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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] untouched by the fires of skydark and the ravages of the decades of nuclear winter that followed. And for the most part it was deserted. All there for the taking. ABC Amber Text Converter Trial version, http://www.thebeatlesforever.com/processtext/abctxt.html And there was only one person keeping Crecca from taking it: Baron Kerr. The last of Kerr's men lay dead in the cart. So far the job of baron looked butt simple to Crecca. Much simpler, and much less dangerous than running a carny and mobile gas chamber. Pick some bounty. Slam some heads. And the last bit was especially easy since the folks getting their heads slammed wanted it to happen. He stared at the low concrete-block building at the foot of the slope. It was the most secure structure in the ville, and where he knew its most valuable treasures would be kept. He recognized the building as a predark pumphouse because he'd come across others like it before. From the oblique and downward angle of view, he could see the huge pipes running down the mountainside to the back of the building. No doubt they had something to do with the pool's water level. A tug at the tail of his ringmaster coat made Crecca turn. He looked down to see Jackson staring up at him with dead black eyes. "Get away from me," the carny master said. The naked stickie started to sing and dance, to try to make up for biting the hand that fed it. Jackson did a rendition of the Tiffany music video that they had been rehearsing in the big wag, complete with head jukes and hip thrusts. The singing sounded like screeching to Crecca, and the dancing wasn't like dancing at all, more like a perpendicular grand mal seizure. The carny master wasn't amused and wanted no part of it. He hauled off and booted the stickie in the backside, sending it tumbling down the road. When Jackson didn't go away, but rather resumed its irritating caterwauling and pelvic thrusting at a safe distance ABC Amber Text Converter Trial version, http://www.thebeatlesforever.com/processtext/abctxt.html and with a pleading look on its pale face, Crecca reached down and picked up stones, with which he pelted the creature. Struck and bleeding, Jackson slunk away over the hillside, still in its choke collar and trailing its chain leash. With Crecca bringing up the rear, the procession crested the rise, then followed Baron Kerr downhill to the muddy bank beside the pool, where he signaled for them to stop. When the baron handed out the cutting tools, Crecca was first in line to take one of the axes. The job was messy, but not difficult, because the tools had been honed to razor sharpness. After the first body had been chunked, Kerr started lobbing the pieces into Page 122 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html the pool. Almost at once the huge lungfish rose to the bait, swirling and splashing on the surface as they fought over their dinner. Crecca enthusiastically returned to the chopping. As he did so, he noticed Kerr staring at him. The carny master smiled at the ville's headman as he brought down the ax. You're next, Baron, he thought. Chapter Thirty-One Baron Kerr had learned not to trust rays of hope. Like everything else in his ever shifting world, they had always proved to be illusions, cast by the burning pool for its own inexplicable ends. Yet, as he watched the man in the red coat struggle on the ground with the black scout over the right to brain the strapped-down-and-beaming sacrificial lamb, he had the first inkling of what might be possible. While it wasn't unusual for people to fight for the right to be next to sit in the Clobbering Chair, and so to sooner exit the grasp of the pool, no one had ABC Amber Text Converter Trial version, http://www.thebeatlesforever.com/processtext/abctxt.html ever before demanded the right to be executioner. To test his suspicion, he had given the pipe back to the black man, then studied Red Coat's reaction when it was used shortly thereafter to crush the victim's skull. Kerr saw fury in the man's eyes. Fury at having been denied pleasure. Fury directed at him, the denier. Which was good. Which was very good. If the anger the baron had witnessed was real, and not some figment of his own imagination, it was also a first. The spores and the bounty had always produced slaves who were compliant. Not demanding. Not impatient. And above all, not envious. They would take up the pipe and wield it joyfully when the time came, but only when ordered to do so. The black man had only battled to keep the pipe because the pool entity, speaking through Kerr, had commanded him to use it. Assuming that the pool had absolute control of Red Coat, a safe assumption under the circumstances, it was making him behave differently than anyone else ever had, allowing him an element of personality that it had refused all the others. Whatever his hallucinations were, they, too, had to be markedly different than anyone else's. The baron kept his eye on Red Coat as he led his flock and the corpse cart up the zigzag trail to the pool. He noticed when ABC Amber Text Converter Trial version, http://www.thebeatlesforever.com/processtext/abctxt.html the red-haired man paused and looked back at the ville. The expression on the newcomer's face was one of desire, of greed, even. What was he seeing down there? Kerr asked himself. Or, more properly, what was the pool making him see? It had a way of finding the weakest point in a human being's psychology, and attacking it. How it did this was a mystery. As far as the baron could tell, the pool wasn't capable of thought; it just did the things it did. It was. As Kerr moved up the grade, he swam in a sea of the dead. Vague floating specters surrounded him, drifted through him, over his head. These were the innumerable ghosts of the pool; he could see them through closed eyelids. He couldn't match names with faces, but every one of them had drawn his or her final breath in the Clobbering Chair. Every one bore the mark of the iron pipe on their skull. Although the baron's world and this spectral world of the pool's victims Page 123 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html overlapped visually-he could see them, but they could not see him-they didn't overlap tangibly. There was no sensation of contact as the gauzy forms passed through or brushed against him. Kerr had become so used to the horrors of these hallucinations that they had become nothing more than an annoyance. Especially when the sun was going down. The angled, softened light made it difficult to see through the randomly shifting apparitions. Though the pool could be subtle in its manipulations, it wasn't in this case. His visions of the legions of dead were meant to demonstrate how close the ones who had gone before were, how close freedom was, and yet always just beyond his reach. It was a constant, minute-by-minute reminder that he who wanted more than anything to escape could not. Once Kerr had had a life, though he could barely remember it. Once he had had faith, though that was dead to him. The pool had taken everything. It had taken his soul. When the procession reached its denuded bank, the pool was ABC Amber Text Converter Trial version, http://www.thebeatlesforever.com/processtext/abctxt.html quiet. It reflected the peach and turquoise of the sunset, and the black fringe of the trees along the ridgeline above. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |