Pilgrimage to Hell

by James Axler

  Hunaker snapped, "That's about all you'll ever get, a sighting." She pulled the two sweat shirts some more, loosening them, then covered herself again. "Okay, ready for the off."

  J.B. said, "Don't forget your ears."

  Hunaker said, "You're as bad as the Old Man."

  She went to the door and began to bawl out the barred window. She knew she had to play this one carefully, not overdo it. It would be easy to throw out the come-hither in a cutesy-pie voice, but that, right now, was not going to work. Instead she yelled, "Hey! There's anyone up there, I wanna talk! Ryan's got a booby on him, ready to blow!"

  Koll muttered, "It's original."

  There was silence. Koll licked his lips, stared at the back of Hunaker's head, at the green hair cropped short and tight. He glanced at Samantha, locked eyes with the black girl for a couple of seconds, raised an eyebrow. Sam leaned back against the wall and clasped her hands together in front of her. Koll noticed that she began twining her fingers restlessly. J.B. stared at the opposite wall. As usual, it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

  "Hey!" yelled Hunaker. "This is for real!"

  More silence, then Samantha nodded and said, "Yeah, they're coming."

  To Koll and the others there was more silence, then at last they heard bootsteps ringing hollowly far off.

  A voice shouted, "Shut the fuck up, bitch, or you get hurt bad!"

  Shaking his head, Koll murmured, "Uninspired. We already know that."

  Hunaker said loudly, "I got something on Ryan. Strasser don't know it."

  They could hear voices raised in argument, but there was no definition to the sound. Then the ringing of boots came closer, two sets, clattering down the concrete steps. Hunaker moved away from the bars. The sec man came nearer. The man called Ferd was in front, and behind him the guy Krysty had kicked, who had not had a wash and brush-up in the interim.

  He was saying, "If there's some kind of fuck-up and Strasser finds out we knew about it all along he'll have us eaten."

  Ferd said coldly, "You just be ready ta shoot the shit outta these monkeys. I don't trust 'em."

  The man with the red-smeared mouth cautiously peered into the cell from the side. He gulped, moved around so he could get a better view, his eyes flickering to the right and taking in the slumped figures on the floor. In the split second he took in this part of the scene, he noted that although he could see both the blond guy's hands, he couldn't see those of the man called Dix, who appeared to be lying on them in a hunched kind of way. But this didn't seem to be in any way significant, so his gaze whipped back to where the green-haired young woman was lounging against the wall, her head back, her eyes half closed, her lips parted. She was breathing heavily. One hand held her shirt up and the man with the bloody mouth could see her right breast. The other breast was half hidden beneath the busy lips of the black girl who was leaning across her from the side.

  The sec man swallowed again. Ferd shoved him aside and snapped, "Lemme see." He, too, stared in, but his face was darkening as he watched. He was marginally less stupid than the man with the bloody mouth and tended not to take everything at face value.

  He snarled, "It's crap. There's something up." He shouted, "Hey, you!"

  Hunaker dropped her head, smiled sweetly and said, "I can't hear you very well. I'm wearing earplugs."

  This was so bizarre that Ferd's mouth dropped open and he said, "I don't…"

  But that was all he did say that was understandable because a vicious cracking blast drowned him out. For a microsecond the steel door was haloed in orange flash fire before it erupted outward, slamming the two men back as it bowled across the passageway, clanging against the opposite wall. The man with the red mouth was punched against the wall, the back of his head cracking open like an egg, his brains spilling out like yolk down the concrete. The man called Ferd was dead already, the steel door having pulverized his face into a scarlet pulp as it smashed into him, and such was the force of the blast that he sailed backward with the door as though he were glued to it. His skull, too, hammered against the wall and fractured-at the top, so that blood and brain fluid geysered in a pinkish spout. Bones in both men's bodies split and shattered as they were hurled against the concrete. The door banged down onto the floor, half covering their remains.

  Inside the cell, J.B. and Koll sprang to their feet. Hunaker and Sam were already tearing cotton wool out of their ears.

  J.B. dived across the cell and out through the now empty door space. Smoke and concrete dust rose like a fog in the narrow area beyond, but his eyes took in an M-16 lying some distance away and he grabbed it and began automatically checking it as he galloped along the passage, closely pursued by Hunaker.

  Hunaker, too, was now armed, with the other man's auto-rifle, another M-16. She, too, was galloping. She, too, was spidering her fingers along her piece, tugging out the mag, glancing at it, ramming it back up again.

  As they neared the bottom of the steps, two men appeared at the top, in the room with the bloodstained block in it. J.B. mentally crossed his fingers, uttered a brief prayer to the only two gods he worshiped, the god of good fortune and the god of ingenuity, and squeezed off a controlled burst on the sprint.

  The M-16 functioned. Devastatingly. Rounds pounded at the two sec men at the top of the stairs, punched them back out of sight, their limbs going into spasm.

  "Behind me! Hit the upper steps!"

  J.B. jumped ahead of the girl as he snapped out the command and sprang up the steps, keeping tight to the left-hand wall. He squeezed the trigger and used up his entire mag, firing up and over the top of the steps at the ceiling, then dropping his angle of fire as he reached the room. He sprayed death around it. He dived at the floor, and Hunaker, behind him, suddenly had three perfect targets on the top set of steps—three sec men, fleeing in panic, lunging for an escape route. Her fire line caught them as they bunched in the narrow stairway, scrambling to get out. Rounds zip-stitched three broad backs, erupting kidneys, shattering lumbar vertebrae, transforming them into bloody dolls.

  Apart from the two guys that J.B. had shot from below, there were two more stiffs in the room who'd caught his bullets, one on the floor, the other sprawled drunkenly across the wood block, new blood from him sluggishly pooling out and soaking into the old.

  J.B.'s eyes darted around the room. He swore as he spotted an auto-rifle lying inches from the outstretched fingers of the man lying on the floor. A stubby Steyr AUG with the long barrel.

  He said, "The nukeshitter had my piece!" in horrified tones.

  He swiped it up and began to check it out feverishly as Hunaker threw down the M-16 she'd been holding and picked up another. She ran to the bottom of the upper steps, squeezed off a 3-round burst around the wall angle and risked a look up. No one at the top, but she could hear a babble of voices from the huge upper room and then she had to duck back as rounds flayed the stairwell above, spraying brick and concrete shards on her.

  "Hell, we could've worked ourselves into a corner here, J.B."

  J.B. was too busy field-stripping the AUG and muttering blackly.

  "Shit, fucker only had it an hour. See that dent?" He angrily jabbed a finger at the Steyr's stock. "See that? Fucker only had it an hour!"

  "Uhh…J.B."

  "Yeah!" the wiry little man snarled through his teeth.

  "Could be we're stuck down here, J.B."

  "Grenade the bastards out!" he snapped viciously. "Fucking vandals."

  "J.B., it's only a dent…"

  He glared at her murderously, his eyes simmering behind his adopted steel-rimmed glasses.

  Hunaker turned away from him. Sam was stuffing herself with hardware while Koll collected spare mags for an M-16 he'd picked up. He tossed a couple of HEs in her direction and said, "Hey, J.B., let's get outta here, like Hun says. You can polish yer butt later, man."

  J.B. shot him a dark look but nodded.

  Suddenly Sam's head jerked up. She rose from where she'd been squatting beside one of
the stiffs on the floor. Her eyes widened, the whites contrasting starkly with her velvety black skin.

  She said huskily, "I heard a bang."

  No one made a joke, even under the present circumstances. Even when, a second later, another burst of firing clattered out from above and they had to duck to one side as lead ricocheted around the room. When Samantha the Panther said she'd heard something no one else had, it was advisable not to laugh it off.

  J.B. slid a 30-round mag up into the Steyr and said, "What kind of bang?"

  "Big one, and a rumble. You didn't feel it?"

  Hunaker shook her head. She said uneasily, "C'mon, J.B. I don't wanna hang around down here if they got something nasty waiting up there."

  There was silence. The sub gunner had ceased firing. Not even the sec men themselves could be heard. Nothing could be heard. Nothing at all.

  Sam said, "And another."

  "Okay, let's beat it," said J.B.

  He took a grenade from Hunaker, saying, "Cover us."

  Koll slid to the corner angle of the steps, poked his M-16 around and fired a long burst, and as he did so, Sam sprang to the other side of the stairway and fired, too, straight up, her body hunched, the rifle spitting lead, the sound racketing shockingly around the echo chamber of the stairwell.

  J.B. and Hunaker unpinned the eggs, counted, darted forward and, almost as one, hurled the grenades upward. The two eggs sailed high and disappeared from view beyond the top step. There was a frenzied yell, a howl of terror, then light blazed down the stairwell and there was a fierce cracking double blast, followed by the sound of glass shattering, metal clanging against metal, a rumbling roar.

  J.B. hurled himself up the steps as dust and smoke billowed at him, roiling around the stairwell. He hit the top and sprayed lead into the fog with the Steyr, Hunaker behind him, her own auto-rifle chattering in a wide sweep.

  The room was long and wide, formerly the high-ceilinged entrance lobby to the bank. At the far end were two massive doors, each one a wood sandwich enclosed by pierced steel planking, triple thickness. The counter of the bank remained, but nothing else. Strasser's sec men had turned the place into a recreation room, with chairs, tables, closets stuffed with weapons. Now the furniture was blasted apart by the HEs. Bodies lay around, either slumped like piles of old clothes, or in contorted heaps. Long windows to the left had all blown out, the glass and the steel shuttering together.

  "Holy shit!" muttered Hunaker.

  She pointed at the windows. Instead of darkness, a lurid and vibrant light throbbed redly. But this was no Deathlands sky effect caused by the rich chemical mix in the atmosphere, which often transformed night into bizarre day with a glow that made the northern aurora look off color.

  "That's a fire."

  Then she cried out, her yell lost in a thunder of earsplitting sound. She felt herself lifted from the floor by a shock wave that slammed into her sickeningly. For a second she felt almost weightless as she flew backward through the air and then she saw, as though in a dream, the two vast doors splitting apart and bowling toward her across the room in an orange eruption. She thought they looked like cardboard doors. Then she thudded back against something hard and blacked out.

  Chapter Ten

  THERE WAS SOME IDIOT using a mallet inside his skull, and it was as if he was fixing fence posts. Every few seconds, whomp! There were also various sets of crazed characters having a tug-of-war with the muscles of his arms and legs, and there was a cretin who seemed to be marching around his body, or maybe swimming along his arteries, jabbing a knife into various key places, though mainly his ribs, as and when it suited him. Not to mention that some clown seemed to be eating into the small of his back.

  "Apart from that," muttered Ryan, his voice like the sound of a rusty rasp, "I'm fine."

  "Check," came Krysty's reply in the darkness of the speeding truck.

  Ryan froze—physically not a difficult operation because he was hog-tied anyhow, lying on his left side like a strained bow, his wrist and ankles tightly laced together behind him. But it was more a mental shock, a freezing of the mind. What he'd just croaked out had been involuntary. He hadn't realized he was speaking aloud. He hadn't even realized the girl was awake.

  He said tentatively, "I, uh… thought they cracked you over the skull when we got outside."

  That had been when she'd suddenly, outside the bank building and in the harsh glare of the floods, managed to back-heel the groin of one of the sec men holding her. She was pretty good with her heels, he thought wryly. The guy had yowled, let her go and she'd twisted away from the second man and started sprinting across the open space toward the three black vans parked near the barbed wire. Strasser had yelled a warning, and three guys had emerged from behind the trucks and clobbered her. Ryan and Krysty had been left on the ground for maybe a half hour, Ryan getting more and more chilled by the minute, not to mention more and more panicky about the time factor that only he knew about. Then they'd been flung into the rear of one of the trucks and the doors had banged. No need for guards, Strasser had said. Waste of manpower. They weren't going to be able to free themselves to go anywhere.

  "They did hit me over the head," Krysty Wroth said. "But I have great powers of recuperation."

  Though it hurt him, Ryan laughed. It was kind of a choked grunt, sounding to his ears like the noise a guy made when someone poked him in the ribs. It felt like it, too.

  She said, "Anyhow, thanks."

  "Thanks?"

  "For getting my…" She paused. "I was going to say, for getting my head off the block, but maybe for getting my ass off the block is more to the point."

  Her tone was dry and sardonic. Ryan knew it was the humor of gritted teeth. You made a joke of the intolerable or else you went under.

  He didn't know what to say. "Look, I should have stopped those bastards before things got too rough," he tried. "I could have. There were…other considerations… I'm sorry."

  She said, "I know. It doesn't matter. Forget it. Life's too short."

  He thought back to when she had actually been tied down to that foul block. She had not struggled, had not screamed or even whimpered. He was surprised, contemplating this, to realize that there had been a degree of serenity about her at that terrible time, as now. It was a strange yet oddly comforting aura of calm that seemed to surround her like a cloak. He hadn't analyzed it then—too many other things to worry about!—but he recognized it now as he reran the scene in his mind.

  Such serenity at such a time seemed to him almost supernatural.

  "You, uh… didn't seem too worried back there."

  She said simply, "I knew Earth Mother was watching over me."

  "I guess you realize your Earth Mother isn't going to save you every time."

  "No, you don't understand. It's not a question of 'saving.' Earth Mother is not a physical presence. She doesn't appear in a flash of light—" she chuckled, and there was irony in her voice "—brandishing an M-16. She just is. At times that's comforting. There had been occasions when I've been stark crazy with fear and panic. Other times when it feels okay, feels right, feels like it's not going to work out too bad. That's how I felt then."

  "How's it feel now?" said Ryan dryly. "I could do with some reassurance."

  "Oh, I'd think we'll make out, don't you?"

  He had to laugh again, and the minor convulsions trembled across his rib cage where Strasser's goons had put more than one boot in.

  "Don't make me laugh. Please."

  The truck lurched over something in the road—a rock or a pothole or maybe a small animal—and Ryan cursed vitriolically as he went up in the air and down again, landing on his wrists. Shafts of agony lanced up his arms. His shoulder blade felt seriously out of kilter for a second.

  He muttered through clenched teeth, "Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea if your Earth Mother did appear waving a piece, because unless they untie me I think we're in deep shit. I hadn't counted on the bastards lacing us up. Didn't seem necessary. Thou
ght they were just gonna shove us in with a bunch of armed goons."

  He didn't tell her that, hog-tied as they were, he thought their chances of surviving were precisely nil. Untied he had options. Like this he might as well be a fish in a barrel.

  She said calmly, "I think I can get my wrists free." Her voice was oddly neutral. She said, "Where are they taking us exactly?"

  "To the Trader first. I guess Strasser wants to get him out of the way before moving onto the train. Always a chance our guys may wake up, and if he gets inside the war wag and trucks before that happens, he's laughing. But no way is that talking skull gonna hijack all that materiel. Right about now, J.B. should be blasting his way out of the bank, unless the goons tied him and Hun and the others up, which I doubt."

  "Blasting?" she said incredulously.

  "Yeah. Strict policy. All of us, since way back, are stuffed to the gills with explosives, or at least the means of creating explosives. An idea I had years ago, worked it out with J.B. Just in case we get caught by bad guys, we have all kinds of shit concealed in our clothes, our boots, our webbing. The bad guys take our pieces off us, grenades, knives, all that. The obvious. They don't bother to look at our boots for false inner soles, or check every stitch, every button. Some of us have big plastique-cored buttons on our long coats, others have wiring sewn into special pouches. You can't even feel it. Don't worry about J.B. He'll make out."

  "Now I know why your bunch is talked about like it is," she said. "As special people. Sure is forward planning!"

  "It's no big deal. It's called survival. These days you need all the help you can think up."

  "Right. In this wonderful country where you could probably live your entire life without getting raped, abducted, murdered, eaten…without seeing a—what did you call it? Plague pit?"

  His mind flew back to the scene in War Wag One, her angry face as she argued with him. It all seemed centuries ago.