by Ryder Stacy
“I can do it, I can . . .” Detroit prepared to jump. It wasn’t deep—just six or seven feet. It was easy.
“Hey, what is Detroit up to? What’s he doing over there by that crevice?” Rock said, shining the light over to the man.
“The illusions have him,” Chen shouted. “Quickly, let’s get him.”
Detroit was poised on the edge of the cliff. The two Freefighters ran to him, and Rockson tackled him and rolled his friend from the abyss. Detroit struggled with the Doomsday Warrior, screaming and tearing at the man as if he were an enemy. He saw not his compatriot trying to save him, but rather the snaking tendrils of a bloodfruit plant. In the illusion projected by the Whisperers, the tendrils had locked around his legs and wouldn’t let go. He searched for his knife, but Chen seized it away from him.
Rockson got Detroit in a hammerlock, and as Rona slapped his face repeatedly, the illusion-mad Freefighter gradually ceased his struggle and came around.
He sat there exhausted, his chest heaving. “Rock, if you could see what I saw, you’d understand. Sorry, I—”
Rockson slapped him on the back. “Forget it. But tell us how it got you—weren’t you guarding?”
Detroit told Rock and the other how it had used a gentle, pleasant memory to get into his mind.
“So that’s what happened. Everyone—keep counting or saying a mantra as you walk, don’t reminisce about anything, don’t let your minds wander. Now let’s get out of here.”
They went on. Rockson felt the subtlest of mental attack. It was a pleasant thought about sitting in the restaurant at Century City and ordering a drink of—no. He fended it off, shutting his mind like a steel spring on it—it passed.
Rona broke stride momentarily, then she too threw it off. One by one they were tested and found not wanting. Thanks to Detroit’s warning.
But with Scheransky it was a different story. Scheransky had trouble remembering his mantra, so he counted. One-two-three. It worked well for a time, his mind didn’t wander, he was keeping up with the others. Perhaps his lack of deep meditative training, he had trouble with such things—didn’t matter. He would be all right. But that wasn’t the case.
They had gone perhaps another three hundred yards in the darkness, when Scheransky suddenly heard his voice, his counting of numbers in Russian, suddenly change to the voice of another man. It was the voice of a guard, a KGB guard. He was a child standing in the snow of the Gulag Reception Station. He was next to his father, a proud prison official. And the counting was not of footsteps in the dark cavern, but the counting of half-naked prisoners walking by him.
Each time a prisoner walked by, his father made a mark in a little notebook. It was so long ago. It was the day that Scheransky most wanted to forget. The day that haunted him.
The Russian’s most dreaded memory was buried deep in his unconscious childhood memories. But the deeper the fear, the more hidden it was, the easier it was for the Whisperers to use it . . . and the more horrible and real it seemed when it came to mind.
There he was in the cold winter darkness of the gulag. And there was a purge going on, the sixth in a year. In the Kremlin, the Malenkov forces were out, and the Dzernoviks’ faction was in, meaning new prisoners were arriving by the trainload—prisoners who had endured month after month of torture already at the hands of the KGB.
And as the faceless political prisoners walked by, one was not anonymous. One, just one, was not a thing to be reviled.
“Momma.” Scheransky gasped. “What are you—”
The woman, number 412, wore a torn and ragged filthy striped robe. She had bare feet, blood in the cracks of her frozen toes, staining the snow beneath her. She stopped, looked glazed at him, looking as if he were a rock or building.
“Momma, it’s me.” He turned to his father, pulled on his arm, “Poppa, it’s Momma, it’s her—why is she here with the guilty? Why is she dressed like this, why is she with the prisoners?”
His father’s face was ashen, his swollen chest suddenly deflated. His black beady eyes grew wide with horror. It was her. “I cannot do anything,” he whispered close to the boy’s ear, and he dragged little Totu Scheransky away. The boy Scheransky was screaming, “Momma, Momma.”
“Shut up, stupid,” his father insisted, “she is not your mother—not anymore. She is a traitor, I don’t know what she did, but she did it. And we don’t know her . . .”
“But Momma—”
His father slapped him. He fell face first in the snow and he heard the crunch crunch crunch of the naked feet of the prisoners walking listlessly across the snow toward the unheated confinement building.
Scheransky, though lost in the illusion, continued walking with his compatriots in the cavern. He was saying, “No, Poppa, no, it is Momma . . . it is . . . it is . . .” In his ears rang the whistle of the death train as it slowly pulled out. The crunch crunch of the Freefighters’ boots was, in his mind, the crunch crunch of the political prisoners’ bare feet toward the death house.
But that was not the worst—that was a past reality. A long-ago memory unearthed by the powers of the unseen enemy in the cavern. Now came the dreaded fantasy.
Suddenly Scheransky was stopped dead in his tracks. And dimly in the cavern’s deep recesses he heard his mother’s voice, all cracked and trembling horribly. “Son, son,” she pleaded. “My little Totu, why did you let them take me away? Why did you deny me, your mother?”
“I didn’t—Mother. I—I—I’m sorry,” Scheransky stuttered out. “I—”
Then the words choked off in his throat, for out of the darkness stepped the decayed, twisted dry corpse of his mother, still wearing the tattered moldy robe with the black stripes of a prisoner on it. She lifted her dried fungus-covered hand in the half-light and shook her finger at him. “Bad boy, you’re a very bad boy.”
“No,” he aspirated, his breath frozen, his chest hard and tight. “I—”
“You let them kill me. You did. You denied me—and now—” the fungus-caked dissolving corpse’s dry mouth cracked a toothy smile—“now, Son, I’ve come to get you . . .
“Join . . . me . . . in . . . cemetery. Here, come . . . kiss your mother . . .” The corpse lurched forward, smacking its dead brown lips over teeth that fell out as she moved.
“No . . . please . . . don’t come any closer,” Scheransky screamed, but he was unable to back off. The corpse kept coming closer. “Oh God Jesus,” Scheransky cried, “Keep her away—keep it away from me.”
Scheransky brought his hands up to his face but not in time. For the staggering mother-corpse leapt at him and held him in a bony-hard death grip. She started biting his face with her decayed teeth, which shattered and broke into sharp fragments as they stuck into his skin. “No—” he screamed, “nooooooooooo.”
“What’s the matter with Scheransky?” Rock yelled as he ran back to the Russian. Scheransky was screaming and tearing at the air as if he was being attacked. Rock and Detroit, who reached their companion at the same time, grabbed his arms. Rockson shouted, shook the Russian defector. “Scheransky, it’s not real, not real. Whatever is happening is an illusion.”
Slowly the screams died down, the flailing and crying died down. Finally Scheransky just sat there on the cold cavern floor, on his haunches, sobbing softly, “Mother . . . Mother. God, I—”
Rockson gently lifted his friend to his feet. “It’s all over now . . . The nightmare is over. We have to go, come on, come on . . . left . . . right . . . left . . . That’s it.”
There was no more mental attack. And there came a different voice, a voice so soft you could sense it rather than hear it. “We are sorry,” said the whisper, “we thought you were more . . . of the bad ones. The ones we kill. But your hearts are good. We are sorry . . . sorry . . . sorry . . .”
And there was silence. They were left—except for one more sentence from the darkness that warned: “Beware of the sky . . . sky . . . sky . . .”
After assessing the damage—no one was seriously
hurt, either mentally or physically, though they were still reeling from what had happened, Rockson urged them onward.
Nineteen
At last they entered a snaking, twisting portion of the cavern with beautiful crystalline stalactites dangling down at them, and the hum in the air, that hum that was the power of the whisperers, ceased. And no one felt those icy fingers reaching into their minds anymore—they had made it.
They spent a dreary hour shivering and walking in what they hoped was the right direction, toward a spiral-shaped immense stalactite hanging from the murky darkness above. The compass said it was dead south. Rock hoped it was right. They had come two thirds of the way now.
There was the faintest squeak of leather wings against cold air. And suddenly there was not illusion—but swift real death. The Grim Reaper—in the form of a giant swooping bat—came at them screeching, and its clawed feet squeezed about Smokestone before anyone reacted. He was lifted into the darkness. “Shoot, shoot,” he yelled. “Never mind if you hit me.”
Rockson understood. The man was in pain, in the grip of a prehistoric creature of darkness. And he reacted. Rock sprayed the air with explosive bullets in the direction of the voice. There was a shriek, a nonhuman shriek. He stopped firing. And waited. There was a tremendous thud a moment later, about a hundred yards to their east.
No one had to tell the rest to follow Rockson through the Stygian darkness, playing their bright flashbeams about to find their lost Indian companion.
They found Smokestone lying crumpled on the hard rocks. He had blood seeping out of two huge wounds, one on either side of his ribcage. Chen immediately went down on his knees and pulled back the torn material of the chief’s garments. He turned his face up to Rockson and slowly shook his head. No. He was not going to make it.
There were no bullet holes on the chief; Rock was thankful for that. The major damage was from the creature itself, though it was obvious that Smokestone’s leg bones were broken too.
The Indian chief was beckoning with his one good hand for Rock to come closer, his lips moved.
Rock put his ear right next to the bleeding lips of his companion and listened. The chief whispered, “Please . . . cut out my eyes, after—after I die . . . bury them on the surface in the light . . . of the sun . . .”
The chief looked pleadingly into Rock’s eyes. Asking for understanding. Rockson understood. It was the Indian way. To have your eyes buried in the darkness of night would condemn your soul to wander in the afterlife, homeless and tortured. Rockson said, “I will do it.” The Chief half-smiled, then exhaled but did not inhale again.
Rockson told the others to move back, and then he did the work with the knife, putting Smokestone’s eyes in his belt-pouch for transport, eventually, to the surface.
Chen had his explosive star-knife out and was poised with it. Detroit scanned the darkness above with the electron night-binoculars. This was done while the Freefighters and Danik rolled some rocks atop the body. Then Rockson recited a brief Indian prayer:
“Great Spirit, you are everything, the first and the always. Through you your children have strong hearts and they walk in the straight path in a sacred manner.
“This fallen chief has walked the sacred path of beauty. His heart was continually yours. Take him to your sky dwelling, for there this beautiful man belongs. I will do my part to let his eyes see your light.”
Twenty
Rockson ordered that only one flashlight be aimed forward; the rest were swept above them, to at least give some warning should another of the bats come to snatch another of their company away. None came. Class Act was hunkered down on her haunches, as if ashamed that she hadn’t caught the scent of the thing that swooped to kill. Rock said, “It’s okay, dog. We didn’t notice either. If anything,” he said, stopping to pet the dog, “it was my fault. I didn’t heed the warning of the Whisperers. Whoever they are, they tried to warn us about the bat.”
Chen overheard, and said, “Rock, you saved Smokestone from the jaws of that thing—and yet you blame yourself for his death. Don’t do that. It happens. Evidently the Whisperers aren’t our enemy. They thought we were someone else. We all heard their warnings, and yet we didn’t do anything. Blame all of us.”
Rock stood up and continued walking. “I’m in charge. It was my responsibility he died.”
The gloomy self-reproach was broken by events. They came to a second artificial wall of stone, this one of gray granite, and cruder than the first. It ran for about ten meters, and was so low you could step over it. Why was this one built? What could be held back by such a wall?
Perhaps it was built only to draw attention to the message it held, Rockson concluded. This wall had an inscription also. This time it was in English. Rock did the honors:
“It says, ‘Ahead are the Eight Legs of Death.’ That’s all it says.”
No one hazarded a guess as to what that meant.
The cavern ceiling became lower as they proceeded. They were all glad of that and of the long sharp stalactites that hung down, practically joining their like formations that jutted from the floor of the lower cavern.
“The bat can’t fly in here,” Rock said happily. “We’ve entered a smaller cavern.”
And more surprising, they soon entered a wide ten-foot-high corridor hewn out of the rock of the mountain, leaving the cavern and heading upward at a steep angle. “The path to Eden, finally,” the much-shook-up Danik said.
“I think,” observed Rockson, sweeping his beam about, “that this area has been fortified, perhaps to be earthquake proof. There’s very little fallen debris on the floor. Someone wanted this area to be safe—perhaps there was something here they wanted to protect.”
They headed onward, feeling somehow more secure to have entered an man-made area. Surely Eden couldn’t be far away now.
Chen put down his explosive shuriken and Rona lowered her Liberator rifle. The giant bat was behind them.
“Sure a relief,” Rock said, lowering his shotpistol. “I was sure we would be attacked again by the bat if we stayed in the cavern.”
The minute he said that, however, Rockson’s mutant sense of danger sent a shot of adrenaline through his body.
On a hunch, he played his flashbeam to the right. There was something square standing in the darkness. Several crates. Each about five feet wide.
Detroit had caught them in his light too. He cautiously walked over to one, shotpistol at the ready. He announced that the crates were broken open, and that there were scrape marks on the ground around them, as if something had been dragged off.
Rockson came over and stood by Detroit. He examined the ordinary-looking wooden crates. They were made of brittle boards. Cheap wood, and easy to break. But they were covered with fine dust. Perhaps they were a hundred or so years old. Some abandoned supplies from Eden, he ventured.
Rock noticed that most of the crates were overturned, and further inspection proved all were empty, their plastic-bubble-foam insulation scattered about like they had been unpacked with a frenzy.
“Hey, Rock,” said McCaughlin. “What’s Scabies?”
“Scabies? They’re little mites—microscopic actually. A parasite like fleas or lice. Sometimes they get into your skin if you don’t bathe—cause a whole lot of itching. Only way to kill them is with a special soap. Lots of the underclass in the Soviet fortress-cities are crawling with the nasty little buggers. Why?”
“These packing crates are marked S.C.A.B.I.E.S.—must be some acronym.”
Rockson played his light up and down the crates. “In the twentieth century the military was crazy about acronyms. They called Browning Automatic Rifles B.A.R.S., they called the Strategic Air Command S.A.C., and so on.”
“Yeah,” said Detroit, “but what’s S.C.A.B.I.E.S.?”
“Here it is,” said Rona. “One of the packages has a lot of small stencil writing on it—and the answer: Special Computerized Ambulatory Bombs Intended for Enemy Systems. So that’s what were in here—some so
rt of war supplies.”
“Probably left here by some of the founders of Eden—hmm . . .” Rockson said, lost in thought. “Something about scabies . . .
“Of course,” Rockson yelled. “Scabies are tiny spiders. ‘Beware of the eight-legged ones.’ That means beware of the spiders—or scabies. They have eight legs, too.”
Detroit took out his shotpistol and looked around, expecting something. He didn’t know what to expect, but something was going to happen.
“Hey, Rock,” Rona said, from further up the corridor. “Come look at this.”
She had called them over to see the deep gouges in the floor of the corridor.
“Craters, each a foot wide, and as deep. Old also.”
“What made them? There’s a half-dozen.”
“The result of some sort of artillery shell explosions, I guess.” Detroit said.
The black Freefighter, an expert at such things as determining the power of an explosive by its blast effect, examined the craters more carefully. There were pieces of shrapnel and bits of bones in them—bones long calcified by the damp dankness of the cavern.
“Whatever blew up here was aimed at some human beings. I’d say these explosions happened a long time ago, though,” Detroit said.
They had proceeded less than five minutes more and were still in the wide low-ceilinged corridor when there was a whirring sound and the distinct plip-plop of a hundred tiny metal feet.
And indeed they were hearing correctly. Caught in a half-dozen flashbeams, the slowly advancing horde of three-foot-high eight-legged walking bombs from the twentieth century approached, their white sensor antennae extended above their round headless bodies, tracking their prey. They were beeping happily, their atomic-cell batteries feeding them the power to move their sharp clawlike legs. They had found victims at last.
“Prepare to fire, Freefighters. The SCABIES are coming.” Rock said, crouching with his Liberator forward.
