by James Axler
Doc stood over J.B. as the Armorer stared at the spilled honey, the rad counter on his lapel showing the needle hard in the red zone.
“John Barrymore?” Doc said. “What...are you doing?”
Kneeling on the kitchen floor, J.B. stared at the glutinous honey as it began to inch slowly across the floorboards where it had spilled. “There’s something in the honey,” he stated.
“You fool! I eat that honey every day,” Doc snapped at him.
J.B. looked up, the concern clear on his face. “I’d stop. Right now.”
Doc struggled to process what J.B. had just said, the bewilderment and frustration clear on his lined face. “What is it you are saying?” he demanded.
J.B. stood and brushed the old man aside, reaching for the cupboard where the kitchen supplies were stored. There were three unopened pots of honey standing on the shelf. J.B. took the leftmost and uncapped the lid.
“John Barrymore Dix!” Doc snapped. “This is madness! What do you think you are—?”
J.B. ignored the man, opening the pot and bringing his radiation counter close to the revealed contents. “This honey is irradiated,” he stated calmly.
J.B. grabbed the next flask and uncapped it while Doc watched.
“This, too,” J.B. said. “Probably they all are.”
“How can this be?” Doc demanded. “I help harvest this honey. It’s made by bees all around Heaven Falls.”
J.B. shrugged. “Fallout from the nukes, mebbe. Whatever caused it has entered the food cycle at some stage. Could even be in the pollen that your bees are collecting.”
“They are not my bees,” Doc said defensively.
J.B. brushed the objection aside. “We need to get this out of your house right away,” he said, snatching up the open pots of honey and marching to the open back door. “Do you have more?”
“What?”
“More honey!” J.B. snarled. “Do you have more?”
“I...I have a jar in the bedchamber,” Doc admitted. “I work with the honey, it is entirely proper that I...”
“I’m not accusing you of stealing it, Doc,” J.B. told him as he threw the clay pots out onto the grass. “Listen to me. Don’t you understand? This shit you eat is red-hot with radiation.”
Doc stood there openmouthed, trying to comprehend J.B.’s words.
J.B. was back at the cupboard. He grabbed the last pot of honey and launched it overarm through the open back door, smiling grimly when he heard it shatter on the ground outside. “You said you had more in the bedroom,” he growled. “Show me.”
Bewildered, Doc led the way to his bedroom and pointed to the night table. It featured an extinguished candle on its top and a shelf set midway below. There was a four-inch-tall clay jar resting on the shelf, a sheet of muslin cinched around its open top with a string. J.B. grabbed the pot and marched to the front door of the property—the nearest exit. He pulled the door open and prepared to toss the clay vessel away when he stopped. Walking along the dirt path not twenty feet from him were two Melissas: Linda and another he did not recognize. They spotted him at the same moment as he saw them.
“Violator!” they cried as one.
J.B. reacted as swift as thought, dropping the pot on the stoop and slamming the door closed. Then he spun and grabbed Doc as the old man came ambling out of his bedroom.
“Where’s your blaster? Quickly!” J.B. demanded.
“I-it was put away.”
“Where?” J.B. growled, but he had already spied the lockbox located outside the washroom and he marched toward it.
Doc followed, glancing back at the front door. “What is going on? What did you see?”
J.B. slid down on his knees and worked the catch of the lockbox, pulling the lid up. Inside there was Doc’s commemorative LeMat and a handful of bullets, and beside it was Jak’s Colt Python, which the albino had left behind when he’d moved out of the property. J.B. grabbed both, checking the barrel of the Python with a professional eye. It was still loaded the way Jak had left it. Naturally suspicious, Jak had doubtless put the blaster away with the thought he may need it in a hurry.
“That untrusting son of a bitch!” J.B. said, smiling as he raised the loaded Colt in a steady, one-handed grip and targeted the front door. It felt good to have a blaster in his hand again; the weight was just right, like a missing limb replaced.
“Doc, you need to get down,” he said, his eyes fixed on the door.
An instant later the front door swung open and Linda came striding into the cabin, her brunette locks fluttering behind her in the breeze. J.B. squeezed the Colt’s trigger and sent a .357 slug straight through the woman’s forehead. The boom of blasterfire sounded surreal after so long without it; almost two weeks away from the carnage of the Deathlands had changed everything.
J.B. watched grimly as Linda fell backward, a red smear materializing dead center between her eyes.
The other Melissa was just outside, and hearing the report of the blaster she stopped, horrified. J.B. was on his feet immediately, bringing the blaster around and trying to get a bead on the white-robed woman where the frame of the door obscured her.
“Violator!” the Melissa shouted. “Place your blaster on the floor right now.”
“Not going to happen,” J.B. snarled as he sent a bullet through the room toward her.
The bullet clipped the edge of the door frame by the Melissa’s face, sending a shower of splinters into the air. The woman screamed, leaped back and brushed the tiny flecks aside, her eyes screwed tightly shut.
J.B. kept moving, striding across the room with the Colt Python extended in front of him. Doc had stepped aside when the shooting began, and he looked bewildered as J.B. passed him.
“This is yours,” J.B. said, thrusting the LeMat blaster into Doc’s gut as he strode past.
Doc’s hands bent around the weapon in surprise.
“Don’t shoot me in the back,” J.B. told him without turning.
Then the Armorer was at the door, his eyes scanning the exterior for the second Melissa. It was still early, an hour or so after sunrise, and Heaven Falls was still waking up. People could be seen in the distance, heading off to the farms, the medical faculty or the construction sites. There was a little mist between the trees, hanging low like bleached cotton candy.
J.B. peered left and right, trying to find the woman who had ducked away from his shot. She was dressed in the flowing white robes of a Melissa, and she had hair styled the way they all wore it while on shift, red locks piled atop her head with twisting curls wafting down past her ears. That red hair and white dress should make her easy to spot, J.B. thought, and yet he could not see her. She had been here not five seconds before—there was nowhere she could have disappeared to.
Then J.B. heard the noise coming from above and behind him, and he spun and ducked in the same movement as the unnamed Melissa leaped down at him from her hiding place on the roof of Doc’s cabin. J.B.’s swift reaction saved him from a broken neck. Instead, the woman in white collided with the top of his left arm with the force of a hammer, and the two of them sank to the dirt in a tangle of limbs.
Shifting his weight, J.B. tried to scramble away, to put enough distance between himself and his attacker to take a shot at her. But her body was on him, the weight of it dragging at his waist and legs where she had dropped. She reached up for him with slender arms, her hands hooked into claws. J.B. batted her hands away with his left hand, whipped the blaster around and tried to aim. The Melissa swiped at the weapon’s muzzle, jarring it with such force that J.B.’s hand shot upward and he almost lost his grip on the weapon entirely.
The woman followed up with a brutal knee to J.B.’s kidney as she clambered up his body and reached for his face.
“Violator!” she raged. “You are an offense to the Regina’s love!”
J.B. saw the woman’s hand reaching for his face with sharp nails. He turned his head as the nails struck, felt them bite against the flesh of his cheek half an inch beneath his eye socket. Then his hand was up and he snagged the Melissa’s wrist, twisting it and forcing her to curtail her attack. The Melissa shrieked with surprise, her weight shifting so that it no longer pressed against J.B.’s legs.
The Armorer scrambled out from under the flailing Melissa, powering across the dirt away from the shack, trying to generate some distance from his attacker in a crouching run. The Melissa followed, her teeth bared, setting her arms back for balance as she sprang after J.B.
He whipped the Colt Python around, targeting his pursuer. She was six feet behind him, her bare feet slamming against the ground as she gave chase. The Melissa started her leap as J.B. squeezed the trigger, and he watched incredulous as she sprang into the air and brought her feet above head height as his blaster spit its deadly issue. The bullet soared past where the Melissa had been, cutting through the air before embedding itself in the wall of Doc’s cabin, two feet from the open door. Then the Melissa’s foot snapped out and caught J.B. under the chin, striking with such force that his head jounced up and backward and suddenly his legs gave way beneath him.
Still running, J.B. caromed to the ground with a burst of dislodged dirt. The Melissa landed three feet away, right foot then left touching the ground milliseconds apart, sliding and spinning as she met the soil.
The woman in white turned to face J.B. even as she landed, but he recovered enough to send another bullet at her. The bullet was angled upward, targeting the Melissa’s chest where the robes met beneath her tanned cleavage. It should have been over then, the bullet drilling through the woman like boiling water on snow, but somehow she managed to twist aside, faster than the eye could follow. J.B. saw it but couldn’t understand it—the way the woman seemed to whirl in place to let the bullet slip behind her. He had seen that quickness once before, when the Melissa called Phyllida had attacked him in the redoubt before he had stabbed her.
Could they all do that? Could they all move at superspeed when they needed to? The thought filled the man with horror.
The Melissa charged at J.B., pivoting on one foot while whipping her other leg back to kick him in the skull. Lying in the dirt, tasting soil in his mouth, J.B. saw that foot cut the air toward him in a pale blur. And then he heard what sounded like a crack of thunder, and suddenly the foot was no longer coming at his face but rather sailing over his head, spewing blood.
J.B. watched, stunned, as the Melissa toppled to the ground beside him, screaming in agony. There was blood on her right leg and the section below the knee was missing entirely, just a ragged hunk of bone and strips of dangling flesh remaining. The rest of the leg and foot landed a moment after she did, fifteen feet to J.B.’s right, on the other side of him to the Melissa.
Doc stood a few feet away, the secondary barrel of his LeMat pistol swirling smoke where it had discharged a burst of buckshot like a shotgun. He had his shirt on now and his frock coat, and his lion’s-head swordstick leaned against the front door to his shack.
J.B. processed all of that in a fraction of a second, even as he began to move. He scrambled forward with the Colt Python in his hand, slapping its snout point-blank against the screaming Melissa’s head. He looked away as he pulled the trigger, feeling the blaster buck in his hand as it delivered a mercy bullet to the woman’s brainpan.
Then J.B. strode back toward Doc’s shack where the old man was returning to collect his swordstick.
“It seems we have much to discuss,” Doc said as J.B. caught up to him.
“Yeah,” J.B. agreed, “but not here. People will have heard that thunderclap of yours, and they’ll come running.”
“I do not doubt it,” Doc acknowledged, his eyes already roving the path and the trees beyond for signs of new enemies.
J.B. slipped past him and into the shack. “Just let me get my hat and the rest of Jak’s bullets,” he explained. “Then we can get out of here and mebbe figure out what the hell is going on.”
Doc agreed. Where previously it had been just J.B. against the whole of Heaven Falls, now things had changed. Now there were two.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
J.B. and Doc hurried through Doc’s cabin, grabbed the fedora and Jak’s spare ammo and slipped out the back door. It didn’t pay to be out front anymore. The sounds of those gunshots would attract attention, and if they didn’t then the bodies surely would. The paths around here were well used and it was the busiest time of the day, when the locals went to their designated assignments—the corpses wouldn’t stay unnoticed for long.
J.B. said nothing to Doc as they passed through the back and into the woods beyond. They moved swiftly, slipping into the shadowy cover of the trees that ran in a narrow band between the cabins and the crop fields. The trees were dense enough to provide cover for now, but J.B. didn’t rate their chances in staying hidden there for an extended period. He had something else in mind.
Once they were out of sight of Doc’s shack, J.B. halted and Doc stopped a pace away. Already they could hear the sounds of alarm as the first corpse was found. It wouldn’t take long for a patrol to be organized to hunt down the fugitive Armorer.
J.B. reloaded the Colt Python as he spoke to Doc. “What brought on the change of heart?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
“You know, I think it was automatic,” Doc admitted. “Seeing you tussling with that woman brought to mind the number of times we have been in combat together, and I think my brain slipped into its default setting of assisting you.”
J.B. gave Doc a cockeyed smile as he heard this. “And what about now?” he asked. “Are you with me?”
Doc shook his head slowly. “My every neuron is telling me that you are a violator to the Regina’s love and that you should be turned in and chilled. I cannot lie to you.”
“But...?” J.B. prompted.
“Love can be a tricky emotion at the best of times,” Doc said wistfully. “I want to do the right thing out of love for the Regina, but seeing the way that slip of a girl fought you—the speed and ferocity with which she attacked—weighs uncomfortably in my mind. I believe that you have stumbled upon something here that the rest of us did not see. Perhaps we cannot see it. So I am trusting you, even though my every fiber tells me to chill you.”
J.B. reached out and grasped Doc’s hand, shaking it firmly. “You’re a good man, Doc,” he said. “When all this has played out, I can assure you you’ll have made the right choice.”
Doc nodded. “I hope so. Now then, where do we go from here? The ville is on high alert for your presence, and presumably it will be for mine now, also.”
“Not yet it won’t,” J.B. corrected him. “There were two witnesses to that altercation, and we chilled both of them. Right now, all anyone knows is that you aren’t in your cabin, which could just as easily mean you went off to do some hiving early.”
“Hiving?” Doc asked.
“Honey collecting, whatever you call it.”
“Irradiated honey,” Doc stated. “That is what you found, is it not?”
“I’m piecing it together,” J.B. admitted, “and I don’t have all of the facts. But there’s something in that honey that’s been messing with your head, and it has not just affected you. I saw Millie and Ricky get sucked into this thing, too, and Ryan nearly chilled me when I went to speak to him last night. If I’d stayed longer, he or Krysty would have.”
“Jak has been rather preoccupied,” Doc mused. “He left the shack we were sharing without a word a few days ago. It struck me as strange, but I did not press it.”
“And you’ve all been eating honey,” J.B. said.
“Not just honey,” Doc pointed out. “They ply us with mead at the rallies—that is beer made from honey. Then there are t
he cakes, the dried fruit glazed with honey, the honeyed water. I did not even think about it.”
“Why would you?” J.B. asked. “Food in abundance—no wonder this place felt like paradise.”
“It still feels like paradise in my heart,” Doc admitted. “But why has this...mental recalibration not affected you?”
“I’ve been getting my water elsewhere,” J.B. said, “and helping myself to fruit off the trees whenever I got the chance, mostly because I took to checking out the ville limits and skipped out on the lunch ration. I probably just ate less of the standard diet.”
“So where do we go now?” Doc asked.
“The honey’s got some sort of psychoactive property,” J.B. stated, “probably because this whole area got showered with nuke fallout all them years ago. It’s probably in the plant life and so the pollen that the bees are gathering is riddled with it. That’s my best guess.”
“They have a huge store of honey,” Doc said. “Years’ worth. I think it has become an addiction with the Trai.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” the Armorer said. “The setup here is very obedient, and it’s efficient, too. People—groups—have designated roles.”
“Like a beehive,” Doc said in realization.
J.B. adjusted his glasses as he thought. “A while back, you told us that Regina is another word for queen.”
“Latin,” Doc confirmed. “Are you proposing that the Regina is some kind of...human queen bee?”
“I think so,” J.B. said. “You feel intense allegiance to her, trust her every word, believe in her love for you and for the people around you.”
Doc nodded uncertainly. “Please go on.”
“Bees are a female-led society, right?” J.B. said. “You have the queen and then what? Come on, Doc, you have book smarts.”
“The worker bees are female,” Doc recalled, “while the males are drones used for menial tasks, including reproduction.”
“The most menial task of all,” J.B. opined sourly. “The Trai have set up Heaven Falls the same way. They call this place the Home, the same way bees probably think about their hive. Women do all the important stuff—the child protection, the medicine, the sec duties—while guys like you and me get to chop wood and harvest food.”
