Pilgrimage to Hell

'No. That is where you are wrong,' The voice had suddenly become crisper in tone. His head jerked up, dropped to one side, like a bird's. 'The locational progressions are simple. There is no problem there. From A to B to C and onward. Or from P to Q and then back to, let us say, G. So you see, there is indeed a way out. Or I should say, many ways out. But finding them, my dear sir, that is altogether a different matter. The Redoubts are there, in situ. Many of them. But — and I put it to you — where is 'there'?'

'Shit,' muttered Teague.

'This is the point. And I fear I have to say the answer is for the moment lost.' He was talking more quickly now, the words spilling out, a curious excitement in his voice, in his whole bearing. His right hand was raised, the forefinger wagging up at Jordan Teague as though in admonishment. As though the losing of the 'answer' was all the gross man's fault. 'No doubt it will reveal itself. No doubt theywill reveal themselves. At times the fog clears...'

He stood up suddenly, began to prowl in front of the pyramid, his hands clasped behind him. Backward and forward, backward and forward. His voice dropped to a dreamy murmur that Ryan could only just make out.

'The fog. Sometimes, if let loose, it's quite powerful. Feedback effect, as I recall, though difficult to explain. And quite arbitrary. Of course, they had no real conception of its power. They said they had, but they lied. They lied much of the time.' He thumped his right fist into the palm of his left hand, his voice rising to an outraged cry. 'They treated me like an animal! It was disgraceful! As though I were a puppet! They had no right to do what they did and I informed them of that fact. And for all their honeyed words I was nothing to them, less then nothing. A subject. An interesting experiment. It was wicked, wicked! God should have struck them dead!' He swung around on Teague, pointed up at him, laughing, his voice cracked, pitching up to a falsetto. 'But through the fog, my dear sir! From A to B! And then to R or M or anywhere! Findthe fog, sir! There is your solution! Your way out! So many possibilities!'

Hunaker whispered, 'Shit, Ryan, we're wasting time. Let's doit!'

Ryan said 'Wait, dammit. There's something...' Then he said, 'Lucky we didn't!' as Teague bawled, 'Jauncy! Hackutt!' and one of the mirrors on the other side of the pyramid swung open and two goons came through at the run. They had slung M-16s and they went separate ways around the pyramid, right and left, and converged on the wild-eyed old man. They were both grinning death's-head grins.

The old man stopped pacing, seemed to shrivel into himself, his face gray.

Teague said, 'Fucker's off again. Take his toys from him.'

'No!'

The man called Doc screamed the word. His hands went up toward Teague in an imploratory gesture, silently entreating him not to do what was to be done, and what had been done, probably, on many occasions in the past.

'C'mon, c'mon!' snapped one of the goons. 'Take 'em out. Hand 'em over.'

Doc stared wildly around, as though looking for some means of escape. Then he swallowed hard, his shoulders slumping. He reached slowly into a pocket of his filthy black coat, then held out his hand. Ryan peered up at the ceiling, the only way he could see what was there: two gray spheroids.

He muttered, 'All right, but don't hit the old guy.'

'Why not?'

'I'm not sure, but don't. I want him.'

'You're the boss.'

They slammed through the curtain, Ryan to the left, Hunaker on his right, one target apiece. Simple.

Except that the two women shrieked and bolted. Their ideal course of escape would be off to the side, out of any line of fire. Instead blind panic turned them both into something akin to chickens with their heads lopped off. They dived in front of the two sec men, yelling in a frenzy. One tripped on a rug, the other tumbled over her. Ryan swore and dived to one side as a sec man, quick off the mark, unslung his piece and fired what must have been half a mag in his direction, the rounds flaying the thick curtains behind into wildly flapping cloth shreds. Ryan was firing the LAPA, its butt smacking into his pelvis, but his aim was wild and rounds hammered into the mirrors behind the pyramid, the glass exploding into a million flying shards.

Hunaker hadn't fired at all. She was rolling across the floor toward the wall in a desperate scramble as bullets from the second guy tore air above her head. She was now regretting that she hadn't jumped into this one with a piece — engineered, as this particular piece was, so it fired only in the fully automatic mode — that did not have the ferocious blast power of the MAC, which was fine for blazing out whole groups of targets with a light squeeze of the trigger but lousy when it came to the one-man job, and especially lousy when that one man was surrounded by others you did not want to hit. Sometimes, she thought as she let the machine-pistol go and dragged an H&K P-7 from inside her jacket, you could be over overconfident.

She rolled fast and scrambled around onto her stomach, fast-sighting as her head rose from the rug, and the compact snug-gripped P-7 barked twice, the first round missing her man by mere centimeters, the second, because of hand quiver on the roll, whipping at his coat. He yelped, jumped to his left, stumbled and fell, a third bullet from the P-7 tearing air where he'd just been. He rolled, too, and took a dive like a sprinter off the block into the comparatively calmer waters on the other side of the pyramid, joined a half second later by his companion, who'd had the same idea.

That idea was not to face up to Ryan and Hunaker at all but get the hell out of the room in one piece by diving through the still-open mirror door through which they'd arrived.

Except Ryan was ahead of them. Where he was he could not hit them, either of them, but the door itself was another matter. He sent three rounds into it, smashing the glass into a wild kaleidoscope of candle-reflected glitter and punching the door into its frame.

It was a standoff. Neither Ryan nor Hunaker had a direct bead on the two goons, who were now crouched behind the pyramid. On the other hand Ryan, from where he was positioned, could destroy anyone who tried to make for that doorway. The two goons were in a slightly better state, although only very slightly. They at least could snipe if they'd a mind to, or poke their pieces up and over the nearest step treads and blaze off in the general direction of their targets. And by doing that they could at least stop Ryan and Hunaker rushing them from the other side.

Ryan bared his teeth in an icy grin as he stared at the reflection of the two men, one of whom was staring back. Their eyes met. The goon wasn't grinning. He looked as though his bowels were about ready to go. That did not, however, make him any less dangerous.

Ryan's gaze roved. The two women were now trying to burrow under the rugs, shrieking and yelling in total-flap hysteria. The old guy called Doc seemed to have disappeared. Ryan couldn't see him anywhere, had not caught his bolt route. Probably he'd managed to flee through that door. Pity. Ryan would like to have talked to him. He'd seemed a wreck — not surprising if, as it appeared, he was some kind of... well, court jester or scapegoat for Teague and Strasser — but he had not seemed completely off his head, which made all that stuff he'd been gabbling about mildly attention grabbing. Or perhaps rather more than mildly attention grabbing. Where had Teague picked him up? He'd not been around two years back. He talked funny, and what was all that shit about 'the fog'? The guy called Kurt, back at Charlie's, had — from what Charlie herself had said — rambled on about fog. Ryan didn't trust coincidences, even in this random, arbitrary and seemingly totally haphazard life. His psyche nudged him, whispered that there might be something odd here, something worth following up. The old coot hadn't just been talking about any old fog, and if Charlie was to be believed neither had the guy called Kurt. Common sense, however, informed him that there were ten thousand natural fogs in the Deathlands per week, somewhere or other, and probably this Kurt bird was vision-ridden from fever — a fog with claws? Come on! — and probably this old coot here was crazed from having been forced into performing grisly and unnatural acts for the delight of that sadistic bastard Strasser. Still, from A to B to C, his mind mused — and what werethe 'possibilities'... and who were 'they' and what had 'they' done to him and what was a 'Redoubt' and why did he talk so weird?

The explanation for all this was probably worth much less than a half pinch of nukeshit, thought Ryan, and right now there were other problems on the agenda, which needed to be solved urgently.

He stared up at Jordan Teague, atop his pyramid, cringing into the wingback chair with a mad and pop- eyed look about him.