Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass (21 page)

Mildred, who’d gotten in a step ahead of him, and his buddy Jak, right on his heels, grabbed the stunned and wounded youth by either arm and bundled him bodily into darkness.

* * *

T
HE BURLY
12-
GAUGE
boom of J.B.’s Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun sounded oddly muffled, and echoed strangely in Ricky’s ears, away down here in the deepest, darkest point they’d excavated in the sunken office complex.

The complex, to call it that, wasn’t large, though what they had discovered of it so far was surprisingly big, given the top of the hole it had mostly vanished into
was twenty or twenty-five yards across maximum. It had apparently consisted of an indeterminate number of modular steel structures, connected by corridors made, obviously on-site, of metal-roofed wood frame. J.B. had opined that it had grown over whatever period of months or years it had seen use.

Doc, in his turn, had pronounced that whatever had caused the earth to swallow it had not been a natural event. Or at least not a normal one. Though the Pennyrile was a veritable Land of the Sinkholes, this clearly wasn’t one. Or at least not in his judgment, which while not as rock-solid as Ryan’s tactical insight, nor the Armorer on blasters, was generally reliable and in any event greater than anyone else’s.

The sound of Jak’s big Python going off from the entrance still carried enough of the characteristic nasty hypersonic harmonics of a .357 Magnum handblaster going off to set Ricky’s teeth ever so slightly on edge.

The shot that had struck Ricky had likely been a ball to begin with—a true old-fashioned soft-lead sphere, not an extended slug like the so-called Minié ball, much less the modern jacketed military hand or longblaster bullet that was also inexplicably called
ball
. And it had ricocheted off something before hitting him, soaking off most of its kinetic killing energy. It had not even penetrated the tough denim of his jeans, nor busted his femur beneath, which was fortunate.

It still left a bruise that had already been turning a mottled rainbow of dull colors when he, red-faced, had to skin down his pants for a quick exam by Mildred by the light of a stinking turpentine-oil lamp. And he was still going to have to endure the ribbing of Jak and the others about having gotten himself shot in the butt—at
least until the next big catastrophic turn in everybody’s lives took their minds away from him and his embarrassing plight, or until they were all staring sightlessly up at the office’s canted ceiling, which was how they’d end up and in a hurry if the mob of attackers had their way. From the conversations of his comrades as they fended off the occasional probe, it seemed as if the whole Pennyrile was up in arms and hungering for their blood.

Feeling morose, Ricky sat with his back to the cool jumble of dirt and rock at the end of the corridor where they’d packed him off to recuperate. Desperate as their straits were, they didn’t actually need him. The threat was not immediate. And as Ryan had shown a pair of locals who had been brave but unlucky enough to try to force entry by dropping in from above, a single determined fighter with a good edged blade—in this case, the one-eyed man and his panga—could hold the narrow door indefinitely by himself, without even wasting a cartridge.

Fact was, Ricky would get in the way. The rest were mostly occupied with either hunkering down waiting for the call to action if—when—the mob nerved itself to try a mass concerted rush, or rummaging through the hitherto-unsorted scavvy and checking the opened chambers for supplies to stuff into their packs. Because it was plenty clear that, if by some miracle they escaped, they’d need to travel far and fast to have a chance of staying in their skins.

Fortunately, they still had a good supply of ammo.

Ricky heard J.B. exclaim from the top of the complex, “Dark night, they’re throwing burning green-brush bundles!”

A moment later he heard his friends coughing as
thick, choking smoke crowded into the entry. A cloudburst of blasterfire broke out. From the higher pitch, it was all outgoing. Ryan and his companions holding the entrance were blindly unleashing as much high-velocity death as they could through what Ricky could imagine with horrifying clarity were big, blinding clouds of smoke, in hopes of discouraging the angry locals from following up the tactical advantage their unexpected cleverness had won them.

No matter how much ammunition they had to burn, he knew with sick certainty their only chances of keeping their determined foes out were slim and none. And
slim
was looking sickly…

It took Ricky a moment to realize that the small voice that had been murmuring, unheeded, at the back of his skull for several minutes was starting to yammer at him. He realized that he was feeling cool air, smelling cool earth and stone, not the combined smells of smoke and the sweat and grime of his friends’ bodies and clothes.

To realize was to act. Only in dealing with other people did Ricky tend to dither before making a move. And at that, those delays were only in face-to-face interactions. When he faced somebody over the sights of a blaster, things were so much more clean-cut…

He was turned around on his knees and digging at the obstruction at the end of the corridor before he knew it. At first with his hands, then—with a pang at using the weapon for a not-exactly-intended purpose—the steel-shod butt of his carbine.

As the half-furious, half-triumphant blood-lusting cries of locals charging the sunken building echoed down to him, he screamed over his shoulder, “Come on! I found us our miracle!”

* * *

“O
H, MY
,” D
OC
said, holding the lantern high above his head. “What have we here?”

“I don’t have your advanced degrees in science or anything, Doc,” Mildred said, “but it looks to me as if we’ve blundered into a big old cave.”

“Rather, a vast and expansive cavern system,” Doc said, trying not to feel smug. These were his companions, after all. And when it came to the brutal realities of the world he was marooned in—and truly, they no less than he, especially the likewise chronologically displaced Mildred—it was he who was the veritable babe in the woods, and they the knowledgeable adults.

Still, he enjoyed demonstrating his worth when he got a chance to. He waved a hand around the tall, high-ceilinged chamber of color-stranded stone.

“Behold the entrances to myriads other caves and passageways! Verily, I say, I believe we have stumbled into the enormous extended system of caverns said to underlie the entire erstwhile state of Kentucky, if not much of the rest of the Southeast United States! When they were, ahem, united.”

“And states,” Mildred added.

“So where do we go from here, lover?” Krysty asked Ryan.

The one-eyed man looked at Doc. “You’re the science expert,” he said. “Got any suggestions?”

Doc blinked at him. “What exactly is our objective, again? Aside from escaping imminent doom at the hands of a ravening mob?”

“That’s a start,” Ryan admitted. “But we’ve done that—for the moment. We can’t sit around too long, though, because sooner or later, probably sooner, they’re going to nerve themselves up enough to come down into
the dark after us. So how do we find a way out of here that doesn’t involve going back up the way we came down—smack in the middle of an enemy army? I reckon if we pop up somewhere else, behind their backs, even if it’s not far we’ve got a chance to get clear without them having so much as a clue that we’ve surfaced again.”

“Then what?” Mildred asked. “It seems like a pretty comprehensive job we got ahead of us, as it is. But the next step after that seems to be to get the hell out of the Pennyrile before anybody’s onto us.”

“What about the scavvy?” Ricky asked. Doc thought to notice tears glistening in the boy’s dark eyes by lantern light. “There’s so much cool mechanical stuff and machine parts we hadn’t even got to!”

“Whoever’s in charge of that fandango up there,” J.B. said with his usual grim humor, “you can bet a bent empty cartridge case that he’s got as much of their would-be mob as they can corral busy looting the stuff for him right now. Or her. Though I doubt that.”

“And just why is that?” Mildred asked, in a dangerous tone. “You developing a problem with women all of a sudden, John?”

“You saw how easily we dealt with the mob when Wymie was in charge,” Krysty said. “However motivated or even smart she was, she had no clue how to control them, and probably didn’t even have a plan worked out beyond ‘revenge.’”

“Right,” Ryan said with a smile for his lover. “Somebody who’s used to organizing stuff and getting it done has taken charge somewhere along the line. The name that comes to my mind is Mathus Conn. And while that cousin of his who’s the assistant may be handling the
planning, she seems content to follow his lead. So, yeah. For him.”

Ryan looked back at Doc. “And to get back to the little matter of getting out of this with our guts still on the inside—Doc?”

Sadly, Doc shook his head. “While I have some solid grounding in the study of natural history, little of use suggests itself right now. Except to stay as close as we can to the surface, and look for a sinkhole.”

“Not going any deeper into scary caves that for all we know are teeming with insane cannies?” Mildred asked. “I can handle that.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Ryan said. “So let’s shake the dust off—”

Before he could finish the sentence, it was as if the sweating limestone walls began to give birth to the white-haired cannies, like bees being born from a honeycomb in a giant, mutie hive or maggots, scared out of a chill.

Hundreds of them, all screaming for blood.

Chapter Nineteen

Even tinged by the orange light of the fire in Conn’s headquarters camp near the sinkhole where the outlanders had holed up, Sairey Furnace’s sharp features were clearly drained of color.

“None of ’em came out,” she said, shaking her head. “Not a one.”

Mathus Conn was glad he’d had Potar’s sec men and sec women—to call them what they were—ring the fire by his command tent to keep the rest of his young army at bay, although doubtless they already knew what had happened. Word spread like wildfire through the district anyway, and even Potar’s huge hammer hands weren’t enough to stop rumors exploding double fast through the assembly of several hundred souls.

They
definitely
did not have a need to know the presumably gory details. To whatever extent they didn’t already.

“That’s the third party we’ve sent down,” murmured Frank Ramakrishnan, his sharp chin sunk to his collarbone where he stood, gaunt as a scarecrow and tall as Potar, next to where Conn sat in his folding chair. Conn’s new chief adviser to replace his murdered cousin Nancy, the middle-aged Frank, was scion of Sinkhole’s leading family of cloth-makers and merchants, who spun pretty fair-quality textiles out of linen, cotton and hemp grown
in the region. He was in the habit of thinking out loud, as opposed to blandly stating the obvious.

“Fifteen good men and women,” Sairey said, nodding. Her eyes were fever-bright in the firelight. “Armed to the teeth. Gone now, and I don’t reckon they’re comin’ back.”

Her eyes pleaded with him not to send her in to bring them back, or their corpses, doubtlessly well chewed and much dismembered.

Conn glanced away toward the cave-in, a quarter-mile or so distant. It was immediately apparent by the glow of dozens of pinewood-splint torches, which sent up a hemisphere of yellow light like a small ville. The only sounds evident were those made by the work parties, relieved of their other duties to recover and sort the surprisingly abundant scavvy the outlanders hadn’t gotten to yet, who worked by the light of those torches. The booty would be disposed of by Conn.

For the greater good, of course.

“Did you hear blasterfire?” he asked the girl.

“Along with the screams? Nuke, yeah. All ours. None of that high-powered stuff like the strangers was shootin’ at us. Smoke poles.”

Conn rubbed his bearded chin and grunted.

“So it was unlikely to be the outlanders who attacked them,” Frank said.

Okay, so sometimes he
did
state the obvious, Conn thought.

Sairey swallowed but said nothing, whether out of her natural reticence, or out of some budding sense of what was prudent to say around powerful men, Conn couldn’t tell. Still, it was the right thing to say, and he credited her for that.

“Mathus,” Frank said, looking right at him. His own
dark features showed unmistakable reluctance. But at the least Conn could trust the man not to mince words with him. Otherwise he’d have been no use. Conn could throw a rock blind into the night from here and hit somebody who’d be happy to babble whatever he or she thought Conn wanted to hear, out of fear of the gaudy keeper’s monstrous enforcer.

Still, there was no harm in encouraging him. “Speak,” he said. “Don’t hold back.”

“I hear talk,” his counselor said, “in the camp. People are beginnin’ to mutter. We have failed to bring the coldhearts to justice, just as Wymie did. And even before this latest butcher’s bill, at greater cost to the people of the district.”

“Tell me who’s talkin’ loose talk like that.” Potar’s eyes glittered, with a far different light than Sairey’s did, as he leaned his ominous moon face forward. “Me an’ the boys’ll straighten ’em right out.”

“We can’t rule by fear!” Frank protested.

Potar produced a chuckle like head-sized granite rocks being rolled downhill in a rain barrel. “What does Mr. Conn pay me for, then?”

Conn raised a hand. “Potar,” he said, “you do your job very well. As does Frank. And in this case, Frank’s correctly pointin’ out that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, at the risk of sounding like the late, lamented Vin Bertolli.”

“Why’d anybody want to catch fuckin’ flies?” Potar asked.

“Figure of speech,” Conn said. “In any event, we’ll all have a smoother road to travel if we continue to get our people to work with and for us voluntarily.”

“Well, they’ll volunteer not to get their heads broke,” Potar said. He smiled. “Or just disappear.”