Deathlands - The Twilight Children

by James Axler

  He rolled over and picked up the Steyr. All of them had slept fully clothed, and it was only a handful of seconds before they were ready to move.

  Ryan gathered the three close around him. "One thing," he whispered. "Anyone tries to stop us-anyone, Michael-then we have to take them out. Can't risk being stopped. Dean, Doc and Mildred are out there waiting and relying on us.1'

  There was just the faint eastern glow of the false dawn, enough to make out the pale blur of Michael's face.

  "You understand what Ryan's saying, don't you, Michael?" Krysty asked.

  "Yeah. If Dorothy happened to come out and try to stop us leaving, then she gets chilled. Sure, Ryan. I understand."

  THERE WAS NOBODY out there.

  Despite the horror of the sneak attack from the stickies, Moses had ruled that there were to be no extra security precautions, no more than the usual couple of lookouts at the front, overlooking the causeway.

  The rowboat was where Michael had tied it, the water of the lake lapping gently under its keel. The mirrored expanse of Shamplin stretched away from them, quiet and calm.

  "Want to be on the way before the full dawn," Ryan said. "Be visible a long way off. Hoped there might have been a mist to cover us."

  Krysty and J.B. took the bow pair of oars, settling them carefully into the oarlocks.

  "Take that side, Michael," Ryan ordered. "Don't need anyone to steer. We can do it with the oars." The teenager stood still, hesitating. "What's wrong? Having second thoughts about coming with us?"

  "No."

  "Then we have to go."

  "We coming back?"

  "Here? Doubt it. You want to?"

  "Maybe, Ryan."

  "Then mebbe we can come back here. Have to see which way the knife lands."

  "I hate having to make decisions. Doc said once that until you have to act, you still have a choice of an infinite number of possibilities. Once you actually do something, then you don't have any."

  "Sounds like Doc," Krysty said.

  Michael grinned, his teeth white in the dawn's gloom. "Yeah. It does."

  He stepped down into the boat, balancing with an effortless grace. Ryan got in last, handing the rifle to the teenager, untying the painter from a wooden stake at the edge of the ville. One push of his oar and they began to drift silently out into the vast stillness of the lake.

  "Try not to make any splashing until we're well away," J.B. whispered.

  "How long will it take us?" Krysty asked.

  "About an hour, I guess." Ryan gave the word for them to begin rowing, setting a steady rate. "Keep in close to the shore and the land when we get close enough to where we think their camp might be."

  "Then what?" Michael asked.

  "Then? Then we do what we can. Can't do any more than that. Nobody can."

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Doc felt less than well. He had a bruise the size of a pigeon's egg just below and behind his right ear. His coat was torn. His beloved Le Mat was stuck in the belt of the tall mutie who appeared to be the leader of the stickie gang. There was a strip of skin peeled away from his right wrist by the vicious suckers of the first of the murderous attacke rs who'd suddenly loomed silently in at them, out of the blackness of the night.

  His hands were tied behind him with thin cord, so painfully tight that he could feel his fingers swelling, blood seeping from beneath the nails.

  Mildred lay on her side next to him, similarly bound, with young Dean a little farther along the line of prisoners. Three young girls from the ville were tied between him and Mildred. The remaining survivors of the raid were scattered around the clearing, all equally helpless.

  It was well past midnight, and Doc guessed that the coolness in the air and the faintest pallor toward the east was a token of the coming dawn.

  The fire at the center of the muties' camp still burned brightly, and there were piles of kindling all around the place. Most of their captors had slept at some point, simply pulling ragged blankets or piles of stinking furs over their bodies, leaving their prisoners to fend for themselves.

  So far, they had only killed one of the children, a little boy of about six. The rest of the young ones from Quindley had begun to scream at the appalling horror of the scene, until the stickles had raged among them, beating them into silence with short-hafted clubs and whips.

  Mildred opened one eye and looked around. "Actually managed to sleep a few minutes" she whispered. "Can't believe I did that. Soon be light."

  "I believe so." Doc profoundly wished that he could have thought of something brave or witty to say, but he felt sick, old and terrified.

  "Ryan'll be here soon," she said, seeing Dean's eyes on her, managing a wink to show him that she wasn't beaten yet. But with the stickles starting to rise and wander about, she didn't dare say more to reassure the boy.

  Doc had been trying to count the number of muties in the camp. Not that he had any serious hope of escape, but it gave nun something to occupy his mind. The trouble was that they kept moving around, and they all seemed to look the same. Lean, with stringy hair and dreadful complexions.

  "Count the legs and divide by two," he'd breathed to himself. He made it around thirty or so. Two-thirds were male, though the women were difficult to tell apart. Most carried crude knives or axes, but several had blasters. It seemed as though they must have recently carried out a successful raid on a large ville or wag train. They had a stash of cans of lamp oil and tubs of pitch, which they'd used against Quindley.

  Doc had learned a fair bit about the variety of human genetic mutations that had flowered across Deathlands since the long winters, and he knew that stickies were about as bad as they got. The only possible reason for taking prisoners was to torture and kill them with as much cruelty as possible. No ransom or trade would be taking place. Just some long, slow dying.

  "How is your bruised head, my dear Mildred?"

  "Like someone's been using it to line a parrot's cage. How about you?"

  "Chipper and perky and ready to be up and doing. Soon as Ryan and the others get here."

  "You sure they'll come, Doc?"

  "Sure as I ever was about anything, madam. If they don't all arrive shortly, I shall, to put it mildly, be most frightfully disappointed."

  IF IT HADNT BEEN for the fact that they were on a desperate expedition to try to rescue their friends from the horror of the stickies, the boat trip across Sham-plin Lake would have been surprisingly pleasant.

  It was a calm, serene morning, the sun breaking through over the tops of the heavily wooded mountains to their right. There was absolutely no wind to ruffle the limitless expanse of black, mirrored water. Behind them, their vanishing wake stretched southward, creditably straight, arrowing toward the just visible bulk of the ville.

  By the time there was enough light for them to have been seen, they were far enough away to be almost invisible to the naked eye. Ryan had deliberately steered them close to the eastern shore, in the shallows.

  He set a good pace, trying to send the small boat darting northward at the best possible speed. There was no weak link among the four of them, and the oars rose and fell in graceful, unflagging unison.

  Far over their heads, a lark soared and filled the morning sky with its piercing song. A hundred yards behind them a single fish leaped exultantly high from the water, its scales a dazzling rainbow of iridescence. It fell back into the lake with an audible plopping sound, leaving only a diminishing circle of ripples to mark where it had been.

  Moments later it repeated its brave salute to the dawning. There was a humming of wings and a blur of movement as a falcon swooped on it, plucking it from the air in its cruel talons and bearing it off toward the shore.

  "Should've kept its head down," J.B. grunted just behind Ryan.

  MICHAEL HAD BEEN glancing back over his shoulder, disrupting the rhythm of the rowing. Ryan kept telling him to concentrate on his oar and not to worry about trying to spot any sign of the stickies' camp.

 
But it was the teenager who first saw the thin column of pale gray, almost white smoke, rising high above the dark mantle of conifers that shrouded the rolling hills to the east of the lake.

  "Easy," Ryan cautioned, shipping his own oar, letting the boat coast silently forward under its own momentum. The only sound was the water dripping from the blades.

  The camp was roughly where he'd remembered it from the previous day, looking to be about a hah* mile inland from the shore. He stared intently behind them, to the south, checking that there was no pursuit coming from Quindley that might hinder their rescue operation.

  But the water was scraped clean of any life.

  "Head in," he ordered.

  "THINK THEVLL FEED us, Mildred?"

  "I somehow don't think so, Dean."

  For a moment the prisoners were on then- own, with the nearest of the muties fifty yards away. The little children from die ville all seemed to have subsided into a collective catatonic stupor. They wouldn't look up or move or respond to Mildred's and Doc's futile attempts to rouse them from their dismal apathy.

  "Think Dad'll be here?"

  Doc answered. "Does a dog piss in the sea? No, I fear that I have used the wrong phrase."

  "You mean does a mutie shit in the woods, Doc."

  "Indeed, I think it was something along those lines. But there is no scintilla of doubt that the inestimable Master Cawdor will be here with us in two shakes of a lamb's tail."

  "They aiming to chill us all, Mildred?"

  "Got to be their plan, son."

  "You, as well?"

  Mildred grinned, feeling the movement mil where the corner of her mouth had been split by savage punch. "Me, as well. Stickles aren't racially sexually prejudiced when it comes to chilling, Dean."

  THE KEEL OF THE BOAT kissed the soft shingle and came to a gentle stop.

  "Tie it up?" Michael asked, leaping out, knee-dc in the cold water.

  "Don't think this lake's tidal." Ryan glanced at J.R for reassurance.

  "Doubt it. Just pull it up." There was a bank of scrubby bushes nearby. "Put a bit of that over it, in case anyone passes by."

  "We might need to get away fast." Krysty was sniffing the air like a hunting dog. "Bad taste to things, lover."

  "Definitely the stickies?"

  "For sure. Been some chilling already."

  "Dean and the others?" Michael paused from putting armfuls of undergrowth over the boat.

  "Can't tell. Have to wait for that."

  Ryan stood back and looked at the concealed vessel. "That'll do it," he said. "Now, everyone knows where this is. Take a careful look around. Lite Krysty says, we might be off and running good when we get back here. Won't be time to hunt around wondering where we hid it."

  "What's the plan of attack, Ryan?" Michael was checking his Texas Longhorn Border Special, work-

  ing the fluid action of the 6-round, centerfire .38 revolver, while the Armorer looked on approvingly.

  "Tell you when we get there. Trader used to say that it was hard to leave it too late to make a plan. But there was a lot of good men six feet under because they tried to make their combat plans too early."

  Ryan had the Steyr slung over a shoulder, the SIG-Sauer loose in its holster. The others all had their weapons ready as they began the cautious walk through the forbidding forest toward the stickies' camp.

  Two MORE of the Quindley children had been killed, butchered with a casual, brutish dispatch that brought tears to Doc Tanner's rheumy old eyes. He managed enough self-control to restrain himself from protesting at the small massacre, knowing that to draw attention to himself was to insist on putting his signature on his own death warrant.

  One was a little boy who had started to snivel when a passing mutie woman had kicked him in the ribs. The second death that morning was a girl. Terrified beyond all control, she had fouled herself, committing the unpardonable sin of drawing the stickies' attention to herself.

  The golden sun was now well up, its fresh bright light fingering between the branches of the tall, fragrant pines all around them.

  Mildred wondered how long Ryan would be.

  "I SMELL BURNED MEAT," Michael said, wrinkling his nose in distaste.

  "Probably not ordinary meat," Ryan replied quickly, instantly regretting his lack of thought.

  * 'You mean they're setting fire to the kids? Or to..." Michael stopped walking and leaned a hand against the rough trunk of a towering ponderosa. "World be a cleaner place without those sicko bastards."

  "Can't argue with that." Ryan looked around. "Must be getting close. Half mile or so. Better move to double-red. Stickies might be out hunting."

  JEHU STOOD AND GLANCED at the painting of the animal's skull. He shuffled his feet and stared at his own reflection in the mirror, waiting to hear what Moses might say about the news of the outlanders escaping and stealing one of the villa's valuable boats.

  "You believe that Sister Dorothy knew nothing of this, Jehu? You are s ure?"

  "Sure as I can be. She was really upset. She had formed close links with the outlander called Michael, and we believed that he was intending to stay here with us, though she knew nothing of your orders to have Ryan and the others executed while they ate their food this morning."

  The calm voice sounded slightly bored with the whole business. "It matters not. If any of them return, then have them chilled immediately. Immediately."

  "Yes, Moses. Immediately."

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  "Doesn't look to me like the stickies have been in these parts for very long."

  J.B. thought about what Ryan had said, and nodded. "Must be right. No damage to the forest. No hacked trails. Usually leave a circle of devastation for a mile or more around one of their camps. Reckon they were moving through. That's why we found that body on the hillside before we got down into the viDe.' *

  They were sitting in a close circle behind a screen of wild cherries. An exquisite pentstemon was flowering just to the right of them. Krysty had picked one from a cluster of delicate pink blossoms, their heavy scent almost hiding the foul stench from the camp on the far side of the ridge.

  "How we going to play this one, Ryan?" J. B. Dix was hunched over his Uzi, his glasses glinting in the bright sunlight. "A recce first?"

  "Yeah. Don't know if they got huts or tents or anything. Where they got the prisoners. Tied up or not. How many of them. What kind of blasters."

  "Shit lot that we don't know." Michael had been becoming visibly more tense ever since they landed the boat and began the trek through the woods.

  Ryan nodded. "Yeah. Sure there is. But we know one thing the stickies don't." "What?" "We know that we're here."

  RYAN CARRIED our the creepy-crawl himself, aware from endless experience that there was no substitute for personal appraisal of the scene for a potential firefight.

  He counted around thirty stickies rather more than he'd anticipated, mostly men, and a few of them with blasters. He spotted one tall mutie sporting Doc's Le Mat in his belt and had no doubt that Mildred's Czech pistol and Dean's Browning were also somewhere in the crude camp.

  He could see the prisoners easily enough.

  With so many of the muties to watch the captives, there had been no effort made to chain or wire them together. As far as Ryan could make out, from behind the screen of some feathery tamarisks, Dean, Mildred and Doc were all alive and didn't show any obvious signs of serious injuries.

  With the excellent Starlite scope on the rifle, it would have been easy for Ryan to have picked off at least half a dozen of the muties from where he was hiding. But that would still leave far too many to chill their prisoners before scuttling off into the woods around.

  It needed some thinking.

  THE SKINNY LEADER of the muties was interested in Doc and Mildred. "What old fucks like you do in that young place?

  Huh?"

  "I asked myself the same question, friend," Mildred replied. "A thousand times."

  "So, what fucking answer?" />
  "Answer is that I don't know."

  "Then you fucking stupe."

  "Yeah."

  The bulbous eyes with their oddly forked pupils turned toward Doc. "You oldest fuck I never saw. We heard that vflle chills every fucker when they gets old."

  Doc nodded. "You heard correctly."