by James Axler
If the she-hes had managed to establish a permanent base at Slake City, within a year they would have toppled the hellscape’s baronies, one by one.
While Ryan had no love for Deathlands’ brutal feudal system, it was paradise compared to what the invaders offered. And the ambitions of the Shadow Earthlings had no limits.
Ryan knew what the Shadow Earthlings had done to their home world because he’d been there—as proof of their success and the hope it offered the starving multitudes, the first expeditionary force had transported him back to their point of origin. On the parallel Earth he had seen what made the colonization of a place like Deathlands so appealing and so necessary. Shadow World was a planet stripped clean of resources.
At the top of the teeming human population of 100 billion were the CEOs of FIVE, the ruling corporate conglomerate, and their whitecoat minions; at the bottom, in the sprawling underground ghetto known as Gloomtown, the vast, expendable segment of the population was reduced to eating pulverized rock disguised as fast food. While the masses slowly wasted away from a lack of calories, the toxic side effects of “Beefie Cheesies” and “Tater Cheesies” drove them homicidally insane.
A bioengineered agrobacteria, touted as the solution to the global food crisis, had run amok, the resulting Slime Zone threatening to carpet the entire planet in green slunk. In order to slow the growth of the unemployable classes, the one-world-government’s Population Control Service had released a flesh-eating bioweapon into the environment, and like the agrobacteria, the self-replicating carniphages had promptly taken root in the megalopolis. They bloomed at random and picked clean the bones of anyone who didn’t reach cover in time.
What the Shadow Earthlings had done to themselves, to their own world, Ryan knew they were hell-bound to do elsewhere.
Big Mike lowered the nearly empty bottle and belched resonantly. “The cockroaches are attacking the nearby villes and sweeping up all comers,” he said. “Anyone who can hoist a chunk of ore they’re dumping at Slake City’s Ground Zero. The folks who can’t do a lick of work, the too-young and too-old, they just slice into chunks with their tribarrels. They’re leaving the villes empty except for the buzzards. And the buzzards are having a grand old time.”
The battle—so desperate, so hard won—wasn’t over after all.
Ryan read the grim faces of his companions. He saw anger and disbelief, his own churning emotions reflected back at him. Krysty’s beautiful green eyes flashed with something even darker, more primitive—savage hatred. And she had just cause. To ensure the survival of their kind, the she-hes had stolen his seed, not from his loins but from Krysty, violating her like she was a barnyard animal.
J.B. broke the stunned silence. “How many wags and aircraft?” he asked.
“They used three wags where I got scooped up, south of Slake City, over in Burrville off old Highway 24 near Fish Lake. Nuke-powered wags, high speed, with wheels and tires as tall as a man, and invisible-armored like the battlesuits against bullets. I saw one of their flying machines in action—a gunship. It lasered the shit out of a stick-and-mud hut where some of the folks were trying to hold off the ground attack. Lit it up in a green flash. Three seconds later all four walls collapsed and the roof dropped to the ground. Raised a huge cloud of dust. Nobody came out of there alive. After that, the rest of the people stopped fighting back. They just gave up and let themselves be taken prisoner.”
“How many she-hes are there?” Ryan said.
“Don’t know for sure,” Big Mike said. “I saw mebbe nine or ten, but there could be a few more. Hard to say because you can’t tell ’em apart in those cockroach suits. When they come and go, you could be counting some of them more than once.”
Ryan scratched the back of his neck. Just looking at the bastard made his skin crawl, and his trigger finger itch. There was no telling how many innocent folks Big Mike had steered to gruesome slow deaths in the mines. And now he was confiding in the companions like they were old running buddies. Like he held no lingering hard feelings for their kicking his butt until he could barely breathe. Like they were suddenly, miraculously all on the same side. As distasteful as that prospect was, the con man had information they badly needed.
“How long ago were you taken?” Ryan said.
“Twelve days,” Big Mike replied. “I was getting busy in a back room of the Burrville gaudy house. Caught with my pants down, you might say…” Behind the dirt mask, his eyes gleamed at the recollection.
“Just tell us what happened,” Ryan said, trying to avert a digression into erotic tall tales.
“Blasters started popping off all around the perimeter berm,” Big Mike told them. “Ten-foot-high dirt-and-rock wall meant nothing to those cockroach wags. They drove right up and over it. When I saw that I knew who was attacking us, and there wasn’t any point in wasting ammo on them. It was time to head for the hills. But we were already overrun, with no way out.
“After the gunship leveled the mud hut, I surrendered along with the others. The cockroaches lined us up, about thirty in all, and put a laser handcuff on everyone’s wrist. They didn’t have enough cuffs to do both hands and both feet. They ordered us to collect all the pieces of lasered-up bodies and pile them in a heap. The folks who refused to touch the corpses got their hands whacked off, then and there. Afterward the cockroaches clamped the dropped cuff on their other wrist.”
Ryan frowned. He and the others had worn those manacles. They were designed not to be a hindrance to hard labor. The bracelets of silver-colored plasteel weren’t connected by lengths of chain. The constant threat of losing something vital was enough to keep the slaves hobbled and compliant.
“Picking up the still warm, cut-up pieces of their relatives broke them folks’ spirit,” Big Mike said. “After that, they were like walking dead.”
“All except you,” Krysty said.
“Weren’t none of my kin, now were they?” Big Mike said. “When I tried to talk to the cockroaches, explain how I used to work for them, one of them recognized me. That’s how I know it was the same she-hes as before. What I’d done for them in the past didn’t buy me any slack, though. She-he said I had one good hand and two good legs, I could move nuke ore until I croaked. That’s all I was good for.
“Cockroaches trucked us to Slake City in the backs of the wags. About 150 miles, a four-hour ride with no food, just a little water. Took us to the same base on the edge of the nukeglass, only this time it looked a lot different. There were big blast craters everywhere—wags, semitrailers and tractors, gyroplanes, the black domes and tubular walkways all blown to shit. Somebody really did a job on their equipment stash while they were gone. Used high explosive and lots of it.”
“Given your predicament,” Doc said, “how did you manage to escape?”
Ryan had been on the verge of asking a variant of the same question: “Whose back did you stab to get away?”
“The other prisoners didn’t know what was coming, but I sure did,” Big Mike replied. “I told them about the mines. Made ’em see that if we were going to make a move to escape we had to do it before they started marching us across the glass.”
“They weren’t afraid of losing their hands to the cuffs?” Mildred said.
“They were afraid, all right, but they were a lot more afraid of dying. If I was willing to take the chance, seeing as I only had the one hand left, they knew I wasn’t kidding about what went on at Ground Zero.”
A steady, low buzzing sound behind them made Ryan half turn. A swarm of fat black flies had discovered the coyote corpses. The scent of spilled blood and guts was riding on the breeze.
“Everyone made a break for it at once,” Big Mike said, “heading off in different directions. In the confusion me and a few others got past the base perimeter. Of course as soon as the she-hes saw what was happening they triggered the laser cuffs. All the prisoners lost a hand, including me. It hurt like a son of a bitch, but since there wasn’t any bleeding it didn’t slow us down. We kept running
fast as we could.
“I don’t know what the maximum range of those tribarrels is, but I’ll tell you this—they were cooking hearts and lungs at better than half a mile. And when those green beams hit rocks, they explode ’em like frag grens. One old boy running ahead of me was hit in the side of the head by some rock shrap, and when he slowed down he got a hole burned through his back and out the other side. Almost cut him in two. The she-hes didn’t come after the rest of us, though. Mebbe they figured five one-handed slaves weren’t worth chasing down with wags and aircraft. We drove ourselves hard, following the roadbed of old 84 northwest, trying to get as far away as we could.”
“How long ago was that?” Dix asked.
“We were six days getting here on foot,” Big Mike said. “Lived off rattlesnakes and lizards mostly. Yesterday we made it to the south side of the Snake River. That’s when things turned triple ugly again. There’s a highway bridge still standing across the river, two low spans, side by side. We should have cut cross-country, gone downstream and tried to raft or swim across, but we didn’t know what the heck we were getting into. We were just following old 84. Halfway across the span these coldhearts with white-painted faces like ghosts come after us, yelling and waving blasters. Turns out, it’s a rad-blasted toll bridge. Nobody crosses without paying something to the baron. Burning Man is what he calls himself.”
“Never heard of him,” Ryan said.
“Me, neither,” Big Mike said, “but I hadn’t been this far north in years. In addition to the war paint, the crazy fucker wears a flamethrower strapped to this back. He isn’t shy about using it, either.”
“A strange weapon to be hauling around,” Ryan said. “Got to be worthless outside fifty yards.”
“Not to mention being a waste of good wag fuel,” J.B. added.
“Take it from me,” Big Mike said, “inside fifty yards that hellfire contraption is nothing you want to mess with. Past that distance his sec men take care of business with bolt-action longblasters.
“Burning Man wanted to collect his toll from us, but we had nothing to give him except cold, cooked snake. When he saw our stumps, everything changed. Right away, he wanted to know how we lost our hands. He was real what you might call ‘insistent,’ waving that flamethrower nozzle in our faces. A couple of the boys panicked. Couldn’t blame them, really. The smell of gas was enough to knock you down. Seeing the baron and that weapon of his, even a triple-stupe droolie could figure out what made all the great big, blackened grease spots on the bridge deck. Our two boys broke ranks and dashed for the other shore. Then we were all running to save our hides. That’s when Burning Man cut loose with his pride and joy. He set three of us on fire. One jumped in the river to put out the flames. The others were still alive, thrashing and burning on the deck, when me and that poor bastard over there, what’s left of him, made it through the black smoke to the far side.
“Baron’s sec men chased us out here into this waste. That’s who I thought you were. They didn’t waste ammo potshotting, trying to pick us off. Thought they could run us down, maybe. They chased us for the better part of half a day, but we lost ’em in the lava field. Either that or they just got tired of playing the game. Figured being this deep in the badlands would finish us off. It almost did.”
The buzz of the flies grew louder.
Krysty let out a yelp and slapped her bare forearm, leaving a gob of flattened bug and a smear of bright blood. “We need to get the butchering done and get out of here,” she said. “These bastards are biting chunks.”
Chapter Three
Ryan swung his panga in a tight, downward arc and the heavy blade chopped through the ball joint of the coyote’s skinned-out hip. He averted his face as he struck the blow, this to keep from being hit by flying gore. Normally, the companions would have throat-slit and strung up the carcasses to let them bleed out, but they had a lot more ground to cover before sundown, and lingering in the collapsed lava dome for long wasn’t an option. The aroma of slaughtered coyotes was certain to draw buzzards, whose high-altitude circling would in turn attract other large predators. And there was a good chance the baron’s sec men were still tracking the pair of grease spots that got away.
Using the razor edge of the panga, Ryan cut into the still-warm flesh, slicing through the inside of the thigh, making sure he didn’t nick the musk gland near the base of the tail. Squadrons of black flies buzzed around his head. They landed on his bare hands and forearms, lapping up the red splatter. There was plenty of it to go around—no need to bite into him to get a meal.
Bloody-fingered, he tossed the separated haunch onto the pile he’d made in the shade of a rock slab. Under his sleeveless black T-shirt, beads of sweat dripped from the sides of his chest and along the middle of his spine. They trickled around his eyepatch and rolled down his cheek. To his left, Mildred and Krysty were dragging yet another 150-pound, limp coyote corpse over to J.B. and Jak for skinning. They were selecting animals for butchering that hadn’t been gutshot. Exploded bowel contents tainted the flesh even worse than butt-gland musk.
Ryan watched J.B. and Jak set to work on the fresh carcass. They had the skinning down to a science. After making incisions above the rear feet, they cut the pelt away from the lower legs. Then Jak held the back paws pinned while J.B. used brute strength to peel the animal’s entire skin forward on the torso, turning it inside out as he went, covering the mutie orange head with inverted hide. J.B. stopped peeling back the skin at the middle of the rib cage. There was no reason for them to skin the whole carcass as most of the meat was in the hindquarters. For the same reason, there was no point in gutting the coyotes, either.
Doc kept an eye on the crater’s rim through the Steyr’s scope, watching for signs of unwanted company, animal or human. The newcomer sat in a spot of shade beside him, fanning away the flies with his prosthetic hand.
“When we get on up to Meridianville,” Big Mike said in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “we’re gonna be treated like nukin’ barons. It’s the biggest settlement left on that stretch of the Snake. Busted dams on nukeday washed away old Boise, and Twin Falls took a full-on groundburst—there’s nothing left of it but a glow-in-the-dark skeleton. Haven’t been to Meridianville for a long time, but I know a lot of folks there, and they all owe me.”
When no one responded to the boast, the big man pressed on. “Me and the whoremaster go way back,” he said. “I used to be his gaudy’s number-one scout. Grew up in the business, you could say. I traveled the hellscape sniffing out fresh talent for his stable. You know, the daughters of dirt farmers who wanted something more out of life than working their fingers to the bone and turning old before their time. I’d stop by their plot for a cup of water or to ask directions and take the lay of the land, see if they had any female younguns running loose. I could tell by the look in their eyes which girls were ripe for what I was offering, when they wanted some fun and frolic while they still had all their teeth. As soon as their mamas and papas suspicioned I was up to no good they run me off, but by then I’d already talked the talent into meeting me later on in the woods.
“Sometimes I had the whole dirt-farm brood out there, naked as jaybirds, lined up on their backs in the grass, waiting their turn. I’d give ’em all a full, ten-round tryout, and if they had the knack and were eager to learn new tricks, I’d sneak ’em away from their farm after everyone else went to bed. Take ’em on over to Meridianville to get broke in good and proper by the gaudy master and his sec crew. Got top jack per tail as my bounty. Those were the days.”
Big Mike reached over and gave Doc a nudge with his prosthesis. “How about you, old-timer? You look like you seen the world and then some. Ever done gaudy scouting? I tell you it’s the best damn job in the hellscape.”
“So I have heard,” Doc said without enthusiasm. “Despite the obvious compensations, it does seem to require rather a lot of repetitive effort.”
Big Mike paid no attention to Doc’s reply. Ryan reckoned he’d asked the q
uestion just so he could catch his breath.
“Trouble was,” Big Mike went on, “I was so good at stealing away younguns that pretty soon I wore out my welcome. Sod monkeys would see me coming down the path and they’d go straight for their blasters. No warning shouts, no warning shots. They just opened fire. Weren’t trying to wound me, either. They aimed at my head.
“In the end I had to travel so far from the gaudy to find homesteads where they didn’t know me that it wasn’t worth the time and trouble of hauling the little sluts back. Got to feed and water them the whole way, you know, and worst of all, you got to listen to them talk. Nearly broke my heart to give up that job, but things always seem to change, and for the worse, don’t they?”
Ryan turned the coyote carcass to give himself a better attack angle on the surviving hip joint. He was irked by the bastard’s buoyant tone, like he thought the companions were going to swallow his line of crap, adopt him as one of their own and nursemaid him from here on.
Sure, in order to get along they had taken up the causes of other helpless victims in the past, and put their lives on the line in the process, but the people they’d helped weren’t accomplices to—and profiteers in—slavery and mass murder. The people they’d helped had done nothing to deserve the injuries they’d received, or the mortal danger they’d been put in. Ryan felt no moral responsibility for the care and safety of the likes of Mike the Drunkard, but he was thankful they hadn’t chilled him the last time they’d met. If they had, chances were they would have learned about the she-hes too late to do anything about it.
