Apocalypse Unborn (10 page)

Silam stood at the end of the pier, raptly watching the white ship’s approach. Against the backdrop of black clouds and sea, its sails underlit by the deck lamps, it glided like a ghost into the wide, protected cove. The night wind stirred his past-shoulder-length cascade of blond curls, his pride and joy, which served to conceal a head far too high at the crown to be considered entirely normal—it looked like he was wearing a crash helmet under a wig hat. Silam’s pale, fine features were compressed in the center of his face, and seemed too small for the width of his head. Though fairly tall, he was cursed with a narrow chest and shoulders. To counter the less than manly impression this produced, he favored slightly oversize garments and broad shoulder pads. And to make doubly sure that no one got the wrong idea, he walked with a rolling, exaggeratedly masculine gait.

By his own account, and the accounts of the two sycophants who stood beside him on the pier, Silam was a certified genius—a poet, showman, illusionist, choreographer, scholar, spell caster. Fantasist extraordinaire.

If he had lived his life before the Apocalypse, those talents would have most certainly gone unrecognized. The horror show of January 21, 2001 and its cruel, century-long aftermath had elevated Silam, as it had other unworthies, by eliminating 99.99 percent of the competition. By the grace of nothing less than global annihilation, he had become Deathlands’s Homer, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Patricia Cornwell.

Chief among his mental gifts was the ability to invent and widely circulate a great volume, if not a virtual library, of terrifying and misleading rumors. A close second was his knack for dreaming up truly horrible experiences for other people to endure. In Deathlands there were no limits of taste or decorum, nor codes of law when it came to psychological operations.

And the nightmares Silam dreamed up, Magus made real.

“This is your best work, by far,” remarked the shorter of the two hangers-on. Rish had a big, bony head and droopy-lidded, sunken, dark-circled eyes. He wore a perpetual, hang-dog look on his long face. From a distance he could have almost passed for a swampie; up close his soft, hairless—and rather petite for an adult male—hands and feet were proof of his pure norm blood. Rish had long ago appointed himself Silam’s biographer-historian, and the official keeper of the minutiae of Psy Ops continuity.

Silam considered the compliment in lofty silence. It was difficult to decide on a crowning feat in a career so studded with successes. As Magus’s personal mythmaker for sometime, he had come up with some doozies. In a dark land of ignorance and fear, a land ruled by deceit, Silam was head liar…

Magus traveling back and forth in time, that had been his idea.

Magus creating the Adam and Eve of the stickie race; that had been his, too.

The list of memorable falsehoods went on and on.

Magus was a fugitive from another dimension. He paid top jack for the rare muties he used in his genetic experiments. Magus was immortal. His steel fingers were everywhere at once, invisibly controlling the course of human events. He had manufactured countless doubles of himself, using spare parts from his victims. He was a thousand years old. He had originally been the 43rd and last President of the United States of America. He had engineered skydark.

He was gathering an army of human scum to conquer all of Deathlands.

Even by Silam’s high standards, that one had been inspired.

“Rish, you may well be right,” the propaganda master conceded. “It’s certainly way up there on the list.”

“Where would Magus be without you, Silam?” gushed Jaswinder. As the balding, stubble-bearded, round-bellied man spoke, he leaned closer to his hero and wrung his hands nervously.

The remark fell like a unexploded bomb in their midst.

Silam stared into the man’s dark, doting eyes. The longer he stared, the faster the grimy hands twisted. Jaswinder was always over the top with his fawning, although he sometimes had a point.

“I am the humble servant of Magus,” Silam said. “I only follow his lead. His glory is my delight.”

“What a team you make!” Rish exclaimed.

“Silam, your wisdom and art define our existence,” Jaswinder continued, merrily wringing away. “You draw the lines even Magus must follow.”

Rish gave Jaswinder a hard jab in the ribs with his elbow. The unexpected blow made the man say, “Ooooof!”

Punished for speaking dangerous truth.

That Magus had the power to bring Silam’s horror shows to life didn’t change the fact that they were
his
horror shows. The products of
his
imagination. Imagination was a mental facility Magus appeared to lack; if he had one, it was unrecognizable as such. Perhaps because he was no longer technically speaking a human he had somehow lost touch with human fears. He relied on his hireling, his head liar to choreograph the worst that people could do to each other. In a way the hireling commanded the master. In a way, he had created Magus’s world. Yet Silam’s accomplishments were unsigned, his genius shadowed, obscured by the legend he had so carefully constructed.

There were other, more pressing realities than public acclaim.

Silam restrained a powerful urge to look over his shoulder. One did not display hubris before Magus—nor dread, nor disgust, nor an excess of curiosity about his physical-mechanical attributes—and survive. One never knew where Magus lurked, or when he was eavesdropping. Silam couldn’t see anything beyond the range of the pier’s torches and the beach fires. The rock wall that abutted the cove’s shoreline faded out of sight about forty feet above the rude camps. Actually, the sheer bluff rose ten times that height before vanishing into the perpetual cloud bank. Higher still, lost in the clouds atop the granite mountain was Magus’s lair. He only descended to sea level to savor the island’s regularly scheduled entertainments.

In Silam’s darkest moments, even he was unable to spin-doctor his position. His blowhard’s mantra, the hidden genius, the poet, the fantasist extraordinaire, rang hollow. He was a jester to an audience of one, to a criminally insane, demonically unpredictable lord. His task was to top himself, constantly. And by succeeding in topping himself, he only made the future more difficult. If his work ever disappointed Steel Eyes, it would mean a horrible death. Magus wouldn’t have to invent something for the occasion. He could use any one of the ten thousand grisly fates Silam had devised for others.

Constant creativity was the propagandist’s lifeline. If the sweet juices ever stopped flowing, Magus would remove his heart and make it beat in some other chest.

As the white ship docked alongside the pier and crewmen hopped off to make fast the mooring lines, Silam hurried over to intercept the group of heavily armed, uniformed men marching onto the dock, pulled aside the platoon leader, and spoke into his large, hair-fringed ear.

“Tell the ship’s captain not a soul is to leave the vessel tonight,” he said. “All hands must stay on board until tomorrow morning so a proper accounting can be made. Heads and cargo must be tallied in broad daylight or he will not be paid for his services. There will be no discussion on the matter. Do you understand?”

The platoon leader nodded, barked an order to his men and set off to do Silam’s bidding.

Locked overnight in the for’c’sle cabin with the other passengers, Mildred slept hard and woke up thickheaded and little woozy. The fight against the
taua
had taken its toll on her. She had fired so many rounds in such a short time that her shooting hand felt like it had been pounded with a hot rock. In the face of the suicidal mass attack, handicapped by the six-shot capacity of their revolvers, she and Krysty had worked as a team to control their section of deck. While one fired, the other dumped empties and reloaded. It went on like that until the retreat was called.

Mildred cleared her throat and she could still taste burned cordite. She could still smell
taua
blood. The gunpowder residue didn’t bother her, she was plenty used to that. But she’d been drenched in the bodily fluids of a top-of-the-food-chain predator. She knew top-dog predators were where all the circulating chemical, biological and radiological contaminants of an ecosystem ended up. There was no way of telling what infectious and parasitical agents had been floating around in that rank red mist. To fully protect herself, she would have needed a biohazard suit with self-contained air supply. In Deathlands no one could be that fussy and stay alive, short term.

“Looks like they’re finally going to let us out of here,” Krysty said, leaning into the bunk. “You’d better get up.”

As Mildred swung off the pallet and stood, her stomach started rumbling and churning. Part of her dizziness was due to the fact that they’d had no food since the night before last, only water. At that moment even a plate of the greasy, bony little fish sounded delicious.

Along with the other passengers, she and Krysty were herded by the crew up the stairs and onto the main deck. The view off the ship’s stern was of an empty sea, as placid as a pond this morning. Smooth gray water blended seamlessly into a threatening gray sky, a vista without boundaries that Mildred found disorientating.

The view in the other direction was little better.

The island before them was all mountain, a looming pillar of granite a half-mile wide that seemed to be holding up the horizon-to-horizon cloud bank. The rock glistened in the weak, filtered light. Water trickled steadily down its steep walls, through its cracks and fissures, oozing from a source somewhere above the cloud line. Despite the plentiful fresh water, the only thing green was the moss on the beach rocks where tiny waves lapped and hissed.

On a wide ledge above the tide line were two single-story buildings made of native rock and the sea’s bounty: scrap lumber, plastic sheeting, chunks of foam, hand-trimmed logs and branches. The larger building was long, but shallow, with many doorways, like a predark motel. There were no doors in the doorways, no glass in the windows.

To Mildred, it screamed “barracks.”

The smaller, even more slap-dash structure had a prominent rock chimney from which black smoke plumed. It looked like a cook shack, with cooking in progress. The very thought made Mildred’s stomach rumble anew.

On the strip of beach below the ledge were firepits and crude lean-tos made of piled driftwood and plastic sheeting. All were deserted.

From the fires and the shooting of the night before, she had gotten the impression that the place was well-populated. It was clear now that was wrong. Or maybe the situation had changed while they were locked in the ship. As she scanned the bluff, she caught sight of a rope handrail fixed to the rock. It marked a narrow path cut into the side of sheer cliff. It switchbacked up four hundred feet or more, into clouds.

The islander crew began shoving the passengers toward the gangway and then down it, onto the pier. Mildred and Krysty were met at the foot of the ribbed plank by a firing squad of full-auto longblasters. AKs, Galils, M-16s, H&Ks. The weapons were held by thirty men in olive-drab uniforms and jungle boots. At first glance they looked like they were from a predark recruiting poster. On closer inspection Mildred saw that most of the uniforms were threadbare. Some were stained with blood and pocked with bullet holes—the clothes of the dead inherited by the living. These “armies of one” had faces and hands rimed with dirt and were missing most of their teeth.

When the passengers started to shuffle toward land, Mildred and Krysty shuffled along with them. They moved a short distance, then everything stopped. Because of all the people milling in front of them, Mildred and Krysty couldn’t see the end of the line. The redhead leaned out over the pier railing to get a peek at what lay ahead. After a moment, she stepped back.

“What is it?” Mildred said. Even as the black woman spoke, she had the answer to her question. Before her eyes her friend’s prehensile hair was drawing up, corkscrewing into a mass of tight coils.

“Look for yourself,” Krysty said.

Leaning out, Mildred saw that a temporary barrier had been set up across the pier, this to facilitate the all-important head count. She had expected to see Captain Eng stationed at the barricade, along with the leader of the men in uniform. Eng was there with his logbook, all right. By his side was a tall, long-haired man with shoulder-length fall of blond curls, unarmed and obviously not a soldier with that baggy shirt and those excessively wide shoulder pads. At his elbow were two much shorter men, who gazed up at him like spellbound schoolgirls.

What drew and riveted Mildred’s attention was the creature standing farther along the barricade. It stood upright, but it wasn’t a man.

And it was naked.

Mildred had lived and fought in the hellscape for quite some time. She knew it was a Pandora’s box of horrors. Every nightmare humanity had ever dreamed took physical form in this place, like a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The end of the world.

The fall of civilization.

Nature run amok.

Even so, shock sent a rush of adrenaline coursing through her veins and set her fingers and toes tingling.

The two-legged animal was unlike anything she had ever seen or heard tell of. It had a thick, knobby, faintly greenish skin, a huge mouth, small sharp teeth and wide-set yellowish eyes. And it was stout, with massive thighs and buttocks. A five-foot-eight-inch, 300-pound cannon ball. Mildred estimated that nearly five percent of that weight was concentrated in its wedding tackle. But for the coloration and knobby topography, the withdrawn apparatus looked mammalian, and very much bull-like. The creature had three-fingered hands, with cruel amber talons on both thumbs, and wide feet with webbed toes.

It was sweating.

Copiously.

Rivulets of perspiration peeled down its warty arms, over the bony, protective plates on its belly, down its legs and off its pot-roast-size testicles, pooling at its feet.

Mildred moved back into line.

“Some new kind of mutie, huh?” Krysty said.

The doctor frowned. In Deathlands, all questions about biology could be answered with “the nukecaust” or “mutie.” According to popular and long-held belief, all muties, or genetic mutations, were a direct consequence of the Apocalypse. The term was used to describe a broad spectrum of bizarre humanoid species, like stickies and scalies, the less obvious mutations such as the precognitive “doomies,” as well as gigantism and other extreme variations among lower forms of animal and plant life. Most people thought muties of all stripes popped up out of nowhere, like mushrooms.

Like magic.

In her former existence Mildred had been a medical doctor and a researcher. She understood the mechanisms of inheritance. She knew what mutations were, and how evolution worked upon them. Quite simply, the variety and strangeness of Deathlands’s biology fit neither the established facts nor the prevailing theories of twentieth-century science.

Producing mutations with overdoses of radiation was like playing horseshoes with hand grenades. The resulting chromosomal damage was not confined to one or two specific locations; it was widespread and totally random. Vital genes were as likely to be destroyed as nonvital ones. Most mutations, whether caused by radiation, chemicals in the environment or spontaneously malfunctioning DNA/RNA, were not adaptive, which meant the organisms that inherited them usually didn’t live long enough to breed and pass them on. They were almost always evolutionary dead ends.

Although some of the living horrors that prowled Deathlands were the result of radiation and other random, low probability effects, that they all were was inconceivable.

Mildred knew that in nature new species evolved only under certain conditions. First of all, the variant-mutant genes had to exist in the population, and they couldn’t be harmful. Members of the population possessing these genes had to be physically separated from the majority for an extended period of time. The longer the groups were separated, the more different they became. In Mildred’s opinion, the differences between predark and mutie species were too great for the time that had elapsed. As a result, they couldn’t be explained by Darwin’s twin theories—natural selection and descent with modification.

An alternative hypothesis, nonrandom and nonradiological, had only recently surfaced. Deep in the belly of the desert southwest, the companions had found living evidence that before the Apocalypse a program of ultrasecret transgenic experiments had been under way. In a hidden, high-security underground facility, whitecoats had spliced together specific genes from plants and animals and produced a new and viable organism—a distinct species not in ten thousand years, but in a matter of months. These designer life-forms were assembled with particular attributes and functions in mind. They were supersurvivors, living weapons systems. This black-budget military program had been underwritten to the tune of billions of dollars, despite the fact that the administration in power had branded such experimentation “immoral” and “against God’s laws,” and had banned it in the public sector.

Though the research program had been derailed by the events of January 21, 2001, there was no way to gauge the postnukecaust impact of the “trannie” experiments because their number, their precise methodology and their scope was unknown. But it was possible that Deathlands had been poisoned by more than just radiation.

“Whatever it is,” Mildred said, “it should be wearing pants.”

“Or at least a five-gallon bucket,” Krysty said.

As the line slowly advanced toward the barrier, the crew began offloading the cargo of crated muties from the hold. The creatures howled and screeched as they were transferred by crane to a fleet of small boats on the far side of the ship. The overloaded dories were then rowed not toward land, but in the opposite direction, out of the cove.

When shouts and curses rang out from the head of the line, Mildred and Krysty rushed to the rail to see what was going on. At first it looked like Doc Tanner might be involved in the fracas. The lanky time traveler was standing behind two big men at the barricade, one white, the other black. The white man was arguing heatedly with the ship’s captain, apparently over the PVC tubes they carried strapped to their backs. At a signal from the guy with the bond hair, the hulking creature started toward them. Its approach abruptly ended the discussion. The men surrendered their tubes, were given a chit for payment and allowed to pass beyond the barrier. Their weapons weren’t confiscated, which was a relief to see.

When Doc passed through the barricade without incident, the women slipped back into line. It took the better part of half an hour for them to reach the checkpoint.

“Your tag numbers,” Eng said without looking up from his log. As they rattled them off, he located and marked them with his pencil.

The blond-haired man, not Eng, was clearly in charge. His pasty face wore a constant smirk. Mildred couldn’t help but notice his misshapen skull, which bordered on the hydrocephalic. The way he carried himself, as if posing for a full-length oil portrait, reminded her of a nineteenth-century fop—Percy Bysshe Shelley in a too big bowling shirt.

The captain wasn’t the only person with a notebook. One of the blond man’s adoring fans, the dour-faced, sunken-eyed lackey, quickly jotted down some notes, which he then offered up for his hero’s approval.

Mildred glanced along the barricade, at the silent, staring, 300-pound guardian. It stood in a shallow puddle of its own sweat. It opened its mouth and thrust out its tongue at her, a human-looking tongue, only much longer and broader. It wasn’t a gesture of contempt. She realized after a moment the thing was tasting the air, tasting whatever aroma she and Krysty gave off. Its own scent was chemical, a mixture of ammonia, ether and acetone. As it waggled its tongue, it began to perspire even more profusely.

From twenty-five feet away, Mildred could sense its murderous volatility. The gut-twisting fear she felt at that moment was instinctive, hard-wired into her nervous system. She wanted to shoot it through the eye, then and there, but couldn’t make her hand move to the ZKR’s butt. Some creatures by their very appearance had the power to intimidate, to disarm, to induce rabbit-in-the-headlights paralysis. This was one of those creatures.

Even the ferocious Captain Eng would not look it in the face.

“What the hell is that?” Mildred said, managing to point a finger at the thing.

“He’s a trainer,” the blond man replied.

“For combat?” Krysty said.

“All recruits receive instruction upon arrival.”

“It can talk?” Mildred said.

“There are many other ways to communicate.”