Outlanders 21 - Devil in the Moon

  DEVIL IN THE MOON

  James Axler

  * * *

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as

  "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  First edition May 2002 ISBN 0-373-63834-5

  DEVIL IN THE MOON

  Special thanks to Mark Ellis for his contribution to the Outlanders concept, developed for Gold Eagle.

  Copyright © 2002 by Worldwide Library.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention. ® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  Printed in U.S.A.

  * * *

  The Road to Outlands— From Secret Government Files to the Future

  Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath— forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

  Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands— poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

  What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

  Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consoli­dated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified, walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

  In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons' public credo and their right-to-rule.

  Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

  But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

  Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid's only link with her family was her mother's red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant's clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Oomi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltyille. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

  Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux— when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

  For Kane, it wouldn't do. So the only way was out— way, way out.

  After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville's head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

  With their past turned into a lie, their future threat­ened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influ­ences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

  * * *

  Chapter 1

  The Day of the Basilisk dawned with wind, a brief flurry of sleet and the stink of blood. Foxcroft Sana­torium was a place of great beauty, with its high whitewashed walls and meticulously manicured lawns. But the cloud-covered sun shed a ghostly, col­orless illumination that painted the grounds in stark contrasts of shadow and light.

  The assembly was the greatest of the year since it was the last of the three feast days, the Period of Behavioral Mastery. All who lived within proximity of the sanatorium flocked to wait in murmuring ex­citement for the basilisks to choose which among the Prey Party would face them in the operating arena.

  Mina, her limbs aching and leaden with exhaustion, looked down the slope into the Valley of the Divinely Inspired. People milled around the walls of the san­atorium and jostled one another for seats in the bowl-shaped amphitheater. The opening ceremonies had al­ready been completed. Chief of Staff Eljay and his assistant, Dr. Sardonicus, were already allowing the preliminary sacrifices into the arena, offering up their blood and flesh to the basilisks.

  Crouched in a clump of underbrush sprouting be-tween two moss-covered outcroppings, Mina could see quite clearly how the stadium was filled by people whose excited shrieks filled the air.

  On one side of the amphitheater, ragged people milled uncertainly through a narrow doorway. Men and women, cripples and the elderly were forced out into the open. One hobbled about with the aid of a crutch. All of them were streaked with blood that trickled from superficial cuts on their arms and legs. The preliminary sacrifices were the Chronics, the ha­bituated respondents, diagnosed by Eljay and Sardon-icus as being untreatable.

  Trumpets blared discordantly. Mina knew the noise signified nothing, but was meant only to agitate the caged basilisks. When a gate on the opposite wall slid aside, the Chronics cried out and tried to escape back through the door, but they were driven back by the lashing whips in the hands of white-coated attendants. The other gate opened completely, and black-winged shapes lunged through it.

  Stimulated by the blaring horns and driven to shrieking madness by the scent of blood, the basilisks swarmed toward the humans. A few of the people tried to hold their ground, while others turned and fled. The basilisks pursued them, alighting on the el­derly and the crippled first, slashing at their faces with razor-keen teeth and talons. Instinctively, the crea­tures sought to put out their eyes, knowing blinded prey was the easiest.

  The man with the crutch flailed furiously, using it as a bludgeon. He managed to hold the basilisks at bay for a few moments until one landed on his head. Dropping the crutch, he tried to protect his eyes. An instant later he went down under a pack of the shriek­ing creatures.

  The audience in the arena shrieked like basilisks themselves.

  Mina's stomach lurched with nausea as she watched the black-winged creatures flitting over the eviscerated bodies in the center of the arena. From the grounds outside the amphitheater came the brassy blasting of trumpets.

  The basilisks crawling over the bodies of the Chronics lifted their heads, like hounds sniffing the wind for a scent. With a piercing, collective shriek, all of the creatures flung themselves into the air. Like an eruption of smoke, the flock rushed up, drawn to­ward the noise.

  Mina's eyes followed them in their swift flight. She saw the pattern of fields and the thatched huts built along the bank of the river, and wondered if any of the Prey Party had been stupid enough to hide there.

  The Valley of the Divinely Inspired was broad and deep, with a sweep of level plain and a belt of thick forest bordering the base of the hills. The branches of the trees glistened with moisture. The sight was stir­ringly beautiful to Mina, even though she had never left the valley and had no knowledge of another place for comparison.

  She shivered in the postdawn chill and peered through the screen of leaves, hoping to sight fellow members of the Prey Party. She saw no one and she didn't know if that was bad or good. She pushed back her explosion of thick black hair from her face. It was an unruly mass of loose curls, as if only the wind had ever combed it. Her eyes were equally black, with a small red N branded between them. She wore a rag­ged crimson tunic, and her bare arms and legs were almost as brown as the winter grass that eked out an uncertain existence on the face of the ridge.

  Mina steadily gulped the cold air, despite the way it burned her lungs. She knew she had been lucky so far in eluding the basilisks. Most of the Prey Party had sought concealment in the trees, hoping the tangle of branches and leaves would provide a protective barrier. Climbing toward the Forbidden Waste was something that didn't occur to the valley-bred.

  Faintly, from the direction of the forest belt she heard a high, gargling shriek. It rose to a shrill pitch of agony, then ended abruptly as if a hand were clapped over the shrieker's mouth—or the throat had been torn out by razored talons.

  Mina shivered again, rubbing her arms briskly. She wo
ndered who among the Prey Party had fallen under the fangs and claws of the basilisks. Whether it was one of the three thieves, the slacker or the day-dreamer, she had no way of knowing. The scream was masculine and she was the only female in the party, the only one diagnosed and branded a nymphoma­niac.

  She didn't necessarily resent the designation since she really didn't know what the word meant. She did know, however than whenever Chief Eljay needed fe­males for the Prey Parties, he would choose women at random, classify them as nymphomaniacs and have them branded as such.

  The pain of the branding iron was intense but brief. However, it angered Mina enough that she was de­termined to survive the hunt. She had already man­aged to live through the Day of Tilkut and the Day of Bast. But the Day of the Basilisk was the last one in the cycle and always the worst. Outdistancing a half-starved, mangy bear had been childishly easy for her. Evading a hungry cougar was a bit more dicey but she had accomplished it. Successfully escaping the basilisks was less than a fifty-fifty proposition.

  Even as the thought registered, Mina heard a flutter of leathery wings overhead. She stopped breathing in­stantly. A shadow flitted across the uneven ground in front of her hiding place and circled lazily. She watched the dark outline slide away over the terrain. When she no longer heard the flap and rustle of wings, she cautiously began to breathe again. She felt as if she had held her breath for an eternity.

  A series of high-pitched whistling shrieks drew her eyes in the direction of the riverside. Near a cotton-wood copse she saw a flock of black shapes held aloft by furiously fluttering wings, dipping and diving, try­ing to flush their quarry. Mina's throat constricted with horror as the half-naked figure of a man sprang from the shadows between the trees. He ran in long-legged bounds toward the river, and she recognized him as Chez, the youth diagnosed as a chronic slacker.

  There was nothing lazy in the way he raced toward the water. His arms and legs pumped furiously but the cloud of winged shapes followed him. From that distance, the basilisks reminded Mina of scraps of dirty cloth, unfolding and folding in the air.

  The clot of flying creatures circled, swooped and struck. There was a moment in which the leathery wings engulfed Chez like a black, writhing cloak, but he continued running. Wet crimson gleamed briefly between the wriggling bodies. On the ground before her the dark shadow slipped silently over the ridge face, and she watched the basilisk arrowing toward its brethren.

  Mina waited a few seconds more, then slowly backed out of the brush, ignoring the thorns scratch­ing her arms and legs. Bent in a crouch, looking up at the sky every few seconds, she began climbing to­ward the ridgeline. She had no plan except to reach it and find a hiding a place among the tumbles of stone for the rest of the day. She wished she possessed the courage to climb down the far side of the hill and leave the Valley of the Divinely Inspired entirely. But all that lay there was the Forbidden Waste. No one, not even Chief Eljay or Dr. Sardonicus knew for sure if the waste was finite or stretched out to encompass the entire world.

  The old legends about brightly lit cities with shiny, cloud-scraping towers at the edge of the waste had been lost in the stream of time, but leaving the valley was still taboo. The primary reason was simple. The Forbidden Waste ringed the valley like a vast zone of death. The indisputable fact was that people who went out into it didn't return. Starvation, thirst, wild ani­mals worse than basilisks or even demons—people didn't come back from the Forbidden Waste.

  Besides, the only reason for even considering leav­ing the valley was the legend of the city of the flam­ing bird, the phoenix. Mina had never spoken to any­one who had even glimpsed it from afar and the people of the valley long ago lost faith it even existed. For that matter, they lost faith that anything existed beyond the waste.

  According to legend, the world had once been green with pure water and air that smelled good. Peo­ple lived in the shining, sky-scraping towers and never worried about anything. Despite the manifest silliness of those stories, they were still enthralling, particularly to children. Mina had been one of those children, and her mind still replayed the old fables.

  Halfway to the crest of the ridge, she heard a sib­ilant screech and a shadow swooped down from the sun. Mina dropped flat, banging her elbows painfully on the rock-strewed ground. The clawed tip of a wing passed so close to her head it yanked a clump of hair out of her scalp. She bit back a cry, knowing the basilisk would rise to a soaring spiral, pause, then swoop down again.

  Mina lunged forward, dragging her way up the slope, scraping her knees raw and bloodying her knuckles against the sharp rocks. Her heart thudded frantically within the cage of her ribs like a terrified bird. She knew she wouldn't make the top of the ridge before a basilisk would alight on her head and tear first into her eyes, then sink its fangs into her jugular.

  A gully seemed to appear out of nowhere, a gash through rock and earth like a knife cut. The edges were hidden by scraggly undergrowth. The lip of the bank was rotten with erosion and it crumbled beneath her weight. She plunged headfirst down the steep in­cline, but she managed to thrust her arms out in front of her as if she were diving into the river. The gully floor was covered by a carpet of soft, damp loam, so she didn't break any bones.

  Still, she landed hard enough to jar the air out of her lungs, and she lay on her stomach, gasping and gagging for a long, panicky moment. Her shoulders ached, and her hands and wrists smarted from impact with the ground. Then she wobbled to her feet and began a scrambling run along the narrow channel, not knowing where she was going but dimly aware the path she followed could lead to only one place—the Forbidden Waste.

  However, she had no inclination to climb out. The walls of the ravine provided some protection from the basilisks. They couldn't pursue her in a straight course since their wingspans were greater than the width of the gully. It was an eerie place, a labyrinth beneath ground level, a network of nearly identical paths overhung by roots and tufts of dry grass.

  Mina threaded her way through a maze of cracks, slamming her knees and scraping her elbows on out-croppings. Nevertheless she kept running, stumbling and lurching from wall to wall. The farther she sprinted, the more rugged the ground became, scat­tered with rock formations sprouting from the ground. Every bump struck by a bare foot triggered vibrations of pain through her head. She knew she was leaving a trail a blind Chronic could follow, but it couldn't be helped. The pain of a stitch stabbed along her left side, the muscles of her legs felt as if they were caught in a vise and her vision was shot through with gray specks.

  Over the rasp and gasp of her own labored breathing, Mina heard the flapping of wings behind her, then a strident screech of triumphant malice. The skin between her shoulder blades crawled in antici­pation of a basilisk alighting there. As she realized the basilisks had found her, all the old feelings of terror she had known as a child returned. The only reason she didn't begin screaming in horror was that she had no breath for it.

  A stone turned beneath her foot and she lost her balance, staggering for several yards before she fell heavily. Spitting out bits of dirt and loam, she lifted her head, dragging in great lungfuls of air. Blinking grains of sand from her eyes, she saw she lay in an open space, a crossroads of sort where four paths branched off in different directions in the shape of an X.

  Mina struggled to her hands and knees, trying to soften the harsh rasp of respiration. Over her gasps, at the periphery of her hearing, she heard a new sound—a faint, high-pitched whine so distant that she couldn't really be certain she heard it.

  Mina began to rise when she felt a tingling, pins-and-needle sensation all over her body, as if she were skirting a low-level electrical field. The tingling be­came a prickle. The fine hairs all over her body seemed to vibrate, to bristle. The air pulsed like the beating of gigantic, invisible heart. At the very center of the crossroads a hazy, blurred shimmer arose, re­minding her of a ripple made by a fish just beneath the surface of the river.

  She gazed at it, frozen in place. Particles of dirt lifted from the gully floor, whirling and spinning, growing from a dust devil to a swirling, cylindrical tornado. It glittered as if powdered diamonds were caught within its powerful vortex.