by James Axler
Instinctively Ryan guessed that these people were the "trackies" that the young woman had mentioned earlier. But they surely weren't going to be any help against Zimyanin and his sec guards.
There were about a dozen of them, and most of them seemed to have mainly male characteristics. But even that wasn't very certain.
What was certain was that they were among the most bizarre muties that Ryan had ever seen.
Not one of them stood taller than five feet, with a couple barely making four feet. All of them were stockily built, wearing dripping layers of what looked like sacking. Most had long spears, some with multiple points, like tridents, and every one seemed to have a knife, sheathed or drawn.
But it was their heads that had caught Ryan's attention in that one snatched look.
Most were uncovered, showing bald skulls, with only a few strands of stringy hair stretched across them. The ears were peculiarly large, farther back on the head than usual. Their noses were simply gaping slits in the front of their faces, with threads of slimy mucus dripping from them. Mouths hung open, lipless, revealing pallid gums and uneven rows of ragged, broken teeth.
At a glimpse, it seemed to Ryan that their eyes were lidless. They protruded from their sockets, goggling around the quay for their prey. Their skin was deathly white, with an iridescent tone of green, like rotting meat.
Ryan sensed that the young woman was about to speak, and quickly laid his hand across her mouth, turning to stare intently at her, shaking his head. He put the barrel of the SIG-Sauer to his own lips to accentuate the need for silence.
Against the background of the river's pounding, it was difficult to hear anything else. Flattened against the rock wall, Ryan was all too aware that the trackies could be creeping up on them. They could be only inches away.
Finger on the trigger, he peeked around the corner of the tunnel again.
The group was motionless, gathered near the net, staring out into the foaming water. One of them pointed with its spear, its mouth moving as it gabbled a few words. Ryan's uneasy guess was that they'd spotted the damage to the coils and were able to see that it had been done with a knife. He also began to suspect that the unusual eyes and ears might well indicate peculiarly exaggerated hunting skills, essential in the cold stone arteries below the mountains.
Kate stared up at him, seeking some clue as to what was going on. But she had enough sense not to try to look for herself.
Ryan lowered his mouth and whispered into her ear. "Think they got double-hearing and dark-seeing. Can't spot no blasters. Got be real quiet."
She nodded.
He risked a third look.
They were about twenty yards away, and the light was extremely poor. But the fractional movement of his head around the rock was enough to catch the eyes of one of the muties.
The damage to their nets had already made them suspicious, and they were all peering about. There was a cry of anger and triumph from the trackie that had spotted Ryan, and the horde began to move toward the hiding couple.
They ran with a curious, flat-footed shuffling movement, rocking at the hips like plump women. They waved their spears threateningly.
"Back in the tunnel," Ryan said.
He led Kate into the deeper darkness, finding a passage that seemed to parallel the river. Less than fifty paces along there was a cutoff to the left, which he took.
"Fireblast!"
They stood together on the quay, now deserted.
"Where are they?"
Ryan looked behind, teeth bared in anger, frustrated by the surging roar of the tumbling river. He didn't expect any fight to be fair, but he didn't like the way the trackies were holding almost all of the cards.
"Might be a mess more of them," Kate said.
"Probably are. Don't much like the idea of picking around in these tunnels with those goggle-eyed sons of bitches waiting around every corner. Rather trust us to the river again."
The brief surge of adrenaline had fought away the bitter cold that was seeping through his body with a fatal ease. Now, standing still, Ryan realized that time was running out for them.
He looked both ways, but the jetty was completely empty and bare, except for a low wall of fallen rock, no more than two feet high, right at the very downstream end of the quay.
THE FIRST OF THE TRACKIES padded out onto the leveled strip of wet stone, its bubble eyes looking both ways.
"Gone! "it wailed.
It banged the haft of its triple-tined spear on the rock, making it ring and echo. The rest of the muties did the same, snarling in frustration.
"In water," one of them said, its pendulous breasts swinging beneath the filthy sacking.
"In water," the leader repeated, shaking its head from side to side.
"Water, water, water…" they chorused.
"Black water takes and black water gives!" the leading trackie shrieked.
They began a rhythmic stamping, feet slapping on the rock, back and forth.
Behind the tumbled boulders, Ryan and Kate pressed together low, backs against the stones. The SIG-Sauer was drawn and ready while the young woman gripped Ryan's honed panga.
"Take and give. Take and give!" The chanting went on, louder and louder, finally beginning to fade away, the noise of the feet also quietening.
Still Ryan and Kate kept motionless, not daring to risk a glance along the quay.
At last there was silence.
He felt the girl stirring and laid a warning hand on her arm.
The river, racing by only a yard away from them, was making enough sound to cover any approach by the muties. Ryan waited, counting his own pulse, reaching four hundred before he decided to chance a move.
He shifted sideways, managing to keep under cover, and cautiously lifted his head above the barrier.
To see a crude iron spear thrusting straight at his face.
Chapter Twenty-One
THERE WASN'T EVEN time to squeeze the trigger on the blaster. All Ryan's reflexes allowed him to do was to push the automatic pistol at the jabbing spear, getting the barrel between two of the prongs, deflecting the thrust away from his face.
His brief look at the trackies had led Ryan to figure them for physical weaklings, which made the demonic power behind the attack even more disconcerting.
The trackie pushed with such force that Ryan was barely able to hold him off, the spear lunging in, knocking him backward. Kate yelped as Ryan and the mutie toppled into her, squeezing her into the narrow space at the extreme end of the jetty, inches from the river.
The pistol was stuck between the points of the trident, twisting Ryan's wrist sideways, making him gasp with pain.
"Bastard norm!" the trackie shrieked, its goggling face pressed close to Ryan's. Its breath was foul, stinking of ancient, rank fish. Its free hand, slightly webbed, clawed toward the man's eye.
"Bastard mutie," Ryan retorted, kicking out and upward, feeling the satisfying thud of the steel-toed combat boots grinding into the creature's groin.
The next few seconds held the familiar insanity of a lethal fight.
Ryan grabbed at the trackie's left hand, ripping the coarse cloth of the sleeve, feeling the sinewy strength of the corded muscles. It spit at him, slimy saliva running down his cheek.
There was a flash of bright metal, and he felt the whisper of sliced air against his skin. The mutie jerked in his grasp, and he saw its face open like a peeled orange. The white skin and flesh parted under the hacking blow from the cleaver. Its right eye was cut clean in half, bursting into a pinkish jelly.
"Got him!" Kate gasped, heaving the eighteen-inch steel blade clear of the splintered cheekbone.
"Watch out for others," Ryan panted.
The trackie had rolled sideways, letting go of its long spear, both its hands reaching toward its ruined face.
Not wanting to waste bullets, Ryan drew his own thin-bladed skinning knife. The wounded mutie was turned away from him, crouched over, showing the back of its neck.
&nbs
p; It was the easiest of instant kills for an experienced knife man.
Ryan picked his spot, precisely where the skull joined the spine, and thrust the narrow blade in as hard as he could. Sliding the delicate point perfectly into the narrow gap, severing the spinal cord and killing the trackie instantly. To make sure, Ryan jerked his wrist from side to side as he withdrew the knife, but the albino creature was already down and done for.
In its last dying spasm, it kicked the spear toward the edge of the jetty and the dark water.
Ryan dived for it, managing to free the blaster, hefting the trident as he turned and straightened.
Kate was battling two more of the trackies, weaving a pattern of whirling steel in front of herself, hacking at the spears as they came lunging toward her.
Though the balance of the weapon was less than perfect, Ryan hurled his trident at the nearest of the trackies. It caught the creature through the wrinkled throat, sending it staggering back, where it finally slipped sideways and vanished into the foaming water. The haft of the spear rose for a moment, then disappeared.
Out of the corner of his eye Ryan saw the young woman open a great gash across the chest of the trackie that was attacking her. Blood gushed out, pouring onto the jetty. For a moment he had the illusion that the steaming liquid was glowing in the semi-darkness.
The remaining nine muties backed off, chattering to one another in an incomprehensible gibberish. Ryan had sheathed his flensing knife and now leveled the blaster at the group. Half a dozen rounds would chill most of them and scatter the rest, but it might also bring the rest of the subterranean tribe flooding from the tunnels. He didn't have that much ammo to spare.
"Do it," Kate panted.
"Too late."
"Why?"
"Look." He pointed at the trackies with the 9 mm automatic.
One of them had broken from the huddle and scampered off in its flat-footed waddle, down one of the side tunnels.
"Fetching reinforcements?"
"Got to be."
"What do we do, Ryan?"
"Looks like we go swimming again. We're on the right side of the netting. Downstream of it."
"No," she said with a firm shake of her head.
"You got a better idea?"
"No."
SOMEHOW THE WATER didn't seem quite as cold as before. Ryan had a suspicion that this was because they were both sinking fast into the welcoming arms of hypothermia.
He took the panga from Kate and sheathed it safely, bolstering the SIG-Sauer. Then, keeping a watchful eye on the trackies, Ryan slid into the river, hanging for a moment on to one of the ancient iron rings. Kate joined him, and they let the current bear them away from the torch-lit quay.
One of the muties shrilled out a cry and hurled its spear at them, but it missed by several feet.
By then the freezing water was carrying them out of range, into the mouth of another dark overhang and into a tunnel of pitch blackness.
To try to keep them together Ryan had hastily ripped a length of sacking off the clothes of one of the trackie corpses and they each clung to one end of it.
Now the flow was slower, the walls and roof of the tunnel feeling wider and higher. But his body was growing stiff with cold, the muscles reluctant to work to keep him afloat. There was a temptation to close his eyes and slide painlessly beneath the surface.
His legs were kicking more slowly; his arm pulled at the water with less and less strength.
Ryan was suddenly walking along a high trail, with a towering escarpment of orange rock, sunlit, to his right. A heather-covered hillside sloping gently toward an amethyst lake far off on his left, and ahead of him walked a young boy with black, curly hair, hand in hand with a tall, attractive woman whose hair blazed like living fire. Krysty and Dean, Ryan thought. His mouth and nose filled with the freezing river, and he coughed and spluttered back to a kind of consciousness.
Kate was close by him, pummeling his back with her free hand, screaming at him.
"Don't you fucking dare die, you selfish bastard! Not without me."
HE SAW THE LIGHT FIRST.
They seemed to have been moving in slow, massive loops for an eternity. Ryan's failing brain had already wondered whether they were miles below the valley, driving ever downward toward the core of the earth itself.
Kate had passed out and he was hanging on to her as best he could, struggling to keep her face above the water. That was how he'd realized there was light—he looked down and was able to see the white blur of her face.
"Light," he croaked.
Now they were accelerating, gathering speed, the glistening walls of smooth rock racing by them, faster and faster.
The light grew brighter, gaining from the prick of a pin in a black sheet to a semicircle that seemed dazzling after the long immersion in the netherworld.
The noise was there again, a distant roar, like thunder.
Ryan wondered, rather distantly, whether he should try to do something to check their progress.
But the idea was…
"Farfetched," he muttered through a mouthful of spray. He remembered that Doc used to say that something farfetched was "like a bucket of shit from China."
It made him grin.
Ryan was still grinning as he and Kate shot from the opening in the mountainside and plunged out into the afternoon sunshine, riding a plume of rainbowed spray that plummeted nearly a hundred feet into a shining pool.
It lay near the head of the main valley, off a side canyon, surrounded by spruce and pinon pines. A thin covering of snow topped the cropped turf all around.
Circling on a frail thermal, way above the water, a falcon looked down from hooded eyes, considering whether there might be good eating below. The two bodies both floated facedown, motionless in the small lake, as the ripples gradually subsided back into stillness.
DEEP, DEEP within the heart of the mountains around the pool, the shredded corpse of a young male trackie lay on the deserted jetty. One of its protruding eyes had been torn from the socket and the other stared blankly at the cave roof. Its left arm had been ripped away, and its intestines tumbled in yellow loops around the blood-speckled feet.
The fourth of the killer sec droids stood over the body, at the edge of the underground river. Its ruby eyes glowed in the dim light as it stared intently at the rushing water, watching it vanish into the distant tunnel.
After nearly a minute it turned around and moved slowly away into one of the maze of adjoining passages.
Chapter Twenty-Two
MAJOR-COMMISSAR GREGORI ZIMYANIN was carrying out the morning examination of his demesne. The weather was warmer than it had been for several days, the thermometer outside the main office of the sulfur mines rising very close to the freezing point. There had been a chem storm during the small hours, with jagged streaks of purple lightning followed by a brief, torrential downpour, which had raised the level of the main river by several inches.
One of the lowest levels of the mine had become flooded, meaning that several of the working shifts had to form a chain, bailing out the stinking, yellow water by hand.
A senior overseer had suggested that excavation could resume once the level dropped below a man's knees. Zimyanin had smiled gently and suggested that perhaps it could begin again once the water was less than waist deep.
A "suggestion" from the bald Russian was something like a message from the Almighty, hewn from granite. Three of the older workers had drowned in the first hour, but the sodden corpses had been quickly removed before Zimyanin came around on his tour of inspection.
Since he'd taken over the mining complex, the Russian had managed to improve production, mainly by bringing in ruthless sec guards to drive the slave laborers on.
But the linked chambers, tunnels and shafts were still chaotically undermechanized. A few gas engines powered hoists and elevators, but virtually everything in the mines was still man- and woman-powered.
If a worker in a medieval sulfur mine had been mirac
ulously transported to Zimyanin's complex, he'd have found very little changed: a bird's nest of rickety wooden ladders held together by frayed lengths of rope; smoking oil lamps that gave a frail yellow light, leaving great lakes of black shadow; narrow passages where a man could hardly stand upright that linked up with other equally stooped tunnels.
To reach the main working areas from the entrances in the valley floor could take more than half an hour, involving as many as twenty ladders. Descending into foul air and a slippery ocher ooze.
Each work period lasted twelve hours. Food was dragged down in iron pots, so that it was as cold as stone by the time most workers received it. Two ladles of cornmeal mush and a hunk of bread were served up halfway through the shift. Rusting oil drums were filled with water and placed at the end of each main gallery in the mine. But within a few minutes a scum of yellow sulfur powder would form on its top, thickening during the twelve hours.
Permission to drink was needed from the armed sec men who patrolled the mine, each of them only working below ground for three hours at a spell.
Bodily functions were exercised in the darker corners of the mine.
Dean Cawdor had been in worse places in his young life.
The survival skills that he'd learned in ducking and dodging were invaluable in the depths of Zimyanin's mine.
Even in the short time that he'd been a prisoner in the freezing north, the boy had learned what could and couldn't be done.
Being small and slight, he could weave his way through the midnight crevices, slipping away from the attention of the guards and shepherding his energy by digging and carrying as little as possible.
Dean also contrived to get to the food first, stuffing himself with the tasteless gruel. He watched other slave workers, not used to the hardship, turning their noses up at the food. By the time hunger drove them to accept the gray sludge, they'd already become weakened.
And they'd soon be dead.
"I HOPE the inclement weather has not meant hardship for the workers," Zimyanin said, pausing to wipe the yellow muck from his high leather boots.
