Baptism of Rage (9 page)

As Jak pulled at the chain, unhooking it from a thick rivet in the wall, the two of them heard a sudden, low growl from the shadows. Something stirred.

Ryan glanced back, just in time to see Mitch and Annie pushing the double doors closed, the moonlight peeking through the cracks between the boards. Even as Ryan tossed the chain aside and began running to the doors, he heard the shunting of wood against metal as a heavy bolt was locked in place.

“Fireblast!” he cursed, slamming a palm against the door and finding it stuck firm. From outside, beyond the door, he heard the cackling laughter of Mitch and his wife. Ryan turned back to where Jak remained crouching
near the back of the barn. A moment later, a lightbulb illuminated overhead, dim wattage working off an oil supply, but enough to light the center of the room.

From its place in the shadows, Jak and Ryan heard movements as the growling, snarling thing at the end of Jak’s chain stirred. And, from beyond the locked doors, they heard the whooping sounds of laughter.

“Jak,” Ryan demanded, his voice steady, “what have we got?”

Jak was carefully backing away from the rear of the barn, leaving the chain back where he had found it on the floor. “Meat eater,” he said. “Can smell it.”

Figures,
Ryan thought irritably.

Jak stepped closer to where Ryan stood, pulling his .357 Magnum Colt Python from its holster and pointing it, one-handed, into the shadows at the far side of the barn. Ryan had doused the flame of the little lighter, and the low-wattage bulb above did little to illuminate the large barn, leaving most of it still in deep shadow. The angry growling continued.

“How many?” Ryan asked. “Can you see?”

Despite his albinism, Jak had incredible eyesight, and his other senses were so attuned that he could often locate enemies by hearing or smell as easily as another person might with his eyes. “Not know,” he answered, trying to see what it was that made the noise.

Suddenly, a blur appeared from the darkness, a leaping shape, a long body and dark hide. The chain was attached to the creature, whatever it was, clanking against the floor of the barn as the thing charged at them.

Jak pulled the trigger of his blaster, and for a moment Ryan saw the thing in the bright flash of gunfire. It was
big—as long as he was tall, with a barrel-shaped body covered in coarse, black fur, a short, curling tail at its rear. The thing was squealing, a high-pitched shriek that sounded like a hideous corruption of child’s laughter, and it was then that Ryan realized what it was that they faced. It was a boar of some kind, as big as a man and as heavy as two.

From outside, beyond the barn doors, gales of laughter came from Mitch and Annie, the simple-minded pair enjoying the cruel entertainment they had created. Ryan knew then that the wags outside weren’t salvage—they were from the previous victims of this sick little game. Most likely, Mitch and Annie had set the tarmac trap and had been forced to improvise when they found five wags and over a dozen people waiting for them.

The mutie boar slammed into Jak, knocking him off his feet as Ryan tracked it with his SIG-Sauer. Jak rolled to pull himself out of the way of the enormous black boar, as Ryan unloaded a full clip into the thing’s hide. It squealed angrily, shaking its head and turning to face the one-eyed man.

Laughter came from beyond the barn doors and the woman’s voice—Annie—mocked Ryan’s efforts: “Come on, stud, big strong man like you can do better’n that.”

Ryan loaded a fresh clip, never taking his eye off the horrible, piglike creature. It had a wide face, dark, leathery flesh covered in coarse, black hair and just a hint of pink peeking through around its blubbery lips. It had twin, upturned tusks at either side of its mouth, stretching almost the full height of its squat head, curving up in daggerlike points. Its eyes were dark pools, a watery black like a spider’s. Along its flank, circles showed where the bullets from Ryan’s blaster had caught
it, but there was no blood. The boar had so much blubber that the bullets had lodged somewhere within its body without hitting any major organs.

Jak was coming around Ryan’s rear, his blaster held ahead as he tried to discern what else was in the barn. He seemed fine, just a little surprised at the speed with which the creature had charged at him.

“This it?” Ryan asked. “Is this all there is?”

Jak strained his ears, but all he could hear was the braying laughter of Mitch and Annie just outside the doors. Looking back, he saw them watching through knotholes in the barn doors, laughing at the antics inside. “Chill light,” he instructed Ryan, blasting an angry shot at the door.

Without a second’s pause, Ryan discharged a shot from the blaster in his hand, and the bullet shattered the bare lightbulb. It could put them at a disadvantage, Ryan knew, but it might be acting as a beacon for the monstrous mutie boar as much as it was helping them right now. And Jak had called it right. Without lights, Mitch and his scrawny lover wouldn’t be able to enjoy their perverse “entertainment.”

For a moment the whole barn seemed plunged into utter darkness, and Ryan sidestepped to the right on silent feet in the hopes that, if the boar tried anything, it would charge at where it had last seen him. That was assuming that the hideous thing wasn’t nocturnal, wasn’t in fact better able to see in darkness. So many unknowns, so many variables, Ryan felt his frustration—and his anger—rise.

Annie’s whining voice came from the barn doors. “Fuckers ruined all the fun, honey. I can’t see shit now.” With a tinge of satisfaction, Ryan ignored her and turned back to the matter at hand.

Jak’s voice came out of the darkness behind Ryan’s left shoulder. “’Nother,” he said.

Damn. This party was becoming overcrowded.

The two men listened as the grunting and snuffling sounds came from around them, trying to locate multiple swine in the enclosed space of the barn.

B
ACK AT THE CONVOY
, the travelers were becoming restless. They had journeyed for most of the day, and this unplanned stop had made them tired and anxious. Several had left their wags, against the advice of Ryan’s team, to stretch their legs and get some fresh air.

“Stay in sight of the road,” J.B. had instructed. He was keeping one eye on the horizon, wishing for Ryan and Jak to hurry back. It didn’t do to be waiting around like this, a whole damn brace of sitting ducks waiting to get shot.

Mildred had joined the personnel in the second wag, where Nisha Adams had taken the wheel from her husband, and was dressing Paul Witterson’s wound from the night before. The wound was scabbing over nicely, and his arm seemed to be working fine. Nisha seemed dignified, almost stately in her mannerisms, but held no edge of snobbery. Mildred chatted to her a little as she dressed Witterson’s wounds.

“Oh, we didn’t come from a ville,” Nisha explained as her husband dozed in the seat beside her. “Just farmland where we were. Had a smallholding, did our best but that soil out west is tough and unyielding. Tough to grow much, year in and year out.”

“It wasn’t always like that,” Mildred said wistfully. “Tennessee used to be all farms, when I was a girl. Cattle as far as the eye could see.”

Nisha peered querulously at her, and Mildred became aware that the other members of the vehicle were watching her, too.

“I, um,” Mildred began, “that’s how I heard it anyway.” She didn’t want to explain how she was a freezie, awakened a hundred years after the end of the world. She got back to tending to Witterson’s wounded arm.

Standing with one foot resting on the front bumper of Torino’s 4WD, J.B. tilted his wrist to check his chron in the starlight. The sun had set, and the area around the stalled wags was almost entirely hidden in the darkness.

“You need a light, brother?” Charles asked, leaning his head out of the driver’s window. “The head beams run off a little battery pack if you need to see.”

J.B. shook his head, thanking the man solemnly. “Best we stay hidden,” he explained. “I don’t like the thought of what’s out there so much.”

“Me neither,” Charles agreed with a throaty laugh. He drew back from the window and reached for the glove box by Doc’s seat, pulling out a stubby cheroot from among the amassed possessions therein.

In the passenger seat, Doc eyed the contents of the glove box in the near-darkness. It contained a handful of stubby cigars and a tinderbox, which Charles reached for to light his stogie. Doc also detected the glint of metal, and realized that there was also a small handgun tucked in the compartment, its barrel about half the length of Doc’s forearm.

“I see you’re carrying a little strategic defense,” Doc whispered to Charles as the man lit his cigar.

The man looked at him, the creases around his old eyes showing in his scarred face as he smiled. “A smart man doesn’t go looking for trouble, Doc,” he said, “but he also doesn’t run away when it comes knocking.”

Doc agreed with the sentiment. “Wise words, Mr. Torino,” he said.

A little way from the horse-drawn automobile, J.B. worked his way down the line of waiting wags, a grim expression on his face. He made his way to Krysty, who was standing close to the lead wag, examining the entrenched wheels with Jeremiah Croxton and the young-old Daisy.

The Armorer gestured to his watch. “That’s ten minutes,” he said, “and I can’t hear their engine making its return trip.”

Krysty looked anxious. “Ten minutes isn’t much,” she reminded him. “That’s how long the guy said it would take.”

“I’m not feeling much patience for these dirt farmers,” J.B. growled. “It just doesn’t feel right.”

Krysty agreed but she didn’t tell J.B. that. “Ryan will handle it,” she said firmly.

I
N THE DARKNESS
, Ryan began to make sense of what he was looking at, discerning shadowy shapes around him as he stepped lightly across the hard floor in a slow, circular pattern. Off to his left, making a similar circular pattern, Jak emerged, just a dark silhouette against a slightly darker background. Ryan saw the dark, hard-edged mound of the farming equipment across from him, wondered if he might somehow use it to his advantage.

The laughing outside had stopped. Presumably Mitch and Annie had become bored by the new events now that they could no longer see them.

“Why have you stopped laughing, Mitch?” Ryan taunted. “Why don’t you and your woman come in here and we’ll all play ‘chill the pig’? Afraid we’ll mistake her for one of them?”

There was no answer from beyond the doors, just a grim silence.

And then they heard the scrabbling on the floor, and Ryan saw one of the boars flit across his vision as the creature charged at him, squealing as it ran. This one was smaller, still just a piglet really, but it had already grown large enough and powerful enough to force a man to the ground, Ryan was sure.

“It’s a mother and her brood,” Ryan told Jak as he ran to one side, out of the angry creature’s path. “No wonder she’s so bastard riled up.”

Ryan blasted a shot from the SIG-Sauer, then another as he saw the monster in the flash of light. There weren’t just two of them—there were six, maybe seven, and they had surrounded Jak and himself as they waited in the darkness. Intelligent pigs, stalking their prey. It was lunacy, but a kind of lunacy that made a perverted kind of sense; pigs had long been proved to be intelligent animals. Probably a whole lot smarter than the laughing pair outside, Ryan thought bitterly.

Behind Ryan, Jak was loosing shot after shot from his Colt blaster, watching the bullets rip into the tusked swine and cursing that they just kept coming. As Jak fired a fifth shot, one of the younger boars charged
into him, knocking the teen off his feet. He staggered, spinning in place before crashing to the hard floor of the barn.

Hearing his comrade fall, Ryan turned, watching in horror as the boars swooped down at him in the lightning flash of his gunshots.
The bullets are having no effect on these hard-skinned bastards,
he realized. Ultimately, they were just going to wear him and Jak down, wait until they had run out of ammo and then kill them unless the companions took some drastic action.

On the floor, Jak was rolling out of the path of the attacking boars. One of the animals stepped on him, high on his left arm, and Jak bit back a cry of pain as the boar’s full weight dug into him. He rammed the muzzle of the Colt under the monster’s jaw and pulled the trigger. The recoil drove through Jak’s hand, pushing his forearm back so that his elbow slammed painfully against the wood boards of the floor. Above him, the young boar squealed once more as a mush of blood and brains and flesh exploded from the top of its wide, fat head.

Jak saw a flash of blasterfire as, standing over him, Ryan fired another shot at the encroaching pack of animals. Then the big man was next to him, wrestling the boar away with his bare hands. He saw that Ryan had grabbed another length of chain from somewhere—one of the hooks, perhaps—and now he whipped it around the monster’s neck, cinching it tight as he straddled the foul animal. With a strained grunt, Ryan yanked the chain toward him, pulling the boar backward, up off its feet, as the other squealed and butted at him. The
boar struggled against the length of chain, grunting and whining as the metal links dug into the thick folds of flesh around its neck.

Ryan continued to pull at the chain, dragging the boar backward against its will, hefting it away until it was out of reach of Jak’s supine body, while its enraged brethren squealed and grunted maniacally. Jak seized the opportunity to blast further shots from his Colt Python, spitting bullets at the surrounding mother and brood as they closed on Ryan and the piglet.

Then, as Jak watched, something flashed in Ryan’s hand in the darkness, and he realized that the foreboding, muscular man was using the razor-keen edge of his eighteen-inch-panga blade to carve a deep cut into the squealing boar’s side. A moment passed, and Ryan’s figure was suddenly standing in the darkened barn, the mutant pig flopped lifelessly at his feet, a trail of guts and blood spewing from the wound in its side and the hole in its head. All around, the monstrous mutie pigs were squealing louder and louder, but whether it was in fear or anger, it was impossible to tell.

“Come on, Jak,” Ryan bit out, breathless, “let’s get out of here.”

Jak rolled his left shoulder, feeling the pain of the forming bruise as he struggled up from the floor. They were surrounded, and these creatures were so bundled in their rolls of fat that they appeared near-impervious to bullets. “How?” Jak asked.

With a light shove, Ryan pushed Jak toward the silhouette of the rusting plow that his eye, now adjusted to the darkness, could make out lurking in the barn. “Up,” Ryan explained, and Jak stepped onto the raised surface of the plow, just two feet off the ground. Behind Jak, the
one-eyed man was blasting another clip of bullets at the angry pigs as they stomped toward the retreating men. A moment later, Ryan was with Jak, balancing atop the plow.

The pigs snarled and snuffled, bashing into the plow with their sharp tusks, making the rusted, rotten piece of equipment shake. Ryan and Jak swayed, managing to keep from falling back to the floor. For a moment, as he balanced atop the plow, Ryan thought back to the game of “pirates” he would play as a child in the vast rooms of Front Royal, leaping from sofa to armchair, onto the rug then grabbing the mantel and hanging from it, Harvey at his side, trying to keep from the sharks they imagined were swimming all about the floor. That was a long time ago, back when Harvey was still some kind of brother to him, before the madness had set in.