Doom Helix

by James Axler

  Dr. Huth was a normal, genetic male, and that was part of the problem. Biologically, evolutionarily, he was a dead-ender—and he knew it.

  As much as the commander loathed the sight of him, he was the only whitecoat they had, and at this point the only whitecoat they were ever likely to find. Whether his scientific expertise was better than none at all, whether it was worth enduring his continued presence, time would tell.

  The seated, mama stickie threw back her head and unleashed a bloodcurdling scream. Neck cords standing out, arms locked rigid, heels frantically drummed on the thermoglass. The infant hung on to one breast as the already bloated belly visibly inflated, the skin stretching and stretching until it shined like polished yellow silk. Then the epidermis began to split: a line of bright green along the central seam of stomach muscles. Like the stickie was about to give birth.

  Caesarian.

  “Time has run out,” Dr. Huth said.

  “Burn it,” Auriel said. “Do it now.”

  The whitecoat reached a gauntleted hand toward a pair of switches set in the nukeglass beside the cell’s opening. One of the switches was a button; the other was protected by a safety cover. He flipped back the cover, exposing a red toggle.

  Auriel quickly shifted her visor out of infrared mode to keep from being blinded.

  Inside the cell, along the left-hand wall stood three silver-metallic canisters. Hoses ran from the valves on the top of tanks to a rack of stubby nozzles spaced at floor level, knee level and waist level, and they were angled to cover the entire interior, wall to wall, floor to ceiling.

  When Dr. Huth hit the switch, mama stickie’s cry of agony was accompanied by the mechanical clack-clack-clack of the ignition system. The roar of combustion that followed was as loud as a gyro turbine. Its blast of heat penetrated the force field, and slammed the front of Auriel’s battlesuit, making her take a reflexive step backward. Inside the cell, temperatures in excess of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit evaporated mutant flesh explosively; the stripped skeletons—one large, one tiny—glowed red for a fraction of an instant, then dissolved. In two seconds mama and baby stickie were reduced to smoke.

  Because of its heat-transfer properties, the thermoglass quickly cooled. Auriel surveyed the enclosed space with infrared.

  Nothing was left but a deposit of fine ash on the floor and the opposite wall.

  No specters.

  Farther down the dusty dark of the mine tunnel, the other endospore-implanted stickies began screaming and throwing themselves at their cells’ force fields. Like they instinctively knew what had happened even though they couldn’t see it, like they were mourning the loss of loved ones.

  Which was odd.

  As far as Auriel knew, stickies didn’t even have names.

  Chapter Six

  Ryan stumbled over the broken ground, his hands tied in front of him, forty pounds of ammo slapping against his sweat-soaked back. Although seven hours had passed since the surprise attack, his good right eye still wept and it burned like it had been sprayed with wag-battery acid. The inside of his nose and his throat were likewise on fire, and his lungs ached every time he coughed or drew a deep breath.

  Similarly bound and burdened, his five companions staggered in a line ahead of him, into the blast furnace heat of the morning.

  A dozen armed men with white-painted faces and hair braided in long, single plaits down the middle of their backs herded them along at a rapid pace. The whitefaces moved effortlessly. They seemed to float over the ankle-breaking obstacles of the lava field, and their bootfalls made no sound. Not only had they failed to answer any of the companions’ questions since the attack, but they also hadn’t spoken a word to one another that Ryan had heard. They communicated with quick touches, nods and hand gestures, giving absolutely nothing away—the sign of a disciplined, seasoned fighting unit. Despite the exertion of the trek and the blazing sun, the whitefaces weren’t sweating. And they didn’t stop to drink; they didn’t even carry their own water with them.

  The leader of their captors, a man slightly taller and broader across the shoulders than the others, with a distinctly blocky head, had confiscated Doc’s sword stick. Having discovered the hidden rapier blade, he kept unsheathing it and gleefully waving it about, amused by the gadgetry. The companions’ blasters had been divvied up, as had all their meager personal possessions. One of the attackers proudly wore Doc’s LeMat and its hand-tooled Mexican holster strapped around his waist. Another had taken J.B.’s prized fedora for his own.

  The whitefaces all seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  And with good reason. Their victory was complete.

  They had tracked the companions over the rubble field of the volcanic plain, through a windy, moonless night, and taken them prisoner without firing a blaster shot or sustaining as much as a scratch.

  While the companions lay sleeping in the cave chamber, the bastards had dropped gas grens down the campfire vent. There had been no warning because the sentries, J.B. and Jak, had already been taken out. Ryan, Krysty, Mildred and Doc were jolted awake by detonating grens and boiling CS smoke. As the caustic clouds enveloped them, they were blinded by tears and unable to breathe. Somewhere off in the smoke, Big Mike shrieked in terror like a little girl.

  Attackers in gas masks had rushed them from both cave entrances at once. In the confusion of jumbled bodies and violent movement, Ryan couldn’t be sure who he was punching and kicking, and he couldn’t open fire with his SIG in the confines of the chamber without risking hitting the others, either point-blank or with ricochets. Before he and the companions could recover and regroup they were overrun, disarmed, bludgeoned, battered and booted toward the sinkhole entrance of the cave.

  Weeping and gasping for air, they stumbled out into the cold night, where they were forced onto their knees. In the starlight, through his streaming tears, Ryan could just make out J.B. and Jak, already tied up, sitting hunched on the ground. Beside him, Big Mike choked and gagged. Then, with a sea-lion roar, he had projectile-vomited every scrap of his greasy, mutie-flesh dinner.

  The whitefaces had quickly bound their hands, too, all except for Big Mike, who, of course, had no hands to bind. Still in gas masks, half of the attackers had reentered the cave. They came out carrying the rest of the companions’ gear and piled it on the ground.

  Ryan and the others had waited for hours huddled together in the middle of the sinkhole, shivering against the wind. The whitefaces didn’t seem to notice the chill or their prisoners’ racking fits of coughing. They slept in shifts through the night, curled up on the bare plates of lava.

  The first rays of daylight had revealed the companions’ blood-encrusted noses, split lips and bruised faces. J.B. and Jak had taken the worst of it by far—what looked like repeated club or gun-butt blows to their heads.

  From J.B.’s and Jak’s expressions, Ryan had realized they were still kicking themselves over what they had allowed to happen. They weren’t alone; Ryan was kicking himself, too. He couldn’t help but think that if he’d circled wider around the companions’ flank on the afternoon recces, that if he’d waited longer on high ground before circling back, he might have seen the whitefaces’ dust in the distance, or caught a flash of sun on naked metal. Or if they had set out more sentries, somebody could have at least gotten off a warning shot.

  Like J.B. and Jak, like the other companions, Ryan had gone to sleep confident that they’d taken appropriate precautions under the circumstances; that they were, in fact, being extra-careful, all things considered.

  The problem was, they had never faced a human enemy with anything close to this level of field skill—tracking ability, night vision, footspeed, stealth, knowledge of terrain—so there was no way to anticipate the danger they faced.

  What was done was done.

  If they were going to survive the stunning defeat, they had to learn whatever they could from it, bank their anger and focus all their attention on turning the tables and making a timely escape.

  S
hortly after dawn, the whitefaces had given them each a swig of the bottled water that was left, loaded them down with backpacks and set them marching southeast, in the direction of the Snake River. The pace would have been brutal even without the extra weight, the broken terrain and the lingering effects of CS gas on their lungs.

  So far, Ryan had seen no wiggle room in their predicament. No opening to exploit. Not with the weight on their backs slowing them, and their hands tied so they couldn’t shrug out of the pack straps. The whitefaces kept their distance, too. And whenever any of them approached their captives up close, they always had at least a half-dozen weapons aimed and unblocked lanes of fire.

  They were obviously well-versed in holding and moving groups of prisoners.

  None of that boded well for making an escape, or for the companions’ future if they didn’t get away. In Ryan’s experience, Deathlanders this accustomed to taking prisoners were usually in the slavery business, either trading them away for jack or jolt, or working them until they dropped dead.

  As he trudged onward, Ryan had to keep glancing down at the ground a few steps ahead, constantly focusing on his footing to keep from falling or twisting an ankle. With his hands tied, he couldn’t swing his arms as he walked, which made balance and forward progress even more difficult. The effects of the long march and the day’s building heat had begun to take their toll on him as well. His thigh muscles had started to spasm, as if they were about to cramp up. And his tongue felt swollen, too big for his mouth.

  Signs of dehydration.

  When the whitefaces finally stopped to give them the last of the water, the sun was at its zenith. There was no shade on the hell-blasted plain. The companions couldn’t sit on the baking black rock, so they stood in their packs, dripping sweat, and gulped what they were given.

  Not enough, Ryan thought as he swallowed the scant mouthful of bathtub-warm backwash. Not nearly enough.

  Krysty was glaring at the whiteface dispensing the refreshments, the one with J.B.’s fedora tipped back jauntily on his head. Half-turning to the others she said, “What’s the point of the white paint? Is it to protect them from sunburn? Or is it supposed to scare us because they look like ghosts?”

  “No paint on hands or arms,” Jak offered.

  A fact that Ryan had noted as well. In daylight their exposed skin was tanned a dark, ruddy brown.

  “They look like Native Americans to me,” Mildred said. “Could the makeup have something to do with the Ghost Dance ritual? I can’t recall the details, but I think it originated somewhere around here in the late nineteenth century.”

  “The Ghost Dancers of my era colored their faces red, not white,” Doc informed her, “with black half-moons decorating their cheeks. Unlike these fellows, they wore red shirts, red-striped leggings and tied dead small animals and birds in their hair. They believed that all the natives who danced the Ghost Dance, no matter the tribe, would be lifted into the sky while the earth swallowed up their enemy, the whites. After which the planet would revert back to its natural state, with new soil, sweet grass, running water, trees, and herds of buffalo and wild horses. Then the dancers and the ghosts of all their ancestors would be returned to the earth to live in peace. It appears what we are looking at is either a bastardization of that original vision, or something entirely unrelated.”

  “Guess the dancing didn’t work, then,” Krysty said.

  “I seem to remember their ghost shirts were supposed to stop bullets, too,” Mildred said.

  “A claim that also proved false,” Doc said. “Based on our location, my guess is these warriors are related to the Bannock-Shoshone. A people whose tragedy was largely forgotten, in part because much of it occurred in the middle of the Civil War, in part because the dominant culture of the day, my own culture sadly, considered their existence nothing more than an impediment to progress and profit.

  “Their reservation, to the south and east of here, had the misfortune of being set along the main supply route to the Montana gold rush. Conflicts between miners and natives ended in the Bear River massacre of 1863. Members of a volunteer infantry regiment killed 250 of 450 Shoshone, including 90 women and children. The women who wouldn’t submit to gang rape by the soldiers were slaughtered, shot or clubbed to death. The heads of their infants were bashed in. Fifteen years later, starvation forced the Bannock off the reservation. After they killed some settlers, a second, full military campaign was launched against them. The fighting ended when Bannock lodges were attacked and all the women and children were killed.”

  “Am I sensing a pattern?” Krysty said.

  “You are,” Mildred said. “It’s called genocide.”

  “Attempted genocide, most certainly,” Doc said. “The tribe endured, albeit greatly reduced in numbers. And if my surmise is correct, they managed to survive the nukecaust as well.”

  “Only now they’re all mute?” Krysty said.

  “It’s been more than a century since nuke day,” Mildred said. “Maybe they don’t speak our language.”

  “Whoever these nukin’ bastards are,” J.B. growled, clearly impatient with both the history lesson and the speculation, “they came out here after big mouth and the one the coyotes ate.” Absent his favorite hat, he had a distinct tan line across the middle of his forehead. Above the line the skin was pink from sunburn, as was his scalp.

  He leaned closer to Ryan and the others and lowered his voice so Big Mike couldn’t overhear him. “That lying pile of crap must mean something to them,” he said. “As far as I can see he’s the only target of opportunity we’ve got. I say we all jump his sorry ass, and threaten to chill him on the spot if they don’t let us go. They’ll understand the sign language if they see me choking the living shit out of him.”

  Ryan frowned. His old friend was grasping at straws, and that wasn’t like him. Maybe J.B. had suffered a mild concussion during the surprise attack? Or maybe it was the combined effect of exhaustion, heat and dehydration? Or maybe he just wanted to get payback, somehow, someway, on someone for the humiliation of being taken prisoner without a shot fired?

  Even though J.B. hadn’t come right out and said “I told you so,” Ryan knew he was damn well thinking it, and that that, too, had to be adding fuel to his fury. No doubt about it, J.B. had been right. If they’d never gone for the look-see, they would have most likely bypassed this fix.

  But being right didn’t change the present circumstances.

  “It won’t work, J.B.,” Ryan said. “They’re not going to let you chill their prize, if that’s what he is. The only reason we’re still alive is they want us to carry the ammo for them. They don’t need all of us to do that, and worse comes to worst, they can always carry it themselves. If you’re right about Big Mike, and you make a grab for him, they’ll shoot you and as many of the rest of us as it takes to get him back.”

  Before J.B. could respond, the whiteface who had liberated his fedora jabbed a longblaster muzzle hard into his kidney, making him groan and take an involuntary, stagger-step forward.

  The signal for all of them to get moving.

  To emphasize the order, the rest of the whiteface crew held their weapons shouldered and aimed, again with clear firing lanes. When the column began to advance, Ryan fell in line behind Krysty and Mildred.

  As they continued southeast, toward the low curve of the horizon, Big Mike dropped back from the front of the file until he was lumbering and puffing right alongside Ryan. His arms were free, and he had no load on his back, but the huckster still had trouble keeping up the pace.

  “We’ve got to find a way to escape before they get us to the river,” he wheezed. “After that it’ll be too late. We’ll never get away from them.”

  When Ryan didn’t immediately respond, Big Mike pressed on. “These whitefaces, you know damn well they aren’t norms,” he said through clenched teeth. “You ever heard of a norm who could follow a trail at night like that, over rocky ground? It must be over a hundred degrees out here, we’re dying of
thirst, and they haven’t broken a sweat or taken a sip of water. I’m telling you they’ve got to be some kind of mutie. The kind that look norm on the outside, but are all mutified inside. Listen to me, Cawdor, we’re nothing but sheep to the slaughter once they get us to the river. I saw their crazy-ass baron up close. I looked into his eyes. He gets his hands on us he’s going to cook us alive, every one of us, sure as hell smells like shit.”

  “Seems to me you’re the only one Burning Man is after,” Ryan said evenly. “Why would he fry the rest of us? Just for a laugh? We’ve got both our hands. We can work for him. After he makes you spill your guts, all you’re going to be good for is flamethrower practice.”

  Big Mike glowered at him from behind his mask of grime, but even with arms free he didn’t have the stones for a direct confrontation. Muttering a string of profanities under his breath, he dropped further back in line until he was well out of Ryan’s sight.

  A lot of what Big Mike said made sense, but no way would Ryan ever admit that to him. Not only was he certain that Big Mike would sell them out in a heartbeat to save his own stinking skin, but in a breakout attempt his 350 pounds would also be so much deadweight, at best rolling cover for them, a bullet sponge. Because of that, it was best to keep him in the dark on their escape plan, or the current lack of same.

  Notwithstanding the comment about the companions’ value as laborers, Ryan knew there was a chance that Burning Man would cook them all for show, for crossing his land, or for something imaginary, and at the first opportunity. He had come across few barons who weren’t by nature murdering bastards.