Damnation Road Show

by James Axler

  More disturbing to the carny master than the spreading brown goo was the erratic movement of the creature’s left leg. A mechanical servo located above the synthetic knee joint had been damaged by a bullet hit. There was a deep dent at one end of its titanium housing, and it leaked an oily green liquid mixed with blood. The injury made it impossible for the Magus to control the leg. It jerked and spasmed madly, donkey kicking in the air. In its cage of stainless steel, the Magus’s human calf muscle seized up into a rock hard lump, sinews straining, real veins bulging, then it relaxed, then it seized up again, as if it had a mind of its own.

  A demented mind.

  The tense-relax cycle was reflected, most horribly, in the few remaining human features of the Magus’s face.

  The spectacle of human-machine interface gone awry might have been funny to Crecca if he had been watching from say, forty or fifty yards away, while hiding behind a large boulder, and if a battle royal for control of the ville hadn’t been going on just outside the wag. As it was, the carny master could only stand there in the shambles of the big salon, grim faced, trying not to show his impatience and growing concern over the deteriorating tactical situation, while he awaited further orders from his commander in chief.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  “Give me a speed wrench!” the Magus cried.

  Crecca handed over the adjustable crescent.

  With wet steel fingertips, the Magus fitted and tightened the jaws of the wrench over the coupling nut on the ruptured steel-mesh vein. “Replacement tubing,” he snarled. “Third drawer of the cabinet. Fast! I’m losing pressure to my head!”

  The carny master didn’t see fit to point out that there was also an alarming knocking sound coming from inside his boss’s torso. He grabbed a twelve-inch length of preassembled tubing from the drawer and ripped it free of its hard plastic shrink-wrapping.

  The Magus loosened the nuts at either end of the broken vessel. “Finger, here,” he ordered Crecca, indicating the lower end of the vein, where it joined a stub of rigid steel pipe.

  When the Magus freed the bottom coupling, Crecca jammed his thumb over the threaded hole, stopping the gush of tranny fluid.

  The Magus fitted the new coupling and vein to the top, torquing it down. After he had Crecca move his thumb, he attached the length of tubing at the bottom. This repair completed, the steel-eyed monster turned his attention to his madly jerking leg.

  To Crecca, the problem didn’t seem life-threatening, or even important—a painful inconvenience, mebbe—but when he suggested that perhaps he was needed to supervise the rousties in the battle for Bullard ville, the Magus would have none of it.

  “Let Furlong deal with rad-blasted dirt farmers!” the creature snarled. “I need your help to deactivate the servo’s internal power supply. I can’t afford to lose any more of my calf muscle.”

  The Magus rarely explained anything, so the carny master was somewhat surprised when he continued. Carefully, as if to a slow child, he said in the unusually high-pitched voice, “There is a balance, precarious at best, between my living and my nonliving parts. I know you think that eventually I will become an entirely mechanical being, but that just demonstrates your profound ignorance of the energy dynamics of biological systems. The steel and plastic parts I have accumulated over the years allow me to survive, but they are clumsy and inefficient, and the replacements are only useful below a certain number. Above that total number, they become a serious liability. My ratio of human tissue to mechanism is already so low that if I exert myself to any degree the nutrient supply to the living flesh is challenged, and I risk massive cell death of my remaining tissue.”

  Though the Magnificent Crecca very much liked the sound of “massive cell death” when it was applied to the Magus, he understood nothing else of what had just been said. Because he understood nothing, he didn’t dare make a sound or even a facial expression.

  When he made no response, the Magus barked more orders at him, demanding a succession of tools from the rollaway box. The titanium housing on the servo had been partially crushed by the slug impact, and two of the retaining bolts had been badly twisted. Because of this, and because the Magus couldn’t keep his leg still, the removal of the outer case not only required Crecca’s hands-on assistance, but that he sit on the ankle to pin it down on the autopsy table while they worked.

  The bent case bolts proved difficult to extract with hand tools. As the moments stretched on, and the din of blasterfire continued, Crecca’s urge to look out the window grew until it became almost intolerable, but he couldn’t leave the operation. As the Magus worked on one of the two bolts with a socket wrench, he cursed Ryan Cawdor. “He did this to me! That one-eyed son of a swampie jolt whore!”

  In Crecca’s opinion, unasked for and unexpressed, the Magus had done it to himself by insisting that One-Eye and his son sit in the tent where he could watch them die with the farmers. And he had done it to the rest of the carny by insisting that the looting begin before the mass chilling was over. The Magus had been obsessed with the idea that in the case of Bullard everything had to happen quickly, the ville cleaned of its extralarge cache of valuables, the bodies buried and the caravan moving on, all before a bunch of new travelers along the long, dry road wandered onto the scene and complicated things.

  If Crecca knew nothing of biology, from his life experience roving through the Deathlands, he had acquired a fine grasp of what made people tick. It didn’t take much to realize that the Magus took an unholy pleasure in playing the puppet master. The steel-eyed monster’s idea of fun was diverting and deceiving the doomed suckers in the gas tent while his crews stripped their humble cabins of furnishings, clothing, tools, food, utensils, weapons and ammunition, and tore up floor- and wallboards looking for other predark treasures. The Magus had assigned twenty-five rousties to this task, supervised by Furlong.

  Dividing the force had been a big mistake, but it was understandable.

  The carny had run this operation successfully so many times that once the crowd was seated, the canisters in position and exit guards in place, all the rest seemed a sure thing. The tent was Kevlar and couldn’t be cut or torn with anything less than a blowtorch, and there were armed rousties to seal off the only way out. The Magus hadn’t even considered the possibility of a mass breakout of his intended victims, so he hadn’t been prepared to defend against it. Nor had he considered the consequences to follow with all the ville sec men alerted, and everyone older than twelve years packing a blaster, and the good folk of Bullard catching the rousties in the act of looting their cabins and storehouses.

  Given the switch in odds, which was suddenly three to one against the rousties, and the fact that these farmers had trained to defend themselves and had been successful doing so in the past, it was no surprise to Crecca that the whole thing had gotten way out of hand in a hurry.

  Some of the carny crew had been chilled in the tent by Cawdor and his bunch, which left another twenty or so to guard the wag convoy. And that was before the shooting from the ville folks started. There was no way of telling how many rousties were still alive. Certainly not enough to beat back the farmers. In which case, the best Crecca and the carny survivors could hope for was to exit Bullard with whole skins. Which meant abandoning pretty much everything to escape, and doing it before they were overrun.

  As the carny master finally wrenched free the bent bolt, it occurred to him that even now the Magus was jerking his strings, making him act against his own interests. And that there was nothing he could do about it.

  Once the cover to the servo was off, the Magus attacked the leads to the microminiature nuke battery that powered the unit. The ruined device couldn’t be replaced; there was no spare on hand. A new one needed to be machined from titanium bar stock, something that couldn’t be done in Bullard. Or anywhere else in Deathlands that Crecca knew about. There weren’t any functioning precision machine tools readily available. Even if there were, no one was alive who could figure out
how to run one. In the present, all the Magus could do was shut off the unit. When the connection to the battery was broken, his calf muscle relaxed, but without the servo to coordinate its movements, the half-steel leg was just so much deadweight.

  The Magus didn’t seem worried. One leg or two, he always managed to get away. Jumped dimensions or time traveled, or whatever it was that he did.

  To get himself a new servo made, Crecca thought as he hurried to the salon’s rear window, mebbe the Magus would jump backward in time, to before the nukecaust.

  One glance across the compound told Crecca his worst fears had come true. Everything had gone wrong. Most of the looter crew lay sprawled on the ground. As the ville sec force advanced on the three parked wags, blasters blazing, one of the wags swerved out of line and came roaring his way.

  Chapter Twenty

  “What the fuck is that?!” Furlong snarled from the Winnebago’s swivel-mounted driver chair.

  The man who was about to dump an armload of spoils into the stripped RV’s built-in booty bins froze as the head roustie lurched out of the shabby throne and bore down on him.

  Furlong snatched a crudely framed object from the top of the load. It was a hair painting, made of twisted and braided lengths of human and animal hair in different colors, knotted into flowers and vines. It was stuck to a square board with little globs of translucent yellow glue.

  “This is worthless shit!” he said, tossing the painting out the open rear cargo doors. “So is this…and this…and this….” Furlong grabbed other items from the roustie and tossed them out onto the ground, as well. Handmade wooden eating utensils, raggedy clothing, holed-out boots. In a matter of seconds, he had stripped the man of his loot.

  The only items Furlong didn’t throw out were a handful of dubious predark trinkets: a broken metal wristwatch without a band, a pair of thick glasses with scratched lenses and some junk jewelry with stones missing from the settings. Gesturing at the heap on the ground, he told the roustie, “Haul back another bunch of crap like that, and you’ll be digging graves. I’m not gonna warn you again. And you tell the others the same. We only want tradeable stuff. No more of that garbage.” As Furlong lumbered back to the captain’s chair, he heard familiar music faintly drifting over from the big top. The swivel throne was turned to the rear so he could oversee the grunt-and-carry work of his subordinates. Overseeing was what he did best. Every time rousties returned to the RV, he gave them the hard once-over, looking for suspicious lumps under their clothing, making sure they weren’t hiding valuable items on their persons. And he kept his eye out for anything especially nice and concealable that he could appropriate for himself when all backs were turned.

  So far, there’d been nothing worth the risk. The pickings from Bullard ville had been pathetic.

  The clothing liberated from the cabins was patched and threadbare, and even when apparently clean, reeked of composted human manure. The flatware used by the dirt farmers was roughly carved from tree branches. The hand tools and edged weapons were made of rebar chipped out of the fallen highway overpass, and of salvaged, ground-down wag leaf springs. The farmers’ personal-grooming items were likewise homemade: corn-cob-and-pig-bristle hairbrushes, snaggle-pronged bone combs, toothbrushes that were nothing more than furred-out twigs. Hut furnishings consisted of small, irregular pieces of mirror, faded predark photos, handmade wooden toys, curtains made of strung small and large animal vertebrae. The predark “keepsakes” consisted largely of broken small electronic items and parts of same; plastic and metal odds and ends that 150 years earlier would have been tossed aside. So far, no weapons or ammo had been found. The dirt farmers had all carried their blasters and cartridge belts into the tent.

  Furlong figured a ville this well-organized had to have hidden away all the good stuff in a safe place, probably under armed guard. The roustie crews just hadn’t uncovered the main storehouse yet. Because Bullard ville was the carny’s biggest target so far, both in terms of population and the number of buildings, the plan was to work systematically, moving from one end to the other, ransacking every hut and lean-to along the way. The looters were under orders to take only the choicest stuff; otherwise the wag bins would get filled up with worthless junk, which would just have to be dumped once they hit the motherlode.

  In the wake of their previous mass chillings, booty other than food, blasters, ammo and fuel, the stuff they couldn’t use in the near term, they had either stashed in caches well off the main roads along their performance circuit or carried to one of Deathlands’ primitive trading outposts.

  Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny wasn’t the kind of operation that could make a roustie rich. Nobody in Deathlands was getting rich, except mebbe the barons. And the Magus. But the carny folk sure weren’t starving, and that set them apart from most other denizens of the hellscape. They had two square meals a day, a shelter over their heads and some regular excitement. Each chiller got a share of the profit, the share determined by the carny master. This was taken out in stolen property, allowing the rousties to occasionally upgrade their blasters and stabbers, and to maintain their jolt and joy-juice habits.

  The chillers’ other options for gainful employment, given their skill base, were slim. They could work for a baron as part of a sec force, or work as solo robbers, ambushing and picking off the weakest individuals, or join a band of coldhearts that could occasionally tackle and overpower a small wag convoy, or attack a remote single-family cabin.

  Furlong had tried the sec man job for a while. It didn’t work out. He liked to use the stick too much, and he liked to steal whenever the opportunity arose. In short order he had made enemies of the very ville folk he was supposed to protect. Personally, he considered the itinerant-robber lifestyle too dangerous, even in a band of coldhearts. Robber packs were usually only a half-dozen strong. When it came to chilling for a living, there was safety in numbers. Big numbers. In organization. In the kind of deception and cover the carny provided.

  When the first crackle of blasterfire erupted from inside the carny tent, Furlong didn’t think anything of it. A few times before in other targeted villes, right after the gas had been released, when the folks in the front rows started foaming at the mouth, going into convulsions and dropping dead, some of the suckers at the rear had guessed what was going on. They had held their breaths and charged the exit with drawn blasters. What with the poison circulating inside the tent and the armed rousties in gas masks, the shooting had never lasted more than a minute.

  This time the blasterfire didn’t stop.

  It dwindled momentarily, then resumed in a frenzy of back-and-forth reports.

  “Nukin’ hell!” Furlong snarled, even as his stomach sank to somewhere around his boot tops.

  Something had gone wrong with the plan.

  A few heartbeats later, bullets started slamming into the side of his wag that faced the tent. They passed completely through the Winnebago’s cargo compartment, thundering on the metal walls above the armor plate, punching ragged holes in the thin sheet steel. A looter caught standing at the rear of the box was hit by many slugs at once. The top of his skull exploded spectacularly as he was hurled backward, into and over the edge of a bin. His upper body was hidden, but his legs, which stuck up in the air, kicked reflexively as they absorbed more impacts from the hail of lead. The bastard couldn’t feel the slugs plowing into and ripping chunks out of his calves. What was left of his brains dripped down the side wall in a pink smear. The two other rousties working in the back managed to dive to the deck and the safety of the low wall of tempered-steel plate, covering their heads with their hands.

  Furlong immediately dropped the louvered steel shades that protected the front and side windows of the RV’s driver compartment. Through the slats, amid the flurry of dust puffs kicked up by the waves of bullet strikes, Furlong watched his looting crew fall dead in their tracks, cut down by withering blasterfire from the rows of plant beds.

  The head roustabout jammed the front half o
f his Llama 9 mm semiblaster through the driver’s-side window shade’s gun port and fired back. The opening was so small that he couldn’t look down the blaster’s sights. There was just enough room for the action to cycle. To aim the weapon, he had to peer through louver slit eight inches above the firing hole.

  Because Furlong had put in a lot of practice shooting through the port, it only took him two bracketing rounds to find the range to the nearest occupied plant bed. The dirt farmer shooters crouching there had found him, too. Their bullets spanged harmlessly off the outside of the armored window shade. Grinning, Furlong pumped slug after full-metal-jacketed slug into the stand of nearly ripe corn, aiming at the muzzle-flashes that winked at him from between the densely packed stalks.

  After the fifth shot, a bib-front-overall-clad dirt farmer came tumbling out from behind the curtain of green. He crashed through the stalks, flattening them as he fell, arms outstretched, handblaster slipping from his fingers. He hit the ground and lay sprawled, head down, over the lip of the bed for a moment, then as he regained consciousness, started thrashing his arms, struggling to get out of the line of fire. Struggling in vain.

  Furlong shot him again. The bullet plucked at the fabric of his T-shirt six inches below the base of his skull, just above the crisscross of his bib-front straps. The arms stiffened and then went limp.

  An instant later, the head roustie was surprised to see the body scoot backward a foot, back between the corn stalks. Then he realized that someone had hold of the dirt farmer by the ankles and was trying to drag him back behind cover. Furlong dropped his aimpoint and touched off five more rounds. Ears of corn exploded juicily, broad leaves went flying, and the stalks parted for a second, revealing a second bib-fronted man, spurting jets of red from a devastating head wound as he slumped over the legs of his dead pal.

  Autofire from behind the front and rear bumpers of the wags mowed down the six or eight ville sec men trying to advance to the closest of the plant beds. The rousties whistled and taunted the surviving sec men, even as their friends twitched in the dirt, trying to make them mad enough to charge into the killzone. Nobody charged. The farmers had discipline. After that, there was a lot of random shooting from both sides. A lot of gray smoke drifted about, but no chilling.