Chapter Five
“Fireblast!”
Ryan saw a shadow-shape like a giant, limb-deprived spider drop suddenly onto Ricky’s back.
His first thought was that things were already out of control and it was time to forget about Dark Lady’s instructions. He’d learned early on that it was easier to get forgiveness than permission. And hardest to get either when you had dirt hitting you in the eyes.
But he’d no sooner thought of reaching back over his shoulder for the pistol grip of his Steyr Scout longblaster than he felt the blaster being grabbed from behind. It was rudely yanked away. The sling spun him half around as if he were a mutie child’s rag doll before it slid off his arm.
Nightmare loomed behind him. His flash impression was that he’d been attacked by a scalie. But a scalie taller than he was and much broader through the shoulders. And with something wrong with the head—for either a scalie or a man.
He fired a straight right hand into the misshapen scaled face. It had a muzzle, he saw now, more like a dog’s than a lizard’s, and two eyes mounted on the face’s front like any human or other predator’s. In the bad light they still looked disturbingly human-like.
His fist connected on the left underside of the chin. That was the “button,” and it tended to overload people’s brains and cause them to temporarily go blank, or rattle their brains around hard enough in their brainpans they got concussed and blacked out.
The weird lizard man’s head barely rocked back on what Ryan now noticed was a massive neck. The creature had lips, too. They pulled back in a smile from alarmingly pointy teeth.
Ryan went for the grip of his panga. Before he could so much as start to tug the broad blade out of its sheath the lizard man shot out a black-taloned hand twice the size of his own in a straight palm to his sternum. The blow hit so hard that Ryan’s one-eyed vision blacked out for a split second as his heart skipped a beat.
When he came fully back to himself he was flying through the air. Not for long. He hit the ground so hard the breath was knocked out of him.
Around him was shadowed chaos, screams and curses. Something—many somethings—were grappling with his friends. He caught a glimpse of Ricky, in the middle of the laager beside the lit-up mobile home, teetering in circles and flailing uselessly at a shadowy form that seemed to envelop his head and shoulders.
At the same time Jak was menacing a second dark figure with a big trench knife. This mutie appeared to be mostly arms and legs, though only two each despite its own marked similarity to an arachnid. It was dancing around Jak, juking left and darting right.
Then it screeched, “You stay away from my sister!”
It threw itself on its hands, flung its long supple legs in the air, and kicked Jak square in the snow-white face. The albino sat right down. Ryan thought it was more of surprise than because he’d been knocked on his butt.
Nuke this, Ryan thought. He snapped up to his feet.
To find himself eye to snout with the lizard man.
He punched the creature hard in the columnar throat. Usually that was a kill-shot, dooming the target to slow strangling death from a collapsed trachea. This was like hitting a steel pipe.
The lizard man smiled wider. “You don’t get it, do you? Give it up.”
Ryan smiled. Then he kneed the monster in the balls.
Or tried to. The lizard man pivoted his hips, fouling the blow with the great muscle of his right thigh. He knew a thing or two about fighting.
The lizard mutie slammed both palms into Ryan’s chest and sent him flying back.
* * *
S
O
THIS
DUDE
in a top hat and a coat with crazy mustachios just like Snidely Whiplash comes up to me in the dark, Mildred thought.
That happened. Plus he fixed her with a burning gaze, raised both hands in a silent-movie spooky gesture, and intoned, “Look into my eyes, dear lady!”
She punched him in the face instead.
He reeled back in surprise. Mildred took quick stock of her friends. J.B. was sparring with an enormous fat woman. She looked as if she could crush him simply by falling on him. Mildred wasn’t worried. J.B. was a smart fighter.
Krysty was wrestling with a balding man in tights. It didn’t look like near a fair fight, either: perfectly proportioned though she was, the tall redhead looked as if she was twice his size, and she was strong for a woman to boot. Doc was flourishing his ebony cane in the fur-covered face of some kind of beast-man mutie. The creature was powerfully built and had pointy ears on the top of his head.
What have we gotten ourselves into?
Mildred wondered.
Oh. Right. A traveling mutie show.
She raised her fists and closed in on her assailant. The man looked to be middle-aged and none too robust. She figured she didn’t need a blaster to take him.
Movement caught her eye. Fearing a blindside assault, she glanced around to see Ryan fly through the air and slam right into the obese woman confronting J.B. Ryan literally bounced off her and landed on the ground in a heap. The woman turned on him triumphantly as J.B. nipped out of sight around her own bulk.
Mildred turned her attention back to the man in the ludicrous top hat. He flung an arm at her. Powder gusted into her face.
Poison! she thought in horror. She tried not to hold her breath.
But it was too late. She’d already gotten a noseful.
And promptly erupted into convulsive sneezes.
* * *
R
YAN
LAY
ON
the ground struggling to catch his breath. He didn’t have any cracked ribs, he thought. But he didn’t feel good.
He saw Krysty putting a wiry little guy in a hammerlock, then she yelped, and the man sprang lithely away from her.
Ryan came flying up off the ground to race to Krysty’s aid. He feared the man had stabbed her with a knife.
He was propelled forward by a belly-bump from the huge fat woman the lizard man had tossed him into.
This is going fifteen kinds of out of control, he thought, on his back on the ground again.
He saw something spin end for end out of the night and knock Doc’s swordstick whirling end over end from his hand with a clatter.
“A bowling pin? By the Three Kennedys!”
He reached inside his frock coat. “I fear you leave me no choice—”
Something flickered in dim starlight. There was a
thunk,
then a knife pinned the sleeve of Doc’s coat to the painted side of the wag.
“Right,” Ryan grumbled. “That’s it.”
He saw Krysty flipped over the skinny guy’s shoulder to land flat on her back. He was already reaching for the butt of his P-226 in its shoulder holster.
He heard a scream of outrage and fury from Mildred. Still flat on his back he turned his head to see her grappled from behind by what looked like the Wolfman from an old-days movie poster. She had her ZKR 551 revolver in hand; one furry paw had her by the wrist and her gun hand thrust straight up over her head.
The .38 cracked off with a bright yellow flash.
Ryan’s handblaster came out. He pointed it at the center of the vast chest of the lizard mutie, who was looming over him like a colossus.
White light dazzled him.
He cranked out three fast shots. They were completely blind. His ears rang from an explosion so sharp and savage he barely heard the 9 mm blaster go off.
Ryan wondered if he was shot. He felt no pain, except in his stinging eye, which saw nothing but shifting purple-and-orange blurs. He’d been shot before and knew a person didn’t always feel it—at first.
The SIG was wrenched from his hand. Still unable to see anything other than what now looked like giant balloons floating inside his own eye, he grabbed at the hilt of his panga. Instead his own arm was grabbed and yanked clear. He felt the broad-bladed knife being pulled from its sheath.
His arm was released. He sat up.
Slowly a semblance of vision returned. He still had big balls of color floating in his vision field, and the night, which had been lit by stars and the glow from Madame Zaroza’s Winnebago, looked dark as four feet up a coal miner’s ass. Around him he heard his friends moaning. He became aware of shapes on the ground, and others standing over them.
Then he could see well enough to start confirming his worst fears: all his friends were on the ground, and all their enemies were standing over them.
“Okay,” growled the immense lizard mutie. “Time to give these rubes a stomping to remember us by.”
“Hold on, everybody,” a calm and quiet voice said.
Everyone froze. Ryan turned his head toward where the voice had come from.
It was J.B. The Armorer stood between the back of one trailer and the snout of a parked motor wag. He had his fedora tipped back on his high forehead. A placid half smile was on his face and the muzzle of his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun was aimed at the small of the back of a stocky, middle-aged woman with flowing skirts and big hoop earrings.
“Playtime’s over,” J.B. called. “All you folks just sort of step back now.”
“Don’t do it!” she commanded brusquely. “Don’t give in, no matter what happens to me. You know what happens when you give in to the rubes.”
“Sorry, Z,” the hairy dude said in a surprisingly high and piping voice. “No can do. These people play for keeps, and we know that without you we’re nothing.”
She looked around at the rest. “Anybody?”
She slumped. “Oh, well. It was worth a try. And the Beauty said they didn’t mean to hurt us if they could help it.”
“We didn’t really mean to hurt you people, either,” the lizard man said in a deep, rasping rumble. “Just rowdy you up some. We can’t let the rubes think they can get away with picking on us, you know?”
Picking himself up, Ryan paused and cocked a brow at him. “Yeah. You know, I think I do.”
“So, no point in standing out here in the cold,” Madame Zaroza said. “Thanks for giving your best, everybody. Go back to bed. And you people—” she looked hard at Ryan to make clear whom “you people” meant “—might as well come on in and enjoy a nice pot of tea.”
Chapter Six
“For a bunch of performers,” Ryan said, “you sure took us down pretty quick.”
“You got the advantage of us in the end,” said the wiry man with the hair cut short to his narrow skull and the vest full of knives.
“By cheating,” the enormous lizard mutie rumbled.
“That’s enough, boys,” Madame Zaroza said. “That’s behind us now. Anyway, we never give a mark an even break. Why would these folks do any different?”
Seated in a wooden chair across from her, Krysty noticed that the room, which was the style for mobile homes, combined the functions of kitchen, dining room and living room, had even fussier décor than Dark Lady’s office, and was a lot more packed with stuff: bobble-head dolls, Ouija boards, what looked like a crow’s skull. Scented candles burned on bookshelves, one stuck to the top of a skull that looked mostly human but not quite. The lamps were oil-burners with lacy shades stuck over their soot-stained glass chimneys with brass harps. They gave off a pretty decent light.
“What exactly are you people, anyway?” Ryan asked. He sat perched at the edge of a green overstuffed chair as if afraid that if he relaxed, comfort would swallow him and he’d lose his keen edge.
“Just what you see, sir,” Professor Finesse said from behind the counter in the kitchen area. He was a courtly middle-aged man with exaggerated mustachios and a fawn suit coat over a white shirt with a frilled front and a string tie. His top hat, which matched his coat, rested crown-down by the sink. “A troupe of performers, making our way across the Deathlands.”
Ryan grunted.
With a bit of a trill a rangy orange tabby jumped up on Krysty’s leg.
“Belphegor,” Madame Zaroza said sharply from her chair. “You be good, now.”
Krysty smiled at her. “He’s not bothering me.”
His claws bit slightly through the faded blue denim of her jeans. She didn’t mind; she could tell they were not all the way retracted. He wasn’t trying to hurt her, or even clinging on. It was obviously just the way he was.
“Thank you, Draco,” Madame Zaroza said to the enormous lizard mutie, who had just poured her a cup of steaming tea from a big white-painted, cast-iron teapot.
“Might as well call me Gordon,” Draco said, moving on to pour for Mildred.
“Tut, tut, Draco,” Madame Zaroza said, wagging a finger. “We’ve got marks here. We don’t use real names.”
He frowned. His face had fewer mimetic muscles than a normal man’s, but he managed to get a lot of mileage out of them. His eyes were amber-colored and actually had lashes. They were oddly pretty, Krysty thought. Especially by contrast to the dull green-and gold-scaled rest of him.
“I thought that, under the circumstances—”
She gave him a look. He shut his big saw-toothed jaw with a clack.
With surprising delicacy for his bulk and build Draco pivoted to pour for Krysty, who stood with her back to a bookshelf between J.B. and Ryan. Though spacious for a recreational vehicle, the room was crowded. Jak, naturally, insisted on restlessly prowling around outside, searching for threats. Ryan, Krysty, J.B., Mildred, Doc and Ricky were all inside. As was most of the traveling show troupe they’d encountered in their scrum outside. The show folk had not obeyed their boss’s instruction to go to bed, and she hadn’t pressed the issue.
Krysty had no idea how Madame Zaroza managed to find fuel for the giant Winnebago, much less her other motor wags. No doubt it was converted to burn alcohol, and probably other fuels, as well, like a lot of wags were these days.
“Are these people marks?” asked the double-long limbed boy. He and his obvious twin sister stood together behind Madame Zaroza. Their dark eyes were wide in dark-olive faces.
“Everybody’s a mark, properly considered,” Madame Zaroza said. “Even these folks. Though not now.”
She dragged in smoke, then pensively let it out. “Right now, looks like we’re the marks for
them
.”
“Are you coldhearts?” asked the spider-limbed girl twin. She seemed more thoughtful than her brother.
“Mebbe,” Madame Zaroza replied, “but I wonder. Tall, dark and dangerous there is too good-looking for a coldheart. Come to think of it, so’s the redhead. Women who look like that don’t
stay
looking like that long running with coldhearts. Unless they get kept more or less intact to sell on to slavers.”
“I assure you, Madame Zaroza,” Doc said in his most formal tones, “we are no coldhearts.”
“At least not your usual run of coldhearts,” Mildred said.
“So what is your gig?” Madame Zaroza asked. “I’m guessing this isn’t a straight jack-up? Because we’d have gotten to the point by now.”
“Not exactly,” Ryan said. “You got something that doesn’t belong with you. We’re here to take it back.”
She nodded. “Well, Sleeping Beauty warned us you were coming for that, yes.”
“‘Sleeping Beauty,’” repeated Ricky, who stood behind Ryan. “That’s the lady in the painting? On the side of the wag?”
“Yes.”
“And you said she said we didn’t mean you any harm, too. Is she a doomie?”
“Well, you’re sure full of questions, aren’t you? Yes, she is.”
“Indeed, Madame Zaroza,” Doc said. “I cannot help noting that a high proportion of your performers appear to be muties.”
“I’m not,” said the fur-covered man, who answered to Squatsch. In the light, the pointed tufts sticking up from either side of his skull proved to be hair. His ears were normal in size, shape and placement, though covered with the same dark fur as the rest of him except the pink palms of his hands. “I’ve got a condition called hypertrichosis.”
“I’m not,” said the slight man in tights. “I’m Stretch—what they used to call an India Rubber Man in the carny trade. I was born flexible and trained myself to the rest.”
“Masked Max—yeah, he takes his mask off sometimes—is a skilled knife thrower and nothing otherwise out of the ordinary,” Madame Zaroza said, nodding toward the man with the vest sewn with many pockets or flaps with flat hiltless knives stuck inside. “Although he can also juggle, and he throws a mean bowling pin, as well—as I believe your older friend discovered.”
With great gravity Doc mock bowed in his chair. He never spilled a drop from his teacup.
“Professor Finesse, who dosed your other friend with his patented sneezing powder and then stunned you all with one of his Patented Double-Wide Flash-Bangs, is a whitecoat, exiled from the lab community he grew up in back East.”
The man in the fawn coat bowed. “In many ways,” he said, “my life, should my background become known, would be in more perilous straits than those of our mutant brothers and sisters.”
He straightened and smiled at their clump of visitors. “No hard feelings, I trust.”
Mildred glared and sniffled. Ryan shrugged.
“Ace trick,” he said. “Worked. That time.”
“I also perform stage magic and conjuring. And of course my patent medicine will display remarkably curative properties to a diversity of ailm—”
“Can the sales pitch, Prof,” Madame Zaroza said, lighting a cheroot. “ Our twins there are Spider and Monkey. They’d been with us a year before we found out their given names were Moss and Hilary.”
“Are you muties?”
“Ricky!” Krysty said sharply.
“Sorry.”
Moss—Krysty thought he was Monkey, but wasn’t sure—alternately glared defiantly and dropped his gaze. His sister seemed more comfortable with the strangers.
“We don’t know,” she said in a clear voice. “All we know is we’re different. We’ve been on our own since we could walk and not welcomed anywhere, until we fetched up here.”
“I don’t suppose I could convince you this is all makeup,” Draco said. He had laid aside his tray and rested his finely scaled forearms on the breakfast bar.
“He’s a mutie. Sleeping Beauty, I told you about. And Catseye, of course. She’s our lookout.”
The last was a tiny young woman, who looked to be little more than a child, who crouched in a corner staring at the intruders half curiously, half fearfully from beneath brown bangs with a pair of golden eyes that were easily twice as large as a norm’s. And their pupils were indeed vertical black oval slits, like a cat’s.
“What about you?” Mildred asked.
Madame Zaroza shrugged. “I’m just the head freak-wrangler,” she said. “I ride herd on this crazy outfit, run the shows, do some sleight of hand, run a few scams on the side, do what I can to keep everybody fed and safe and the wags running. Otherwise my job is Woman of Mystery.” She said the last pointedly.
“As to why we could handle you so fast,” Masked Max said, “it’s the same reason I can throw knives and Stretch can put his heel behind his head when he’s standing up—practice.”
“It’s hard enough on my people being muties and freaks,” Madame Zaroza said. “My traveling show just barely gives them a pretext to be accepted among norms, and that’s limited in degree and duration. Even here in Amity Springs, and that’s an accepting place.”
She sighed. “Or was. So we don’t dare hurt any of the locals. Nothing permanent, anyway. You see?”
“Yeah, well...” Ryan said. “What I
saw
was that you people were ready enough to put the boot in when you had us down.”