by James Axler
If Doc couldn’t shake them out of their state, and he couldn’t remove them forcibly, then he knew he only had one course left. And that was to try to chill whatever it was that lived in the pool.
On the face of it, a much more daunting undertaking. The thing was vast and inconceivably powerful. Still, Doc knew he had to try.
As he racked his brain to come up with something, anything of use in that regard, the carny scout volunteered to sit in the chair.
The black man was all smiles as he let himself be strapped down. It was difficult to tell for certain, but he seemed to have a change of heart when the first blow landed and it didn’t kill him outright. Lying in the dirt, he wasn’t screaming words; he was just screaming. Doc had the feeling, though, that the shock had awakened him at the last instant, when it was already far too late to do anything about it.
Tanner turned away from the follow-up mayhem and stared at the low concrete blockhouse. The blows were still sounding behind him when he started to put the whole thing together.
He was fairly sure that for whatever reason, for pure science or to develop a new military weapon, predark whitecoats had created the pool and its ecosystem. And that they had done it from the ground up.
He asked himself why then had the laboratory been sited here, so far below the pool. Certainly, it made more sense to build the lab next to the system they were studying. That told Doc the whitecoats probably knew it was dangerous, and that they wanted to be a safe distance away. Which offered support for the bioweapon hypothesis. But that wasn’t the whole story.
He could see that the laboratory was connected to the pool through the pipes at the base of the slope. As there were no pipes in evidence at the lakeside, at least none that he had seen, they had to be in place under it. Which supported the idea that it wasn’t a naturally occurring body of water. The pool had been created. But that didn’t explain what the pipes were there for. Could the whitecoats have used them to sample the pool’s contents? Doc thought that unlikely. A pipe five feet across was overkill for taking samples. As he examined the base of the hillside, he noticed two other structures that seemed to be artificial. The rounded humps looked like culverts that had been buried by rock and dirtfall. They were twice as big as the blockhouse pipes.
What was all the underground plumbing for? Doc asked himself. Was it because the whitecoats knew even in the planning stages the potential danger of the pool? Was it because they wanted their fingers on the trigger of a fail-safe device that could deactivate or terminate the project?
From the position of the blockhouse and the pipe connections, Doc had a clue as to the function if not the exact construction of the device. It involved draining the lake above. Draining it suddenly and completely. The trouble was, they hadn’t designed it as a dead man’s switch. The nukecaust had taken them by surprise, as it had everyone else.
Doc grimaced. It was all supposition, of course. As he started for the steps leading to the blockhouse entrance, the rousties pulled the body of the dead scout from the chair and pitched it into the cart. When he looked back he saw young Dean taking a seat in the death chair.
It stopped him cold in his tracks.
“By the Three Kennedys!” he cried, and he broke into a run, not for the bunker, but for the boy. Doc threw himself between the numbed spectators, trying to reach Dean and drag him free before harm could be done.
Powerful hands roughly grabbed Doc by the arms and hurled him back. The crowd closed in more tightly around the chair, effectively blocking another attempt on his part.
Doc gripped the handle of his swordstick, but he didn’t draw the blade. He knew he could skewer more than a few of the bodies before him, but he could never chill enough of them to free Dean in time. And in the process, he would have had to mortally stab his friends, even Ryan, who appeared to be willing to stop him from rescuing the boy.
The old man reversed course and sprinted across the square. He ran down the blockhouse steps and through its open door. His boots splashed in the faintly glowing puddles on the floor of the central hallway. As he ran, he ducked and dodged the dangling, rusting light fixtures. The smell of mildew and rot was almost overpowering.
Doc charged into the first room he came to, skidding on the concrete floor. Before him was a row of squat, heavy-looking machines. They looked like pumps of some kind. In the dim light, he quickly examined them. Yes, they were definitely pumps. He located the starter switch on one of them and depressed it. Nothing happened.
He tried the others with same result. He kicked aside some of the debris from the fallen tile ceiling and saw the thick electrical cable on the floor. They were electric powered.
There was no generator in the room. The wall opposite the hallway was laced with rows of heavy pipe. He scanned the various dials and gauges set at intervals along the wall. Some had cracked faces and missing indicators. All the others read zero. The system was off-line, either because it was simply broken, or because of the lack of operating power.
Doc was slammed by a crushing sense of hopelessness. Without a blueprint or a schematic of some kind, how was he ever going to figure it out? He smothered the thought and moved on. If there was a generator in the building, he had to find it.
And quickly.
It wasn’t in the next room he checked, but in the one after it. There was no mistaking it, either. It was the size of four refrigerators, stacked one on top of the other. Doc located the ignition switch, pressed it and got nothing. If there was a battery in the system, it was long dead. The pull-start rope produced nothing, although the engine did turn over.
He found the generator’s gas tank and discovered the root of the problem. It was empty.
“Hell’s fire!” he cursed, slamming his fist on top of the tank.
He knew that whitecoats sitting on a biological time bomb wouldn’t leave themselves a single way to deactivate it. They wouldn’t completely depend on electrical power that could be shut off at a critical moment by any number of mechanical failures. There had to be a more direct method. He thought about the lake above, and the pressure of thousands of tons of water. Perhaps the deactivation system was gravity powered. Perhaps it could use the water pressure to physically or hydraulically move a barrier out of the way.
Doc rushed on. Now that he had a clue what he was looking for, he wasted no time on the offices where it appeared people had been living. The last room in the corridor had more of the squat pumps, and the pipes along its wall were much bigger in diameter.
When he saw the red steel wheel, and the sign above it, he knew he had found the drain plug. The wheel was part of a massive valve set in a bend in a thick pipe. The peeling red-on-white sign was stained with rust but it was still legible. It read: Extreme Danger: Emergency Use Only! System Test and Certification Required Every Thirty Days. Secure Escape Route And Evacuate All Downstream Personnel Before Operating Valve.
There was a dusty clipboard hanging on a hook below the valve. The faded top page was a maintenance record. It’d been almost a hundred years since the system had been checked and certified.
Not that that mattered. It either worked or it didn’t.
And there was no way to evacuate anybody.
Doc untwisted a loop of steel wire that locked the rim of the wheel to the valve. When he tried to turn the wheel, it wouldn’t budge. He jammed his swordstick through the spokes and used it like a lever.
With a crack and a creak the wheel moved an inch or two, then the turning became easy. From somewhere on the other side of the wall came a squeal. The squeal grew louder as he spun the valve open.
Then something boomed. The floor rocked violently and the air was ripped by a deafening noise. The roar sounded as if he had just unleashed Niagara Falls.
Everything continued to shake, and as it did, to shake apart. Concrete dust streamed from the ceiling above him; he knew it was going to come down, and before he could reach the doorway, it did. Doc lost his grip on his swordstick as the debris buried him.<
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Chapter Thirty-Four
Ryan the passenger watched from the wheelhouse of the S.S. Cawdor as Baron Crecca beat the scout’s head to a pulp. He was standing close enough to be hit by some of the back splatter, brains or blood, or both. He could feel it dripping down the side of his face, but he couldn’t make his hand move to wipe it away.
The hallucinations of his father and Trader had faded into the gathering darkness, so he knew that the combined effects of the spores and the bounty were wearing off. However, the odor of the bounty that was roasting unattended on the burn barrel was making his mouth water. His body wanted its share. Passenger Ryan fought against the urge. Fought successfully.
Thunder rolled and flashes of green lit the slope above the ville. The sky started to spit a few tentative spores.
It was coming again, he knew. The pool was about to reestablish control over its slaves.
Ryan forced his fingers to move. A twitch was all he could muster, but it was a start.
Then Crecca called for another volunteer, and Dean stepped forward. Ryan wanted to cry out a warning, but couldn’t. His hands closed into fists at his side. Dean took a seat in the chair and allowed himself to be strapped down. There was a commotion to his left. He managed to turn his head far enough to see Doc Tanner fighting to break through the crowd and save his son from execution. Ryan tried to help, but only got a step or two in the right direction before the rousties seized Doc and threw him back.
The other companions were struggling as he was; Ryan could see that from the strain and anguish in their faces.
Ryan turned the full force of his effort to reaching the chair and the red-coated chiller before he could bring down the pipe. It was like walking through molasses. He had to beat back the heaviness and lethargy that infused his limbs. But with each step, it got a little easier.
The new baron watched his slow-motion approach with amusement. “What do you think you’re doing, Cawdor?” he said. “Do you think you can get here in time to stop me?”
Ryan didn’t answer. He didn’t want to waste his energy or divert his focus from what he had to do.
“Well, you’d better hurry up, then,” Crecca told him. “Get a fucking move on.”
It took minutes for Ryan to cross the short stretch of ground. Minutes while the former carny master watched and waited with a leer on his face, confident that he had the upper hand, confident that he could smash the boy’s skull with a single blow, even as his father reached out to save him.
Sweat poured off Ryan’s face, chest and back. Though it hadn’t started to snow in earnest yet, the tiny granules were peppering the square, and the thunder was an almost constant rumble.
He was still ten feet away, and moving at a crawl, when Crecca lightly tapped the top of Dean’s head with the end of the pipe, measuring the range to his target. Then he reared back, cocking the bludgeon over his shoulder, coiling himself to swing for the center field fence.
A deep growl shook the ground, making Crecca stagger and lose his balance. He caught himself on the chair back to keep from falling.
Earthquake! Ryan thought as he continued to move.
But it wasn’t.
With a howitzer-like boom, water and dirt exploded from the base of the mountain, about one hundred yards from where they all stood. Ahead of the twin plumes of black water, flying through the air like artillery shells, were chunks of broken limestone. As the rock crashed down and bounced around them, the water’s howl grew much louder. Seventy-five feet from the mouths of the hidden culverts that had unleashed them, the two torrents coalesced, funneling, twisting together, plowing headlong into the earth with their combined might. They blasted through, sending a wall of water and debris ten feet high racing downhill toward the square. Baron Crecca was no longer intent on caving in the back of Dean’s head. Riveted by the sight of the onrushing wave, he didn’t seem to notice Cawdor closing the distance between them, either.
Ryan could feel his strength and his physical control returning. For the last few feet, his legs drove forward with real power, as if their overdrive had suddenly kicked in. His right hand did his bidding, unsheathing eighteen inches of panga from its scabbard below his knee.
As the one-eyed man reached the foot of the chair, Crecca bolted away from it and the boy, cutting across the square toward the blockhouse entrance, well ahead of the leading edge of the flash flood.
There was no time for Ryan to hack through the four leather straps that held Dean pinioned. Grunting from the effort, he picked up the chair by the arms and started lugging it and Dean away. He’d gone no more than few yards when J.B. caught up to him and grabbed one of the arms. The two of them then ran with the chair and the boy between them.
Mildred and Krysty ran ahead, as did Jak, who had picked up the girl, Leeloo, and was carrying her in his arms. The companions raced to their left, away from the water, beyond the far end of the square, and along the curve at the base of the mountain.
When they were far enough away to be safe, Ryan and J.B. stopped, put down the chair and looked back.
The wall of water had gouged its own deep channel in the dirt, dividing the square and separating its occupants. The rousties who could run had gone the opposite direction and were out of sight. Those still partially paralyzed by the spores managed to move away, but slowly, like their legs were encased in ice—a feeling Ryan and his companions would never forget. The edge of the flood-choked channel eroded away at the chillers’ heels. As the undercut bank gave way beneath them, their bodies twisted and fell, disappearing into the churning blackness. The main thrust of the torrent had swung past the front of the blockhouse, missing it entirely. But it was rampaging full-tilt into and through the hammered-down shanty ville. With falling darkness, it was impossible for Ryan to see clearly, but it looked as if the entire place had already been washed away, scoured off the landscape. He looked up at the sky and saw that the spore fall had stopped; the threat of blizzard was gone. The thunder, if there was any, was drowned out by the roar of the draining lake.
Beside him, Jak and J.B. were busy unstrapping Dean from the chair. Mildred and Krysty were comforting the little girl. Ryan was relieved to see them working as a team again.
“Is everybody all right?” he yelled over the noise of the cataract. He counted heads as they each nodded, and came up one shy.
“Where’s Doc?” he shouted at them. “Did anybody see what happened to Doc?”
BARON CRECCA STOOD transfixed by the sight of two monumental gushers exploding from the hill-side. Twin streams of water ten feet in diameter jetted through the air before burying themselves in the earth, sending dirt and spray flying. The sound it made was like some gigantic engine running wild. It took a second or two for the full import of what he was seeing to sink in.
Then a cold finger touched the center of his heart.
The source of the water was the burning pool.
It had to be.
The pool was being emptied.
Without the protective layer of water, without the lungfish who lived in it, the entity at its bottom couldn’t survive. Without entity’s continued existence and assistance, Crecca’s was going to be one of the shortest-lived baronies in Deathlands history. He had to stop the drop in water level, before the pool was completely drained.
Crecca left the boy in the chair and sprinted toward the blockhouse. He was almost there when a ripple passing through the earth made him stumble over his own feet and fall. As he scrambled back up, to his right he saw the flash flood rip a fifty-foot-wide trench in the ground.
Somewhere behind him in the failing light, his handful of subjects were running for their lives. If they were screaming in terror, he couldn’t hear it over the water’s roar.
Crecca dashed down the stairway and into the corridor. Inside the hallway, the effect of the ground shaking was much worse. Plaster and concrete dust rained on him from the remains of the collapsed ceiling. As he ran down the corridor, splashing through the puddles, th
e back-and-forth tilting of the floor made him careen into and bounce off the walls.
The baron had known from the get-go that this catastrophe couldn’t have been an accident. Hallucinations or not, massive floodgates didn’t just open by themselves. Not suddenly, after a hundred years. Someone had to have done it on purpose. Since he hadn’t seen anyone come out of the blockhouse, he was fairly sure that the someone was still inside. He had to find him or her and reverse whatever had been done.
Pipe in hand, and ready to clobber, he ducked his head inside the first few rooms along the hall. The dim light was made even dimmer by the airborne dirt and dust, but he saw no one.
In the last room, ninety-five percent of the ceiling had fallen onto the floor. It lay in a jumbled heap, from wall to wall. In a far corner something caught his eye.
Something bright and reflective along the back wall.
He climbed over the piles of rubble to reach it. The silver lion’s head was on the end of a wooden walking stick that had been thrust through the spokes of a red metal wheel. The kind of a wheel that opened or closed a valve. Crecca read the warning sign.
Or a floodgate.
He pulled out the stick and flung it aside. Then he started to crank the wheel over clockwise, shutting the valve.
“Not the best of ideas,” said a loud voice to his right.
Crecca whirled to face a glaring scarecrow of a man. He recognized him at once as one of Cawdor’s party. It was the old, babbling bastard who had to be led around on a rope. The baron’s laughter was muffled by the dull roar coming through the walls.
“So, old man,” he shouted back, “looks like you’ve got your brain on straight…just in time for me to beat it in.” To demonstrate he bashed the end of the pipe into the concrete wall.
