Axler, James - Deathlands 60 - Destiny's Truth Page 26

  "And just when will the time be right?" Mildred asked.

  "When the likes of you have fulfilled your little task, and spread my disease across the land, making it clean of scum and fit for the new order to come forth and achieve dominance."

  "Over an empty world ravaged by a disease that will chill everyone, including your descendants?" Doc cannily posited.

  Reveling in his supposed ascendancy, Taschen took the bait. "You surely do not think that I would leave my own people unprotected? Of course they are inoculated, so they can walk freely over the land above. Naturally, the shrinking gene pool and the encroachment of time will lead to their eventual demise, but I shall still be here, like Ubu roi—a character in fiction I always admired—cloned forever and bestriding my domain like a colossus. I believe I may have mentioned that fact before.

  "But now, I have told you enough. I felt I would like to unburden to you, as you have been the worthiest opponents I have ever faced, and in a sense you have become my recruits, albeit unwittingly, as I shall be using you to spread my little disease across the lands, sending you in batches to my redoubts and letting you loose in your new locations to do my work on any you may care to meet. A plan stunning in its simplicity. You will, of course, be sent forth without weapons, as I will have to take precautions to insure the safety of my Illuminated Ones, just as I have taken precautions on my own behalf by stripping you of weapons before admitting you into my presence."

  It was now that the despot's sense of overweening arrogance revealed itself as his Achilles' heel. He had finished his discourse, and Mildred was assured that there was an antidote and inoculation against the pox. Her fears regarding the lack of people resident in this redoubt were also calmed. She looked at Jak and Doc, and as her eyes met theirs, they knew that she was satisfied. J.B., Ryan, Krysty and Dean also gathered this, and from the brief glances that were exchanged, it was obvious what needed to be done.

  "You know something?" Ryan asked of Taschen, stepping forward and attracting the attention of the sec squad. "You really have got too big a head—even bigger than that fat body of yours. You should get out more, you coldhearted, fat bastard."

  "Hard words, my one-eyed friend, but my men will cut you down before you get near me," the fat man grated, expecting an unarmed attack from Ryan.

  Which distracted their attention from Jak for just long enough. The albino had been slowed by the ravages of the disease, but even with this handicap he was too quick for the sec squad to follow. Palming three of his leaf-bladed, razor-sharp throwing knives from their hiding places, he tossed two to Ryan and J.B., hilt first, so that the two men were able to catch them with ease. The movement of the knives flashing in the muted light of the room confused the sec squad, who froze. With fatal consequences.

  The third knife was hilt to hand for the albino, whose arm, despite the slower reflex action, was still a blur as hand and eye combined in perfect alignment. The knife sped to its target, landing in the left eye of Emile Taschen, penetrating the eyeball, spilling the viscous liquid down his cheek as the point cut through the muscle at the back of the eye, and thence into the skull cavity and the brain itself.

  Taschen half fell, half staggered backward, rolling his vast bulk over the desk, gurgling in pain and shock as the impact hit him and the receptor centers of his brain realized that the synapses were being extinguished.

  "You can't do this," he gurgled in strained disbelief, his voice almost a strangled whine. "It's too soon…I'm not ready yet…"

  "Are," Jak said simply and in a neutral tone as he vaulted the desk to where the stumbling Taschen had come to rest, behind the comp terminal from which he ruled his own little perverted universe. The albino followed his simple words with an even more simple action: removing the knife with a determined tug, so that blood and fluid poured out of the wounded eye and down the fat man's cheek. Jak pulled back his head and finished the chilling with a swift slice across Taschen's throat that caused blood to jet across the room with the beat of the man's heart, diminishing in flow as the beat lessened until the fat man was still. It had been a simple task. Jak may have been slowed by the disease, but he was still infinitely quicker than his opponent.

  The sec squad was still stunned by the sudden ferocity of the action, and the chilling of their leader. Ryan and J.B. were able to overpower their chosen opponents with ease, disabling them with kicks and blows that doubled over the sec personnel, making them easy targets for the knives to find a home and buy the farm.

  The two sec who hadn't been attacked had a few moments more in which to galvanize themselves to action. One of the women—the one who had been vicious to Mildred—raised her blaster, once more picking the plaited woman as her target. But she had reckoned without Doc. Assuming that he was a frail old man, she had ignored him leaning on his cane. But as she looked away, Doc unsheathed the Toledo steel blade within the cane and brought the finely tempered metal slicing through the air, chopping it down onto the sec woman's arms as they cradled the laser blaster. The blade cut through her flesh, severing nerves, as well as causing her hands to become slippery with her own blood. The blaster dropped from nerveless fingers, and she squealed in pain.

  Doc completed the sweep of the blade, bringing it back up so that he could thrust the fine tip at her exposed and uncovered heart, the thin material of her uniform proving no defense against the steel. She stopped squealing as her ruptured and pierced heart jolted to a halt.

  Three down, but the last one was armed, and the two companions facing him weren't.

  Krysty and Dean unconsciously separated, making the distance between them such that he couldn't fire on both without changing his stance. Unsure of whom to aim for, he vacillated with dire consequences. Dean kicked out, his boot catching the man on the side of the knee. He gasped in shock and pain as the joint gave way, making him fall sideways. As he fell, Krysty was on him. The blaster was pointing downward, and her knee pinned it harmlessly to the ground, while her knuckles sought the soft area around his temple. Finding it with a short jab, she drew back her arm and smashed the vulnerable section of his skull with one blow, sending splinters of bone into his brain, and causing the vital organ to begin shutting down.

  The companions were now alone in the room, surrounded by five corpses. With Taschen chilled, the Illuminated Ones were now just disparate groups of dwindling people waiting for orders that would never come. The important thing now was to find the cultures of disease and destroy them, synthesize the antidote and mop up the remnants of the base.

  Arming themselves with the laser blasters from the chilled sec squad, they headed for the door.

  "Let's get Gloria and the Gate out of that chamber and get down to business," Ryan said brusquely.

  The chron was now almost at zero. The ticking had stopped.

  It was now or never.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Gathered by the door leading from Taschen's quarters, the companions readied themselves for the trip back to the mat-trans hangar and the Gate.

  "Everyone triple frosty?" Ryan asked calmly, gathering a series of nods from his people. "We follow the usual formation, but keep it tighter. We need to move quick and get through the redoubt without being spotted, or at least without raising an alarm. Anyone sees us, we chill them on the spot. First priority is to get the Gate out of that chamber. Then we hit them hard, and go for the med lab."

  "Why don't we free the Gate from here, so they can get moving and we can devote ourselves to getting to the lab?" Dean queried. "It won't take me and Mildred more than a few seconds to crack the comp on the fat man's desk…and then they can start to wipe out the Illuminated Ones while we get to the lab."

  The one-eyed man shook his head. "Nice idea, son, but there are problems. We don't know if the Gate have had their weapons taken away, and if the sec doors on the chamber start to move, the sec on guard will have the advantage—"

  "—and they'll come and check here," Mildred added. "The longer fat boy buying the farm is kep
t quiet, the better."

  Dean thought about that, then nodded. "Yeah, I see what you mean. Guess we'd better get going, then."

  The group now had four laser blasters, taken from the sec squad. As Jak, J.B. and Ryan all had blades, the other four had taken the blasters, meaning that Mildred, Doc, Krysty and Dean were now equipped to face any danger head on. They clustered in the doorway of the room, casting a glance back at the mayhem behind them.

  Taschen lay at his desk, blood dripping across the surface and spilling onto the antique Persian rug that lay in front, once regally spread but now rucked and torn by the fight that had taken place. Although most of the antique furniture and priceless objects d'art that he had collected in his various incarnations still cluttered the room undamaged, Louis XVI chairs were splintered and antique display cabinets were splattered with blood.

  "All that conspicuous wealth," Mildred muttered, almost to herself.

  "Wealth? It doesn't mean anything now." J.B. shrugged. "It's got no real value in the real world."

  "That's the problem, John," Mildred said sadly. "In his version of the real world, it still did. And it once had in the world I lived in. That was why people like him made shit like this happen."

  "It's over for the Illuminated Ones now," Krysty said firmly but quietly. "Without that fat bastard, they're nothing more than a bunch of confused idiots spread across the land, waiting for a call that'll never come."

  "None of which will matter a jot unless we get the little matter of the nefarious disease resolved," Doc interjected with a note of urgency in his tone. "So I suggest that we follow our leader and begin the counterattack."

  Ryan nodded firmly, his mouth set grim and tight in anticipation of the knife edge journey they had to face, and hit the sec door release with the flat of his hand. As with the exterior locking mechanism, there was no keypad, only a single red button. Dean was about to ask Doc how it could be a counterattack if there was no initial attack to actually counter, but held his peace as the door began to rise. Taschen had obviously had the self-belief to never consider that anyone other than himself would wish to leave the room, and so had no safety devices built in.

  Led by the one-eyed man, they stepped out of the room that stank of decadence, decay and death rooted in the long distant past, and moved into the bare concrete corridor of a world that was more familiar to them.

  THEY KNEW that the redoubt was sparsely populated. That gave them an advantage in that it should, theoretically, be easy to avoid the Illuminated Ones and get back to the mat-trans hangar in order to free the Gate. But that could take a little time, and the ticking chron was a commodity of which they were short.

  The auxiliary corridor in which they found themselves was quiet and deserted, leading onto a main corridor in which there was also very little sign of life. Although they kept close to the wall, alert for any activity, they were in a part of the redoubt where little in the way of work activity took place, and so they were able to make rapid progress down to the next level. It was as they progressed that Mildred became aware of the pains in her lungs, her breathing coming harder. She was acutely aware of the wheezing that emanated from Doc, and Jak's normally ghostly pale skin was scored by a number of weals and sores as the pox burst out on his hands and face, becoming more visible.

  "Ryan, slow for a second," she rasped.

  The texture and urgency of her voice made the one-eyed man cease moving forward, and he looked back to her. Under her plaits, which hung limply around her face, he could see that her dark skin was darker in patches, where the disease was erupting through her pores. The whites of her eyes were bloodshot. She looked ill, and her labored breathing was alarming to him.

  "Listen," she began, "I don't know if I can make it back to the bottom and then find the lab. I have a suggestion. Doc and I go for the med lab, try to find the cure, while you free the Gate and chill these fuckers."

  "You be okay, just the two of you?"

  Mildred smiled. "How the hell do I know, Ryan? But Doc and I are worst hit, so we need the antidote first, and we can move better as two than as three or four. Besides, you need all the firepower you can get if you're going to get the Gate free."

  Ryan pondered that. In truth, it took less than a second for him to see the sense of what she was saying. Under any other circumstances, he would have been more cautious until the Gate were free. But time was of the essence.

  "Okay," he agreed, "you two go for it. Know where you're going?"

  Mildred nodded. "I've got a good idea. And we've got these to keep us safe and warm on the way, right, Doc?" she added, slapping the laser blaster she was carrying.

  "It should suffice, madam," Doc told her.

  So, with the briefest of farewells, Mildred and Doc left the rest of the companions at the junction of two corridors, heading toward the level where the woman believed the med lab was situated while the rest of the party headed downward, hoping to encounter as little resistance as possible.

  "DO YOU HAVE anything other than a rough idea of where the lab should be?" Doc panted as he and Mildred moved rapidly along an empty corridor. "I ask not from any lack of faith, but purely because I fear I may soon run out of steam."

  "You know something, Doc? I feel pretty much the same myself," Mildred commented, "but I figure the lab should be on this level. Most redoubts they're pretty high up, and I'm counting on the late and unlamented fat man Taschen wanting to keep a pretty close eye on things."

  "Ah, yes, the man who invented himself," Doc mused, "That would make perfect sense."

  So far they had been fortunate. There had been little activity on this level, and with luck they would not have to pass any of the comp rooms or admin rooms where they had seen Illuminated Ones at work on their initial journey through the redoubt. Which left the possibility of stumbling across moving sec. They kept to the sides of the corridors, using the buttresses as cover, but were completely unable to prevent what happened when they reached the level of the lab.

  As they approached an open door, Mildred suddenly became aware of the sounds of movement from within.

  He held up a hand to stay Doc, who was moving close behind her, but they were already past the last line of cover. And then she heard the voices.

  "You got everything you need now?" spoke the first.

  "Uh-huh. Be glad to get off this level. The lab always give me the creeps," returned a second, this one female.

  "Don't let the boss man hear you say that," returned the first.

  "Like I'd be that dumb," the second countered.

  Both voices had grown nearer as the pair approached the open doorway. Mildred swore softly to herself, knowing that there was no way to get into cover.

  She had forgotten that she was still wearing the Illuminated uniform with which she had first entered the redoubt, and as she readied to blast, she was momentarily taken aback by the friendly way in which she was greeted by the duo of Illuminated Ones as they exited the room.

  "Hey, what're you doing here?" the woman asked, puzzled. "I thought we were the only ones who—"

  Mildred recovered first. Their initial lack of hostility had thrown her for a fraction of a second, but despite the pox her reactions were still quicker than those of the Illuminated Ones, soft from lack of combat.

  She raised the laser blaster as Doc stepped from behind her, also raising his weapon. Two short, sharp blasts from the rifles pulsed in the air before the Illuminated Ones had a chance to even bring around their weapons to aim. Both shots had been for the head, a feasible target given the close range. Both skulls were hit by the high powered lasers, the bone crumbling and the flesh searing under the deadly ray. With no actual force of impact, the chilled Illuminated Ones merely crumpled to the ground, a sickening black charred mess occupying the space where their heads had once sat. The head shot had eliminated the risk of either Illuminated One crying out, be it in pain, fear or alarm, at the moment of buying the farm.

  "That was a trifle too close to be comforta
ble," Doc commented mildly as he stared down at the corpses.

  "Yeah, and we're too close to let it slip now," Mildred added.

  Doc moved around in front of her and began to drag one of the chilled corpses back into the room. "Then I suggest we hide these, just in case they should be spotted before our task is accomplished."

  "Good call," Mildred agreed, taking the other corpse and following the old man into the room.

  It was a fortunate act of chance that took them there. As they stashed the chilled Illuminated Ones out of view from the corridor or a casual glance into the room, Mildred caught sight of what was contained within.

  "Look at this, Doc," she murmured, leaving the hidden corpses and walking across the room to a comp display that was linked to graph machines spilling reams of computer paper silently into a collection basket.

  "I believe I've seen something like this before," Doc whispered, joining Mildred. "It is, is it not, some kind of medical monitoring device?"

  "On the button, Doc," Mildred muttered, scanning the comp displays and taking out a sheaf of the papers to study them. "Complete vital function, brain and organ scan. But who are they monitoring this closely?"

  "Time enough for that in a while," Doc said quietly. "If this is medical monitoring, then perhaps we have hit the home run?"

  "Might just be that, Doc. Whatever this is attached to is through that door," she said, indicating a closed sec door that linked the two rooms, the cables for the machine running through specially built wall sockets. "I figure there won't be anything else in there, by the look of this hardware, so we'll take a look after we've scouted the rest of this level. 'Cause it should all be here."

  Doc agreed, and they temporarily left the comp setup in order to scout the rest of the level. There was only one external sec door onto the corridor—the one through which the two chilled Illuminated Ones had come. But internally, the rooms were linked by a series of sec doors that formed a chain. The first two rooms they entered were nothing more than standard examination rooms with tables and plentiful supplies of medications. Any other time, Mildred would have gladly raided them, but there were more important items on the agenda. It was in the third room that they found that for which they sought.