Doom Helix

No wags here.

The faint ghost of a predark highway, eroded by chem rain and crosscut in places by five-foot-deep washouts, was only fit for foot or horse traffic.

Ryan turned toward Jak Lauren, who squatted on his left. The albino’s white hair fell in lank strands around his shoulders, his eyelids narrowed to slits as he faced into the hot wind. Jak’s short stature and slim build made him look younger than his years. Those who mistook him for a mere teenager and underestimated his fighting skills, only did so once. The ruby-eyed youth was a stone chiller, Deathlands born and bred. From ten feet away Ryan could almost feel the intensity of Jak’s focus, which was pushing every sense to the limit in order to read the faint sign.

“What do you say, Jak?” Ryan asked. “What is it?”

The albino’s reply was delivered without emotion, a death sentence. “Something’s cornered,” he said. “’Bout to get et.”

“Let’s give whatever it is a wide berth,” J. B. Dix, the group’s armorer, said. He swept off his fedora and mopped the beads of sweat from his face with a frayed and stained shirtcuff. “It isn’t our problem. Got to keep moving. Don’t want to have to spend an extra night out on this rad-blasted rock.”

Mildred Wyeth lowered the plastic water bottle from her lips. The freezie, a twentieth century medical doctor and researcher, had taken advantage of the pause in the march to slip out of her pack and stretch her back. Her sleeveless T-shirt was soaked through with perspiration, her brown arms glistened and the tips of the beaded plaits of her hair steadily dripped. “But maybe we can be the ones doing the eating,” she countered.

Ryan had already considered that possibility. Their food cache was down to a few strips of venison jerky each.

Two days earlier they had made their way out of an underground redoubt hidden among the 11,000-foot peaks of the mountains of southern Idaho. The deserted complex’s armory turned out to be a bonanza: unfired cartridge cases in a variety of calibers, gunpowder, primers and bullets, all kept separate, all hermetically vacuum-sealed, in a temperature and humidity-controlled chamber.

After J.B. and Ryan had loaded and test-fired some sample rounds, they began loading cartridges, assembly-line fashion. They loaded as much ammo in 9 mm, .357 Magnum, .38, 12-gauge and 7.62 mm as the companions could carry. Reliable center-fire ammunition was as good as gold, worth top jack and top trade anywhere in the Deathlands. Unfortunately, the redoubt’s food cache had turned out to be unusable. Decades earlier, all the ready-to-eat packets and the canned goods had ballooned up and burst. Foot-high tendrils of dead, gray mold carpeted the contents and floor of the storage room. The seals on the bottled water were intact, though, and it seemed safe to drink.

From the readings on the site’s remote radiation counters, the area had taken a near hit on nukeday. It could have been the result of a targeting error on the part of the Soviets, an MIRV inflight guidance malfunction, or a failed attempt to take out the redoubt. Whatever the cause, it meant traveling northwest wasn’t an option for the companions. Given the food situation, they would have jumped out with their booty, but before they could do that, the redoubt’s power inexplicably failed.

Which had left them on foot, with one open direction of travel: away from the rugged mountain range, onto the edge of the volcanic plain.

Many times in the past Ryan and his companions had taken large prey for their own after others, animal and mutie, had done the hard work of hunting and chilling—a case of survival of the best armed. From what Ryan had seen so far, the biggest critters living on this harsh landscape were yellow chipmunks. And they weren’t worth the price of a looted bullet. Not that a crispy, roasted chipmunk-on-a-stick or two wouldn’t have gone down nicely after thirty-six hours of starvation rations, but a hit by a nine mil or a .38 would have left a scrap of bloody fur with feet. In the jumble of broken flood basalt, it was impossible to catch or trap the little rad bastards. Escape routes, deep cracks and holes were everywhere.

“Might be a jackrabbit,” Krysty said. “They can scream.”

“Bobcat or eagle would make short work of a rabbit,” J.B. said. “One squeak and it would be over. If it wasn’t chilled on the first hit, it would just jump in a hole and hide, out of reach. It wouldn’t keep yellin’ like that.”

“There’s also the possibility that it’s a much larger animal, more difficult to pull down,” Doc said. “A deer or a stray horse resisting the attentions of a pack of predators.” Perspiration had pasted Doc’s long gray hair to the sides of his deeply lined face and neck.

“Or something much more highly evolved,” Mildred suggested.

“We can’t see what it is from here,” Ryan said. “And there’s only one way to find out for sure.”

“We don’t need more trouble than we’ve already got,” J.B. said. “For nuke’s sake, Ryan, it could be a trap, something triple-bad luring us in for an ambush—the oldest trick in the book. There’s a million hidey-holes for things to jump from. If we’re caught flatfooted on a patch of open ground, we’re never going to get out of this nukin’ frying pan.” The short man paused to thumb his wire-rimmed spectacles back in place, up the sweaty bridge of his nose. “We’ve got a lot of miles of lava field left to cross,” he said. “We should stay on the road, swing wide of whatever it is and never look back.”

Ryan took the Armorer’s point. But as things stood, their lives were balanced on a knife edge, and it was a question of priorities—a decision had to be made as to what came first.

“We need to round up some food,” Ryan said. “We won’t poke our noses in if there’s nothing to gain.”

Their stomachs audibly rumbling, Doc and Jak nodded in agreement.

Outvoted, J.B. screwed his hat back down with a flourish and said no more.

Ryan shoulder slung the Steyr and led them offroad, confident that J.B.’s injured feelings would quickly pass, whether or not they found fresh meat. J.B. was a team player, had been ever since the glory days with Trader—that meant honoring a group decision even if he didn’t agree with it.

Off the highway there were no trails for Ryan to follow. The jumbled chunks of lava were a solid mass underfoot. Sometimes he was stepping on jagged points, sometimes in between them, and the edges of the rock tore at the soles and sides of his boots. The surface was so rough that running over it without falling would have been impossible. Even walking a short distance in a straight line was damned difficult. Every ten yards it seemed, holes as big as semitrailers and twisting crevasses blocked their way.

Gradually, the vista ahead revealed itself, and it wasn’t as flat as it had appeared a quarter mile back—a trick of perspective and of the uniformity of the terrain’s coloration. Before them was a dished-out, sunken swath of ground, the top of a huge, collapsed lava dome. Ryan could see the far rim of the crater, a crescent of blacker black, and it was at least a mile away. The deepest part was in the middle, a hundred feet below the rim. The surface looked to be basalt, but the fractured plates of rock were much bigger and tipped up at steep angles.

Ryan knelt at the edge of the drop-off, hand-signaling for the others to do the same. From their new vantage point, the sounds were much more distinct and disturbing.

“My word!” Doc exclaimed. “That scream sounds almost human.”

Jak pointed and said, “There.”

Ryan caught a glimpse of movement in that direction, but it was too far away to make out details. He unslung the .308-caliber longblaster and uncapped its scope. Seven hundred yards downrange he saw a cluster of four-legged animals madly scrabbling, their heads lowered, their tails in the air, pulling and tearing at something on the ground. The low-pitched sounds he’d heard were their growls and snarls. What with the movement, the intervening heaps of rock, and the heat shimmer it was difficult to see clearly, but he could make out tall, skinny creatures with ribs showing through gray coats, and pointed muzzles and ears. And their heads were all oddly marked: the hair on top, between their ears, was bright orange-red. The violent tug-of-war took the animals and the prize they were fighting over out of sight behind the upturned slabs.

“Looks like a pack of wolves or coyotes,” Ryan told the others. “Real big ones. A couple dozen at least. They’ve chilled something large and they’re ripping it apart. Can’t see what they’ve got, but it isn’t fighting back.”

The shrill cry rolled over them again.

“There’s at least one victim still alive down there,” Mildred said.

“It appears to be begging for mercy,” Doc said.

“Begging the wrong critters for that, from what I saw,” Ryan said as he lowered the rifle.

“Guess we won’t be eating fresh meat tonight, unless it’s haunch of wolf,” Krysty said with dismay.

“In my experience,” Doc said, “no matter how it’s sauced, simmered, or pounded, wolf meat tastes like old boot.”

“A boot that’s stepped in shit,” J.B. added. “Okay, we’ve had our look-see. We should move on, and triple quick before they catch our scent.”

“We can’t leave whoever it is that’s trapped down there,” Mildred protested.

“More likely it’s a ‘whatever,’” Dix told her. “A scalie or some other mutie. And if it’s an ankle-biter, I say more power to the wolves.”

Ryan raised the Steyr to his shoulder, dropped the safety and surveyed the kill zone through the scope, waiting for the feeding melee to come back into view. No matter their complaints, no matter how nasty the meat tasted, he knew he and his companions would choke it down somehow, and with any luck it would keep them going long enough to get past the lava field.

Doc and Krysty were still discussing recipes when, a moment later, targets reappeared downrange.

Ryan held the sight post in the middle of the circling animals. He took up the Steyr’s trigger slack and held it just short of the break point, slowing his breathing and, by extension, his heartbeat. One of the creatures paused in the pitched battle. Panting hard, it straightened to full height, turning itself broadside to him.

To hit a bull’s-eye at the distance and with the twenty-degree down-angle meant taking an aim-point eight or nine inches low. Ryan dropped the sight post that far beneath the animal’s chest, and tightened down on the trigger. When it broke crisply, the Steyr boomed and bucked hard into the crook of his shoulder. He rode the recoil upward, working the butter-smooth action in a blur. Fresh round chambered, he reacquired the sight picture in time to see a puff of dust explode on the critter’s near shoulder. The .308 round drove it into the rocks hard. It bounced once, ragdoll limp, and stayed down.

The sound of the rifle shot and the echoes that followed turned the other animals into statues, but only for a second.

As they began to scatter, Ryan got off another round. His intended target juked an instant before the bullet struck, and a heart shot became a spine shot. Dust puffed off the animal’s back just in front of its hips. Its rear end and tail dropped like a deadweight. Meanwhile, the rest of the pack zigzagged away through the slabs—like the critters had learned how to avoid long distance rifle fire—and vanished into the lava field.

Through the scope Ryan saw the wounded animal crawling for cover on its front legs, dragging the back ones limp and useless behind it. “Two down,” he said, ejecting the spent cartridge. “The others took off.”

“Think they’ll keep their distance?” Mildred said.

“Depends,” J.B. said. “On how hungry they are.”

“They looked plenty hungry to me,” Ryan said, slinging the Steyr and unholstering his SIG-Sauer P-226 handblaster. “Stay alert and stay close.”

Weapons drawn, the companions carefully descended the crater rim after him, jumping from block to basalt block until they reached the bottom. Then they began working their way, single file, toward the center of the depression.

They walked in silence, except for the occasional scrape of boot soles. There were no more piercing screams for Ryan to home in on. The screamer had either been chilled by the pack of predators, or it was laying low in the wake of the gunfire, waiting until it sussed out the shooter’s intentions.

When they reached the kill zone, Ryan immediately signaled for the others to fan out and secure a perimeter. He and J.B. quickly tracked the wounded animal to a narrow opening in the lava. From the blood trail it had left on the rocks, it wasn’t likely to ever crawl out of the hole. Or live long enough to starve.

“Better have a look at this, Ryan,” Krysty called out. She and Mildred, wheelguns in hand, stood over the body of his first victim.

“Now that is what I call butt ugly,” J.B. said.

The spindly-legged corpse’s gray fur was mottled with yellow; amber-colored eyes stared fixedly into space. Its bloody canines were a good two inches long, and a purple tongue drooped out of its mouth. The .308 round had blown a cavernous hole crossways through its chest, sending a plume of pulverized flesh, bone, fur, and blood spraying across the hot rock behind.

Ryan could see things squirming in the puddles of gore. Thin, wiry things.

Parasites.

None of that was the “butt ugly” J.B. referred to.

Ryan dropped to a knee beside the body. The patch of color on its overlarge skull wasn’t composed of hair after all. From above the ears and eyebrows to the back of its head, the creature had a cap of brilliant, reddish orange skin; naked skin, wrinkled and seamed like a peach pit. He gingerly poked at it with the muzzle of his SIG.

Spongy.

The hairless patch rose to a massive sagittal crest, the anchor for jaw muscles powerful enough to crack the long bones of an elk.

“Look at the muzzle and the shape of the eyes,” Krysty said. “It’s not a wolf, it’s a coyote.”

“Part coyote,” Ryan said. “Definitely part somethin’ else.”

“A four-legged, nukin’ buzzard,” J.B. spit.

Ryan looked up when Jak appeared from behind a slab of basalt. He held a battered combat boot by the toe. It dripped thick blood off the heel; the laces were still tied and it still had a foot in it. The splintered end of a shin bone jutted out the top. “Rest over here,” Jak said.

The rest was quite a mess, and spread over a wide area.

“Sweet merciful Lord!” Doc said as he took it all in.

Spirit reduced to flesh, Ryan thought. And mercy had had no part in it. He had seen many terrible deaths in his time. This one was right up there with the worst.

The head had been torn from the neck and was missing, no doubt carried away, as were the four limbs, which had been gnawed off at the elbows and knees. The belly-up torso was nothing short of a wag wreck. And the wag wreck was what Ryan had seen the coyotes fighting over. The body cavity was chewed open, neck to crotch, ribs clipped to angry stubs, the organs and guts yarded out through the gaping wound—perhaps while the poor, luckless bastard was still alive. The torso was wrapped in a few bloody rags, the remnants of clothes. Gobbets of bone and flesh, drops of blood and hanks of long brown hair were spread over the ground.

Ryan sensed how quiet it had become in the crater. The weight of the silence seemed to press in on his eardrums. Then he got a whiff of superconcentrated funk. Rotting meat. Vile musk. Ammonia-stinking urine. In that instant he knew the mutie coyotes had doubled back on them, keeping out of sight by following the deep crevices in the rock. Pulse pounding in his throat, Ryan thumbed off the 9 mm SIG’s safety.

“They’re comin’!” Jak exclaimed, putting his back to the others and swinging up his Colt Python in a two-handed, fighting grip.

There was no time for a further warning.

A unison banshee howl was followed by a scrambling of claws and a concerted rush from all sides and all angles. The coyote pack relied on panic and confusion in a confined space to get the job done. Surprise, overwhelm and dismember. It probably worked champion on dumb animals and lost triple-stupe droolies, but the companions were a different breed altogether.

For Ryan and his companions the ambush drill had become second nature. Even as their weapons were coming up, they moved into a tight, back-to-back circle. This gave them clear firing lanes and reduced the span of those lanes to a mere sixty degrees, ideal for snap-shooting multiple near-targets.

Coyotes launched themselves from the tops of rock slabs. They shot out through gaps in the lava, their fangs bared, their amber eyes gleaming with blood lust. They had no more than twenty feet to cross to reach their victims.

Ryan swung the SIG’s sights from left to right, squeezing the trigger as fast as he could. Instant killshots weren’t required. The idea was to break the oncoming wave; any incapacitating hit would do.

To his right, J.B.’s M-4000 shotgun boomed as he cut loose from the hip. The high-brass load of buckshot blew an airborne animal off-course, into Ryan’s firing lane. As it twisted in the air, he punched a 9 mm round through its exposed underbelly. Before that creature hit the ground J.B. had jacked the pump gun’s slide, found a second hurtling target and fired again. With the same result: a sideways-flying coyote, like it had been snap-kicked by a giant’s boot.

There was no way and no time to count the attackers. There were too many of them. And they were coming too fast. No time to think, either. Ryan aimed for chests and heads, firing like a machine.

With Mildred, Jak and Krysty similarly cutting loose behind him and Doc blasting away on his blind side, the din of gunfire was deafening.

As Doc’s black powder LeMat barked into Ryan’s left ear, it sent forth successive gouts of dense gray smoke, which partially obscured the battlefield. The Civil War antique shot lead-ball ammo from its nine cylinder system, and a single shotgun round through a shorter underbarrel. After Doc emptied the cylinder, the shift to fire the shotgun chamber required moving a lever down on the end of the hammer.

Which meant a momentary pause in his stream of fire.

“Release me, you bastard!” Doc howled.

Ryan half turned at the cry and saw a flurry of movement beside him. A coyote had Doc’s right boot clenched in its teeth and was shaking its head, trying to tear off the foot at the ankle. The old man stood balanced on his left leg and the tip of his ebony swordstick, which he held behind him. Doc aimed the LeMat point-blank at the top of the animal’s garish skull. With a rocking boom, two feet of flame and a tremendous rush of smoke enveloped it.

Ryan didn’t know what the hell Doc had packed the shotgun barrel with this time—he usually favored metal scrap and shards of glass—but smidgens of skin, like wet shreds of orange peel spattered the front of the old man’s knee boots and slapped into Ryan’s thigh. The blast flattened the coyote and set its back and shoulders on fire.

It was the last blast of the battle.

The air was choked with the stench of blood and spilled guts, of burned cordite and flaming fur. Through the haze of gunsmoke, Ryan could see a ring of sprawled, four-legged bodies, a few still breathing laboriously.

They had discharged more than fifty rounds in a matter of seconds.

Ryan’s ears were ringing as he replaced the SIG’s spent magazine. Behind him, Mildred, Jak and Krysty dumped their empties and recharged their revolvers. J.B. thumbed fresh 12-gauge shells into his combat scattergun.

As the smoke thinned and lifted, Ryan glimpsed a couple of the coyotes making for the horizon. They kept looking over their backs, perhaps to check for pursuit. When the animals neared the crater rim, he shouldered the Steyr and sent a 7.62 mm round zinging after them.

A reminder to keep on running.

“It was almost like they were on a suicide mission,” Mildred said as he lowered the longblaster.

“Didn’t want to abandon their kill,” Ryan told her. “Fresh meat has got to be hard to come by around here.”

“It appears we have more than enough, now,” Doc said. He jabbed at the remains of the animal smoldering beside his boot with the tip of his walking stick, then added, “Such as it is.”

“Nearly blew off your own foot, didn’t you, Doc?” J.B. said. “How many times do I have to tell you, single actions suck.”

“I’m alive,” Doc said. He gave the corpse another poke. “And that hideous thing is not.” From the side pocket of his frock coat, he pulled out the leather pouch that held his black powder reloading gear. He then sat himself down on a nearby rock and with a quick, deft hand began charging and recapping each of the revolver’s chambers.

J.B. looked over at Ryan and shook his head.

The one-eyed warrior shrugged. At times, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner could be infuriatingly stubborn and cantankerous. And there was nothing they or anybody else could do about it. The twentieth century whitecoats who had time-trawled him away from the bosom of his family in the late eighteen hundreds, his beloved Emily and his two young children, had gotten so fed up with his contrariness that just to be rid of him, they’d sent him forward in time, to Deathlands. Despite the considerable downsides to the 250-year-old sidearm Doc carried, the truth was, only if and when the LeMat blew up in his hand would he ever consider replacing it.

As Krysty and Jak were finishing off the wounded animals with close-range head shots, a muffled voice called to them. “Is it safe to come out now?”

Ryan and the companions swung up their hand-blasters, searching for the source of the sound with gunsights.

“Help me, puleeeeeeze!”

It was a man. Very close.

“Are they all dead?” came an even louder holler. “Make sure they’re all dead!”

“Keep your pants on,” Ryan shouted back.

“I do believe I recognize that voice,” Doc told the others.

“How is that possible?” Krysty said.

“More ghosts from your past?” Mildred asked. “An Oxford don circa 1882? Is your merry old brain vapor-locking again, Doc?”

“Neither a supernatural occurrence, nor a mental aberration,” Doc said, refusing to rise to the bait, “but certainly a coincidence of note.”

“Help me! Puleeeeeeze, help me! I swear I won’t run off again.”

“‘Run off again’?” Krysty said. “He thinks we’re somebody else.”

“Somebody he’s scared to death of,” J.B. said, “or he’d have shown his rad-blasted face by now.”

Jak moved quickly and quietly toward a vertical fissure in the bedrock about forty feet away, his .357 Magnum ready to rip. Like a bird dog, he stood there on-point. Ryan and the others slipped into position on either side of him, in front of the narrow cave’s entrance.

“Come on out,” J.B. said. “Now.”

“Leave your blaster behind,” Ryan said.

“Coming out, got no blaster.”

The pancaked crown of a waxed-canvas fedora appeared in the crack in the rock, then a prosthetic right hand—ivory-colored, it had articulated fingers and a big knob on the back of the wrist for tightening them into a fist. The man whimpered mightily as he tried to squeeze his big body sideways through the gap.

He was halfway in, halfway out of the cleft when J.B. said, “Well, I’ll be nuked!” and drew a tight bead on him with the M-4000.

“Are you back for another trouncing, you traitorous dog?” Doc demanded, stepping forward and brandishing his ebony cane.

When the wedged-in man looked up and saw who his rescuers were, his jaw dropped. Grunting from the effort, he quickly retreated, squirming back into the fissure, out of sight.

“I told you I recognized that voice,” Doc said to Mildred.

Ryan recognized him, too. The man in the hole was none other than Big Mike, also known as Mike the Drunkard, and the “Tour Guide from Hell,” a turncoat huckster who had sold his services to the she-hes, the would-be colonizers from Shadow Earth. Riding around in a gaudily painted bus, he had conned gullible villefolk with free joy juice, free jolt, free sex and promises of a much easier life in Slake City. It was a nonstop rolling party until they arrived at the site, then the awful truth was revealed: they had been gathered up to slave until death in the nuke mines.