James Axler Deathlands 001 Pilgrimage to Hell

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watching you.
And they always seemed to be whispering about you behind your back, except
when you swung around and they weren't whispering at all, their lips were
closed.
Except you knew they'd been whispering about you, insulting you. And you got
so mad at this sometimes that you took a whole bunch of them men, women,
brats and herded them into the trucks and took them back to the Cellars and
you stopped them watching you out of the corners of their eyes by taking their
eyes out. And you stopped them talking about you behind your back by sewing
their lips together.
But the funny thing was, it didn't seem to do the trick, didn't seem to stop
the watching and the whispering. And you couldn't herd the whole town into the
Cellars.
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And then there was the sniping. You'd be in a jeep and heading to the mines or
coming back from them, in the line of duty, and suddenly one of the guys with
you would keel over, one side of his head blown away, his soft nose and blood
and brains splashed everywhere. First time this had happened everyone had
thought it was a marauder attack, although marauders around this neck of the
woods were in fact very scarce; they'd been dealt with savagely years back and
now didn't come around anymore because of Mocsin's heavy rep. But it wasn't a
marauder attack.
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There were no damned marauders in the near vicinity or the far vicinity, and
you couldn't figure out who it was. And then it happened again. And again. And
again.
And it got to be a regular occurrence, although randomly timed and in
different places, different stretches of the road. And so all the open jeeps
were laid off and mine patrols only worked from secure buggies and land wags.
And now, over the past couple of months, three buggies had been blown to scrap
by mines, their occupants so much torn and bloody meat.
And then there were the disappearances. Every so often a buddy would fail to
return to barracks. At first this was thought to have been due to drunkenness,
perhaps. In the old days there'd been a great deal of drunkenness, but then it
was realized that although everything in town was yours, and free, there had
to be some discipline in the force, and you only got seriously juiced in off
periods, when it didn't matter. But then it was thought that maybe it wasn't
the booze because none of those guys ever came back, and at last count, over
the past two months or so, there were about twenty guys gone and it was as
though they'd never existed in the first place.
And the worrying thing was, no one at the top seemed to be taking much notice
of any of this, despite the rumbles of discontent from the lower ranks. And
when you put forward the theory to your unit leaders that maybe something
ought to be done about this, and it seemed to you that all of these weird
occurrences were maybe somehow linked, and it was just possible that there was
some kind of underground cell in town intent on sabotage and murder, all that
happened was you got bawled out and told to mean up your act, boy, or you'll
be on hog duty in short order.
So you shut up.
Of course, you appreciated that the guys up top had their own problems and
plenty of them. You couldn't help but notice these things. Power shortages,
food shortages, sewer-disposal problems even the johns in the barracks were
beginning to stink up, and no one seemed able to unblock the crappers. And all
these epidemics didn't help matters.
And now these miners. It was unbelievable. How in hell had they been able to
fix things the way they'd been fixed? Someone wasn't running a very tight ship
out
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there. Some very red faces would be around when it was all sorted out. Not to
mention a few summary executions. Probably more than a few, come to think of
it, and it was a relief to realize that you hadn't been involved in mine duty
for a good four months. So they couldn't blame you.
Best thing to do under the circumstances was keep your head down; don't make
waves, don't attract attention. Let the upper echelons sort the mess out. Just
do your job and don't talk back and don't come up with wildies about criminal
elements in town being behind all this because those at the top knew what they
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were about, and if they dumped on such theories the reason had to be because
they had the matter well in hand.
That had to be it.
Nevertheless, it was wise to take precautions. Even out here, in the north end
of town, outside the Big Man's mansion outside this sprawling, many-roomed
pre-
Nuke dwelling place that had once belonged, or so you'd heard, to some guy
called Bank Manager, whatever that meant it was wise to be wary.
You always had to stand, when you were on guard duty, out in the light, out in
the glare of the spotlights that lit up the area around the house, the lawns,
the driveway. That was where you had to be. You had to show yourself, holding
your piece, so that any guy who got past the electrified fencing and then the
outer ring of sentry-hides would see you and shit himself. That was the
theory, and as a theory it was fine, although of course the mere idea of
anyone getting up this far was ludicrous. Laughable. The last time anyone had
tried to ice the Big Man was -well hell, it had to be all of a dozen years
ago, and he'd been crazy, and in any case what had happened to him had been so
bad that anyone trying the same trick would have to be triple crazy. As far as
you could remember and you'd only been eight or nine at the time they'd kept
the sucker alive for two whole weeks out in the center of town so everyone
could see, on a specially constructed platform, and for the last ten days of
that two weeks he was screaming to die, begging for it. How the hell they'd
managed to keep him alive, with not much skin on him, and things sticking into
him and out of him and up him and all, was beyond you. Unreal. Those
guys hell, they'd been real clever, real talented. It was one of the reasons
that made you want to be a sec man when you grew up.
So no way was any guy going to be smart enough or brave enough or even stupid
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enough to get this close to the Big House, and really what you were was a kind
of honor guard, and there was no danger whatsoever and it didn't really matter
if you stood in the light at all. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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