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Smith &
Wesson 12-gauge. Awakened from sleep by the scream of the castrated stickie,
J.B.'s fighting reflexes had been swift enough to level and fire the shotgun,
gripping it by the pistol butt, bracing it against his own chest. The shot
exploded with twenty of the inch-
long Remington flechettes, the tiny, razored-steel darts that shredded
anything in their path.
They had flayed the mutie's face, blinding, stripping away all the hideous
features, pocking the raw bone of the angular skull, turning it into a
ghastly, mocking ornament of violent death.
"Time to move," Ryan said.
J.B. quickly threw down the rifle, slinging the scattergun over his own
shoulders, jamming on the fedora and sliding from the tree. "Hang on while I& "
He pulled out his glasses and hooked them on the bridge of his bony nose.
"That shriek'll bring any bastard stickie within five miles," Ryan said,
waiting anxiously.
"Ready. Yeah, and a bright moon like this is all we need. We going to hole
up?"
Moving too fast was, as the Trader often remarked, sometimes worse than moving
too slowly.
It seemed a high probability that there were more stickies in the surrounding
forest, maybe a lot of them, which meant the risk of charging into them like
headless chickens.
But the amount of cover was minimal.
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They hadn't seen any buildings for some time. In any case they would be the
first targets for any hunting muties seeking vengeance for their three
slaughtered brothers.
"Don't forget those boobies and mines the map shows," Ryan cautioned.
They stood still, breath held, listening. The death screech of the second of
the stickies had frozen the forest, silencing every living thing. Wherever
they looked, Ryan and J.B. saw only stark silver light and deep, etched
shadows.
"Can't hear anything." The Armorer bit his lip, shifting his feet as he
noticed that the pool of blood from the three corpses was spreading near him.
Despite their clumsiness and general stupidity, some stickies were able to
move quickly over short distances, and most of them had great stamina, being
capable of holding on to a pursuit for hour after hour.
"Might as well carry on north." Ryan took a last look around. "Got a better
idea, brother?"
J.B. shook his head. "North it is."
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Wolfram had insisted that his "guests," as he so fulsomely called them, should
join him and the Magus for breakfast that morning.
They were all released from their locked and bolted huts, and marched over to
the quarters of the joint leaders of the fortress. The sec men had their
hand-blasters drawn and cocked, circling the prisoners, watching them warily.
They were particularly suspicious of Jak's fiery spirit, keeping several paces
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away from the albino teenager.
Doc had almost refused to join them, complaining that he preferred to eat
alone rather than with the mongrel scum of Deathlands.
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Mildred had taken his arm and gentled him like a spooked horse, suggesting
that there was no point at all in antagonizing their captors.
"Costs us nothing to be nice to them," she urged. "And it might help us in the
long run."
Doc had grumbled and grumped. "Upon my soul, Dr. Wyeth, but you are too much
sweetness and light, and I am cantankerous and evil livered."
"Yes, but we all love you, Doc," she replied, squeezing his hand.
BREAKFAST WAS uncomfortable and stilted. Wolfram was the very model of
easygoing good nature and surface charm. But it rang as false as a cougar's
smile. The
Magus was nothing but wormwood and gall.
Once they were seated, the fat man gestured for the meal to be brought in.
Sec men carried in dented silver chafing dishes, with polished covers, laying
them at intervals around the long refectory table. Krysty watched with some
interest, noticing that there seemed to be no women in the fortress at all,
not even the sluts that might have been expected.
The food was basic, approaching adequate, leaning heavily on what the
surrounding forest and river supplied: some long-boned fish with the heads
left on, silver eyes boggling at the ceiling, jaws brimming with a triple row
of serrated teeth; a leathery omelet, liquid at the center, larded with pieces
of bacon and fat strips of pork. The best dish was some wafer-thin flakes of
beef soaked in oil and served with chopped onions, sun-dried tomatoes and some
olive bread.
"We had some scouts out in the wood last night," Wolfram said, once he'd
helped himself, piling his blue-and-white plate high with food, scooping out
several ladles of greasy fried potatoes and adding a half pint of ketchup.
"And what did they see?" Krysty asked.
"More what they heard," muttered the Magus, who was pulling a fish apart with
his steel-
tipped fingers.
"What?" Mildred asked, sipping at a mug of coffee sub.
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Wolfram leaned back, making his deep-armed chair creak. "Couple of my best
scouts were out, on my orders. Told them, dear fellows, to keep out of
trouble. To watch and listen. Not become involved. That's what they did."
"Probably the shitters only went a hundred paces into the trees, then waited a
few hours and came back out again," the Magus said.
"I think not. I trust them somewhat. Said they heard a gang of stickies moving
south toward the ville that has the strange museum place. Tedious stuff. But I
digress. My men say that they heard a scream."
"Just one scream?" Jak asked.
"Indeed, my white-haired youth, just the one. Nothing to build a reputation
on, is it? A
scream. It could have been a wild hog. Or a slaughtered stickie. Or even a
one-eyed murderer who once rode with the arch slayer, the Trader, finally
making his way aboard the final locomotive, westbound."
Krysty stopped eating, not sure whether the grossly fat man was playing a
cruel joke on them all. Did he know more than he was saying? Was Ryan lying
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cold and dead somewhere out among the endless miles of pine trees?
"You look head-fucked," the Magus said, staring accusingly at her.
Krysty managed a bright smile at his cruel face. "No. I'm really fine. Could
be you who gets head-fucked when Ryan and J.B. get here."
The Magus stared at her, and she felt a chill run down her spine, her sentient
hair curling defensively around her nape. He lifted his hand and tapped his
right eye with the steel nail, generating a metallic clicking sound. "I see
what I see. I see what's going to happen.
When debts are paid and accounts settled. You have the power of seeing, don't
you?"
"Some."
"So, what does the future hold for you and for me? For all of us?"
Krysty rarely responded to that kind of challenge, having learned from her
mother that the special talent of seeing that she possessed was Gaia-given and
shouldn't be devalued,
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Axler, James - Deathlands 33 - Eclipse at Noon cheapened and peddled as though
it had fallen off the back of a truck. But the snide probing of the Magus had
gotten to her. She closed her eyes and sat back in her chair.
"You should not succumb to the fiend," whispered Doc, on her left.
"It's all right," she said. "Got everything in hand. It's all right." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]