Labyrinth

by James Axler

  Ryan dived down the steps, shoulder-blocking J.B. out of the line of fire. The Armorer stumbled, dropping the stone he was carrying, and it fell down the steps, nearly rolling over Krysty and Jubilee before it hit bottom.

  “Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed, screwing his hat down.

  They hadn’t made it inside the redoubt. Their tiny force was divided. The full weight of the ville was coming down on them, and they were pinned down in a twelve-foot-deep pit.

  J.B. had described the situation pretty well.

  Ryan grabbed the Steyr, grimacing at the death zone a few feet above his head. Waves of bullets continued to zing off the boulders and top step. Those that missed whanged into the tempered concrete above the vanadium door. The high-powered, centerfire slugs cratered the concrete; the black-powder pistol and rifle balls flattened or shattered against it.

  Returning fire was going to be a dangerous proposition.

  “We’ve got to get in the redoubt, and quick,” Mildred said. Scrambling to the bottom of the steps, she tried to lift one of the rocks out of the way by herself, but it was far too heavy for her. Though she strained, she could hardly budge it.

  “Mildred,” Ryan said, “let J.B. do that. Take his shotgun.”

  As J.B. passed the weapon over to her, Ryan told him, “If you stack the rocks on top of each other on the steps, there might be just enough room to open the door. We’ll hold them off as long as we can.”

  Mildred and Ryan took opposite sides of the stairs, easing up the last few steps on their butts. Right away, they could see that the rocks he and J.B. had thrown out provided some cover from the onslaught, deflecting incoming rounds and giving them something to shoot around.

  Crawling forward onto the grass a yard or so, Ryan brought the Steyr tight to his shoulder. It was too dark to use the scope, but not too dark to see shadowy human forms crossing the open ground and filtering along the line of trees.

  Then a frag gren detonated with a resounding boom in the middle of the grassy field. The flash lit up a sixty-foot circle and revealed a roiling plume of smoke.

  In the brief flare of light, Ryan picked out a figure running right at him. He managed to snap off a shot an instant after the flash faded, but he couldn’t see if he’d hit the guy. As he cycled the bolt, flipping out the spent casing, the thudding began. Bodies and body parts blown into the air started bouncing back to the grass.

  Before the ville folk could resume firing, two more grens detonated, cutting off the screams of the wounded. The explosions were about thirty feet apart and tight against the tree line on Doc’s side of the square. Heavy limbs cracked and crashed down, and more body parts thudded onto the grass.

  The chorus of anguished shrieks and moans was drowned out by massed blasterfire from the far end of the park. Ryan aimed well below one of the muzzle-flashes and squeezed off a round. He held low because the range was way short for the Steyr’s three-hundred-yard zero.

  Despite Mildred’s prowess with small arms, the hundred-yard distance to target was too much for her short-barreled weapons. She was forced to keep low and hold her fire, conserving her ammo until the ville folk got closer.

  Which they were doing, by the second.

  Ryan ignored incoming bullets thwacking the rocks in front of him and throwing dirt in his face, and methodically fired at the muzzle-flashes, giving the opposition something to think about. Behind him, J.B. was struggling with boulders. Under the clatter of bullet impacts, Ryan could hear him cursing. Krysty couldn’t help him; she was holding Jubilee down, trying to keep her out of danger.

  The combination of grens and Ryan’s sharpshooting forced the attackers to flee the open ground. They scurried to the trees on both sides of the park, and continued to advance.

  When they were forty yards away, Mildred shouldered the pump gun and opened fire. She sent blast after blast of double-aught buck sailing between the trees. With only eleven .31-caliber balls in each round, scoring a hit on moving targets was a matter of dumb luck. But the hellish rain of lead slowed them, and that was more important.

  “J.B.,” Ryan said over his shoulder, “is it clear, yet?”

  “A few more rocks to go,” he groaned. “We’ve got to give it up, Ryan,” Krysty shouted. “Got to make a break for it, now!”

  She couldn’t see, but it was already too late for that.

  Ryan dug a gren from his coat pocket. He primed and chucked it.

  The flash bang’s paralyzing light and sound caught five or six attackers between tree trunks.

  For a moment they stood like statues, caught in midstride.

  Ryan and Mildred mowed them down with buckshot and .308s.

  It worked so well, Ryan quickly tossed another gren, but he put a little too much on it. It landed high in the branches of a tree, then exploded. The tree burst into flames, limbs and leaves blooming in a brilliant orange ball.

  In the light of the fireball, they saw what they were up against. The whole radblasted ville was coming after them.

  The scattergun empty, Mildred hauled out her Czech ZKR and started picking off the running men like shooting gallery targets. The .38 didn’t pack enough wallop to chill them dead. Unlike shooting gallery targets, these ducks thrashed and kicked in the grass, screaming.

  The window of opportunity was rapidly slamming shut.

  “J.B.?” Ryan shouted. “J.B.?”

  “Almost there, almost…”

  “Krysty,” Ryan said, “get the keypad.”

  Leaving the girl at the bottom of the steps, she rushed to the door and its electronic lock.

  “Now,” he said. “Key in the sequence, now.”

  From above and behind him, Ryan heard the sound of running feet. Before he turned, he knew what it was. And that it was something he couldn’t defend against. The ville folk had flanked the redoubt and climbed onto the roof from the rear.

  Rolling to his side, with the Steyr braced against his hip, he looked up at a row of blaster barrels pointing down at them.

  Someone on the roof shouted, “Hold your fire! We’ve got ’em!”

  The shooting stopped.

  “Ryan, you’ve got nowhere to run.”

  Ryan recognized Plavik’s voice. He was on the roof, too, but standing safely back from the edge.

  Krysty stood at the redoubt keypad, her fingers poised to tap in the open command.

  But a large boulder still blocked the door.

  Ryan did the math, and it came up short. No way could they trigger the entrance lock, move the obstacle and get through the doorway before they were shot to pieces.

  He looked at Krysty, then Mildred and shook his head. This hand had been played out. He said, “We’re done.”

  Mildred lowered her revolver.

  J.B. looked at the heap of rocks they’d moved and spit. “All for nothing,” he said.

  “Stand up slowly, one at a time and throw your blasters out on the ground,” Plavik said.

  Ryan carefully set the Steyr in the grass and rose from the dirt. As he raised his empty hands in the air, he could feel a hundred sets of blastersights aimed at his heart.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Krysty and the others were driven, single file, their wrists bound behind their backs, down a gauntlet of angry survivors. There was shoving, kicking and punching, but most of the abuse consisted of shouted insults and spitting. Lots of spitting.

  It could have been, perhaps should have been, much worse.

  Starlight revealed the carnage the companion had wrought: scorched circles in the earth where the grens had gone off; scorched bodies and parts of bodies in the grass, crumpled, unmoving figures scattered around the bases of the trees.

  Krysty saw many dead on the ground, but very few wounded being tended to. Ryan and Mildred had hit what they were aiming at. Not just men, either. Several of the pilgrims’ wives had been chilled. She guessed Little Pueblo had lost between twenty and thirty residents in the attack, enough to impact their ability to farm the fields. On the other han
d, there were that many fewer mouths to feed.

  Perhaps that’s why the crowd hadn’t torn them to pieces, she thought. Then another idea occurred to her. Maybe they had an even more painful punishment in mind.

  Although she would have preferred a neat, quick, permanent escape via the redoubt’s mat-trans unit, Krysty felt no guilt over the considerable loss of life. She and Ryan and the others hadn’t come into town looking for trouble, but when it found them, backing down wasn’t an option. You didn’t last long in the hellscape if you weren’t willing to fight to the death. There was always someone or something ready to take advantage of perceived weakness. And more often than not, an offer to negotiate a solution was seen as vulnerability, and an opening for immediate attack.

  It was understandable that people didn’t want to lose what little they had. Whether it was freedom in the case of the companions, or a way of life in the case of the ville folk. As always, it all came down to blasters and blades. To keeping what you had, or giving it up. And giving it up usually meant giving up breathing, because that was the only way to eliminate retaliation, with interest, at some later date.

  Even though a lot of folks had died, Krysty and the others were no closer to their goal; in fact, they were farther from it. Prisoners at the mercy of their captors. Krysty knew Jak and Doc weren’t among the dead. If they’d been chilled, Pilgrim Plavik would’ve made a point of showing them the bodies. With Jak and Doc on the loose, there was a still chance of counterattack and escape—they wouldn’t leave their friends behind.

  Plavik led the way across the street and up the steps of city hall. When they were inside the foyer, he directed two of the other pilgrims and a half-dozen field hands to take charge of Ryan, J.B. and Jubilee. “Escort those three to the holding cells,” he said.

  Ryan, J.B. and the girl went down the stairs at blasterpoint, while Krysty, Mildred, Plavik and all the pilgrims’ surviving wives climbed to the second floor and entered the room they’d left twenty minutes ago.

  After the torches had been lit, Krysty and Mildred were forced into chairs, and the wives retied their wrists to the chair arms, and their ankles to the legs, using turns of heavy cord.

  The room was packed with people. Almost all of them were women. Looking around, Krysty counted twenty-eight wives. They weren’t hiding their weapons, now. Every one of them either had a flapjack holster belted around their waist, or a handblaster hanging from a neck lanyard. The pistols were black powder. All revolvers, replica Colts and Remingtons in either .36 or .44 caliber. Some of the blasters had lost their grips, and been repaired with wraps of duct tape. Black powder was an uneven burning and inefficient propellant. From all the black-speckled hands and fingers, the women of Little Pueblo had fought at least as hard as the men.

  Pilgrim Plavik looked on from the doorway, his long arms folded across his chest, until the prisoners were secured. As he approached Mildred and Krysty, his eyes seethed with cold fury.

  “You’ve done Little Pueblo a great injury tonight,” he said. “Out of ignorance and greed you have upset the balance of our lives and put us all at terrible risk.”

  Krysty tested her bonds. She couldn’t move her arms or her legs, and the ropes were cinched so tight around her ankles that she was already starting to lose feeling in her toes.

  “Only the bravery and fighting skill of our people kept you from violating our most sacred shrine,” he said. “The tomb of Bob and Enid.”

  “Blessed be,” pronounced the assembled wives and pilgrims.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Mildred grumbled under her breath.

  Krysty reckoned the ville folk had paid mighty dearly to protect their holy place. Unfortunately, none of the payees were pilgrims. It appeared that Plavik and his ilk had led the assault from the rear, keeping as many bodies as possible between them and the action.

  “For the crime of attempted desecration,” Plavik went on, “Ryan and the short man will pay the ultimate price at dawn tomorrow.”

  “You’re going to execute them?” Krysty said, her face turning into a mask of pure hate.

  Plavik shook his head. “There would be no gain in that. We will offer them to the greater glory of…”

  “Bob and Enid?” Mildred suggested.

  Plavik nodded.

  Somehow that knowledge didn’t reassure Krysty.

  “And what about us?” Mildred pressed.

  “You must pay for the crime as well, but unlike your male friends you have trading value. So for you there will be pain and no sacrifice. Members of your own sex will deal out the punishment.” Plavik turned to the wives and said, “Remember, no scratching. No biting. No broken bones.”

  The women of Little Pueblo looked plenty eager to get on with it.

  Pleased, Plavik and the other pilgrims left the room and shut the door behind them.

  At once, one of Plavik’s wives, a pudgy, freckled woman, took charge. She wore her brassy blond hair in thick, braided pigtails. Under the pudge and the baggy robe, she looked strong. She had big arms, and her callused hands were peppered with black.

  “Me, first,” she told the others, “then Randi, then Valerie Louise…”

  When she straddled Krysty’s knees, her mutie hair twisted up like a nest of crimson snakes.

  “Well, lookee there,” the woman said. And as she did, she reached out for the hair.

  “Better watch out,” Krysty warned her, “it bites.”

  “Might have to shave it all off, then,” Plavik’s wife said. “After we get done here…” With that, she started swinging and landing open-handed smacks to the sides of Krysty’s face.

  Krysty was ready for the blows, which came down so hard and so fast they made her see stars. She kept her jaws tightly clenched so her teeth wouldn’t cut her tongue and the inside of her mouth. Even so, the rain of slaps split her lower lip.

  The woman spent about four minutes on Krysty, while the other women cheered and egged her on. And when she was done with Krysty, she moved on to Mildred.

  Like Krysty, the black woman absorbed the slaps without making a sound. The woman really wailed on her, too, hitting her so hard that it made her nose run and her eyes tear.

  When pigtails figured she had given Mildred her best, she waved in the second woman, Randi, who was a few years younger and thirty pounds lighter. The new girl didn’t know how to punch, but she sure could screech. Her roundhouse swings boxed ears and arms with little effect.

  When Randi could hit no more, the one called Valerie Louise pulled her off and took her place.

  “Why aren’t your big, strong menfolk doing this?” Krysty said, spitting a gob of blood on the floor.

  “That would be a waste of their energy,” Valerie Louise said.

  Her hair was coarse and brown, parted in the middle, and spread out in a dense mat across her shoulders. She had a triple hard look in her eyes that reminded Krysty of Plavik. They weren’t related, though. Not if Plavik’s story about his coming here a few years back was true. This wife was eighteen if she was a day.

  “Besides,” Valerie Louise said with a smile for her sister wives, “only a woman knows how to really hurt a woman.”

  A demonstration of that talent brought a scream to Krysty’s lips.

  “Cut us loose, bitch,” Mildred said, “and we’ll show you what hurts.”

  “That’s the attitude we’re trying to get rid of,” Valerie Louise said. “We’re doing this for your own good, believe it or not.”

  Not, Krysty thought.

  “Because we’re such valuable trade goods?” Mildred said.

  “Because you’re women and there aren’t very many of us here. We’ve got to stick together to survive. There isn’t any escape from this place for the likes of us. Not with a whole skin, anyhow. You’re here now, and you’ve got to make the best of it. If you want to keep on living, you have to learn the rules and follow them like the rest of us.”

  Bells were ringing in Krysty’s head, and not just from all the smacks. “If we don
’t follow the rules, we get culled.”

  Valerie Louise smiled.

  “Just like you cull everyone else who doesn’t fit in,” Krysty said. “Even your own children.”

  “Of course. It’s the only way to keep order. There’s no point in feeding someone who won’t obey the rules.”

  “I get the feeling Jubilee isn’t just going to get a few slaps and be sent on her way,” Mildred said.

  “You’re right about that. She’s already had her chances. Now she’s got to pay. Even the unfit serve a greater purpose in Little Pueblo, praise Bob, praise Enid.”

  “And what purpose is that?” Krysty asked.

  “They help keep the world in balance.”

  “How so?” Mildred prompted.

  “Bob and Enid taught us that everything has a price, and that the price must be paid by someone. If you want to know the truth, it was Enid, not Bob, who set it all down. She knew things that even the whitecoats didn’t understand. She knew about the people who used to live here in olden times.”

  “You mean the Anasazi?” Mildred said.

  “We don’t have a name for them. They lived like we do, a very long time ago, right here in this place. Enid learned their secrets. Every place in the world is like a machine, that’s what Enid said. The parts have to fit together for the machine to run, and when they break they have to be replaced. Either with same parts, or parts that do the same thing, more or less. Those are the rules of the world.”

  “And what’s that have to do with the unfit?” Mildred said.

  “You have to make peace with everything you can see, and everything you can’t see. You have to feed the demons.”

  A look of surprise came over Mildred’s face. “What sort of demons?” she asked.

  “Hungry ones,” Valerie Louise said. “Older than time.”

  “That’s strange,” Mildred said. “I heard a similar story about this place, many years ago.”

  “That’s because it’s true,” Valerie Louise assured her.

  “How many babies have you had?” Randi asked.