James Axler - Damnation Road Show

“If we wait just a tetch too long, Ryan, things could get bastard ugly in a hurry,” the Armorer said.

For a long moment there was silence between them.

The silence indicated a mutual understanding of the situation, and a mutual consent to proceed as exactly as Ryan suggested.

It was only broken when Dean looked around, and said, “Where’s Jak?”

OUT OF THE COMPANIONS’ direct view, around the curve of the sideshow trailers, Jak once again had his head thrust through the bars of the mountain lion’s cage. Once again that great, hot tongue lovingly washed his face and neck.

The pale, ruby-eyed youth had few words to describe even the simplest moments of his violent and tragic life. For Jak, things were good or they were bad. He was happy or he wasn’t. Hungry or not. Loaded or reloading. The complexity of his feelings at that moment was impossible to translate into a neat, black-white duality.

Only the lion understood what he felt.

And that was because he and the lion shared.

Everything.

Without words.

Jak pushed back from the bars and wiped the viscous slobber from his cheek with the back of his forearm. He took in the enormity of dense, soft, beige fur; the long, lashing tail as big around as his bicep; the fat, black-fringed ears, rounded beautifully at the tips. Jutting from the sides of the creature’s massive neck was the pair of curving, pointed horns that served to protect the throat against attack from the sides, and as offensive weapons. The canine fangs exposed by the lion’s wide grin were longer than the blade of Ryan’s panga; the lion’s claws were cruel black gut hooks, fully extended in pleasure now, cutting shallow, bright grooves into the steel floor of its cage. The smell of meat breath and musk gusted over Jak’s face.

He couldn’t explain how the creature’s thoughts and emotions came into his head, or how he knew that likewise the lion experienced what he experienced. It was as if an invisible tunnel connected them, and through the tunnel ran a torrent of exquisite tenderness.

The albino gripped the bars again and stared into the beast’s huge, pleasure-slitted, yellow eyes. The sound of its purring rattled the steel in his hands like an earthquake. The tremendous heat given off by its body blasted him like a black basalt boulder sitting in the midday sun.

You free soon, he thought. Then we hunt.

Jak’s mind was slammed with gratitude and joy, and then a caress, a voiceless voice, a soundless sound that resonated in the very pit of his stomach: I know you will free me, Little Brother. I know you will.

After the companions’ meeting broke up, Dean went looking for Leeloo Bunny. He found her standing in front of one of the trailered sideshow cages.

“Hi, Leeloo,” he said as he walked up.

“Hi, Dean.” From the light in her eyes, she seemed real glad to see him. She had put a crown of fresh daisies in her shining hair.

“What’re you doing?” he asked.

“Just looking at this one,” she said.

The painted nameplate on the bars read Baldoona, The Two-Headed Scalie. The male mutie inside the cage sported a pair of heads that sprouted side by side in the middle of its wide shoulders. Shoulders that seemed to stoop from their combined weight. One head was full-sized, as if from a grown-up person. It looked mebbe forty years of age. Its coarse, gray-blond hair was matted and greasy, its face florid, beardless and unlined. Bloodshot eyes glowered at them from beneath a heavy, eyebrowless ridge of bone.

The other head was a baby’s, small, bald and perched on a short neck. Its skin was flushed with infantile frustration. The eyes on the little head were black and glittered behind squinty, puffy eyelids. The scalie was exhibited stripped to the waist. It had a massive torso, wide and thick, and there were big muscles under the layers of sagging fat. As it moved slightly, the angled light caught the rows of tiny scales that covered its skin, giving it an iridescent grayish cast.

The cage was fouled by the smell of urine and excrement; brown mounds of the latter lay clumped along the cage’s rear wall. Clouds of flies buzzed amid the miasma.

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