Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass (23 page)
“I brought them into being,” McComb the Mother said. “So naturally, I rule them.”
“How old are you, anyway?” Mildred asked.
“The knowledge that created my children sustains me,” the queen said. “That is all you need know. More, perhaps.”
“You didn’t chill us,” Ryan said, before Mildred and Doc could ask the questions he could hear them drawing breath to ask. “Or, you didn’t have your children do it. That means you got plans for us.”
“Perhaps I mean to have you killed before my eyes to amuse me.”
“I don’t reckon so.”
“Your reckoning about me and my people does not have a conspicuous record of success, Mr. Cawdor. Make few assumptions.”
He felt someone step up beside him. From the scent and sense of presence, he knew it was Krysty.
“But he’s right,” she said forthrightly.
McComb the Mother nodded. “I have a task for you.”
Ryan uttered a grunt that his companions would know
to take for a short, wry laugh. “What kind of deal are you offering us?”
“I need make no deal,” she said, “beyond refraining from killing you as a reward for your success.”
“But you’ll chill us if we fail!” Ricky piped up.
The kid’s got balls, Ryan thought. Unfortunately, they tend to overcome his brain at the worst bastard times. He reassured himself with the knowledge that this crazy cannie queen and her brood had to need him and his companions bad. She’d have to be far crazier than she’d shown so far to have them chilled for saying the wrong thing.
“If you fail, young Master Morales,” McComb the Mother said, “I shall have no need to punish you at all. Nor indeed the ability to do so, unless you believe in an afterlife. I do not.”
She sat back up erect in her chair.
“I believe in what I can see, and hear and touch!” she declared.
“Mutha!” shouted the naked multitude.
“I am prepared to offer you a substantial reward for your assistance, however,” she said.
“What kind and how much, exactly?” Mildred asked.
“Substantial,” McComb the Mother repeated. “My children bring many treasures down from the surface. Others make their way here in…other ways. Much of that we have little use for. You shall have it—if you do what I demand.”
“Ace,” Ryan said. “We accept.”
“But, Ryan—” Mildred began.
The one-eyed man didn’t so much as glance her way. She was out of his field of view, as it happened, somewhere behind his left shoulder. He merely extended the
forefinger of his right hand, whose wrist was tied crossed over his left. Merely a flick.
Mildred abruptly shut up.
McComb the Mother nodded. “Of course you do. We sized you up well.”
“So that’s why your folks kept shadowing us, and occasionally throwing stuff at us,” J.B. said. Ryan knew that wasn’t a rhetorical question.
“Indeed.”
“Testing us,” Ryan said.
She nodded. “You demonstrate the sort of facility for which you have been chosen to serve. And—potentially—to walk out of here alive.”
“You seem to have spent liberally of your ‘children’s’ lives in these tests,” Doc pointed out.
“Their lives are short and lived only to serve the community, which means, for all practical purposes, me. Even in all our numbers, we lack the strength to save ourselves from the doom that rapidly overtakes us. You have proved, by the very hurt you inflicted upon our flesh, that you may have the ability to succeed where we have failed.”
Ryan rubbed his chin.
“I probably shouldn’t say this, but you got the better of us triple quick there, a little while ago. What makes you think we can do what your people can’t?”
“You and your people possess not just skills but tools that we lack,” the cannie queen said. “Bluntly, if throwing bodies at the menace could end it, it would have. It didn’t. So here we are.”
“So that last cann—uh, wave attack was just, like, a final test?” Ricky asked.
The cannie queen nodded.
Ricky said no more, which wasn’t exactly characteristic of him. But Ryan heard him make a “whoo” sound through pursed lips.
“So if we failed—” Mildred said.
“You would have proved unworthy, and my people would have enjoyed special meats at the ensuing feast.”
“Uh, yeah,” Ryan said. “So what is it you want killed?”
McComb the Mother laughed. “You come so easily to the conclusion that is what we require?”
“I don’t reckon you selected us for our digging and scavvy-trading skills. Those and fighting were pretty much the ones you would’ve seen us display.” Well, not including certain partnered nocturnal activities, on the part of him and Krysty, and Mildred and J.B., but he didn’t want to pursue that line of thought.
“You’re correct, Ryan Cawdor. As I have told you, we face a terrible menace. Something evil and huge, long forgotten except in our whispered legend, has awakened in the depths far below. It now seeks to come—up.”
“The Balrog?” Mildred and Ricky asked simultaneously.
“Nothing so fanciful,” the cannie queen said. “But no less terrifying. Or formidable.”
“What is it, then?” asked Ryan, who’d read those books, too. The baronial palace in Front Royal where he’d grown up had a well-stocked library and as a baron’s son, Ryan had been taught to read.
She shook her fine head. The pendants of human finger bones hung from either pierced earlobe tinkled like dull chimes. Somehow Ryan knew they were norm-human bones, not those of coamers.
“It’s big,” she said. “It digs great tunnels. It eats. It destroys. And it reappeared months ago.
“Our people have spread far and wide. Not merely down, though we have done that, too. The caves are vastly more extensive than we—than was ever guessed at, even by whitecoats, before the Nuke War. The monster first showed itself miles to the east of here, driving our people before it. Those who survived.”
She paused for a moment and passed a hand wearily across her eyes. Even by the light of torches, abundant but not bright, Ryan almost thought he could see the bones of her hand through her age-thinned white skin.
I can almost believe she’s as old as she claims to be, he thought. Sort of.
“The thing dived deep when it reached our heartland, here in these caves,” she continued. “We are not without defenses, but it is as if it toys with us. It has been working its way up, slowly, slowly, devouring our breeders and devastating our grub farms.”
“Wait,” Ricky said. “Grub farms? You mean you raise food?”
“It is not a rare practice, after all. Even in this brutal, desiccated world of today.”
“But I thought your, uh, children ate people.”
“Don’t be stupe, son,” J.B. said matter-of-factly. “They can’t very well live off eating each other. And if they hunted humans for their main food, they’d have been at war with the surface years ago.”
“You are correct, Mr. Dix. The flesh of norm humans is a delicacy among us, you might say. Its taste and texture highly prized. It is a consequence of their creation.”
Ryan noticed she didn’t say “accidental” or “unintended.”
“Yet we refrained from foraging aboveground, except on the rarest occasions, until the monster left us no
choice. And as for dining on one another, it’s true that tradition calls upon us to return our flesh to the family when we are dead. But we could no more subsist by that than you and Mr. Dix could build a perpetual-motion machine.”
“So why didn’t you try to recruit the locals, instead of us?” Mildred asked.
“You made a quick impression upon me. You possessed an air of competence, especially with weapons, the inhabitants of the district do not generally possess. And your weapons are much superior to theirs. You’ve fought them. Would
you
have faith in them as champions against a monster that’s a force of nature?”
“They saw us off quick there, last time we ran into them,” Ryan said. “Or, rather, they ran into us.”
“They prevailed by sheer force of numbers. Surely you did not forget I said what little use mass attacks have already proved against our great enemy? We can bring far greater numbers against it than were assembled against you. And their crude black-powder firearms lack power to do our enemy any great harm.”
“You judge ours have the power, though,” J.B. said.
“I have faith in your ability to use them,” the cannie queen said. “And in your resourcefulness. But if those are not enough to defeat our great enemy after all…”
For the first time her smile widened to show her teeth. They looked surprisingly normal. Except, perhaps by a trick of the light, or even Ryan’s imagination, her eyeteeth—her fangs. These looked as long and unnaturally wicked-sharp as those of her canine-snouted children.
“Then we’ll know when you fail to return and claim your reward, then, won’t we?”
“We need action!” the man with the food-stained beard hanging well down the front of his shabby overalls declared. “Somethin’s gotta be done!”
His crowd of a dozen or so listeners nodded sagely. “Yeah,” one of them shouted from the rear of the clump. “Somebody’s gotta do somethin’!”
“But we hunted down like half a dozen collaborators already,” insisted a sturdy middle-aged woman with a greasy bandanna around her mouse-colored cap of curls.
“And the attacks ain’t stopped yet,” the bearded orator declared. “We need to do something that works.”
The group had gathered on the fringes of Mathus Conn’s camp, near the excavation site. The sun was low, though it had not yet dropped behind the rise whose crest had fallen in on itself to swallow what was proving to be a still-unexhausted treasure trove of scavvy. Conn halted his small party, returning from a walk near the camp, in the deep shadows gathered in the bushes between a pair of red maples, at the clearing’s edge.
Potar growled low in his throat. “Henry Harkens,” he said, then spit. “Want me to put a stop to that stupe-talk?”
“Not yet.” Conn considered briefly. The unsuspecting men nearby continued to gripe about the ongoing cannie attacks—and their own fear.
“It wasn’t these drifters from over by Sanders Gap
we hanged yesterday done it,” said a short, squat man whose features were totally obscured by a floppy hat and bristling facial hair. “No loss, ’cause they was just petty thieves and robbers. But they didn’t have nothin’ to do with all the cannie killin’ and eatin’ people. That’s them coamers, sure.”
“Wymie says it’s all them outlanders,” a second woman said. “Them and their helpers. And there ain’t no such thing as coamers.”
“Wymie did a great job of gettin’ us massacred,” someone else said.
“We’re not doin’ nothin’ now that works,” the woman said. “Chillin’s still goin’ on.”
“It’s gotta be the coamers,” the hidden-faced man insisted. “What the outlanders said they looked like was right out of the old stories. And they only come out at night—just like the stories.”
“They are just stories!”
“They stole the chills straight off the gallows, soon as nobody was lookin’!” a gaunt man said. He looked nervously around as if the fabled cannies might jump out of the bushes at any moment. “It’s gotta be the coamers!”
“Does not!”
“Does too!”
As arguments broke out, Conn gestured with a raised forefinger. The group started to move again, swinging wide back into the woods a short distance to approach Conn’s tent without passing through the camp proper.
“Been a lot of talk like that the last couple days,” Frank said. “All over the camp.”
“They were eager enough to see the last set of ne’er-do-wells swing, and the ones before.”
Frank wrung his hands in a worried gesture.
“But it was true what they were saying, that the cannibal attacks have not stopped,” he said. “That has people antsy and wantin’ more action. And more and more are blamin’ the coamers, in spite of Wymie and her holdouts.”
He scratched his head. “I wonder sometimes if we’re on the wrong track, chasing the outlanders at all.”
“Coamers’re real,” Chad insisted. The bouncer’s right arm was tied against his chest in a sling. Gator Malloan’s ax to the chest had been more gory than actually damaging; it had done little more than break his right clavicle. He and his pal Tony had both attached themselves to Conn as bodyguards, which worked out fine, as Potar, while seldom leaving his master’s side, was growing more and more preoccupied with playing sec boss, spying on Conn’s army and keeping order in it.
Tony said nothing. He was busy eyeing the surrounding brush nervously with a replica .44 Henry repeating longblaster in his hands, unnerved by the rapid onset of darkness. The sun had dropped below the rise while everybody was engrossed in the camp gossip.
“Every night we see their red eyes glowin’ in the firelight of the camp,” Chad said. “Watchin’ us from the bushes.”
Conn waved a hand dismissively. “At this point it doesn’t much matter whether the coamers are real or not,” he said. “At least as regards the fate of the outlanders. We have no choice but to continue our pursuit of them, gentlemen. It’s mere self-preservation.”
“But if the coamers are responsible for the attacks,” Frank said, “the attacks will continue until we deal with them. That requires us to find a way to come to grips with them. We don’t even have any direct evidence they
exist. And the mob, as you point out, is demanding action now.”
“You should let me do something about that loudmouth Harkens. He’s been a troublemaker all along,” Potar said.
Conn stopped. Then he smiled. “You’re right, Potar. I should and I will. Now let me tell you
how
you’re going to handle him…”
* * *
“I
T STRIKES ME
,” Doc said, “that these creatures into whose service we find ourselves so involuntarily pressed are rather more sophisticated than we imagined.”
With a grateful grunt Ryan swung first his Steyr on its sling and then his heavy rucksack off his back and lowered them to stand propped against the stone. The coamers had given them all their gear and weapons back
after
they had escorted them well away from the immense royal cavern, and formed a solid white-skinned phalanx between the surface-dwellers and their queen.