Doom Helix (4 page)

Big Mike waved the blackened stump in their faces. “Getting free cost me this,” he said.

Ryan sized up the double amputee, who sat in the shade of a slab of basalt, drinking greedily from a plastic water bottle death-gripped in his prosthetic hand. The grime caked on the big man’s face made his eyeballs and teeth appear much whiter than they were, as if he was peering out from behind a mask. He wore filthy bib-front overalls, a holed-out khaki T-shirt and battered, unlaced boots. His blinding reek reminded Ryan of a bear pit in midsummer.

In the past, Big Mike had proved himself a backstabbing con man, but the evidence of that fresh stump couldn’t be ignored. The cut at the wrist and the crust of scab looked far too neat for bladework. The only instrument Ryan had seen that could make such a precise cut—and simultaneously seal off the wound—was a laser. A technology lost in the wake of Armageddon, but perfected to a high degree by the invaders from Shadow Earth.

The last time Ryan and the companions had crossed paths with the she-hes, the combination of advanced weapons and intelligent armor had been more than they could handle. Unable to return effective fire against the battlesuits’ EM shields, they had been captured, then marched out to the middle of the hundred-square-mile, Slake City massif—the remains of a once-great, predark
city melted and fused into a glacier of thermoglass by a multiwarhead, airburst nuke strike. At Ground Zero they were forced to mine radioactive ore from the maze of tunnels full of bloodthirsty stickies. They had no food but the rats they caught and cooked themselves. And just enough water to keep them working underground until they dropped dead of starvation or rad sickness.

Despite the long odds against survival, none of them had lost heart, and in the end, thanks to ingenuity and luck, they had prevailed. Ryan remembered with pride how his young son Dean had stood his ground, fighting alongside the others, turning the enemy’s own weapons against them.

Memories turned bittersweet.

Some time after the nuke mine ordeal, in the dead of night, Dean’s mother, Sharona, had stolen the boy away and taken him to who knew where. Ryan smothered the surge of fury that rose up whenever he thought about what she’d done. He couldn’t change the past, and dwelling on it only led to guilt and self-recrimination that served no purpose. His abiding hope was that his son Dean wasn’t lost to him forever, that he had just gone missing until they somehow, someway managed to find each other again. The boy was never far from his thoughts.

After the encounter at Slake City, it was clear to Ryan and his companions that if the black-armored invaders hadn’t come down with a hideous pox, if the disease hadn’t forced them to jump universes, the battle for Deathlands would have been lost. Though they were relatively few in number, nothing in the hellscape could stand against them. The battlesuits’ shields deflected
even point-blank blasterfire. With their all-terrain wags and flying machines, they had the advantage of speed, maneuver and firepower. And the cherry on top, they alone could fully reap the bounty of Armageddon. They ran all their equipment, from the tribarreled laser rifles to the gyroplanes, with reprocessed radioactive waste.

If the she-hes had managed to establish a permanent base at Slake City, within a year they would have toppled the hellscape’s baronies, one by one.

While Ryan had no love for Deathlands’ brutal feudal system, it was paradise compared to what the invaders offered. And the ambitions of the Shadow Earthlings had no limits.

Ryan knew what the Shadow Earthlings had done to their home world because he’d been there—as proof of their success and the hope it offered the starving multitudes, the first expeditionary force had transported him back to their point of origin. On the parallel Earth he had seen what made the colonization of a place like Deathlands so appealing and so necessary. Shadow World was a planet stripped clean of resources.

At the top of the teeming human population of 100 billion were the CEOs of FIVE, the ruling corporate conglomerate, and their whitecoat minions; at the bottom, in the sprawling underground ghetto known as Gloomtown, the vast, expendable segment of the population was reduced to eating pulverized rock disguised as fast food. While the masses slowly wasted away from a lack of calories, the toxic side effects of “Beefie Cheesies” and “Tater Cheesies” drove them homicidally insane.

A bioengineered agrobacteria, touted as the solution to the global food crisis, had run amok, the resulting
Slime Zone threatening to carpet the entire planet in green slunk. In order to slow the growth of the unemployable classes, the one-world-government’s Population Control Service had released a flesh-eating bioweapon into the environment, and like the agrobacteria, the self-replicating carniphages had promptly taken root in the megalopolis. They bloomed at random and picked clean the bones of anyone who didn’t reach cover in time.

What the Shadow Earthlings had done to themselves, to their own world, Ryan knew they were hell-bound to do elsewhere.

Big Mike lowered the nearly empty bottle and belched resonantly. “The cockroaches are attacking the nearby villes and sweeping up all comers,” he said. “Anyone who can hoist a chunk of ore they’re dumping at Slake City’s Ground Zero. The folks who can’t do a lick of work, the too-young and too-old, they just slice into chunks with their tribarrels. They’re leaving the villes empty except for the buzzards. And the buzzards are having a grand old time.”

The battle—so desperate, so hard won—wasn’t over after all.

Ryan read the grim faces of his companions. He saw anger and disbelief, his own churning emotions reflected back at him. Krysty’s beautiful green eyes flashed with something even darker, more primitive—savage hatred. And she had just cause. To ensure the survival of their kind, the she-hes had stolen his seed, not from his loins but from Krysty, violating her like she was a barnyard animal.

J.B. broke the stunned silence. “How many wags and aircraft?” he asked.

“They used three wags where I got scooped up, south of Slake City, over in Burrville off old Highway 24 near Fish Lake. Nuke-powered wags, high speed, with wheels and tires as tall as a man, and invisible-armored like the battlesuits against bullets. I saw one of their flying machines in action—a gunship. It lasered the shit out of a stick-and-mud hut where some of the folks were trying to hold off the ground attack. Lit it up in a green flash. Three seconds later all four walls collapsed and the roof dropped to the ground. Raised a huge cloud of dust. Nobody came out of there alive. After that, the rest of the people stopped fighting back. They just gave up and let themselves be taken prisoner.”

“How many she-hes are there?” Ryan said.

“Don’t know for sure,” Big Mike said. “I saw mebbe nine or ten, but there could be a few more. Hard to say because you can’t tell ’em apart in those cockroach suits. When they come and go, you could be counting some of them more than once.”

Ryan scratched the back of his neck. Just looking at the bastard made his skin crawl, and his trigger finger itch. There was no telling how many innocent folks Big Mike had steered to gruesome slow deaths in the mines. And now he was confiding in the companions like they were old running buddies. Like he held no lingering hard feelings for their kicking his butt until he could barely breathe. Like they were suddenly, miraculously all on the same side. As distasteful as that prospect was, the con man had information they badly needed.

“How long ago were you taken?” Ryan said.

“Twelve days,” Big Mike replied. “I was getting busy in a back room of the Burrville gaudy house. Caught
with my pants down, you might say…” Behind the dirt mask, his eyes gleamed at the recollection.

“Just tell us what happened,” Ryan said, trying to avert a digression into erotic tall tales.

“Blasters started popping off all around the perimeter berm,” Big Mike told them. “Ten-foot-high dirt-and-rock wall meant nothing to those cockroach wags. They drove right up and over it. When I saw that I knew who was attacking us, and there wasn’t any point in wasting ammo on them. It was time to head for the hills. But we were already overrun, with no way out.

“After the gunship leveled the mud hut, I surrendered along with the others. The cockroaches lined us up, about thirty in all, and put a laser handcuff on everyone’s wrist. They didn’t have enough cuffs to do both hands and both feet. They ordered us to collect all the pieces of lasered-up bodies and pile them in a heap. The folks who refused to touch the corpses got their hands whacked off, then and there. Afterward the cockroaches clamped the dropped cuff on their other wrist.”

Ryan frowned. He and the others had worn those manacles. They were designed not to be a hindrance to hard labor. The bracelets of silver-colored plasteel weren’t connected by lengths of chain. The constant threat of losing something vital was enough to keep the slaves hobbled and compliant.

“Picking up the still warm, cut-up pieces of their relatives broke them folks’ spirit,” Big Mike said. “After that, they were like walking dead.”

“All except you,” Krysty said.

“Weren’t none of my kin, now were they?” Big Mike said. “When I tried to talk to the cockroaches, explain
how I used to work for them, one of them recognized me. That’s how I know it was the same she-hes as before. What I’d done for them in the past didn’t buy me any slack, though. She-he said I had one good hand and two good legs, I could move nuke ore until I croaked. That’s all I was good for.

“Cockroaches trucked us to Slake City in the backs of the wags. About 150 miles, a four-hour ride with no food, just a little water. Took us to the same base on the edge of the nukeglass, only this time it looked a lot different. There were big blast craters everywhere—wags, semitrailers and tractors, gyroplanes, the black domes and tubular walkways all blown to shit. Somebody really did a job on their equipment stash while they were gone. Used high explosive and lots of it.”

“Given your predicament,” Doc said, “how did you manage to escape?”

Ryan had been on the verge of asking a variant of the same question: “Whose back did you stab to get away?”

“The other prisoners didn’t know what was coming, but I sure did,” Big Mike replied. “I told them about the mines. Made ’em see that if we were going to make a move to escape we had to do it before they started marching us across the glass.”

“They weren’t afraid of losing their hands to the cuffs?” Mildred said.

“They were afraid, all right, but they were a lot more afraid of dying. If I was willing to take the chance, seeing as I only had the one hand left, they knew I wasn’t kidding about what went on at Ground Zero.”

A steady, low buzzing sound behind them made Ryan
half turn. A swarm of fat black flies had discovered the coyote corpses. The scent of spilled blood and guts was riding on the breeze.

“Everyone made a break for it at once,” Big Mike said, “heading off in different directions. In the confusion me and a few others got past the base perimeter. Of course as soon as the she-hes saw what was happening they triggered the laser cuffs. All the prisoners lost a hand, including me. It hurt like a son of a bitch, but since there wasn’t any bleeding it didn’t slow us down. We kept running fast as we could.

“I don’t know what the maximum range of those tribarrels is, but I’ll tell you this—they were cooking hearts and lungs at better than half a mile. And when those green beams hit rocks, they explode ’em like frag grens. One old boy running ahead of me was hit in the side of the head by some rock shrap, and when he slowed down he got a hole burned through his back and out the other side. Almost cut him in two. The she-hes didn’t come after the rest of us, though. Mebbe they figured five one-handed slaves weren’t worth chasing down with wags and aircraft. We drove ourselves hard, following the roadbed of old 84 northwest, trying to get as far away as we could.”

“How long ago was that?” Dix asked.

“We were six days getting here on foot,” Big Mike said. “Lived off rattlesnakes and lizards mostly. Yesterday we made it to the south side of the Snake River. That’s when things turned triple ugly again. There’s a highway bridge still standing across the river, two low spans, side by side. We should have cut cross-country, gone downstream and tried to raft or swim across, but
we didn’t know what the heck we were getting into. We were just following old 84. Halfway across the span these coldhearts with white-painted faces like ghosts come after us, yelling and waving blasters. Turns out, it’s a rad-blasted toll bridge. Nobody crosses without paying something to the baron. Burning Man is what he calls himself.”

“Never heard of him,” Ryan said.

“Me, neither,” Big Mike said, “but I hadn’t been this far north in years. In addition to the war paint, the crazy fucker wears a flamethrower strapped to this back. He isn’t shy about using it, either.”

“A strange weapon to be hauling around,” Ryan said. “Got to be worthless outside fifty yards.”

“Not to mention being a waste of good wag fuel,” J.B. added.

“Take it from me,” Big Mike said, “inside fifty yards that hellfire contraption is nothing you want to mess with. Past that distance his sec men take care of business with bolt-action longblasters.

“Burning Man wanted to collect his toll from us, but we had nothing to give him except cold, cooked snake. When he saw our stumps, everything changed. Right away, he wanted to know how we lost our hands. He was real what you might call ‘insistent,’ waving that flamethrower nozzle in our faces. A couple of the boys panicked. Couldn’t blame them, really. The smell of gas was enough to knock you down. Seeing the baron and that weapon of his, even a triple-stupe droolie could figure out what made all the great big, blackened grease spots on the bridge deck. Our two boys broke ranks and dashed for the other shore. Then we were all running to
save our hides. That’s when Burning Man cut loose with his pride and joy. He set three of us on fire. One jumped in the river to put out the flames. The others were still alive, thrashing and burning on the deck, when me and that poor bastard over there, what’s left of him, made it through the black smoke to the far side.

“Baron’s sec men chased us out here into this waste. That’s who I thought you were. They didn’t waste ammo potshotting, trying to pick us off. Thought they could run us down, maybe. They chased us for the better part of half a day, but we lost ’em in the lava field. Either that or they just got tired of playing the game. Figured being this deep in the badlands would finish us off. It almost did.”