Judas Strike

by James Axler

  Stepping onto dry land, J.B. burped the Uzi at the nearest group of armed cannies, sending them to hell, but he refrained from spraying the entire ville. The unknown female, possibly Ann, was somewhere loose among the deviant flesh-eaters, and he could easily ace her going for the big chill. He had to do this the hard way.

  A beautiful woman carrying a spear charged at the companions, then jumped forward, throwing away her weapon. She hit the ground hard just as the boom of the Steyr rolled down from above. A sharp crack followed, and a man loading a flintlock spun like a top, a hole in his face where a nose used to exist. Krysty and Mildred were on the job.

  Darting from the reeds to behind a stack of firewood, Ryan chose his targets and aced everybody who wasn’t screaming in panic. The more disorganized the bastards were, the better. Just then a pounding hail of miniballs hit the cord of wood, slamming it apart and almost trapping Ryan under the falling logs. A roll of thunder shattered the night as Doc triggered the LeMat, the deafening report illuminating the battle scene in brutal clarity, and three cannies flipped sideways.

  Small children were running everywhere, and a pregnant cannie shuffled for safety behind a tree. Ryan’s blaster tracked their movements, but he didn’t pull the trigger. They were no danger. No sense wasting ammo.

  Withering cross fire filled the air, chips of bark flying off the trees, and the cooking torso jerking in a ghastly pantomime of trying to escape from the spit. Just then, a woman dressed in dirty rags staggered from behind the killing tree and headed for the inclined ramp out of the crater. Ryan bolted across the open ground to catch her in his arms. Blood was pumping freely from a terrible wound on her chest; most of one breast had been torn away by a miniball. She tried to fight off Ryan as he carried her into the weeds. A chest wound. No way could he get a tourniquet around that, and he had nothing to use as a pressure bandage.

  “Sorry,” he said, dropping a clip and reloading to fire into the thinning mob of cannies.

  Clutching a ruined hand, one man just stood there, howling at the stars until Ryan shot him again and the noise ceased.

  Several men dressed in gray charged from a tent into view, large clay pots with dangling fuses in their hands. J.B. swung the Uzi in their direction. No way he was going to let them do that smoke trick again. The Uzi spoke, and the gray men fell, the smoke bombs rolling away. Then there came a fast series of sharp bangs from above and each one burst apart, totally destroyed. J.B. nodded at the unseen women and moved on, firing single rounds to conserve ammo.

  Dropping his spent brass, Jak reloaded and sent three booming messengers toward two cannies trying to sneak behind Doc. Both men fell as if hit with sledgehammers, the hollowpoint rounds tearing holes in their bellies the size of a fist. As the flintlocks hit the soil, the blasters discharged, sending the .75 miniball rounds randomly into the ville.

  A gang of old women carrying axes came after them now, and J.B. used the rest of the clip to blow them away. The survivors ran for the ramp to reach the safety of the bamboo forest. But as they reached the top, Krysty and Mildred mowed them down in ruthless efficiency.

  A spear sailed by overhead, forcing Ryan to duck. Then a trembling hand touched him, and Ryan briefly glanced at the dying woman. Her mouth filled with blood, she burbled something impossible to hear and went still. Then Doc fired again, and in the flash Ryan got a good look at her face. She was beautiful and badly scarred, but this woman was much too old, an adult, deeply tanned with pirate-style earrings.

  “She’s still in the pit!” Ryan shouted through cupped hands.

  That was all the others needed. J.B. stood and cut loose with the Uzi, mowing down the cannies with a deadly storm of the copper-jacketed 9 mm rounds. Darting out of the shadows, Jak flipped both of the 30-round mags into the campfire and dived for cover. In less than a heartbeat, the ammo started cooking off, the irregular series of detonations throwing hot coals and deformed lead everywhere. Clay pots shattered, a man fell, clutching his ankle, two more fell over lifeless, a tent hit with coals burst into flames and another cannie insanely rushed the campfire and struck at the exploding magazines with a war club. That close, he caught all of the next rounds and was torn apart. The corpse fell forward into the campfire, and the reek of burning hair soon mingled with the wretched aroma of roasting human flesh from the torso on the spit.

  In raw terror, the last few cannie warriors broke ranks and dashed for a tent set off by itself in the ville. Going inside, a grisly cannie came back out with a flintlock rifle and a pouch of ammo. Jak shifted his position to get closer. That longblaster was trouble. As the warrior started to load the weapon, Jak aimed carefully and shot him with the Magnum pistol. His face gone, the hideous corpse fell backward into the tent, and the other men started firing their weapons from within the flimsy structure.

  Whistling sharply, Ryan gestured at the tent, and J.B. rolled their only gren through the opening. The companions took cover and the whole crater shook with the strident blast, a roiling fireball spreading out to engulf a dozen other tents. In moments, the whole ville was in flames.

  Suddenly, a young boy charged out of a burning hut, brandishing a bone dagger. Most of his body was covered with burn marks, the skin cracked and covered with large blisters. Shouting more in pain than anger, the child charged straight at Ryan and he aced the boy with one careful shot to the heart. Death was instantaneous.

  When the campfire stopped spitting lead, Ryan headed for the holding pit to check on the prisoners. But as he passed the smoking ruins of the exploded tent, Ryan saw no bodies strewed around in the wreckage. Only a neat square hole in the ground, a sturdy bamboo ladder going down into the darkness. Ryan set his mouth in a thin line. Tricked again!

  Whistling sharply, he signaled the others over and they cautiously gathered around the hole. Doc dropped down a torch, and a group of cannies standing at the bottom of the ladder started firing flintlocks in reply. Moving out of the way, Ryan fired blindly over the edge until the others stopped.

  “Son of a bitch, this is just the top!” J.B. raged, shouldering the exhausted Uzi. “The rest of the ville is underground!”

  “Seal it,” Jak said, passing over the munitions bag. “Found this in other tent.” The bag was splashed with fresh blood, none of it from the Cajun.

  Making the catch with one hand, J.B. dug into his bag and pulled out a block of C-4 salvaged from the lighthouse. Actually, it was the C-4 taken from forty grens whose firing mechanisms had been rusted useless. He removed the small pats of plas and molded them into a block. Safe inside the airtight gren, the high-explosive plastique was as good as ever.

  “Half block,” Ryan said, estimating the size of the tunnel. He wanted it sealed tight, with no chance of their digging their way out again.

  “Hell with that,” J.B. retorted, the raw marks of his wrists aching as he stabbed a timing pencil into the full block. Snapping off the length of the pencil at thirty seconds, he tossed the whole primed charge down the hole.

  Wasting no time, the companions raced away from the area and were almost to the filthy pool when there was a tremendous detonation and the entire valley shook. The torso fell off the spit, large sections of the pungi-stick wall collapsed and the horses in the corral screamed in fear.

  Checking the results, the men saw the ground had fallen into a deep depression about twenty feet wide and just as deep. There was no way the cannies were going to dig their way out of that avalanche, if anybody survived the blast.

  “Let’s find Ann,” Ryan said, heading across the ville.

  Going over to the holding pen, Ryan passed a moaning cannie twitching on the ground, a piece of tent stake protruding through his side. Holstering his piece, the Deathlands warrior drew his panga and silenced the noise with one quick stroke.

  Reaching the pen, Ryan called out for the woman, but there was no reply. He tried again, but still nothing. Fireblast, she might have been knocked unconscious. Taking a torch from a bucket of tree resin, Jak lit it with his butane lig
hter and looked inside. The crackling torchlight brightly illuminated the small cramped hole. There was nobody in sight, and an open door led deeper underground. Soft light came through the opening from somewhere on the other side.

  “They took them with them,” Ryan growled, drawing his blaster. “Stand back.”

  Firing the SIG-Sauer twice, he blew off the lock and, kicking aside the wooden grating, Ryan jumped into the damp pit. He landed in a crouch and stayed that way, waiting for his eye to become adjusted to the darkness. Without warning, a screaming cannie rushed in through the doorway, brandishing a wooden club studded with human teeth. Ryan shot him in the belly, and the man doubled over, dropping the club and howling with pain, clutching his middle with both arms. Kicking the club out of reach, Ryan saved ammo and used the panga once more.

  There was a shadow cast from overhead and Doc landed in the prison cell, an M-16 cradled in his arms. “Prudence dictates decorum,” the scholar said, working the bolt on the rapidfire.

  “Sweep it,” Ryan ordered, jerking a thumb at the door.

  Doc stuck the fluted barrel of the M-16 out of the doorway and fired a burst in both directions. Screams announced hits, and the two men charged out of the cell, blasters firing. Already wounded, the cannies waiting in ambush were aced in seconds, their flintlocks remaining unfired. Stooping, Ryan picked up two of the weapons and fired one, then screamed as if in pain and fired the other.

  “That’ll make them think we’re wounded,” he said, casting the spent blasters away. “They’ll get brave, easier to chill.”

  “Exemplary, my dear Mr. Cawdor,” Doc rumbled, tucking one of the ammo pouches from the dead into a pocket of his frock coat.

  With catlike speed, Jak appeared from the cell with the second M-16. J.B. was right behind, the Uzi sweeping for targets. A spare ammo clip from the recovered munitions bag was tucked into his belt for fast access.

  “What this?” Jak demanded, squinting in the dim light.

  “Some sort of underground lair,” Doc said. “Highly appropriate for eaters of the dead. Almost ironic.”

  The corridor walls were stacked rows of bamboo tucked into place behind thick wooden beams that supported a jigsaw of wooden pieces: roofing shingles, tabletops, decorative louvered doors, plywood, ship planks, anything that would serve as roofing. Every few yards, there was a niche in the wall with a clay bowl full of some greasy substance, a burning piece of cloth serving as a crude wick. The passageway extended to the left for only a short distance before ending at a mound of fresh-turned earth—the cave-in from the C-4 blast. The right ended at a sharp left turn. There was no noise or voices discernible, only the slow echoing drip of water striking stone from somewhere distant.

  “Smells odd,” Jak stated, crinkling his nose.

  “They’re burning human fat in the lamps,” Ryan said grimly.

  “Devs.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Well, leaving won’t be a problem,” Ryan stated, looking over the collapsed tunnel. “We can climb the cave-in and reach the ground easy.”

  “Indeed. As long as the folks on the other side don’t dig their way out,” Doc reminded him curtly. “Perhaps I should stay as rear guard, to prevent such an occurrence.”

  “Good idea,” Ryan said. “Anybody with us when we came back, and I’ll use code.”

  Hesitating for a moment, Doc offered the man the M-16, but he pushed it back. “You may need it,” Ryan said, glancing at the ton of collapsed soil.

  The scholar nodded. “Understood.”

  “Hey, what that?” Jak asked, retrieving a small piece of dirty cloth from the floor. It wasn’t a wick for one of the candle bowls, or a used snot rag. On a hunch, he held it to the clothing of the dead men and it was completely different.

  “This Ann?” the teenager asked, showing it to the others.

  Ryan took the rag and looked it over closely. “Same color,” he said thoughtfully. “And it has been ripped loose, not cut. Mebbe she’s laying a trail for us to follow.”

  “Or a trap for us to walk blindly into,” J.B. stated, straightening his glasses.

  “Come on,” Ryan said, advancing, “Let’s find her and get out of here.”

  He took the point and crouched to sneak a peek around the corner of the tunnel. There was a long passageway beyond that stretched for yards before ending at another intersection. Rising, he led the way down the corridor, pausing at a dark section of earth that rose ever so slightly above the rest of the floor. Ryan scuffed his combat boot on the ground and detected a subtle movement under the newly turned soil. He fired twice into the ground. There was a muffled cry and blood began to ooze from the earth.

  “Triple stupe,” he stated coldly. “Old trick. Trader taught it to us over beers at Charlie’s bar.”

  “Called it a Hanoi Handjob,” J.B. added.

  “No shit?” Jak asked nervously, brushing back his snowy hair. The cannies buried a man to wait like a land mine for one of them to step on, and then he’d attack. It was brilliant. The teenager now scrutinized the dirt floor and the jigsaw-puzzle ceiling much more closely for any additional living traps.

  Reaching the intersection, the companions found the tunnel went in both directions for a good distance, the walls lined with doors. Most were unlocked and led to sleeping quarters for families, empty now. A few were locked, and contained clothing from the prisoners, one room packed to the ceiling with assorted boots. But no weapons.

  Every corridor ended in another intersection, each branching out into more corridors and side passages. Closed doors lined the bamboo walls, and they had to check each one before risking to leave it behind them. It was slow going, and they worried about the cannies preparing another trap. The gray men were smart and ruthless, a dangerous combination.

  “Place is a bastard maze,” Ryan growled, using a pencil stub to draw a map of the tunnel on a piece of the lighthouse journal. He had kept the page because it showed the strange symbol from the gateway. He had hoped to ask some of the locals to see if they knew what it was. Now he simply needed it as paper. No way he was going to let them get lost down here for the cannies to trap and slowly starve them into submission. He’d rather take a round than go into a stew pot.

  Another bit of rag led them to the left of an intersection. This corridor was dark, all of the wall lamps extinguished. Ryan nudged J.B. and motioned behind them. The Armorer nodded and passed the warning onto Jak. He silently agreed, then started down the darkened corridor as if unaware they were walking directly into a trap.

  Almost at once, there came the slamming of a door, followed by the barks and howls of dogs. In unison, the three men turned and opened fire at the floor, the fusillade of rounds tearing the hounds to pieces, blowing away ears, legs and eyes. Only a large bitch managed to reach the men, bleeding but still alive. J.B. kicked its head into the wall, Jak used the butt of the M-16 to smash its jaw and Ryan buried a blade into its spine. Still snarling, the beast dropped and lay there heaving for breath, crippled but not dead.

  “Couple more of those and we would have been on the last train west,” Ryan stated, reloading the SIG-Sauer.

  “Tough like hellhound,” Jak said, checking the clip on the rapidfire.

  “What’s that?” J.B. asked.

  “Big mutie in bayou. Tough kill.”

  J.B. pulled the clip and checked inside. “Ten left,” he announced, slamming it back into the breech.

  “Out,” Jak said, dropping the rapidfire to draw his .357 Magnum pistol.

  “See big black dog, shoot in eyes,” he said cryptically, cocking the hammer with a callused thumb. “Just eyes. Not stop firing till say.”

  Using their butane lighters, they lit the lamps along the corridor but stopped when they found a piece of rag caught between a door and the jamb. J.B. checked for boobies, while Ryan and Jak stood guard. When satisfied it was safe, J.B. picked the old lock and got out of the way. Then Ryan kicked the door open without entering. Taking a lamp from the wall, he thrust it into
the darkness. Dirty human faces stared back. People were sitting on the floor, and one of them stood to walk toward the light, a hand covering her face.

  “You okay?” Ryan asked, looking her over for injuries that might slow her. The longer they stayed down here, the more time the cannies had to regroup. Time wasn’t on their side.

  “Ryan? You came!” Ann cried, then threw herself at the man, weeping uncontrollably.

  Holding her by the shoulders, Ryan pushed the woman away and slapped her hard across the face. She recoiled in shock.

  “Stay focused if you want to live,” Ryan snapped. “We’re up to our ass in dreck and low on ammo. Where’s the ship?’

  Ann blinked in confusion. “What?”

  He squeezed her arm. Pain always made a person more aware. “Said you know where a ship was to be found. Tell me and we all leave together.”

  “There is—” Ann hiccuped with nerves and tried again “—there’s a ville, on the far side of the island, past the Black Mountains. It’s a port. Lots of ships dock there.”

  “You know the way,” Ryan said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes! Of course, I do. Used to live before—”

  “I know the way,” someone said, hobbling to the doorway. He was a big man, gaunt from hunger, but his former strength was clearly visible in his sheer size. Black hair and almond skin, he was dressed in bloody and torn clothes of very good cloth. A wide leather belt around his waist proclaimed the man a sailor.

  “Ann said you would come after her,” he added. “Guess she was right.”

  “Here for her. Not you,” Ryan said bluntly, and jerked a thumb. “Leave if you want. But don’t follow us. Get in the way and you’re zero days.”

  “I know the way through their pungi-stick wall,” the man said, reaching out with his hand.

  “The creek. Found it already.”

  The man lowered his gaze to the 9 mm pistol in Ryan’s grip. “Then again, mebbe you don’t need us,” he said in awe. “Does that thing actually work?”