Deathlands 01 - Pilgrimage to Hell by James Axler

Author:James Axler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

DESPITE ORDERS, you kept to the shadows. The deep shadows. The deeper the

better.

You kept to the shadows despite orders, despite doomy warnings from your unit

leaders, despite hideously snarled threats of disembowelment or being flayed

alive or having your hands nailed to the wall. Despite all these and more, you

kept to the shadows because you were beginning to get… cautious.

A sec man's life in the old days used to be different. It used to be fun, used

to be a laff riot. It meant you were top of the pile, king of the ville. Meant

you could do what you wanted, when you wanted, for as long as you wanted, and

free. Mocsin was open city for the sec men, and you could tool along its streets

and whatever you saw was yours. Not for the asking—you didn't need to ask for

anything. It was all yours for the taking. Yours by right of conquest. Didn't

matter what it was, you had an open license on it. Food, booze, men, women.

Whatever was your fancy, it was yours.

And sure, on the surface the situation hadn't changed. On the surface it was

still the sec men's paradise. On the surface everything was as it was, as it had

always been, since Jordan Teague first hijacked the burg way back when most of

today's sec men were brawling brats.

On the surface.

But underneath, paradise was maybe not quite what it appeared to be. There was a

tension in the air—something you could almost feel, almost gnaw at—that none of

the old-timers had ever known. A population that had once been like rabbits,

cowed and submissive, seemed to have changed, seemed to have become insolent.

They always seemed to be watching you, except when you looked straight at them

and then they weren't watching you at all. Except you always caught that twitch

of the face, that nervous flicker of the eyes, that meant they had been watching

you. And they always seemed to be whispering about you behind your back, except

when you swung around and they weren't whispering at all, their lips were

closed. Except you knew they'd been whispering about you, insulting you. And you

got so mad at this sometimes that you took a whole bunch of them—men, women,

brats—and herded them into the trucks and took them back to the Cellars and you

stopped them watching you out of the corners of their eyes by taking their eyes

out. And you stopped them talking about you behind your back by sewing their

lips together.

But the funny thing was, it didn't seem to do the trick, didn't seem to stop the

watching and the whispering. And you couldn't herd the whole town into the

Cellars.

And then there was the sniping. You'd be in a jeep and heading to the mines or

coming back from them, in the line of duty, and suddenly one of the guys with

you would keel over, one side of his head blown away, his soft nose and blood

and brains splashed everywhere. First time this had happened everyone had

thought it was a marauder attack, although marauders around this neck of the

woods were in fact very

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