Apocalypse Unborn

Post-nukecaust Morro Bay had been rebuilt using recycled materials from the former marina, and from the fleet of commercial fishing boats and private yachts scattered high onto the hillsides by tidal waves and hurricane-force winds. Single-story, ramshackle shacks shared walls and predark concrete block-and-slab foundations—there was not a single right angle in the entire ville. Nor was there much in the way of ground cover, save for the clumps of tiny wild daisies sprouting along the open-trench latrines. It reminded Mildred of movies she’d seen of Calcutta, India: a seething, mounded garbage dump shrouded by acrid wood smoke.

Ville folk furtively watched the line of newcomers from window holes punched in their cardboard walls; concealed in shadow, they huddled in doorless doorways. Though Morro Bay serviced the small ship trade to coastal outposts in the north, it had no gaudy, as such; that sort of business was conducted in the earthen ditches alongside the road. There were no frantic sluts pandering along the crowded pier this day. No begging children, either. Murder for profit was a growth industry here, yet the inhabitants were taking pains to hide themselves.

With good reason.

The folk who lined the dock were the foulest, most dangerous scum in all of Deathlands. Maniac mercies. Double-crossing ex-sec men. Slavers. Jolt traders. Mutie hunters. Blackheart robbers and chillers. The line of human refuse stretched past the end of the pier and wound back up the hill. Most of the cargo crates in the queue held living creatures that squealed and shrieked, but some pleaded in English for water, food or a quick and merciful death. The air holes were too small and too widely spaced for Mildred to see what or who was trapped inside.

“Hey, slut, I’m asking you a question,” the skinner said. He punctuated his remark by giving her a hard poke in the kidney with a stiffened finger.

Mildred turned and looked up into his eyes. She saw animal lust, greed and seamless ignorance. “Back off,” she warned him.

It was a waste of breath.

The skinner smiled. “Maybe you do so much business on your backs you can’t remember faces,” he said. He drew out eight inches of predark Buck knife and waved its cruel gut hook in her face. “Bet you remember this…”

“Let’s bang ’em again, right here,” the shorter man growled, moving closer, his hand on the butt of his remade pistol.

Krysty and Mildred were on their own. To avoid being recognized, the six companions had split up at the ville’s city limits. Ryan Cawdor was far ahead of them in line and the others, Doc Tanner, Jak Lauren, and J. B., were spread out some distance behind. Although it was vital to draw no extra attention to themselves, there was another, equally important consideration: the voyage south was going to be long and in tight quarters. Unless Krysty and Mildred made a statement that could not be misconstrued, they were going to be subject to the unwanted, nonstop, belowdecks attentions of a hundred-odd, semihuman shitballs.

In a blur Mildred drew her Czech ZKR 551 revolver and jammed the muzzle under the much taller man’s chin. For a fraction of an instant he stood there flat-footed, long knife in hand. Under the circumstances, there was no moral lap dance, no question of Mildred holding her fire, of just disarming him.

That option simply did not exist.

The pistol’s bark was partially muffled by flesh and bone. The skinner grimaced as the .38-caliber slug rocketed out the top of his head and brains jetted skyward in glistening puff of pink. He toppled backward, bright arterial blood spurting from the ragged hole in his crown.

His running buddy tried to clear the Astra from his waistband, but Krysty beat him to the punch. Snatching her Smith & Wesson 640 out from under her coat, she lunged forward and shot him once in the heart. The close-range muzzle-flash set his matted carpet of chest hair on fire. The .38-caliber bullet zipped through his torso and out his back, skipping off the pier railing before blipping into the bay. Clutching the smoking entrance wound, he staggered sideways, his eyes bulging. His mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. Dead on his feet, he twisted and fell onto his face.

The two women turned back to back and scanned the nearby crowd over the sights of their handblasters. Everyone had turned to look at the closely spaced shots. Some drew their pistols or unslung long guns, but when they realized there was no threat and the show was over, they all stood down. No one seemed concerned about the sudden chillings; for this scabrous crew it was business as usual.

Having made their point, Mildred and Krysty booted the still-twitching bodies off the side of the pier. Other corpses bobbed down there—bloated, slack-jawed whoppers drifting among the pilings. Overfed seagulls rode on pale chests, either dozing or pecking halfheartedly at empty eye sockets and the roots of shredded tongues.

As Mildred stepped away from the railing she glanced down the line to the ruined end of the pier. Ryan Cawdor was now three back from the interrogation table.

F ROM A DISTANCE of fifteen feet, Ryan observed the frigate’s captain, a mountain of brown skin and black tattoos seated behind a makeshift desk. Naked to the waist, his torso and arms were decorated with intertwined thorny vines; his front teeth, top and bottom, were filed to triangular, sharklike points. But most striking was the gruesome facial branding. Four parallel ridges of pink scar tissue ran over the bridge of his wide nose and down his broad cheeks. The corners of his mouth had been likewise disfigured, they twisted upward in a perpetual, manic grin.

Ryan recognized the islander blood, what more than a century ago would have been called Maori or Fijian. The captain’s black hair hung in a braid down past the middle of his back. He had gold rings on every thick finger and both thumbs. A Government Model 1911 Colt pistol with an extended, high-capacity magazine lay on the tabletop. The .45’s hammer was locked back, the grip safety permanently held down with tight wraps of waxed cord. Next to his hand, it looked like a child’s toy. The armed, half-naked men at the stairway were islanders, too. They held their AK-47s casually aimed at the next man in line. Safeties off. Firing lanes clear. Index fingers braced against the outside of trigger guards.

The three mercies standing in front of Ryan wore grease-stained canvas dusters and scarred lace-up boots. They carried blueless but well-oiled 9 mm Heckler & Koch machine pistols on shoulder slings. The weapons looked to be in excellent condition. They kept their hands in view and well away from their blasters. The first guy in line, presumably the trio’s boss, sported a broad-brimmed leather hat pulled down low over his eyes.

The captain waved them forward. “Where are you boys from?” he said, pencil point poised against the open logbook.

“We come from Siana country, over near Fayette,” the mercie leader replied in a gravelly voice. “A bastard long walk.”

“Who did you crew for?”

“Crewed for ourselves. We’ve been wolf-packin’ for the last six, eight months.”

“Wolf pack” was Deathlandese for a band of roaming, freelance robber-chillers. And wolf-packing would not appear distasteful to the captain, under the circumstances.

He didn’t ask for any of their names. He didn’t start writing in the logbook, either. At his elbow was a pile of tarnished metal disks with neck thongs. Every disk had a different stamped number. Those he handed a tag got a berth on the white ship and free passage south, to promised mayhem, glory and riches.

“I heard there’s lots of cannies roaming the bayous these days,” the captain said.

Cannies were cannibals, arguably Deathlands’ most degraded and depraved human subculture. They operated in small, highly mobile clans, joining forces to hunt, to chill, to feed on the weak and the unwary.

“No more than any place else,” the mercie said.

“We had a few maneaters slip aboard the last trip,” the captain said. “Guess they thought it was gonna be a floating picnic. It wasn’t. Bystanders got caught in the cross fire. Hell of a mess.” The captain put a yellow plastic bucket on the table. “You mind spitting in this?”

The mercie leader didn’t look back at his pals; he didn’t take his eyes off the four AK-47s pointed at the center of his chest. He shrugged. “You want some spit, I’ll give you spit.” Holding the rim of the bucket close to his lips, he hawked resonantly and expelled a stringy gob, mopping the blowback off his chin stubble with his duster sleeve.

The captain reached under the table for a quart Mason jar three-quarters-full of liquid. The fluid was the color of burgundy wine, but when he poured a little into the bucket, it dripped thick and slow. Holding the bucket at arm’s length, the captain sluiced around the contents, then dumped a foaming mess out onto the deck. The liquid was no longer ruby-red. It wasn’t even pale pink. It was the color of predark concrete. “Gray means oozies,” he told the mercie leader as he set aside the bucket. “But you already know that.”

Ryan took a quick, careful step to one side. Oozies was the cannie plague. Spread by the eating of human flesh, it produced weeping lesions inside the victim’s brain. In its final stage, a thick, gray pus leaked from ears and nostrils. As Ryan planted his feet, his fingers an inch from the butt of his holstered SIG-Sauer P-226, from under the table came a shotgun’s deafening roar.

The table’s front legs hopped from the ground and the mercie vaulted backward, arms spread wide, enveloped in a billowing white cloud that twinkled with tiny comets of burning black-powder. He landed flat on his back, a smoldering, gory crater blown from hip to hip. The awful swathe of destruction was the product of not one, but two simultaneously discharging 12-gauge barrels, the product of a muzzle loader packed with metal scrap and bent nails.

The other two mercies jumped through the smoke for the railing. Before the islander crew could open fire, they dived headfirst over it.

Their splashdowns were punctuated by the clatter of Kalashnikovs. The islanders fired over the rail, full-auto. The passenger wannabes rushed to that side of the pier, shouting and potshotting at the pale shapes swimming toward shore four feet under the surface. Ryan drew his handblaster, but didn’t join the fray. There was no need. Concentrated bullet impacts churned the water to a fine froth. First one, then the other body popped up, no longer moving, leaking red from dozens of wounds. At which point, the shooting stopped abruptly.

Behind them on the deck, the mortally wounded cannie jittered—heels drumming, back arching, teeth snapping, gray mucous bubbling from his nostrils and ears. The double scattergun blast had gutted him, but missed his heart and lungs. Ryan crouched upwind, just beyond the cannie’s reach, raised his blaster and fired once, putting a 9 mm round in front of the cannie’s left ear, blowing infected brains out the far side of his head.

As he reholstered the SIG, the crewmen rolled the corpse off the pier.

The background racket resumed at once. Along the queue, sec men and slavers pushed and threatened one another, jockeying for dominance. Brief fist and blade fights broke out. Caged anomalies shrieked and moaned in mortal terror. The looming mass of fog, the drifting gun and wood smoke and the overwhelming reek of death from beneath the pier added to the atmosphere.

Hell’s circus.

Only one creature in all of Deathlands could have recruited and assembled such a gathering.

The ringmaster.

Magus. Steel Eyes. The thing that wouldn’t die.

Once he had been one-hundred-percent, flesh-and-blood human. How long ago that was, or where he had come from was not known. As his organic parts—limbs, organs, sensory arrays—failed due to age or damage, he had used inorganics such as nanotech circuit boards, memory chips, servos, pumps and titanium struts, to make the necessary repairs to himself. The melding of mechanical and biomechanical subsystems had prolonged Magus’s life, but the result was not a pretty sight. Blood, machine oil and pus seeped from the joins of angry flesh to gleaming metal, erratic clicking sounds, like a box of cheap wind-up clocks, came from inside his torso, and he was enveloped in the rank odor of his own putrefaction.

Over the years Ryan and his companions had crossed the creature’s path more than once, witnessing the unspeakable cruelties he wrought on the innocent and unwary. Ever the puppetmaster, Magus relied on norm and mutie minions to do his wet work, and to cover his retreat into the shadows. Steel Eyes had long ago cut out his own humanity; if he still had a heart, that organ was made of plastic and Kevlar. Animated by a seemingly bottomless evil, this reeking, lurching contraption terrified and awed even Deathlands’ most degenerate human trash. He attracted lesser villains like moths to a black flame.

In the past, Magus had toyed with randomly selected, living game pieces, amusing himself by sowing localized horror, apparently on a whim. Attacks on remote, poorly defended villes required relatively small hit crews, which could be assembled from the front porch of almost any gaudy in the hellscape. His slavery/natural resource extraction operations used the same breed of enforcers. Magus was never out of pocket for any of his criminal enterprises. Slave laborers worked for free and mass murderers were paid in the spoils of carnage.

Something new and infinitely more menacing had drawn Ryan and the others halfway across Deathlands to the pier on Morro Bay. In the last month or so, groups of drifters, traders and refugees had passed the word along the network of eroded predark interstates, through roadside and dry river bottom campsites, shanty villes, skeletonized major cities, from gaudy to gaudy all the way to the eastern baronies. Steel Eyes was recruiting an army of blackhearts. The call had been sent across the whole of the hellscape. Those who signed on were guaranteed jack, jolt and joy juice in unlimited quantities, and the opportunity to indulge in savagery unheard-of since nuke day.

Magus had never shown any ambition for conquest before. He had been content to play on the margins of Deathlands’ disjointed feudal system, squabbling baronies separated by vast, lawless territories. He seemed as interested in concealing his whereabouts, his motives and the true extent of his power as he was in wreaking havoc on the defenseless. Until now the location of his home base was anybody’s guess—that it would be in the West Coast’s most nuked-out zone, in a place no one would dare look, made perfect sense.

The captain gestured for Ryan to approach the interview table. Wide-set, heavy-lidded brown eyes took in his battle-worn face.

A face impossible to disguise.

A knife slash from his brother had cost Ryan his left eye and had marked his eyebrow and cheek with a jagged scar. A black eye patch covered the empty socket. Losing an eye was a common enough injury in Deathlands, where fighting was often hand-to-hand with edged weapons. Other men were as tall, with similar rangy builds and long dark hair. Few had an eye so blue. Fewer still carried an eighteen-inch panga in a leg sheath and a scoped Steyr SSG-70 longblaster. But there was no sign of recognition from the islander captain. Which was just as well because diving off the pier was not going to save life and limb. Either the captain had never heard of the one-eyed man’s exploits, or he failed to identify Ryan without his constant companions at his side.

Ryan stared at the man’s heavily scarred forearms. This was no decorative disfigurement. The oval-shaped, long-healed wounds were three and a half inches across. He had lost great divots of flesh, clear down to the bone.

Bite marks.

“Why’d you waste a good centerfire bullet on that cannie?” the captain asked. “He was gonna be dead meat in five minutes, tops.”

Ryan would’ve shot a rabid stickie in that condition, but Magus wasn’t in the market for mercy chillers. “Had a clear shot on the rad bastard,” Ryan told him. “Wanted to get in my licks while I could.”

“You solo?”

“Always.”

“Mercie?”

“Sec man. Came up under Baron Zepp.”

“Down Florida way.”

Ryan nodded. “Greenglades.”

“Old Zepp got himself chilled.”

“He was still breathing when I moved west.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“Needed a change of climate.”

The captain didn’t ask for his name—names had a tendency to change, before and after wet work—but he looked hard at the bolt-action Steyr slung over Ryan’s shoulder. “You any good with that longblaster?”

“Good enough to keep it.”

It was the kind of rare, high-end weapon that most folks would chill for, given the opportunity.

The mountain of brown stared up at Ryan’s face. “But not good enough to keep your eye?”

Ryan smiled. “One’s all I need.”

“Here,” the captain said, shoving the yellow bucket across the table at him. “Spit.”

Ryan obliged. When the mixed sputum and blood poured out red, the crewmen let the aimpoints of their AKs drift away from his chest.

“Call me Captain, or Captain Eng,” said the seated man. He picked a token from the pile, wrote down the number in his log, then tossed Ryan the disk. “From now on you are called 46. Wear that tag around your neck at all times. Don’t lose it. Without it, you won’t be fed or paid. Go down the gangway and wait on the dock. You’ll be told what to do. Make no trouble, and you’ll have no trouble.”

Ryan nodded, although trouble was exactly what he had in mind. He and his friends had missed the chance to chill Magus before.

If they missed this time, all of Deathlands would pay the price.

Chapter Two

Doc Tanner leaned hard against his oar, putting every ounce of his skinny, six-foot-three-inch frame into the effort. He sat on the right half of the eighteen-foot boat’s middle thwart, facing the stern and the hulking, brown-skinned man at the tiller, a man with heavy brows and squinty, slitted eyes. A wispy black chin-beard hung down his chest, between pendulous bare breasts. Intricate blue-black tattooing, like a filigreed cape, shadowed sloping shoulders.

“Pull!” the tillerman ordered his conscripted crew as he steered into the steady breeze. A remade AK-47 with a steel skeleton stock lay across the tops of his thighs. An extra 30-round magazine was taped upside down to the weapon’s clip. In the edge of the wooden seat beside him, he had stuck a machete, blade-first, its handle within easy reach. A plastic bailing can floated in the bilge water between his bare feet.

After some initial clumsiness and disorganization, the ten passengers had their oars moving more or less in sync, and the boat made smooth, gliding progress toward the anchored frigate.

As Doc dipped his oar, he recalled a more pleasant sea voyage, roughly two centuries ago. It, too, had been a journey via sailing ship. There had been no rowing required. He had been returning home to the United States from Oxford University in England, where he had earned a PhD degree in science. Shortly after his repatriation, he had met and married the lovely Emily Chandler. Their union had been blessed with two children, a girl Rachel, born in 1893, and a son Jolyon, born in 1895. The Tanners began a happy domestic life in Omaha, Nebraska. Their joy was cut short by an unimaginable turn of events. A world stood on its head in a single, terrible instant. One afternoon in November of 1896, blind fate had torn Dr. Theophilus Tanner from the bosom of his young family.

Blind fate and human cruelty.

Out for a stroll with his wife and children, he had been time-trawled against his will by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos, vacuumed up and drawn forward to the year 1998. After almost two years of close confinement, constant interrogation, physical and psychological testing, of torture in the name of a twisted, morally bankrupt science, he had been hurled forward in time again, farther still from those he had loved.

In a strange and terrible world, he had been adopted by a new family. No wife had he. No offspring. But rather, brothers and sisters of battle, fighters bound together by a common thread: survival.

As the boat drew away from the pier, Doc thought he saw Jak Lauren’s shoulder-length white hair gleaming among the milling crowd. Jak was a red-eyed albino, a wild child of Deathlands, skilled with leaf-bladed throwing knives and his Colt Python handblaster, a young man of few words and great, selfless bravery. The Armorer, also known as John Barrymore Dix, was farther back in the throng, his fedora hat lost behind much taller heads. J.B. brought up the companions’ rear with a 12-gauge Smith & Wesson M-4000 pump shotgun. The rest of Doc’s extended family—Ryan, Krysty and Mildred—were already onboard the white ship.

Doc took in the other rowers around him. A motley crew, to be sure. Some had used strips of black plastic bags and winds of duct tape to repair tears in their boots, jackets and trousers. Their centerfire and black-powder weapons were mostly well-worn, missing handblaster grips replaced with layers of silver tape. Their knuckles were scarred, and their faces grimy and gap-toothed. Even the steady head wind couldn’t blow away the smell of unwashed funk, spilled joy juice and the stink of intense fear. None could predict what they might encounter on the road to promised riches. Or if, in fact, any riches lay ahead. They kept rowing, though, heads down, backs bent. These were men accustomed to big risk and small rewards.

Only a certain kind of Deathlander would consider signing on with the likes of Magus—someone stuck at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. Someone with a taste for chilling and the desire to claw his way upward, over the bodies of others, to the light and air. It required a willingness, indeed an eagerness, to do anything, at any time, to anyone, an amoral mentality that in Tanner’s Victorian Era had been ascribed to “primitive” peoples in distant lands, and to the criminally insane.

Alone in a small boat in such company, Doc felt considerable unease, himself. His ebony sword stick leaned against the thwart, its silver lion’s-head handle pressing into the side of one of his tall, cracked leather boots. Under his black frock coat hung a massive, holstered black-powder pistol. The LeMat represented a high point in Civil War weapons technology—two sidearms in one. A .63-caliber, single-shot scattergun barrel was married to a 9-shot .44-caliber revolver. Properly angled from the rowboat’s bow, the LeMat’s “blue whistler” barrel could incapacitate the entire crew and tillerman in one horrendous, stem to stern blast.

Despite the undeniable appeal of that course of action, Doc put it out of his mind. When it came to evil, these were minnows.

The man rowing on the thwart in front of him had four sections of black PVC pipe strapped to his back. Connected in a crude rope frame, the pipes were two feet long, four inches in diameter, and securely capped at both ends. Air holes had been drilled along the sides every few inches. Leaning over the gunwhale a little, Doc managed to catch sight of the side of his face. It was painted a flat white from forehead to neck, ear to ear. A grizzled short beard stuck through the crusted pigment. Where the paint had flaked off, Tanner could see tiny, scattered whorls of red. It appeared the man had taken a load of birdshot full in the face.

Looking more closely at the plastic pipes, Doc saw clustered yellowish feet sticking through the air holes.

Crisp, hairy, insect feet.

“For lack of a proper name, we call them scagworms,” said the black man rowing beside him. He was the same height as Doc, but the dreadlocks gathered on top of his head, sprouting up like the jutting leaves of a great pineapple, gave him another eighteen inches. He had a hugely muscled back and corded neck. He, too, wore a rack of PVC pipes.

“With a plethora of appendages, it would seem,” Doc remarked. “Pray tell, precisely how many creatures am I looking at?”