Pilgrimage to Hell

Chapter Six

"And check your boots," said the Trader through his cigar smoke. He waved the cigar at J. B. Dix. "See they do it, J.B."

"Don't worry. They always do."

"You, as well."

J.B. didn't say anything. He glanced at Ryan, a pissed-off expression on his thin face.

"And don't look like that!" barked the Trader. "I know what I'm talking about! It's the little details. You forget the little details, you might as well be dead. Hell, you forget 'em and you will be dead!"

Ryan reflected that it was ever thus when they were approaching what the Trader invariably referred to as a "pest hole" — town or area controlled not by men and women with a certain standard of civilized behavior, but by men and women for whom there was no law but their own, no rules but those that they invented on the spur of the moment to satisfy some passing whim or desire. Mocsin was just such a place. It was not the worst, but it was well up — or, depending on how you looked at it, down — the scale.

Back a hundred years or so it had been typical small-town America. A long main street with cross streets cutting it into blocks. A movie house, a bank, a couple of realtors, ice cream and pizza parlors, supermarkets, drugstores, bars, a half dozen greasy spoons, a couple of upmarket but still essentially tacky restaurants, a Lutheran church, a sheriff's office with a small jail facility for drunks to dry out in, two motels. The edge-of-town streets had trees on them, well-shaved lawns in front of medium-sized dwelling places for the moderately well-off. There was a small industrial complex: a machine-tool plant, a couple of lots where electrical components were stamped, a coast-to-coast shipping warehouse, a small plastics factory. Near the industrial part of town the homes were drabber, the streets grimier, the bars grubbier, the nightlife darker.

Mocsin dwellers of the past, had they been able to skip a hundred years into the future, would have both recognized the old hometown and not recognized the old hometown. The outline was there. The bank was there, the church, the movie house: everything was still in its place. The Nuke had not hit Mocsin, just the aftereffects.

The bank wasn't a bank anymore, the church wasn't a church, the movie house wasn't a movie house. There were places where you could eat, places where you could sleep, places where you could buy food, but in no sense of the words were these places restaurants, hotels, stores. All were more or less rat pits. What flourished in Mocsin were the bars and the gambling houses and the whorehouses. Perhaps "flourished" was not quite the word: there wasn't a hell of a lot of bartering strength in Mocsin, except at the top.

The top was represented by Jordan Teague, who certainly had his fair share of flesh; and his so-called chief of police, Cort Strasser, somewhat less well endowed in body, though not in brain.

Strasser, nowadays, ran things. Teague still gave the orders, was still very firmly in charge, but Cort Strasser kept the show on the road, did all the hard graft necessary to keep things from falling apart completely. Largely this meant cracking down viciously on anyone or anything that looked as if he, she or it might buck the system, a system that had grown up over a period of twenty years, based on Teague's highly dubious claim but iron grip on the gold mines to the southwest of town.

The road through Mocsin was the main route to the northwest and the north. Travelers, heading into the Rockies in the hopes that there they would find fresh fields, had to pass through Mocsin and consequently had to pay for the privilege, either in creds or in kind. For that reason not a lot of travelers actually made it through the town, the toll being hair-raisingly high. If you argued the toss, you ended up six feet under and your goods and chattels, which included both kith and kin, went straight into Jordan Teague's treasury. If you paid up, it usually broke you, and you either signed on as a miner so that you could earn back what you'd paid out in toll — a laughable ambition — or you simply parked your steam truck and van where a few hundred other hopefuls had parked theirs and tried to find some kind of honest employment in the district. There was now a vast shantytown of rusting trailers, buggies and rigs sprawling out of the south end of town.

Those who resided in the town and its environs did not so much live as exist, and it was a miserable and squalid existence at that. Most took refuge in booze or happyweed, sometimes both, and brought up their children in wretched circumstances with the ever present fear that one day Strasser's talent spotters would home in on them. Pretty young girls and pretty young boys were always needed for the recreational activities of Strasser's security goons. Then, once the bloom had gone from them, the kids were consigned to the various gaudy houses that lined the streets in the center of town.

Sure, commercial life, of a kind, went on. People made clothes and mended boots and shoes; people reared hogs and horses, built timber-frame houses, had small farmsteads outside of the peripheries where root vegetables, corn and wheat were grown. The mech trade was the real thriver: mechanics, welders, machine repairmen were all highly prized. Men and women who were skilled mechs could command ace jack. Even Jordan Teague had to pay for skill. He had to keep up his fleet of land wags and trucks. Maneuverability was essential in the Deathlands.

"You're not listening to me, Ryan."

"True. I was thinking about Mocsin."

"Don't waste your brain," growled the Trader. "We wanna be in and out of there, smooth and fast."

Ryan laughed.

"Fat chance! Bastard could keep us hanging around for days. Then we finally get the 'audience' with the great man. Then we have to point out that he's only getting less than half because we got hit by marauders. Then he gets mad and stalks out on us. Then we wait around for..."

"Yeah, yeah," the Trader muttered. "I know all that." His face suddenly twisted, his mouth snapping shut like a steel trap as he snorted explosively through his nose. His right hand slid inside his worn leather zip-up and clutched his gut. "Nukeblast this... indigestion."

Ryan stared at him. "See the medics about it," he said.

"Damned warlocks, that's all they are," the Trader grunted. "Piss-artists. The day I let some no-good incompetent get his mitts into me'll be the day after I've kicked it." He wiped an arm across his brow, leaving a smear of grime from the soiled jacket sleeve. "Indigestion is all. Bastard cook. Poisoning me. Needs changing." He gestured at Ryan. "Do something about Loz, Ryan. Get a new cookie. That'll cure me."

Night was falling. Deathlands night. The sky was a lowering bottle green greased with angry flame-red streaks. Dark clouds were boiling up behind them, though it was doubtful that they were rain clouds. In front of them, the mountains were picked out in an extraordinary diamond hard and brilliant radiance, strange luminance backlighting the sharp-toothed serrations of their peaks. A bitter breeze whipped the dust at his feet.

Ryan shivered, closed his long fleece-lined coat, stamped his boots. He said to the Trader, "We still heading south after this number?"

"Yeah."

"Great. It's too near to the Icelands up here. At night you start to breathe sleet chips."

The Trader laughed raucously.

"You're getting soft, Ryan. When you've had twenty years or more of this crap, you don't notice it."

Ryan watched the busy scene below. The land wags, trucks and two of the war wags were parked in a wide circle off the road. Fires were being built outside the vehicles' perimeter, massive constructions of logs and thorn and brush scrub and chunks of long-burning hardwood carried especially for the purpose in one of the trucks. Fires, as such, did not particularly deter marauders or strange animals that sometimes came shuffling around, sniffing for easy kills — dogs as big as steers with tusks a foot long, roaming in packs, bred in secret, truly carnivorous; or hideous, unknown beasts of great bulk that left wide trails of yellow slime behind them — but flames would give light when you didn't want to waste the generators, and psychologically, they were good for the men. What did deter was the immense amount of firepower concentrated in that circle of travel-worn and travel-stained vehicles.

There was enough blast power there to shred anything that might dare to take on the land wag train.

On the road itself, maybe forty meters from the bottom of the hillock on which he and the Trader stood, was the lead war wag, two big container rigs and an armored truck on Ryan's buggy. Men were milling around there; Ryan could see J.B. giving terse orders, checking things out. He yawned, turned, took in the dreary terrain.

This was basically flatland, desert scrub. Behind lay the purple forest, a dark mass only just glimpsed beyond the rises of the semi-ruined blacktop. To Ryan's right, more forest. To his left, low hills, dun colored, sparsely vegetated with brush and trees picked as clean as ancient animal bones. In front of him, far distant, the foothills leading up to the towering tors and peaks that marched across the dying sun. And between them and Ryan was the road, more woodland and, beyond, out of sight, the mess that was Mocsin.

He glanced northwest. There the hills were significantly darker, blacker. Hence "the Darks." Once, he believed, they had been known by some other name, but what it was he could not say. The Darks suited them: black, brooding mountains, slashed by hideously deep ravines, with a climate and an ugly mythology all their own.

There... lay Paradise?

The Trader said, "How's the girl?"

"Great minds think alike."

The Trader glanced at his tall war captain. "Getting yourself in there, huh?" He chuckled. "You young dogs. Make me feel like a real cripple, real old fart."

"I was thinking about what she said. The Darks."

"Most unpleasant locale. Never penetrated it. Nothing for us there, boy. At least nothing marked on old Marsh's plans."

"Doesn't mean to say they're empty."

The Trader laughed.

Had they not once made the long haul through the mountain chain maybe four hundred klicks south of there, and stood looking out over the seething Pacific Ocean, watching it roil and bubble and steam?

Had they not actually managed to sail around the lagoons that lay over what on the old maps once been called "the Black Rock Desert"?

Had they not found a vast inland sea where once had been a lake? Had they not penetrated the peripheries of that dread land of fire and howling wind that lay far to the south of them now, where terrifying gale-force gusts tore across the parched landscape, transforming the world into a hell of dust and whirling grit that shredded bare skin to the bone?

All in search of Stockpiles. All in search of...

Suddenly he stopped laughing, whipped his head around, stared at the tree line toward Mocsin.

"I think I caught a flash." He had turned to the west, one arm flung over his eyes.

"A flash? In this light? What kind of flash?"

"Light on metal. I could be wrong." The Trader shrugged. "Wouldn't surprise me if that fat bastard had guys on lookout for us. But so what? They won't try anything, you bet your life. They'd be outta their skulls. They'd need a few major field pieces to blow our snot away, and Teague's got none."

"That we know of."

Again the Trader's shoulders moved, and he turned full on to Ryan. "Where is the girl, anyhow?"

"Asleep. War Wag Two. She wanted to come with us but I got Kathy to feed her some caps. She's out. She'll stay out for hours."

"And then? Can't keep her on the train if she don't wanna stay, Ryan."

"Kathy'll talk to her, try and persuade her to stay clear of Mocsin and out of the Darks. It's an insane idea to head up there alone. She wouldn't stand a dog's chance."

"Looks a tough cookie to me."

"Not the point."

The Trader pushed a hand back through his grizzled hair, sniffed and spat. He jammed the cigar, now dead, back into his mouth.

"Up to you."

Below, J.B. was climbing the hillock followed by the lanky, long-haired Abe. J.B. stared up at Ryan through his steel-rimmed glasses.

"See the flash?"

The Trader grunted.

"What say we give 'em a little present?" said Abe. "What say a rocket up the ass? Huh? Huh?"

"It's not them I'm worried about," said J.B. darkly.

Ryan caught his eye.

"What's the problem?"

The thin little guy stared at the ground, then glanced to the east where darkness was reaching out toward them.

"Should've made sure of that mutie bunch."

"Man, we destroyed 'em!"

"Could've been more in the rocks. Could've cleared out long before we started looking."

"We were there most of the day, J.B."

Dix's shoulders twitched. "Don't like it. Should've sanitized the place. Scorched earth."

Abe looked uneasy. Ryan felt uneasy. The Trader's face was blank. J.B. looked up, his sallow face coloring slightly.

"Okay. We don't kill for the kill. Even so. Guy who ramrodded that band had brains. Thought he could nail us, which was stupid. But he went about it the right way. That's what counts."

"He's dead," said Ryan. "Gotta be. The girl, Krysty, said a sticky chased him. The sticky came back but the scaly guy didn't. What more d'you want?"

J.B. said, "His head." He added, "I just got a feeling."

Ryan felt he'd known J. B. Dix for a long, long time: an age, a lifetime. He had joined the Trader's band only a year or so after Ryan himself had signed up, and had proved himself utterly indispensable as the Trader's weapons master. Thin and intense, slightly melancholic, he rarely said much; what he did say was short and to the point. Whereas others might yell and rage to push their argument, J.B. just got gruffer, his sentences more clipped. Ryan respected this incisiveness, his singular mind.

Even so...

"Ah, come on!" Ryan punched him on the shoulder lightly. "If that mutie can take the train solo, he can have it. He'll have earned it. We oughta sign the bastard on!"

They began to move off down the slope, Abe veering left, the others heading for the small convoy on the road.

The Trader yelled, "Don't forget. Every hour, on the hour."

Abe waved. "We'll be there."

The Trader said, "Hey, J.B., you tell the guys to check their boots?"

Dix didn't reply.

In a huge, high-ceilinged room with a gallery running around its walls midway up, and tall windows now cloaked with rich, wine-red velvet hangings, and a door at the far end similarly masked, lit by light lancing down in an intense cone from a single spot concealed in one of the corner angles high above, a man of indeterminate age, clad in a faded and filthy black coat that reached to his thin shanks, and black pants, cracked knee-length boots, a shirt that perhaps centuries ago might have been white but now was a mottled brownish-yellow, and with a tall hat on his head, the brim chipped and worn, the crown sagging sideways as though it had half-snapped off, capered and danced and recited in a cracked tenor:

The shades of night were falling fast,

As through an, ah... something, ah, ah, Alpine — yes!

Alpine village passed

A youth who bore, ah, ah... something-ice,

A banner with a — no, the... thestrange device,

Excelsior!

He skipped a couple of steps, jerked off his hat so that greasy locks trumbled over the back of his neck, and waved it. Then he jammed the hat back on, took it off again and bowed away from the door, facing into the spotlight's glare, sweeping the hat around with a flourish. He straightened slowly, a nervous smile on his stubbly face. His lips came back, revealing unexpectedly white teeth. His eyes were narrowed against the light.

"Come on, come on. That ain't the end!"

The voice came from the darkness, impenetrable to the man in the ragged black clothes, somewhere under the spotlight.

"No, indeed. By, ah... no means." The old man's voice was now richer, deeper, more of a baritone. It was clear that the cracked and reedy tenor was reserved for abnormal rather than normal speech.

"Get to the bits about her tits!" bawled another voice. There was a rustle of subdued laughter.

"The, ah... tits. Yes." The man in the black clothes pondered this, a hand to his brow. Close-up, he could be seen to be sweating, the rivulets of perspiration cutting shallow channels through a good deal of grime. "Yes. It is... somewhere... somewhere here. Up in the, ah... cerebrum..." he laughed, somewhat apologetically. "One forgets, my dear sirs. One forgets so easily."

"Get on!"

"Yes. Yes, by all means. Was it not... the girl? The girl warning him? Warning the traveler? Ahh..." He held one hand in the air, forefinger upstretched, pointing toward the ceiling. On his face was a singular expression, the eyes now bulging, a terrible frown concentrated on his brow. He intoned,

Beware the pine tree's withered, ah... branch!

Beware the, ah... awful avalanche!

Beware...

He paused, squeezed his eyes suddenly shut. His hand dropped to his brow, the fingers digging into the flesh as though trying to claw their way into his brain. He was shaking, shuddering as though in the grip of an ague. His left hand now shot up from his side to his head, the fingers clamping themselves around the hand already there. A sound like a steam whistle came from his mouth.

Near the spotlight muzzle-flashes flared twice. The roar of a handgun crashed through the room, reverberated around it, the sound of the two shots running together. The rounds smacked into the floor inches from the man, whined off into the darkness beyond the light's penumbra. There was a wild yell from the side.

"Nukesucker! Watch what ya doin'!"

At the sound of the shots the man in the ragged black clothes came alive again and skipped backward. It was as if he had been expecting something of the sort, as if the experience was by no means a new one.

"I have it! I have it!" he cried. "The maiden is warning him, warning him of the fearful disasters that may befall a lone traveler amid those eternal Alpinic snows!" Again the hand shot up, forefinger quivering.

"O stay," the maiden said, "and rest

Thy weary head upon... my breast!"

There was a howl of laughter and a roar of obscenities from the hidden watchers around the huge room.

Which suddenly died to silence as another man strode into the spotlight.

Tall and gaunt, he, too, was dressed in black, though his clothes were not shabby but clean and pressed, his black riding boots sending off a sparkle of highlights from their polished surfaces. His head had a fringe of dark hair at the back but was otherwise bald except for a line of mustache on his upper lip. His skin was yellowish, the flesh drawn over the bones of his face like thin parchment. His eyes were narrowed slits; his lips were drawn back into a grin that held no humor whatsoever.

Reaching the center of the room he halted. The man in the ragged clothes watched him warily, licking his lips.

"Pathetic!" spat out the man with the skull-like face. "You've got it wrong again, you old fool."

The other shook his head, a look of abject terror now sliding across his grimy features.

"No, sir. No, Mr. Strasser, I... I don't believe so." His voice was pitching higher even as he spoke. "I... I may misremember the odd word, sir. Here and there. Now and then. But I don't believe I..."

Strasser lashed out suddenly with his right foot, the toe of his boot cracking into the other's right knee. The man screamed, staggered, collapsed on the floor and clutched his knee in agony.

Strasser bent over him, hissed at him, "We shall have to put you in with the sows again, Doc."

The man on the floor cringed away from his tormentor, his voice a whimper of mingled horror and revulsion. "Please. Not that, Mr. Strasser. Please just tell me, tell me where I went wrong."

Strasser stood and stared down with a cold smile on his face.

"The maiden," he said softly. "You always get it wrong, Doc. The maiden implores the lone traveler — not to put his headon her breast, but his hand."

The man called Doc blinked up at him, still clasping his knee with one hand, a puzzled expression creasing his face.

"Are... are you sure, Mr. Strasser?"

"Positive! The maiden wants the lone traveler to squeeze her breast. Both breasts, in fact. With both hands. She is yearning for this, you old fool. Her entire body is quivering with lust for him. She tells him that she is wet for him, that only his lips, his tongue, can assuage her desire." He paused, pursed his lips thoughtfully. He said quite pleasantly, "You do remember this, don't you, Doc?"

"Why, yes...yes." The man on the floor swallowed a couple of times, licking his thin lips again, his brow corrugating into a frown. "Yes, I... I do believe you're right, Mr. Strasser. Curious that I should forget Longfellow's immortal lines. So stupid of me..."

"Pathetic."

"Indeed," the man replied, gulping. "Pathetic. Indeed, sir."

"We shall still have to put you in with the sows, Doc."

The man on the floor began swallowing hard. It was clear he was on the verge of tears.

"Please, not that again, don't make me do that again, I implore..." The words came out in a ghastly, whining torrent.

"We shall have to strip you, Doc, and throw you in with the sows. Only when you've done your duty will you be allowed to leave."

Suddenly tears were streaming down the man's face, and his body shuddered convulsively. He began to bang his head on the floor, great choking sobs racking him. He had released his knee and now started beating his clenched fists against the floor in time with his head. He began to howl.

Strasser turned from him, his gaunt face masklike. He snapped his fingers once and two men emerged from the shadows. They bent over the man called Doc and picked him up as though he were garbage.

Strasser said, "Take him to the pigpens. You know what to do."

They dragged him, screaming and howling and kicking, into the darkness.

Strasser watched them go, watched them disappear from sight, heard a door open, clang shut. He turned and stepped from the light into the gloom.