James Axler – Deathlands 35 – Skydark

The second time he didn’t bounce.

The audience of norms applauded and whooped. Someone started shouting, “Do it again! Do it again!”

The sec men on the penthouse started hoisting him up, feet first.

By the time they pulled Ryan’s legs back over the railing, his face had turned beet red.

“It’s called bungee-jumping, Cawdor,” Elijah said. “The predarks used to do it for sport. They used a different kind of rope, of course. Springier. They didn’t want to rip their legs off.” The baron laughed.

His sec men laughed, too.

“Ready for another go?” Elijah asked.

Before Ryan could answer, the sec men grabbed him by the legs and threw him bodily over the railing. There was no opportunity for a swan dive mis time, no putting some distance between himself and the building. He dropped straight as a rock, skimming past the hotel’s jutting patios.

The falling was the easy part.

Stopping was what hurt.

Again his entire weight crashed onto his right hip and ankle. He groaned as he was ripped back up in the air by the rope’s stretch. Something inside his nose burst, and blood gushed out of his nostrils.

The crowd squealed as they moved out of the way of the spray.

This was what they’d come to see.

Chapter Sixteen

For the first time in his life, Lord Kaa was one color, and that color was mocha brown.

He lay on his back with his powerful arms and legs spread wide. He was well within sight of the berm. If anyone had known where to look, and if they had looked hard and long enough, they might have caught the outline of his upper torso shadowed against the base of the earthen bank. As Kaa lay there, baking in a shell of mud, tears of pink raced down his clay-daubed temples and curled behind his ears. In the middle of his forehead and sticking up out of the uniform brown of the landscape like a piece of river-rounded, white quartzite, his mutant pineal eye was open. Its protective lids had no muscles, no nerves. They couldn’t blink. To protect itself from drying out as it stared up into the cloudless sky, the eye leaked a steady stream of watery gore.

Kaa couldn’t see the blue vastness above him. Because his norm eyes were closed, he saw nothing directly. Nothing outwardly. Everything he viewed was indirect, channeled through the psychic network that he enabled and controlled. While his third eye peeked through twelve thousand keyholes, the dead eyes of an

army of stickies scattered around and under Baron Elijah’s fortress, his mutant brain collated and integrated the flood of images. His brain acted as a central processor for all the stickies’ input.

Holding his soldiers still for so many hours was the hardest thing Kaa had ever done. They didn’t want to lie there; they wanted to kill. The feat of mental dominance required unwavering focus on his part. Over and over he showed them the plan, the order, the outcome. Like a chess match he had already played and won, he knew how it would unfold. The murderous stickies lay where he had positioned them the previous night, hardly breathing while the sun cooked cracks in their mud coats. They awaited the completion of the last and longest tunnel. It ran under the berm at the north end of the ville, near the rear of the hotel.

A dagger was poised over the heart of Willie ville, and the time had nearly come to drive in the blade, to watch the blood well up around the hilt.

Lord Kaa knew that the only way to defeat the baron’s perimeter defenses was to get a small force behind them. The system of bunker blasterports fielded overlapping zones of fire that could control 360 degrees of access, for as long as the ammo held out. But if three of the bunkers in a row were knocked out, a clear path opened up down the middle. Once the berm was breached and his army was pouring through the gap, it would be no contest.

In fact it would be a slaughter party, a butcher game.

It pleased Kaa to think that if anyone was to blame