End Day (23 page)

“Vee knows where and when she wants to die,” Mildred said. “And she's not afraid. You have to respect that.”

“I do respect it,” Doc said. “It seems such a terrible waste.”

“She brave woman,” Ricky said.

“And stubborn,” Krysty added.

“Yeah,” Ryan said, “she would've fit right in.”

“I do it!” Jak said in exasperation. The albino reached behind Doc and punched the button.

Once started, there was no stopping the process.

The floorplates began to glow, and gray fog materialized in writhing tendrils near the chamber's ceiling. Ryan knew what was coming, and he steeled himself for it. First the stinging mist, then the vertigo. He tried to stay upright by supporting himself with a hand on the wall, but his legs gave out from under him, and he hit the floorplates on his back. His head smacked last with a whip-crack motion that made him see stars and groan.

It was worse than he remembered. Or maybe the problem was, everything was happening in reverse.

It started with violent compression when he was expecting the opposite. So when an impossibly powerful force began pancaking him end to end, he felt a rare moment of panic. That he was in the grip of something he couldn't fight made the panic worse.

Then it started to hurt. Really hurt.

Under the tremendous pressure, the long bones of his lower legs began to crack, then splinter and suddenly his ankles were grinding up against his kneecaps. His neck bones exploded, dropping his head between his shoulder blades. If the others were screaming, he couldn't hear them—he was screaming too loud, himself.

The pain didn't stop.

The compression continued at a faster and faster pace. Thigh bones gave way; ankles and kneecaps rammed into his hip joints. His rib cage disintegrated all at once, in an agonizing
poof!
With nothing to stop it, his head smashed into the top of his pelvis. In the middle of it all were his insides, and they and their contents were squashed flat. There was no rolling over this time: he projectile-vomited straight up in the air.

If it rained down on him, he never felt it. What he did feel was a powerful grip seizing his wrists and ankles and a force pulling him in opposing directions. Deep down he knew he was in the homestretch, but that didn't help while he was caught in the moment.

Every broken part of him was stretched out, all the jagged bits of bone, the ruptured vessels, the exposed nerve ends, drawn out thinner and thinner and then thinner still until he went blind, until his heart stopped, until he didn't exist.

Only the pain existed.

The pain inside his throat felt as if a tiny someone was trapped in there trying to hand saw his way out. Back and forth the blade went, ripping, ripping. The pain was from nonstop screaming.

Then there was a jolt and a sound like a siren winding down, from high pitch to low. Suddenly he was aware of the smooth surface beneath his back and something wet sliding down the sides of his face.

He coughed, sputtered, then opened his eye. He saw fog. Swirling gray fog.

They'd made it, he thought.

The floorplates under and around him were still glowing, but their brightness was fading. With an effort he raised up on an elbow and felt his skin crackle and pop with static. The others were all breathing.

He tried to rise and couldn't manage it. When he fell back, he hit his head again. He knew they had to prepare for the upcoming fight, but he couldn't summon a shout to rouse them. He lay there and watched the fog swirl near the ceiling. It had no pattern for the longest time—utterly random movement—then it began to spin counterclockwise, slowly at first, then faster, like water swirling down a drain. As it spun, it got smaller and smaller until it was gone.

It took a while longer for him to recover his strength. By that time the others were stirring. Ricky had puked himself dry again and was still heaving. His expression looked desperate. Mildred leaned over and patted him on the back, trying to calm him down.

Ryan rolled on his side, then struggled to his feet. To stop swaying, he leaned against the wall.

“You okay, lover?” Krysty asked.

“Yeah, yeah, I'm good,” he lied.

He looked over at the porthole. The lights were on in the mat-trans anteroom, but from his angle of view, he couldn't see anything past the scratches the enforcers had made.

Using the wall for support, he edged over to the round window. As he pressed close to the glass, a dark, warty face appeared on the opposite side, two inches from the tip of his nose. Yellow eyes bored into him, and a ribbonlike tongue darted out over small, sharp teeth, flicking at the glass. It wasn't wearing a hoodie.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Magus relaxed in the executive chair of the redoubt's former commandant, a man dead over a century. The office suite was expansive and decorated to his personal taste—blank white walls, bare concrete floors, uncomfortable seating arrangements for guests. It was all about establishing dominance.

His reunion with Cawdor and friends had been in the planning stages for eight months. The do-over experience meant he could relive the parts of his life that were enjoyable and omit what wasn't. Or try something new.

The roboticist had completed work on his hand, but unfortunately for him, his was a very limited specialty. There were no correspondent tasks he could assume. Besides, Magus had tired of his constant whining. Their last conversation still stuck in his mind.

“I saved you from certain death, you ingrate,” he had said.

“This place is worse than death,” the man had replied. “You watch bugs fight for entertainment.”

Magus had been tempted to punish him for his insolence, but fair was fair. He had done a fine job of rewiring the hand. His reward: instead of being given to the enforcers for a kick toy, he'd been shuffled off to the ruins of a predark nuke plant Magus had staked out for himself. Where, along with other slaves of Magus, he'd been set to work, mining the control rods from the reactor core. That had effectively quadrupled the scientist's life span, from zero to four months.

Had he said thank you? Of course not.

Dr. Nudelman's contribution had been a great disappointment, start to finish. All his attempts at miniaturizing the pee battery had failed. He had gotten it down to the size of a bread loaf, but to satisfy even the smallest power requirements, say operating his optical-servo motors, would have taken three of them. That meant they couldn't be carried inside his body. He'd have had to wear them strapped to his back or push them along in a cart. And their combined weight was prohibitive. The barrow that carried them would have needed to be motorized, as well. All this just to make his eyes blink.

The bioengineer had turned out to be something of a prima donna, too. He'd claimed he'd lacked the proper equipment to complete the task he had been given; he'd moaned about the unfairness of it. That had reminded Magus of the old saw about a poor workman blaming his tools.

He had left Nudelman hanging from a basketball hoop in a high school gymnasium, en route to the redoubt.

The only captive from his most recent trip to the past who had survived the full eight months was the wag driver, McCreedy. When pressed, he'd turned out to be a very resourceful fellow. Mechanic. Chiller. Carny master. The Deathlands' lifestyle agreed with him. And what was not to like? No traffic. No police. No laws. No wife. No mother-in-law. Plenty of jolt and joy juice and gaudy sluts. Two weeks into his stay, he had asked if he could carry a blaster. And when handed one, he'd promptly taken it and shot in the head a sec man who had been giving him grief. No one gave him grief after that.

Magus looked over at McCreedy, then at his head sec man, Kossow, both of whom sat on the hardest bench Magus could find. Neither of them was intelligent or educated enough to fully grasp the implications of what he had accomplished.

By taking the place of his former self and returning to Deathlands before he had in fact ever left, he had created a new parallel universe. One in which he hadn't yet caused the merging of timelines. Everything that had happened had to be repeated, only this time with a point in mind and a certain outcome: Cawdor's destruction.

The trail for Cawdor and his band to follow had been laid down as before, on purpose. His men were ordered to give away secrets in the gaudy, which led Cawdor and company to the redoubt. It would have been fine if the enforcers had chilled them before the jump, but that hadn't happened. He'd made the time jump, they'd followed, all according to plan.

Some people might find reliving their life boring. Not so with Magus. Killing never failed to amuse, and there were nuances missed in the first go-round. It all happened too quickly to capture every detail. And it gave him the opportunity to refine the story's unfolding and make the ending all the more satisfying.

Oh, what a surprise when the Cawdor crew arrived and saw what and who was waiting for them on the other side of the door.

They would have nowhere to go.

They would have no choice but to surrender to him.

The very thought of it made the human side of his face salivate.

Magus always considered himself a grand showman, if not a genius of spectacle. Having assured himself of the capture of Cawdor and his companions, he had spent much time and energy deciding what to do with them. A theatrical event centered around their torture and killing seemed most appropriate. Working out the details kept him up at night. He sketched scenery and elaborate torture devices. He sent out scouts to round up acts that would fill in the rest of the show: aerial acts, mutie fights, gladiatorial contests, a musical group or two. It would be a spectacle for the ages. McCreedy had been a great help in the enterprise. He had a knack for knowing what Magus wanted in terms of entertainment and knowing how to find it. The wag driver had become his carny master. Magus saw him as a possible replacement for Silam, whose oversize head he had crushed after the Cawdor-induced disaster at gladiator island.

A carefully staged exercise in godlike power had turned out to be just the opposite. Magus's stranglehold on the hellscape was based on fear; that was the fiat by which he ruled. No one defeated him. No one crossed him and lived.

Cawdor had shown him to be vulnerable. The tales had spread far and wide.

That damage had to be undone.

By a public, not a private, show this time, with all the barons and their inbred families invited. Those who refused would be kidnapped and chained to their seats with their eyelids taped open.

“My men are nervous about all the enforcers on the loose,” Kossow said. “They don't like running into them alone in the hallways.”

Magus knew his sec men didn't trust the enforcers. And why would they? The reptilians were evil-tempered, foul-smelling bastards. The sec men had every right to feel threatened by creatures that couldn't be chilled. But Magus needed both types of soldier for his hellscape operations. The kind that killed until there was no one else to kill. And the kind that saw other routes to achieve a desired result. If the sec men had their way, the enforcers would all be locked in darkened cold storage, putting them and their primal urges into hibernation.

A knock on the door broke his train of thought. “Enter!” he said.

A sec man stepped into the bleak room. He seemed out of breath. “Sir, you asked to be warned when the time apparatus has been activated.”

“That has happened?”

“Yes, sir. The sequence is underway.”

“Excellent,” Magus said. With a wave of his steel hand, he dismissed his carny master and sec man. They both had work to do.

* * *

M
C
C
REEDY
TROTTED
AT
a brisk pace down the long corridor. He was a changed man. It never failed to amaze him how quickly he had cast off the trappings of civilization and embraced the mantle of savage. After eight months in the hellscape, he rarely thought of his previous life. There were too many exciting and interesting things to do. It was hard at first, because he had to learn the ropes, the chain of command, a language that was choked with new words and twisted meanings. Once he had a blaster in his hand, everything had fallen into place. Blowing off the head of that asshole sec man was the most satisfying experience of his life—up to that point. After being bullied and kicked, robbed, humiliated in front of Magus and the rest of the human crew, it was his coming-out party. After that the floodgates of plenty opened for him.

Magus was a big-time operator, the Donald Trump of Deathlands. And in the short span of eight months, McCreedy had become his right-hand man instead of an organ donor. It was a rags-to-riches story that could never have happened in New York City. Not even on a reality TV show. He was still servant to a greater master, but his service included being a rock promoter. A rock promoter in hell. It was a sink-or-swim proposition, but he had been raised on tabloids and gossip magazines, grown up watching big-league sports and action movies. He had the right credentials for the job.

Magus could be a generous employer, but working for him was like walking a tightrope. If something short-circuited in that cobbled-together brain of his, suddenly down was up and you were heading for the nuke power plant in shackles.

The threat of violent, horrible death no longer kept him up at night. Perhaps because he had seen so much of it in eight months.

The venue for Magus's big show had yet to be chosen. There were many options on the table, but he was looking for a natural amphitheater at a hellscape crossroads. An open-pit coal mine would do nicely. There was time to make the perfect choice. The actual performance wasn't scheduled to take place for months. It would take that long to construct all the stages, gather the supporting acts and assemble the select group of spectators.

He was going to promote it as the biggest event in Deathlands since the nukecaust. The Second Coming of Armageddon. Magus intended it to be a command performance. From what McCreedy had gathered, most of the hellscape royalty was going to be eager to attend the festivities anyway. It seemed Ryan Cawdor and his companions had made a lot more enemies than just ol' Steel Eyes.