Damnation Road Show
The fifteen-wag caravan slowed to a crawl as it approached the defensive berm. Leeloo saw that some of the wags were towing big tarp-covered cages on flatbed trailers.
Then the music started.
Taped music, scratchy with age and thousands of playings. Loud enough to wake the nukecaust’s dead, a powerful male baritone boomed above the insistent crash of cymbals and drums. The words he sang rolled like thunder. Leeloo had taught herself to count to a hundred, so she knew what “76” signified. She wasn’t sure whether a “trombone” was animal, vegetable or mineral, but the raucous, cheerful beat of the predark music thrilled her to the core.
As the dust clouds drifted away to the south, with the convoy slowly advancing, men began to jump out of the wags. They threw back the tarps covering the trailered cages, revealing the collection of creatures within.
Leeloo sucked in an astonished breath. It was more wonderful than her wildest imaginings! Behind the bars of the first cage lurked a two-headed scalie. One head was normal sized; the other looked like a baby’s. The next trailer cage held a gaggle of stickies, naked but for plastic collars in bright colors, like open flower petals.
They showed their needle teeth and dilated their flat nostril holes as they took in the scent of the ville. Another cage contained a huge mutie mountain lion with scythe-shaped horns jutting on either side of its neck. It raised its head and yowled balefully along with the marching song. On the trailer behind the mountain lion was the biggest desert rattler Leeloo had ever seen. The thing was mebbe ten feet long, and its body was as big around as her waist. Its flat, triangular-shaped head was even wider, and the mouth could have easily swallowed two of her whole.
There were lizard birds with leathery wings and fangs so sharp they scored the steel bars of their cages.
Leeloo turned her attention to the carny folk walking alongside the trailers. The men wore slitted masks over their eyes. Their leather jerkins and shorts exposed bulging arm and leg muscles. They all carried bullwhips, which they smacked against the bars of the cages, making the mutie creatures howl in complaint. The carny women were long legged, their faces and heads concealed by brightly sequined hoods. But for thigh-high, high-heeled boots and a tracery of string over their privates, they were naked. The women also used whips to stir up the rolling menagerie.
Once inside the berm, the caravan of wags circled twice, to Leeloo’s way of thinking, most majestically. Then it stopped.
A tall, muscular man in a worn red satin tailcoat, and with tight white pants tucked into hard-used black riding boots, climbed out of the largest wag. On one hip he wore a holstered, blue-steel, .45 Government Colt blaster; on the other he carried a coiled black bullwhip. His short, wiry hair was a rusty red, as was his six-inch-long goatee. A jagged ring of scar marked the left side of his face, perhaps made by a broken neck of a bottle, or Leeloo thought, by an attack from one of his ferocious muties.
As the tailcoated man walked toward the ville’s leaders, a tiny stickie, not more than four years old, trotted along at his left heel. It was naked and barefoot, and there were bruises all over its pale body. Around its neck was a choke chain dog collar that wasn’t tethered to a leash.
“Welcome to Bullard ville,” Melchior said, extending a damp, callused hand to the carny master. “A pleasure to have Gert Wolfram and his famous troupe as our guests.”
“I speak for my entire company,” the tailcoated man stated, “when I say we are most honored to have the opportunity to entertain you.”
The young stickie, eyes as dead as black stones, sniffed through the two holes in its face, taking the measure of the overweight Melchior. And having done that, the baby mutie made soft kissing noises in his direction, and began to drool copiously. Melchior’s right hand reached across his pendulous chest and came to rest on the rubber butt of his shoulder-holstered Ruger Single Six.
“Oh, don’t worry about Jackson,” the carny master said, stroking the creature’s hairless skull. “Unless you corner the little tyke, he’s not the least bit dangerous.”
At the hand-to-head contact, the immature stickie closed its eyes with pleasure; its jaw gaped, exposing tightly packed rows of needle teeth.
“When is the show going to start?” Skim O’Neil asked.
This question was met with wild cheers and whistles from the assembly.
“It takes us a while to stake out and set up the main tent,” the carny master said.
“I’m afraid it’s already too late in the day to get started on it. With your permission, we’ll set up camp inside the berm tonight, then start raising the tent tomorrow morning. That will give my people a chance to rest up, too. They need a break before they perform. We’ve been on the road three days getting here.”
Leeloo was crushed to hear this. She wasn’t alone. A chorus of groans rippled through the crowd.
“Couldn’t you give us a little taste of what’s to come?” Melchior asked. “We’ve all been waiting for this day for weeks and weeks.”
The carny man scratched his red chin beard, briefly considering what taste he might offer. “All right,” he said, “I’ll give you fine folks a preview of what’s in store for tomorrow. But I warn you now, once you see it, you won’t sleep a wink tonight.”
He looked down at the baby stickie and said, “Sing!”
As the order echoed off the berm walls, the people of Bullard ville blinked at one another in amazement. It was common knowledge that the mouth parts of stickies were so primitive, so unevolved, that most could barely make mewling noises, let alone make music.
Yet, at its master’s command, the little stickie opened its round, practically lipless mouth, threw back its bald head and sang, in perfect pitch, in a high, clear soprano, a predark song even older than the one caught on tape. “Ave Maria” burst forth from between rows of mutated needle teeth.
Most of the folks in the crowd closed their eyes and simply listened to the exquisitely pure tones, like bell chimes. Each word of the lyric was perfectly formed and enunciated.
There were no cries of sacrilege because no one understood the words, which were in Italian. Even if the Deathlands dirt farmers could have translated the lyric into English, its meaning and references would have been a mystery to them. Despite the yawning gap in the audience’s understanding, the music itself was so moving that by the time Jackson finished the a cappella performance, there were tears of wonder in the eyes of men and women alike.
While Bullard ville rendered wild applause, the carny master patted the little stickie on the head, and it nuzzled its cheek against the side of his riding boot, leaving behind a shiny smear of saliva.
After the tumult had died down, a beaming Melchior pointed out a likely spot for the company to spend the night. The carny master thanked him, then returned with Jackson to the biggest wag, which pulled out of file to lead the convoy to the campsite. The marching music started up again as the wags and trailers rolled forward. Dust boiled up from their tires, swirling in thick, yellow clouds through the open gate of the berm.
Out of the corner of her eye, Leeloo caught more movement on the plain. Shadowy figures advanced through the man-made dust storm, making for the ville’s entrance. They were hard to see with the all dust and the sunlight slanting hard behind them.
She counted seven.
Mebbe stragglers from the carny? she thought.
When they stepped out of the cloud, Leeloo knew at once they weren’t carny folk. They were hunters. The man in the lead carried a scoped longblaster on a shoulder sling. He was tall, with dark hair falling to his broad shoulders. A black patch concealed his left eye socket. As he came closer, she noticed the color of the other eye.
It made her think of a cloudless morning sky.
Infinite blue.
Infinite cold.
Chapter Two
Ryan Cawdor shifted the sling, transferring the weight of his scoped Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle from his right shoulder to his left. Six dusty companions followed single file behind him, heading for the crude gate cut into the twelve-foot-high berm wall. For the last third of a mile, they had been breathing and eating the drifting grit thrown up by the wag caravan. For the last third of a mile, they had been listening to the predark marching music, its sprightly cheerfulness like a dull dagger jammed in their guts, then twisted. For the last third of a mile, it had taken every bit of Ryan’s self-control not to break into a dead run. Just as it not took all of his inner reserve not to sprint up the face of the perimeter barrier, drop belly down on the summit with the 7.62 mm longblaster and start bowling over the carny folk.
Suicide wasn’t part of the plan.
The plan was to make damn sure what they all suspected was true, and then to act in stealth, lowering the odds from eight to one against before showing their hand. The mechanics of the operation had been hatched over four days of one of the hardest forced marches Ryan and the others had ever endured. They had approached Bullard ville from the west, cross-country, over seemingly endless rolling hills and scrub forest, breaking their own trail, sleeping only a few hours each night. They had pushed themselves mercilessly because they didn’t want to risk arriving too late and uncovering another horror.
For the thousandth time, the image of the hand came into Ryan’s mind. A grisly, ruined, black hand jutting from the earth in the middle of long patch of churned-up ground. The flesh had been torn away by teeth or beak, or both. Three fingers were missing down to the knuckles. Right off, he knew it was a woman or a child’s hand because it was so small and slender. Somehow, whoever it was had survived long enough to claw up through the smothering clods of earth. It had to have taken a superhuman effort.
They had discovered why after they had carefully scraped back the top layer of soil.
Cradled in the young woman’s other arm was a dead infant.
Her strength had come from desperation.
The companions peeled back more dirt, exposing other bodies. Many, many bodies piled on top of one another. Both sexes, old, young, strong, weak. As soon as Ryan saw the tangle of limbs and torsos, he sent his twelve-year-old son, Dean, away from the pit to recce the rest of the ville. The boy left gratefully, but he would have remained to prove to his father and the companions that he was made of the same rock-hard stuff that they were. Ryan had no doubt about the boy’s stuff; as far as he was concerned, Dean had nothing to prove.
There were close-range blaster wounds on a few of the corpses, but most were unmarked by obvious acts of violence. They never did find the bottom of the mass grave. The stench of death rained like hammer blows against the sides of their heads, and they staggered from the trench, bent over, retching.
“Bastards chilled the whole ville,” Krysty Wroth gasped as Ryan put a strong, gentle hand on her shoulder. The titian-haired, long-legged young woman was his lover and soul mate. They had seen many hard things during their wanderings over the hellscape, but rarely had they seen such wanton wholesale slaughter as this.
“Not all, mebbe,” said Jak Lauren, pointing at the cluster of shabby dwellings. It was a false hope. And from the expression in the albino’s ruby red eyes, he knew it. But Jak, like everyone else, wanted to be away from the pit and its rotting horrors. A thorough search showed the nameless little ville had been looted of everything of value, just like the dead folk buried in the ditch. The huts and lean-tos had been stripped, the underground storage pits emptied. All that remained was the trash in the ville’s midden too heavy to be blown away by the howling wind.
Uncovering the mass grave had flipped a switch in Doc Tanner’s head. He had stopped talking the moment they found the bodies of the mother and child. Which was unusual, because normally Doc never shut up. At the time, Ryan figured the discovery had triggered memories of Doc’s own terrible loss of his long-dead children and wife, of the time-trawling whitecoats from the future who had snatched him from the natural course of his life in the year 1896, then played with him before bumping him further down the timeline, to the living hell called Deathlands.
Doc hadn’t participated in the speculation about what had happened in the ville, about who could have committed such a bastard evil deed, and how the deed was done. Nor did Doc vote when it came time to decide what in rad blazes they should do about it—if anything.
Some hours later, as Ryan and the companions tracked the overlaid tire prints of many heavy wags leading out of the ville, Doc had suddenly started walking stiff-legged, like a tall, scarecrow zombie in his frock coat and high boots. After he had taken several hard falls, despite the support of his swordstick, J. B. Dix had safety-lined him to his waist with a fifteen-foot length of rope to keep him from wandering off and breaking his neck.
A week had passed since they came on the looted ville and the mass grave. A week of walking, first in the wheel ruts of the presumed chillers to the ville of Perdition, then overland to try to intersect the path of the already departed convoy. In that time, Doc hadn’t improved, and J.B. still towed him, out of duty and friendship.
The peeling sweat on J.B.’s face cut stripes of clean skin through the caked yellow grime; his wire-rimmed spectacles were smeared with a mixture of both. The stocky man wore his precious fedora hat screwed down on his head as he strained forward. Seeing the determination on his face made a flicker of a smile cross Ryan’s lips. He had known John Barrymore Dix since their wild and woolly days with the legendary Trader. J.B. had been that operation’s Armorer, a nickname that had stuck. They were best friends then, as now.
J.B. never said he was sorry when he wasn’t.
And he never gave up.
As Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was dragged along, he railed at a god who was either absent, or oblivious, or malevolent. Or some of each. Doc was an educated man. He used big words. Complicated arguments chased his thoughts, rather than vice versa, like angry wasps trapped inside his skull. He made leaps in logic, dropping out pivotal points, speaking from opposite points of view. At times he seemed to be taking on the persona of his own grand inquisitor.
The only companion with the background to unscramble his philosophical ravings was Mildred Wyeth, and she had long since given up the game. The solidly built black woman was a medical doctor, and aside from Doc, had the most formal education of any of them. She had been cryogenically frozen after a botched surgery just before skydark, and reanimated by Ryan and the others nearly a hundred years later.
Mildred’s diagnosis of Doc’s current condition was grim. She had said his overwhelmed mind had twisted in on itself. Anger reflecting anger, which led to agonizing flashbacks, which reduced him to sobbing into his palms. The man was suffering from an unspeakable, unending ordeal—a price paid for no crime of his, other than the exquisite bliss of his former life. The life he had been born to live, and had been denied. In Mildred’s medical opinion, Doc’s rambling, often shouted, diatribes to imaginary gatherings of Oxford dons allowed him to flee the crushing reality of the present, where he was doomed to exist without his beloved wife and children.
Though Mildred sometimes acted as if she had little love for the old man, it was plain to Ryan that she found it hard to watch and be helpless to slow his further mental and physical disintegration.
The one-eyed man remained cautiously confident that Doc would come out of the tailspin eventually. As he always had before.
As they neared the ville entrance, Ryan saw a little girl in a loose-fitting, faded cotton print dress staring at them from inside the gate. A very pretty little girl with a headband of daisies. Her gaze swept past Ryan to rest upon Dean. The boy sensed he had a rapt audience of one. Though exhausted, he drew himself to his maximum height and flashed a smile at the girl. Ryan was amused to see that his son managed a bit of a manly swagger, with the 9 mm Browning Hi-Power blaster prominently strapped to his hip.
Krysty gave Ryan a nudge. “Like father, like son,” she commented.
A trio of armed men in bill caps stood behind a pile of concrete boulders and rubble that served as both a checkpoint and traffic barrier. Beyond them, Ryan caught his first glimpse of Bullard ville: an oasis of brilliant green that sprouted miraculously from the sunbaked yellow earth. In rows of raised beds, under slanting, corrugated metal roofs, the crop plants grew lush and tall. On the far side of the beds, simmering in the valley heat, predark plastic-and-metal signs on tall poles dangled precariously above a line of low buildings.
“Man, oh, man, could I ever go for a cheese-burger and a strawberry shake,” Mildred said.
Ryan grinned. “We’ll be lucky to get a plate of beans and a swig of green beer.”
“I know, I know. But a girl can still dream, can’t she?”
As they stepped up to the checkpoint, one of the bill caps shouted in an unpleasantly high voice, “And just who might you folks be?” Without giving them time to answer, he asked a second question. “What is your business here?” The two other sentries held sawed-off, 12-gauge, double-barreled shotguns at waist height. The range was such that, by discharging all four stubby barrels at once, they could cut the strangers not so neatly in two.
Ryan showed the guards open hands. “We’re just travelers on the long road north,” he said. “Come to water and rest, and willing to pay for it.”
The head sentry, a very short man with a full brown beard, gave them a hard once-over. He looked especially long at their complement of weapons, appraising them for possible threat and commercial value. When he came to Doc, he couldn’t help but notice the slack rope that connected him around the waist to the man with the smeared eyeglasses.
“What’s with the geezer?” the guard leader chirped. “He sick? He looks sick to me. He better not have the fucking oozies!”
Ryan and the companions knew he was referring to an incurable, mutated brain virus, much feared and believed to be transferred by cannibalism.
“He’s just old,” Krysty said. “Very, very old.”
“Oughta leave him to meet his maker, then.”
“Ain’t his time, yet,” Ryan said, the look on his face telling the guard to mind his own bastard business.
Unable to contain himself any longer, one of the shotgunners excitedly blurted out, “We got a carny come to town.”
“That so?” J.B. said.
The sentries shared wide grins.
“Best rad-blasted carny in all the Deathlands,” the head guard added. “Big show’s tomorrow.”
“We’ll have to stick around, then,” Ryan said. “Something like that you don’t see every day.”
“You’d better believe it,” the shotgunner said. “Gert Wolfram’s carny only plays the most important, big-time villes.”
“You can stow your gear over where the carny is putting up camp,” the head guard said. “As long as you got something to trade, you got the run of Bullard ville. There’s food, water, joy juice and the best damn gaudy house this side of Perdition. When you run out of trade goods, we will escort you out of the berm. We don’t give no charity here. And we don’t take no guff from those who don’t belong.”
With that warning, the guards lowered their scatterguns and allowed the companions to enter Bullard ville.
Once inside, there was no mistaking the proposed campsite. Not with fifteen wags parked in a broad circle on the baked yellow dirt. On the side of the largest wag was a crudely painted sign that read Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny Show. Lots of ville folks were standing around gawking while dozens of carny roustabouts worked to set up camp. The heavy protective tarps were pulled back from the trailered cages so the gawkers could see in. Only from a goodly distance, though. The newcomers appeared to have set up a kind of invisible perimeter that the ville folk weren’t crossing. Mebbe they’d been warned to steer clear? Mebbe they didn’t need to be.
As they approached the mob of spectators, a strange sound split the air. Two very loud tones, a high note sliding to low. Only Mildred made the connection to a foghorn; none of the others had ever heard one. To them it sounded like a baleful howl.
Beside Ryan, Jak cranked his head around and stiffened, as if ten thousand volts had just shot through him. The youth’s reaction surprised the one-eyed man. It was just an animal noise. A very large animal.
Before Ryan could raise a hand to stop him, the albino took off, running at full tilt for the cages. Some of the carny folk saw him coming and tried to block his way with widespread arms, but he feinted, swinging his white head one way, then squirted past them. Staring at his rapidly accelerating back, the empty-handed roustabouts yelled for someone to get him.
“Dark night,” J.B. muttered, “we were supposed to go in nice and quiet, and recce first.”
“Better back his play,” Ryan said, waving the companions after him.
J.B. pulled Doc along like a stubborn calf.
Suddenly the howling got a whole lot louder, and it changed in timbre. Instead of coming from deep in a huge set of lungs, it came from high in the throat.
It went from misery to absolute joy.
Then it stopped altogether.
There was no one left to try to turn back the companions. All the carny folk had rushed over to one of the trailered cages.
And with good reason.
It appeared that the agile intruder was getting eaten alive.
Jak had his head stuck between the bars of the cage, holding on to them with both hands. For a split second, Ryan’s heart dropped in his chest. He thought the young albino was a sure goner, his head half inside the great carnivore’s open maw. But then he saw Jak wasn’t getting chewed.
He was getting licked.
The mutie mountain lion’s tongue slathered his face so hard that even holding on to the bars with all his might, Jak couldn’t keep his boots on the ground.
The great cat made a loud purring sound, like a wag’s big diesel engine fast idling, as it scrubbed the albino’s face and neck with a wide pink tongue that had to be a foot and a half long.
“What the nuking hell?” J.B. exclaimed as he came to a stop beside his one-eyed friend.
“It’s the lion, J.B.,” Ryan said. “They’ve got the lion.”
The companions—except Doc, who was still wearing the thousand-yard stare—needed no further explanation. Some time ago, Jak had been made a prisoner in Baron Willie Elijah’s mutie zoo. He had been caged up with a mutie mountain lion. After an initial, violent and lengthy misunderstanding, the two had got on famously. They were both wild things, so well matched physically and spiritually that they could communicate without words, with their eyes and with touch. Brother beasts of the hellscape.
Once freed, the big lion hadn’t run off, but had followed Jak and the companions. Only when it refused to enter a mat-trans unit was it left behind. This, it seemed certain, was that selfsame noble beast.
“A captive again,” Mildred said glumly.
“Unlucky,” Krysty said.
“Mebbe,” J.B. stated. “Mebbe not.”
“What do you mean?” Krysty asked.
“Found Jak again, didn’t he?”
“Step back from the cage, mutie,” one of the roustabouts shouted as he shouldered up to the bars. He was a big, thick-bodied man with a heavy blue-black shadow of beard stubble, and matted black hair on the tops of his shoulders and the backs of his arms. He outweighed Jak by more than a hundred pounds.
The albino paid him no mind.
“I said, step back!”
With no one to stop them, the ville folk pressed forward for a good view of the action. The show was starting a day early.