by James Axler
“Hurry!” Isis shouted. She fired another shot from her BAR. “You! Outlanders! Get your asses on board now if you want a chance to live!”
“She does mean it, Ryan,” Krysty said. “We need to do it.”
Bent low to reduce her cross-section to the now brutal wind she scuttled from the shelter of her tree to plop down next to her pack. She yanked the tarp off. The wind grabbed it from her and whirled it away out of sight up the once-more sluggish river before she’d got it all the way clear. Her hair was blown in front of her face, the scarlet tendrils, their colors muted by the dim gray light, twisting like a ball of agitated snakes.
“It appears our friend the Black Mask is retreating out to sea at a goodly clip,” Doc shouted. He pointed a long skinny arm. Ryan could see the mainmast of the Black Joke dwindling rapidly to become lost in the trees.
“May not be all under his own power,” J.B. said.
“Let’s go,” Ryan said. Krysty’s move had sealed his decision.
Following Ryan, the others made their way against the force of the wind to recover their packs. A tree thirty yards downstream tore loose. It flew up the channel, its roots shedding mud, right between Egret’s stern and New Hope’s bow. Somehow it missed both ships, and didn’t even tangle the taut tow line before splashing into the river.
Ryan stood with his pack on his back and his rifle slung. He had to lean hard into the wind to keep it from doing to him what it had just done to the big cypress tree. Onboard Hope Long Tom stood gesturing excitedly at Randy in the lee of the cabin, pointing toward the fallen tree, which now lay in the middle of the channel with half its dark foliage above water. Apparently they were discussing whether it blocked their passage or not.
“Everybody grab on to somebody,” Ryan yelled. He reached out blindly as he did, found himself holding on to Doc’s skinny biceps. The old man hastily grabbed Ryan’s arm in reply.
Stumbling, staggering, blinking in a mostly futile attempt to clear raindrops driven hard as bullets out of their eyes, the six made their way to the stern of the Snowy Egret. Half the ship’s gleaming white keel was now fully exposed.
Ryan just had presence of mind to lead his people around the grounded ship’s downwind side. It was as if a giant hand pressing against him had been swatted away. He almost toppled into the hull from leaning hard into a relentless pressure that was suddenly no longer there.
Isis herself helped hand him up. Her grip was strong, as if her muscles were steel cables. Her exotic face was set hard as an ivory statue’s. Some of the Tech-nomads who had gotten aboard disappeared below.
“No room left belowdecks,” she shouted. “Grab on to something. Do it now. Hang on as if your life depends on it, ’cause it does!”
Ryan had let go of Doc to clamber aboard the Tech-nomad yacht. Now he looked around and hurriedly found Krysty. She came to him at once. Putting an arm around each other, they grabbed on to a railing that ran along the top of the cabin.
Ryan looked around. He could only see J.B. and Mildred, doing the same thing he and Krysty were a few feet toward the bow. “Sound off!” he roared. “Everybody secure?”
Through the storm howl he couldn’t hear the response from Doc and Jak. But J.B. yelled, “Other two are locked down, too.”
Isis stood braced in the hatchway to the main cabin a few feet astern of Ryan. “What’re we waiting for?” he yelled.
“You’ll see.”
He noticed that the wind had blown the Egret against the slow current so that she now lay almost at a right angle to the bank. It had to have happened before the water level dropped; he’d been too buried in the scope to notice. He figured it had to be a good sign.
“There goes the Hope!” J.B. called. The rotor-ship was powering upstream away from Egret, severed tow rope trailing into the water off her stern. She literally scraped between the fallen tree and the seaward bank.
“Friends running out on you?” he shouted to Isis.
The wind made her topknot stick straight out like a silver pennon. “Nothing more they can do for us,” she shouted. “Might as well save themselves if they can.”
Before he had a chance to say more, a shout was raised from somewhere on the far side of the boat. “Here it comes!”
“What?” Mildred shouted back.
“The Gulf of Mexico,” Isis said.
A porthole opened into the cabin right next to where Ryan and Krysty stood clinging for dear life against some as-yet-unknown threat. He couldn’t resist leaning forward and peering through.
By chance it gave an unobstructed view out the port on the far side. And what he saw through the rain-streaked polycarbonate was—
“Glowing night shit!” he yelled. “Tsunami!”
Isis about had it right. The Gulf was coming back, with a vengeance, piling up into dirty gray-foaming waves so high he could see them rise right up above the trees of the seaward bank.
“Storm surge,” the captain yelled back.
The rolling water wall blasted through and over the trees. Ryan turned away and he and Krysty huddled against each other for all they were worth.
Then with a mighty roar, the wave hit Snowy Egret and kicked her hard up into the air.
The sea boiled all around them. The yacht spun counterclockwise as it was hurled inland. Ryan felt the impacts and scrapes as her hull pushed through the treetops, now submerged beneath the enormous, irresistible churning flow of the storm surge. He caught a glimpse of the New Hope whirling away to the east like a dune buggy doing doughnuts on a salt flat. He saw a water-strider boat riding the foam-scummed crest of a wave, its rider pedaling furiously, miraculously afloat and intact. Then they spun out of sight.
The Egret was now being flung bodily inland, stern first. Ryan and company were exposed to the full force of the wind. The good news was that it pressed them against the cabin, rather than try to pluck them away. The bad news was that the triple-digit wind speed made it hard to breathe, as if a giant anaconda had thrown its coils around Ryan’s chest and was constricting.
Lightning lanced across the sky. Thunder cracked so loud he thought the Egret was breaking up. But the ship didn’t break into pieces beneath and around them.
Not yet. But no matter how fiercely driven by the monster storm, no matter how far the water had been sucked out to sea, no matter how flat the land beneath for that matter, there was a limit to how far inland the wave could carry them. Sooner or later they’d come back to Earth. Odds against a soft landing were good.
And as he thought that the surge began to fail.
With a splintering crash the Egret hit exposed treetops. Ryan’s grip was broken and he started to tumble sternward. But Krysty’s strength held. For a moment he was stretched horizontally in the air, his heels toward the stern, Krysty’s hand locked like an iron band around his wrist.
Then something knocked the Egret spinning again. The side of the cabin slammed against Ryan’s left side. He felt one of his boots slam into Isis, braced in the doorway, felt her break free and tumble inside.
Then there was nothing but the roaring and the darkness and the water that slammed over the bow and rushed over the deck. And through it all, somehow, the grip on his wrist, warm and solid, maintained.
Something banged into Ryan’s head. He didn’t black out, not wholly, but he lost track….
“RYAN,” A VOICE was calling. “Ryan!”
His awareness, which had been a roaring redness, began to resolve into bright sun and heat.
“Ryan, you got to pull yourself together in a hurry.” He recognized J.B.’s voice, coming as if from a great distance.
But it wasn’t competing with the roar of the wind. It seemed that had been his entire being for an eternity. That and then a wild whirling ride. Then multiple impacts and…confusion.
Something pressed his right cheek, soft and plaint, then tickled his right ear.
His lone eye came all the way open. Krysty leaned over him, her red hair haloed by sunlight. He couldn’t see h
er face for shadow but from her silhouette and smell and the sheer feel of her he knew it was her, and knew she was smiling from the kiss. Her sentient red hair caressed his face like feathers.
He saw the paleness of her smile in her shadowed face. “I thought that was a better way to call you back to this world, lover,” she said. “And I thought you’d wouldn’t react so violently as you otherwise might.”
“I’d rather you rouse me by kissing my cheek than J.B.,” he said, his voice a frog croak.
“That’s both of us, partner,” came the Armorer’s dry voice. “Now get up and get a move on.”
Ryan sat up, realizing he did so against gravity. That was strange. As was the realization that the surface he sat on was tilted to at least thirty degrees.
“Did I sleep through the hurricane?” he asked.
“Nope,” J.B. said. “Welcome to the eye.”
“Oh, shit,” Ryan said.
He got hastily to his feet. Immediately he swayed. He was looking back at the stern, which was crazily framed against the empty sky. His head swam and his gut churned.
The steadying grip on his biceps was strong and sure. This time he could see Krysty’s smiling face perfectly. He gave her a quick, tight grin.
“Status?” he asked.
“Heard the old expression ‘up shit creek without a paddle’?” J.B. asked. “Well, we made it come true. Also we’re up a tree.”
“Several trees, actually,” Krysty said. “We need to get down in a hurry.”
“The rest?”
“The Tech-nomads have lowered a rope, and some of them have climbed down. So has Doc. He’s reloading his LeMat.”
“Keep him out of trouble for a while. You both fit to fight?”
“Never better, Ryan,” J.B. said laconically. “You’re the one took a hit to the head.”
“Jak? Mildred?”
“Hurt his arm,” Krysty said. “So did Isis, but she told Mildred to look Jak over first and slid down the rope to take stock on the ground.”
Ryan nodded. He was glad she’d come through. “What about the rest?”
“Of the Tech-nomads?” Krysty asked. She shook her head. “I don’t know where New Hope is, or whether she even survived. Communication’s out. Of the people who got onto the Egret before the wave hit, there’s mebbe ten alive. Some of them are hurt pretty bad.”
Ryan looked around. At the bow, which was tilted down toward a disarmingly placid black bayou, Jak was sitting on a jumble of gear as Mildred examined him. His face looked paler than usual, somehow. His narrow jaw was set.
“How is he?” Ryan called.
“Not so good. His arm’s dislocated.”
“Oh,” Krysty said, “is that all?” She strode purposefully aft.
“Is that all?” Mildred repeated. “Okay, well, I suppose there’s one way to deal with it.”
The redhead had walked up to the albino teen. “You ready?” she asked.
He nodded.
Mildred was shaking her head. “Go for it.”
Krysty had grabbed Jak’s limply hanging right arm. Bracing the sole of a boot against his rib cage, she pulled.
Even Ryan winced at the ensuing crunching sound. From a corner of his eye he saw the usually unflappable Armorer do likewise.
Jak grunted stoically.
“Better?” Krysty said.
Experimentally the albino teen raised his arm. “Yeah.”
Chapter Eleven
“So what now, Ryan?” Doc asked when they were all on relatively dry, or at least not currently flooded, ground.
It was a grassy patch far enough away from where the Snowy Egret hung improbably suspended twenty feet in the air that if gravity caught up with the yacht it wasn’t likely to land on their heads.
Not far away Isis, her broken arm hastily set, bandaged and looped in a sling by Mildred, stood beneath the hulk supervising the extraction of the last wounded member of her crew: a bearded young man named Freebo, whose back seemed to be broken. They were bringing him down strapped to a door—or hatch, as they insisted on calling it because it was on a ship. Mildred was helping tend to the other wounded who had already been brought down.
Isis had directed them to keep watch again. She assessed threat levels as low even though the trees cut off view in a hundred yards in all directions. She explained that while the sight of the Egret perched high up in a tree would normally bring swampies running from miles around greedy for loot, muties hereabouts were familiar with the behavior of hurricanes. No matter how hard up they were, they weren’t about to risk getting hit by the full force of the storm while plucking the marooned Egret of her booty.
Ryan hoped she was right. He’d seen desperation drive people to do some stupe things. He’d seen muties do crazy shit for no reason he could conceive.
Norms, too, now that he thought about it.
Already the wind was picking up. “We don’t have long, do we?” Ryan asked.
Doc shook his head. “Soon the eye will have passed. We are in the proverbial calm before the storm.”
“The eye-wall winds are the fiercest in a hurricane.” Her injured shipmate safely on the ground, Isis had walked up to the group. “What do you intend to do, Cawdor?”
Everybody always asked him that. The thought grimly amused him. “Don’t have much experience with hurricanes in these kinds of circumstances. I’d say we should find as dry and sheltered a spot as we can, mebbe tie ourselves to some trees that don’t look like they’ll blow over easily, and try triple-hard not to die.”
The exotic woman’s silver topknot bobbed as she nodded. “Sounds like as good a plan as any. But I was curious what you and your companions had in mind.”
He scratched his eyebrow with his thumbnail. “We still work for you, far as I know.”
“Your contract was with Long Tom.”
“He don’t seem to be around,” J.B. said, “so looks like you’re the boss now.”
“We signed on to protect you,” Ryan said. “Don’t know how good a job I can say we’ve done so far. But once we take a job, we see it through.”
The captain showed gleaming white teeth. “If you people knew a way to defend against a hurricane, you’d be the bosses of everything. You’ve fought alongside us and done what you could. Only problem is, paying you could be a problem. No way we get poor Egret unloaded before the eye passes and the hammer comes down.”
“We’ll see the storm out,” Ryan said. “Then if we live, we can work out the details.”
“Our best bet’s sticking together anyway, right now,” Krysty said. “We should be finding a lie-up.”
Isis nodded. “See to that then. We’ll—”
Ryan heard a hard thunk. Mildred cursed, and Isis glanced back toward where her surviving comrades were gathered.
“Looks like Freebo decided he didn’t like his chances and opted to catch the last train for the coast,” she said.
“Poor Mildred,” Krysty said. “She takes losing a patient that way hard.”
“Forget her for now,” Ryan said. “You heard the lady. Let’s find cover and get ourselves stuck into it.”
“WATER RISING,” Jak said.
“Oh, dear,” Mildred said.
Silently, Krysty echoed the sentiment. Then the physician gave voice to Krysty’s own fear, which she hoped no one would voice.
“Do the eye-wall winds drive a second storm surge?” Mildred asked, her voice rising and taking on an edge that bespoke the nearness of panic. “If another tsunami like the last one hits us here, we’re toast. Um, soggy toast.”
“Easy, Mildred,” Ryan said, his voice calm.
“Nothing we can do about it, anyway.”
They had found a clearing in a cypress grove whose floor Isis estimated rose four feet about the current level of the nameless bayou chance and the tsunami had dumped them on. It was the best shelter anyone had been able to find in a fast recce. Doc and Jak had inspected the trees, one using his antique science, the other his intimate kn
owledge of nature and swamp terrain, and pronounced their roots sound and liable to hold. Krysty had no way of knowing if either had the faintest notion of what he was talking about. But the roots seemed sound to her, too, and anyway, it wasn’t as if they had a lot of choice.
The most important thing was that the survivors of the Egret could all clump together in the little clear space without being too crowded, yet able to grab one another and the trees if threatened with being swept away by wind and water.
After a hurried consultation out of earshot of the rest, Ryan and Isis had agreed they wouldn’t try lashing themselves to the trees. They had enough forest around them to damp the effects of the wind. And if the waters did get too high, being tangled in rope was the last thing anyone would need—it could shave the slimmest chance of survival down to none.
“It shouldn’t be as bad,” Isis said over a rising whine of gale winds. “Bad as the eye-wall winds are, they don’t have time or space to build a really wicked surge.”
Then the wind hit like a hammer.
It was as if a vacuum was sucking the very breath from Krysty’s lungs. She battled to breathe as the wind beat at her face with the bruising impact of fists. She groped blindly, found Ryan’s strong grip with one hand and Mildred’s with the other.
It was bad. Worse than before. Their mad whirling trip across the storm-surge wave had terrified Krysty, but it had also distracted from the wind’s brutal impact.
And they had ridden above the water, at least. The winds of the eye wall, which had to have greatly exceeded a hundred miles an hour, didn’t create a second tsunami-like surge. But they did drive the waters ahead of them, piling the salt waters of the Gulf on the “fresh” water of the river, driving all in front of them with the force of a great pump.
The tea-colored water frothed yellow and rose around them. It felt as warm as blood as it lapped against Krysty’s legs.
“Forget me, girl!” Mildred hollered. “Grab a piece of tree!”
The sturdily built black woman followed her own advice. Ryan caught Jak by the hair as a sudden rush of green water knocked the youth off his feet, and dragged him to where he could clutch another bole like a half-drowned kitten. Not far away J.B. and Doc stood on opposite sides of the same bole, hanging on as if holding the tree up.