by James Axler
For a century, Doc Tanner told them, the scientists had stuck to their chosen path with a crazed, religious fervor. As a generation died, the flame burned more brightly. As they bred and interbred, the streak of genetic madness grew broader until all sanity was lost forever.
All that mattered to them was research for Central. And now Doc had found out just where that research was being aimed.
Very simple. Bigger and better methods of total genocide. Ways of wiping the last pitiful survivors of the planet from their fingernail hold on a form of life. As though the slaughter of the long chilling of 2001 hadn't been enough, the scientists of WICSA wanted more.
Doc spoke for a long while, his voice pitched low, drawing the others into the nightmare world he'd accidentally stumbled upon. Once he asked Finn to bring him a glass of water for his dry throat. The rest of the time he just talked.
The scientist operated largely by committee. With their ranks thinning, and with any sense of balance gone forever, they had decided some months ago to test-launch all their new babies into the unknown world beyond the lake. And their arsenal contained all manner of horrific weapons.
Some old-fashioned and conventional.
Some chemical, some biological and some postnuclear in design.
Doc told them that the scientists had perfected a particle beam missile, linked to a rail-gun employing kinetic energy bullets, a missile system, fully integrated, using pulsed laser beam riding and a multifunctional infrared-coherent optical scanner.
The complex was protected from the results of its own toys. Even a high-power electromagnetic pulse that would knock out all conventional electronics and computers wouldn't touch the deeply buried Wizard Island complex.
The scientists were also producing grossly malignant strains of germ culture that could be disseminated by low-yield missiles and used on a fire-and-forget premise. Doc talked about the old Russian-initiated chemical agents, how the scientists had taken them and made them more foul. Particularly there had been research, led by Dr. Tardy, in the uses of tabun and thickened soman.
"The 'dirty' missiles were specifically designed to produce the most fatalities and the highest incidence of terminal cancer in survivors — hundreds of milli-Sieverts pouring out across the ravaged Deathlands.
"I'm not surprised they've developed a successful rail gun," Doc said. "Parallel conducting rails, linked to a direct current. Sliding armature between them that completes the circuit. Plasma-arc materials were always best. Current on. Down one rail and through the armature up the other rail. Acceleration is produced by the Lorentz force. Put the projectile in front of the armature, and it goes with it."
"How fast?" J.B. asked.
"Between fifty and one hundred kilometers per second," Doc replied.
The Armorer laughed at that. "Come on, Doc. That's around three hundred and fifty thousand kilometers an hour. Nothing goes that fast."
"Rail gun does," Doc said simply.
He also told them what Dr. Avian had stammered out to him about some of their germ and drug research. Most of their testing had been on their own breeding stock of muties. One drug, based on an animal anesthetic, had made the victims begin to devour their own bodies. They'd start with their fingers, then pluck their own eyes from the sockets and tear strips of flesh from their own chests and stomachs.
Ryan asked Doc why he wasn't surprised about the success of the scientists with projects like the rail gun.
"They've built on foundations before the long chill. Way back over a hundred years ago, round 1986, the people hereabouts spent a hundred million dollars on rail guns."
The catalog of megadeath and horror went on, voiced in Doc's calm, well-rounded tones. Things that would travel in the air. Some in the water. Some that would come with fire and noise. Some that would come with silent invisibility to coat the skins and eyes of sleeping innocents. The products of one hundred years of the most concentrated work by the scientists — for their beloved Project Eurydice, for the Central they worshipped, blind to the fact that it no longer existed.
"And they aim to release all this? Soon?" Krysty asked when Doc Tanner finished his recital and lay back on his bed with a sigh of exhaustion.
"Next week. That is their plan."
"We'll stop them, won't we, Doc?" Lori asked.
"Indeed we will, light of my life, fire of my loins, sweetness of my heart."
Lori smiled and blushed.
"Just how the fuck do we stop 'em, Doc?" Finn asked, standing up and stretching, moaning as his muscles locked from kneeling on the floor by the old man's bunk bed for too long.
Doc Tanner opened his eyes again. "Kindly allow me to make myself quite clear, ladies and gentlemen. From the drunken mumblings of poor Dr. Avian, who is madder than the craziest of hatters, I have no doubt whatsoever that within the week Dr. Tardy and her comrades will have put their toys out to play. The result will be the end, within less than six months, of all life, not only in Deathlands but throughout the planet."
"You mean people, Doc?" J.B. asked.
"I mean life. Animal and vegetable. There will not even be a speck of bacteria. Earth will be utterly, eternally barren. And that must not happen, even if our own poor lives are pawns in the great game."
"Talk's cheap," Ryan said thoughtfully.
"I am aware of that, my friend. I am also aware that the saying goes on about the price of action being quite colossal."
Ryan glanced at the Armorer. "What d'you think, J.B.? Can we take this place out? It's the strongest redoubt I ever saw."
"May just be the weakest as well," J.B. replied, his glasses reflecting the dim light from the far end of the room.
"How, when and where?" Ryan asked. "That's what the Trader used to say about making a war plan. Not much else matters."
"When is the easiest. Has to be in the next couple of days. We have to spring the kid first."
Ryan nodded his agreement. "Sure, J.B., sure. And where couldn't be simpler. Here. Problem linked to that is how the flying fuck we get out of here after we've done it."
"Got to blow her up," Doc said. The old man looked exhausted, blinking away his tiredness. "Set charges and get out. Way that stammering sot put it, there's enough stuff down here to blow the planet in half. Most's fission, so we won't trigger it in a fire or explosion."
"This place's fucking deep enough to bury anything, isn't it?" Finnegan asked.
"Sure. Only problem is..." Doc Tanner hesitated. "You know this used to be an old volcano. Mount Mazama? When it went up, it left Crater Lake. These scientists— how I hate that word now! — they've dug so deep they must be damnably close to tapping into the old magma chamber under the caldera. Big bang down here and the force hasn't anywhere to go. Except down, mebbe."
"Mountain might go bang," Lori said.
"As usual, my dearest child, in your simple way you have placed your cunning digit upon the core of the question. It might indeed, 'go bang,' as you put it."
Doc fell asleep shortly afterward, with Lori at his side. The other four went to another part of the dormitory to formulate a plan that would enable them to overcome forty or so heavily armed mutie guards and destroy the most sophisticated weapons complex in the history of civilization.
It took them all of twenty minutes.
Finnegan was the most confident. "Those fucking toy blasters they have. Blasters! Couldn't blast their way through a gaudy house blanket."
J.B. was more cautious. "They must work some of the time, Finn."
"One in a fucking hundred, that's all. You won't get better fucking odds in any firefight, I tell you. Easy as hitting a fucking war wag with a Sharps fifty."
Ryan laughed. "Hope you're right. You're too big a target, Finn. That's your trouble." He glanced at the big chron on the wall. "Look. It'll soon be in the red. Let's get some sleep. Big day tomorrow."
Chapter Twenty
Jak Lauren had slept well.
He often dreamed of the old days of childhood, back in the humi
d swamps of Louisiana. His night phantoms were mutie alligators or swampies with blind eyes that floated over the sucking mud, webbed fingers grasping for him as he danced from them with an elusive ease. The albino always relished such dreams, never dreading the demons that rose in them.
This night it had been different.
A couple of times Jak's father had taken him, as a child, into the outskirts of the ruined urban spread that had once been the proud city of New Orleans. It had become a featureless waste, with an occasional spire of twisted metal where a water tower or aerial had stood. There had been great fires, Jak's father had heard from his father's grandfather. Fires that had ravaged anything that had remained after the nuking. Fires that had gone on burning for years, drawing on gases and liquids far beneath the crust of the earth.
The dream had been a little like that.
He had been walking briskly along what was left of an old blacktop highway, its surface cracked and seamed with ridges like waves where the shocks of the missiles had turned stone into a corrugated ribbon. Plants burst in profusion through the ravaged road, but they weren't from Louisiana, though the dream somehow seemed set there.
There was alpine fireweed, stonecrop, bog orchids and purple asters, goldenrod and brown-eyed Susan, all flourishing and bright in a landscape that was predominantly gray and leprous white.
Near Lafayette Jak had known of an age-old cemetery, with angels and graceful ministers of moss-stained stone weeping mournful tears in the damp air.
There they were, all about him, his feet sinking silently into long, cropped turf. Graves, each with its own memorial tablet, bore witness to the name and dates and virtues of the persons who lay buried there. Jak paused to stoop and peer at the nearest stone.
"Jak Lauren," it read. "He died in agony and sleeps forever waking."
The next grave said the same.
And the next.
Next.
A pallid sun cast watery shadows among the tombs, but Jak himself threw no shadow at all. There was a mist weaving about some stunted yew trees, their boles and knobbed branches draped in long fronds of Spanish moss. It was impossible to see more than twenty or thirty yards in any direction, and Jak began to feel he was not alone.
He began to walk faster, picking his way among the graves. Now he was in an older part of the cemetery, where some of the stones had fallen, their jagged edges ready to trip the unwary.
The ground rose and fell, making it difficult to maintain a steady pace. Jak paused several times, staring into the roiling banks of fog seeping all around him. He laid his head to one side, straining to catch any noise. There was a faint rumbling, like a well-laden wag laboring up an incline. And water. The sullen sound of water dropping over cold rock from a great height.
The graves disappeared, and he was on an open hillside, among heather. Tough, wiry roots gripped him by the ankles, and he fell several times. He heard laughter somewhere below him.
Or was it from above?
The air was thin and cold, searing his lungs as he fought for breath. Once, as he fell, he laid his hand upon a nest of tiny, wriggling maggots that squirmed away from him at enormous speed, vanishing into the earth.
A lake became visible through the shifting cushion of fog. A shingled beach, with round, smooth pebbles that rolled under his bare feet, clattering and echoing. The echo carried on even when he stopped running, sounding closer, as though whoever pursued him was gaining.
Or whatever pursued him.
Then, half turning, Jak saw it. Saw them. Tall, lumbering creatures in glittering black armor, with masks made from dull mirrors. As the boy stared at them, he recognized myriad reflections of himself, white hair drifting about his crimson eyes, menacing him from every helmet.
He ran again, now at the edge of the lake, stumbling into it, the water burning him with its fiery chill. It splashed about his naked body, leaving a livid blotch for every drop that touched him. Jak's left eye hurt him, and he lifted a hesitant hand, feeling a black patch that sealed off his sight, as though it were grafted to his own living skin.
They were gaining on him. He didn't dare to turn now, so close were they, their clawing fingers straining to peel the flesh from his back. He knew that the masks were gone and that they grinned at him with charnel faces, the skin dripping off in wedges from the scabrous bone.
Someone was calling to him out near the middle of the vast lake, calling him by name. Jak struck out, seeing a piece of rotting wood in his way. He pushed at it, but it bobbed up and down, blocking his way past. There was carving on it, the letters etched deep in the soft surface, some of them almost obliterated by a gray-green fungus. But he could make out the last part.
...died in agony and sleeps forever waking.
Something immeasurably huge moved, swirling far below him in the water. The voice still called him, but it was moving away, becoming more faint. Treading water, Jak tried to make out something that appeared for a second through the fog. It was in a small boat, and it had a great nodding, spongelike head that was, mercifully, turned away from him.
At that moment he woke up, still in the clean, antiseptic cell of the security section of the Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement.
It was hard to reckon how long the dream had lasted, but he felt refreshed, as though the rest of the night had passed peacefully. Still, the images continued to haunt him as he sat on the narrow bunk and waited for the mutie sec guard to bring breakfast. By squinting through the barred slot in the door, the boy was able to see the corner of a clock.
It was around the middle of Ein the red. The first plate of pallid, tepid stodge normally arrived just as the pointer shaded from red into amber.
The sec man moved across his line of sight. Jak was tempted to call out to him, but he knew from previous attempts that it would be futile. The speaker on the wall would respond to him, but only to ask what his request was. His keen hearing caught the sound of someone walking in the corridor beyond the outer door. The sec man also heard the noise and stood up to block the entrance, blaster at the ready.
Jak guessed it was Ryan Cawdor even before he heard his voice.
"Hi. Can I come through to see my friend?"
There was the usual delay, but this time Ryan didn't have to repeat what he'd said. The speaker came on almost instantly. "Greetings, stranger. The experimental sample can be seen. But work will be done on him during this three-color period. After that all access will be withdrawn."
Jak didn't much like the sound of that. Maybe it was getting time to move on out. He'd talk to Ryan first, though.
The rusty bolts slid open, and Ryan walked in. His long white silk scarf was wrapped around his throat and tucked into the neck of his coveralls. Jak grinned crookedly at the older man, who smiled back, brushing his mouth with the index finger of his right hand — the signal they all knew for caution.
"You all right?"
"Sure."
"Doc got piss-ant drunk last night."
"In this place?"
Ryan laughed, moving in closer to the boy. "Yeah. Even in here. Got to talking with one of the scientists. Found out how interesting the work is."
Jak was puzzled. He didn't see where the conversation was leading.
Ryan sat down on the bed. "Fact is, we could all go like Baron Tourment. You remember him?"
Jak could hardly forget the evil genius who'd run the ville where he'd first lived, nor could he forget how the baron had ended up. "I get the meaning, Ryan."
"Best we got things moving real fast, kid. Real fucking fast."
Ryan jerked his thumb toward the half-open door in an unmistakable gesture, running his hand across the front of his own throat as if he were slicing it with a sharp blade. Jak shrugged his shoulders, showing open palms. How were they going to make the break from the security section without weapons?
"Glad it's all good." Ryan stood up.
"It's good."
"Guess I'll have to go. The scientists are going to start
their experiments on you today. So we might not meet up again."
"I heard that," Jak replied, also standing.
"Well. Best go, kid. Take care now, you hear. Everyone sends their best to you."
They shook hands, Ryan managing a wink with his right eye as he pulled the door open and called to the sentry outside. "All right if I leave?"
The blank-visored face turned incuriously toward him. The mutie stood quite still, waiting for instructions from his scientist masters.
"I asked if I could go," Ryan repeated.
"Egress permission affirmative," the corner loudspeaker squawked.
The guard turned away from the two men in the cell and gazed down the corridor.
Ryan clenched his fists together and swung a dreadful clubbing blow at the creature's back, striking it with crushing force a little to the right of the small of the back over the kidneys. The sec man gave a choked cry of pain and shock, forced out past the voice activator, hardly louder than a whisper. Jak darted in like a hunting animal and snatched the laser blaster as it dropped from nerveless fingers.
As the guard dropped to his knees, almost paralyzed by the awesome power of the double punch, Ryan flicked off his heavy helmet. The face turned up toward him, eyes rolling in agony, the mouth drooped open, showing yellowed gums. The hair was cropped to the scalp, one ear completely lacking.
Despite all, it was unmistakably the face of a woman, pleading silently for mercy.
Ryan didn't hesitate, chopping with the edge of his hand across the front of the throat and crushing the delicate electronic implant. His hand also pulped the thyroid cartilage and crushed the laryngeal branch of the vital vagus nerve.
