by James Axler
A moment later he heard his friends coughing as thick, choking smoke crowded into the entry. A cloudburst of blasterfire broke out. From the higher pitch, it was all outgoing. Ryan and his companions holding the entrance were blindly unleashing as much high-velocity death as they could through what Ricky could imagine with horrifying clarity were big, blinding clouds of smoke, in hopes of discouraging the angry locals from following up the tactical advantage their unexpected cleverness had won them.
No matter how much ammunition they had to burn, he knew with sick certainty their only chances of keeping their determined foes out were slim and none. And slim was looking sickly…
It took Ricky a moment to realize that the small voice that had been murmuring, unheeded, at the back of his skull for several minutes was starting to yammer at him. He realized that he was feeling cool air, smelling cool earth and stone, not the combined smells of smoke and the sweat and grime of his friends’ bodies and clothes.
To realize was to act. Only in dealing with other people did Ricky tend to dither before making a move. And at that, those delays were only in face-to-face interactions. When he faced somebody over the sights of a blaster, things were so much more clean-cut…
He was turned around on his knees and digging at the obstruction at the end of the corridor before he knew it. At first with his hands, then—with a pang at using the weapon for a not-exactly-intended purpose—the steel-shod butt of his carbine.
As the half-furious, half-triumphant blood-lusting cries of locals charging the sunken building echoed down to him, he screamed over his shoulder, “Come on! I found us our miracle!”
* * *
“OH, MY,” DOC said, holding the lantern high above his head. “What have we here?”
“I don’t have your advanced degrees in science or anything, Doc,” Mildred said, “but it looks to me as if we’ve blundered into a big old cave.”
“Rather, a vast and expansive cavern system,” Doc said, trying not to feel smug. These were his companions, after all. And when it came to the brutal realities of the world he was marooned in—and truly, they no less than he, especially the likewise chronologically displaced Mildred—it was he who was the veritable babe in the woods, and they the knowledgeable adults.
Still, he enjoyed demonstrating his worth when he got a chance to. He waved a hand around the tall, high-ceilinged chamber of color-stranded stone.
“Behold the entrances to myriads other caves and passageways! Verily, I say, I believe we have stumbled into the enormous extended system of caverns said to underlie the entire erstwhile state of Kentucky, if not much of the rest of the Southeast United States! When they were, ahem, united.”
“And states,” Mildred added.
“So where do we go from here, lover?” Krysty asked Ryan.
The one-eyed man looked at Doc. “You’re the science expert,” he said. “Got any suggestions?”
Doc blinked at him. “What exactly is our objective, again? Aside from escaping imminent doom at the hands of a ravening mob?”
“That’s a start,” Ryan admitted. “But we’ve done that—for the moment. We can’t sit around too long, though, because sooner or later, probably sooner, they’re going to nerve themselves up enough to come down into the dark after us. So how do we find a way out of here that doesn’t involve going back up the way we came down—smack in the middle of an enemy army? I reckon if we pop up somewhere else, behind their backs, even if it’s not far we’ve got a chance to get clear without them having so much as a clue that we’ve surfaced again.”
“Then what?” Mildred asked. “It seems like a pretty comprehensive job we got ahead of us, as it is. But the next step after that seems to be to get the hell out of the Pennyrile before anybody’s onto us.”
“What about the scavvy?” Ricky asked. Doc thought to notice tears glistening in the boy’s dark eyes by lantern light. “There’s so much cool mechanical stuff and machine parts we hadn’t even got to!”
“Whoever’s in charge of that fandango up there,” J.B. said with his usual grim humor, “you can bet a bent empty cartridge case that he’s got as much of their would-be mob as they can corral busy looting the stuff for him right now. Or her. Though I doubt that.”
“And just why is that?” Mildred asked, in a dangerous tone. “You developing a problem with women all of a sudden, John?”
“You saw how easily we dealt with the mob when Wymie was in charge,” Krysty said. “However motivated or even smart she was, she had no clue how to control them, and probably didn’t even have a plan worked out beyond ‘revenge.’”
“Right,” Ryan said with a smile for his lover. “Somebody who’s used to organizing stuff and getting it done has taken charge somewhere along the line. The name that comes to my mind is Mathus Conn. And while that cousin of his who’s the assistant may be handling the planning, she seems content to follow his lead. So, yeah. For him.”
Ryan looked back at Doc. “And to get back to the little matter of getting out of this with our guts still on the inside—Doc?”
Sadly, Doc shook his head. “While I have some solid grounding in the study of natural history, little of use suggests itself right now. Except to stay as close as we can to the surface, and look for a sinkhole.”
“Not going any deeper into scary caves that for all we know are teeming with insane cannies?” Mildred asked. “I can handle that.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Ryan said. “So let’s shake the dust off—”
Before he could finish the sentence, it was as if the sweating limestone walls began to give birth to the white-haired cannies, like bees being born from a honeycomb in a giant, mutie hive or maggots, scared out of a chill.
Hundreds of them, all screaming for blood.
* * *
Chapter Nineteen
Even tinged by the orange light of the fire in Conn’s headquarters camp near the sinkhole where the outlanders had holed up, Sairey Furnace’s sharp features were clearly drained of color.
“None of ’em came out,” she said, shaking her head. “Not a one.”
Mathus Conn was glad he’d had Potar’s sec men and sec women—to call them what they were—ring the fire by his command tent to keep the rest of his young army at bay, although doubtless they already knew what had happened. Word spread like wildfire through the district anyway, and even Potar’s huge hammer hands weren’t enough to stop rumors exploding double fast through the assembly of several hundred souls.
They definitely did not have a need to know the presumably gory details. To whatever extent they didn’t already.
“That’s the third party we’ve sent down,” murmured Frank Ramakrishnan, his sharp chin sunk to his collarbone where he stood, gaunt as a scarecrow and tall as Potar, next to where Conn sat in his folding chair. Conn’s new chief adviser to replace his murdered cousin Nancy, the middle-aged Frank, was scion of Sinkhole’s leading family of cloth-makers and merchants, who spun pretty fair-quality textiles out of linen, cotton and hemp grown in the region. He was in the habit of thinking out loud, as opposed to blandly stating the obvious.
“Fifteen good men and women,” Sairey said, nodding. Her eyes were fever-bright in the firelight. “Armed to the teeth. Gone now, and I don’t reckon they’re comin’ back.”
Her eyes pleaded with him not to send her in to bring them back, or their corpses, doubtlessly well chewed and much dismembered.
Conn glanced away toward the cave-in, a quarter-mile or so distant. It was immediately apparent by the glow of dozens of pinewood-splint torches, which sent up a hemisphere of yellow light like a small ville. The only sounds evident were those made by the work parties, relieved of their other duties to recover and sort the surprisingly abundant scavvy the outlanders hadn’t gotten to yet, who worked by the light of those torches. The booty would be disposed of by Conn.
For the greater good, of course.
“Did you hear blasterfire?” he asked the girl.
“Along with the
screams? Nuke, yeah. All ours. None of that high-powered stuff like the strangers was shootin’ at us. Smoke poles.”
Conn rubbed his bearded chin and grunted.
“So it was unlikely to be the outlanders who attacked them,” Frank said.
Okay, so sometimes he did state the obvious, Conn thought.
Sairey swallowed but said nothing, whether out of her natural reticence, or out of some budding sense of what was prudent to say around powerful men, Conn couldn’t tell. Still, it was the right thing to say, and he credited her for that.
“Mathus,” Frank said, looking right at him. His own dark features showed unmistakable reluctance. But at the least Conn could trust the man not to mince words with him. Otherwise he’d have been no use. Conn could throw a rock blind into the night from here and hit somebody who’d be happy to babble whatever he or she thought Conn wanted to hear, out of fear of the gaudy keeper’s monstrous enforcer.
Still, there was no harm in encouraging him. “Speak,” he said. “Don’t hold back.”
“I hear talk,” his counselor said, “in the camp. People are beginnin’ to mutter. We have failed to bring the coldhearts to justice, just as Wymie did. And even before this latest butcher’s bill, at greater cost to the people of the district.”
“Tell me who’s talkin’ loose talk like that.” Potar’s eyes glittered, with a far different light than Sairey’s did, as he leaned his ominous moon face forward. “Me an’ the boys’ll straighten ’em right out.”
“We can’t rule by fear!” Frank protested.
Potar produced a chuckle like head-sized granite rocks being rolled downhill in a rain barrel. “What does Mr. Conn pay me for, then?”
Conn raised a hand. “Potar,” he said, “you do your job very well. As does Frank. And in this case, Frank’s correctly pointin’ out that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, at the risk of sounding like the late, lamented Vin Bertolli.”
“Why’d anybody want to catch fuckin’ flies?” Potar asked.
“Figure of speech,” Conn said. “In any event, we’ll all have a smoother road to travel if we continue to get our people to work with and for us voluntarily.”
“Well, they’ll volunteer not to get their heads broke,” Potar said. He smiled. “Or just disappear.”
“I prefer to reserve those actions to enhance their effect.”
Frank licked his thin lips. “That’s not all they’re sayin’. They say it can’t be the outlanders who’ve been doing all the chillin’. At least not the butcherin’ and eatin’ part. There aren’t enough of them, and anyway they don’t work that way.”
“And who’s saying this?”
“Pretty much everybody who’s not one of Wymie Berdone’s remainin’ few diehards. And Wymie herself, of course. She denies the existence of coamers. But they’re who everybody else has begun to blame.”
“And has anyone actually seen one of these red-eyed, white-haired, naked, screamin’ ghouls out of legend?” Conn asked. “Much less chilled one and brought in the body?”
“Not as far as I know,” Frank said hesitantly.
“Not my boys ’n’ girls, that’s for nukin’ sure,” Potar said. “And I’ve had ’em lookin’ for them.”
“None of which means there might not be somethin’ in the old stories,” Frank said, “old half-forgotten legends and campfire tales though they are.”
Conn thought a minute, then he looked at his lead scout, who squatted across from the fire on her skinny legs, front and back flaps of her buckskin loincloth trailing to the ground. If anything, her face looked more frightened than it had before.
“Thanks, Sairey,” Conn said. “You’ve done well.”
She sat looking at him with huge, silent eyes.
“You can go now, child,” Frank said, not unkindly.
She gulped visibly, nodded and vanished into the night in an eyeblink.
“If we can’t produce coamers,” Conn said, “we have to look elsewhere for the ones who have been assisting the outlanders in their crimes.”
“But you yourself are uncertain of their guilt, sir,” Frank said.
Conn sighed. “At the least, they’re guilty of chillin’ many of our people, robbin’ families of loved ones and breadwinners. And even if the army’s seeking about to fix blame, they’re the ones they signed on to hunt down and exterminate.”
He looked at Potar. “So they must have assistants. That much is generally agreed on—even if it’s not strictly factual, Frank, so you can spare me further objections. So it becomes incumbent upon us to keep our force engaged and at least mollified by producin’ some of these accomplice coldhearts and subjecting them to sufficiently exemplary public punishment, of course.”
“Uh, where exactly do you expect us to look for these accomplices, boss?” Potar asked.
“Why, around. Known bad actors, the shiftless. The rootless and vagrant. People whose downfall will be publicly welcomed. Or who, in any event, shall not be widely missed.”
Potar frowned momentarily, then his vast brow smoothed, and his smile came back, broader and uglier than before.
He may be slow, Conn thought, but he’s definitely not a feeb. It would do well to remember that.
“Take out the trash, as it were,” he said. “Chill two birds with one stone. My, I really am turnin’ into that oldie blowhard Vin. I leave it to your capable hands.”
“How many you want?”
“As many as you and your people can lay hands on, for now. We don’t need any great number, really. Three or four should suffice. For now.”
“But, Mathus,” Frank said, “that is dishonest! What about justice?”
“To quote an old saw that Vin likely never would, ‘There ain’t no justice—there’s just us!’ But seriously. Until we can find the real perpetrators, whoever they are, the mob demands blood. And think about it—if we lose them, what happens? Do you want Wymie back in charge? Or mebbe someone less delusional but also less scrupulous? Or do you want them runnin’ wild, mere anarchy loosed upon the land?”
At that last, his adviser’s dark features paled. Frank was a big believer in order.
Which is well for us all, old friend, Conn thought. Since much as I need and value your candor, there are still limits.
“You see?” he asked, deliberately gentling his tone. “It’s not as if we’re preyin’ on the innocent, after all. And in tryin’ times like these, sacrifices must be made by all of us—for the greater good.”
* * *
“SO THAT’S HOW they obtain their light,” Doc said. “The walls in their passageways are dotted with some manner of phosphorescent moss or fungus. I wondered why the cannies, though obviously primarily troglodytic in their habits, had not evolved to be blind, as so many cave-dwellers do.”
“But how do they recharge the stuff down here?” Mildred asked. “It’s as dark as a baron’s heart in these caves. And the growths, whatever they are, need to absorb light at some point to give any off.”
Despite her forced calm, Krysty grimaced as one of the five albino cannies holding her above their matted-hair heads jostled her kidneys. Otherwise, it was a remarkably smooth ride; though not much larger than children, the creatures were surprisingly strong.
It’s a good thing my friends can keep their spirits up enough for discussions like that, she thought. Or is it their way of dealing with the fear?
They had had no chance. Even though they had to have chilled at least a dozen of the stinking, naked white creatures, the cannies never faltered. They swarmed the companions and powered them down by weight of numbers and ferocity. Krysty heard Ryan calling her name, and steeled herself for the first kiss of fangs.
Instead her Glock was wrenched away, her arms yanked behind her back and her wrists bound with something that felt like rough vegetable-fiber rope. Despite the strength and fury with which she kicked them away, caving in at least one snouted, red-eyed face in the process, they managed to tie her ankles together, too. She might
have summoned the strength of Gaia, who felt so near to her as Krysty was here in the Earth Mother’s bosom, but the onslaught just happened too quickly.
And it was just as well. As she was hoisted aloft and saw her friends raised up likewise, she saw they were surrounded by what looked like a throng of hundreds of the slight, stooped, yet deadly creatures. Even had she fought them with all the mad strength Gaia sometimes gave her, she would still probably have been overwhelmed after the Gaia power left her, as she would have been depleted and helpless.
There’s not much reason to think they’re letting us live out of kindness, she thought.
She was as stunned by the fact their animalistic attackers had tied them, and with brisk efficiency, as that they refrained from eating them alive. It seemed so…human.
They were being carried along a relatively straight and oddly uniform passageway about fifteen feet in diameter. On both sides Krysty glimpsed small groups of coamers, mostly female, taking clumps of blue-green glowing moss from a piece of plank on one side, and what had to have been a scavvied cast-iron kettle on the other, and somehow sticking them to the walls.
They looked somehow different from the cannies they’d seen before, including the unwashed horde that carried them now to an uncertain but no doubt unpleasant fate. But she didn’t get an ace look at them. She had other matters on her mind, much as she would have liked to drown her fears in detail.
“Why haven’t they chilled us yet?” she heard Ricky ask. He sounded as if he was trying to be brave.
Evidently their captors didn’t mind them talking.
“They got plans for us,” Ryan said gruffly.
“Wh-what sort of plans?”
“We’ll know it when we find out.”
The walls and ceiling fell abruptly away, and they were bundled into a vast subterranean chamber awash with light from a thousand fragrant pine-scent torches.
* * *
