Deathlands 074: Strontium Swamp

by James Axler

  As the darkness began to fall, an air of nervousness began to sweep through sections of the army. They knew that the sec patrols would be out before long, and they knew that a large force such as theirs was easy to spot.

  Jak could feel the tension as it began to spread. By his reckoning, they were less than five hundred yards from the edge of West Lowellton. Once they reached the old suburb, there would be plenty of places to hide from the outgoing patrols.

  “Keep alert,” he whispered, spreading the message back through the ranks. “Nearly at edge of old ville. Safe there.”

  “Man, easy for him to say. Wish I could feel the same way,” LaRue said uneasily, some five yards back in a phalanx of fighters.

  Prideaux grinned at him, a smile that held no humor, only contempt. “You starting to get a little nervous, mebbe? Wish you’d stayed at home with the women and children?”

  “Listen, stupe, there’s a lot of women here who’d have your balls for that,” LaRue growled by way of reply. “And I figure you’d have to be some kind of crazy not to get a little nervous. This ain’t gonna be easy.”

  “Sure, ass-boy, you say what you want,” Prideaux replied with a knowing wink.

  LaRue was infuriated. He hated Prideaux anyway, but hated him even more when the bastard seemed able to see inside his head and know that, for all the bravado, he was shitting himself with fright. As far as he was concerned, a person would have to be a fool not to be frightened of the odds. But he couldn’t let Prideaux know this.

  The rebel force had now reached the edge of the old city, and had the stretch of barren ground that led from the swamp to the first crumbling remains of the old suburb. A few hundred yards of lobster grass and a few vines that crawled along the ground—the swamp was beginning to encroach upon the predark remains, but not with enough fervor to provide them with cover.

  Jak divided the force into small groups of six and seven, sending them across to scuttle into the shadows of the ruined buildings, providing cover while they ran. He sent Marissa with the first group trusting her to keep them together until all the rebel army had gained the city.

  Jak moved in the last group, outpacing the other guerrillas as he sprinted across the open ground. He turned and watched the last of his group make the safety of darkness. In the distance, over the chanting that always sounded from the walled ville at night, he could hear the rumble of the sec wags as they left the enclosure to take the old road out of the city and on to their regular patrol routes.

  Ushering them into the cover of the shadows surrounding the building debris, Jak waited while the sec wags drew near. The rumble grew louder and the tension he could feel rippling among the rebel army grew more and more taut.

  The wags rumbled past, their cargo of sec men oblivious to the fighters waiting in the darkness. The last of the convoy went past and beyond them into the darkness of the swamp. There was an almost palpable release of tension among those who were hiding in the rubble, and some even exchanged a few whispered words of encouragement.

  “C’mon, let’s get moving,” Marissa whispered, her voice carrying back over the assembled army. The relieved swamp dwellers stirred from their positions and began to move toward the old road, feeling safe now that the sec convoy had passed.

  Jak strained his hearing, trying to pinpoint something over the hubbub of the rebel force. He wanted to quiet them while he tried to work out what was disturbing him, making him feel uneasy, but it was too late for that: under Marissa’s direction they had started to move out.

  Jak moved through the mass of the guerrilla army, catching up to Marissa. “Wait,” he said, “go triple red.”

  “Why?” she asked, her face clouding. “What’s the matter?”

  “Dunno—just…”

  Jak never got to finish. His words were broken by the chatter of SMG fire and the scream of one of the rebels, who had been hit in the shoulder and upper arm by the spray.

  “Cover, now!” Jak yelled, hoping that his shout would galvanize the guerrillas. The sudden fire had shocked them into staying frozen, easy targets out in the open.

  Scrambling into the burned-out shell of an old shopfront, Jak headed for the rear immediately, skirting around the back of the old building until he came to an alley. Down the far end, out in the street but just around a bend—and so unsighted—from where the rebels had been walking, he could see a sec wag. It had been part of the convoy, but had been delayed by a mechanical problem. It was obvious from the way that the hood of the vehicle was raised, as though the driver had been working on it. The sec men who had been sitting in back had heard the rebels as they had come out of hiding, and were now trying to pin them down with fire from their AK-47s and MP-5s.

  There were six sec men, and they had positioned themselves in cover behind groupings of rubble or half-demolished walls. However, because of the angle they needed to get a clear shot, dictated by the bend in the road, they were leaving themselves exposed to an attack from the rear.

  Six was too many for Jak to take on alone without driving some of them deeper into cover. There was already some returned fire from the guerrillas to keep them pinned into position. Now he needed to go back and get a couple of other fighters to come with him and pick them off from a position behind their lines.

  Running, picking his way over the rubble at the rear of the old row of shopfronts, Jak returned to where the guerrillas were clustered. There were some on each side of the road, with a no-man’s-land between. Marissa was on the far side with about half the rebels. Prideaux was on this side, and Jak went to him.

  “Need you and LaRue come with me. Go around back of these stupes, hit ’em in the ass quick. None of “em covering each other.”

  Prideaux nodded. “I’m with you. Dunno where LaRue is, though.”

  “Shit——mebbe he’s on other side.”

  “I’ll do it,” one of the other rebels volunteered. She was Marissa’s age, perhaps a little younger, and wielding a Lee Enfield like she knew what to do with it.

  “You sure, Claudine?” Prideaux asked.

  “Rather do that than stay here and get shot or die of fuckin’ boredom waiting for them to run out of ammo,” she said with a grim smile.

  Jak nodded. “Good—we go now.” He looked across to where the other group of fighters was pinned down. He could see Marissa in the dim light, and gestured to her that he was headed around the back of their opponents. She nodded, and directed her soldiers to keep up a suppressing fire. If she could pin down the sec men as they had tried to pin her people, then it would make Jak’s task easier.

  Jak took Prideaux and Claudine out through the back of the old shopfront and along to the alley. Silently, he led them as far toward the street as he dared, and indicated the positions of the sec men. There were the six who had been in back of the wag, and the driver, who was huddled in his cab. He was frantically scrabbling with some wiring in the dash, clearly visible through the open door, and Jak hoped that meant that any radio contact he might have had with the ville had been broken.

  Jak indicated which of the sec men he wanted the fighters to take out and began to move forward. They had to get as close to the mouth of the alley as they could before acting. Surprise was the key.

  The sec men were concentrating on the rebels they had pinned, almost without realizing that they, too, had been pinned. Jak led his small force to the lip of the alley, then indicated that they should attack.

  The driver was the only one to realize what was happening. He looked up from his dash and saw the three rebels in the alley. He opened his mouth to yell a warning, but got no further than a death rattle as Jak’s Magnum round ripped a hole where his nose used to be, the exit wound splattering his brains against the far door of the cab.

  The direction of the shot made the sec men whirl, almost as one. But again, their reflexes were just that little too slow. Claudine took the two nearest, sinking to one knee and ignoring her own lack of cover, concentrating instead on rattling off two accurate s
hots that drilled holes in their foreheads. Prideaux took two who were at the edge of the bend, running and going into a forward roll to avoid the shots that kicked up dust around his feet, coming up firing. The Smith & Wesson he was using was in a two-handed grip to steady it, the volley of four shots striking home three times, the fourth hitting a block of concrete where his chilled target had already slipped down.

  Jak went for the two who were farthest away. He figured that as leader he should take the biggest chances. And in having already taken out the driver, he gave himself a bit more to do. It was a fraction of a second spent readjusting his position, but it was enough for the two sec men to turn and open fire on him.

  He used the side of the wag as cover, diving beneath and wriggling across the tarmac, Colt Python raised enough to snap off a shot as soon as he could sight one of his opponents. It didn’t hit home, but it did deflect the man’s fire, his own shot smacking into the boards on the side of the wag. Before he had a chance to aim again, Jak took him out with a shot that hit him in the gut, the soft nose of the Magnum shell spreading inside him, the percussion waves turning his internal organs to jelly.

  Before the man was even chilled, Jak had switched to the remaining sec man, who was lining him up. It was a question of whose reflexes were quicker. The sec man’s fire went high and wide as he fell back, a single slug from Jak’s Magnum pistol tearing a hole in his throat and neck, rupturing the carotid and throwing him off balance.

  There should have been silence, but now they were being fired on by their own people, who were unaware that the danger was being eradicated and that they could cease their suppressing fire.

  Jak and Prideaux were in no mood to appreciate the irony as they squirmed back into the cover of the alley, avoiding their own force’s fire to join Claudine in the cover of the alley.

  “Let’s get back and shut them the fuck up,” she said. “They’re wasting ammo.”

  As they regained their original position, and the realization that they had been successful spread through the guerrilla force, Jak felt something that was, if not a sense of optimism, then at least a glimmer of hope. The rebels had stuck together and achieved their first victory. This had lightened the atmosphere among them. Moreover, in Claudine he had found at least one more fighter in whom he could have some faith.

  The two groups came out of cover and came together again in the middle of the road.

  “Got keep it triple alert now,” Jak warned. “Mebbe others like that sec patrol out there.”

  “Hell, we’ll trash the fuckers if there are,” Marissa said with a grin, ignoring Jak’s pointed stare. He was concerned that the rebels would get too cocksure and careless unless he kept hammering the point home.

  “Jak’s right,” Prideaux cautioned. “We need to keep it cool and keep ourselves covered. We got caught too easily there. If it had been more than one wag, then we would have been fucked.”

  He turned to Jak. “Mebbe we should have a scout party go on ahead, just two or three of us, to check the way’s clear.”

  Jak grinned. “Good idea. You want go?”

  “Yeah, me an’ that stupe bastard LaRue can do that sort of shit in our sleep. Not much difference doing it in the ville as opposed to the swamp.”

  “Okay,” Jak agreed. “You and LaRue. Where is he?”

  Marissa frowned. “He was with us until the blasting started. Now he’s gone. Fuck it, I wouldn’t have had him figured as running scared.”

  LARUE WAS TRIPLE STUPE. He knew he was. In fact, he didn’t know what the hell had come over him. He’d been fighting all his life in the swamps, and a little bit of blasterfire had never disturbed him before. But here, in the old ville, where you didn’t know the layout and where that feeling was so intense that it took you over.

  He’d run. He didn’t know why or where, but he’d just taken off like a hare being chased by a mangy old cur. And now he had no idea where he was. Could he go back and find the others? They had to have noticed that he was gone by now. What would they have to say to him? Or would they just chill him there and then as a liability?

  Fuck it, he didn’t know what to do. And he didn’t know anything about this damn ville. He was completely lost, stumbling blindly from building to building, across roads littered with rubble and those that were completely clear, until he had no notion of where he was, where the walled ville was, or where the guerrillas were.

  He could hear nothing but the blood pounding in his ears, the sound of his own terror. Perhaps this was why he didn’t hear the sec wag as it approached. Before his radio had shorted in the same electrical burn-out that had killed his engine, the wag driver who had just been chilled had got off a message to the walled section of Lafayette to send a replacement wag for the sec patrol, and a mechanic.

  This wag was now on its way, and its path was about to intersect with that of LaRue as he stumbled around a blind corner, no longer knowing where he was going.

  Above the sound of his own blood pumping it was the high-pitched squeal of the brakes that he heard, not the dull roar of the engine that meant the wag was on top of him before he had a chance to see it. He yelled, stumbled backward, and felt a jarring run through his body from head to foot as the near-side fender of the wag caught him. His backward momentum saved him from being chilled as it meant he rolled with the force of the blow.

  He was saved further pain from the impact by a blow on the back of the head as he struck a piece of raised concrete on the old sidewalk.

  All became blissful, oblivious black.

  “HE’S COMING TO, now.”

  LaRue heard the voice rather than saw anything, as his eyes were still closed, and the voice sounded as though it came from a distance, through a fog. Distorted, and not real.

  He opened his eyes and it was real enough. He was lying on the floor in a room lit only by candles that were placed on ornate holders around the room. The floor was soft, covered by thick carpets and rugs. Everything was muted, in oranges and purples that were dull in the dim lighting. Huge chairs and sofas were scattered about, and an oak table covered in papers took the center of the room.

  The speaker had been a sec man, dressed in the dyed camou. He was about fifty, with a slightly protruding gut and an MP-5 holstered on his left side. He had scars on his chin and across his forehead, and his eyes were dark with pinprick pupils. They bore into LaRue.

  “Good, let me talk to him.” A huge man hove into view. He was dark and leonine, with immensely powerful shoulders, dragging one leg with a limp. He was wearing a cloak and tunic, with dark leggings that disappeared into highly polished leather boots. His face was dark with anger, and his eyes, too, bore the pinprick pupils of a heavy jolt user.

  LaRue lost control, soiling himself as he realized where he had seen the man: he was in the presence of Dr. Jean himself.

  The big man laughed as he sniffed the air. “I see you’ve realized where you are, fool,” he commented. “Now I want to know just who the hell you scum think you are? Taking out a few of my men isn’t gonna do anything more than make me mad as hell. See—oooh, I’m scared,” he added mockingly, putting his face up close to LaRue’s and enjoying seeing the man back away, wincing.

  “You must be one of the disbelievers who hides in the swamp,” he continued. “But you’ve got brave all of a sudden, haven’t you? Still, it’ll save me a task rooting you all out if you’re coming to me to be chilled. Oh, yes,” he continued, enjoying the look of shock on LaRue’s face, “I was sending my boys in two nights from now, so you’ve done me a little favor.”

  His tone had been mocking, almost gentle. But now it changed as he suddenly grasped LaRue, pulling him to his feet and then up off them, using his height and reach to dangle the smaller man. Now his voice had a harsh, unforgiving edge.

  “Now listen to me, you sniveling, pathetic piece of turd. There must be a reason you people have gotten brave and decided to attack now, and I want to know why. And I want to know how many of you there are. And I want to kno
w just how the hell you intend to get in, ’cause I doubt you’re gonna come knocking on the door, asking nicely. And I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

  Still holding the man at arm’s length, Dr. Jean strode from the room, preceded by the sec man. They walked down a corridor and ascended three flights of stairs, lit by neon light. There was a sec man at a door on each level, but not one even acknowledged that the baron had passed, standing impassive.

  Dr. Jean carried LaRue, weeping and gibbering to himself, with his own mess running down his leg, into a room whose door had been opened by the sec man. Inside was an array of electrical equipment, and in the center of the room stood a chair with leather wrist and ankle straps. Dr. Jean flung LaRue into the chair, and the sec man deftly strapped the man’s wrists and ankles before he had a chance to even register what had happened to him.

  At a gesture from the baron, the sec man then took a knife and ripped LaRue’s shirt and pants, pulling the material away so that he sat naked. Meanwhile, the baron switched on a generator and fiddled with an amp meter. This would have struck terror into his own people, who would have known what was coming. LaRue was scared, but also confused. Red-hot pokers and blades he understood, but he had no experience of electricity.

  However, he wasn’t so stupid as to hazard a guess when Dr. Jean connected electrode clips to his genitals and nipples. These hurt enough on their own, and he had a notion that it would be nothing compared to the main event.

  “No, you don’t have to do that,” he cried. “Look, I’ll tell you. It’s a stupe idea and it was never going to work anyway.” Pleading for his life, he poured out all he knew, hoping it would be enough to save him. He told Dr. Jean about Jak, and about the old sewer the recce party had used, and that the guerrillas would be using. “That’s all it is. Now please, I beg of you, don’t chill me. I could join you. I can see how wrong I was before.”