By James Axler

 

A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON • PARIS • AMSTERDAM • STOCKHOLM • HAMBURG

ATHENS • MILAN • TOKYO • SYDNEY

First edition March 1987 ISBN 0-373-62503—

Copyright © 1987 by Worldwide Library. Philippine copyright 1987. Australian copyright 1987.

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

The Worldwide Library trademarks, consisting of the words GOLD EAGLE and the portrayal of an eagle, and the Worldwide trademark, consisting of the word WORLDWIDE in which the letter “O” is represented by a depiction of a globe, are trademarks of Worldwide Library.

Printed in Canada

 

Table of Contents

Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five

Prologue

^ »

A GLISTENING PEARL OF sweat ran down between the woman’s breasts, across the flat stomach, into the vee of curling dark hair. Another drop slid past her parted lips, over her chin, hung suspended for a moment, then fell through the smoky air and landed with delicate precision on the polished blade of the tiny silver dagger.

Her dark skin was smooth, her tumbling hair as black as the wing of a raven at midnight. She was naked, sitting cross-legged in the dirt, a yard from a smoldering fire of hewn cottonwood branches. It was difficult to guess her age. From her body you might have thought she was in her early twenties. Then you might have looked into her face.

The cheeks were pocked and scarred, with open sores weeping around her mouth. The lips were full, slightly parted as she panted in the heat. Most of her teeth were missing, and those that remained were yellow and chipped, jostling each other for space, like tumbled gravestones.

But it was her eyes that held you like an insect trapped in a web.

They were pale as watered milk, with a thin membrane drawn across each cornea, like a veil of finest lace. Beneath the pallid shroud the eyes moved, darting and jerking.

Her right hand gripped the knife, the hilt made from the middle finger of a man, the joints bound with silver filigree, an uncut ruby set at its pommel. The blade was about four inches long, razored on both edges, the tip needle-sharp. The flickering light in the reed-roofed hut revealed lettering engraved along the blade in twining, ornate script.

La Mort Lente.

The slow death.

In her left hand the blind woman clutched a small fluttering feathered creature. A red-winged blackbird, head turning from side to side, its tiny bright eyes rolling against the sheen of its plumage.

Inside the hut were more than a dozen men, most wearing cotton trousers, some with ragged shirts. Nearly all of them had tightly-curled cropped hair, with faces that betrayed an African ancestry. They knelt in the dirt, eyes locked on the woman’s mutilated face, hands folded in their laps, as if in prayer.

One of them rose and scattered a handful of dry powder on the glowing ashes of the fire, sending a cloud of dense white smoke toward the hole in the roof that served as a chimney. White smoke tinged with scarlet filled the hut with a bittersweet scent.

The woman lifted her hands, bringing both the silver knife and the fluttering bird nearer the blind eyes. She breathed in deeply, her body trembling, the nipples becoming erect, fire-tipped, like cherries. She opened her mouth, whispering to the waiting men in a voice harsh and grating. The language was a sort of French, a debased and corrupt form of the tongue that had originated four hundred of years before with Creole settlers from Haiti.

“As I see, so shall this far-flying singer upon wings see.”

The hut was silent and still, and only the frail scratchings of the bird’s claws upon the skin of the woman’s hand betrayed movement. Outside, the wind had fallen away as night set its grip tighter upon the land.

“For us and for the baron and for life beyond and life within, I do this thing.”

“Do this thing,” came the mumbled chorus from the watchers.

The hands came together, the point of the knife seeking the gleaming eyes of the blackbird. Slowly, with the care and skill of long practice, the woman pricked out both of the creature’s eyes, blinding it. A thread of bright blood streaked the feathers of its chest as it opened its beak and gave out a piercing screech of pain and black terror. But the woman held tight.

“Sing not and speak not and see not. But let the pinions bear upward that we might see where hope shall beckon.”

She lowered her head and breathed on the injured bird, soothing it, stroking the feathers at the nape of its neck with her fingers. Opening her right hand and letting the stiletto fall in the dirt, she cupped the left hand so that the bird nestled there, unmoving. Then she raised her arms toward the hole on the roof.

“Fly free! ”she cried.

For a frozen moment, nothing happened. The loops of graying smoke curled lazily up toward the sky. The bird turned its head from side to side, as if desperately seeking a salvation from its darkness. Minute specks of blood dappled the woman’s forearm.

“Fly free,” she repeated.

The red-winged blackbird finally made a feeble halfhearted effort to fly, beating its wings in a flurry of motion. It rose halfway toward the chimney hole, then faltered. There was a gasp of horror from the men as it fell, then rose again, and finally fell a second and final time. It plunged into the fire, flailing as the air filled with the stench of burned feathers. No one tried to save it. That would not have been appropriate.

It was a balding, wizened man who broke the shocked silence. “Why? Why did it not show the road that must be taken?”

The woman turned her opaque, sightless eyes toward the speaker, and he took a hesitant step back, as though he’d been struck across the face.

“There is a season for all things. A season to live and a season to die. Even the proudest of men must one day fall into decay. Stay quiet while I look inward.”

She began to rock slowly back and forth on her heels, her hands weaving an intricate pattern in the smoke-filled air. Quietly she started to hum a queer, keening tune that had no words. Then gradually the harsh Creole lyrics came through, telling of a land where there was only honor, humility, truth and courage. Yet a land where the shadows roamed, even in the brightness of dawn. Where a midsummer banquet was darkened by the whispering of distant thunder.

The song ended, and they all heard the rising wind outside the hut. The blind woman stopped rocking, stretching out her arms, jerking her head back so the sinews in her throat stood out like cords of wire. Her breath came fast, her body shook as if gripped by fever.

Suddenly she relaxed, gazed across the room, over the fire. Her mouth dropped, and for a moment her face held an expression of simpering idiocy. That, too, passed and she spoke.

“As stands the baron high, so shall he be brought low. Not from within but from without. He…” Her voice faded.

“What? What will ail him?” whispered the bald man.

The woman trembled, mouth sagging. Her eyes gaped wide in terror, the whiteness dreadful, as if someone pressed them from behind. Then she screamed.

And again. A rasping, high noise, like a stallion being put to the gelding.

“They come!”

The voice filled the hut, spilled out through the thin walls into the moist warmth of the surrounding land. It hung in the air like a raised fist.

She screamed again, locked into her trance. “They come!”

“Who? Who comes?”

She ignored the question, once more screaming the same two words. “They come, they come, they come!”

Outside, the swamp stretched limitlessly in all directions as far as man could know. Within its depths there was a slow stirring, as if it could sense something happening, something utterly new.

 

Chapter One

« ^ »

RYAN CAWDOR STIRRED and opened his eyes.

The last tendrils of the mist were clearing away. On the floor the pattern of raised metallic disks no longer glowed. The same pattern on the ceiling of the hexagonal chamber reflected his own face, distorted and blurred. The walls were of smoked armored glass, tinted a deep blue. It was much the same as other gateways that Ryan had been in. Maybe a little cleaner and in better condition than some of them.

He took a quick glance around him. Something else struck Ryan. This particular gateway was warm. Indeed, after his recent sojourn in the biting chill of the land that had once been called Alaska, it was uncomfortably hot.

Even though it had been days since he’d been wounded, the small cut on his left hand still stung. Then, he had been in the extreme northwest of the country, still in the grip of nuclear winter. From the heat he guessed that they were somewhere down south, and toward the east. By his calculation it was around the middle of February.

Around the chamber, all slumped over like untidy bundles of clothing, were Ryan’s six comrades. Four of them had been with him since they had traveled on the armored War Wag One, with the Trader, roaming across the Deathlands of Central United States, buying cheap and selling dear. They’d been fighting for life in a country that was still ninety-five percent devastated from the great nuclear war of January, 2001, nearly a hundred years ago.

The first of them to be showing signs of recovery was J. B. Dix, the Armorer. Around forty years of age, lean and compact, J.B. knew more about weapons than anyone alive. His battered fedora sat at a rakish angle on his forehead; his wire-rimmed glasses had slid down his thin, sallow face.

He blinked awake, his right hand going in a conditioned reflex to the Mini-Uzi that rested across his lap. The big Steyr AUG 5.6 mm pistol was bolstered on his right hip.

“Hot, Ryan,” he said.

J.B. was a man of very few words. And all of them were relevant.

“Yeah,” replied Ryan. He thought about standing up and decided he didn’t quite feel ready for that, not just yet. The patch over the empty right eye socket had moved a little, and he edged it back into place. The butt of his pistol—a SIG-Sauer P-226 9 mm handgun with fifteen rounds in the mag—banged against the glass, and he reached to his hip to adjust it. On the opposite hip Ryan carried a panga with an eighteen-inch blade. His immediate and obvious armaments were completed by the Heckler & Koch G-12 automatic rifle and fifty caseless rounds of 4.7 mm.

Nobody in Deathlands ever worried about having too many weapons.

“Doc looks ill,” commented J.B.

Ryan glanced across the gateway chamber at the oldest and most mysterious member of their party.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner. “Doc.” Tall and skinny, aged around sixty, with peculiarly excellent teeth. Doc had a deep, resonant voice, and often spoke in a strangely old-fashioned way. He was sprawled on his side, breathing noisily through his gaping mouth. His battered stovepipe hat had rolled across the gateway chamber. The ebony sword stick with the silver lion’s-head top was in his lap, and the bizarre Le Mat percussion pistol was holstered at his belt.

Doc had been rescued from the ugly township of Mocsin, his mind better than half gone. But he seemed to have a lot of arcane knowledge, touching on the technology of the past. The far past, even before the bombs and missiles ruined the land.

Next to him, Finnegan and Hennings propped each other up. The former, stout and short, carried a gray Heckler & Koch submachine gun with a drum mag of fifty rounds of 9 mm and a built-in silencer, Hennings was a tall black man with an identical HK54A gun by his right hand.

Old friends from the days with Ryan Cawdor and J. B. Dix on the war wag, they were tough fighting men, fiercely independent, each with a dark and macabre sense of humor.

Both men wore identical clothes, more like uniforms: dark blue high-necked jumpers, with matching pants. Both in black midcalf combat boots, with steel toe caps.

Lori Quint lay next to Doc. Ryan had noticed over the past few days that the old man and the six-foot blond teenager had been becoming increasingly friendly. It wasn’t that surprising. In Deathlands the first thing you needed was a reliable weapon. A friend came a close second.

Lori had been the second wife of mad, ragged Quint, the Keeper of the redoubt in Alaska that concealed the gateway. The long fur coat that she wore in the chilly north was by her side, but now she wore a short maroon suede skirt, hiked up around her long tanned limbs. The red satin blouse was torn and stained. She stirred as consciousness came creeping back, the tiny silver spurs on her thighboots of crimson leather tinkling with a thin clear sound. Her only gun was a small pearl-handled PPK .22 pistol.

Ryan, feeling the familiar dizziness and pressure behind the eyes from previous jumps, eventually decided to make an effort to stand. At his side, Krysty Wroth was coming around. He looked down at her, filling with a great wave of affection. That was the best word he could believe about it. “Love” was a word that was not much used by Ryan Cawdor.

“By the Earth Mother, Ryan, it’s hot in this place.”

“I figure we’re somewhere far to the southeast.”

“Still in Deathlands?”

“Mebbe beyond.”

With no apparent effort, the girl uncoiled herself to stand by him. Ryan was a good two inches clear of six feet, but she was less than a palm’s span below him. He marveled at her amazing powers of recovery. Though the others were all moving, moaning and sighing, Krysty’s green eyes were bright as ever, and she was leaning against the glass wall, arranging her staggeringly bright red hair with long fingers. The girl wore khaki coveralls, tucked into a beautiful pair of cowboy boots, also from the Alaskan redoubt. They were hand-stitched in blue calf, overlaid with silver falcons, wings spread wide. The toes of the boots were knife-sharp, chiseled from silver. Her gun was also silvered, a 9 mm Heckler & Koch P7A-13.

In the next few minutes they all managed to stand, though Lori felt sick, kneeling with vomit drooling from her mouth. Doc knelt at her side with a cracking of knee joints, putting a comforting arm around the girl.

“Where we come? Hot. Never known hot. How we come to this? Walls different color.”

“Tell her, Doc,” said J.B. “Like to hear how you explain it to the dummy.”

Doc Tanner scowled at the Armorer. “I would be obliged, Mr. Dix, if you would refrain from calling Miss Quint a dummy. She is not a mute. Nor a mutie. That foul imbecile Quint never educated her and kept her in a state of terror. She is as bright as you or I.” He paused for a moment. “Certainly as bright as you.”

“Fireblast!” swore Ryan. “It’s bastard hot. Guess I’ll leave my coat here.” Dropping the long garment with its white fir trim to the floor, he hesitated, then retrieved a white silk scarf with weighted ends from a pocket.

“Why hot? My head hurts.” Lori stood and leaned against Doc. Finnegan seemed as though he was going to make some joke about the oddly matched couple, then caught Ryan’s good eye and closed his mouth.

“The pain will abate, child,” Doc said. “We are now in some other, hotter part of what was the United States. Unless we have been carried to one of the gateways that was established in… But let us not consider that for a while.”

Ryan listened, puzzled. Doc occasionally dropped strange hints about the gateways and what they could do. As if he possessed more knowledge than he possibly could.

“No, we enter this chamber, built long years ago, before the great nuclear conflict that destroyed this earth as we knew it, and the mechanism operates. Instant matter transmitter. From here to there in that much time.” He clicked his bony fingers together to emphasize the shortness.

Lori’s face was utterly blank, but she nodded as if she understood.

“These transmitters were known as gateways. They were hidden in many locations throughout the land. I imagine most were destroyed. But they were well made, using what was called the state-of-the-art technology. Many survived, hidden within a variety of redoubts.”

“Like home?” she asked.

Doc nodded, his long white hair drifting across the high cheekbones. “Precisely, Miss Quint. Like that vision of Dante’s last circle of the inferno that you knew as your home. This is a gateway. A part of Project Cerberus. Research from scientists that was to run to the very end of endless night.”

“When was we home?”

This time Doc shook his head. “Alas, I have no really accurate chronometer, Miss Quint. But my memory, addled though it often is, recalls a transmission time of less than .0001 of a nanosecond. Of course, it seems longer because of the recovery time from the molecular scrambling and disassembly.”

In the few jumps he’d made, Ryan had wondered how long it took. On one he’d checked the chron on his left wrist, but it didn’t seem to have moved at all from the beginning to the end of the journey. Doc’s explanation hadn’t made it any easier to understand. All he knew was that you got into one of the surviving gateways and closed the door. An infinity of scattered time later, you were in another gateway, perhaps three thousand miles away.

“So we was there and here at same time?” asked Lori, in her slow, almost tranquilized voice.

Doc smiled paternally at her, but the hand that squeezed the top of her thigh, where skirt nearly met boots, was far from paternal.

The old man turned his smile on Ryan Cawdor. But it was quickly replaced with a taut expression of horror. The eyes bulged wide at Ryan. Doc’s grip on sanity gradually seemed to be returning, but it was still frail.

“The men of science, Ryan. Upon my soul, ladies and gentlemen, but they are such inhumane scum. They seek better and better ways of slaughter. Oh, the sights I saw when I was… oh, the horrors!” He closed his eyes, swaying like an aspen in a summer wind. “A young man, a taxi driver from Minneapolis, a petty thief… nothing vicious in him. Seen him used as a guinea pig for one of their nerve toxins. Seen him trying to bite his hand off, gnawing to the bloody bone. Children, from Asia, experiments for the agency that… rubbing their own excrement in great ulcerated sores that they had torn in their own flesh. Oh…”

He began to weep. Lori put her arms around him, hugging his frail body as he sobbed uncontrollably.

For a moment, everyone avoided eye contact. It was Ryan who broke the silence.

“Best we move.”

“Yeah,” said J. B. Dix.

 

THE DOOR TO THE GATEWAY opened smoothly. The anteroom was filled with chattering banks of computers and ranged equipment that hummed and whirred. Red and green and amber lights flickered. This was the cleanest and apparently best-preserved gateway control room that Ryan had seen.

Above the small panel of numbered and lettered buttons by the side of the chamber door, there was a notice that Ryan had seen before. Up in the Darks, where it had all begun for them.

“Entry Absolutely Forbidden to All but B12 Cleared Personnel. Mat-trans.”

This time there was no small room between the controls and the actual gateway. There was a massive door of vanadium-steel at the far side of the room.

“Blasters ready,” ordered Ryan, taking out the SIG-Sauer pistol, steadying it, his finger firm on the trigger.

Everyone drew rifles or pistols and ranged around Cawdor as he reached for the door. In the humid heat it felt cool to the touch. To the right was a green lever, pointing to the floor, with the word Closed printed on it. Ryan grasped it and tugged it upward, toward the Open position.

When the door was only a couple of inches ajar, Ryan eased the lever back to the neutral position, pressing his good eye to the slit and squinting both ways along the corridor that ran outside.

“Anything?” asked J. B. Dix.

“No. Pass the rad counter.”

The Armorer handed him a small device, like a pocket chron, that measured the radioactivity. It cheeped and muttered quietly, showing no more than a minor surface level. There were places scattered throughout the country where it would have howled out the danger. These hot spots were often near cities or towns where there had been either missile complexes or communication centers.

“Safe?”

“Yeah.”

Hennings was at his elbow as the door hissed open the rest of the way.

“Fucking hot, Ryan. Help sweat some of Finn’s fat.”

“Careful the sun don’t fucking burn you blacker, Henn,” replied the stout little man.

“Cut it, you two,” snapped Ryan. “Come on. Keep tight and careful.”

Nobody needed telling where to go.

Ryan led the way, as always. Then came Krysty, light on her feet, two paces behind. Hennings was third in line. Doc, with an arm around Lori, was in the middle of the group. Finn was last but one, with J.B. bringing up the rear, about ten paces behind everyone, constantly turning to check that nobody was trying to come up behind to cold-cock them.

The corridors were a pale cream stone, seamless, curving slightly to the right. About four paces wide, and about twelve feet high. Lighting was contained in recessed strips. There were no doors on either side.

“This a redoubt, Doc?” Ryan asked.

“Perchance not, Mr. Cawdor. Not all of the gateways were built within the large storage redoubts.”

The corridor wound on. Ryan’s guess was that it was going to come a full 360 degrees. Every now and then they passed beneath what were obviously defensive barriers, locked away in the ceiling. And every thirty or forty paces they walked under the cold gaze of small vid cameras, set in the angle between wall and curved roof.

“Nobody?” called J. B. Dix from the rear.

“Not a smell or sight of ‘em,” Ryan replied.

“There’s nobody,” said Krysty Wroth, voice utterly decisive.

“Sure?”

“Sure, lover,” she said.

In the century after the nuclear apocalypse many parts of what had been the United States were disastrously contaminated by all forms of nuclear poison. Chem clouds, bitter winter, acid rain and lethal doses of radiation had all combined to produce a multitude of genetic mutations. Muties came in all shapes, sizes and forms.

In many cases their names gave clues as to what they were like and how they acted.

Stickies had strangely developed hands and feet that enabled them to grip almost any surface. They were hard to kill.

Sensers were able to see into the future, mainly in a very limited and often inaccurate way.

Doomies could only feel when some disaster was going to happen. They could rarely be specific, but their premonitions were generally correct.

Crazies were… well, crazies were plain crazy.

Krysty was a kind of mutie. Ryan had found it difficult to handle when he first became aware of it. After they’d first made love. She had mixed talents. Her long hair was slightly sentient and seemed to move of its own volition. She could often sense trouble, in the way that a doomseer could. Also, she had unusually keen sight and hearing.

But her greatest attribute was generally hidden. Her late mother, Sonja, had always drilled into the girl the key phrase: Strive for Life. She had come from a settlement called Harmony, which had a reputation as a sanctuary, as peaceful hamlets were called. Krysty had been taught there by her mother, and by two good men, her uncle Tyas McNann and his friend Peter Maritza. They had taught her to respect the Earth Mother, Gaia, as she was called, after the Greek goddess of the earth.

Though it exhausted her, Krysty was capable of disciplining her mind and body to such an extent that she could unleash a terrifying physical strength.

It wasn’t just humans that bred muties.

In his thirty or so years, Ryan had encountered just about every kind of genetic perversion that a diseased mind could imagine. Fish and fowl. Insects from the locked rooms of a dying nightmare. Animals and snakes and birds. All distorted into obscene parodies of their original forms.

Ryan believed that this odd circular redoubt was devoid of life. Krysty just confirmed his suspicions. The air tasted clean and untouched. Once you’d smelled death, you never forgot it. Not ever.

It was only about three minutes later that they reached what looked like the main doors. The corridor opened to a room about ten paces square. The walls showed faint shadow-shapes, squares and rectangles, where pictures or notices had been hung. But the entire complex was clear. Whoever had been there when Armageddon came had done a good cleaning. Nothing remained, not even dust. It was all hermetically sealed, waiting for human beings to return.

“There’s no control panel,” said Finn. “Not like the others.”

The walls around the doors were smooth and clean, lacking any kind of opening mechanism. Ryan looked to Doc for help.

“I confess I’m baffled. The individual design of some of the gateways was outside the scope of the Cerberus people.”

“Blast it. Got some grens.” As usual, J. B. Dix was direct in his thinking.

“I suggest caution, Mr. Dix,” replied Doc. “Some of these main entry ports are highly sophisticated. If we were to fail to blow it open, then we might find we had permanently closed the building’s only exit.”

“So? What do we do?” asked Ryan. “Feels warmer here than anywhere.”

“Got to bring fresh air in every now and then. Been going for a hundred years, give or take. So some outside air and humidity leaks in. I am of the opinion that the controls for this might be in some hidden master unit.”

“In the big fucking fire!” swore Hennings. “That mean we can’t get out?”

“Wait,” said Lori, pushing past them all and walking slowly, fearfully toward the dully gleaming great doors.

“What’s she going to do?” hissed J.B. “Lean her tits on it?”

“Shut up, Dix,” warned Krysty. “Looks like the kid knows something we don’t.”

About six feet from the portal, Lori hesitated, then took two more long strides forward, her little spurs tinkling.

At first nothing seemed to happen.

Then like a metallic giant unclenching his fists, the doors began to slide ponderously back, letting in a waft of humid air that made all seven of them gasp. The doorway was nearly forty feet wide, and when the doors finally stopped moving, a stretch of corridor, around two hundred paces in length, was revealed. At its end was a steel wall with an ordinary-sized door set in it.

“Come,” said Lori, stepping briskly forward, followed by the others with varying degrees of reluctance.

On the right-hand wall someone had neatly stenciled the word Goodbye.

“How d’you know just to walk up to it like that?” shouted Ryan, his words ringing out above the echoes of boot-heels.

Turning her head over her shoulder, Lori answered, “Back door out home. Quint show me. Earth slip and cover it. Look same. Eyes see us and open door. Eyes of dead men.”

“Mebbe boobied, girl,” called Hennings, running past her, stopping at the door and pushing cautiously at the handle. “Locked!” he bellowed.

“No,” said the girl, moving him aside and taking the handle in her right hand. She pulled it slowly toward herself.

It was unlocked.

Henn followed the tall blond girl out into the daylight. Ryan came next, with the others at his heels. He stood on the threshold of the building, staring out. The light was oddly diffused, with shifting green shadows moving in the doorway. He drew a deep breath, filling his lungs, tasting the air, savoring it like a connoisseur.

Ryan Cawdor had visited many parts of the continent. He had walked the cracked avenues of New York City, through the groves of whispering vegetation with poisonous flowers and berries on every corner. Gazed across the oily brew of chemicals to the charred stump of what had once been a mighty statue. Something the locals mostly called Libberlady.

He’d been in the cold and ice of the north and down in the glowing rad-crazy wastes of the southern deserts, where chem clouds flamed from east to west. If J.B. was right, and they were in the southeast, then it was new territory for him.

“Some ozone,” he muttered. “Can taste gas. Mebbe in the ground or water. Fireblast, but it’s hot and wet here.”

Already he was sweating, a trickle of perspiration running down the small of his back. From habit he glanced behind him, seeing to his surprise that virtually all of the gateway was below ground. Creepers twined all about the shallow concrete single-story building, covering it with an impenetrable mat of gray-green foliage. His first guess was that this superb natural camouflage was the main reason the gateway hadn’t been entered and despoiled.

“Here we come,” said Finnegan, staring out at the unbelievable landscape around them.

Krysty shuddered. Within the deeps of the limitless swamp that stretched all around them, she sensed a slow stirring.

It was not a good feeling.

 

Chapter Two

« ^ »

THE BLIND WOMAN SAT trembling on a large wooden chair, leaning against the high quilted back, arms folded across her breasts. She wore a thin cotton dress, with a dark brown stain on the right hip. Her right hand fiddled with the slim silver knife, sheathed on a cord around her neck. Every few seconds her pink tongue flicked nervously over her dry lips.

All around her, in the lobby of what had once been the Best Western Snowy Egret Inn of West Lowellton, near Lafayette, Louisiana, men bustled about their business. Not one of them looked directly at her. If Mother Midnight had been summoned by their lord, then it was best to avoid any entanglement. The scar-faced woman was notorious as one of the most cunning of the witches. The magicians of the day were known as houngons, and were frightening enough. But Mother Midnight was one of the dark wizards, called bocors.

Cross her, and she might wish you dead. Might touch you on the cheek with a long fingernail and whisper the single word, Thinner. That had happened only a month ago to tall, strapping Stevie King. Slowly but surely, he began to waste away. Within twenty days he died, shriveled to less than eighty pounds.

And now something had gone wrong. All through the bayous the whisper had gone out of a disaster at a ritual. So the baron wished to see her.

Her sensitive nostrils caught the sharp scent of marijuana, and she turned toward the sound of steps, hearing them stop near the chair.

“He will see you now, Mama Minuit.”

There was not the usual respect in the young man’s voice, and the woman tasted fear on her own tongue. The baron ruled over a vast area of the swamps, all around Lafayette. Apart from the renegades, every soul for fifty miles around paid dues to Baron Tourment. Even the Cajuns, deep within the Everglades, would not cross him.

She stood and reached out a feathering hand for guidance. The Best Western had been the headquarters for the baron ever since she could recall. But he moved from room to room daily, fearing assassination. The hand that gripped her fingers was soft as a girl’s, and she could smell scent.

“This way. There is a step, then another.”

She wasn’t going to ask why she’d been summoned, in case she got the answer she dreaded.

She wasn’t going to ask.

“Why does…?” she began.

“He will tell you.”

“Oui,” she said simply.

The carpet was soft beneath her sandaled feet, muffling their steps. Her sense of direction was excellent, but even she lost track of the twists and turns of the endless corridors. Twice they passed clunking machines that made ice for the baron and his army. Once they stopped, and she heard the thin whining of an elevator. They went up one floor, then along more corridors. They entered another elevator. As her bare shoulder brushed against the sliding metal door, she felt the faint whipcrack of a static shock. Down a level.

She realized that the young man holding her hand was teasing her. Playing some cruel jest by taking her a winding way, making the darkness around her into a bewildering maze.

“How far?”

Ignoring her, he quickened his pace, dragging her behind him.

“How far, friend?”

“Soon.” There was a measured pause. “And do not think I am your friend, Mother.”

Then, clear and distinct, her ears caught the sharp click of a gun being cocked. She winced in the expectation of the shock of a bullet. But nothing happened. The man at her side giggled, feeling the sudden tenseness of her hand.

“That is not his way. Not a swift death.”

“I know it,” she replied, her voice shriller than she’d intended.

The last public execution had been around the beginning of the year. An old man who’d stolen a chicken for his family and had been caught by the sec men.

They’d stripped him, his pale, sagging belly almost concealing the shrunken genitals. Poured gasoline over him and ignited it. The flame was almost invisible in the bright sunlight. He’d capered and jigged, his hands beating at the fire. The leader of the baron’s sec men, Mephisto, had handed the old man a can of water, which he’d immediately poured over his own head.

The water had been boiling hot.

Smoke and steam had mingled in a deadly halo about the old man’s skull. Layers of skin had come peeling off like discarded decorations at Mardy. Careful not to sully his immaculate white suit, Mephisto had splashed his victim with more gas, flicking a match to light it. The cold liquid had streamed over the man’s body, over his groin and his legs. The flames, with the more beautiful blue tint to them, had danced all over. The pubic hair had scorched; blisters burst out by the hundreds.

Mother Midnight had seen none of this, relying on one of her followers for a description. But she’d smelled burning hair. Roasted flesh. Heard the mewing and gagging of the old man. The hiss as Mephisto poured more boiling water over the fire.

Flames and water.

Flames and water.

Flames.

“Come on,” snapped the young man, jerking the witch from her reverie.

She was pulled into a room and was left alone. She coughed, trying to establish the size and shape, but the sound was muffled, as if large drapes hung everywhere.

“The ritual of the bird, Mama?”

He used the Creole French that she always used in her ceremonies, rather than the anglicized patois of his followers. His voice was deep and resonant with a pleasant amiable tone to it.

“It was bad, Baron. Real bad.”

“Everyone leave us.”

There was a scurrying of feet and a jostling in the doorway as if too many people were trying to get out at once. The woman heard the door close, then silence broken only by a susurrating creaking sound. Leather and wood and metal moving against each other, under tension.

Mama Minuit had never seen Baron Tourment. She had spoken many times with him. Even made love with him. Her body knew his dimensions. All of them.

She knew that he was immensely tall. Three inches over seven feet. Though his fingers were like steel, his body was weak, the knees and hips unable to fully support him. To compensate, he wore a clumsy exoskeleton of steel struts and bindings around his lower torso and legs. His hair was short and curly. She also recalled that his penis was about twice ordinary size, thick and long, like the forearm of a young child. He had thrust remorselessly between her wide-spread thighs, tearing her, so that blood gushed over her legs and belly.

She had never conceived. Nor had any woman he had ever serviced. But she knew that the baron still lived in hope of a son and heir.

“I heard of the red-wing slain. Falling into the flames to perish.”

On an impulse she dropped to her knees, conscious of him looming over her. She could smell his body. Musk and soap, mingling.

“I have never seen the like.”

“You put out the eyes?”

“Yes.”

“And released it clean? It was not harmed? The wings were unbroken?”

“Yes, lord.”

His breathing was slow and steady. The only other sound the woman heard was the surf of her own blood seething through her ears.

“It fell to the fire and was consumed?”

“I have never…”

“You have said that.”

“Forgive me, lord.”

“For what? There was a ripple in our world, and you asked for the strangers’ ritual to be performed. It has been done before. And it will be done again. This time, it went… I am disappointed, madame, I am very disappointed.”

“It proves what I had said. There had been signs before. When there has been a great tide or the earth has shaken. The insects, the snakes and the birds. All behave in…”

His hand touched her face, and she stopped speaking. The middle finger of his right hand touched her jaw, beneath the left ear. His spatulate thumb probed under the right ear.

“Tell me once, woman. Why?”

The palm of his hand was across her lips, pushing them against her broken teeth. There was the warmth of sweet blood in her mouth.

“There are strangers come. But they are not as we are. Not Cajuns. Not your men or women. Not the wolf’s-head renegades from the other side of the town. They have come from nowhere.”

“And the signs are bad?”

“As bad as can be. Never…”

The finger and thumb began to tighten, making the cartilage pop under the skin. The woman moaned, but the grip was inexorable.

“That is all? There is nothing more you can say to aid me with these strangers?”

She desperately racked her mind for something that might satisfy Baron Tourment, might spare her from his cold anger.

“No?” he said, voice as soft as the touch of a butterfly’s wing. “Then you have failed me.”

The hand closed on her jaw, squeezing, the nails digging into her flesh. The skin burst under the pressure, and the woman tried to scream for mercy. But already her windpipe was clamped shut. First the left side of her jaw was dislocated, then the right joint cracked apart. She tried to bite the black hand, but it was too tight against her lip.

Blood was filling her mouth, and she struggled to swallow it. The hand pincered in, harder and tighter, until she couldn’t breathe.

Her veiled eyes protruded from their sockets, blood trickling from the corners. More blood came seeping from her broken mouth, from her nose and from both ears. It was as though her entire skull was a great sponge, filled with crimson blood, and Baron Tourment was squeezing it slowly dry.

The giant black braced himself on his splinted legs, lifting Mother Midnight until her bare feet hung clear of the carpet, kicking and jerking. He wrinkled his broad nose at the stench as she lost control of both bladder and bowels and fouled herself. But his grip didn’t relax for a moment.

The last sound she heard, deep within her own head, was a soft cracking, like a man setting his heel to a fresh apple.

“Adieu, Mama,” whispered the man, opening finger and thumb with a gesture of revulsion, allowing the corpse to drop to the floor at his feet. He wiped the blood from his hand on his dark cotton shirt.

There was a polite knock on the door of the luxury suite.

“Come.”

“It’s over, Lord?”

“Yes, Mephisto. It’s over. Remove that and dispose of it to the pets.” The grating Creole French was gone and the man spoke perfect English.

“And then? She saw something?”

“I think so. Something could be real bad. Pass the word for extra care.”

“Who can they be?”

The massive black creaked across the room and collapsed inelegantly on a long sofa, stretching the exoskeleton and sighing.

“Not that white butcher kid and his friends?”

“Lauren and his gang?”

“No, Mephisto. The bocor woman here smelled something new. From outside the swamps.”

Mephisto grinned wolfishly. “It is a vengeful spirit come to punish you for your evil, Baron Tourment.”

It was dangerous to make that kind of joke, but the sec boss had judged the moment well.

“You think maybe that? Do I do wrong? No. A man like me shouldn’t worry about something like that. It may even be blasphemous.”

He threw back his leonine head and laughed uproariously at his own joke. Mephisto joined in, stopping when the baron pointed a long, bloodied finger at him.

“But take care. Who knows what manner of creature moves amongst us?”

 

Chapter Three

« ^ »

THIS PLACE is fucking something else,” complained Hennings, swatting irritably at a huge mosquito that had battened on his shoulder.

“These bastard fly-bugs are the biggest I ever saw,” added Finnegan.

“Muties,” commented J.B., laconic as ever.

The Armorer used his pocket sextant to take a sighting of the glowering orb of the sun through the dense foliage of the forest surrounding them. It confirmed his original suspicion that they were in the Deep South, around two hundred miles west of the old port of New Orleans.

“Cajun country,” said Doc Tanner, pausing to wipe sweat from his brow with a massive kerchief with a swallow’s-eye design.

“What’s a Cajun?” asked Ryan, easing the shoulder strap of his weapon.

“Around five hundred years ago, back in the 1600s, the French settled on a part of the east coast that would later be known as Nova Scotia. The soil being fertile and the climate temperate, the settlers called their paradise Acadia. More than a hundred years later, the British drove them out of the region and the Acadians fled south to these parts. Acadians got corrupted to Cajuns. Simple, isn’t it?”

Nobody said anything, and Ryan wondered, as he had a hundred times in the past few weeks, just how the old man came to have such a bottomless supply of knowledge.

 

AFTER LEAVING the small redoubt they had tugged the door shut behind them. At J.B.’s suggestion, they had put a tracer on it so they could find their way back through the labyrinth. But the tiny trans didn’t work.

“Damp,” said J.B. disgustedly. “Don’t have another, Have to watch our path real careful.”

Ryan led the way, following the faint remains of a narrow two-lane blacktop through the trees and shrubs. Never in his life had he seen anything like this place. Not even in his dreams.

Though it was nearly noon, the sky was filled with a dull, hazy greenish light. On both sides of the road there was the sullen glint of water, rainbow-tinted where oil lay on its surface. Cypress and pecan saplings twined about each other, with groves of beautiful oaks and graceful elms. And over all of the forest were the smothering veils of Spanish moss, dangling from every branch like spider webs. As the sun broke against it, the moss seemed to shift and alter, diffusing the light in shards of white and gold Where the shadows gathered, the moss changed color like a chameleon, from green to gray.

Two hundred paces from the building, they came across what had been the security gate. There had been triple-layer barbed wire with porcelain conductors, evidently meant to carry a lethal dose of electricity. But over the decades the planet had struck back at the man-made intrusions. Fallen trees had smashed the fences; long creepers had brought down the guard towers where machine guns rusted in the gloom.

It took several minutes for Ryan to lead his party over and under and around the tumbled trees, using his panga to hack away at the clinging ivy. Several times he heard something scuttling away from them but did not see what it was.

They came to a fork in the road, and Hennings stepped across to examine the remains of a notice board rested crookedly against the stump of a dead azalea. But as he attempted to pick it up, the wood crumbled in his fingers, rotted by beetles and the humidity.

Passing more fallen barriers and fences, Ryan realized how tight the security must have been when the redoubt was built, way back at the end of the twentieth century. Now it was all wiped away by the bombing and by the weather that followed.

“Much nuking down here, J.B.?” he asked.

“Never been hereabouts. Recall some trader in a gaudy house near Windy City saying they used some kind o’ new missiles. Kills life and leaves things standing.”

Both men started, looked upward through a break in the covering branches, seeing a great white bird with beautiful plumage soaring far above them. Neither of them recognized the creature as a snowy egret.

“What we going to do ‘bout food, Ryan?” asked Finn, stopping to shoo away a cloud of tiny orange flies that gathered around his flushed face.

“This road’s got to lead somewhere. We all got food tabs. Place like this might have dirties living close by. Take their food.”

The idea of getting food from the backward muties who were supposed to live deep within some of the more isolated swamp areas wasn’t that attractive to anyone.

“There,” said Lori, pointing ahead, where the trail narrowed by the remains of a high fence. It was now a tangled heap of rusting steel.

“Looks like there could be a real highway yonder,” Hennings said.

He was wrong.

It was a back way into a kind of park. There was a wooden causeway, floating on the watery mud that flooded the area. Some of the logs had rotted and broken, and others shook dangerously as Ryan stepped carefully on them. Leading the way, he warned the others to be cautious and keep ten paces apart.

The trees became sparser, comprised mainly of intertwined mangroves set in the water, some leaning and toppling. The water opened into a kind of bay, offering a visibility of up to a couple of hundred paces. The sun was a watery gold, sailing in a sky dotted with purple and black clouds. Intermittently Ryan noticed that the surface of the swamps was broken every now and then by a rippling splash, as if something had moved or jumped. But it was always the actual enlarging rings of water that caught his eye; he was never quick enough to see what was doing it. Once, as he was standing on the edge of the piling, staring down into the thick brown water, he was sure something large passed underneath, setting up a sullen rippling on the surface.

“What’s that?” asked Krysty, pointing at a thick square post with the number 25 deeply etched into its sloping top. At its base was a black plastic box.

“Looks like a small trans. J.B. what d’you reckon?”

“Could be. Antipersonnel, mebbe. Pick up intruders by the gateway. Fire gas? Looks like it’s well iced by now.”

Doc stopped to peer at it, running his gnarled fingers over the carved numbers.

“Upon my soul, but this rings a far-off and tiny bell in some back room. I believe… no, it eludes me, I fear.”

The next two posts along the causeway had rotted away to mere stumps. At a curve in the trail, many of the logs had collapsed into the murky swamp below, and they had to leap the gap. Doc surprised everyone by leaping across like a startled gazelle, but Lori found it harder, eventually removing her high boots and throwing them across first, and finally jumped with little difficulty.

Finn slipped on landing and opened a small cut on his hand. He bent over to wash it in the swamp. “Water’s warm,” he said, raising his hand to his lips and licking it. “Warm and salty.”

“Not that far from the sea. Only a few miles from Gulf o’ Mexico. Few years back they had vicious acid rainstorms here. Strip a man to his bones in a few minutes if’n you got caught in one. Seems calmer.”

“Them clouds is gathering,” said Hennings, pointing with the muzzle of his gray HK54A submachine gun.

The sky was blackening, the violet becoming a deep royal purple. The sun ducked and dived behind the clouds, sending shadows racing across the water.

“Best move faster,” urged Ryan.

Passing more wooden posts, he automatically noticed the numbers. They stopped at a post numbered 18.

“You are approaching the end of the Audubon self-guiding nature trail. Remember, the planks may be slippery, so use the handrails and ropes where provided. Children should hold the hand of an adult.”

The disembodied voice was so sudden and shocking that Ryan slipped and came within an ace of tumbling head over heels into the turgid slime.

“Fucking fireblast!” said Ryan, recovering his balance and his composure.

The voice went on, creaking a little like an old farm gate in need of oiling, occasionally fading and then rising again.

“In the basin directly in front of you are thousands of tiny green turtles. If you see or hear something slithering in the water, then it just might be old brother alligator. But they have been carefully selected to prevent them growing too big, so don’t be frightened.”

There was a click as the tape loop reached its end.

“Activated by a low-intense beam,” said J. B. Dix. “Works like a basic gren trap.”

“A hundred years old and still working,” said Krysty Wroth, moving close to Ryan.

As the seven continued to walk along the wooden causeway, they passed several of the stumps, but only a couple were working.

Number 7: “Wandering along the Audubon self-guiding nature trail, most visitors will have, even in this vast solitude of mud and water, a sense of kinship and friendliness with the environment.”

“Like a hole in the fucking head,” spat Finnegan, slapping angrily at one of the insects that had settled on his neck for its afternoon fix of fresh blood.

“Remember, no picking or taking, please! The delicate ecostructure can easily be damaged by the careless hand of man. Some creatures here are real messy housekeepers, so watch where you step.”

This time the tape didn’t stop. It just began to repeat itself, gradually slowing down, drawling and blurring its speech until it died with a crackling, hissing mess of static.

They walked on in silence.

 

“LOOKS LIKE DRY LAND,” said Hennings, pointing ahead with the muzzle of his blaster.

The cathedral of towering trees that surrounded them was thinning out a little, occasionally letting the sun dart through, creating pools of brightness all over the tangled roots of the mangroves. They spotted several large birds swooping among the upper branches. Ryan had never seen creatures like some of these. Brown-feathered birds, with great leathery bills that hung like sagging shopping bags.

“How deep d’you figure this swamp, Doc?” asked J.B., leaning out over the side and shading his eyes with his hand, peering into the clouded depths.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to find them, technically, bottomless. The water will grow thicker as you go deeper. Muddier. Until muddy water becomes watery mud. Then thicker mud, slimy and clinging. Perhaps a hundred feet or more before you reach anything that could be regarded as solid.”

“Another speaking tree,” said Lori, indicating the last of the posts, with the numeral 1 carved deep into it. As they drew level, the ancient mechanism creaked to life.

“To wonder is to begin to understand…understand. Welcome to the Audubon self-guiding nature trail. The leaflet you are holding will help you to… to… to… to appreciate the wonders of this part of the Atchafalaya Swamp, the largest natural swamp in the entire country. To wonder is… entire country…”

“Kind of strange listening to a voice from the past like this, even if it is going all wrong.” Krysty shook her head.

As if involving actual effort, the tape began to grind around once more, with many jumps and starts and repeats.

“If you…finish with it, replace it for use of those… after. Help to preserve this vital part of our living heritage so that they…by the great-great-greatgrandchildren of us all, a hundred years in the unguessable future.”

“Unguessable,” echoed Ryan. “Son of a bitch sure got that right.”

As the tape jerked along, Finnegan sighed and sat down on the edge of the causeway, less than twenty paces from the murky edge of dry land. He leaned over the side, trailing his hand in the warm salty water, straining to hear the faint voice on the tape.

Above them, the sun had disappeared once more behind the gathering clouds. Twice in the past few minutes they had heard the whiplash of lightning as it slashed to the earth.

Half-listening to the voice from the past, Ryan Cawdor walked a dozen paces beyond it, then stopped where the last logs of the walkway were rotting and settling into the crusted mud of the shore. Tiny orange crabs scuttled and darted among the jumbled debris. Near the pier a metal can bobbed on a sullen swell, still bearing the recognizable words Miller Lite. Ryan had seen dozens like it before. They had been containers for beer, or sugary drinks that had foamed and fizzed when opened. He’d seen pictures in old magazines in redoubts.

“The Audubon trail is controlled by the National Parks movement. Remember…man…harmony…environment. Man in harmony with his environment.”

Abruptly, Finn screamed and threw himself back on the moss-stained planks, rolling to try to get away from the enormous alligator that had come bursting from the stinking ooze. Jaws gaping open wide enough to swallow a buffalo, with rows of sharp, triangular teeth, the predator raked the air as it sought its prey.

 

Chapter Four

« ^ »

THE HECKLER & KOCH G-12 automatic rifle has a laser sight that makes it extremely accurate over any distance by day; and equally so by night with its infrared laser nightscope.

J. B. Dix had once explained to Ryan why the three-round burst, such as the G-12 features, had been introduced, back before the long winter hit the world.

“On full automatic, most rifles, like the M-16, tend to start rising after four or five rounds have been fired. Difficult to control. So you fire a succession of three-round bursts. Interrupts the cycle before the muzzle comes up at you.”

Everyone was startled by the eruption of the monster reptile from the swamp. Some reacted more quickly than others.

Doc struggled to drag out his nineteenth-century pistol, but Lori jerked out her popgun. Krysty and the Armorer were equally fast in readying their blasters, with Hennings a split moment faster to try to save his friend’s life.

Ryan, with his H&K G-12, was first and quickest of all. As he spun around, finger already dropping to the pistol-grip trigger, the alligator was less than ten yards away from him, and Finnegan was desperately scrabbling away from the yawning chasm of its jaws. Muddy water streamed off the horny ridges along its spine and its tiny hooded eyes stared unblinkingly at its potential victim.

Ryan snapped off five successive three-round bursts, bracing himself against the recoil, firing from the hip against the advice of all the approved manuals. He’d owned the oddly-shaped blaster for only a few days, and still found it odd not to be surrounded by spent cases, pinging all about his feet. But the nitrocellulose caseless cartridges were all used up in discharging the 4.7 mm bullets.

The first triple burst, sounding to an inexperienced ear like a single tearing explosion, ripped into the edge of the sodden wood, a hand’s breadth from the monster’s snout. Wooden splinters exploded, showing white beneath the surface. The next four bursts all caught the mutie alligator, raking it from the end of its jaw, along the side of its questing head, into the light-colored belly with its softer armor.

Blood spouted over Finnegan, soaking his face and chest. Shards of jagged bone were torn from the creature’s savage teeth, pattering into the water. One of its eyes disappeared, the whole cavern of the socket disintegrating under the high-velocity fire from Ryan’s weapon.

The reptile was kicked back into the water, off the edge of the causeway, its claws tearing away at the wood. Propelled at an extreme velocity, the rounds punched into the target with fearsome force.

There was no need for anybody else to fire. More than a dozen bullets had ripped the alligator apart, sending it flailing and thrashing, throwing up a great pink spray that darkened to crimson, covering its death throes. Hennings helped Finnegan to his feet, and they stood on the edge of the torn planks staring as the monster passed from life. The others, including Ryan, with his finger still on the trigger, also watched carefully.

“Bastard that big could still come at us,” he said.

“Be fine way to go. After all he’s fucking eaten,” grinned Hennings, one hand still on Finn’s shoulder. “Being that fucker’s dinner.”

“Why did you sit down there?” asked J.B.

Finnegan shook his head, wiping the mutie’s blood from his face and neck. “I asked a man that. Tail-gunner off War Wag Three. Dean Stanton, his name. Little runty guy with a lot o’ balls. Once seen him throw himself clear off a high bridge into a couple of feet of water. Near Missoula. We dragged him out and I asked him why he done it.”

“And?”

“And he said it just sort of seemed a good idea at the time.”

Finnegan began to laugh, hanging onto Hennings for support. The laughter was contagious, and they all began to laugh, even J.B., easing away the tension of the fat man’s near escape.

“Crazy bastard,” called Ryan, patting the stamped sheet-metal housing of the automatic rifle. It was damned near the closest he ever came to showing any affection.

“Thanks, Ryan,” said Finn.

“Sure,” he replied.

The alligator was nearly still, no more than a twitching corpse. Around it the water was stained a deep brown-red, and small fish began to appear by the hundreds near the carcass.

As Ryan and the others looked on, fascinated, the dead alligator, better than fifty feet in length, began to jerk and roll, its white belly up, the fish tearing at it.

Within less than five minutes the corpse had been stripped to raw bones and shreds of tattered sinews.

“Piranhas,” corrected Krysty. “And you’re right, Henn. They are mean bastards.”

It was a relief to finally set foot on dry land at the end of the walkway.

There was a small stone building, with a roof of woven reeds, standing among a grove of oaks. Its windows were unbroken, and although the stucco on the walls had peeled, most of it remained undisturbed by the elements.

It was an odd sight in a world where the great bombings of 2001 had reduced virtually every building to rubble. Ryan could almost count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d seen prenuke architecture intact like this.

“Figure the low land protected this place?” he asked J.B.

“Has to be.”

“No.”

“What’s that, Doc?”

Doc Tanner rubbed at a green stain on the side of his stovepipe hat. “Not the lie of the land, my dear Mr. Cawdor. Have you not heard of a little toy called the neutron bomb?”

“Neutron bomb?” asked Ryan. “What the fireblast was that?”

“I heard of it,” said the Armorer slowly. “Took out men and left the houses. That it?”

Doc nodded. “A simplistic summary of the effects, but accurate enough for our purposes.”

The door of the little building was open; the weather had apparently cleared out whatever it might have held.

With the aid of Ryan’s long machete, they hacked through a screen of tumbled vegetation about forty feet thick, which screened off the walkway and ultimately kept the location of the redoubt and its gateway a secure secret.

On the far side was a crumbling road, winding southward. Standing on the cracked pavement, they heard no sign of life, just the occasional crying of a distant bird and the endless clicking and chirping of insects.

“There’s more water,” said Krysty, pointing ahead. “Cross the road.”

It was a slow-flowing muddy-brown river, wide as the eye could see, moving toward the east; it washed out the remains of the highway. Finnegan, still visibly shocked by the near miss from the mutie alligator, dipped his hand cautiously in the water to wipe off some of the blood. He touched a finger to his mouth.

“Fresh. Not salty like the other.”

“How come this has risen, but the swamps back there look like they’re ‘bout the same height they was before the war?” asked Krysty, puzzled.

At first no one answered; then Lori spoke.

“All rivers bigger. No people drink them.”

“That’s the fucking most stupid thing I ever heard,” laughed Hennings. “Rivers rise because there—”

Doc Tanner interrupted him with a raised finger, crooked like a claw, the nail yellow as old ivory. “Mock not, my somber-hued brother. Think that we are close to the delta of the old Mississippi River. I would surmise that even now, a century later, barely one-fiftieth of the people live and work in its basin. No factories to drain it. No rest rooms, flushing away millions of gallons. No drinking, as Lori said. No commercial uses at all. No wonder the levels of the streams and rivers have risen.”

“You figure we’re stranded here?”

The old man looked sideways at Ryan. “It is conceivable. Perchance we should go back and try the gateway.”

“What the bastard big freeze does perchance mean?” hissed Finnegan, but nobody answered.

“East or west?” asked J.B.

Ryan looked both ways. The vegetation was stiflingly thick to the east; to the west it looked a little clearer. Along the edge of the river there almost seemed to be some sort of cleared pathway.

“West,” he replied.

It was a path.

Not very wide, flirting with the water, but it was most definitely a trail. After a few paces, Ryan dropped to his knees among the bushes, peering at the marks in the soft ground.

“Animal?” asked Hennings.

“No. There’s something looks like deer. Cloven hoof, sharp. But there’s human feet. Deep tread, working boots. Recent. Let’s be careful.”

The warning wasn’t really necessary. Even young Lori had been with them long enough to realize that life was lived astride a singing blade.

While she had been with them in Alaska, one of the party had mentioned problems to Ryan. She recalled his answer.

“Problems? Solving problems isn’t our business. We deal in death.”

She sensed what that meant.

As before, Ryan led the way, gun cocked and ready, his finger on the trigger. Everyone followed in their places, their own blasters ready for instant action.

Once Ryan thought he caught the sound of human voices ahead. But Krysty’s mutie hearing didn’t register anything, so he figured he was mistaken.

It was an error that within an hour would culminate in the death of one of the party.

 

THEY FOUND THE VEHICLE less than a quarter mile along the trodden path. It was beached, like a long-dead swollen whale, pulled in among the trees, its rear wheels still in the water. At first glance it looked like a boat on wheels. Its six wheels held it about eight feet above the mud; it had small metal ladders on each side, and the biggest, fattest tires that any of them had ever seen—their diameter was at least six feet. Ryan poked at the tires, finding them amazingly soft and underinflated.

“Swamp buggy,” pronounced Doc Tanner confidently. “Deep tread on the tires. Go through or over just everything you can imagine. Land or water. As well as anything that lies between.”

J.B. clambered up a ladder and peered inside. “Seats for eight. Couple o’ cans of gas. Steers with a rudder kick-bar. Box of old scattergun shells. Fish hooks. Something looks damned like a ramrod. Figure it can’t be. Only blasters from two hundred years back use a ramrod. Muzzle loaders.”

“See anyone?” called Ryan.

“No.”

“I can drive it,” said Finnegan. “Let’s get the fuck out of here ‘fore they come back.”

After a moment Ryan nodded his agreement. There was a simple rule you learned in the Deathlands. If you held it, then it was yours. If someone else held it, then it belonged to them.

The swamp buggy was about to belong to Ryan and his comrades.

 

THE TRADER HAD ESTABLISHED routines for most occasions. Even for stealing someone else’s transport.

“One gets in, slow and easy. Watch for traps. Small landwag, one man can watch. Big one takes two or three. Don’t start it until the last possible moment. Say again. Don’t start it until the last moment. Once you make a noise, then they’re on you, and you got borrowed time. Once it’s running, get the chill out of there.”

Finnegan sat in the driver’s seat of the buggy. Krysty, Doc and Lori took the other seats, each watching a different section of the land and river around them. Hennings, Ryan and the Armorer moved into the surrounding forest, their eyes and ears ready for the return of the men who owned the vehicle.

Once he felt he could master the controls, Finn gave a low whistle. The three men fell back, ringing the swamp-wag with their backs to it, eyes raking the shifting wall of green all around them.

“Which way?” asked Finn.

“Cross the river. That’s where the old road went. Must lead to a ville of some kind.”

“Ready?”

“Ready, Finn,” replied Ryan.

The starter was a three-inch nail, bent and smoothed from use. Finn grasped it, pushing on the gas pedal a couple of times. His left hand nursing the throttle, he twisted the starter.

There was a spluttering muffled cough, like a sleeping bear waking in a deep cavern. Finn tried it again. A puff of thick blue smoke spurted from the exhaust, but the engine still wouldn’t fire.

“Again!”

“Bastard won’t…”

“Come on, Finn. You’re going to bring every citizen for miles.”

On the third go the engine very nearly caught, turning over a dozen times, then dying away. Krysty half stood in her seat, pointing to her right; to the west.

“I hear someone, Ryan. Men running.”

At the fourth attempt the engine of the swampwag fired, filling the small clearing with a deep throaty roar. Smoke rushed from the exhaust in a choking pall. Standing on the ladder, rifle at the ready, Ryan gestured for the others to climb aboard.

“Go. Fast as you can, Finn. Go ‘cross the river. Make for cover.”

“Only blasters they got look like they come from a hundred years ‘fore the nukes,” said J.B.

The massive wheels began to rotate, throwing a spray of mud and brackish water in the air.

“All the tires give power,” shouted Finnegan, kicking at the rudder bar to steer the buggy into the water.

Ryan watched behind them, where Krysty had warned of men coming fast. But there was no sign of them. He suddenly realized that the bottom of the ladder was going to be immersed as the buggy slid fully into the river and he hastily climbed aboard. Clambering up, his eye caught a movement near the bottom of the short ladder: the scaly spade-shaped head of a huge water moccasin emerged above the water, and the two deep-set eyes gazed blankly into his.

The utter depth of feeling made the short hairs bristle at the nape of his neck.

“Left, you gaudy bastard bitch!” cursed Finnegan, wrestling with the unfamiliar controls.

“Open her up!” yelled the Armorer, one hand hanging on to his beloved fedora hat.

“She’s open wider than a low-jack whore’s legs already,” replied Finn, sweat streaming from his chubby face.

They were about halfway into the serene brown water when men appeared on the bank.

“Five of… no, six. Seven,” amended Hennings, leveling his gray Heckler & Koch submachine gun, steadying the drum magazine on the side of the swampwag.

“Hold fire,” warned Ryan. “We already stole their buggy. Let ‘em deal the first hand. See what they’re holding.”

Krysty shaded her eyes with her hand, peering toward the men silhouetted against the elusive sun as it broke through the clouds.

“Nothing much. Nothing automatic. The one on the left with the scarf around his head has a… some kind of long blaster. He’s thumbing back on a sort of hammer.”

Hennings stood up. “I’ll waste them all, Ryan?”

The buggy was very close to the belt of sycamores that lined the far side of the river. Another ten seconds or so, and they’d be under their cover.

“Hold it. There might be hundreds of the double-poor bastards round here on both sides o’ the water.”

“I’ll just warn them some,” said the black, bracing himself and squeezing the trigger.

The blaster was set on continuous, and a stream of bullets flowed out, with a sound like tearing silk; it kicked up a line of spray a few paces from the watching men.

Finnegan glanced over his shoulder, whooping his approval at his old friend’s success. “Teach them suckers not to fuck with us!” he crowed, his enthusiasm making the swampwag veer alarmingly to one side, nearly sending Hennings toppling into the water.

“One of them’s got a blaster aimed!” shouted Krysty warningly.

Hennings waved his hand derisively toward the group of natives, clenching his fist in a power salute.

Ryan watched the men pick themselves up after Hennings’s burst of fire and scatter. All but one. He stood still, a long rifle at his shoulder, rock-steady.

There was something menacing about the man’s deadly calm. There was the look about him of someone who knew precisely what he was doing, not frightened by the shattering effects of the fire from the buggy. Ryan could almost feel himself inside the man’s skull.

He considered the windage, the elevation, the drift, the distance.

Then he squeezed and squeezed again.

Ryan turned toward Hennings, tasting the immediacy of the danger like cold steel on his tongue.

“Get down, Henn!” he shouted.

The tall black glanced sideways at him, the smile of triumph still on his lips. From the corner of his eye Ryan spotted the puff of gray powder smoke as it billowed from the muzzle of the long gun.

A moment later he caught the crack of the explosion. Almost simultaneously he heard the unforgettable flat wet slap of lead striking flesh. Hennings gave an “oh” that held more surprise than fear or pain.

“No,” said Finnegan, half standing, losing control of the swampwag for a moment, sending it skittering sideways, down the river.

“Keep on it,” yelled J.B., nearest to Hennings, holding the black man as he folded into his arms, blood gushing from the back of his head.

Ryan sprayed the men on the bank with his blaster, getting a vicious satisfaction from seeing three or four of them go down, kicking and jerking. But the man with the musket had reached the safety of the fringe of low scrub.

The buggy jolted and tipped as it reached the far side of the river and moved up the sloping bank. The six wheels worked independently, grinding over the tangled roots of the bayous. Mud and water splashed up off the huge tires.

Low branches scraped across the top of the swampwag, leaves crowding in on the crouching men and women. The moment they were totally under cover, Finnegan kicked the engine to a stop, letting it idle and die in a grinding of fears; vaulting off his seat he got back to where J.B. still cradled Hennings.

“How is…?”

Both Finnegan and Hennings had ridden with the Trader on his expeditions for some years. They’d both seen a lot of deaths. Both of them knew the truth.

The leaden ball had struck the black man just above the right eye, leaving a neat dark hole from which a little blood seeped, bright scarlet against the skin. The exit hole was huge: a chunk of skull the size of a man’s fist had been punched out in jagged fragments, blood and brains slopping all over the bottom of the buggy.

Krysty, Lori and Doc stood helplessly by, looking down at the felled man. Lori was crying silently, her shoulders shaking, tears sliding down her smooth cheeks, pattering into the spreading pool of blood.

Hennings’s eyes were open, blinking in shock. Though the brain damage was clearly terminal, a shred of life still remained. His eyes sought Finnegan, fighting to focus on the red face of his oldest friend.

“I’m here, Henn,” said Finnegan, leaning over the dying man.

“Going dark, Finn.”

“Yeah. Mebbe a storm on the way.”

“What…?”

“What blaster?” guessed Finnegan. “Some fucking musket from the cave days.”

“Good, shooting.” Hennings’s tongue flicked out across his dry lips.

“Not fucking bad, friend.”

Not far to the west, there was a dazzling burst of sheet lightning, followed by a deafening peal of rolling thunder.

Henn struggled to speak. “Do this mean what I think it do?”

Finnegan nodded. “It do.”

Hennings’s eyes remained open, but life slipped away, leaving them blank and empty.

As the first heavy drops of rain began to fall about them, Finnegan lowered his head and wept.

 

Chapter Five

« ^ »

FOR NEARLY TWO HOURS the rains came pounding down so hard that it was impossible to move. There was a stained brown tarpaulin inside the swampwag that they managed to pull up over themselves, keeping the worst of the storm off. But even then the rain was so devastating that it seeped through the canvas in a fine spray, soaking them all. Water collected in the bottom of the buggy, diluting the blood from Hennings’s corpse, turning the crimson to pink.

It was the worst storm that Ryan Cawdor had ever experienced.

It wasn’t the banshee gales—he’d heard those farther north in the Deathlands. But the lightning and thunder were almost continuous, pounding at the ears until the senses began to totter. The rain swept in, seeming at times as if it were a solid shroud of tumbling water. At one point J.B. stuck his head from under the tarpaulin, taking care to remove his glasses first, trying to see if there was any sign of the storm abating. He pulled back a few seconds later, blinking and gasping.

“Can’t breathe. Drown out there, in open air. That’s the trouble. No damned air. Just water.”

By the time it eased to a persistent drizzle, the noise of the thunder drifting inland, it was close to dusk. The purple-black clouds remained, hiding the setting sun.

During the two hours, Finnegan hardly spoke. Not that conversation was easy above the noise of the thunder and the drumming of the monsoon on the stretched canvas sheet. He sat, his head in hands, beside Hennings’s corpse. He ignored all attempts to console him. Only Ryan’s words about having iced several of the natives seemed to cheer him at all.

For some time Ryan had worried that their attackers might be creeping around, readying an ambush. But the experience of the Armorer convinced him that as long as the rains lasted they were safe.

But now it was quieting.

“J.B.? What d’you reckon?”

“Go.”

“Where?”

“Same way we said ‘fore Henn bought the farm.”

“South. Way the blacktop was going. Move until it gets dark?”

“Yeah. Stay in the swampwag. Best chance we got. It’s noisy as a butchered sticky, but it can go over any kind of land and water. We got the blasters to hold anyone off. Go south and then find a good defensive position for the night. That’s the way I see it.”

Ryan agreed.

Hennings’s sudden death had depressed him, made him question what he was doing as the leader of the group. When the Trader had walked off into the night and never returned, he handed over the command of the party to Ryan. And what had Ryan done with it? Taken a handful of comrades on a crazy expedition through a mat-trans gateway.

Then, in only a few days, three of the original eight were lost. Tall, sullen-faced Okie, one of the top blasters, a girl who kept her own counsel. Hunaker, with her cropped green hair and her incessant taste for anyone of either sex at any time.

And now Hennings.

“We’re going to move,” he said, throwing back the tarpaulin, standing and stretching. He tasted the flatness of iron on his tongue, carried on the drizzling rain. There was also a hint of the sharpness of gasoline in the air.

“What ‘bout Henn?” asked Finnegan.

If Finn hadn’t been there, Ryan probably would have dumped the body over the side of the swampwag into the swollen muddy river.

“We bury him, Finn,” he replied.

 

THE VOICE WAS SWEET and pure, ringing like a crystal goblet, unsullied by the rain and the dark and a friend’s violent death.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…That saved a wretch like me…

The digging was accomplished with a short-hafted trenching tool they found in the back of the buggy. After going a couple of feet down, Ryan and J.B. were for stopping, but Finn took the shovel, wordlessly continuing in a frenzy of action; mud and clods flew to either side as he bent to the task; he paused only when the grave was a full five feet deep, the sides slick with the rain.

“Now” was the first word he said.

With a touching dignity, the fat man lifted his friend’s body and laid it out straight on the short, cropped grass. He took some rags from the buggy and wiped Hennings clean, then closed the eyes firmly. Folding the arms across the chest, Finn placed the HK54A submachine gun in the cold graying hands.

“Gimme help with a piece of that tarpaulin, Ryan,” said Finn,

Together they cut a piece off, struggling to keep it as straight as possible. While Finn steadied the corpse, Ryan wrapped the stiff cloth around it like a shroud.

“Keep him for a’whiles,” muttered Finn. “Way from the fuckers.”

As Finnegan gently put the body into the grave, Lori began to sing.

“I once was lost; but now am found…”

All of them stood around. J.B. had looked at Ryan meaningfully when Finn took the dead man’s blaster and wrapped it with him, ready for the grave. Standing orders from the Trader had always been that a dead man’s possessions, especially weapons, should be shared among the survivors. Ryan shook his head at the Armorer. Times had changed. They all had blasters. There was no point in burdening themselves with another.

Besides, he figured that Finnegan would have tried to chill anyone who aimed to stop him.

“…was blind, but now I see…”

Doc mouthed the words along with the girl. But none of the others had ever heard the tune before.

The rain came in gray sheets, dripping from the ghostly veils of Spanish moss. Small pools of water glistened in the folds of the canvas shroud, reflecting the somber sky. The wind had fallen to a gentle breeze. With full darkness still an hour or more away, Ryan was becoming concerned that they might be vulnerable to a sneak ambush from the locals.

“Want to say a few words, Finn?” he asked.

“I don’t fucking know any words. Someone else best do it.” He looked around the circle.

Ryan did it, knowing it was his job. It wasn’t for anyone else, once Finn had refused. That was the way of it. First the closest comrade, then the leader.

That was the way.

“This is Hennings, on his last ride. Hennings… I don’t even know his other name—Finn?”

“Arnold,” muttered the fat man.

“Arnold? You certain?”

“Yeah.”

Ryan wiped a bead of rain from his nose. More water had run behind the patch on his left eye, and he lifted it, allowing the cold liquid to trickle down the unshaven cheek.

“Henn was a good blaster. Never run from you. Always stand at your shoulder in a firefight. There aren’t many men you can say you trusted with your life. Henn was one of them. Now he’s gone and we’ll all miss him. Times we’ll talk of him, around a good fire.” He stopped, looking at the others. “That’s all I got. Anyone else?”

Finn nodded. “Yeah. Just ride easy, Henn. I’ll see you over the next hill.”

The slopping chunks of wet earth fell on the tarpaulin with a flat, final sound. Each of them took a turn, with Finnegan snatching the shovel and filling in the rest of the dirt and flattening it as best he could.

“We got a marker?” he asked. “Can’t just walk away from Henn and fucking leave him here like a dog.”

“It’s best, Finn.”

“How come, Ryan?”

“Put a marker, and they’ll find it. Dig him up. Do…do fireblast knows what to him. That’s not right. Few days, and the grass’ll cover him snug and safe.”

Finnegan nodded his agreement.

And so they left Hennings, sleeping alone and undisturbed among the trees.

 

ALTHOUGH THE SWAMPWAG was equipped with headlights, Ryan figured it would be suicide to drive after dark. It would be like carrying a great sign asking folk to blast you. As soon as it got too dark to drive safely, Ryan ordered Finn to pull off the road among a grove of live oaks.

J.B. found some strips of dried fish in the buggy, and they divvied them out. Ryan appointed guards, in pairs for extra safety, A fire was too hazardous, but the night promised to be mild and humid.

Krysty sat next to Lori. “That was a right pretty song. I think mebbe I heard old ones sing it, back in Harmony. Where did you learn it?”

The girl looked down, blushing in embarrassment. “Back redoubt, Krysty. Quint sing when he ice someone. Every time. I hear lots time. Called ‘A Mazing Grace,’ I think. Seemed right sing for poor Henn.”

“Guess it was,” said Krysty.

 

ALONE IN HIS BED about thirty miles from where Ryan had set the camp, Baron Tourment lay in an uneasy sleep. The grotesque exoskeleton lay propped at the side of the king-size bed, once available at a special A tariff for visitors to the motel. The heavy curtains were drawn across the picture window, shutting out the last shreds of the storm’s lightning.

The giant black, who often had nightmares, generally slept alone nowadays. After twice strangling bed companions in his sleep, he had agreed to forgo more deaths.

He was restless, tossing and turning, tangling the sheets about him. Once during the night he dreamed, his right hand touching and fondling himself, bringing himself to an erection of terrifying proportions. Beneath the pillows was a silver-plated pearl-handled Magnum pistol that he’d found in the loft of a big house on what had once been the exclusive side of West Lowellton. His hands reached for the heavy pistol, caressing it, stroking the cool metal.

And all the while he was asleep.

Just before dawn he began to thrash and mumble, but the words were inaudible—apart from the repeated muttering of, “Strangers, strangers.”

 

RYAN AND KRYSTY took the last watch of the long night. They took turns circling the swampwag at a distance of between fifty and a hundred paces. The false dawn came whispering in, with a pink glow in the east and the promise of a fine morning. Then darkness returned, followed at last by the sallow light of true dawn.

“Wake the others, lover?” she asked.

“Soon. Let ‘em sleep long as they can. A jump really scrambles up your head. And losing Henn like that…”

The sentence trailed away into the stillness. The air was cool, with a faint mist hanging over the trees behind them. They heard the delicate clicking and chirping of insects, rousing for the new day, and the songs of birds to the east.

The Atchafalaya Swamp was coming to life.

Krysty laid a hand on Ryan’s arm, just below the elbow. “Why do we do this, love?”

“This?”

“Keep running. Fighting. Now… dying?”

“I figure you can live easy or hard. Easy, and you never stand up for a thing. Hard, and…”

“And what, Ryan?” Her grip tightened on his arm, making him wince at her latent power.

“Once you start with fighting and killing, Krysty, then it’s killing and killing and more killing.”

“Why? When do you stop?”

“When the reason for the fighting and the killing is done and ended.”

“When will that be?”

“Maybe tomorrow. It’s always going to be tomorrow. Until one day you find it’s come. That’s all there is.”

About a mile ahead of them, a thin column of gray smoke was curling up into the morning sky. Ryan and Krysty noticed it simultaneously.

Ryan set his boot on the ladder into the swampwag, “Time to wake ‘em,” he said.

 

Chapter Six

« ^ »

AFTER SOME DISCUSSION they agreed that the safest bet was to leave the buggy behind, hidden under cover, ready in case they needed a fast-footed run from danger.

J.B. suggested that they split into groups, circle around and then meet back at the swampwag, but Ryan insisted they stay together.

“No. With Henn gone we’re low on blaster power. You, me an’ Finn. Doesn’t mean Doc and the girls don’t pull their weight, but we’re the professionals. Best we stick close.”

The promise of a good day was vanishing fast. The sky was chameleonic, shifting from a pale blue streaked with pink to a deep purple with black clouds slashed across it.

Ryan, as usual, took the point position, keeping as far as he could to the side of the blacktop, in among the shadows, blaster at the ready, finger close on the trigger. Krysty came second, twenty paces back, on the opposite side of the road. Then Doc and Lori, who were becoming increasingly difficult to separate, with Finn a farther twenty yards behind them. J.B. brought up the rear, keeping a good hundred paces off, on the same side of the road as Ryan.

The temperature was already rising, humidity making the going tough. Ryan estimated that it was already close to the hundred mark. He was glad that he’d left his beloved fur-trimmed coat behind in the gateway.

A large mosquito, wings shimmeringly iridescent in the hazy light, settled on Ryan’s left wrist, readying itself to feed. “Bastard!” Slapping at it, he crushed it in a smear of blood‘.

There weren’t many signs that the blacktop was actually used very much. Oases of vegetation sprouted from cracks in its surface. A sharp curve to the left was followed by one to the right. At each turning Ryan held up a hand, slowing the others until he checked out what was around the bend.

Moving back, he called the rest to him, using the prearranged signal of touching the top of his head with his left hand. One by one they came up, J.B. at the rear.

“Road goes straight, but we’re close to a ville of some kind. And there’s a guard box over on the left, near a side trail.”

As they neared it, moving closer together, Ryan was first to see that the small building wasn’t a guard box at all.

“It’s a phone booth,” said Doc wonderingly. “I vow that it has been…” He seemed awestruck. “…many a long year since I have seen such an artifact.”

The box, with some of its glass still intact, leaned to one side. The letters ‘AT&T’ were still visible on it. The group stopped to gawk at it.

Above them the sky had darkened as it had the previous afternoon, with a jagged spear of silver lightning occasionally crackling down. To one side there was a large pool, reflecting the sullen clouds. Beyond the water several buildings were silhouetted in the distance, seemingly fairly undamaged.

If a whole large city had really escaped the nuking of 2001, it would be an astounding thing to see. Certainly Ryan Cawdor had never seen anything like it before.

Finnegan stepped closer, stopping about a dozen paces from the booth.

“Some fucker’s in there. I can hear it moving.”

“Get back, Finn,” ordered Ryan. “Don’t take any chance with…”

The words died in his throat when he saw, as they all did, the creature that Finnegan had disturbed.

“A fucking rat,” said Lori. It was the first time any of them had heard her swear.

In the Deathlands there were all kinds of mutie creatures. But none of them had ever seen a rat like this one. It was much larger than usual, hanging on the plastic receiver cord, gnawing at it, while its fiery red eyes stared at the invading humans. Its coat was white as driven snow.

“Albino,” said Krysty. “I had a pet mouse back home called Blanche. She was like that. Pink eyes and white coat. No pigment.”

Almost contemptuously the rat scurried down the cable, pausing in the open door to pick its way delicately over splinters of broken glass, then running across the road and stopping on the edge of the bushes. Finnegan drew his Beretta 9 mm pistol, steadying his right hand with his left.

“No,” snapped Ryan. “Don’t be a stupe, Finn.”

“Why not? We can waste any local double-poor swamp muties.”

“Just like Henn did? Come on, Finn.”

During the brief conversation the rat made a leisurely escape.

 

THERE WERE FURTHER COLUMNS of smoke, and soon they could actually taste the flavor of roasting meat. Finnegan was all for pushing on at best speed, going in with blasters spitting, taking what they wanted and icing anyone who stood in their way,

He was overruled by the others.

“Slow and easy, Finn, Usual way. Let’s go and do it.”

 

SPREADING ACROSS HALF the roadway was a tumbling mass of brilliant azaleas, a rainbow of brightness, dazzling in the dullness of the morning. Away beyond were the buildings of the town, but the smoke from cooking fires was closer. It emanated from a dip in the land in which lay a maze of shallow swamps.

“Flowers pretty,” said Lori, staring open-mouthed at the display.

“Road sign, yonder,” said Krysty, pointing to a small rectangle of dark green, well over a mile beyond the flowers.

“It name the ville?”

She stood on tiptoe, straining, her face wrinkled with concentration. “La something. Yeah. Layayette. Lafayette, and it says West… Can’t… West Lowellton. Nearest place looks like it’s called West Lowellton. Maybe Lafayette’s farther.”

Doc looked across at her. “I believe that Lafayette was a city, Miss Wroth. Perchance West Lowellton is a suburb of it.”

A dozen muties appeared from behind the azaleas. Suddenly and silently. One second the road was clear; the next second the creatures were there.

“Fireblast!” breathed Ryan, dropping into a blaster’s crouch, gun braced against his hip, checking to make sure the others had fanned out.

About forty paces ahead, the swampies stood in a frozen group, staring at the invaders as if they were men from deep space.

Ryan checked them out, trying to guess precisely what their mutation was, wondering if it might be safest to simply chill the whole lot of them in a raking burst of lead. But there might be three hundred of them around the next bend.

The first thing that struck Ryan was their stocky build. Not one was taller than about five-two, and not one, including the single woman, weighed less than about two-twenty. Most of them had negroid features, with flattened noses and thick lips. Their hair was short and curly, and came in all shades from black to white, through red and yellow. Ryan noticed that their eyes protruded slightly, surrounded by nests of scars, like old tattoos.

None of them had fingernails.

As they glared at Ryan and his companions, their mouths sagged open as though their noses were blocked. There was not a blaster among them, though several had peculiar small crossbows strapped to their forearms. Each one, including the woman, wore long pangalike knives at the hip.

They were dressed in cotton shirts and patched short trousers, with flapping sandals on their feet, hacked from chunks of old tires.

For several heartbeats nobody moved on either side.

Then Finn opened fire.

Immediately all the others started shooting. After all, who was going to stand there shrugging his shoulders and complaining he hadn’t been involved in a tactical planning discussion?

Two utilities raised their feeble little crossbows as if to retaliate, but the wave of fire sent them crashing down in a tangled heap of thrashing arms and legs.

Ryan saw his triple bursts wipe three of them away. First the woman, two 4.7 mm rounds smashing into her neck, nearly severing the head from the torso.

“High,” muttered Ryan, automatically adjusting his aim. Finn’s actions hadn’t entirely taken him by surprise. The chubby blaster had never been known for his patience. And after Henn’s murder…

The swampy beside the stricken woman was on a crutch, half his left leg missing. Ryan shot him through the stomach, spilling his tripes in the dirt.

Ryan’s third victim had already been knocked off balance by one of his falling comrades, and Ryan’s bullets hit him through the upper chest, on the left side. A clear heart shot, fatal within thirty seconds or so.

Perhaps fifty rounds were fired by Ryan’s party, laying them all down. Peculiarly, none of the muties screamed or cried. Just a faint mewing from the dying.

In the loud silence, Ryan turned to face Finnegan, who was clearing the Heckler & Koch, reaching for spare ammunition.

“Open fire like that again, Finn, and I’ll ice you myself.”

It was said very calmly, with no obvious anger. But the blaster flinched and looked down at his boots. “Sorry, Ryan. You know how…”

“Yeah, I know how. But not again. Now let’s get the fuck outta here before—”

There was a stifled scream from Lori. Everyone else was sufficiently experienced to know that all of the muties were down and done. Finished. But the tall blonde had been staring at the twitching corpses with a morbid fascination. Now she stood, pointing with her dainty blaster, her eyes wide with terror.

Three of the corpses had risen and were walking unsteadily toward them.

“By the three Kennedys,” exclaimed Doc, taking a shaky step backward, away from the horrific apparitions.

Ryan knew that stickies were notoriously difficult to kill, but this was something else. The three… another one was struggling to rise... four muties had all taken terminal wounds. One had half his intestines hanging out, looping around his feet so he stumbled and nearly fell; bending to pick them up, he draped them over his arm, looking like an old picture Ryan had seen of an elegant Roman senator in his toga.

A second had an arm hanging by a thread of gristle with tattered rags of muscle bloodily weeping from the stump. Ryan had shot that one. A third had been shot in the face, the bullet dislodging an eyeball so it dangled prettily on the scarred cheek. The fourth had two massive bullet wounds in its chest and upper abdomen.

“They can’t,” said J.B. in disbelief. “They’re dead.”

“Then why aren’t they fucking lying down?” asked Finnegan.

One of the swampies had managed to fire its crossbow, the bolt flying short and burying itself in the earth near Krysty’s feet. She stooped and plucked it from the ground, looking at the sticky patch of brown oil smeared around its point.

“It’s poisoned,” she warned.

The four staggering muties were only fifteen paces away, lurching like drunken customers leaving a gaudy house at midnight. Ryan noticed that their wounds, appalling though they were, didn’t seem to be bleeding as much as they should be.

“Again,” he said, opening up at point-blank range with the G-12 automatic rifle, the burst of the caseless ammunition sending all four figures dancing and toppling. He raked the four bodies repeatedly, using thirty rounds to make sure they wouldn’t rise a second time. Blood spurted, and chunks of flesh splattered into the air, with gouts of crimson, carrying splinters of bone.

After the racket of the guns, the silence was intense. The bodies lay still, torn apart by the ferocity of the shooting.

“If there’s more of them, they’ll be on top of us any time now,” warned Ryan.

“How could they?” asked Doc Tanner, moving and staring down at the mutilated corpses. “Such wounds, and they rose and walked.” He squatted down, oblivious of the blood soaking, around his cracked boots.

“Where?” asked the Armorer.

“Away,” replied Ryan. “Must be more where that smoke was. I don’t want to face more if they’re that bastard-tough to put the stopper on.”

“Sure. Back to the swampwag? Or into the brush?”

Standing up, his hands slobbered with dripping blood from probing at the carcasses of the muties, Doc interrupted, “Amazing. My dear Mr. Cawdor, it is truly amazing.”

“What?”

“These poor creatures, genetically mutated as a result of the neutron bombing, have developed a dual circulatory system. Two hearts, two sets of lungs, two sets of arteries. That is why they are difficult to slay.”

“Zombies,” breathed Krysty. “By Gaia! They are truly the living dead.”

“Nukeshit!” Ryan looked at her in surprise. “You don’t believe that stuff. They’re muties. Just muties. All muties are different, Krysty, but they’re still muties. Right?”

The moment his words were out, he wished he could suck them back and swallow them. The girl glared at him for a long-held moment.

“I know about muties, Ryan. So do you.”

“Hey, I’m… I’m sorry, only…”

She nodded her understanding. “I know why. Doesn’t make it right.”

“I hear them,” said Finnegan, hastily reloading his blaster.

They all heard it. A distant ululating cry, rising and falling like the howls of hunting wolves. It sounded like an awful lot of swampies were heading their way.

“Let’s move,” said Ryan, turning away from the water and running unhesitatingly into the heavy undergrowth alongside the track.

 

A DESPERATE CHASE it was, and lasted all morning, and well into late afternoon. At one point there was another torrential downpour but they didn’t dare stop for shelter, in case the muties just kept coming after them.

Ryan, Krysty, J.B. and Finn were able to keep going with no great strain. Battle-honed and fit, they could have run for a day. Lori, despite the handicap of her high-heeled boots, did well enough. But for Doc Tanner it was a torturous pursuit.

At first they more than held their own, ducking and weaving along paths that danced and twisted like a breakback rattler. Ryan led the way, his steel panga drawn, slashing the branches that blocked their progress. Every few minutes he’d hold up his right hand for a brief rest, while all of them fought to control their breathing so they could listen for the sound of the muties.

The banshee wail seemed closer for the first couple of stops, then it faded away until it was no louder than the humming of bees. But by the fifth check, Doc was in a perilous state, dropping to hands and knees, his chest heaving, sweat dripping from beneath the high hat.

“I beg you, gentlemen and ladies, to go on and leave me behind. I have my trusty cannon,” he said, half drawing the ancient, ponderous Le Mat percussion pistol. “I assure you that I shall give a good accounting of myself, and I shall take some of the monsters with me.”

“Save a round for yourself, Doc,” urged Finnegan, readying himself to move on deeper among the trees.

“No. Finn. You keep on this path with the women. I insist that—” Doc tried, but Ryan turned on him with a ferocious anger.

“Shut that fucking mouth, Doc, or I’ll bust it. This isn’t some old-fashioned fucking game of heroics. If you were gut-shot, I’d be first to leave you. But you aren’t. J.B. and me’ll stop and slow ‘em some.”

“Usual on the paths?” asked Finn.

“Yeah. Straight when there’s no doubt. Any choice, take alternate right and left. Dagger slash on the nearest bush or tree.”

Finn nodded and began to move, while Ryan and the Armorer readied an ambush for the swampies who were following. Lori helped Doc up on his feet, but still he hesitated,

“Come on, Doc,” called Finnegan. “Have no fear.”

The old man came close to a smile; it trembled uncertainly on the edge of the white lips. “You say to have no fear, my plump companion.” An ironic laugh. “My own words to myself, a hundred times a day.”

“Come on, Doc,” urged Krysty. “Uncle Tyas McNann used to quote something ‘bout being of good cheer and playing the man.”

This time the smile was broad and genuine. “I know the saying, lady. But the man who said it died moments later.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” said J.B., leaning against a tall sycamore, his gun a comfortable extension of his right hand.

The four of them melted into the undergrowth; the only sounds were the sucking of the increasingly muddy earth at their boots. Ryan and J.B. waited, as they had waited in a dozen different places and times, for the enemy to come to them.

 

IT WORKED.

They didn’t need a signal. Ryan was the leader, so when he squeezed the trigger, the Armorer was a split second behind him. In such thick cover it was difficult to count the enemy. And with the muties’ talent for recovering from mortal wounds, Ryan wasn’t about to go and check them out. But at least eight went down, hit hard, and the others fled into the bayous, splashing and crying out to each other in odd, bubbling cries.

It was necessary to try the same trick again around four in the afternoon.

Doc has passed out, his breathing shallow, heart racing like a pump engine. Normally, if they’d been out from War Wag One, there’d have been a medic among them with drugs. But out there in what had once been called Louisiana, they had nothing.

“Take five rest,” said Ryan. “Me and J.B. will go do it to ‘em again.”

The swampies had learned their lesson and were approaching more cautiously. But four or five of them went down under the combined fire of the Armorer’s Mini-Uzi and Ryan’s caseless G-12.

“Take five,” ordered Ryan, once they had all caught up with each other.

“I regret,” panted Doc, “that I truly can no longer even walk, let alone…”

“We’ll hold up here,” Ryan interrupted. “Either those zombie bastards leave us be, or we stand and fight ‘em. No other way.”

The ground had been getting wetter and wetter, until at every step their boots sank inches deep into slimy muck. The sky had cleared and now had only a scattering of light orange clouds, floating high and untroubled, intermittently visible through breaks in the green curtain that was draped overhead.

While they waited, Krysty stood a little apart from the others, her head to one side, listening hard. The long red hair rolled over her shoulders, bright in the half light.

Ryan came and stood by her, putting a hand on her wrist. She smiled at him.

“I’m sorry ‘bout the cracks on muties!” he said.

“It’s fine, lover. I know how it is.”

He kissed her gently on the cheek, tasting the faintest hint of gasoline from the dirt and mud. “You hear them, love?”

“No. They backed off at the last firefight. But I can hear…” She shook her head.

“What?”

“I heard a dog barking. Then it sounded like a pig snuffling. Not far ahead, but the wind’s against me for good hearing. I thought I heard a woman’s voice. Singing. Mebbe another swampie village ahead of us.”

They’d been running more or less blindly, picking anything that looked remotely like a trail, even, narrow animal tracks: Now they were in a small clearing with some exceptionally tall elms around them, covered with the white Spanish moss, so that they resembled a mute assortment of frozen brides draped in stained wedding lace.

Ryan hesitated. If they turned back for the swampwag, they might encounter the muties. They couldn’t go right or left either. The deep waters of the salt swamps had been closing on them on both sides. That left only straight ahead, where Krysty Wroth had heard sounds of active life.

The sound of a gas engine came to them from behind; deep and throaty it was, exactly like the noise of the buggy’s engine.

“Swampies?” said Finn.

It didn’t seem likely that any community as brutish as the dirties who’d attacked them could drive a swampwag. But whoever it was, there was a better than even chance that they weren’t going to be friendly. Anywhere in Deathlands the odds were never better than even.

“On,” pointed Ryan.

 

THE SWAMP CLOSED IN even more, leaving only a path less than six feet wide that wound among the high-rooted mangroves. Several times the mud and water mingled, and they waded through slime that reached above their knees. Remembering the giant alligator, everyone was edgy, concentrating on the slick surface of the mud as they progressed.

Several of them, not just Krysty, heard the dog bark again. And, drawing closer, they also heard the sounds of a small rural ville. Ryan advanced cautiously forward, and the others followed in single file, moving from quivering tussock to mud thick as molasses, stopping at the sudden apparition that seemed to spring from the very swamp itself.

A skinny white man, in a red shirt and white cotton breeches. He had long white hair and a neat beard. He held out both arms to show that he was weaponless.

“You are fatigued, mes enfants. Welcome to the humble ville of Moudongue. Here you may rest, and here you will be safe.”

He turned on his heels and after a brief pause, Ryan Cawdor and his party followed the old man. There really wasn’t anything else to do.

 

Chapter Seven

« ^ »

IF THEY WAS GOING TO fucking butcher us, then they’d have fucking done it by now!”

“Finn makes sense, Ryan,” said J.B. “Why bring us here?”

Ryan Cawdor shook his head. “Damned if I know. I just know that something here doesn’t set right.”

“I feel that, too,” added Krysty. “There’s a scent…a taste…I don’t know.”

“It seems to me, if I may venture my humble opinion, that we are better off here than out in that wilderness of mud and water, being pursued by the living dead.”

“Lori says Doc speaks good.”

Ryan shrugged. “Sure, no wonder. They promised to feed us in a few minutes, didn’t they? Just make sure everyone keeps on their guard. And make sure that we eat different things. In case they’ve put sleepers in it.”

He walked to the side of the hut, feeling the narrow planks bend under his weight; he looked out through the slatted blind, past the mesh of the mosquito netting and across the square of the small ville, down toward the swollen river.

There were about thirty small wooden houses in the ville of Moudongue, set in a rough rectangle along the river. Two or three swampwags were tied to the posts of a wharf.

The old man, who’d told them his name was Ti Jean, entered, followed by three young, slatternly women in dirty dresses of plain cotton. They carried dishes made of turned wood, with some battered metal forks and spoons.

“You are hungry. We feed you,” he pronounced. “Later, you join us for dancing. We sing old songs. ‘Jole Blon. Hippy Ti Yo. Marnou Blues.’ Dance to the… how do you say…accordion. A good time. It’s Mardy, and we all love every man.”

“Will you stay and eat with us?” asked Ryan, hoping to find out something about the area.

“No. I regret not. But eat and drink. The beer is good. The wine—” he shrugged expressively “—not so good. The crawfish and red snapper are fresh as tomorrow’s sunrise. Gumbo and collard greens. Rice in plenty. Eat well, mes amis. Later we talk.”

The dishes steamed enticingly. Following Ryan’s orders, they tried to eat different things, but it wasn’t easy. Everything looked and tasted delicious. Finnegan, in particular, managed to tuck into sizable portions of almost every sumptuous course.

Ryan sampled the crab meat chowder and some trout cooked with spiced rice. The beer was flat and thin to his palate. But he was surprised to find such good eating, in such a wretchedly poor hamlet. He said as much to the Armorer.

“It’s Mardy. Fat Tuesday. These aren’t like them swampies. These are them Cajuns that Doc spoke of.”

As they were wiping up the last smears of juice with fresh-baked cornbread, Ti Jean reappeared, smiling like an indulgent father to see how well they’d eaten.

He had obviously been drinking; the sour smell of home-brewed beer hung on his breath. The French accent was more noticeable than before, but he was still in a high good humor.

“Well eaten, mes copains,” he slurred. “Now you may join us for our feasting of Mardy. Older even than the sky-bombs that changed the world. You said there had been trouble with the muties of deep-swamp. They will not come here.”

While some of the women tidied the hut, clearing away dishes and beakers, Ti Jean told them a little about where they’d landed up.

“Lafayette’s not far off. West Lowellton is closest suburb. There is fighting there.”

“Fighting?” asked Ryan. “Between whom?”

“The baron and the renegades.”

“What baron? Local lord of the ville?”

“No, Mr. Cawdor. More. Much more. Baron Tourment controls this whole…what is the word? Region? Oui, this region is his. We are his. Even the muties. We call them les morts-vivants.”

“The living dead,” said Doc Tanner quietly.

“We can control them. Use them as slaves. But they are dangerous. Not to be trusted. They live in hovels deep within the bayous. The lost ones. We guard against them. Now and then they take babies.”

“To ransom? For money? They ask you for jack for the babies?” asked Finnegan.

“Non, non,” Ti Jean replied, laughing. “They take the little ones to eat.”

 

RYAN WAS INTERESTED in knowing more about the renegades. From his experience, any man who stood against a local baron was likely to be a better man than those who lived on their knees in virtual serfdom.

Ryan felt that Ti Jean was not being entirely open. To look at, he was the most hearty, trustworthy old-timer in many a country mile.

But Ryan intuitively felt that it would be better not to turn your back on Ti Jean.

His unhappiness was compounded by not being able to understand what the villagers of Moudongue were saying to each other.

Doc whispered that he could speak a little French, but the people hereabouts spoke a bastardized patois that he suspected was Creole French.

On the surface, all was well.

There was a long room at the far end of the hamlet where everyone had assembled, and were drinking, dancing and bellowing out incomprehensible lyrics at the top of their lungs, Ryan made sure that everyone in his group carried their blasters, but he was reassured to find that the men of the small ville had no guns, though everyone wore a long thin-bladed knife at the hip. The building shook to its rafters from the heavy stamping that passed for dancing in the bayous, to the accompaniment of a fiddle and an accordion; the latter was played by an immense fat man, his shirt sodden with sweat, toothless mouth open, revealing a tongue that was bizarrely forked.

“The Two-step de Bayou Teche” was followed by a driving song with a heavy beat, called “Un Autre Soir d’Ennui.” Gradually the members of Ryan’s group split apart as they entered into the spirit of the dance. Doc swung Lori away, his legs kicking sideways, knees cracking audibly, whooping his pleasure, the girl smiling like a pretty doll in his arms.

Finn was eyeing a skinny girl who looked to be around thirteen. She sashayed up to him and whispered something into his ear.

“Can I dance, Ryan?” he asked.

“Stick to dancing, Finn. Don’t leave this room, or I’ll slit your fat windpipe.”

“Sure thing.” The fat man grinned and went wheeling away after the sprite in her torn dress.

J.B. leaned against the bar, rubbing a pattern in the spilled beer with his forefinger. A huge woman, fully six and a half feet tall and weighing around 350 pounds, came over and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Dansez, mon petit?” she asked.

“What did…?” began the Armorer, but not even waiting for an answer, she jerked him forward, pressing his face into her rolling breasts, nearly knocking his hat off and sweeping him onto the crowded dance floor.

“Want to dance, lover?” asked Krysty.

“Better offer than J.B. got,” he replied.

“Want it more formal?”

“Yeah,” he said with a grin. The beer was loosening him up, and the food had been as good as any he’d eaten in…in a long time and a lot of miles.

“Sure.” She composed herself, brushing back an errant strand of the fiery hair from her cheek. “Miss Krysty Wroth of the sanctuary of Harmony requests the pleasure of the next dance with Mr. Ryan Cawdor of… of where?”

The answer came in a crackling high-pitched giggle, from someone behind her.

“From the ville of Front Royal in the great state of Virginia, run by Baron Cawdor.”

The blood drained from Ryan’s face at the sudden voice.

Once, years back, a whore in a gaudy house somewhere near Denver had kicked him in the groin in an attempt to rob him. He’d broken her arm to teach her a lesson, but the shocking pain remained a powerful memory. It had felt like the breath had been sucked clean out of his body.

The feeling now was similar.

“What’d you say?” asked Krysty, turning on her heels.

“He’s the youngest runt o’ Baron Cawdor. Richest and most powerful man east of Ol’ Miss.”

The speaker looked to be around three hundred years old, but was probably somewhere between sixty and ninety, with a filthy fringe of hair around a peeling scalp. He was not much over five feet tall, with a drooping shoulder that made him look like a hunchback. He was dressed in a variety of rags, held together with mud and spittle.

His eyes were bright as stars.

Ryan gaped at the hideous apparition. There was something vaguely familiar about the old, old man, but he, couldn’t set his mind to it.

“You don’t know me, Ryan Cawdor, do yer?”

The noise of the music and bellowed singing was so loud that nobody apart from Krysty and Ryan had heard the dotard’s chattering, or shown the least interest. Instead they concentrated on having a good time.

Finn whirled past, hugging the young girl. On the far side of the hut J.B. was still almost suffocating in the embrace of the giantess. It might have been a trick of the flickering oil lamps, but Ryan could have sworn at that moment that the Armorer’s feet were a good eighteen inches clear of the planking.

But all of that blurred compared to this totally unexpected confrontation. The Trader had known a little about Ryan’s background. About the lost eye. About the emotional scars.

But even the Trader had only known the small glimpses of the past that Ryan allowed him.

Now this…

For a moment of scorching rage, Ryan was tempted to reach out and snap the scrawny neck of the diminutive old man to still his babble forever. But that would bring everyone in Moudongue down on them.

Oddly, it never occurred to him that the stranger might be chattering lies, might just have a snippet of useless information that meant anything or nothing. Somehow Ryan knew that this was the revelation that he’d feared for many long years.

“I think I know you. What’s your name?”

The face contorted into an expression of vulpine cunning. The old man wiped a gnarled hand over the stub-bled cheeks.

“Like to know, wouldn’t yer, Squire Cawdor?”

Ryan eased aside the shirt, showing the butt of the SIG-Sauer pistol. “Name?” he hissed.

“Ryan? What does—” began Krysty, recoiling as he turned to look at her, the one eye glowing with a manic light.

“Let it lay, woman,” he snarled.

“I don’t rightly recall what my true name is,” muttered the old man, licking his lips and speaking so softly that Ryan had to lean close to catch the words. He winced at the stale alcohol on the breath.

“What do they call you?”

“Pecker.”

“Pecker?”

“Yeah.”

A vacuous smile slithered across the wrinkled cheeks. The old man touched his stomach with his right hand, smoothing the torn shirt. He moved his hand lower, fondling himself, demonstrating how he’d earned his nickname.

“You know Ryan?” asked Krysty.

“Sure. Knowed him. Years, back. He knowed me then. Don’t know old Pecker now, do yer?”

The man put his head to one side like a bird sizing up a juicy morsel of food. Then Ryan remembered him—remembered his real name.

“Bochco. Harry Bodice. You were my…the dog-handler at the ville.”

“Harry Bochco.” The man tried the name out for size, running it around his mouth, repeating it and finally shaking his head in bewilderment. “Sometimes past I don’t recall. You say it, then it was so. But I recall you.”

“Then tell it,” said Ryan wearily.

Against the noisy maelstrom of the Cajun dance, unheard by anyone else, the old man told it.

 

Chapter Eight

« ^ »

FRONT ROYAL WAS THE biggest, strongest, richest ville in all Virginia. The nukes hit it hard, but the land’s good. Fertile. Plant a bullet, and it grows a blaster. Baron Cawdor held it, in the Shens, from his father and his father ‘fore him.”

The music and the dancing swirled about them, but Ryan and Krysty were locked into the old man’s story; the girl heard it for the first time; Ryan tasted the bitterness of old wounds, feeling the empty eye socket beginning to throb with ancient pains.

“Home like a fortress, deep in the hills. Oh, sweet Lord, those blue-muffled hills and the rolling forests. I swear it were near heaven. Ryan here, Lord Cawdor, was the youngest. Bravest. Proudest. Best with blade or blaster. Finest…”

“Get on, man,” snapped Ryan.

“But only as he grew some. There were three in the litter. Morgan was oldest, and like Ryan here. Cherished him when we were little. Runt of the lot when young, Ryan was. The middle brother…”

“Harvey,” whispered Ryan, barely conscious that he’d spoken.

“Aye, Harvey. Curse his fucking name. Twisted like a windblown rowan tree. I recall that when he were but ten years old, he took this kitten and a white-hot dagger and pushed…”

“Fireblast!” Ryan closed his good eye, fighting for self-control. “Keep to the center of the story, or I’ll fucking… Go on!”

“You were only fourteen when Harvey struck. Your older brother, Morgan, was out with a landwag train, meeting up a trader from the Apps. Stickies mined the wag. None lived to tell.”

The rowdy songs had momentarily ceased, and a young girl, her skin afflicted by disease, stood at the center of the long hut and sang a slow, sad ballad, alternating lines in French and English. Around her, the dancers had slowed, with everyone holding their partners tighter.

My yesterdays are always here,
Tomorrow is another now.
And none may say when life will end
And no man may say how.

Krysty had moved closer to Ryan, sensing the dreadful tension and memories roused in him by the old man’s story.

“They said it was stickies,” stressed Pecker. “I was there with me dogs—you said it was dogs, Lord Cawdor?”

“Don’t call me that, Bochco. The name is Ryan Cawdor now.”

“Where was I?”

“The dogs. After the stickies mined the landwag and butchered Morgan.”

The old man giggled suddenly. “Them dogs was… Yeah, I was there with the dogs. The baron sort of figured that there was something didn’t set right ‘bout it. There was boot tracks in the hillside ‘bove where the mine had been triggered.”

“Boot marks?”

Pecker started to sing to himself in a warbling, fragile voice. One or two of the Cajuns looked around, but nobody took much notice.

Well, I traveled four and forty miles
Mebbe was only three
But boots upon a stickie,
I never more did see.

“It was Harvey. I knew it then. Couldn’t prove it, but I knew it.

“Then he poisoned your father’s mind. The baron believed you’d a hand in Morgan’s passing. Harvey kept whispering in his ear, like tainted honey. The baron near lost his mind with grief. Then, when time was right, Harvey sprung his trap on you.”

Though he fought against it, Ryan’s right hand rose jerkily in the air of its own volition, brushing his chin, seeking the patch that hid the ruined left eye. A part of his mind was vaguely aware that the Cajun girl was singing another slow ballad; the only other sound in the room was the shuffling of feet as the dancers caroused about her.

It was a song of lost love and the pain that remains.

I miss him in the weeping of the rains,
And I miss him at the turnings of the tide.

Pecker was leaning against the table that served as a bar, reaching for a mug of beer, fumbling it so that it toppled over, the frothing liquid spilling on the scuffed planks.

“So Harvey and half a dozen of his sec men came for you. Kid of fourteen.”

“Fifteen, Bochco. The day after my fifteenth birthday. Ten at night. Corridor outside my room.”

 

THE FORTRESS AT FRONT ROYAL was one of the largest buildings anywhere in the East. It had been the mansion of a horse breeder, back before the long chill of ‘01. Ryan’s father had built on it, repairing the work of his father and grandfather. Adding refinements. Fences and a moat. Blasters at every angle. You didn’t get to be a baron by making everyone love you.

They had plenty of gasoline. Electric generators. A fleet of wags. A hundred sec men.

Harvey had tried to drug his younger brother, but a loyal servant named Kenny Morse had warned the lad not to eat or drink that evening. So when Harvey came with four of the sec men, they found Ryan awake and ready.

With his blaster cocked and ready in his right hand. A Colt .45 pistol that he’d stripped and oiled and cleaned himself. Because of his father’s suspicion of him, Ryan hadn’t been allowed a blaster, and he’d been restricted to certain parts of the fortress. But that hadn’t stopped Morse from stealing the gun for him and instructing him in its use.

The blaster held seven rounds.

The first two rounds killed the first two sec men. Ryan had waited, just inside the doorway of his darkened room. Morse’s last favor had been to remove a couple of the light bulbs, so that the attackers would be perfect silhouettes for the lad. As soon as he heard them coming, Ryan jumped out, firing.

Two shots to the upper chest and throat. Certain kills, sending the men in their maroon uniforms and polished knee-boots crashing back into the others.

The third guard took two bullets. One through the right arm as he dodged sideways, the next penetrating his skull as he tried to duck away to safety.

Harvey fired back at him with tracer bullets that hissed and flared in the darkness, bursting off the wall at Ryan’s shoulder.

The last of the sec men had thrown himself flat on the floor, behind the jerking body of one of his fellows, firing short bursts from some sort of machine-pistol, but Ryan kept moving, dodging in and out of his room. His first shot at the man missed by inches, howling into the blackness at the top of a narrow flight of stairs.

The second bullet from the Colt drilled through the guard’s open mouth: shattered his teeth, slicing his tongue to ribbons of bleeding flesh, angling upward through the palate to bury itself into the man’s brain.

“You fired six, brother,” yelled Harvey. “One to go.”

“I reloaded,” Ryan lied. Morse had only been able to steal a single magazine.

At that moment, the fifteen-year-old boy knew his life was measured only in short minutes. His room offered no escape: the window opened on a sheer drop of fifty feet to the stone flags of a courtyard. If he could make it past his brother to the stairs, then he might have a slight chance.

With Ryan Cawdor, even at just fifteen, to think was to act.

He dived headfirst through the doorway, rolling over and coming up, his finger on the trigger, squeezing off his last shot, not even waiting to see that he’d missed the crouching figure of his brother. He drew the horn-hafted dagger from his belt and sprinted through the dim light, hurdling the dying guards.

“Bastard!” screamed Harvey trying to shoot him, cursing as the pistol jammed.

“Butcher!” cried Ryan as he closed in on his older brother.

Harvey was taller and stronger than the boy, but he lacked the ruthless determination. As they grappled, he managed to draw his own knife, and Ryan felt a cold fire across his ribs from the steel. But he also drew blood, cutting Harvey Cawdor on the upper arm, making him cry out in pain and shock.

Within seconds he could have killed him. And the rest of his life would have been utterly different. But there had been a sec man on a regular patrol in the corridor a floor beneath, and he’d come running at the sound of gunfire, arriving in time to drag Ryan away from his screaming brother.

The boy was quick enough, wriggling like a gaffed eel, to stab the guard to the heart, feeling the life flow from the man as his grip relaxed. But the interruption had given Harvey the moment he needed.

Ryan lived all his days with that memory. At times he felt he still had both eyes, so vivid was the image of the knife in his brother’s hand, moving toward his face.

Striking.

He saw it. Actually saw the tip of the blade as it grated into his left eye socket. There was liquid trickling down his face that mingled aqueous humor of the eye with a little blood. Surprisingly little blood.

Shocked beyond belief, not realizing the devastating damage the knife had done, Ryan had staggered back, dropping his own dagger, his hands grabbing at his injured eye. Harvey had slashed out once more, aiming for the right eye, missing it by the width of a finger. The steel opened up a great jagged tear from the edge of the eye to the puckered corner of his mouth. This time blood cascaded over his chin and neck, soaking into his shirt.

In agony and desperation, Ryan punched out at the leering Harvey, feeling the man’s nose break like a rotten apple. Then he turned and ran for the stairs, scarcely able to see, moaning from the pain. He never truly knew how he escaped from the fortress at Front Royal that hideous night. Perhaps a servant aided him. There was a door open. Driven snow from the Virginia winter chill on his face. Darkness, stumbling among the tall pines. A hand on his arm.

Had there been a helping hand on his arm?

Away, as far as possible. Running, running. Hiding and fighting. The years ground past until he had met the Trader and begun a new phase of his life, hoping that he had shut all of the past behind him forever.

He knew now that he had not.

 

BOCHCO BABBLED ON.

“After, there was a fearful inquisition. Poor Kenny Morse was put to death by Harvey Cawdor. So were others of the servants judged to have helped you.”

“I did not know that,” said Ryan quietly.

“The cobblestones of the great yard ran with blood. Harvey was in a fearsome temper.”

“My father?” asked Ryan hesitantly.

“He was told by your brother that not only were you responsible for Morgan’s death, but that you’d bribed the sec men to murder him. The baron named you wolf’s-head with a lot of jack on your head.”

“I heard that.”

“Guess you didn’t hear ‘bout the new Lady Cawdor.”

“What?”

Again the crazed giggle from the old-timer called Pecker. “Yeah. Your father wed the whore, but it was Harvey that did the pleasuring. Only eighteen she was. Plump as a corn-fed chick. Hair like straw. I figured the old man was getting bats loose in the belfry by then, what with all that happened.”

“My father died, I heard, Bochco. Was that the hand of my brother?”

“No, no, no, no. That was his wife. Lady Rachel Cawdor. The word about Front Royal was that she bound him with cords of silk. Game of love, she called it. Then she smothered him with a pillow. He was frail by then. It was at Harvey’s word.”

Ryan licked his dry lips. There was a small room, locked at the end of a corridor in the west wing of his memory. Despite everything he’d done, someone had come along and, forced the bolts.

And in a perverse, cathartic way, he was relieved that it was over and the door flung open and the secrets dispersed.

“Go on, Bochco,” he whispered:

“He was dead and under the earth, feeding the worms and maggots, all in a day and a night. There was a babe born an’ all.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Boy, Lord Cawdor… I’m sorry, sorry, so sorry. Mr. Cawdor. Christened Jabez Pendragon Cawdor.”

“My father’s or…?”

The look on the old man’s face was the answer. Harvey had sired the child, on his father’s wife. His mistress.

“Hard to say which was most wicked, her or him. Mebbe they’s twin shoots of the same dark flowering weed.”

“And now?” asked Krysty. “Does Ryan’s brother rule Front Royal? With the woman and his child? Is Harvey the baron?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” babbled the old man, his eyes rolling madly. “The crow shits where the eagle should roost. Will you return, Mr. Cawdor, my lord, and claim what should be yours?”

“Harvey has it. Let him keep it. And let him have the fucking pleasure in it that he deserves,” spat Ryan, turning away from Bochco, blinking as he found Doc Tanner and Lori at his elbow. “I didn’t know you were…” he began.

“I beg pardon for dropping at the eaves, Ryan,” said Doc. “The dancing was far too tiring. Lori and I are going to bed.” Seeing Ryan’s raised eyebrow, he added, “Yes. We are going to bed together. I may find dancing a little much now, at my age. But that does not mean I am totally impotent.”

“Sorry, Doc,” muttered Ryan.

“Apology accepted. Krysty.” He gave a half bow.

“Good night, Doc. Good night, Lori. Sleep well.”

“Thanks. And you,” replied the blond girl.

“Doc,” called Ryan, suddenly aware that the dance seemed to be breaking up around them with couples drifting away.

“Yes?”

“Did you hear any of that? About my brother and…and this,” he said, fingering the patch over the barren left eye.

Doc smiled, looking startlingly, touchingly youthful. “Of course. But I had known it all along. Good night, my friend.”

“Good night, Doc,” Ryan said.

 

Chapter Nine

« ^ »

INSIDE THE HEAVY DOOR WAS a thick drape of black velvet. Mephisto eased it to one side, creeping through, allowing it to fall silently into place behind him. He paused, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dim light. A thick yellow candle, made from corpse fat, guttered in one corner of the motel room, filling the air with the pungent odor of ambergris and squill.

The sec boss knew from long experience that it was best to be careful when approaching Baron Tourment in the night. His predecessor had died from a snapped neck for just such a foolishness.

“Lord,” he called, from the safety of the doorway, keeping the heavy octagonal table between himself and his slumbering master.

“I heard you creeping on tiptoe along the corridor, Mephisto.” The sonorous voice sounded gently amused, “Though the knocking of that ice-chiller came close to drowning the sound.”

“Shall I turn it off?”

“No, no, any machine that still functions from before the fireblast deserves every chance. What is it? You have news? I can tell. I heard the noise of the swampwag a half hour back.”

Mephisto took a few more careful steps. His eyes had adjusted, and he could make out the calipers leaning against the side of the long bed. Tourment’s bare feet protruded beyond the bottom of the blankets. The air-conditioning in the room whirred and hissed, keeping the awful damp heat at bay.

“He brought a bird from a ville.”

“Where?”

“Moudongue.”

“Aaah.” He sounded like a great cat purring its satisfaction. “Our hunched friend Pecker, as they call him. Master Bochco as he is truly named. How many?”

“There were seven and now six.”

“The black on the bayous?”

Mephisto nodded, knowing that Baron Tourment could see him well enough. “I have arranged a payment of food. But they killed a dozen of the morts-vivants and ran.”

“To Moudongue, Mephisto?”

“Four men and two women, is the message.”

“And they are still there?”

“Oui.”

“The question is, where do they come from? Who are they? What do they want? Are they to be allies for the snow-head bastard and his wolf pack? Questions, questions, Mephisto, and no answers.”

For a moment Tourment managed to stand without the aid of his exoskeleton, flailing his great arms in a fit of anger. But the effort was too much, and he crumpled backward onto the bed.

“Questions,” he repeated softly. “Will they join the renegades?” Then he began to laugh. “But if they are strangers in Moudongue, at Mardy… I guess that mebbe there’s nothing for us to worry on.”

“Should I send men to the ville? Better to be safe than sorry, lord?”

“When they are sorry, then we shall be safe, mon cher Mephisto.”

“Could they…they be blasters from the Deathlands? Hired guns?”

“Generosity. That was my error. I left them a little more than usual last year, and how do they repay me? By buying guns? Surely they would not dare, Mephisto, would they?”

“The people love you, Lord. Only the snow-head and his running curs… The rest are in mortal fear of you.”

Tourment smiled indulgently. “If the saints in their wisdom had not wished them to be bled, then they would not have been created as hogs.”

Mephisto laughed heartily, wondering as he always did whether the note of fear rang through his desperate merriment.

“You did well to wake me, Mephisto. If the strangers have arrived…the ones seen by the blind witch…then we should walk light. Take a dozen men and two swampwags and go hunting.”

“How should we take them, Lord?”

Again he smiled lazily. “Alive, if you can. Specially the women. Oh, yes, Mephisto. I would have the women brought to me alive.”

The sec boss backed out of the bedroom, nodding his eager agreement. When he closed the door, he leaned against it for a moment and took several long, slow breaths, finally recovering his composure.

Only then did he go to call for his men to go hunt in the ville in the swamp.

 

Chapter Ten

« ^ »

RYAN MADE LOVE TO KRYSTY as quietly as he could. Wrapped in a blanket, J. B. Dix was sleeping in the far corner of their hut, away from the door and window. His hat was by his side, and his Steyr AUG 5.6 mm pistol was tight in his fist. Doc and Lori lay side by side against a wall, the old man snoring gently through his open mouth.

Finn wasn’t there.

Toward the end of the night’s revelry, the mother of the girl that Finn had been dancing with had come along and whisked her away, chattering accusingly in Creole French at the plump blaster. But all hadn’t been lost for Finnegan. The giantess who’d snatched J.B. had tired of his lack of enthusiasm and had sidled up to Finn. Nobody knew what she’d whispered, but it was the first time that either the Armorer or Ryan could recall seeing Finnegan actually blush.

As the dance had ended and Ti Jean had come to see them all through the small ville back to their own quarters, Finn and the woman had disappeared. The Cajun had laughed at it. “Marie has found a man worthy of her,” he said.

 

KRYSTY HAD REACHED for him in the sultry humid darkness of the hut. Her long fingers spidered over his muscular chest and across the flat wall of his stomach, then down lower, finding him springing to a hard erection. He turned his head, raising himself on one elbow to kiss her. It was a long, lingering kiss, their tongues thrusting against each other.

“Yes, love. Oh, yes,” she sighed as his hand touched her thighs. Her long legs opened to him, so that he could read the moist warmth of her body. The tender bud of flesh hardened as her passion rose. She kissed him all over his face and neck, nipping with her sharp teeth, drawing a bead of crimson salty blood from his lips. He bent his head to nuzzle her breasts, the nipples swelling at the touch of his tongue.

Unable to control his fiery lust, Ryan had rolled on top of her, his hips rising and falling, letting her reach and guide him into her.

He climaxed moments before the girl, her nails raking at his bare shoulders, clutching him deep within her. She’d sighed, pressing her lips against his chest to quiet herself, fighting not to waken the others in the hut.

“I love you. By Gaia, but I love you with all of my heart, Ryan Cawdor.”

“And I love you, Krysty.” But the words still wouldn’t come easily to his lips, which for so long had been used to a cold tightness when he rode with the Trader. Love and tenderness hadn’t played much part in Ryan’s life for far too long.

“You don’t have to say it, lover,” she’d whispered. “I can feel you feel it. That’s enough for me.” She kissed him as they rolled apart. “One day it’ll be easy and natural, Trust me, lover.”

“I do, Krysty.” And he really did.

Around three he woke, pressed against her back, cuddling like two spoons, snug in a box. The contact was enough to rouse him again, but the second time she mounted him, sitting above him, grinning triumphantly down into his face. Her hair seemed to billow about her face and shoulders, even though there was no wind in the hut.

With all the dozens and dozens of women that Ryan Cawdor had taken to bed, none had been like Krysty. She had the most amazing control over all her muscles, so that he felt sucked and gripped into a cave of sexual heat that squeezed at him, milking him for her pleasure.

After the second time they both rose, naked, and walked to the window of the hut, peering out through the slats across the trampled earth of the square toward the sullen, rippling surface of the river.

They stood together, savoring the faint breeze that came sidling in through the blind. She shivered, and he put his arm about her waist, pulling her close to him.

“Cold?”

“No. It’s not that. I think I hear engines.”

“Swampwags.”

“I don’t know. They’re far off, almost beyond my hearing. I don’t know if I really hear them or whether I’m imagining.”

“Are you a woman dreaming you’re an eagle, or an eagle dreaming that you’re a woman?” he asked her.

“Don’t be so fucking runic, lover,” she said. “Next you’re going to be asking me to describe the sound of one hand clapping.”

“No, I’m… Look, there in the shadows, to the far right.”

If they hadn’t been standing so close to the window, they never would have seen the movement. It was a man, bent low, scurrying across the gap between two of the wooden huts. He was followed by another, and then a third. As the last one darted across, Ryan caught the flicker of silver moonlight glancing off steel.

“He’s got a blade,” whispered Krysty.

“I knew that Ti Jean was a swift and evil bastard,” said Ryan.

“It might not…” She stopped. “No. That’s stupid. Course it means trouble.”

“And the engines you hear.”

“Yeah.”

“Couple of hours to dawn. What can…? This Mardy festival, I heard of things like this. Some backwood villes where they pick a boy and let him do what he wants. Eat and drink what he wants. Fuck anyone he wants. For a special day each year. Then they slit his throat for the promise of a good crop. I wonder if…”

Krysty left his side, padding to her clothes. “Best get moving.” She dressed with an elegant haste, tugging on her boots.

He joined her, polling up his trousers, then fastened the buckle on his belt and checked his guns. Moving silently to the door and inching it open, he peered around the edge of the warped frame. He saw nobody out there. Yet his sixth fighting sense told him that the whole of Moudongue was bristling around them.

“I’ll wake the others?”

“Yes. I’ll wake Doc.”

J.B, came instantly to full awareness, the gun probing out into the darkness, his eyes open. “What? Trouble?”

“Men on the move. Holding knives. Krysty thinks she hears swampwags, far off.”

Lori came awake, trembling a little like a frightened fawn, eyes glistening. “What?”

“Trouble,” said Krysty, matter-of-factly.

Ryan knew from previous experience that Doctor Theophilus Tanner wasn’t the quietest of men when it came to being roused from sleep. He knelt beside him, cautiously extending his right hand and clamping it across the old man’s jaws, holding the mouth shut. Simultaneously he hissed into Doc’s ear, “It’s Ryan. Keep still and quiet.” Doc jerked and struggled, his hands scrabbling to free himself, but Ryan was far stronger, holding him down on the floor. “Fireblast, Doc! Wake up, will you? Keep quiet—there’s danger.”

Only when Doc was finally still did he release him. The old man sat up, rubbing his face. “Upon my soul, Mr. Cawdor, but you have a grip like a poacher’s trap. What ails you now?”

Krysty answered him. “We’ve seen men moving around the huts with cold steel in their hands, Doc. And I heard engines, miles off.”

“What about Finn?” asked J.B., standing at the window, flattened against the wall, squinting out. “He’s with that giant whore.”

“Where?”

Lori answered. “Saw big woman and Finn. Go to house with picture of bird on door.”

“A white cockerel with a red band about its neck,” exclaimed Doc. “Three down from the long hut where we all danced.”

In a couple of minutes everyone was fully dressed and armed and ready. Ryan once more looked out of the shuttered window where J.B. had been keeping watch.

“Anything?”

“No. Thought mebbe I heard a noise, along to the side, by the river.”

Ryan eased out of the hut, keeping in the dark lake of shadow and peering into the surrounding forest where the Armorer had said he’d heard something. It was difficult to tell, but there could have been the faintest light of a fire. A dim red glow, but he couldn’t have sworn to it.

J.B. joined him. “What d’you figure?”

“Get out. I reckon we should make for that township we saw. West Lowellton. This Baron Tourment runs Lafayette. Keep out of that ville. I figure we’ll lose if’n we try and fight these Cajuns in the mud. Better we get into some ruins and make them play on our patch.”

“We go and get Finn?”

Ryan nodded, slowly. “Yeah. You take Doc and Lori and go get him. I want to see what those bastards are doing by the river. I’ll take Krysty. Meet you out where the trail narrows. Get to the far side of that and cover the path.”

J.B. nodded and turned to go back inside the hut, then paused. “Chill the big woman?”

“ ‘Course,” replied Ryan.

 

ALL THE NOISES of the Atchafalaya Swamp were oddly muted.

Ryan led the way, with Krysty a silent shadow at his heels. There wasn’t a light showing in the whole ville, but ahead of them they now saw that a large fire was lit deep into the curtain of the mangroves. The wind was drifting eastward, toward the ville, so they could smell the scent of the burning wood.

“I hear a drum. Muffled, slack kind of noise,” said Krysty. “Beating slow and even. It’s ‘bout in time with a heart.”

Ryan heard it, too, or more exactly, felt it, as though it was striking within his body.

Something suddenly scurried away from beneath the toes of his boots, making him jump. It vanished with a soft plopping sound into the river.

Now they were so close that they heard the crackling of the fire. They also heard an occasional mumbled chanting, rising and falling in the damp air.

Ryan stopped so abruptly that Krysty nearly bumped into him.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“Don’t like this.”

“What?”

“This whole fucking place. The heat. The damp. The fucking mud. That creepy ville with its songs and dances and all the time… always there’s something fucking rotten going on. Since we met we’ve been in the cold, high country. That’s better, somehow. This swamp is fucking evil, girl.”

“I feel that, too. Mebbe stronger than you, lover. How’s ‘bout us turning right around and heading back for the gateway and getting out?”

“No, Krysty. Trader always figured a man had to go out and hit a lick for what he believed was right. If’n everyone turned their backs when things got mean, then I guess the world would just get real fucking mean. Let’s go see what the Cajuns are doing out here.”

Now they were within fifty paces of the blazing bonfire, close enough to make out figures moving in a shuffling ring around it. They were men and women, from what they could see through the dangling fringe of Spanish moss on the trees. The riverbank was only a few yards to their left.

“Look,” breathed Krysty barely audibly, pointing ahead and slightly to the right.

Someone was standing rock-still, leaning against the trunk of a topless sycamore. It was one of the Cajuns who’d asked Krysty to dance: a large, squat man, wearing an old plaid shirt torn across both shoulders. He had a long beard, streaked with silver like a tree seared by lightning. There was enough orange light from the fire to show that he was cradling a blaster. It was a long, old-fashioned musket, like the one…

“The one that killed Henn,” Ryan said.

Revenge was one of the sweetest-tasting dishes in all creation to Ryan. But he had been alive long enough to know that it was also a dangerous pleasure. If this was the man who had slaughtered Hennings, then it would be good to ice him. But only if it could be done safely.

The drums would drown out the noise of a cautious approach, Ryan realized as he studied the man, who was obviously supposed to be on guard. The stock of the musket, bound with baling wire, rested on the soft earth. There was a machete, similar to Ryan’s own steel panga, sheathed on the man’s left hip; a smaller knife was strapped to his right knee. Beyond him, the fire was burning brightly, the breeze carrying the scent of bitter spices to them.

At his side, Krysty looked up at Ryan’s, face, seeing the orange light flickering across the hard, almost brutal planes of the high cheeks, throwing his good right eye into shadow. The faint gleam, of the strong teeth was revealed between parted lips. It was a face of total, cruel concentration. The girl knew that he was considering how best he could murder this Cajun: it showed in every angle of the taut face. Yet it was a face that only an hour or so before she had seen melt into gentle consideration in their love-making.

 

The Cajun’s name was Henri de la Tour. As he leaned against the bole of the tree, he contemplated the hours to come. Once the rituals were finished, they would collect the outsiders and take them for the new ceremonies. But if the baron was interested in them, then they must not be unduly harmed.

Yet the girl with hair as red as glowing coals in a fire…

His head was sunk on his breast, and he lifted it, jerking a hand up in irritation at the feathery touch of an insect near his ear. The movement exposed the side of his neck above the collar of the shirt, uncovered by the long beard.

“Merde,” he hissed. Even to someone who’d spent all of his life in the swamps, the insects could be torture. There had been a woman in Moudongue, named Jenny, whose skin had carried a subtle odor that was irresistible to the hordes of biting insects around the bayous. Poor Jenny. She’d tried getting help from the local voodoo priests. Even gone to Mother Midnight and begged aid against the swarming skein of fluttering flies that always hung around her long hair and face. In the end, Henri recollected, Jenny had been driven insane. Clearly mad, she had run screaming into the splashing shallows of the nearest slime hole, tearing great bloody gouges in her face. No one who had watched the frenzy of her thrashing in the gray-brown ooze tried to help her. It hadn’t taken long for the sinister caymans, attracted by the disturbance, to slither from the banks.

Again there was an insect brushing at his hair, making him twitch with irritation.

He moved his head to precisely the right position.

De la Tour cursed fluently, slapping his hand to the point just below the right ear where the bastard moustique had stung him. Sharp and painful, where the big carotid artery carried the blood from the aorta to the brain.

In the darkness of the forest, the Cajun heard rain pattering on the leaf-mold around his worn boots. That was strange as it wasn’t raining. Somehow it was hard to concentrate on why that should be so peculiar.

It was definitely raining. Henri could feel rain soaking through the collar of his shirt on one side, running over his skin. Warm.

“Chaud?” he muttered, puzzled by the heat, of the rain.

He felt his lips move, heard the faint whisper of his own voice. But all of it was happening a long, long way off. Happening to someone else.

With a labored slowness he reached up to touch the place where the insect had stung him, feeling for the lump of the bite. It wasn’t a lump at all. It was a tiny mouth, set in his throat. Pouting lips that intermittently spat blood into the night air.

The Cajun’s left hand, opened, and the musket dropped away to be caught by Ryan Cawdor before it could reach the ground.

Then the Cajun understood.

Through the murky slowness of his fading mind, he knew what was happening. He wanted to shout a warning to the others, busy at their ritual, but a hand, strong as a steel clamp, shut over his mouth, helping him as he felt his legs start to falter.

Ryan steadied the dying man, laying down the blaster with one hand, lowering the blood-splattered body to the earth. He actually sensed the moment that life departed.

The last cogent thought of Henri de la Tour was that he had, shamefully, lost control of his bowels.

“Pays the debt, Henn,” said Ryan quietly, wiping his hands on the stubby grass that grew around the base of the trees.

 

IN SOME DOUBLE-POOR COMMUNITIES, out in the deserts, Ryan had seen ceremonies, sacrifices, hoping to bring some sort of fertility or rain or freedom from plague.

They’d all been poor, shoddy events.

This was different.

The air tasted of fear. Followed by Krysty Wroth, the one-eyed man picked his way with exaggerated caution, closing in on the fringe of stunted bushes that hid them from the fire and the people around it.

There were eighteen: fourteen men and four women. All were naked to the waist, and sweat glistened on their bare flesh. What fueled the fire was rough-hewn logs, piled loosely in front of a broken block of concrete around eight feet long and four feet thick.

Spread-eagled on the makeshift altar was a huge boar, its skin pink in the light. A hemp cord was bound tightly around its long muzzle, muffling its shrill cries. It lay on its side, its legs and neck stilled with wire. Leaning against the stone rectangle was a long-hafted logger’s axe, its edge glittering orange.

“They going to kill it?”

Ryan nodded. “Yeah. Got to be. I heard of some crazies out west kill like this. Trader said he once seen them slitting the throat of a girl child.”

“What did he do?”

“Asked ‘em first. They said it wasn’t a girl. They said it was a goat. A goat without horns. I never forgot that.”

“But what did…?” she began.

“Iced them all.”

“How about them?” she asked, pointing through the trees at the group of dancing Cajuns as they circled and shuffled through the trampled mud to the slow beating of the drum.

Ryan patted the butt of the gray Heckler & Koch G-12. “Could freeze the lot of them.” He paused. “Mebbe. And mebbe that’s not enough.”

“There’s others back at the ville.”

“Sure. Could be other villes close by. No, best get our heels clean of here. Join the rest where we said now we know what’s going down.”

“You figure we could’ve been next, Ryan?”

He shook his head. “Mebbe, Krysty. Let’s go.”

They turned their backs on the fire and the bizarre ceremony in the deeps of Atchafalaya and carefully began to walk toward Moudongue.

They’d gone about a hundred paces when they heard the drumming reach a swift crescendo, then stop. The stillness was eerie. A man, his voice high and cracked, sang out some words in a foreign language. It sounded like “Je suis rouge,” whatever that meant.

The words were echoed by the rest of… Ryan almost thought of them as a congregation, like some of the church-belt crazies in Deathlands. There was a moment of awful teetering silence, as if the world around licked its lips in lascivious anticipation.

The faintest whistle of a steel blade sliced the air.

There was a solid, wet thunk.

Both of them heard the stifled squeal of mortal shock from the tethered pig. But they kept their faces turned and continued toward the ville and their friends.

 

AFTER THE EXCHANGE of whistled signals, Ryan and Krysty rejoined the others. Doc and Lori were sitting quietly together along the faint trail that they hoped led toward West Lowellton. Finnegan and J.B. stood watching the immensely tall Cajun woman. She leaned against a live oak, with little trace of animation on her heavy, brutish features. She was wearing only a coarse brown blanket across her brawny shoulders.

“They’re butchering a pig back, there at the fire,” said Ryan.

“A pig?”

“Yeah. Better’n a goat with no horns.” Only the Armorer would have understood the allusion; Ryan wrinkled his mouth in distaste.

“We going?”

“Yeah, J.B., I guess so. Why d’you bring the woman with you?”

“He wanted to fucking ice her while we was still fucking fucking,” spat Finnegan angrily.

“You said…” J.B. started to protest, looking across the small clearing at Ryan.

“So why’s she here?”

“She knows all ‘bout this fucking Baron Tourment,” said Finn.

The woman showed little interest in their discussion, busying herself with digging something from her cavernous nostrils, examining it closely, then popping it into her mouth and chewing with stolid relish.

“Mebbe she can show us a way out of here,” suggested J.B.

The paths were tortuous in the darkness; Ryan realized that once the Cajuns discovered them gone, they’d be able to move faster and farther. Perhaps the woman could help. “Tell her to show us the fastest way to West Lowellton,” Ryan ordered Finnegan. “We going to keep her?”

“Far as it takes.”

 

WHILE THEY MOVED, quietly and in single file, through the dank wilderness, Finnegan walked alongside the towering woman, trying to converse with her. Now and again he turned to relay something to Ryan.

“Says it’s about two hours. Says there’s some pack of killers there. Led by a snow wolf. Don’t know what that means. Fucking English isn’t so good.”

Somewhere deep to the left there was a rippling sound, as if some huge creature had moved gently from land to water. Everyone heard it, and everyone made certain a finger was on a trigger. Doc moved closer to Lori and put his arm across her shoulder.

“She says the buildings are still there from before. She calls it the ‘great sleeping.’ Says that West Lowellton is ‘bout the only place this cocksucking Baron Tourment doesn’t run.”

“Ask her ‘bout him,” said Ryan, falling back a little way, gesturing for Krysty to take point so he could listen to what the Cajun had to say.

“Says he runs the dead and alive. Those got the death without ending, she says. Baron got a fortress not far off. Runs the ville’s all around. She says he’s ten foot tall with a…” He laughed. “With a prick so long he ties it to his knee.”

“What sort of power’s he got? Sec men?”

Finnegan muttered the question. “Says he don’t need that. Got the power. Makes it sound like some kind of wizardry, Ryan. Says he’s the walking death himself. Says he can’t be killed.”

J.B. caught that, bringing up the rear of their small column, and he snorted. “Put him in front of my Steyr blaster and see if he’s still walking and talking after six rounds go into him.”

The towering woman heard him and giggled. It was a strange, thin, feeble sound, like that made by an ailing child, amazingly out of proportion to her build. Finnegan said something, and she leaned down to listen, one hand resting lightly on his arm. The other hand, Ryan noticed, stayed under the blanket.

“She says the baron would eat a little man like him,” Finnegan said, gesturing toward J.B. “And shit him out for the… I think she means the gators.” Ryan found it all like a bewildering puzzle. Gradually they were putting together some of the pieces. The whole region looked as though it had been nuked with neutron missiles that devastated people and left buildings intact. There was this mysterious Baron Tourment, who seemed to be a very big fish in a medium-size pond. Maybe used voodoo to keep his people in line. And there was this equally odd resistance group somewhere around West Lowellton, where they were heading. Led by a white wolf.

“A white wolf?” he muttered to himself.

 

Chapter Eleven

« ^ »

RYAN HAD TRULY INTENDED to let the hulking Cajun woman go free.

If he’d felt that she’d been any threat to them, then he’d have given Finn the nod to put a bullet through the base of her skull. He’d have given the word and not had a moment’s unease about it. That was the way it was in the Deathlands.

But she wasn’t a threat. She’d brought them through the swamps, into the pale glow of dawn, right to the edge of what had to be the suburb of West Lowellton. It didn’t matter to them that she would tell Ti Jean and the other Cajuns. It was obvious that they preferred the dark, mazy wilderness to the open spaces of the town. Ryan didn’t figure there was any real danger of their being pursued.

So why not let her go?

Finnegan looked at him, beneath the grove of stunted elms dripping with the leprous moss, where they waited. The woman’s left hand was scratching where an early rising mosquito had raised a weal above her swollen, freckled breast. Her right hand was still beneath the torn blanket, where it had been every single time that Ryan had looked at her. That bothered him a little. Even when she’d stumbled on a couple of occasions, she’d used only her left hand to steady herself.

“How ‘bout…?” asked Finn, gesturing to the Cajun. His dark blue sweater and pants were splattered with mud, some patches drying, some still dark and wet. The steel toe caps of his combat boots were slick with the gray-brown slime.

“Let her go,” said Ryan. “She’s told us ‘bout all there is. We best watch out for this Baron Tourment and the snow wolf. Tell her she can go free.”

Standing beside her, virtually in her shadow, Finnegan beckoned to her. Doc grinned at the sight of the tubby little man and the looming woman.

“She stands like a sow that hath o’erwhelmed all her litter but one,” he said. “Henry Four.” Cackled with laughter at the looks of total bewilderment on the faces of all his colleagues. “But let it pass, my brothers. Oh, let it pass.”

“Hurry it up, Finn,” called Ryan, staring at the oddly matched couple.

“Fucking all right,” snapped Finnegan, looking away from the Cajun for a moment.

Ryan’s good eye opened wide.

Just as Finnegan half turned away from the woman, gesturing with his arm toward the dark desolation of the swamp behind them, she finally began to take her right hand from under the blanket.

“Fireblast,” breathed Ryan, but before the word hung in the air, the drama was played.

The G-12 coughed, the triple burst sounding like a single shot.

Finn jumped, the Model 92 Beretta pistol jerking into his fist. J.B. raised his Mini-Uzi, searching for the threat. Doc was fumbling for his Le Mat. Lori squeaked her dismay, and Krysty Wroth had drawn her H&K P7A-13 9 mm handblaster.

The Cajun woman lurched sideways as all three bullets stitched into her, all hitting within a hand’s span, under the ribs on the left side of her body. Despite her great size and strength, the three bullets sent her staggering. The blanket fell away, revealing her nakedness. Blood came from the bunched wounds, dark and thick, dappling her thighs as she tottered, fighting for balance.

“Bastard,” she said, in a normal, quiet conversational voice, sinking to her knees, then sliding in the dirt on her face, both hands clutched beneath her, holding the triple wound.

“Ryan! Ryan?”

“What is it, Finn?”

“You said she could go. You fucking said…” His voice was rising.

“Look in her hand, Finn.”

She still lived—if the residual nervous twitching and jerking of the body could be called living. Finn kicked her over with the toe of his boot, staring down as the corpse rolled on its back, breasts sagging, blood and urine trickling across the thighs and belly. “In her right hand,” said Ryan. The fingers were clenched, and the man bent down and pried them open. Then he stood up and shook his head at what he saw, at what they all saw.

It was an open cutthroat razor, honed down over countless years until it was only a sliver of steel, hardly as wide as a man’s fingernail. The handle was of dull white bone, broken and mended with twine.

“Fucking double-poor crazy bitch,” said Finnegan, spitting into the staring eyes of the dead Cajun woman. Lori took a few steps away from the body, looking toward the nearest buildings, all shrouded with thick vegetation. “We go in there? Food? Shelter?”

“Shelter, yeah,” replied Ryan. “After a hundred years or so, I’m not so damned sure ‘bout any food. Let’s go see. And let’s take care.”

 

THE FOUR MEN and two women moved out of the deep, lush greenery, picking their way along what had once been the farthest outpost of West Lowellton. They passed a partly completed suburban development of medium-priced housing that once pushed the sprawling frontiers of Lafayette deeper into swampland. Nearly one hundred years ago, in the remote past.

 

“MOUDONGUE?”

“Oui, Baron. Moudongue.”

“They are becoming of interest to me, my dear and loyal compatriot, Mephisto.”

“We’ll take them.”

“Such confidence. What of the teams of sec men out in the green?”

“Pecker said they’d gone.”

“Why were they not kept for me?”

“They were…” The sec boss hesitated, wiping a hand down the leg of his white pants. He noticed that his fingers left a sweaty trail.

“Yes?” asked the baron, his voice as gentle as a maiden’s whisper. Mephisto found himself sweating a little more than before.

“They were taking a pig.”

“A ritual?”

“Yes.”

The exoskeleton creaked and groaned as Baron Tourment pulled himself upright, towering over the sec boss as he strode around the motel room, seeing himself reflected again and again as he passed the mirror over the oyster-pink washbasin.

“Had I given my permission?”

Mephisto had known the question was coming and had anticipated it from the moment one of the patrol teams in the swampwags had reported back to him.

“I had one in five blasted, Baron.”

“Only one in five?”

“They are useful to us, so close to the part of West Lowellton where the boy runs.”

The great leonine head nodded slowly, and Mephisto knew that he’d guessed right: he would live for another day.

“Truly spoken. One in five? Good.”

“The outlanders took out one man.”

“Who?”

“De la Tour. The one with the beard forked as if lightning had struck it.”

“Was he not the one who shot the black in the buggy a day back?”

“Yes.”

“Revenge?”

Mephisto nodded. “I believe so. We can ask when we take them.”

“And they will tell you, my dear Mephisto?”

“They will tell me,” he replied, ignoring the irony in Baron Tourment’s voice.

“Where are they now?”

That was the one question that the elegant sec boss had been dreading. His patrols had returned within the hour from their search, and he knew that the baron would have heard the rumbling engines as they ground into the ville. “One woman was missing from Moudongue.”

The striding stopped, and the baron’s eyes turned toward him. “Who?”

“Marie Laveaux.”

“Who?”

Mephisto hissed through his teeth. “Marie. Jeanine was her younger sister, the one that you ordered to be…”

“I know. Watch your careless tongue, Mephisto. There are many who would welcome your fall. It was Marie? The large woman? I remember her.” There was something that could have been a smile.

“She was…” Caution sealed his lips and made him reconsider his description of the Laveaux woman as a giantess. It would not sit well with the baron, whose head scraped the ceiling of the bridal suite at the Best Western Snowy Egret Motel.

“Was a fine strong woman. She took me and wept for more. Not like some of these fucking little tight-cunted bitches who scream and bleed, shrieking that I’m tearing them apart. No, she… she is dead, you said, Mephisto? The toll rises for these strangers.”

“She was shot three times at close range. Sec-patrol leader said the slugs were strange.”

Tourment sat down, the bed sinking under his weight. On the wall behind him was a painting that seemed to show a murky orange sunset and a pale blue sky streaked with fiery chem clouds.

“Strange? Stra-a-a-a-ange…?” He drew out the syllable until it almost snapped.

“Caseless small bore. High impact. Never seen anything like them.”

“This was near where the snow wolf lives?”

“Yeah.”

“Are they to be allied ‘gainst us, Mephisto? Is this the root of the tree? The kernel of the fruit? Will the two blades be forged as one?” He lay back, and his voice became thin and singsong. “Shall the sky and earth wed? Will water marry fire? Will the wolf cleave to the panther?”

He was silent for a long moment, then sat up and pointed at his sec boss.

“Go get that fucking ice-suit dirty. Track ‘em and take ‘em. That’s all. No more words, or I’ll reach into your flicking chest and part the ribs and tear out your lungs.”

Mephisto carefully closed the door of the suite and stood in the narrow corridor, his eyes squeezed shut, trying to control himself. He nearly wiped his hands on his pants again. Licking his dry lips, he ran his fingers through his tight, pomaded curls.

“Mephisto, my brave and cunning friend,” he whispered to himself. “Best find these strangers and bring ‘em here.”

He thought he heard the baron stepping toward the door inside the room, and he scampered away, set on his lethal mission.