Rat King, page 24
Did the old man want to get chilled?
The floor was unprotected boards. To make their way across to the far corner and
the bed without making a noise to wake Abner was going to be a hit-and-miss
affair, made easier by the lack of extra sec men, but still risky. What were the
chances that the old man would sleep with a blaster as readily as a woman?
Jak tapped Dean on the arm and gestured for him to follow the line of the walls
around to the bed, keeping low under the window openings. Jak would follow the
line around the opposite wall.
It took a matter of seconds for them to skirt the edges of the room, where the
boards would be least likely to creak. They met at the foot of the bed. Abner
and his woman were still snoring, oblivious.
Without a word Jak strode forward and put his hand over Abner's mouth, pinching
his nostrils with his thumb and forefinger. The old man's breathing was cut
short, and he spluttered into wakefulness, his eyes staring wide in shock as he
began to rise—into the point of the leaf-bladed knife that Jak held with his
other hand.
"Make noise, get chilled. Your choice," Jak whispered.
Abner's staring eyes, flicking across Jak and registering fear, said everything.
The woman stirred in her sleep, then awakened slowly.
"What is it?" she asked sleepily, raising herself on one elbow. The filthy sheet
and blankets covering them fell away, revealing her young and newly formed
breasts. She couldn't have been more than fourteen years old.
Seeing Jak standing over Abner, she opened her mouth to scream, only to suck in
her breath and squeal when Dean moved into view, holding the point of his knife
to her throat.
"Don't make me use it," he said softly, trying not to stare at her breasts.
Wide-eyed, the girl shook her head.
Jak spoke softly in the darkness. "Come with us. Keep quiet."
Abner nodded. Jak stood back, and the old man rose from the bed. He was naked,
his sagging gut hanging over his balls, making him look like a eunuch in the
darkness. He reached for his clothes, draped on the end of the bedstead.
"Uh-uh…" Jak reached out to the ragged garments, shaking them before handing
them to Abner. An old bayonet fell from the material. Even in the near-black,
Jak could see that the weapon had a serrated edge, the kind that tore and
splintered bone on its removal.
There were no other weapons in the clothes, and Jak allowed Abner to dress
quickly before ushering him toward the door.
He left Dean to deal with the girl.
"You just stay here, stay quiet," Dean whispered. "I won't harm you unless you
shout or scream, so don't do that. Okay?"
The girl nodded, clutching the sheet to herself—more in the manner of a shield
from the knife than in any kind of modesty.
Dean left her, turning his back to follow Jak across the room.
He was only a few steps behind the albino when he heard the rusty click.
Whirling on his toes, Dean caught the barest glimpse of the girl kneeling on the
bed, her nakedness now fully exposed as she grappled with the old blunderbuss
that Abner kept by his side in the bed. The rusty click had been the old hammer
being hauled back.
She started to raise her head and aim the blaster.
She never made it.
Without pause for thought, Dean judged the distance and range, taking the
largest part of the target to get the maximum chance of a hit. The knife left
his hand and was embedded in her breastbone before she had a chance to blink.
Eyes still wide in shock, the girl fell onto the stinking mattress, dropping the
blaster under her.
Abner started to shout, either in shock or outrage, but was stopped by the
sudden pressure of Jak's knife on his carotid artery. He watched in silence as
Dean hurried to the now dead girl and turned her over to remove the knife and to
make the blaster safe. She had died with the hammer still cocked and ready, not
even given the reflex time to squeeze the trigger.
"Good chill—you remember," Jak whispered in Abner's ear. The old man tried to
nod, but stopped when he realized that it pressed the blade into his artery.
Dean took the lead as they left the shack, Abner stumbling momentarily when he
saw the bodies of the chilled sec. It was a simple matter to return to the adobe
hut where Ryan and the others were waiting. Mac was still lying outside, still
unconscious.
Dean pulled the wooden gate open, and Abner walked inside with Jak's knife at
his throat. When Dean had shut the gate behind them, Jak withdrew the knife and
stood back, at the same time gently pushing Abner so that the baron stumbled
into the center of the room, where he came to stand near the still shivering and
muttering J.B.
Mildred, bent over the Armorer, looked up but said nothing.
Ryan was standing, arms folded, partially in shadow. Krysty was beside him. They
said nothing.
"What is it you want?" Abner asked in a tremulous voice.
Still no one spoke.
"Look, you…you can have anything you want, friends," Abner stuttered in a
pitiful voice. "You can leave before morning, with supplies. We don't have much,
but it's yours."
"Right, we leave the ville and end up in the valley, where your sec men can
outnumber us in an environment where they're more familiar with the conditions.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense," Mildred scoffed without looking up.
Abner gave her a puzzled look. "Why would we come after you?"
"The ritual chilling." Ryan spoke softly, his voice all the more menacing for
its relative calm. "You haven't forgotten that, have you? You still need victims
for it. Us."
Abner spread his hands and shrugged. "So we don't make a sacrifice to the sun…it
won't be the first time."
"Fat man give in too easily," Jak muttered.
Abner turned to the albino. "Why not? You've got me at your mercy. I'd have to
be triple stupe to try and hold out on you now."
"But later?" Ryan asked.
Abner shrugged again. "Okay, I could send sec men against you, true enough, I
guess. But why waste time on outlanders when we have enough trouble just
surviving and coping with the insiders when they come for us?"
Ryan said nothing for a moment. He could see the fear and worry in Abner's eyes,
reflecting the smoky glow of the hurricane lamp. He had the baron on the run, if
he played it right.
Finally he spoke. "I don't usually do deals. I like to clean the mess up and get
out of the bastard ville before the shit starts to spread. But I'll make an
exception for you."
Abner looked relieved, but still had to ask. "Why?"
Krysty answered. "J.B.'s sick and needs time to recover. That coldheart Wallace
also has one of us still in the redoubt. You want them out of your face. We want
them out of the way so we can get our man back and leave this bastard place. So
we need manpower. You need more fighting skills."
"A deal?"
Ryan nodded. "A deal. You don't chill us. You help us get our man out."
"And in return?"
"We teach you things you never dreamed of. You'll have a chance of ridding
yourselves of Wallace, Murphy and their sec men. More, you'll have a better than
even chance of beating away any other attackers you might get."
Abner scratched his chin through his beard and rubbed absently at his dangling
belly.
"Guess I'm not in any position to say no, even if I want to," he mused. "I don't
agree, you just chill me and go."
"That's about it," Ryan assented. "Thing is, at least the other way we both get
a chance for what we want."
Abner nodded. "That's true, boy. I don't say I trust you, but I guess I'll go
along with it."
"I can't say that I trust you, either," Ryan replied. "We'll just have to live
with it."
SUN UP CAME as a wan light reflected red through the light mist of dust. The
inhabitants of the ville rose to go about their tasks only to find that
something radically different had happened in the night.
At Abner's request, the bodies of the two sec men and that of the young girl had
been laid out in the rough square at the center of the ville. They lay in the
early-morning sun, starting to swell in the rising heat.
Abner stood at the head of the corpses, with Ryan, Krysty and Jak behind him.
The old man carried his blaster, and the companions had their own blasters,
retrieved from the shack that laughingly passed for an armory. It had crossed
Ryan's mind that J.B. would have wept to see blasters stored in such a way, had
he been able.
Instead the Armorer lay in Abner's bed, attended by Mildred and Dean. The two of
them acted as security for each other, as well as nursing J.B. on his route to
recovery. The Armorer had passed the crisis of his fever during the night and
was now lying peacefully. Once he recovered his strength, the real problem would
be in how long it took his ankle to heal. In the corner, not forgotten, lay Mac.
The sec man was still unconscious.
Outside in the rough square, the curious ville dwellers gathered to hear Abner
speak.
"Listen here, all of you. These good people, who were to be our sacrifice to the
sun, did this last night…" He spread his free hand to indicate the corpses.
"They chilled these folk without a second thought, and spared me only because
they propose a bargain."
"What bargain could be enough to appease the sun?" came a voice from the back of
the crowd.
"Good question, friend," Abner said with a note of ice in his voice that didn't
escape Ryan's notice. "What do we need more than anything? To rid ourselves of
the mother insiders. These good people have a man inside that they want back. We
help them, they train us so that we can grind the mothers into the dirt once and
for all. That seems fair to me. After all, the sun must have sent them—look what
they did to two of my best sec men without even trying."
There was a thoughtful silence from the crowd. Any doubts were kept unspoken in
deference to Abner's underlyingly sinister air of command.
"This should be an interesting experience, lover," Krysty whispered to Ryan.
Chapter Seventeen
Doc found himself standing in a room similar to the one in which his corporeal
form was lying prone. Blurring and wobbling at the edges of his vision, the room
contained the mainframe computer, the couches, the trailing wires, but not the
skeletal forms that were molded to the couches.
These men were now standing in front of him, clustered in the middle of the
room. They looked as they had to have when first joined to the mechanism—fat,
sleek, well-fed military and intelligence services men, middle-aged and experts
in their own fields of diplomacy and conflict.
Fields that were too rapidly rendered barren by sky-dark.
One of them smiled. They all smiled.
Doc shivered. Their eyes reflected only the same glow of insanity that he had
noticed in Wallace.
"Welcome to the mechanism. It wasn't designed to admit fresh blood, but the
technicians have done a fine job in joining you. It was unfortunate about our
colleague, but we were warned that accidents and acts of nature could occur."
"Acts of nature?" Doc spit, backing away from the man's outstretched and
welcoming hand. He checked himself when he realized he was in cyberspace, a
virtual reality where they couldn't physically harm him.
"Death can come to us all. From nowhere," the man continued in a bright tone. He
lowered his hand awkwardly, feeling snubbed by Doc but not wanting to lose face.
He turned the lowering into a sleeve-tugging gesture on his Air Force uniform.
"I hardly think from nowhere. Extreme old age is hardly an unexpected cause of
death," Doc said with a heavily sardonic tone.
The Air Force general looked momentarily confused. "Old age?"
He turned to his companions, and they muttered among themselves, obviously
excluding Doc by choice. Doc took it as an opportunity to survey the room
further.
It was an almost perfect replica of the room in which they were all strapped,
with one glaring omission: the wall where the glass observation window into the
control room beyond was situated. There was no window. There was nothing but a
blank wall.
Doc also noticed that the door into the anteroom was open. What lay beyond that?
He was interrupted from his reverie by a cough. He turned back to find them
looking at him again.
"I find that we have some questions to ask you before we accept you into our
fold," the Air Force general said softly. "Not the least of which is how you
came to be here. My colleague here—" he indicated the sole soberly suited man.
"—was under the impression that the Chronos operatives had tired of your
constant disruption and had used you as part of an experiment in forward time
travel. You were their great success in trawling, but as for forward travel…" He
shrugged.
Doc felt a bile of anger begin to rise. A "success"? He remembered the
obscenities that were Judge Crater and Ambrose Bierce, remembered the pain and
agony of being trawled by the cruel whitecoats and was painfully aware of his
own mental instability. So that was 'success'?
"Do you know what's happened outside your moribund and absurd machine?" Doc
snapped.
"No," the general answered ingenuously, so much so that it took Doc aback.
The uniformed man continued, "We have been cut off from the outside. Some sort
of communication breakdown. It happens, even in the best-run complexes, and this
is such advanced technology. We've been running through simulations, waiting for
the call. But so far there has been nothing. In truth we, ah, have rather been
hoping that you can tell us."
Doc was drained of anger by his surprise. For a moment he forgot that these men
were part of a project that had ripped him from the bosom of his family and
hurled him—twice—into futures that he should never have witnessed. For a moment
he looked on them as human souls as lost as himself, trapped by harsh
circumstance in a world for which they were not made.
"Have you been fed no information about the world?" he asked. "Hasn't Wallace
been giving you the data?"
One of the men—Army by his uniform, and bunching large fists in frustration as
he spoke—said, "Wallace is a good man, but it seems to me he's losing his grip.
I've noticed a deterioration in his mental capacity over the time period we've
been hooked up."
Doc was about to comment that he felt Wallace was bordering on insanity, when it
suddenly struck him: the Army man was talking about the General Wallace who had
been in charge of the redoubt when they were initially hooked up to the Moebius
MkI. He had no idea that he was now several generations of Wallace down the
line.
"Do you actually know how long you've been linked together?" Doc asked quietly.
The Air Force man looked puzzled, scratched his head and turned to the others
for guidance. They all seemed to be at a loss. Finally he said, "Something you
will soon realize Doctor, is that time has no meaning as such in here. Once you
become part of the rat king, as you just have, then the outside world and all
its concepts become very, ah, abstracted is probably the best word."
"To a ridiculous degree," Doc commented. "There is no need for this computer.
There are no Reds anymore. There's little of anything anymore. Your obscene
plans caused the end of the world as you know it."
"You mean there's been a war?" the Army man asked after some whispered
consultation.
Doc gave a hollow laugh. "You could call it that. Skydark. A total nuclear
conflagration that has laid waste to the world. What we used to call the United
States is now the Deathlands. And believe me, gentlemen, it more than lives up
to that name."
There was more whispered consultation. The Army man turned to Doc.
"So who won?"
Doc felt an urge to giggle. It crept up his throat, making him choke. He began
to laugh. At first it was soft and low, but it grew louder and louder, harsher
and harsher, verging on hysteria. Tears of laughter ran down his cheeks, turning
to tears of rage and sadness.
They watched him impassively, only the occasional puzzled flicker of a frown
giving away any emotions.
Doc finished, doubled up and in agony from cramps in his ribs. Which, if he
tried hard to concentrate, was absurd. How could he get cramps when he wasn't,
as such, real?
He pulled himself upright. "Nobody won, you cretin. Everyone lost. There is no
