Pilgrimage to Hell

by James Axler

  J.B. jumped toward the door. Ryan, running to him, yelled, "No bangs in the street!"

  J.B. stopped dead, as though mesmerized by a vision only he could see. Ryan, running up the room full pelt, slowed to a halt, SIG raised.

  The door had creaked open; in fact, the guy was pushing it inward with his body. The guy staggered in the doorway as the door swung away from him. He teetered on his heels, his arms half raised, his hands clawing feebly at nothing. He fell backward and crashed to the carpeted floor.

  Another figure appeared in the doorway. It was Sam, holding a silenced Walther PP Super in her right hand. She stepped over the body, bent and heaved it away from the door. She slammed the door, kept hold of the Walther.

  She said, her voice husky but not panicky, "Main train's gone off the air. We were rapping with Cohn in War Wag One when he suddenly reported the convoy was surrounded. Voice came on the net, demanded to talk to the Old Man. Then there was a lot of interference. We relocated, heard this other guy say they'd nerved the main train, they were all dead, finished, kaput, and unless the Old Man threw in, the convoy'd get blitzed, too. Then there was more interference and they cut out."

  She stopped, impassive.

  "Dead line?"

  "Dead as this goon here." She gestured at the man on the floor. "We tried everything. They're off the air."

  J.B. shot a look at Ryan and Ryan sucked in air through his teeth, an icy feeling running up his spine like electricity.

  Had Teague copped nerve gas? But where from? Then Ryan thought, if we found some, why not someone else, somewhere else?

  Or was it maybe bluff? Had they merely axed the radio link somehow? But how would they have done that? They could certainly throw in interference fuzz, but not kill it dead unless…

  Unless those in the main train really were dead.

  And what about the Old Man? Was he dead and those with him, too? On reflection, almost certainly not, and for one excellent reason.

  J.B. lit up one of his thin black cheroots, his eyes behind his steel-rimmed glasses narrowed in thought.

  Ryan turned to the bar and said, "Do us a favor, Charlie. Get these stiffs outta the way."

  "Just like that? I'll wave my wand, Ryan." Then she sighed and said, "Okay, don't panic. We'll fix it. I take it there's more on the stairs?"

  "You take it correct."

  Charlie's tiny mouth opened and closed.

  "You're a real hothead, Ryan." She added, "What if they came in a vehicle?"

  "He said he saw them in the street. Across the street."

  "Oh, right. Good memory."

  Ryan watched as half the bar patrons began dragging bodies toward the far end of the room. J.B. sucked on his cheroot, blew smoke out in a thin plume. He said, "Listen. They used gas on the train. Why didn't they use it on the Old Man?"

  "That's a rhetorical question, J.B. You know the answer."

  "Hmm. They mortared gas canisters in." He clicked his tongue irritably. "Something we didn't make allowances for. Gas gets in through cracks and tiny holes. So all our people are dead. Nothing we can do there. Say it's a short-term agent. After dispersal they now have to open up all those land wags and trucks and the two war wags. But they can't, because they know that every damned vehicle owned by us is packed with boobies. Everybody knows that. And if they start smashing out window glass or blowing in doors, the whole caboodle could go up and they lose everything. So they're stuck." A dark smile of satisfaction fled across the thin man's sallow features. "They're well and truly stuck."

  "So they have to parley with the Old Man," said Ryan. "So they have to take him alive."

  "Nontoxic agent."

  "Nothing else'd do."

  "Yeah."

  "So that means," continued Ryan, "the Old Man's out. But he'd have made sure all the vehicles were tight. So that means Teague's goons have got more vehicles on their hands they can't touch, move or do any thing at all with."

  "Yeah."

  J.B. blew a smoke ring. It sailed up toward the ceiling, shimmying, expanding, drifting out from the center, breaking up.

  "And that means," said Ryan, "we're the only free agents in town."

  "Yeah."

  "But they don't know what we know. No one knows that."

  J.B. murmured, "That little extra." He glanced at Ryan. "How long we got?" Ryan checked his watch. "Rough timing, I'd say about four hours."

  "Gotta work fast. What's your plan, war chief?" The room was now clear of stiffs. Incredibly those who remained in the bar were drinking and talking as though nothing had happened at all in the past ten minutes or so. He caught Ole One-Eye's single orb, pink rimmed, the eyelid fluttering in a macabre and sardonic wink. He stared at Sam, Rintoul, finally at J.B. He thought of those on the main train, maybe a couple of hundred souls all told. All loyal comrades; some, indeed, close friends who'd shared with him a thousand experiences, a thousand dangers, a thousand joys and carousals. He thought of the flame-haired girl, Krysty, with the deep, the luminous green eyes. Extinguished. Snuffed out. Rage was like a sudden eruption of fierce white flame that licked through his entire system.

  He said, his voice taut, "We take the war to the enemy. We pay a visit to Jordan Teague."

  Chapter Eight

  DESPITE ORDERS, you kept to the shadows. The deep shadows. The deeper the better.

  You kept to the shadows despite orders, despite doomy warnings from your unit leaders, despite hideously snarled threats of disembowelment or being flayed alive or having your hands nailed to the wall. Despite all these and more, you kept to the shadows because you were beginning to get… cautious.

  A sec man's life in the old days used to be different. It used to be fun, used to be a laff riot. It meant you were top of the pile, king of the ville. Meant you could do what you wanted, when you wanted, for as long as you wanted, and free. Mocsin was open city for the sec men, and you could tool along its streets and whatever you saw was yours. Not for the asking—you didn't need to ask for anything. It was all yours for the taking. Yours by right of conquest. Didn't matter what it was, you had an open license on it. Food, booze, men, women. Whatever was your fancy, it was yours.

  And sure, on the surface the situation hadn't changed. On the surface it was still the sec men's paradise. On the surface everything was as it was, as it had always been, since Jordan Teague first hijacked the burg way back when most of today's sec men were brawling brats.

  On the surface.

  But underneath, paradise was maybe not quite what it appeared to be. There was a tension in the air—something you could almost feel, almost gnaw at—that none of the old-timers had ever known. A population that had once been like rabbits, cowed and submissive, seemed to have changed, seemed to have become insolent. They always seemed to be watching you, except when you looked straight at them and then they weren't watching you at all. Except you always caught that twitch of the face, that nervous flicker of the eyes, that meant they had been watching you. And they always seemed to be whispering about you behind your back, except when you swung around and they weren't whispering at all, their lips were closed. Except you knew they'd been whispering about you, insulting you. And you got so mad at this sometimes that you took a whole bunch of them—men, women, brats—and herded them into the trucks and took them back to the Cellars and you stopped them watching you out of the corners of their eyes by taking their eyes out. And you stopped them talking about you behind your back by sewing their lips together.

  But the funny thing was, it didn't seem to do the trick, didn't seem to stop the watching and the whispering. And you couldn't herd the whole town into the Cellars.

  And then there was the sniping. You'd be in a jeep and heading to the mines or coming back from them, in the line of duty, and suddenly one of the guys with you would keel over, one side of his head blown away, his soft nose and blood and brains splashed everywhere. First time this had happened everyone had thought it was a marauder attack, although marauders around this neck of the woods w
ere in fact very scarce; they'd been dealt with savagely years back and now didn't come around anymore because of Mocsin's heavy rep. But it wasn't a marauder attack.

  There were no damned marauders in the near vicinity or the far vicinity, and you couldn't figure out who it was. And then it happened again. And again. And again. And it got to be a regular occurrence, although randomly timed and in different places, different stretches of the road. And so all the open jeeps were laid off and mine patrols only worked from secure buggies and land wags. And now, over the past couple of months, three buggies had been blown to scrap by mines, their occupants so much torn and bloody meat.

  And then there were the disappearances. Every so often a buddy would fail to return to barracks. At first this was thought to have been due to drunkenness, perhaps. In the old days there'd been a great deal of drunkenness, but then it was realized that although everything in town was yours, and free, there had to be some discipline in the force, and you only got seriously juiced in off periods, when it didn't matter. But then it was thought that maybe it wasn't the booze because none of those guys ever came back, and at last count, over the past two months or so, there were about twenty guys gone and it was as though they'd never existed in the first place.

  And the worrying thing was, no one at the top seemed to be taking much notice of any of this, despite the rumbles of discontent from the lower ranks. And when you put forward the theory to your unit leaders that maybe something ought to be done about this, and it seemed to you that all of these weird occurrences were maybe somehow linked, and it was just possible that there was some kind of underground cell in town intent on sabotage and murder, all that happened was you got bawled out and told to mean up your act, boy, or you'll be on hog duty in short order.

  So you shut up.

  Of course, you appreciated that the guys up top had their own problems and plenty of them. You couldn't help but notice these things. Power shortages, food shortages, sewer-disposal problems—even the johns in the barracks were beginning to stink up, and no one seemed able to unblock the crappers. And all these epidemics didn't help matters.

  And now these miners. It was unbelievable. How in hell had they been able to fix things the way they'd been fixed? Someone wasn't running a very tight ship out there. Some very red faces would be around when it was all sorted out. Not to mention a few summary executions. Probably more than a few, come to think of it, and it was a relief to realize that you hadn't been involved in mine duty for a good four months. So they couldn't blame you.

  Best thing to do under the circumstances was keep your head down; don't make waves, don't attract attention. Let the upper echelons sort the mess out. Just do your job and don't talk back and don't come up with wildies about criminal elements in town being behind all this because those at the top knew what they were about, and if they dumped on such theories the reason had to be because they had the matter well in hand.

  That had to be it.

  Nevertheless, it was wise to take precautions. Even out here, in the north end of town, outside the Big Man's mansion—outside this sprawling, many-roomed pre-Nuke dwelling place that had once belonged, or so you'd heard, to some guy called Bank Manager, whatever that meant— it was wise to be wary.

  You always had to stand, when you were on guard duty, out in the light, out in the glare of the spotlights that lit up the area around the house, the lawns, the driveway. That was where you had to be. You had to show yourself, holding your piece, so that any guy who got past the electrified fencing and then the outer ring of sentry-hides would see you and shit himself. That was the theory, and as a theory it was fine, although of course the mere idea of anyone getting up this far was ludicrous. Laughable. The last time anyone had tried to ice the Big Man was—-well hell, it had to be all of a dozen years ago, and he'd been crazy, and in any case what had happened to him had been so bad that anyone trying the same trick would have to be triple crazy. As far as you could remember—and you'd only been eight or nine at the time—they'd kept the sucker alive for two whole weeks out in the center of town so everyone could see, on a specially constructed platform, and for the last ten days of that two weeks he was screaming to die, begging for it. How the hell they'd managed to keep him alive, with not much skin on him, and things sticking into him and out of him and up him and all, was beyond you. Unreal. Those guys—hell, they'd been real clever, real talented. It was one of the reasons that made you want to be a sec man when you grew up.

  So no way was any guy going to be smart enough or brave enough or even stupid enough to get this close to the Big House, and really what you were was a kind of honor guard, and there was no danger whatsoever and it didn't really matter if you stood in the light at all.

  In any case, these days the lights weren't so damned bright as they used to be and even here, even outside the residence of the Big Man, there were obviously power supply problems, screwed-up generators and the like. You couldn't help but notice that a couple of the pylons this side of the house were in an alarming state of disrepair, and one of them kept on flickering, which was a nuisance, irritating to the eyes.

  It felt safer in the shadows, the deep shadows, where no one could see you—not that there was anyone out there to see you except your opposite number on the other side of the house. You got to see each other every now and again because you arranged it with each other so that that was what happened; so he'd know you were here and you'd know he was there and everything was jake. That way everyone was happy—although, come to think of it, you hadn't seen him for a while now, the creep. He'd probably edged right back to the road and was having a cigarette on the sly, or a woman. And that was exactly what you felt like right now, only this near the House it really wasn't too damned smart, and there go the bastard lights again, right off this time, blackout, and hell, maybe the dark didn't really feel all that safe with no moon in the sky, only the chem clouds shifting in from the west, and here we go again, lighting-up time, flicker-flicker-flicker so it hurt your eyes trying to see across the blasted grass—it made it seem as if there were things out there that couldn't possibly be because your opposite number wouldn't have let them through, and dammit, they really ought to get some sucker to do a job on this system; it was really sloppy, a proper job and no argument. Tell them they'd get their balls bitten off by the dogs if they didn't wire the bastard up the way it should be wired and—shit, that hurt—what the hell is this? Some clown's pissing around, got a knee in your back and a hand over your mouth and you can't yell and your head's being dragged back so you feel your back's going to break any moment and all you can see is this grinning face above you, upside down, staring right at you eyeball to eyeball and then all you can see is some fat blade stroking right into you except you can't see where it's gone, only feel it like an electric kiss on your throat and a sudden shaft of agony that lances straight through you, transforming every single nerve end in your body into an internal live wire, and now the blade's gone and you're sinking backward and there's no hand over your mouth and you want to yell but you can't, you really can't, nothing'll come out and everything's loose and you've shit yourself and there's nothing there, nothing at all, just blackness.

  UPSIDE DOWN, in the jittery light from the arcs, the face looked hideous, as though it was grinning up at him with two mouths, one of which had far too much lipstick around it. Ryan knelt, wiped his gloved hands and then the panga on the grass, and thrust the thick-bladed weapon back into its sheath. He glanced around.

  Hunaker sidled up and took the guard's legs and they lifted the body and heaved it into the thick shadows at the base of the building's wall, shoving it into the heart of a struggling bush. They crouched beside the bush, waiting, patient.

  Out here it was quiet. It was almost as if the rest of the town did not exist. There were trees and lawns and gardens. The gardens were mostly overgrown, a wild and junglelike tangle, although here, around Teague's mansion, some effort had been made to keep the place neatened up, to create not only a se
tting worthy of Mocsin's lord and master, but also to carve out a loose kind of security zone around the house. There had been other large houses in this part of town, but in the neighborhood of Teague's place they had either been demolished or turned into pens for sec men, so that a weaponed-up enclave surrounded the mansion, small forts around the big one.

  That was the theory, and a brief smile twisted Ryan's lips as he thought about it. Actually it was pathetic. Actually security was so damned lax that a single man could have invaded Jordan Teague's sacred precincts with no trouble at all. Sure, there was an electric fence, but the power was on the fritz, as evidenced by the flickering lights, and in any case trees had been allowed to grow over parts of the fence, and it had been a simple matter to swing over. They'd made a few kills, but there were guys out there that they hadn't needed to ice, they were so doped up. In one of the houses every sec man they could see was higher than a bird on happyweed. So high, in fact, that the girls who were also there were utterly redundant, were playing cards and drinking to while away the time.

  Decay, thought Ryan moodily, his silenced SIG-Sauer now grip-held in his right hand. The decay of empire. Look back through history and there it was, clearly to be seen. Yet no one seemed to see it. It happened time and time again. Yet nobody ever seemed to learn the lesson. And the chilling thought was that it could happen even to the Trader and his empire, such as it was. All that had to happen was to say the hell with it once in a while, ease up. That was all it needed,

  Hunaker muttered in his ear, "Why don't we just take out the light system altogether? Be easier for us."

  "Too risky."

  "Hell, Ryan, no one'd ever know. It's shot to hell already. Way those damned arcs're blinking on and off…"

  "Too risky."

  "You're the boss."

  Ryan checked his watch. Roughly three hours forty minutes to go. It seemed a lot but wasn't. Not if they got caught up in something, met stiff opposition and had to shoot their way out. It wasn't very long at all.