Breakthrough. James Axler

sword and laid it down gently on the bank a safe distance away. A handful of villagers, including the wailing women, knelt beside the corpse, sobbing. With cupped hands they dripped river water on the body, tenderly washing the mud and blood from the face and chest.

      “Ugly way to croak,” Jak spit.

      “Let’s make sure nobody else gets nailed by that rad blasted thing,” Ryan said.

      The companions quickly formed a firing squad beside the fish’s head. But before they could shoot, the man in the fish-skin vest jumped in front of the raised muzzles, waving his hands. “No, no!” he shouted at them. “No lead! The metal will put a curse on the meat.”

      With that, the village leader scrambled onto the fish’s head, using the net’s mesh for hand and footholds. He was joined by another man who carried an ironwood club and a three-foot-long bone sword. The leader took the sword and knelt down, feeling around on the fish’s forehead with his fingertips.

      “What’s he doing?” Dean asked.

      “He’s looking for the seam in the skull,” Ryan replied. “A weak spot in the bone.”

      The village leader found what he was searching for. He positioned the sword point against the skull, dropped his hands below the skin-wrapped grip and nodded to the second man, who raised the club and struck the pommel of the sword a mighty blow. The impact echoed sharply off the riverbank’s trees, and the serrated blade sank in a foot.

      The great fish didn’t seem to notice.

      But when the man dealt it a second blow, driving the sword in another foot, the animal went berserk, humping up and heaving its body against the net, its long, fleshy whiskers curling and cracking like bullwhips. The man struck again with the club before the fish could throw them off. On the third whack, the blade slipped in to the hilt, the mutie catfish’s eyes went dead, and its entire length began to quiver.

      The villagers sent up a cheer and began preparations for the butchering. After untangling the net, several of the strongest men pried open its jaws, propping them wide apart with an ironwood stake sharpened at both ends. One of the men crawled inside the yawning mouth. Using the tip of his knife, he cut the lining of the throat away from the surrounding bone and muscle, and then disappeared into the dark cavity of its body. After a few minutes passed, he stepped out of the mouth, covered in blood and pulling the free end of the throat lining behind him.

      The other villagers joined in and they began draging the guts out of the catfish, five feet at a time. As they gave the empty, pale gray tube of muscle the heave-ho, it stretched down to the size of a man’s arm. On the third pull, the tube caught on the far side of the stake. Redoubling their efforts, the villagers managed to free it.

      The cause of the hang-up popped out onto the mud.

      Inside the opaque gut lining was a blue-dark bulge easily as long as a man.

      “Is it a person?” Dean asked, awed. “It looks like a person!”

      The village leader immediately stopped the proceedings and using a borrowed sword, hacked through the gut tube in a single swipe. Covered in slime, a hairless, earless, mottled blue head peeped out. Its gaping jaws were lined with rows of needlelike teeth, its beady eyes had been turned the color of milk by the fish’s corrosive digestive juices.

      “Mutie eel,” Jak pronounced, matter-of-factly. “Big un.”

      The eel’s jaws snapped shut like a bear trap.

      It was blind, but it sure wasn’t dead.

      The headman could have easily lopped off its head, but he just stared at it, sword at his side. The eel, sensing freedom, shot out of the fish’s gut, frantically sidewinding for the defenseless women and children clustered on the bank. The women and children could have scattered to safety, but they didn’t. They stood there. Waiting.

      Whether the eel intended them harm or just wanted back in the river, Krysty reacted at once. Stepping between the onrushing animal and the innocents, she raised and fired her Model 640 Smith & Wesson. The .38-caliber slug hit the eel square in the head, knocking it down, but not out. It writhed in the mud, toothy jaws snapping. Krysty gingerly pinned the thick neck to the ground with her boot heel, leaving the tail end free to slap and churn. Kneeling down, she held the muzzle of the revolver against the side of its head and snapped the cap. The coup de grâce cratered the eel’s skull and sent a plume of blood, brains and bone fragments splashing into the river.

      As Krysty straightened, the women and children encircled her, making cooing noises as they stroked the arms and hem of her fur coat.

      “It’s okay, really, it’s okay,” she told them, carefully holding the blaster out of their reach. They wouldn’t be put off. They continued stroking the furry coat sleeves and cooing at her.

      When things finally settled down, Ryan and the others retired to the shade of the forest’s edge to watch the rest of the butchering. The village men skinned back the hide at the tail and started hacking out great, foot-thick slabs of pale pink flesh. These were passed to the women, who skewered them on ironwood sticks and began char-roasting them over the open fires. The sweet aroma of blackened catfish set the companions’ empty bellies to gurgling.

      After a few minutes, the headman walked over to where they sat. He carried an uncapped antifreeze jug, which he handed to Ryan. The one-eyed man sniffed the spout. “Whew!” he said. “That’s powerful stuff.”

      “It’s brewed from the fruit of the strangler vine,” the village leader told him. “Drink and enjoy your-selves. After she has been served, the feast will begin.”

      “Who’s ‘she’?” Krysty asked.

      “Sirena,” the leader said. “She told us of your coming, of the great fish, of Chambo’s death on its spine and the eel alive in its gut. Sirena sees all, and knows all.”

      “A doomie!” Dean exclaimed.

      None of the others said a word. Ryan knew they were all thinking the same thing.

      Bullshit.

      Though doomies actually existed in Deathlands, the genuine article was as rare as a thirteen-year-old virgin. Real doomies were a unique race of humans, possibly mutated, possibly not. Each individual was gifted to a varying degree with the second sight, the ability to see past and future events. Usually, however, the folks claiming to have the doomie sight turned out to be con artists or coldheart chillers.

      The companions watched as a floppy-breasted young woman carried a smoking hunk of fish past them on a carved bone platter. Escorted by the village leader, she disappeared into a hut at the end of the line.

      Doc took the antifreeze jug from Ryan and tried a long swallow.

      “By the Three Kennedys!” he croaked, wiping his streaming eyes and nose. “A ferment drawn straight from Satan’s piss pot!”

      “That good, huh?” J.B. said, accepting the jug.

      “Go easy,” Ryan warned.

      After a single gasp-and-shiver-producing gulp, J.B. handed the joy juice to Krysty, who whiffed it, made a face and passed it on to Jak without tasting.

      In contrast to the companions’ restraint, the male villagers hit their blue jugs hard, and the effects were immediate. Joined by their headman, they started singing, waving their arms and stamping their feet in the mud. Their tuneless song was as repetitive as it was nerve grating. And they directed it, and the accompanying rhythmic hip gyrations, toward their guests.

      “We are rulers of the forest and the river,” they howled. “We chill the great beasts with their own bones. Our powerful and manly seed will live forever.”

      “Now there’s a comforting thought,” Mildred muttered to herself.

      At that point, another woman stepped forward and laid down a heaping platter of cooked fish before them. The companions used their bare hands to tear into the char-crusted and still scorching-hot meat.