Seedling

by James Axler

  The Armorer obeyed Ryan's instructions, throt­tling right back, easing the wag alongside the high wall of concrete and iron.

  "Mooring ropes in here," Mildred called, opening a small hatch to the side of the turret.

  J.B. cut the engines, and Mildred and Krysty leaped ashore to make the wag secure, fastening it to rusting girders.

  There was a gap of three or four feet between the LAV and the makeshift jetty, and it took both Doc and J.B. to help Ryan across. Even then they nearly stumbled and fell into the sucking patch of foaming water.

  J.B. was trembling nearly as much as Ryan, and the two old friends clung to each other.

  "Can't go on like this," the Armorer said. "Need a rest. Sickness took too much. Have a rest and I'll be fine."

  "Yeah, me, too," Ryan agreed. "Could do with being drier and warmer."

  "That is a fire," Krysty said, shading her eyes with her hands. "Can't see anyone near it. Me, Doc and Mildred will go look. You two stay here."

  Ryan didn't much like that. J.B. was too bushed to care, sitting down on a slab of concrete, burying his head in his hands.

  Krysty led the other two along the dock toward the light. Ryan looked across at J.B. "We're getting too fucking old for this."

  IT WAS THE FIRST TIME Krysty could remember lead­ing a scouting team without Ryan, and she knew well enough that there was a better than average chance that the recce could turn into a bloody chilling.

  She had her gleaming Heckler & Koch P7A-13 in her right hand. Mildred came second with her target pistol cocked and ready. Doc, at the back, had the Le Mat set on the scattergun barrel. Subtlety wasn't the best way of taking out a scalie.

  "Someone there," she said, beckoning her two partners to her.

  "Can you see them?"

  "No, Doc. But I just know they're there. Muties. More than one."

  Ryan had managed to urge caution on her. "Make much noise and it'll be like sticking your dick in an ant's nest," he'd said.

  "Not a problem for me, lover," she'd replied, giv­ing him a quick kiss on the cold cheek before leading Doc and Mildred away.

  The jetty, built from old rubble, gradually became lower until it reached a stretch of flatter land. It could be concrete or shingle; the light of the moon wasn't good enough to make sure. The beach was about fifty yards wide, sloping up toward the wide arch where the fire blazed. The other tumbled pier stretched off into the river on the far side.

  "Ready?"

  "Sure," Mildred replied.

  "Apart from a pressing need to relieve a certain tightness of the bladder, caused, I think, by a com­bination of the bitter cold and the excitement, I'm fine."

  "Sure you don't want to piss here and now, Doc?" Krysty asked.

  "No, no. But thank you for the kind offer, my dear lady."

  "Map shows this as a back entrance to the bur­rows. Only used in daylight, so Harry Stanton says."

  "If anyone's inside, they'll hear us coming across that shingle," Mildred said.

  "Only if they're listening," Krysty replied, half smiling. "Let's go and find out."

  Chapter Forty-One

  RYAN AND J.B. HUGGED each other, shaking like aspens in a hurricane.

  "Never been so fucking cold," Ryan stated. "Numb from head to toe."

  "Me, too." J.B. was breathing very quickly, his whole body trembling.

  "Reckon we should've gone with 'em?"

  "I'd never have made it. Be a liability in a firefight."

  Ryan nodded. "Yeah. Couldn't draw a blaster. Never find the trigger with frozen fingers. Just wait and listen. Fireblast! That blaze sure looks good."

  KRYSTY PADDED across the shingle, leaning a little forward, spreading her weight. Her boots made a faint whispering sound on the tiny pebbles. Doc was about three paces behind her and Mildred another couple of yards at the back.

  There was obviously going to be a very unpleasant moment. The fire was so bright that it wasn't possi­ble to see anything in the cavernous shadows behind it. They would have to come around the corner into that dazzling glow, the best of targets to anyone sit­ting patiently inside the tunnel.

  Krysty held up a hand, bringing the others close to her. "No other way," she said. "Triggers tight and in we go. I'll take whoever's on the left. Mildred, pick off the right. Doc, just let rip in the middle. All right?" They both nodded. "Now."

  OUT ON THE BREAKWATER Ryan and J.B. heard the sound of shooting, oddly muffled by the distance and the wind. But the three different blasters were all eas­ily distinguished.

  "Three from Krysty," the Armorer said, "and two, spaced, from that bitching little pistol of Mildred's. Should mean two dead from her, plus a couple from Krysty."

  "And Doc's thunderblaster," Ryan said, manag­ing a grin despite his frozen lips. "Could mean any damn thing."

  "Feel up to going to take a look?"

  "If we can get near that fire, yeah, let's go for it."

  Just seeing the blazing pile of wood made Ryan somehow feel a touch warmer. But as they reached the sloping beach, with the tiny wavelets lapping near their boots, both men were conscious of a sinister si­lence.

  Suddenly the ice in Ryan's body didn't seem so crippling. The SIG-Sauer came out of its holster, smooth as silk. He gestured for J.B. to cover him.

  Slowly and cautiously he flattened himself against the ice-caked concrete of the tunnel wall, sliding his face around the corner to squint, finding the same problem that Krysty had experienced only a few sec­onds earlier. He was blinded by the golden flames of the big bonfire.

  "Come ahead, lover," Krysty called. "Yeah, they were here. Five of them. But they're not any longer. Come get warm. And you, J.B. It's clear."

  Five dead scalies were lying where they'd fallen, a tight group, tangled together, their puddled blood soaking into the shingle beneath them.

  "They were just on the other side of the fire," Mildred explained, "backs to us, rolling dice."

  "You chill them from behind without giving them any warning?" Ryan asked.

  "Sure." Krysty looked doubtful.

  He smiled at her. "Did good, lover."

  Doc was reloading the scattergun chamber of the Le Mat. "Nearly took the head clean off the chap in the middle. Jolly unsporting, don't you know, Ryan. Behavior like that would get us all blackballed from any fox hunt in the English shires."

  "If I ever want to go hunt foxes in English—"

  "England," Krysty corrected.

  "Thanks. If I ever want to hunt foxes…over there, I'll bear your warning in mind, Doc. And now it's time to get warm. You checked out where this tunnel goes?"

  Krysty nodded. "About twenty yards back there's a big sec door. That's what those stupes were guard­ing. Had a quick look behind it. Nothing. Wide pas­sage. Nobody in sight."

  Mildred had finished reloading her ZKR 551. Ryan had already noticed that two of the muties had been chilled by a bullet smack through the center of the skull.

  "I'll watch that door while you two get warmed up," she said.

  Nobody argued with her.

  While he sat as close as he dared to the searing flames, Ryan let his thoughts wander past the steel sec door, wondering if the boy was there, safe and alive.

  "Think they're going to be replaced?" J.B. asked, looking down at the slumped bodies of the scalie guards. Already the Armorer was warming up, a faint glow coloring his sallow cheeks.

  Ryan was still sitting by the fire, an aura of steam rising around him from his soaked clothing. But like J.B., he was feeling vastly better. Just ten minutes of the blazing heat shook off the horror of the freezing river.

  "Bound to have some sort of rota. It's real weird seeing muties with a kind of uniform, like some high-drawer baron with his sec men. Anything's possible, I guess."

  J.B. reached up. Touching the dressing that Mildred had managed to fix over the wound at the side of his jaw. A little blood was weeping from be­neath it, discoloring the bandage.

  Mildred saw the gesture. "Giving you some tro
u­ble, John?"

  "Not really. Stings from the saltwater. Not bad. Thanks."

  She smiled, her face becoming radiant with plea­sure at his acknowledgment of her assistance.

  Ryan stood, finding the tongues of fire were so hot that he had beads of perspiration across his fore­head. "See if they had some food with them."

  "I checked," Krysty said. "Hadn't been touched. Figure that means they weren't due to be relieved for sometime."

  "What sort of edibles were they, Krysty? I have to confess to a small pang of hunger now and again."

  "Thought you might, Doc." She grinned. "You want raw worms and uncooked eel heads? No? Then I guess you have to stay hungered for a while longer."

  Ryan walked to the river side of the fire and peered into the darkness. It might have been his imagina­tion, but he thought he saw something moving along the edge of the shingle, something about the same size and shape as a dead tree, but with short legs, a long tail and the whiteness of teeth at the front end.

  The gators in the Hudson might be another com­plication when it came to getting away from the scalies base.

  Assuming they all got in and then out again.

  "Everyone ready to move?" he asked, turning back past the fire and walking toward the heavy sec door. Nobody spoke. Ryan smiled at them. "Anybody not ready to move?" Still no word. "Then I guess we go." The hinges on the doors were rusted from the salt­water, creaking in protest as Ryan leaned his weight against them. He peered around, seeing that the tun­nel continued, bending slightly to the right. It was about fifteen feet high and twenty across, with a roof of arched brick, light blazed from a number of torches stuck into brackets. The smell of the badly refined oil battled over the stink of fish.

  "Nobody," Ryan said,

  "Think we should split up?" J.B. suggested. "Rendezvous back at the wag in, say, forty minutes. By then we've found the kid or we're all dead."

  Ryan hesitated. He'd thought about that option and then rejected it. Now he reconsidered, but reached the same decision. "No."

  "Wouldn't we have more chance of finding the boy?" Mildred asked, "Place could be a regular warren."

  "Gotta be a shit load of scalies here. Most'll be sleeping, but a few won't. I want to avoid a challenge for as long as we can. The boy—Dean—will likely be sleeping with the other prisoners. Looks like the muties don't have too much firepower, but they have numbers. We don't have numbers, but we've got the firepower. Use what advantage you got. We stick to­gether."

  Chapter Forty-Two

  DOC LEANED A hand against the wall, immediately re­moving it with an expression of disgust. He looked ahead of them, where the tunnel finally opened up into a huge, sprawling space.

  "By the three Kennedys!" he exclaimed. "It's like a glimpse of the bottom circle of Dante's Inferno. Truly this is hell."

  In his lifetime in Deathlands Ryan had never seen anything quite like it.

  It was impossible to do any more than guess at what the complex of buildings might once have been. In front of them was a great underground cavern. Fires burned at its center, and all around were ranged dozens and dozens of sleeping figures. Many were chained together, and there was the constant chink­ing of metal as someone moved uneasily. At a slightly higher level Ryan saw a number of the scalie guards, all apparently asleep.

  The roof seemed to be high and vaulted, but the lack of light made it difficult to make out. At a rough guess it was a full three hundred feet across. On the far side, toward the ville, there seemed to be the opening of still more tunnels and passages. The stained walls glistened with discolored streaks of ice.

  Ryan beckoned J.B. to his side. "Must have pa­trols out on the land side. These are reliefs. Best move before they start changing shifts."

  "Too late."

  The one-eyed man led the hasty retreat back into the darkness of the tunnel, watching from the shad­ows as squat muties came shuffling in, boots ringing. They all wore the black berets with the lightning flash. Most carried self-made blasters or had small-caliber pistols tucked into broad belts.

  They all seemed to know where they were going, and what they were doing. They woke their replace­ments with a minimal waste of time, then took their sleeping blankets. It was all done and over in less than ten minutes.

  "Like to meet the scalie that runs all this," J.B. whispered. "One day."

  One or two of the muties weren't going straight to sleep. A few gathered near the fire, helping them­selves to fish stew from a large blackened iron cal­dron. There was the sound of rough laughter as one of them pointed toward a far corner and called out a harsh, guttural comment.

  Eventually that group sat down, huddled around the fire, and started talking quietly.

  "Can't wait any longer," Ryan said. "Won't be too long before those bodies by the river get found. Be hard getting away after that. Go around that way."

  He pointed with the barrel of the G-12 to their right, where the shadows seemed deepest.

  It was like picking a way through a breathing nightmare.

  The wind outside the scalies' base blew along the nest of passages, brightening the fires, blowing smoke in wreathing clumps all across the great room. Bod­ies lay everywhere, moving restlessly, as though part of some vast living organism. In among the rags it was virtually impossible to determine the sex or age of the prisoners.

  At that moment Ryan felt a wave of despair. There had to be well over a hundred in the muties' slave la­bor force. How to find a ten-year-old boy, assuming he was still there and still living?

  Ryan wound a mazy path through the slumbering crowd, often having to step over sleepers. Once his foot caught in the ragged edge of a torn blanket, snagging it, so that it was tugged away from the fig­ure it had been covering.

  "What d'you… ?" a voice mumbled.

  Ryan froze.

  A trick of the firelight showed him the face. It was a woman, vaguely Oriental with narrowed eyes.

  She half smiled up at Ryan. With the smoke bil­lowing around them it was a truly strange, dreamlike moment. All color was draining out and the great cavern was tinted only with a variety of shades of gray, some dark and some lighter.

  The woman looked to be in her late teens or her early twenties. There was a thick chain around her right wrist that had worn a bloody gouge in her flesh, linking her to the sleeper next to her. She also had a fading bruise on her left cheek.

  Ryan lifted a finger to his lips, managing a half smile to reassure her.

  She blinked, as though she was easing out of a drugged world of half truths. Then she opened her mouth a little farther and screamed at the top of her voice, "Outies! Help, help, outies!"

  Chapter Forty-Three

  THE SCREAM SLICED into Dean Cawdor's dozing brain, jerking him fully awake to find the short, muscle-bound scalie looming over him. The creature was holding a short-hafted ax with a curved blade in its left hand, and it had a battered automatic pistol in its belt.

  It had been about to throw itself on the ten-year-old, and the front of its pants already gaped open. But the noise checked its lust, and it turned away from Dean. Then it snarled over its shoulder, "Not this time, baby, but I'll be back again."

  The boy lay still, fighting the terror that threat­ened to overwhelm him. He heard thunder from somewhere, then realized it wasn't thunder. It was gunfire, overlaying the yells and screams.

  He stood and began to move slowly and cautiously toward the sound of the firefight.

  RYAN CAME INFINITELY CLOSE to wasting three bul­lets by pulping the skull of the screaming woman. His combat training controlled him and his finger re­laxed on the trigger. But then she tried to grab at him, clawing for his ankle, the chain rattling. He kicked her once with his other foot, the toe of the heavy boot catching her beneath the chin. Her teeth broke as her jaws snapped shut, and she fell back, unconscious, bleeding copiously from the mouth.

  "Fireblast," Ryan breathed.

  All the thinking and the planning was shot to hell because
of a torn piece of old blanket. Now the only thing to do was carry out as much chilling as possible and head back for the tunnel and the waiting recce wag.

  With dozens upon dozens of armed scalies coming awake all around the cavern, it was going to be tough.

  The initial danger was the small group by the fire. They were already up, snouts questing toward the source of the noise. One of them, quicker than the others, had his blaster drawn and was leveling it at the invaders.

  "Mine," Mildred said calmly as if she were in the butts for pistol practice on a Saturday afternoon.

  The revolver fired a big .38 round, and she could hit a mosquito on the wing with it at fifty paces. A scalie's skull at the same distance was like shooting fish in a barrel for her.

  The mutie went over backward, landing in the fire, its legs kicking.

  "Pick your targets!" Ryan shouted.

  Within ten seconds the whole place was a mael­strom of screaming chaos. The prisoners were trying to run every which way, the chains pulling them off their feet and tangling with other groups. The scalies were trying to get at Ryan and the others, but they were hampered by the panic all around them. Some had their clubs drawn and were ruthlessly beating their slaves across heads and faces to get them out of the way.

  "Back to the tunnel. I'll cover you with the G-12," Ryan yelled, picking himself a spot against the wall where nobody could get behind him or outflank him from the escape route.

  It wasn't a time for argument.

  Doc led the way, his long legs stretching out, knees exploding like firecrackers. Three scalies, one armed with a long pike, lumbered across to try to cut them off. Doc paused for a moment to steady his aim and pulled the trigger on the Le Mat. The .63 shotgun round went off in the faces of the trio of muties, putting all of them down and out. There wasn't time to readjust the hammer on the blaster, so Doc holstered it, drew his rapier swordstick and ran on, brandishing it at any potential enemy.

  Krysty was at his heels, picking her shots, going for any of the scalies that seemed to pose a threat.