Labyrinth

by James Axler

  “I haven’t had any,” Mildred said.

  “I’d say you’ve got three or four left in you,” Randi said. “And the red head has nine or ten.”

  Baby machines.

  For the likes of Pilgrim Plavik.

  “You don’t have to submit to this,” Krysty told the assembled wives. “You can fight the pilgrims.”

  “Maybe we could,” Valerie Louise said, “but we can’t fight all the men. There are too many of them. And any man can become a pilgrim with the right luck. That’s the way it works in Little Pueblo. One breaks down, and another takes his place.”

  One woman breaks down, another takes her place, Krysty thought.

  “Things have been like this since the day after Armageddon,” Valerie Louise said. “Bob and Enid made it so. We can’t change it. And we don’t want to change it.”

  “Why change what works?” Mildred said.

  “Exactly.”

  Krysty nodded as if she agreed. And the punishment came to an end without blows from Valerie Louise.

  It had all been about getting them on-board with the program. Scaring them, hurting them, whatever it took. Satisfied with the progress they’d made, the wives exited the room, leaving the new converts to Bob-and Enidism tied to their chairs.

  “What about Doc and Jak?” Mildred said softly. “Do you think they got themselves chilled?”

  “There’s no way of knowing,” Krysty said. “We can’t count on their help, though, and it sounds like Ryan and J.B. are going to be in big trouble come dawn.”

  “To hear those wives tell it, when people get put down into that dam, they don’t come out again,” Mildred said.

  “What was all that about feeding the demons?”

  “I don’t know. I got the same story from a tour guide in the early 1990s. Unkillable monsters appeared spontaneously during times of drought to prey on the people living in the canyon. He said it was a myth from the Anasazi days. It seems to have survived Armageddon. Can you get loose?”

  “Only if I use my Gaia power,” Krysty said. “I don’t want to do that. We may need it again later, and it takes me too long to recover. We’ve got to find another way to get free.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ryan and Dix let themselves be led down the shaky staircase. In front of them were fieldhands with torches; behind them were four more armed men, and bringing up the rear, the pilgrims in charge, Dennison and Ardis. Dennison was the bigger of the two, a wide young man with huge hands and feet. Ardis was tall, lean and hard, with wavy blond hair and a wiry mass of black chin whiskers.

  The deeper they descended the stronger the mold smell got. Water stains marked the walls. Outside the limits of the torches it was very dark, and the quarters in the stairwell were tight. Tight enough so if Ryan could’ve freed his hands, could’ve made a fight of it. Even with the terrible odds, he could’ve grabbed a blaster from one of the lackeys and done some real damage, maybe even gotten them out of this fix. But he couldn’t free his hands. And with just his feet for weapons, and the steep down angle of the steps, it was a lost cause.

  He could see that J.B. was thinking the same thing and coming to the same conclusion.

  The stairs ended in a long, narrow hallway lined with walls, floor and ceiling of rough-hewn stone. It was hard to breathe for all the dust they were kicking up. They were probably twenty-five feet underground, and there was no ventilation. The field hands shoved them onward.

  Halfway down the corridor, Ryan saw the floor-to-ceiling bars waiting for them at the end. The heavy steel for the early twentieth century jails had survived the deluge.

  After ushering Ryan, J.B. and Jubilee inside one of the cages, Pilgrim Dennison clanged the door shut and locked it with a massive iron key.

  The holding cells on either side were empty.

  Ryan surveyed the stone block walls and floor. The cell’s lone bed was a metal rack that hung suspended from the wall by two lengths of chain. It had no mattress. In the corner was a dented lavatory bucket.

  “How about cutting our hands free?” Ryan said to the pilgrims. “We aren’t going anywhere.”

  “Not after what you did,” Dennison said.

  “No way,” Ardis agreed. ‘You stay tied.”

  They left an armed man to watch over them, even though they were bound and securely locked away. He pulled a white plastic lawn chair out of the adjoining cell and took seat in the hall, under the torch. After a few minutes, figuring things were well under control, he let his hairy chin fall to his chest and fell fast asleep.

  Ryan and J.B. walked along the back wall and took in the graffiti scratched into the stone. It was not promising: Hell awaits; Kiss your ass goodbye, and other words to that effect.

  Ryan looked over at Jubilee, who sat on the edge of the bench, staring at her hands, which were shaking uncontrollably.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” Ryan asked the girl.

  She didn’t answer.

  “You know what’s going to happen. Tell us.”

  She looked up at him, her face devoid of hope. “There’ll be a ceremony tomorrow morning,” she said. “We’ll be taken to the crest of the dam and offered.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” J.B. said.

  “Offered to what?” Ryan said.

  “The demons.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They live in the dam. As long as we give them offerings they stay inside. Those are the rules that Bob and Enid set down in the beginning. If we don’t obey them, everything will fall apart.”

  “What do these demons look like?” J.B. asked her.

  Jubilee gave him a blank stare.

  “Ever see one?” J.B. asked.

  She shook her head. “No one has.”

  “Then how do you know they even exist?”

  “There are screams sometimes, from the people who get put down into the dam. Terrible screams. And blasterfire inside. Not for long, though.”

  “How will everything fall apart?” Ryan said.

  “The demons will come out into the canyon if we don’t make offerings to them. They don’t like it outside, they hate open space, but if they’re hungry enough they will come. And when they do they will eat everybody.”

  “If that had ever happened you’d all be dead,” J.B. said.

  “It hasn’t happened because folks never let it. Since the days of Bob and Enid the people have been making offerings.”

  “Why can’t you just chill these radblasted things?” J.B. asked. ‘You’ve got plenty of able hands, and blasters and ammo to go around.”

  “You don’t understand,” Jubilee said. “They aren’t flesh and blood like us. They’re spirits. They’re like smoke. Bullets don’t hit them. Blades don’t cut them.”

  J.B. gave Ryan a dubious look.

  They had both encountered wagloads of superstitious crap in their travels across the hellscape. Left on their own, the people of Deathlands worked out all sorts of rubbish to believe in, and organized complicated rituals to celebrate it. Separating the real dangers from the imagined ones could be a full-time job.

  “Where did these things come from?” Ryan said.

  “I don’t know. No one knows. Where does the air come from? Or the sun? For as long as anyone can remember, they’ve always been here. Only now there are more of them.”

  “Mebbe because your triple stupes fed them and let them breed,” J.B. said.

  “Easy, J.B. It wasn’t her doing.”

  “People here just followed the rules that Bob and Enid set down,” Jubilee repeated. “And they’ve always worked to keep things safe. Bob and Enid showed us the way. They were the first to understand. They offered themselves to save the ville.”

  The girl wasn’t helping Ryan separate the real from the bullshit. He changed the subject. “I know why J.B. and me are locked up,” he said, “but what did you do?”

  “I made some mistakes before you came.”

  “Must’ve been some
pretty big ones,” Ryan said.

  “Sometimes a person can’t help doing certain things, even when that person knows something bad’s going to happen afterward. I don’t like being told what to do. I talk back. I argue. Because of that, Pilgrim Wicklaw wanted to get rid of me, to pass me off to some other pilgrims. Only none of them would have me because of the way I am. Wives are supposed to keep quiet when a pilgrim gives an order. Wicklaw tried to trick you into trading for me because you didn’t know that I’m worthless as a wife. When people are judged worthless in Little Pueblo, they get culled real quick. When they’re offered to the demons in the dam, they’re put to some use. People who think and act different don’t live very long here. And the demons are always hungry for more.”

  “What will happen to Mildred and Krysty?” Ryan said.

  “Some pilgrim will take them for his wives. If they don’t do a good job of wifing, they’ll be culled, too.”

  J.B. leaned close to Ryan and said, “Jak and Doc got away. Didn’t see their bodies on the grass.”

  “If they’re alive, they’ll find a way to help us.”

  “Let’s hope they do it before we get sent down into that radblasted dam,” the Armorer said.

  A noise on the stairs made them both turn. Not just creaking sounds. Moans. Groans. Whimpering.

  “What the blazes is that?” J.B. said, moving to the bars.

  At the stair end of the hall, a couple of field hands appeared, half dragging a wounded man between them. Three more wounded from the battle in the square hobbled into view behind him, bracketed by armed guards. The man in front had a broken right leg. He was making most of the racket. It looked like he’d taken a .308 round just below the knee. The slug had shattered the bone so badly that the lower part of his leg swung around like a deadweight. From knee to shoe top, the leg was drenched in blood. The guards put him on the bench in an adjoining cell. Two other men had received wounds to legs and arms, both from gunshot and gren shrapnel wounds that were bound with strips of rag. The third man was blinded, probably by a gren blast, his eyes covered with a dirty bandage.

  “What’s all this about?” Ryan asked Jubilee. “Why are they locking up the wounded?”

  “They’re the ones hurt too bad to recover. They’re going to be offered tomorrow, too.”

  A look at the men’s faces told him what she said was true.

  “Well, lookee who’s here,” J.B. said, giving Ryan a nudge.

  Limping down the hallway at blasterpoint with his hands raised was Pilgrim Wicklaw.

  Chapter Fifteen

  An ounce short of trigger break, with a man in his sights, Jak held his fire. He watched as the attackers climbed the redoubt’s rear wall and swarmed over the roof. Doc was right. Picking off a few of them wouldn’t help their friends break out. The entrance was surrounded. Ryan, J.B. and Jubilee had no place to run.

  From behind the tree, he and Doc heard the call for a cease-fire, and when the shooting stopped, Plavik’s demand for a surrender.

  “They’re still alive,” Doc said. “Thank goodness for that. We need to withdraw and formulate a rescue plan.”

  “Trouble coming,” Jak said.

  Five men with blasters had just stepped from the trees onto the sidewalk, about thirty yards down. One of them pointed and yelled something and the others turned toward the newcomers.

  “We go,” Jak said.

  Before the ville folk could get off a shot, he and Doc broke and ran, cutting across the corner of the park, putting the trees between them and pursuit. Neither of them considered making a stand in the square; there were too many enemies, too close at hand.

  For an old man, Doc could still hump it pretty good, Jak thought. And that was a good thing because the five men were running hard to catch up. There wasn’t any more yelling from behind. They were saving their breath.

  Jak led Doc across the street to the opposite sidewalk. He turned toward city hall, and sprinted for the one-story doorway he’d already used. Even though the sidewalk was a long straightaway, and their backs were unprotected, it was dark and he figured the men chasing them wouldn’t stop and lay down bracketing fire. They didn’t have clear shots, and if they stopped they risked losing their quarry altogether. He took Doc through the building and out the back door. As they cleared the rear exit, they could hear the ville folk storming in the front. This time, when he rushed into the alley, he went right, heading away from the park.

  Before the hunters could close ground, they reached the mouth of the alley and got around the corner. Spread out before them was a moonscape of ruination bathed in starlight. Below the crown of the town center there were no intact buildings, just empty lots and debris from the houses that had once stood there. A hurricane or tornado would have produced much the same effect, stripping away the above-ground structures, leaving behind the concrete foundations and concrete pads, as well as a clutter of bent pipes, old water heaters, furnaces, pieces of rebar and lengths of insulated wire.

  Falling down wasn’t an option if they wanted to stay alive, so Jak kept to what was left of the paved streets. As he ran, he listened for the footfalls of the pursuit. He was leading them away from the square and they were following, just as he’d hoped. He and Doc had to isolate the hunters, get them as far away from backup as possible, and then quietly take them out. They had to do that before they could help Ryan and the others.

  On either side of the eroded asphalt road a gridwork wasteland sloped down toward the dam. The city ground wasn’t worth cleaning up to grow food on. Not when there were fertile fields already established closer to the shores of the lake.

  As they neared the city limits, Jak caught a change in the sound of running footsteps behind them. He stopped, pulling Doc down into the cover of a concrete block crawlspace open to the sky.

  “They split up,” Jak said. He pointed off to the left. “Two that way, try to trap us.”

  “Shall we trap them, instead?”

  Jak nodded. “No blasters. Use blades.”

  “I concur,” Doc said. “We must dispatch the scoundrels with all due haste and return to free our companions.”

  “Watch feet,” Jak said, jumping out of the shallow pit and cutting across the abandoned lots.

  Their pursuit was still having trouble spotting them, or they would have fired a shot or two by now, either to try to pin them down, or steer them into the trap. Having split up, they were even less likely to fire for fear of hitting each other in the dark. The hunters were playing it safe, being patient, using their knowledge of the terrain. Short of some kind of lucky break, Jak figured their plan would be to tree the quarry, send back for reinforcements and wait until daylight to finish them off.

  Jak would have none of that. It was a big, dark world out there.

  His world.

  But it wouldn’t be dark very much longer.

  The gridwork of streets turned into plowed fields. Jak and Doc raced over the soft, tilled earth, through waist-high corn. In the distance, the stars reflected in the placid lake. Everything was breathlessly still, as if they were moving across a painting, or a photograph.

  When they reached the predark highway, Jak headed for the row of grain elevators surrounded by the fields of corn. Off to the right, about a hundred yards away, he caught movement, a pair of runners, angling in, trying to cut them off. There was no good cover before they reached the silos. And no good place to set up a countertrap. He picked up the pace, his lank white hair streaming back from his head.

  With his long legs, Doc managed to keep up, but just barely. He was breathing in ragged gasps by the time they got to the silos.

  The towering grain elevators hadn’t fared well, what with the deluge and reemergence. The six cylinders weren’t made of tempered concrete like the redoubt. They had all weathered, particularly around the metal fittings, which had rusted away, giving the elements access to the softer interior and allowing erosion to set in. The silos at either end of the row had taken the brunt of the retreatin
g water’s suction, suffering impacts from floating debris and well as the scouring action of churning rock and sand. Their external ladders had been swept away, as had their inspection doors, and domed roofs.

  The storage units abutted each other, sharing common walls, so there was no way to pass between them. Which was to Jak and Doc’s advantage. It bought them a little time out of sight of the hunters.

  Jak and Doc rounded the end of the row and ran along the far side to a line of grain carts, dual-axeled, four-wheeled, with long yokes and multiple cross posts. Carts designed to be pulled by human beings. They stopped beside them and did a quick recce. A twenty-foot-wide ring of bare, pounded dirt surrounded the bases of the silos. More waist-high corn fields stretched off to the lake and dam. There was no decent cover that way.

  To go farther meant risking getting driven against the sheer walls of the dam or the canyon. The best hope, the last hope was at their backs.

  The hunters would know that, too, and expect them to make their stand at the silos.

  Jak looked at the grain scattered on the ground and trampled into it. It made a light-colored path from the carts to the side of the fourth elevator.

  “Ville folk using that one,” he told Doc. He scanned the ladder that ran the entire length of the cylinder and disappeared over the top. “Door there.” He pointed at a three-by-three-foot square of dark metal, about twenty-five feet above the ground.

  “Yes, I see it. It is an inspection door, I believe. What is your idea?”

  “No idea. Trick.”

  There wasn’t time to explain further. Jak scampered, as quick as a cat, up the rusted ladder to the inspection door. It had a bolt for a lock. He slid it back and opened the door wide. It creaked on its corroded hinges. The sweet smell of grain wafted up to him from inside. The job done, he scurried back down the ladder.

  “We go in field,” Jak said, pulling Doc by the arm. “Two come that side, three come other way. See door. Think we’re inside. maybe go up ladder to close, to lock us in. We take them from behind, from field, with blades. Won’t expect that. You go that way, use carts as cover.”