Moonfeast

“Good, I don’t like this place,” Krysty said, openly scowling in distaste at a group of armed sec men walking by with a prisoner in chains. The old man had been badly beaten and he was dragging a twisted leg that would probably never work correctly again.

“Damn straight,” Jak agreed, both hands resting on his belt buckle to stay close to his blaster. A true albino, the lean teenager was pinkish-white, as if the savage Deathlands sun never reached his pale skin. His long hair was the color of fresh snow, his eyes as red as the dawn after a storm. A pair of sunglasses poked out of his shirt pocket for when needed, the bridge repaired with a piece of duct tape. A knife was sheathed at his side, another at the small of his back, and a third jutted from the top of his left boot. Several others were hidden all over his body. A big-bore Colt Python .357 Magnum blaster rode in a leather holster at his side, the brass in his gunbelt an odd combination of both .38 short rounds and the slightly larger .357 Magnum Express rounds.

“Then let us make haste, Hermes, and outrace the golden apple of yore!” Doc Tanner rumbled in a deep bass.

“Come again?” Jak asked, blinking.

“Let’s blow this pest hole before nightfall,” Ryan said by way of translation.

The albino teen smiled. “Fucking A.”

“Quite so, my young friend. Quite so,” Doc stated in agreement, dourly watching the sec men shove the prisoner into a tan brick building. The faded lettering on the side proclaimed that the place had once been the Hobart Public Library, but now it served as the city jail, an internment facility from which few, if any, ever departed still requiring air to breathe.

Tall and slim, Theophilus Algernon Tanner was neatly dressed in clothing from another era: a frilly white shirt with a black string tie, and a swallowtail frock coat. Everything he wore was patched, but clean, and his fingernails were neatly trimmed, which set him apart from most people in Deathlands. His long face was heavily lined, but not from age, and his luxuriously thick hair was a deep silver in color. A massive Civil War blaster called a LeMat rode on his hip, the pouches of his gunbelt bulging with black powder and other items needed to feed the monstrous handcannon. A small eating knife was sheathed behind the revolver, and an ebony stick with a silver lion’s head was thrust into the gunbelt like a Japanese war sword.

Born in the nineteenth century, Dr. Theophilus Tanner had been an unwilling participant in a time-trawling experiment. Ripped from the bosom of his family into the late twentieth century, Doc had been deemed too difficult a subject and was sent one hundred years into the future to what had become Deathlands. Alone and confused, Doc had nearly gone insane struggling to survive in the savage reality of the shockscape until Ryan rescued him from the slave pit of a sadistic sec chief named Cort Strasser. Sometimes, Doc’s mind slipped a little, and he briefly imagined that he was safely back home in the loving embrace of his wife, but he always rose to the occasion if there was trouble. Doc was a valuable member of the group with his mental encyclopedia of arcane knowledge, and a deadly fighter. However, the companions knew for a fact that the man would abandon them in a heartbeat if he ever got a chance to go back home to his children and beloved wife, Emily.

Going to the folding door of the bus, Ryan yanked it open and climbed inside. The wag was empty. “Where are J.B. and Mildred?” he growled, sliding into the driver’s seat. The man had fully expected them to be asleep in the back.

“Just down the street,” Krysty replied, slipping into the gunner seat opposite the man. “There was a commotion down at the local healer’s, so Mildred wanted to see if there was anything she could do to help.”

“And J.B. went along to guard her six.”

“Exactly, my dear Ryan,” Doc stated, taking a place alongside Jak. “He is the Daemon to her Pythius.”

Understanding the obscure literary reference only because the time traveler had used it many times before, a brief flood of anger filled Ryan, then he forced it aside and accepted the simple bad timing. There was nothing else to do in the matter. Dr. Mildred Weyth, a freezie from the twentieth century, had her own set of priorities, and helping folks in need of medical attention was at the top of that list.

“All right, let’s find them fast, then roll,” Ryan said, pulling the lever to close the door. It cycled shut with a hiss of working hydraulics.

“No prob,” Jak said confidently, cracking open the cylinder of his Colt Python to start removing the .38 rounds and replace them with the much more deadly hollowpoint .357 Magnum cartridges. One reason the teenager carried this particular model blaster was that it could use both size brass, a unique feature that had saved his life many times.

Working the throttle and gas, Ryan fought the old diesel engine into life, then rumbled away from the curb and started down the middle of the road. Kids and barking dogs scattering at the advance of the rattling vehicle while adults went to hide inside homes and stores, and mounted sec men fought to control their frightened horses at the sound of the sputtering engine.

“Rad-blasted bastards,” Krysty muttered, reading the lips of a passing guard. “These local boys really hate us.”

“We not slaves. Of course hate,” Jak stated, closing his blaster. “They try capture, we fight. Easier ace drunks and crips.”

“How true, lad,” Doc agreed, thumbing back the hammer on the single-action LeMat. “Too long have these cowardly poltroons feasted upon the flesh of the weak, and the taste of an honest fight fills their bowels with Hobbesian turpulence.”

“They still outnumber us fifty or sixty to one, Doc,” Ryan reminded him, turning the wheel sharply to take a corner. “So stay razor, people!” Then he added almost as an afterthought, “And if a man wearing a derby hat comes at you, chill him fast.”

“Isn’t that your friend who got us the exit pass?” Krysty asked, her animated hair curling in confusion.

“He was,” Ryan growled, going around a huge pothole before angling into the parking lot of a large brick building with a lot of tiny windows set high off the ground.

Once, long ago, the place had been a carpet warehouse. But now the ville used it as the slaughterhouse for the animals they raised to feed the baron and his army of sec men. Supposedly, it was also what passed locally for a hospital. There was a strong smell of blood and excrement in the air, and from somewhere inside the building came the agonized squealing of a hog that abruptly stopped, only to be followed by the dull thuds of a butcher’s hatchet.

“By the Three Kennedys, this is an abattoir!” Doc said in utter repulsion.

“Not our business,” Ryan stated, braking to a halt. Briefly, the man checked the plastic mirrors to make sure nobody was lurking outside the wag, before cycling open the door. “Let’s just find our people and jump out of this rad pit.”

“Agreed, lover,” Krysty said, removing the tape from the handle of a gren. Gaia, the Earth Mother, said that all living things were precious, but the woman also knew that sometimes the only way to save an innocent life was to chill an enemy. She saw no contradiction in this. It was merely common sense, a question of balance in maintaining the circle of life.

After checking their weapons, the companions dutifully clambered out of the vehicle, and Jak went behind the wheel.

“I stay,” the teen announced, slipping on his sunglasses. “Keep engine hot in case we run fast.”

“Just remember the codes,” Krysty warned, and the teen scowled in reply as if such an event was beyond impossible.

Heading past a low corral full of bleating sheep and a couple of three-eyed goats, the companions walked into the slaughterhouse and were instantly assaulted by the nearly overpowering reek of bodily fluids. The concrete floor was covered with a mixture of sand and sawdust clotted with feces and spilled blood. Clattering chains hung overhead, the dressed carcass of a cow going by, the warm meat steaming slightly in the afternoon chill.

Lining the walls were tiny stables of assorted animals waiting to be aced, rough trenches were cut into the flooring to drain away their urine to be used in the tanning process.

Scurrying around were teams of young children carrying plastic buckets full of blood, probably to be made into sausage, while somber adults pushed along wheelbarrows piled high with raw animal skins. The hides were covered with thick layers of salt as a preliminary step to becoming cured, then tanned and turned into various useful forms of leather.

Off to the side was a claw-foot bathtub full of slimy animal brains, and right alongside was an open hole in the floor that a squatting man was using as a toilet.

“Mildred must have gone ballistic over these filthy conditions,” Krysty muttered, trying not to breathe through her nose. Outside the slaughterhouse, the combinations of ripe smells was horrendous, but inside the building they were beyond description, almost becoming a tangible force.

“You got that right,” a familiar voice said.

Turning, the companions saw a short, wiry man step out of the shadows. He was in a worn leather jacket, a battered fedora and fingerless gloves. An Uzi machine gun was slung at his side, and a strip of damp cloth was tied across his nose and mouth.

Called J.B. by his many friends, John Barrymore Dix was also known as the Armorer, a nickname given to him because there wasn’t a firearm known that the man couldn’t repair. Hanging at his side was a bulging leather bag, a stiff piece of fuse and the end of a pipe bomb sticking out from under the protective flap. A S&W M-4000 scattergun was strapped across his back, the nylon strap lined with fat, red, 12-gauge cartridges.

“Here, try this,” J.B. said, tossing over a plastic bottle.

Catching the container, Ryan removed the cap then pulled out a handkerchief to liberally douse the cloth with the murky fluid. He passed it over to Krysty, then tied the makeshift mask around his face. Instantly the reek of the place eased noticeably, to be replaced with the sharp, antiseptic sting of witch hazel. It made his nose tickle, but the urge to vomit was seriously reduced.

“Millie hated to waste the witch hazel, but there was no other choice. This place stinks worse than a stickie’s underwear,” J.B. said, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses. “So, did we get the pass?”

“Yes, but we have to leave right now,” Ryan stated, covering his mouth with a hand. “Where’s Mildred?”

“This way,” J.B. said, walking deeper into the reeking building.

Just beyond a pile of rock salt that reached almost to the ceiling was a curtain of red velvet that had probably been salvaged from a movie theater. Pushing it aside, the companions saw only smooth concrete floor and canvas cots. Most of them were filled with limp bodies lying perfectly still in a way no living being could ever duplicate.

At the sight, Doc was stunned speechless. This was also the ville morgue? Reaching into a pocket, the man extracted some beef jerky he had purchased from a street vendor and surreptitiously threw it away. He would rather starve than consume anything processed from this house of horrors.

In the center of the room, several large wooden spools used to carry cable had been tipped over sideways to be used as makeshift tables. Old-fashioned glass lanterns stood on each of them, the alcohol flames turned up all the way to give the maximum amount of light. Surrounded by the tables was a sec man firmly strapped into a chair, and a black woman was standing nearby running the flame of a butane cigarette lighter over the end of a pair of ordinary pliers.

Short and stocky, the woman’s beaded plaits hung to her shoulders and occasionally clattered when she moved. She was dressed in denim jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, and a lumpy canvas satchel hung at her side, the worn fabric bearing the faded lettering M*A*S*H. A police-issue gunbelt circled her waist, the holster supporting a Czech-made .38 ZKR target pistol.

Born in the twentieth century, Dr. Mildred Weyth had gone into the hospital for routine surgery, but something had gone terribly wrong and the attending doctors desperately attempted to save the life of their friend by putting her into an experimental cryogenic freezer unit. A hundred and some odd years later, Mildred awoke to find the nuclear war long over and herself trapped in a never-ending battle for survival in the nightmarish world of what had once been the United States of America.

“Now this is going to hurt,” Mildred said, cutting off the lighter and waving the pliers to cool them down. “But there’s no other way if you ever want to eat meat again. Understand?”

Dumbly, the man nodded, his muscles visibly tightening.

“I don’t know about this,” said a stocky man wearing a bloodstained carpenter’s apron. The loops were filled with different types of knives, homemade probes and car mechanic tools. “I’ve never been able to transplant the teeth from a corpse into a living man before.”

“That’s because you probably waited too long,” Mildred admonished. “Or washed the teeth first. Never do that. Teeth are alive, but if the roots are cleaned of blood they die in moments. You have to remove the bloody teeth from a warm corpse, and hammer them into the gums of the patient as fast as you can. Then lash his mouth shut to keep him from using the teeth for a week. After that, he should be okay.”

“’ow eat wid no ’eeth?” the sec man mumbled.

Mildred smiled tolerantly. “We’ll leave a gap in the front for you to drink soup and water.”

“’hine?” he asked hopefully.

“Absolutely,” she said. “All the damn shine you want.”

“Sorry to interrupt, Millie, but we have to go,” J.B. said, resting a hand on her shoulder.

She shook the man off, intent upon the forthcoming surgery. “In a minute, John,” she answered, examining the bowl of freshly extracted teeth.

“Now, Mildred,” Ryan stated gruffly, stepping closer.

Hearing that tone in his voice, the physician sighed and passed the sterilized pliers to the ville healer. “Wash them with shine afterward. Wash everything with shine, before, after and during.”

“Understood,” he said, touching the pliers with a dirty finger to test their cleanliness.

Sighing deeply, Mildred quickly stuffed the rest of her instruments haphazardly back into her med kit, wished the patient good luck and followed the other companions out of the building. Her instruments, such as they were, could be cleaned and organized later. But first and foremost, the physician had to stay alive. It was a sort of sidestep to the ancient Hippocratic medical code: first, do no harm.

Reaching the bus, the companions checked for anybody loitering nearby, then Ryan rapped on the bumper with the barrel of the SIG-Sauer.

“Hey, Albert,” Ryan said, using the code for all-clear.

“The name’s Adam,” Jak replied, working the handle to open the folding door. As they entered, the teenager wrinkled his nose. “Who-wee! What all been doing? Skinning week-aced-old stickies?”

“I would not at all be surprised if that exact scenario occurred here on a daily basis,” Doc rumbled, taking a seat. “Immediately followed by a dung-fire barbecue.” Rummaging though his backpack, he extracted an MRE food pack and found the tiny lemon-scented moist towelette that came with each U.S. Army meal-ready-to-eat. Removing his handkerchief, the man wiped his face and hands thoroughly, then did it again. Better.

Since Jak was already behind the wheel, Ryan went to the seat directly behind the teenager and settled into place with both of his weapons at the ready. Everybody else took similar positions, and for a moment the wag was filled with the mechanical sounds of bolts being worked and safeties being disengaged.

“Nice and slow,” Ryan advised, placing the Steyr out of sight and pulling out the pass. “Remember, we have the baron’s permission to leave.”

“If only it true,” Jak said, shifting gears and easing in the clutch. The clouds were thick overhead, but they could still see that the masked sun was starting to dip behind the western mountains. One heartbeat after that, the pass would become only a piece of paper again, as useless as a eunuch in a gaudy house.

Rolling along the paved streets, the teenager kept the pace of the wag steady, as if they had all the time in the world. A wrinklie with a crippled leg hobbled along the sidewalk, using his lantern to light the pitch torches set on the corners. The workday was nearly done, and the crowds of ville people were going into the ramshackle huts to start the evening meal.

Passing a group of sec men standing on a corner, Doc tried to smile affably, but they scowled in return, one of the women going so far as to hawk and spit at the vehicle.

“The age of courtesy is dead, and so shall we be, if our egress is long delayed,” Doc muttered, hefting the massive LeMat just below the louvered window. “Make haste with thy chariot, Hermes!”

“For once, the old coot is right,” Mildred said unexpectedly. “Better move it, or lose it!”

“Hear that,” Jak muttered in agreement, shifting into a faster gear.

“J.B., do we have any explos?” Ryan asked, scanning the rooftops.

“Some,” the man replied. “Want me to make some bombs?”

“Just a big one,” Ryan countered grimly. “We’ll try blowing a hole in the wall before we go into the chains.”

“We don’t have enough to breach the ville wall,” J.B. stated honestly.

“Make it anyway,” Ryan ordered, pulling out a butane lighter and setting it on the seat.

The rumbling storm clouds were turning lavender as the bus turned the corner at the barracks and headed for the main gate of Hobart. The wall was massive, as it needed to be this deep in the Deathlands, well over ten feet tall, and made of everything and anything the locals could get their hands on: bricks, pieces of smashed bridges, concrete slabs, wooden logs, cinder blocks, thousands of pieces of broken glass and endless coils of barbed wire. Armed sec men walked patrol along the wide top, and guard towers were situated every hundred feet, the wooden platforms equipped with machine guns. There was no way of knowing if the baron had any brass for the military rapidfires, but only a feeb would put them on the wall otherwise. The gate itself was a composed of railroad beams bolted and chained together into a formidable mass, the outside surface studded with thousands of sharp nails.

Set directly in front of the gate was a sandbag nest blocking the path of any possible invaders. The nest contained armed sec men and two shiny brass Civil War cannons that Doc called Napoleons. Nearby were small wooden barrels of black powder and several low pyramids of dull gray cannon balls.

“They set for war,” Jak said, going around the nest and braking to a halt directly in front of the deadly cannons. He hated to park there, but it was the only way to leave. The baron was a triple-cursed bastard, but not a fool.

Impatiently the companions waited for a sec man wearing sergeant stripes to leave the others and saunter their way. The man was clearly in no hurry, and deliberately took his sweet time crossing the scant few yards.

Somewhere in the ville, a bell began to toll.

“Nobody can leave,” the bored sergeant said as a greeting.

“We got a pass,” Ryan countered, lifting the window to hold out the paper.

Scowling in disbelief, the sergeant took the slip and unfolded the paper, reading it carefully. His cocky smile slowly vanished. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “It’s real!”

“Mind getting a shake on there?” J.B. added, resting an elbow out the window. “We got some business to handle for the baron. And you know how he hates failure.”

“Sure, sure, no prob,” the sergeant replied, then looked up and cupped his hands. “Ahoy, the wall! Open her up!”

“Say what?” a guard yelled down. “Nobody ever leaves, Sarge. You know that!”

“You been smoking wolfweed again, sir?” Another guard laughed.

“I said, open the fragging gate!” the sergeant boomed, a hand going to his blaster. “They have a pass from the baron himself! So move your asses, or you’ll go to the mines!”

That threat clearly startled the sec men, one of them dropping a smoking cig from his slack mouth.

“Yes, sir!” the first guard replied loudly, snapping off a proper salute. The second guard merely dashed into the thickening shadows.

A few moments later there came the sound of a gasoline engine sputtering into life, then rumbling gears, and the titanic gate slowly scraped aside, moving slower than winter ice.

“Be back soon,” Jak cheerfully lied, and shifted gears to casually drive through the widening crack between the gate and the wall. They were less than halfway through when somebody unexpectedly shouted for them to stop.

“Fake!” a sec woman shouted. “The pass is a fake!”

“Chill them!” the sergeant shouted at the top of his lungs, spittle flying from his mouth.

Instantly, Ryan triggered the Steyr, and the woman flipped over backward, her red life spraying into the air. As the rest of the companions opened fire at the sec men behind the sandbags, Jak stomped on the gas pedal and shifted into high gear. The engine paused as it revved to full power, then the armored bus shot forward with a roar, black smoke pouring from the exhaust pipes.

Releasing the handle on the gren, Krysty threw it backward over the bus and it hit the ground to roll a few feet then violently detonate. A score of screaming people clutched their faces, blood gushing from the hundreds of tiny shrapnel wounds.

Twisting the steering wheel hard, Jak guided the wag at an angle where the cannons couldn’t reach. One of the Napoleons thundered anyway, the cannonball humming past the rear of the vehicle and missing by the thickness of an atheist’s prayer.

“Move this heap!” Doc bellowed, holding down the trigger of the single-action LeMat and fanning the hammer with the palm of his other hand. The big-bore blaster fired a fast three times, and two more sec men tumbled into eternity, one of them discharging his own handblaster impotently into the sky.

“It’s a break!” somebody shouted on the wall, and a blaster boomed, sending out a thick cloud of dark smoke.

Something zinged off the roof of the bus, and J.B. responded with a short burst from the Uzi. A man cried out in pain and fell back into the ville.

“Hug the wall!” Mildred shouted, snapping off shots from the ZKR. “The machine guns in the towers can’t reach us there!”

However, a flurry of arrows shot down from the sec men on the wall and something crashed to the ground just behind the bus and exploded into flames.

“But their Molotovs can,” Krysty cursed, her hair flexing wildly. “We can’t risk going all the way around to the pass with those raining down.”

“No choice then. Head for the trees!” Ryan growled, acing a dimly seen figure brandishing another Molotov. The man fell and the bottle shattered, whoofing into a fireball. Standing upright, the man shrieked insanely, his entire body covered with flames. Ryan tracked the man as he dashed around madly, but didn’t waste a brass on acing an enemy who was already on the last train west. Hopefully, the pitiful screams would discourage the other sec men from following his example.

“That’ll put us into range of the machine guns,” Mildred reminded, hastily reloading.

“Got better plan?” Jak asked over a shoulder.

“No!”

“Then hold on to ass!” the albino snarled, and banked away from the safety of the wall.

As the wag streaked across the open grassland, everybody braced for the arrival of machine-gun fire. Nothing happened for almost a full minute, and the speeding bus was nearly at the trees when the ville gate began to lumber aside and out poured a dozen sec men on galloping horses, closely followed by a dozen more.

Chapter Three

Just then, the rapidfires in the guard towers cut loose with a rattling cacophony, the leaves in the trees over the bus exploding in an emerald blizzard.