Damnation Road Show. James Axler

them for him.

      For years prior to his promotion to carny master, Crecca had worked for the late Gert Wolfram, but never as a roustabout. He had been an advance scout and collector of specimens for the fat man’s menagerie of living oddities. He trapped wild muties in the Darks, using rope snares or pitfalls. In and around the villes, he bought or kidnapped the tame ones. He’d find a particularly disgusting freak that he knew old Wolfram would like, then he’d shove a bag over its head and steal it from the bosom of its loving family. If the family caught him in the act and objected too strenuously, he chilled the whole lot of them. He was paid by the pound in those days. Wolfram had a thing about the size and weight of his attractions, said “the big uns” drew better crowds—a rule of showmanship that the new carny master still followed. While on the road, Crecca often had to force-feed his severely depressed captives at blasterpoint to maintain their redemption value. If they still wouldn’t take nourishment, he ditched them to make room for more profitable cargo. Dumped them in the middle of nowhere to starve or be eaten. Their lives weren’t worth the price of a centerfire bullet or the trouble of resharpening a bone-nicked knife blade.

      “What are you going to do with the bodies afterward?” Crecca asked his head roustabout.

      “Drag the pieces of shit outside the berm and bury ’em on the plain.”

      “And tomorrow morning nobody’s going to notice seven people who upped and vanished?”

      Furlong shrugged. “Somebody might notice, but there’d be no proof, so what could they do?”

      “What if one of them yells out as your boys attack or gets hold of a blaster? What then?”

      Furlong was silent under knit brows, straining to come up with a good answer. He might as well have been trying to explain gravity. But he was too stupid to see the futility of the effort.

      “Bullard ville’s gonna be the best pickings we ever had,” Crecca told him. “If we try anything on One-Eye and his crew and it goes sour, it will queer the whole deal. And I won’t risk that.”

      The hairy man started to restate his case for a surgical strike, but Crecca cut him off. “Do nothing,” he said. “Do absolutely fucking nothing. Understand?”

      It took a long moment for this to sink in, but Furlong finally, reluctantly nodded.

      “Get out,” Crecca said, dismissing him with a wave of his hand.

      After Furlong left, the carny master assured himself that even if One-Eye had come to pay them a visit, that even if he knew about the spoils of mass murder, it didn’t matter. Cawdor didn’t know how the chilling was done. He couldn’t know because there had never been a single survivor left to tell the tale. Cawdor and his six fellow travelers would die like dogs along with the rest of the Bullard ville hayseeds.

      Crecca twisted the ends of his goatee into a point. It was too bad about the bitch, though. Her mutation—the squirming strands of flame-red hair—wasn’t flashy enough for her to make a sideshow attraction, but she had real potential as a sex slave. Ah, well, the carny master thought, sex slaves, even ones with legs as long as hers, could be had anywhere.

      He reached in his tailcoat side pocket and took out a small beige cardboard box. On the box were printed the words Choco Duds. He shook a few of the predark candies onto his palm. They looked like ossified rat turds. Their milk-chocolate coating had crystallized to a floury white. More than a century of storage had turned once soft caramel centers to amber glass, unchewable by norm teeth and jaws.

      Crecca flicked one of the Choco Duds across the cabin. It hit Jackson on the cheek with an audible whack. The stickie’s eyes popped open at once. It sniffed the air, mewled in delight, then rooted in the heap of rags until it found the treat.

      Jackson had no trouble eating the pellet. The dead eyes begged for more.

      “First we’ve got work to do,” Crecca said, getting up from his chair. He put a videocassette in the player and powered up the TV.

      Jackson watched his every move with rapt attention.

      Loud, hard-driving, backbeat-heavy music erupted from the speakers, and bright colors and dancing females appeared on the screen. Crecca fell into step with the lead singer-dancer—a dewy-eyed, teenage blonde with a bare midriff—and her troupe of four bare-bellied dancers. Their moves were complex and violent. And there wasn’t much room to work. Tails of red satin coat flapping, the carny master pivoted left and spin-kicked right.

      “Come on, Jackson,” he called, teasing the creature with the offer of another treat. “Let’s go!”

      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