Damnation Road Show. James Axler

he showed her how to hold her finger outside the trigger guard until she was ready to fire.

      Nobody had given her any blaster training before. And certainly not with such a sophisticated and deadly predark weapon. She wasn’t old enough. Dean Cawdor, whose long, dark hair tickled the back of her neck as he leaned over her, thought she was. He cocked back the hammer with his thumb and told her to dry-fire the Browning.

      “Go ahead,” he said, “squeeze the trigger.”

      The firing pin made a twig-snap sound.

      “Does it make a lot of noise when it really shoots?” she asked him.

      “Sure does.”

      He took back the blaster, lowered the hammer with his thumb, put the safety on and reholstered it.

      “My ma got chilled,” Leeloo told him.

      Dean looked at her for a long minute. She wasn’t sure whether she had said something bad without meaning to. Something that would make him not like her anymore.

      She was about to apologize when he said, “Mine, too. She died of cancer. She was sick a long time. What happened to your ma?”

      “My ma got choked in the gaudy while she was wrestling.”

      “Wrestling?” Dean said, puzzled.

      “On the bed.”

      “Oh,” Dean said.

      Leeloo stared at him closely, and as if she could read his mind—or heart—said, “Did your ma wrestle in the gaudies, too?”

      “Sometimes,” the dark-haired boy said, staring down at his dusty boot tops. Though his lips moved, his face was expressionless. “But only when we didn’t have anything to eat, or nowhere safe to sleep. She was so pretty she could always find work in a gaudy.”

      “They strung up the geezer who chilled my mom,” Leeloo told him. “I saw them do the whole thing. They yanked his pants down first. When his neck broke, it made a loud crack and his willy stuck out, like in wrestling. One time, before they cut him down, I clonked it good with a rock.”

      “What about your dad?” Dean asked.

      “Never had one that I know of. You’re lucky ’cause you’ve got one. And a good one, too. I can see that from the way he looks out for you.”

      “Who takes care of you, then?”

      “Fat Melchior, the headman of the ville. He took me in after Ma got chilled.”

      “Is he nice to you?”

      “Sure. But there’s not enough nice to go around. He has too many other kids of his own and the cabin is small.”

      “You sound sad, Leeloo. Are you sad a lot?”

      “I try not to be. I do things that make me happy, mostly by myself.”

      “Me, too,” Dean said. “I like scouting ahead for the others when we’re on the move. Jak, he’s the one with the white hair, he’s teaching me how to read signs. He doesn’t say much, but I think I’m starting to get good at it.”

      “You must have wonderful adventures with your dad and your friends. I’m still too young for adventures, I guess.”

      “You’ll have some, though. Mebbe even better ones.”

      “Do you really think so?”

      “I’m sure of it.”

      From the other side of the compound came the sound of her name being called. “Leeeee-looooo Bunny!”

      “Dinnertime,” she said, destroyed at the prospect of being pulled away from something so exciting and extraordinary by something so boring and ordinary.

      “You’d better go, then,” he told her. “Don’t want to be late, not with all those other kids at the table. You won’t get anything to eat.”

      “Are you staying for the carny?” she asked him.

      “Sure.”

      “Then mebbe I’ll see you tomorrow?”

      He smiled at her. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll look for you in the morning.”

      With a totally mystifying combination of pain and joy sitting upon her heart, Leeloo Bunny descended the berm. She had never had a crush on a boy before. Had never wanted to kiss a boy before. In part, this was due to the awakening of her physical self; in part it was due to the fact that none of the ville boys interested her in the least. And for good reason. After watching the goings-on through the gaudy windows, the older ones got all panting and grabby handed, trying to insinuate their dirty fingers into very private places. Other girls in the ville, some even younger than Leeloo, let them do that, and more. Not Leeloo, though. The younger boys in Bullard ville were even more dismal crush prospects. They all had snot caked on their cheeks, and their breath smelled like creamed corn.

      When she got back to Fat Melchior’s cabin, the chaos of dinner for ten was well under way. She didn’t compete for food, hardly ate any to speak of, and later, when she finally curled up on her tiny cot, she found she couldn’t sleep a wink. And the cause, strangely enough, wasn’t her excitement over the carny.

      Chapter Seven

      With Jackson trotting at the heels of his jackboots, the Magnificent Crecca headed back to the rear of the big wag, down the narrow, windowless, low-ceilinged corridor.

      As the carny master approached the closed metal door at the far end, he felt a wave of the familiar, powerful unease he always felt just before entering the Magus’s lair. Gert Wolfram had been afraid of the Magus, too. At the time, Crecca had thought it hysterically funny to see that huge mountain of blubber tiptoeing around, trying to avoid even the most incidental contact. Wolfram had never shown his fear to the Magus’s face, if what he had could even be called a face—more like the jumbled contents of butcher and machine shop trash cans. The Magus loved to induce terror. And when he saw its first tender sprout, he nourished it and made it grow.

      Crecca was much more comfortable when the puppet master wasn’t along for the ride. The carny picked him up and dropped him off at different locations on the route. No explanation was ever given. They never knew where he went or how he got back. All they knew was that he was privy to ultrasecret, predark whitecoat technology, and that he had developed some unique refinements of his own.

      The Magus had a distinctly unpleasant smell. Crecca had always figured it had something to do with the unnatural combination of flesh and stainless steel. The worst thing by far, though, were the eyes. Like a pair of chromed hen’s eggs, with pinhole pupils. You could never tell for sure what they were looking at.

      Crecca ordered Jackson to sit and stay outside the door. The Magus had been known to bite the heads off baby stickies on a whim, and Crecca had put in far too much time on this one to start over. He raised his balled fist and pounded on the door.

      “Come!” said a strange, thready voice from the other side.

      When Crecca entered the wag’s rear salon, he was slammed by the odor of machine oil, fried brake linings and spilled blood. The dim, smoky room was surrounded by one-way, blasterproof, glass windows. It was five times the size of his cabin, and it had a hundred times more junk in it. Unsorted junk. Littering the floor were piles of gears, pipe, wire, housings, glass beakers, lamps, conduit, parts of wag engines and computer motherboards. Sitting on the salon’s built-in rear-window sofa was living nightmare cast in decaying flesh and stainless-steel struts.

      One of the rules of survival with the Magus was to not let him catch you staring.

      Crecca tugged hard at his red chin beard, pretending to study with interest the vivisection that had been left abandoned on a crude wooden table. It was impossible to tell whether the half-dissected body was norm or mutie, as its layers of skin and muscle were now peeled back and tacked