Authors: James Axler
After a moment Ricky unslung his DeLisle from across his back. Unlike Jak he wasn’t a master of the stealthy blade, but he trusted himself and that blaster. And the fact was, its locked-up action and subsonic projectile made it little louder than a knife was.
Crouching, Jak peered into the large chamber, then he stepped out. Ricky followed without hesitation. For all his propensity to do balls-out-crazy shit like this, Jak retained the paranoid instincts of an old tom alley cat, as well as its senses.
It was a big empty room with ladders leading down from the lobby and where Ricky judged the kitchen had to be. There were a few old crates and barrels stashed by the back wall, near that second ladder. He couldn’t make out much of them since they lay too far from the single lantern hung from a bracket in the wooden ceiling, which was a little higher here. Enough a tall man like Ryan or Doc might be able to stand upright without braining himself.
Ricky saw that another tunnel opened up toward the back. The rooms on the other side of the corridors had to host concealed trapdoors, too. He shuddered.
“Shouldn’t we warn the others?” he asked, realizing it was even now probably a little late to be asking.
“And say what?” Jak asked. Then without waiting for the answer he knew was not coming, he padded off into another, wider tunnel that led out past the front of the hotel.
Ricky followed, glancing back nervously over his shoulder. His nutsack was trying its level best to crawl up inside his belly, and Jak seemed to be leading them into the utter lightless dark of underground.
“Not look back,” Jak said. “Spoil vision.”
Ricky set his jaw for fear of somebody—
something
—creeping down the tunnel after them. He followed Jak by the light that came from behind. Ricky realized quickly there was more faint glow shining from ahead.
They came to a place where another wide tunnel crossed this one. To the right lay total blackness. From the left came a faint yellow glow—and a hint of moving air.
Before them the tunnel continued. Clearly it ran on beneath the town hall. And to the sea, judging by the way the smell had gradually gotten stronger.
Jak headed to his left. About forty yards ahead another fish-oil lantern hung from a bronze bracket sunk in the dressed-stone walls.
As they neared the lamp, Jak stopped. He held up a slim white hand.
Ricky frowned. Then he heard.
“Is that someone chanting?” he asked, remembering to speak in a low voice rather than whispering. As J. B. Dix had taught Ricky, a whisper actually carried far, and was more liable to catch the notice of the very people, or other creatures, you didn’t want to hear you.
And speaking of other creatures, Ricky realized there was something wrong with the distance-muffled voice he heard and the chorus of other voices that rumbled a low response.
Jak moved forward. He was crouched, going slower and more cautiously. Shaking off a pang of fear and lonesomeness for his wounded, missing mentor, Ricky followed.
They came to some stone steps that were wide, slick with condensation and led down.
Ricky tapped Jak’s shoulder, gingerly, since he was afraid of what his friend and that knife might do if he startled him.
But Jak merely glanced back.
“We’re under the old church,” Ricky mouthed.
Jak nodded once, then he put a white finger to lips so pale they were barely pink.
He led them down the stairs. Past him Ricky could see that at the bottom was some kind of landing, apparently unlit. From behind, as they reached the bottom, came the dancing glow of nude flames.
Jak slipped onto the landing and to his left, so that his slight form wouldn’t be lethally silhouetted against the light at the top of the stairs. Ricky had almost reached the bottom himself when he caught a glimpse of what lay beyond the landing.
There was a vast chamber lying perhaps a story below the landing, which turned into a kind of gallery. It was full of light from two bonfires and a number of torches—and a myriad of hunched bodies shadowed and swaying against the light.
“Santa María, Madre de Dios,”
Ricky breathed. “Frogs!”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ricky almost shrieked in reflexive terror when a hand grabbed his left arm. Then he realized it was Jak, leaning back into the opening to pull Ricky’s stupe ass out of the light. He’d have been clearly visible if any hostile eyes had turned his way.
Actually reassured by the gallery’s darkness, Ricky overcame his urgent desire to run screaming back to their friends. Bent low over the reassuring heft of his longblaster, he followed Jak forward to the rail that ran along the gallery.
The lower level was
full
of frogs. The man-size muties hunched or swayed in place, waving their long misshapen arms above their heads. There were at least a hundred of them packed into a rough circle around the open, man-high fires.
The ones with their backs to the young men in the shadows were shadows themselves, grotesque and horrible. The ones on the far side were worse. Ricky could see their faces—their sunken cheeks and lantern jaws filled with long, curving needle teeth, their enormous eyes, the vertical slits that almost completely supplanted noses. What was worst about them was that, underlit like this by capering flames, those faces clearly showed the
human
in them.
Ricky noticed that some of the creatures had blue eyes. He crossed himself and begrudged the second or two it required him to take his hand off the foregrip of his longblaster.
So mesmerizing was the sheer horror of the mob of frog muties that it took Ricky—a healthy adolescent male who liked the opposite sex—a good half minute to notice that in the middle of the stone-floored circle were two naked women.
For some reason Ricky’s first thought was a terrified,
I hope one of them’s not the baron’s daughter!
But he quickly realized neither could be. They were both fuller-bodied, thus obviously older, although neither was what he’d call overfed. Each showed ribs down her bare sides. The blonde one had pink skin and nipples. The rangier redhead had olive skin.
Both were done up like gaudy sluts, eyes staringly outlined in black and showing hints of green and purple, cheeks unnaturally pink and mouths painted as red as fresh blood. For gaudy sluts, though, they looked surprisingly young and fresh. Not that Ricky had...intimate experience of such. But in the time he’d spent crisscrossing the Deathlands with Ryan and his companions he’d seen his share of them.
And they were both busy pleasuring a naked young man spread-eagled face-up on a stone or probably concrete slab set between the bonfires.
Ricky turned to look at Jak, who crouched beside him peering over the stone rail. He felt oddly relieved to see the albino was watching the scene with ruby eyes as avid as Ricky’s. But they were still attuned to the slightest flicker of peripheral motion; the foxlike white face turned instantly to his companion’s.
“So why is he chained down like that?” Ricky mouthed. He knew
he
wouldn’t need to be restrained to let himself be pleasured by two girls like that. Despite the scrotum-tightening existential dread of so many man-eating muties packed together—some almost within reach of his arm over the railing, and stinking horribly of fish—a raging hard-on threatened to explode the fly of his jeans.
Jak nodded as he turned his attention back to the scene. He wasn’t tunnel-visioning on the naked girls, though obviously he was as aware of them as Ricky was.
A tall and rather narrow-looking frog stood on the far side of the altar. With another gut-shock Ricky realized that was the only thing the slab could possibly be. Around his neck the frog had a big gold medallion decorated with a weird staring-eyed face surrounded by wiggles like tentacles. Ricky remembered that symbol suddenly: it was the same one he’d seen daubed on the front of the church by the town square.
The one they were hiding beneath.
The frog mutie was chanting something in a deep and sibilant voice. The mob of excited muties croaked responses in ragged unison.
The young man had his eyes closed and was tossing his head side to side as the women worked on him.
And then the mob fell silent. The only noise was the beguiling moans of the women and the captive youth’s answering and increasingly urgent groans.
Another creature stepped from the shadows on the far side of the sunken temple. It was tall and also somewhat gaunt for a frog mutie. It possessed a pair of small but unmistakable breasts protruding from either side of its keel-like breastbone. The green nipples were erect.
“Santo Niño de Atocha,”
Ricky breathed.
As she approached the altar a pair of naked—and obviously male—frogs came from both sides to seize the naked human women around the waists and drag them away from the young man. They struggled and screamed.
The young man’s eyes were still shut, his head whipping back and forth.
Climbing onto the pedestal, the frog-woman mounted the young man and the mating ritual continued.
As the young man clearly spent himself in the frog-mutie woman, she threw her head back and uttered an ecstatic roar. The onlookers went crazy, hopping and dancing and shaking their talons in the air as if they were all getting off, too.
As the spasms of his orgasm subsided, the captive opened his eyes and uttered a shattering scream.
The frog-woman swung her body around so that now she straddled his bare, hairless chest. She bent down toward him. He stared up at her with eyes bulging from his young face. She thrust her face toward him as if to kiss him.
At the last instant she opened her huge jaws and bit his face off with an audible crunch. His body spasmed.
Ricky’s mouth filled with sour vomit. He tried to raise his DeLisle. His only thought was to blast the frightful creature.
Jak placed his hand across the built-in silencer that shrouded the barrel, stopping Ricky. As cryptic as the albino usually was, Ricky had grown adept at reading his friend’s expressions and body language, which could be downright eloquent.
One upraised white eyebrow loudly told him, You aren’t triple-fucking-bright, are you?
He lowered the longblaster.
The nude women were struggling futilely and screeching shrilly, also without effect on their burly captors. Their bare breasts flopped in a way that almost distracted Ricky from the awfulness of what he’d just seen—and was continuing to see.
“You promised when you bought us you’d let him go when you were done with him!” shrieked the blonde.
Ricky’s heart, trapped in mid-throat like a pigeon flapping frantically to fly out his mouth, plummeted to the bottom of his stomach like that same bird shot full of lead buck.
Bought! he thought. They’re trading with the slavers!
The frog priest turned an unmistakable and ghastly smile on her. “We lied,” he said in his sonorous bass croak.
The blonde glared at him defiantly. She opened her mouth to say something furious.
Then her blue eyes shot wide and her companion’s scream blasted out fit to shatter glass. Ricky realized the male frog who held the blonde had just reached around to slash her throat.
“The hell with this,” Ricky said to Jak. The frogs were croaking fit to bring the low-domed ceiling down. Jak could barely hear him.
“Go now,” Jak agreed.
He turned and rabbited back the way they’d come. Ricky gulped and followed.
* * *
T
HERE
WAS
NO
one on watch when they burst back into the corridor from the unoccupied room where they’d entered the tunnels.
“Oh,
no,
” Ricky moaned. “We’re too late.”
Jak trotted down the hallway to the door of the room Ryan shared with Krysty. As he reached it Ricky sprinted to his side and raised a fist to hammer frantically on the door.
Jak turned the knob and opened the heavy hardwood door.
Their friends were standing in the middle of the floor by the empty, rumpled bed, shrugging into their well-stuffed backpacks. All except one.
“Where’s Ryan?” Ricky yelped.
He found himself thrust out of the door he stood blocking by a hard hand on the shoulder. “I was arranging a little diversion,” the one-eyed man said.
“You found the fish-oil stores, then, Ryan?” asked Doc, who stood with his huge LeMat in one knobby hand.
“Affirmative,” Ryan said, as Krysty swung his heavy backpack off the bed as if it were as light as a newborn baby and held it up to his back.
Ricky stared with his mouth hanging open. As he threaded his arms through the backpack’s straps, Ryan grinned at him wolfishly.
“What?” he demanded. “Did you think J.B. was the only one who could improvise incendies?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Consciousness landed on J.B. like an anvil. It brought with it a skull-busting headache and awareness of a gut that tossed like storm-blasted sea.
Then terror and loss and rage.
“Rance!” he croaked, snapping up to a seated position.
His head reeled. The back of it banged against the door, which he’d been knocked against, he recollected now. His head was still sore.
His stomach turned over. He only just managed to stop himself from puking.
Dark night, he thought. I got a nukin’ concussion.
His eyes, now open, cleared to the sight of an empty room. That much he could make out without his glasses.
Feeling sick fear—laid atop the nausea—that the frog mutie might’ve busted his glasses and left him just a little less blind than a bat, he groped around for them. Almost at once his fingers felt the familiar hardness of cool curved wire and ground glass. He fumbled the specs onto his nose.
He let out the anxious breath he’d been holding. The lenses were intact, though the frame needed a bit of careful warping to fit correctly on his face. But at least he could see.
The floor looked intact again. He might have believed the whole episode had been some kind of hallucination, cooked up by his brain after he’d tripped and addled it by banging it against the door frame, if not for the sight and smell of the dead body lying just past an arm’s reach away.
Digging with his heels, he pressed his back up the wall and away from the chill, who obviously had crapped his pants when he bought it.
For a moment he just leaned back. While his blood sang with urgency to rescue Rance—and his other companions, too—the very dizziness that made it obviously unsafe to move forced him to focus his aching brain and think.
First:
observation
. One man had been chilled and four people taken from their beds without much sign of struggle, which meant they’d all been caught sleeping except for Slammer: Gonzalez, a wiry little Indian-looking guy who was an electronics wizard who usually worked comms and sensors in War Wag One. Under Ace he had taught J.B. the rudiments of electronics as well as weapons-control and sighting systems. The others were a couple of Trader’s burliest cargo-handlers, who doubled as drivers—along with most everybody else—named Zap and Stang. And, of course, Rance.
He noticed there were wet patches on the wooden floor. Some gave a vague impression of footprints, from the front ends of clawed feet. He remembered the creatures seemed to stand on their toes. So the weird froglike muties had come from water. Reasonable enough. Maybe the sea, which was just a few hundred yards past the town hall?
They hadn’t bothered to ransack the room. J.B. could see his own pack, as well as a Remington 870 pump 12-gauge lying on the floor beside Joe Slammer’s body.
Experimentally he pushed off from the wall. His head still hurt like hell and his legs seemed to be made out of boiled noodles. But after a little swaying back and forth his legs solidified some, and his stomach at least started acting as if it meant to stay put.
Now:
action
.
Keeping his mind focused, he went quickly through the things Rance and the rest had left behind when they were taken. There were some things he needed, including Rance’s EAA Witness handblaster and a pair of spare double-stack mags of .40 S&W rounds. And, of course, the shotgun. He was never going to be a long-range marksman, not with his weak eyes. But he always favored the heft and firepower a longblaster gave him.
As he got ready to leave, he spotted Rance’s fedora lying under her bed. He bent and picked it up. He tried fitting it experimentally on his head.
Surprisingly, it did fit him. Though Rance was taller than he was, he’d always had a big head for his frame.
He didn’t delude himself she’d take him back for bringing her her cherished hat. He was beyond that now. If rescuing her didn’t do the trick, the thing could not be done.
Of course, first he’d have to rescue her. And hopefully his other friends.
And, he was realizing—mebbe even Trader himself. J.B. distrusted coincidence, and that the same ville Trader had chosen to do a secret deal was just incidentally also home to a tribe of horrible fish-frog-human muties who had a secret tunnel network connected to hotel rooms by trapdoors was just way too much to swallow. That meant that Trader, Marsh, Tully and the convoy’s two ace blaster-handlers, Sciabarra and Morrison, were either captives, too, or chills—or in immediate danger of becoming one or the other.
As for the convoy itself, J.B. dismissed it. The majority of the crew were still with the wags. They wouldn’t go down without a bastard fight, and they were just the bastards to lay one down. They could take care of themselves.
He went to stand beside the trapdoor. Then he squatted. The light in the room was too dim to make out detail, least of all with his eyes, glasses or not. But he had a small flywheel flashlight that was powered by squeezing the handle to generate juice. It was one of the things Trader apparently bought from the Science Brothers; they did do some pretty fair fabrication, whether or not they sometimes decided to go into the grand larceny end of things.
He took it out now and began to pump it with his palm. It made a sort of wheezy grinding sound along with a spatter of faint light the color of old piss. Then it lightened and brightened.
The light was enough for him to make out where the trap was fitted. That was good work, he had to admit. Though he also had to admit he was no kind of carpenter. He wouldn’t think that fine a separation would allow the door to open easily and without making much noise, as obviously it had to take even the watchful Slammer by surprise. Though obviously the sentry was focused on the door when the frogs took him down by stealth. But it took all J.B.’s fabricator’s knowledge and intuition to make out the hair-thin lines where the door was cut out crosswise to the run of floorboards.
With his pocketknife he pried up the door. As expected, it came readily and quietly. No frog monster sprang out to rake his face off with its claws.
He eased the door down beside the hole. Cautiously he shone the flywheel light inside.
A ladder with wide and double-sturdy wooden rungs led down about six or eight feet to a floor of polished flagstones. He could actually see some puddles of water at the bottom where the muties had dripped.
He needed a plan, but without more information he had no grounds to make one. So taking a deep breath, he lowered himself into the hole and pulled the lid shut above his head.
He was well and truly stuck in it now. With no clear idea of what
it
really was.
He only knew it was bad, and that it’d probably chill him.
But he never thought of backing out. Setting the hat firmly on his head, he swept the flashlight beam around his new surroundings. It was a tunnel, not a sewer, and it seemed to run along the line of rooms.
The wet patches and marks of frog-mutie feet led toward the area beneath where the lobby was. He headed that way.
Quickly he found himself in a larger chamber, low but much wider. Other tunnels opened off it.
A larger one led in a direction that, if he was oriented right, went under the square toward the town hall. The wet marks led that way.
By the entrance he spotted something dark. He knew right off it was unusual. The tunnel and subterranean chamber were clear of trash, even any accumulation of dust and muck, although some of the crates and casks stashed toward the back showed dust.
He went to it and hunkered down. He primed the flywheel light, which squeaked. He was glad his hands were strong, though the truth was he felt his palm muscles tiring. His hands, capable and used to doing as they were, weren’t accustomed to doing
this
.
He reached for the dark item on the ground. It was a little scrap of black. Brown fragments fell out of it as he picked it up with his free hand.
He thought he recognized it. A sniff made him sure. It was a piece of one of the cheroots his boss and former lover smoked.
Rance, he thought. Stuffing the chunk of cheroot in his pocket, he steeled himself and walked into the tunnel’s black mouth.
* * *
“U
GLY
,” R
YAN
SAID
,
as Ricky finished gasping out the story of his and Jak’s exploration and their horrifying discoveries.
And it was. Ugly even by the standards of what Ryan had seen and heard in his travels.
Weapons in hand, they were trotting through the ville toward the bridge inland. Not down the main street, but down a cobbled side street so narrow Ryan felt as if he could stretch out both arms and brush the soot-smeared brick and stone facades with his fingertips. He didn’t like moving through surroundings that made things this easy for would-be ambushers, but he was relying on what lay below the yellow glow that was visible behind them, down by the waterfront, to give the frogs something better to do than chase them.
All a man could do was all he could do. Trader had said that, often enough. And like many things Trader habitually said, Ryan lived his life by those words.
“But don’t you
see?
” Ricky gasped.
He and Alysa were bringing up the rear. He clutched his longblaster in both hands. At the very tail of the line, the Stormbreak sec woman had her saber in her hand and her pale eyes were wild in her paler face.
“The ville is full of muties!” Ricky said. “And they’re dealing with the slavers!”
From right ahead of him in their single file Mildred shushed him.
“We figured something was dirty, kid,” she told him—gently, given how the stress she was under was amping up her normal grumpiness. “Why else do you think you found us getting ready to bolt?”
“We didn’t know the details,” Krysty said from right behind Ryan. “But we knew our hosts planned something.”
“Ryan suspected,” Doc said. “He smelled out the trap. Our white wolf, Jak, is not the only one with that gift, either. A sly, black wolf is Ryan.”
“When we came in across the bridge the only sec they had on the one and only land route into the ville was guarded by a fat middle-aged dude and a weedy teenage boy,” Ryan said. “And if Tavern Bay didn’t have some kind of top-notch defenses against attack from the sea, the slavers would own this place. The locals weren’t staying off the streets because they were afraid of outsiders invading. They had reason not to want to be seen.”
“Ryan went out for a quick recon,” said Mildred, who was right ahead of Ricky in their single file. “And what should he see but
frogs
. Hopping across the square right out in front of God and everybody, headed for that boarded-up old church of yours. Like they had no reason to give a shit if anybody saw them or not.”
The she added, “Eyes front, kid.”
Glancing briefly back Ryan saw the boy was walking backward, obviously staring back at the brightening yellow glow.
“Did you set fire to the hotel?” Ricky asked, reluctantly facing forward again.
“No,” Ryan said. He already had his face swiveling again, his lone eye skinned, scoping the buildings on either side for signs of danger. “I found a warehouse full of cloth, a couple blocks down. I poured the cask of fish oil I happened to have along all over the stuff, left a lit cigarette I rolled out of the tobacco and paper we carry to trade on a crate beside it, so it’d fall down in the oil when it burned down to a butt.”
Behind them a bell began to ring with frantic urgency. Ryan allowed himself another glance back. The yellow fire-glow had just gotten visibly brighter.
“And
now
the hotel’s on fire,” Ryan said with just a flash of satisfaction.
“The old church retains its steeple bell,” Doc said musingly, “despite the profane purposes to which it has been turned.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Well, we best power out of here now. If we’re lucky, the frogs’ll reckon we’re heading for the docks to steal a boat, instead of taking the long, slow way out of this ville.”
He led them into an easy lope. Until they had evidence of direct pursuit he saw no reason to blow everybody’s wind running full-tilt. Plus a fast pace would make it hard to spot incidental danger.
As it turned out they were going too fast anyway. Or not fast enough.
They were within a couple of blocks of where the street played out into the weeds of the salt marsh, which were ghost-pale in the starlight. The moon had set about half an hour before. The light of the fires behind them was spray-painting a sullen burnt-orange glow on the underbellies of storm clouds rolling in low off the sea as if in pursuit of the fugitives.
Over the clip-clopping of their boot-soles on the uneven cobblestones, Ryan heard Alysa scream.
He stopped and spun, raising his SIG-Sauer handblaster.
At least a half dozen dark, shambling shadows surrounded the young woman. Ryan saw one reel back with its face spurting black from a slash of the girl’s curved sword.
“Run!” she shrieked after her companions. “Save Milya!”
A frog hopped at her with arms wide to clutch. She ran it through the chest. It uttered a dismal croak and fell flopping. But the blade was caught in its sternum. Its weight wrenched the hilt from her hand.
Another grabbed her from behind and picked her up off the pavement.
Other frogs were emerging from a side street—what had been Alysa’s right, with the main drag two blocks to their left. Apparently a whole passel of the muties had been making for the main street in answer to the church-bell alarm and had spotted the fleeing group at just the wrong instant.
Another frog went down. Facing the mutie mob, Ricky worked the action of his DeLisle to chamber another round. And short-shucked it, jamming the empty in the breech before the ejector had a chance to kick it free.
Mildred grabbed his collar from behind. “Come on, kid!” she yelled. “We can’t help her!”
With a deep hollow tolling like a parody of the perverted church’s bell, a manhole cover was pulled open by the frogs. They clustered around the thrashing captive. Ryan could see her blond hair flying as she battled them.