Child of Slaughter

by James Axler

  “That’s right.” She grinned at him. “I did say I was going to do that, didn’t I?” Then she spun and swung the crowbar into the control panel again, kicking off the loudest crackling and the biggest sparks yet.

  Jak stepped closer, keeping a knife palmed in one hand and the other hand near the butt of his holstered .357 blaster. “What ’bout multiple personality problem? Also said wanted machines fix that.”

  “Is that what I said?” She swung the crowbar again, smashing more controls. “And you believed me?”

  Another quake struck, and Jak teetered. “Not understand. If not doing those things, what want? Why smash?”

  “What do I want?” She was wild-eyed when she looked his way again. For the first time since he’d met her, the braid that hung from her left temple had turned bright purple. “I want to destroy the whole damned Shift and everyone living in it!”

  Chapter Fifty

  Just as Ryan and his team rounded the corner, a squad of shifters burst into the hallway, charging straight at them.

  Then, when they spotted Ryan’s group, the onrushing muties thundered to a halt. They stood in the middle of the corridor, sizing up Ryan and his people with narrow-eyed stares of suspicion, just as Ryan’s team did the same thing to them.

  Sensing an opportunity, Ryan addressed the man he thought was the leader of the muties. “We don’t want a fight,” he said evenly. “We’re not your enemies.”

  The corridor shook with another quake as the mutie leader thought it over. His men’s eyes flicked alternately between him and Ryan, watching for a sign from either one.

  “Are you the ones causing these quakes?” the mutie leader asked finally. “Destroying the balance of the Shift?”

  “Absolutely not.” Ryan shook his head. “We’re only here to find a friend of ours.”

  “Did she cause the quakes?” asked another mutie, perhaps the leader’s second in command.

  “It’s a he,” Ryan replied. “And I don’t see any possible way he could have done that.”

  “Liar!” shouted the second in command. “Norms always bring destruction!”

  “Enough!” The shifter leader snapped an arm stiffly upward. “We don’t want a fight, either. We just want to get out of here.” He stepped to one side and gestured for the other shifters to do the same. “You go your way, and we’ll go ours.”

  The rest of the muties followed the leader’s example and made room. Ryan nodded and started forward, with his team close behind.

  But midway down the corridor, the second in command leaped from the ranks and charged at Krysty.

  Before the attacker had taken his third step toward her, a blastershot boomed in the corridor, and a round punched through his skull. The impact jerked him sideways, then he dropped to the floor in a bloody heap.

  All eyes flashed to the shooter, Ryan, as he calmly lowered his handblaster. “Thought we had an agreement,” he said slowly.

  “We do,” the leader stated firmly. “Let’s go,” he told his people, and they headed down the corridor.

  Some moved more slowly than others, white-knuckling weapons and giving Ryan’s group the stink eye, but no one crossed the line laid down by the second in command’s corpse.

  “Assholes,” Hammersmith muttered as the two groups slipped past each other.

  “Less talking, more walking,” Ryan urged, though his idea of walking, as he hurried down the corridor, was more like a full-tilt run.

  * * *

  DOC KNEW HE was near the end of the chute, but he wasn’t sure what to do when he got there.

  Exo was somewhere behind him, coming up fast. His voice seemed a little bit closer every time Doc heard it.

  That meant Doc wouldn’t have time to do much of anything when he left the chute. No sooner would his feet hit the ground than Exo’s would do the same…at which point, all bets would be off. The maniac shifter had already beaten him repeatedly in casual meetings with no provocation; Doc could only imagine what he would do to him now, when Doc had tried to escape him.

  Exo’s nonthreatening comments didn’t offer any clues. “Looking forward to having a chat when we get out of this,” he called through the chute. “We’ve really got our work cut out for us, Doctor H.” Somehow, the lack of blatant threats was more frightening than if he’d just come out and screamed a litany of terrible things he was going to do to Doc.

  Suddenly, the old man swooped around a bend and saw a circle of sunlight in the distance. Heart pounding, he raced inexorably toward that circle, even as he knew from the map in his head that it represented the final exit.

  The chute angled upward, and Doc’s momentum carried him toward the light. He would be outside in seconds.

  Jaws clenched, muscles tensed, he tried to get ready, tried to prepare himself for the prospect of fighting for his life against the lunatic mutie.

  * * *

  JAK SCOWLED AS Union hauled off and bashed another control panel with the crowbar. “Why destroy Shift and everyone? Not make sense.”

  “Not if your sisters weren’t murdered by the locals, it doesn’t.” Again, Union wrenched back the crowbar and smashed it into the console. A storm of sparks erupted in her face, forcing her back a step.

  “Sisters?” Jak thought about taking her down before she did more damage. He knew he could, with the weapons in his hands, but then he wouldn’t hear her story. He wouldn’t get the answers he wanted more than anything, to explain why a woman who’d seemed to care for him could have been lying to him from the start.

  “Four of them,” Union added. “All whitecoats, specializing in treating animals with the energies of the Shift. They developed hybrid creatures and turned them loose in a wilderness area, hoping to evolve life-forms that could clean up the ruined ecosystem of the Deathlands. That one area became their outdoor laboratory.”

  “Devil’s Slaughterhouse.” Jak nodded as the pieces fell together in his mind. “Sisters made beasts that attacked us there.”

  “And they were murdered for it. The locals executed them when some of the Slaughterhouse creatures attacked a ville and killed some people.” Her face contorted with rage, she let the crowbar fly again, shattering a computer monitor. “My sisters were trying to help, and they were murdered for it.”

  “Wait.” Jak leaned against a welding unit as the latest quake nearly rocked him off his feet. “Four sisters, you said?”

  “Yes!” Again, she hammered the console with the crowbar. “Four!”

  Jak knew that what he was about to say was true before he said it. “One was named…Taryn?”

  Union swung the crowbar without answering.

  “And the others,” Jak said. “Names Rhonda…Dulcet…Carrie?”

  “Yes!”

  Finally, Jak felt as if he was getting the picture. The four women in one body—they were all dead sisters, or at least echoes of their personalities. But one question still remained about those women and that body.

  “If four sisters in there, who talking now? Not sound like Sasha.”

  “Because there is no Sasha,” Union snapped. “Sasha was just a lie to hide our real reason for being here.”

  “Then, who talking now?”

  “The lucky sister! The one who survived!” As she said it, the quake rumbled and crashed like thunder. “The one who will help the others get revenge for their deaths!”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Doc popped out of the end of the chute, propelled by the momentum of his ride, and landed on his butt on the sandy ground. Driven by the thought of Exo popping out next, he quickly got to his feet, taking in his surroundings as he did so.

  He was somewhere outside the redoubt, looking up at one of the rounded hills that stood on each side of it. The sun was down, and gray twilight was settling over the rumbling land.

  Nowhere did he see an abandoned weapon or something that could be used as one. The only thing he had to fight with was the razor blade in his pocket.

  As for hiding places, there was nothi
ng within a hundred yards. His best bet was to run for the hills bracketing the redoubt, though he knew, even as he started running in that direction, that he could never get there in time. He could never outrun a bullet from his own LeMat .44 revolver, which Exo would certainly be carrying when he emerged from the chute.

  But running was still the only strategy that made any kind of sense to Doc, so he threw himself into it with every bit of energy he had. Legs churning furiously, he charged across the sand toward the nearest hill, listening all the while for sounds of Exo behind him.

  He finally heard them when he’d gotten a third of the way to his destination: the sounds of running footsteps and a high-pitched voice. “Dr. H.! Wait for me! I need to show you something!”

  For an instant, Doc wondered if maybe he’d been wrong about Exo’s intent. Was it possible Exo didn’t want to kill him? Would Doc have been better off staying back at the exit of the chute to meet him instead of running away?

  His answer came in the form of a blaster and a .44 slug whizzing past his right ear.

  “Come on!” Exo hollered. “I just want to talk, my friend!”

  Just as he said it, Doc heard the crack of a second shot and another whizzing slug—this time sailing past his left ear. And a thought flitted through his mind—what if the third shot was the charm?

  * * *

  JAK WAITED UNTIL the worst of the quake had tapered off, then eased around the welding unit, taking care not to step on the body of the shifter on the floor behind it. “How kill everyone?” he shouted. “Equipment haywire, but will wrecking destroy Shift and kill everyone?”

  Union laughed and twirled the crowbar. “Fuck no!” Turning, she jammed the end of the crowbar in the crack between two nondescript panels in the wall. “Wrecking the equipment is just for kicks! It has nothing to do with destroying the Shift!” With that, she pried the panels apart, pulling one loose from the wall.

  One mighty heave, and the loose panel came free and went flying to the floor. In the rectangular space exposed by its absence, Jak glimpsed something glinting in the flashing light of the malfunctioning mat-trans controls around it.

  “Now, this…” Union reached in and wrapped her hand around whatever was stored there. “This is that big danger I told you about earlier. The big surprise. The one that everything else was just a warm-up for.”

  Jak watched, spellbound, as she pulled out the object and held it up for him to see. From where he was standing, it looked like a silver cone, six inches long, studded with circuitry and multicolored crystals.

  He knew he should attack at that instant, put her down hard and snatch whatever it was from her grasp—but he waited. He felt compelled to know more, to hear her tell it, as if that might somehow explain what she’d put him through. As if that might somehow make it all make sense.

  “What that?” Another strong quake knocked him around but didn’t knock him over. “Why big danger?”

  “I’ll tell you this much.” She grinned as she turned the object around in her hand. “This won’t kill everyone living in the Shift, but it will summon something that can.”

  Jak frowned. “What talking ’bout?”

  “You’ll see.” Union slid the cone into the hip pocket of her jumpsuit. “Briefly, at least. You won’t live longer than that, I’m afraid.”

  He got the feeling that she was about to make a move, and he steeled himself to do the same. “Don’t do it,” he said. “Why kill innocents with guilty?”

  “Everyone’s guilty if they’re part of this sick society.”

  “Not children,” Jak said. “Not babies.”

  She shrugged. “Collateral damage happens. Tough shit.”

  “Just kill everyone? You, too?”

  “I guess so.”

  “No!” Jak felt an irrational wave of emotion rise within him. “Carrie, Taryn, Dulcet, Rhonda not deserve to die! I want them live.”

  “They’re already dead! Long dead!”

  “Still alive in you!” Jak said. “Good still inside!”

  “Gullible moron.” Union laughed cruelly, then stopped. A change came over her face, as the wickedness seemed to drain out of her features. Her eyes widened, her mouth opened, her look softened. In the beat of a heart, she went from dark and secretive to bright and revealing. Her voice, when she spoke, was familiar—upbeat and sweet. “Jak, wait. You’re right! You’re so right about us!”

  And her braid was brown.

  “Dulcet.” Was it possible? Had Jak gotten through to her? “Good hearing voice.” He’d never stopped believing she and the others were still in there, no matter what Union had told him.

  “Oh, Jak! We’ve missed you!” Suddenly, her expression changed again, becoming less open, more timid. “It’s true! We have!” Her braid was white now—Carrie.

  The ground shook as Jak took a step toward her, searching her eyes. He thought he saw Carrie looking back at him, thought he felt her familiar presence.

  Then her face shifted again, becoming rougher, more sardonic. Her braid turned auburn. “You pasty son of a bitch!” It was Rhonda. “I knew you were too pigheaded to give up on us!”

  She changed one more time, then, turning frigid and distant with a jet-black braid.

  “Taryn,” Jak said.

  “Yes.” She nodded once. “And no.”

  Then, in that one instant when he’d dropped his guard the tiniest bit, she suddenly lashed up the crowbar and hurled it at his head.

  Jak had been half expecting something and leaped to one side, but the crowbar still struck his left shoulder. It threw him just enough off balance that the latest quake brought him down.

  Even as he hit the floor, Union charged past him. Twisting, he saw her dive headfirst into the pit in the middle of the chamber and disappear. Her black boots were the last trace he saw of her.

  It was then, as he scrambled to his feet, that he heard another familiar voice over the rumbling of the quake and the crackling of the ruined lab.

  “Holy shit!” It was Hammersmith, glaring in the doorway. “What did you motherfuckers do to my lab?”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  The latest in a long line of earthquakes saved Doc’s life as he ran from Exo.

  Just as the mutie fired the third shot from Doc’s LeMat, the ground shook violently, throwing Doc off his feet. He came down hard on his right side, crying out in pain, but at least he missed taking the bullet that soared past above him. No question: the round would have struck him if he’d still been upright.

  Unfortunately, the fall that saved him also left him at Exo’s mercy. Doc wasn’t fast enough to leap up and keep running before Exo could get to him.

  Wincing, the old man pushed himself to a sitting position, but that was as far as he got. Suddenly, Exo trotted up in front of him, grinning and pointing the revolver at Doc’s face.

  “Wow, finally!” Exo was panting from the run. “What does a guy have to do to have a talk with you anyway?”

  Doc was much more winded than the shifter. “What do you…want to…talk about?” He had to force himself to act as if he wasn’t worried about the revolver in Exo’s hand.

  “My device, for starters,” Exo said. “You need to get back there and fix it for me, Hammersmith.”

  Doc nodded as if he had every intention of doing just that. “Right.” Playing along with the brain-damaged lunatic had to be the better plan…if any plan was better in these circumstances.

  There was another quake as Exo shook the LeMat at him. “My empire is crumbling from within! We need to save it!”

  “Of course.” Doc slid a hand in the pocket of his coat and found the razor blade. He pinched it tightly between his thumb and forefinger, trying to gather the courage to use it.

  Could he bring himself to try to slash Exo’s throat? Did he have the slightest chance of success against the insane and murderous shifter?

  Sweating from the run and the stress of what he was considering, Doc got to his knees. “Ankh and Fixie forced me to help
them,” he lied, fighting to stop the rampant shivers rippling through his body. “I ran away because I was afraid you would not understand.”

  “I understand perfectly.” Keeping the LeMat in one hand, Exo reached down with his free hand to help Doc to his feet. “I know exactly what happened.”

  “Thank you.” Doc saw his moment present itself, as both Exo’s hands were full, and his bare throat beckoned. “You were always so good to me.”

  “We need to hurry, Hammersmith,” Exo said. “Time is running out.”

  Doc nodded. “It is.” Slowly, he started to pull his hand with the razor blade out of his pocket.

  * * *

  AS RYAN AND the rest of the group pushed into the mat-trans chamber behind Hammersmith, Jak rushed over to the gaping maw of the pit. Gazing into it, he saw only darkness, but he knew Union was down there somewhere.

  “Oh, my God,” Mildred said. “This big room is a mat-trans chamber. Of course!”

  “Did that bitch do this?” Hammersmith still sounded furious. “Did Union tear this place apart?”

  Standing on the edge of the pit, Jak waved for the others to join him. “Come on! Need go now!” He jabbed a finger at the pit.

  “Go where, Jak?” Ryan asked. “Where does that lead?”

  “Not know, but she went this way!”

  “We’re not here for her!” Ryan shouted over the loudest rumbling yet. “We’re here to rescue Doc!”

  “Mebbe Doc there, too.” Again, Jak pointed at the pit.

  “You see him go in?” J.B. asked.

  Jak shook his head. “Big fight before got here. Two dead muties.” He gestured at the bodies of Ankh and Fixie on the floor. “Mebbe happen before Union got here, too. Mebbe Doc involved, got away.” Something caught his eye then, and he walked to the opposite edge of the pit. Bending, he picked up a long black object discarded there amid a jumble of wires and broken glass. “Look.”

  Ryan marched over and took the item from Jak’s hand. “He was here, all right.” Ryan held the object up for the others to see. “It’s the sheath of his swordstick.”