James Axler – Road Wars

“The children,” J.B. said. “Black dust, Ryan! There’s a triple-crazy mind working here.”

It was like an illustration from an old predark magazine. Ryan remembered Doc had mentioned the name of an artist who specialized in portraying everyday life in the United States before it became Deathlands.

“Rockwell,” he said.

There were rows of little figures, their straight backs toward the two men, faces toward the blackboard and the rigid statue of the teacher.

He was a very tall, skinny man, in his mid-thirties, with gold-rimmed pince-nez perched on the end of his beaky nose. His hand was folded around a creased book of grammar, and there was a whippy cane on the desk behind him. Ryan saw yet again the incredible attention to detail that the mysterious embalmer used. There was a faint dusting of chalk on the cuffs of the faded blue pin-striped suit, and a pottery apple rested on a table in the corner, by a globe of the planet.

There were about eighteen children in the classroom, all of them wearing antique clothes, making them look like visitants from Victorian times. All of them, boys and girls alike, wore cotton caps on their heads.

Ryan turned the handle on the box on the wall, by a poster showing the location of the centers of the wheat belt across the Midwest.

After a few seconds of hissing static, piping voices, overlaid, chanted their number tables. “Eight sevens are fifty-six and nine sevens are sixty-three and ten sevens are seventy.”

J.B. walked slowly to the front, his boots squeaking on the waxed and polished floor. He turned and looked at the children, hesitated and peered more closely.

“Ryan” He gestured with the muzzle of the Uzi. “See what I see?”

“The kids?” He joined his friend. “Oh, fire-blast!”

At a first glance, all of the eighteen children looked roughly the same size and age, roughly ten years old. But that wasn’t the reality. Now that he could see beneath the caps, Ryan realized the truth. Only four or five of the class were actually human. The rest of them were

“Dogs,” J.B. said, unable to conceal his disbelief and disgust.

All of the other corpses that they’d seen had been skillfully preserved, arranged with great cunning into acceptable facsimiles of normal behavior. But the embalmer had been less successful with the dog-children.

You could see where vulpine jaws had been pushed back and muzzles extended, bristling hair shaved off and the sharp teeth filed and drilled. The peaked ears were hidden under the caps, but some of the silent rows of creatures showed mutilated paws, resting on pencils and primers.

And the clothes had been clumsily pinned and sewn together to try to fit around the misshaped bodies of the variety of canine breeds.

In the background, the tape was still grinding on. “Six eights are forty-eight. Seven eights are fifty-six. Nine eights are seventy-two.”

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” J.B. said. “Place is a nightmare.”

“I’ll go with that.”

Ryan was ready to go. Before leaving he glanced up at the blackboard. There was a line and a half of roughly scrawled writing chalked on it, that simply ended, as though the person had lost interest.

Once upon a midnite dreery, while I pondered week and weery, Over many a

“What’s it mean?” J.B. asked. “Looks like some sort of a poem.”

“Rings a kind of bell with me. But the spelling’s all up the creek.”

They both felt the slightest breath of air as the door opened behind them. They started to turn, aware that they were going to be too slow and too late.

The voice was mild and gentle. “I fear that spelling was always my weak point.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Sure looks good,” Ryan said, returning from washing his hands at the pump out back.

J.B. was just behind him, wiping his fingers on the leg of his pants. “Surely does.”

Malachi Gribble smiled at them from his seat at the head of the table. “If only it was real, gentlemen. But I fear the bread and the venison alone are fit to be eaten. The rest are the products of my humble skill.”