Dark Carnival

by James Axler

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  THE WALLS OF the gateway chamber showed a pale filtered silver color, and Ryan remembered that was the right shade for the redoubt down in the wilderness of what had once been called New Mexico. At least the jump seemed to have taken them to the correct place.

  He took several deep breaths, trying to fight down the inevitable nausea, closing his eye again, and felt a tight steel band clamped across the frontal lobe of his brain.

  "Fireblast," he said. "Least we're still alive."

  He looked down at his son.

  Dean was unconscious, his mouth open. A faint smear of blood covered his lower lip, but he was breathing steadily and his pulse was strong. Ryan still had his arm around the boy and he shifted carefully, lowering him so that he could lie on the floor.

  "I'll get some, Rona," Dean whispered.

  But his eyes stayed closed.

  Ryan stood, stretching like a great cat, muscles creaking with the strain. Out of habit he checked his weapons: the butcher's cleaver on his hip, safely in its sheath, and the slim-bladed flensing knife in the small of his back; the pistol in its holster and the new Steyr bolt-action rifle slung across his shoulders.

  He couldn't remember much about the actual gateway. A terrifying illness had struck him in the redoubt beyond, taking his mind for a time and nearly taking his life.

  The glowing disks in floor and ceiling had all cooled and returned to their usual dull sheen. The mist was gone from the air—air that felt noticeably drier than in Florida.

  "Kept my eyes open all the time, Dad."

  The small voice made him turn around. Dean was struggling to sit up.

  "Lie still for a bit. Otherwise you'll throw up. How do you feel?"

  "Sick. But I kept… No, I don't think I did. But I tried, Dad."

  "Never managed it myself. Seems part of the mechanics of the jump that you have to pass out. Something to do with all the bits of your body and mind beind scrambled up and then brought back together again. That's what an old friend called Rick told me once. Don't understand it."

  "I dreamed about Rona."

  "Nice dream?"

  Thy boy sat up, wincing, and put a hand to his head. "I know she was crying. We were in some big stone ville. Lots of people. And she was crying. Can't remember why."

  "Fit to fight?"

  "Sure." The boy stood, then wobbling knees folded in on themselves. Ryan was just in time to catch the lad and save him from falling.

  "Wait a while longer, Dean. There's no hurry to get moving."

  "Will it be the same time here?"

  "Night?" He looked at his son. "You know, I don't think any of us have ever really thought much about that. I think it is. Often we don't find exactly where we are until we get outside the redoubt. That sometimes takes days."

  Dean tried again, this time managing to stand unaided. His face was frost pale, and his eyes didn't look too secure in their sockets. But he was upright.

  "Will there be a place we can rest and eat?"

  "Doubt it. The fact that the mat-trans unit is still here and functioning is a real double ace on the line for us."

  "Jak Lauren? Will he—" Ryan lifted a warning finger. Dean managed a wan smile. "Sorry. Too many questions. I'm ready, as long as we don't go too fast."

  Ryan pushed at the door, and immediately outside he checked the control panel, making sure that it also carried the L and the D buttons.

  "Get your blaster out," he said.

  "Why?"

  "There's a lot of golden dust around the floor. Don't remember that from last time. Could mean someone else has been using the gateway, or that it's open to the outside. Either way it's dangerous."

  "If Krysty was here she'd feel if there was danger, wouldn't she?"

  Ryan nodded, his finger on the trigger of the P-226 9 mm pistol. "Most times. But not always."

  The boy drew his Smith & Wesson 425, eyes narrowing. "I'm ready for them, Dad."

  "Trader used to reckon that the man who survived was the man who was ready…even when he wasn't ready. Get it?"

  "Think so." Dean sounded doubtful.

  They exited the small room, then the main control section for the gateway, into the passage beyond.

  Ryan stopped. "Shit," he muttered.

  He remembered that Krysty sometimes quoted a saying of her mother's that good luck and bad luck were often tangled together. You might fall down and break a leg, yet just avoid going over a thousand-foot cliff.

  The autodestruct devices that had been laid throughout the complex had done most of their work with devastating efficiency. Ryan and his companions had been the reluctant witnesses of that.

  The good luck was that the gateway hadn't been damaged. The bad luck was what he saw at the end of the passage—sky, a circle of vinyl black, sprinkled with a myriad stars.

  "Keep back while I take a look. Could be undercut and dangerous."

  He moved forward very cautiously. All the lights were out in the corridor, and his feet slid through a thick bed of sand and pebbles. By the time he came close to the brink of the opening, Ryan was already aware of a sighing wind in the night and the sense of a vast space beckoning him on.

  "I'm coming back," he called.

  "What is it?"

  "Don't like it. Can't see a hand in front of my face, and I have a feeling there's a big chasm out there. Tackle it better in the light. Right now we'll get some sleep."

  "We could try it, or we waste a lot of time, don't we?"

  "No. We'll need sleep. Need to be alert for the walk across open desert to Jak's place."

  "How do you know he's still there?"

  It was a fair question, one that Ryan had been repeatedly pushing away into a locked room at the back of his mind. In Deathlands nothing was certain. And the Southwest was an unusually hostile environment for survival.

  "Dad?" Dean's voice came from the pool of light that spilled out from the open doors of the mat-trans control area.

  "I'm here. It could be that something's happened to Jak and his woman. But you have to take risks in life, or you're deader than a spent round. Find out in the morning."

  For safety they went back inside the chamber, curling up together on the floor. Ryan had his blaster in his hand all the time.

  "DAD!"

  Ryan came awake immediately, instantly aware of where he was.

  "What?"

  "Look."

  A small bird was perched in the doorway, head on one side, looking curiously at the two figures on the floor. It had a bright crimson beak and a splash of gold on its head.

  As Ryan sat up, it turned and flew away, the whirring of its tiny wings vanishing into the morning.

  Dean went out for a piss, calling his father from the passage. "There's footmarks here."

  "Mine?"

  "Yeah. And others. Different patterns of boots in the sand. A lot of them, Dad."

  That wasn't good news.

  Ryan joined the boy, nodding his head in agreement. "Yeah. Looks like a dozen of them. Not too recent. See the way the blown dirt's drifted in on some of the boot-marks."

  "Hey, look out there! You can see for a million miles."

  In daylight the end of the passage was now clear. The side of the mountain that had contained the redoubt had been sliced open as the plas-ex exploited a major geological fault. Half of the hill had vanished as though a gigantic machete had carved through it.

  Moving carefully, father and son made their way to the edge of the gulf.

  Ahead the whole countryside lay open before them like a scorched paradise.

  It was still only a little after dawn, and that flank of the mountain was still in darkness. Far below, the floor of the desert was littered with patches of shadow from frost-riven boulders.

  A maze of narrow arroyos seamed the land, and farther away there was already enough heat to cause the distant ranges of hills to shimmer. It might not have been a million miles, but Ryan's guess was that it was possible to see more tha
n a hundred.

  "Can't see nobody. Nothing. No houses. No ville. Nothing."

  At the bottom of the slope Ryan could just make out the rusted remains of the battered comm dish that had sheltered them from the blowout. He leaned out and was able, to his relief, to spot a narrow, winding track.

  It wandered to the right, then cut sharply in a series of break-back turns, eventually reaching the flatter land below. It wasn't possible to tell whether it was man or animal that had originally broken the trail. Now boot prints appeared along it, as well as the spoor of a number of medium-sized animals.

  It took them nearly half an hour to negotiate the steep twists and reach level ground. Dean wiped sweat off his face, staring up above them.

  "Must've been double-thrilling."

  Ryan was breathing hard from the exertion. The temperature was already up into the eighties, but it was baking, dry heat. "What?"

  "When you all escaped the mountain blowing up like that."

  "Thrilling? One of the closest times I ever came to shitting my pants."

  "Really?" Dean smiled at his father.

  But Ryan wasn't amused. "Not a joke, Dean. That dish over there was the only thing that saved our lives. There were stones blizzarding down all around us. Some as big as implode grens. Some bigger than a war wag."

  The desert was almost empty of life. They spotted a blur of movement as a tiny orange lizard skittered and jinked between the rocks.

  "Which way?"

  Ryan pointed toward the south west. "That way. Should be there by noon unless something goes against us."

  It was less than fifteen minutes later when he saw the telltale puffs of dust rising from the far side of a ridge, not more than a half mile away.

  Dean caught the movement and stopped. "What's making that?" he said.

  Before Ryan could reply, the answer revealed itself. A pack of twenty or more mutie coyotes loped over the top of the hill toward them.

  Chapter Thirty

  THE PACK WAS running silently, concentrating their ferocious energy on the hunt. These coyotes were larger than any that Ryan had seen before, and they were also much more heavily muscled.

  They were moving at an easy lope, aiming a little in front of Ryan and his son.

  Dean drew his pistol, but Ryan motioned for him to put it away.

  "Waste of time. If they get within about forty or fifty paces, you can chill some. No, it's worth trying the new long gun."

  He unslung the Steyr military sniping rifle from his shoulder, working the bolt to put a 7.62 mm round under the pin. The Starlight nightscope and the laser image intensifier wouldn't be a whole lot of help on such a bright, sunlit morning.

  The problem was going to be selecting a target from among the shifting, moving pack and focusing in on it.

  "Shouldn't we keep going? Run for it?" Dean was looking all around as though he expected to see a rescue party appearing on the skyline.

  "They'd have us in less than ten minutes." Ryan knelt, wishing there'd been a handy boulder to rest the SSG-70. "If I can knock over two or three, the others might lose interest."

  "Much farther to the spread?"

  "When we came here last time I didn't know there was anybody for miles, so I didn't pay that much attention. Never thought I'd be coming back here with—Fireblast!"

  "What's… Oh, yeah."

  He saw what had annoyed his father. The pack of coyotes had disappeared into a dried creekbed, making a shot impossible. It would also bring the pack that much closer before Ryan could draw a bead on one.

  There was no sound and nothing to see except for the occasional smear of dust from the arroyo. Ryan held the rifle cradled against his cheek, looking where he expected the animals to come into vision again.

  "There!" Dean said excitedly.

  Without a word Ryan moved the sights a little to the left, picking the lead animal and squeezing the trigger. There was surprisingly little recoil, and the flat crack was quickly swallowed up by the vastness of the desert.

  "Missed," Dean said, unable to conceal his disappointment.

  "See where it went?"

  "I think a bit short. Difficult to see in all the dust."

  Ryan fired twice more, succeeding with the third shot in bringing down the hulking coyote in a snapping tangle of legs.

  The rest of the dogs halted and stood around, watching as the leader died, kicking and snarling in the bloodied sand.

  "Move," Ryan ordered, standing up. "While they're thinking about what to do."

  He and Dean covered another mile or so, circling around the threat. The coyotes watched them, heads lowered, close together. It almost seemed as if they were holding a committee meeting.

  "Coming again."

  Dean was grinning broadly, as though he and his father were taking part in an exciting game. It occurred to Ryan that the boy genuinely didn't realize that they were in serious danger, that a large hunting group like this would chase and chase until they wore down their prey.

  Now the targets were even more difficult, coming after them head-on only showing Ryan the front part of their heads. Nonetheless, he tried four more shots, killing one of the coyotes outright and sending it leaping high in the air, biting at its own back legs. Two more of the animals were wounded, but it hardly slowed the pack at all.

  "How much ammo you got?"

  "One in and one spare. Twenty rounds altogether. Not fucking enough. Didn't think I'd need any more than twenty."

  He'd already fired seven. Two coyotes were dead, two more injured, limping along at the rear, and about sixteen still coming.

  "That's…" Dean began, stopping as he realized he was stating the obvious.

  "Yeah."

  Ryan had only one plan, and even that wasn't terrific—move toward where he thought Jak Lauren's homestead should be, stopping every now and again when the hunting dogs came close enough to pick one or two off and hope that eventually the slavering animals would give up the chase.

  The morning grew hotter, with a haze distorting everything. And the survivors of the coyote pack grew more cunning.

  They split up into three groups, taking advantage of the broken ground. One group actually managed to circle its way so far to the north that it suddenly appeared out of a draw, less than a hundred yards in front of the man and boy. But the animals paid the price for their own cleverness. Ryan fired three times and killed two of the dogs outright, breaking a leg of a third animal.

  "How much ammo you brought for your blaster?" he panted as they kept walking briskly toward the south west.

  "No spares. Got ten in the mag."

  "Save them till I tell you."

  THE BOY WAS BUSHED. His face was pale, and he was so dehydrated that he'd stopped perspiring. They'd brought water with them, but Dean admitted that he'd drunk most of his before they'd even left the redoubt.

  According to Ryan's wrist chron they'd been hunted by the coyotes for more than two hours. Eleven of the original pack were still in the chase, and he was down to his last four rounds of ammunition.

  The outlook wasn't good.

  If he and Dean tried to hole up and wait, there was always a serious risk of more of the big mutie animals joining the pack. At the moment there was a better-than-even chance that be could chill enough, using Dean's .22 as well, to drive them away. But how long would that take? "Too long," he muttered through cracked lips. The sky was unrelievedly blue, and the temperature was way up over the hundred-degree mark. Without any water they'd become delirious in a couple of hours, in a coma an hour or so later and dead fairly soon after that. If the coyotes didn't get them first.

  There was one other alternative that had crept over the horizon into his mind. He could stay behind and attempt to delay the animals while Dean went on alone to try to find Jak Lauren and bring help.

  But that left an awful lot of incalculables to be faced. Almost too many.

  "Rest, son. Then you take the pistol and make for the house. Can't be far now." The boy looked u
p at him. "Dad?"

  "Yeah."

  "Two—" he swallowed hard, "—two things. One is that I'm too fucked to go far. Second is that if I felt fine I wouldn't leave you." He grinned weakly. "So, what're you gonna do about that, Dad?"

  "Slap your ass redder than a fried chili. But not now."

  "Sure."

  The remaining animals were hunkered down on their bellies about two hundred yards off, barely visible through the trembling air. Ryan could make out that the pack looked tired, jaws gaping as if they were laughing. But he knew that the moment he and his son rose and began walking again, the coyotes would be up and after them. Eternally patient.

  It was still hours until the hottest part of the day.

  Dean actually slipped into an exhausted steep. Ryan lay beside him, watching the skulking mutie animals as they occasionally advanced a few feet. If they came ten or fifteen yards closer, he'd try to take out another with the Steyr.

  Apart from tiredness and the pressure of the heat, Ryan felt only a bitter and futile surge of anger.

  His life had been filled brimful with danger and adventure. Now, unless they had an extra large slice of luck, he was going to die a squalid and pointless death in the middle of nowhere, butchered by a mongrel bunch of coyotes. And he hadn't said a proper goodbye to Krysty.

  It was no way to go.

  "Sorry if this is the end, Dad," said a quiet voice at his side. A hand touched his.

  "I'm sorry, as well, Dean. But we all have to go sometime."

  "Least we found each other. Could've been we'd both died and never knew each other. Least there's that, isn't there?"

  "It's not over till it's over, son. We got ammo and we got knives. They want us, they're going to pay a shit-high blood price."

  "Reckon I could go a bit farther."

  Ryan stood and looked around. "Sort of a rise over that way." He hesitated. "It does look a bit like the ridge we crossed before we looked down on the Ballinger spread, where Jak lives."

  Dean got to his feet, the movement provoking obvious interest in the pack of hunters.

  Ryan watched them. "Dean, go about twenty yards toward the hill, then stagger and fall down. Might bring them on and I can pick off two or three more. Worth it. Must come a point where the bastards are going to give up."