Doom Helix

He was halfway in, halfway out of the cleft when J.B. said, “Well, I’ll be nuked!” and drew a tight bead on him with the M-4000.

“Are you back for another trouncing, you traitorous dog?” Doc demanded, stepping forward and brandishing his ebony cane.

When the wedged-in man looked up and saw who his rescuers were, his jaw dropped. Grunting from the effort, he quickly retreated, squirming back into the fissure, out of sight.

“I told you I recognized that voice,” Doc said to Mildred.

Ryan recognized him, too. The man in the hole was none other than Big Mike, also known as Mike the Drunkard, and the “Tour Guide from Hell,” a turncoat huckster who had sold his services to the she-hes, the would-be colonizers from Shadow Earth. Riding around in a gaudily painted bus, he had conned gullible villefolk with free joy juice, free jolt, free sex and promises of a much easier life in Slake City. It was a nonstop rolling party until they arrived at the site, then the awful truth was revealed: they had been gathered up to slave until death in the nuke mines.

Ryan, his son Dean and the companions had themselves toiled in the sweltering, poisonous shafts at Ground Zero. Although they had eventually fought their way free, they had been unable to stop the she-hes from escaping this reality and Deathlands’ brand of justice. They had, however, waylaid and beaten one of the invaders’ vilest puppets to within an inch of his life.

That puppet was Big Mike.

They had decided to let him live because he was already an amputee. He had only the one hand, which made his surviving in the hellscape a constant, and ultimately losing battle. After all the pain and suffering he’d inflicted on innocent folk, simply chilling him would have been too much of a kindness. Ryan was surprised he’d lasted so long.

“Come on out,” the one-eyed warrior said. “We’re not going to beat you again.”

“Swear to it?”

“Come out now, you tub of shit,” J.B. ordered, “or we’re going to leave you here to rot. Put your hands up and keep them up.”

Big Mike obeyed, moaning as he forced himself out of the cave, holding his arms above his head.

“You seem to have lost something else since we last crossed paths,” Ryan said, gesturing with the muzzle of the SIG.

Big Mike glanced up at his left arm, which now ended in a stump. It was cut through clean, like it had been sliced off with a bandsaw.

And recently.

The massive scab was black and the skin around it an angry red.

“In a place as hard as Deathlands,” Krysty said, “a man who’s missing all you’re missing is in one hell of a pickle.”

“Hell, pickle ain’t the half of it,” Big Mike said. “Lookee here.” He held out his artificial hand. “Only way I can grip down on something is if I use my teeth on the fucking knob.”

“What happened to the other one?” Ryan asked. “From the looks of that stump, it wasn’t mutie coyotes who took it.”

“You must’ve really pissed somebody off,” J.B. said, making no attempt to conceal his amusement.

“My former bosses, the cockroaches from alternate Earth,” Big Mike replied. “The bastards are back at Slake City, working the mines again, only this time they’ve cut out the middleman. They’re rounding up their own slaves. They took me for a slave, too.”

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

Chapter Two

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.