Apocalypse Unborn

by James Axler

  The battle turned into a melee.

  No field commander could have kept order. No battle plan could have survived that first head-on impact. The stickies’ frenzy was such that they felt no pain. They withstood wounds to their heads, arms, torsos and kept on pressing forward, driving their wedge deeper.

  The norms who were pulled down were dragged by their faces from the ranks of their own kind, dragged into the stickie fold, where the serious tearing began. Though stickies were generally of small stature and wiry build, they were hellishly strong. With their suckers and brute strength, they split open bellies, with their needle teeth they ripped out hearts in chunks. Those that disappeared under the wave of pale bodies never rose again.

  The recruits answered frenzy with frenzy, stabbing, slashing and clubbing. White limbs fell severed to the ground, sucker hands, arms, legs. Blood gushed and flowed, mutie and norm, indistinguishable to the naked eye.

  It was the brand of warfare practiced in the Stone Age, before the invention of body armor or battle shields. Brute bludgeoning power against brute bludgeoning power. Foes trading blows, exchanging gaping wounds. Bloodied men stumbling over the gray loops of their own spilled intestines. Stickies hacked apart with dull swords, their bodies broken, pulped by sledge hammers.

  The hand-to-hand fighting pushed back and forth in the middle of the volcanic bowl, a grinding, clanking, squealing counterpoint to the awful clamor of the music.

  “That bastard tin can’s up there laughing at us!” Ryan shouted at J.B. “Laughing!”

  “Aieeeeeeee!”

  At the sound of the scream they both pivoted to the right, weapons up and ready to strike.

  Another Wazl had stooped, dead-falling from a height of twenty feet, and struck. Only this time the quarry was an islander. The lizard bird frantically flapped its long wings, dragging 250 pounds of violently resisting prey along the shoreline. Its black talons were buried in the flesh of the islander’s tattooed shoulders, the points curving deep beneath his collar bones. The man’s flesh puckered, stretching under his body weight, his bare feet scrabbled and slipped over the rocks.

  “Patu ia! Patu ia!” the islander cried in a high, shrill voice, his eyes huge with terror and pain.

  J.B. and Ryan sprang forward at the same instant, hurling themselves on the bird before it could gain any more altitude. They grabbed the long, bony, whiplike tail and held on for all they were worth, digging in their heels. As they pulled the Wazl down, Krysty, Mildred and Jak joined the fray, jumping on the wings, the back, seizing hold of whatever they could. Together, they brought the great bird crashing to earth. To properly defend itself, it had to release its victim, and when it did so, the islander rolled away, bleeding profusely from inch-wide holes in his chest and back.

  The companions gave the Wazl as much mercy as it had shown its victim.

  They tag-team hacked it to death.

  Over and over, Krysty and Mildred thrust their long bayonets deep into its sides, searching for its vitals with double edges of cold steel. Ryan pinned its hindquarters to the ground with his body weight and plunged his panga to the hilt into its back. The bird flapped and screeched, and tried to crane its neck around and bring its wicked teeth to bear on Krysty and Mildred. Before it could do that, J.B. leaped in with the tomahawk. A two-handed, overhead swing split the flat, leather-upholstered skull like a coconut. The Wazl dropped flat to its stomach, wings outstretched and quivering, brains oozing between plates of fractured bone.

  Whether it was the smell of the liberated gray matter, or some message in the dying bird’s scream, the other four Wazls swarmed in. The islander who the companions had just saved, who had staggered away, clutching his grievous wounds, was their sole target. Talons raked his head and slashed the back of his neck. Moaning, he fell to his stomach and the biggest bird landed on his back, sinking its claws into his flesh. The islanders rushed forward to try to rescue their kin, but the Wazl immediately let go of their shipmate’s buttocks and shifted position, lunging, snapping, keeping the attackers off balance and well out of sword range.

  The poor wounded bastard was still alive, yelling at the top of his lungs when the Wazl took his head sideways in its jaws and, bearing down, crushed it like a raw egg, making the juices squirt out between its jaws. Then it started sawing with its serrated teeth. In an eyeblink the islander’s headless body dropped free, blood gushing from the tattered neck stump. Gulping down its prize, the Wazl jumped into the air and flapped away.

  Captain Eng bellowed in rage as the other Wazls flirted with him, mocked him, flying just beyond the reach of his slashing saber.

  LIKE THE OTHERS, Jak had to stand and watch while the Wazl chilled the helpless islander. The sailors were bunched up so tightly, trying to get their own stabs in, that there was no room for him to strike.

  Then the damned thing just tore off the islander’s head and flew away.

  Funny how the birds could be half chilling each other over dinner one minute and fighting to avenge a fallen nestmate the next.

  Avenge it, they had.

  And now they were rubbing it in, flying low, swooping, making cackling noises.

  The Wazls were still a problem, but Jak knew the stickies were going to have to be dealt with pretty quick. Down in the bowl, the muties were pushing the recruits in reverse, blades flashing, scuffling feet raising rock dust. Behind the blur of arms and heads, in the wake of the stickie advance was a slick carpet of red. As the battle sawed back and forth, crumpled bodies, norm and mutie, were revealed, then hidden again.

  The wildness of the scene, the sounds of combat energized the albino like a double line of prime jolt. Jak felt the call to battle, big time, and there was nothing close enough to chill.

  From behind came a whip crack of leather wings, a hard gust of wind, then a woman’s desperate cry. It was Krysty.

  A Wazl had her gripped from behind by the shoulders of her fur coat. Because she didn’t weigh more than 150 pounds, the flapping bird was able to drag her away. The toes of her boots skimmed a few inches above the ground. Krysty couldn’t bring her bayonet to bear. Her arms were trapped in the sleeves of her coat by the downward pull of her own body.

  Ryan turned toward her a second too late, and his jump for her ankles missed by inches. He crashed flat-out onto the rocks, arms outstretched, hands clutching nothing.

  Jak was even farther away. The albino wheeled, shaking a leaf-bladed knife from his sleeve. The blade found its natural place in his hand, like a steel ball rolling into a precision-drilled hole. There was no hesitation. No thought. No aiming. Jak whipped his arm forward and let the weapon fly.

  The flat-black leaf blade sang through the air, curving left and diving toward its speeding target. Jak’s throw arc and the Wazl’s head intersected. The point slammed into its left eye, the steel thorn driven in so deeply that it almost disappeared into the socket.

  Jolted by the impact, the bird dropped Krysty, who landed lightly on her feet and raced out of the way.

  Less gracefully, the Wazl skidded to the ground. Flapping its wings, screaming, it shook its head this way and that, clawing at its own head, trying rid itself of the excruciating pain.

  Captain Eng launched himself at the wounded bird, his saber cocked at his hip. He drove the blade into its torso with every ounce of his three hundred pounds behind it. The Wazl reared up, its wings stiffly outspread as thirty-five inches of cold steel slid into its guts.

  The bird tried to claw its tormentor and found it couldn’t reach him. Eng held it fast to the ground with main strength and the skewering blade. Unable to use its talons, the Wazl tried to tear his head off with its beak.

  Eng dodged the rapidly weakening strikes with ease. Then he laughed and with both hands on the sword’s grip twisted the curving blade. The tendons in his massively scarred forearms jumped as he cored out a deeper, far more devastating wound. Gore and intestinal contents spewed over Eng’s arms and bare chest.

  With the last of its strength, the nig
ht hunter drew in its leathery wings, a look of surprise in its surviving eye. That it would meet its end at the hands of a hairy, grinning earth-bound creature had to have come as a shock.

  As it shuddered and died, Eng hawked and spit in its face.

  Which reaffirmed Jak’s belief that there was much to like about the islander captain.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Rish hung well back from the cone’s doorway in a small, protected alcove. The menagerie’s exit was completely blocked by rolling cages full of highly agitated Wazls. The enforcers used steel mesh nets to cover the four-foot gap between the cage tops and the underside of the double doorway. This prevented the muties from reversing course and attacking the enforcers once the cage doors were flung back.

  When the cages were opened, the enforcers used prod poles to encourage the birds to exit. It didn’t take much prodding to get the desired result. The Wazls flapped away, onto the field of battle, screaming blue murder.

  Rish marked off item number one from Silam’s checklist with a savage flourish.

  Even in Deathlands, at the bottom of human culture’s ash bin, behind every successful, incompetent twit there was a creature such as Rish, a diligent, hardworking, unrecognized soul. Rish was no longer stunned when Silam took credit for his ideas.

  “I know you won’t mind if I use that” was a phrase he had come to loathe.

  Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had minded.

  All glory went to Silam. All homage went to Silam.

  While Rish was sucking up, salaaming to the poet laureate, what was he really thinking?

  Blockhead.

  Drooler.

  Pompous ass.

  If he had to listen to that Hammurabi story about how Silam had chiseled a dirt farmer into giving him a free ride on all his daughters one more time, he thought he was going to go berserk.

  There was another side, a hidden side to Rish. He had dreams of his own. He knew he could do Silam’s job because he had been doing it for months, virtually by himself. Magus’s head liar was a burn-out case. And Rish knew he could do the job a million times better than Silam ever had.

  Rish realized that some of his feelings of rage and bitterness were fueled by natural jealousy over his own physical shortcomings. Silam was tall. He had normal-size hands and feet. Although he had a very strange-looking forehead, Silam wasn’t cursed with a face that radiated perpetual misery. Even when Rish was deliriously happy, he looked like his dog had just died.

  What infuriated him most was that he was often mistaken for a western swampie, an ankle-biter, even though he was not filthy, bearded or hairy. The resemblance in stature had made him scrupulous about his toilette. He scraped his jowls twice a day and buffed his little hands until they were pink. If his arms had had more than a fine, pale down on them, he would have shaved them, too.

  Rish would never be any taller, never have manly hands and feet, never be looked upon by women with anything but revulsion, but he could orchestrate mayhem with the best of them.

  After the Wazls’ cages had been rolled back, he waved the enforcers over to the stickies’ cells. They followed his commands immediately and without question. Rish didn’t even know if the enforcers could talk. If they could, they certainly never did it in the presence of a norm.

  He could list what he knew about the enforcers on the fingers of one tiny hand. They hated fire. They could see perfectly in the dark. They sweated in their sleep, and they slept in big piles, like cats. Big, sweaty piles. They never seemed to eat or drink. If their race had a culture, it was locked away in their heads. They had no tools, no books, no written language. No clothes. Yet they understood and obeyed those in Magus’s chain of command.

  It filled Rish with a dizzying sense of power to be able to order around such terrible destructive forces. But he was no fool. He knew the limits of that power and the extent of his own vulnerability.

  Before he gave them the signal to release the stickies, he stepped into an empty cage, then shut and locked the door.

  In the cell next door were two female scalies. Naked from the waist up, hugely, intimidatingly mammalian, the hems of their long skirts dragged through straw already fouled with their waste.

  Safely behind bars, Rish nodded to the enforcers, who threw open all the stickie cells. Kissing and moaning, the pale, skinny muties flooded into the menagerie corridor. They threw themselves upon the other cages and cells, trying to get their hands on the muties still prisoner.

  Rish jumped back as they reached in for him with greedy, sucker fingers. Dead black eyes in excited faces coveted his soft flesh. Nose holes and needle teeth-lined jaws dripped with mucus and saliva in anticipation of smelling and tasting his fresh blood.

  The stickies hurled themselves upon the unprotected enforcers. They tried to pull their watchdogs apart, but their suckers wouldn’t stick to the sweat-slick, knobby skin. The enforcers started throwing stickies, picking them up around the waist and chucking them at the exit. That got the muties headed in the right direction, toward the light streaming through the doors and the sound of music, which made them coo and scatter frantic kisses.

  They had learned that Wagner meant party time.

  It had occurred to him before that all he had to do to get Silam’s job was to keep quiet. To just agree with whatever idiotic plan the spin doctor set out. To refrain from offering subtle suggestions and advice, to stop posing key questions that revealed fundamental, grievous errors. To stop personally altering programs after the fact to correct the head liar’s bonehead mistakes.

  In his little, hairless hand he held the sword of Silam’s destruction.

  Along the side of the cheap ballpoint, emblazoned in gold paint were the words Sunset West Motel, Bloomfield, N.M.

  There was nothing wrong with the scheduled order of attack, but as usual, Silam hadn’t bothered to read the careful win-loss odds projections he’d done. If the spin doctor had even glanced at them, he would have seen his battle plan was badly flawed. Including the islanders in this afternoon’s festivities had been Rish’s bright idea, not Silam’s. Although Silam had quickly adopted the clever twist as his own, he hadn’t thought through some of the obvious consequences. That core of seasoned, organized fighters needed to be dealt with first, singled out, targeted and destroyed. Instead, they were ignored, treated as run-of-the-mill mercies. Silam had signed off on the choreography. It was his baby. There was no way for him to pass the blame.

  Rish had a choice, to save Silam or let him flame.

  He chose flame.

  Rish had never actually seen Magus angry. Seeing him pleased was scary enough.

  The scalies in the adjoining cell started banging their slops buckets against the bars.

  “We’re hungry. Feed us!” one of them snarled in his face. “This is torture!”

  “Feed us, you stumpy little bastard! We’re wasting away!” the other cried.

  Between massive, drooping dugs, their wrinkled bellies sagged a good two feet over the waistbands of their flowing, raggedy skirts. Even though these two were relative lightweights for the species, they still weighed close to four hundred pounds. Their monumental appetites were what made them a regular feature of Magus’s little military melodramas.

  “You’re up next on the program,” Rish assured them. “You’ll get all you can eat in a few minutes.”

  The scalies’ expressions immediately brightened.

  Chapter Twenty

  Doc Tanner clung to the rope rail, gasping. There was so much water vapor in the cloud that it was difficult for him to breathe. It felt like he was drowning on dry land. The condensing moisture beaded on his hands and dripped down his face.

  A few more volleys of wild autofire whined off the rocks around Doc and the freezies. Then the shooting stopped. Apparently the uniforms had given up the hunt.

  “We’ve got to keep moving,” Bell said. “On the double.”

  They trudged blindly upward. It got even darker as they climbed. Four fe
et of visibility dropped to three, then two. If the rope rail hadn’t been there, they would have mostly certainly blundered off the cliff to their deaths.

  “The mist is getting thicker, Antoine,” Bell said. “You’re sure we haven’t passed it already?”

  “We couldn’t have,” the black man replied. “This trail’s a dead end, like I said. It’s the redoubt’s emergency exit route, and the only way out of the place from the north side. The main entrance and exit is on the far side of the mountain.”

  “You’ve been here before, then?” Doc said.

  “Yeah, but the secret installation hadn’t been built when I visited,” Kirby said.

  “Then how do you know so much about it?”

  “I used the data banks in our redoubt to access the site’s physical layout,” Kirby said. He patted his pants’ pocket. “Pulled a hard copy of the setup here. Super-detailed. Floor by floor. Room by room.”

  Doc stopped listening. He was as lost in self-doubt as he was in the swirling, choking grayness. Questions that he couldn’t answer kept popping into his head, over and over. Had he done the moral thing? Wasn’t it his natural right to return to his own time? Would he be able to hold his dear children to his bosom and not think of the friends he had turned his back on? Would that precious reunion moment, so long sought, be soured, ruined by the betrayal that it had cost?

  To have thrown his lot in with these two strangers, all or nothing, was a measure of the depth of Doc Tanner’s desperation and spiritual exhaustion. He wanted to believe that what they were offering him was real. He wanted it with all his soul.