“What do you want?” the Magus demanded. “As you can see, I am fully occupied at present.” He was screwing together a contraption made of plastic tubing and metal fittings. He kept turning the thing over in his hands, then holding it up to the gaping chest as if measuring its fit.
What the gizmo’s angles and ridges might do inside that tortured anatomy the carny master had no clue. He shifted his boot soles and felt the stickiness underfoot. Gear grease or guts, he couldn’t tell. Crecca cleared his throat before he spoke, afraid his voice might break. “I just wanted to let you know that the valve problem on the canisters has been repaired,” he said. “It was a rubber gasket that failed. We jury-rigged replacements. You said you wanted to be kept informed.”
The Magus got up from the sofa. Lurching forward on knee joints made of Teflon and titanium, he wasn’t a pretty sight.
Even though the carny master knew that to turn and run would have meant the end of him, it took every ounce of nerve to stand his ground. And as the creature clicked past him, he couldn’t help but let go a sigh of relief.
The Magus had to have heard the exhalation.
He stopped in midstep, his head rotating as if on massive ball-bearing swivels, his eyes spearing the carny master’s very soul.
Crecca opened his mouth, but no sound came forth. All he could see was the pupil holes in the chrome eggs narrowing to tiny pinpoints. He felt as if he were falling into them, drawn down as if by a whirlpool into spinning metal blades.
“So One-Eye has come for the world-famous show, has he?” the Magus said. “And brought his spawn to see it, too? How very, very convenient for me. To finally dispense with both the infuriating cyclops of a father and the annoying simp of a son. Poof!”
Crecca said nothing.
“Make sure he gets a good seat,” the Magus ordered. “Make sure his son is sitting beside him. And make sure they don’t get out of the tent.”
“Of course, Magus.”
“Death comes to all of us,” the Magus said brightly as he moved to the dissection table. “Well, most of us, anyway.” Then he threw back his head and made a noise.
Because Crecca had been the creature’s pawn for so long, he recognized the racket as laughter and stifled the urge to cover his ears. To anyone else, it would have sounded like a wag engine throwing a piston rod—shrieking, clanking, before rattling to a stop.
The Magus reached a steel-claw hand into the chest cavity and took hold of the beating heart.
“This ville is fat and ripe for the plucking,” the Magus said, weighing the pound of wet muscle on his palm. “There can be no mistakes.”
Crecca nodded.
“Mistakes will be costly.”
To prove his point, the Magus crushed the heart in his fist, making hot blood squirt in all directions. The body made a grunting noise, then its heels began to drum on the tabletop. Working in an absolute frenzy, the Magus fit the plastic-metal contraption into the ravaged chest. Muttering to himself, he seized a soldering iron and plunged the red-hot tip into the cavity. The smell of scorched flesh and burning plastic billowed from the gash.
He had no more time for carny masters, or canisters.
As the Magus began to hum—not from his throat, as a flesh-and-blood person might do, but from his round, spider belly—Crecca carefully and quietly backed over the piles of junk and out of the room.
As soon as he shut the door, Jackson jumped up and started licking the spatters of blood from the toe of his boot. Still a bit dazed, Crecca watched the little monster feed for several moments before backhanding it hard against the wall. Jackson ended up on its butt on the floor, face slack, vacant eyes slowly blinking.
Stickies had to be treated with firmness, and all instructions had to be repeated countless times before they sank in. Crecca was in charge of when, how and what Jackson ate. Left to its own primal instincts, the immature mutie would have chewed right through the tip of the boot, and once it tasted his blood, Crecca would have had to put a slug in its head to stop the chomping jaws and needle teeth.
Safely back in his own quarters, the carny master rushed to a waiting jar of joy juice and had a long, steadying pull. It was only then that he realized he had crapped himself.
Chapter Eight
Ryan and the companions were among the throng of ville folk watching the roustabouts lay out rolled sections of the big tent on the ground. Predark music blared from a row of black speakers on the roof of one of the wags. It was the same raucous show tune Ryan and the others had marched to the day before.
The head roustabout shouted orders over the insistent drumbeat. One of his men made measurements using a long piece of chain bolted to a stake that had been driven into the yellow dirt. The fixed length of this device allowed him to draw a great circle. As he moved the chain around the center-stake, at even intervals he tapped in perimeter stakes. When the floor plan had been laid out, two other men began digging a narrow, deep hole at the midpoint to act as a footing for the tent’s main upright support.
When this was done, the roustabouts hauled the tent sections into final position, like the spokes of a wheel, and began snapping them together and folding the double, overlapping seams. From the strain and sweat on their faces, the rolls were very heavy.
In a matter of minutes, the big tent began to take shape on the ground. Easily two hundred feet across, it was striped in gay red and white, and made of some heavily coated fabric.
The cheery music and the festive colors made Ryan’s skin crawl and his trigger finger itch. As did the expressions of delight he saw on the faces of the onlookers.
Like lambs led to slaughter.
Ryan was by no means a do-gooder, and life in Deathlands was survival of the fittest. But some things just had to come to a stop.
A worker with a wheelbarrow passed out tent stakes to men who waited at the perimeter markers with sledgehammers. The thick, cylindrical metal spikes were almost four feet long. The roustabouts grunted and swung in time to the music. The twenty-pound heads of their hammers sent showers of sparks flying as they slammed the spikes deep into the earth. When the broad ring of side stakes was set, ropes were tied, loosely connecting them to the tent’s lower wall. A seventy-five-foot-long steel pole, also made up in shorter sections, was assembled, then eight men crawled inside the flattened bag with it.
At the hairy roustabout’s direction, a heavy rope was attached to the tent’s peak. A dozen workers then yarded it over the top of the tallest wag as the men inside the tent angled up the center pole in a series of steps timed to the music’s beat.
The crowd of bystanders sent up a wild cheer as the pole’s butt slipped into place and the tent was finally raised. Red-and-white pennants on the peak of the roof and around the top of the side wall hung down limply in the still, already scorching air.
“There’s only the one exit,” J.B. said to Ryan. “And no window vents that I can see.”
“It’s like we thought,” the one-eyed man said. “Whatever it is that they’re doing to folks, it all happens inside the tent.”
“And nobody’s getting out,” Krysty added.
“From the looks of the fabric,” Mildred said, “the tent could be a Kevlar weave, or something like it. But with a plasticized coating on the outside. If it is made of Kevlar, even blaster slugs won’t tear it. With those double seams, it’s got to be virtually airtight.”
“A candy-striped, portable death house,” Krysty said softly.
“All the evidence we’ve seen points to an inhalant,” Mildred went on. “They’ve got to be using some kind of poison gas.”
“Mebbe we don’t want to go in there, Dad,”