As Kaa stepped out of the car, he glanced at the other side of the elevator shaft, at the car crushed by impact with the ground. It was sprinkled with stickies so dead and stiff they might have been cardboard cutouts. He pushed the living soldiers away from his legs and in a loud and distinct voice, ordered them to help carry the bags out of the back of the car.
They trooped in a ragged file back across the lower level of the redoubt, under the low, acoustic-tile ceiling
and the banks of sputtering fluorescent lights. At Kaa’s direction they deposited the bags on the floor beside the open door to the gateway.
The odor of death was thick and noxious, despite the hum of the nuke-powered air-filtration system. That was because the source of the pollution was still inside the mat-bans chamber. Kaa could see the soles of bare feet, already blackened by decay.
The chamber door was standing wide open, which, he thought, could have explained why no more reinforcements had arrived. Without a closed circuit at this end, the book had said it was very dangerous to send anything living through the system. Perhaps that’s why there were so many dead inside. Had the last stickie out of the chamber forgotten to shut the door? Stickies were capable of great thickheadedness, especially when excited.
Kaa stuck his head in the chamber and saw the sprawled bodies of half a dozen stickies. He knew right away they weren’t mat-trans casualties because they didn’t have the telltale marks of a failed remateriali-zation-incomplete heads, fingers, toes. These stickies had been hacked to death, their skulls broken apart by multiple blows by a sharp, heavy weapon, a cfeaver or machete. Quite violent blows, from the look of them. Two of the stickies had their arms cut off at the elbows.
“Get them out of there,” Kaa said. “And get something to mop up the mess.” The blood, vomit and excrement in the chamber was still in a semi liquid state. Before they used the gateway again, it needed to be
completely swabbed out. Either that or they risked arriving at their destination coated head to foot with a fine film of the stuff.
The zoo muties rummaged around in the surrounding rows of desks and came up with various paper products, some more absorbent than others. They set to work inside the chamber.
“You,” Kaa said to Jak, “what do you know about all this chilling?”
The white-haired teen didn’t lie and he didn’t beat around the bush. He looked up at the mutant giant and said, “Was us or them. They didn’t give us choice.” He leaned over and pulled out one of his little black throwing knives from the throat of a dead stickie. He wiped off the blade on a desk blotter. “We were just trying get out here,” he said. “Stickies didn’t want to let us.”
Kaa looked at his Angelica, who nodded. It was the truth, and he accepted it
“I understand,” Kaa said to Jak. “You had no choice. Regrettable, but there’s nothing more to be said.” He watched the cleanup for a minute or two, then he said to Jak, “I want you to go up in the elevator and bring the rest of the stickies down here to me.”
“Lion come, too?”
“If he wants to,” Kaa said, “but don’t let him smack around any more of the stickies. They don’t like it.”
“Can’t blame ’em for that,” Jak said. He trotted off for the elevator with the lion at his side.
When the teenager was gone, Kaa took Krysty’s
wrist and led her away from the others. She followed willingly. “Sit, Angelica,” he said, indicating one of die office chairs behind a desk. She sat, gazing up at him expectantly with her clear green eyes.
“I want to finish the conversation I started in the Apocalypticon vault,*’ he told her. “I said that you are important to the future of the new people of Death-lands, but I didn’t explain why. Now is the time for me to do so. I told you back in Willie ville about my worst fear, that I might succeed in uniting our land and its people during my lifetime, but that once I die, it will all pass into chaos again.”