Читать книгу Grailstone Gambit - James Axler - Страница 9

When Grant awoke that dawn, he tasted blood in his mouth. The blood had dried on his lips and he licked them, his tongue exploring the lacerations on the tender lining of his cheeks. He came out of unconsciousness like an exhausted swimmer pulling himself ashore, and he became aware of a consuming pain in his head and a burning thirst. He remained motionless, listening to the sound of voices speaking in low tones below him. The abraded flesh around his left eye felt swollen and raw.

Grant lay in a wooden cage, a bit under five feet tall at its apex, six feet in diameter. The slats were lashed together by rawhide thongs and many turns of a heavy-gauge wire. The entry gate was sealed by a length of rust-flecked chain and an old-fashioned iron padlock.

All things considered, the cage hanging from the cross-brace framework ten feet above the ground wasn’t the worst place he had ever been imprisoned, but it was a long way from the most comfortable.

The events that had led up to his imprisonment were only a set of disjointed images, fragmented memories of ugly dreams.

Grant remembered how he and Domi sauntered into the camp of the Survivalist Outland Brigade without being challenged by sentries, mainly because none was posted. They hadn’t seen any pickets, nor did there appear to be a clear-cut perimeter of the camp. The place was a sprawling mess of people and slapdash structures.

Tar-paper shacks, lean-tos, huts and tents stood jumbled in Central Park, spread out like a spilled garbage can. Four huge fires sputtered redly in the drizzle. In front of some of the dwellings stood poles of stripped saplings with skulls mounted on top, not all of them animal.

The people they saw in the camp ranged from youths with wispy beards to sharp-eyed, hard-bitten warriors. The clothing styles were varied and eclectic—colorful wool serapes, wide-brimmed cowboy hats with snake-skin bands and scruffy fur caps.

Grant easily differentiated between the Roamers and the Farers—the Roamers were festooned with weaponry, bandoliers crisscrossed over their chests, with foot-long bowie knives and big, showy handguns at their hips.

The Farers dressed a bit more sedately, and their weapons of choice were utilitarian longblasters, bolt-action rifles and a few autocarbines.

But neither Roamer nor Farer gave Grant or Domi so much as a second glance, which, he realized in retrospect, should have aroused his suspicions. Despite being dressed in standard Farer wear—patched denim jeans and leather hip jacket over a khaki shirt—he still stood four inches over six feet and much of his coffee-brown face was cast into sinister shadow by the broad brim of an old felt fedora. Walking side by side with a petite albino girl barely five feet tall should have drawn some curious glances, even from the most jaundiced member of the SOB.

He had almost no memory of being buffeted on all sides by a surging mass of bodies that overwhelmed him with such swift efficiency he had no chance to draw his weapon. As he was borne to the ground under the weight of many men, he heard Domi blurt in wordless anger. He shouted for her to run, then a flurry of blows fell on him and hands ripped the big revolver from his shoulder rig beneath his jacket.

A soft, lisping voice said, “Move aside, let me see him. Move aside, let him up so I can see him.”

When the crushing weight obligingly left Grant’s body, he lunged upward—then he felt as if an immense fist slammed into the back of his head. The impact drove all light and consciousness from his eyes. For a long time, he saw nothing but black and heard only silence.

He regained his senses in piecemeal fashion when a cup of icy water dashed into his face roused him. He blinked, trying to clear his vision. Agony tore his skull apart. He tasted the salt of his own blood in his mouth.

Then the pain ebbed, fading to a steady throb. Grant squinted around, trying to focus through a series of what seemed to be gauzy veils draped over his face. Finally, he realized he was surrounded by planes of pale gray smoke. He made a motion to touch his head, but he couldn’t move his arms. He sat tied to a heavy, wooden, straight-backed chair, arms and legs bound tightly by strips of rawhide. Glancing down at himself, he saw he wore only his T-shirt and jeans. Everything else, including his boots and socks, had been stripped from him.

The acrid fumes of the smoke seized his throat and dragged a cough from him. Lying on a far table were several long-stemmed clay pipes, the bowls discolored and smoldering. The place reeked of marijuana and overcooked meat, of stale and sweaty bodies.

The fact that he could even smell the stink of the room told him just how powerful the stench was. His nose had been broken three times in the past and always poorly reset. Unless an odor was extraordinarily fragrant or fearsomely repulsive, he couldn’t smell it; he was incapable of detecting subtle aromas unless they were literally right under his nose.

Grant coughed again, then cleared his throat.

“You may speak if you wish.”

The voice was a low, ghostly whisper, touched with a faint lisp. He remembered hearing the voice before, and he turned his head toward a shadowy figure looming on his right.

He felt a quiver of revulsion at the sight of Shuma and his enormous scaled belly bulging over his sweat pants. He glanced up into his face, expecting to see it twisted in a triumphant smirk. Instead, Shuma’s expression was vacant, his eyes hooded and distant as if they were focused on another scene entirely. His flaccid lips hung open, slick with saliva.

The voice spoke again and Shuma’s lips did not move. “Do you find your host revolting, Mr. Grant?”

Not responding to the question, Grant rumbled in his lionlike voice, “Who the hell are you?”

Shadows shifted behind Shuma’s bulk, and Grant caught a whistling, asthmatic wheeze. “I am the voice, the mind, the spirit behind the Survivalist Outland Brigade.”

Grant hawked up from deep in his throat and spit on the floor. “Bullshit.”

The voice tittered, sounding somewhat like an out-of-breath owl. “Why are you so sure?”

Straining against the rawhide bindings, Grant tried to peer around Shuma. “Let me see you.”

“All in good time, Mr. Grant…all in good time.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Oh, your spy—Wright was her name?—was most forthcoming about everyone and everything.”

Grant did not allow his sudden apprehension to show on his face or be heard in his voice. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

There was another breathy giggle. “Oh? What a pity…because I definitely know what she was talking about.”

The note of certainty, of complete confidence in the speaker’s voice sent a tingle of fear up Grant’s spine. He gusted out a weary sigh. “All right. But she wasn’t a spy.”

“She was here on an intelligence-gathering mission, correct?”

“More or less. We wanted to find out more about Shuma and this SOB of his.”

“Of his?” A mocking lilt touched the voice, but Grant detected an edge of anger there, as well.

“Who else?” He eyed Shuma surreptitiously, looking for a glimmer of intelligence in his eyes. They were covered by a dull sheen, the lids drooping.

“What’s wrong with him?” he asked.

“Nothing,” came the dismissive response. “That is, nothing that’s isn’t wrong with any other addict of jolt and various other opiates.”

Grant knew that jolt was a combination of various hallucinogens and narcotics, like heroin. To sample it once was to virtually ensure addiction.

He hesitated, started to ask a question, then closed his mouth, shaking his head.

“You were about to ask how a jolt-brain could command his own bowels, much less an army.”

Grant nodded. “Something like that, yes.”

“I command Shuma and he commands the SOB.”

“Which brings me back to my first question—who the hell are you?”

“My name would mean nothing to you…but if you must call me something, you may call me Esau.”

Grant inhaled a deep breath, held it, then released it slowly. “What are you?”

“I believe you have already guessed.”

When Grant declined to respond, he heard a shuffle of movement and a small figure stepped out from behind Shuma. At first Grant thought it was a crippled child, leaning as it did on a pair of crutches. But when the figure lurched closer he knew with a rise of nausea he was vastly mistaken.

Esau stood a little more than four feet tall, his emaciated body lost in a baggy flannel shirt and pants several sizes too large for him. An old extension cord cinched the waistband tight. The frayed cuffs of the trousers dragged on the floor, but Grant couldn’t see any sign of feet.

Esau’s face was dominated by a thick shelf of bone bulging above his huge eyes. The forehead rose like a marble wall, angling upward to join with the flat crown of his skull. A mat of thin gray hair covered it.

Grant struggled to keep his expression neutral, to disguise the fear swelling within him.

Esau’s small mouth twitched in a parody of a smile. “I revolt you more than Shuma, do I not?”

Grant didn’t respond for a few seconds, visually examining the blue-and-red mapwork of broken blood vessels spreading over Esau’s forehead. “Not exactly. I’ve come across your type a time or two.”

Esau’s smile widened in mock ingenuousness. “And what type is that, Mr. Grant?”

“Doomies,” he retorted matter-of-factly. “You’re a doomseer. I didn’t think there were many of you left.”

In the Outlands, people with enhanced psionic abilities were called doomseers or doomies, their mutant precognitive abilities feared and hated.

Most of the mutant strains spawned after the nuclear holocaust were extinct, either dying because of their twisted biologies, or hunted and exterminated during the early years of the unification program. Doomseers weren’t necessarily mutants, but norms with true telepathic abilities were rare in current times.

Extrasensory and precognitive perceptions were the most typical abilities possessed by mutants who appeared otherwise normal.

Esau uttered a scoffing, contemptuous laugh. “Hardly a doomseer. I can’t foretell the future any more accurately than you can.”

“Then what do you call yourself?”

Casting a sideways glance up at Shuma, Esau answered confidently, “A mastermind. I call myself a mastermind.”

Grant cocked his head in puzzlement. “A what?”

“I can master minds not my own…like Shuma’s here.”

His gaze narrowed, Grant asked, “How can you do that?”

Esau’s shoulders jerked in what appeared to be a nervous tic but was an attempt to emulate a shrug. “By a variety of measures. The drugs help, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But I have the ability to stimulate certain parts of his brain so I can flood his nervous system with endorphins.” Esau paused for a handful of thoughtful seconds, then asked, “Do you know what those are?”

Grant nodded. “I do.”

“Then you know that when the nervous system is exposed to endorphins, a biochemical reaction takes place. The reasoning parts of the brain are inhibited.”

“And therefore easy to control,” Grant interjected.

Esau’s smile widened. “It doesn’t work the same for everybody. It helps if you’re a self-indulgent voluptuary in the first place, like Shuma.”

“I gathered that,” Grant replied dryly. “So you’re really the boss and Shuma is just the front man?”

“Something like that. Clever, wouldn’t you say?”

Grant nodded in grudging agreement. “I suppose so…Roamers would never take orders from a crippled little pissant like you.”

Esau’s lips tightened and he stepped closer to Grant, staring at him unblinkingly, as if challenging him to look away. Grant did not. “Are there any further questions?”

“Plenty of them, but first, where is the Wright woman?”

Esau’s brow acquired a line of concentration. “Oh, I do apologize. I should have reunited you much sooner. She can actually answer most of your other questions.”

“You don’t even know what they are.”

In a voice barely above a whisper, Esau stated, “You would ask me to reconsider leading the Survivalist Outland Brigade and join with Cerberus in an alliance against these so-called overlords…whatever they are.”

Grant stirred uneasily. “How do you know that?”

“Because that is what the Wright woman asked.”

“And what did you tell her?”

Esau turned toward Shuma. On the right side of his massive head, a thick vein pulsed. Shuma lumbered forward, grasped the back of Grant’s chair and lifted it clear of the floor without apparent effort. He turned it and set it down at a different angle.

Peering through the gloom, Grant saw heavy wooden beams supporting the ceiling. Four chains dangled from a block-and-tackle assembly attached to the rafters. The ends of the chains were tipped with sharp meat hooks of the type used in slaughterhouses.

From two of the hooks hung a naked body, gutted like the carcass of a pig he had seen once since in a butcher’s shop. One of the big hooks had been inserted through the underside of the chin, and the tip of another pierced the left armpit.

Through the fog of horror clouding his vision, Grant looked into the glassy, dead eyes of Wright.

Teeth clenched, a wordless snarl of rage vibrating in his throat, Grant hurled himself against his bonds, rocking the chair back and forth, hoping to tip it over on Esau. Shuma’s huge hands fell onto his shoulders, pressing him down, holding him motionless.

Esau lurched into view on his crutches, staring levelly into Grant’s eyes. “She told me quite a bit, but not everything. You’ll do that for me, Mr. Grant.”

“Goddamn you to Hell, you little mutie piece of shit.” His voice was so guttural with fury it sounded more like the growl of an animal.

Esau leaned forward, stroking the side of Grant’s face with tiny baby fingers. “God has done enough to me already, Mr. Grant. I do the damning to Hell here.”

His unnaturally large eyes suddenly seemed to increase in size, as if they were squirming from their sockets. Tiny red flames flickered within the pupils. Grant sensed rather than heard a multitude of tiny voices, all chittering like faraway crickets. The sound slid along the edges of his awareness, and terror pushed away his rage. His heartbeat thundered in his ears.

A nova of pain exploded within the walls of his skull and he heard himself crying out, as from a million miles away. His body spasmed, thrashed. He felt his mind being pulled into a whirlpool of dark energy that sucked his blood and bones and soul out through the pores of his skin, and turned them to dust.

He whirled, orbiting every instant of his life, spiraling through memories of joy, of loss, of grief, of victory and defeat. He spun through a sea of images, and no matter how hard he tried to stop them from flying to the forefront of his mind, he knew Esau saw them, rifled through them, memorized them.

The most intense pain gradually abated but didn’t fade completely. There was a ringing in his ears and numbness in his extremities. He felt blood inching from his right nostril and flowing over his lips. He breathed shallowly because of the bile burning in his throat. Then he doubled over and vomited between his legs. He felt as if a violent tornado had ripped a mile-wide path of destruction through the field of his mind.

Slowly raising his head, he squinted through his watering, blurred eyes toward Esau. The vein on the little man’s temple pulsed violently as if a worm squirmed just beneath the thin layer of flesh. The network of broken blood vessels on his forehead appeared to be even more livid. His arms trembled as if he was having difficulty maintaining his balance on the crutches.

“Interesting,” he said in a faint, tremulous voice. “Far more interesting than I thought it would be. I’m going to keep you alive a while longer, Mr. Grant…at least until your friends come to rescue you, an eventuality of which you seem certain. But it wouldn’t be so if our situations were reversed.”

A small, bronze-hued curve of metal clinked to the floor at Grant’s feet. He recognized it as the Commtact.

“You are quite isolated, my large friend,” Esau went on. “You live only at my sufferance and my continuing interest in your memories. Many of them are intriguing to the point of fascination.

“Shuma, I think he needs some fresh air. Take him to the cage.”