Doom Helix (27 page)

Big Mike acted like he was invisible. Something impossible, even ridiculous, for a man of his size and bulk had the whiteface warriors’ attention not been focused elsewhere. As his captors charged through the gap in the ridge, heading for the bright lights of Ground Zero, he simply moved slower than they did. While he pretended to keep up, he actually slipped farther and farther back in the mob.

When there was no one else behind him, he turned and ran in the opposite direction, toward the darkness, hoofing it hard down the road to Slake City. Getting away was so easy, he had to stifle the urge to laugh.

The blasterfire and explosions had already started by the time he reached the limit of the kliegs’ illumination. When he entered the shadows he knew that he’d made it to safety. Because he couldn’t see more than a few feet of the road ahead, because he wasn’t in good physical shape, he had to drop his pace to a walk. He didn’t stop, though. He wanted to put a lot more distance between himself and Ground Zero—just in case the cockroaches decided to send out a hunting party before dawn.

The battle at his back grew more and more intense. The booms of explosives overlapped, and the clatter of blasterfire was constant. Big Mike did a happy little turn in the middle of the road, a dance-move pirouette on the
toes of his boots. Pleased as punch, he was. A consummate actor, at least in his own mind, he had played dumb and defeated. He had waited for his main chance and when it appeared, he had seized it. In a matter of minutes, all the whitefaces and Ryan and friends would be laying in chunks on the glass of Ground Zero. This while Big Mike lived to enjoy another Deathlands sunrise.

As he continued walking, taking careful, deliberate steps, he began to visualize a brilliant new career, a new future for himself. He had no hands, but he still could talk. And he had the gift of gab. He saw himself as a Firetalker, perhaps installed as a featured part of the live entertainment in an upscale gaudy house. A mug perpetually clutched in his prosthetic fingers, and perpetually topped off with premium joy juice. Free rides on the ponies whenever business was slow. And oh, the stories he had to tell, all with the same central theme—how much more clever he was than everyone else.

How Big Mike had outplayed hundreds of whitefaces.

How Big Mike had escaped the deadly alien menace.

The sounds of battle continued to rage behind him, a counterpoint to his lurid imaginings.

And then he just couldn’t hold back his exuberance any longer. Braying with laughter, he closed his eyes, and holding his pancaked hat down on his head with his prosthesis, cut a series of wild dance turns. And as he did, he tripped and inadvertently blundered off the shoulder of the road.

When he opened his eyes, he stopped himself short. He knew he hadn’t veered far off course, but he couldn’t
see anything, and he didn’t know which direction he’d come from, so he couldn’t retrace his steps.

“Oh, shit,” he moaned.

Big Mike stood frozen in place, trying to figure out which way to go. The terrain around him was treacherous beyond belief, a veritable minefield of very nasty ways to die. He looked up at the stars and realized that if he had bothered to check them before he got lost they might have given him his bearings. Now they were useless.

It was amazing how quickly someone remarkably clever could turn into a triple-stupe droolie.

One thing was for sure, he couldn’t stay where he was until daybreak; he had to be much farther away from Ground Zero by sunup. Like a tightrope walker, arms outstretched to keep his balance, he began to shuffle his boots and move forward on the glass, a foot or so at a time.

The surface he traversed offered precarious footing—knobs of melted glass, knives and sawteeth blocked his path. With his toes he felt for cracks in the surface. Between the roar of explosions in the distance, he could hear the massif moving, creaking, sighing, snapping around him. Using the stars as a guide, he tried to at least maintain a straight course over the broken ground. The idea of circling endlessly over this landscape terrified him.

Then, as Big Mike looked up to check his position against the carpet of stars, he saw a towering, shadow shape to his left. He remembered walking past a ruined, glass-encased building on the trek in. It stood within a hundred feet of the edge of the road. Awash with relief, he began shuffling doggedly in that direction.

When the ground gave way beneath him, it did so
without warning. With a shriek of splitting glass, a crevasse suddenly yawned underfoot, far too broad to jump. As he started to drop he somehow managed to twist his body and throw his arms over the edge of the break. This slowed but didn’t stop his fall.

If he’d still had hands, he might have pulled himself out. But he couldn’t hold on. He slipped backward on the down-tilted plate, then dropped from its edge, bouncing off the sides of the chasm as he plummeted downward.

Big Mike crashed in a heap, the air knocked out of him. He had no idea how far he’d fallen. And it was so dark he couldn’t see his artificial hand in front of his face. There was an awful pain in his lower stomach. When he reached down and touched it with his bare stump, it was wet, and there was some kind of stuff hanging out.

Coils of stuff.

“Oh, crap,” he wailed.

He frantically tried to push his guts back in with the prosthetic hand and stump of a wrist. They wouldn’t stay inside; they kept flopping back out.

Finally, he just gave up. He was so tired, more tired than he had ever been, and growing so very cold. He couldn’t feel his feet or his legs. Even the excruciating pain in his stomach was fading away. Wedged in at the bottom of the crevasse, in the blackest of black pits, he sensed a gradually building glow around him, and dim shapes moving at its verge.

Hopeful to the last, Big Mike said, “Mommy? Mommy, is that you?”

D
R
. H
UTH WAITED
, hidden in a side crevice of the helix until he was fairly sure the killing around him was over. The screams and the dull whumps of exploding bodies had long faded away. His helmet visor’s infrared mode showed an absence of specters passing in front of the vertical opening, a turn of events that he found remarkable. Something clearly had happened, something unexpected.

Levering himself out of the narrow crack, he climbed the spiral, making for his lab. He paused a few times en route to listen for footsteps or voices, and hearing nothing he hurried on.

When he reached the cell, he headed straight for the computer monitor. Adjusting the view of the remote cameras with a few deft keystrokes, he took in the entirety of Ground Zero. He was astonished to discover that some of the Deathlanders had actually survived the battle. Then he saw the jump machinery was gone. Obliterated.

And suddenly everything fell into place.

The connection that had so eluded him had been there in plain sight all along. Dredda, then Auriel, had kept the jump machinery in suboperational mode ever since the first encounter with the specters. That meant the corridor between universes was never one hundred percent closed. It was the idling jump machinery that had provided a link, an open portal to the Null through which they had passed. Without it, the specters couldn’t have reached into this or any other universe.

A simple, elegant solution.

Now that he had figured it out, he found it rather amusing and droll. They’d left the jump machinery
running so they could get away from the specters at the drop of a hat, but leaving the machinery on is what had allowed them in.

To end the threat, all they had to do was shut down the system and break the link to the Null.

Dr. Huth had allowed himself to be blinded by the paradigms of his own science, forcing the facts, the observations to fit erroneous assumptions and faulty theories. It struck him that probably he’d been wrong elsewhere as well. Perhaps the specters weren’t individual entities, after all. Perhaps they had no intelligence, no instincts of their own.

They didn’t need instincts—or DNA or RNA if their division wasn’t actually reproduction—if they were all part of the same macroorganism, like the fingers on a hand, or the tendrils of an anemone.

Tendrils that reached out through the reality corridor to harvest those who had been targeted. Severing the connection to the source would make the specters vanish or die, like the amputations of ghostly limbs.

Dr. Huth couldn’t actually confirm any of these conclusions. And even if they were correct, there remained lingering, tantalizing mysteries. He still didn’t know what the macroentity was, how it lived, why it killed, or what it harvested from those it slaughtered. Questions that could never be answered because the jump machinery couldn’t be repaired or replaced.

It was a realization that he found disappointing, but only marginally so. If a lifetime of whitecoat training had taught him anything, it was that tantalizing mysteries were a dime a dozen.

He watched on the monitor as the whitefaces and
slaves gathered and carted their dead back into the mine. When the one-eyed man and his short friend with the fedora carried all the tribarrels into the entrance and returned empty-handed, Dr. Huth grinned toothlessly.

Cackling to himself, he unfastened and removed his battlesuit helmet. There was no longer any need for the damn thing, now. He breathed deeply and felt the humid air against his sweating face.

The cameras showed the whitefaces busily mining the entrance, about to blow it closed.

“A lot of good that will do,” Dr. Huth said aloud.

Repowering the depleted weapons with the mine’s generators was a piece of cake. And once that was done, he could laser his way out in no time. With the tech gear that remained in his lab, he could rekindle his own personal dream of conquest through science. Deathlands and it inhabitants would become his playthings.

The blast of the explosion at the entrance shook the floor of the lab and rained sparkling glass dust from the ceiling.

As the echoes dwindled, Dr. Huth heard a distinct noise behind him, from the cell’s doorless opening, a soft kissing sound that made his blood run cold. He had assumed that all the wild stickies were dead, that the specters had hunted them down and killed them. If one was alive, then…

From behind came a chorus of soft kisses.

Before he could recover his battlesuit helmet, the muties had him by the face and neck and they were dragging him, kicking and screaming into the darkness.