Haven's Blight

by James Axler

  In a moment he’d recovered his iron self-control and willed himself to stand upright again. No matter how much effort it cost him to resist the jelly-like weakness in his legs. Then he walked to her side and gazed down.

  She looked beautiful. Not that that was anything unusual for her. In his experience it sure was unusual for someone suffering the effects of a serious dose of snake venom. Her cheeks were perhaps paler than usual, her breathing shallower as she lay on her back beneath a white coverlet with little purple flowers embroidered on it, and her hair spilling across the pillow like blood. Her eyes were closed. Her full lips were set as if in effort.

  “What’s the matter with her?” he rasped. “This isn’t like any snakebite I’ve ever seen.”

  “Me neither,” Mildred said. “You killed the snake that bit her. What kind would you say it was?”

  “Water moc,” he said. “Sure as slow rad death.”

  She shook her head. “Could you be mistaken?”

  “Don’t think so. Then again I’m no snake expert. Why?”

  “A water moccasin is a pit viper,” she said. “Like rattlesnakes. They produce predominantly proteolytic venom. That means it destroys proteins—makes cells, including red blood cells, explode, basically. It’s associated with severe initial pain and massive tissue damage.”

  Ryan frowned at Krysty’s leg, hidden beneath the flower coverlet. The idea of that flawless ivory flesh corrupted and decayed tore at him like wolf teeth. But she was his life’s partner, he thought fiercely. No matter what.

  “The baron’s men were able to extract some of the poison,” Mildred said. “They told me later—none of us in much better shape than you. We’d all been running on adrenaline too long, plus getting beat on by weather and bad guys. But she seemed to instantly lose consciousness when she was bitten. And she’s been this way since.”

  “So what’s the bottom line?”

  Mildred shrugged. “I’m no snake expert, but I’d say the symptoms more resemble neurotoxin-heavy venom. Which is characteristic of elapids.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “They are the other major kind of poisonous serpent,” Doc said. “As opposed to the vipers, among whom the water moccasins are numbered.”

  “The ville actually has some antivenin,” Mildred said. “Mainly for cottonmouth bites. But Dr. Mercier refused to administer it because Krysty doesn’t show any of the usual viper-bite symptoms.”

  Ryan shook his head. “I’m confused.”

  “As are we all, Mr. Cawdor,” a voice said from behind. Its feminine lilt struck him as oddly familiar. As Elizabeth Blackwood’s had.

  Yet he could never remember hearing it before in his life.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ryan turned. As if through some protective instinct, his friends had moved into the room to surround the bed—the pack shielding and caring for an injured member. The voice, soft and feminine and delicately accented, had come from the open door.

  A woman stood in the door. She was of medium height, about the same as Elizabeth Blackwood, willow-branch slender in her black jacket and slacks. Skinnier even than the baron’s sister, in fact, although she gave an impression of wiry solidity, as opposed to the other woman’s wispiness. Her face was a long oval, her nose pert, her mouth pursed, her brown hair drawn back into a severe bun. The eyes that peered at him over the tops of her square-framed spectacles were large and liquid-brown.

  “Ryan, this is Dr. Amélie Mercier,” Mildred said. “She oversaw our medical treatment after they carried us back here. She’s ville healer.”

  Mercier smiled with thin lips. It looked like a perfunctory, professional smile, of the sort Ryan had seen on plenty of whitecoats who appeared a good deal less benign than this one did. Did he also note a flash of shyness to the expression, as if in her case the austere professionalism masked a lack of confidence dealing with others?

  Mentally, Ryan shrugged off such speculation. He didn’t know what made people tick, though he’d learned it could be important to have some understanding of what made people do what they did.

  “If I may?” Mercier said. Without waiting for a reply she glided past Ryan and gave Krysty a brisk, thorough examination. “Her condition seems stable. As to whether or not that’s an altogether good thing, I’m not prepared to say.”

  “There’re worse alternatives,” Ryan said.

  She looked at him with her thin-plucked eyebrows raised into arches of comic surprise. Interesting note of vanity, he thought, that she plucked her brows. “How do you mean?”

  “She could die.”

  “Ah. Yes. So she could. Unfortunately, until and unless I am better able to understand her state I’m in no position to define the relative likelihood of whether she dies, spontaneously awakens, or continues in this condition. Oddly, and fortunately, I’m seeing no signs of the usual deterioration that affects patients in a comatose state, even after relatively short periods.”

  “What, in your studied opinion, is the cause of her state, Doctor?” Doc asked in his courtly way.

  “You mean, this curious…suspension? As to that, I have no hypothesis as yet.”

  “What about what kind of snake that bit her?” Ryan asked.

  “As your own healer no doubt told you, her symptoms are highly anomalous for the dominant species of poisonous snakes who inhabit this region.”

  She paused, biting a pale lower lip with neat, gleaming white teeth. It struck Ryan she could be a good-looking woman, if she bothered to take trouble with her appearance.

  “There are rumors among the people, especially the ones well back up Blackwood Bayou,” she said. “The backwoods folk tell of something they call a Dream Snake, whose bite induces not tissue rot and painful death, but a strange dreamlike state. Some victims simply die. Some experience terrible nightmares from which they can’t awaken. Others sleep for a time and then wake up with no ill effects.”

  “That doesn’t sound like any snake I ever heard of,” Mildred said.

  “It could conceivably be a mutation,” Doc said.

  Mercier shrugged her thin shoulders. “I can’t attest to the truth of that. I’ve never seen even an alleged victim of this Dream Snake’s bite, much less examined or treated one. I’m a person of science, trained to trust only what experiment and reason show me. These rumors may be nothing more than folk tales. And yet, I must admit, sometimes the wildest of backwater stories proves to contain a grain or more of truth. My father and I have uncovered herbs with medicinal properties unknown to the surviving literature by pursuing certain such tales.”

  “Your father…” Mildred began.

  “My late father,” Mercier said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The healer shrugged again. “Even as we seek to prolong and enhance life, do we not learn the inevitability of death, Dr. Wyeth? I have…come to terms with my father’s death. And now I fear I must return to my lab. There is much work that needs doing. I’m still inventorying the materials recovered from the Tech-nomad ship. They might hold the key to various breakthroughs which would significantly affect the people of this ville.”

  “Krysty—” Ryan said.

  “I will do what I can for her, Mr. Cawdor,” she said. “That is all I can do. In the meantime Dr. Wyeth can see to her day-to-day care. Good afternoon.”

  She walked out. The others looked after her for a moment. Ryan stood with chin sunk to clavicle, gazing at Krysty.

  “Strange bird,” J.B. said, taking off his round-lensed spectacles and cleaning them with a handkerchief.

  “She seems competent,” Doc observed.

  “Ice queen to the max,” Mildred said. “Still, yeah, she does seem to know her stuff. To a surprising degree, actually.”

  “One surmises her father handed down to her a tradition of scientific training and the spirit of inquiry that proceeds from before the Apocalypse.”

  “Yeah, and we haven’t had luck with those kinds in the past,” J.B. said. “You neither, come to thin
k about it.”

  Doc turned his palms upward. “Yet I myself was schooled in the scientific tradition.”

  “Gaia,” Jak said.

  The albino youth had been perched on a sill of an open window, covered against insects that had begun to really rise and swarm in the late afternoon, with a screen that had to be premium predark salvage. He had been sitting with his arms crossed in his usual attitude for such discussions: bored half to death but realizing he had to endure the conversation.

  J.B. cocked an eyebrow at Jak. “You comin’ late to religion, Jak? You don’t seem the type.”

  Jak dropped noiselessly to the hardwood floor. “Krysty talk about Gaia powers,” he said. “Calls on in emergency. Mebbe Gaia power helps fight poison, whatever kind snake bite?”

  “Mebbe,” J.B. said. “Got no way to know, do we?”

  “Pardon, messieurs, madame,” a timid female voice said from the door.

  A small, plainly dressed young black woman in an apron stood there. “The baron and Lady Elizabeth request that you join them for the dinner now, s’il vous plâit.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. He realized he was ravenously hungry. “We’ll be there.”

  The servant curtsied and went away. Ryan turned back and looked down at Krysty again. He longed to somehow absorb her through his good eye, as if somehow that might mean he would never lose her.

  He bent and kissed her cheek. It was cool. He straightened, frowning.

  “She’s cold,” he said. “What does that mean, Mildred?”

  “That she’s not suffering fever,” Mildred stated flatly. He turned a hot blue glare on her, but she didn’t flinch.

  “We don’t know anything about her condition, Ryan. Except that Krysty’s stable and doesn’t seem in any danger. We need to let time, and hopefully Mercier, do their work.”

  “Will we get time?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I’m a doctor, not a doomie.”

  He felt J.B. grip him firmly by the upper arm. “Come on, Ryan,” he said. “Let’s go get some food before we turn inside out. I could eat a week-dead skunk myself.”

  Mildred gave him a sour smile. “That’s my man,” she said. “Always knows how to whet a woman’s appetite.”

  He tipped his fedora to her. “Part of my natural charm.”

  STERLING SILVER SERVICE tinkled against white porcelain as thin as a sec man’s mercy. The dining room was long and not very wide. The off-white walls were hung with dark portraits of pale-skinned, gloomy-looking men and women in old-days dress. Baron Blackwood sat at table’s head with Elizabeth, looking radiant and sad in a dark yellow dress, on his right. Ryan sat at his left.

  Looking entirely uncomfortable, Jak perched on a chair beside Elizabeth. Across from him, at Ryan’s left elbow, sat Doc. Next to the professor sat J.B., and across from him Mildred. They were all dressed in their usual garb. Although like Ryan’s own clothes, it was unusually clean.

  At the foot of the table sat Hal Barton, a man of middle age and middle height, plump-cheeked and decidedly stocky, with blue eyes bright behind glasses with rectangular wire rims, a shiny head bald and pink as a baby’s bottom fringed with wisps of prematurely white hair that continued down his cheeks in the form of extravagant muttonchops. He had been introduced as the baron’s secretary. He mostly sat and listened, using his mouth mainly to eat.

  “—radios powered by a few generators adapted to run on kerosene, fish or palm oil, or even shine,” the baron was saying. He wore a deep scarlet tailcoat that made his feral eyes glow like rubies. The outfit had to be hot as hell despite the fan circling overhead. Yet Blackwood’s manner was as refined as Doc’s at his most courtly.

  “We obtained them from the Tech-nomads,” Elizabeth said. Despite her sickly appearance, she seemed animated and happy.

  “Do much trade with the Spookies, ma’am?” J.B. asked, spooning up some of the rich, creamy green soup. “Er, Tech-nomads.”

  Elizabeth turned her lovely smile on him. It wasn’t so much sexy as it made a person feel warm from the pit of the stomach to the tips of his toes. Ryan had experienced it a few times himself since they’d sat to supper.

  “Much is a relative term, Mr. Dix,” she said, sipping from a glass of tea with a slice of locally grown lime in it. “They may visit us twice in a five-year period.”

  She turned her head. “But I don’t want to interrupt my dear brother’s explanation.”

  The baron drank red wine. Ryan had a glass of that himself; he was no connoisseur, but this was good stuff. Even his jaded palate could tell that.

  Blackwood sipped and smiled back. “An illustration is never an interruption, Elizabeth dear. We communicated with Long Tom’s fleet, although somewhat sporadically, given the interference from the storm. Which prevented us from warning them in timely wise that the pirate Black Mask was blockading the mouth to Blackwood Bayou.”

  “How’d you know that?” Mildred asked.

  “Very little happens in the ville’s environs that Baron Tobias doesn’t know about,” Barton said from the end of the table. His voice came low and slow in a Southern drawl with no hint of French.

  “Good spy network, huh?” J.B. said.

  “The people of the ville,” Barton said. “They have the ‘swamp telegraph,’ a rumor network almost as fast as radio. And in its way more reliable.”

  “And they share that info with you, Baron?” Mildred asked in surprise.

  Savoring another big spoonful of that rich-flavored soup, with yellow liquid fat floating on the top, Ryan understood her astonishment.

  “Why wouldn’t they tell us?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Most villes we been through,” Ryan said, “people’re usually more concerned the baron, or anyway his sec boss, not overhear things they say.”

  He caught a look from Mildred, despite her own startled question. Well, fuck me, he thought, I guess I was too blunt again. He needed Krysty around, if not to smooth his own rough edges, at least to smooth the feathers he sometimes ruffled.

  And for a wagload of other reasons, besides.

  But neither the baron nor his sister took visible offense. “That’s not how we do things here,” Blackwood said matter-of-factly.

  “At least not since Father died,” Elizabeth said.

  For the first time Blackwood’s red eyes were briefly hooded. Then he smiled and nodded and went back to being his genial self.

  “We managed to figure out where the Tech-nomad squadron entered the bayou system from such scattered communications as we were able to receive,” he said. “I summoned the sec men and set out immediately. Fortunately, we encountered some of our people who reside in the region, who were able to give us a solid notion of where your vessel had wound up. Less fortunately we proved unable to arrive in time to keep you and the Tech-nomads from being assailed by those mutant barbarians.”

  His manner became intense. His features seemed to sharpen, become feral and wolflike, and his eyes glittered like drops of fresh blood. His sister patted the slim white hand that gripped the stem of his wineglass as if to strangle it.

  “Tobias, please, don’t exert yourself.”

  He relaxed with visible effort, then laughed. “You’re the one who needs to watch her overexertion, sister dear,” he said, sitting back in his red-velvet upholstered chair. “But as always you’re right—it does me no good to grow overexcited and dismay our guests. It’s just that the swampies give us so little rest. They constantly ambush our hunters and parties extracting pine sap for turpentine, plunder wags bringing lumber and produce to Haven ville from the countryside, raid isolated dwellings and butcher the hapless inhabitants.”

  “Some say they eat their victims, as well,” said a mellifluous voice from behind Ryan. It drawled like a Southerner’s, and was touched with a French accent, as well.

  Ryan half turned in his chair to see a man in a ruffled white shirt and black trousers, carrying a decanter of wine. He was tall and skinny, skinnier than Doc even, with an exquisite
ly trimmed black beard that came to a point beneath his narrow chin, slicked-back hair and eyes that glittered like black glass beads.

  “Ah, St. Vincent,” Blackwood said. “I see you’ve come to refresh our guests’ beverages.”

  “Always eager to serve the baron’s guests,” the man said with a smile.

  “St. Vincent is our chief steward and majordomo,” Tobias said. “Don’t know what we’d do without him.”

  “That’s just a wild story, you know,” Barton said. “About the swampies eating people. Their actions are bad enough on the face without making them out as cannibals.”

  “Ah, Mr. Barton,” St. Vincent said. “A fine gentleman such as yourself would perhaps not spend enough time among the common people to learn to trust them.”

  Barton’s pink face went purple. But he said nothing, glaring down at his soup bowl and lapsing into stubborn silence.

  “This soup is delicious, Mr. St. Vincent,” Mildred said as he bent to refresh her own glass, trying to paper over the uncomfortable gap in the conversation. Ryan noticed she still wore a bandage for her “M-1 thumb” incurred during the fight with the Black Gang. “What is it?”

  “Sea turtle, mademoiselle.”

  Mildred twinkled—the other staff all insisted on calling her “Madame” or “Mrs.”, it seemed—for just a moment before her eyes got wide and her cheeks went pink with outrage.

  “Sea turtles? But they’re—they’re endangered!”

  He arched a brow. “One wouldn’t care to contradict a lady such as yourself…”

  He glanced toward the baron. “Actually the waters offshore teem with them, as well as with all manner of marine life,” Blackwood said. “The old sunken oil rigs harbor an abundance of edible sea creatures. They’re a main source of our sustenance.”

  Mildred looked confused. Doc blinked indulgently at her.

  “We need to learn, you and I,” he said softly, and half dreamily, “that in this sorrowful day and age, the only endangered species is Man.”

  St. Vincent went out, presumably to oversee readying of the next course. As servants entered bearing salads of greens and chopped peppers and tomatoes, “Don’t mind St. Vincent, Hal,” Elizabeth said to Barton. “He means well.”