“That’s okay, Jackson,” Crecca said patiently, after the little creature’s spin move went awry, and it crashed into the wall. “Let’s take it from the top…”
Chapter Four
The Clobbering Chair smiled and waved at Baron Kerr, beckoning him to come sit. To take the load off.
The plain piece of metal office furniture stood in the middle of the ville’s tiny, pounded-dirt, central square. It had been dragged out of the low blockhouse across the way. Leather straps hung from the armrests and looped around its front legs. Leaning against its back was a club made of three and a half feet of heavy iron pipe, one end wrapped with strips of rag to form a handle.
For a shimmering instant, the baron could see a smiling victim seated there. A smiling executioner, standing behind, club in hand. A smiling audience surrounding all, patiently waiting its turn.
Baron Kerr had long since given up trying to keep the faces of any of them separated. For him the individual members of the army of the dead blurred into one another, and into the few still living, who were just as eager as those who had gone before to feel the weight of the falling club.
Kerr never had visions of the ghosts of those carted up to the pool, quarter sawn and chucked in. But often, living people appeared to him—indeed, everything that he saw, heard, touched, tasted and felt—as puffs of colored smoke rising up in front of a wall of infinite blackness. At other times, the baron experienced just the opposite perception, that everything that existed was unified, a universe-spanning, living singularity that invaded and permeated the void like the tendrils of a rad cancer. When in this latter mode, as he was now, the clear divisions between objects, the boundaries between animate and inanimate, between human and tree and stone no longer existed.
He dimly remembered that there had been a time—or he imagined that he dimly remembered— when his perception of things had been different, when he was someone else, somewhere else. Though the details were beyond him, he could recall that creatures like those of the pool and surrounding woods hadn’t always spoken to him in his own language, and that the earth and water and sky hadn’t always heaved and shuddered with stirrings only he could see and understand.
The world, itself, hadn’t always been entirely alive.
The pale-yellow snow of spore fall, as fine as table salt, lay in scattered drifts as Kerr trudged across the square, toward the dirt-floor shacks and lean-tos built against the outer wall of the blockhouse. A half-dozen people stood around a fifty-five-gallon fire drum, watching their dinner cook on a red hot steel grate. One of them turned over the sizzling, pale, roast-shaped blob with a sharp-pointed stick. The baron’s grimy, raggedy, bright-eyed subjects all grinned and nodded a subservient greeting to him as he passed.
Kerr didn’t acknowledge their presence. He walked down the short, narrow flight of concrete stairs to the below-ground-level blockhouse entrance. The door, a massive, welded-steel bulkhead, had been twisted and wrenched away from the frame by crowbar and chisel. Scraped back on its sprung hinges, it no longer closed; it had never closed for as long as Kerr had been resident royalty in the blockhouse palace.
Though there were no windows, it wasn’t dark inside. Greenish light coruscated from the beads of condensation sweat on the concrete-block walls. It glowed from the accumulated puddles along the floor seam of the central hallway. Most of the acoustic tile ceiling lay scattered about on the floor. The low ceiling’s fluorescent light fixtures dangled lopsidedly from rusting chains and rotten wires.
Four of the seven small rooms off the main corridor were packed with squat, yellow-enameled, inoperative machines of unknown function. These machines were lagbolted into the floor. Thick nests of pipes of varying diameters fed into and out of them, and vanished into holes cut into the block. Dials and gauges with cracked faces and missing indicators dotted the walls of these rooms.
Kerr’s quarters were in the largest of the blockhouse’s three offices. He made his baronial bunk on the gray plastic laminated top of the built-in desk that ran the full length of the back wall. His pallet was a duct-tape-patched, flaccid, plaid-flannel-lined Coleman sleeping bag that hadn’t been cleaned since skydark. The work space’s computers, printers and monitors had been pushed off onto the floor and left there in a shattered heap.