by James Axler
Both of them turned at a sound from behind. It appeared to have come from the door they had just passed. Without another word they retraced their steps, moving on either side of it, weapons ready.
Doc strained to hear over the ringing in his ears.
“Is that you?” a voice asked softly.
Then he noticed that a faint light was spilling out the crack at the bottom of the jamb. Mildred took hold of the knob, simultaneously nodding and pantomining a quick countdown.
On three, they barged through the doorway, Doc high and Mildred low, sweeping the darkened room with barrels of their submachine guns. Doc caught the glint of polished metal tables and beyond them, a wall of matching lockers.
A weak glow came from under a desk to their right. They split up and moved around each side of it. The light was brighter on the far side. Trousered legs and a butt stuck out of the knee well. Mildred took aim at the butt while Doc bent, seized the exposed ankles and pulled the man out. He was wearing a lab coat.
Doc ripped away the flashlight and shone it into the whitecoat’s face. It was a face he instantly recognized.
Holding up the heel of his hand to block the light, Dr. Lima tried to act dignified and in control, but Doc could see the fear in his eyes when he realized who they were.
“Where are our friends?” Mildred demanded, poking him in the chest with the MP-5’s muzzle. “Were they all together? What have you done with them?”
“They were all in the cages next door the last time I saw them,” Lima said. “Every one of them. If they aren’t there now, I don’t know where they went. I’ve been in here ever since the icequake struck.”
Doc was only mildly surprised when Mildred shifted the submachine gun to her left hand and hit the whitecoat in the face. In times of exceptional stress she could be somewhat impatient. It was not a bitch slap, by any means. It was a straight, hard right that seemed to uncoil from the soles of her feet. The impact of the blow snapped back Lima’s head and buckled his knees, and he would have fallen if he hadn’t caught himself against the edge of the desk.
“We’re going to find them,” Mildred said. “And you’re coming along to help. Then you’re going to take us back to the mat-trans.”
When Lima opened his mouth to speak, the blood that had welled up inside spilled over his lower lip and ran down his chin. It dripped onto the lapels of his lab coat. He wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve and looked at the stain in disgust and dismay. “Why would I cooperate with you?” he asked. “You’re going to kill me anyway.”
Mildred took the flashlight from Doc and played the beam around the room. “Looks like a pathology suite to me,” she said. “I haven’t been inside one since med school. You’ve got some real nice cutting tools. And in such close proximity to the zoo. Did you really plan to dissect our friends?”
“Kill me and get it over with,” Lima said.
“I don’t think so,” Mildred said, shining the light back in his face. “You can die easy after you help us, or you can hold out and die hard here and now. I’ve got to warn you, even though we did some butcher work in your meat market, it’s been a long time since I’ve performed an autopsy. I’ve never done it on a living person before. I’m sure there’s a learning curve.”
Lima’s face blanched. “You can’t be serious.”
Mildred leaned forward. “As serious as an aneurysm,” she said, looking him straight in the eye. “Choke him out, Doc, he’ll be easier to get onto the table.”
Doc stepped behind the man and locked his forearm across the front of Lima’s throat. As the old man slowly applied pressure on the carotid artery, the whitecoat struggled at first, then waved his hands in surrender. “All right! All right! I’ll help you. I’ll do whatever you want me to.”
Doc shoved Lima away. He hadn’t really thought Mildred was going to disassemble the whitecoat while he was still alive, but as Lima was the driving force behind their current situation the idea certainly had its appeal. From outside the autopsy room, from down the hall in the direction they figured their companions had gone, came a muffled string of gunshots—five or six, then silence.
“That could well be Ryan and the others,” Doc said. “Chances are they’re in trouble. We have to get moving.”
“Just one second,” Mildred said as she spun Lima. “Hold still, dammit!” She bound his wrists behind his back with his own belt. Pushing him toward the door, she paused to pick up a pair of eight-inch dissecting knives from a tray on the nearest steel table. “Try to run, try to keep us from getting out of here, and we will gut you like a fish.”
She handed Doc a knife and slipped the other one in the side pocket of her black coveralls.
The blade was single-edged with a thick spine and a very sharp point. It had a deeply grooved handle for a positive grip. The knife was heavy enough to disarticulate the major joints of a corpse. A sheath would have been his preferred choice with an edge so fine, but with a mental shrug he pocketed the weapon. Snapping the submachine’s retractable skeleton stock to full extension, Doc went out the door first.
They followed the puddles of frozen blood, hurrying down the corridor three abreast. Mildred had hold of the whitecoat’s arm with her free hand. There were no other bodies and no live muties in evidence.
“The stairwell is just down there,” Lima said.
The whitecoat kept looking around as if he thought a rescue might pop out of nowhere. Or maybe it was simply his last hope. Doc kept the buttstock tight to his shoulder and his fingertip close to the trigger, just in case.
The entrance to the stairwell was dimly lit, but there was light enough to see the huge pair of webbed feet sticking out the doorway, taloned toes pointing up. Having only recently dealt intimately with such feet, Doc had no doubt what kind of creature they belonged to.
They stopped just short of the landing entrance. Mildred swept the flashlight beam over the pengie’s corpse. Its beak gaped open, the long, pointed black tongue drooped out. In death the little wings had retracted tight against the body. There was what looked like a single bullet hole in the center of the broad chest. The wound was encircled by contact powder burns.
“Looks like someone broke one of your toys,” Mildred said.
Lima said nothing.
“I wonder who would do a thing like that?” she went on. “Somebody with a blaster. Somebody who got up close and personal to use it. You don’t have to answer, but we all know who it was.”
As far as Doc was concerned, the dead mutie was an uplifting sign. It could have just as easily been one of the companions laid out on the icy floor. But instead they had commandeered a weapon and dispatched a threat. At least in the short-term they had the means to defend themselves.
“How do you think they could find a gun so quickly?” Mildred said. Then she answered her own question. “Unless they took it off an enforcer between here and the pathology suite.”
Lima grimaced as if she had punched him again. Doc knew she had hit an exposed nerve. The rescue the whitecoat had been hoping for was off the table.
“How far behind them are we?” Mildred asked.
“It depends on how quickly they’re climbing,” Doc replied, “but this mutie was killed minutes ago.”
“We can’t yell or fire off a burst to get their attention,” Mildred said. “No telling what kind of creature or how many men in black that might attract. We have to catch up to them. There’s no other way.”
“I concur,” Doc said. “And I suggest we proceed with all due haste.”
They stepped around the dead pengie and started up the stairs. It was plain almost at once that a considerable throng of muties had passed the same way. The treads of the steps and the landings were dotted with frozen feces and puddles of yellow ice.
As the three of them raced up the stairs, Doc managed to stay in the l
ead for the first half dozen floors. But after that the exertion combined with the weight of the duffel bag on his back began to take its toll. Huffing billowing clouds of steam, he fell back even with Mildred and Lima, then step by step, dropped behind them. Though Doc had steeled himself for a long, difficult climb, he wasn’t prepared for the weakness that came over his legs, and the speed with which the lactic acid buildup hit him.
When he dropped a full flight of stairs behind, Mildred slowed the pace to let him catch up. But he couldn’t manage it. The strength in his legs was draining further away with every step he took.
As Doc struggled to reach the next landing, Lima and Mildred waited there for him. She had her backpack off.
“Let me spell you with the duffel,” she said. “Take my pack instead.”
Doc gladly switched loads. As they started up again, his legs felt wobbly, but not as if they were about to give out.
Mildred lasted in the lead even fewer floors than he did. When she fell behind, he was the one who waited for her at the next landing.
“Your turn,” she said, out of breath as she unshouldered the duffel.
Doc traded with her. The load felt twice as heavy as before. He lasted three more levels before he had to stop.
He knew the reasons it was proving so difficult: they hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept; there was the stress of exposure to extreme cold, the stress of prolonged exertion, the stress of feeling hopelessly trapped at the ends of the earth. Meanwhile their companions, unburdened by the weight of the small arsenal, were putting more distance between them. With every rest stop precious ground was lost. But it couldn’t be helped—their bodies were betraying them.
Doc unslung the heavy bag. “There is no evidence the muties have chilled anyone along this route,” he said. “There is no blood, no bone fragments, no scraps of clothing. Their kill frenzy will be unbearable by now. They might even be turning on one another to satisfy their urge.”
“That must be something Ryan’s counting on,” Mildred said. “In a frenzied frame of mind, the muties will seek out and attack the largest concentration of victims, which would force the colonists to bring all their resources into play at a single location. Hell of a distraction.”
As she picked up the duffel bag, she asked Lima, “How much farther to the main level?”
The whitecoat looked decidedly green under his flushed cheeks. Lowering his head, he turned and vomited in a corner of the landing. He was still heaving when the clatter of automatic blasterfire rolled down the stairwell from above them.
“Not far, is my guess,” Doc said. He grabbed Lima by the scruff of the neck and pulled him across the landing and forced him up the steps.
The overlapping full-auto blasterfire continued as they climbed three more flights. When they turned on the landing and started up the fourth, spent shell casings rolled down the treads from the higher level. They were less than thirty feet from the center of the action.
Doc shoved Lima facedown on the steps along the inside wall of the stairwell. “You will be safe here, out of the line of fire,” he said into the man’s ear. “But if you raise your head, I will gladly put a dozen bullets through it.”
Mildred shed the duffel, and they began to mount the last ten steps together. Because they were dressed in black, because the enforcers would hesitate to fire on their own, they had an extra fraction of a second to operate. From the vantage point of the fifth step, Doc could see the landing was held by eight men in black. Legs braced, submachines shouldered, they poured blasterfire into a ruined doorway. In the haze of cordite smoke, he also saw the landing was crowded, and not just with enforcers—a dead, shot-to-shit spidie and several stickies lay sprawled on the floor. The spidie’s yellow-leaking, legless corpse took up fully a third of the available space. More black suits were firing from the steps of the next flight. They jammed the staircase, top to bottom and wall-to-wall.
Doc had no doubt who and what they were shooting at.
There was no way the companions could have slipped past that many black suits. There was no answering fire from inside the redoubt. Somewhere beyond that disintegrating doorway they were trapped, perhaps wounded or already chilled.
Doc and Mildred opened fire simultaneously. The ideas of fair fight or chivalry, popular in the nineteenth century, the time of his birth, never even entered Doc’s mind. He had long since discarded such comforting romantic notions. In Deathlands, he had quickly learned one killed or died. The how and the why of it was immaterial. Sweeping their muzzles from left to right, they chopped down the shooters on the landing from behind, stitching tight lines of lead across the middle of their backs. The through-and-throughs sparked off the concrete walls, spitting up little puffs of gray dust. Spun sideways by multiple bullet impacts, the men in black dropped their weapons and toppled.
It was slaughter, pure and simple.
And for a second they were the only ones firing.
But only for a second.
As soon as the men on the stairs realized what was happening, they started shooting. Doc and Mildred jumped back down the stairs. Pressing their backs against the left-hand wall, which presented the black suits with the most difficult target angle, they ditched their mags and reloaded. Bullets rained down on the steps in front of them and gouged holes in the opposite wall. While Mildred guarded the edge of the landing, Doc swung up his submachine and sprayed the rail and ceiling above them with a full-auto burst. When his bullets nicked the edge of the stairway, they made a sharp crack, then zinged off. When they hit flesh and bone, they made a different sound.
Hollow. Thudding.
The fire from above abruptly stopped. Then Doc could feel the tramp of heavy bootfalls on the stairs above. He knew at once that they were rushing the landing, using numbers and firepower to overwhelm. Clearly, Mildred was prepared for the attack.
As the black suits appeared above the first step, from one side of the landing to the other, weapons barking, slugs wildly screaming overhead, Mildred calmly stood her ground and mowed them down. She was quick and she was accurate, aiming not for heads, but for center mass.
Doc saw the bullet impacts pluck at the fabric of their coveralls, and the reaction: faces contorted in agony. None of the enforcers made it past the first three steps alive. Knees buckling, they fell down the staircase headfirst. Their bodies bumped down the steps until their momentum finally gave out.
Mildred stopped shooting, dumped her mag and reloaded. By the time she finished, spilled blood had begun to gush over the treads. Inside Doc’s head a dull roar reverberated. All he could hear was the rasp of his own breathing.
Beside him, Lima’s eyes were closed tight, his lips were drawn back and his teeth were clenched. Doc got the impression that if the whitecoat could have stuck his fingers in his ears, he would have.
It was just the first wave of attackers, Doc knew. There were plenty more enforcers on the stairs and the higher landing. He and Mildred could not defend their position for long. Sooner or later, overwhelming numbers would defeat them.
When Doc attempted to communicate with Mildred, she gave him a puzzled look, pointed at her ear and shook her head. She, too, was suffering from auditory overload. He had to press his mouth against her ear and shout in order to be heard. “We should have taken the RPGs!”
“No, I’ve got it covered,” she shouted back, and she began digging into her pack. She pulled out a pair of frag grens, made a gesture as if to chuck them over the rail above them, then yelled into his ear, “Got to time this just right. When these babies go off, get the weapons and Lima up the steps and across that landing.”
Doc nodded that he understood the plan, and he gave her a thumbs-up, even though what she was suggesting was an act of desperation. If the timing of the arming and the throws were off by the slightest bit, the black suits would toss the grens back at them, or they’d detonate
on the wrong side of the stairwell.
Blasterfire clattered again, bullets sparked off the treads, zigzagging off the walls. The enforcers weren’t leaning over the rail to aim for fear of being shot; they were sticking out their blasters and firing blind. Doc aimed the MP-5 up and slightly back, spraying the rail with hot lead and driving back the shooters. As he reloaded, he got the unsettling feeling that their opposition was sucking it up, about to make an all-out charge.
Doc watched as Mildred pulled the safety pins and let both spoons flip off in the same instant. He read her lips. “One thousand one, one thousand two...” Then she let them fly.
The old man didn’t watch the grens clear the rail; he ducked and covered.
The twin explosions that rocked the stairwell made him see stars. For a second he thought he was going to black out from the concussion. Part of the wall next to him fell across the steps, then the debris began to rain down, some of it warm and wet, and a pall of caustic smoke rolled down the staircase. Doc had already thought through his next moves. His body responded automatically to the “go” signal. He lurched up, snatched hold of the duffel strap in one hand and Lima’s neck in the other, and charged the steps into the roiling gray cloud. The detonations had rendered him deaf. The smoke blinded him and made his eyes stream tears. If the enforcers above were still firing in his direction, he couldn’t hear the gunshots and he couldn’t see the impacts.
Memorizing the positions of the dead spidie and stickies didn’t help. There were many more bodies on the landing now. It was impossible not to step on them. He stumbled over something or someone he couldn’t see. Using Lima’s body as a crutch, he caught himself before he fell and kept them moving forward.
Then the dark, rectangular hole of the emptied doorway appeared out of the swirling smoke and he dragged the whitecoat through it.
Chapter Sixteen
Ryan stood with his back pressed against the side corridor’s wall, trying his hardest to think up a way out while blasterfire raged back and forth not ten feet away. There were far too many blasters set against them, and the blasters had a seemingly endless supply of ammo—to step out in the hallway unarmed was suicide.
