Breakthrough

As he rounded a tight bend, he saw the group’s pointman frozen like a bird dog fifty feet ahead. Ryan swung to hip height the scoped Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle he carried. Jak Lauren, his pale skin and lank white hair almost luminous in the forest’s half-light, held up a hand, indicating caution. Jak was a man of few words. Fiercely loyal, without an ounce of guile or deceit, he was a true wild child of Deathlands. Jak’s weapon, a battle-scarred .357 Magnum Colt Python, remained in its holster. Whatever he’d found, there was no immediate danger.

“Cook fire,” Jak said softly as Ryan stepped up, his albino eyes as red as rubies. He raised a hand to point downslope. “There…”

Ryan caught the faintest smell of woodsmoke, filtering up the winding trail through the forest. It was the first sign of another human presence since the mat-trans jump.

It smelled delicious.

For three days Ryan and his companions had been on starvation rations of mutie rattlesnake jerky and tepid water. The forest’s lack of undergrowth meant there was no ground-dwelling large or small game for them to hunt. During the day, they had caught a few glimpses of little creatures darting about high in the branches, but the dense canopy made shooting at them a waste of ammo. And at night it was so black they couldn’t see their own feet.

Though all their bellies rumbled, no one had complained.

A tall, skinny man, dressed in a dusty frock coat and tall boots, moved up the trail and closed ranks with Ryan and Jak.

Leaning on his silver-handled walking stick, Doc Tanner sniffed at the air, and said, “Dear friends, it would seem that Providence has seen fit to smile upon us once more.” He inhaled again, savoring the aroma. “Somewhere below, the groaning board is piled high. Broiled flesh of some sort, I would venture.”

Though Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner appeared to be a well-preserved sixty, chronologically he was four times that old. The Harvard-and-Oxford-educated man was the first human time traveler, albeit an unwilling one. He had been ripped from the loving embrace of his family in 1896, and drawn one hundred years into the future by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. The twentieth-century scientists quickly tired of Tanner’s ingratitude, truculence and general unpleasantness. Shortly before skydark, to rid themselves of the troublemaker, they had hurled him forward in time. In so doing, they had inadvertently saved him from the nukecaust that scoured away their civilization. Though Doc sometimes rambled in speech and broke into tears for no apparent reason, a consequence of his life’s overload of trauma and tragedy, this day he was as sharp as the point of the steel blade hidden in his ebony stick.

A stocky black woman dressed in baggy camo BDU pants and a sleeveless gray T-shirt stepped up behind Tanner. Her hair hung down in beaded plaits. “Smells like somebody’s had themselves a hearty breakfast,” she said.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth had also time-traveled, but in a much different fashion than her Victorian colleague. After a life-threatening reaction to anesthetic, she had been cryogenically preserved just prior to the all-out U.S.-Russian nuclear exchange of January 20, 2001. She had slept in the land of the dead for a century, until revived by Ryan and the companions. Mildred’s weapon of choice was a Czech ZKR 551 target pistol, the same gun she’d used to win a silver medal in the last-ever Olympic Games.

“Whatever it is, it’s making my mouth water,” said the boy following close on Mildred’s heels. At age twelve, Ryan’s son, Dean, was already growing tall and straight like his father.

“Dear child, the human nose is by no means an infallible instrument,” Doc cautioned as the last two members of the group—a tall, red-haired woman, and the rear guard, a short, bespectacled man in a fedora—moved up the trail to join them. “What we Homo sapiens take for sweet succulence might well be the effluvium of some wayfarer not unlike ourselves. Someone whose grim misfortune was to be caught out in last night’s chain lightning. That hell-struck sir or madam could be down there somewhere, quietly smoldering.”

Dean made a disgusted face.

“Or it could be a trap,” offered the leggy, green-eyed redhead. Because of the sweltering heat, Krysty Wroth, Ryan’s lover and soul mate, had taken off her long fur coat and tied the arms around her slender waist. The only visible effect of the radiation-induced mutations that skydark had inserted into Krysty’s family tree was the prehensile ability of her long hair, which reacted to stress like a barometer. Her hair now hung in loose coils, indicating concern but not apprehension.

“Cook smoke could be the bait,” agreed John Barrymore Dix, aka the Armorer. Ryan and J.B. shared a bond of blood that went back many years, to their wild and woolly days with the Trader, the legendary Deathlands entrepreneur and road warrior. J.B. rested the barrel of his well-worn Smith & Wesson M-4000 12-gauge pump gun on his shoulder and tipped his sweat-stained hat back on his head. “In a place like this,” he said, pausing to thumb his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose, “with no game to shoot, nothing growing to eat, a scent trail could draw victims from a long ways off.”

Though Ryan respected J.B.’s and Krysty’s trail savvy, he didn’t consider an ambush likely. There had been no sign of stickies or cannies. No grisly heaps of red bones and bloody rags strewed about. Stickies and cannies, Deathlands most murderous, subhuman residents, hunted in packs, like wolves, seeking out norms—nonmutated humans—and muties alike, and failing that, they would prey on the weakest of their own kind. The condition of the path told Ryan there wasn’t much foot traffic, certainly not enough to support the appetite of a large predator, or group of predators.

“Trap or no trap,” he told the companions, “we’ve got to follow the cook smoke, or we’re going to starve in this bastard forest.” He slung the Steyr and unholstered his SIG-Sauer P-226 pistol. “Triple red, everybody,” he said. “Dean, middle of the file.”

The boy didn’t protest his position in the column, but watched with undisguised envy as Doc drew a massive revolver from the front of his frock coat. The gold-engraved LeMat was a Civil War relic. It fired nine .44-caliber lead balls through a six-and-one-half-inch top barrel. A second, shorter, big-bore barrel hung beneath the first, chambered for a single scattergun load of “blue whistlers”—odd bits of scrap metal and glass that added up to close-range mayhem. Dean left his own weapon, a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power, buckled down in its holster. He was under standing orders from his father not to draw the weapon unless they came under direct attack, and not to shoot unless he had a clear lane of fire.

With Ryan in the lead, the companions headed downslope. If anything, as they descended the winding trail, the canopy became more dense, and the air more humid. As Ryan rounded a turn, harsh sunlight backlit the groves of oaks ahead. Through the trees came the sounds of high-pitched, chattering speech and the rustle of movement. The one-eyed man dropped the blaster’s safety and pushed on.

No command to the rear was necessary.

The companions reacted as one, spacing out along the path as they continued to advance. They dropped to their bellies and crawled the last few feet to the edge of the forest.

The clearing before them bordered on a sluggishly moving green river fifty yards wide. The activity was down by the water’s edge. A group of three dozen people, men, women and children, all with straight black hair and skin the color of cinnamon bark, were tending thick, hand-braided ropes that stretched back from the river almost to the trees. The children were naked; the men and women wore short kilts.

Inbreeding was common in Deathlands’s isolated, primitive communities. Noting the uniform distribution of low foreheads and underslung jaws, Ryan decided that these folks had been at it for a very long time.

Back from the river’s muddy bank, nestled in the protection of the ironwood canopy, stood a ragged row of translucent yellow shacks made of tanned hide or skin that was stretched and tied over curving supports that looked like gigantic rib bones. Cooking pits lined with red hot coals had been dug in the soft earth. Whatever food had been roasted over them earlier had already been polished off.

Jak tersely summed up the cinnamon people’s armament. “No blasters, just knives.”

Ryan nodded. Their weaponry consisted of bows and arrows, spears, knives and short swords. And the edged weapons weren’t made of metal, or even flint. To Ryan the blades looked like bone. Serrated bone. Given the twentieth-century firepower he and the companions carried, the villagers presented no real threat.

The breeze shifted suddenly, swirling along the bank. Cook fire odors were overpowered by a terrific stench.

“Smells like dead fish,” Dean choked. “Tons of dead fish.”

“Ugh, I just lost my appetite,” Mildred said.

“Don’t trouble yourself over that, my dear,” Doc stated pleasantly. “If past is prologue, it will return to you shortly, and tenfold…”

At one time, Ryan would have expected the black woman to go ballistic over the snide remark. Not because she was the least bit sensitive about her weight, which was appropriate for her body type, but because of the outrageous presumption that being a woman, she should have been sensitive about her weight. Mildred had learned to fight fire with fire when it came to dealing with the bony old codger’s needling.

“And how’s the tapeworm doing today, Doc?” Mildred asked back sweetly.

Ryan pushed to his feet. “Come on, let’s introduce ourselves,” he said. “Stay alert. Watch the flanks.”

The companions emerged from the forest, fanning out with weapons up and ready. The river people were startled at first, but they said nothing. None of them made a move to approach or to retreat from the armed intruders. After a moment or two of standoff, the villagers surprised Ryan and the others by pointedly turning their backs on them, and refocusing their attention on the murky river and their braided ropes, each of which was strong enough to tow a war wagon.

When Ryan advanced and opened his mouth to speak, a man wearing a translucent fish-skin vest held up a hand for silence. There was a warning in his extremely close-set black eyes. He pointed at the river, which silt and algae had turned the color of pea soup. Stretched across its width were floats made of clusters of blue plastic antifreeze jugs, tied together by their handles. The villagers had a fishing net out.

Dean stepped over to the bank for a better look. As quick as a cat, the boy jumped back from the river’s edge.

Ryan swung up his 9 mm blaster in a two-handed grip. Over its sights, twenty feet from shore, he saw a swirl, like water sheeting over a great boulder just under surface. Then a five-foot-long bone blade, like a dirty yellow, two-handed broadsword, slashed up through the surface. It gleamed for an instant, then disappeared beneath the murky flow. Ryan held his fire, as did J.B., who had his scattergun hip-braced and ready to roar.

“Fireblast!” the Armorer sputtered. “What the hell was that?”

“Shades of King Arthur and the Lady in the Lake!” Doc exclaimed.

“King who?” J.B. said.

Ignoring the question, Doc went on, “In this case, Excalibur appears sadly the worse for wear.”

Before the companions could unpuzzle Tanner’s remarks, the strings of blue net floats jerked violently, then skittered across the water like a flock of leg-snared waterfowl. One by one, the clusters of antifreeze jugs glugged under the surface…and stayed there, trembling in the current.

Whatever it was, it was caught fast.

The villagers leaped to their ropes and pulled them taut, their bare feet sliding in the mud. Only when the creature swam up to the surface and began to thrash midriver, rolling and wrapping itself in the fishnet, did Ryan realize how big it was. The brown-backed fish was easily thirty feet long. Its great tail slapped at the water as it momentarily turned belly up.

Before the river beast could get its bearings, the villagers began to draw in the net. Men, women and children hauled for all they were worth, their legs and backs straining. As they retreated from the waterline with the net in tow, they made the great fish roll over and over, further entangling itself.

The gargantuan mutated catfish flopped onto its belly on the edge of the bank, showering mud in all directions. Its mouth gaped. The gigantic lips looked plump and rubbery and almost human, as did the pale tongue. Its eyes, which were set far apart on a broad, flat skull wider than a man was tall, radiated a terrible fury. The ventral and dorsal fins were extended through the mesh, as were their cruel serrated spines. The cruelest of all stood atop its back like a hellship’s mast.

Unable to pull the fish any farther onto shore, the villagers secured the free ends of their ropes around the tree trunks at the edge of the clearing. One of the men cautiously approached the animal. He walked stiffly, his head lowered, shoulders slumped, obviously very much afraid. Behind him, a pair of village women began to wail and cry and tear at their own hair.

“I don’t like the looks of this,” J.B. said out of the corner of his mouth. “Why don’t they stop that guy? What the blazes is going on?”

“A chillin’,” Jak said.

Ryan sensed it, too. Not just danger, but death.

The ropes groaned as the great fish lunged against the net. With a crack like a pistol shot, the line at its head parted in the middle, one end sailing high into the trees. Before the man standing beside the beast could retreat, it had him. Whipping its head sideways, the fish sank the point of a ventral spine into his chest, then it rolled on top of him. With impacts that shook the ground, it flopped, using its tremendous weight to pound the man and the impaling spine into the soft mud.

The screaming villagers grabbed the loose end of rope and drew it tight, then they angled the other lines until the fish was once again pinned flat on its belly.

Too late.

Skewered on the spine was a muddy, bloody rag doll, the head lolling backward on a broken neck. Three men carefully slid the body off the bone broad sword and laid it down gently on the bank a safe distance away. A handful of villagers, including the wailing women, knelt beside the corpse, sobbing. With cupped hands they dripped river water on the body, tenderly washing the mud and blood from the face and chest.

“Ugly way to croak,” Jak spit.

“Let’s make sure nobody else gets nailed by that rad blasted thing,” Ryan said.

The companions quickly formed a firing squad beside the fish’s head. But before they could shoot, the man in the fish-skin vest jumped in front of the raised muzzles, waving his hands. “No, no!” he shouted at them. “No lead! The metal will put a curse on the meat.”

With that, the village leader scrambled onto the fish’s head, using the net’s mesh for hand and footholds. He was joined by another man who carried an ironwood club and a three-foot-long bone sword. The leader took the sword and knelt down, feeling around on the fish’s forehead with his fingertips.

“What’s he doing?” Dean asked.

“He’s looking for the seam in the skull,” Ryan replied. “A weak spot in the bone.”

The village leader found what he was searching for. He positioned the sword point against the skull, dropped his hands below the skin-wrapped grip and nodded to the second man, who raised the club and struck the pommel of the sword a mighty blow. The impact echoed sharply off the riverbank’s trees, and the serrated blade sank in a foot.

The great fish didn’t seem to notice.

But when the man dealt it a second blow, driving the sword in another foot, the animal went berserk, humping up and heaving its body against the net, its long, fleshy whiskers curling and cracking like bullwhips. The man struck again with the club before the fish could throw them off. On the third whack, the blade slipped in to the hilt, the mutie catfish’s eyes went dead, and its entire length began to quiver.

The villagers sent up a cheer and began preparations for the butchering. After untangling the net, several of the strongest men pried open its jaws, propping them wide apart with an ironwood stake sharpened at both ends. One of the men crawled inside the yawning mouth. Using the tip of his knife, he cut the lining of the throat away from the surrounding bone and muscle, and then disappeared into the dark cavity of its body. After a few minutes passed, he stepped out of the mouth, covered in blood and pulling the free end of the throat lining behind him.

The other villagers joined in and they began draging the guts out of the catfish, five feet at a time. As they gave the empty, pale gray tube of muscle the heave-ho, it stretched down to the size of a man’s arm. On the third pull, the tube caught on the far side of the stake. Redoubling their efforts, the villagers managed to free it.

The cause of the hang-up popped out onto the mud.

Inside the opaque gut lining was a blue-dark bulge easily as long as a man.

“Is it a person?” Dean asked, awed. “It looks like a person!”

The village leader immediately stopped the proceedings and using a borrowed sword, hacked through the gut tube in a single swipe. Covered in slime, a hairless, earless, mottled blue head peeped out. Its gaping jaws were lined with rows of needlelike teeth, its beady eyes had been turned the color of milk by the fish’s corrosive digestive juices.

“Mutie eel,” Jak pronounced, matter-of-factly. “Big un.”

The eel’s jaws snapped shut like a bear trap.

It was blind, but it sure wasn’t dead.

The headman could have easily lopped off its head, but he just stared at it, sword at his side. The eel, sensing freedom, shot out of the fish’s gut, frantically sidewinding for the defenseless women and children clustered on the bank. The women and children could have scattered to safety, but they didn’t. They stood there. Waiting.

Whether the eel intended them harm or just wanted back in the river, Krysty reacted at once. Stepping between the onrushing animal and the innocents, she raised and fired her Model 640 Smith & Wesson. The .38-caliber slug hit the eel square in the head, knocking it down, but not out. It writhed in the mud, toothy jaws snapping. Krysty gingerly pinned the thick neck to the ground with her boot heel, leaving the tail end free to slap and churn. Kneeling down, she held the muzzle of the revolver against the side of its head and snapped the cap. The coup de grâce cratered the eel’s skull and sent a plume of blood, brains and bone fragments splashing into the river.

As Krysty straightened, the women and children encircled her, making cooing noises as they stroked the arms and hem of her fur coat.

“It’s okay, really, it’s okay,” she told them, carefully holding the blaster out of their reach. They wouldn’t be put off. They continued stroking the furry coat sleeves and cooing at her.

When things finally settled down, Ryan and the others retired to the shade of the forest’s edge to watch the rest of the butchering. The village men skinned back the hide at the tail and started hacking out great, foot-thick slabs of pale pink flesh. These were passed to the women, who skewered them on ironwood sticks and began char-roasting them over the open fires. The sweet aroma of blackened catfish set the companions’ empty bellies to gurgling.

After a few minutes, the headman walked over to where they sat. He carried an uncapped antifreeze jug, which he handed to Ryan. The one-eyed man sniffed the spout. “Whew!” he said. “That’s powerful stuff.”

“It’s brewed from the fruit of the strangler vine,” the village leader told him. “Drink and enjoy your-selves. After she has been served, the feast will begin.”

“Who’s ‘she’?” Krysty asked.

“Sirena,” the leader said. “She told us of your coming, of the great fish, of Chambo’s death on its spine and the eel alive in its gut. Sirena sees all, and knows all.”

“A doomie!” Dean exclaimed.

None of the others said a word. Ryan knew they were all thinking the same thing.

Bullshit.

Though doomies actually existed in Deathlands, the genuine article was as rare as a thirteen-year-old virgin. Real doomies were a unique race of humans, possibly mutated, possibly not. Each individual was gifted to a varying degree with the second sight, the ability to see past and future events. Usually, however, the folks claiming to have the doomie sight turned out to be con artists or coldheart chillers.

The companions watched as a floppy-breasted young woman carried a smoking hunk of fish past them on a carved bone platter. Escorted by the village leader, she disappeared into a hut at the end of the line.

Doc took the antifreeze jug from Ryan and tried a long swallow.

“By the Three Kennedys!” he croaked, wiping his streaming eyes and nose. “A ferment drawn straight from Satan’s piss pot!”

“That good, huh?” J.B. said, accepting the jug.

“Go easy,” Ryan warned.

After a single gasp-and-shiver-producing gulp, J.B. handed the joy juice to Krysty, who whiffed it, made a face and passed it on to Jak without tasting.

In contrast to the companions’ restraint, the male villagers hit their blue jugs hard, and the effects were immediate. Joined by their headman, they started singing, waving their arms and stamping their feet in the mud. Their tuneless song was as repetitive as it was nerve grating. And they directed it, and the accompanying rhythmic hip gyrations, toward their guests.

“We are rulers of the forest and the river,” they howled. “We chill the great beasts with their own bones. Our powerful and manly seed will live forever.”

“Now there’s a comforting thought,” Mildred muttered to herself.

At that point, another woman stepped forward and laid down a heaping platter of cooked fish before them. The companions used their bare hands to tear into the char-crusted and still scorching-hot meat.

“Tastes like free-range snake,” J.B. remarked around a full mouth. He paused to extract a thin fibrous strand from between his teeth. “A hell of a lot more parasites, though,” he said, flicking the three-inch serpentine of unchewable tissue into the forest.

The dinner bell ended the village men’s caterwauling. They took seats in the shade across from the companions and started to eat. The women and children sat behind them.

Partway through the feast, one of the men gave the leader a nudge, indicating the young woman waving at him from the doorway of the far hut. The headman, who had washed down the fish course with numerous gulps of strangler wine, rose unsteadily to his feet, and said, “Sirena has been fed. You will pay your respects to her, now.”

Ryan nodded. “It would be our pleasure.”

The village leader ushered them into the tiny hut that was occupied by a withered old woman. She sat in an inverted catfish skull, a rocking chair hollowed out and packed with an excelsior of dried vine fibers. Over her skinny shoulders, she wore a fish skin cape with a tall, spiky fishbone collar. In her hand she held a long bone pipe, which gave off the pungently sweet smell of herbal tobacco. Even in the dim light filtering through the translucent yellow walls and the haze of smoke, Ryan could see that Sirena’s pupils and irises were the color of milk. Like the eel’s.

Dean was struck by this, as well, and whispered to his father, “Was she swallowed by a fish, or was she born blind?”

“If you’ve got a question, young man,” Sirena said in a gravelly voice, “best ask me direct.”

“Okay,” Dean said. “You get eaten by a fish?”

A hoarse, cackling laugh burst from the old woman’s throat. “Eaten and spit right back on the bank,” she said. “See these beauty marks it gave me?” Skeletal fingers traced down both sides of her face, pointing out the stripes of pink-white discoloration where the flesh had been etched away. Her scalp had hairless patches of the same color. “Right off, folks around here took my coming out of that fish alive as a sign and a wonderment. And it was a bigger wonderment than anyone dreamed. Inside that fish’s belly I lost normal sight, but I gained the doomie sight. Or mebbe I had it all along, and never knew until my eyes got melted away.”