Breakthrough

by James Axler

  The business end of the new tool was three feet of green glass splayed teeth, some huge, some small— all razor sharp.

  Smaller was better.

  The weapon's edge had to be able to deliver a blow without losing its teeth. Ryan knew that the closer the teeth points were to the channel opening, the less likely they would be to snap off.

  The kissing sounds from the darkness were a lot louder now.

  There was no time for fine work.

  Using the flat end of the ax head, he sprawled off the longest points of glass in quick, powerful strokes that left them shorter, but just as wickedly sharp.

  "They're coming!" Krysty cried over her shoulder. "I can see their eyes! Ryan, there are too many of them!"

  He snatched some scraps of the dead man's clothes from the floor and hurriedly wrapped the cloth around the makeshift handle to protect his hands from any spurs of glass he might have missed.

  "Get back!" Ryan shouted.

  Krysty's eyes widened at what he held.

  A yard of sawtooth horror.

  She ducked under his left arm and got behind him.

  When Ryan saw all those sets of eyes bouncing down the shaft toward him, he said, "Fireblast!"

  Stickies moved at tremendous speeds in short bursts; they also defied the laws of gravity. With the suckers on their hands and feet, they ran upside down along the ceiling and sideways along the walls.

  Ryan closed his mind to the impossibility of the task. Deal with them one at a time, he told himself. One stroke at a time.

  The narrow walls of the tunnel would only permit a looping, overhead, figure eight slash. That he had freed a terrible weapon was evident when the first stickie launched itself at him.

  With a screaming hiss, he brought the blade down at the join of hairless head and scrawny neck. At impact, there was a crunch, then the head leaped free and caromed off the side wall. Blood fountained from the neck stump as the body jittered wildly at his feet.

  It wasn't a clean slice.

  Chunks of wet flesh and shards of bone torn out by the sawteeth were flung against the ceiling as Ryan rolled his wrists, swinging the edge over in a tight arc. The backslash caught the next stickie as it leaped from the wall on his left. The rows of nested spikes ripped into the creature's exposed midsection, gutting it in an eye blink from groin to breastbone. The force of the blow sent the body spinning back into those who ran behind, knocking two of them flat.

  The others clawed over them to get to Ryan.

  It was all eyes and bared teeth for as far as he could see.

  Ryan looped the jagged sword back and forth, driving with his legs and hips, grunting with the effort of each blow. They were coming too fast, from too many angles, so there wasn't time to aim for their necks. He just hit them wherever he could, across faces, across chests.

  Contact was all he was after.

  The nukeglass sword did the rest.

  Its splayed teeth opened gaping trenches in flesh and bone. Wherever they touched, devastating wounds appeared. Bowels spilled in slimy coils from half split torsos. Jaws were torn off whole along with tongues and teeth.

  And still they came.

  The ceiling, walls and the floor of the tunnel ran slick with stickie blood. Ryan's boots began to slip and slide in the viscous stuff. It had the same effect on the stickies—their suckers couldn't get firm holds on walls and ceiling.

  The more blood that was spilled, the wilder they got. Though they could no longer run along the ceiling and walls, they threw themselves at him from the floor, leaping over the corpses of their brethren.

  Ryan shut out the fatigue in his arms and shoulders, and kept the nukeglass sword windmilling, making his lower body do most of the work, driving all of his two hundred pounds into each strike.

  Though he clobbered them, they wouldn't stop.

  Their bodies piled up, clogging the crevice, forcing Ryan to retreat to clear his swing. The heap of dead stickies worked in his favor, by effectively narrowing the corridor. Only by clawing over the remains of their fellows could they come at him through the gap, one at a time. They fought one another to clear the opening, to meet death upon the edge of his gruesome sword.

  "Ryan!" Krysty cried desperately.

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw a hairless mutie perched on her back, its sucker fist caught in her hair, its needle teeth bared to bite the side of her lovely throat. Spinning, Ryan angled the glass blade across the stickie's neck. The body jolted, and the head tumbled off the ragged stump, which spewed gore to the ceiling.

  The dead hand was still caught in her hair. The corpse's body weight pulled her backward.

  Ryan couldn't bear the sight of it touching her. Growling a curse, he rolled his forearms, whipping the sword over, slashing its hacksaw teeth against the wrist joint. Arm and hand separated with a snick. The spasmodically clutching ringers released.

  When he whirled back, he faced a pair of onrushing stickies who had cleared the gap in the corpses. They were already too close for him to swing the ax. He sidestepped their frantic, arm waving charge and used the tip of the business end of the Unistrut like a lance, jamming it through the needle teeth and into the mouth of the creature on the right. In the same motion, he ripped the sword down and out, splitting tongue, jawbone and throat down to the collarbone. The other stickie's outstretched fingers brushed his face, but either it was going too fast, or his face was too bloody for the suckers to attach.

  As it moved past him, sliding on the floor, Krysty stepped up and nailed it with a full-power whack of her pickax. The combination of her speed and its momentum made for deep penetration. The stickie's forehead dimpled in around the point of the ax, and Krysty jerked it off its feet and onto its back. She stomped the ax handle, freeing the point by popping up a divot of the stickie's skull.

  Because the flow of stickies had slowed to a trickle, Ryan was able to take his time. He measured his sword strokes, timing them so necks and sawblade made contact at the maximum power point of his swing. Detached heads careened off the walls, bouncing into the dark.

  Then the rush stopped altogether.

  From atop the high pile of bodies, dolls' eyes in bald heads and flabby faces stared at him. As if suddenly it had dawned on them that he was royally kicking their asses.

  As the stickies turned to run, he followed them through the gap, his boots slipping on the slick flesh and spilled guts. The stickies traction was even worse than his. They were used to relying on their suckers, and the suckers did them no good on the wet floor. They squealed as their feet and hands slid on the edges of the broken glass and were cut to pieces.

  Ryan gained on them easily. Running right up their backs, he chopped their legs out from under them. He dropped three more like that before he stopped, panting. On his way back to Krysty, he finished off the badly wounded stickies with single blows to the neck.

  It was only after he had crawled through the gap that he realized he was covered with blood. It dripped down his arms and face and from the tips of his hair.

  "How many did you chill?" Krysty asked.

  "Don't know for sure," he said. He looked down the tunnel, heaped with pale bodies and body parts, with tangled, twitching wrecks. Ryan sagged against the wall, breathing hard. "Never saw so many of the bastards in such a small space."

  After a moment or two, he straightened and said, "Dump the ore out of your bag."

  "Why?"

  "Just do it."

  Ryan set aside the Unistrut sword and tipped his bag full of ore onto the floor. Then he picked up one of the bald, severed heads by its eye sockets and stuffed it in the bag.

  "Ryan?" Krysty said. "Are you all right?"

  "Put them in the bag," Ryan told her. "Get as many in as you can and put them in the bag."

  Because the stickie heads were lighter than the ore, and because the bags stretched somewhat, they could pack a lot inside and still carry it. Ryan's sack topped out at ten.

  "Okay, now what?" Krysty said
.

  "Take them back to the cart."

  "I don't understand."

  "You will."

  Ryan was already moving, dragging the bag behind him, his glass sword in his other hand.

  When he exited the crevice and started toward J.B. and Dean, the boy jumped up and shouted, "Dad, are you all right?"

  "Fine," Ryan said. "Don't worry. It's not my blood. It's theirs."

  With that he poured the heads into the sledge.

  The other slaves standing cart guard heard the series of hollow thuds and ventured close enough for a look. Their jaws dropped.

  "I'll be nuked!" the Armorer exclaimed.

  Then Krysty stepped up and did the same thing, tipping her overstuffed bag into the cart.

  Thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk.

  Blood smeared faces, gaping needle toothed jaws, blank eyes looked up from the bottom of the box.

  "Ryan, what's going on?" J.B. asked. He stared at the bloody and flesh fouled nukeglass blade. "And what the hell is that?"

  "We'll be back in a minute," Ryan said. "Come on, Krysty."

  They made two more trips to the kill site. Ryan used the Unistrut sword to chop the heads off the stickies who had died of other wounds. They loaded their bags with grisly trophies. When they reappeared the second time, the slaves left their own sledges and gathered around to watch the dumping. The third time, they cheered as heads rolled.

  And they kept on cheering. The noise they made in the tunnel was tremendous.

  "I counted fifty-four, Dad," Dean said.

  "That's a shitload of heads," J.B. commented. "What are you gonna do with them, Ryan?"

  "Cash them in, of course."

  Ryan looked over at Gabhart, who lay curled on his side on the floor, unconscious and barely breathing. "Help me get the colonel in the cart, then let's push it into the fresh air."

  The other slaves deserted their posts to follow.

  Ryan, J.B., Krysty and Dean shoved the sledge back to the main tunnel's fork, past the pair of troopers, who didn't notice anything was wrong until they saw the mob following. Then it was too late to intervene.

  As they pulled the sledge out of the mine and onto the flat, the mob spilled out, as well, and spread out over the dimpled ground, passing the word that something exciting was about to happen.

  Ryan and the others pushed their cart past the others waiting to be unloaded, right up to the head of the line. No one complained. They glanced at the cargo, grinned and waved them on.

  The trooper standing beside the ore truck looked into their cart. There was no way to gauge his surprise through the opaque visor, but he paused for a long moment before he said, "We don't give water in exchange for heads. Only ore."

  "Fuck that!" said one of the slaves whose sledge was waiting to be unloaded. He reached into the companions' cart, grabbed a bald head for himself and quickly placed a double armload of ore on the ground beside the cart.

  The idea caught on quickly.

  Everyone with a sledge waiting to be unloaded did the same thing. In a matter of minutes, their cart was empty of heads and a pile of ore stood beside the cart.

  "How about some water now?" Ryan said to the trooper.

  Another cheer went up as he waved them over to the water tank. "Give water to sledge number seven," he said.

  The slaves who had traded seemed delighted with the deal they had made. Hooting and hollering, they began booting the stickie heads around Ground Zero like soccer balls. Even the rad sick ones, too weak to stand, managed smiles at the ghoulish antics. The major horrors of the slaves everyday existence had been reduced to kick toys.

  Ryan ignored the raised pulse rifle of the trooper guarding the water tank, opened the tap, stuck his head under it and rinsed the blood off his hair and face. There was so much blood that it stained the wide puddle beneath the spout a rosy pink. After he had cleaned himself off, Ryan filled a cup and took it over to Gabhart, who had been moved to one of the shallow depressions in the glass. He and Krysty got the colonel to swallow a few tiny sips.

  "Damned guards can't do a rad blasted thing!" J.B. said, slapping his thigh in delight. "Whoa! Dean, look at that kick! That one's outta here!"

  The troopers were unprepared to deal with death sentenced slaves having fun on their own killing ground. They didn't know what to do, so they did nothing.

  "Ryan, lover," Krysty said, "you just opened the floodgates of hope. Life in Hell is never going to be the same."

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dredda entered the doctor's quarters without knocking. "You have something for me?" she said to Jann, who sat at a small desk.

  "Yes," Jann said, pushing up from her chair. "I took some scrapings from Mero's neck. And I found a similar patch of discoloration on myself, which I also sampled. Before giving you my analysis, I'd like to examine you, as well, if I could."

  "Of course," Dredda said. She immediately unbuckled the torso plates of her battlesuit. They came away in two halves, front and back. They were overlapping and airtight. Underneath the armor, she wore a sleeveless gray T-shirt. She pulled the T-shirt off over her head, the hard muscles of her back outlined and jumping under her pale skin.

  Jann used a magnifying loop to look at the area of redness on her right shoulder, which had spread from a small patch on her shoulder cap to cover half of her shoulder blade. The entire area was tender to the touch, and the edges of the patch, where they contacted normal looking skin, had a slight yellowish crust on them.

  After a moment or two, Jann said, "I'll want a scraping from you, too. If you don't mind."

  "Fine. Do it."

  With the point of a fine-edged scalpel, the doctor teased some of the irritated tissue onto a slip of plastic. She took the sample over to the microscope on her desk and examined it more closely. When she drew back from the binocular eyepiece, Jann said, "It looks like we're all infected with the same creature."

  "Infected?"

  "Come over here and see for yourself."

  Dredda bent over the microscope. What she saw were clusters of single cell organisms, like stars on a midnight-black field. They all looked pretty much the same to her. They were oblong and globular in shape. They had waving, whiplike strands at either end. These strands seemed to propel them around—all of the creatures were jumping about erratically. If she looked hard, she could see right through their outer skin or cell wall. Tiny gobs of indefinable stuff moved around inside of them.

  "What is it?" she said as she straightened.

  "An organism of some sort," Jann said. "A bacteria or a fungus. We don't have an exact counterpart for it on our world. From the samples I've taken and cultured, it appears to be a relatively slow breeder for a prokaryote. The population doubling time is in hours, not minutes."

  Dredda pointed at the microscope. "That's what's causing the rash?"

  "Yes, I'm almost sure of it."

  "Almost?"

  "It's the simplest solution I can come up with. But at this stage I can't rule out the possibility that the rash is caused by something internal, and the organism on the skin is simply attracted to the irritation for feeding purposes. We may have brought these organisms with us from our Earth."

  "You just said they weren't like anything found there."

  "Because of its rapid breeding cycle, this kind of organism is prone to mutational changes. The differences that are apparent may have something to do with the Level Four procedure."

  "How so?"

  "Genes could have jumped from the engineered virus to these organisms by accident."

  "Couldn't the mutation have been produced by the nukecaust in this reality?"

  "That's a possibility, too."

  "Is this dangerous?" Dredda asked.

  "At this point, it doesn't seem so. Though it's spreading rapidly, it appears to be a superficial topical infection. I'm going to treat everyone who is infected with an antifungal ointment and see what happens. That's all I can do without more specific information. I'll need to check the male
troopers to see if it's showing up on them, as well. And it wouldn't hurt to look at the Deathlanders, too."

  "How quickly can you test all the possibilities?" Dredda asked. "Are the battlesuits involved? Could they be infested with these things? Can our armor be sterilized? Jann, this matter is a top priority. Our security may be at stake. I want it settled as quickly as possible."

  "That could present a major problem, I'm afraid. There's only one of me. I could use some help in this."

  "You can call on as many of the sisters as you need."

  "I need trained help." Jann paused, then said, "I understand you sent Dr. Huth to the mines?"

  "So?"

  "You could bring him back. Let him work with me."

  "I'm not sure what use he might be."

  "I'm just a medical doctor," Jann said. "A diagnostician. A surgeon. Dr. Huth is a genius at research. He can help me nail down the organism's life cycle in short order. And once that's done, it's possible that the only solution to the problem will be biochemical. That's way outside my field of expertise. I'm concerned that if the organism continues to spread on our bodies, it could become life threatening. We can't afford to wait and find out. By then it might be too late to do anything about it for any of us. If Huth is no use, we can always send him back to Ground Zero."

  "You can have Huth," Dredda said, "but I do not want to be forced to order the sisters out of their battlesuits for any length of time. That is completely unacceptable. Do you understand?"

  "Of course."

  After Jann had applied ointment to her shoulder and back, Dredda pulled on her T-shirt. "What is the status of the egg-fertilization program?" she asked. "I want to get our embryos started as soon as possible."

  "We are ready to begin anytime," Jann said. "Once we have the male factor, we should be able to start implantation of host mothers within a week to ten days. I take it Shadow Man hasn't changed his mind about being a sperm donor?"

  "I haven't given him a chance to yet."

  "It's important that he isn't left out at Ground Zero too long," Jann said. "There could be irreparable damage to his reproductive cells, which would make them worthless to us."

  "I have no intention of ever bringing Shadow Man back here," Dredda told her. "He's nothing but trouble. He's going to die at Ground Zero."