Kitabı oku: «End Day»

Prologue

Ryan Cawdor peered through the 2.5x telescopic sight of his Steyr Scout Tactical, index finger resting against the longblaster’s trigger guard. Behind the scope’s center post, through the heat shimmer rising off the desert floor, he tracked the five-wag convoy rattling over dirt the color of rust, down a string-straight track between clumps of dry sagebrush and scattered sentinels of saguaro.

At his side J. B. Dix said, “Got a shot on the nukin’ bucket of bolts?”

Ryan didn’t answer. The two wags in the lead, a camouflage-painted SUV and a three-quarter-ton, black-primered pickup, sporting a cabover-mounted machine blaster, raised billowing clouds of dust. If the patterns of the past held, Magus was lounging in the third wag—a big, steel-plate-armored Winnie. The half-human, half-machine monster liked to ride in style, with room to keep spare parts and unspeakable experiments close to hand. Although the drop-down, bulletproof metal shutters on the side windows were raised, a coating of orange dust obscured the view through the glass.

Even if he’d had a target, Ryan wouldn’t have fired. With the Winnie in motion and bouncing over rough terrain, the odds of scoring a hit, let alone a clean kill, were too long. And to open fire would have revealed the companions’ presence to an enemy force they had reckoned was at least thirty-five to their seven.

The issue was more than just superior numbers.

Steel Eyes’s enforcers, which looked like bipedal crosses between carnivorous dinosaurs and bulls, weren’t actually blasterproof but, thanks to a horny, knobby hide two inches thick and bone like reinforced concrete, the squat three-hundred-pounders came damn close to it; in fact, none of the companions had ever seen one downed by a bullet—or a dozen bullets. In a previous encounter, on Magus’s remote gladiator island, they had learned the only way to chill the enforcers was by fire. When the temperature of their copious sweat—a potent secretion that smelled like a combination of ammonia, ether and acetone—was raised to ignition point, they turned into living candles, or more accurately, living blowtorches.

The empty socket under Ryan’s eye patch itched, but he didn’t scratch it. With the sun baking his shoulders and back through his worn black T-shirt, he watched the convoy rumble across the plain, heading for the barren mountains in the eastern distance. When he found himself looking at the rear of the last wag in line, he pulled back from the notch between sandstone boulders, stood up, and slung the Steyr.

“What now, lover?” Krysty Wroth asked.

A layer of desert dust had dulled her usually radiant red prehensile hair; her clothes and high boots were coated with grime. Perspiration mixed with rusty dirt smeared her forehead. The other companions were likewise tinted orange. Doc, Jak, Mildred, Ricky and J.B. looked as if they had just risen from shallow desert graves.

Ryan knew there would be no graves for any of them if they lost the battle ahead; and the dying when it came would be triple hard. Gutted, disemboweled and torn limb from limb, their remains would be scattered across the hardpan, fought over by mutie coyotes, buzzards and pincer-jawed scagworms.

“We follow the convoy at a safe distance until the bastards stop to make camp,” he said. “Wait until they’re all settled in, nice and cozy, then we use frag grens to disable the wags, stun the enforcers and chill any sec men. Mop up the enforcers with the incendies.”

They’d found the cache of AN-M14 TH3 grens among the corpses of a band of coldheart scavengers after a disagreement turned into a gun battle in the hills of New Mex. The nine scavengers wanted to trade some of their predark treasures for a no-holds-barred, romantic overnight with Krysty and Mildred. When they wouldn’t take no for an answer, they took a crisp volley of lead instead. The incendie grens didn’t explode, but when ignited, they burned for thirty to forty-five seconds at 4,330 degrees Fahrenheit—twice the temperature needed to melt steel. The moment Ryan and the companions had laid eyes on the red canisters, they’d all had the same thought: they’d come in handy at some point, especially if they happened to cross paths with Magus and his nasty, sweating playmates again.

Fate had granted them that favor—thanks to the mile-a-minute prattle of a jolt-stoned gaudy-house slut.

“We don’t have enough gas and water left to follow the convoy for another day,” Ryan went on. “We have to make our move tonight. It’s been a hard and bloody road, but this is going to be Magus’s last sunset.”

“Justice finally delivered,” Doc Tanner intoned. “Without mercy or restraint, swords buried to the hilt.”

Even though Doc was the only one who carried a sword—a rapier, actually, which lay concealed inside his silver-handled, ebony walking stick—there were grim-faced nods of agreement all around. After so many years of wandering the hellscape together, the nineteenth-century time traveler’s archaic metaphors rolled off the companions like water off a duck’s back.

Gathering up their longblasters and backpacks, they remounted the dirt bikes they’d acquired from the mountainside ville some eight thousand feet above the desert plain. Krysty took a seat behind Ryan. J.B. and Mildred, and Doc and Ricky were riding double, too. Only Jak Lauren, the albino, was riding solo.

J.B. hawked and sent a gob of rust-colored spit flying over the handlebars and into the dirt. Then he thumbed his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose and screwed down his fedora. The Armorer was ready to roll.

So was Dr. Mildred Wyeth. Having settled in on the seat behind J.B., the African American freezie clapped a steadying hand on his shoulder, which raised a sizable puff of dust.

To Ryan it looked like orange smoke.

“Remember to stay clear of the road,” he said. “Spread out and keep the speed down. If they bother to look back, they’ll think we’re a dust devil. They won’t be able to hear our bike engines over their own racket. Jak, take point. Get as close as you can without showing your hand. When they stop to make camp, turn back at once and catch us up.”

“Yeah,” Jak said, kick-starting the dirt bike and revving the engine. His shoulder-length white hair was streaked with orange, as were his front teeth and dead-pale face. With his ruby-red eyes and the .357 Magnum Colt Python strapped on his hip, he looked like a nightmare clown.

Bristling with their own armament, kerchiefs pulled up over their noses and mouths, Ryan and the others followed Jak down the steep, rocky trail to the valley floor. Without another word the albino zoomed off after the convoy, white hair flying behind him as he jumped the ruts in the crude road.

Ryan waved for his companions to fan out, and they began to advance in a thin skirmish line on either side of the track. Krysty’s arms wrapped around his waist as he zigzagged around sagebrush and cactus, avoiding exposed rocks and navigating flash-flood gullies. Because he was moving so slowly over the soft, loose terrain, he had to keep planting his boot soles to make the bike stay upright. It was hard, sweaty work but necessary: for them to have the best chance of success, they had to catch this enemy by surprise.

As he plowed forward, fighting the drag of the sand, images of what he’d seen high on the mountainside kept cycling through his mind. Try as he might, he couldn’t make them stop.

In Deathlands, violent acts always had a familiar form and shape, like something copied over and over: deeds of murder and mayhem committed out of greed, hunger, lust, revenge and sheer stupidity. Though the details, the circumstances and victims differed from one instance to another, they were similar in scale and scope.

What had happened at the mountain ville was different.

If the place had ever had a name, there was no one left alive to reveal it. What had been done there made the hellscape’s standard inbred chillers, coldheart robbers and insane barons seem like dimmies playing in a very small sandbox.

This wasn’t like the legendary massacre at Virtue Lake, where it was said even the flies on the dog shit were dead. Despite the campfire tales that painted Trader and his cohorts, Ryan Cawdor included, as senseless, murdering monsters, Virtue Lake had no perpetrators, only victims; it was the result of an unfortunate coalescence of events. A bad hand of cards.

The luck of the draw had nothing to do with what had happened high on the mountain. Beyond excessive, as pointless as a cataclysmic act of nature, it bore the unmistakable signature of its creator. The companions had not only viewed this grandiose handiwork before, they had almost been made part of it more than once. There was just one such artist in all the hellscape—an artist who mimicked a wrathful, mindless god.

Magus.

Ryan coasted the bike down the side of a shallow gully, then powered over the soft sand of the wash, building speed to climb the opposite bank. Krysty’s arms tightened around his waist as the bike went momentarily airborne, crow-hopping over the lip.

The suffering of the innocent and the weak in Deathlands was a given, as were the angry forces of nature unleashed by the apocalypse more than a century before. Drought, pestilence, fire, earthquake, eruption, storm, flood, famine were things the companions were powerless in the face of. But the cyclone that was Magus, that cut a path of destruction and horror across the Deathlands, could be halted with bullet and blade, and for the sake of their own continued survival, had to be stopped.

They had fought Steel Eyes before, never losing but never completely winning, either. The monster always seemed to find a way to slip from their grasp at the last second, leaving a stalemate and the threat of doom still hanging over their heads. What they were about to do this night, they were doing for themselves. Avenging the slaughter of the helpless, and the misery left in its wake, was the icing on the cake.

Despite the kerchief covering his lower face, grit crunched between Ryan’s back molars. He would have spit it out, but he was already losing too much moisture. Sweat peeled down the sides of his face, down his spine and rib cage. The bike wasn’t moving fast enough to cool him down. Riding in slow motion, with the taste of mud in his mouth, time dragged on and the exertion was constant. The convoy’s dust cloud was too far away to see; besides, he had to focus on what was directly in front of him. Strain built up in his arms and lower back, even in his fingers, as they gripped the handlebars and feathered throttle and brakes.

Gradually, the eastern hills grew larger until they towered above. The chain of peaks was about four hundred feet high, with saddles between the rounded summits. They were glowing an even warmer shade of red as the sun began to set. When Ryan glanced down at the fuel gauge, the needle was bouncing on empty. If he was running on fumes, they were all running on fumes.

A dirt bike appeared out of the heat waves in the near distance, coming toward them at a leisurely pace, Ryan signaled for the others to stop and shut down their bikes at once. By the time the albino rode up, they had dismounted and were stretching out sore muscles.

“Well?” Ryan said as Jak dumped his bike onto the sand.

“Stopped base of hill, mile ahead. Circled wags, make camp.”

“We’ll hide the bikes here and go the rest of the way on foot,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to take control of the high ground above them. Me and Ricky will circle around behind the hill and come down over the crest. When we attack, we attack from all sides at once. Everyone has to be in position before we lose the light. We have to be able to see these bastards. We can’t have them coming at us out of the dark. If there’s no wind, belly crawl in, close enough to pitch the grens into the middle of the camp. If there’s any breeze, come at them from downwind so the enforcers don’t sniff us out.”

“If we’re that spread out, how will we know when to attack?” Mildred asked.

“You’ll be in position long before we will,” Ryan said. “Watch the hillside above the camp. I’ll blink my flash once. Wait a count of twenty so Ricky and I can close in from above, then let it nukin’ rip.”

Krysty stepped up to him, slipped her arms around his neck and pulled him down for a long, lingering kiss. “That’s not a goodbye,” she said as she drew back a little. “That’s a see-you-later, lover.”

He looked into her emerald eyes and saw concern in their depths. It was mirrored by her mutie hair, which had contracted into a mass of tight curls. For sure, it was the last night on earth for somebody—at this point it was a coin toss who or what that somebody was going to be, them or Magus.

“It’s never goodbye,” he told her, gently brushing her cheek with the tips of his fingers.

Waving for Ricky to follow, Ryan turned for the hills and didn’t look back. They set off at a brisk pace, beelining across the plain to the foot of the nearest saddle. With Ryan in the lead, they climbed the crumbling slope using scrub and boulders for handholds. As evening fell, the sweet scent of the sage seemed to grow stronger and stronger. The scattered saguaros cast long, skinny shadows across the slope, and the air temperature began to drop.

At the base of a giant cactus, a mutie jackrabbit with a hairless face as pink as a newborn baby stared at them, its body frozen like a statue. Its foot-and-a-half-long ears stood erect.

“Muy sabroso,” Ricky hissed through clenched teeth, drawing a slim throwing knife from his sleeve. Arm cocked back, eyes locked on his target, he held the blade by the tip.

The teenaged boy seemed to be growing bigger by the day, and he was always hungry, always thinking about his next meal. “Not now,” Ryan said in a low tone. “Jackrabbits scream. Focus. Tune out distractions.”

Once they had crossed over the saddle and began to traverse the shadowed far side of the mountains, he stopped worrying about noise giving away their approach. The view east under a cloudless sky was of another, even wider stretch of desert plain, which ended at the horizon in staggered rows of desolate, ruddy hills.

That they had ended up here—bodies sun-blasted, throats parched, with sand in their boots, on the verge of closing the book on Magus—was the result of a singular chain of coincidence. It had started in the relatively fertile valley on the other side of the eight-thousand-foot mountain. Steel Eyes’s handful of human sec men had slipped away from their camp for some recreation and joy juice in the nearby ville’s tiny gaudy house. They had gotten so drunk while waiting in line to be serviced by a lone slut, who was puffing away like the little engine that could, that they’d blathered on about their employer, the convoy and the direction they were all headed next. A day later, when the companions showed up at the gaudy house en route to points north, the sec men were long gone and the slut so sky-high on jolt she was talking nonstop and tap-dancing in a puddle of her own piss.

After verifying her Magus story—the gaudy master had overheard it, too—the companions traded an assortment of extra gear, including one fully functional, single-shot 12 gauge with a broken buttstock, for six skinny swaybacked horses. They picked up the convoy’s trail just outside the ville and followed it up a steep, winding, predark mountain road. The going was slow because they had to stop often to let the horses rest. They spent one sleepless night beside the disintegrating tarmac.

By Ryan’s reckoning, they were two full days behind Magus when they reached the edge of a broad meadow bordered by tall pines and a small stream. According to the gaudy master, Magus’s likely next landing spot was just the other side of it. Continuing on the ruined road would have led them directly to the ville but cost them the element of surprise. Ryan guided them a ways into the meadow, then stopped the single file of riders with a raised hand. He listened hard, but there was not so much as a bird tweet or a bug chirp.

From her perch behind him on the horse, Krysty pointed at the thick, waist-high grass to their right. She said softly in his ear, “Something there. It’s moving...”

Jak was already standing tall in his stirrups, eyes fixed in the same direction.

Ryan signaled for the albino to dismount and circle around behind, drew his panga from its sheath and quietly swung down from the horse. He had walked no more than twenty feet when he saw something bright red among the green. He thought he glimpsed a stout black body beneath. Whatever it was, it turned to the left and disappeared. He followed, wading through the lake of tall grass.

Jak was moving toward him, the sun reflecting off white hair and skin. He had his arms outstretched, and he was smiling.

When Ryan took his next step, it was met by a burst of noise from in front of him. A blur of angry birds with flaming red heads, thick black-feathered bodies and flapping, four-foot wings, shot from cover. As the buzzards rushed past him, scuttling away like gigantic swarthy chickens, he instinctively swung the panga, smacking one of them on the pate with the flat of the blade. Stunned, the bird sat down hard, beak gaping, wings spread and twitching. It stank like a slaughterhouse; there was fresh blood smeared on its chest feathers. Its stomach was grossly distended, the contents so densely packed and heavy that, like its brethren, it couldn’t fly.

That didn’t bode well.

He waved for the others to dismount. They left the horses to graze in the meadow and, spreading out, weapons at the ready, advanced to the edge of the clearing. Nestled among the trees, the nameless ville had once looked like something out of a predark storybook: tiny central square with bandstand, on either side of which stood a school, city hall, church with tall steeple, movie house, stores. Because of its remote location, it had survived Armageddon pretty much intact. And had apparently provided sufficient protection to a support a limited population.

Past tense.

The central square and surrounding street was littered with bodies. It looked as if it had rained dead people and dead dogs. Many of the corpses were torn into pieces: arms, legs and heads ripped off and flung. The buzzards had been hard at the best bits—the eyes and tongues—leaving three gory craters in every upturned face.

Some of the humans had been more carefully disassembled.

In the school gymnasium they found a makeshift surgical theater. The hardwood floor was smeared with swooshes of blackened, congealed blood. The air was thick with the stench of death and swarmed with flies. Dissected organs lay piled on the bleacher seats: hearts here, lungs there, eyeballs in a plastic bucket. The horror hadn’t ended very long ago. The blood in the tiled showers was still red; it stood in pools where the butchers had hosed themselves down afterward.

At the far end of the predark basketball court, a man in a lab coat was hanging from the rim of the hoop, by the neck, by his own belt; his belly had been slashed from sternum to crotch. Greasy gray intestines looped around his ankles. He had a large irregular purple birthmark on his right cheek—it looked like a silhouette of Texas.

“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc had gasped through the kerchief over his nose and mouth, “that poor soul’s wearing his guts for garters!”

The entire ville had been chilled; everything alive had been ground up and spit out. What Magus had been looking for, if anything, was a mystery. Replacement parts for a deteriorating body? Recreation for a deteriorating mind?

In the end the reasons didn’t matter. What was done was done.

Only this time there would be payback.

After Ryan and Ricky had skirted the back side of the desert hills for a goodly distance, he sent the young Latino up to a summit to recce their position relative to the enemy camp.

“Wags at the bottom of the hill after next,” Ricky said when he returned. “No campfire that I see.”

Minutes later they belly-crawled over that summit, then descended to just below the ridgeline. Over tops of sagebrush and boulder, Ryan could see the five wags parked in a ring, bathed in rosy light as the sun slipped behind the peak of the mountain. Ricky was right; there was no campfire in the center. He peered through the Scout’s scope. There were no milling figures. No one seated, either. No sign of Magus. No lights on inside the Winnie.

Ryan didn’t give the attack signal as planned. There was no one to attack.

He and Ricky moved carefully down the slope. He slipped between two sets of bumpers, his longblaster held waist high. The Steyr’s 7.62 mm round packed enough wallop to drop all of the hellscape’s large predators; it figured to be more effective versus enforcers than 9 mm handblasters, but that was a proposition yet to be tested. As the last light began to fade, the other companions emerged from the shadows between the wags, with weapons raised.

A quick search of the parked vehicles turned up nothing.

“Where did the rapscallions go?” Doc asked when they reconvened in the center of the camp.

With head lowered, Jak was already circling the perimeter. He stopped abruptly and pointed at a patch of churned-up dirt that led past the pickup with the cab-mounted machine blaster. “This way,” he said.

The trail was wide and easy to follow, even as night fell. It ended a short distance away, farther along the base of the hill, where the bedrock had been cut away, carved into an unnatural arch. Before they stepped under it, Ryan and the others knew what they’d find: a redoubt’s vanadium-steel door.

The massive portal stood ajar, and weak light spilled out from inside.

With weapons up, they slipped single file through the gap, into a tunnel with a polished-concrete floor. Ryan stared down at the mass of rusty, overlaid footprints in front of them. There were way more than thirty-five sets of feet. The toes were headed in both directions—in and out. The redoubt had been breached many times in recent memory.

“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc said, “that is somewhat dire...”

He wasn’t looking at the overlaid footprints and drips of enforcer sweat, which turned the tracked-in dirt dark brown in spots. His attention was focused on the painted metal warning sign hanging on the wall. In eight-inch-tall letters it read:

SECURITY LEVEL RED ALPHA

UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY WILL BE MET BY

LETHAL FORCE

TURN BACK NOW

Cartoon silhouettes below the lettering showed helmeted soldiers with automatic longblasters shooting down a running man, woman and child.

“Think it still applies?” Mildred asked.

“Only if skeletons can fire M-16s,” J.B. said.

“After more than a century, such threats do tend to lose their teeth, my dear Mildred,” Doc said, displaying his own remarkably fine set.

“We don’t know what defenses this place has,” Krysty stated. “But we sure as hell know what’s gone in ahead of us. Fighting enforcers in close quarters means big noise. Our element of surprise is going to disappear quick.”

“We could wait for the stinking pendejos to come out,” Ricky said. “Booby-trap their wags. Blow them all to hell and back when they try to drive off.”

“What if they’re planning to use the mat-trans to jump out of here?” Ryan queried. “What if they have no intention of ever coming back? We could wait outside this redoubt until we’re skeletons, too.”

The companions said nothing. He could see from their expressions his point had sunk in.

“We’ve got to find out what Magus is doing here,” Ryan went on. “We’ve dealt with enforcers in a redoubt before. The tight spaces belowground will make the incendies even more effective. Think about it—chain-reaction fireballs!”

“I do like the sound of that,” J.B. admitted.

One by one, the others nodded. None of them wanted to abandon their quarry after so long a hunt and with the finish almost in sight.

Her eyes gleaming, Krysty said, “Let’s go fry us some big, fat lizard butt.”

“Before we do that,” Ryan said, “we’ve got another little job on our plates.”

At a trot he led them back to the circled wags. “Only way anyone is leaving this camp is on foot,” he said as he unsheathed his panga. With that he slashed the blade across the sidewall of the Winnie’s left front tire, dropping the wheel to its rim with a sudden whoosh.

The companions needed no further instructions. They spread out in the near darkness and quickly cut all the tires on the wags.

As they returned to the redoubt entrance, Ricky said to no one in particular, “There’s lots of gas in the wag tanks for our bikes. And water in the Winnie.”

“Ah, the unbridled optimism of youth,” Doc said with a laugh.

J.B. chuckled, too. “Yeah, the kid thinks we’re actually going to live through this.”

“J.B., what do you mean?” Ricky asked.

“Wait until you come toe-to-toe with an enforcer, my boy,” Doc told him, “then the veil will be lifted.”

The far end of the tunnel was blocked by a blast-proof sec gate, steel bars backed by armaglass, which stood open. Along a bowed-out section of wall near the entry, the snouts of three M-60 machine blasters protruded from a single, horizontal firing slot. Against the wall opposite was a six-foot-high backstop on skids, designed to absorb blasterfire and minimize ricochets. The backstop was decorated with lines of 7.62 mm bullet holes at waist height. They looked as though they’d been drawn with a yardstick. Above and below the holes were irregular patches of brown—ancient crusted blood spatter.

With the others standing well clear, Ryan swept his hand over the electronic eye set in the wall above the blaster muzzles. Nothing happened. The motion detector was out of commission.

After passing through the sec gate, Ryan peered around the corner at the inside of the blaster turret. The trio of M-60s was controlled by a mechanized cam apparatus that had linked triggers and arc of fire. Someone had stripped out the guts of its electronics; wires were cut and hanging loose, circuit boards smashed. The threat on the entrance sign wasn’t hollow. And Krysty was right—this place had its own built-in set of challenges.

“Listen up,” Ryan said, “some of the redoubt’s automatic defense systems might still be operational. There’s no telling what other kinds of traps are still armed. If we follow the footprints, the path should be safe. If we find chills on the floor, we’ll know to take another route.”

“I don’t think we’re going to find chills,” J.B. said as he stared down at the mishmash of rusty footprints. “I get the funny feeling Magus has been here before. Most of the tracks are from barefoot drippers.”

It was something that Ryan had already noticed. The enforcers never wore boots and had very wide, very distinctive, four-toed feet.