Apocalypse Unborn (17 page)

Then the damned thing just tore off the islander’s head and flew away.

Funny how the birds could be half chilling each other over dinner one minute and fighting to avenge a fallen nestmate the next.

Avenge it, they had.

And now they were rubbing it in, flying low, swooping, making cackling noises.

The Wazls were still a problem, but Jak knew the stickies were going to have to be dealt with pretty quick. Down in the bowl, the muties were pushing the recruits in reverse, blades flashing, scuffling feet raising rock dust. Behind the blur of arms and heads, in the wake of the stickie advance was a slick carpet of red. As the battle sawed back and forth, crumpled bodies, norm and mutie, were revealed, then hidden again.

The wildness of the scene, the sounds of combat energized the albino like a double line of prime jolt. Jak felt the call to battle, big time, and there was nothing close enough to chill.

From behind came a whip crack of leather wings, a hard gust of wind, then a woman’s desperate cry. It was Krysty.

A Wazl had her gripped from behind by the shoulders of her fur coat. Because she didn’t weigh more than 150 pounds, the flapping bird was able to drag her away. The toes of her boots skimmed a few inches above the ground. Krysty couldn’t bring her bayonet to bear. Her arms were trapped in the sleeves of her coat by the downward pull of her own body.

Ryan turned toward her a second too late, and his jump for her ankles missed by inches. He crashed flat-out onto the rocks, arms outstretched, hands clutching nothing.

Jak was even farther away. The albino wheeled, shaking a leaf-bladed knife from his sleeve. The blade found its natural place in his hand, like a steel ball rolling into a precision-drilled hole. There was no hesitation. No thought. No aiming. Jak whipped his arm forward and let the weapon fly.

The flat-black leaf blade sang through the air, curving left and diving toward its speeding target. Jak’s throw arc and the Wazl’s head intersected. The point slammed into its left eye, the steel thorn driven in so deeply that it almost disappeared into the socket.

Jolted by the impact, the bird dropped Krysty, who landed lightly on her feet and raced out of the way.

Less gracefully, the Wazl skidded to the ground. Flapping its wings, screaming, it shook its head this way and that, clawing at its own head, trying rid itself of the excruciating pain.

Captain Eng launched himself at the wounded bird, his saber cocked at his hip. He drove the blade into its torso with every ounce of his three hundred pounds behind it. The Wazl reared up, its wings stiffly outspread as thirty-five inches of cold steel slid into its guts.

The bird tried to claw its tormentor and found it couldn’t reach him. Eng held it fast to the ground with main strength and the skewering blade. Unable to use its talons, the Wazl tried to tear his head off with its beak.

Eng dodged the rapidly weakening strikes with ease. Then he laughed and with both hands on the sword’s grip twisted the curving blade. The tendons in his massively scarred forearms jumped as he cored out a deeper, far more devastating wound. Gore and intestinal contents spewed over Eng’s arms and bare chest.

With the last of its strength, the night hunter drew in its leathery wings, a look of surprise in its surviving eye. That it would meet its end at the hands of a hairy, grinning earth-bound creature had to have come as a shock.

As it shuddered and died, Eng hawked and spit in its face.

Which reaffirmed Jak’s belief that there was much to like about the islander captain.

Rish hung well back from the cone’s doorway in a small, protected alcove. The menagerie’s exit was completely blocked by rolling cages full of highly agitated Wazls. The enforcers used steel mesh nets to cover the four-foot gap between the cage tops and the underside of the double doorway. This prevented the muties from reversing course and attacking the enforcers once the cage doors were flung back.

When the cages were opened, the enforcers used prod poles to encourage the birds to exit. It didn’t take much prodding to get the desired result. The Wazls flapped away, onto the field of battle, screaming blue murder.

Rish marked off item number one from Silam’s checklist with a savage flourish.

Even in Deathlands, at the bottom of human culture’s ash bin, behind every successful, incompetent twit there was a creature such as Rish, a diligent, hardworking, unrecognized soul. Rish was no longer stunned when Silam took credit for his ideas.

“I know you won’t mind if I use that” was a phrase he had come to loathe.

Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had minded.

All glory went to Silam. All homage went to Silam.

While Rish was sucking up, salaaming to the poet laureate, what was he really thinking?

Blockhead.

Drooler.

Pompous ass.

If he had to listen to that Hammurabi story about how Silam had chiseled a dirt farmer into giving him a free ride on all his daughters one more time, he thought he was going to go berserk.

There was another side, a hidden side to Rish. He had dreams of his own. He knew he could do Silam’s job because he had been doing it for months, virtually by himself. Magus’s head liar was a burn-out case. And Rish knew he could do the job a million times better than Silam ever had.

Rish realized that some of his feelings of rage and bitterness were fueled by natural jealousy over his own physical shortcomings. Silam was tall. He had normal-size hands and feet. Although he had a very strange-looking forehead, Silam wasn’t cursed with a face that radiated perpetual misery. Even when Rish was deliriously happy, he looked like his dog had just died.

What infuriated him most was that he was often mistaken for a western swampie, an ankle-biter, even though he was not filthy, bearded or hairy. The resemblance in stature had made him scrupulous about his toilette. He scraped his jowls twice a day and buffed his little hands until they were pink. If his arms had had more than a fine, pale down on them, he would have shaved them, too.

Rish would never be any taller, never have manly hands and feet, never be looked upon by women with anything but revulsion, but he could orchestrate mayhem with the best of them.

After the Wazls’ cages had been rolled back, he waved the enforcers over to the stickies’ cells. They followed his commands immediately and without question. Rish didn’t even know if the enforcers could talk. If they could, they certainly never did it in the presence of a norm.

He could list what he knew about the enforcers on the fingers of one tiny hand. They hated fire. They could see perfectly in the dark. They sweated in their sleep, and they slept in big piles, like cats. Big, sweaty piles. They never seemed to eat or drink. If their race had a culture, it was locked away in their heads. They had no tools, no books, no written language. No clothes. Yet they understood and obeyed those in Magus’s chain of command.

It filled Rish with a dizzying sense of power to be able to order around such terrible destructive forces. But he was no fool. He knew the limits of that power and the extent of his own vulnerability.

Before he gave them the signal to release the stickies, he stepped into an empty cage, then shut and locked the door.

In the cell next door were two female scalies. Naked from the waist up, hugely, intimidatingly mammalian, the hems of their long skirts dragged through straw already fouled with their waste.

Safely behind bars, Rish nodded to the enforcers, who threw open all the stickie cells. Kissing and moaning, the pale, skinny muties flooded into the menagerie corridor. They threw themselves upon the other cages and cells, trying to get their hands on the muties still prisoner.

Rish jumped back as they reached in for him with greedy, sucker fingers. Dead black eyes in excited faces coveted his soft flesh. Nose holes and needle teeth-lined jaws dripped with mucus and saliva in anticipation of smelling and tasting his fresh blood.

The stickies hurled themselves upon the unprotected enforcers. They tried to pull their watchdogs apart, but their suckers wouldn’t stick to the sweat-slick, knobby skin. The enforcers started throwing stickies, picking them up around the waist and chucking them at the exit. That got the muties headed in the right direction, toward the light streaming through the doors and the sound of music, which made them coo and scatter frantic kisses.

They had learned that Wagner meant party time.

It had occurred to him before that all he had to do to get Silam’s job was to keep quiet. To just agree with whatever idiotic plan the spin doctor set out. To refrain from offering subtle suggestions and advice, to stop posing key questions that revealed fundamental, grievous errors. To stop personally altering programs after the fact to correct the head liar’s bonehead mistakes.

In his little, hairless hand he held the sword of Silam’s destruction.

Along the side of the cheap ballpoint, emblazoned in gold paint were the words Sunset West Motel, Bloomfield, N.M.

There was nothing wrong with the scheduled order of attack, but as usual, Silam hadn’t bothered to read the careful win-loss odds projections he’d done. If the spin doctor had even glanced at them, he would have seen his battle plan was badly flawed. Including the islanders in this afternoon’s festivities had been Rish’s bright idea, not Silam’s. Although Silam had quickly adopted the clever twist as his own, he hadn’t thought through some of the obvious consequences. That core of seasoned, organized fighters needed to be dealt with first, singled out, targeted and destroyed. Instead, they were ignored, treated as run-of-the-mill mercies. Silam had signed off on the choreography. It was his baby. There was no way for him to pass the blame.

Rish had a choice, to save Silam or let him flame.

He chose flame.

Rish had never actually seen Magus angry. Seeing him pleased was scary enough.

The scalies in the adjoining cell started banging their slops buckets against the bars.

“We’re hungry. Feed us!” one of them snarled in his face. “This is torture!”

“Feed us, you stumpy little bastard! We’re wasting away!” the other cried.

Between massive, drooping dugs, their wrinkled bellies sagged a good two feet over the waistbands of their flowing, raggedy skirts. Even though these two were relative lightweights for the species, they still weighed close to four hundred pounds. Their monumental appetites were what made them a regular feature of Magus’s little military melodramas.

“You’re up next on the program,” Rish assured them. “You’ll get all you can eat in a few minutes.”

The scalies’ expressions immediately brightened.

Doc Tanner clung to the rope rail, gasping. There was so much water vapor in the cloud that it was difficult for him to breathe. It felt like he was drowning on dry land. The condensing moisture beaded on his hands and dripped down his face.

A few more volleys of wild autofire whined off the rocks around Doc and the freezies. Then the shooting stopped. Apparently the uniforms had given up the hunt.

“We’ve got to keep moving,” Bell said. “On the double.”

They trudged blindly upward. It got even darker as they climbed. Four feet of visibility dropped to three, then two. If the rope rail hadn’t been there, they would have mostly certainly blundered off the cliff to their deaths.

“The mist is getting thicker, Antoine,” Bell said. “You’re sure we haven’t passed it already?”

“We couldn’t have,” the black man replied. “This trail’s a dead end, like I said. It’s the redoubt’s emergency exit route, and the only way out of the place from the north side. The main entrance and exit is on the far side of the mountain.”

“You’ve been here before, then?” Doc said.

“Yeah, but the secret installation hadn’t been built when I visited,” Kirby said.

“Then how do you know so much about it?”

“I used the data banks in our redoubt to access the site’s physical layout,” Kirby said. He patted his pants’ pocket. “Pulled a hard copy of the setup here. Super-detailed. Floor by floor. Room by room.”

Doc stopped listening. He was as lost in self-doubt as he was in the swirling, choking grayness. Questions that he couldn’t answer kept popping into his head, over and over. Had he done the moral thing? Wasn’t it his natural right to return to his own time? Would he be able to hold his dear children to his bosom and not think of the friends he had turned his back on? Would that precious reunion moment, so long sought, be soured, ruined by the betrayal that it had cost?

To have thrown his lot in with these two strangers, all or nothing, was a measure of the depth of Doc Tanner’s desperation and spiritual exhaustion. He wanted to believe that what they were offering him was real. He wanted it with all his soul.

Bell stopped short. “I think there’s something ahead…” he said over his shoulder.

Doc thought he saw the man reach out a hand.

“Metal,” Bell said. “Feels like a door. Yep. There’s a keypad lock beside the frame.”

Kirby carefully stepped around Doc to get closer.

Doc couldn’t see the door at all. From a distance of three feet, he could barely see the two men’s backs.

Something beeped in the mist. Something hissed. Then the swirling cloud that surrounded them was sucked away, drawn into the redoubt by a humidity or temperature gradient. Doc stared at the open doorway that had gobbled up the fog like a hungry mouth. Beyond it, banks of fluorescent lights flickered and came on, illuminating a long corridor.

“Never a doubt,” Kirby bragged.

“Shh,” Bell said. “Listen…”

A scraping, grunting sound came from the path below them. The rope snapped hard against Doc’s grip. After a momentary pause, it jerked again. Pause. Jerk. Something was pulling itself up the trail. Something big and sweaty, no doubt.

“Come on, Tanner,” Kirby said. He grabbed hold of Doc’s shoulder and pulled him into the redoubt. When all three of them were inside the entrance, the black man tapped the keypad on the interior door frame and the vanadium steel barrier slid shut.

“That should keep the bastard out,” Kirby said.

“Unless it knows how to use the lock,” Bell said. “Maybe we’d better shake a leg.”

This redoubt was similar to all the others Doc had seen. It was furnished in a grim institutional style: gray-tile floors and walls, broad rooms with low acoustic ceilings, rooms that were divided into a maze of cubbyhole offices by chin-high, moveable partitions. Unlike most of the other redoubts, this one hadn’t been looted and ransacked. The deserted workstations and tables were neat under their thick coating of dust. There were no papers strewed over the floor. The computer screens were unsmashed.

There was evidence of heavy foot traffic, though.

Big footprints tracked through the dust along the main hallway. And there were dark, muddy places where falling drips of sweat had mingled with the un-swept dirt of more than a century. The corridor smelled faintly but distinctly of acetone.

“Trainers have been here,” Bell said.

“There’s been no audible alarm,” Kirby said. “Think they’re looking for us already?”

“Count on it.”

Kirby referred to his printout map of the installation. “We’ve got to go down again,” he said, tapping the paper. “The mat-trans gateway is eight floors below us.”

“Then we’d better use an elevator,” Bell said. “No way can we control the stairwells against the trainers.”

“Where we are going, if I may ask?” Doc said.

“We’re about to jump from here to our redoubt,” Kirby told him. “That’s where the Chronos machinery is.”

The black man figured out the direction they had to travel and hurriedly led them onward.

As they trotted around the eerily empty room, Doc wondered if anyone had ever worked here. There were no personal items at any of the workstations. Just blank, gray corkboards, bookshelves with neatly stacked, spiral-bound technical manuals, a forest of identical ergonomic chairs. It appeared that all this effort, all this expense, had been for nothing.

When Kirby located the elevator, he pushed the button to summon the car, then stepped back. He and Bell shouldered their autoblasters and aimed for the middle of the doors. Doc held the LeMat in a two-handed grip, hammer cocked. They were ready to unleash an all-out barrage, but when the doors opened, the car was empty.

As they ducked into elevator, Kirby jabbed the muzzle of his assault rifle at the muddy floor. “Bastards have been in here, too,” he said.

The chemical fumes in the car’s enclosed space were dizzying. Like a paint factory.

“Phew, that’s some high-octane sweat!” Bell said. “Do you think it’s safe to use the elevator? Something in the motor could spark off on us and wham! We got ignition.”

“If it didn’t fireball when I hit the up button, it probably won’t now,” Kirby told him.

From the far side of the redoubt came the sound of a pneumatic door sliding back. From the direction and the sound, it was the same one they had used. Then heavy, running footsteps, getting louder and louder.

“It would appear the risk of descent has been superseded by the risk of staying here,” Doc said.

Kirby punched the down button. A spritely bell dinged.

The trio waited but nothing else happened.

There was a courtesy delay in the automatic closing of the doors. Kirby punched the button again. Dingdingdingding.

Still nothing.

Which gave the Olympic-sprinting trainer enough time to close the gap.

“Get him!” Bell cried as the mutie burst into view down the long, straight hall, like a shooting gallery target. He and Kirby opened fire with their M-16s, a little wild at first. The spray of 5.56 mm tumblers brought down tiles from the ceiling, shattered computer monitor screens and exploded light banks. The ricochets whined around the room.

Doc braced himself against the door frame and carefully aimed for the trainer’s eyes. Boom and flash. Boom and flash.

The creature held its taloned hand in front of its face and advanced at a dead run. Bullets and pistol balls smacked into it. It soaked them up like a sponge, and kept on coming.

Though it spurted some blood, it seemed to have no vitals to hit.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Bell snarled as he dumped an empty mag on the floor. He slapped home a full one, gave the charging handle a quick flip and resumed firing, all in a single fluid movement.

The trainer was ten feet away when the doors finally whooshed shut. Before it could pry them apart with its thumb talons, the car dropped.

Again the freezies braced themselves and took aim at the doors. As Doc had no time to reload the LeMat, he drew his sword. He was unsure what if anything that weapon could do against the trainers, but it made him feel better to have a blade in his hand, ready to strike.

When they arrived on the mat-trans level, the doors opened onto a deserted hallway. A profusion of muddy tracks ran down its center.

Before Kirby left the car, he pressed the buttons for the six lower floors, sending the elevator to the bottom of the shaft, giving them a little more time to work before the car could be called up.

The hum from nuke generators vibrated through the floor. Doc could feel it in the soles of his feet and halfway up his legs.

As they advanced, Bell and Kirby checked the rooms on either side of the hall to make sure they were clear.

“Oh, man, have a look at this,” Bell said, waving over Doc and Kirby.

There weren’t any sweaty footprints in the long room.

It was a different sort of mess.

The concrete floor was stained with blood and caustic chemicals, littered with boxes full of parts: medical, automotive, computer. Along one wall was a virtual machine shop with lathes, computerized drill presses, punch and milling machines. Low shelves were stacked with bar stock. On the opposite wall was a walk-in refrigerator and dozens of opaque fifty-five-gallon plastic drums containing shadowy, fetal position human forms. The barrels were topped off with formaldehyde, which acted as a room freshener.

In the center of the space, under powerful spotlights, was either an operating table or a mortuary slab.

It was occupied.

“What the hell is this?!” Kirby said.

Doc had the answer. “It’s Magus’s private laboratory. He fancies himself something of a virtuoso.”

“Come again?” Bell said. “He’s a musician?”

“No, virtuoso is an archaic term, from the seventeenth century. He’s a dabbler in things scientific or pseudoscientific. A talented amateur.”

The thing on the operating table might have debated that last point. It lay on its back, wrists and ankles belted in place. It had been flayed, opened up, layer by layer. Each layer was pinned back with stainless-steel surgical clamps. Its chest cavity had been split wide and its organs opened to the air and the hard light.

Much of what he or she had been born with was missing. The eyes. The top of the skull. The genitalia. Muscle had been removed from both calves. Inside the red chasm of torso, a heart still beat laboriously, glistening lungs heaved.

“God, it’s alive!” Bell groaned.

“Do you think it’s conscious?” Kirby said. “Do you think it knows?”

“If so, it will thank me for this,” Doc said. With that, he thrust his sword point through the middle of the pounding heart and out the other side. The muscle pumped rapidly twice, squeezing around the double edged blade, then it stopped. As Doc withdrew his point, the gaping cavity began to fill with oozing blood.

“One less toy for the monster to amuse itself with,” Doc said. “Rest in peace, poor soul.”

They left Magus’s play room and continued on to the end of the hall. It turned out that Kirby’s downloaded map was accurate. Before them was the entrance to the redoubt’s mat-trans unit.

The control room was unoccupied, but its bank of computer drives were chittering, and every monitor screen was lit. Doc immediately picked out the massive metal door set in the far wall. It had an inches-thick, circular, gasketed window.

Kirby stood by while Bell bent over a monitor, surveying the system status and calling up the destination program’s GUIs.

Kirby walked to the chamber’s door, pressed the lever and pushed it open wide, revealing a small, low-ceiled gateway. The armaglass panels on the walls were marbled red and black, and shot through with seams of gold.

“The system is good to go,” Bell said from the consoles. “The coordinates are input.”

His last words.

They never heard it coming.

There was no slap of wet feet in the corridor. No rasp of breathing. No grunt of effort in the final lunge.

The trainer caught Colonel Bell from behind, pulling him away from the computer bank. Before he could reach the pistol grip of his M-16, an amber talon flicked out and stabbed into his earhole with a loud crunch, like a stake driven into a crisp apple.

As Doc backed toward the mat-trans unit doorway and the black man swung up his assault rifle, the trainer used its other amber gut hook to draw a line of red across the front of Bell’s throat. The freezie’s eyes bugged out, his lips moved as he frantically tried to speak. Blood gushed out over his tongue, pouring down his chest.

The trainer tossed Bell aside with one hand, like a wet trash bag. As the dying man crashed into the rows of monitors, the mutie lunged for the mat-trans gateway and more victims.

“Motherfucker!” Kirby howled. He shoved the muzzle of his M-16 at the onrushing mutie’s chest. When he pinned the trigger, the longblaster stuttered full-auto. Orange flame spewed from the muzzle onto the trainer’s sweat-slick skin.

Everything went white.

First ice cold.

Then blistering hot.

The explosion lifted Doc off his feet and sent him flying backward through the chamber door. The swordstick and its ebony sheath clipped the edges of doorway and flipped out of his hands, across the control room. As his backside hit the plates, all 250 pounds of Dr. Kirby landed sprawled across his legs. Ears ringing, Doc rolled out from under the scorched mathematician, slammed the gateway door shut. The jump mechanism didn’t automatically start when the door closed. He could see the trainer through the thick window glass. It spun around and around, the fire that billowed from its torso sheeting up over its face and head, black oily smoke staining the ceiling. Like a drunkard, the flaming mutie stumbled out into the hall, leaving the control room full of smoke.