by James Axler
Like Ricky himself.
He nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak without panting.
Ryan gestured for Jak and Ricky to lead off to the wag circle. The rest stayed behind crouched in the concealment of the grass. Before he took off Ricky couldn’t help noticing that Ryan had his longblaster in his hands, ready to roar.
Running bent over, the two young men quickly crossed the hundred yards or so to the wags. They were camped in a wide area of bare dirt. From the looks and firmness it had been trampled clean of vegetation and packed down by the boots of ville folk avid to watch the show. That and the performers, likely, as well as whoever set up and took down the stages and signs or whatever they used.
I wish I could see the show, he thought. At least what they do.
They made it with no sign of detection, or any sign of life within the wag circle except the lights from the central mobile home. Breathing hard through his open mouth, Ricky pressed his back against the box of the show wag.
He realized—or his mind, over-revving, finally took note of something he’d been seeing but had been too mentally busy to take in—that the circled wags had paintings on the side of them. Not just the sign—Madame Zaroza’s Caravan of Curiosities—but images, fabulous images: a lizard man like a giant scalie but with a protuberant muzzle almost like a dog; an enormously fat woman; a pair of what looked like kids just younger than Ricky, a boy and a girl, with arms and legs of exaggerated length.
And then the woman. He had spotted her on the next wag over. Without thinking, he drifted over, ignoring a soft chirp of inquiry from Jak. He did keep presence of mind to glance between the wags as he passed the gap, to make sure no one was lurking on the inside to leap out at him.
No one was.
She was magical, even painted there on the box of a blunt-nosed cargo wag in colors he could tell were bright even by starlight. Her hair was so golden, streaming down the sides of the bed or cloth-covered table or whatever it was she lay on on her back. And her nipples were clearly in evidence poking up the fabric of the evidently flimsy nightgown she wore. The unknown artist’s skill hadn’t been great—Ricky didn’t know a thing about painting, but he did know workmanship when he saw it, or didn’t—but he managed to show that just fine.
He got so worked up by the picture that he took little notice of the giant beast-man shape looming over the painted lady in the background—whether threatening her or protecting her being left considerably more to the imagination than the contours of her lovely body.
“Quit gawking, kid,” he heard a familiar voice growl in an undertone. “We’re not here to sightsee.”
Ryan trotted up, straightening after a hunched-over dash across the clear space to the wags. He held his longblaster in both hands, but as he slowed he slung it.
The others, Ricky realized in sudden chagrin, had already come up to cluster by the other wags. Pursuant to their employer’s wishes, which Ryan had decided to humor for now, they had no weapons in hand and consequently looked even more paranoid than usual.
“What the Hell’s wrong with you, Ricky?” Mildred demanded.
“I believe you moderns call it ‘adolescence,’” Doc said with a smile half dreamy, half humorous.
“Great. It’s the perfect time for testosterone poisoning to strike.” She glared accusingly at Doc. “You probably think it’s funny, you old coot.”
“Indeed.”
She turned away in disgust. “Men.”
“Pipe down, everybody,” Ryan said.
He pointed first at Jak, then at Ricky. “You and you, go scout the wag in the middle.”
Jak insisted on going first, and Ricky followed hard on his heels.
The circle left about twenty yards of open space between the outer wags and the side of the mobile home. It was huge, at least to Ricky’s eyes, covered with paintings of stars and planets, galaxies and nebulas and other fantastic things. Ricky only knew what the stuff other than stars was because his parents had insisted he read old books as part of his education growing up.
He wondered what Jak made of the paintings—which again, even in the darkness, the yellow glow spilling out curtained windows did little to alleviate, he could tell were colorful to the point of gaudiness. He wasn’t sure Jak’s mind even registered them. He was so tuned to immediate survival, and the natural world in general, that his disdain for technological artifacts, including signs of civilization, struck Ricky sometimes as bordering at least on deliberate obliviousness.
He joined Jak beside the trailer. Its interior was obviously heated somehow. He could feel the warmth beating from its thin-gauge metal sides. He fought the desire to press his body against the painted panels and suck up the warmth. The others seemed to find the high-desert spring evening no more than pleasantly brisk. He, Tropics-raised, found it freaking cold. He shivered when he remembered their sojourn in Alaska.
Jak flicked his ruby eyes toward Ricky. He nodded.
His pale hands made a complicated series of gestures, which Ricky, after a beat, understood to indicate that Ricky should look for a way into the trailer. The albino wasn’t much for talking, but he did love his hand signals. By constant exposure, Ricky had learned to interpret them with at least as much ease as he did Jak’s notoriously abbreviated speech.
Oh, he thought. He wants me to pick the lock.
He grinned. For all of his love of gadgets, growing up in Nuestra Señora had offered little opportunity to practice lock-picking. His home ville had seldom bothered to lock its doors. But his new idol and mentor, J. B. Dix, had proved willing to teach Ricky the art. For his part, Ricky was an avid student.
The problem was that the only door in the site was up front right beside the driver’s seat, which, naturally, would likely be watched, if not alarmed. As quietly as he could, Ricky stole to the rear of the vehicle and peered around. While there was a sort of rack affixed to the back, there was evidently a cargo hatch back there.
Uncertain how to proceed, Ricky glanced back at the outer circle of wags. Ryan was crouched behind the trailer hitch of the wag with the image of the sleeping woman on its side, and he gestured peremptorily for Ricky to proceed.
He seemed to be getting pretty hot, so Ricky swallowed his misgivings and decided to proceed. He duck-walked around the corner of the mobile home.
A massive weight slammed onto his back and shoulders. His vision was blacked out an instant before he landed face-first on the cold, hard ground.
Chapter Five
“Fireblast!”
Ryan saw a shadow-shape like a giant, limb-deprived spider drop suddenly onto Ricky’s back.
His first thought was that things were already out of control and it was time to forget about Dark Lady’s instructions. He’d learned early on that it was easier to get forgiveness than permission. And hardest to get either when you had dirt hitting you in the eyes.
But he’d no sooner thought of reaching back over his shoulder for the pistol grip of his Steyr Scout longblaster than he felt the blaster being grabbed from behind. It was rudely yanked away. The sling spun him half around as if he were a mutie child’s rag doll before it slid off his arm.
Nightmare loomed behind him. His flash impression was that he’d been attacked by a scalie. But a scalie taller than he was and much broader through the shoulders. And with something wrong with the head—for either a scalie or a man.
He fired a straight right hand into the misshapen scaled face. It had a muzzle, he saw now, more like a dog’s than a lizard’s, and two eyes mounted on the face’s front like any human or other predator’s. In the bad light they still looked disturbingly human-like.
His fist connected on the left underside of the chin. That was the “button,” and it tended to overload people’s brains and cause them to temporarily go blank, or rattle their brains around hard enough in th
eir brainpans they got concussed and blacked out.
The weird lizard man’s head barely rocked back on what Ryan now noticed was a massive neck. The creature had lips, too. They pulled back in a smile from alarmingly pointy teeth.
Ryan went for the grip of his panga. Before he could so much as start to tug the broad blade out of its sheath the lizard man shot out a black-taloned hand twice the size of his own in a straight palm to his sternum. The blow hit so hard that Ryan’s one-eyed vision blacked out for a split second as his heart skipped a beat.
When he came fully back to himself he was flying through the air. Not for long. He hit the ground so hard the breath was knocked out of him.
Around him was shadowed chaos, screams and curses. Something—many somethings—were grappling with his friends. He caught a glimpse of Ricky, in the middle of the laager beside the lit-up mobile home, teetering in circles and flailing uselessly at a shadowy form that seemed to envelop his head and shoulders.
At the same time Jak was menacing a second dark figure with a big trench knife. This mutie appeared to be mostly arms and legs, though only two each despite its own marked similarity to an arachnid. It was dancing around Jak, juking left and darting right.
Then it screeched, “You stay away from my sister!”
It threw itself on its hands, flung its long supple legs in the air, and kicked Jak square in the snow-white face. The albino sat right down. Ryan thought it was more of surprise than because he’d been knocked on his butt.
Nuke this, Ryan thought. He snapped up to his feet.
To find himself eye to snout with the lizard man.
He punched the creature hard in the columnar throat. Usually that was a kill-shot, dooming the target to slow strangling death from a collapsed trachea. This was like hitting a steel pipe.
The lizard man smiled wider. “You don’t get it, do you? Give it up.”
Ryan smiled. Then he kneed the monster in the balls.
Or tried to. The lizard man pivoted his hips, fouling the blow with the great muscle of his right thigh. He knew a thing or two about fighting.
The lizard mutie slammed both palms into Ryan’s chest and sent him flying back.
* * *
SO THIS DUDE in a top hat and a coat with crazy mustachios just like Snidely Whiplash comes up to me in the dark, Mildred thought.
That happened. Plus he fixed her with a burning gaze, raised both hands in a silent-movie spooky gesture, and intoned, “Look into my eyes, dear lady!”
She punched him in the face instead.
He reeled back in surprise. Mildred took quick stock of her friends. J.B. was sparring with an enormous fat woman. She looked as if she could crush him simply by falling on him. Mildred wasn’t worried. J.B. was a smart fighter.
Krysty was wrestling with a balding man in tights. It didn’t look like near a fair fight, either: perfectly proportioned though she was, the tall redhead looked as if she was twice his size, and she was strong for a woman to boot. Doc was flourishing his ebony cane in the fur-covered face of some kind of beast-man mutie. The creature was powerfully built and had pointy ears on the top of his head.
What have we gotten ourselves into? Mildred wondered. Oh. Right. A traveling mutie show.
She raised her fists and closed in on her assailant. The man looked to be middle-aged and none too robust. She figured she didn’t need a blaster to take him.
Movement caught her eye. Fearing a blindside assault, she glanced around to see Ryan fly through the air and slam right into the obese woman confronting J.B. Ryan literally bounced off her and landed on the ground in a heap. The woman turned on him triumphantly as J.B. nipped out of sight around her own bulk.
Mildred turned her attention back to the man in the ludicrous top hat. He flung an arm at her. Powder gusted into her face.
Poison! she thought in horror. She tried not to hold her breath.
But it was too late. She’d already gotten a noseful.
And promptly erupted into convulsive sneezes.
* * *
RYAN LAY ON the ground struggling to catch his breath. He didn’t have any cracked ribs, he thought. But he didn’t feel good.
He saw Krysty putting a wiry little guy in a hammerlock, then she yelped, and the man sprang lithely away from her.
Ryan came flying up off the ground to race to Krysty’s aid. He feared the man had stabbed her with a knife.
He was propelled forward by a belly-bump from the huge fat woman the lizard man had tossed him into.
This is going fifteen kinds of out of control, he thought, on his back on the ground again.
He saw something spin end for end out of the night and knock Doc’s swordstick whirling end over end from his hand with a clatter.
“A bowling pin? By the Three Kennedys!”
He reached inside his frock coat. “I fear you leave me no choice—”
Something flickered in dim starlight. There was a thunk, then a knife pinned the sleeve of Doc’s coat to the painted side of the wag.
“Right,” Ryan grumbled. “That’s it.”
He saw Krysty flipped over the skinny guy’s shoulder to land flat on her back. He was already reaching for the butt of his P-226 in its shoulder holster.
He heard a scream of outrage and fury from Mildred. Still flat on his back he turned his head to see her grappled from behind by what looked like the Wolfman from an old-days movie poster. She had her ZKR 551 revolver in hand; one furry paw had her by the wrist and her gun hand thrust straight up over her head.
The .38 cracked off with a bright yellow flash.
Ryan’s handblaster came out. He pointed it at the center of the vast chest of the lizard mutie, who was looming over him like a colossus.
White light dazzled him.
He cranked out three fast shots. They were completely blind. His ears rang from an explosion so sharp and savage he barely heard the 9 mm blaster go off.
Ryan wondered if he was shot. He felt no pain, except in his stinging eye, which saw nothing but shifting purple-and-orange blurs. He’d been shot before and knew a person didn’t always feel it—at first.
The SIG was wrenched from his hand. Still unable to see anything other than what now looked like giant balloons floating inside his own eye, he grabbed at the hilt of his panga. Instead his own arm was grabbed and yanked clear. He felt the broad-bladed knife being pulled from its sheath.
His arm was released. He sat up.
Slowly a semblance of vision returned. He still had big balls of color floating in his vision field, and the night, which had been lit by stars and the glow from Madame Zaroza’s Winnebago, looked dark as four feet up a coal miner’s ass. Around him he heard his friends moaning. He became aware of shapes on the ground, and others standing over them.
Then he could see well enough to start confirming his worst fears: all his friends were on the ground, and all their enemies were standing over them.
“Okay,” growled the immense lizard mutie. “Time to give these rubes a stomping to remember us by.”
“Hold on, everybody,” a calm and quiet voice said.
Everyone froze. Ryan turned his head toward where the voice had come from.
It was J.B. The Armorer stood between the back of one trailer and the snout of a parked motor wag. He had his fedora tipped back on his high forehead. A placid half smile was on his face and the muzzle of his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun was aimed at the small of the back of a stocky, middle-aged woman with flowing skirts and big hoop earrings.
“Playtime’s over,” J.B. called. “All you folks just sort of step back now.”
“Don’t do it!” she commanded brusquely. “Don’t give in, no matter what happens to me. You know what happens when you give in to the rubes.”
“Sorry, Z,” the hairy d
ude said in a surprisingly high and piping voice. “No can do. These people play for keeps, and we know that without you we’re nothing.”
She looked around at the rest. “Anybody?”
She slumped. “Oh, well. It was worth a try. And the Beauty said they didn’t mean to hurt us if they could help it.”
“We didn’t really mean to hurt you people, either,” the lizard man said in a deep, rasping rumble. “Just rowdy you up some. We can’t let the rubes think they can get away with picking on us, you know?”
Picking himself up, Ryan paused and cocked a brow at him. “Yeah. You know, I think I do.”
“So, no point in standing out here in the cold,” Madame Zaroza said. “Thanks for giving your best, everybody. Go back to bed. And you people—” she looked hard at Ryan to make clear whom “you people” meant “—might as well come on in and enjoy a nice pot of tea.”
Chapter Six
“For a bunch of performers,” Ryan said, “you sure took us down pretty quick.”
“You got the advantage of us in the end,” said the wiry man with the hair cut short to his narrow skull and the vest full of knives.
“By cheating,” the enormous lizard mutie rumbled.
“That’s enough, boys,” Madame Zaroza said. “That’s behind us now. Anyway, we never give a mark an even break. Why would these folks do any different?”
Seated in a wooden chair across from her, Krysty noticed that the room, which was the style for mobile homes, combined the functions of kitchen, dining room and living room, had even fussier décor than Dark Lady’s office, and was a lot more packed with stuff: bobble-head dolls, Ouija boards, what looked like a crow’s skull. Scented candles burned on bookshelves, one stuck to the top of a skull that looked mostly human but not quite. The lamps were oil-burners with lacy shades stuck over their soot-stained glass chimneys with brass harps. They gave off a pretty decent light.
“What exactly are you people, anyway?” Ryan asked. He sat perched at the edge of a green overstuffed chair as if afraid that if he relaxed, comfort would swallow him and he’d lose his keen edge.
