Chapter Eleven

The first thing Ryan heard was the engine's roar and the whipping of the wind. The first thing he felt was the pain in his right ankle, as if it were very slowly being twisted off. Blood throbbed in his face and neck, and the weight of his insides pressing at the back of his throat felt like they were about to jump out of his mouth. He opened his eye a crack, and there was nothing beneath him but air. For hundreds of feet.
Head down, he hung suspended in space.
As Moonboy corkscrewed far below, an awful dizziness hit him. He shut his eye; it was either that or throw up. But before he did, he glimpsed the black expanse of the aircraft's belly above him, and his ankle trapped in some kind of clamp. It was all that kept him from falling to his death.
Then the plane dropped like a stone with him hanging there, helpless, every muscle in his body clenched.
Six feet above the center of Moonboy's main street, the aircraft stopped and hovered. With a clack, the claw around his ankle snapped open, and Ryan fell unceremoniously to the dirt. The propwash lashed his back as the plane turned away and landed on the trailer.
When he sat up, black-armor-clad figures had him surrounded. He stared down the muzzles of their tri-barreled blasters, then looked from visor to visor, trying to make out the faces behind them. All Ryan saw was his own reflection.
One of the creatures in black gestured at him with its blaster. "Stand up," it said.
The thing spoke English, but its voice was rad-blasted strange, metallic and disembodied.
As Ryan obeyed the command and rose to his feet, a door slid open in the side of the aircraft and the pilot exited, hopping down to the road and walking purposefully toward him. The cannie who'd stolen his longblaster was sitting by the ruined curb on the other side of the street. Beside him was a squat black cube on wheels. The skin of his face under the salt-and-pepper beard stubble looked sickly gray-green. Perhaps, Ryan thought, because his severed right hand was sticking up out of the top of the cube, as if it were waving goodbye. The cannie cradled the scorched stump of his right arm to his chest. The treasured Steyr SSG-70 stood leaning against a piece of corrugated steel, part of a collapsed porch roof.
"I'm not part of that cannie bastard's crew," Ryan said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder at the cannie as the pilot stepped up. "Came here to chill him myself. I have no grudge against any of you."
Ryan didn't expect instant amnesty. He was just trying to draw them out of their black shells, looking for an edge, something he could use. He got no response.
The pilot who faced him was the biggest of the lot. Bigger than Ryan, too. No telling how much of it was armor, of course. Irritated by the silence, determined to show no weakness, the one-eyed man went nose to visor with him.
"Can you hear me in there?" Ryan shouted at his own reflection. "Or are you a bunch of rad-blasted dimmies?"
"This one's quite a specimen," said a scratchy, metallic voice behind him. "Love the eye patch."
"He came after the assault gyro with nothing but a great big knife," the pilot said.
Ryan winced at their peals of laughter, laughter grated through stainless steel. It dawned on him that they all had some kind of amplification system for external communication. "I'm guessing you people aren't from around these parts." he said dryly.
The pilot pointed to the cannie. "Over there."
As he was escorted across the street, Ryan checked out the stubby blasters they carried. He'd never seen their like before. Why three barrels? he asked himself. Unlike Doc's LeMat, all the muzzles seemed to be the same diameter. So what was the point of having three of them if they all fired the same thing? It looked like the barrels were fed from the blocky-looking mag near the stock's buttplate, so they weren't a triad of single-shot breeches, same way a side-by-side shotgun was. He also noticed they had two triggers, instead of one.
Or instead of three.
Ryan wondered if he was going to live long enough to figure it out.
The cannie looked mighty worried as they approached. He shrank against the curb, cowering like a kicked dog.
"How did Reverend Gore check out?" the pilot asked.
"He's a wash," the one with the higher-pitched voice replied. "Standard tests show he's infected with a Shadow variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob."
"Ice Nine," the pilot said grimly. He leaned over the huddled cannibal. "With the ugly shit you've got in your head," he said, "we can't even use you for fertilizer."
As he straightened, the pilot barked a command. "Foam him. And don't forget his fucking hand."
One of the figures in armor snatched the severed limb out of the hole in the top of the cubeto Ryan, the stump end looked as if it had been gnawed by ratsand unceremoniously threw it to the cannie, while another armored figure undipped a hose from its hip. One end of the hose terminated at the bottom of the tank on its back; the other in a nozzle. As the hoser advanced on the cannie, the other one moved the cube to the middle of the street. Everyone else backed away from the flesh eater. Ryan followed suit.
"What're you gonna do to me?" Gore croaked, his eyes wide with fear.
"Ever hear of a carniphage?" the pilot asked.
The cannie swallowed hard and shook his head.
Ryan didn't know what it was, either, but he didn't like the sound of it.
The pilot tried another tack. "Well, do you know what bacteria are?" he asked.
Gore looked desperately at Ryan, whose face was a mask of stone.
"That's too bad, because I don't have time to explain it to you," the pilot told him. "Won't say this isn't going to hurt, though, because that would be a lie."
The one with the tank took another step forward, then creamy yellow stuff shot from the nozzle in its gloved hand. Three feet from the tip of the nozzle, the thin line of fluid seemed to balloon in all directions, expanding on contact with the air. Gore let out a banshee shriek as foam splattered his body, head to foot.
Whatever it was, it didn't take long to work.
Ryan could see the clothes melting right off the man. The duster dissolved, then the holey gray T-shirt. As his epidermis dripped from the sides of his face, the cannie did a shivery, heel-drumming, horizontal dance in the gutter. The yellow foam continued to billow up, until it completely concealed him. Ryan heard choking sounds from beneath the bubbling mass.
Then the cannie's good hand thrust up out of the foam, the ringers already stripped of flesh, red bones dissolving from the fingertips down, like icicles held to a flame. Beneath the mound of yellow fluff, brown fluid sizzled forth, pooling then slowly sinking into the asphalt sand.
Ryan whirled on the pilot. "What in rad-blazes are you?" he demanded.
"We'll ask the questions for the time being."
"I don't talk to bugs. I'm not answering any questions until I see your ugly faces. Take off that fucking helmet and look me in the eye. Unless you're afraid."
"We've got nothing to be afraid of, friend. Problem is, these helmets don't come off. Battlesuit isn't designed that way. But we can do something about the tint."
The top of the pilot's helmet started to go transparent, black turning clear, down over the visor, to the neck opening. The head inside had close-cropped dark brown hair in a widow's peak, and hard brown eyes.
"You're a norm," Ryan said.
As the one-eyed man turned, the other helmets went from black to clear. He saw that one of his captors was female. She had pale blond hair cut short, pale blue eyes and a thin, aquiline nose. The man standing next to her had a shaved head and wore a sandy-colored walrus mustache that drooped past the corners of his mouth. The third male was taller than the woman, but only just. He had shoulder-length, curly brown hair, some of it graying.
The last man was the one with the foam tank. He was as big as the guy with the walrus mustache, and sharp-featured. Under his helmet he wore a seamed, red skullcap with an embroidered logo across the crown that read Buy or Die! 759th AirCav. There was a different insignia on his armor's breastplate the word FIVE in small silver letters. For the first time, Ryan noticed the same design on the breastplates of all the others.
"Hold the foam ready, Ockerman," the pilot said. "If this one's got Ice Nine, too, we're going to need it."
"No worries," Ockerman replied. He looked thoroughly amused.
"I don't have the oozies," Ryan told the pilot.
"That's what you call the disease?"
"Right. I don't have the oozies because I don't eat human flesh. Never have, never will."
"You might think that would make a difference," the pilot said, "but you'd be wrong. Turns out you can get infected from eating an animal that fed on another infected animal. Or by eating a plant that was fertilized with composted flesh from an infected animal. The provirus that causes the infection is almost indestructible because it isn't really alive. It's a kind of chemical. We need a tissue sample in order to test you for it."
"You're not taking off my hand," Ryan said, retreating a giant step backward, ready to fight.
"No, no, that's not necessary. We used your friend's because it was, well, already available. A tiny snip of your skin will do nicely for our purposes. Or if you'd prefer, we could just forget about the test and carniphage you as a precaution."
Ryan looked at the yellow curds floating on top of the thin puddle of brown, which was all that was left of the cannie. If the test came back wrong, he was going to be slime in a hurry, too. Ryan thought about making a grab for one of their weapons, but he knew that would draw fire from the others. And even if he got his hands on one of the strange blasters, he didn't know how to operate it. Somehow, he didn't think they'd be willing to give him the time to get up to speed. There was the Steyr, of course, and perhaps it was still loaded, but he'd already seen how ineffective it was. Given his predicament, he decided the best course was to go along with their program, hope his body was disease free, and, if it wasn't, to fight to the death.
The woman gently took his hand, turned it palm up and expertly nicked him with a gleaming silver tool. "Big, brave boy," she said, when he didn't flinch.
A trickle of blood ran down his wrist.
She carried the sample to the cube, deposited it into a clear vial, then inserted the vial into a slot in the side of the machine.
Meanwhile, the others gave ground as Ockerman squared off in front of him, hose in hand. The no-nonsense look in his eyes told Ryan there wasn't going to be time for a discussion if the news came back bad.
"Mind telling me what a carniphage is?" Ryan asked him.
"Flesh-eating, single-celled life-form," Ockerman said. "The carniphage eats, reproduces geometrically, eats some more, then, after a preset number of generations, the whole colony burns out and dies. About the same time as the food supply is gone. Been genetically tailored to have a short life span. We're talking a matter of seconds. Otherwise, it wouldn't be safe to release it into the environment. We use it as a field sterilizer."
"Not on this one, though," the woman said, turning from the cube's LED readout. "He's prion-free. His DNA looks in good shape, too. No sign of radiation-induced mutation in his chromosomes."
"Okay," the pilot said, "the fun's over, Ockerman. Put it away."
"Right, Colonel," the man in the skullcap said. He reclipped the nozzle to his hip.
"You dodged the proverbial bullet, my friend," the pilot-colonel said to Ryan. "If you'd been infected with Ice Nine, or had inheritable damage to your chromosomes, we'd have been forced to destroy you."
"The way you destroyed every person in this ville?"
"That was regrettable, but we had no choice in the matter. Sterilization is part of our mission protocol, to prevent any possible genetic or infectious agent contamination. Everyone living in this settlement was in some way radiation damaged. Either riddled with cancerous tumors or neural-system impaired."
So, Ryan thought, Moonboy ville hadn't been so fireblasted pure after all.
Not until now.
When it was pure dead.
"If I'm not infected or rad-damaged, then I'm free to go?" he said.
Again came the steel laughter, but this time he could see their faces. They were really enjoying themselves.
The one with the longish hair said, "You're good to go, all right, but you're not free."
Ryan glared at him.
"What Captain Connors means," the colonel said, "is that we're taking you back to Earth."
"This is Earth, droolie."
"From your point of view, I suppose it is."
"What other point of view is there?"
"You'll find out, in exactly eight minutes. Until then, I suggest you sit quietly on the curb while we finish our preparations."
The impenetrable black tints returned to their helmets, as if they were fishbowls filling from the bottoms with ink.
As he waited for the time to pass and the mystery to be revealed, Ryan scanned the ridge top. His companions were out there, somewhere. Question was, would they do the dumb thing and try to get him out of this mess? He sure as hell hoped not. Considering how hard his captors were to chill, any rescue attempt was doomed to fail.
He'd noticed that they'd addressed one another using military rank. In Deathlands, such things ordinarily had little meaning. People could and did call themselves anything they wanted. Colonel. Archduke. God. But there was something in their voices, as distorted as they were, and in the way they carried themselves that told Ryan the references to rank were real. Perhaps they belonged to some far-flung baron's army? If so, there were no badges, bars or stars; their only insignia was the FIVE on their breastplates, and the word meant nothing special to him.
Ryan took a good, long look at their other gear. All of it was strange. Especially the derrick. It was even more massive than it had looked from the ridge top. It was made up of three interlocking sections that, when extended, doubled its overall length. To what purpose he couldn't guess. J.B. had been right, though. There were no signs of wear on the superstructure or of its having been cobbled together out of recycled materials. No acid rain damage, either. Everything gleamed, as if it had been recently swabbed with oil.
If the others had been captured with him, they might have been able to put their heads together and come up with an explanation for all of it. Of course, an explanation wasn't worth the price of their lives. It was far better for his friends that they weren't here, facing an unknown fate. Ryan hoped they were on their way back to Perdition by now. And that once they arrived there, they had plans to put even more miles between themselves and this place.
Up to this point, Ryan could see no opening for himself, no weakness in the enemy that he could exploit to either gain control of the situation or make good his escape. Thus hobbled, it suited his purposes to be placid and obedient. When it came time for him to make his move, at least he would have surprise on his side. One thing was certain, however. Wherever they intended on taking him, he had no intention of going along quietly.

FROM A DISCREET DISTANCE, knowing that he couldn't see her face through the black tint of her helmet, Captain Nara Jurascik studied their prisoner. Her interest was neither purely scientific nor purely military. The way he looked, the way he moved, fascinated her. It was more than his apparent natural grace and strength. It was his confidence. The confidence born of a lifetime of freedom. Freedom not easily won. Or held.
He had killed other men, of that she was sure. Probably more men than he could remember. And he had taken the lives of women, too. As a combat vet herself, she could see it etched in his blade-scarred face, a familiar road map of violence.
One-eye was a savage, perfectly matched to a savage land.
And perfectly matched to the needs of the mission.
There was so much to learn about this raw and brutal place, its riches and death traps, and such a short time to do it. What better source for this vital information than a true survivor who'd had the singular misfortune of falling into their net?
Nara recalled how sixteenth-century explorers to the New World had returned to the royal courts of Europe with captured native peoples in tow, as living trophies. The financiers of conquest had no interest in the history, culture and social organization of these prisoners. They had only zoo value. The expedition underwriters were obsessed with the acquisition of a single precious metal, easily mined with slave labor, and transportable in wind-powered sailing ships. While their minions grubbed and murdered for gold, the real wealth of the land lay in plain view before them. The wildlife. The trees. The minerals. Pure water and soil. Vast reserves of petroleum. But above all, the space to grow.
With the advantage of six hundred years of history, of countless bitter lessons learned, Nara considered her colonizer ancestors ignorant, shortsighted swine. A proper job of conquest and exploitation, a job in which not a drop of precious resources was wasted, took scientific and military precision. It took high-tech information gathering and rigorous data analysis. It also took an understanding of the psychology of the indigenous population, of the minds the environment had shaped.
What the Shadow man held in his head, the full range of his experience on this world, was absolutely priceless. If his knowledge was shared among the FIVE, it could maximize the return to all concerned and minimize the elapsed time. It could save, literally, billions of human lives. If, on the other hand, his knowledge was hoarded by just one of the FIVE, it would give that competitor an overwhelming advantage in the weeks and months to come.
A chime tone in her helmet snapped her out of her reverie. The countdown timer in the upper-left corner of her visor showed one minute until the gateway reappeared. Fifty-nine seconds. Fifty-eight.
Nara took a last look around, drinking in the brilliant sky, the limitless horizons, the expanse and emptiness, the unspoken promise of Shadow World. Of all that awaited her back on Eartha hero's welcome, an honorary CEO-ship, an assured spot in historythe only thing that really mattered to her now was the guaranteed return trip.
A second chime alerted her that there were just twenty seconds left.
"Take your positions, now, "Colonel Gabhart said. "Everyone, stand well clear."
The ground began to tremble underfoot, and once again a glittering tornado appeared in the middle of the street.