by James Axler
Drawing their weapons, the black suits moved for the door. As it closed after them, Lima clicked off the flash.
Gunshots boomed almost immediately. Just two. Then the sound of running feet continued.
Lima crouched in the darkness, trying not to cough and give away his position. After a minute or so, the footfalls stopped.
The men in black should have been back by now, he told himself. If everything was all right, they should have returned. He wanted to open the door and look out, but he was afraid of what he might see—and what might see him.
The only source of that many feet was just down the hall and around the corner, in the mutie zoo.
Turning away from the door, he risked clicking on the flash for an instant to check his watch.
He decided to wait a little longer.
Chapter Fourteen
After the head whitecoat and his enforcers left the zoo, the collection of muties immediately resumed their complaints. The din they made bounced off the room’s concrete walls, floor and ceiling. It was almost as if the captives were competing with one another to raise the most hell, or perhaps the swell of noise, itself, terrified them, making them wail and screech louder and louder. Ryan had never heard stumpies shrieking in soprano in the wild. Normally, the males and females—both sexes long-bearded with short, hairy arms and legs and wide feet—communicated in impatient, baritone grunts and snarls from between clenched little yellow-and-black teeth.
He tried to raise his head from Krysty’s lap, but she held him down.
“Don’t move, lover,” she said. “They have cameras watching us on all sides. Probably can hear us, too, but not over all the racket if we talk softly.”
Though the floor was ice-cold against his back, Ryan let himself relax as she stroked his forehead. “No sign of Mildred or Doc?” he said.
“They haven’t shown up, yet. What did Lima mean by your ‘infected blood’? Is that what they injected us with?”
“They shot me up with some pink gunk that was supposed to chill me, but it hasn’t,” Ryan said. “At least not yet. It did make me triple sick, though. Real high fever, bad sweats and worse nightmares. They had to put me in an ice bath to keep my brains from boiling. After they brought my fever down, they drew my blood to inject you with—they figured they’ve poisoned it. If they succeeded, you might be in for a rough ride shortly.”
“Why are they doing this? What’s in it for them?”
“This place is falling apart. They have to pull up stakes or this redoubt is going to be their mass grave. They plan to move their whole operation to South America, and from there to Deathlands.”
“The people and the critters in between might have a little something to say about that. You know how tough they can be!”
“They can’t pull it off without help,” Ryan said. “That’s what the infection is for. From what I overheard, the sickness they gave me carries a chemical ‘kill switch.’ It’s supposed to target and chill every living thing that’s been tainted by that nukeday virus he told us about. As the Antarcticans invade, they’re going to spread the disease and wipe out most of the opposition.”
“So 90 percent of what the whitecoat told us was bullshit.”
“More like 99,” Ryan said. “They kidnapped us and all these other creatures because they needed lab rats from Deathlands to test and perfect their weapon.”
“They used it on you, but you feel okay, now?”
“Yeah, I’m nowhere near dead. I just hope you don’t get as sick as I did. There isn’t an ice bath to cool you down.”
“The sickness isn’t the only problem. Lima said they were going to kill us no matter what happens.”
“We’ve got to get out of these cages before the infection hits,” Ryan said.
“That’s going to be hard with the cameras on us and them watching.”
“We don’t have any choice. If we wait, we may not get another chance. One of us has got to escape and get the keys to the cells. They keep them hanging on a hook on the wall by the doors. Tell J.B. and have him pass the word to Jak and Ricky.”
Krysty eased the back of his head to the floor. She got up and moved to the bars that separated her cage from J.B.’s. Ryan couldn’t hear what she said, but the Armorer immediately turned to the aisle and waved to get the attention of the younger members of the group. Krysty returned to his side and once again cradled his head.
Ryan knew the Armorer and Ricky had excellent mechanical skills. If anyone could pop the locks, it was them.
J.B. pointed at Ricky, then at his own eyes, then at his own chest.
Watch me.
The Armorer turned his back to the camera to conceal what he was doing. He picked up the plastic latrine bucket and ripped off the metal wire handle. Pinning the wire between the bars at the back of his cage, he worked it back and forth until it finally weakened and broke in the middle. He held up the two pieces to show Ricky. Both sections had a short, hard right-angle bend on the ends.
Ricky attacked his own bucket in the same way, and in a matter of minutes had produced a matching set of tools.
Reaching through the bars, J.B. inserted the bent ends into the keyhole. On the other side of the aisle, Ricky was doing the same thing, his face twisted in concentration as he fished around inside the lock. They were both working with hands in an awkward position through the bars, upside down relative to how they would have normally tackled the job, and trying their best not to draw attention to themselves.
After a few minutes Krysty said, “They don’t seem to be making progress. Mebbe it can’t be done with those bits of wire.”
Ryan didn’t want to consider that possibility—if they couldn’t get out of the cells, they’d all die there. “Do you feel any fever, yet?” he said.
“I don’t feel anything strange. J.B., Jak and Ricky look fine, too.”
Over the clamor from the other captives Ryan could hear J.B. and Ricky cursing as they worked.
“Are any of the muties sick?” he asked.
“Not that I can tell. But I’ve never seen a sick scagworm. They’re still running around in circles.”
“What about the female whitecoat?”
“She’s huddled in a corner of her cage crying, but seems okay otherwise.”
“That pink stuff made me sick in a hurry. If no one shows any symptoms in the next few minutes, there’s a good chance their precious virus is a dud.”
“So how much time do we have before they come back?” Krysty asked.
“Sounded like they were in a hurry to get results. You might want to remind J.B. of that.”
“He knows, lover. Trust me, he knows.”
Ryan felt a quiver run through the concrete. It made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Before he could shout a warning, there was a terrible boom, and in the next instant everything around him was in motion. The floor didn’t buck and roll this time; it jitterbugged. The bars of the cells vibrated in a blur, clanging together, steel pipe on steel pipe, beating out a painful, high-pitched whine. There was no escape inside the cage; the up and down motion was so violent and so rapid he couldn’t get to his feet.
As he grabbed hold of Krysty, shielding her with his body, the ceiling above them cracked. Chunks of concrete crashed down on the barred top of the cell, spilling rubble and dust over them. Under the steady roar of the quake, he heard a ripping sound. Then the floor beneath them gave way, and, clutching each other, they fell into the gap. The drop was only a couple of feet.
With his brains shaking loose Ryan could barely hold a train of thought. He forced himself to focus on what he could see and feel. They had dropped into a narrow, V-shaped gully the quake had torn into the floor. The sides were jagged, the vibration making the edges stab into his skin. Through the clouds of dust he could see the rip extended across the full
width of the cell, out into the aisle.
Pushing away from Krysty, Ryan dragged himself down the bouncing gully, hand over hand, until he reached the foot of the bars. He could thrust his arm under them, but the gap wasn’t wide enough to get his head and shoulders past.
There were other splits, much wider ones, transecting the aisle and running under the cages opposite. A smaller person, a more slender person, might be able to crawl through them to slip out.
“Jak! Ricky!” he bellowed through cupped hands.
He could see the companions dimly across the aisle on the floors of their cells, but his voice was lost in the roar.
No matter. It turned out Jak was on the same page. The albino suddenly dropped out of sight; a second later his white face and hair popped up from the floor outside the bars of his cell. Jak was free!
“The keys! The keys!” Ryan shouted at him. He stuck his arm under the bars and waved frantically in that direction.
Again, he couldn’t make himself heard. Again, it didn’t matter; Jak knew what he had to do. Ryan watched him speed-crawl down the aisle toward the key ring, hunks of ceiling falling all around him. He disappeared around the end of the row.
As Ryan pulled his arm back, on the far side of the bars a pair of massive black jaws appeared out of nowhere and snapped shut, barely missing his hand. The three-hundred-pound scagworm lunged again, tail lashing, hundreds of little legs scrambling, but its head was too big to get under the bars. The roaring of the quake sent it into a frenzy of bloodlust.
Bloodlust denied.
It took out its frustration on the bars, but found the vibration of steel against chitinous jaws not to its liking. The huge worm slithered off drunkenly amid the shaking, looking for easier prey.
“Jak! Jak!” Ryan cried.
The warning was useless. He could barely hear himself shout over the tumult.
Ryan knew, quake or no quake, that starving mutie worm was going to track down Jak, either by the scent trail he left or his body heat. Unarmed, taken from behind and by surprise by those huge jaws, the albino wouldn’t stand a chance. The worm would squeeze him around the middle until he suffocated or bled out—if it didn’t cut him in two. Ryan could only think of one option. He stuck his arm back under the bars and waved it around frantically, trying to lure the monster back.
But it didn’t return.
Gradually the tremors weakened, the grinding roar faded, things stopped jumping around in a blur. But Jak didn’t reappear. If the scagworm had gotten him, if he had screamed before he died, the sound had been lost in the din.
“Yee-haw!” J.B. shouted through the bars of the adjoining cell. “Run, Jak, run!”
Across the aisle, through the swirling dust, Ryan saw Jak scampering on all fours across the barred tops of the cages, hopping from one to the next. Stickies and spidies leaped up from inside the cells, trying to grab him, or pull off a piece of him. But he was far too light and quick for that.
Jak jumped down in front of Ricky’s cage, let him out, then crossed the aisle to unlock the doors to J.B.’s and Krysty’s cells. He was all smiles.
“Did you see that scagworm?” Ryan asked.
“What scagworm?” Jak said, his grin melting away.
“That one! Nuking hell!” J.B. said, pointing down the aisle.
The big-ass worm scrambled out of a gully and rushed them full-speed, its five-feet of body snaking back and forth, curved jaws snapping.
As Ryan pushed Krysty back into the cell, J.B. scooped up his ten-gallon latrine bucket, turned a neat pirouette and, with perfect timing, just as the jaws snapped shut, jammed the bucket over them and down onto its bullet head past the first neck plate.
The fit was tight, and trying to open its jaws while shaking its head only made the bucket’s grip tighter. Realizing it was trapped, or perhaps responding instinctively to the burrowlike darkness, the scagworm froze.
“What now, Ryan?” Krysty asked.
“We find and secure the mat-trans. I’m sure the female whitecoat can lead us back there. Then we find Doc and Mildred.”
Staccato sounds rattled in the distance. They registered in Ryan’s mind, but only dimly. Parts of the redoubt, fatally damaged, were still crashing down in the aftermath of the quake.
“How are we going to secure anything?” J.B. asked. “There’s hundreds of whitecoats and sec between us and the mat-trans. We’ve got no weapons.”
Ryan had been thinking about that from the moment the whitecoats rolled him into the zoo. “Depends on what you mean by ‘weapons,’” he said.
“What do you mean?” Ricky asked. “Are we going to fight with buckets?”
“No,” Ryan said, “we open all the cages and let the muties loose.”
“Are you crazy?” J.B. said.
“J.B.’s right,” Krysty said, “stickies don’t discriminate—they’ll tear apart anything they can reach. Same goes for all the others. Letting them out will just add another enemy to the mix, and a savage one at that. They’ll turn on us the first chance they get.”
“I’m not talking about making a truce with them,” Ryan said. “They aren’t going to be our allies. More like a scattergun blast to clear the room.”
“If we open the cages and let the muties loose,” J.B. said, “we can’t control them, pure and simple.”
“No, listen to me, J.B.,” Ryan said, putting his hand on his old friend’s arm. “We know their strengths, how they fight in the wild, and the people in this redoubt don’t have a clue. If we let them out, their predatory senses and instincts will do the controlling for us.”
“Their instincts will tell them to chill us first,” J.B. stated.
Ryan understood his companions’ reluctance. It was based on bitter, tooth and nail combat, and the losses of loved ones and comrades. But in this case, under these circumstances, they were dead wrong. “If we open the doors to the hallway and let them out of the cells first,” he said, “we can stay out of their way in the cages until after they’ve left the zoo. If we give them a minute or two head start, we should be able to follow relatively safely. The whole idea is to introduce chaos into the equation. And panic.”
“It will sure as hell do that,” J.B. said.
“The muties can soak up the black suits’ bullets and chill whoever’s in our way,” Ryan went on. “We don’t have to do anything but coast in their wake, and not slip on the puddles of blood.”
“But we don’t know which way they’re going to go once they’re free and in the hallways,” Krysty pointed out.
“Yes, we do. They’ll home in on the smell of blood and on body heat, just like in Deathlands. They don’t have to clear a path for us all the way to the mat-trans. They just have to occupy the whitecoats and their enforcers while we locate it.”
From their expressions, none of the companions was entirely convinced.
“The people here will be fighting them and not us,” Ryan said.
“There are women and children here too,” Krysty said. “You know what the muties will do to them.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Ryan replied. “This is a counterpunch. They struck first, and if they’d had their way, if their poison had worked as they’d planned, we’d all be chilled by now and they’d be set to use our blood to murder who knows how many defenseless women and children between here and Deathlands. None of you are sick, so it looks like they failed this time. But they’ll try again, that’s guaranteed. Even if we don’t make it out of here, we have to stop them. There’s no room for sympathy. It’s chill or be chilled.”
“What about Mildred, Doc?” Jak asked.
“They know where we’re headed, back to the mat-trans,” Ryan said. “They can use the chaos this is going to create to make their escape, if they haven’t already. If they’re not waiting for us at the unit, we’ll
find them.”
“If we let out all these bastards at once,” J.B. said, “they’ll be killing each other in here. Most of them won’t make it to the hallway.”
“We’ll let them loose by species and foot speed,” Ryan said. “All the spidies first, then stickies, scagworms, stumpies, and that giant bird and the scalies last.”
“Wish we had a different choice,” the Armorer said, “but I guess we don’t.”
The other companions looked at one another, but remained silent. It appeared that all the objections had been addressed.
Ryan told Jak to open the cells where Lima had executed the stickie and stumpie, then he and the albino dragged the bloody carcasses by the feet, the ruin of their heads striping the floor from the rows of cages to the exit doors with gore. They opened both of the doors and then doubled up, one taking mutie hands, the other taking feet, and slung the bodies out into the corridor.
By the time they finished, the others were unlocking cages, moving quickly to the ends of the rows. It took only a few seconds at each cage. They left the doors shut and the stupid muties, having tried and failed to escape the bars so many times, didn’t realize that they could now get out by themselves, with just a little push. After Ryan, Krysty, and J.B. got into an empty cage, Jak and Ricky ran down the rows of roofs throwing back the doors to the spidies’ cells.
As soon as their cells were opened, the gigantic insects jumped out into the aisle, their eyes on stalks twisting this way and that. They hovered over the blood trail, multijointed hairy legs pumping up and down, huffing up the scent and drooling from beaked mouths turned ninety degrees from normal, running nose-to-chin rather than cheek-to-cheek. In the next instant the room rocked with a violent aftershock, everything vibrating, more chunks of ceiling crashing down.
Spooked, the spidies beelined for the exit. It looked as if they were floating on air: their heads and abdomens remained level while the legs bent and stretched to accommodate the rubble and the gaps in the floor. They made no sound as they zipped out the double doors.
Turning creatures like that loose on civilians was not something Ryan took lightly. But once the decision was made, he did not give it a second thought. Even after they had gorged themselves with fresh meat, even after they ran out of silk to cocoon their victims with, spidies kept killing. Not because they were machines but because they liked it.
