James Axler - Deathlands 43 - Dark Emblem

by Dark Emblem [lit]

  Browning delivered on impact was utterly devastating.

  When the bullet hit the freakish mutie, it struck with pile-driver force. The chupacabras's head was obliterated in a cloud of wet grue and bone, leaving behind a stump of a neck that spouted pinkish blood, even as the body continued to be propelled forward by sheer momentum.

  "Thing runs 'round like chicken with head cut off," Jak noted.

  "Got news for you, Jak. This sure as hell ain't no chicken," J.B. retorted as he kicked out with a booted foot and halted the now-headless creature's charge.

  "I didn't expect them to be so tiny," Krysty said as she eyed the dead mutie.

  "What's the deal, Soto?" Ryan asked. "That little thing couldn't have been over two feet tall. You mean to tell me the entire island's been hiding in fear of that?"

  "No, you misunderstand, Ryan Cawdor. This chupacabras is a mere child, a baby."

  "Oh."

  "You're bleeding, lover," Krysty said, running her hand along one of Ryan's stubbled cheeks and wiping away a red smear. "Claw must've got you on the way down."

  Ryan pulled off one of his tight-fitting black gloves, revealing additional superficial cuts on the top and heel of his left hand.

  "Spines got me, too," he said. "Who's carrying the first aid and playing medic this trip?"

  "Me," Jak said, reaching back into the pack slung over one shoulder. The albino removed a tightly wound bundle of cotton gauze and a roll of white adhesive tape.

  "These goatsuckers-any poisons or toxins in the spines?" Ryan asked, wincing as Jak sprayed a stream of hissing antiseptic from a small med can onto his exposed hand.

  "Hope not," Soto replied, kneeling at the corpse, using the muzzle of his long blaster to poke at the creature's exposed underbelly.

  "You're a lot of help," Krysty snorted to the smaller Hispanic man.

  "I answer true, girl. I don't think the spines are poison, but I don't know for sure. I never tried to find out, if you know what I mean."

  "You test subject, Ryan," Jak said, grinning, showing off sharp-looking teeth. "How you feel?"

  "Felt better," Ryan replied as the gauze was wrapped around his hand. "Felt a lot worse. Don't feel sick or poisoned."

  "Looks like Jak has the makings of a decent field medic," J.B. noted, glancing at the albino's handiwork on Ryan's injuries. "If Millie doesn't watch out, she'll be out of a job."

  "Tough for you," Jak replied. "Not share your bed." Dean snorted and laughed, but didn't turn. He re- mained alert, his Browning Hi-Power cocked and ready to shoot if more firepower was needed.

  Ryan held a hunk of the remaining gauze to his bleeding face. Jak had offered to attach a pad with some of the white adhesive tape, but Ryan told him no. The bleeding was already starting to ease.

  "All right. Let's go on down," Ryan said.

  Deathlands, 2095

  Doc TANNER CAME to his senses in the middle of what he believed to be the worst fog he'd ever encountered in his life. And how long was that life? Thirty years or a hundred years? An unruly mass of days and decades and he neither cared to nor could he keep count. He was flat on his stomach in the dirt, now in a world whose floor had been jerked out from beneath his feet.

  Somehow, he'd managed to gather up his clothing and dress himself, but having lost track of time long ago, he had no real concept how long he'd been stumbling down the treacherous mountain path. Chunks of his conscious mind, along with his immediate short-term memory, were missing, as if sliced away by a butcher's blade and discarded in some charnel pit.

  Even worse, there were a few times he knew for certain, or at least, as certain as he could be in his addled state, that he'd blacked out while trying to stagger along his chosen path in the damp mist.

  The last memory he could pull up from his brain was that of Emily. In the memory, the hour was early, perhaps seven in the morning. He'd dined on poached eggs, crisp bacon and day-old bread recovered from the previous night's meal that had been toasted to disguise its origins. He and Emily were standing at the front door of his home, and she was nagging at him in a pleasant tone to not be late, as they were expecting her parents for supper.

  Emily was still in her nightclothes, covered by a filmy pink robe for modesty's sake. However, for some reason, the robe wasn't tied around her middle-her more than ample middle. The belt wasn't long enough, he supposed, since her frame was normally so petite. In fact, blessed Emily was getting quite the gut on her, but Doc was so happy he didn't care.

  She gave him a kiss on the cheek and he stepped through the front door of the apartment. And everything appeared normal, except he didn't recall Emily being so overweight.

  "By the Three Kennedys!" he said aloud. "Emily was pregnant!"

  Pregnant with their first child? Their second? Doc had no clue.

  The apartment...they hadn't lived there in how many years? Before Rachel was born, yes! That much he was sure of, and when her young face appeared in his mind's eye, Doc felt an almost inconsolable, unbearable tidal wave of wrenching pain and loss inundate his entire being.

  All around him, the fog was growing heavier, but

  Doc didn't notice in the slightest, since he was weighted down by an even heavier fog from within. Night and day and another night passed as he stumbled along, sleeping when he was tired, hungry beyond imagining, but he never seemed to black out for very long.

  He was found facedown on the broken tarmac of an old highway, his skull coming close to being crushed under the wheel of a small armored transport. The occupants believed the long-haired elder to be a drunk from the nearby town of Mocsin, but none of them could identify the face. The direction he'd apparently been traveling also gave them pause. Behind Doc was nothing but the mysterious Black Hills, a mystery which those above them in the chain of command had expressed an interest in.

  Doc was kept alive. There were men who would want to talk to him.

  He awakened in a toilet, his long legs bent and hanging over the side of a bathtub. After struggling to gain his footing, Doc looked in the cracked mirror hanging crookedly over the filthy washbasin. He squinted once, twice and closed his pale blue eyes to refbcus before taking another peek.

  "What carnival jest is this?" he wondered aloud to himself, for what was looking mutely back at him wasn't his face, no, couldn't be his face, since he knew damn well the visage he was seeing was that of his own sainted father.

  "No more," he said in a quavering voice, watching his chapped lips move in the mirror's reflection.

  "Gods of the universe, I can take no more of this. How many more pounds of flesh can I give before nothing is left but barren white bone? Accursed speculum, why do you show me such a terrible sight?"

  What stared back at him from the mirror was his transformed image, skull-like and hollow-eyed, topped off by the silver-gray hair he knew was his own, matted with dirt and sweat.

  The hair remained healthy, but the rest of him appeared to have aged more than thirty years. He appeared to be a man of sixty-plus years.

  At least thirty years, three decades of time, had been foisted upon his personage, and he remembered none of it.

  Doc smashed his forehead into the reflection while starting to incoherently wail at a fever pitch. A wordless jumble of sounds bubbled out, interrupted only when he had to stop and suck another breath of air into his chest. He banged his head again and again, feeling the mirrored glass crack under the assault and cut his forehead. Blood began to run down his bushy silver eyebrows and the left side of his long nose.

  Doc looked at the man in the mirror and cackled insanely, until his stomach began to violently cramp, driving him to a crouch. Feeling as though he were about to become violently, messily sick, Doc dropped his trousers and sat on the filthy toilet seat, thankful even in his current state of near-insanity that he hadn't soiled himself.

  The metal door to the small bath chamber swung open partway, blocked from fully opening by Doc's bony knees. Doc remained hunched over the porcelain toilet, his pants ar
ound his ankles and his bare, bony knees sticking pointedly up. His stomach was gurgling, still expunging itself of the vile water he'd drank from a ditch many hours before.

  The bearded sec man threw in a dingy towel many washings removed from its original color of orange, and spit out a series of orders to the captured man.

  "Use the tub behind the plastic curtain. Water works. Hope you like cold. When you're clean enough, you moldy old fruit, the baron wants to talk to you."

  "Baron?" Doc whispered. Such a form of address was medieval to his ears and reeked of the past, not the future land to which Welles had so arrogantly claimed he was sending him. In a quick second, Doc's mind lost the patina of confusion he had feared to be permanent and began clicking on all eight cylinders again.

  Doc wondered whether he could have been shunted back in time instead of pushed forward. The prospect was grimly appealing, until he considered the appearance and manufacture of the bathroom in which he was now sitting. While it didn't look any more modern than the small bath he'd been allowed to use during his stays in Dulce and Chicago, it was certainly in much poorer condition.

  Leaning out from his seat, Doc pulled back the dank, slimy shower curtain and looked at the condition of the bathtub. The interior was nearly black. A vapid green millipede as long as his forearm crawled back and forth, all one thousand of the ghastly insect's legs trying vainly to find purchase on the walls of the enamel to crawl out to safety.

  Although repulsed by the sight, Doc felt a certain kinship with the many-legged insect. He, too, was trapped, and scrambling for a way out, but the walls surrounding him were as smooth as pure spun glass, and in his present condition, just as insurmountable.

  CHOOSING TO WASH his face and upper body in the sink, Doc had removed the layer of road dust he'd picked up on the trail and was actually feeling halfway human again. A bar of soap would have added to the ease of bathing, but none had been offered and he didn't dare ask. The same gray-bearded man had come to fetch him, making many unfunny comments about the way Doc had "smelled up the shitter" to the amusement of the other fellow who served as his backup.

  Together, the three had left the bath and entered a long hallway. Once upon a time, Doc noticed, the far side of the hall had been made of nothing but inviting panes of glass, offering a view of the world outside. Now, the glass appeared to have been mostly broken out, and huge slabs of plywood and scavenged metal nailed in place to contain the walkway. One piece of metal used was cut in the shape of a colossal red circle, and a white star rested in the center. The letter ' T'' was in the middle of the star. The color red and the star itself made Doc wonder for a brief moment if he'd ended up inside the borders of Asia, or one of the Soviet states, but no Russian was spoken and the design of the hall furnishings ended this line of thought, as well as seeing the sign's mate farther along, and this time the word "Texaco" could be easily read.

  "Texas," Doc mused. "Funny. I have been through Houston, and it does not feel hot enough for Texas."

  The comment earned him two things: a snarled "Shut your mouth," from the bearded man appointed to be his keeper and a whack to the back of the head from the butt of the rifle held by the second guard. While the blow wasn't hard enough to send Doc crashing into unconsciousness, or even send him sprawling to his knees, it was ample and unexpected enough to shake his brain loose from the coherent mooring he'd reestablished and start him careening from topic to topic once more inside his damaged mind.

  After the long walk down the side hall, Doc and his captors entered through a large double door into a great room, a high-ceilinged monstrosity. The room was empty, barren of any decoration or furniture. Industrial carpet of olive green had been lain upon the floor, muffling the sounds of footsteps. A second carpet, this one of royal red, stretched across the expanse like a lazy tongue that led to a mouth of equally red draperies, slightly parted. Soft, flickering light was escaping from the gap left in the massive curtains, which helped cover the worn condition of the carpets underfoot, royal red and olive green, equally ratty and dirty.

  A figure behind the curtains beckoned. For a moment, Doc's addled mind proposed the possibility he was but an actor, waiting to go on and deliver his latest performance. Trying to remember his lines, he stopped walking for a second, and struck a pose, one hand on a hip and the other one extended, palm up, just so.

  Doc cleared his throat.

  "You got a problem?" his keeper asked.

  '"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have then" exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages,"' Doc boomed.

  The new figure stepped out from behind the curtains and took in the sight of Doc and the waiting guards. He smiled and it was phony and insincere, a cold-hearted smile belonging to a cold-hearted man. It was a smile with no joy, a cruel twisting of the lips, like a pasted-on applique. A dead smile.

  "Greetings, friend. And who might you be?" Doc said brightly. "I hope I have not missed my cue."

  "My name is Strasser. Cort Strasser," the man said, silky smooth. "And you haven't missed a damned thing, old man. In fact, you're just in time for the festivities."

  "Fancy that!" Doc said.

  "Fancy that," Strasser echoed.

  Making an "after you" motion and holding out a hand to the gap in the curtains, Strasser stepped aside, the smile across his lower face frozen in place as he waited for Doc to move. As the older gent passed, squinting to see as he entered the dimly lit room beyond the curtains, Strasser cuffed him across the back of the head, causing Doc to stumble forward. He managed to break his fall with his hands, but still landed painfully on his knees, which seemed to have developed all-new aches and pains after his latest mat-trans chron jump.

  "I'll have none of that crazy babbling, old man, stuff about entrances and exits. Keep it up and the only exit you'll be taking is the slow train West, get me? I've already heard enough of your wailing and crying. If you try and embarrass me in front of the baron, I'll chill you on the spot, one slug right to the head, okay?" Strasser grated from behind.

  "Take heart that I meant no embarrassment. The words, sir, the words I spoke came from the Bard. And William Shakespeare, for all of his faults, was far from crazy."

  "Do I look like I give a good long happy shit?" Strasser demanded, his face visibly angry even in the subdued lighting of the wide room.

  "I must confess, no, you do not," Doc answered truthfully.

  "So you aren't a total half-wit."

  Doc didn't reply as he carefully looked around the room in which he knelt. The lighting was as bad as what passed for illumination outside in the great hall, but at the same time the room still seemed bright because of an abundance of mirrors-on the walls, mounted in freestanding racks, on the ceiling above. And in the mirrors were the reflections of lighted candles. Candelabra were placed on a series of small tables that Doc would have recognized as being old even during his boyhood, so this baron had to have an affection for antiques. The scent of incense hung in the air, thick and heavy, almost covering other, more undesirable smells of body odor and decay.

  The floor beneath his knees was covered in rugs of all sizes, shapes and colors. They were strewed upon the floor in haphazard fashion, overlapping in a scattering of patterns. Doc had the impression that a series of new rugs were brought in on a daily basis and slapped down wherever, covering the older soiled ones.

  He turned and addressed his reflection in one of the long mirrors. He didn't have to look far to see himself, since the mirrors were indeed mounted all around him. "Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness, and mere oblivion. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything," Doc said, finishing his earlier scene.

  "So, you're the one," a voice from on high said. "The one I've been hearing about. What secrets you got to tell me, old man, before we chill your sorry ass?"

  Chapter Fourteen

  "At least this maze of stairs is l
it," Dean said, memories of the quickly fought but intense battle back at the hospital in Carolina still fresh in his mind. The stairs were made from the same sturdy vanadium steel as the walls, with dark rubber strips on the top of each step for added safety and traction. All in the group had noted the dizzying array of scratches and claw marks left behind in the rubber.

  "The old one, she told me I would have to stride bravely into the bowels of hell to face my quarry. I know now she was correct," Jorge said firmly. "I visited a seer. She predicted victory for us all, my friends."

  "If you've been down to hell once, you been there a dozen times," Ryan replied cryptically. A journey into one of the redoubts was nothing new or exciting, and the only difference offered up by this one was the possible presence of the murderous mutated chu-pacabras.