Czytaj książkę: «Damnation Road Show»

Chapter One

A little girl in a faded cotton dress sat atop Bullard ville’s dirt-and-concrete defensive berm, watching distant plumes of yellow dust spiral up from the vast, barren flood plain—man-made tornadoes backlit by the hard glare of the late-afternoon sun. She sat with her skinny, sun-browned legs drawn up, her elbows propped on scabbed knees. The hand-me-down garment she wore was way too big for her. Every time she moved, it slipped off one or the other of her thin shoulders.

During the hour that Leeloo Bunny had been keeping vigil, the ville’s other children had joined her at intervals, scrambling up the back side of the berm for a look-see. After less than a minute of quiet reconnoiter, the pushing and pinching started. Squealing, they raced back down to resume an extrafrantic, extrashrill game of Chill the Mutie.

Only Leeloo had the patience to stay, to sit in silence and allow the promised miracle to unfold. She wanted to be first to see it, and to be able to remember every second as long as she lived.

Nothing this exciting had ever happened in Bullard ville.

It was without a doubt one of the two most dramatic moments in Leeloo’s eight years of life.

It towered above sneaking peeks through the windows of the gaudy house to see the mostly naked men and women fight on the pallets laid on the floor. Leeloo had sometimes watched her own ma, Tater Bunny, fight men on those mattresses. It was a safe bet that one of Tater’s adversaries was Leeloo’s father; there were a lot of candidates for the distinction, but no one had ever stepped forward to claim the little girl as his own.

Because Leeloo didn’t fully understand the aim of the gaudy house mattress fights, she had yet to figure out how to judge winners and losers. To her it seemed the combatants usually parted on friendly, if not affectionate terms. Some of the women fought ten or twelve men a night, and didn’t seem the worse for wear, at least not any place that showed.

It was a different story for her ma. Tater Bunny had died more than a year ago when a drunken drifter choked her a bit too hard.

That was Leeloo’s life-changing, dramatic event number one.

The man who’d chilled her ma had tried to run away afterward, but the ville’s menfolk caught him and dragged him back. They hung him from an old basketball stanchion with his pants pulled down around his boot tops and his willy sticking out. Leeloo had sometimes gone to look at the man who chilled her ma, to look through the hot, blurry screen of her tears and throw rocks at him as hard as she could. After a while, she had to stand upwind because the smell got so bad. The ville’s men cut down and buried the corpse only when they needed the stanchion to hang someone else.

Leeloo Bunny had no interest in eventually following in her ma’s professional footsteps. Not because of the nature of the work, which held no particular stigma in Bullard ville, or the danger of injury, which was considerably less than other jobs to be had, but because of the required confinement. Leeloo liked to be outdoors in the sun, not indoors, lying in tangled, sticky bedding. She liked planting seeds in the raised beds under sheet-metal awnings and tending the young plants until they grew big enough to eat. She liked picking bouquets of the bitter-tasting, little wild daisies that seemed to pop up everywhere. She made delicate ornaments for herself out of them by knotting the stems together. This day, she was decked out with a daisy circlet on the crown of her head, and tiers of bracelets dangled from her slender wrists.

Her anticipation of specialness on this day had begun three weeks earlier, when the carny’s advance scout had roared up to the berm gate in an armored Baja Bug.

The little wag had outsized knobby tires and a roll cage around the driver’s seat made of heavy pipe. Over the empty front, rear and side window frames were hinged, blasterproof metal shutters that could be dropped during an attack, leaving only a view slit for the driver to steer by.

The carny scout had called himself Azimuth. A giant with cascading woolly dreadlocks, every muscle and sinew was visible beneath his glossy ebony skin. He wore a sleeveless vest of mutie coyote pelt, turned hair side out, and gray army pants tucked into the tops of scuffed and scraped, steel-toe-capped, lace-up, shin-high, black leather boots. Grimy goggles hung around his wide, muscular throat.

Leeloo could close her eyes and recall how the man smelled: a sweet, feminine perfume mixed with sharpish body odor. Azimuth had either slathered himself with great quantities of the flowery scent, or he had been in a prolonged fight with a gaudy slut who had. Leeloo also remembered the way his front teeth were filed to points, top and bottom, and that the inside of his mouth was as red as blood, as was his tongue and the insides of his nostrils.

Azimuth had been greeted by Bullard ville’s most important people, including its headman, the lumbering, overweight, perpetually sweating Wilbur Melchior, who had adopted Leeloo right after her ma died. The black giant’s mission was to determine whether the ville would be willing to pay for the privilege of seeing Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny Show. If so, Azimuth said, the troupe would stop there for a night or so en route to another engagement. He quoted them a steep price for this entertainment, in water and fresh food.

When asked by Melchior what the show consisted of, Azimuth threw back his head and let out a howl that so startled the delegation of dirt farmers, they stepped back and grabbed for their blaster butts.

But there was no threat.

It was a howl of sheer exuberance.

When things calmed down, Azimuth assured them that Gert Wolfram’s World Famous Carny offered genuine miracles and wonderments, gathered at great expense and hazard from the farthest corners of the Deathlands and beyond, all for their private amusement and edification. On his long, thick fingers, he listed some of the various, incomparable attractions: singing, dancing stickies; fantastical mutie beasts trained to do amazing tricks; feats of norm superstrength and daring; the most beautiful norm women this side of Hell walking around in next to nothing; unparalleled exhibitions of music, comedy and drama.

Something to tell your grandchildren about, Azimuth said. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

At that point, Melchior and the other leaders of the ville withdrew to the shade of a nearby sheet-metal awning and conferred. Leeloo edged close enough to overhear their conversation. Her adoptive father said it was a matter of pride, that Bullard ville deserved this admitted luxury. Their hosting the World Famous Carny would indicate to anyone with half a brain that the remote agricultural enclave had finally come into its own. Around the circle, heads nodded in agreement.

The only word of caution came from the gaudy master, Skim O’Neil. He said there could be a big risk in letting so many strangers inside the berm at once. The protest fell on deaf ears. Melchior spoke for the rest when he bragged that Bullard ville wasn’t afraid of anything that walked. Mopping his sweat-beaded jowls with a big wad of cotton rag, he reminded O’Neil how they had turned back the attempted takeovers of two different barons and chilled their sec men.

A vote was taken, and it was unanimous.

When they returned to where the scout waited, Melchior put his hand out and told him that he had a deal. They shook on it. Then Melchior and the other leaders took Azimuth on a guided tour of Bullard. Leeloo tagged along behind, unnoticed.

As was common in Deathlands, the isolated ville had sprouted up at the edge of a ruined interstate highway. The overpass that had once connected high-speed travelers with an oasis of fast food and fast gas had collapsed across four lanes of traffic on the day the world changed. The center of Bullard ville was formed around the shambling remnants of those predark fast-food franchises. Their dilapidated plastic signs still beckoned: Mergen’s Family Restaurant, Taco Town, Burger Stravaganza, Fish ’n’ More—now the gaudy house.

The four-lane highway had once paralleled a lush river valley that stretched for many hundreds of miles, bordered by rugged, steep, dark mountains to the east and rolling hills to the west. The flat valley, postnukecaust, was parched, burned yellow, turned to dust by sun and chem rains. Postnukecaust, the slow, meandering river that had watered trees and grass and cultivated fields decided it no longer liked the looks of things and burrowed deep underground.

The river’s disappearance saved Bullard ville from extinction. Of course, there were no more pre-breaded steaks, fish fingers, burger patties or ice-cream novelties to lure tired, hungry travelers to Bullard. Yet the travelers still came and stopped and parted with whatever valuables they had, because there was water. The underground river ran right under the ville. Hand-operated pumps provided water for drinking, for very occasional bathing and for travelers to take away.

Grub could be had, but it was whatever was on hand. Travelers ate whatever bush meat the residents could chase down and kill. Usually mutie jackrabbits, or snakes, or birds of all sizes, from sparrows to turkey vultures. These were either spit-roasted over an open fire or parboiled in caldrons made of salvaged, fifty-five-gallon oil drums.

With the virtually endless supply of clean water, the ville folk grew a variety of edible crops year-round, under the shelter of metal awnings to keep off the chem rain. For fertilizer, they composted and used their own excrement. They cultivated beans, hot peppers, onions and garlic. They grew corn primarily for the sugar, which was used to make joy juice. There wasn’t enough surface area inside the defensive berm to produce food for mass export. And there weren’t enough people in Bullard to defend an expansion of crop growing outside the barrier.

Considering the miserable, hammered-down state of the world, the little hamlet was doing quite well. During the tour, Melchior hinted as much to Azimuth, but as Leeloo noticed, he gave no specifics.

As she well knew, the treasure of Bullard was safely locked away in the basement of Mergen’s Family Restaurant, under twenty-four-hour armed guard. It consisted of miscellaneous objects of value traded for water: weapons, ammunition, canned food, predark medicine, first-aid supplies, wag fuel, oil, grease, batteries, transmission fluid, antifreeze, tires, matches, clothing, boots and shoes, hand tools, auto parts, various bits of repair material, duct tape, bailing wire, nails, screws, rope and electrical wire. There was no jolt, though. The ville leaders drew the line at hard drugs.

The contents of the warehouse were tangible proof of the water’s worth. And anything worth more than a few drops of piss in Deathlands was worth chilling someone over. Two barons had tried and failed to annex Bullard ville, which stood in disputed border zone at the edges of their respective territories. Neither baron could muster and transport a large enough force to defeat the villagers. Every person over the age of twelve carried a loaded blaster all the time, whether working on the crops or sleeping. The youngest ones packed well-cared-for .36-caliber, black-powder, Italian-reproduction Colts. They wore the 5-shot, 1862 Police models in canvas, snap-flap hip holsters. The entire volunteer sec force trained regularly in marksmanship and tactics.

Leeloo Bunny was too young and still too physically frail to control a blaster that weighed more than a pound and a half, unloaded. But she was very much looking forward to the day when finally she got her own blaster. Not because she wanted to shoot anything in particular, but because it was a symbol of her growing up.

After the guided tour, the ville’s leaders fed Azimuth a massive meal, got him stinking drunk and then let him fight three women at once in the gaudy.

All free of charge.

Melchior had called this extraordinary generosity “the famous Bullard ville hospitality.”

As the dust plumes on the plain grew closer, Leeloo could just make out tiny, dark shapes at their bases, and her heart leaped. The shapes became more and more distinct until she could see the gaily painted wags, racing with strings of bright pennants whipping from their radio masts.

A man standing at the berm gate shouted, “The carny’s here! The carny’s here!”

Every man, woman and child dropped whatever they were doing and rushed to the ville’s entrance, forming a dense double line, a gauntlet of well-armed Bullard ville welcome.

The fifteen-wag caravan slowed to a crawl as it approached the defensive berm. Leeloo saw that some of the wags were towing big tarp-covered cages on flatbed trailers.

Then the music started.

Taped music, scratchy with age and thousands of playings. Loud enough to wake the nukecaust’s dead, a powerful male baritone boomed above the insistent crash of cymbals and drums. The words he sang rolled like thunder. Leeloo had taught herself to count to a hundred, so she knew what “76” signified. She wasn’t sure whether a “trombone” was animal, vegetable or mineral, but the raucous, cheerful beat of the predark music thrilled her to the core.

As the dust clouds drifted away to the south, with the convoy slowly advancing, men began to jump out of the wags. They threw back the tarps covering the trailered cages, revealing the collection of creatures within.

Leeloo sucked in an astonished breath. It was more wonderful than her wildest imaginings! Behind the bars of the first cage lurked a two-headed scalie. One head was normal sized; the other looked like a baby’s. The next trailer cage held a gaggle of stickies, naked but for plastic collars in bright colors, like open flower petals.

They showed their needle teeth and dilated their flat nostril holes as they took in the scent of the ville. Another cage contained a huge mutie mountain lion with scythe-shaped horns jutting on either side of its neck. It raised its head and yowled balefully along with the marching song. On the trailer behind the mountain lion was the biggest desert rattler Leeloo had ever seen. The thing was mebbe ten feet long, and its body was as big around as her waist. Its flat, triangular-shaped head was even wider, and the mouth could have easily swallowed two of her whole.

There were lizard birds with leathery wings and fangs so sharp they scored the steel bars of their cages.

Leeloo turned her attention to the carny folk walking alongside the trailers. The men wore slitted masks over their eyes. Their leather jerkins and shorts exposed bulging arm and leg muscles. They all carried bullwhips, which they smacked against the bars of the cages, making the mutie creatures howl in complaint. The carny women were long legged, their faces and heads concealed by brightly sequined hoods. But for thigh-high, high-heeled boots and a tracery of string over their privates, they were naked. The women also used whips to stir up the rolling menagerie.

Once inside the berm, the caravan of wags circled twice, to Leeloo’s way of thinking, most majestically. Then it stopped.

A tall, muscular man in a worn red satin tailcoat, and with tight white pants tucked into hard-used black riding boots, climbed out of the largest wag. On one hip he wore a holstered, blue-steel, .45 Government Colt blaster; on the other he carried a coiled black bullwhip. His short, wiry hair was a rusty red, as was his six-inch-long goatee. A jagged ring of scar marked the left side of his face, perhaps made by a broken neck of a bottle, or Leeloo thought, by an attack from one of his ferocious muties.

As the tailcoated man walked toward the ville’s leaders, a tiny stickie, not more than four years old, trotted along at his left heel. It was naked and barefoot, and there were bruises all over its pale body. Around its neck was a choke chain dog collar that wasn’t tethered to a leash.

“Welcome to Bullard ville,” Melchior said, extending a damp, callused hand to the carny master. “A pleasure to have Gert Wolfram and his famous troupe as our guests.”

“I speak for my entire company,” the tailcoated man stated, “when I say we are most honored to have the opportunity to entertain you.”

The young stickie, eyes as dead as black stones, sniffed through the two holes in its face, taking the measure of the overweight Melchior. And having done that, the baby mutie made soft kissing noises in his direction, and began to drool copiously. Melchior’s right hand reached across his pendulous chest and came to rest on the rubber butt of his shoulder-holstered Ruger Single Six.

“Oh, don’t worry about Jackson,” the carny master said, stroking the creature’s hairless skull. “Unless you corner the little tyke, he’s not the least bit dangerous.”

At the hand-to-head contact, the immature stickie closed its eyes with pleasure; its jaw gaped, exposing tightly packed rows of needle teeth.

“When is the show going to start?” Skim O’Neil asked.

This question was met with wild cheers and whistles from the assembly.

“It takes us a while to stake out and set up the main tent,” the carny master said.

“I’m afraid it’s already too late in the day to get started on it. With your permission, we’ll set up camp inside the berm tonight, then start raising the tent tomorrow morning. That will give my people a chance to rest up, too. They need a break before they perform. We’ve been on the road three days getting here.”

Leeloo was crushed to hear this. She wasn’t alone. A chorus of groans rippled through the crowd.

“Couldn’t you give us a little taste of what’s to come?” Melchior asked. “We’ve all been waiting for this day for weeks and weeks.”

The carny man scratched his red chin beard, briefly considering what taste he might offer. “All right,” he said, “I’ll give you fine folks a preview of what’s in store for tomorrow. But I warn you now, once you see it, you won’t sleep a wink tonight.”

He looked down at the baby stickie and said, “Sing!”

As the order echoed off the berm walls, the people of Bullard ville blinked at one another in amazement. It was common knowledge that the mouth parts of stickies were so primitive, so unevolved, that most could barely make mewling noises, let alone make music.

Yet, at its master’s command, the little stickie opened its round, practically lipless mouth, threw back its bald head and sang, in perfect pitch, in a high, clear soprano, a predark song even older than the one caught on tape. “Ave Maria” burst forth from between rows of mutated needle teeth.

Most of the folks in the crowd closed their eyes and simply listened to the exquisitely pure tones, like bell chimes. Each word of the lyric was perfectly formed and enunciated.

There were no cries of sacrilege because no one understood the words, which were in Italian. Even if the Deathlands dirt farmers could have translated the lyric into English, its meaning and references would have been a mystery to them. Despite the yawning gap in the audience’s understanding, the music itself was so moving that by the time Jackson finished the a cappella performance, there were tears of wonder in the eyes of men and women alike.