by James Axler
Doc asked himself why he hadn’t been paralyzed by the spore fall. Was it because he was already stark raving mad when exposed to the stuff? It seemed to have had the opposite effect on him as it had on everyone else: it had straightened out his thinking instead of confusing it. And the spores had only brought a mild numbness to his hands, feet and face. Perhaps he was immune to the chemicals they contained. Perhaps that immunity had something to do with his time travel. With the rearrangement of his atomic structure. Perhaps everyone else’s susceptibility had to do with skydark-produced mutations in their genetics. Mutations that he didn’t have since he had been born one hundred and forty years before it had occurred. None of these speculations satisfied him.
As the others turned to face the baron, Doc pushed away from the wall and moved to the back of the crowd.
“Bring out the chair!” Kerr said.
Two of the men who had ridden in the Baja Bug with the baron pulled a metal office armchair out into the middle of the square. The third rider placed a long pipe with the rag-wrapped handle in a four-wheeled cart and pushed it near the chair. Everyone pressed in closer until they were shoulder to shoulder, ringing the center of the square. They seemed expectant and eager, as if they knew what was coming. They all wore stiff, unnatural grins on their faces.
Doc wasn’t grinning. He didn’t understand what was about to happen, but he had a very bad feeling about it, a premonition that turned out to be well-founded.
Baron Kerr waved the black man over to his side and slapped him in the middle of his broad, muscular back.
“The burning pool is hungry,” Kerr said to the circled crowd. “And we must feed it. As it feeds us. Eat the body. Become the body.”
Doc was taken aback when the audience, without prompting, immediately picked up the chant, “Eat the body. Become the body. Eat the body. Become the body.”
Even the notoriously closemouthed Jak added his voice to the chorus, his ruby-red eyes wide with excitement.
“This evening we celebrate three departures,” Kerr said, pointing at the men who’d been passengers in the Bug. “The road to where they’re going starts right here.” The baron patted the back of the chair. Then he asked, “Who’s going to be first to take the load off?”
The question started a shoving match between the three men to see who would take the seat. The pushing escalated into full-power punches and kicks. When one of the men fought his way to the chair, the others stopped wrestling on the ground and quickly strapped down his wrists and ankles. The winner smiled as this was happening, showing his bloodied teeth to the crowd. The black man with the dreadlocks took the iron pipe from the cart and made a whistling practice swing. Overhead and down, he drove the end of the pipe into the dirt.
Doc watched as the cook then moved to the back of the chair. Planting his feet, he reared back on one leg and swung the pipe over and down, putting all his weight behind the blow and grunting from the effort.
Like pounding in a tent stake with a twenty-pound mallet.
At the last second, Doc instinctively averted his gaze. But he didn’t have time to stop up his ears. He heard the hollow whack of the pipe and the sound of crunching bone.
Dean, who stood next to him, flinched at what he saw, but didn’t look away.
From the crowd there was a unison gasp of amazement.
I am imagining this, Doc thought, shaking his head to clear it. This can’t be real.
But when he looked back, there was no doubt that it was. The top of the seated man’s head was caved in, his body jerking and kicking against the restraints. The old man’s stomach heaved mightily, and he knew he was going to be sick. As he gritted his teeth, stumbling to the side of the blockhouse to vomit, the others were just standing there, staring at the horror that sat quaking in the chair, and smiling. It was as if they were seeing something completely different than he was. Leaning against the blockhouse with a hand, Doc retched into the dirt. He didn’t have much to retch.
He was still bent over, dry heaving when one of the two remaining men pulled the body out of the seat and dumped it over backward into the waiting cart. The third man took the opportunity to slip past the other and sit in the chair, firmly gripping the arms and wrapping his shins around the front legs. When the second man couldn’t drag him out of the seat, he buckled down the wrist and ankle straps. The man in the chair beamed at the audience as if he were about to be crowned king of the world.
Instead of being simply crowned.
AS RYAN MADE his way out of the caves, the entourage of people from his past trooped alongside and behind him. Their happy chatter began to fade as he approached the exit. And when he turned to look at Trader and his father, he saw their shapes rippling, then disintegrating like campfire smoke in a breeze. A terrible sadness struck him. He didn’t want them to go, but he couldn’t make them stay. Outside the cave, Ryan the passenger became Ryan the captain, the sole commander of his own body. Fully conscious as he filed along with the others toward the square, he understood that he had been hallucinating, that he had been talking to ghosts, to imaginary presences. That he had been utterly lost in those hallucinations. It was worse than any jump nightmare he had ever suffered because it was real. And because he knew without a doubt that he was being held against his will, and made to perform like a puppet or a mutie in the zoo.
He wasn’t alone.
Krysty, J.B., Mildred, Jak and Dean stumbled along beside him, lost in their own inner worlds, raving to themselves.
Something terrible had gripped all of the companions, and it was toying with them.
Ryan knew he had to gather Dean and the others and get out of there while the getting was good. Even as he shook free of the leadenness that still hung upon his limbs, thunder boomed at his back, then came the hot wind, then the sting of the pale-yellow snow.
He stopped walking and turned to face it.
The initial jolt this time, the plunge into the perfume of the flower fields, was less shocking to his system. He slid into it like a well-worn pair of boots. And almost at once, he had a profound sense of well-being. All the wrinkles, the doubts were smoothed away.
He stood there, eye shut, head tilted back, mouth wide open, letting the spores fall on his tongue and dissolve there. They tasted like grains of sugar. Time passed, the snow drifted over his ankles and up to his shins, but he didn’t care.
He was happy. He was content.
Trader and his father, Baron Titus, were by his side again.
Passenger Ryan knew this couldn’t be. But the body in which he was trapped felt their presence, their physical warmth. It even smelled Trader’s cigar smoke. When everyone moved in close to the chair, Ryan’s body moved along, too. When they grinned and chanted, it grinned and chanted. It knew that bloody murder was about to be done.
In all his days, in all his battles, Ryan had never seen men fight each other in order to be the first to die. He had never seen men rejoice at the prospect of their own destruction. Passenger Ryan felt the body rejoice, as well, and was disgusted. Not only did he have no control over the emotions that it felt, but also they weren’t and never could be his emotions.
He wanted to look at the others, but he couldn’t make the head turn; it was locked straight ahead, at the man scrambling into the chair. Ryan sensed that his friends were feeling the same thing that he was, that they were smiling like he was. The insanity was like an infection. Not just out of character. For the companions he knew, it was out of the question. And yet none of them could break free and stop the horror.
The man strapped in the chair was filthy and raggedy, beard matted. His eyes burned like blue coals in his head; he was missing most of his front teeth. With all the dirt that encrusted him, it was hard to guess his age, but he was probably somewhere between twenty and thirty years old.
It all happened very quickly. The black man stepped behind the chair, cocked himself, then brought down more than a yard of metal pipe. The impact drove the man’s head between his sh
oulders. His skull crunched lopsidedly. Brains flew. Blood sprayed. And his right eyeball popped out of its socket and dangled on his cheek.
Along with everyone else, Ryan let out a gasp.
From the cratering wound twinkling points of light streamed upward, circling mebbe five feet above the body, building in volume and turbulence. The light continued to stream until the corpse heaved its last jerk. Then the pinpoints drifted farther and farther apart, until they finally disappeared.
Ryan the passenger was stunned by the detail and realism. Had it been a hallucination? Or had he witnessed the spirit flowing out of the dying body, the soul freed?
After dumping the corpse in the cart, the two men left squabbled and struggled over who would take the seat next. The guy who won was strapped down by the guy who lost. The lucky winner glanced over his shoulder at the waiting black man, a gleeful expression on his face. Then he turned back and shut his eyes as if he was in store for a pleasant surprise.
The black man swung the pipe down again. At the impact Ryan was jolted to the core, as if he had been the one who had been struck. And again, from the devastating wound, he witnessed the streaming of nonsubstance, of ectoplasm, of soul.
“This is the real carny,” Trader whispered into his ear.
THE MAGNIFICENT CRECCA grabbed the bloody end of the pipe with one hand and gave Azimuth a hard shove in the chest with the other. “Give it to me,” he said. “I want a turn swinging the pipe.”
The black man refused to let go of the weapon.
“In case you forgot, you work for me, Azimuth,” Crecca said, giving him another hard push. “Me and the Magus.” He put a heavy emphasis on the last two words.
“I used to work for you, mon,” the carny scout said. “No more. Now I do just what ol’ Marley says.”
Crecca glared at Baron Kerr, who stood with his arms crossed over his chest. Then, without warning, he ducked forward and head-butted Azimuth. The black man’s nose crunched under the blow, and bright blood gushed from his nostrils. As the carny master tried to wrench the pipe away, his scout fought back. Azimuth landed a hard right to the side of Crecca’s head, then jammed the end of the pipe into his solar plexus.
Crecca doubled over and went down, but he pulled the off-balance Azimuth along with him. The two big men crashed to the ground and began rolling around in the dirt. Over the next thirty seconds, they each had their moments. Crecca hammered the black man’s face with consecutive rights and lefts. Azimuth got his big hands around the carny master’s throat and squeezed until his face turned purple. It was the baron who finally broke up the scuffle. He picked up the pipe that Azimuth had dropped and gave each of the men a solid whack in the legs with it.
Crecca got to his feet first. “I want to take my turn on the last guy,” he said to Kerr, holding out his hand. “Azimuth has already done two.”
The baron stared at him hard for a few seconds, then half smiled in a strange, sad way. “I like how he handles the pipe,” Baron Kerr said. “A sweet swing.”
With that, to Crecca’s fury, he handed the weapon back to the black man. The carny master was then forced to watch with the others as Azimuth wound up and hit another long ball. When the shuddering from the chair had stopped, he shouldered in beside the black man to help him load the last body into the cart.
“You’re dead meat,” he warned his former scout.
“We’re all dead meat, mon,” Azimuth said with a laugh.
The baron threw a couple of axes and machetes and a tree-limb saw on top of the corpses. Then he set off across the square, gesturing for the crowd to push the cart after him.
On the north side of the ville was the start of a narrow track that led up the mountainside in a series of winding switchbacks between the fallen blocks of limestone. From the wheel ruts, which were deep and matched the tires perfectly, the cart had been the only vehicle to traverse it in a very long time, and had traversed it often.
Crecca didn’t do any of the cart pushing. He walked a short distance behind, and he stopped to look back when the procession was halfway up the slope. What he saw wasn’t what Ryan or Mildred or Doc saw.
There were no shabby huts below, no open sewers, no mind-numbing poverty and starvation. What Crecca saw instead was a place of enormous wealth and luxury homes, a suburban development that had apparently, miraculously been left untouched by the fires of skydark and the ravages of the decades of nuclear winter that followed. And for the most part it was deserted.
All there for the taking.
And there was only one person keeping Crecca from taking it: Baron Kerr. The last of Kerr’s men lay dead in the cart.
So far the job of baron looked butt simple to Crecca. Much simpler, and much less dangerous than running a carny and mobile gas chamber.
Pick some bounty.
Slam some heads.
And the last bit was especially easy since the folks getting their heads slammed wanted it to happen.
He stared at the low concrete-block building at the foot of the slope. It was the most secure structure in the ville, and where he knew its most valuable treasures would be kept. He recognized the building as a predark pumphouse because he’d come across others like it before. From the oblique and downward angle of view, he could see the huge pipes running down the mountainside to the back of the building. No doubt they had something to do with the pool’s water level.
A tug at the tail of his ringmaster coat made Crecca turn. He looked down to see Jackson staring up at him with dead black eyes.
“Get away from me,” the carny master said.
The naked stickie started to sing and dance, to try to make up for biting the hand that fed it. Jackson did a rendition of the Tiffany music video that they had been rehearsing in the big wag, complete with head jukes and hip thrusts.
The singing sounded like screeching to Crecca, and the dancing wasn’t like dancing at all, more like a perpendicular grand mal seizure. The carny master wasn’t amused and wanted no part of it. He hauled off and booted the stickie in the backside, sending it tumbling down the road.
When Jackson didn’t go away, but rather resumed its irritating caterwauling and pelvic thrusting at a safe distance and with a pleading look on its pale face, Crecca reached down and picked up stones, with which he pelted the creature.
Struck and bleeding, Jackson slunk away over the hillside, still in its choke collar and trailing its chain leash.
With Crecca bringing up the rear, the procession crested the rise, then followed Baron Kerr downhill to the muddy bank beside the pool, where he signaled for them to stop. When the baron handed out the cutting tools, Crecca was first in line to take one of the axes.
The job was messy, but not difficult, because the tools had been honed to razor-sharpness.
After the first body had been chunked, Kerr started lobbing the pieces into the pool. Almost at once the huge lungfish rose to the bait, swirling and splashing on the surface as they fought over their dinner.
Crecca enthusiastically returned to the chopping. As he did so, he noticed Kerr staring at him. The carny master smiled at the ville’s headman as he brought down the ax.
You’re next, Baron, he thought.
Chapter Thirty-One
Baron Kerr had learned not to trust rays of hope. Like everything else in his ever shifting world, they had always proved to be illusions, cast by the burning pool for its own inexplicable ends.
Yet, as he watched the man in the red coat struggle on the ground with the black scout over the right to brain the strapped-down-and-beaming sacrificial lamb, he had the first inkling of what might be possible. While it wasn’t unusual for people to fight for the right to be next to sit in the Clobbering Chair, and so to sooner exit the grasp of the pool, no one had ever before demanded the right to be executioner. To test his suspicion, he had given the pipe back to the black man, then studied Red Coat’s reaction when it was used shortly thereafter to crush the victim’s skull. Kerr saw fury in the man’s eyes. Fury
at having been denied pleasure. Fury directed at him, the denier.
Which was good.
Which was very good.
If the anger the baron had witnessed was real, and not some figment of his own imagination, it was also a first. The spores and the bounty had always produced slaves who were compliant. Not demanding. Not impatient. And above all, not envious. They would take up the pipe and wield it joyfully when the time came, but only when ordered to do so.
The black man had only battled to keep the pipe because the pool entity, speaking through Kerr, had commanded him to use it.
Assuming that the pool had absolute control of Red Coat, a safe assumption under the circumstances, it was making him behave differently than anyone else ever had, allowing him an element of personality that it had refused all the others. Whatever his hallucinations were, they, too, had to be markedly different than anyone else’s.
The baron kept his eye on Red Coat as he led his flock and the corpse cart up the zigzag trail to the pool. He noticed when the red-haired man paused and looked back at the ville. The expression on the newcomer’s face was one of desire, of greed, even.
What was he seeing down there? Kerr asked himself. Or, more properly, what was the pool making him see? It had a way of finding the weakest point in a human being’s psychology, and attacking it. How it did this was a mystery. As far as the baron could tell, the pool wasn’t capable of thought; it just did the things it did.
It was.
As Kerr moved up the grade, he swam in a sea of the dead. Vague floating specters surrounded him, drifted through him, over his head. These were the innumerable ghosts of the pool; he could see them through closed eyelids. He couldn’t match names with faces, but every one of them had drawn his or her final breath in the Clobbering Chair. Every one bore the mark of the iron pipe on their skull.
