Deathlands 068: Shaking Earth

by James Axler

  Then the rolling overpressure hit.

  THROUGH SHEER REFLEX Ryan dropped flat and hugged the floor when he saw the flash. That saved him.

  There was a breathless moment, then the noise and the dynamic overpressure hit.

  The blast wave blew right through the windowless floor, all but unimpeded. The Eagle Knight with the MP-5 was bowled out into space. Doc came rolling and sliding past Ryan.

  The one-eyed man grabbed Doc’s wrist as he was swept over the edge. Ryan winced as the older man’s weight slammed his arm against the floor. Fortunately his vector was more down than out. He didn’t pull Ryan after him, and the one-eyed man somehow held on.

  Then the other Jaguar Knight was by his side. Together they hauled Doc, still clutching his LeMat, back to safety.

  Ryan grabbed up his rifle. Kneeling, he raised it, put his eye to the scope. He dreaded what he would see.

  THE BLAST WAVE knocked Mildred off her feet. She saw the picnic table with its ludicrously incongruous parasol go spinning away on that awful wind. Then she did a bellyflop in the blood.

  Gagging and spitting, she raised her head. Everyone had been thrown down by the shock wave except Krysty, who stood with legs braced, terrible and tall. From the plaza below came screams of fear and pain.

  When Mildred made her move, Tenorio had jumped to his feet, which saved him from being blown away with the table. Instead he was knocked down and rolled off the top step by the blast. He was away free and clear then. He could have just lain there, or gone scrambling down the side of the pyramid, and made good his escape.

  Instead he clambered back onto the top block of the pyramid, slipping and sliding on the blood that covered it and streamed down its sides, and threw himself onto the broad back of Don Hector, who was just disengaging his own face with a squelch from the pooled congealing blood. He began to pummel his rival baron with both small hands.

  An attack from a merely human foe snapped Hector back to manhood. Bracing himself on his huge arms, he rolled over, casting the smaller man from his back. He scrambled to his feet, skidding on the blood. He kicked Don Tenorio, who was trying gamely to rise. Ribs audibly cracked. The smaller man fell onto his side.

  The earth was shaking violently now. Focused on his fallen enemy, the cacique raised a dripping foot to stomp him.

  “Hector.” The voice was like another eruption. Hector turned. She was standing directly behind him.

  He tried to flee.

  Her hair unreeled. Like a whip, it struck his head and wrapped around his face. Then it began to drag him back to her.

  Felicidad had recovered. The obsidian-edged club again in hand, she lunged for Krysty. Mildred tackled her from behind.

  “You’re a game little bitch, I’ll give you that,” Mildred grunted, “but no way will I let you win.”

  Felicidad jabbed back over her shoulder with a thumb. Mildred yanked her head up enough to save her eye. The nail gouged a furrow in her cheek. Felicidad rolled onto her back and the two began to grapple. Mildred had the edge in size and absolute strength. The sec woman had muscles like bronze wire wrappings and was slippery as an eel. Biting, punching and spitting like cats, the two wrestled in the foul red muck.

  Like tentacles, Krysty’s sentient hair pulled Hector back into reach of her arms despite his frenzied struggles. She grabbed him at shoulder and hip.

  Fingers digging in so brutally that the blood started around them, she yanked him up into the air above her head. She roared. As if in response, the very earth of the plaza split open at the pyramid base. A great sulfurous cloud of smoke rolled up, lit yellow by molten lava from below. Sec men and valley dwellers and luckless scavvies screamed as they fell into the hell maw.

  For a moment longer the Krysty-thing held Hector kicking feebly over her head. Felicidad and Mildred both froze in mid-death grapple, staring at the incredible sight. Blood streamed from Krysty’s eyes and mouth and ears, Mildred saw to her horror. But the red-haired being paid no attention.

  Instead she threw Don Hector as if he were a toy. He went sailing out and out into space, trailing a lung-rending scream as he flew. Thrashing and twisting, he actually cleared the pyramid base, dropped into the crack in the earth, fell into the lava, where he vanished with a final shriek and a plop of glowing yellow liquid stone.

  Grinding and growling, the sides of the crevice closed in again until they shut like jaws with an impact that rocked the pyramid.

  Felicidad wormed an arm free. She punched Mildred in the eye. Then she squirted out from under the bigger woman like a slick watermelon seed squeezed between two fingers. On all fours, she scrambled to her fallen macahuitl, snatched it up, then turned back to Mildred. Mad triumph blazed in her eyes.

  “Now, you bitch,” she shouted, “I’ll—”

  Red tendrils wrapped around the weapon, plucked it from her grasp, tossed it over the pyramid’s edge.

  “Girlfriend,” Mildred said, picking herself up, “you’re in a world of hurt.”

  Screeching like a panther, Felicidad Mendoza hurled herself at Mildred, hands curled into talons. The black woman met her with a perfect overhand right to the middle of her face.

  Mildred almost came as she felt that perfect sculptured nose crunch and splay beneath her fist.

  Felicidad staggered back, clutching at her ruined nose. She looked up at Mildred with something like wonder.

  Mildred took a quick side step and launched a side kick that landed right between the sec woman’s center-fold breasts. Felicidad went sailing off the top of the pyramid.

  Mildred slipped and fell down.

  She crawled quickly to the edge. Felicidad’s bloodsmeared cinnamon body was still bouncing down the side of the pyramid, step by step. “Didn’t have quite the hang time of Krysty’s toss,” Mildred muttered, “but not bad for a home girl.”

  She stood then, her flesh suddenly crawling at the contact with all that clotting blood. “God damn, but this is nasty!” she exclaimed, trying to scoop the gunk off her.

  A fresh tremor jerked her back to the here and now. She looked up. Krysty was standing tall and alone, her hair like a nimbus around her head. Lightning skeined the black clouds above her.

  Behind her, Mildred saw a figure rise up. An Eagle Knight, raising his laser armlet.

  “Krysty!” Mildred shrieked.

  The Eagle Knight’s head exploded.

  A moment later the crack of a rifle shot arrived.

  Krysty collapsed.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-One

  A full-bore earthquake erupted. The building was rocked so violently by the tremors, Ryan had to go prone to keep from being thrown to the floor. As soon as he was down, he got the rifle up again and looked back through the scope just as Krysty caught the fleeing Hector with her hair.

  “Ryan,” Doc shouted, “should we not vacate these premises before they fall down around our ears?”

  “Fireblast, no! Krysty may need help.”

  But she didn’t. Ryan watched in amazement as the earth split open and she pitched Hector into the fumarole. He almost fired when Felicidad came at Mildred, but then Krysty disarmed her with her hair.

  “I say,” said Doc, who had pulled himself up alongside Ryan. “I do believe Krysty is faring fine without any help from us at all.”

  Mildred punched Felicidad and kicked her off the pyramid. Doc applauded. “Good show! Jolly good!”

  Ryan realized Doc was speaking with a silly stagy English accent. He couldn’t let himself be distracted now.

  He saw the Eagle Knight rise to his knees. Even before the man raised his laser arm Ryan had the crosshairs fixed, the proper elevation and windage calculated on the fly. With something like relief that he was able to do something, Ryan squeezed off the shot.

  When the rifle came back down, Ryan saw the headless torso fall, he wasn’t surprised; he knew it was a good shot.

  Then he saw his woman fall.

  “My word, is she hit?” Doc asked.

  �
��No! It’s the Gaia power—you know how it tears her up when it comes over her and gives her superstrength. Fireblast, the way she was this time, she may be dead!”

  His every fiber longed to bolt down, then across the plaza and up the steps to her side. But he knew there was something he had to do first. He made himself keep looking through that scope, scanning the top of the pyramid for enemies who might harm his woman.

  He found two Eagle Knights showing signs of life. He put a rapid stop to that. All the rest had fled.

  The earth was still shaking. The skyscraper they were in trembled like a frightened child. Ryan scarcely noticed. He got up, shouldered his pack, hefted the rifle.

  “Come on, Doc.”

  THE PLAZA WAS a madhouse. The scavvies were slaughtering Hector’s sec men. The hapless serfs trucked in from the valley to watch their cacique crown himself emperor didn’t seem to know whether to fight the scavvies, their own oppressors, or one another. The wise had already taken to their heels.

  For what good it would do them. The earthshocks just kept coming. The city was being shaken to pieces around them. All the time volcanic bombs were dropping into the city like glowing-hot, wag-size hail.

  Ryan had expected to see J.B. and Jak, if he ever saw them again, already atop the pyramid. Instead Doc called out and pointed them out, still laboring up the steps with two of the Jaguar Knights. Ryan realized they’d been delayed by having to blast their way through the frenzied struggling mob.

  The path was clearer now, a good percentage of the rioters having been killed or simply run off. “A piece of cake,” Doc pronounced. “Provided we are not knocked off our feet or smashed by a ton of airborne lava.”

  IT WAS A NIGHTMARE CLIMB. Fine sulfur-smelling ash had begun to fall like snow. It wanted to clog the mouth and nostrils and make it even harder to pull air into lungs that already felt as if red-hot iron skewers had been thrust through them. Somehow Ryan made it across the plaza and up the pyramid. Even more amazingly, Doc stayed with him the whole way.

  At the top they found J.B., Jak and Mildred gathered around Krysty. The black woman had stretched her on the altar, which had less blood on it than the pyramid top itself. A deceased Eagle Knight’s plastic breastplate served to prop her head. To one side the two Jaguar Knights crouched over Tenorio, tending his wounds.

  Doc collapsed into the red muck. Only the sound of his wheezing let Ryan know he was still alive. Ryan managed to stagger through the sticky blood and fall to his knees beside the sacrificial stone. He seized Krysty’s hand, which was limp and cold.

  “Krysty, we’re here.”

  She opened her eyes. Mildred had cleaned her up as best she could, which wasn’t very, given all she had to work with was her hands. Krysty looked as if she were a child who’d gotten naughty with the red finger paint. But it was worlds better than the way she had looked, which probably would have struck Ryan dead on the spot.

  “I’ll be fine, lover,” she said in a voice that, though hoarse, was all hers. She squeezed his hand. “Now that you’re…here.”

  Her voice trailed off and she went limp again.

  There came a screech of metal and concrete tormented beyond endurance. All heads turned.

  A skyscraper fronting the plaza tottered. Then it fell against the building Krysty’s would-be rescuers had occupied with an unbelievable crash. That building in turn squealed, shook and collapsed, sending columns of water a hundred feet in the air.

  Ryan heaved himself to his feet. With a strength he didn’t know he possessed, he scooped Krysty off the altar.

  “We’ve got to got out of here now!” he shouted above the din of buildings falling like dominoes, of lives and dreams and futures being shaken to pieces.

  “To where?” Mildred cried. Frustrated tears streamed down her cheeks.

  J.B. put his arm around her shoulders. “Only one place,” he said.

  THE WATER WAS KNEE DEEP in the underground armory. Ryan had feared it would be fully flooded. Soon enough.

  The lights were on, the generator still somehow thumping away, saving them from having to navigate by Doc’s purloined flashlight. Ryan splashed through the water in the lead, carrying Krysty in arms that felt as though they belonged to somebody else. Next came J.B. and Mildred, helping a semiconscious Doc. Jak brought up the rear with his Python in hand. He had fired his Browning shotgun dry into a pack of screaming valley peons who had attacked them barehanded, breaking the stock over the head of the last one before the others fled.

  Smoke filled the air from waist level up. Ryan didn’t know if the building was burning or if it was fumes from outside. Part of the ceiling had fallen in. A Bridgeport mill had toppled, crushing a bandsaw.

  “What a waste,” J.B. said, shaking his head. “What a nukeshitting waste.”

  They reached the door with the warning, opened it, passed through to the door of the mat-trans. Jak pushed the level. For what seemed an eternity nothing happened.

  “Oh, damn,” Mildred said, sagging.

  Then, groaning like an old man rising from bed, the door opened. The walls of the jump chamber were black armaglass. Like obsidian.

  “Wait!” a voice cried from behind them. “I beg of you, wait!”

  It was Tenorio, standing alone in the shattered workshop’s far door.

  Jak took J.B.’s place, helping to support Doc. The Armorer gently lifted the unconscious Krysty from Ryan’s arms. They fell to his side like lengths of dead meat. His friends moved into the black-walled chamber.

  Tenorio limped forward. “You were not altogether candid with me, my friend,” he said. “I thought you were evasive when pressed for details of your journey. But you seemed to be of good character and well disposed toward us. So it did not seem hospitable to press.”

  “We were,” Ryan said. “Well-disposed, I mean. I’m…sorry. We lied.”

  Tenorio halted ten feet away. The water surged and sloshed around his bare shins to the heaving of the earth. Debris kept dropping from the ceiling in chunks. The air was clogged with dust as well as smoke.

  “So the reports that hinted at some marvelous means of transportation—teleportation, of travel without crossing the distances intervening—were true.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “We could do great things with such means at our disposal. We have…much rebuilding to do, as you know.”

  Ryan stared at him. He didn’t know whether to laugh out loud at his foolishness or to weep in admiration of his determination.

  “You’re a man, Don Tenorio, I got to give you that. I don’t know if you’re a saint or a fool. But you’re a man.”

  “That means you won’t help us.”

  Ryan raised a hand. It still felt like a club. He let it fall again. “I wish I could. But it’s a secret we can’t afford to share.”

  Tenorio looked at him. The moment seemed to stretch toward infinity.

  The earth gave a mighty spasm beneath them. Ryan was slammed against the side of the doorway. Tenorio swayed but kept his feet. A length of pipe six feet long and six inches thick fell behind him with a splash that drenched his back. He gave no sign of noticing.

  “Ryan,” J.B. called urgently.

  “You have helped us, more than we dared expect,” Tenorio said. “You saved us from the Chichimecs and from Hector’s tyranny. More than that we cannot ask. We will stand on our own. Or fall on our own. That is as it should be.”

  He raised a hand. “Farewell, my friends. Remember us.”

  He turned and walked away.

  “Ryan!” Mildred called. “This place is falling around our heads!”

  Ryan backed into the chamber. He watched the small, lonely figure walk away from him, head held high. The earth lurched. A segment of ceiling dropped, obscuring him from view.

  The one-eyed man stepped into the mat-trans chamber and closed the door.

  “Wonder if he made it,” J.B. murmured.

  “No way,” Jak said.

  “I think he did,” Mildred stated.
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  Ryan turned and looked down. Lights were pulsating in the chamber and the mist started to form. Krysty lay in the middle of the floor. He knelt beside her.

  “We’ll never know,” he said.

  He lay down beside the woman and gathered her in his arms to await the transition.

  ISBN: 978-1-4603-7332-3

  SHAKING EARTH

  Copyright © 2004 by Worldwide Library.

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