Chapter Three

 

 

Jak Lauren was walking through the heart of a huge, sprawling ville. He didn't recognize it, though it reminded him a little of the outer suburbs of ruined Newyork. It was an endless tangle of rusting metal and rotted concrete, the streets littered by old cans and broken glass, so that every step crunched under the heels of his combat boots.

 

He was holding the sticky hand of his two-year-old daughter, Jenny, and they were trying to find Jak's wife, Christina. The little girl had been toddling bravely at his side all day, but now she was starting to complain that she was becoming tired and hungry.

 

"Want eat, Daddy"

 

"When we find Mom," Jak replied, tugging a little harder at the child, almost pulling her off her feet, making her whine unhappily. He stopped and knelt by her, wiping her face with a spotless linen kerchief embroidered with a flying dragon in vermilion silk.

 

"Nearly fell," she protested.

 

"Sorry, honey. Daddy's tired and hungry, as well."

 

He thought they'd been walking for days, though Jak couldn't recall when they'd actually begun their trek. Nor could he remember precisely where he and Christina were supposed to meet. Where or when.

 

It was passing strange that there was nobody around in the ville.

 

He was sure that earlier they'd been pushing their way through bustling streets, going against a faceless, silent throng, making them battle for every yard, like salmon fighting up a succession of foaming torrents.

 

It seemed as if he had almost lost his grip on Jenny's tiny fingers and nearly lost her, turning to see the little figure being washed away amid the human breakers.

 

But he still had her.

 

From the poor light that spilled between the shattered, grounded hulks of skyscrapers, Jak guessed that it had to be late afternoon or early evening.

 

Jenny stopped and reached up to her father, and he stooped and plucked her from the street, cradling her safely in his strong, lean arms. Somewhere in the vast stillness, Jak was aware of the distant rumbling of a powerful war-wag engine.

 

"Where's Mommy?"

 

"Around, Jenny. Don't worry. Find her."

 

It had been raining and the chill streets were dark and gleaming, with coiling snakes of steam billowing up from deep below the city.

 

A rat appeared from the open doorway of an antique deli, as big as a terrier, its eyes glittering like gold as its head turned slowly to consider the human invaders into its territory. Jak's hand dropped to the butt of his Python, but the holster was empty.

 

"Fuck off," he grated.

 

The rodent seemed to hesitate, its narrow mouth opening, showing threads of bloody mucus dribbling from the needle-sharp teeth.

 

Reluctantly it turned away from Jak and the little girl, padding across the street into the shadows that spilled from a ruined office tower.

 

"Nasty," Jenny whispered.

 

"Right," Jak agreed.

 

The noise of the engine was roaring closer.

 

Riding above it, the teenager heard the unmistakable sound of someone walking along a side road, someone who had a severe limp, the steps uneven.

 

"Christina?" he said, puzzled at how flat and dead his voice sounded, with not a single echo from the concrete pinnacles that surrounded them.

 

"Mommy?" the little girl queried.

 

"Could be her. Must be her. Will be her. Will be good. Will be very good."

 

"There's Mommy!" Jenny's,whoop of delight took him by surprise, and the little girt wriggled free from his hands, stumbling as she landed, then toddled off at a surprising speed toward the shape of a woman that had appeared on the corner of two streets.

 

The silhouette was limping toward them, waving a hand, encouraging the child toward her, beckoning her across the wide avenue.

 

The roar of the war-wag engine was louder.

 

Much louder.

 

It raced in a low gear at high speed, screeching like a midnight voodoo demon in a Louisiana graveyard.

 

Jak opened his pale mouth to shout a warning to both wife and child, but the words became trapped in translucent bubbles that caught the sound and muted it, floating away, high into the evening air, catching the last bright rays of the setting sun, far off among the stone canyons of the ville.

 

The wag turned a corner, huge in camouflage browns and greens, sparks trailing from its rumbling exhaust, wheels skidding on the damp tarmac.

 

The woman stopped, reaching out for the toddler.

 

Jenny's mouth was open in delight, her eyes wide and sparkling, her little legs pumping.

 

Jak stood frozen to the spot, his fingernails digging bloody furrows in his white palms, trying to scream.

 

The impact was surprisingly small for the extinction of a human life. There was a dull thud, and the child hurled through the air, arms and legs limp, her head hanging loose on her neck, hair flying. A veil of blood fountained from her open mouth.

 

The body landed a good twenty yards in front of the powerful war wag, which made no visible effort to stop. It clattered on, its huge wheels crushing the helpless little body, pulping it into the pavement.

 

Jak closed his ruby eyes, great tears coursing down his ivory cheeks.

 

The wag carried on without even attempting to deviate or brake, vanishing around the next corner and rumbling off into the distance, the smell of its exhaust overlaying the bitter tang of fresh-spilled blood.

 

The woman hadn't moved, staring at the crumpled corpse, her face in shadow.

 

Lifting her head, she revealed the smooth complexion and almond eyes of the little geisha, Issie, her rosebud mouth pursed in distress. "So sorry," she lisped. "To save the child would have been difficult."

 

Jak couldn't stop crying.

 

 

 

MILDRED LAY ON A TABLE of polished glass, naked, in a room of glittering chrome walls and ceiling and floor.

 

Her breath was slow and steady, pluming out into the freezing air around her. Her body was covered in a sheen of ice crystals, fragile and delicate.

 

A range of gleaming surgical instruments hung limply from the ceiling, the concealed lighting bouncing off the steel. There were various probes, drills, strange whirling blades and spring-loaded devices that looked as if they were designed to stretch the intimate orifices of the body.

 

Mildred couldn't move.

 

She wasn't dead.

 

Was she?

 

There wasn't a shred of feeling in any part of her body, no sensation of life.

 

But she could see her own breath.

 

There was a faint tinkling sound, and some of the remote-controlled equipment above her began to move in a way that seemed sinister and threatening to her.

 

A long probe, the size and shape of a pencil, lowered itself over her face, hovering as if it were trying to select a target, going toward her right eye.

 

Mildred struggled to close her eyes, to protect them from the steel, but nothing happened.

 

The probe delicately tapped on the surface of the eye, and she heard a faint clicking sound like metal on glass. The knowledge that the surface of her eye was frozen solid was somehow more terrifying than anything else, and she wanted to vomit.

 

But that was closed off from her, as well.

 

Another of the surgical devices was moving toward her, aiming itself at the junction of her spread thighs.

 

There was a whirring noise, and it began to revolve very quickly, the sharp teeth on its end spinning with a vibration like a tiny chain saw.

 

As Mildred felt the machine enter her, with a sudden warmth over her thighs, she fought to scream in revulsion and in protest at the gross invasion of her helpless body.

 

But there was no sound from her.

 

The blackness that swam up over her mind was a great mercy to her.

 

 

 

J.B. STROLLED through a dense forest of pine trees, with a bright, dazzling sun that broke through like golden spears into the occasional clearing, filling the still air with the scent of balsam.

 

The path wound its way gently into a steep hollow, the close-packed trees making it hard to see more than a few yards ahead.

 

The air was oppressively warm, and he hadn't seen any wildlife. Nothing scurried across the trail. No bird soared in the gaps in between the upper branches.

 

As J.B. reached the bottom of the track, he found himself in a clearing, surrounded on all sides by a dense hedge of thorns. He pushed through the undergrowth, glancing behind him as the brush sprang back to close the opening, sealing him in.

 

At the center of the clearing was an irregular block of stone, roughly rectangular.

 

The Armorer pushed back his fedora, blinking in the dusty light. He took off his glasses to polish them on his sleeve, then peered at the boulder, realizing that it was some kind of altar.

 

It had a dark, ancient, ominous stain crusted on one side, and there were deep incisions on all four sides, visible as shadows. J.B. knelt to look at them, vaguely conscious that anyone watching him might think he was performing some secret act of worship to this god unknown.

 

There seemed to be some kind of writing hewn into the granite. The Armorer couldn't read it, but he felt a vague unease, a feeling that his hands had suddenly become contaminated and sticky. He wiped them on the dry grass around the altar.

 

He blinked at the carvings, feeling that there was something wrong about them. They seemed to contain blasphemous suggestions of entities beyond time and space. The meaning was barely concealed from him by a ragged veil. If it was removed, then J.B. might understand all things.

 

And he might well go mad.

 

He leaned his back against the sun-warmed stone and slithered into a deep sleep.

 

And as he slept, they came gibbering for him.

 

He fought to wake himself from the living nightmare, but all in vain, trapped forever in the heart of a pitiless and relentless darkness.

 

 

 

SUSPENDED BETWEEN the two malfunctioning gateways, Krysty dreamed of a great fire that dropped from the sky and scorched the face of the earth.

 

Up in Harmony, her old home, she was a young girl. Barely past puberty, with tender, budding breasts, she was playing softball with friends on a high, flat expanse of cropped turf above the buildings of the ville. She was out in left field, shading her eyes against the sun, near the edge of the playing area, marked by a steep bank that rolled down into a ditch that held a clean, fast-flowing stream of pure water.

 

Patti van Onselen was at bat and had just cracked an enormous hit over Krysty's head, the ball rolling down the incline and splashing into the water.

 

"Go get it!" called an older girl, sitting in the shade of some white-thorn bushes.

 

Krysty started after it, hearing the distant sound of an airplane way, way overhead. Part of her mind thought that it was strange, as there were no longer any planes in Deathlands. But part of her accepted it as perfectly normal.

 

The noise of the chattering stream was loud in her ears as she slithered over the edge, making her way down on her denimed rear toward the white ball that was bobbing along fifteen or twenty yards away.

 

There was a faint whistling from somewhere above her, but Krysty ignored it, focusing her attention on the softball, shutting out the yells and shrieks of her friends on the field behind her.

 

She darted along in the shadow of the steep bank, finally seeing the ball trapped in a small pool between shallows. Krysty splashed out to reach for it, gasping at the icy bite of the meltwater.

 

Her fingers had just touched the ball when the world seemed to explode.

 

There was a flash of light, so bright that it blinded Krysty, making her drop the ball as she pressed her fingers to her eyes, crouching by the stream.

 

While she was still there, paralyzed by shock, there was a great wave of noise and heat, like the horsemen of the apocalypse racing close overhead, with a blast of fire and a rumble like a thousand peals of thunder all rolled into one.

 

Krysty cried out, falling to her knees, smelling her hair scorching in the inferno that roiled above her.

 

Several long seconds drifted by, and the noise and the rushing, fiery wind all passed over. She came to her senses enough to realize that the steepness of the bank above had protected her from what had happened.

 

It took several long minutes before she recovered enough to stand on shaky legs and crawl up the slope toward the softball field.

 

The grass at the top was gone, replaced by a dark, powdery ash, and the air was filled with an overwhelming stench of scorching, like the time in the fall when the farmers burned off the stubble from their fields.

 

Very slowly Krysty pushed her face over the brink of the slope until she could see all around her.

 

Until she could see that there was nothing all around her.

 

Everything had gone.

 

She gazed out at an unrelievedly gray landscape, like a far-off planet. There was no color except gray, shades of gray, close to black in places.

 

Nobody.

 

Except that the gray of the burned grass held strange blacker silhouettes, human shapes, distorted, hands high, running, falling figures. Nothing remained of her friends except those smudges on the smoking ground.

 

Krysty cried out once and collapsed in a dead, mindless faint.

 

 

 

DOC HAD PLUNGED directly into a black pit that held a lake of freezing black water.

 

He felt too tired to struggle and submitted to the icy embrace, letting himself sink.

 

 

 

RYAN SAT BY A GRAY SEA, where sullen breakers washed slowly over rounded boulders. Farther along the bleak shore he could see two saddled horses standing in the edge of the water, side by side.

 

He looked around the other way, and wasn't surprised to see a tall, slender figure in a long black cloak, the hood pulled up over the shadowed face.

 

"You come for me?"

 

"I come for everyone, Ryan Cawdor."

 

"I didn't expect you yet."

 

"It is rare that anyone expects my arrival. They always look for me on the morrow."

 

"Somewhere else?"

 

"Perhaps in Somarra."

 

The figure moved toward him, seeming to float over the restless shingle, the cloak widening until it filled half of the horizon.

 

"I thought I could play you at chess," Ryan said, gesturing toward the board that stood open on a large flat stone in front of him.

 

A spark of interest lit the deep-set eyes beneath the hood. "How did you know I played chess?"

 

"Seen the movie."

 

"Ah, yes. The weary knight. That was so very long ago, Ryan Cawdor."

 

The one-eyed man arranged the pieces on the board, taking off a pair of pawns, concealing them behind his back, then offering them to the cloaked figure, who tapped the left hand and smiled at Ryan.

 

"Black. Appropriate, is it not?"

 

They began to play, accompanied by the ceaseless whispering of the waves on the beach.

 

"This is the place where ignorant armies clash by night," Death commented.

 

Ryan stared at the board, realizing with a shock of horror that he didn't know how to play the game. The pieces weren't familiar to him. Instead of knights, bishops, pawns and queens, there were dragons, monks and razors.

 

When he looked up from the board, the dark figure had gone. So had the beach.

 

Now he was standing in a ruined ville, with fireworks exploding in the distance in showers of cascading reds, yellows and blues. Ryan walked through a gaping doorway, finding himself in an open place, filled with lines of washing, endless rows of white sheets, making it impossible to see more than a few paces.

 

He could hear someone sobbing, panting, ragged breaths that flowed with pain.

 

"Hey, there," Ryan called softly, sensing that he was in a place of danger.

 

A hand came around the edge of one of the sheets, close by him, pressing it against the body of whoever was hiding behind it. Immediately there was a spreading patch of dark blood, black against the starched white of the sheet.

 

A face, young, with curly hair, wearing heavily tinted glasses, peered at Ryan.

 

"Can I help you? Looks like you stopped one there."

 

The handsome youth didn't answer, but staggered away from Ryan, through another gate on the far side of the area. He stumbled and fell into what looked to Ryan like the biggest garbage heap in the world.

 

The youth held both hands clasped to his stomach, where Ryan could see a hideous gash had opened him up. Loops of intestines, gray and yellow, streaked with pink, were tumbling from the wound, trailing in the fly-covered filth.

 

It was a most dreadful way to die.

 

Ryan had closed his eye for a moment, not wanting to watch the agonized death throes.

 

As he opened it again, the world had changed.

 

The garbage heap had vanished.

 

Now he was riding alone in the back of a filthy cart, his hands tied tightly behind his back, wearing some triple-weird old-time clothes with a brocade frock coat and stained lace at his throat and cuffs.

 

A spavined nag pulled the cart over uneven cobbles, through a jeering crowd that cursed and spit at him. They heaved rotting vegetables at him, calling him an aristo and screaming that he would soon be kissing Madame.

 

Most of the scruffy men and women wore ragged clothes, and all sported ribbons or caps of red, white and blue. Ryan couldn't understand where he was. Or when he was. The lath-and-plaster houses that lined the narrow street were packed close together, with mullioned windows, half-timbered fronts and thatched roofs. Beneath the iron-bound wheels of the cart bubbled a noisesome open sewer.

 

The stench of the foul air was almost too much for Ryan, and he gagged, trying to breathe through his mouth to minimize the smell.

 

Now he could hear a different noise above the bedlam of the hostile mob. There was a pattern to it, repeated again and again, louder as the car drew nearer to the center of the action.

 

It was a drum roll, then a voice calling out what sounded like a name. A howl of derision rose from the crowd, then came the strangest noise of alla high whistling like a sword slicing through the air, then a dull thump, like a huge butcher's cleaver striking squarely at a carcass.

 

Another loud cheer erupted, then the whole thing was repeated over and over.

 

The mob grew thicker and noisier as the cart pressed on, the man leading the horse having to strike out with a short whip to keep them back. The flavor of a lynching lay heavy in the bright sunlight.

 

Ryan tested the cords, but they'd been tied by someone who knew his business. They had been pulled so tight that he could feel blood trickling from around his fingernails.

 

The street turned a sharp dogleg corner, and Ryan could see what was waiting for him.

 

Suddenly he was out of the cart, being pushed up a short flight of steep stairs, standing on a wooden platform that was awash with blood and urine. Below it was a pile of straw sodden with more dark blood.

 

An old woman had been sitting on the steps, her hair and clothes splattered with crimson, calmly knitting. "May ye rot in Hell, citizen aristo," she hissed at him.

 

There was the rattle of the drum, and the name of a marquis was called out. The great steel blade was hauled to the top of the guillotine by a team of four men, its angled edge dripping scarlet.

 

The press of people on the platform prevented Ryan from seeing what was happening, but he saw the blade drop and heard the thunk of the impact and the cheer from the huge, swaying crowd at the gout of blood that sprayed into the sunshine.

 

"You're next, citizen," muttered an old man in a stained frock coat and cracked knee boots, pushing at him with an ebony stick with a silver lion's-head hilt. "All over soon. By the Three Kennedys, it will."

 

Ryan recognized the voice and tried to turn, but he was gripped firmly by the elbows and marched to the foot of the guillotine.

 

His feet slipped in the blood, and he nearly fell.

 

There was a long, broad plank, with a semicircular notch roughly cut in one end, the whole thing soaked in blood. It was tilted toward him for ease of handling, and he felt himself lifted bodily and slid along, the sticky liquid cold and clammy against his skin. Another piece of wood was clamped over the back of his head, holding him still.

 

"For treason against the body and heart of France and for dealings counter to the righteous ideal of the revolution, sentence of death is hereby pronounced against the person of the duke of Glamis, marquis of Cawdor."

 

"Who should have been king hereafter," whispered the old man with the ebony cane.

 

The drum was beating, very fast and high, like a staccato heartbeat.

 

The cheering that had greeted the announcement of Ryan's name was hushed, dying away into a great, sighing stillness that filled the square of the town.

 

The rope creaked as the ponderous blade was hauled to the top of the execution machine.

 

"This is a cruel and unnatural punishment under the constitution," Ryan said, but a cloth gag had been thrust into his mouth and he nearly choked on his own words. All of his senses were swamped with the sensation of blood, soaking into his clothes, reeking in the warm air.

 

If Krysty and the others were going to rush to his rescue, then they were cutting it close.

 

"Hangman, hangman, slacken the noose," Ryan whispered to himself.

 

There came a snapped command and the strange whistling noise that had puzzled him earlier, followed by that same sickening thud as the blade severed his head. His dimming eye took a close-up picture of bloodied straw into eternal darkness.