Apocalypse Unborn. James Axler

it produced weeping lesions inside the victim’s brain. In its final stage, a thick, gray pus leaked from ears and nostrils. As Ryan planted his feet, his fingers an inch from the butt of his holstered SIG-Sauer P-226, from under the table came a shotgun’s deafening roar.

      The table’s front legs hopped from the ground and the mercie vaulted backward, arms spread wide, enveloped in a billowing white cloud that twinkled with tiny comets of burning black-powder. He landed flat on his back, a smoldering, gory crater blown from hip to hip. The awful swathe of destruction was the product of not one, but two simultaneously discharging 12-gauge barrels, the product of a muzzle loader packed with metal scrap and bent nails.

      The other two mercies jumped through the smoke for the railing. Before the islander crew could open fire, they dived headfirst over it.

      Their splashdowns were punctuated by the clatter of Kalashnikovs. The islanders fired over the rail, full-auto. The passenger wannabes rushed to that side of the pier, shouting and potshotting at the pale shapes swimming toward shore four feet under the surface. Ryan drew his handblaster, but didn’t join the fray. There was no need. Concentrated bullet impacts churned the water to a fine froth. First one, then the other body popped up, no longer moving, leaking red from dozens of wounds. At which point, the shooting stopped abruptly.

      Behind them on the deck, the mortally wounded cannie jittered—heels drumming, back arching, teeth snapping, gray mucous bubbling from his nostrils and ears. The double scattergun blast had gutted him, but missed his heart and lungs. Ryan crouched upwind, just beyond the cannie’s reach, raised his blaster and fired once, putting a 9 mm round in front of the cannie’s left ear, blowing infected brains out the far side of his head.

      As he reholstered the SIG, the crewmen rolled the corpse off the pier.

      The background racket resumed at once. Along the queue, sec men and slavers pushed and threatened one another, jockeying for dominance. Brief fist and blade fights broke out. Caged anomalies shrieked and moaned in mortal terror. The looming mass of fog, the drifting gun and wood smoke and the overwhelming reek of death from beneath the pier added to the atmosphere.

      Hell’s circus.

      Only one creature in all of Deathlands could have recruited and assembled such a gathering.

      The ringmaster.

      Magus. Steel Eyes. The thing that wouldn’t die.

      Once he had been one-hundred-percent, flesh-and-blood human. How long ago that was, or where he had come from was not known. As his organic parts—limbs, organs, sensory arrays—failed due to age or damage, he had used inorganics such as nanotech circuit boards, memory chips, servos, pumps and titanium struts, to make the necessary repairs to himself. The melding of mechanical and biomechanical subsystems had prolonged Magus’s life, but the result was not a pretty sight. Blood, machine oil and pus seeped from the joins of angry flesh to gleaming metal, erratic clicking sounds, like a box of cheap wind-up clocks, came from inside his torso, and he was enveloped in the rank odor of his own putrefaction.

      Over the years Ryan and his companions had crossed the creature’s path more than once, witnessing the unspeakable cruelties he wrought on the innocent and unwary. Ever the puppetmaster, Magus relied on norm and mutie minions to do his wet work, and to cover his retreat into the shadows. Steel Eyes had long ago cut out his own humanity; if he still had a heart, that organ was made of plastic and Kevlar. Animated by a seemingly bottomless evil, this reeking, lurching contraption terrified and awed even Deathlands’ most degenerate human trash. He attracted lesser villains like moths to a black flame.

      In the past, Magus had toyed with randomly selected, living game pieces, amusing himself by sowing localized horror, apparently on a whim. Attacks on remote, poorly defended villes required relatively small hit crews, which could be assembled from the front porch of almost any gaudy in the hellscape. His slavery/natural resource extraction operations used the same breed of enforcers. Magus was never out of pocket for any of his criminal enterprises. Slave laborers worked for free and mass murderers were paid in the spoils of carnage.

      Something new and infinitely more menacing had drawn Ryan and the others halfway across Deathlands to the pier on Morro Bay. In the last month or so, groups of drifters, traders and refugees had passed the word along the network of eroded predark interstates, through roadside and dry river bottom campsites, shanty villes, skeletonized major cities, from gaudy to gaudy all the way to the eastern baronies. Steel Eyes was recruiting an army of blackhearts. The call had been sent across the whole of the hellscape. Those who signed on were guaranteed jack, jolt and joy juice in unlimited quantities, and the opportunity to indulge in savagery unheard-of since nuke day.

      Magus had never shown any ambition for conquest before. He had been content to play on the margins of Deathlands’ disjointed feudal system, squabbling baronies separated by vast, lawless territories. He seemed as interested in concealing his whereabouts, his motives and the true extent of his power as he was in wreaking havoc on the defenseless. Until now the location of his home base was anybody’s guess—that it would be in the West Coast’s most nuked-out zone, in a place no one would dare look, made perfect sense.

      The captain gestured for Ryan to approach the interview table. Wide-set, heavy-lidded brown eyes took in his battle-worn face.

      A face impossible to disguise.

      A knife slash from his brother had cost Ryan his left eye and had marked his eyebrow and cheek with a jagged scar. A black eye patch covered the empty socket. Losing an eye was a common enough injury in Deathlands, where fighting was often hand-to-hand with edged weapons. Other men were as tall, with similar rangy builds and long dark hair. Few had an eye so blue. Fewer still carried an eighteen-inch panga in a leg sheath and a scoped Steyr SSG-70 longblaster. But there was no sign of recognition from the islander captain. Which was just as well because diving off the pier was not going to save life and limb. Either the captain had never heard of the one-eyed man’s exploits, or he failed to identify Ryan without his constant companions at his side.

      Ryan stared at the man’s heavily scarred forearms. This was no decorative disfigurement. The oval-shaped, long-healed wounds were three and a half inches across. He had lost great divots of flesh, clear down to the bone.

      Bite marks.

      “Why’d you waste a good centerfire bullet on that cannie?” the captain asked. “He was gonna be dead meat in five minutes, tops.”

      Ryan would’ve shot a rabid stickie in that condition, but Magus wasn’t in the market for mercy chillers. “Had a clear shot on the rad bastard,” Ryan told him. “Wanted to get in my licks while I could.”

      “You solo?”

      “Always.”

      “Mercie?”

      “Sec man. Came up under Baron Zepp.”

      “Down Florida way.”

      Ryan nodded. “Greenglades.”

      “Old Zepp got himself chilled.”

      “He was still breathing when I moved west.”

      “Why’d you leave?”

      “Needed a change of climate.”

      The captain didn’t ask for his name—names had a tendency to change, before and after wet work—but he looked hard at the bolt-action Steyr slung over Ryan’s shoulder. “You any good with that longblaster?”

      “Good enough to keep it.”

      It was the kind of rare, high-end weapon that most folks would chill for, given the opportunity.

      The mountain of brown stared up at Ryan’s face. “But not good enough to keep your eye?”

      Ryan smiled. “One’s all I need.”

      “Here,” the captain said, shoving the yellow bucket across the table at him. “Spit.”

      Ryan obliged. When the mixed sputum and blood poured out red, the crewmen let the aimpoints of their AKs drift away from his chest.