by James Axler
Krysty and the Armorer gathered up their packs and followed the two men out of the tiny redoubt. Krysty’s knees almost went weak as the breeze played across her. After the blood, smoke and filth of the stickie siege the clean, cold ocean air was a gift from Gaia.
J.B.’s head snapped up. “Hear that?”
Krysty cocked her head. She did, in the distance she heard the sound of men trying to give each other the gift of lead. “Blasterfire.”
Nando squinted out into the channel and nodded. “Jak.”
J.B. heard the crack and boom of firearms he didn’t recognize, but the clouds of white smoke told him they were burning black powder, and J.B. would recognize the crack of Jak’s .357 Magnum blaster anywhere. The battle seemed short and inconclusive from shore, and one of the boats came about and began making for the escarpment. J.B. deployed the folding stock on his Uzi. He lowered it as Doc’s lean figure stood in the prow and waved. The boat puttered up to the concrete quay. Doc threw Nando a line and everyone boarded the boat.
Everyone in the boat looked at Krysty and J.B. in horror.
“We really need a bath,” Krysty whispered.
J.B. was all too aware of that. “What do we have, Jak?”
“War,” Jak replied.
“A revolution,” Doc said.
“The short end of the stick,” Mildred stated. “As usual.”
Krysty shook her head in disappointment. “Where’s Ryan?”
“He is upon the main isle,” Doc answered. “He rescued myself and Mildred, and then stayed on to organize resistance.”
Krysty rolled her gorgeous green eyes. “Typical.”
“J.B.,” Doc continued, “Ryan asks that you and Jak organize the natives of the Sister Isle for war. We can expect the ville to launch an invasion quite soon.”
J.B. sat exhaustedly as Jak took the whaler back out. “Give me the whole story.”
“Well,” Doc began, “as you know, Ryan and I were first of our party through the mat-trans, whereupon we found ourselves alone save for a puffin. He was quite a handsome specimen so I sketched him. Then my—”
“Mildred?” J.B. interrupted. “Give me the short version.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Ryan and Cafu crept through the field. He hadn’t quite been sure what he expected, perhaps a blood “plantation” with people in pens. What Cafu brought him to was a fortified predark clinic. The road here was cracked and raddled pavement rather than the cobblestone of the old ville. Most of the parking lot had been ripped up and turned into a field. The walls of the clinic had been buttressed with brick and stone. The electric glass doors had been replaced with iron-bound oak. The ambulance roundabout still existed, and Ryan was surprised to see a red-and-white ambulance that looked to be in good shape parked beneath the portico. Ryan looked over at Cafu. Despite his bull-like strength, Cafu was an old man, and a man with half a left foot wasn’t made for marching. Ryan figured the ambulance would make a fine war wag.
It might also solve the problem of egress.
This raid would have to be fast. They were dangerously close to the ville. Ryan was hoping one whole hell of a lot that their sec men were at the powder mill right now with their hands on their hips staring at a smoking hole in the ground. Ryan glanced backward at the column of smoke still rising to the east.
Blowing up the powder mill had been big fun.
Ryan turned his attention back to the clinic. “Cafu.” Ryan pointed. “You been in there?”
Cafu exposed his arms to show the scars dotting his inner elbows. The old man had been “harvested” many times. He pointed at his mutilated foot to show that drawing blood wasn’t the only operation going on inside.
“What do you say, Cafu?” Ryan gestured at the clinic with his blaster. “You want to have some more fun?”
“Big fun.” Cafu tapped his club into his palm several times as he gazed bitterly at the medical building. “Fireblast.”
Ryan doubted they could go nukecaust on the place as they had the powder mill, but if they could bastard up both the ville’s munitions and meds situation, the revolution was going to have a leg up on things. “Want to go for a ride?”
“Ride?” Cafu asked.
Ryan did some finger pantomime of steering wheels and crashing. “Cafu, we’re going to take that wag and drive it right through the doors.”
Cafu started chattering rapid-fire and shaking his war club. He stopped short of jumping up and down and clapping his hands, but it was clear he was excited about the plan and thankful to be a part of it.
“Let’s do it.”
Cafu nodded and the two men continued their creep forward through the field.
Seven and a half feet of nightwalker erupted out of the earth behind them.
Ryan whirled. Two more exploded up out of their hides and their hunting screams shook the air. They were using spider holes. Wicker frames supported stiffened blankets covered with thatches of field stalks and brush that concealed their lurking pits. The nightwalkers had swathed themselves from head to foot in strips of ville fabric like black-clad mummies. Their heads were heavily turbaned, and thinner black gauze covered the slits they had left for their eyes. The closest nightwalker reached for Ryan with one hand as it raised a splitting maul in the other.
Ryan’s blaster burned on full-auto as he held down the trigger. Bullets walked up the mutie’s body in a line of bloody purple geysers. The mutie’s spider hole became his grave. Ryan put five rounds into the second nightwalker, and his blaster racked open on a smoking empty chamber. Cafu gave the creature both barrels. The third nightwalker was female by the shape beneath its wrapping, and swung a stolen oar from one of the whaler’s like an ax. Cafu’s ribs cracked like kindling beneath the blow and his spent scattergun went spinning away. The oar blade flashed and Ryan narrowly avoided a skull crushing. The she-thing screamed and swung the oar down like an ax. Ryan barely got his empty blaster in the way. Splinters flew as the blade hit the barrel. Ryan grimaced and buckled to one knee as the force of the blow shocked down both arms. There was no time or opportunity to go for his SIG-Sauer. The next blow would finish him.
Cafu rose behind the nightwalker. He groaned horribly as he swung his club into the nightwalker’s back.
It was a weak blow, but the weight of the weapon did most of the work and the orca teeth sank in a line across the nightwalker’s liver. The creature’s shriek was deafening. For a second she went rigid with shock, and Ryan slapped leather for his SIG-Sauer. The blaster barked once in Ryan’s hand and the nightwalker toppled with a smoking, purple-stained hole in the gauze covering its eyes.
Cafu’s knees buckled. Ryan slammed a fresh mag into his blaster. Sec men were spilling out of the clinic. “Cafu! We have to go!” Cafu tried to pull his club free of the dead mutie’s flesh, but he didn’t have the strength. Ryan hauled him up. “C’mon!” Cafu took two agonized wooden steps forward. Ryan shook his head. “Fireblast.” He groaned as he slung Cafu’s heavy frame into a fireman’s carry across his shoulders.
People burst out of the clinic. A blaster cracked and a bullet whipped past. Ryan trotted toward the trees. A gully spilled out to irrigate the field, and beneath the trees was sheltering darkness. Another shot rang out and Ryan gritted his teeth beneath his load and shambled into the creek. Mud splashed beneath his boots as he staggered into the gloom under the trees. The eroded walls of the gully topped his head and provided cover. Ryan slid Cafu off his shoulders. The gully was a narrow defile, and he had a modern blaster with an optic. He could hold off a lot of sec men from here. “Cafu!” Ryan pointed upstream. “Go! I’ll catch up!”
Cafu shook his head and drew his two handblasters.
“Cafu, you have to…” Ryan’s eye flew wide. He had been too busy carrying Cafu to notice. It was too dark beneath the trees. Ryan looked up. The overhanging trees had grown into each other; and someone had taken the further step of weaving them with netting and brush to form a canopy to block the sun. It was a perfect obser
vation point for someone to watch the clinic during the day.
And it was a trap.
An inhumanly deep voice spoke from around the bend in the gulch. “Now.”
Ryan spun. Above him the canopy shook and snapped. Four anvil-size rocks plunged through the branches above as the trigger line holding them was cut. Heavy netting was strung between them. Ryan sprayed a burst up the gully as the net fell across him. The trawling net was woven of heavy strands of hemp, made to hold catches of Lantic cod fish. Ryan struggled to stand beneath the net’s weight. He fired another burst and clawed his slaughtering knife from his boot. Ryan sawed the razor-sharp blade against the strands weighing down his rifle.
Feet splashed at the entrance to the gully behind him.
Ryan tried to turn but the netting snagged on his rifle. He turned his head to see a nightwalker filling the entrance to the gully. It spun a casting net around its head like a gladiator. The net was smaller, weighted with round stones around its circumference and opened like a flower in the air as the nightwalker cast it. The netting fell over Ryan’s head and shoulders. The mutie heaved back on the cords tied to its wrist and the net contracted against Ryan and Cafu. Cafu fired his blaster up the gully at something. A third net fell across them. Ryan heaved at the piles of rope clogging his every movement. It was nearly impossible to raise the muzzle of his blaster. He could hear the nightwalker behind him splashing through the creek. He managed to punch his blade out through gaps in the mesh, but the giant easily avoided the thrust. The nightwalker grabbed Ryan and Cafu and bodily lifted them both off their feet, nets and all, then slammed them facedown into the creek. The giant hand against Ryan’s back pinned him in place like an insect.
Ryan tried to push up but he stood no chance. His lungs began to burn as his face was pushed deeper into the mud and gravel of the creek bottom. Huge hands lifted the edges of the net and ripped away his weapons. Ryan’s vision was blackening when he was yanked up out of the mud and hurled against the wall of the gully like a sack of refuse. He bounced off the slick clay and fell back to the mud.
Ryan rose with a rock in his hand.
Three nightwalkers were arrayed against him. Two were as tall and straight as saplings, and they looked almost identical in conformation beneath their wrappings. Except one clearly had breasts. The third was far larger, like a misshapen titan out of mythology, and carried something with a huge blade much like a medieval polearm. It turned gauze-shrouded eyes on the rock in Ryan’s hand.
This was the cave-chiller.
A laugh like distant thunder rumbled out of its giant chest as it reached down and pulled up a rock the size of a watermelon from the creek bed with one spatulate hand. “Shall we have another exchange of stones, Ryan? I believe you are currently a point up. In the interest of fairness I shall let you have the first throw, so—”
Ryan threw.
He was beaten and exhausted, but hatred had always been a good motivator for him. Ryan flung his rock like it was his last act on earth, aiming at Raul’s skull. The rock hit low but with a meaty thud into his adversary’s collarbone. Raul’s chunk of stone fell from his nerveless fingers.
The only thing missing was the snap of bone.
Raul sank his blade into the mud and brought a huge hand to his shoulder. He slowly circled his arm in its socket several times and sighed, then unwound his turban and pulled away the gauze covering his eyes. Raul wore wooden snow goggles like those who still hunted what remained of the icepack in the Arctic Circle. He pulled them down to reveal the charcoal he had smeared below his eyes. Raul’s eyes were the same color as Ryan’s single orb. The difference was that Ryan’s glacial gaze was that of a man who had seen and survived the worst the Deathlands had to offer. Raul Barat’s burning cobalt stare was that of a creature that slaked its thirsts by inflicting them. The charcoal smeared around those eyes made them pop with even more insane clarity. “I now owe you for two rocks, Ryan.”
The one-eyed man was too weary to respond. He made a mental note to go for Raul’s eyes or his balls, whichever presented themselves first, assuming he survived the first heartbeat of the engagement.
Raul’s smile was horrible to behold. “To tell you the truth, once I put my wrath upon you, I do not think I will be able to control myself, and sad to say, my dear brother wishes to speak with you, and I have promised to deliver you onto him alive.”
Raul turned his horrid glare on Cafu. The old man wheezed and bubbled blood between his lips. “I shall slake my thirst for blood and pain on this poor slave you dragged to his doom.” Raul pointed a huge, black-wrapped condemning finger at Ryan. “As for your chastisement, allow me to introduce the twins, Niolao and Xadreque Andrade. Xadreque, my love, please educate Ryan in his inadequacies.”
The woman unwrapped her turban and pulled down her goggles. Waves of black hair spilled around her shoulders. Gray eyes gazed insanely at Ryan out of the charcoal masking her eyes. It was obvious that once she had been beautiful. Her cheekbones were pronounced, and she had the chin and widow’s peak of a witch, but she had not yet achieved the Neanderthal-like physique of the other nightwalker women Ryan had seen. She was young, most likely in mid-transformation, and was still exotically attractive, except that she was running six foot nine in height. “Crippled, my Baron of the Night?” Xadreque suggested. “Emasculated?”
“Beaten, humiliated and compliant,” Raul suggested. “We mustn’t disappoint my dear brother. At least not quite yet.”
Xadreque was on Ryan in two strides. He tried to go for the eyes, but the insane she-thing was too fast and too strong. He had to cover up as the first blow came at him, and it nearly broke his arm and drove him into the wall of the gully. The sky seemed to open and rain sledgehammered. Ryan saw stars as Xadreque’s open palm cracked across his face like an iron skillet. He buckled as her huge fist hit him in the belly like a battering ram. Ryan fell back and rammed his boot into her belly in return, but it was like kicking a steel wall. She picked Ryan up in both hands, pressed him overhead and hurled him across the gully. She crossed the creek in three strides and repeated the process three more times. Ryan was a rag doll in the mutie’s hands. After the fourth toss, Xadreque stepped back to examine her handiwork.
Ryan rose, swaying like a drunk.
“He is a strong one,” Raul observed.
“Is he?” Xadreque’s hand shot around Ryan’s throat, and she lifted him a foot off the ground. Another giant, feminine hand slammed up invasively between Ryan’s legs. Xadreque smiled to show her growing teeth and purple gums. Her squeezing hand stopped just short of crushing his testicles. “Yes, he is a strong one.” She slowly pulled her hand back until Ryan’s organs strained against their moorings in his body. Ryan’s vision went white. “And a big one, my baron.” Xadreque giggled and dropped Ryan gagging back to the mud. She suddenly squatted on her heels beside him. Her voice was a hiss. “When the false baron is through with you, Ryan, you will watch, screaming, as my teeth tear your manhood from you.”
Ryan had nothing left. He tried to rise and another crushing slap sprawled him back down in the chill water.
The hunting whistles of the Baron Barat’s sec men were suddenly close. Raul tapped Cafu’s crippled, wheezing form with his flensing blade. “Let us hasten, my love.”
Ryan rolled over and once more tried to push himself up, but his muscles hung like brutalized meat off his bones. Xadreque tore off Cafu’s tunic. She buried her face between his legs and Cafu’s body spasmed in shock. Xadreque leaned back, her lips smeared with blood, and threw back her head, swallowing like a crocodile gulping a fish whole. Raul flipped Cafu over and with the tip of his weapon ripped open the right side of Cafu’s lower back. Raul tore out Cafu’s liver with his bare hand, shoved it into his mouth and cut off the excess with a flourish of his weapon. Raul gave a third to Xadreque and tossed the rest to her brother.
Xadreque swallowed and knelt over Ryan with Cafu’s blood staining her lips and chin. “I want him now.”
“Wait, my love.” Raul piled Ryan’s weapons out of reach. “My dear brother comes, and we shall render unto Caesar that which is his, for now, and when my brother renders Ryan back unto us, broken upon the wheel, you may take your every pleasure of him. We go.”
The giants took up their nets and Cafu’s body and were gone up the gully in an eyeblink. Ryan made an effort to crawl to his blasters, but the clinic sec men reached the gully and were on him before he could make more than five feet through the mud of the creek. The stomping they gave him was completely superfluous, but after what had happened to the powder mill, they were in a bad mood. Ryan really didn’t feel much of it.
His last coherent thought was of Krysty. For her sake he hoped J.B. and Jak had a plan.
J.B. AND JAK SURVEYED their collection of weapons. It was laid out in its entirety on a single blanket. They had two auto-blasters with four mags between them. They were Heckler & Koch G-3s, heavy, .30-caliber weapons that would shoot till Doomsday. They were in decent condition, and still firing a hundred years after skydark. That was the best of it. Beyond that they had two bolt-actions with ten rounds apiece, two of the long, single-barrel, single-shot blasters, four of the short doubles, two automotive starter blasters and five swords. None of the regulars in J.B.’s army had the slightest idea how to use any of it, and there wasn’t enough ammo or powder to teach anybody even the basics. Krysty was out of .38 ammo.
According to rumor, the enemy had cannons.
J.B.’s artillery consisted of a single swivel gun with two harpoons.
The Armorer shook his head. The situation wasn’t good. In the Deathlands guerrilla war would’ve been the obvious answer, picking up much-needed weapons and experience in a series of running fights and ambushes. Jak was a past master at that kind of war. But they were on a small island. There just wasn’t room to run. The windswept rolling hills of Sister Isle didn’t provide much cover, and there were no subterranean cave complexes to hide in. J.B.’s biggest problem was that the Sister Islanders had been raised pacified. Luis and Leto had spent the past twenty-four hours running from hamlet to hamlet and telling their tale of what happened to those who were taken to the main island. The Sister Islanders were outraged and angry, and they knew they would be defending their families, but there was very little time to teach them how. The only two advantages J.B. could claim was that he would have the invading force outnumbered, and by all accounts most of them would be using single-shot blasters. There was no way around it. It was going to be a stand-up fight.