Crucible of Time

by James Axler

  At one point Ryan had thought the tortured man was dead. Then he drew several racking, shuddering breaths, his whole rib cage heaving with the effort of staying alive. A hank of cloth had been knotted around his mouth to keep him from crying out again. The head turned desperately from side to side, as though he were blindly seeking some sort of salvation.

  The leader of the worshipers seemed to be a singularly tall, skinny man. Endowed, Ryan couldn't help noticing, with an extremely large penis that hung almost to his knee, like a length of rejected hose. He had a shaved head, streaming with rain, his eyes wide and staring. His mouth hung open, showing a series of jagged and broken teeth. His whip was bigger than the others, multithonged, which he was using on his own back, lashing his scarred flesh across alternate shoulders.

  Now he held up the dripping flail and called out to his followers in a harsh, croaking voice.

  "Best we finish before the weather fucks us in our intention," he yelled.

  Krysty tugged at Ryan's sleeve. "Are we not going to do something, lover?"

  He shook his head. "Man's almost dead."

  "Still ease his passing."

  Ryan looked sideways at her, seeing the way the storm had flattened her fiery hair against her skull.

  "Trader used to say that you didn't clean up shit unless you'd already trodden in it. Not our business, Krysty. Can only lead to trouble."

  She tugged harder. "I don't believe what I'm hearing, lover. I don't."

  "There's times and there's times. You know that, just as well as I do."

  Part of him wanted to put a violent ending to this bloody torture. But the more rational side of his character told him to leave well alone and move on. It wasn't their business. He sighed, rubbing his finger along the side of his nose, huddling his shoulders as the rain beat down even more strongly. The wind was also gathering force, whistling and shrieking through the tall trees, whipping the fire into a steaming inferno.

  The dancing had stopped, and the eighteen men and women were gathered around their victim.

  "In the name of the gods of sky and land and earth and sun and fire and water and stone and blood… That you might help us to a great harvest, we offer up this worthy sacrifice to you all. He came willing like…" There was a pause, and muffled sniggering from a couple of the women. "Now we offer him to you, through fire and through rain."

  He turned to a stout young man. "Light the torch, brother, and then we can go home."

  The raging storm made it hard to get the brand lit, but it eventually flared into life, smoking with an orange-red glow, showing that they were using some crudely refined petroleum to help it to burn.

  "If you don't, Ryan, then I will," Krysty warned, aiming with her Smith & Wesson blaster. "Sorry, lover. Can't let them do this."

  For a fraction of a frozen moment, it crossed his mind to punch her out, knock the blaster from her hands, stop her from disobeying him in front of the others. The crimson rage was blazing, but that microsecond of red-mist rage passed as quickly as it had reared its cobra head.

  The teenager, hair dank across his shoulders, was stooping to set light to the pile of brushwood just below the head of the tortured man.

  Ryan made his decision. He turned to Mildred, crouched on his left. "Put away their victim. Rest of you, chill as many as you can. Best that none of them escape to carry the word back to their ville."

  Mildred already had her Czech target revolver drawn, in her right hand. She leveled it slowly, blinking away the rain.

  Ryan could have spent hours watching Mildred shooting. Her talent with a blaster was truly phenomenal, better than anyone else he'd ever seen in Deathlands. She had once told him that her expertise didn't just extend to holding her breath before gently squeezing the trigger. She was so aware of her own body that she had the ability to judge the single beats of her heart and fire between them.

  The rest of them all had their blasters at the ready, peering out through the dripping bushes at the last scenes of the bloody ritual.

  "When you're ready," Ryan said, leveling his own blaster at the dangling head of the crucified man.

  There was a blinding flash of chem lightning, like a purple spear, exploding against the top of one of the pines, less than a hundred yards away, igniting the tall tree as it seared its way to the ground. It was followed instantly by a massive rumble of deafening thunder.

  The noise drowned out the thin crack of the ZKR 551, though Ryan sensed Mildred shooting and saw the effect of her single shot.

  She fired again, at the young man who was concentrating on lighting the fire, bent forward. The .38 round took him through the back of the skull, a little to the left. The round tumbled as soon as it hit the bone, distorting, rolling and slicing through the soft tissues of the brain. It erupted through his open mouth in a welter of gray, pink and scarlet, and white shards of bone, smashing his teeth and shredding his chubby lips. His scream of shock and horror was choked off with a gush of blood and a grue of brain matter.

  The rest of the naked coven stopped stock-still. To them it had to have appeared that their companion had been stricken down by a blast from heaven. Like Ryan, they couldn't possibly have heard the sound of the shot above the crash of thunder. And there was the young man rolling on his back, fists clenched, flailing, feet scrabbling in the muddy earth, eyes wide open, the rain splashing on them. It looked as if some horrific accident had led to him vomiting out his own brains.

  The tall leader started to turn toward the undergrowth, the only one of the group to begin to suspect that they were under attack.

  Krysty shot him through the upper chest with her first shot, sending him staggering backward, tumbling over his own feet and landing on his back in the remnants of the big fire. He began to yell in a frantic, high-pitched voice.

  Then the clearing became a maelstrom of death. It was a far, far worse massacre than that of the Mescalero Apaches—more helpless, defenseless dead.

  Most of the dead fell to the chattering spray from the barrel of J.B.'s Uzi, a hail of leaden slaughter that sent them spinning and dancing in a ghastly parody of riotous pleasure. Blood fountained from sliced flesh, turning pink in the torrential downpour.

  Because of the shortage of ammo for his Le Mat, Doc was the only one of the seven not to engage in the shooting party, instead watching the butchery, stone-faced.

  By a freak of happenstance, one of the women escaped the killing ground. A bullet from Dean's blaster had clipped her right shoulder, but she managed to stagger away, dodging and sliding in the mud, mouth gaping in a silent shriek of horror. Ryan tried a snap shot at her as she slithered on hands and knees behind a clump of aspens, but the bullet stripped off a length of bark and missed her by a good eighteen inches.

  "Get her, Jak," he snapped. "Don't want word of this to get out."

  The teenager holstered his blaster and was off, a white-haired ghost, vanishing surefooted into the gloom like an avenging angel of savage death.

  "J.B., drag that corpse out of the fire," Ryan said, stepping cautiously from cover.

  There was little movement in the clearing. One of the older men had been gut shot and was rolling from side to side, clutching the gaping wound in his scrawny belly. Threads of gray-yellow entrails seeped out into the dirt. Ryan holstered the blaster and drew the panga, stooping and cutting open the dying man's jugular, giving him a swift and merciful passing that had been denied to the wretched figure that dangled upside down from the tree. Blood sprayed out, and Ryan stepped neatly to one side to avoid having it splatter over his pants and boots.

  The Armorer dragged the tall, skinny corpse from the smoldering remnants of the fire, where it had already begun to blister and scorch, the hair sizzling and stinking in the cool dampness.

  They had barely finished checking the bodies when Jak returned to them, wiping the leaf-shaped blade of one of his throwing knives on the sleeve of his jacket, whistling under his breath.

  Ryan glanced across at him, eyebrows raised in a q
uestion. As more lightning hissed close by and thunder filled the forest, Jak simply nodded.

  "Good."

  "Think they were those Children of the Rock?" Krysty asked, looking around at the carnage.

  "Could be. But we've come across this sort before. Let's get him down off the tree," Ryan said, pointing at the tortured body.

  "Seemed more like a crowd of penitents," Mildred suggested, reloading her blaster. "I vacationed a few times in the Southwest and came across them down there. All across New Mexico, and into Colorado. And parts of Arizona. They were real big on crucifixion, I recall."

  "And flagellation," Doc added. "Mortifying the body to cleanse the spirit."

  They managed to lever out the long iron nails, carefully lowering the raggled body to the wet ground. The center of the storm seemed to have passed them by, and the rain had eased to a steady drizzle.

  "We aren't going to bury him, are we, lover?" Krysty asked.

  "No. Carry him back down the path and put him in the river. It's in flood, and he'll get carried well away from here. It's all we can do for him."

  "How about the rest of them, Dad?" Dean asked.

  "Leave them. Soon as we put him in the water, we can move on again. There's far too much blood and too many corpses in this part of Deathlands."

  THE CHEM STORM WAS behaving oddly. Having rushed upon them, it had eased away to the south. But within ten minutes the wind had changed and the rain turned back into a torrential downpour, battering at the trees, driven by the howling wind into the faces of Ryan and his companions.

  By the time they'd struggled through the darkness down the winding, treacherous path with the heavy body, all of them had taken at least one fall and were covered in slick, dark mud.

  "River's around the next bend," J.B. panted. "Need to cross it if we want to get north and west along the highway and get in among the really tall timber."

  "Listen to that noise!" exclaimed Doc, who was wrestling with the dead man's legs. "It sounds to me as though that little river has become something of a flood."

  Jak was out at point and he suddenly reappeared, shoulders hunched. "Bad news," he yelled, cupping his hands to his mouth.

  Ryan rubbed at his good eye. The water had penetrated behind the patch over his missing eye, stinging the socket. "What is it, Jak?"

  "River's up."

  "Much?"

  The teenager grinned wolfishly at the question, holding his long-fingered hands as far apart as they would possibly go. "Plenty," he called.

  "We get across?" yelled the Armorer, who was supporting the shoulders of the slippery, naked body, barely managing to keep it up out of the dirt.

  "No way. Fucking impossible!"

  As soon as Ryan rounded the corner and saw the state of the river, he knew that Jak was correct. There was no way at all that they could cross the foaming inferno that interrupted the trail ahead of them.

  Chapter Ten

  They heaved the corpse into the river, taking the greatest care that none of them lost their footing and followed it into the tumbling torrent. It dipped and rose, riding the whirlpools and rapids, one arm reaching out of the white frothing bubbles, as though the dead man had revived and was seeking help from the silent watchers on the bank.

  "Poor bastard," Mildred said very quietly.

  "Least blood price paid. Paid good odds." Jak smiled at the woman.

  The lightning and thunder of the chem storm had passed, but the wind had risen to something close to hurricane strength and the rain was so heavy that if you stood with your face upturned there was a risk of drowning. The water was icy cold and tasted of rusty iron on the tongue.

  The rippled blacktop vanished beneath the turbulent river and reappeared, tantalizingly close, on the other bank. It was barely twenty yards from side to side. Ryan had no doubt that when the rains ceased, the river would drop within hours and they would be able to continue their journey.

  They found a huge sequoia that had fallen, probably a hundred years earlier, during the tremors of skydark, and had barely begun to rot. Its root structure was massively tangled, like a mummified Medusa's hair, forming a cavern a good fifteen feet deep and at least a dozen feet across. Large enough for them all to find shelter.

  Within a couple of minutes, J.B. had used one of their precious self-lights to set sparks to some dry leaf mold, some thin, broken twigs and some bigger branches, until there was a bright, roaring fire.

  They stripped off their sodden outer garments, keeping on only underclothes, and hung the soaked pants, shirts and vests on the dried roots, turning them now and again as the dark, damp patches gradually became lighter and their white, wrinkled skin resumed its usual color.

  The steam from the wet garments hung heavy in the damp air. Ryan glanced out into the teeming rain, conscious of Doc at his elbow.

  "You know, dear friend, that this used to be a hell of a beautiful part of the country once upon a while. Now, every place we set our feet, it seems like the shadow of death falls across the land."

  Ryan shook his head, running his fingers through his damp, thickly matted hair. "Something's real wrong in these hills. Trees like the gods just finished growing them. Air so fresh you could slice it with a knife. Everything green and pleasant. Yet, like you said, it's as if there's a corpse lying under every bush. Madness. First the Apaches freaking out when there wasn't any need for it. Then those fladgies with their sick games."

  He felt Krysty's hand, gentle on his arm, like a moth's wing, the warmth of her nearly naked body against his.

  "Think that it's these Children of the Rock that have tainted things, lover?"

  He put his arm around her shoulders. "How do we know? Possible. Either we can keep on and explore a while more, or we turn around and go back and make a jump to someplace else."

  "Keep goin'," Jak said from the darkness behind them.

  "I'll second that," J.B. called, his words echoing in the cavern.

  "And I'll third it," Mildred added. "Soon as we can rest, get ourselves dry and our clothes dry and the rain stops. Then maybe find something to eat."

  "Seen game trails," the albino teenager commented, shaking his tumbling mane of snow white hair. "Deer all sorts."

  "Won't be much fishing with the river in spate." J.B. took off his glasses, then realized that he had nothing to wipe them on. "We can hole up here. This rain looks like it's here to stay for a while."

  Ryan spit out into the rain. "Guess we don't have a lot of choice right now. Just so long as we don't have to massacre anyone else for a while."

  IT WAS A LITTLE before dawn. The fire had sunk to a pile of white, glowing embers, and the rain had recently stopped, water still dripping noisily from the pines. A gray mist hung in the trees, about fifty feet up, hiding the soaring tops. Ryan awakened feeling cold and stiff, yawning and stretching, feeling the tight muscles creak across his shoulders and the back of his neck.

  "Sleep well, lover?" Krysty whispered.

  "Getting too old for this sort of thing." He quickly began to dress himself, pulling on his pants and slipping his blaster into the greased holster. "Time I settled down in a snug little log cabin with a warm fire and an old mongrel dog sleeping on the hearth."

  "And a snug little wife waiting up the stairs for you to go and join her?"

  "Sure. That, too."

  Krysty laughed and rolled out of her blanket. In less than half a minute she, too, was dressed and armed.

  They made no effort to keep quiet, and within a few moments the others were stirring.

  Doc's knee joints cracked like musket shots, and he threw back his head and yawned noisily, showing off his unnaturally splendid set of teeth. "By the Three Kennedys!" he exclaimed. "This may have suited Daniel Boone, but I find it parlously chill. Who let the fire be so sadly neglected?"

  "All of us," Dean replied.

  "No point in getting it going again." Mildred stood, the beads in her plaited hair tinkling softly. "God, what time is it, John?"

  T
he Armorer checked his wrist chron. "Little after five-thirty."

  "I could have used another couple of hours' sleep." She rubbed her eyes. "That's one of the things I hate about Deathlands. You never get to sleep in."

  THEY ALL WENT DOWN to check on the river, finding it was still swollen, racing at five times its previous width, foaming and muddied, carrying all sorts of detritus in its jaws. Even as they watched, a dead animal was swept by, head lolling, its limp body destroyed by the force of the water.

  "Wolf?" J.B. asked.

  "Could be. Bound to be plenty of them in a forest this size."

  Ryan shrugged. "No way of getting over here. Best follow upstream until we can find a place to cross and carry on northward."

  ABOUT A HALF MILE upstream they heard the thundering of a cataract, and tasted the coolness of misty spray hanging in the rainbowed air.

  The land had changed from open hillside to a steep gorge, with granite rocks gleaming in the dampness of early morning. The sun was peeking over the mountains toward the east, casting long shadows across the narrow paths.

  Dean had gone a little ahead of the others and he came scampering back, breathless with excitement. "Hot pipe! Fish," he panted. "Lots of fish!"

  The ravine was around two hundred yards in length, filled with a thunderous torrent. The water raged over a series of falls, the steepest of them rising fifty feet in a number of minor jumps. And it was there that it was possible to see and appreciate the quantity of fish.

  Even in dry times, in midsummer, it would have been an impressive sight. Here, after the heavy downpour, it was unbelievably spectacular.

  "Steelheads," J.B. announced, recognizing the silvered, iridescent scales of the trout. They watched as the fishes—thousands of them—swarmed their way upstream, battling the incredible power of the swollen river. Some of them were visibly muties, stretching out well over six feet in length, the sunlight catching their blankly incurious eyes.

  "Is that not a truly remarkable sight?" Doc asked. "Nature at her most mysterious."

  "Good eating," Krysty said. "Though I don't see how we're going to get close enough to catch any of them."