James Axler – Deathlands 35 – Skydark

The man screamed and whirled, punching, kicking, trying to throw him off.

Ryan held on, riding his enemy like a wild horse, and when the man paused for breath, he repositioned his grip. As he moved his hands, he saw the torn strips of skin, the bright, slick blood and the rows of round red welts he had left behind. Suddenly everything made sense. The speed. The uncanny climbing ability. The animal urges. Even as Ryan realized with a pang of horror what the welts meant, what kind of subhuman, mutated body he possessed, his body slapped a hand against the side of the man’s face. The tiny suckers that lined his fingers and palms seized the flesh of cheek, nose and forehead. Bracing a knee in die middle of his enemy’s back, he used all his power to twist the straining, corded neck and draw the chin toward him over top of the bleeding shoulder.

The dark-haired man had a single eye, blue and full

of hate. The empty socket on the other side of his face was covered by a patch, which only partly concealed the old blade scar that split eyebrow and cheek.

It was like looking into a mirror.

The life Ryan Cawdor was about to take was his own.

Then something even stranger began to happen: it started to hurt.

Bad.

For a terrible instant Ryan floundered in a jumble of conflicting viewpoints and sensations. His world blurred as two different sets of images, from two different sets of eyes-murderer’s and victim’s-were superimposed on one another. His consciousness inhabited both of the struggling dream-bodies at once, but he couldn’t control either. Though he ordered the aggressor to let go, it wouldn’t obey; though he commanded the victim to break free, the attacker on his back was too strong. Ryan simultaneously felt exquisite pleasure and unendurable pain as the tendons that anchored face to bone snapped, and the brutally drawn flesh tore free from the front of his skull. Victim Ryan’s head wrenched back with such force that his neck vertebrae shattered, severing his spinal cord.

Blackness cut through Ryan’s consciousness like a sword slash, dividing him from the slumping human form.

And once more there was only one creature standing in the narrow, corpse-Uttered lane.

Straddling the broken human body, Ryan the victor

clutched in his suckered fist a bloody rag of muscle and sinew and, dangling by its torn nerve bundle, one intensely blue eye.

THE HUGE BONFIRE BEAT against Mildred’s bare back in scorching waves. Of their own accord, her legs responded to the erratic rhythm of the heat, propelling her around the edge of the blaze in a jittery, jerky, arm-waving dance. Between her toes the earth was gooey soft, churned to muck by the footsteps of the dozens of others who circled the fire with her. Numbed by the pleasure she felt, Mildred danced through roiling clouds of rank smoke, through showers of golden sparks. Beside her the fire roared like an engine from hell.

It hissed and whistled, squealed and screamed.

As Mildred jigged and hopped, her arms pumping overhead, something in the heart of the pyre exploded. The soft whump hurled chunks of flaming wood, like miniature comets, across the courtyard. Wood wasn’t the only thing burning-or flying. Hot, wet gobbets of flesh spattered her bare breasts, stomach and thighs.

For the first time Mildred looked down and took note of her dream-body. Its stark whiteness stunned her. She stopped dancing, letting the other celebrants brush past her. Her limbs weren’t dark brown as they should have been, but pale as ash. And they were the wrong shape, too. Not muscular and heavy boned, but slender, almost fragile.

When she turned over her hands, she saw the rows

of tiny suckers that lined their mutated palms. A chill of horror crept up the back of her neck.

A wall of blast-furnace heat rolled over Mildred. It was so intense that she had to jump away or have her skin blistered. As she whirled, the burst of heat penetrated her from head to foot, and like an exotic drug, lubricated her joints, her belly, and made her brain bubble and froth. Instantly her concern over what she had become vanished-and the lithe, pale body resumed its erratic dance.