Chapter Nineteen

« ^ »

THE LIGHT FROM THE MOVIE PROJECTOR lanced through the humid darkness of the Adelphi Cinema, West Lowellton, centering on the glittering screen. Jak Lauren sat in the middle of a row of plush seats, with his top fighters in the rows around him. Ryan sat next to the lad, with Doc on one side, and J.B. and Finn a few seats down on the other side.

The albino had insisted they watch this, telling them it would last only about ten minutes. “It’s all we got left. We watch special times. Like now. Kind of gives heart. How it was ‘fore the winters came.”

Though he was desperate to get on with the task of saving the women, Ryan knew that there was little point in rushing in like headless muties. The baron wouldn’t have risen to his pomp and power if he were a stupe. That meant caution. He’d also captured Jak’s father, so it would take a good plan to beat him.

Doc was astounded to find that some of the vid-house’s equipment was still in working order. Jak showed them a booklet, dated January 2001, listing the attractions on at the Adelphi. They’d been in the middle of a retrospective season, with movies from the 1970s and 1980s. And even earlier. Names that meant nothing to Ryan or the others, but that brought a sparkle of enthusiasm to the rheumy eyes of Doc Tanner.

“John Ford and Sam Peckinpah,” he exclaimed. “They were showing The Wild Bunch and Ride the High Country. With She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Last Hurrah the same day. That was Clint’s final movie, ‘fore he took up with all that politicking.”

“We got bit of one left. Culpepper Cattle Company. Heard of it, wrinkly?”

Doc ignored the insulting nickname from the snow-haired lad. “Heard of it, sonny! By the three Kennedys! You’ll ask me whether I’ve heard of…of, what’s his name? Damn, it’s left me.”

“All else was gone. But in top shelf of closet was single round tin, and in it was piece of vid. Means a lot, Ryan.”

So they sat and watched it. Doc was the only one there who knew what it was about, but his memory was sadly selective and imperfect. All he could recall, to the dumb fascination of Lauren and his gang, was that it was about a lad leaving home on a cattle drive and how he grew up and became a man. That a local land baron—the word aroused a mutter of hushed whispering—was going to drive some settlers off. There were some gunmen in it, and they finally came to the aid of the boy and the settlers.

It began with a scratching sound and much jerkiness, but it gradually improved. The volume was weak, coming through a single speaker, wired to the side of the screen. But it was enough. Ryan watched the flickering images with a naïve wonderment. He was in a movie house, watching a film!

There were some wagons being dragged into a line by the gunmen. The settlers, kneeling in prayer, were singing “Amazing Grace.” In the distance was the unmistakable outline of the local baron and his own team of blasters.

“Comes back to me,” whispered Doc, along the row. “Names and the faces. Gary Grimes is the kid. That’s Geoffrey Lewis with the kind of squint. Bo Hopkins, giggling there, with the smooth face. Man with long hair… don’t know. Could have maybe been Wayne Sutherlin. He was in it. The other man’s an actor called Luke Askew. One of my favorites. What happened to…”

“Shut up, Doc,” hissed J.B.

“Hell of a firefight,” sighed Finn. “Way to fucking go.”

At first, the defenders gunned down several of the hired pistoleers. But there were too many of them, and one by one the defenders were picked off. Crimson sprayed as they died in slow-motion. Finally it was the kid and the old man who led the attack. The boy had a blaster nearly as big as he was, but he froze and was about to get himself chilled. Then the one whom Doc had said was called Luke Askew rose—from the dead, it seemed—and stabbed the attacker, the two men falling together, locked in each other’s arms.

Ryan felt the short hairs rising on the back of his neck as the single, pure voice of a woman came swelling with the old hymn again. The skinny preacher with crazed cowardly eyes told the boy they wouldn’t stay.

Told him that the land they’d wanted—which the men had died for—was not meant for them. It was tainted with blood, and they were moving on. In the end the kid drew on the man in black, insisting that they bury his friends before they moved on, and grudgingly the settlers agreed. At the last, with the lines of “Amazing Grace” still ringing out, the boy dropped his blaster beside the graves and rode away.

“Though we are dead, ten thousand years,” sang the woman; and all around the vid-house, Lauren’s gang sang. Several people were weeping at the beauty and power of the film, well over a century from the past.

Ryan felt a prickling behind his own eyes.

“Son of a fucking bitch, ain’t it,” said a grizzled man behind him. “Always kind of lifts me. Makes me want to get out and ice the baron on my fucking ownsome.”

The lights returned, making everyone blink. Ryan glanced around him, seeing the ragged army he was about to help. And he saw why the short piece of film was so important to Jak Lauren’s people.

The battle appeared hopeless, against overwhelming odds. Yet the faded images, with the crackling sound track, typified the desperate lonely, struggles that were taking place all over Deathlands. Ryan was understanding it more and more. It was a natural process. Groups arose, some promoting only themselves, others trying to clean up the world. As he saw it, it wasn’t enough just to worry about your own survival. Sometimes you had to stand up and fight for things you believed in.

It was that courage that Ryan saw in the ratlike teenager and his raggled army. “Time we talked.”

“Sure. You four, and me and my five top chillers. That set with you?”

“Yeah. Want to know all ‘bout the Baron Tourment. His ville. Where he lives. Where he’ll keep prisoners. Sec men. Blasters. All that.”

“And more,” said J.B. “We know all that, we can get the plans made.”

Ryan stood up, stretching. “Some food and drink. Need to be ready by dark.”

Jak Lauren peeled back his lips in an icy grin. “Be dark in around five hours. Time for real good plan. We were lost, now we’re found.”

“Mebbe,” said Ryan.

 

Chapter Twenty

« ^ »

THE CELLAR DOOR OF the Best Western Snowy Egret inched open, then stopped. It opened a finger’s-breadth more, then stopped again. The two women heard the deep resonant voice of Baron Tourment laughing quietly.

“Very good. Oh, very good.”

Krysty wondered for an insane moment whether she could possibly take out the chieftain of Lafayette, realizing immediately that the butchering of the two guards had left her too drained even to wrestle a kitten.

“I am impressed, ladies. Fucking impressed. Oh, yes, I am.”

Inside the room, it was almost silent. Just the hypnotic buzzing of a blowfly, conjured from nowhere to feast on the banquet of blood that poured from the mouth of the one sec man, the groin of the other. The baron’s voice resonated from outside the room.

“Alain and Neal. Two of the best, if that roguish Mephisto is to be believed. Are you to be believed, Mephisto? Eh?”

“They were good. You sure they’re chilled?”

“Can’t you taste their souls fleeing from their useless carcasses? Such a sour, yet sweet flavor. No, they are dead, are they not, sluts?”

“Come and find out, cripple,” taunted Krysty.

“Good.” Baron Tourment sounded as if he were genuinely amused. “Two more on the account.”

At last he appeared, his head bent to avoid the low ceiling, the white-suited sec boss at his elbow. Both men were holding M-16s. The baron’s weapon was plated with gold, its stock studded with semiprecious stones. Mephisto’s rifle was comparatively plain and uncluttered, except for the head of a red-eyed cockerel, done in opals and rubies.

Krysty and Lori, licking their dry lips, stood beside the tables.

“How did they chill ‘em?” asked Mephisto. Tourment shook his head. “Don’t matter. It’s the redhead. She’s got some real power. They got careless. They got dead. End of that story.”

He lifted the barrel of his blaster, covering both women. His eyes searched Krysty’s, until she felt he was somehow trying to suck her soul from her body.

“Go fuck a dead shark,” she said, trying to provoke him again.

“Perhaps I shall allow you that pleasure, girl,” he replied. “Or, perhaps a live gator. See how your power works on that. But I feel your power is exhausted.”

Krysty knew she was right: the massive baron was a doomie. But he wasn’t able to see what she was thinking. Her mind was locked too tight for him to penetrate. She said nothing, staring him out.

“We should find out where they are,” interrupted Mephisto. “Get after ‘em ‘fore dark. If’n we wait, they could be anywhere.”

Tourment sighed. “Such haste, my dear sec boss. If they are in league with the snow wolf, they will have gone to his skulking place in the vid-palace.”

“Said we should have blown that apart.”

“Only last week one of our swamp-wags was taken by the little bastard. The time is not ready yet.” There was a snap in his voice that made Mephisto hastily step back.

Krysty could feel herself strengthening. She’d expended much more energy in destroying enemies far more powerful than the two sec men in the past, and hence her recovery would be quicker. Lori, at her side, stood straight and tall. Only the faintest trembling told Krysty how tense the young girl was.

“Enough of this. Come with us, and I’ll show you what happens to anyone standing against the anger of Baron Tourment, high priest of Lafayette, lord of Mardy, night-stalker and spirit-raiser.”

“And all round shit,” completed Krysty, relishing his hesitant stumbling toward her on the creaking frames. She saw the finger whiten on the trigger of the pretty M-16. “Come,” he said, gesturing with the gun. “See how the kin of the snow wolf, your friend, is treated.”

Outside, there were a dozen armed sec men waiting to escort them through the echoing basement corridors of the large motel.

His head bent to avoid some of the painted metal pipes that festooned the ceilings, the baron led the way toward steep iron stairs. He negotiated them slowly and with obvious difficulty, leaning, on Mephisto to steady himself. Krysty whistled, tunelessly between her teeth at the delay.

 

JAK LAUREN STALKED around the auditorium, the tiny pieces of metal sewn into his clothes glinting in the overhead lamp so that at times he seemed to be wearing a suit of dancing lights. They’d been talking for an hour, not even stopping when bowls of hot stew were brought in from the kitchen of a nearby house.

The meat was a light pinkish-gray, tough and salty, in a broth with fresh vegetables. Finn devoured his and asked for more. Only when he’d nearly finished the second helping did he ask what it was.

The woman with the scar across her neck grinned, but no smile could ever light up her stony eyes. “What’s your guess, Finnegan?”

“Some kind of bird. Or mebbe horse.”

“Nope. It’s gator meat. Killed this morning, so it’s real fresh.”

If she’d expected disgust from the fat gunman, she was disappointed. Finn laughed and held out the chipped dish for a third helping. “Day or so back one of them fuckers tried to fucking eat me, lady. Nice to know I’m getting my own back.”

The albino joined in the laughter, clapping his approval of Finn’s response. “Same way chill baron and all,” he said.

“Not unless we get the details of this plan worked out,” called Ryan. “We got a lot of pieces, and none of them stick together. You showed us the plan of the Best Western and told us how many men and what kind of weapons they got.”

“And you showed us what you got,” added J.B. “You sure you told us all?”

Jak stopped pacing and turned toward the slight figure of the Armorer. “Sure. Blasters. Ammo. Grens. Some high-ex but not much. Two flamers we captured when we got the swamp wag last week.”

“There’s that gas-jelly, Jak,” called a balding man with a drooping mustache.

“What?” snapped J.B. “How’s that?”

“Yeah. Year or more back, three of us, one was Pa, near got jumped by sec men up near old highway. Hid in brush and found a war wag from before the winters. Army. Two smaller wags with it. Few blasters, fucked by water and rain. But in back was drums this gas-jelly.”

“How many? How big?” asked J.B., glancing across at Ryan, who was searching, his memory for a long-forgotten piece of information.

“Twenty. All ‘bout this high,” he said, holding his hand about four feet, from the floor. “Opened one. Sticky. Fuck, was it sticky! Tried dipping a hunk of wood in it, and it burned like gas. But we couldn’t see no use for it.”

“Jelly that burns like gas,” said J.B., turning to Ryan with a blissful smile, It was the happiest that Ryan had seen him in months. “Know what it is, Ryan?”

But it was Doc who replied. “I know, Mr. Dix.”

“What?”

“It’s napalm.”

 

BARON TOURMENT led them onto a low concrete dock that jutted into an expanse of murky water. It faced west, toward a red sun that was sliding nearer the horizon, sinking behind bayous lined with stunted trees, their roots tangling above the brown slime.

The stone dock was mud-smeared, chipped and broken where it came in contact with the water. It stood about three feet above the swamp, on pilings of rusted iron. Several wide-bottomed metal canoes were tied to the pier. Across the water Krysty could make out the silhouette of a building, open on two sides, a stone table at its center. Her sight was exceedingly sharp, and she could see metal rings at each corner of the table and the thick stains that ran down from the top.

Sec guards ranged around them as they stood there in the cooling late afternoon, with the baron and Mephisto at their head.

“Now for you to meet an old friend, ladies. The father of your leader.”

Krysty felt Lori stiffen, the word “Ryan” on her lips, and nudged her into silence. “Our leader?” she said.

“Jak Lauren, slut. The white wolf himself. We hold the coward’s own father.” Raising his voice and clapping his hands together, he ordered, “Bring him here. And the pitch.”

The air filled with the tang of hot tar as four sec men struggled with an iron caldron that bubbled and smoked. Two others brought out a prisoner cuffed between them. He was short and frail, wearing only rags of cotton, with a pair of rubber sandals flapping on his feet.

“Father Lauren,” said the baron. “Have you three met before?”

The man, who looked to be close to Doc’s age, ignored the baron, staring stubbornly at his own feet. Lori shook her head and looked away. Krysty was puzzled. It seemed as though Tourment genuinely thought they knew each other. If it wasn’t a trick, then what did he think was going on? She knew the leader of the other gang in West Lowellton, the snow wolf, was the bitter enemy of the baron. If he was called Jak Lauren, then this old man was his father. Why had the baron brought him out? What was he trying to prove?

There wasn’t long to wait. Tourment gestured for Mephisto to approach. The sec boss sidled to the front of the group and drew a long, slim-bladed stiletto from a sheath at the back of his belt. He grinned as he showed it to the women.

“His son will be angry. I don’t care,” said Tourment. “I don’t fear him. Or any of you. Even the man with one eye.”

At a sign from his chief, one of the sec men stooped and picked up a paddle from the nearest canoe. He slapped it a few times on the water, the noise echoing across the lagoon until it faded. Tourment waved his hand again, and the man stopped.

“I decided this would be best. It will show you and the others what happens to those who stand against me, show the pack in Lowellton what awaits them. And I shall take some fucking delight in it. Start, dear Mephisto.”

The sec boss moved in front of the old man, weaving the knife in his fingers. He glanced, around to make sure the pitcher of hot tar was ready and then bowed to the two women.

“Watch,” he whispered to them.

 

J.B. REMOVED HIS FEDORA and banged it against the back of one of the seats, raising a cloud of dust. “We’re wasting fucking time,” he said, his voice grim. “You’re more like damned kids than men who want to fight.” He looked around the old cinema at the faces of the gang, mocking them with obvious anger. “We got to go first. We got to have the best blasters. We got to drive the swampwag. We got to… mother-fucking stupes.” He rubbed his eyes, showing his fatigue.

“He’s right,” said Ryan. “It’s close to dark. We got us a good plan. One that might just work. And all we’ve done for the last hour is pick our asses and chew round and round and waste time.”

Jak Lauren stood up and moved to join Ryan. “This is our ville, Ryan. Our enemy. Our battle.”

“Then fucking fight it on your fucking own,” spat Finnegan, shaking his head in disgust. “You’re like fucking kids at a fucking game. It’s my ball, so you can’t fucking play.”

There was a burst of chattering and shouting angrily directed at Finn. But Ryan shouted louder than anyone and even considered firing a triple burst into the star-embossed ceiling.

“This is it,” he called, when the noise died a little. “Our way or not at all. It’s what we do and we do well. It’s not up for argument. Get it?”

Lauren nodded. “Sure. Guess it’s the only way. Your way.”

“Sure. Now we can talk details. Just you and us and six of your best.”

The kid sucked on his teeth. In that unguarded moment Ryan glimpsed the child of fourteen living inside the body of the trained killer. “Yeah. Not all of us are good with blasters. You see, Ryan, we all read an’ write. Pa made sure of that. Years ago. And his Pa. There’s men and women here with all the skills. They know ‘lectrics, power, water, farming, crops, land… how to do all that. They all got a real skill.”

“What’s your skill, young fellow?” asked Doc Tanner.

The snow wolf didn’t hesitate. “I’m the best at butchering men,” he said.

 

LORI WAS DOUBLED OVER on her knees, her skirt riding up to reveal her buttocks and attracting lustful glances from many of the sec men. She was vomiting copiously, threads of yellowish vomit dangling from her mouth, splattering on the concrete. Krysty stood close to her, watching what Mephisto was doing, determined not to give way and show any weakness.

First he had sliced off all the old man’s fingers, one by one, first holding the wrist on one hand, then the other, to gain enough purchase to force the blade through the knuckle joints. Blood spurted, and the old man struggled and cried out, but the sec men were too strong for him. That was when Krysty saw the reason for the caldron of smoking pitch.

At a nod from Mephisto, the guards thrust their prisoner’s hands into the scalding, sticky liquid. Instantly there came the hiss of steam and the smell of scorched flesh. Lauren’s body stiffened, then went limp. Tar coated his wrists, sealing off the leaking stumps of his fingers so he didn’t bleed to death.

“Bring him round. I want him conscious for all of this,” said Baron Tourment quietly.

The nearest sec man slapped the old man hard across the face. A ringing round-arm, blow that jerked the skull on the thin neck. His cheeks swollen and bruised, Lauren jerked back to awareness. He started to moan; Tourment gripped him by the jaw.

“Listen to me. This is for your son and all his stupe killing. He’ll hear of this and know what awaits him.” He let go and looked at Krysty Wroth. “And this waits for you after our talk.”

She ignored him.

Tourment extended a hand to Mephisto, who dropped the severed fingers of their captive into the huge pale palm. Ten pieces of bloodless meat, jointed, with chipped nails tipping, them. The baron smiled and walked to the edge of the dock, scattering the fingers on the surface of the water with a joyous gesture of release.

“First course, my pets,” he called.

Krysty noticed that the front of the man’s elegant breeches was swollen with a truly frightening erection; she looked away. Mephisto, at a signal from the baron, picked up a large cleaver and ran a thumb along the edge, like a lover caressing his mistress’s body.

Fifty yards out into the Atchafalaya Swamp, there was a rippling of water. Then a long spade-shaped head protruded, eyes glittering under ridges of bone, the ferocious snout raised to the evening air.

 

“DO WE ALL AGREE?” asked Ryan Cawdor, facing the entire West Lowellton street gang.

Nobody spoke: they all watched him with a sullen, grudging respect. “Well,” said Doc Tanner. “They don’t disagree, Ryan.”

“We go midnight,” said Jak Lauren. “Plan sounds good to me.”

“Best we got,” Ryan said. “It works, and you get to drain the swamps and build your windmills around dawn tomorrow.”

“It don’t work, and we get to dig us some graves,” replied the boy, his wolfish eyes glittering.

 

LORI SHOOK as though she was suffering from some dreadful ague. She held her head in her hands, her palms pressed hard against her ears to try to shut out the hideous mewing cries of the tortured old man. Krysty, her face set like marble, determined not to show the gloating baron and his sniggering sec boss any weakness, watched without flinching. She spoke only once.

“I’ll never forget this. And I’ll be there when the score is settled with you and your sick, stinking filth. I swear it by Gaia.”

They laughed.

By then Father Lauren was close to death. Mephisto had hacked away at both feet, sawing them off at the ankles, again using the hot tar to curtail the bleeding and cauterize the wounds.

Out in the lagoon, the massive cayman waited patiently for each severed limb and bit of flesh. Its jaws, gaping wide enough to swallow a swampwag wheel, snapped at each white foot, gulped it down with no discernible effort or pleasure. Then the creature disappeared into the murk until only its eyes broke the scummy surface.

“Hands next, baron?” asked the sec boss, looking down in irritation at some specks of blood that dirtied his nice clean suit.

“Maybe his cock, Mephisto. Or his ears. Maybe his lips or nose. So many choices. Yes. Ears and then nose. No, wait. Be difficult to use the pitch on his face. That can come later. Hands next and then cock.”

Krysty judged that merciful Death finally spread its mantle over the old man at about the moment when the kneeling sec boss began to hew clumsily at his remaining wrist with the cleaver. The blood, no longer spurting vigorously from the stumps, simply oozed sluggishly across the stained concrete.

“He’s gone,” said Mephisto, disappointed.

“Throw his hands to our pet?”

“What about the rest of the fucker?”

“Carry on with cock and then do his face. There’s the big flagpole in front of the motel. Haul what’s left up there with a notice about what happens to enemies of Baron Tourment. Leave it to the crows.”

The warm humid Louisiana evening was closing in around them as the girls were driven back to the cellar at gunpoint. Once more, the baron bound them to the tables. Leaving them, he said, “Later, sluts. We can talk later.”

 

RYAN CAWDOR WAS RESTLESSLY pacing around the lobby of the Adelphi Cinema, watching darkness descend on the neighborhood. At Jak Lauren’s orders, most of his small army was resting or asleep, with a skeleton crew on sentry patrol. Doc had also fallen asleep, after having entreated Ryan to wake him should there be any news or action. Finnegan had found his way into the kitchen and was stoking up his boilers, ready for the firefight to come.

J.B. joined Ryan, and the two old friends walked together. “Not long,” he said.

“No. I wish we could recce some around the baron’s ville.”

“Why not?” asked the Armorer.

“Yeah,” said Ryan. “Why not? I’ll check with the kid and get us a map of the region. They’ve got good ones. Seen ‘em. Just you and me, J.B., like old times. What d’you say?”

J.B. rubbed his fingers contemplatively over the darkening stubble on his chin. Then he grinned. “Yeah,” he said.

 

Chapter Twenty-One

« ^ »

JAK LAUREN WASN’T keen on their going out so soon before the attack. His hair flowed about his shoulders as he gesticulated, waving his hands.

“What the fuck you want to do this? We got maps. You know where the ville is. We’ll be with you. Fucking stay here.”

Ryan shook his head. “No. If’n you fear us going to ‘tray you to Tourment, we’re leaving Finn and Doc here with you. If we go to fight with you, we want to see what we can first. Be back in good time. It’s only seven now. Our plans are to leave here at eleven, so we’ll be back by then, three hours from now. I want to go and look at what we’re tackling.”

“Too late to change plans,” said the boy, almost reproachfully.

“Why change ‘em?” asked J.B. “Fine as they are. Just fine.”

 

RYAN AND J.B. each carried one of the hand-torches from the Holiday Inn on their belts, as well as their usual armaments. The weather was calm, the air still. Jak opened the maps one more time, showing them where and where not to walk. He pointed out swamps that had risen over old highways or trails that were patrolled by the Baron’s sec men. Both men listened carefully, committing the information to memory.

“Come back safe,” said the boy, patting them both on the shoulder as they left the lobby of the old vid-house. Ryan half grinned, still finding it hard to believe that this war-leader was a lad of just fourteen.

 

IN SOME WAYS the recce was abortive. They found their way along the abandoned suburban streets, past the entrance to a massive shopping mall, taking the route that the albino kid had shown them. A couple of times they were startled by animals—once by a massive armadillo, with its family in tow, crossing the blacktop in front of them. Another time they never saw the creature, but they heard it moving through high brush at the back of some houses. They stopped where they were and waited for it to pass.

Eventually they managed to get within sight of the Best Western Snowy Egret, but the area was crawling with sec patrols, moving in groups of five or six, using generator-powered searchlights that cut through the night, making it impossible to approach within a hundred yards.

“Have to take them out first thing,” said J.B. as they crouched in a grove of whitebeams on the edges of a large derelict mansion.

“Easy with this.” Ryan patted the butt of the G-12 with its bulky night sight. “Soon as we open up, they’ll know what’s going down.”

“If the plan works, they won’t have time to do nothing ‘bout it.”

Ryan peered at the front of the big building. “No gates.” He was about to crawl back when his eye was caught by something. “Fireblast!”

“What?”

“There. That pole.”

J.B. followed his pointing finger, finally, making out the tall metal bar rising vertically in front of the motel. The lights were dazzling, and it was some seconds before his eyes adjusted to lake in what it was that dangled from a rope some thirty feet in the air. “Man or woman?” he whispered.

Ryan had brought a small, powerful pair of night glasses with him, and he reached from them, his heart sinking. It was undeniably a naked corpse. The rope was knotted around its neck, but the lamps threw it into a sharp contrast of brightness and shadow, making it hard to see it clearly.

He focused the glasses, taking a deep breath to hold them steady. “Bastard,” he breathed.

“not one of the women?”

“No, J.B., it’s not Krysty or Lori. It’s a man up there.”

“But it looks like there’s no—”

“Yeah. That’s right, friend. It’s been castrated. And there’s no hands neither. And no feet.”

“The bastards! Like some dirt-crazies, that shrink heads or take hair.”

“The eyes, nose and ears are gone, as well.”

“Who do…?”

“Looks like an old man. Could be past fifty. I reckon it’s the lad’s father.”

“Whitey’s old man?” This was the nickname that Ryan had given him. “Yeah. That would, figure what we know of this baron.”

Ryan pocketed the binoculars. “Let’s go. Tell the kid what we’ve seen.”

He wriggled away, with J.B. at his heels, ready to return to the old cinema.

 

THEY WERE ABOUT HALFWAY BACK when they heard boot-heels ringing on the overgrown, gravel road. Ryan hesitated only a second before pointing to the left, then dived over a rotting picket fence and moved quickly along the side of a trim little house. He felt J.B. at his back and stopped once they were both safely around the corner.

“Wait,” he whispered, peering toward the street. Six men, making up the sec patrol, were marching toward their base. Most of them were smoking and carried M-16s slung across their chests. Ryan’s keen nostrils caught the unmistakable aroma of maryjane drifting over the weed-infested garden. The sound of their footsteps vanished away down the road, and Ryan and J.B. were able to relax again.

“Could have took them,” said the Armorer, easing his finger off the trigger of his Mini-Uzi. “Hit ‘em all in one burst.”

“They’d have heard it and figured it was the start of the attack. This Tourment may be the meanest fucker in the land, but he can’t be a total stupe. He’ll know we might come after the women. No point giving him any warning.”

J.B. nodded. “Guess so. Let’s move.”

“Wait.”

“What now, Ryan? You don’t want to take a leak, do you? Trader always said when you first joined you was always sneaking off to take a piss before the shooting started. That it?”

“No. What the fuck’s that there? In the middle of the garden, by that dead rosebush?”

It was a metallic dome that rose about three feet above the matted surface of what had once been a neatly trimmed lawn, now overrun with crabgrass. Ryan picked his way through the knee-high weeds, then bent over the strange protuberance.

“What’s your guess? We could do with Doc here. That old bastard knows more about the times before the long winters than any man does. Or should.”

“Small redoubt?” guessed J.B., tapping on the top with the butt of his blaster.

“Private one. Wait. Didn’t you once tell me ‘bout the last years, when folks installed their own nuke shelters. This could be one, still here.”

The Armorer set his weight against a large wheel set in the top, but it didn’t budge. “Bolted.”

“Yeah. But look at the rust round it. Might go if n we both give it a try together. ‘Come on. Heave on three. One, two, three!”

There was a brittle snap as corroded metal gave up its resistance. The wheel then turned fairly easily, with a thin grating sound that made Ryan look behind him. “Check the road. I’ll come get you when it’s open.”

It took thirty or more turns before Ryan heard a latch disengage, and he was able to lift the trap. It was enormously thick, obviously counterbalanced by weights; it opened with a clunk. There was a faint hissing, and a waft of overpoweringly stale air, so dry and sour that it almost seemed to Ryan to clutch at his throat, like a hundred-year-old wraith.

J.B. joined him as he flashed his torch into the entrance. They saw a tunnel that dropped vertically about thirty feet, with a white-painted set of ladders, its rungs throwing sharp shadows.

“Going in, Ryan?”

“We got time. I’d kind of like to see inside one of these places.”

He went first, slinging his H&K caseless over his shoulder. It was obvious that the shelter hadn’t been opened for a century. It was probably one of the few totally safe places in all of Deathlands.

 

THERE WAS A DOOR at the bottom, with a simple catch on it. Stuck to it with contact adhesive was a flowery notice. It said: “Don ‘n’ Peggy’s place. If you got no beer, you can’t come in.”

A smaller card said: “This is the golden door that has a silver lining.”

The shelter was small and cramped, with a living space opening to a couple of bunks. There was a kitchen area and toilet and washbasin. Beyond that was another door that hid the controls, generator, air purifier, water recycler and stores.

Ryan saw the two corpses immediately.

Unlike those above ground, these hadn’t deteriorated into skeletons. They were mummified bodies, leathery lips peeled back off yellowed teeth. The skin had shrunk and tightened across the faces, showing the skulls that lay beneath.

The woman, with long black hair, lay on one of the bunks, looking as though she’d been laid out in a funeral home. The skeletal hands were folded neatly on her shrunken breasts. She wore pale blue dungarees, stained and filthy, with a black and white badge pinned to the shoulder strap. Both J.B. and Ryan recognized it from old books as the emblem of a society that opposed all forms of nuke growth.

“Didn’t do her no good,” said J.B., his voice flat and muffled in the cramped metal tomb.

The man’s body was in the John, huddled over the chemical toilet-bowl, almost as if he was at prayer.

“Looks like he died puking,” commented Ryan.

There was plenty of food in tins. J.B. switched on the water purifier and found it still functioned. Ryan sat down on a canvas chair, looked around the shelter and saw a primitive vid-machine, with a camera wired to it. He pressed the button marked Battery, and a faint red light glowed on the display, as if some tiny hibernating creature had just been awakened. “It works, J.B.—it works.”

He wasn’t totally surprised. In some of the better-protected redoubts that they’d found during the years with the Trader, they’d quite often come across battery-operated machinery that still functioned. But generally the charge was only held for a few minutes, and then the equipment would grind to a halt forever.

“Press the On button on the telly there.”

J.B. hit the starter, and the screen lightened, revealing a jagged pattern of gray and white. Ryan had already noticed that there was a reel sitting in the vid-machine. He leaned forward and pressed the control to set it in motion.

“You don’t think there’s…” The voice of the Armorer faded away into a stillness that verged on awe.

The jagged dashes and dots changed to colored splashes and streaks. The speaker crackled, and then they heard the sound of music.

“Testing, five and four and three. Coming through real good. Just turn off my new Pogues compact. There.” The music ceased.

Suddenly something appeared on the screen, a great blurred outline, like a football. It vanished, and then they saw the head and shoulders of a man who sat in the same chair where Ryan now sat. He looked to be around fifty years of age, with thinning black hair and a small neat mustache. He had plump, well-shaved cheeks and immaculate teeth. Teeth so good they couldn’t possibly have been genuine. He wore a bright shirt, decorated with garish bananas and pineapples. On his right hand was a ruby fraternity ring and on his wrist a platinum Rolex watch.

“Hi there to the future.” There was a sheepish grin on his face, and he seemed a little embarrassed at his own presentation. “My name’s Donald Haggard, and I’m an optometrist here in West Lowellton, part of the great city of Lafayette in the great state of Louisiana. Don’t know rightly why I’m telling you this, because I guess you’ll know all that. I’ve just broken off from Christmas brunch to tell you a little ‘bout… Guess I damned near forgot to tell you the date. It’s December 25, in the year 2000. Wanted to make this here vid as a kinda record, I guess, of what’s going on here right now.”

While Ryan and J.B. sat there, spellbound by this message from a dead man, Don Haggard went on to outline the political situation. The tensions between East and West, the problems in Libya, in South Africa, in the Philippines, in Cuba. In the northern cities of Great Britain and in Israel.

“Seems like the whole world is just waiting for someone to push the first button.”

He talked a little about his wife, Peggy, who worked locally in telephone sales, and their three sons, Johnny, Dwight and Merle.

“Guess you know from that what kind of music I’m into,” he guffawed. J.B. and Ryan looked at each other blankly.

The picture wobbled, and the gears of the vid-machine grated and whined as if they were about to give up. Ryan leaned in the chair and pressed the Fast Forward button, letting it go ahead for several seconds.

“Don’t have time to watch all this, J.B.,” he said. “Mebbe take it with us.”

“Stop it here.”

Don was back, looking rather less cool and in control than he had on Christmas Day. “Things don’t,” he began. “Sorry. Start with date. It’s January 15, 2001. Yeah. Government tells us not to worry. Motherfuckers. Not to worry. They don’t live out in the open. They’ve got their bunkers and hideouts. Me an’ Peggy’ll be fine. What about them good old boys of ours? Where do they go? Can’t come in here. Built for two. Jesus on the fucking cross, what a mess!”

“Can’t have been a big magnetic pulse in the skies round here,” commented J.B. “Would have cut off all the electrics.”

Haggard rambled on a while longer, cursing the politicians, both Russian and American, for letting things slide to the brink of war.

Ryan ran the tape farther forward, watching the dancing picture and halting it when there was an obvious change of time.

“January 24.” Looking at his watch, Don went on. “Late morning, I think. Watch stopped. Guess it’s around ten-thirty. Peggy’s worse, crying and throwing up and taking on so.”

Don looked terrible. His shirt was stained and dirty, and he was pale and unshaven. His eyes were sunken, and he had obviously been weeping. “I’m real fine, folks. Whoever you are. Felt the bangs again a day back. Last night, maybe. Not sure. Bet I’m real fine and so’s Peggy. Just a mite sickly. See my hand shaking some. Should have stocked up on liquor, never thought ‘bout that when I built this place. Saved our lives, I guess. Can’t tell for sure. Haven’t been up top. Won’t yet.”

J.B. walked across the room and removed a knife from a neat mounting on the wall. “Tekna.” He held it up, showing Ryan the five holes in the hilt and the distinctive double sawing edge. “Surgical steel with a high chrome content. Haven’t seen one in years. I’ll take it.” Sheathing it, he hooked it on his belt.

Ryan pushed the Fast Forward control, stopping it when the man’s head vanished in a blur of visual static. He glanced at his chron again, seeing they still had a little time. To watch this film was even more amazing than being in a vid-house or a Holiday Inn. Seeing this vid was to witness the beginning of the long winters, as it was happening. The neutron bombs had fallen, infecting everyone with a lethal burst of nuke energy.

“Twenty-fifth January. Air filter doesn’t fucking work properly ‘gainst what the Reds dosed us with. I can feel it rotting my fucking bones. Peggy’s worse. I’m going up top to see one time. If anyone ever sees this, you’ll know what it’s like.”

The camera showed the walls of the tunnel and angled shots of the ladder as Haggard carried it up. He panted and sighed, stopping a couple of times to gather breath. Then there was a break, presumably while he cautiously opened the hatch and peered out. The next shot was in his garden, the man providing his own commentary on what they were seeing.

“Lotsa smoke all round. Looks like there’s houses fired toward ‘fayette. Our house is standing good.”

Wobbling and jerking as Haggard carried the camera with him, shooting as he went, the film showed a murky scene, poorly lit on account of the smoke drifting by. At first it didn’t seem the holocaust that Ryan and J.B. knew it to have been.

Then it began.

The commentary began to stammer and fade, sinking to a spasmodic muttering that identified people here and there. It finally faded to silence, and the sound track only picked up a low keening, with a piercing scream intermittently shattering the quiet.

The land was a massive enamel house. A land that was filled only with the dead and the dying. A high wind whipped clouds across the sky, which seemed to be a dark purple, like braised flesh. Wherever the lens probed, there was death. Young and old, frail and hale, all felled by the same single swipe of the nuclear scythe. The nuking had been cunning and selective, hitting only creatures that breathed, sparing all the buildings.

“Tom Adey and his young kid…Beulah and her gran… little Melanie and her folks… Pop Maczyzk… new married couple moved into the Wainwright place last week.”

Dead and dying.

On porches and in the road. One body hung out of a burned car, the head, arms and upper torso untouched by the flames; the lower torso and the legs were charred and blackened; the mouth was open in a soundless scream of ultimate agony.

Dogs crawled along the sidewalk, snapping at their own hind paws, eyes rolling, tongues hanging from their jaws. A wheelchair was caught by the vid camera, tipped on one side, wheels slowly rotating in the wind, its occupant vanished.

The camera swung wildly through 180 degrees, pointing at the ground, its shots very jerky and fast.

“He’s heading back here,” said Ryan. “Had enough. Poor fucker can’t take any more of what happened to his neighborhood.”

The picture went blank, and J.B. moved toward the television, thinking it was over. But it wasn’t.

Not quite.

A face swam into approximate focus. The face of a mortally ill, dying man, still recognizable as Don Haggard, but drawn and yellow and thin. Dark seams furrowed his face from his hose to the corners of his mouth, and the eyes were veiled with a dreadful fatigue. He wore a plaid shirt that was moist with vomit and what looked like drying blood.

The voice was hoarse and labored. The tape ran on with long pauses as the man seemed to fight to remember how to speak.

“Donald Haggard here of West Lowellton. Don’t know the date no more. Been six days since Peg passed away. Poor old dear been sleeping more and finally slipped from me while I slept. I got the sickness like everyone. Been shitting so much I can’t keep me clean no more. Lost all my dignity. Puked blood today. Can’t be soon ‘fore I join my darling. Guess our boys are long dead. Hope they died quicker and easier than folks round here. Conceived in fucking liberty… We can’t hallow or consecrate this ground…” He was overtaken by a coughing fit, his body shaking. “Last full measure of devotion… It shall not perish from the earth. No, no, no.”

“Turn it off, J.B.,” said Ryan.

Don Haggard’s voice was weakening. “Heard knocking a whiles back, but I couldn’t… wouldn’t have… not going out again.” The man staggered to his feet, swaying to and fro, pointing a finger at the camera. “Do you feel fucking lucky, punk?” he said, to the bewilderment of two people a century later.

That was the last he said.

Then there was the noise of someone being violently sick—a choking, tearing sound that went on and on until J.B. pushed the Fast Forward button again. Don Haggard never reappeared, though the tape ran right on through to its end and automatically rewound itself.

“Going to take it?” asked the Armorer.

“No. Like robbing a grave. Not right. Leave it here.”

They switched off everything, gently pulling the door shut and climbing out into the cool of the late evening. Ryan lowered the exit hatch, swinging the wheel-lock on it, making sure that no casual predator would disturb the last resting place of Don and Peggy Haggard of West Lowellton, Louisiana.

They returned to the Adelphi Cinema without incident and rejoined Jak Lauren in good time for the last fire-fight.

 

Chapter Twenty-Two

« ^ »

RYAN WAS IMPRESSED WITH the regimented hold that the fourteen-year-old boy had over his small army. Jak had ordered silence, and that was what he got. Each man and woman understood his or her role in the assault; they oiled and greased their weapons, and carefully wrapped rags around them to prevent noise. A few of the men checked the captured swampwag to make sure the steering was smooth.

The heavy casks of napalm were loaded into the rear of the buggy, the tops having been painstakingly cut off by hand. Old blankets were wadded between them to stop them from rolling and clattering.

Under the direction of J. B. Dix, grens were wired to various points around the swampwag, their pins secured with loops of fishing line, cut to an agreed length of 120 yards.

Just after midnight, they were ready to go.

 

BARON TOURMENT hadn’t yet returned to the cellar. Bound and helpless, the girls lay in total darkness with only the rhythmic clunking of the nearby ice machine and the distant chattering of one of the elevators to break the stillness.

They talked for a while. Krysty tried to keep the younger girl’s spirits up, telling her that Ryan and Doc and the others would surely come for them. Eventually, around midnight, both of them managed to fall asleep.

 

THE GEARS SET IN NEUTRAL, the buggy, pushed by teams of fighters, rolled on its massive tires. The tall woman with the jagged scar across her neck sat at the controls. She was reputedly the best driver in the small army, and the success or failure of the first part of the plan depended upon her skill and nerve and timing.

Finn walked with two of the older men, all three of them carrying flamers. Tanks of propellant, with a nozzle like a garden hose, were supported across their shoulders by a web of faded canvas strapping.

“You sure that slope’s steep enough at the front?” asked J. B. Dix.

“Yeah. There’s a hill out of sight of the motel. We get it there and then let her go. By the time they see it coming, speed’ll be well up. Too fucking late to do much. Leah jumps, and Finn and his men get to work.”

It took them close on two hours, with stops for frequent pauses for everyone to gather breath. Even Doc insisted on taking his share of heaving at the lumbering vehicle, though it nearly exhausted him. His ebony sword stick was in his belt, the massive Le Mat pistol, over two hundred years old, in its holster.

 

KRYSTY DREAMED that she lay in an archaic wooden wagon, with a fluttering top of white material. It was set amongst a grove of green-leaved sycamores, with sunbaked fields all around it. There were men, women and children, hunkered down in the grass behind the wagon, in old-fashioned clothes. The women in long cotton dresses and poke bonnets. Dark suits for the men. By another wagon she saw four men and a boy, loading antique blasters, laughing as they did so. Somehow, though there was no enemy in sight, Krysty knew that a battle was about to go down. A bloody firefight against a superior force.

 

“TWO-SEVENTEEN,” said Ryan Cawdor, angling his chron to catch the stray moonbeams that filtered through the trees. From far below they heard noise around the Best Western Snowy Egret: men calling out orders; laughter; a shrill scream, followed by more laughter.

Leah stood quietly by the swampwag, dwarfed by the wheels, her scarred face in shadow. She pulled on leather gauntlets, brushing her hair back from her eyes. Nearly a foot shorter, Jak Lauren stood beside her, his own hair tied into a silvery ponytail.

“Jump and roll once you’re sure it’s on course. And get the fuck out. Finn and flamers are going to be right behind. Is that okay, Leah?”

“Sure. I won’t let you down, Jak.” Leah looked across at Ryan. “Won’t let anyone down.”

She swung up, seating herself, waving a gloved hand to show her readiness. There was the faint sound of metal on metal as she released the brake. Some of the men set their shoulders to the back of the swampwag, and it began to move forward, gaining speed on the slope.

“Go, Finn,” called Ryan, urging them on. The buggy was going faster than they’d guessed, and he saw suddenly that the three men with the flamers were going to have a serious problem getting close enough if the grens didn’t do their stuff. The thin lines paid out behind the swampwag, each held by one of Jak’s people.

Lauren led them down the hill after the swampwag, slowing as he reached the edge of the covering trees. Ryan patted him on the shoulder, turning to J.B. and Doc and six men he’d picked earlier,

“Going round the back, Whitey. See you inside. Good luck.”

And they were gone. They cut to the left along a side road that would wind about and bring them to the rear entrance of the motel, through its abandoned parking lot, by the shell of the swimming pool.

It was surprisingly late before any of the baron’s sec men saw the swampwag noiselessly hurtling toward them. Ryan heard the first shouts and a crackle of spasmodic fire. He watched the big buggy move within a hundred yards of the main entrance, driven straight as an arrow by Leah.

“Now. Jump, girl,” he said, knowing there was no way she could hear.

Bullets sparked off the front of the vehicle, whining into the night. The searchlights jerked and danced as they sought the rushing attackers. Finn and his two comrades were caught and held by the beams, frozen in the stark light.

“Now, J.B.,” said Ryan, carefully aiming the Heckler & Koch. The Armorer stood in the center of the blacktop, his legs spread, the Uzi braced against his hip. Both men opened fire simultaneously, their guns on continuous burst. Their aim was good enough, even at that range, to smash both searchlights instantly. There was a tinkling of glass, and wounded men cried out as they fell. The front of the motel was immediately plunged into darkness.

Then everything started to happen more or less as they’d planned it.

But Leah’s death hadn’t been part of the plan. She was supposed to jump. Instead, she stayed at the steering controls, making sure that the swampwag hit smack in the center of the main entrance. It crashed with an enormous metallic crumpling noise, half overturning, spilling its load of napalm. The impact was so tremendous that some of the grens were jerked free of their mountings, with only two remaining in place.

Ryan saw the crash, watching as Leah’s body was thrown high in the air, arms and legs like a disjointed doll’s. She hit the motel with crushing force, sliding down the wall and lying still.

“Fireblast!” he swore. “She didn’t…”

The grens went off, almost together, splattering the napalm over a wide area but failing to ignite it. J.B. had warned that the sticky gas might have lost some of its combustibility; that was why Finn was there as back-up. Now he was needed.

Although Ryan and the others should have been moving to the rear of the Best Western, they waited to see what would happen. If the flamers didn’t work, then the whole attack was going to fail.

“Come on, Finn, you old bastard,” Ryan muttered.

The firefight was gaining momentum. Bullets hissed and snapped all around the front of the building as the Baron’s sec army came tumbling out to repel the attack. Jak Lauren was leading a group of fighters down the hill, darting from side to side to use what little cover there was. All along the front of the fortress, picking their way through the sticky, stinking mess of napalm, the sec men were gathering their strength.

One of the men beside Finnegan fell soundlessly, shot through the head, his blood and brains splashing over the road. They were a scant sixty yards or so from the wrecked swampwag, and bullets started to bracket them. J.B. had wanted to get closer.

“Fuck that!” shouted Finn, dropping to his knees, opening the valve and pressing the ignite button. He pressed it a second time when nothing happened. At his side, one of Jak’s men also knelt, fumbling with the controls. A spray of lead centered on his chest, and he went toppling on his back, the flamer falling limply from his dying grasp,

Finn pressed the button a third time.

Ryan held his breath.

 

KRYSTY AWOKE, tugged from her dream. Straining her exceptional hearing, she caught the muffled roar of an explosion. And shouting. A lot of shouting.

“Lori,” she called. “Wake up, Lori. They’re here. Wake up!”

 

THE JET OF FLAME, dripping beads of golden fire all along its magical length, struck the center of the ruined swamp-wag, playing over it, instantly igniting the hundreds of gallons of napalm.

Finn jumped to one side, releasing the main control of the flamer, burying his face in his hands at the cataclysmic explosion. Jak Lauren and his group stopped in their tracks, shrinking back from the inferno that raged outside the motel. The sec guards were destroyed in the blink of an eye, converted from fighting men to dancing puppets, tugged by strings of fire. Their thin, helpless screams were drowned by the ferocious roar of the flames. The entire front of the building caught fire, and lakes of smoking crimson spread inside through shattered windows and doors. In less than one minute, the whole place was ablaze.

The men with Ryan and J.B. stood and gaped. Night became dazzling day. The shooting stopped for a few moments, replaced by the noise of the fire and the screeching of hundreds of wild birds, erupting from the trees all around. Ryan saw a great slim-necked white bird with an enormous wingspan flying majestically away over the burning motel.

“Now,” he said, breaking the others from their shocked contemplation. “Come on. To the back.”

 

BARON TOURMENT HAD been sleeping, his arm resting across the hips of a slim Cajun girl. Her tanned body was covered with bites and scratches, and she had slithered into a merciful, drugged sleep.

Mephisto burst into the room, his clothes crumpled, a blaster in his hand.

“They’re here! For fuck’s sake, Baron, get up and fight, or run!”

“Who? The one-eyed man?”

“Don’t know. Move this slut outta the way.” He pulled the girl to the floor; moaning, she resumed her slumber. “Bombs. Fire-sprays. Blasters. It’s a fucking war out there.”

Tourment reached for his braces and buckled them on while Mephisto outlined what had been happening.

“Whole place is burning. Must be twenty dead. Could be more. It’s bad. Real bad, Baron.”

Tourment hitched on his belt, with the twin pistols in it. Stub-gripped Ruger GP-11Os, a matched pair of silver-plated revolvers that had been taken from one of the gun stores in downtown Lafayette years back.

“How many out there?”

Mephisto shook his head. His own customized M-16, with its ornate cockerel’s head, dangled from his right hand, almost as if he’d forgotten he was still holding it. “Don’t know. Plenty. Thought I saw the snow wolf.”

“And the man with one eye?”

“Who?”

Tourment reached for his trembling sec boss and grabbed him by the front of his jacket. “You heard me, offal! Was there a man there with only one-eye? He’s the one to be feared. I know it. I’ve seen it.”

“Didn’t… didn’t see him. Time’s racing, Baron. The place is lost. Got to get out.”

“Side way, canoes,” said the giant black, striding to the door of his suite. “Get the two women and bring ‘em.”

“Too late for that,” said Mephisto, his voice rising until, it was almost a hysterical scream. “Don’t you… it’s fucking over. We lost. One fucking bang and a damburst of fire, and we’re done.”

 

KRYSTY LAY STILL, resting, harvesting the layers of calmness. Knowing that if the motel was under attack by Ryan, then it would not be long before Baron Tourment, or one of his sec men, remembered them and came looking for them. That could be the moment when her special powers might be most needed. Lori, at her side, lay still, whistling to herself to keep her spirits up.

 

HALF A DOZEN SWAMPWAGS were already rolling around the back of the blazing building, with sec men still clambering into them, ready to run. Exchanging fire with Ryan’s party, all of them fell dead, with only a single casualty in the attackers group.

“Blow the buggies?” asked one of Jak’s men.

“No. You’ll need ‘em after this is done.”

“You figure we’re winning?” asked another of them as they neared a large rear entrance.

“Yeah. Leah gave us better than we’d hoped for. When this is finished, you ought to build her a bitching great statue and bring your children to look at it every fucking anniversary.”

There was a foot of stagnant slimy green water at the bottom of the pool. It reflected the flames that were already beginning to break through the roof of the Best Western. One of the sec men came sprinting around the corner of the motel, heading toward them, clutching a suitcase. He saw them but didn’t check his stride, figuring them for his own comrades.

“Mine,” said Ryan, putting a single round from the H&K through the man’s neck. It kicked him back, his feet flying up in front of him as though a wire had been pulled around his neck.

“Rat abandoning the sinking ship,” commented Doc Tanner.

The door was unguarded and unbolted. To their left they heard shooting. Their nostrils filled with the acrid stink of poisonous smoke. The speed with which the fire spread was startling. Ryan realized that he hadn’t really taken into account the way a dried-out hundred-year-old husk of a building would blaze. The plan had been even better than he could have dreamed. A single crushing blow.

“All we gotta do is find the girls and get clear,” he said. “Whitey figured the basement. Best get to it ‘fore we all go up.”

 

OUT FRONT, Jak Lauren had managed to stop crying. Seeing his father’s hideously mutilated corpse dangling from the flagpole, like some obscene trophy of battle, had created an ocean of grief and anger within him. In his fourteen years, the boy had seen enough killing to last most people a full lifetime. But for his father to die now, with victory suddenly and magically within their grasp—that was bitter.

The tears lasted only a minute or two before his iron self-control returned and he led his people in a screaming charge. Taking the firefight into the burning building, they massacred anyone around. He used a .357 Magnum with a satin nickel finish, spare ammunition rattling in the pockets of his torn jacket. So far only a half dozen of his group had gone down, compared to more than two-thirds of the Baron’s defending sec men.

One of the gaudy sluts came running toward the boy, her mouth open in a scream of horror and agony, burning napalm dappling her naked shoulders and back. Jak steadied his right wrist with his left hand and shot her carefully between the eyes.

He was greatly tempted to stop and lower his father’s body from the pole. But that would take time and men, and both were vital to maintain the momentum of the attack. What had been his father was no longer around. It didn’t seem to matter what happened to his dismembered corpse.

 

KRYSTY MANAGED A SMILE as Ryan came kicking in through the cellar door, the G-12 raking the room, ready to butcher anyone there.

“Hi, lover,” she said.

“Hi. How’s it gone?”

“Could have gone a whole lot worse if’n you’d left it till tomorrow. That Tourment is one evil fucker. And his sec boss isn’t any better.”

Doc had rushed straight to Lori, and laying down his sword stick, embraced her while she wept. J.B. pushed past him, the Tekna knife in his hand. The keen edge parted the cords that bound the girl to the table; he turned and released Krysty the same way.

Smoke was billowing in from the corridor, making them cough. Someone ran past outside, loudly yelling for help.

“We winning?” asked Krysty.

“Yeah,” replied the Armorer.

“Looks that way,” said Ryan, steadying the girl as she stood up. She brushed the fiery hair off her face, smiling at him.

“The Baron been chilled yet? Or Mephisto?”

“No. Unless Whitey’s got ‘em.”

“I’d like ‘em,” she said. “Half hour in here with them tied like we were.”

There was a look of venomous hatred in her eyes that Ryan had never seen before.

Some of Lauren’s men were getting anxious. “Fire’s getting close,” said one. “Best go help Jak.”

“Sure. We’ll go out the same way and round the far side. By the lagoon.”

He couldn’t understand why Krysty shuddered at the word.

Doc was still comforting Lori; the tall blonde hung on to him, her face buried in his chest. J.B. was fumbling with the knife, resheathing it. Ryan’s arm was around Krysty.

Then Mephisto appeared silently in the doorway, with two sec men at his elbow. All three of them had M-16s.

“You’re all fucking dead,” he said, favoring them with a graveyard smile.

 

Chapter Twenty-Three

« ^ »

ONE MOVE, AND YOU’RE all swamp-fodder.” The sec boss looked mad, his eyes bulging, white froth hanging from the corners of his lips. His suit was stained with soot and mud and was torn across one shoulder. But the muzzle of his carbine was rock-steady.

The men on either side of him were typical stony-eyed sec men, their uniforms also smoke-stained and scruffy; their guns covered the five people in the cellar.

It was desperate ill-luck that none of the three men in Ryan’s party were able to get immediately at a blaster.

“Baron’s making ready to leave the ville. Set up house somewheres else. I’m going with him with a few good men like Rafe and Pierre here. You bastards have done in one night what the dirt-poor under the snow wolf haven’t done in years.” He stared at Ryan Cawdor with an intense curiosity. “Baron been doomseeing you, mister. Man with only one eye. Figured it would be his ending.”

Ryan said nothing, easing away from Krysty, freezing as one of the sec men shifted his aim to cover him more closely. J.B. hadn’t moved an inch since Mephisto appeared. Doc had let go of Lori, standing with his hands on his hips, looking contemptuously at the three gunmen.

“Don’t look like his ending, mister. Looks more like your ending.”

“Why don’t you take us to see the Baron?” asked Krysty. “You know he likes me and the straw hair. Might be angered if you don’t.”

The sec boss shook his head. “Sorry, slut. It’s going to be here. And it’s going to be now.”

Ryan’s reflexes were stretched adrenaline-tight, ready for a last desperate, hopeless try, before they were all ripped apart.

It was Lori who checked the executions. She took a step away from Doc, teetering as she often did on her ridiculously high heels, drawing eyes as she wobbled. “I’m sick,” she said. “Got to take clothes off.” Her speech was slurred as if she were drugged.

“Get the…” began Mephisto, his voice drifting away as the beautiful blond girl hoisted up her scanty red skirt and began to peel off her panties.

Directly in front of the sec men, Ryan and J.B. were unable to risk any sudden moves. Doc Tanner stood a little more to one side, his shoulders stooped—a defeated old man, waiting for death.

Suddenly the defeated old man had a cannon in his right hand.

It was his thirty-six caliber percussion Le Mat revolver, nine-chambered. But the unique quality of the pistol was that it had a second smooth-bore barrel, chambered to take an eighteen bore single scattergun round.

There was a smile on the wrinkled cheeks and a merry twinkle in the old man’s eyes as he squeezed the narrow trigger.

The boom of the explosion drowned out the crackling of the flames from the corridor. A great burst of black powder smoke filled the cellar, blinding everyone. Ryan heard screaming as he pushed Krysty to one side, the G-12 falling ready to his hands and snapping off a double burst toward the doorway.

The Armorer’s Uzi barked a quarter-second later. Some ballets whipcracked off the stone walls, pinging and ricocheting off the metal pipes. Some tore into soft flesh.

As the smoke cleared, it was almost as though a master magician had performed a skillful illusion. Mephisto and the two sec men had disappeared. Then Ryan made out a pair of boots, sprawled in a corner, of the corridor, moving spasmodically.

He edged sideways, seeing that all three of the baron’s men were down and done. The single round from Doc’s blaster, at point-blank range, had been perfectly aimed. The shot spread just enough to hit all three men at face level. Both guards lay kicking, one mumbling for aid through a mouth filled with blood. The lead had ripped into their eyes and cheeks, tearing flesh from bone. The impact had been sufficient to send them all staggering backward, easy prey to the torrent of lead that followed from J.B. and Ryan.

Doc joined them, beaming at his success, manipulating the action, on the smoking Le Mat, ejecting the spent cartridge and reloading from one of the capacious pockets in his old frock coat. He shifted the hammer so that it rested over one of the thirty-six caliber rounds.

“Upon my soul, Mr. Cawdor, but that was vastly enjoyable. To see the wicked so smitten and righteousness triumphant.”

“Early days, Doc,” grinned Ryan, watching the wounded sec men. “But you done real good. And you, Lori,” he called. “Fucking great.”

“Thank you,” said the girl, breathing hard with excitement. “Wanted to see the motherfuckers drown in their own shit and blood.”

“You done that,” J.B. commented dryly.

“The matter is not quite concluded,” Doc said, looking down at the three men. One of the guards was already still, his chest and stomach ripped apart by the G-12 or the Uzi, his blood and bone and intestines mingling on the floor. The second sec man was dying, his face shredded from taking the worst of the Le Mat’s shot. He was moaning, rolling from side to side, his hands holding his ribs from where blood oozed.

“The quality of mercy is not strained,” said Doc. Still smiling broadly, he knelt and placed the muzzle of his pistol into the raw hole where the sec man’s mouth would have been. He squeezed the trigger. The bullet bounced the man’s head off the stone, killing him instantly. Doc thumbed back the hammer once more, turning to look at Mephisto.

The sec boss was dying. Several pieces of shot had pocked his face, one bursting his left eye. And more bullets had stitched across his chest from Ryan’s and J.B.’s shooting. But he still breathed, flat on his back, his carbine thrown several feet away. Smoke drifted down from the main part of the burning building, and the heat was growing appreciably.

The firing from the front entrance had slackened. Ryan guessed that Jak Lauren’s army had vanquished most of the baron’s shattered forces.

Mephisto blinked up through the blood that ran down over his one good eye. “Still won’t catch Baron. Too clever for you.”

Krysty looked coldly down at him. A sudden anger washed over her, and she spat in the dying man’s face, wanting to tear and hurt him. Lori was at her side, also looking down at the sec boss with bitter hatred on her lovely features.

“Bastard killer,” Lori said, lifting her foot and stamping down with all her weight. The heel of the red leather boot struck Mephisto in the center of his one good eye, splattering it to a bloody liquid. The tinkling silver spur hooked in the corner of the socket, and the girl jerked at it. Mephisto shrieked in stunning pain as his head was rolled backward and forward. Finally the spur was wrenched clear, tearing the flesh away like raw meat.

Doc straightened, leveling the antebellum pistol, squeezing, the trigger once more. The ball splintered the blood-slick forehead of the sec boss, killing him.

“Should have left him-gut-shot,” said J.B.

“Better dead,” Doc said, bolstering the heavy gun.

Ryan looked along the corridor. The billowing smoke was tearing at his lungs. “Gonna be roasted if’n we don’t move fast.”

“That mother said the baron was making a run. Which way?” asked Krysty.

“Got to be across the far side. By the lagoon.”

“There is boats there,” said Lori.

“Boats?”

“Canoes. Small ones,” amplified Krysty. “And the biggest mother of a gator I ever seen in my life. Makes the one that tried for Finn look like a baby.”

Ryan hesitated, then turned to the Armorer. “J.B., we gotta go help Whitey and his group? Sounds like it’s going well.”

“Want me to go check? And you go after the baron?”

“Yeah. Take Doc and the women.”

“Sure.”

“I’ll come,” said Krysty.

Ryan shook his head. “Way I look at this, it’s kind of personal. It’s like a debt.”

“You don’t owe anything to anybody, Ryan,” said Doc Tanner. “Except myself. Now let’s move.”

 

THE BLAZE HAD BECOME a full-fledged firestorm. A gusting wind tugged and howled about the inferno that had once been the Best Western Snowy Egret. Jak’s men were already mopping up, trailing and killing any of the bewildered and demoralized sec men they could find.

Some had managed to escape the withering fire of the assault party and headed blindly toward the depths of the swamps. As Ryan and his group emerged from the smoke at the rear of the motel, Jak saw them and came dancing over. Hearing their news, he told them of his own total success.

“Not total if some of the sec guards have ‘scaped free,” said J.B.

“The Cajuns don’t love ‘em. With Tourment gone, they’ll kill ‘em all. Cajuns or the swampies.”

“I’m going after the baron. Seems he’s gone ‘cross the lagoon in a canoe.” Ryan pointed to the left of the raging fire.

“I’m coming,” said Jak.

“No. He’s mine.”

The boy pointed behind them, to the mutilated corpse of his father, still hanging from the flagpole. “Not after that. Mine.”

“Time’s wasting,” J.B. said.

Ryan looked into the boy’s crimson eyes, seeing the flames reflected in them; the mane of white hair, torn free from its binding, swayed in the strong wind. Ryan was a good judge of men, and he saw that he would have to kill the fourteen-year-old if he wanted to stop him from going after Tourment.

“First one there chills him Whitey,” he said, turning and leading the lad toward the lagoon and the mysterious island.

 

Chapter Twenty-Four

« ^ »

SO FEROCIOUS WAS the blaze, so all-consuming, that within twenty minutes of the swampwag crashing into the front of the motel, virtually the entire building had been devoured, leaving only columns of twisted metal and stone and a windblown mound of glowing ashes.

Jak Lauren overtook the older man, leaping easily over the corpses of the sec men strewn along their way, turning and grinning at Ryan, his teeth bared in animal pleasure. The big .357 was in his right hand. Through the parking lot they ran, blinking as the wind blew a golden cascade of sparks all around them.

“There,” shouted Whitey. “No sign.”

The concrete dock, scattered with cinders, was deserted. Near the metal boats they saw the body of a sec man sprawled near the edge of the water, his neck snapped with a single crushing blow. Jak Lauren gestured at it. “Baron’s work. Least we know we’re on the trail of giant bastard.”

The moon still sailed above the light clouds, its silvery glow strong enough to cast blurred shadows all around. The surface of the muddy lagoon glittered and danced with a million points of white, like a watery galaxy of stars. On the far side, Ryan could make out land, and a peculiar building standing on it.

“What’s that?”

“Tourment’s voodoo temple. Sacrifices of hornless goats. Girls slaughtered. Children defiled. The dead made to live.”

“And the living made to die,” completed Ryan.

There was no sign of life on the island opposite. Ryan squatted down, shading his eye against the moonlight, trying to make out what was happening. He saw some low shrubs and stunted live oak trees: enough cover to hide a platoon.

“What’s on the other side?” he asked.

“Swamp comes on far edge. Way through in good light. Trails like gut-slit moccasin snake. Baron never find in this dark. Wait up, then try. Don’t forget his legs real fucking weak. Like crutches. Die in thick mud. We take care, and we got him.”

The lad slipped to the edge of the dock, looked searchingly over the water, then untied one of the boats and climbed in. Ryan went to join him, but Jak was too quick.

“Take your turn, Ryan. He’s mine. See you later,” And he was gone, the paddle slicing in and out of the ooze, the canoe darting, arrow-straight, toward the far bank.

“Fireblast!” hissed Ryan, taking the next boat along, easing himself into it cautiously. He was aware of how low in the water he was now set and recalled that there were giant mutie alligators infesting the swamp.

By the time he mastered the flimsy craft, rotating it twice before attaining the right direction, Jak Lauren has already grounded his canoe and hopped out on the slippery shore. He waved triumphantly at Ryan before disappearing into the brush, his white hair blazing like a beacon.

Halfway across the lagoon, Ryan’s paddle grated against something hard and serrated. Something that moved away with a sullen reluctance. It felt a little like a massive submerged log, but every nerve in Ryan’s body told him that it wasn’t.

He worked harder, bending all his muscles into each thrusting stroke, feeling the boat shoot forward faster, a gurgling wave breaking under the bow. His ears caught a strange sound behind him: a thin, hissing noise, like escaping steam. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the water parting and something chasing after him.

The instant the bow of the canoe slid into the pebbles and mud, he leaped from it. His blaster ready, he spun around to face what had been pursuing him. But the water was calm and still, with only the faintest suggestion of a ripple toward the deeper part of the swamp.

He was motionless for a moment, gathering his self-control about him like a protective cloak, checking his bearings. In the moonlight, he could barely make out the tracks of the albino through the mud. But he saw a rowboat a few yards farther along, toward the building. Examining it, he discovered some extraordinary marks in the mud. Someone had fallen, and fallen again, and dragged himself along by hand. There was one clear print, and Ryan stooped and placed his own hand in the seeping mark. The fingers were nearly four inches longer than his. “Fuck it,” he sighed. Tourment was going to be a difficult man to take if it came to close combat between them. The mud also showed the truth of the leg-supports. Great furrows vanished into the bushes where the land was less wet. Despite, or perhaps because of his enormous size, the baron wasn’t going to find it easy to move.

The fire was dying behind him as he set out to move inland. The temple was open, and it was obvious that nobody was hiding there. The island was apparently no more than a half mile in length, but he had no idea how wide it was. The undergrowth closed in around him.

He never heard the swampies.

One moment he was up and walking; the next he was rolling over on his hands and knees, the G-12 pulled from his grip, someone’s arm around his throat, another attacker hanging on his waist, kicking at his legs. There was the stench of gasoline and sweat as he grappled with the oily bodies.

Despite the shock of the sudden attack, Ryan was able to immediately retaliate. Heaving up, feeling the hold loosen on his waist, he snapped an elbow back as hard as he could, hearing a rib break, and a strangled gasp of pain. The arm was off his throat, and he was able to wriggle to his feet, drawing the panga, the best weapon for hand-to-hand combat.

There were three of them.

Two men and a woman. Muties, like the ones they’d seen on the day they arrived in Louisiana. All of them were around five feet tall, stumpy, squat and muscular. Dressed in torn pants and shirts, they had flapping sandals of hacked rubber on their feet. They stared at him blankly, the sockets of their eyes surrounded by odd scars. The woman held a small crossbow, and the men were armed with machetes shorter and narrower than Ryan’s own weapon.

They breathed noisily through open mouths, their arms hanging by their sides. Standing gazing at Ryan, they seemed to be waiting for him to make the first move. Suddenly the woman raised the bow, aiming it jerkily at Ryan’s belly.

The thought darted through his mind that this was a squalid and foolish way to die. Alone in the muddy darks, gut-shot with a wooden arrow. He tensed, ready for a desperate dive at her, his senses telling him it would be too late and too slow.

The bow twanged, and the shaft hissed through the air several yards over his head. Ryan stared as the woman staggered sideways, her nailless fingers plucking at the hilt of the slim dagger that sprouted from her neck like a bizarre pendant.

“Take the others, stupe!” hissed Jak Lauren, darting from the undergrowth, a knife in each hand.

The fountain of blood from the woman’s severed neck pattered around them; she fell to her knees, then rolled heavily on her back. Her legs spread, and Ryan noticed with revulsion that a small residual penis dangled from her naked belly.

An instant later one of the swampies was on top of him, its dank, noxious breath hot in his face. The machete hissed toward him, and he wriggled around, blocking the blow with his forearm. He stamped on the creature’s foot, making it mew like a kitten, breaking away from him.

“Cut its throat!” called Jak Lauren, who was fencing around the other mutie, his knife glinting in the moonlight.

The noise might warn Baron Tourment that they were close. So it was important that they dispose of this threat swiftly.

The swampie came shuffling in, waving its steel blade, grunting with the effort of each feinting blow. Ryan backed off, considering drawing the SIG-Sauer P-226 9 mm blaster. But the ground underfoot was slippery. One mistake, and he would be down and done for.

He darted in and back, stooping as though he’d slipped, one hand going down into the slimy mud. As he straightened, he saw the mutie looming over him, blank eyes like a shark’s. Ryan threw a handful of dirt straight into those eyes. The swampie staggered away, grunting in anger.

The eighteen-inch blade of Ryan’s panga flitted out and back and out again. Slick with blood. He cut the swampie across the lower forearm, and again across the top of the right thigh. Both had been deep, slashing blows that opened up the flesh into scarlet lips. The creature’s machete dropped, and it hopped back, squeaking feebly.

Ryan waited, remembering how hard it had been to kill the living-dead muties before. Dodging around his opponent, Jak Lauren had been grabbed around the chest. But the mutie howled in pain, releasing him, looking in bewilderment at its stubby fingers, which streamed with blood from a dozen cuts; the tiny slivers of razor-steel sewn into the albino’s clothing again proved their worth.

The other swampie was moving in on Ryan again, stooping to reach for the fallen blade, fumbling in the dark mud. It was an opportunity that couldn’t be missed. Ryan stepped once forward and once to the side, blade up, muscles poised for the downward hack. Steel whispered in the moonlight, then came a solid thunk and grating sound. The panga eventually sliced clean through the mutie’s scrawny neck, decapitating, it, the head rolling into the mud, the body slithering at Ryan’s feet, jerking and twitching.

Wiping blood from his face, Ryan turned to see if the boy needed aid. But there was no need for worry.

Jak Lauren was amazingly, dazzlingly fast in hand-to-hand combat. Maybe the best Ryan Cawdor had ever seen. He switched the knife from side to side quicker than the eye could follow. The mutie lumbered after him, making great ineffectual swings with its machete that would have sliced the lad in half if they’d landed. Jak pulled away, then sprinting in toward the swampie, took off with a great spring and actually leaped clear over the man. Turning a somersault in the air, he still had the control to slash at the creature’s face. The thin knife cut across the eyes, blinding the mutie with streaking blood.

“Off with head, Ryan,” called Jak, landing in an easy forward roll, coming up in a fighter’s crouch.

Dodging the mutie’s helpless lunge at him, Ryan took a half step to one side and hacked with the panga at the neck. The living-dead mutie had a heavy build, and the blow failed to totally behead it. But the steel severed the spinal column and most of the flesh and muscle. The body fell, spouting blood that seemed black by the light of the moon. The round brutish head remained attached to the shoulders by a stringy thread of gristle and sinew, rolling behind it like an afterthought as the body pitched and jerked.

Ryan stooped to cleanse the blade of his panga in the stubby grass. At his shoulder, Jak Lauren was grinning. “Easy as shooting sec men,” he said.

“Tourment’ll have heard the fight.”

“Let him. Can’t get off here. With his crooked legs, he can’t run or swim. I’ll take him.”

“Or me,” said Ryan, sheathing the panga, then he picked up his G-12, wiping it clean of mud.

“Yeah. You or me, Ryan.” Like a swamp wraith, the boy was off and running, visible mainly by the glimmer of his stark white hair.

 

THE BARON nearly managed to fool them. Despite his bulk and his clumsiness, he succeeded in lying quiet in the undergrowth until they passed. Then he made a lumbering charge for the boats before they could turn and follow. But Ryan heard him and yelled out a warning to Jak Lauren.

“Boats, Whitey!”

As Ryan sprinted back along the twisting trail, his boots kicking up spray around him, he glimpsed a monstrously tall man, striding as if he wore stilts, near the narrow strip of beach where the canoes waited, A triple burst from the G-12, fired on the run, didn’t come within ten paces of Tourment, but it was enough to make him stumble and dive sideways for cover behind a low mud bank. Ryan, in turn, leaped off the path, finishing up flat against the trunk of a fallen tree, slippery with moss and cold to the touch.

A couple of shots smashed into the wood, only inches from his head, and he flattened down. He tried to identify the flat barking of the blaster. If J.B. had been there he probably would have guessed not only the model of the gun, but even figured out the year of manufacture; all Ryan could tell was that it was a big handgun. He strained his ears and caught the giveaway triple click of a hammer being cocked. That meant a revolver, which probably meant six rounds, but Ryan wasn’t about to stake his life on that.

There was a blur of movement, topped with a streak, of white, and Jak Lauren dived to the ground behind another toppled tree a few yards away.

“Yonder,” called Ryan, waving the barrel of his handgun,

Two more shots were snapped off, both coming close. Jak fired once with his Magnum, its six-inch barrel gleaming in the moonlight.

“We got him,” he yelled. “Got him cold as dead gator meat.”

“Want to talk, snow wolf?” came the voice, calm and measured. Utterly unhurried.

“Want to kill, bastard,” replied Jak Lauren.

“Want to talk, one-eye?”

“Want to kill you, Baron,” replied Ryan Cawdor, His words were rewarded with three spaced bullets, the last shot showering him with splinters of chipped wood. Glancing around the side, he was able to see the gun being withdrawn, and recognized it as a Ruger GP-110. Six shot.

“Fired seven. Means two guns. Would have heard him reload,” he called to Jak Lauren. “Five rounds left,” he said, raising his voice so it would carry to their adversary. “Five left, Baron. Another few minutes there’ll be men coming over. It’s done.”

“I can find plenty of jack. More cards than either of you would see in a lifetime.”

“Rather piss in your face,” shouted Jak, snapping off a couple of rounds from the Magnum, the bullets kicking up a spray of earth near the top of the rise.

“One-eye?”

“Yeah, Baron?”

“I’ll give you everything.”

Ryan sniffed audibly. “Been offered a lot of things in my life, Baron. Never everything. What would I do with everything?”

“That’s our last word? What’s your name?”

“Ryan Cawdor. Yeah, it’s my last word. Come out or stay there. It’s all one. Quick or slow, Baron. Easy or hard.”

The reply was two bullets in his direction, and two at the tree that sheltered Jak Lauren. That left him only one round, unless he had another hidden blaster or was going to reload.

“That’s it. One left for myself. Would have liked to take you scum with me. Au revoir, mes amis.” This was followed by a single muffled shot.

“Goodbye, Baron,” said Ryan, motioning for Jak to remain where he was. “Could be a trick. Likely is.”

But it wasn’t.

They were both startled by an animal howl of searing agony. The huge figure of the Baron appeared, crashing over the top of the rise, both hands clutching his face, stumbling on the creaking metal and leather frames, falling to his hands and knees, rolling and rising again. He howled in dreadful pain.

“Watch him, Ryan,” warned Jak Lauren.

Through the dim light, Ryan could see that this wasn’t a ruse. Tourment must have put the muzzle of the Ruger into his mouth, intending to pull the trigger and blow away his brains. Removing the possibility of an execution at the hands of the snow wolf and his followers. But, as is surprisingly common, he’d screwed it up. The gun hadn’t been angled correctly and the abrupt kick as he pulled the trigger had thrown off the aim.

As he fell again, hard, one of the leg-supports snapped in half, making it impossible for him to rise. Ryan could see the damage more clearly. It looked like the heavy caliber bullet had angled up and sideways, smashing the upper jaw, boring through the top of his mouth, exiting through the cheekbone, just below the right eye.

It had torn the eye itself from the socket, leaving it hanging on his cheek, like a pendulous ornament.

Ryan stood up, leveling the G-12, ready to chill the wounded man.

“Pull that trigger, and I’ll ice you, Ryan,” came the cold voice of Jak Lauren, also standing, his big Magnum looking absurdly large in his small fist. But it was very steady.

“What do you want, Whitey?”

“Couple things.” He walked to stand by the thrashing man, and leveling the pistol, carefully shot Tourment four times. Once through each elbow and the center of each knee. The giant black man rolled helplessly, moaning in pain, unable to move.

His face like stone, Jak unbuttoned the front of his trousers. Keeping his threat, he urinated in the baron’s upturned face, the yellow liquid splashing in the man’s eyes and mouth, making him gag and choke.

“That’s for my father. The bullets are for all my friends. But this last is for me,” said the boy, bolstering the pistol and unwinding a length of thin cord from around his waist and beckoning for Ryan to help him.

Ryan Cawdor had always seen the justice of making the punishment fit the crime. For a man as blackly evil as Baron Tourment, that wasn’t a simple matter. But Jak’s plan was simple and would fit the bill.

 

IT WASN’T EASY to manhandle the flopping, screaming giant down to the water, and roll him into the soft warm mud of the shallows while he tried to scream through his broken jaw and smashed mouth. Blood kept choking him, and he coughed and moaned.

The rope was tied around his waist, the other end knotted to the stern of one of the canoes. Both Jak and Ryan got into it, pushing off and paddling as hard as they could. The cord tightened, and for a few moments they were paddling and getting nowhere. Then the Baron was sucked free of the slime, rolling and flailing in their wake.

Jak looked back, nodding in satisfaction. Stopping for a moment, he slapped at the brown water with the flat of the wooden paddle.

“What’s that for?” asked Ryan.

“You see,” replied the boy.

Glancing over his shoulder, Ryan saw a huge log, motionless on the far shore, suddenly jerk into clumsy, waddling life and slither into the water and disappear. A V-shaped ripple on the surface of the swamp, arrowing toward them, indicated that the beast was approaching.

Ryan bent to his paddling, but Jak Lauren had stopped once more, gazing back at the floundering figure of the baron with an expression of gentle content on his narrow, scarred features.

In turn, Ryan stopped. Ahead of them the last portion of the roof of the Best Western Snowy Egret collapsed in a great shower of sparks, soaring skyward. For a moment, smoke billowed across the lagoon, making it difficult to, make out what was happening. Then it cleared.

The cayman was swimming alongside the towed body. It reared out of the water for a moment, its eyes gazing into the ruined face of its master as though it couldn’t believe what it saw. Then the jaws opened, gaping, row on row of teeth.

And closed.

 

RYAN WOULD NEVER FORGET that sickening crunch of bone and meat being devoured, stripped from a living body.

By the time they had paddled back to the dock where the others waited for them, the end of the rope was just a bloodied knot. Nothing else remained.

 

Chapter Twenty-Five

« ^

NO, WHITEY.”

“Come on, Ryan.”

“No. Your fucking place is here. They’re your people. We helped you beat the baron. Now it’s up to you.”

“I’m coming.”

“No, you’re not. What about the windmills? The clearing and draining of the land? The planting of crops and the founding of a settled ville for you and your folks?”

Jak Lauren was still immovable. Three days had passed since the battle at the motel. The dead were buried, the last of the sec men hunted down and slaughtered. The Cajuns had been to West Lowellton, learned that the rumors were true. That the bad days were truly over and peace had come to the Atchafalaya Swamp.

Now, with Ryan and his party all fed and their various minor cuts and wounds tended, it was time for them to be moving on. But Jak Lauren had insisted on talking privately with them on an overgrown patch behind the Adelphi Cinema.

Mainly, he and Ryan did the talking.

The boy’s hair, recently washed, had dried into a great torrent of purest white that foamed about his narrow shoulders. His red eyes were blazing with the intensity of his feelings.

“Pa set this up so’s if we ever won fighting, then there’s all skills here, I told you that. My only skill’s killing. No need for that here. Not now. Come with you.”

The others sat in a circle in the grass, looking at the skinny young boy. Doc’s arm was around Lori; her head was on his shoulder. J.B. was playing with his fedora, turning it around and around in his lap, avoiding Ryan’s eye, Finn was picking his teeth after three helpings of gator stew, Krysty sat quietly beside Ryan.

“But they need you, Whitey.”

“No, I… I need you, Ryan.”

There was no doubt that the kid was a great fighter. Rough around the edges, but he would be a useful addition to them. Seven had been a good number. After Henn’s death, there was a sort of vacancy.

“I don’t know.”

Jak shook his head, his face vanishing beneath the white froth of his hair. “My work’s done, Ryan. My people will stay here forever now. Now the shadow’s been lifted. Like a strong wind, you helped rid the land of vermin.”

“Yeah,” said Ryan, still doubtful of taking a child of fourteen into their select group.

“If’n you don’t, then you might see it hard to find that gateway you spoke of.”

“That a threat, Whitey?” asked J.B.

“More promise,” replied the kid. Doc Tanner began to laugh at Jak’s nerve. Lori joined him, then Krysty and Finn. Finally J.B. glanced at Ryan, and the two old friends also began to laugh.

So it was decided.

 

THE FAREWELLS WERE BRIEF.

Jak led them away, through the suburbs of West Lowellton, toward the edges of the swamps. The sun was shining and the neat rows of white houses looked as though their inhabitants had just slipped down to the shopping mall and would be back at any minute.

Guided by the albino, they reached the low redoubt before the sun was setting, finding it as they had left it.

The walls of seamless pale stone were tinted a gentle pink by the sun’s lowering rays. Inside, it was clean and trim, and Ryan took over, leading them along the corridors. The air inside was hot and humid, and he could feel himself sweating.

“Easy as this to get in,” said Jak, his voice more subdued than usual. “Never guessed. Folks scared of it.”

They walked through the anteroom with its serried rows of flickering lights and chattering tapes. The door of the gateway stood open, as they had left it. On the way they collected the clothes and provisions that they had earlier abandoned, and Ryan again possessed his beloved long coat with the white fur trim.

The walls of the trans-mat chamber were dark blue smoked glass, armored and thick, with the now familiar pattern of raised metal disks on both the floor and ceiling.

“Going to be like being knocked out, Whitey,” said Ryan. “Sit down and close your eyes. When you wake, we’ll be somewhere else. Don’t know where. It’ll be fine.”

“Sure,” said the kid.

All of them sat down, their backs against the walls. Ryan waited a moment, his hand on the door. “Here we go,” he said, shutting it firmly.

He sat down and closed his eye, hearing the quiet voice of Jak Lauren, singing to himself.

Once I was lost, but now I’m found. Was blind, but now I see.

Ryan’s head began to swim as the trans-mat jump began, and the words of the old, old hymn faded from him.

His last conscious thought before the dark pool engulfed him was a hope that this time they’d find someplace that wasn’t so damned hot.

—«»—«»—«»—