James Axler - Pilgrimage to Hell

Charlie shrugged.

"Who knows? I ain't privy to everything that goes down in this shithole, Ryan. All I know is that Mocsin's on the edge. It's like there's a button somewhere and there's a finger hovering over it. And once the finger jabs down, once the button's pressed — Blooey !"

Rintoul, still casting glances at the hostile faces of the drinkers staring at them, said, "Yer'd think the place'd be an armed camp if all this shit is going on. Patrols in the street, curfew, shoot to kill. Like that."

"We got a lot of crap at the entrance to town," said Ryan, "and they were nervous, but they didn't seem to be pissing in their pants."

Charlie reached under the bar and pulled out a cigar. She warmed it over a candle before sucking flame into its end.

"It's like I said, Teague's lost his grip and Strasser doesn't seem to care. I guess they just don't understand after twenty years of tight control. They're blind. It happens."

Ryan acknowledged the truth of this. All he knew of history told him that often those who had been firmly in control of a potentially dangerous situation for years gradually lost their objectivity. In their rigid and unshakable belief in their own strength, their own power to keep the lid down hard, they were blind to all else, even the most disturbing and concrete evidence of disaffection.

Sure it happened.

And sure it was time Mocsin boiled over. You couldn't beat an entire town into subjection forever.

He took his wine and strode over to the table where Ole One-Eye and Chewy the Chase — that terrible man crudely named after a suburb of what was once a Washington suburb, according to some ancient map — were seated, Chewy crouched deep in his mobile chair.

Ryan said, "Look, count me out of this."

There was silence for a moment, then Chewy snickered and said, "Hey, ya know what? They're crackin' down on muties now."

Ole One-Eye turned on him and rasped, "Don't use that word! How many times I gotta tell you! I don't call you a crapping norm, do I?"

Chewy said, "How many norms you seen walkin' around on no legs, huh? You hideous apology for a human being."

"Pity they didn't blow yer vocals out when they blew yer legs! The shit I hafta put up with!"

The nature of Ole One-Eye's particular mutation was more than merely dramatic. It was clear at once to any observer that at least one side of his bloodline had gotten savagely zapped three generations back by a rabid breed of rad bug. Maybe both sides of his bloodline. That would certainly account for the top of his pate being flat and hairless and made up of flabby, spongy ridges of flesh, and his having only one eye, one glistening ocular orb, dead center of his forehead. From his nose downward, beyond the mouth and the stubbly beard shot with gray, he seemed perfectly normal, though a little on the squat side and with arms maybe a fraction longer than the average. But only a fraction.

It was not known exactly what part he'd played in the Mutie War of 2068. He didn't talk about it much. Mutants escaping serfdom in the Baronies of the East had fled West and gravitated by degrees to the area around old Louisville and built up their own short-lived homeland over a period of four or five years. But there had been too much tension. The people around there, the normals, had grown discontented at what they saw as an invasion of their territory, their "clean" territory, by whole families of those whose indebtedness to the Nuke, genetically speaking, was blazingly obvious. They wanted the muties out. The mutant families, having finally escaped from conditions in which they'd been treated worse than animals, refused to shift. They had built houses, farms, repair shops, set up trade lines. The move toward outright war had a blind and fearsome inevitability about it.

A norm farmer whose steam truck's boiler had burst near a mutie ville had forced a couple of mechs to fix a running repair, then casually shot them both when they'd asked for payment. If the farmer gained any gratification from this act of gratuitous violence, he didn't have it for long. He was followed to his own town and shot outside his home. What followed lasted maybe ten months, during which time hundreds of mutants were massacred, whole villes burned and steam-dozered. They gave as good as they got, but there were too few of them, too many normals who, in any case, called to certain of the East Coast Barons for arms and heavy hardware and reinforcements. The upshot was that in the late fall of '68 the muties had moved out, headed farther into the Central Deathlands, dispersed. Ole One-Eye had turned up in Mocsin and settled there.

Chewy the Chase grinned toothily, scratching his head. He said to Ryan, "The old bastud's insults are losin' their kick. Time was he could be a mean-assed son of a bitch. Maybe I'm gettin' used to him. Whattya say, Ryan?"

"Yeah," Ryan said,

"Say one thing for this craphole of a town," Chewy said. "That fat hog of a Teague never used to give a shit if you had one head or two, one prick or three. Know what I mean? But now, hell! Them sec men of his are startin' to beat up on the armless, earless and noseless. They'll be puttin' 'em up agin a wall next, you mark my words." He turned to Ole One-Eye. "They say they aim for the heart, but with you I reckon it'll be someplace else." He cackled, raised his glass of beer. "The perfect target. Here's lead in yer eye, pal."

Ryan said, uneasily, "Look..."

Ole One-Eye made a dismissive gesture with his right hand, drank with his left. He said quietly, "Shut it, Chev," then looked up at Ryan. "Don't mind him. Wind's in the wrong direction. His legs've been giving him shit for days."

Chewy drank more beer, stared down at what was not there and had not been there for some years. He said, his voice suddenly a hoarse whisper, "Nukeblasted right."

Ole One-Eye smiled gently, gazing up at Ryan. His eye was white irised, pinkish around the edges.

"Speaking as one one-eye to another," he said softly, "I'd say ya better figure out fast which way ya gonna jump, boy. All hell gonna break out soon, and that's a realer feelin' than when young Chev here gets aches in his hocks. Ya gotta choose, boy. Choose damned soon."

Ryan stared down at the guttering flames reflected from the candles in the pools of spilled beer on the tabletop, aware that the buzz of conversation in the bar, muted and desultory as it had been, had suddenly ceased altogether. Even Rintoul, a mouthy kid at the best of times, though a good shot and loyal, had shut up. He could see Ole One-Eye's face, upside down, hideously distorted, in the liquid, could even see that single eye fixed on his. All at once stories he'd often heard on his travels slid into his mind, stories of mutants with the "blazing" eye, the eye that, blasted you with a look, the eye that killed. Couldn't be true, of course. Foolish talk. Yet why not? There were sensers, weren't there? Sensers who sniffed out danger, danger that was to come, danger that was just around the corner, short-term, within the hour. And there were those who had an even rarer and more terrifying power; the doomseers: precogs who had sharply defined visions of the future, what was to happen in the longer term. So why not the Eye? Why not a look that could burn your mind out.

He shook his head, looked up suddenly at the reality rather than the strange mirror image. Ole One-Eye's single eye shifted up, too, to follow him. Ryan drank what remained in his glass.

"You're probably right," he muttered.

The other chuckled quietly. "That's m'boy," he said. "One thing about you, Ryan, you're dependable. Known for it."

Ryan rubbed at his face, at the stubble growing on his chin. Weirdly, he felt that he'd just made an important decision, a vital decision, although he was not aware that his conscious mind had done so, and the reply he'd just given had been little more than noncommittal.