Damnation Road Show

Every man, woman and child dropped whatever they were doing and rushed to the ville’s entrance, forming a dense double line, a gauntlet of well-armed Bullard ville welcome.

The fifteen-wag caravan slowed to a crawl as it approached the defensive berm. Leeloo saw that some of the wags were towing big tarp-covered cages on flatbed trailers.

Then the music started.

Taped music, scratchy with age and thousands of playings. Loud enough to wake the nukecaust’s dead, a powerful male baritone boomed above the insistent crash of cymbals and drums. The words he sang rolled like thunder. Leeloo had taught herself to count to a hundred, so she knew what “76” signified. She wasn’t sure whether a “trombone” was animal, vegetable or mineral, but the raucous, cheerful beat of the predark music thrilled her to the core.

As the dust clouds drifted away to the south, with the convoy slowly advancing, men began to jump out of the wags. They threw back the tarps covering the trailered cages, revealing the collection of creatures within.

Leeloo sucked in an astonished breath. It was more wonderful than her wildest imaginings! Behind the bars of the first cage lurked a two-headed scalie. One head was normal sized; the other looked like a baby’s. The next trailer cage held a gaggle of stickies, naked but for plastic collars in bright colors, like open flower petals.

They showed their needle teeth and dilated their flat nostril holes as they took in the scent of the ville. Another cage contained a huge mutie mountain lion with scythe-shaped horns jutting on either side of its neck. It raised its head and yowled balefully along with the marching song. On the trailer behind the mountain lion was the biggest desert rattler Leeloo had ever seen. The thing was mebbe ten feet long, and its body was as big around as her waist. Its flat, triangular-shaped head was even wider, and the mouth could have easily swallowed two of her whole.

There were lizard birds with leathery wings and fangs so sharp they scored the steel bars of their cages.

Leeloo turned her attention to the carny folk walking alongside the trailers. The men wore slitted masks over their eyes. Their leather jerkins and shorts exposed bulging arm and leg muscles. They all carried bullwhips, which they smacked against the bars of the cages, making the mutie creatures howl in complaint. The carny women were long legged, their faces and heads concealed by brightly sequined hoods. But for thigh-high, high-heeled boots and a tracery of string over their privates, they were naked. The women also used whips to stir up the rolling menagerie.

Once inside the berm, the caravan of wags circled twice, to Leeloo’s way of thinking, most majestically. Then it stopped.

A tall, muscular man in a worn red satin tailcoat, and with tight white pants tucked into hard-used black riding boots, climbed out of the largest wag. On one hip he wore a holstered, blue-steel, .45 Government Colt blaster; on the other he carried a coiled black bullwhip. His short, wiry hair was a rusty red, as was his six-inch-long goatee. A jagged ring of scar marked the left side of his face, perhaps made by a broken neck of a bottle, or Leeloo thought, by an attack from one of his ferocious muties.

As the tailcoated man walked toward the ville’s leaders, a tiny stickie, not more than four years old, trotted along at his left heel. It was naked and barefoot, and there were bruises all over its pale body. Around its neck was a choke chain dog collar that wasn’t tethered to a leash.

“Welcome to Bullard ville,” Melchior said, extending a damp, callused hand to the carny master. “A pleasure to have Gert Wolfram and his famous troupe as our guests.”

“I speak for my entire company,” the tailcoated man stated, “when I say we are most honored to have the opportunity to entertain you.”

The young stickie, eyes as dead as black stones, sniffed through the two holes in its face, taking the measure of the overweight Melchior. And having done that, the baby mutie made soft kissing noises in his direction, and began to drool copiously. Melchior’s right hand reached across his pendulous chest and came to rest on the rubber butt of his shoulder-holstered Ruger Single Six.

“Oh, don’t worry about Jackson,” the carny master said, stroking the creature’s hairless skull. “Unless you corner the little tyke, he’s not the least bit dangerous.”

At the hand-to-head contact, the immature stickie closed its eyes with pleasure; its jaw gaped, exposing tightly packed rows of needle teeth.

“When is the show going to start?” Skim O’Neil asked.

This question was met with wild cheers and whistles from the assembly.

“It takes us a while to stake out and set up the main tent,” the carny master said.

“I’m afraid it’s already too late in the day to get started on it. With your permission, we’ll set up camp inside the berm tonight, then start raising the tent tomorrow morning. That will give my people a chance to rest up, too. They need a break before they perform. We’ve been on the road three days getting here.”

Leeloo was crushed to hear this. She wasn’t alone. A chorus of groans rippled through the crowd.

“Couldn’t you give us a little taste of what’s to come?” Melchior asked. “We’ve all been waiting for this day for weeks and weeks.”

The carny man scratched his red chin beard, briefly considering what taste he might offer. “All right,” he said, “I’ll give you fine folks a preview of what’s in store for tomorrow. But I warn you now, once you see it, you won’t sleep a wink tonight.”

He looked down at the baby stickie and said, “Sing!”

As the order echoed off the berm walls, the people of Bullard ville blinked at one another in amazement. It was common knowledge that the mouth parts of stickies were so primitive, so unevolved, that most could barely make mewling noises, let alone make music.

Yet, at its master’s command, the little stickie opened its round, practically lipless mouth, threw back its bald head and sang, in perfect pitch, in a high, clear soprano, a predark song even older than the one caught on tape. “Ave Maria” burst forth from between rows of mutated needle teeth.

Most of the folks in the crowd closed their eyes and simply listened to the exquisitely pure tones, like bell chimes. Each word of the lyric was perfectly formed and enunciated.

There were no cries of sacrilege because no one understood the words, which were in Italian. Even if the Deathlands dirt farmers could have translated the lyric into English, its meaning and references would have been a mystery to them. Despite the yawning gap in the audience’s understanding, the music itself was so moving that by the time Jackson finished the a cappella performance, there were tears of wonder in the eyes of men and women alike.

While Bullard ville rendered wild applause, the carny master patted the little stickie on the head, and it nuzzled its cheek against the side of his riding boot, leaving behind a shiny smear of saliva.

After the tumult had died down, a beaming Melchior pointed out a likely spot for the company to spend the night. The carny master thanked him, then returned with Jackson to the biggest wag, which pulled out of file to lead the convoy to the campsite. The marching music started up again as the wags and trailers rolled forward. Dust boiled up from their tires, swirling in thick, yellow clouds through the open gate of the berm.

Out of the corner of her eye, Leeloo caught more movement on the plain. Shadowy figures advanced through the man-made dust storm, making for the ville’s entrance. They were hard to see with the all dust and the sunlight slanting hard behind them.

She counted seven.

Mebbe stragglers from the carny? she thought.

When they stepped out of the cloud, Leeloo knew at once they weren’t carny folk. They were hunters. The man in the lead carried a scoped longblaster on a shoulder sling. He was tall, with dark hair falling to his broad shoulders. A black patch concealed his left eye socket. As he came closer, she noticed the color of the other eye.

It made her think of a cloudless morning sky.

Infinite blue.

Infinite cold.

Chapter Two

Ryan Cawdor shifted the sling, transferring the weight of his scoped Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle from his right shoulder to his left. Six dusty companions followed single file behind him, heading for the crude gate cut into the twelve-foot-high berm wall. For the last third of a mile, they had been breathing and eating the drifting grit thrown up by the wag caravan. For the last third of a mile, they had been listening to the predark marching music, its sprightly cheerfulness like a dull dagger jammed in their guts, then twisted. For the last third of a mile, it had taken every bit of Ryan’s self-control not to break into a dead run. Just as it not took all of his inner reserve not to sprint up the face of the perimeter barrier, drop belly down on the summit with the 7.62 mm longblaster and start bowling over the carny folk.

Suicide wasn’t part of the plan.

The plan was to make damn sure what they all suspected was true, and then to act in stealth, lowering the odds from eight to one against before showing their hand. The mechanics of the operation had been hatched over four days of one of the hardest forced marches Ryan and the others had ever endured. They had approached Bullard ville from the west, cross-country, over seemingly endless rolling hills and scrub forest, breaking their own trail, sleeping only a few hours each night. They had pushed themselves mercilessly because they didn’t want to risk arriving too late and uncovering another horror.

For the thousandth time, the image of the hand came into Ryan’s mind. A grisly, ruined, black hand jutting from the earth in the middle of long patch of churned-up ground. The flesh had been torn away by teeth or beak, or both. Three fingers were missing down to the knuckles. Right off, he knew it was a woman or a child’s hand because it was so small and slender. Somehow, whoever it was had survived long enough to claw up through the smothering clods of earth. It had to have taken a superhuman effort.

They had discovered why after they had carefully scraped back the top layer of soil.

Cradled in the young woman’s other arm was a dead infant.

Her strength had come from desperation.

The companions peeled back more dirt, exposing other bodies. Many, many bodies piled on top of one another. Both sexes, old, young, strong, weak. As soon as Ryan saw the tangle of limbs and torsos, he sent his twelve-year-old son, Dean, away from the pit to recce the rest of the ville. The boy left gratefully, but he would have remained to prove to his father and the companions that he was made of the same rock-hard stuff that they were. Ryan had no doubt about the boy’s stuff; as far as he was concerned, Dean had nothing to prove.

There were close-range blaster wounds on a few of the corpses, but most were unmarked by obvious acts of violence. They never did find the bottom of the mass grave. The stench of death rained like hammer blows against the sides of their heads, and they staggered from the trench, bent over, retching.

“Bastards chilled the whole ville,” Krysty Wroth gasped as Ryan put a strong, gentle hand on her shoulder. The titian-haired, long-legged young woman was his lover and soul mate. They had seen many hard things during their wanderings over the hellscape, but rarely had they seen such wanton wholesale slaughter as this.

“Not all, mebbe,” said Jak Lauren, pointing at the cluster of shabby dwellings. It was a false hope. And from the expression in the albino’s ruby red eyes, he knew it. But Jak, like everyone else, wanted to be away from the pit and its rotting horrors. A thorough search showed the nameless little ville had been looted of everything of value, just like the dead folk buried in the ditch. The huts and lean-tos had been stripped, the underground storage pits emptied. All that remained was the trash in the ville’s midden too heavy to be blown away by the howling wind.