Baptism of Rage (10 page)

After a while, the boars gave up on their attacks, turning their attention instead to their fallen colleague and, though it was hard to discern in the darkness of the barn, Jak and Ryan were sure that they were eating the corpse.

Crouched up there, tottering on the narrow bar of the plow, Ryan whispered instructions to Jak while they reloaded their blasters. Ryan indicated the lengths of chain that hung from the hooks on the wall as he outlined his plan. Jak nodded in agreement, his eyes fixed on the boars, watching their dark, bulky shapes as they feasted on their brother, the mother on her son.

Once he felt certain that the boars were occupied, Jak stepped very lightly back onto the floor of the barn, placing one foot silently down on the wooden planks. The boars continued at their awful meal, barging one another aside as they tore away bloody hunks of the
warm flesh. Slowly, silently, Jak walked across to the chains that hung against the wall, the Colt Python back in its holster. Standing there, watching the boars, Jak weaved his left arm behind the chains, wrapping one around his wrist and getting a firm grip upon it. Then, with a remarkable economy of movement, he pulled himself from the floor, muscles straining as he took his whole weight on one arm. Once he was off the floor, Jak kicked his feet forward and scrambled up the wall, his legs running to power him up until he could reach the little wooden ledge that ran around the barn, roughly eight feet above the ground. Below him, the strange mutated boars circled, grunting and squealing, feasting on their fallen sibling.

The crossbeam that Jak found himself on was very narrow, barely half the width of his foot. Jak remained composed, his innate sense of his surroundings kicking in, calmly balancing as he made his way along the ledge toward the barn doors.

Two or three minutes passed, and the boars began to quiet down. From outside, Annie’s screeching voice came loudly to their ears. “I think they may be chilled,” she said.

Then they heard the sound of a slap coming from beyond the door, flesh on flesh. “You see how I’m laughing, Annie? No way,” Mitch’s voice replied. “Those boys’ll take more punishment than that. They just bought themselves a tempor’y breather is all.”

Standing atop the rusted plow, Ryan waited in the silence, his SIG-Sauer gripped firmly in his hand. He could see the rotting double doors to the barn. And there, above the doors, his boot heels flush against the wall on the narrow wooden ledge, Jak waited with the
Colt Python glinting in his pale hand. The light of the fire from Mitch’s wag could be seen through the cracks and knotholes in the doors, fizzing and spitting with the inconstant redness of living flame, casting a slight, eerie glow into the barn itself.

A shadow appeared across one of the knotholes, blocking the light, and Annie’s whining voice came through the doors once. “I can’t see nuthin’ in there,” she said, keeping her voice quiet but still audible to Ryan and Jak. “I think it’s just the pigs that are a-living.”

Mitch’s voice came through the door then. “You think? Shame about them dousing the light. Was a good show while it lasted. Not as much fun as a scalie fight. Them dumb sons of bitches don’t bust our light. Guess even muties know good entertainment when they sees it.”

There was some rustling from outside, and Ryan waited, keeping his breathing steady as he watched the illuminated holes in the doors for further movements.

“Don’t gimme that look, woman,” Mitch said, his voice rising in anger. “I ain’t opening up. Not till morning now. Make sure they’re good and dead. I ain’t no idiot.”

“But I want to see,” Annie whined. “I want to see what the pigs did to the big one, I reckon he put up a hell of a fight.”

“I reckon he did, too, Annie,” Mitch said, and there was something in his voice, an edge that was like a taunt.

Ryan watched the doors as shadows crossed the knotholes once more, and then the barn doors shook.
They’re opening them, after all,
he thought. But no, the doors
weren’t moving. They shook a little with the pressure as a body was pushed against them, and Ryan realized, with a twinge of disgust, that the couple were making out, right there, against the door; turned on, presumably, by the thought of the bloodshed, the sadistic play they had created by locking Jak and himself in the barn with these savage carnivores.

Both Mitch and Annie were busted in the head, Ryan knew, the flame of their mutual concupiscence only sparking when they hurt others. Whatever the nuclear eschaton and the rise of the Deathlands had done to humanity, it was no excuse for people like this. In any world, on any day, they were sick—corrupt in their thought processes, corrupt in their very souls.

The sounds of kissing, the murmurings of lust, of wanting, drifted through the doors. Without another second’s thought, Ryan squeezed the trigger of his blaster, driving a 9 mm Parabellum bullet through the rotten wood of the door and into the human body that rested against it.

There was an agonized scream, and the shadow figure fell away from the door. Below, on the floor of the barn, the boar mother and her children began snuffling, agitated by the sudden explosion of light and noise.

“Saint holy crap—” Mitch’s voice was raised in shock “—what the hell just happened? Annie? Annie!”

Annie’s voice sounded weak, and Ryan couldn’t make out the words.

Mitch was cursing then, calling Ryan and Jak every name he could think of as he tried to recover. Ryan and Jak silently waited. Then, things outside went quiet once more.

Standing atop the farm machinery, his lone eye locked on the barn doors, Ryan whispered his instructions for Jak into the darkness. “He’ll come now,” he said. “Get ready.”

Standing against the wall, Jak bent and unbent his knees, keeping the circulation going, preparing himself for the final assault.

It took about two minutes, but finally they heard the engine of the boneshaker wag that Mitch drove splutter back to life. The engine of the heavy wag rumbled louder, and then the pitch changed and Ryan waited for the inevitable. In a moment, the light grew brighter through the splits in the wooden doors, a shotgun blast drilled through the door, creating another split in prelude to what would happen a moment after. Then the doors caved in as the wag crashed into them, knocking the rotten doors aside as Mitch plowed his wag into the barn. The boars squealed, running from the colossal crashing shape of the vehicle as it drove through the splintering doors. Ryan could see two figures lit by the fires of the engine. Mitch was in the high driver’s seat again while Annie was slumped in the passenger chair, the shotgun resting awkwardly in her hands.

As Ryan watched, Annie raised the weapon and began blasting, but the assault lasted less than a second. Above her, Jak leaped from the crossbeam ledge that ran high over the barn doors, the ball of his booted right foot crashing into the barrel of the shotgun, knocking it free of the woman’s grip.

Running, Ryan kicked off from the rusty, rotten plow, pouncing forward, letting gravity feed his momentum as he barreled at the approaching wag. He landed on the high front plate of the awkward-looking wagon,
charging forward as Mitch raised his Colt Anaconda and snapped off a shot. The bullet flew wide, and Ryan gave him no chance to try another. He was already upon him.

With a powerful grip, Ryan pulled the scrawny sadist from his seat, slapping the blaster out of his hand. Mitch was muttering some words in complaint, but they seemed nonsensical now, as if he had lost his ability to comment, to speak properly.

“You should have stayed outside,” Ryan barked at the disheveled driver.

Across from the driver’s side, Jak reached up and un-hooked one of the lengths of chain from its place on the wall as the old, patched-up combine harvester trudged past them. The fight appeared to have left Annie, and a bloody wound could be seen on the right side of her chest just below her collarbone—Ryan’s bullet had driven through her from the back, and she was losing a steady stream of blood now.

Jak whipped up the chain, knocking the woman’s jaw with its tail end. She toppled from her seat, looking dazed. “Up,” he told her. One word, an angry instruction.

The woman crawled across the curved surface of the wag, trying to get away from Jak.

The wag continued on, traveling slower than walking speed but shunting everything in its path aside.

Across the other side of the wag to Jak, Ryan had yanked Mitch from his seat and he rammed the barrel of his blaster into the man’s stomach, driving it upward—hard—as he held the man by the collar of his shirt.

“You don’t have the guts to chill me,” Mitch said. It was a ludicrous thing to say, the kind of moronic bluff only an idiot would try.

“What?” Ryan asked, his voice grim. “Do you think I’m going to leave you to your pets, some kind of poetic justice?”

Mitch nodded, wincing as the one-eyed man before him shoved his blaster harder into his soft gut. “Yeah, that’s the ticket, Ryan,” he said, his voice strained and breathless. “Poetry justice, just like what you said.”

Holding the man in place, Ryan turned his head, watching the grunting, squealing boars scramble aside as the wag trudged onward through the darkened barn on its trundling wheels. Lit by the fires that powered the heavy wag, Ryan saw that there were bones there, both human and animal. Mitch and Annie had locked other people in this barn for their perverse entertainment, doubtlessly laughed as they heard them scream and die, screwing each other senseless as they reached their insane form of ecstasy.

“Poetic justice?” Ryan snarled. “Do you see how hard I am laughing, Mitch?”

As Mitch began to answer, Ryan pulled the trigger of his blaster, drilling a bullet up into the man’s gut and beyond. Mitch spluttered, a thick line of dark red liquid oozing from his mouth.

Across from him, Annie was scrambling away from Jak as the albino teen brandished the chain. She had heard the muffled gunshot as Ryan blasted her husband, and she looked up, shrieking with disbelief.

“No!” she cried. “Mitch, my darling. My darling.”

Ryan let go of Mitch’s body as it went limp in his hands, and watched as it tumbled from the wag and down
onto the wooden slats of the barn floor. In the firelight cast by the stokehole, Ryan saw the boars circling, watching their fallen owner with dark, malevolent eyes.

Jak made to tie up Annie using the length of chain, but Ryan held his hand up, stopping the albino youth in his tracks. “Let her be now,” he instructed, his voice drained of all emotion.

Annie leaped from the wag, down to where her husband lay, blood pooling around his stomach wound. She pulled his thin figure close to her, cradling the man’s head in her lap and kissing him on the forehead. “Mitch, my darling, darling brother,” she sobbed as the family of angry boars closed in on them.

Above her, Ryan swung into the driver’s seat and began yanking at the levers, gunning the engine and aiming the vehicle toward the still-solid back wall of the barn. Across from him, Jak was settling into Annie’s seat at the side of the stoked fire.

“Hang on, Jak,” Ryan instructed as he picked up speed.

Jak braced himself as the wag lurched forward, increasing speed until it smashed through the far wall of the barn and out the other side, splinters of rotted wood crashing about them like rain. With a shift of levers, Ryan swung the mighty wag around and drove past the outbuilding and the dilapidated house, heading back along the dirt track toward the town of Tazewell.

J.B. pulled the binocs from his pocket and squinted into the eyepieces. He could make out the trees and run-down buildings all around them, stark lines against the darkening night sky, but he could see little else. There was something moving out there, he was sure of it, could feel it in his bones. He stashed the binoculars in his pocket and strode swiftly back to where Krysty perched at the side of the road.

“Krysty,” he said, his voice low, “I want everyone gathered up and back in the wags right now.”

Krysty cocked a thin, red eyebrow as she looked at him. “Did you see something out there, J.B.?”

“No,” he replied, “but I can feel it. Sure as shit, something’s out there watching us.”

Krysty nodded. She had known J.B. a long time and felt no desire to question his instincts. He might not be as in tune with his surroundings as their half-feral companion, Jak, but the Armorer wasn’t one to jump at shadows, either.

J.B. checked the load in his M-4000 scattergun, eyeing the edge of the road as Krysty went off to gather the various passengers of the wag convoy. Then he reached to a hidden loop inside the back of his coat, pulling out the 9 mm mini-Uzi he had stashed there. “Come on, you sneaky bastards,” he muttered, “let’s get a look at you. Prove me right.”

Beside the convoy, Krysty was giving out instructions, swiftly ensuring that everyone was back in their own wags and under cover. Mildred leaped out of the truck cab that was the second wag, her work on Paul Witterson’s wounded arm complete, and chased after Krysty as the taller woman made her way along the road to instruct the other vehicles.

“What’s going on?” Mildred asked, keeping her voice low.

“J.B. says there’s something out there,” Krysty explained before turning to Charles Torino, the amiable driver of the third wag in the train. “Everyone here who should be here?” she asked.

“All present and accounted for, sister,” Charles replied with a friendly smile. “You got trouble?”

“Not yet,” Krysty told him, “but we may be expecting us some.”

Torino nodded once. “Let me know if you need a spare hand,” he told her.

Beside Charles, Doc pushed open the passenger door and stepped out of the car. “You’ll have to excuse me, I’m afraid,” he told Charles and Mary Foster, who sat with her baby in the back of the wag, “but ’twould appear that duty calls.”

A moment later, Doc took up a position in the shadowy fields by the edge of the road, the modified LeMat in his hand. He tapped the old weapon against his leg anxiously as he waited for whatever it was that J.B. had sensed.

As Krysty hurried Maude and Vincent, who had left their tractor while they answered their respective calls of nature, a sound howled through the trees. “Go!” Krysty instructed them. “Back to your wag. Quickly now.”

The couple didn’t need to be told twice; they rushed away, peering behind them as they climbed into the back of the converted tractor.

All around it was dark, the sky a deep indigo now, dotted here and there with stars. Wisps of fog, rainbow-tinted like spilled gasoline, wavered across the sky on the far horizon, more of the ceaseless fallout from the devastation that had begun a hundred years before and yet never seemed to end. There were noises, the irritated tsk-tsking of crickets’ legs, the distant baying of dogs, the whispering flutter of wings. Krysty walked back along the road, sticking close to its edge, her Smith & Wesson in hand.

A little farther up the road, standing between two stationary wags, Mildred waited with her ZKR 551 target revolver held low to her body. She had removed her satchel of medical supplies, tucking it down on the ground beneath one of the wags.

Doc stood close to the edge of the tarmac on the far side, his blue eyes narrowed as he tried to discern something among the withered trees and scrubby grass that surrounded the blacktop. It was impossible to tell—there might be nothing at all, or there could be a hundred men staring at him, unmoving, just feet away. It was too dark to see. He strained his ears, stilled his breathing, picking through the natural noises of nocturnal life and trying to do the impossible, to find something that—just maybe—didn’t belong. But all he heard was the ticking over of wag engines, the uncomfortable shuffling of their passengers. He cursed himself for an old fool; it was like hunting for a needle in an auditory haystack, he knew, but there weren’t exactly a wealth of options presenting themselves to him at this moment.

Out at the front of the line of stationary wags, a blaster in each hand, J.B. picked his way forward slowly, scanning the horizon. He could hear something, but not really hear it. Smell it, mebbe. Leastways, he could sense it. Something was waiting just out of reach. Something that came out at night, something that knew its prey was stranded.

Slowly, reluctantly, J.B. began to walk backward, his eyes darting this way and that, searching for that telltale sign of movement.

Back at the lead wag, the one that had become buried in the tarmac, J.B. called up to the driver. “You got some lights in that rig, Croxton?” he asked.

Croxton assured him he had. “Couldn’t travel by night without them, J.B.,” he said. “It’ll take a little time getting the generator up and running though.”

“Do it,” the Armorer instructed firmly.

Croxton turned the ignition key and the wag’s engine rumbled back to life, chugging contentedly as it spit black exhaust through the upright pipes. He let the engine idle for thirty seconds before reaching for a switch on the dash, a makeshift junction box with an old-fashioned light switch on its top. As the engine ticked over, Croxton poked his head from the window and tried to locate J.B. in the darkness around them. After a moment, he gave up and simply called out his instructions. “J.B.,” he said, “I’m turning on the lights in five seconds.”

Unseen by the old farmer, the Armorer nodded. He was waiting on the spongy tarmac at the front of the sunken wag, stood between the headlights of the cab, the scattergun and Uzi poised like natural extensions of his arms. He narrowed his eyes to slits, barely leaving
himself any vision at all, as he counted down from five to one in his head. Then the headlight beams burst into life, bathing the area before the wag in a flickering, yellowish glow.

J.B. saw them immediately, and so did Croxton and the girl-crone Daisy. Scalies.

Hundreds of them surrounded the convoy.

“Dark night,” Dix murmured.

“W
AG’S GOT A LOT
of pull,” Ryan explained as he wrestled with the controls of Mitch’s converted harvester, urging the heavy vehicle away from the farmhouse and its outbuilding. “More than enough to get Croxton’s wag out of the tar.”

Jak nodded as he sat in the passenger seat and reloaded his .357 Magnum Colt Python.

Ryan grimaced, yanking the levers on the old wag, urging it to speed. The patched-together wag bumped across the fields and hurried toward the road.

T
HIS WASN’T THE FIRST
time that J.B. had seen scalies. In fact, Ryan’s disparate group of companions had crossed paths with scalies on numerous occasions in their long trek across the shockscape. Indeed, the actual term “scalies” was a disingenuous one, for it referred to several different types of mutation that the group had encountered in the Deathlands.

The group that emerged from the trees, fields and buildings all about them seemed to be very mutated, with hard, crustlike skin on their upright, naked, repellently deformed bodies. There had to be at least fifty of them, the Armorer realized. And that was just the ones
he could see. Even as he watched, more scalies poured from the shattered buildings along the main street. Many of them carried weapons, clubs and knives, and J.B. ran his eyes across the group, picking out a few blasters among them. They had to have been nesting there, waiting for the night.

Nocturnal scalies, Dix thought. It explained something, of course—just why Mitch and Annie had been in such a rush to get home as dusk turned to night. Which brought another question to mind—just where the heck were Ryan and Jak? They should have been back by now.

The Armorer stood between the headlights of Croxton’s lead wag, knowing that he was perfectly hidden as he stood between the dazzling beams. Raising his voice, he called to the approaching scalies, thinking there might be a few of them intelligent enough to understand him. If they were smart enough to carry weapons, maybe they could listen to reason. “Attention, locals,” he called. “We’re just passing through. Don’t mean you no harm. You let us pass and we’ll be out of your way before you know it, that I promise.”

The scalies continued to surge forward from the wrecked structures, a slow, building wave that was searching for a shore to crash into. Was it possible, J.B. wondered, that the scalies had set the slushy tarmac as a trap for anyone passing through Tazewell? Ensnare wags and then pick them off at their leisure? It seemed a complex plan for muties, but not an impossible prospect.

Movement caught the corner J.B.’s eye, and he peered across just in time to see something hurtling through the air toward the lead wag. Off-target, the
thing fell short and to his left, and he ducked his head behind a hunched shoulder as the object—a homemade grenade—exploded.

“Playtime’s over,” Dix murmured, turning the M-4000 scattergun and the Uzi on the crowd and holding down the triggers. The scattergun boomed in his right hand, while a steady stream of bullets spurted from the mini-Uzi in his left, mowing down the front line of scalies in the direction of the gren thrower. From behind him, J.B. heard his compatriots begin their own defense against the onrushing mutie army.

In quick succession, J.B.’s blasts knocked down a dozen approaching scalies, felling them like saplings. He held his position and reloaded, first the Uzi, then the scattergun. His first volley had made the scalies slow down warily, but that wouldn’t last long. Outnumbered, he needed a miracle.

The Armorer’s mind was racing. They needed to pull back, form a tight defensive perimeter, somehow halt the scalies’ advance. The sheer weight of numbers would be overwhelming unless they could figure some solution.
Nocturnal scalies?
his mind asked.
What the hell do you do against nocturnal scalies?

As his scattergun boomed in another explosive flash that lit the road and its surrounds, a savage smile crossed J.B.’s features. Light. That was the answer.

The scalies weren’t closing in on him, but it wasn’t simply because of the stream of bullets he was feeding them—it was the light. The lights of the old truck rig were holding them at bay. He just needed a big enough light.

N
EAR THE MAIN GROUP
of the parked wags, Doc held his LeMat steady as he tracked the movements in the trees around the road. There were human shapes moving there, scalies choosing their positions in the darkness.

Even as Doc watched, the fronds of a bush parted and three leather-skinned scalies pounced out into the road, boldly showing themselves at last. Standing his ground, Doc depressed the trigger and blasted a bullet through the skull of the leader, dropping him in a shower of blood and bone. The two remaining muties halted, looking at their fallen colleague, wondering what to do. Doc didn’t hesitate. He pulled the trigger again, driving his next bullet through the skull of the mutie to the left.

From somewhere behind him, Doc heard the horses whinnying, spooked by all the noise and explosions. He paid it no attention, trusting Charles or someone would calm the horses.

As his second comrade dropped to the floor, leathery hands over his destroyed face, the final scalie turned tail and ran back into the woods, glancing fearfully over his shoulder as Doc held his weapon on his retreating form.

This first skirmish had been successful, but it was a lucky escape, Doc realized. If they weren’t careful, the sheer weight of numbers would overwhelm them.

S
UDDENLY, A NOISE
came from the roadside bushes just beside Krysty, where Maude and Vincent had been urinating just minutes before. Krysty spun, training her Smith & Wesson on the space between the trees. “Stay in the wags,” Krysty ordered, not bothering to check on her charges.

Krysty took a step closer, her blaster steady. The bushes were blobs of darkness on darkness. There could be people or creatures there for all Krysty knew. It was damn hard to see, as there was barely any light; just what little came from the stars overhead, the sliver of waxing moon.

“Who’s there?” Krysty challenged, her voice loud.

No answer. Nothing.

“Who’s there?” Krysty repeated, inching closer to the bushes, her feet leaving the hard artificial surface of the road and squelching on the muddy soil.

Again, there was no answer. Just the wind rustling the spiny leaves of the bushes, the shadowy branches of the trees above.

The blaster held firm before her, Krysty looked swiftly to the left and right, trying to make out something in the gloom all around. Her green eyes flicked to the ground below, back up to whatever was ahead of her. And then she looked above her head, and as she did so something moved, dropping from the branches overhead, a dark shape, black on the ink sky.

Krysty fired, more of a flinch reaction than a planned effort, and the .38 flashed to life, lighting the darkness all around as the bullet raced from the blaster’s barrel. In that half-second flash, Krysty saw the creature that dropped towards her. It was humanoid, but not human. It wore no clothes, and its skin was hard and leathery, callused plates like armour crisscrossing its chest. The thing was completely hairless, bald with a long, angular face. Its mouth had been open, displaying a jaw filled with needle-thin teeth like the spines of a porcupine. Its eyes were wide, saucer-shaped with a black splodge of pupil amid a yellow base; they reminded Krysty of
a cat’s eyes, or those of an owl. The eyes had reacted in that flash of light, dilating, and the mutie had given out a noise, a breathy grunt of pain like the hydraulic brakes of a bus.

Even as Krysty’s brain raced to process what she had seen in that half second, the creature landed beside her on all fours, thudding into the spongy earth. Krysty turned toward it, ducking her head as she swung the blaster she held at the mutie’s face.