Latitude Zero

by James Axler

  And that was how Salvation, Texas, looked as they walked cautiously down the blacktop toward the main street.

  RYAN'S EYE KEPT being drawn to the ruled metal lines that met at infinity. He knew from things that he'd read that the railroads had been all-powerful during the late 1800s and early 1900s. But by about the middle of the 1900s their authority had declined and lines were closing everywhere.

  He'd seen rusting rails and worm-rotted sleepers at a lot of places out in the wilds, but he could see the way the watery sun was winking off the steel, telling of regular, recent use. But where did it go? To the distant hills? Then where? And who was running it?

  In order to try to find answers, Ryan decided that they should split up, contrary to the Trader's usual rules about entering a strange ville.

  "Stay close, keep quiet and have your finger loose on the trigger."

  But Ryan had never known Krysty to be wrong. If she felt there was no imminent danger in Salvation, then that was good enough for him.

  He and Krysty took the center of the main street of the township. Mildred and Doc formed an uneasy partnership going down the north side, taking the alleys and cross streets. J.B. went with Jak on the opposite side.

  "The usual," Ryan told them. "Shot or a shout, come running. Meet the far end of the ville in, say, an hour or so from now."

  SALVATION WAS a typical one-street town, the civic equivalent of a shotgun shack—fire a blaster from one end of the main drag, and the bullet would go clean on through and out the other end.

  Ryan and Krysty walked along the sidewalk, peering into the dusty interiors of the stores and houses. There were great clusters of weeds pushing through, but both of them noticed quickly that the ville wasn't an abandoned ghost town like some they'd visited.

  "Plenty of boot marks," Krysty observed.

  "Right. Must be the men riding that loco wag. Use this as a base, mebbe."

  "This Skullface?"

  "I don't know, lover. Why leave this ville empty? What do they use it for? Keep supplies? Sleep? Doesn't make sense."

  The buildings, mainly adobe and crumbling stucco, were in fair shape. The wind and heat of West Texas had stripped every flake of paint from any exposed door or window, and the glass was dulled and crazed. But few roofs had caved in, and most walls were still vertical.

  The corpses of the original inhabitants were long gone, mostly to the predators and carrion-jaws of the surrounding desert, but their ghosts still walked in the opalescent morning light.

  The ville was heavy with the trivia of the last days before the sky grew dark, before the massive electromagnetic pulse circled the globe and wiped out every power source.

  There was a row of small shops, covered from what had probably once been a livery stable and feed store. Ambitiously named The Salvation Shopping Mall, it held a dozen miniature stores. Ryan led the way into the shadowed alley, feeling that he was the first person to set foot there for nearly a century. But he almost immediately had to step quickly sideways to avoid treading into what looked like a decidedly human turd of recent vintage.

  Barbie's Bootique had its window smashed in, and all of its stock was long gone. Footwear of any quality was always at a premium in Deathlands.

  Ma's Apple pie and Fudge Emporium was next along the mall. There was a notice on the door, still legible—Due To Lease Renewal At An Exorbitant Increase, We Are Closing December 30th. Thanks To All Our Customers And Goodbye.

  The lock was broken and Ryan pushed the door open, his feet disturbed a bunch of junk mail, dried out like fall leaves.

  "Gala!" Krysty said. "Every time we find a place like this I start feeling all excited. Mebbe we'll find some real treasure from before the long winters."

  Ryan pulled the door closed again. "I know what you mean."

  "Then you look around and there's always the same sensation. Dust and echoes and shadows. It brings a lump to my throat. You kind of glimpse people's hopes and ambitions, and you know they've all been dead. So long dead."

  "Want to go out in the sun again?"

  Krysty managed a smile. "No. Ghosts don't hurt you. Let's look on."

  Saucy Lita. Ryan figured there was probably some kind of joke in the name, but he couldn't get it. He tried saying it several times, but it still didn't sound like anything he'd heard. Again, the lock was broken and he pushed the door open and walked inside, Krysty at his heels.

  A printed notice on a curling card said "Over 16s Only. IDs May Be Requested. Another large one had fallen faceup on the floor—Warning. This Shop Contains Items Of An Adult Nature. If You Are Easily Offended, GET LOST!

  Krysty stooped and picked up a piece of delicate rag off a broken table, holding it up against herself. It was made from black silk with some rotting ribbons and artificial lace. It looked as if it had once had elastic around the waist but that was long gone. There was about enough material to cover a man's hand.

  "That what I think?" Ryan asked.

  "Depends on what you think, lover." She grinned. "But I've only ever seen anything like this on that blue porno."

  "Shame they've rotted. I'd have given good jack to see you in something like that."

  "Look at this kid's doll," he went on, picking up the figure of an old man with white hair and beard, carrying a price sticker of $35.95 that read Naughty Uncle Fred The Flasher.

  "What's a flasher?" Krysty asked, reaching for the unbuttoned overcoat on the doll and pulling it open. She immediately gave a shout of laughter at what was revealed. "Oh! So, that's what a flasher is!"

  Most of the stock of the small, cramped store had vanished or rotted away over the past hundred years, but there were still a few remnants that gave Ryan and Krysty a better than good idea of what kind of place it had been.

  "I just don't see how many people in a one-street ville like this, in the wastes of old Texas, would have bought anything like this," Ryan said, showing Krysty a massive artificial penis in purple plastic. It was at least fifteen inches from base to tip.

  "Not getting jealous, are we, lover?" Krysty grinned.

  A wooden torso modelled a white cotton T-shirt with the same slogan repeated hundreds of times, all over it-Tiny Tits. Tiny Tits. Another of the faded notes read We Have The Tiny Tits T-shirt In All Sizes Up To 50 Inches.

  Ryan read it and smiled at Krysty's expression of disapproval. "Not getting jealous, are we, lover?" he asked.

  "SALVATION WAS SURE big on muffler shops," Mildred said when they'd regrouped. "We saw five of them, with two launderettes."

  "Only one of them fluff and fold," Doc added, wiping sweat from his forehead with his swallow's-eye kerchief.

  "We checked a few houses. They've all been cleared out of anything worth taking." J.B. looked around the ville. "Funny though. Jak here spotted it. I hadn't noticed."

  "What?" Ryan asked.

  The teenager hesitated. "Not certain."

  The Armorer grinned. "Sure he's sure. Tell 'em, Jak."

  "Houses stripped recently."

  "Recently?" Ryan glanced at the others. "Anyone else spot this?"

  Krysty answered, "Now you mention it, yeah. Think about it, lover. Some of those places had the feel that they'd been untouched for a hundred years. Sure, there was some old damage. But a lot of it somehow felt… felt like it had been done yesterday."

  "Fucking right!" the boy exclaimed, eyes glistening like a striking cobra. "Yesterday! Not enough dust around things broke."

  Ryan sighed. "Sure. I saw it, too. But I didn't somehow register what it meant. Fireblast! Stupid of me. Getting old."

  J.B. shook his head. "We're all getting old, Ryan. Been riding too many roads for too many years. The kid was… Sorry, Jak. Didn't mean anything by that. Just that you're young and you got young eyes. You see better and think sharper. You should get out of all this before you finish up like the rest of us. Seriously."

  It was an unusually long speech for the normally taciturn Armorer.

  The albino teenager nodded slowly. "Know that's tr
ue, J.B., and been thinking same thing. One day. Yeah, one fucking day."

  There was a long silence among the group of friends.

  THEY DISCUSSED whether it was worth bringing in a working party to go through the town more carefully, to see if there was anything tucked away in any of the houses that might be of some value. But they all eventually agreed that it was unlikely.

  J.B. summed it up. "Seems that the ville's been turned over in the past few weeks. Could be the people who were running that loco wag. Either way, there's nothing here for the settlers."

  Ryan agreed. "We'll go back and tell Major Ward and the smiling Elder Vare. Still be a good place to camp. There's that small creek for water and plenty of wood for fires."

  "Good place for us to leave from?" Krysty suggested.

  Ryan nodded. "Been reading my mind, lover."

  Doc coughed. "Me and the lady found a poster tacked up inside a window. I confess it was more than a little faded, but still legible. Was it not, Mildred? Legible?"

  "Course it was legible, you daft old goat! How the hell would we have known what it said if we couldn't read it?"

  Doc shrugged, grinning in embarrassment.

  "What did this notice say?" Ryan asked.

  Doc answered. "It announced a grand reopening. Dated November of the year of Our Blessed Lord, 2000 annu domini. The Salvation to Silver Lode Railroad spur. Closed these one hundred and twenty years."

  Mildred took over the account. "And the restoration of the engine house."

  "Then let's go down and take us a look at this engine house," Ryan suggested.

  "Must be that group of buildings to the west where the rails end," J.B. guessed.

  That was where they found the first of the corpses.

  Chapter Sixteen

  "THE GOOD FOLK of Salvation," Ryan said quietly.

  "Guess so," J.B. replied. "There were two or three of the old houses that looked like someone had been living in them. I figured it was probably pack rats, wanderers from the outlands. Could be they really lived in the ville."

  The engine house stood alone. A cobbled yard was located at one end, with a huge turntable, carrying the rails where the loco wags could be turned around. There were a number of outbuildings, mostly in good shape. From the remnants of weathered signs it looked as though the idea had been to deck them out as ticket offices and museums of the old railroad. But sky-dark had obviously overtaken the project, and most of them contained very little.

  Very little except for the corpses.

  The longest dead was dried out and leathery, giving an approximate date of a month or so ago. The most recent was still covered in blowflies, the stench enough to make Doc gag. Death had been within forty-eight hours or so, not long before the locomotive had pulled out of Salvation's depot.

  None of the townsfolk looked as if they'd been given an easy passing.

  Something about the mangled bodies tugged at Ryan's memory. Deathlands wasn't a kindly place, filled with warmhearted, rosy-cheeked folk. But it normally wasn't a place of ice-heart brutality.

  This wasn't a simple outburst of pesthole butchery, no bullets-in-the-neck execution.

  These deaths had been slow and agonized, and a dreadful, racking pleasure had been taken by the killer. Expert hands had tied the knots and made the cuts; knowing fingers had pried out eyes and torn off genitals.

  Ryan could almost hear the screams from the gaping jaws and the broken teeth, could catch the sound of hearty laughter at the tortured thrashings against the heated blades and the smoldering probes.

  "By God!" Mildred breathed, shaking her head at the carnage in front of her. "There are some seriously sick bastards around this neighborhood, Ryan. Let's go."

  "Just a minute, Mildred. We got to do some thinking about this."

  "Well, you do your thinking in this charnel house, and I'll go and do mine outside in God's good, clean air."

  "Thought you were a doctor, Mildred," Ryan called.

  "Oh, thanks a million, buddy. Yeah, I was a doctor, and in all my life I never saw anything like this. I saw films of Belsen and Auschwitz and places like that. Man's inhumanity, Ryan! Sure I saw that. And I saw what the knights of the fucking invisible empire did to my own father. So, don't shit me about not handling violence. Right now, I've just seen enough for today!"

  She walked away quickly, tears streaming unchecked down her cheeks. Krysty looked at Ryan and, without a word, followed the other woman into the bright sunlight.

  Ryan bit his lip and stared at the most recent corpse.

  It had probably been male, though it wasn't that easy to tell. Clotted blood, fly-coated, overlaid a scorched wound at the junction of the spread thighs. The victim had been strung up against the wall, hands chained and ankles also tied apart. The hair had gone, as had all the skin off the face, neck and shoulders. Ryan sniffed, catching the faint scent of gasoline. There were vicious whip marks across the chest, stomach and thighs. The deterioration of the body made it difficult to be sure, but there were what looked like a number of small-caliber bullet holes around elbows and knees. Most of the fingers were hacked away, and those that remained were bent and broken.

  "Skullface," Doc muttered.

  The other three looked at him, then back at the ragged, stinking corpses.

  Ryan nodded. "Guess so. Muties wouldn't do this. Stickies might burn men, or women, but not this. This is someone else."

  The thought of who that someone else might be continued to nag at him all the way through the ville and up the rise to the waiting wag train.

  RYAN REPORTED WHAT they'd seen to only Major Ward and Elder Vare, refusing to talk about what they'd found in Salvation to any of the settlers. There were some delicate decisions to be made and it was best they weren't made by a mob.

  He described the township, and told them that it seemed to have been raided recently. There was good water but no food supplies at all.

  "Wood?" the wag master asked.

  "Yeah. Enough to keep you going for weeks. Funny. Looked like a couple of old buildings, one of them a school, had already been pulled down. Plenty of wood with 'fresh edges to it."

  "How about people?" the preacher asked. "Are there any of the Lord's anointed down there, Mr. Cawdor?"

  "If they'd been anointed by the Lord, then they sure weren't talking about it."

  "Dead, Ryan?" Major Ward took off his battered Stetson with a suitably mournful expression on his face.

  "Dead as you can get."

  "Those mutated sons of nukedom!" the preacher exclaimed.

  "No."

  "No?"

  "Not muties. The way I read it, there were a few folks hanging on to some sort of life in what was left of Salvation. Along comes someone, likely this Skullface chiller they speak about, and he and his gang take over the ville."

  "And they murdered the poor folks? Oh, that such wickedness should flourish! Are thine eyes closed to this, Almighty Savior?"

  "Guess he can't be everywhere, Reverend," Ryan said.

  "What do we do? Pass the place by, I guess. Or just stop for water and wood."

  Vare wagged a bony forefinger in Ward's face. "If it be the place of blood, then we shall conquer it. Our women are tired and our babies weep for rest. That looked a likely and godly place down there. You saw no heathens, Mr. Cawdor?"

  "None living."

  The wag master looked to Ryan for help. "If this Skullface took the loco wag into the hills, then he might likely come back again. Anytime. We got no place to run. Ox wags don't get you away real fast. Ryan?"

  "Not my business." He'd already made up his mind this train was bad news. Ward was right. Oxen meant death if the chillers returned. If they could butcher a dozen innocent folk, they weren't likely to draw the line at one hundred.

  "It's my business, Major Ward," Vare's cold, grating voice continued. "Please see that my request is carried out. We will dwell in the remains of Salvation for three full days. Is that clear?"

  Ward shook his head and cl
apped his Stetson back on. "Sure thing, Elder. Can't say I like it, but by golly I'll do it."

  Ryan left the one-sided meeting and rejoined the others.

  THE WAG TRAIN wound its way along the blacktop until it reached Salvation. Ryan walked faster to snatch a word with the wag master, who was striding out, leading his pony.

  "Be ready for trouble, Major. You'll see for yourself what's happened there. Could happen all over again."

  The older man grinned. "No way, son. You ever heard of lightning striking twice in the same place?"

  "Yes," Ryan replied. "Yes, I have."

  Chapter Seventeen

  "A SHOPPING MALL?"

  "That's right, son."

  "Untouched?"

  Ward nodded, pointing at his map. "Right smack on there. See."

  Ryan sniffed. "I see a cross drawn, Major. I see the words Shopping Mall, Undamaged and Full-stocked. I see that."

  "And you don't believe it?"

  "Come on. You believe it, Major?"

  "Man who sold me this here map said it was true. Said there was even some gas wags still sealed up ready to be driven away."

  "Ah." That was maybe different. The idea of there being a shopping complex still unravaged anywhere in Deathlands was so unlikely that Ryan barely gave it a second thought. But the story of there being some mint-fresh wags…

  "Tempting, ain't it, son?" the wag master said, nudging him with a bony elbow.

  "Sure. Course it is. But the chances of it being true…"

  Ward grinned. "This here map ain't been wrong since I started using it. Water hole was where it said. And Salvation was just like it showed. Like manna for the chosen people."

  "How far? Looks like a good day's ride from here. Northeast up into those hills."

  "Day there, day back. Elder Vare wants a rest here. Don't need us, does he, son?"

  Ryan considered that, looking away up the glittering metal rails, wondering where the locomotive had gone, with its crew of killers and torturers.

  "Suppose Skullface comes back?" It was now somehow assumed by everyone that the railroad train had been taken by the mythical Skullface.