by James Axler
“Phyllida,” Nancy said. “You’ve...”
“She attacked me, and I’ll do you, too,” J.B. vowed. “All of you. Now step aside.” The initial rush of adrenaline was passing already, and he could feel himself getting weak.
“You’ve...” Nancy said again.
J.B. glanced back, eyeing Phyllida’s slender form where she lay on the blood-streaked floor of the mat-trans. “She isn’t dead yet,” he told Nancy. “You want to fight me, or you want to save her?”
Nancy glared at him, fury burning in her blue-gray eyes. Then, reluctantly, she stepped aside and ushered the other women away from the door. J.B. trudged through the doorway, shouldering past one of the engineers, the bloody knife dripping in his hand.
“You’re a dead man,” Nancy told the Armorer as he made his way through the control room and into the corridor beyond. “Run all you like, violator, it won’t save you. Not after this.”
J.B. ignored her. He had been threatened by meaner people than this, and he was still breathing where they weren’t.
As Nancy and the engineers gathered to help Phyllida, J.B. exited the redoubt, forcing himself to keep moving.
* * *
J.B. WAS ON the run now. He had made it out of the redoubt without being followed, though each step was fought for past the pain, like swimming through molasses. He had made it topside, got out through the wedged-open door and into the fresh air, and that had kicked in something in his brain, making him wake up and get moving where inside he had wanted to just fall down.
It had been bad luck that both the sec women had come down to check on the mat-trans, he realized as he made his way through the trees and off into an overgrown mountain pass. They had found the open door and had come in numbers to see who had broken into their pet project, which made a degree of sense. At the same time, it had been good for him because it meant he had gotten out alive without meeting another one of the fast-moving Melissas.
And, yeah, what was that about anyway? he thought. That Phyllida woman had moved as though she was high on jolt, faster than the eye could properly follow. J.B. had never seen anything like it.
The Armorer thought about that as he followed a path west, creating distance between himself and the redoubt and the ville. He could make it a few nights up here in the mountains, but without a blaster he wouldn’t rate his chances in the land beyond.
And he couldn’t leave Ryan. There, he’d said it, at least in his mind.
The tree cover was thick, with tangling bushes budded across the sloping ground like barbed wire. J.B. created a way through it, following the path of least resistance, hacking the odd branch aside with his knife. He checked behind him as he went, placing the redoubt entrance where he thought it had to be, figuring himself to be not that far from the limits of the vast underground facility. They had built them big when they had built them, no question about that. Hadn’t done them any good. Most of the people who’d built those redoubts had died in the first few seconds of the nuclear conflict, and what few survived had been too irradiated to make the trek there without keeling over. Shitty way to die, radiation; it sunk into the bones and ate at everything until the body just gave in.
The sun was starting to sink, casting long shadows across the ground, bringing that chill back that J.B. had felt when he had gone to meet Doc that morning. It seemed a long time ago now, and J.B. wondered how Doc was faring without him. Doc was a slick talker when he needed to be; he’d probably come up with something to explain away J.B.’s continued absence.
The tangling undergrowth gave way to an orchard—twenty apple trees clustered in a neat little circle. J.B. stopped by a tree and turned back, watching behind him, searching the long shadows for movement. They’d start following him soon, he knew. Nancy would probably delegate the care of her colleague to the engineers so that she could come for him. She was a sec woman, what they called in these parts a Melissa. Hunting down “violators” was her job.
Moving away from the tree, J.B. kicked his way through the undergrowth, searching for a place to hole up and watch, somewhere he might be able to defend.
Beyond the trees, the side of a rocky incline waited like a hurricane-toppled wall. It was too steep to climb without gear, yet offered good protection from the wind.
J.B. ran toward the rocks, peering over his shoulder frequently to ensure he wasn’t seen. There were caves here—no, not caves but dark little depressions that had been carved by rainwater and were just big enough to hold a person. J.B. used his knife to cut away a tangle of briars that he carried with him to the outcropping. He located a good-size hole, one big enough to fit inside, hunkered down and slipped inside, pulling the tangle of green in front of him like a door. The green would act as camouflage, a screen he could peer through without being seen.
Then he waited.
* * *
“YOUR FRIEND’S BEEN gone a long time,” Jon said to Doc. They were gathering their equipment, circling back toward the towering gates of Heaven Falls.
“What? John Barrymore?” Doc replied. “I believe I saw him return to the Home a couple hours ago now. Did he not come speak to you?”
“’Fraid he didn’t,” Jon said. “Tom? He speak to you?”
Thomas shook his head as he hefted another pail of honey into the cool box that sat in the fields.
“Well, mayhap he had not wanted to bother you,” Doc suggested. “He could obviously see we were busy.”
Jon nodded, smiling. “Shame about his headache. You think he’ll come back on crew again?”
Doc shrugged. “Who knows? What makes a good beekeeper?”
Jon laughed. “Patience and a steady hand.”
Together, the three-man crew made its way through the open gates and back into the hub of Heaven Falls, thinking nothing more of J.B. and the fact he had gone missing. Doc only hoped that J.B. had found what he was looking for out at the redoubt, and that the man was all right.
* * *
NANCY RETURNED TO Heaven Falls with the engineering team and their wounded companion, Phyllida. Nancy carried Phyllida on her own, resting her unconscious body over her arms, managing the weight with apparent ease. Phyllida’s virgin-white robes were stained red with blood and, while Nancy had done what she could to patch up the woman, she was still losing a lot of blood.
One of the engineers called Deirdre hurried ahead to ensure that the gates were open by the time they arrived. Alerted, a medical team hurried to meet Nancy as she entered the gates, and they rushed Phyllida to the medical tower. Word was sent to the Regina, and shortly thereafter she came to find Nancy at the medical faculty to discuss what had happened.
“We found one of the newcomers in the mat-trans,” Nancy explained. She was standing at the doorway to the room where the medics were working on Phyllida, her brow furrowed with concern.
“A newcomer? Which one?” the Regina asked.
“The one with the hat,” Nancy told her. “Dix.”
The Regina nodded, her blond ringlets brushing like a pendulum across her shoulders. “The others have found their places, but Dix has been restless since he first arrived,” she said. “He petitioned to join one of the honey-harvesting teams. That’s how he got out.”
“An oversight,” Nancy said, “but one that can be corrected, my Regina. I will see to it personally.”
“Take a squad,” the Regina said. “You’re Chief Melissa now, until Phyllida is ready for service again.”
Nancy nodded in understanding. “As you will. All love.”
“All love,” the Regina responded.
* * *
THE SUN WAS low when the women came looking for J.B. There were five of them, each dressed in the gossamer-thin white robes of the Melissas. The robes billowed around them like mist, and the last rays of the sun highlighted the curves of their supple bodies beneath as it peered through the material. They had tracked J.B. via the path in the undergrowth, following the signs he had left in his haste to get away from the redoubt. He hadn’t had time to cove
r his tracks; his body ached and it was all he could do to hide.
J.B. had rested in the bolthole all afternoon, the agony of the beating he had received turning to a persistent ache. Nothing was bleeding, nothing was broken, and for that he was grateful. His ribs ached, though, and he figured there would be bruises there if he looked in the light, but he dared not step out from cover, for fear that someone would see him. So he had remained in the shallow hole all that time, watching through the curtain of brush as the afternoon shadows had grown longer, the once-vibrant grass turning a deep olive as the sun set.
Despite the pain, J.B. was alert. He spied the women as they made their way through the trees, their robes catching the breeze and whipping up behind them. Fanned out to cover as much ground as they could, there was about fifteen feet between one woman and the next. He couldn’t make it out between them; they hadn’t left enough room for that. They would swarm him the instant he showed himself.
J.B. watched from his bolthole as the women came closer, and he recognized three of them. One was the second Melissa from the redoubt—Nancy—her black hair piled high on her head. Accompanying her were Adele and Linda, plus two others he didn’t know by name but recognized from his travels around Heaven Falls. He was outnumbered with nothing to use against them except one lone knife.
He had to get away from them, and do it quickly. What he had seen in the redoubt, the inhuman way that Phyllida had attacked him—the speed with which she had assaulted him—was something uncanny. J.B. had to assume that the others could do the same.
He watched through the foliage as the women came closer, closing in on him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Regina had called a rally at sunset. Everyone was expected to attend.
The rally was held in the plaza outside the Regina’s tower, torches burning around the edge to illuminate the space as the sun slid below the horizon. It took thirty minutes from when the Regina had decided to hold the rally to everyone in Heaven Falls arriving.
Ryan and Krysty stood together in the crowd as the Regina took the stage, actually a raised platform outside her tower. Illuminated by the burning flames, their cheeks seemed to glow, and their eyes were alight with adoration for the benevolent leader of this paradise on Earth.
The Regina wore a wrap dress of bloodred with a matching headdress that ended in a sharp spine at its apex. The dress and headpiece was wound with black material, around and around in a series of thick stripes. Two white-robed Melissas stood in front of the stage, one to either side, surveying the crowd with stern expressions.
“My people,” the Regina began, her arms held aloft, “my children. I have gathered you this eve with terrible news. A violator walks among us. A violator has lived with us—passed himself off as one of us—for many days. The man showed his true face today when he tried to kill one of my precious daughters.”
A rumble of dismay buzzed through the crowd. A dark-haired young man dressed in a toga handed a flat wooden box roughly the size of a shoebox to the Regina with a bow. The crowd waited on tenterhooks as the Regina opened the box and removed the single item that rested within. Then she held it aloft, and a rumble of shock and revulsion went through the crowd. It was a lone item of clothing—the familiar white robes worn by the Melissas—only this one was stained with blood, fully two-thirds of it turned red.
“Phyllida, leader of our Protection Sisters and my most precious daughter, was almost killed,” the Regina announced to the horrified crowd. “She lives only because she is strong—made strong by the royal gift.”
Watching, Krysty turned to Ryan, pulling him a little closer. “It’s terrible,” she said. “I thought this place was safe.”
“So did I,” Ryan said, a mixture of emotions rushing through him.
Still holding aloft the bloodstained robe, the Regina continued. “Fear not. The attack was perpetrated outside the Home, in the mat-trans unit where daughters work. The violator who did this remains beyond our walls.
“We are hunting him down even now. A squadron of Melissas has been dispatched to end his reign of wickedness.”
“It’s like William all over again,” muttered a woman close to Ryan.
“Who is this violator?” cried a woman at the front of the crowd. All around, other people in the audience repeated the question.
“The violator’s name...” The Regina paused, waiting for the crowd to quiet. “The violator’s name is J. B. Dix!”
A roar went through the crowd. From somewhere close by, Ryan heard a man’s voice say, “I worked with him! That guy was always kinda off.”
“Me, too,” said another, this one a woman. “J.B. never wanted to contribute to the Home. He kept going off by himself.”
Ryan looked to where the voices were coming from and realized that more people were saying similar things about J.B. A wave of dissent was sweeping through the crowd—everyone seemed to know J.B. and everyone seemed to have had their suspicions.
“Ryan?” Krysty prompted, touching his arm.
Ryan saw the look of confusion on her face, illuminated by the flickering flames.
“Can it be true?” Krysty whispered. “You’ve known him longer than any of us. Could J.B....?”
Ryan fixed her grimly with his cold eye. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s true. I can feel it. That bastard’s going to ruin our Home.”
* * *
FIVE MELISSAS CLOSED in on the rock wall past the orchard. It was obvious that this was as far as a person could run in that direction; after that he or she would have to climb and it was a near-impossible task to scale that wall once it became vertical just above head height.
They moved almost silently, foot over foot, their white robes fluttering around them like mist. J.B. winced as they settled on the little indentation in the sheer rock wall where he had been hidden less than five minutes before. He had moved when he’d seen them approaching, using the cover of dusk to scramble out of the hole and under the dense cover of the tangled bushes. It seemed scant cover now, with five Melissas prowling the scene.
In the lead, raven-haired Nancy turned briefly, hissing something to her colleagues. They had him. Or so she thought.
J.B. hunkered down behind the tangled briars, the knife clutched tightly in his hand, his breathing shallow and silent. They were just feet away. All that they needed to do was to turn and they would have him. He watched as Nancy took the lead, sidling up to the wall by the bolthole, then moving like lightning to peer within. J.B. should have been there, but he wasn’t.
She moved on, meticulous and logical, checking each crevice in turn, backed by her sisters in sec. J.B. hunkered lower, holding his breath, recirculating the air in his throat, letting out only the faintest whisper of breath when he really had to.
Five minutes felt like a lifetime. The women checked every inch of that slate-gray outcropping, checked each hole twice over to be sure they hadn’t missed something in the last of the twilight. By the time they were done, it was dark—the kind of dark it only got in the mountains, when there weren’t even shadows, just blackness.
One of the women lit a torch made of plaited brambles. It burned slow with a sweet, musky scent that sat heavy on the air. J.B. watched the flickering flames from his hiding place in the bushes, cupping his hand over his glasses so that they wouldn’t reflect the brightness and give his position away.
It seemed to take forever, but finally the women moved on. J.B. watched as they passed his hiding place under the thick tangle of foliage. The closest stepped just eight feet from J.B.’s face; he watched her bare feet pass, their contours ever-changing shadows from the flickering torch.
“The violator must have gone up the mountain,” one of the women proposed. “It’s the only place left to run.”
“There’s nowhere to go from there,” another replied. J.B. recognized it as Adele’s husky voice. “Chances are a bear will get him, or a wolf.”
The women continued to discuss this as they moved out of earshot. J.B. ju
st lay there in the dirt for a long, long time, watching the flaming torch retreat, turning from a burning ball to a tiny speck that winked in and out of existence as the search party moved through the trees.
So they figured him dead, or as good as. Maybe they were right, J.B. thought. He didn’t know this territory, and he’d heard about the mutie bear that had almost chilled Jak and his group. The only thing he could do was get back to what little protection the bolthole in the mountainside had given him and try to get some sleep, trusting that the Melissas wouldn’t come back until morning.
Slowly, J.B. crawled out from under the bushes and trudged back to the outcropping. He sank down into the crevice and pulled a tangle of bushes over the entrance, enough—he hoped—to hide him.
“Dark night,” J.B. muttered, sinking into the dirt, his body aching from Phyllida’s assault. “Dark fucking night.”
* * *
MORNING CAME WITH a shock of brightness, waking J.B. like an inquisitor’s lamp. He grunted as he placed the glasses on his nose. His side ached where Phyllida had attacked him, and what was more his gut was grumbling that he hadn’t eaten in twenty-something hours.
Ignore it, J.B. told himself.
He peered through the screen of brambles, searching the underbrush and the inclined plain that lay beyond. There was no one there, just a few early birds hopping around as they searched for grub. After batting the camouflaging bramble aside, J.B. used his arms to wrench himself up from the gap in the rocks and out into the dawn. The air smelled fresh.
J.B. pissed in the bushes, careful to cover the evidence with dirt. Then he made his way from the outcropping that had been his bed, using the sun to navigate, making his way west, away from Heaven Falls.
Two hours later J.B. hit a snag. The mountains had herded him in a southwesterly direction thanks to various impassable tracts of rock that ran vertical or at an acute angle that no man could climb. Now J.B. found himself in an alleyway between two towering rocks, at the end of which was a ravine that spanned seventy yards before the path restarted. Up close, the ravine looked bottomless.
