James Axler - Grailstone Gambit

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.”

A cold rain pattered down through the leaves that formed a loose canopy over the top of the cage. Grant shivered in the early-morning chill, but he turned his face upward so the raindrops fell into his open, as-dry-as-dust mouth.