by James Axler
The crowd smiled at that, and the chief barb snorted a laugh. The outlander was wise. “We rule from the swamp to the Cobalt Mountains, and from the glass lake to the black doors of Horseshoe Canyon. All of that belongs to us.” The barb expected the outlanders to be impressed, but their silence was heavy, their features stiff from the effort to remain neutral. So, they had seen the black doors, eh? Few outlanders had and lived to speak of it. The Great Ones guarded the doors like their cubs. Yet those were to the north, and the outlanders came from the west. Interesting, the chief barb thought.
“How long would it take to reach Horseshoe Canyon?” Krysty asked, keeping the interest out of her words. Black doors, could that be the entrance to a redoubt?
The barb almost smiled at that question. “Two suns.”
Which meant the earlier offer of one-day safe passage was merely a trick to get them out of the town, Ryan realized coldly, so that the companions could be attacked somewhere else. Perhaps these were the descendants of the original farmers and still held the land in reverence.
“Then again, perhaps we’ll stay right here,” Ryan said, patting his horse. “This is good land. We might farm, raise families and never leave.”
“Sacrilege!” a barb screamed, advancing a step and raising his spear to throw.
The crowd gasped in horror at the action, when there came the crack of a blaster and the wooden shaft of the spear exploded as it flew out of the barb’s grip. With a cry of pain, the barb cradled his bleeding hand, his fingers bristling with splinters.
“I could have removed his head,” Mildred said, holstering her smoking blaster.
“But you did not,” the chief barb murmured. Was it from fear of their numbers? No, he saw no fear in these six, unlike the four that had passed through earlier on their forbidden machines. They had reeked with nervous sweat, and it was only the speed of the iron horses that allowed them to escape alive.
“We don’t chill unless it’s necessary,” Ryan stated, crossing his arms.
“Nor do we,” the chief barb replied, turning. “Chal-ka! Who is your worst enemy in the tribe?”
“Tal-hala,” the wounded barb muttered uneasily, his gaze shifting to a beautiful woman who scowled at him in open contempt.
“Since he is no more, his widow, Da-sha, is now your wife for the next winter.”
“No…!” the barb started, then bowed his head in shame. “I hear and obey. Her pots will be full of meat, her bed warm.”
“Then your sin is forgotten,” the chief barb said ritually, and looked back at Ryan. “You knew we do not chill here.” He didn’t phrase it as a question.
“We’re still breathing,” Ryan said in explanation, “and you had the drop on us. Fair and square.”
Saying nothing for a few minutes, the chief barb thrust his spear into the soil. “Safe passage for a hand of days, no more.”
Five days to leave territory only two days wide. “Fair deal,” Ryan said, pulling his knife.
Walking closer, the chief barb also drew a knife and in unison the two men cut their own palms, then clasped hands. The entire tribe thumped the ground with the blunt end of their spears in approval.
“I am Hoal-thar, and this is the tribe,” the chief barb said, reclaiming his hand and sheathing the bloody knife.
“The name’s Ryan Cawdor.” He introduced the rest of the companions.
“So, tell me, Ryan of the One-Eye, how did you slay a Great One?” Hoal-thar asked, binding his palm with a strip of cloth.
“Fire. They can’t regen from fire very quickly,” Ryan answered, doing the same with a handkerchief. “Move fast, and they fall.”
Another low murmur swept the army of barbs at this pronouncement, but this time their faces were stern and disapproving.
“That is a forbidden word,” Hoal-thar growled, tightening the crude bandage until his skin turned white from the pressure.
“Nothing is forbidden if there is no other word to use,” Doc spoke up again.
The tribe made various noises at that, and the chief chuckled. “Your wrinklie is wise.”
“What can you tell us about those black doors?” Ryan asked.
Suddenly, someone on a rooftop screamed, and a barb vanished from sight only to reappear a second later, the two halves of the body sailing away in opposite directions.
“A Great One!” a barb yelled in warning, pulling back his arm to throw the spear, then pausing, unable to break the ancient taboo on chilling.
Bellowing, a wendigo rose into view and swatted the barb aside, the man flying off the rooftop to land on the street below with a sickening crunch. Snarling defiantly, the barbs raised their deadly spears, then lowered them again, their faces clearly showing the internal struggle between wanting to fight and breaking the most sacred of all laws.
Seeing their indecision, Ryan made a fast decision. “Ace it!” he shouted, levering a round into the Marlin.
Opening fire with their blasters, the companions hammered the wendigo with hot lead as the huge mutie jumped off the roof to land in the street, the impact cracking the pavement for yards. Their bodies trembling from the effort to do nothing, the barbs could only watch in impotent rage.
Constantly jerking from the arrival of the bullets, yellow blood everywhere, the wendigo slowly stood to stumble toward the companions in an awkward gait, its broken bones audibly grinding back into place.
Chapter Sixteen
Shutting down their sputtering bikes, the Pig Iron Gang checked their blasters before stepping off the hogs and walking toward the rocky cliff. Some pebbles were kicked ahead of the gang and tumbled over the edge to disappear. It was almost a full minute before they hit the ground below and bounced off the jagged boulders into the sluggish river of blue water.
“And there it is, just like Big Joe said.” Petrov chuckled, resting the plastic stock of the Steyr on a hip.
“I guess for once the son of a bitch wasn’t lying,” Charlie said, a cold grin slowly forming.
Clutching the book, Thal merely grunted in agreement.
“Amazing,” Rose whispered, extending the Navy telescope to its full length. “Simply amazing.”
Looking down into the craggy abyss of Horseshoe Canyon, the four coldhearts studied the colossal pair of black metal doors. This time of year, the Cobalt River flowed gently through the box canyon, green plants growing along both of the rocky banks and surrounding the single pillar of red stone that rose from a small island in the middle. During the spring, the melting snow from the Cobalts made the river a rushing torrent that flooded the little canyon nearly to the top, the northern water foaming from the punishment it received racing into the curved box canyon, only to rush out again toward the east, moving even faster.
Over time, the brutal currents had to have shifted enough of the loose stones to uproot a boulder, and as it shifted position it revealed a pair of the black doors. The metal appeared to be new, without a scratch or a flake of rust, as if freshly forged only minutes earlier. Yet they had to have been hidden before skydark, over a hundred years before.
Swinging up the Steyr, Petrov looked through the telescopic sights, sweeping along the murmuring river until finding the black doors. A warm breeze ruffled his clothes as the coldheart studied the metal barrier carefully and then the nearby rock formations. Aside from the black doors, there was nothing unusual about the rocky pillar. A couple of small trees tried to grow out of the sides, and a stingwing had a nest situated in the branches of a yucca tree at the very top, the nearby rocks littered with the gnawed bones of hundreds of small animals.
“If there’s a keypad down there somewhere, it’s bastard well hidden,” Petrov announced gruffly, lowering the longblaster. Then he petulantly raised it again and fired. The stingwing jerked from the arrival of the 5.56-mm copper-jacketed round and collapsed into the nest. Instantly, the newborn stingwings began tearing their mother apart into bloody gobbets.
“The book says it’s there,” Thal stated confidently, hugging it
closer.
“Well, I can’t see the damn thing!”
“Not from here anyway,” Rose countered, double-checking with the Navy telescope. There was no sand or even dirt near the doors to hold any footprints. A dead juniper bush stood in front of the portal, which meant that either nobody had been there for at least a day or the doors slid aside, instead of swinging out.
“Ain’t no choice,” Charlie said, pulling a piece of smoked fish from a pocket and starting to gnaw on it. “We gotta go down there and check up close.”
“There could be all sorts of traps to chill the curious,” Rose warned, checking the rad counter clipped to the lapel of her jacket. Thankfully, the device was silent.
“No, that isn’t a shatterzone,” Petrov stated. “The blast craters and skeletons would only reveal where the door had been hidden. That is, before that boulder moved.”
The rest of them nodded in agreement. With the boulder in place, there would have been no way to tell the doors were there, unless you were standing on the island only a few feet away. They knew the predark military had been crazy, but not stupe.
“How did Joe find them again?” Charlie mumbled around the fish.
“Hiding from some trader named Roberto. He sold the guy a bag full of diamonds that were actually something called quartz, and the damn trader went ballistic! Over diamonds.”
“What good are they, aside from putting into a scattergun for shrapnel?”
“Dunno, but that Roberto acted like he’d been sold a bag of fake brass, and that’s a fact.”
“So, Big Joe never got inside?” Rose asked.
“Nope. Oh, he tried to blow his way in using black powder and even something called TNT, but the doors never budged, never even shook hard.” The coldheart frowned. “Then again, Big Joe never knew to look for a keypad.”
“I tell you it’s down there somewhere,” Thal reiterated stubbornly, tucking the book away inside the canvas med bag.
“Well, I don’t see any way down from here,” Rose stated, glancing over the ancient stones. “We’ll have to circle around to the flatlands and travel up the river.”
“Without a boat?” Charlie asked, tightening the belt on his bearskin coat. “Gonna carry us on your back?”
“The water isn’t very deep here, only downstream where we crossed a few days ago,” Thal answered, then his eyes went wide. “Down! Everybody get down!” he cried out, dropping flat.
The others swiftly followed suit, then crawled forward on their bellies to peek over the edge of the cliff to see what had startled the man.
“Son of a bitch, it’s the Guardian!” Charles whispered in astonishment.
Down in the canyon, a droid was sloshing through the shallow river, the five legs kicking up rippling wakes. The rusty chassis of the machine was battered and dented, an eye was missing and one leg was dragging along behind, tufts of grass and a tree branch caught in the crook of the bent metal.
“What do ya think it’s doing here?” Rose asked in a hushed whisper, working the bolt on the Uzi rapid-fire.
“The same thing we are,” Petrov growled in reply, titling back his fedora.
Going around the curve, the Guardian went straight to the island and stood before the black doors. Nothing seemed to happen, but a moment later, the doors ponderously slid aside, revealing a smooth tunnel brightly illuminated with lights. As the damaged machine stumbled inside, the doors rumbled closed again with a dull boom.
“Well, that nukes this idea!” Rose growled, rolling onto her back to face the sky. “Only a feeb would attack the Guardian. Even one as beat-up as that!”
“Not necessarily,” Thal said, removing his wool cap to scratch his bald head before pulling it back into place. “One of the levels in the book is marked as a garage, with a machine shop. The Guardian is probably going in there to fix itself.”
“How is that good news?” Charlie stormed.
“Because it’ll probably leave here to go back to the swamp and stand guard again.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Charlie retorted hotly. “What if the triple-cursed thing is settling in for good, making this its new home?”
The giant man scowled at that possibility, but could offer no reasonable rebuttal.
“Your call, Chief,” Rose said, sitting up and turning to look into the canyon again. “Should we wait to see what happens, or do we go in now?”
“Neither,” Petrov said, slowly standing. “We go down right now, but even if we find the keypad, we don’t go inside. We knock on that black door until the Guardian comes out to see what’s going on.” Rummaging about in the munitions bag, the coldheart unearthed a pipe bomb. “Then we blow it to hell and claim the bomb shelter for ourselves!”
CUTTING LOOSE with all of their blasters, the companions maintained a steady barrage of lead into the lumbering wendigo, smashing the leg joints and shooting out the eyes as fast as they were being regenerated. But even then, the fur kept changing color to match whatever it was near—the street, a bush growing out of a pothole, the rusted wreck of the predark wag.
Stepping in close, Ryan viciously slit the mutie’s throat. Yellow blood gushed out to cover the man, and using all of his strength, Ryan tried to remove the head. But the neck bones proved to be impossible to cut through and the one-eyed man had to step aside fast when the gurgling creature lashed out with its tentacles.
Raising his spear to throw, a barb then turned away in shame and cast it onto the ground. With tears of frustration in his eyes, the barb looked at the ancient metal signpost that marked the city limits. It was thirty feet away. A child could throw that far before they were weaned! Now it was as distant as the moon. Standing in the middle of the street, a female barb slumped her shoulders in defeat, while another male softly began to hum his death song. Unable to fight and unwilling to run, there was nothing else for the tribe to do but stand and perish.
“Medusa, call me Perseus!” Doc shouted, bracing the M-16/M-203 combo against his leather saddle. Impatiently, he waited until Ryan was clear before triggering the reloaded shotgun shell. The deafening discharge forced the horse to stumble sideways and filled the street with a billowing cloud of dense smoke.
For several long moments, nobody could see the wendigo, then the cloud slowly dissipated, and the headless beast was still standing, thick golden blood pumping from the severed arteries in the neck. New muscle fibers were rising from the body in what could only be an attempt to regrow the destroyed head.
“Son of a bitch!” Mildred whispered, lowering her rapid-fire. “That…that’s impossible!”
“Nothing impossible!” Jak snarled, putting five rounds from the booming Magnum blaster into the belly of the beast. The massive .44 rounds slammed the wendigo to the ground, gushing blood, and the filaments noticeably slowed in their work.
“Keep pumping in lead!” Ryan commanded, using the Marlin longblaster to blow off a knee. “Hoal-thar, help us ace this thing!”
“We cannot fight here. It is holy land,” Hoal-thar said softly, his face bright red with shame.
Blindly struggling forward, the wendigo bumped into a barb and smacked the male aside with a paw full of claws.
Vivisected, the barb fell to the ground, his intestines slithering out of his body like greasy rope.
“Then give us wood!” Krysty snapped, slamming a fresh magazine into the AK-47. “Find a hole and fill it with wood, anything you can find! Is that permissible, the stacking of wood?”
“Yes, it is!” the chief barb said with growing excitement, then the man cupped a hand to his mouth and cut loose with an undulating war cry.
Surging into action, every member of the tribe rushed into the nearest building to come right back out again carrying a table, or a chair, sometimes both. Using his spear to point into the exposed basement of the old police station, Hoal-thar directed the hasty construction of a huge stack of flammable material.
As Krysty, Mildred and Doc maintained a steady pounding of the wendigo with their rapid-fi
res, Ryan knotted a long rope into a loop, while J.B. and Jak used their butane lighters to set some spare clothing on fire, then tossed it into the basement, along with the last of the shine and black powder. In only a few moments, the dry wood was ablaze and began growing into a bonfire.
Jumping onto his horse, Ryan lashed the rope around the pommel, rode toward the sightless mutie and threw the crude lasso. He caught a flailing arm and kicked the frightened stallion into a gallop. The Deathlands warrior knew that this trick had better work because at the rate the companions were using brass, they were never going to get another chance. This was it, all or nothing. Live or get aced.
Softly in the distance, another wendigo sounded a long, plaintive cry, sounding eerily like a wolf howling for its mate.
Unexpectedly jerked off its feet, the regenerating wendigo was brutally dragged down the street, patches of fur ripped off the monstrous body to leave a gory yellow trail along the cracked span of pavement. Riding pell-mell past the police station, Ryan cut the rope loose as he reached the mailbox and the mutie rolled along the ground to stop at the edge of the blazing-hot basement.
Even as white bone started to form a face amid the pulsating muscle tissue, the creature flinched from the growing waves of heat and started to move away.
Running up the street at full speed, J.B. insanely charged the wendigo and thrust his sawed-off right into the ragged belly. “Regen this, nuke sucker!” he snarled, and fired both barrels.
Thrown backward from the double blast, the wendigo stumbled over the rim of century-old masonry and fell sprawling into the inferno. Instantly, the sizzling fur turned fiery colors, and the mutie tried to claw its way out of the banked holocaust, the ancient brickwork coming out of the walls under the raking claws.
Rushing closer, the companions tied rags around their mouths to help them breath in the thick smoke and triggered their blasters into the mutie, blowing off fingers every time it tried to get free. Thrashing about mindlessly from the intolerable pain, the wendigo turned to battle the flames, punching and clawing at the unseen enemy, its tentacles lashing out in every direction. The regeneration of the head slowed as the skin blistered and charred, the raw hide splitting to reveal the flesh and bone underneath. The creature fell to the ground and didn’t rise again, succumbing to the hellish embrace of the growing bonfire.
