Damnation Road Show

The stickie began to follow along with its master. Singing, sort of. Unable to precisely vocalize the new words, which dealt with virginal angst, Jackson soprano-droned along with the video’s megastar. Dancing, sort of. The stickie waved its spindly arms, snapped and ground its narrow hips, a hair behind the beat.

“Good stickie,” he said, smacking the creature on the forehead with another well-aimed Choco Dud.

It was part of the Magnificent Crecca’s job, and the real, chilling-robbing operation’s cover, to keep audiences in the larger villes coming back every time the company circuited through Deathlands. This required the invention of new and ever more spellbinding acts. The carny master’s latest idea for a big-top finale was an all-stickie rock-dance number, with music and routines lifted from the video, and Jackson singing and dancing in drag—long blond wig, bare belly, tight miniskirt. As a Tiffany-imitator, the stickie had a long, long way to go.

“That’s okay, Jackson,” Crecca said patiently, after the little creature’s spin move went awry, and it crashed into the wall. “Let’s take it from the top….”

Chapter Four

The Clobbering Chair smiled and waved at Baron Kerr, beckoning him to come sit. To take the load off.

The plain piece of metal office furniture stood in the middle of the ville’s tiny, pounded-dirt, central square. It had been dragged out of the low blockhouse across the way. Leather straps hung from the armrests and looped around its front legs. Leaning against its back was a club made of three and a half feet of heavy iron pipe, one end wrapped with strips of rag to form a handle.

For a shimmering instant, the baron could see a smiling victim seated there. A smiling executioner, standing behind, club in hand. A smiling audience surrounding all, patiently waiting its turn.

Baron Kerr had long since given up trying to keep the faces of any of them separated. For him the individual members of the army of the dead blurred into one another, and into the few still living, who were just as eager as those who had gone before to feel the weight of the falling club.

Kerr never had visions of the ghosts of those carted up to the pool, quarter sawn and chucked in. But often, living people appeared to him—indeed, everything that he saw, heard, touched, tasted and felt—as puffs of colored smoke rising up in front of a wall of infinite blackness. At other times, the baron experienced just the opposite perception, that everything that existed was unified, a universe-spanning, living singularity that invaded and permeated the void like the tendrils of a rad cancer. When in this latter mode, as he was now, the clear divisions between objects, the boundaries between animate and inanimate, between human and tree and stone no longer existed.

He dimly remembered that there had been a time—or he imagined that he dimly remembered—when his perception of things had been different, when he was someone else, somewhere else. Though the details were beyond him, he could recall that creatures like those of the pool and surrounding woods hadn’t always spoken to him in his own language, and that the earth and water and sky hadn’t always heaved and shuddered with stirrings only he could see and understand.

The world, itself, hadn’t always been entirely alive.

The pale-yellow snow of spore fall, as fine as table salt, lay in scattered drifts as Kerr trudged across the square, toward the dirt-floor shacks and lean-tos built against the outer wall of the blockhouse. A half-dozen people stood around a fifty-five-gallon fire drum, watching their dinner cook on a red hot steel grate. One of them turned over the sizzling, pale, roast-shaped blob with a sharp-pointed stick. The baron’s grimy, raggedy, bright-eyed subjects all grinned and nodded a subservient greeting to him as he passed.

Kerr didn’t acknowledge their presence. He walked down the short, narrow flight of concrete stairs to the below-ground-level blockhouse entrance. The door, a massive, welded-steel bulkhead, had been twisted and wrenched away from the frame by crowbar and chisel. Scraped back on its sprung hinges, it no longer closed; it had never closed for as long as Kerr had been resident royalty in the blockhouse palace.

Though there were no windows, it wasn’t dark inside. Greenish light coruscated from the beads of condensation sweat on the concrete-block walls. It glowed from the accumulated puddles along the floor seam of the central hallway. Most of the acoustic tile ceiling lay scattered about on the floor. The low ceiling’s fluorescent light fixtures dangled lopsidedly from rusting chains and rotten wires.

Four of the seven small rooms off the main corridor were packed with squat, yellow-enameled, inoperative machines of unknown function. These machines were lagbolted into the floor. Thick nests of pipes of varying diameters fed into and out of them, and vanished into holes cut into the block. Dials and gauges with cracked faces and missing indicators dotted the walls of these rooms.

Kerr’s quarters were in the largest of the blockhouse’s three offices. He made his baronial bunk on the gray plastic laminated top of the built-in desk that ran the full length of the back wall. His pallet was a duct-tape-patched, flaccid, plaid-flannel-lined Coleman sleeping bag that hadn’t been cleaned since skydark. The work space’s computers, printers and monitors had been pushed off onto the floor and left there in a shattered heap.

Though the building looked like a pump house complex connected to the shallow lake on the mountain ledge above, it had been much more than that. The baron couldn’t read a lick, but even he realized the framed diplomas and certificates screwed into the walls of the offices meant whitecoats had worked there. Heavy-duty whitecoats. And the machines and electronic gear and miles of perforated computer spreadsheet covered with rows of numerical data meant government research jack. The bales of used printout paper were just about gone. For many years, the ville residents had used sheets of it to start their cook fires. Because of this, the site’s original purpose would probably always remain a mystery.

The baron hung his straw cowboy hat on a wall hook next to the neatly arranged predark fishing gear he had found in a metal cupboard. He figured it had belonged to one of the whitecoats. Rods. Reels. Aluminum boxes of tiny flies. Wiped down. Oiled. Polished. Cased. They were the only items in the place so meticulously tended.

His evening meal had already been set out on a crude wooden platter on the end of the desk. The mound of sliced, roasted fungus was crispy and brown on the outside and still white, creamy, almost molten in the center. From it arose a delicious and intoxicating smell of cardamom and cinnamon spice.

Kerr wasn’t hungry, but he ate. He ate every bite. And as he ate, he looked down at himself from somewhere near the ceiling, watching as his body satisfied the hunger that wasn’t his own. It was eating of the body by the body—its flesh, his flesh, inseparable.

After he was done, he felt the familiar weight of exhaustion descend, infiltrating his limbs, his torso and finally his brain. On the desktop, his sleeping bag quivered in anticipation of holding him. The surrounding walls of concrete block maintained their slow, steady breathing. Kerr let himself fall back onto the pallet, and there began to weep. Tears spilled out from under his wraparound sunglasses and trickled into the edges of his beard. Overhead, the partially collapsed ceiling flinched and grimaced in sympathy.

If the baron, too, yearned to sit in the Clobbering Chair, he had learned long ago that the burning pool would never let him. Of all those it had drawn unto itself, he was different.

Chosen.

Pampered.

Held apart.

For reasons that were unfathomable, James Kerr had been made baron of an ever changing, joyous, obedient flock that was oblivious to its cruel poverty, its physical suffering and the absolute certainty of its doom.

There was nothing his subjects wouldn’t do for him.

Except chill him.

And for as long as he could remember, that was all he had ever wanted.

Chapter Five

Ryan and the companions laid down their packs and bedrolls in the slanting shade of one of plant bed awnings, a good distance from the carny’s campsite. Doc knelt on the ground, tethered by his waist to one of the awning’s support posts. The old man’s eyes were vacant, and his fingers raked furrows in the yellow dirt. As Ryan watched him, he felt a growing sadness in his heart. If the old man didn’t snap out of his stupor, there would come a time for a mercy chilling. And he would have to be the one to do it. It was his responsibility as the undeclared leader of this group of friends.

A sound from the circled wags behind them made Ryan look over his shoulder. Blocked from view by the angle of its cage and trailer, the lion began to yowl mournfully—strange, high-pitched, flutelike noises.

Ryan glanced at Jak, and his stomach tightened into a hard knot. The albino was staring in the direction of the mutie cat. He stood flat-footed and rigid. The sinewy muscles in his dead-white, bare upper arms twitched from the strain; his hands were clenched into fists. The shock of each piercing cry rippled through his whipcord body like a wave. Ryan sensed that if the tension wasn’t released, and quickly, his young friend was going to shake apart.

“I go…” Jak announced to no one in particular.

With that, he loped away from the companions, crossing the pounded dirt in long, easy strides, making for the ville’s defensive perimeter. When he reached it, the slope didn’t slow him. The sun flashed once on his mane of white hair as he disappeared over the top of the berm.

“What’s with him?” Mildred said in dismay. “Where’s he off to now?”

Ryan shrugged as he smoothed out his bedroll and carefully set down the Steyr SSG-70. “Got some private business to attend to, I guess.”

“Are we going to have trouble with Jak?” Mildred asked him point-blank, hands braced on her sturdy hips. “Is he going to lose it on us? Has he already lost it? That’s the last thing we need.”

“Mildred, keep in mind that Jak has saved your life more than once,” Krysty cautioned her.

“And vice versa,” the black woman replied. “Jak and that mutie mountain lion have a connection that’s downright spooky. It’s been so long since we parted ways with that horn-necked monster, I’d almost forgotten just how spooky. It reminds me of the psychological case studies I’ve read about the psychic bonds between human twins. Only in this case it involves creatures of very different species. It isn’t natural, Krysty. It doesn’t make sense, biologically or physiologically.”

“You’re talking like a whitecoat.”

“I can’t help that,” Mildred said. “I was trained to think like a scientist. And the scientist in me says, we have no way of predicting with any sort of confidence what Jak is going to do next. Think about it. We no more than got inside the berm and he had us facing off against a dozen blasters…all over that mutie cat.”

“She’s right about the trouble,” J.B. told Ryan as he took off his glasses and polished the lenses with the hem of his shirt. “The big question is, can Jak keep to the plan we made? Or is he going to blow it for all of us by trying to get that critter out of its cage?”

“As it stands,” Mildred added, “this whole deal is balanced on a knife edge.”

J.B. nodded in agreement. He slipped his glasses back on. “Every one of those carny chillers over there has a centerfire blaster,” he said. “The odds were bastard bad even before we lost Doc. If the rest of us aren’t at one hundred percent, and on the same page, we don’t have a chance in hell here. We’re all gonna end up in a shallow hole with dirt in our faces. Mebbe the smart thing would be to slip over there once it gets dark and put a slug in the back of that big cat’s head.”

“Jak won’t let us down,” Ryan said with conviction. “He never has and he never will. He knows what we have to do, and why.” The hard edge to his voice said for the time being the discussion was over.

Inside, Ryan was as concerned as Mildred and J.B., and for the same reasons, but he couldn’t show it. His confidence had to shore up theirs; it was a simple matter of survival. He had to be the calm in the eye of the storm.

He sat cross-legged on his bedroll and with a scrap of lightly oiled rag began to brush the dust from the scope and action of his treasured predark longblaster. In silence, the others started going through the contents of their packs, sorting and gradually assembling a small pile of trade items so they could all eat and drink at the ville’s hostelries.

Ryan’s hands moved over the rifle automatically, his fingers programmed by countless repetitions of the same vital task. Trader had taught him that a fully functioning weapon was the difference between being dead and cold by the side of the road, and walking on. As he worked, Ryan thought about their long journey, about how they had followed the wheel tracks from the looted hamlet to Perdition ville. The trail ended on the outskirts of Perdition where they found a wide circle of deep holes pounded into the ground, holes made by carny tent’s massive stakes. Exactly the same circle they had found in the looted ville.