Dark Carnival
Dark Carnival
14 in the Deathlands series James Axler
Chapter One
“It’s time to go, son,” Ryan Cawdor said, holding out a hand.
For several heartbeats the boy didn’t move, only stood and stared at the one-eyed man.
“You’re Dean?” Ryan asked.
“And your name’s Ryan Cawdor?”
The child’s voice was calm, his breath billowing in the cold, damp air. The noise of death and fighting was all around them.
Ryan knew that his friends, J. B. Dix, Doc Tanner, Krysty Wroth and Mildred Wyeth, would have reached the shingle beach of the Hudson River by now, near the ravaged ville of Newyork. They’d be waiting for him to join up with them so that they could escape in the recce wag.
“Time’s one thing we don’t have, son,” he said. “Time for talk later. Now we gotta go.”
“You my father?”
“Yeah, that’s what they tell me.”
“Truly?”
“Yeah.”
Ryan had never been a man of limitless patience. Right now the boy was pushing things way beyond the limits.
“Don’t suppose you got my knife? Green handle?”
“I got it.” A short quarrel from a crossbow splintered against the stone wall just above Ryan’s head, and he heard a guttural voice bellowing out commands. One of the scalies’ leaders was trying to restore some order.
“Dean,” he growled. “Now.”
Finally the boy held out a hand, sticky with fresh-spilled blood, and grasped Ryan’s fingers. Together father and son sprinted into the arched tunnel that wound its way toward the river.
THE BROKEN FRAGMENTS of fading moonlight had disappeared by the time J.B. emerged past the corpses of the scalie guards. A frail snow was falling, driven on a strong northeasterly wind. The shingle was dusted white, and the waves off the river tumbled and hissed on the gently sloping stretch of beach.
“Wag still there?” Mildred asked, panting.
“Can’t see. You make it, Krysty?”
She held a hand above her eyes, trying to look a little to the side of where she thought their vehicle might be. It was a trick that Ryan had taught her, and it generally worked. But the sleeting flakes of snow pattered in her face, making it impossible to see anything.
“No. We wait here for Ryan?”
“Perhaps if we were to remove ourselves to the beginning of that broken pier, we might be better able to provide him with any covering fire he might require.”
“Good thinking, Doc,” J.B. said. “All of us trying to scramble up there in dark and ice, and something’d go wrong.”
“I’ll wait here,” Krysty stated calmly. “Just reloaded my blaster. The rest of you go out there and keep watch for us.”
They’d been together long enough to know better than to waste time arguing with the flame-haired woman when she used that tone of voice. With J.B. in the lead, they vanished into the Stygian blackness.
Krysty held the silvered P-7A13 Heckler amp; Koch in her frozen right hand, feeling all the better for the thirteen fresh rounds of 9 mm ammo in the mag.
She knew that the others would be reloading their own weapons, preparing for the charging pursuit that would inevitably come from the enraged scalies. Krysty had enough confidence in Ryan to believe that he’d come out of the tunnel ahead of any chasing muties.
She flattened herself against the wall of rock, pistol in hand, waiting. Something was nagging at her “seeing” sense, but too much of her mind was devoted to the immediate present. Still, a small part of her brain was whispering “Danger.”
Amplified by the acoustically perfect shape of the tunnel, the dreadful sounds of dying were clearly audible. Screams, made high and thin, squeezed past the half-closed sec doors. Twice there was the noise of a gunshot, followed by what sounded like one of the scalies roaring orders.
Krysty put her head to one side, straining to hear what was going on, imagining that she could hear the clattering of Ryan’s steel-tipped combat boots striking sparks off the stones of the wide corridor.
“Gaia, help him,” she whispered, her breath frosting the air in front of her face.
RYAN REALIZED how vulnerable they’d all be if a concerted attack from the scalies should hit them out in the open, on the crumbling, slippery jetty. Against his better judgment he stopped halfway to the steel doors, reaching for the spare caseless rounds for his assault rifle. He gestured for the boy to stand still and wait for him while he reloaded.