by James Axler
They continued on, and were quickly swallowed up in the gloom of the weakly lit passage. Over the steady crunch of the chair’s wheels on the frosted floor, Ryan heard a wailing sound, faint at first, but growing louder as they advanced. It rose and fell in a slow rhythm, spiked by an occasional piercing shriek.
Then they turned down another corridor. Lit by a single overhead bulb, the passage abruptly ended in a set of double doors. There was no doubt about it—all the noise was coming from the other side. Accordingly, when a black suit opened one of the doors, and the chorus of screaming and howling rolled over them, it was no surprise to Ryan. What was surprising was the condition of the large room they entered.
The throwing poop reference suddenly made sense to him.
It was everywhere.
It streaked the white ceiling and walls. It spattered and littered the concrete floor. It clung to the bars of the steel cages lined up in rows, from one end of the room to the other. He was glad he was wearing the hazard suit and had his own oxygen supply; all he could smell was plastic and his own sweat.
Echo stopped the wheelchair just inside the doorway. There was so much mess on the floor that she couldn’t roll the chair around it; to proceed she would have had to roll the wheels over it.
“Clear away the excreta at once,” Lima told the black suits as he removed a key ring from a hook on the wall.
They hurried to uncoil a thick hose from a reel on the wall. It had a heavy nozzle and massive on and off lever. When they threw the lever, water blasted out in a blistering, high-pressure stream. As they advanced down the aisle, apparently for their own amusement, they shot water into some of the cells, slamming it into the faces and crotches of the prisoners, who were sent cartwheeling into the far corners of their cages. The force of the water was so powerful that in a matter of a couple of minutes they had cleaned a wide path down the floor of the aisle between the cages, sending the detritus rushing against the back wall in a brown mini-tidal wave.
Until Echo pushed him closer to the long rows of cells, Ryan couldn’t get a clear look at the occupants. But as he was moved deeper into the room he recognized them at once. The whitecoats of this redoubt had raided the mongrel privy of Deathlands—in the cages on either side of him he could see stickies, scalies, stumpies, scagworms and spidies. It was a mutie zoo. And there were a lot of cages; more than he could easily count. No doubt the shit-throwers were the scalies and stumpies; their species had the pure reasoning power of drying mud. If scalies and stumpies were triple stupes, stickies were even worse—deciding to throw a turd was beyond their mental capacity. Scagworms and spidies had no hands, as such, to throw with; they could however projectile-defecate for short distances when sufficiently stirred up.
The general hubbub, which was overwhelmed by the explosive hissing noise of the hosing, resumed the instant the water was shut off. With nothing left to hurl, and no way to reach their captors, the scalies and stumpies could only squeeze and pound the bars of their cages, jump up and down, and scream impotently. The stickies scrambled with sucker hands and feet over the sides of their individual cages, hanging upside down from the roof bars like bats, puffing their bony chests in and out, opening their lipless mouths and shrieking like steam whistles.
Echo had rolled Ryan only a short distance down the center of the aisle when Lima held up his gloved hand for a stop.
“Pistol!” he shouted over the din.
One of the black suits quickly unholstered his Beretta and passed it over to him, grip first.
“Muties!” the whitecoat bellowed. When he didn’t get their attention, he yelled even louder, waving the blaster. “Muties! Listen to me!”
His demand made no dent in the racket, if anything it got louder. Lima stepped up to the nearest cage, stuck the Beretta’s muzzle through the bars and fired point-blank into a stumpie’s hairy face. The gunshot boomed and the ankle-biter’s head snapped backward. The slug passed through the rear of the heavy skull, skipped off the bars behind and zinged wildly around the room.
When the echoes stopped, there was nothing but silence.
“I realize that some of you won’t be able to follow what I’m about to say,” Lima told the captive audience, “but for those that can, any creature caught throwing shit will get what that stumpie got. This explanation is for those who can’t understand English....”
He pointed the blaster at a brown pile in the aisle that the hosing had missed. “See that?” he said to the caged stickie nearest the mess. “See that?”
The mutie hissed at him and showed its needle teeth.
“Bad stickie,” Lima said, swinging up the Beretta and firing into the creature’s open maw. The back and top of the soft-boned head exploded like a frag gren, sending blood and brains flying. The slurry of red and gray slapped the roof bars of the cage, sprayed past them and stuck to the ceiling.
The roar of the second gunshot in the closed room sent the muties into an even wilder frenzy.
Ryan knew the whitecoat hadn’t gotten his point across. The intelligence gap between Lima and his audience was too vast; simply put, he hadn’t stooped low enough. To the dimwitted and hand-signal challenged, it had to have seemed as if he was executing captives at random—and that they were next.
Lima waved for the men in black to come closer, no doubt because he didn’t want to keep shouting his commands over the din. Ryan couldn’t hear what he told them, but they immediately separated, moving to the ends of the two rows of cages nearest the doors. A waist-high metal pole stood on either side of the aisle in front of the last cell; atop each of the poles was a toggle switch that the enforcers immediately flipped.
The move initiated a loud creaking noise, audible even over the muties’ howling; it sounded like gears badly in need of grease were meshing.
Ryan wasn’t sure what was being accomplished by the concealed mechanism, but that was because he wasn’t looking in the right place. Only when the inner sets of bars had crept a foot from the back walls did he see what was going on. He hadn’t realized that the backside of each cage had two sets of bars; he hadn’t noticed the tracks and rollers, either. The gears and the motor driving them were gradually reducing the interior space of each cell, forcing the occupants to move closer and closer to the aisle.
They didn’t go quietly.
Stickies were stupid but they had eyes; they could see what was coming, that they were about to be crushed. They went crazy inside their cages, trying to bend or bite the bars to escape.
The stumpies threw their shoulders against the oncoming wall, bracing with their stout legs. Under their wiry beards their faces turned red from the exertion, but their little feet slid on the concrete and the wall kept advancing. The scalies didn’t fight the mechanism; they just sat as far from the closing set of bars as they could get like great lumps, wailing over the injustice of it all—they were about to die without enjoying a last meal.
Five-foot-long, three-hundred-pound scagworms scuttled around the floors of their cages in tight, frantic circles, snapping murderous pincer jaws at the interlocking plates of their own backsides.
A creature Ryan had never seen before—it looked like a man-sized bird with a dagger for a beak—flapped its tiny wings and screeched.
Ryan didn’t understand what was going on—or why—any more than the terrified muties did.
The gears kept creaking as they turned; the inner walls kept closing, inch by inch, until the muties were securely pinned against the bars along the aisle. The machinery didn’t account for different sizes or shapes of prisoner; it squashed them all into the same impossibly narrow space, and held them there. The scalies and giant birds were pressed so tightly that their blubber bulged between the bars.
When the motor stopped, the room’s ambient noise level dropped considerably. Unable to draw full breaths, the captives couldn’t yell as loudly.
One of the black suits passed him a blood blaster.
“It doesn’t matter where you inject them,” Lima said, “as long as you hit deep soft tissue. That means don’t shoot it straight into their skulls. Not only would viral absorption be compromised, the impact could scramble their brains. The whole point is for them to live long enough to acquire the virus. And make sure you don’t miss on the first shot—make firm contact with the injector. The protocol is one dose per cage.”
He crossed over to the first cell in the row on the left. The stickie was caught halfway up the wall, spread-eagled, hands gripping the bars, face crammed between them. Distorted by the pressure, its lipless mouth stretched back from the rows of needle teeth. Thus pinioned, its drool dripped down the bars, and bubbles of mucus glistened at its nose hole.
After adjusting a small knob on the side of the blaster, the whitecoat jammed the muzzle into its dead white stomach. The injector discharged with a sharp, crisp snort. The stickie went rigid and let out a scream. Blood—its or Ryan’s—rolled in a thin red line down its belly.
“There,” Lima said. “Just do it like that. Easy peasy.”
He handed the blood blaster back to the black suit. “Get a move on, before they all suffocate.”
The point of the moving interior wall was no longer a mystery. Ryan had seen something like it, only much more crudely fashioned, in many ville farmyards. Individual head of livestock were penned then trapped with a sliding wall so they could be forced to swallow unpleasant mixtures to treat their various ailments or have their injuries doctored and sewn up. A similar setup was used in communal slaughterhouses to subdue large animals before they were dispatched.
The enforcers went down each side of the aisle with the blood blasters, injecting one mutie and moving on to the next. Echo pushed the wheelchair after them, so Ryan was able to witness each step in the procedure.
The injections by blaster had to have been very painful, but Ryan was untouched by the weeping and moaning. He was insulated from the muties’ stink by the plastic suit and from their individual suffering by a lifetime of hard experience. As far as he was concerned, they were nothing but vermin, and they were vicious chillers, one and all. If the situation had been reversed, he knew they would have no pity for him; indeed they would have been begging the men in black to inject him again.
Trapped and helpless, the stumpies on either side of the aisle growled and snapped like dogs as the injectors were poked into them. When the blasters discharged, the hairy ankle-biters bleated like sheep.
One of the black suits stopped in front of a caged scagworm. Its shiny, black pincer jaws were thrust through and wrapped around a pair of bars, the back of its heavily armored head held fast by the pressure of the inner wall. Its segmented belly was pinned against the bars. Hundreds of tiny, scratchy legs and feet along the sides squirmed madly, trying and failing to gain purchase on thin air.
The enforcer looked back at Lima for direction. “Where do you want the injection to go on this one?” he said. “Got all these rock-hard plates. No soft tissue.”
Lima approached the cell. He squatted and looked under the set of razor-sharp jaws. “In there,” he said, pointing with the Beretta. “Jam the barrel between those claspers, there. It can’t get at you with its jaws. Inject it right in the mouth hole. That should work fine. It just might take a little longer for the infection to take hold.”
The black suit stuck the blaster into the scagworm’s maw and fired. The rows of tiny legs stiffened for an instant, then triple-timed, scrabbling madly at the bars.
The cage on the opposite side contained a spidie. As giant, mutie spiders went, it was small, maybe three feet tall and five feet across. It was squashed against the bars in a jumble of spindly, hairy legs, one of which stuck out into the aisle. The leg moved lazily, bending at the first joint over and over like a beckoning finger, until the enforcer came closer. Then the leg thrust outward with a single goal—to hook his neck with a taloned foot and pull him in range of its poison fangs. Seeing that, the man in black merely shifted his angle of approach, ducked and injected into its pulsing abdomen, causing the hairy pouch to violently contract, and the spidie to simultaneously hiss and shit.
The enforcer jumped back just quickly enough to avoid being hit by the arc of khaki-liquid splatter.
Echo followed along with the wheelchair as the black suit continued down the line. At the far ends of the rows of cages, behind the bars on either side of the aisle, Ryan caught flashes of bright yellow—the same color of coveralls he wore, the same color his companions had been given. He tried to convince himself that it didn’t have to be Krysty and the others in the cages, but he knew he was grasping at straws. If it wasn’t them, then who was it?
As they drew closer, cell by cell, his four companions gradually came into view. He was torn between being glad to be reunited with them and disappointed that they weren’t already free and safely away from there.
Jak, Ricky, J.B. and Krysty all faced the aisle, flattened between the sets of bars like cuts of meat in a grill grate.
The scalie caged next to J.B. let out a shriek as it took its turn with the injector. “Oh-oww-oww!” it moaned. “Hurt Shirley!”
The companions were next in line.
Ryan shifted slightly on the wheelchair, gripping the armrests and digging his boot soles into the footrests. Though he was braced for action, though he wanted more than anything to jump out of the chair, seize a blaster and free them, he could see there was too much distance between the Beretta in Lima’s hand and the one that remained in the black suit’s holster on the other side of the aisle—thirty-five feet was twenty-five feet too far. No matter which blaster he went for first, he’d get shot in the back by the other before he could turn and fire.
That wasn’t all that kept his butt stuck to the chair.
Surprisingly enough, he was feeling almost fully recovered. If the pink stuff he’d been shot full of wasn’t chilling him in short order as the whitecoats planned, why would a dose of his blood do anything to harm the others? And if it didn’t hurt them, then all that Lima’s scientific rigmarole had accomplished was freeing their hands to fight.
There wasn’t any time to come up with other options. The enforcer was already at Jak’s cage.
“Croak triple-hard for this,” the albino assured him.
“Yeah, mutie, I’m pissing my pants thinking your ghost is gonna come back and kill me.”
Jak recoiled at the sudden snort of the injector. The powerful burst of compressed air tore a ragged hole in his shoulder, but he didn’t make a sound.
Ricky was next. Hate radiated from his black eyes as the enforcer put the muzzle to an arm he could not retract. Like Jak, he jerked at the pain, but didn’t utter a peep.
They rolled on to the last cages in the row.
J.B.’s sallow face was now bright red with fury, his fedora flattened between the back of his head and the bars, his spectacles hanging precariously by one ear hook. He clamped his eyes shut and bared his teeth as the injector fired into the side of his neck.
“Where’s Ryan?” Krysty aske. “What have you done with him?”
It tore Ryan up to see her beautiful body crushed against the bars like that. It tore him up even more when the enforcer injected her in the forearm. Like the others, she refused to give the whitecoats the pleasure of hearing her cry out.
Ryan wanted to tell her the burning sensation would pass, but he couldn’t. Not yet, anyway.
“Reverse the motor,” Lima said.
The black suits returned to the switches at the other end of the rows. The gear-grinding sound resumed, and in seconds the inner walls of every cage began to slowly retreat. As the pressure withdrew, the captives could breathe and move again. But the experience—either
being trapped or forcibly injected—seemed to have changed their outlook. At least momentarily they looked drained of spirit.
Not the companions, though.
“What was the red shit in that bastard jar?” J.B. asked as he firmly screwed down his hat.
“A quick death, we hope,” Lima said. “Believe me, that would be best for all concerned.”
“Nuke you, whitecoat,” J.B. snapped. “What did you shoot into us?”
“Maybe you’d better ask your friend there,” he said, pointing at the wheelchair.
When the companions turned to look at the man in the biohazard suit, Lima nodded to Echo, who reached from behind and jerked off the hood.
“Ryan! Thank Gaia!” Krysty said. “Are you okay, lover? What did they do to you?”
He wanted to reassure her, but at that moment it was far more important to keep playing possum. Instead of answering, he let his head slowly drop, chin to chest, and sagged as if he’d passed out, or even died.
“What’s wrong with him?” Krysty demanded. “Is he hurt? Let me help him!”
“If the mutie wants what’s left of him back, she can have it,” Lima said, tossing the key ring to one of the black suits. “Strip off that suit first.”
After they’d pulled off the protective gear, the enforcers grabbed Ryan under the armpits and dragged him to the cell doorway. After unlocking it, they shoved him inside. As he toppled into Krysty’s embrace, he saw the red running down her forearm.
His injected blood mingled with hers.
The cage door clanged behind him, and the lock clicked shut.
Krysty lowered him into a sitting position on the floor, then gently drew his head back into her lap.
“Ryan, wake up,” she said, stroking his cheek. “Please wake up.”
When he opened his good eye a crack, she was staring down at him, her emerald eyes brimming with tears. Her expression shifted from sadness to shock. He winked at her, then shut his eye. Out of sight of their captors, she reached behind his back and gave him a hard pinch.
