Deathlands 124: Child of Slaughter (30 page)

“Was it an albino who did this?” Ryan asked sternly.

The shifter nodded. “The woman said he was an enemy of the Children of the Shift and had to be stopped.”

“And you believed her?” Ryan asked.

The shifter tried to shrug, then winced and gave up on it. “She is well-known here. We heard she’d returned to the fold after betraying our holy mission.”

“I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.” Ryan spun, found the exit and headed straight for it, calling to the team in his wake, “Let’s go!”

The floor shook as the others rushed after him. They
all knew they had their work cut out for them, catching up to Jak and Union before everything went south. Rescuing Doc was the top priority, but they didn’t want to lose anyone else along the way.

Ryan waited in the hall outside the exit long enough for Hammersmith to join him. “Which way?”

Hammersmith swung left without hesitation. “This way.” The floor rocked, bouncing him off a wall, but he didn’t miss more than a step. And he didn’t waste time whining about it. “Look alive, bitches!” he shouted to the people behind him. “We’re almost there!”

* * *

M
OMENTS AFTER
D
OC
started his long slide through the dark chute out of the mat-trans chamber, he heard the high-pitched voice behind him.

“Wait for me, Hammersmith!” It was Exo, calling from a distance. “I need to teach you a very important lesson, my friend!”

Suddenly, Doc’s ride through the chute took a darker turn. Exo’s voice was staying with him, keeping pace—that meant he was riding along after Doc, not calling from the mouth of the tunnel.

And that meant Exo would catch up to Doc at the end of the chute. The man who’d just brutally killed his own brother, Ankh, in cold blood would pop out of the chute right behind Doc.

The old man had escaped the mat-trans chamber but hadn’t gotten away from Exo at all. And this time, there would be no one else to distract the insane mutie leader from taking out his frustrations on Doc.

* * *

J
AK DIDN’T HAVE
any trouble finding the mat-trans chamber, thanks to the trail of mutie bodies strewed through the corridors. He was moments behind Union, thanks to her dirty trick of pitting a mob of shifters against him,
but the bodies of the muties who’d gotten in her way were like bread crumbs.

By the time he ran through the doorway into what appeared to be a large mat-trans chamber, Union was already hard at work wrecking the place.

She didn’t see him at first as she swung a crowbar into a control panel, shattering glass displays and plastic control surfaces. That gave Jak a chance to quickly size up the room, taking in the crater and the two mutie bodies sprawled on the floor. One had been gutshot, the other bludgeoned. Had Union killed them? Had she grabbed a blaster from a shifter in the corridor, then shot her way into the room?

The big question on his mind, though, was why was she demolishing the equipment?

She was in midswing when she finally saw him. “Grab something to smash with!” she shouted over the firecracker snapping of blown circuits and the rumbling of earthquake tremors. “Give me a hand!” Her Russian accent was gone as she called out to him.

Jak stepped closer, weaving through debris and bobbing as a spike from the latest quake shook his footing. “Why smashing?” he shouted back at her. “What about triggering collective intelligence, bringing back Soviet Union?”

“That’s right.” She grinned at him. “I did say I was going to do that, didn’t I?” Then she spun and swung the crowbar into the control panel again, kicking off the loudest crackling and the biggest sparks yet.

Jak stepped closer, keeping a knife palmed in one hand and the other hand near the butt of his holstered .357 blaster. “What ’bout multiple personality problem? Also said wanted machines fix that.”

“Is that what I said?” She swung the crowbar again, smashing more controls. “And you believed me?”

Another quake struck, and Jak teetered. “Not understand. If not doing those things, what want? Why smash?”

“What do I want?” She was wild-eyed when she looked his way again. For the first time since he’d met her, the braid that hung from her left temple had turned bright purple. “I want to destroy the whole damned Shift and everyone living in it!”

Chapter Fifty

Just as Ryan and his team rounded the corner, a squad of shifters burst into the hallway, charging straight at them.

Then, when they spotted Ryan’s group, the onrushing muties thundered to a halt. They stood in the middle of the corridor, sizing up Ryan and his people with narrow-eyed stares of suspicion, just as Ryan’s team did the same thing to them.

Sensing an opportunity, Ryan addressed the man he thought was the leader of the muties. “We don’t want a fight,” he said evenly. “We’re not your enemies.”

The corridor shook with another quake as the mutie leader thought it over. His men’s eyes flicked alternately between him and Ryan, watching for a sign from either one.

“Are you the ones causing these quakes?” the mutie leader asked finally. “Destroying the balance of the Shift?”

“Absolutely not.” Ryan shook his head. “We’re only here to find a friend of ours.”

“Did
she
cause the quakes?” asked another mutie, perhaps the leader’s second in command.

“It’s a
he
,” Ryan replied. “And I don’t see any possible way he could have done that.”

“Liar!” shouted the second in command. “Norms
always
bring destruction!”

“Enough!” The shifter leader snapped an arm stiffly upward. “We don’t want a fight, either. We just want to
get out of here.” He stepped to one side and gestured for the other shifters to do the same. “You go your way, and we’ll go ours.”

The rest of the muties followed the leader’s example and made room. Ryan nodded and started forward, with his team close behind.

But midway down the corridor, the second in command leaped from the ranks and charged at Krysty.

Before the attacker had taken his third step toward her, a blastershot boomed in the corridor, and a round punched through his skull. The impact jerked him sideways, then he dropped to the floor in a bloody heap.

All eyes flashed to the shooter, Ryan, as he calmly lowered his handblaster. “Thought we had an agreement,” he said slowly.

“We do,” the leader stated firmly. “Let’s go,” he told his people, and they headed down the corridor.

Some moved more slowly than others, white-knuckling weapons and giving Ryan’s group the stink eye, but no one crossed the line laid down by the second in command’s corpse.

“Assholes,” Hammersmith muttered as the two groups slipped past each other.

“Less talking, more walking,” Ryan urged, though his idea of walking, as he hurried down the corridor, was more like a full-tilt run.

* * *

D
OC KNEW HE
was near the end of the chute, but he wasn’t sure what to do when he got there.

Exo was somewhere behind him, coming up fast. His voice seemed a little bit closer every time Doc heard it.

That meant Doc wouldn’t have time to do much of anything when he left the chute. No sooner would his feet hit the ground than Exo’s would do the same…at which
point, all bets would be off. The maniac shifter had already beaten him repeatedly in casual meetings with no provocation; Doc could only imagine what he would do to him now, when Doc had tried to escape him.

Exo’s nonthreatening comments didn’t offer any clues. “Looking forward to having a chat when we get out of this,” he called through the chute. “We’ve really got our work cut out for us, Doctor H.” Somehow, the lack of blatant threats was more frightening than if he’d just come out and screamed a litany of terrible things he was going to do to Doc.

Suddenly, the old man swooped around a bend and saw a circle of sunlight in the distance. Heart pounding, he raced inexorably toward that circle, even as he knew from the map in his head that it represented the final exit.

The chute angled upward, and Doc’s momentum carried him toward the light. He would be outside in seconds.

Jaws clenched, muscles tensed, he tried to get ready, tried to prepare himself for the prospect of fighting for his life against the lunatic mutie.

* * *

J
AK SCOWLED AS
Union hauled off and bashed another control panel with the crowbar. “Why destroy Shift and everyone? Not make sense.”

“Not if your sisters weren’t murdered by the locals, it doesn’t.” Again, Union wrenched back the crowbar and smashed it into the console. A storm of sparks erupted in her face, forcing her back a step.

“Sisters?” Jak thought about taking her down before she did more damage. He knew he could, with the weapons in his hands, but then he wouldn’t hear her story. He wouldn’t get the answers he wanted more than anything, to explain why a woman who’d seemed to care for him could have been lying to him from the start.

“Four of them,” Union added. “All whitecoats, specializing in treating animals with the energies of the Shift. They developed hybrid creatures and turned them loose in a wilderness area, hoping to evolve life-forms that could clean up the ruined ecosystem of the Deathlands. That one area became their outdoor laboratory.”

“Devil’s Slaughterhouse.” Jak nodded as the pieces fell together in his mind. “Sisters made beasts that attacked us there.”

“And they were murdered for it. The locals executed them when some of the Slaughterhouse creatures attacked a ville and killed some people.” Her face contorted with rage, she let the crowbar fly again, shattering a computer monitor. “My sisters were trying to help, and they were murdered for it.”

“Wait.” Jak leaned against a welding unit as the latest quake nearly rocked him off his feet. “Four sisters, you said?”

“Yes!” Again, she hammered the console with the crowbar. “Four!”

Jak knew that what he was about to say was true before he said it. “One was named…Taryn?”

Union swung the crowbar without answering.

“And the others,” Jak said. “Names Rhonda…Dulcet…Carrie?”

“Yes!”

Finally, Jak felt as if he was getting the picture. The four women in one body—they were all dead sisters, or at least echoes of their personalities. But one question still remained about those women and that body.

“If four sisters in there, who talking now? Not sound like Sasha.”

“Because there
is
no Sasha,” Union snapped. “Sasha was just a lie to hide our real reason for being here.”

“Then, who talking now?”

“The lucky sister! The one who survived!” As she said it, the quake rumbled and crashed like thunder. “The one who will help the others get revenge for their deaths!”

Chapter Fifty-One

Doc popped out of the end of the chute, propelled by the momentum of his ride, and landed on his butt on the sandy ground. Driven by the thought of Exo popping out next, he quickly got to his feet, taking in his surroundings as he did so.

He was somewhere outside the redoubt, looking up at one of the rounded hills that stood on each side of it. The sun was down, and gray twilight was settling over the rumbling land.

Nowhere did he see an abandoned weapon or something that could be used as one. The only thing he had to fight with was the razor blade in his pocket.

As for hiding places, there was nothing within a hundred yards. His best bet was to run for the hills bracketing the redoubt, though he knew, even as he started running in that direction, that he could never get there in time. He could never outrun a bullet from his own LeMat .44 revolver, which Exo would certainly be carrying when he emerged from the chute.

But running was still the only strategy that made any kind of sense to Doc, so he threw himself into it with every bit of energy he had. Legs churning furiously, he charged across the sand toward the nearest hill, listening all the while for sounds of Exo behind him.

He finally heard them when he’d gotten a third of the way to his destination: the sounds of running footsteps
and a high-pitched voice. “Dr. H.! Wait for me! I need to show you something!”

For an instant, Doc wondered if maybe he’d been wrong about Exo’s intent. Was it possible Exo didn’t want to kill him? Would Doc have been better off staying back at the exit of the chute to meet him instead of running away?

His answer came in the form of a blaster and a .44 slug whizzing past his right ear.

“Come on!” Exo hollered. “I just want to talk, my friend!”

Just as he said it, Doc heard the crack of a second shot and another whizzing slug—this time sailing past his left ear. And a thought flitted through his mind—what if the third shot was the charm?

* * *

J
AK WAITED UNTIL
the worst of the quake had tapered off, then eased around the welding unit, taking care not to step on the body of the shifter on the floor behind it. “How kill everyone?” he shouted. “Equipment haywire, but will wrecking destroy Shift and kill everyone?”

Union laughed and twirled the crowbar. “Fuck no!” Turning, she jammed the end of the crowbar in the crack between two nondescript panels in the wall. “Wrecking the equipment is just for kicks! It has nothing to do with destroying the Shift!” With that, she pried the panels apart, pulling one loose from the wall.

One mighty heave, and the loose panel came free and went flying to the floor. In the rectangular space exposed by its absence, Jak glimpsed something glinting in the flashing light of the malfunctioning mat-trans controls around it.

“Now,
this
…” Union reached in and wrapped her hand around whatever was stored there. “This is that big danger I told you about earlier. The big surprise. The one that everything else was just a warm-up for.”

Jak watched, spellbound, as she pulled out the object and held it up for him to see. From where he was standing, it looked like a silver cone, six inches long, studded with circuitry and multicolored crystals.

He knew he should attack at that instant, put her down hard and snatch whatever it was from her grasp—but he waited. He felt compelled to know more, to hear her tell it, as if that might somehow explain what she’d put him through. As if that might somehow make it all make sense.