concrete dungeon.

  And the bad news was just beginning.

  The man or woman whose bones littered the corridor had fired just one shot in self-defense—a single shot from a machine pistol capable of firing 600 rounds a minute-before being almost cut in two.

  “Whatever chilled that one,” Tolliver said in a shaky voice, “it was something triple-mean.”

  “Something mutie…” Dunbar whispered.

  Ewald Starr knew all about muties. Over the years, he’d slaughtered the two-legged, homicidal freaks in face-to-face battle, in ambush, as a mercie, as a sec man. And whenever ammo was plentiful, he’d hunted them for sport. Stickies, scalies, cannies, stumpies—nukeday’s genetic horrorshow—were no match for a functioning Uzi in the hands of a professional chiller.

  “We’re gonna die in here,” Willjay moaned. “We’re all gonna die!”

  Before the teenager’s panic could contaminate the other two, Ewald racked a round and snarled, “Dead bastard couldn’t shoot straight.” Weapon ready to rip, he glared at the boy. Willjay caught his meaning and
shut up quick, a decision that saved his life.

  “But what’re we gonna do?” Tolliver asked the dark-skinned man. “How’re we gonna get out of here?”

  “It’s simple,” Ewald told him. “We work our way down to the bottom of the dam. There should be an opening on the spillway side.”

  “And if there isn’t?” Tolliver said.

  “Then we’ll nukin’ make one. Follow me, and make sure you all stay close.”

  Ewald didn’t want tight ranks because he gave a radblast about their safety. The way he saw he it, the more baitfish there were in a school, the better the odds of being the one that didn’t get eaten.

  Halfway along the gritty, weeping hallway he found the door to a stairwell. When he opened it, the stench drove them back on their heels.

  “Nuke shit!” Tolliver groaned, clapping a hand over his nose and mouth.

  “More deaduns down there,” Dunbar said. “Stairs could be some kind of a trap.”

  “Yeah, but it’s the fastest way out of here,” Ewald said. “Mebbe the only way out of here. You got a better idea? Mebbe you want to spend some time exploring the nooks and crannies of this place?”

  Dunbar shook his head so hard his belly flab trembled. They all shook their heads.

  “Then let’s do it,” the ex-mercie said.

  With Ewald on point, they carefully descended the stairs in close formation. The light from their torches didn’t penetrate far, and with every step, the odor of death grew more intense.

  Two floors down they discovered its source. On the concrete landing lay the eroded remains of several corpses, their burned-out torches, and a pool of yellow bile. Tolliver scooped up a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun that had either been dropped or thrown clear of the puddle. When he broke open the 12-gauge, its ejectors flipped out empty plastic hulls.

  Ewald had already figured as much. On the facing wall were two, foot-wide, buckshot blast craters. One stood at belly height; the other was ten feet above it. There was no blood spatter in or around either of the craters. The shotgunner had missed twice at point blank range. Ewald guessed that either the second shot had been fired wild in the air, or the intended target was clinging to the wall up there. Stickies had suckers on their palms and feet; they liked to drop on unsuspecting victims. That didn’t explain the sword slice—stickies didn’t use weapons as a rule, preferring to tear their prey apart with their bare hands. Nor did it explain the goo.