Zero City

by James Axler

  The blacksmith nodded glumly. "If my wife gave birth to a redhead, I'd do the babe a favor and drown her on the spot."

  The words were said so casually, but with such vehemence, Ryan didn't doubt the man for a moment. What the hell was the redheaded baron doing with the girls? It wasn't really Ryan's problem, until he realized Krysty's situation. If her hood slipped, the woman might be taken captive and find out what was happening to the females of the ville.

  Quickly easing his way deeper into the attentive throng, Ryan reached the edge and frantically searched for the woman.

  "We are also here to punish a traitor!" the baron boomed, raising the med kit high. "This woman is Patrica, the madam of our gaudy house. Favored with easy work, she has grown fat, but her work is important and we did nothing. So some of this is our fault for allowing her to think she was above the law."

  "None are above the law!" shouted a teenager near the huge baron.

  "None," the redheaded man agreed, and the crowd roared its agreement.

  Elbowing his way through the throng, Ryan heard the words, but was concentrating on every hooded person in the crowd. He found Krysty amid some bare-chested men holding shovels, and grabbed her shoulder.

  "Don't show yourself," he whispered.

  "Why?" the old woman demanded, sliding back the hood to expose a wealth of gray hair. "What do you want? Who are you?"

  "Sorry, wrong person," Ryan apologized and moved on quickly.

  On the platform, a gang of sec men pushed a fat woman into view, coils of rope binding her. A cloth gag filled her mouth, and even from this distance, Ryan could see the blind panic in her face.

  "This is our enemy, and all that is to transpire will take place here in the justice square," the baron said formally. "I hide nothing in the darkness of basements or hidden rooms."

  The guards lashed the fat woman to a wooden stake, binding her at the neck and waist. The prisoner struggled frantically and achieved nothing. A sec man removed her gag, and she spit out another wad of cloth.

  "It was a mistake!" the woman screamed in desperation. "I hadn't gotten to the baron yet when they caught me. I have done nothing wrong!"

  "Lies!" the redheaded teenager spit. "When we went to pay her the reward for finding the doctor bag, the sec men found a cache of blasters in her room. Not one, or two, but many!"

  The crowd voiced its shock and disapproval.

  "Even one blaster is punishable by the Machine," the baron intoned, spreading his arms. "But why so many? Who needs more than one?"

  He advanced upon the bound woman, shouting at every step, "Why were you building an armory? Are you working with outsiders to overthrow the ville? Confess, traitor, and die a clean death!"

  "Liar," a man whispered to the person next to him. "Big words, and a knife in the back is all you get here."

  "Just like they did my cousin who found the searchlights," the other man agreed, hands stuffed deep into his pockets.

  "No, it serves her right," a young blonde in a colorful dress said with a sneer, hands on her hips. "That bitch Patrica was the meanest madam a slut ever worked for."

  Ryan stopped at those words and stared at the struggling prisoner on the platform. She was his key to the baron? Oh hell. Good thing he already knew where the med kit was.

  "Mercy!" the madam shrieked. Blood trickled down her forearms as she tried to escape from the ropes.

  Clearly, the baron wasn't moved by the outburst, almost as if he had heard it all far too many times before. "Strip her."

  Leonard approached with a knife and cut away her clothing, until the woman was nude to the waist, her giant breasts squeezing out either side of the wooden post.

  "Start with the whips," the baron said calmly, crossing his arms.

  In the anxious throng, a young woman started to guide her children off the square.

  "You, there!" Leonard shouted. "Stay, mother, and let them watch. This traitor to our ville dies so they may live in safety. That is the gift—knowing is the price!"

  Going pale, the teenager curtsied and hugged the trembling children close, their eyes wide with fear.

  A sec man on the platform removed his shirt, displaying a Herculean torso of rippling muscles. Expertly, he uncoiled a long whip, the knotted leather moving across the cracked concrete like a writhing snake.

  "Wait!" Leonard ordered, holding up a hand.

  Everybody watched in silence as the youth stepped forward. Even the baron seemed caught by surprise with this unexpected move. Hope blossomed in the madam's face, and the executioner turned toward the teenager. "Yes, Lieutenant Strichland?"

  "Do not kill her quickly," the boy said fiercely, shaking with barely controlled rage. "Make this filthy traitor feel the terrible guilt of her crimes!"

  Bursting into tears, Patrica soiled herself and started to choke.

  "I shall obey, my liege," the executioner said with a bow, and the whip cracked forward, blood spraying into the air.

  The fat woman screamed with a wild animal sound, every inch of her soft body jiggling.

  Nauseated by the obvious pleasure Strichland was getting from the torture, Ryan forced himself to watch for a while to appear normal. Hopefully, Krysty was doing the same, blending in and staying low. Then he noticed a commotion among the crowd on the other side of the courtyard.

  "Wait!" the baron shouted, staring into the crowd. "What's going on there?"

  A cloak went flying, a man bent over double clutching his gut, a woman screamed and Krysty burst from the bystanders running across the open courtyard. Her hood and cape were gone, her long fiery hair billowing behind her. Instantly, sec men charged from behind the sandbags.

  "An outsider!" Leonard shouted, pointing with the knife. "Guards, capture her!"

  As if poleaxed, Baron Strichland openly stared at the woman as if unable to believe what was happening. His hair fanned out around him in a wild corona of astonishment.

  Deciding to risk a shot, Ryan drew the silenced SIG-Sauer but balked at the sight. The man's hair was the same as Krysty's. Exactly the same! Suddenly, Ryan knew what the baron was doing with all the redheaded girls who came to the ville. He was searching for another of his kind, searching for a mate. And now he had found one.

  As the crowd linked arms to form a wall blocking her escape, the troops converged from every side. As Krysty raised her blaster, the men in the sandbag machine-gun nest fired a short burst. The rounds struck the ground at her feet, rising a line of dust clouds.

  "Halt or die!" the baron commanded, the wanton lust and need on his face brutally on display.

  Forgotten at the post, Patrica savored the scant few seconds without pain, knowing this was no release from her death sentence, but merely a brief delay.

  Surrounded on every side, Krysty turned wildly, as if searching the crowd. Then she found Ryan. They exchanged glances. He nodded, and she stopped running, dropping her blaster and raising both hands.

  "Alive!" the baron roared, climbing down from the platform. "Take her alive at all costs!" The sec men swarmed over Krysty.

  Returning the blaster to its holster, Ryan merged with the excited crowd and disappeared from sight.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The ramshackle old pickup truck rattled noisily down the sandy street, resembling the loser in a car crash. Its tires were bald, the muffler was held on by wire hangers, and the doors were composed almost entirely of duct tape.

  But deadly serious armed sec men were in the cab and sitting in the open back. They had been boastful and confident in the ville, but now amid the ghostly ruins of the city, their conversations were brief and to the point. Death lurked everywhere among the crumbling structures: falling masonry, poisonous spiders and lethal plants. Hell-flowers, they were called. Beautiful plants, with gorgeous flowers. But take a sniff and you stopped moving until a buddy dragged your sleeping body away. Something to do with spoors, or such. But if you were alone, the victim would stand there locked in a perfumed dream until he toppled over dead fr
om starvation. Then the plants would feed on the rotting carcass. Before the fuel started running low, the sec men used to firebomb the plants on sight. They hated the filthy things. It was no way for a man to die, stupefied like a drunk in a gaudy.

  Worse, outsiders come to loot the ruins—once cannibals, another time a predark war machine. And then there were the human muties who wandered in from the glowing red pits beyond the mountains, plus the local winged muties. Sometimes, even their own wolves turned against them for unknown reasons.

  "Hold it!" Sergeant Benson cried, leaning out the passenger-side door. "Right here."

  The driver applied the brakes, and the truck slowed, squealing every foot of the way.

  "Henders, check out that body!" the sergeant directed, pointing to a vacant lot. A sprawled form lay amid the wolfweed and wreckage. Lizards were chewing on his flesh, and what seemed like a perfectly good longblaster was in the bones of his hands. The triple-damn reptiles always seemed to eat the hands of the dead first.

  "Sure, Sarge," the private replied, puffing away on his pipe.

  Strolling over, Henders used his bolt-action rifle to chase away the lizards, then pinched his nose shut against the stink of the decomposing flesh as he inspected the corpse.

  "Nobody I know," he reported, choking a bit. "Dead for a day, mebbe more."

  "Get the blaster!"

  "Sure." Bending over, the private picked up the rifle and felt the slightest tug from a string attached to the stock. His face registered curiosity, then horror for a full second before the lot was filled with an expanding fireball that vaporized the man, corpse and a hundred lizards, before reaching the sidewalk and dissipating.

  Shrapnel peppered the truck, sounding like hard rain, and a man in the back toppled over with a cry, falling out of the vehicle.

  "Skydark!" Benson roared, holding on to the sagging door of the battered truck and painfully lifting himself off the ground.

  There was no need to recce the blast zone. Smoking shoes and a burning skull told the story. Henders was gone. The ground was a charred pit with flaming wreckage scattered for dozens of yards. Shaking his head to ease the ringing in his ears, the sergeant watched as the mushroom cloud of the blast rose into the cloudy sky. Damn explosion resembled a plas-ex blast, but nobody had any of that anymore. Not even the baron. Stuff crumbled over the passage of time, became unstable, then dried into a hard, useless brick.

  "Hey, Sarge!" a private called, stepping into view from behind the truck. His empty hands were dripping blood. "Pete is dead. Got a chunk of rifle barrel right through the belly."

  In wordless fury, Benson glanced around the intersection at the movie theater, garage, pawnshop and office buildings. Nothing stirred—not a soul was in sight. But he knew the hunchback was somewhere near.

  "Okay, Harold!" he yelled. "You got two of us with the trap! Well, enjoy the victory, 'cause you ain't getting any more!"

  Silence answered the comments, and drawing a knife from his belt, Benson stabbed it into the street. "You see that?" he asked, pointing at the knife. "There's where I'm going to stake you out like a dog! Baron says we got to bring you in alive."

  The sergeant took in a deep breath, then bellowed, "But alive doesn't mean with eyes! Or fingers!"

  "Get moving!" Benson barked at the squad. "I want a five-block perimeter sweep of the whole damn area. Smash open every ground-level door that looks suspicious."

  Clutching their longblasters, the sec men rushed to comply, fueled by their own anger and hatred.

  "No prisoners," Benson growled, cracking open the top of his .44 Webley revolver and loading every chamber. The hell with rationing. "Shoot first, and we'll loot the bodies afterward."

  "And find me that son of a slut Harold!"

  THE BASEMENT of the government building was brightly lit, mirrors from the bathrooms on every floor now ringing the sleeping Dean on each side. Mildred remembered reading how Thomas Edison assisted the doctor operating on his mother by boosting the candlelight with mirrors, and the trick worked. If necessary, the physician had no doubt that she could do an operation on the boy's spine. That is, if Ryan returned with the field kit.

  Sitting on a plastic milk carton, Mildred was rubbing gun oil into the stiff leather of her new boots. They fit better every day, but still needed a bit more softening or else she'd have blisters on her heels for a month.

  Finishing the first boot, Mildred took a drink from her tin cup of coffee. It was room temperature, but she needed the caffeine to help stay awake. Sipping the brew, the physician listened to the stillness. The old building was as silent as a grave, and even her breathing seemed to echo slightly amid the empty stalls and bare walls. Jak was on the ground floor standing watch, and the others were out on recce, so she was alone again with Dean. Even if the group had working radios, they wouldn't be so stupid as to waste precious batteries on idle conversation.

  Placing aside the empty cup, Mildred dutifully started on the other boot, removing the laces first so they wouldn't become oil soaked and impossible to tie anymore. But then the physician jerked her head toward the sleeping boy lying under the conference table. Had his breathing just changed a little?

  Putting aside the boot, the doctor padded over. Suddenly, Dean started to hack and cough. His left arm ripped lose from the binding, and he clawed at the restraining straps.

  Grabbing the limb and pulling it away, she knelt on the arm to keep it still, and the boy stopped breathing. Immediately, Mildred started to apply CPR, but then realized pressing on his chest to force air into the lung would only aggravate the possibility of a puncture from the broken rib. Pinching his nose shut, she inhaled deeply and exhaled into his mouth, their lips pressed tight together. His chest rose and fell at her ministrations, but the boy didn't stir and his pallor took on a faint grayish tinge.

  "Come on, Dean," she panted between breaths, feeling light-headed from hyperventilating herself. "Live!"

  EXPLOSIONS SOUNDED from the ground floor of the skyscraper, then the front door exploded in a spray of glass. Firing steadily, Doc and J.B. stumbled into the tinged sunlight, their blasters booming and chattering.

  Backing into the middle of the street, the two men paused for a moment as they quickly reloaded.

  "Looks—" J.B. paused to swallow and moisten his throat, "—looks like we made it."

  "By Godfrey, what foul magician conjured these dark visitors!"

  "Here they come again!" J.B. cried, snapping the bolt on his Uzi and triggering the blaster.

  Doc was only half finished reloading the LeMat, but he leveled the blaster and discharged the scattergun barrel. Smoke and thunder blasted from the muzzle, and something inside the building screamed in pain. His heart pounding, Doc pulled a paper cartridge from his pocket, bit off the top and poured the black powder into an empty recess of the nine-shot cylinder, then placed the lead ball from the package into the recess and lastly tamped down the paper to hold the charge and lead in place. He shifted the selector pin from the shotgun back to the revolver. God's blood, how many of the damn muties were there?

  Doc reached over his shoulder and hauled out a Molotov.

  "Light me," he ordered, proffering the rag fuse.

  But J.B. started for the Hummer. "Let's get out of here while we got the chance," he retorted. "Then we'll blast them with a LAW from down the street."

  "Brilliant," Doc said, as a window on the second floor exploded and a black shape sailed across the street to land heavily on the hood of the military wag. The bat clawed and bit at the sheet metal covering the engine, its large eyes shut tight against the blinding sunlight.

  J.B.'s Uzi barked a dull staccato of death. The 9 mm rounds knocked the mutie off the wag, yellow blood spraying out from the impacts. The men rushed forward just as a dozen more of the muties leaped from the ruined front door of the building and landed in the middle of the street.

  The companions froze, trying to be as quiet as possible while the creatures raised piglike snouts and loudly sniffed
the air, turning their misshapen heads this way and that. In the tainted light of the cloudy sky, the beasts were mostly wings, their bodies no bigger than a dog's. Their ears were almost a full foot tall, their mouths filled with rows of needle-sharp teeth. The wings gave a semblance of size, spreading well over eight feet wide, the elongated elbows sticking high over their bodies and waggling ridiculously as the killers crawled about in a gross pantomime of walking.

  In slow motion, J.B. took a careful step toward the Hummer, the sand softly crunching beneath his boot as he shifted his weight. Instantly, the muties turned toward him and a few started scuttling forward. The Armorer raised his leg, and one darted directly underneath the boot.

  An odd noise caught Doc's attention, and he glanced over a shoulder to see two more bats directly behind him sniffing the air. Sweat broke out on his brow. He knew that primates sweated ammonia, and once any animal realized that, it could track a human forever. He didn't know if bats naturally had a good sense of smell, but these certainly seemed to. Thankfully, they were stone blind in daylight, and it was only the soft breezes from the coming storm in the desert that was keeping the muties from finding them immediately. However, if the wind shifted, or one got too close, it was all over. This close, sight wouldn't be necessary for the monsters to claw the men apart.

  High above them, thick smoke poured from the broken windows of the skyscraper where the Molotov cocktails had set the building on fire. The fuel bombs had done a good job blocking the stairs and slowing the advance of the winged muties. But the elevator shaft was more than their nest apparently. It was a highway reaching from the cool dark basement to the observation tower. No wonder nobody had ever found them before. Who would search for aerial creatures underground? Smart, too damn smart for his liking.

  Aiming his LeMat at the largest of the bats, Doc dangled the rag of the last Molotov before the barrel. When he fired, the muzzle-flash would ignite the rag, then he'd drop the bottle and dive out of the way. Hopefully, the noise of the gun would attract several of the muties into the flames before they knew what was happening.