by James Axler
The surviving scrap of the original James Kerr saw the burning pool as a conscious, malevolent force that had swallowed him alive, a whirlpool of impossible power and perfect evil that had held him trapped, that had manipulated him like a puppet for longer than he could remember.
The larger portion of himself, the vast fleshy ship that carried him and that he observed with what seemed to be some degree of emotional detachment, had a much different view of the situation. The SS James Kerr found indescribable peace and contentment in living close to the pool and its lovely, twinkling spores. That James Kerr found serenity in tending the fungus in its moist grottoes, in following the pool’s grisly, unspoken commands, in being one with its infinite majesty.
It was this larger James Kerr who, standing on the edge of the fire road, felt the crushing fear of separation and loss. He longed to be back in the pool’s all-encompassing embrace.
Though passenger Kerr could only vaguely remember it now, there had been a time when he had been a whole, undivided being. He remembered traveling from Paradise ville to the pool and the blockhouse and the shanties. He had come on purpose, and he had brought many others with him. Like-minded others. Kerr had belonged to an extended family–religious cult of nearly a hundred members who had migrated from the east in a handful of rusted-out school bus wags. They came in search of a new eden, unpolluted land and water, freedom from the moral depravity that typified Deathlands, and personified Paradise.
In their view, the thriving ville, with its rows of scabrous, twenty-four-hour gaudies and its lice-infested flophouse shacks, with its thieving, murderous residents, was nothing short of hell. After many weeks of enduring the indecencies and indignities of this postnukecaust Sodom, Kerr had located and purchased a crudely drawn map that, according to the traveling trader who had sold it to him, purported to show the way to exactly the sort of place the members had come looking for: isolated, protected, unsullied.
Kerr had then taken the map around the better sections of Paradise, in search of someone trustworthy who they could pay to lead them to the hidden high mountain valley.
No one trustworthy in Paradise would have anything to do with the journey. On seeing the map, most of the prospective guides just spit in the dirt and walked away. The few who would talk to Kerr repeated gruesome campfire stories about what went on in those cruel, dark mountains. About people going up there and never being seen or heard from again.
Because Kerr and his fellow cult members believed they were righteous in their faith and that their god wouldn’t lead them astray; because they were desperate to leave Paradise, they chose to ignore the ominous signs and set out to find the place marked on the map on their own.
Inside of ten minutes of their arrival at poolside, the green lightning began to crackle and the spores fell upon them in a pale-yellow blizzard. It was so beautiful, so remarkable that the people cheered and rejoiced on the bank, taking it for a sign from God. Afterward, they had wandered down to the deserted shacks, to the ready-made, if shabby, little town. Within half an hour, the Clobbering Chair had been dragged out of the blockhouse and into the center of the ville’s pounded-dirt square. The first victims had laughed as they pushed and shoved one another to win a seat and be strapped down. There was more cheering and rejoicing from these morally upright folk as the lead pipe smashed down and brains began to fly.
That day Kerr himself had swung the bloody pipe and led the cheers, and had supervised the butchery that followed on the muddy banks. His curse from the very beginning had been his receptivity to the pool’s needs. It was what kept him alive. Even when he no longer wanted to be.
“Only five,” one of the men standing near him said.
The words snapped Baron Kerr out of his dismal reverie. He refocused his eyes and saw that that was true. Just five wags. One was a ways ahead of the others. It was a much smaller convoy than the scout had described, but there was no way of knowing how many people were inside each one. There was room for sixty, for sure, if they were packed in tight.
Once all five wags had taken the detour and turned up the main fire road, Kerr led the three men back to the Baja Bug. He drove them down to the valley floor, then to the barricade across the interstate. At his command they got out and started dismantling the barrier, throwing the chunks of concrete onto the shoulder. It was the work of a couple of hours to pull it apart.
The baron didn’t remember how many times he had temporarily diverted traffic in this way, but he had always diverted just enough to fill the pool’s needs. Only so many could be accommodated in the ville. Only so many could be nourished by the fungus.
How long would sixty fresh souls last in the hidden valley? Kerr no longer tried to predict such things. Survival time was different for every individual. And sometimes, for reasons beyond his understanding, the pool chose to gorge shamelessly, taking a dozen or more unto itself in a single day.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jak peered around the bend in the downhill road, squinting his ruby-red eyes to slits as he listened hard for the sound of pursuit. All he could hear was the rasp of his own breath in his throat. The oppressive and airless stillness of the deep forest pressed against the sides of his head; it felt as if his ears were plugged up with cotton. The albino shifted the Colt Python to his left hand and wiped the sweat on his right palm on his pants leg. His mission wasn’t to fight a rearguard, delaying action, but to verify that the carny chillers had abandoned their wags and come after them on foot. And to try to get a head count if he could.
Jak had been the natural choice for the job because he was the fastest runner of the companions. But he was as slow as molasses compared to the lion, who sat on his back legs on the road beside him, its huge head cocked, its round ears upright and at full attention.
They are coming, Little Brother, the big cat said without making a sound, the words appearing in Jak’s mind.
Knew would be, Jak thought back. How many?
Fourteen pairs of feet.
That all? We seven, eight with you…
I cannot help you fight them.
Jak was astonished by this revelation.
Only men with blasters, he thought. You stronger. You faster. Is it this place? Bad place?
It has nothing to do with them, or with these woods. It is what’s coming, what waits for you all over the mountaintop.
The lion gently placed its huge paw on his shoulder. Little Brother, I am not afraid. I just know how it ends, and I know I have no part in it.
How know? How can know if hasn’t happened yet?
Time as we know it is an illusion. It’s an artifact of the physical forms we currently inhabit, of their hardwiring, if you want to look at it that way. The truth is, everything that has ever happened, that ever will happen, is always happening. All of history takes place in the same endless instant. There is no past, no present, no future.
If can see it, tell what happens.
I cannot tell you.
I live? You live?
It doesn’t matter. Don’t you understand? Nothing ever dies, Little Brother.
Wife Christina, baby? Jak thought at once, a great lump rising in his throat.
They are with you, and with me.
The albino shook his head, grimacing. They weren’t. If he knew anything, he knew that much. He had buried them with his own hands.
Not understand.
But you will, Little Brother. Listen. They are close now.
A second later, Jak heard footsteps crunching on road. Many men were running uphill in a skirmish line.
We go, Jak thought as he holstered his handblaster. He ran soundlessly up the road, sprinting on his toes and high kicking. The lion loped easily along a few steps behind.
When Jak rounded a turn and glanced back over his shoulder, the great cat was gone. Simply gone.
There was no crashing noise as it plunged deep into the tangle of deadfall.
No twinkling dust trail spiraling up into the slanting rays of sunlig
ht that pierced the forest canopy.
No goodbye.
“IT’S JAK,” Dean called softly to his father’s back.
Ryan stopped jogging and turned in the middle of the road, as did the others, watching as the albino raced up to him, out of breath. The lion was nowhere to be seen.
The one-eyed man said nothing about the lion; he had other, much more important questions. He listened, grim faced, to the answers Jak gave. They were pretty much what he had expected. The carny chillers were still pursuing them. They were on foot and about a quarter of a mile behind. There were as many as fourteen in the band.
Ryan had three choices, as he saw things. The first was to lead the companions over the mountain at top speed and keep on running, figuring that the coldhearts would eventually wear down and abandon the chase. That outcome was something he knew he couldn’t count on, especially with the Magus giving the orders. There was also the problem of his not knowing the terrain; with a full-out run there’d be no time for recce, and he could get his people boxed in.
Permanently.
His second choice was to find the highest ground and spread his force out to defend it. This would work, he knew, but only if they had enough ammo to do the job, and enough time to reach the peak. Ryan couldn’t tell how far off the summit was because of the densely packed trees. It was possible that the pursuit could overrun them before they reached it.
His last option was to locate a suitable place for an ambush and bushwhack the murdering bastards as they came up the road. That seemed the best course of action to him. At the very least, it would reduce the number of the opposition, and the massed fire might scatter, or even turn the rest back. There was also the possibility that the companions might nail them all—the odds were only two to one. It also gave him the choice of the chilling ground, which was a big plus as far as he was concerned.
“Okay, let’s move,” he said, waving the others up the road after him.
They jogged in a single file along the steeply angled track, which wound back and forth through the clustered trunks. There was dust underfoot, and there was stifling heat, but there were no signs of life other than the trees. Here and there, shafts of light speared through breaks in the canopy of branches, spotlighting the blue-gray, bone-dry litter of fallen needles and limbs.
As he trotted up the road, despite the suffocating heat, a chill passed down Ryan’s spine, and he felt a sudden tension at the back of his head, as if the skin had drawn drum tight. It was the same feeling he had experienced when they uncovered the death pit in the nameless ville.
In the grim, eerie forest, he sensed the presence of the dead. Multitudes of the dead, swarming around him.
With an effort he shook off the sensation. He had more than enough flesh-and-blood trouble on his plate without worrying about legions of ghosts. J.B. ran behind him, straining to pull along the roped Doc. After Doc came Dean and Leeloo, then Mildred and Krysty. Jak brought up the rear. Ryan dropped back to jog alongside the Armorer.
“Got to quickly find us a place to chop down these bastards,” Ryan said in a low voice to J.B.
“Anyplace along here will do,” he replied as they rounded a right-hand bend that led to a long, dark, uphill straightaway. “Split up on either side of the road. Sandwich ’em.”
Ryan held up his hand, signaling for the column to stop. “This looks like a good spot for an ambush, ” he told them. “We let ’em get to the straight part, then cross fire them from behind. If we work fast, we can keep them from getting to cover in the trees.”
“They’ll be tracking us, for sure,” J.B. said. He pointed at the jumbled footprints in the soft dirt of the road.
“By the time they figure out we’ve doubled back on them,” Ryan said, “they’ll be caught in the killzone.”
He then split up the companions, sending Dean, Leeloo, Mildred and Krysty to the left side of the road. He led Jak, J.B., and Doc to the right, into the stand of trees on the inside of the bend.
He didn’t have to tell any of them to make their shots count.
Underfoot, the dry twigs and branches snapped and crackled. Puffs of talc-fine dust rose like smoke into the shafts of light.
From the other side of the road came a tiny squeak of a smothered sneeze.
Leeloo, Ryan thought as he watched Jak and J.B. slide belly down in the litter beside the dark trunks. The Armorer made Doc lie down beside him, then followed Jak’s example and pulled some of the crumbling forest litter over them both, creating a double-wide hide.
Before burrowing into the deadfall himself, Ryan carefully placed the Steyr longblaster behind a tree. The range was going to be too close to use it, and the bolt action was way too slow for the shoot-out he envisioned. The idea was to keep the chillers from reaching cover, and that meant cyclic rate. He dropped the SIG’s magazine into his palm, making sure it was topped off. Then he set out a second and a third full mag in front of him, hoping to hell he wouldn’t have to reach for them.
Chapter Twenty-Six
As he trotted up the road, the Magnificent Crecca carried his .223-caliber assault rifle by its plastic pistol grip, with his trigger finger braced outside the trigger guard, just behind the thick curve of the 30-round magazine. The rifle’s fire selector switch was on full-auto. The carny master was ready to whipsaw with hot lead anything that moved among the seemingly endless ranks of tree trunks.
Nothing moved on either side of him, nor on the road ahead.
Not yet, anyway.
Even after his eyes had become adjusted to the darkness of the forest, the road before him was dim. Fifty feet ahead, it blended in with the dismal shadows. There were a few bright patches where sunlight penetrated the branches, but they actually made things worse. They made the surrounding shade seem even darker, more impenetrable.
That’s why he had brought Jackson along. What the little stickie couldn’t see, it could sniff out.
Because Crecca had been concerned about Jackson’s breaking free and running off to hunt solo, he had reeled in all but five feet of the leash, keeping the mutie on a short lead. He kept the rest of the chain coiled in reserve. He could pay it out if the creature made a sudden lunge, taking the strain off the leash, but still keep the stickie under control.
Sensing the excitement of his trainer and the impending bloodshed, Jackson was no longer the singing, dancing puppet that so fascinated the hicks and hayseeds. Under conditions of the hunt, the real Jackson, the pure stickie, bubbled to the surface. The raw chiller instinct that could never be beaten away.
Eyes bulging, whipcord muscles straining, needle teeth bared, it was a perfect example of a stickie on the prowl, a thing that drops from a tree limb into your path with sucker-tipped fingers reaching for your face; a thing that crawls through the half-open cabin window and makes soft kissing sounds under your bed before it crawls in with you, who are too scared to move or cry out.
If either of the prevailing legends was true, if the Magus had constructed the stickies using predark whitecoat technology, tinkering with the minute components of human sperm and egg, or had simply snatched a few breeding pairs from the future, then he had peopled—monstered was a better word—the nightmares of every Deathlands child.
As the carny master and Jackson rounded a turn, the stickie made a sudden surge forward. It dropped onto all fours and scrabbled madly at the dirt, trying to break free, straining at the chain. The prey was close. Very close. Despite the pronged choke collar, it was hard for Crecca to hold the stickie back with his left hand. To get Jackson’s full attention and cooperation, Crecca had to forcefully apply the butt of the M-16.
Twice.
He then drew his men together on the right side of the road. They were all breathing hard and dripping with sweat from the heat and the uphill run. They weren’t scared; Crecca could see that. These were hard-eyed, hard-bitten, longtime professional chillers. They had willingly dug mass graves, administered mercy bullets to the survivors of the poison tent and robbed the huts of
the still warm dead. They’d gotten all pumped up for the big chilling at Bullard, but had been denied their fun and their spoils. Like Crecca, they had lost everything in the debacle. Not just gear and livelihood, but friends and lovers, too. And the blame for all of it could be laid at the feet of Ryan Cawdor and his pals.
The rousties wanted payback. As did he.
Crecca spoke in a hushed whisper, so softly that the chillers had to huddle around him to hear. “From the way the stickie’s acting,” he said, “looks like Cawdor and company are waiting for us up around the next bend. They’ve probably got both sides of the road covered, expecting us to walk into their sights. Not gonna happen that way, though.”
The carny master drew a rough sketch in the dirt with a fingertip. It showed the right-hand turn in the road that they could see the start of from where they stood. He pointed at the three best shots of his crew. Each had a high-capacity, semiauto handblaster. “I want you to sneak up to the edge of the bend on this side of the road,” he said, pointing at his sketch. “Don’t show yourselves until you hear the first shots. Then move out around the curve and nail anyone running down the road.” He tapped the point of the curve. “From this spot,” he said, “you’ve got control of the KZ. If no one breaks and runs, locate the shooters in the cover on the left side. For sure, they’ll be potshotting at us from across the road. Pin ’em down and chill ’em.”
Crecca waved for the other men to huddle even closer. “The rest of us are going to work our way through the brush and get behind the shooters on the right. It’s going to be tough for us to move quietly through all the fallen branches. Go slow and watch your step until we’re in position. When I give the attack signal, we’ll charge them from the rear—the more noise we make the better, and either we kill the bastards outright or drive them onto to the road, where they can be picked off easy by our sharpshooters.”
As Crecca straightened, Jackson let out a soft whine. The mutie was quivering, head to foot, with excitement. That wouldn’t do. Not at all. The carny master showed the stickie the rifle butt.
