Moonfeast (10 page)

“Excellent shooting, my dear Jak,” Doc said. “But I’m rather surprised that you didn’t ace a deer, instead.”

“Can’t skin while walking,” Jak explained pragmatically, producing a small knife and starting to slice off the fur.

By the time noon rolled around, the companions were more than ready to stop and cook the rabbits. Krysty seasoned the meat with some crushed pine nuts, and Mildred filled a small pot with water from a stream, boiling it thoroughly before adding a few drops of iodine. That would kill almost any bacteria in the water, and was good for the thyroid glands of the companions. Iodized salt was a thing of the past, so the physician kept a close watch on the others for the first sign of a suspiciously sore throat or low-grade fever that never got any better.

After the meal, the companions felt vastly refreshed
and continued their trek through the barrens. Strangely, there was an ever-increasing amount of wildlife in the forest, which was starting to make them nervous. A complete lack of people often meant there was some sort of a mutie around that had chilled everybody.

Crossing a field of Shasta daisies, the group paused as a bald eagle screamed defiantly from the sky, laying claim to the entire plateau. In a blur of motion, a stingwing launched upward from some laurel bushes like a leathery missile. The two predators collided in an explosion of feathers and blood. The furious battle was short, and soon the headless corpse of the stingwing tumbled from the sky, the eagle majestically winging away in triumph. The mutie had been vanquished, but found inedible by the eagle, and thus was simply abandoned. The interrupted hunt for clean meat continued unabated.

“‘And thou, wretched boy, who did consort him here, shall with him hence,’” Doc said with a wry smile.

“Romeo and Juliet,” Mildred replied, closing her collar against the encroaching chill. “You ever see the play?”

“Several times, madam. After all, I was once a teacher of literature,” Doc replied, gesturing with the stick. “Once, my students even performed a truncated version of the play, and I was drafted to play the Jewish apothecary to a twelve-year-old Romeo who barely reached my waistcoat.”

“I saw the vid in a redoubt once,” Krysty said unexpectedly. “It was rather hard to follow the story, but I liked the parts about family honor. Funny, I didn’t know
they had blasters back in the, you know, the predark times before our predark times.”

Blasters? Doc and Mildred looked at each in confusion.

“You must have seen the modern-day remake of the seventeenth-century classic.” Mildred chuckled in realization. “Yeah, John Leguizamo was excellent! But then he always is…was.”

“So, they didn’t have blasters back then?”

“Nope, just swords and knives.”

“Nothing wrong with that.” Jak smiled.

“Speak for yourself,” J.B. retorted, patting the stubby barrel of the Uzi.

“And what is this I see?” Doc asked in a conversational tone of voice, drawing both of his blasters and clicking back the hammers.

Everybody tensed at the actions. Off to the side of the field was a large stand of trees with thick brambles growing around the trunks. But upon closer examination, it was fake. The brambles were actually a cluster of sharpened poles thrusting into the ground. Pungi sticks, Mildred called them. The companions had used such things many times before around a temporary campsite, or while repairing a wag out in the wilds. Using pungi sticks to fill in the gaps between trees was a deuced clever idea. It would quickly make a crude wall to protect you from the predators of the night.

However, these pungi sticks looked old and weathered, as if the poles had been here for many winters. And there was a gate attached to a tree, a stout barrier of bolted planks, the outer surface studded with so many pungi sticks it was difficult to see the wooden beams
underneath. Whatever else the place might be, this was definitely not a temporary structure.

“Odd configuration,” Mildred said, walking closer. Then she saw a thick purple substance smeared onto the needle-sharp tip of every stick. “Don’t touch those poles! They’re poisoned!”

“Have to be, or else this wouldn’t have lasted a week,” Ryan stated, studying the treetops for any sniper platforms hidden among the branches. He easily found several, but they were empty and piled with loose leaves.

“This place is abandoned,” Krysty said, looking over the bristling wall. “Nobody has been here for years.”

“Mebbe,” J.B. countered warily. “But I never did trust folks that liked to use poison as a defense.”

“Perhaps poison is all they had,” Mildred suggested, taking a scalpel from her med kit. Carefully, the woman sliced through the end of a pole, then used a handkerchief to slip it into one of her precious plastic zippered bags for later examination.

Starting to walk toward the right, Ryan pointed at J.B. and he started off the other way. A few minutes later the men returned from opposite directions.

“Four hundred ten feet around,” Ryan stated. “This is no campsite, but a small ville.”

“And this is the only gate,” J.B. added accusingly, clearly not ready to trust anything about the place.

Dropping to a knee, Jak inspected the ground. To the rest of the companions it seemed smooth and featureless.

“Something big tried get in,” the young hunter stated. “Didn’t like wall. Tried bunch times, finally went away.”

“How big, and how long ago?” Doc asked.

“Couple months. Size…” Jak merely shrugged. “Big as some dinos saw at museum.”

“Indeed,” Doc murmured, clicking off the safety on his assault rifle. The ancient beasts on display had been only ossified skeletons, but that had been more than enough to disturb the man for many days. The Holy Bible clearly spoke of monsters in the olden days, and who could say for certain those hadn’t been dinosaurs of a sort? It was a most disturbing possibility.

Indeed, similar creatures stalked the Deathlands to this day. Nobody alive had ever seen a kraken completely out of the water, but the companions had personally witnessed one of the giant muties drag a four-masted sailing ship underwater with a hundred tentacles, each thicker than a telephone pole.

“Most dinosaurs were peaceful herbivores,” Mildred said. “They only ate grass and leaves.”

“But not all of them,” Ryan countered. “Right?”

Sadly, Mildred admitted that the man was correct. The largest creatures to ever walk the planet had been carnivores, meat eaters. Just before she had gone into the cryogenic unit, the woman had heard about the discovery of the skeleton of a proto-alligator from the Jurassic period that was over sixty feet in length. That was longer than two city buses! The blasters and grens carried by the companions wouldn’t even annoy such a primordial behemoth, much less chill it.

“We still have two implo grens,” Krysty said, patting the pocket of her bearskin coat.

“Keep one handy, just in case,” Ryan ordered. “How are we on pipe bombs?”

“More than enough to handle anything this side of a kraken,” J.B. said confidently, one of the explosive charges already in his hand. “And I have a stick of TNT primed and ready to go.”

“Smart move.” Proceeding around the open gate, Ryan led the others inside the hidden ville. However, there was nothing to be seen, only a weedy field that stretched from the ring of trees and back again. There were no buildings, tents or structures of any kind.

“Now why would anybody put a wall around a fragging empty field?” J.B. demanded, tilting back his fedora.

“Corral?” Jak asked, frowning. “Mebbe prison?”

“Mayhap there once was a ville, but it burned down?” Doc suggested hesitantly.

Spreading out, the companions checked for any signs of fire damage or foundations. But there was only the weedy grasslands, exactly the same as outside the trees.

“Don’t like this,” Ryan muttered, tightening his grip on the Steyr. “Something wrong here.”

“Pain,” Krysty said in a soft voice, her eyes tightly closed. “I can still hear the screams of the dying.”

“Ville jacked by nightcreep?” Jak asked with a scowl.

“They weren’t attacked,” Krysty whispered, swaying slightly. “It was something worse…much worse…so much pain…and there’s blood everywhere…” With a shudder, the woman straightened. “We need to leave right now,” Krysty said in a tight voice.

Studying the woman for a moment, Ryan nodded in
agreement. “Okay, let’s roll. The main things we want are food and brass, and there is none of that here.”

“I concur wholeheartedly,” Doc said, then abruptly went silent.

Wondering what made the man stop talking, Ryan glanced sideways and was surprised that he couldn’t see Doc anywhere. Turning, Ryan felt his combat instincts rise at the startling realization that Doc was gone, as if he had vanished into thin air.

Quickly, Ryan scanned the trees for any suspicious movements, nets or a lasso being hauled out of view. But there was nothing in sight. Fireblast! Inhaling deeply, the man cut loose with an ear-splitting whistle that would have stopped traffic in ancient Manhattan. But there was no reaction or response. Just silence.

“Theophilus! Theo!” Krysty shouted, her hair tightening in response to her agitated state of mind.

“All right, nothing grabbed him from above, or we would have seen it flying,” Mildred snarled, jerking her head in a different direction. “Which means he’s underground. Maybe there was a sink hole…”

“Bullshit, gotta be trap,” Jak retorted, prodding the weeds with his crutch in one hand, the Colt Python in the other.

“Stay in pairs!” Ryan barked. “We could be facing a drinker!”

The memory of the deadly subterranean mutie made the other companions grimly alert, and fingers tightened on the triggers of their blasters.

Trying to recall where he had last seen the silver-haired man, Ryan strode through the knee-high weeds looking for anything out of the ordinary. If at all possible, Doc would have left behind some trace to warn the others. Even if that was only a… As the ground
shifted under his boot, Ryan tried to throw himself backward, but it was too late. He dropped down into inky blackness, barely managing to fire his longblaster into the sky before crashing into a writhing nest of insects.

A split second later, a net swung down from the darkness and pressed him flat against the crunching bugs. Red fury filled the one-eyed man, and he tried to reach the panga, but his arms were held immobile. Changing tactics, he fired the Steyr, the brief muzzle-flash clearly showing the net. It was made of knotted ropes stretched across a wooden frame, crude, but highly effective.

Pressing the barrel of the Steyr to a corner of the frame, Ryan trigger the longblaster again, and the wood exploded into splinters, easing the pressure on his arms. Releasing the Steyr, Ryan forced his arm forward in jerks to finally reach the panga sheathed at his side.

Braced for the onslaught of the crackling bugs, Ryan wiggled his hand around, sawing at the ropes holding him prisoner, then he suddenly understood he wasn’t lying on a bed of bugs, but just some dry hay. The noise it made when he moved was remarkably similar to that of the army ants from Chicago. The fact that he wasn’t about to be eaten alive eased his mind somewhat, but the hard reality of the net made Ryan keep cutting at the bonds until one of them parted. Jerking his arm free, Ryan hacked at the other ropes, the stiff material parting easily under the razor-sharp steel.

Fighting his way loose, the one-eyed man sheathed the blade and reclaimed the Steyr, working the bolt to chamber a fresh round. Wherever he was located inside the ground, it was pitch black, without any bastard sign
of the bright sunshine only a few yards away. Straining to hear any movements in the dark, Ryan flicked his butane lighter alive. The tiny flame filled the room with a flickering nimbus of illumination, and he scowled at the heavy shackles and chains that hung off the stone-block walls. There was a door, thick and banded with iron straps, but it was wide open, showing only more darkness beyond. This was a prison of some sort. But one that wanted to capture outlanders alive? That was when cold adrenaline flooded the man at the sight of the bones on the floor. They had clearly been gnawed upon, and not by animals.

“Cannies!” Ryan snarled hatefully.

Just then, the ceiling exploded and Ryan stepped to the side to avoid being hit by the broken pieces of wood and other falling debris. A rectangle of sunlight streamed down from above, then a gloved hand holding a mirror peeked over the edge, closely followed by the taut face of J.B., his other hand clenching the Uzi.

“Hey, Adam!” J.B. shouted suspiciously, looking around in frank disgust. Even from his angle he could see the chains on the walls and guessed their purpose.

“The name’s Cain!” Ryan replied, using the alphabet code to signal the area was clear.

“Glad to hear it,” J.B. said, easing his grip on the machine pistol. “You hurt any?”

“Just bruised,” Ryan shouted back, brushing some hay out of his hair. “We got enough rope to haul my ass out of here?”

“Not a chance, lover,” Krysty said, coming into view. “You’ll have to find the exit.”

“Yeah, thought so.”

“Any sign of Doc?”

“No, but he can’t be too far away,” Ryan said. “He must have fallen down another of these mantraps.”

“Thankfully, they wanted folks alive!”

“This one did, at least!”

That raised a nasty possibility while Doc hadn’t been heard from yet, and the man and the woman frowned.

“Make some room!” J.B. yelled, removing his glasses. “I’m coming down to join you. Two blasters are better than one.”

“Aim for the middle,” Ryan advised, stepping out of the light.

Easing himself over the edge, J.B. lowered his legs as far as possible before letting go. The drop wasn’t very far, and he hit the pile of hay in a crouch. Instantly there came an audible click as some mechanism under the cushioning material was triggered by the impact. The wooden frame jerked up, only to slam back down again, knocking J.B. sprawling.

“Fragging cannies,” the man snarled, kicking the damaged netting aside to stand. “Dark night, this reminds me of Castle Rock in West Ginnia.”

“Just a lot less screaming,” Ryan agreed, spotting a torch set into the wall.

It was just a bundle of green reeds soaked in tar, but there was still some residue left in evidence. Using the butane lighter, Ryan got it going, and the room was filled with the bright torchlight that showed every detail. There were a lot more bones than Ryan had originally assumed, and over in the corner were a pair of withered corpses still chained in a stone-block corner. From the
clothing, they seemed to be a man and a woman, but it was impossible to say for sure anymore. Any significant features had shriveled and become indistinguishable over time. Oddly, both of the prisoners had large sections of their arms, or legs missing. Thick leather dangled from their desiccated forms to show where tourniquets had once been tightly lashed around their limbs.

“Son of a bitch, not just a trap. This was also their larder,” J.B. said curling a lip. “They kept the poor bastards alive and cut off chunks!”

“That explains those feelings Krysty had about all the blood and screaming,” Ryan commented, glancing at the woman in the ceiling.

“Here I come,” she shouted, just as there came the muffled bang of an explosion and some dust rained from above.

“Hold it a sec,” Krysty said, and wiggled back onto the grassy field. She returned in less than a minute. “Okay, Jak found the entrance! Head to your left and we’ll meet you there in ten!”

“Make it five!” J.B. shouted, turning away from the bodies chained to the wall. An overactive imagination was a bad thing for anybody who worked with high explosives. Remaining calm and cool was the key to staying alive and in one piece. But even he could feel the bad vibes of this hellhole. Suddenly the Armorer longed for the honest filth of the slaughterhouse back in Hobart.

It took a few tries, but Ryan got another torch working. He and J.B. left the cell and started down a long corridor. These walls were made of logs fastened together
with some kind of glue, yet the floor was made of slabs of concrete from predark sidewalks, which meant that some ruins had to be fairly close, as these things were particularly difficult to transport without breaking into pieces.

“The cannies really put a lot of effort into this,” J.B. noted, impressed in spite of his feelings.

“This was their home,” Ryan said simply, as if that explained the matter. “Nothing lives in their own drek but stickies.”

Blasters in hand, the two companions passed several rooms along the way, but they proved to merely be sleeping quarters and such. No sign of Doc anywhere. Encountering some more torches set into the walls, the men ignited each in turn, leaving the corridor behind them brightly illuminated, the ceiling alive with thick smoke.

Reaching an intersection, Ryan held both torches while J.B. got on his hands and knees to check for traps. Sure enough, the man found another pressure plate, a board with a nail drive-through positioned on top of a live brass set into a rusty coffee can. Inside was a good five pounds of black powder, enough to collapse this entire section of the corridor.

After disarming the trigger mechanism, J.B. took the can of powder for Doc to use in his LeMat.

There came the sound of boots on concrete, and Ryan whistled like a nightingale. There came back the song of a meadowlark, and Krysty stepped into sight, followed by Mildred and Jak.

“No sign of him yet?” Mildred asked anxiously. She enjoyed arguing with Doc, but it also helped to keep
his damaged mind sharp and alert. What a mat-trans jump did to a person’s stomach, apparently time travel did to their mind. First and foremost, Mildred was a physician and always concerned about what was best for a patient, even if that included busting their ass on a regular basis.

“Nor anybody else,” Ryan stated. “This place is deserted. The cannies are long gone.”

“Wonder why?” Jak asked, hobbling forward, inspecting the support ceiling and log walls. “No signs fight. Seems okay.”

“Indeed, it is, my dear Jak,” Doc whispered, stepping out of a black doorway, an arm clutching his side. “This is virtually the Gibraltar of hellholes.”

“Sit down, you fool!” Mildred admonished, rushing to the man. Cupping his face with both hands, she thumbed open his eyelids to check for internal bleeding, then felt along the base of his skull for any trace of posterior swelling.

“Any dizziness?” Mildred demanded, listening to him breathe.

“Not since I last ate your cooking,” Doc replied, trying to pull away. “Unhand me, madam! My mettle is in fine fettle!”

“Said what, did who?” J.B. asked with a grin.

“The old coot is fine,” Mildred declared, then leaned in to peck him on the undamaged cheek. “Never do that again, you hear me, Doc?”

“Absolutely, I shall endeavor to do my best to comply,” Doc intoned, giving a stiff bow. “From the hay attached to your clothing, my dear Ryan, I see that you,
too, received an impromptive surprise from the absent landlords of this charming little charnel house.”

“Damn near broke my back,” Ryan said, rubbing the seat of his pants.

The tall man smiled. “Quite so. I only escaped from that accursed slide by using my sword as a brake. The blade bent in a most alarming manner, but the steel held true, and it allowed me to roll out before descending into a pit full of spikes.” He frowned. “There were quite a few others down there, thankfully deceased.”

“A slide, eh?” Ryan asked, then told about the hay and rope net. “Seems they wanted some folks alive, but others aced.”

“Food and fun,” Jak replied simply. The plain statement was said so casually that it startled the rest of the companions. Although only in his teens, Jak was a widower and combat veteran who knew more about the brutal realities of life than many people twice his age.

“Encounter anybody alive?” Krysty asked, passing over a canteen.

Taking a drink before answering, Doc wiped the excess coconut milk off his mouth with a handkerchief. “Only ghosts, dear lady.” He sighed, returning the container. “The few cannies I found had shuffled off this mortal coil a very long time ago, and at their own hands, I might add.”

“Fight each other. Run out food?” Jak said as a question.

“Not quite,” Doc answered, taking a torch off the wall and stepping back into the room. “But come see for yourself.”

Trailing after the man, the companions proceeded along a narrow passageway, the walls coming alarmingly close together. Ryan soon recognized it as a shatter zone, a killing box where invaders could be easily disposed of with a minimum of fuss. Not for the first time, the Deathlands had to accept the hard truth that nuke-ass crazy didn’t also mean stupe. The underground ville was very well built, and if the cannies had still been alive, getting out of here would have been a nightmare fight for the companions, in spite of their superior firepower.

The narrow passage ended in a circular room composed entirely of doors, each adorned with an amazingly detailed painting of a different flower. As Doc went toward a door to the right bearing a rose, Jak sniffed the air and took a step to the left toward a door decorated with a yellow daisy.

“Stop there, lad!” Doc shouted, holding up a restraining hand. “The daisy seems to mean death to the cannies. That door leads to their…well, kitchen, for want of a better word.”

Scowling, Jak relented and followed the old man through the rose door. However, as Mildred passed the daisy, she had to take a quick peek inside. As her sight adjusted to the gloom, Mildred gasped and slammed the door shut. Sweet Jesus, the physician hadn’t seen anything like that in her dissection classes in medical school!

Quickly rejoining the others, Mildred saw that the walls along this corridor were heavily pockmarked with bulletholes, and there were constant signs of explosions. Soon, the torchlight exposed the tattered remains of the
cannies, their teeth filed to sharp points, and every inch of skin covered with tattoos of wild plants. Instantly, Mildred understood it was camouflage for hunting people in the forest. Ghastly.

Opening a door marked with sunflowers, the companions entered a cramped room, the stone-block wall only a yard wide.

“Here is where I escaped,” Doc said, lifting the torch high.

Coming down from the ceiling, a wooden trough cut through the room at a very steep angle. Studying the slide, Ryan saw the inside was well greased to facilitate the passage of a prisoner. Taking a stone from the ground, he dropped it inside and watch the rock tumble away, rapidly building speed and disappearing into the blackness to the right. The echoing noise faded to end with a clatter of metal grinding against metal.

“It’s a fragging garbage disposal!” J.B. muttered, the firelight reflecting off his glasses.

“The term is oubliette,” Doc said, feeling pretty sure that he had just mangled the medieval word. “It was created by the English as a way of disposing of their enemies as cruelly as possible.”