Damnation Road Show

by James Axler

  A week had passed since they came on the looted ville and the mass grave. A week of walking, first in the wheel ruts of the presumed chillers to the ville of Perdition, then overland to try to intersect the path of the already departed convoy. In that time, Doc hadn’t improved, and J.B. still towed him, out of duty and friendship.

  The peeling sweat on J.B.’s face cut stripes of clean skin through the caked yellow grime; his wire-rimmed spectacles were smeared with a mixture of both. The stocky man wore his precious fedora hat screwed down on his head as he strained forward. Seeing the determination on his face made a flicker of a smile cross Ryan’s lips. He had known John Barrymore Dix since their wild and woolly days with the legendary Trader. J.B. had been that operation’s Armorer, a nickname that had stuck. They were best friends then, as now.

  J.B. never said he was sorry when he wasn’t.

  And he never gave up.

  As Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was dragged along, he railed at a god who was either absent, or oblivious, or malevolent. Or some of each. Doc was an educated man. He used big words. Complicated arguments chased his thoughts, rather than vice versa, like angry wasps trapped inside his skull. He made leaps in logic, dropping out pivotal points, speaking from opposite points of view. At times he seemed to be taking on the persona of his own grand inquisitor.

  The only companion with the background to unscramble his philosophical ravings was Mildred Wyeth, and she had long since given up the game. The solidly built black woman was a medical doctor, and aside from Doc, had the most formal education of any of them. She had been cryogenically frozen after a botched surgery just before skydark, and reanimated by Ryan and the others nearly a hundred years later.

  Mildred’s diagnosis of Doc’s current condition was grim. She had said his overwhelmed mind had twisted in on itself. Anger reflecting anger, which led to agonizing flashbacks, which reduced him to sobbing into his palms. The man was suffering from an unspeakable, unending ordeal—a price paid for no crime of his, other than the exquisite bliss of his former life. The life he had been born to live, and had been denied. In Mildred’s medical opinion, Doc’s rambling, often shouted, diatribes to imaginary gatherings of Oxford dons allowed him to flee the crushing reality of the present, where he was doomed to exist without his beloved wife and children.

  Though Mildred sometimes acted as if she had little love for the old man, it was plain to Ryan that she found it hard to watch and be helpless to slow his further mental and physical disintegration.

  The one-eyed man remained cautiously confident that Doc would come out of the tailspin eventually. As he always had before.

  As they neared the ville entrance, Ryan saw a little girl in a loose-fitting, faded cotton print dress staring at them from inside the gate. A very pretty little girl with a headband of daisies. Her gaze swept past Ryan to rest upon Dean. The boy sensed he had a rapt audience of one. Though exhausted, he drew himself to his maximum height and flashed a smile at the girl. Ryan was amused to see that his son managed a bit of a manly swagger, with the 9 mm Browning Hi-Power blaster prominently strapped to his hip.

  Krysty gave Ryan a nudge. “Like father, like son,” she commented.

  A trio of armed men in bill caps stood behind a pile of concrete boulders and rubble that served as both a checkpoint and traffic barrier. Beyond them, Ryan caught his first glimpse of Bullard ville: an oasis of brilliant green that sprouted miraculously from the sunbaked yellow earth. In rows of raised beds, under slanting, corrugated metal roofs, the crop plants grew lush and tall. On the far side of the beds, simmering in the valley heat, predark plastic-and-metal signs on tall poles dangled precariously above a line of low buildings.

  “Man, oh, man, could I ever go for a cheese-burger and a strawberry shake,” Mildred said.

  Ryan grinned. “We’ll be lucky to get a plate of beans and a swig of green beer.”

  “I know, I know. But a girl can still dream, can’t she?”

  As they stepped up to the checkpoint, one of the bill caps shouted in an unpleasantly high voice, “And just who might you folks be?” Without giving them time to answer, he asked a second question. “What is your business here?” The two other sentries held sawed-off, 12-gauge, double-barreled shotguns at waist height. The range was such that, by discharging all four stubby barrels at once, they could cut the strangers not so neatly in two.

  Ryan showed the guards open hands. “We’re just travelers on the long road north,” he said. “Come to water and rest, and willing to pay for it.”

  The head sentry, a very short man with a full brown beard, gave them a hard once-over. He looked especially long at their complement of weapons, appraising them for possible threat and commercial value. When he came to Doc, he couldn’t help but notice the slack rope that connected him around the waist to the man with the smeared eyeglasses.

  “What’s with the geezer?” the guard leader chirped. “He sick? He looks sick to me. He better not have the fucking oozies!”

  Ryan and the companions knew he was referring to an incurable, mutated brain virus, much feared and believed to be transferred by cannibalism.

  “He’s just old,” Krysty said. “Very, very old.”

  “Oughta leave him to meet his maker, then.”

  “Ain’t his time, yet,” Ryan said, the look on his face telling the guard to mind his own bastard business.

  Unable to contain himself any longer, one of the shotgunners excitedly blurted out, “We got a carny come to town.”

  “That so?” J.B. said.

  The sentries shared wide grins.

  “Best rad-blasted carny in all the Deathlands,” the head guard added. “Big show’s tomorrow.”

  “We’ll have to stick around, then,” Ryan said. “Something like that you don’t see every day.”

  “You’d better believe it,” the shotgunner said. “Gert Wolfram’s carny only plays the most important, big-time villes.”

  “You can stow your gear over where the carny is putting up camp,” the head guard said. “As long as you got something to trade, you got the run of Bullard ville. There’s food, water, joy juice and the best damn gaudy house this side of Perdition. When you run out of trade goods, we will escort you out of the berm. We don’t give no charity here. And we don’t take no guff from those who don’t belong.”

  With that warning, the guards lowered their scatterguns and allowed the companions to enter Bullard ville.

  Once inside, there was no mistaking the proposed campsite. Not with fifteen wags parked in a broad circle on the baked yellow dirt. On the side of the largest wag was a crudely painted sign that read Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny Show. Lots of ville folks were standing around gawking while dozens of carny roustabouts worked to set up camp. The heavy protective tarps were pulled back from the trailered cages so the gawkers could see in. Only from a goodly distance, though. The newcomers appeared to have set up a kind of invisible perimeter that the ville folk weren’t crossing. Mebbe they’d been warned to steer clear? Mebbe they didn’t need to be.

  As they approached the mob of spectators, a strange sound split the air. Two very loud tones, a high note sliding to low. Only Mildred made the connection to a foghorn; none of the others had ever heard one. To them it sounded like a baleful howl.

  Beside Ryan, Jak cranked his head around and stiffened, as if ten thousand volts had just shot through him. The youth’s reaction surprised the one-eyed man. It was just an animal noise. A very large animal.

  Before Ryan could raise a hand to stop him, the albino took off, running at full tilt for the cages. Some of the carny folk saw him coming and tried to block his way with widespread arms, but he feinted, swinging his white head one way, then squirted past them. Staring at his rapidly accelerating back, the empty-handed roustabouts yelled for someone to get him.

  “Dark night,” J.B. muttered, “we were supposed to go in nice and quiet, and recce first.”

  “Better back his play,” Ryan said, waving the compani
ons after him.

  J.B. pulled Doc along like a stubborn calf.

  Suddenly the howling got a whole lot louder, and it changed in timbre. Instead of coming from deep in a huge set of lungs, it came from high in the throat.

  It went from misery to absolute joy.

  Then it stopped altogether.

  There was no one left to try to turn back the companions. All the carny folk had rushed over to one of the trailered cages.

  And with good reason.

  It appeared that the agile intruder was getting eaten alive.

  Jak had his head stuck between the bars of the cage, holding on to them with both hands. For a split second, Ryan’s heart dropped in his chest. He thought the young albino was a sure goner, his head half inside the great carnivore’s open maw. But then he saw Jak wasn’t getting chewed.

  He was getting licked.

  The mutie mountain lion’s tongue slathered his face so hard that even holding on to the bars with all his might, Jak couldn’t keep his boots on the ground.

  The great cat made a loud purring sound, like a wag’s big diesel engine fast idling, as it scrubbed the albino’s face and neck with a wide pink tongue that had to be a foot and a half long.

  “What the nuking hell?” J.B. exclaimed as he came to a stop beside his one-eyed friend.

  “It’s the lion, J.B.,” Ryan said. “They’ve got the lion.”

  The companions—except Doc, who was still wearing the thousand-yard stare—needed no further explanation. Some time ago, Jak had been made a prisoner in Baron Willie Elijah’s mutie zoo. He had been caged up with a mutie mountain lion. After an initial, violent and lengthy misunderstanding, the two had got on famously. They were both wild things, so well matched physically and spiritually that they could communicate without words, with their eyes and with touch. Brother beasts of the hellscape.

  Once freed, the big lion hadn’t run off, but had followed Jak and the companions. Only when it refused to enter a mat-trans unit was it left behind. This, it seemed certain, was that selfsame noble beast.

  “A captive again,” Mildred said glumly.

  “Unlucky,” Krysty said.

  “Mebbe,” J.B. stated. “Mebbe not.”

  “What do you mean?” Krysty asked.

  “Found Jak again, didn’t he?”

  “Step back from the cage, mutie,” one of the roustabouts shouted as he shouldered up to the bars. He was a big, thick-bodied man with a heavy blue-black shadow of beard stubble, and matted black hair on the tops of his shoulders and the backs of his arms. He outweighed Jak by more than a hundred pounds.

  The albino paid him no mind.

  “I said, step back!”

  With no one to stop them, the ville folk pressed forward for a good view of the action. The show was starting a day early.

  Jak pulled his head out from between the bars but didn’t move away. His fine, shoulder-length white hair was plastered to the side of his head.

  “Let cat out,” Jak said, his ruby-red eyes glittering.

  “Yeah, right,” the roustabout replied sarcastically.

  Then he turned to address the gathered carny people. “Turn loose a thousand pounds of man-eater on your say-so.”

  This remark was met with peals of laughter from the ville and carny folk alike.

  “Let him out,” Jak repeated. His voice was flat, calm, controlled.

  The smile melted off the hairy man’s face.

  “Get closer,” Ryan told the others.

  Even as they began to move, the hairy guy snarled, “You’re begging for a major ass-kicking, Snowball.” He looked around to make sure he had backup, then added, “And by skydark you’re gonna get it!”

  Before the hairy roustabout and his pals could take a step forward, the albino’s right hand was up and full of .357 Magnum Colt Python. He showed them all the dark hole in the crowned muzzle, the hole where death slept, until called.

  Jak spoke again. This time it wasn’t a polite request; it was a threat. “Open cage now….”

  Ryan lunged and used his momentum to throw a shoulder into the hairy man from behind. The blind-siding impact sent the roustabout stumbling to his knees, hard. He cursed as he immediately jumped back to his feet. He was very nimble for a big man.

  In the next instant, weapons were out all around.

  The carny folk waved nine mill semiauto blasters, mostly KG-99s and Llamas. Blue-steel, high-capacity cheapies, in excellent condition.

  Ryan held his scoped Steyr SSG-70 rifle at waist height. Krysty had her Model 640 Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver in a double grip. Dean likewise braced his Hi-Power. Mildred one-handed her .38, a Czech-built, ZKR 551 target pistol. J.B. balanced his 12-gauge Smith & Wesson M-4000 pumpgun against his hip. Seeing the deadly turn of events, the ville gawkers turned and ran, scattering for the cover of the plant beds like so many jackrabbits.

  The tense moment stretched on and on.

  No one on either side wanted the shooting to start. They were standing way too close to each other to miss. Once the blasting began, there weren’t going to be any survivors.

  Nobody moved.

  Nobody even blinked.

  Then, from over by the circle of wags, someone shouted, “What in the rad-fucking-blazes is going on here?” A tall man in a red tailcoat stormed out of the side door of the biggest wag. At his side was a naked, three-foot-tall, immature stickie.

  The tailcoated man and his little shadow slowed their charge as they approached the fracas.

  With his KG-99’s sights locked on Ryan’s chest, the hairy roustabout explained the deadly stalemate. “Snowball there,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, “wants us to let the nukin’ lion out. Started waving his blaster in our faces.”

  As if it understood what the albino was trying to do, the mountain lion reached a huge paw between the bars and placed it lightly on his slim but powerful shoulder.

  “Not gonna happen, son,” the red-haired, red-goateed carny master told Jak. “That’s one smart cat. The smartest, meanest, damnedest mountain cat in all of Deathlands. He’s playing you for a triple stupe. Open that cage door and he’ll gut you from windpipe to goobers with one swipe of that big old friendly paw of his. Then he’ll carve up the rest of us, just for fun, before we can do jack shit about it. Same way he chilled three of my best handlers over the past two months. One second they were alive, and the next they were torn clean in half—legs here, the rest of them way the fuck over yonder.” To illustrate, he gestured over his shoulder with a hooked thumb.

  Ryan sidestepped over to Jak and whispered in his ear, “It’s not the time for this fight…we got other business first.”

  The albino youth didn’t give a flying fuck for the wishes of most other human beings, but he always paid close attention to Ryan Cawdor, whose battle smarts had never proved wrong, and whose courage never failed.

  Ryan stared hard into the bloodred eyes and nodded, to underscore his point.

  Jak smiled, then swung the ventrib sights of the Python across the chests of his adversaries, counting and marking targets, left to right. Prep for a rapid-fire, cylinder-emptying fusillade.

  A visible shudder passed through the pack of roustabouts.

  Having made his point, Jak holstered his blaster.

  After a pause, all weapons were lowered.

  “You ain’t Gert Wolfram,” J.B. said to the man in the tailcoat.

  The baby stickie started making kissing sounds at the Armorer, who shifted and planted his back foot, bracing himself to swing up the shotgun and take the sucker-fisted squirt’s spongy little head off at the neck.

  “What makes you say that?” asked the carny master.

  “Gert Wolfram is fat, fifty and fucked,” J.B. replied. “Last time we saw him, he had two broken ankles and his stickie slaves were pulling him apart like a sweet dough pudding.”

  “Even if Wolfram survived the appetites of his pets,” Mildred added, “he couldn’t have lost twenty years in age, two hundred pou
nds in weight and gained six inches in height.”

  “You got me there,” said the red-haired man with a disarming grin. “Actually I never claimed to be old Wolfram. People just assume that it’s so. Sure doesn’t hurt the business to let them keeping thinking that. I’m committed to keeping the show’s original fine reputation. I’m called the Magnificent Crecca, for obvious reasons.” He reached down to adjust the soft but prominent bulge in the front of his white pants. Then he leered at Krysty.

  “Do we call you Magnificent, or just Crecca?” she asked.

  “I answer to either, or to M.C., or carny master, or in your case—” he leaned closer to her to add “—to lover man.”

  Krysty’s prehensile hair reacted to the unwanted advance, drawing up into tight coils.

  Crecca’s eyes widened when he saw this. “My, my,” he said, “aren’t you the special one?” He pulled at his chin beard, looked her up and down salaciously, then said, “Wonder what else you’ve got hidden away for me?”

  Krysty put her hand on the butt of her wheelgun. “I’ve got six hollowpoints, all for you,” she said, staring him down.

  For a second Ryan thought things were going to escalate out of control again, but Crecca just looked amused. “I hope you’re all going to be here tomorrow so you can see the carny show,” he said. “You’ll never forget it. I promise you that.”

  Neither will you, lover man, Ryan thought. Neither will you.

  Chapter Three

  “Ain’t you never heard about the man with the black eye patch?”

  From the luxury and comfort of an executive office chair bolted to the sheet metal floor—the rips in the brown leatherette on the arms, seat, and head-rest repaired with overlapping strips of frayed duct tape—the Magnificent Crecca gestured impatiently for the big man breathing wolf-nasty in his face to take a step back. Something more easily ordered than obeyed.

  Floor space in the carny master’s cabin in the big wag was at a premium, largely because its side walls were lined with built-in, sway-proof racks and shelves. Jammed on these shelves were select items taken either in trade for performances, or looted after a mass chilling and burial. Among the more important trinkets were unfired, Brazilian-made handblasters still wrapped in their protective Cosmoline; several .223-caliber, full-auto, military carbines; a scoped Remington 700 longblaster; and factory-loaded ammo in their original metal boxes. There were tall bottles of the very best joy juice and plastic bags of uncut jolt. There were lidded glass jars packed with bright bits of jewelry and dozens of cardboard boxes full of single-serving-sized containers of predark candies. There was also a barely functioning mini-TV and VCR, a small number of video-and audio-tapes and a black boom box. The electricity to power the carny master’s home entertainment center came from movable solar panels on the wag’s roof.