Deathlands - The Twilight Children

by James Axler

"Okay, Dad. Sipped at a rain spill. Tasted just like bullock's piss."

  "How do you know, Dean?" Michael asked. "You ever drunk the piss of a bullock?"

  Dean reappeared, wiping his mouth, gobbing in the dirt. "Real funny, Michael. Real fucking funny."

  "Best not to try to eat or drink anything while we're here," J.B. warned. "Soon be back at the gateway. Make a jump. Then get something."

  THE TRACK BEGAN to wind upward, and they eventually reached the rotting stump of the huge tree that they remembered from the walk down from the gateway. The huge albino maggots that had infested it had all mysteriously vanished.

  While they stood at the bend in the track, something scuttled out of the mist, almost under Mildred's feet, making her jump back with a gasp of fright.

  It was like a string of mottled greenish pebbles strung together with threads of gristle, about four feet long, with no apparent eyes or mouth. Without pausing, it snaked across the path and vanished once more into the coils of mist.

  "Proper little valley of the shadow of death, isn't it?" Mildred said to no one in particular.

  The rank vegetation became more sparse, eventually thinning out completely, leaving them on the narrow, rutted trail that climbed higher between the granite walls.

  The small wound on Ryan's neck was stinging and he touched it, finding that it was leaking a colorless liquid. He brought his finger to his nose and smelted at it. There was the unmistakable odor of corruption.

  Krysty saw the gesture and moved to walk alongside him. "Problem?"

  "Septic poisoning from that mutie back in the store. Can't wash it until we get clean water."

  "Light's not good enough to see it properly." She touched it gently and he winced. "Sorry, didn't mean-"

  "Sore," he said.

  "Feels hot. Best keep an eye on it."

  "I know. I already said that."

  "Fine. You don't have to snap at me like that when I'm trying to help you." "Sorry. Bit ragged at the edge." "Sure."

  THEY REACHED the narrow ledge of hewn rock, with the circular entrance to the small mat-trans unit opening off it.

  Doc was panting hard, his face pale in the silvery evening light. Now they were well above the mist, and it was like looking down onto a gently moving sea of fresh-picked cotton.

  "I shall have no regrets about departing from this place," he said. "My heart is working like a leaking pump, and the breath sours in my throat."

  "Want to take a rest, Doc?" Ryan looked at the old man, concerned at how parchment-pale he looked.

  "No. No. My thanks, dear fellow, but the sooner we get the next jump over, the better I shall be pleased." He straightened, taking some of his weight on the elegant sword stick. "Let us leave this peak above Darien," he said.

  It took only moments for them to walk along the cramped tunnel and into the makeshift control room.

  The battered wooden door swung slowly back on its hinges, squeaking softly. Great tangles of multicolored wire hung from the broken rectangles of chipboard ceiling. One of the overhead neon lights was buzzing and crackling erratically, its glow reflected in the vein of green quartz that seamed the bare rock above. The consoles, on their rickety tables, were cheeping and muttering to themselves and to each other.

  Krysty ran a finger over the top of one of the comps, her red hair darkened by the blue screen. "I can't believe that this place has existed so long in this condition."

  Mildred stood, with her hands on her hips. "Like Michael said, when we jumped here, some of the stone still has marks of the chisel. Fresh as yesterday's sunrise."

  J.B. nodded. "With the acid rain and all those mu-ties, you'd have likely thought something would have broken in here, fifty years ago." He took off his glasses and began to wipe them clean from the smearing mist.

  Dean had gone back out into the corridor, but suddenly reappeared. "Think there's something coming, Dad."

  "What?"

  "Can't tell. Just a noise like wet clothes being dragged over a cold stone floor."

  "What?"

  "Real big load."

  Ryan glanced out into the rocky passage, seeing nothing but darkness and a few stray fingers of white mist that were feeling their way into the complex. He listened in the stillness, but he couldn't hear anything.

  "I heard it, Dad."

  "Believe you, Dean." He closed the flimsy door, aware that it wouldn't do much to deter even a sickly kitten.

  J.B. had carefully perched his spectacles back on the bridge of his bony nose. He glanced at Ryan. "We go?"

  "Reckon so."

  The granite vault of the anteroom was starkly empty, and the door of the gateway chamber still stood ajar, as they'd left it only a few hours earlier.

  Ahead of them, the dark gray armaglass walls of the unit were a patchwork of green and yellow lichen.

  "Like getting into a toad's belly," Krysty said with a shudder of disgust.

  Ryan shepherded them in, one at a time, though nobody was keen to squat on the cold floor. Like the whole of the region, there was something fundamentally unclean and unhealthy about the ill-lit gateway.

  Doc leaned uncertainly against the far wall, finally sitting down, his knee joints creaking loudly, checking that the Le Mat was snug in its holster. "Come, then, my friends, and let's away. To seek the fortunes of a gentler day."

  "That real Shakespeare, Doc?" Mildred asked, kneeling at his side. "Or just one of your make-ups?"

  He smiled at her, his wonderfully perfect teeth gleaming in the gloom. "The truth, my sweet Dr. Wyeth, is that I have completely forgotten."

  J.B. took his place next to her. Michael and Dean were waiting their turn, with Krysty and Ryan.

  "Was..." he said, half turning.

  Krysty looked at him. "Yeah. Think I heard it, too, lover. Like Dean said."

  It was a heavy, slow, slithering sound. The picture that sprang unbidden into Ryan's mind was of a giant snail, making its inexorable way through the fog toward them, leaving a wide trail of stinking slime.

  "Quick." He pushed his son and the teenager into the mat-trans unit, drawing his SIG-Sauer and glancing again behind him. Krysty joined the others, sitting down, her back against the wall, leaving a space for him to complete the circle.

  Ryan pulled the door shut behind him, but realized that he hadn't heard the distinctive click that indicated that the lock had triggered the actual mechanism of the jump.

  "It didn't..." Krysty began.

  "I know it fucking didn't." Ryan opened it and slammed it shut more firmly, aware through the gap in the door of a shadowy bulk gliding across the control area toward him.

  Chapter Nine

  The sound, like a giant whispering, had grown suddenly much stronger, and Ryan knew that the creature, whatever it was, had entered the control area less than thirty feet away from the hexagonal chamber.

  Most of the mat-trans units were firmly built of almost impregnable armaglass, set into the solid concrete of the main redoubt. But this one had shown all the marks of hasty and amateurish workmanship. With the flaws and cracks in the armaglass, it probably wasn't even proof against a decent handgun.

  "Did it shut?" Krysty's voice disturbed Ryan because it showed fear. And he knew that Krysty Wroth almost never got frightened.

  "Couldn't tell. Noise outside."

  "Try it again." Michael stood now, holding his Texas Longhorn Border Special in both hands.

  There was something barely visible through the gray walls, the same thing that Ryan had glimpsed in the nanosecond when the door had been open.

  "I do believe that... what was the phrase? That all systems are go."

  Doc was the calmest of them all, perhaps because he wasn't yet aware of the horror that was approaching the mat-trans unit from the ravaged world beyond.

  Ryan glanced down, seeing the metal disks in the floor were beginning to glow through their coating of moss, and the upper half of the chamber was filling with the familiar white mist, quite unlike the acrid fog outside.
>
  "Sit down, Michael." Ryan took his own place alongside Krysty, the SIG-Sauer leveled at the door.

  The light beyond the chamber was blocked out, and Ryan tightened his finger on the trigger.

  THE BLACKNESS was streaked with dreams that mixed past and present into a bizarre future, where reality and fantasy were inseparable and indistinguishable, where time and place were familiar and strange.

  The woman who stood by the bed was someone who Ryan thought he knew. She was tall and blond, skinny, part woman and part child, and wore an obscenely short skirt of soft red material.

  "Suede."

  With a fringe. Her legs seemed to begin at her shoulders and were encased in scarlet boots with silver spurs, decorated with tiny bells that tinkled as she walked around the room.

  "Lori." That seemed to be the right name for her, though he wasn't sure.

  Ryan watched her with his good eye, straining to rum his head to follow her movements.

  Aware that he was naked and cold, his breath clouding out into the air in front of him.

  Naked and cold, tied by the wrists to the corners of the bed, ankles spread to the bottom of the bed.

  Not a bed. Just a metal frame, with narrow strips of steel running from side to side, digging into his hips and spine and shoulders.

  "Lori?"

  The face, the fringe of hair so blond it was almost white. The makeup around her eyes turned them into dark, smudged pits. Her lips were pale and narrow, unsmiling.

  Ryan tested the ropes. Not ropes. Steel handcuffs, biting into his wrists. Chains were around his ankles.

  "Keep still, Ryan Cawdor. Don't move or you're dead. Dead men don't move. Quint not move. Quint dead."

  Ryan turned from her, looking around the room. There was a single overhead light, a naked bulb that swung slowly from side to side.

  There was no other furniture, except a small marble table that stood on wrought-iron legs. Some articles rested on the table, but it was just beyond the periphery of Ryan's right eye.

  On the walls were a number of tattered old vid posters, a few with the names of ancient, predark movies that Ryan had heard about. He'd even seen speckled copies of some of them, projected on sheets with temperamental gas generators.

  The moving light sent a dancing arc of brightness swinging over the posters.

  "Chances run out, Ryan."

  "What chances?" To his own ears his voice sounded odd, muffled, the words distorted.

  "Chances to tell me. Save yourself."

  "I don't understand."

  The woman laughed, a bleak sound, a thousand miles away from any humor.

  "Thought knocking your teeth out, one at a time, might have helped your memory."

  Then he felt the pain, flooding through both jaws, and he could taste the bitter iron of his own blood.

  "Awmyteef?"

  "Speak properly."

  He tried again. "You knocked out all of my teeth? You fucking slut."

  He felt her hand on him, finger and thumb squeezing gently at the tender skin inside the top of the thigh. She pinched harder, the pain burning, making him arch his back off the bed.

  "Hurts, does it? I'll kiss it and make it better."

  Her lips, nibbling so softly, moved higher, her hand cupping his balls, forcing him to an erection that could have bent an iron bar.

  "Now you're ready to tell me, Ryan."

  "What?"

  She smiled, showing stained, broken teeth. "You know what, lover."

  "I don't." Whatever happened he wouldn't beg. Trader would never beg. No point.

  She was stroking him again, bringing him tremblingly close to the brink of ejaculation. Ryan thought that he'd burst if she went on for just ten more seconds.

  "Know what I'm going to do?" She moved out of his vision and picked something up from the table.

  'No.'

  "See this." Lori held up a coil of pale yellow tubing, with a greasy exterior, nearly as thick as a child's little finger. "Know what it is?"

  Ryan did know, but it had slipped his memory. He shook his head. "Don't remember, Lori."

  "Slow fuse."

  "Fuse?" It was like the young woman was speaking some alien tongue.

  "It's a length of slow fuse. I call it my friendly persuader, Ryan."

  "Like for setting off a bomb?"

  She smiled radiantly and clapped her hands. " Very good."

  "What are you going to do with it?"

  She was running it through her fingers, caressing it, bringing it to her lips to touch it with her long tongue. "It'll burn anywhere, even without oxygen. Under water. Anywhere. Once it's lit, it'll bum."

  "I know."

  She smiled and touched his throbbing penis. "Put the fuse anywhere and light it." Her fingers moved up the shaft toward the flat muscular wall of his stomach. "Insert it slowly and carefully, Ryan. You'd be surprised what a long way it'll go, and nothing can put it out. There are so many orifices of the human body that can receive it."

  "Please."

  Fuck Trader saying that a man shouldn't ever beg for mercy.

  "Please don't."

  "Just tell me."

  "What?"

  Lori bad lighted the fuse. It was glowing almost white-hot, like a fiery worm, devouring itself, defecating white ash, moving very slowly, a millimeter at a time.

  "Tell me everything."

  "I can't." The horror was the way her left hand kept him agonizingly erect, despite the appalling thing that she was going to do to him.

  "Start at the beginning. Place of birth."

  "Front Royale ville in the Shens."

  "Parents?"

  "Baron Titus and Lady Cynthia Cawdor."

  "Brothers and sisters."

  "Two brothers. Morgan and...I can't remember the other one's name."

  "He bunded you."

  "I know."

  "His name?"

  "Harvey. That was it. Harvey!"

  The glowing tip of the burning fuse was an inch away from the tip of his cock.

  Lori laughed at him. "Stupe! Think I give a flying fuck about your family? Or about anything you say? I don't, Ryan. Couldn't care less."

  "Then... why?"

  She leaned over him, and he could taste the rotten sweetness of her breath. * 'Reminds me of a girl I knew out in Las Cruces. One day she went into the desert and found a prairie rattler. Put her hand out to mate it bite her. It did. They carried her back dying. Arm black and shining from finger to shoulder. I asked her that same question. Asked her why she did it."

  "And?"

  "Said that it seemed a good idea at the time."

  The young woman threw her head back and laughed, the eldritch screech of amusement turning into the lonesome howl of the midnight coyote.

  Ryan felt the mind-toppling agony as she started to slide the burning fuse inside him, aware that his body was straining off the bed, the steel cutting into wrists and ankles.

  He screamed and screamed.

  "RYAN!" He tried to punch at her, but the grip on his wrist was too tight.

  "Don't!"

  "Just a bad jump, lover. Come on."

  Lori's voice was Krysty *s voice, loud in his ear.

  "Fighting like a bastard to get free."

  Krysty's voice became J.B.'s voice.

  Ryan opened his eye.

  He was spread-eagled flat on his back in a gateway chamber. Doc was lying across his legs, with Mildred helping him with the pin-down.

  Dean stood looking down at him, his face confused and frightened. Ryan managed a thin smile for his son. "Don't hurry," he said.

  "He means for you not to worry, Dean." It was Krysty's voice.

  Ryan was finding it difficult to focus, but his vision was filled by her tumbling mane of bright crimson hair, hanging across his face as she concentrated on holding him still. J.B. was on the other side, with Michael across his upper body.

  "Treating me like a rabid panther," Ryan managed to say, though his tongue felt hugely swollen and t
oo large for his mouth. "I'm fine now."

  "Bad jump?" J.B. asked.

  "Yeah. But you can let me go now." He was uncomfortably aware that the front of his dark blue pants was tighter than usual, though the residual erection was slowly subsiding. Ryan hoped that nobody had noticed it.