GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  Mike saw how they let the lines on the boom sag. So much air spilled from their sails that the Red Pill was able to range up alongside.

  With the two boats almost touching, Mike nudged Colleen, who repeated in a carrying whisper, what he had told her to say: “If your Corsairs give you any more trouble, kill them as soon as the shooting starts. That’s what Mike’s going to do.”

  It was coldly spoken and a shock to everyone on the Rapier, including Rebecca. She nodded, showing little confidence. The ex-Corsairs didn’t seem to notice, they were staring across at Mike. They saw the resolution stamped on his face, the determined way his brow was set, and how his sailors moved swiftly to follow his orders.

  “Tell her to maybe start with one or two of them and see if the rest fall in line,” Mike whispered to Colleen. Just as she repeated this, the Tempest lit the first of her smoke bombs and cut its line. It floated free, making a surprisingly loud rushing/hissing sound. It also put out a huge volume of smoke. In seconds, the Tempest and a good part of the island were hidden from view.

  All hell was about to break loose and Mike had to hope Rebecca could handle herself. He turned his full attention to his own boat, which had begun to bob and spin slowly to the right as it had its wind stolen by the Rapier. It was only with difficulty that he pulled ahead. The Red Pill was more of a racehorse and had a tendency to gripe in weak winds, almost as if it were a toddler throwing a fit.

  Once she got a little headway, the boat settled down and Mike set her on a course, aiming for the heart of the smoke that was billowing and growing.

  Always a bit shy on board a boat, Stu had set his first bomb off seventy yards from the dock, so Mike knew there was plenty of room to get even closer. Though, once he was inside the cloud, he knew he would have to trust his instincts more than his talent as a sailor if he wanted to keep them off the rocks guarding the approaches to the island.

  He knew the rocks around the island quite well. Some were nasty, sharp spires that would tear the guts out of a ship like the Red Pill without a problem. Others were little more than hidden humps that would grab the hull and hold her tight. If he’d had the bad luck to run aground on them a month before, he would have suffered only from a terrible case of embarrassment. Now, with the defenders of Alcatraz waking up to the fact that an attack was in the works, getting stuck on those rocks would be a death sentence.

  As frightening as it was to charge into that insurmountable darkness, their current situation was worse. The wind had dropped at the same time it had swung around from the west, effectively killing the boat’s speed until they were practically crawling toward the smoke.

  “Come on, come on, please,” Mike began hissing, begging the wind to pick up.

  Next to him, Colleen started chanting, “Please, don’t see us. Please, don’t see us.” So far, the Corsairs on the island had been foolishly shooting at the cloud of smoke that Stu had produced. It would be only a matter of time before someone saw the faint outlines of the Red Pill as it crept along.

  When they were fifty yards from the smoke, a bullet thwacked into the wheel next to Mike’s hand. A damned lucky shot on such a dark night, Mike hoped. If there was a sharpshooter out there, they were doomed. The next bullet tanged off the mast.

  Crap! It was a sharpshooter and one with the deadest eye imaginable. Ignoring a new shoot of hot pain, Mike thrust the rifle with its fancy scope to his shoulder and saw the hot white outlines of twenty men shooting his way. It was impossible to tell which were missing their target by a country mile and which were zeroing in on them.

  After another near miss, Mike thrust the gun into Colleen’s arms and raced to the boom, brushing aside one of the ex-Corsairs.

  Mike couldn’t yell and he couldn’t waste time speaking through Colleen, so he worked the sails and rudder himself, coaxing every ounce of speed out of the failing wind. Still, they inched forward as more and more holes appeared in the mainsail, and splinters, shot away from the gunwale, rained down like confetti.

  Two dreadfully long minutes elapsed and they had nearly made it into the smoke when two of the ex-Corsairs were shot in quick succession. The first was killed as he cowered next to the mast and the other was hit in the side a second later as he ran to get below decks.

  The safety of the cabin was an illusion as a new scream of pain proved moments later. The ex-Corsairs should have known better and yet only Leney and Colleen were still on deck as they mercifully slid into the smoke.

  Mike had not expected the smoke to be as thick as it was. Colleen, only a few feet away, was little more than a white-faced ghost that seemed to materialize out of nothing and disappear again just as quickly. Leney was a whispering apparition, begging, “Bring her up to port?” This would lead them north, away from the island and the bullets zinging by.

  “No!” Mike hissed, with such painful force that he had to grab his throat. Leney was only a few steps away at the wheel and, by the ticking sound it made, Mike could tell he was slowly turning it. In his hurry to stop him Mike almost pitched head-first down the stairs and only an unseen rope catching him across the chest kept him from falling.

  He was jerked to a stop with a new flare of pain—and was that blood leaking down his throat?

  Hoping it wasn’t, he searched around with outstretched arms until he found Leney, who jumped at the touch. Mike hauled the wheel back, whispering, “Get out of the way.”

  As far as Mike’s eyes were concerned, the boat effectively ended not much beyond the reach of his hands. Everything else was a swirl of the most intense darkness he’d ever experienced. The same panic that had Leney cowering, also threatened to steal Mike’s reason. The seventeen-year-old found himself gripping the wheel fiercely, a breath away from turning to port—a second away from diving into the cold, bare safety of the bay.

  The only thing that stopped him was the mushy action of the rudder as it sent its barely discernible vibrations up through the spokes of the wheel. The erratic, puffing wind was coming now from the northwest, and a turn to port would put them bow-first into the wind.

  “That won’t do,” he whispered. “I have to…” His words faltered as he threw off the panic clutching at his heart and concentrated on steering his ship by hearing alone.

  To his front left was the hissing sound of the smoke bombs that Stu had lit, while ranged further to his right was a smattering of gunfire from Alcatraz. Almost dead ahead was a light, hollow thumping that he recognized as the sound of wooden-hulled boats made when they knocked gently against a dock.

  Holding his breath as bullets whizzed all around him, he maintained a steady course. Next to him, Colleen flinched when the flying lead got too close, while Leney, hidden by the smoke, cursed in an endless mutter like only a practiced Corsair could.

  Guided by his instincts and his years of sailing these very waters, Mike had them on a perfect approach. The same could not be said of the Rapier. Mike could hear Rebecca and her ex-Corsairs somewhere not too far off his port beam arguing which way north was. They were lost in the smoke, but by the sound of their voices, he could tell they were heading straight south, directly toward Alcatraz.

  Their course would take them out of the smoke and leave them vulnerable. Before Mike could get Colleen to understand his excited hissing, there was an explosion of shooting both to and from the Rapier. Rebecca began screaming: “Hard to starboard! Hard to starboard!”

  “No! To port!” countermanded one of the ex-Corsairs. “Port will point us right into the wind. We’ll fall off. Do you understand? It means we’ll stall. We’ll be sitting ducks, damn it!”

  Mike’s worst fears had come true: they had come out of the smoke in full view of the island and even the darkness couldn’t save them. Bullets thumped into the hull and rang off the mast and punched holes in the people exposed on deck. There were more shrill screams and then, in all the chaos, someone on the Rapier lit off their smoke bombs but didn’t cut the rafts away.

  Perhaps they were trying make their own cloud
to hide in; instead they doomed the ship. It was one thing to ride through a cloud of smoke; it was annoying and choking. It was an entirely different thing to have three huge smoke bombs brewing up a black storm ten feet from the stern of a boat.

  Mike’s heart was in his throat; he could hear the panic aboard the Rapier, and he thought he could picture the terrifying situation. Then, a minute later, the Red Pill burst out of the smoke and he was able to see it firsthand.

  In order to save her crew and her boat, Rebecca had turned to port so that the stale wind ran down the length of the ship, sending a huge mountain of smoke towards the island. Still, half the boat was engulfed in the black cloud that billowed six-stories high. People from below were rushing onto the deck and desperately pushing to get to the bow where the only breathable air remained—the only way to get there was to force those already there into the water.

  It wasn’t long before some frantic, desperate person in the back began shooting into the crowd. New screams ripped through the air.

  “Son of a bitch,” Leney moaned. Although he’d been a bloodthirsty Corsair until the day before, he was also a sailor and no sailor could abide seeing something so tragic, yet he couldn’t seem to take his eyes from the horror that was the death throes of the Rapier.

  “They gotta cut ‘em away. Cut away the rafts, damn it!” he screamed across the water. “Cut ‘em away! Cut ‘em…”

  Just then the Rapier’s bow fell away from the wind and the boat turned in a long slow arc towards Alcatraz. Whoever had been at the wheel had either been overcome by the smoke or had run away.

  Now the smoke roiled across the entire ship, blocking it entirely from view. The Rapier was gone.

  Chapter 23

  Mike Gunter

  Without anyone at the wheel, the Rapier was adrift, floating side-on towards Alcatraz. The smoke was so intense that Mike knew nothing could survive in it for more than a minute or two and those minutes were long gone.

  Looking as though she were close to puking, Colleen crossed herself. “That has to be the end of this, right? Are we done? Can we go?”

  They couldn’t be done. Not yet, not with the Rapier stricken like she was. Mike had to help if he could. Suddenly furious, he shoved the radio at her and then pointed toward the cloud. He then grabbed Leney by the coat and heaved him to the stern where their smoke bombs were still floating innocently along behind them.

  “Light them,” Mike growled, through clenched teeth—they were perfectly positioned between Stu’s drifting smoke bombs and the dock. If Stu attacked without Mike’s smokescreen, the Tempest and everyone on it would be destroyed.

  Leney started cursing again just as Colleen began whispering into the radio, “Rebecca? Are you there? Please, Rebecca say something.”

  There was only static. There were a dozen reasons why Rebecca wouldn’t have answered and none of them were good. It was also a bad sign that Stu hadn’t said a word. His radio was still off. He was going to attack the island even though he had just lost a third of his already paltry forces.

  Mike snapped his fingers at Leney to hurry with the smoke bombs. Leney worked quickly and in only half a minute he lit the smoke bombs and cut them away; it was a good thing too since the island defenders had just noticed the uniform darkness and the regular lines of the sailing ship against the flowing backdrop of clouds. Bullets began to zip their way again just as Red Pill turned back into the cloud, heading north with the light wind on her beam.

  With smoke all around him it made no sense to try to squint through it, so Mike closed his eyes and pulled his shirt up over his nose as he waited for the exact moment to turn, either back southwest, or straight west depending on the direction of the drunken wind that veered all over the compass.

  “Please, let’s cut our losses and get out of here,” Leney begged.

  Mike shushed him. He needed absolute quiet. He had no idea where in all this madness the Tempest was. Stu would have his ship running silently with only the wind in her rigging giving her away. If she was lurking somewhere in the smoke, there was an unlucky chance that Mike could run the Red Pill right into her.

  Another reason he needed Leney to keep his mouth shut was that he had to keep his ears oriented on the sound of what was left of the Rapier’s crew. They were in the slow process of drowning and with the bay filled with zombies, they couldn’t risk calling for help. All they could do was pray in wet, gurgling, frightened voices.

  Mike could feel their panic on the cold air and it sent shivers deep into his chest. He drew his heavy coat around him. As he did he pictured the survivors in the water fighting against the weight of their own coats. And it wasn’t just the weight that was dragging them down. All their clothes would be clinging to them like a slowly constricting second skin.

  How long did they have? Another two minutes? Maybe three? Just then the wind shifted again, coming from the north. Without hesitation, Mike threw the wheel over and began snapping his fingers for Leney to swing the boom around.

  Leney was a fine sailor and after only a tiny pause, he had the boom in position. The sail filled and the boat swung around like an obedient little dog. Mike wrung every bit of speed that he could out of the weak air and the boat knifed through the water, even casting a small wave of water from its bow.

  Then he was through the smoke Stu had laid down and out in the open bay, not seventy yards from the island, where there was a great roar of shooting. It had been oddly muted while they were in the smoke, now it was loud and terrifying. Colleen let out a whimper and slunk down, while Leney was hunched, halfway down the stairs that led to the cabins.

  It hurt his throat to flinch and he couldn’t steer if he cowered, so Mike only shrugged and waited for the bullet with his name on it. He figured it had to come since they were cutting right across the island. They should’ve had every gun the Corsairs owned pointed right at their ship, but once more luck was on their side.

  The Tempest had been spotted trying to dart between the banks of smoke. A cry had gone up and now the water all around the big ship was frothing and leaping. Its mainsail was so shredded that it lost more air than it captured and its once beautiful hull and deck were so torn-up with so many yawning black holes that Mike thought it looked something like a ghost ship.

  It had suffered so much that it was fast becoming unsailable and Stu barely managed to duck his ship into the cloud produced from Mike’s three bombs.

  By the time anyone bothered to look back around for the Red Pill, she had scooted in behind the colossal smoke bank sent up from the Rapier, which spewed so violently that it resembled an erupting volcano. A third of Alcatraz was covered by the smoke. Enough of it lay under the velvet black blanket that the Red Pill remained unseen as she went about the slow process of searching for survivors.

  It was an anxious few minutes as they loitered within rock-skipping range of the island, pulling exhausted, frightened people from the icy, corpse-filled waters. The freshly dead were limp, white blobs, while the nearly dead were blue-lipped and hollow-eyed. Ten minutes in the bay had left them barely capable of even standing and most were sent below to add the heavy aroma of sea water to the smell of sweat and fear.

  Only a shivering Rebecca Haigh remained on deck. “I couldn’t see nothing, Mike. It wasn’t my fault. We just came out of the smoke and the island was right there, dead-on. And the wind…it turned on us. It betrayed us.” She sat in a stiff ball with her arms curled about her and babbled more excuses that Mike didn’t have time to listen to.

  His ship was drifting towards the impenetrable bank of smoke which hid the Rapier. Somewhere in the hell of its own creation, the ship was being ground to kindling against the rocky shore of the island. The sound of the ship being gutted grated on his soul.

  Feeling somewhat numb, he patted Rebecca’s knee and told her in a rasping whisper that it wasn’t her fault. It was a lie that he needed to say and she needed to hear.

  Of course it was her fault. Whenever a ship was lost, it was alwa
ys the captain’s fault, even if she was new to the command and her crew was made up of prisoners of war; even if the overall plan was weak; and even if the wind was against her. None of that mattered. It was her fault the Rapier was on her side being bashed over and over again into the rocks.

  It wasn’t something he could dwell on.

  Judging by the crash of rifles off to his left, Stu had managed to find the dock and had begun his one-man assault. For all their sakes, Mike couldn’t let him fight this battle alone. He patted Rebecca’s leg a second time and went to the wheel.

  “Aw, for crap’s sake,” Leney whispered when he saw this. “Hold on! You need to re-think all of this. You saw what just happened. Your people…” He cast a quick look at Rebecca who was staring dazedly at the mountain of smoke before them. “Your people aren’t cut out for this sort of thing. Besides, they’ve been through enough.”

  “Enough of what?” Colleen asked. She, too had been gazing at the smoke. The cold had not affected her beauty in the least. Crystalline tears gilt her blue eyes, while her cheeks were the color of a rose in bloom.

  “Enough of dying, damn it!”

  Angrily, Mike snapped his fingers at Leney, pointed to the sail and then down the length of the island toward the dock.

  “Are you joking?” Leney cried. “You want us to just la-di-da right down the island in full view of everyone? With this wind? Why don’t you just line everyone up and shoot ‘em? It’ll be quicker.”

  “Quiet down or…” Mike grabbed his throat and grimaced. Leney wasn’t wrong. The fastest route to the dock was also the most dangerous one. Chances were that the Red Pill would get ripped up worse than the Tempest had been, and with her cabin filled with people, the carnage would be unbelievable.