Haven's Blight

by James Axler

  J.B. fired his M-4000 as fast as he could cycle the action. Bubbles popped rapidly. The stench grew almost overwhelming.

  Wailing filled the moisture-saturated afternoon air. The water boiled almost as violently as it had right before the monster appeared. Two huge tentacles lashed at the sky directly above the churning mass as if in supplication, then the intact bubbles vanished beneath the water, too.

  The pond’s surface rhythmically smoothed itself. A stinking polychromatic sheen where the monster had been was all that remained in view.

  Ryan popped the partially expended magazine from the butt of his SIG-Sauer and fished for a full one. If the horror came back, he didn’t intend his slide to lock open after just a couple shots.

  “Anybody hurt?” he called.

  “We’re all fit to fight,” J.B. said, “but Rameau got his arm stung.”

  Ryan looked back. The Havenite boss sat in the second flatboat with his face not much darker than Jak’s and his eyes dilated. He’d clearly gotten stung far worse than Ryan had.

  And Ryan’s face still felt as if the whole left side was on fire. The affected area hadn’t gotten numb at all. He could feel the scar tissue that ran down that side of his face flexing stiffly as muscles twitched.

  “We’ve got to get to shore soon,” he said. “Anybody know how to treat this shit?”

  “It seems a lot like jellyfish venom,” Mildred said. She was examining Rameau’s stung arm and not looking too pleased with what she saw. “You’re supposed to scrub that with sand.”

  “We have passed some sandy banks. Surely we can find another,” Doc said.

  “If we can’t, maybe grass will do,” Mildred said. “Or, I don’t know, dry cloth. I know you’re not supposed to use water. Damn! I just remembered—you’re supposed to do things opposite if it’s a Man o’ War sting. How do we know what that bastard had?”

  “We don’t,” Ryan said. “So we fake it. What’s next?”

  “Then rinse with vinegar. Um, any mild acid will do, I guess. Do we have anything like that?”

  Ryan knew his companions didn’t. Rameau was busy grinding his teeth together to keep from howling like a stickie on fire. Ryan looked back at Bluebottle, who shook his head. He wasn’t looking too healthy, either. He probably was just shaken, the one-eyed man thought. No surprise there.

  “We may have to skate on that,” Ryan said. “Anything else?”

  “Um, apply ammonia.”

  “And where do we get that?”

  Mildred looked uncomfortable. She was scrubbing at Rameau’s wound.

  “From urine, my friends,” Doc said. “It is the most readily available source.”

  “Ace on the line,” Ryan said. “Anything else?”

  “Apply aloe vera. Sometimes I have that in our med supplies. We’re out now.”

  “We have the aloe vera,” Bluebottle said. “We carry healing kits.”

  “Luck, for once. Okay. Keep your eyes peeled for a place to land and camp for the night.”

  Ryan dug through his pack for a spare pair of socks and dabbed at the slime the tendril had left on his face with the worst holed one. Then he pitched it overboard.

  “Littering, Ryan,” Mildred said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” She shook her head. Rameau had kind of sunk down into the boat. He looked bad.

  “What the hell was that thing?” Mildred demanded. “It was like a…a cross between an octopus, a jellyfish and kelp. And—and a person! That eye was structured exactly like a human eye!”

  “Mutie,” Jak said laconically.

  “Perhaps,” Doc called. “And perhaps not. When I was held, a helpless captive out of time, I overheard my captors talking about a project to create an artificial life form that could be used to explore some unimaginably alien world.”

  “You think what they came up with was that?” Ryan said.

  “I cannot know. But those words did come rather forcibly back to me now.”

  “That’s a planet I never hope to see,” Mildred said fervently.

  “Think it’s dead?” Cole asked.

  “All I know is it’ll be a bastard while before the rad-sucker fucks with us again,” Ryan said. “I’ll settle for that.”

  Mildred looked at Rameau, who had begun shivering in uncontrollable reaction.

  “Got to treat this now,” she said. She stood uncertainly amidships and began to fiddle with the fly of her camou pants. “Everybody turn your heads. Cole, honey, you just concentrate on keeping us moving.”

  “Why?” Jak asked.

  “No vinegar,” Mildred said. “So, here goes the next step of the treatment. You understand?”

  After a moment Ryan said, “Oh, for nuke’s sake. Everybody look away while Mildred drops her pants. The woman’s being all proper again.”

  “How about that facial wound, Ryan?” she called sweetly.

  “It’s fine!”

  “THANK YOU for giving poor Terance the coup de grâce, my friend,” Rameau said through chattering teeth to J.B. “It was all that could be done.”

  They had built a yellow dancing fire from driftwood in the middle of a space they’d cleared in an expanse of waist-high grass. Overhead a few clouds slid like gray rafts across a sea of stars. For various reasons nobody felt like camping back among the trees. They wanted a wide field of fire around them this night.

  The usual swamp smells of decay and decomposition seemed thicker and more cloying than usual.

  The Armorer shrugged. “Glad I stopped his suffering,” he said, “but I can’t claim credit. Fact is, I was aiming for that rad-blasted eye.”

  The aloe had helped. Ryan’s face still felt as if a razor was cutting his skin, over and over, but the terrible venom prickling had stopped. Still, given that Rameau had gotten it worse than he had, the man had to be bastard tough to talk at all.

  “Poor Terance,” Mildred said. “I’ll see that face in my nightmares the rest of my life.”

  After a moment she added, “He’ll have plenty of company.”

  J.B. patted her shoulder. “Well, I don’t have to worry about you dreaming about any handsome dudes,” he said with a chuckle.

  Mildred’s face turned a sort of greenish pale in the yellow firelight. She immediately stood and stomped off.

  “What?” J.B. looked thunderstruck. From Ryan’s angles the lenses of his specs were blank yellow circles. “I was just trying to lighten the mood! What’d I do?”

  “For a man as smart as you are about so many things,” Ryan growled, “you can be a real stupe sometimes. Don’t you know anything about women?”

  J.B. turned to look into the darkness after Mildred. He took off his hat and scratched the thinning spot on top of his head.

  “Guess not, Ryan. What do I do now?”

  “Get up and go after her!”

  The wiry Armorer scrambled to his feet and trotted after the angry healer. Shaking his head, Ryan turned back to the fire.

  “We’re in enemy territory now,” Rameau said. “They should be careful.”

  “They’ll be fine,” Ryan said. “They’re all grown up. They can take care of themselves.”

  He threw another chunk of driftwood onto the fire. Sparks trailed up toward the stars.

  Rameau dropped his pointy-bearded chin to his clavicle. “I hope we can all say that. It is a hard road we walk.” He shook his head. “But we knew that when we set out upon it. If there’s blame, it falls on our own heads.”

  “Yeah, well, I wondered why the baron sent two guides with us,” Ryan said. “Reckon I see the sense of it now.”

  THE MORNING DAWNED bright, but there was a yellow cast to the eastern sky and dark blue clouds piled up away off to the southeast.

  “Storm buildin’ out over Gulf,” Bluebottle said.

  They ate a breakfast of cold frog legs and fish they’d roasted the night before. Rameau’s right arm wasn’t working well, and Mildred tied it up in a sling for him. Given how Ryan’s face still felt it
was a wonder he was functioning even today. The pain of the sting hadn’t kept him from sleeping soundly. Hardly anything ever did. But this day he felt as if somebody had split his cheek open with Bluebottle’s casse-tête and poured salt in.

  Mildred had rubbed more aloe juice onto the wound, which helped. The bone still throbbed with every beat of his heart.

  Mildred was moving around quite happily this morning. It had been more effort than usual for the companions to ignore the sounds she and J.B. made reconciling after their spat.

  The previous evening they had drawn the flatboats onto the low shore and done the best they could to get the grass to stand back up where they had dragged them, to make it less obvious they were there. The grass was green, water-fat and resilient, which helped. Ryan didn’t think it’d fool anybody raised in these bayous for more than the time it took a cartridge to light off when you dropped the hammer, but all they could do was the best they could.

  He shouldered his pack and his rifle and stood. The others did the same. Without making an issue of it, the much bigger Bluebottle helped haul Rameau to his feet. The man looked past Ryan. His anthracite eyes went wide.

  A pair of beings, as much like barrels as men, with exaggerated broad features, hair like steel wool and skins the color of chalk, stood between the party and their boats. One carried a spear with a leaf-shaped steel head, the other a chunk of hardwood that looked as if it might have started out as an oar and become a bladed club. They wore necklaces of gator teeth and fingerbones. The one with the spear has a shiny brass ring through his wide, flat nose.

  Quickly, Ryan looked left and right.

  Swampies rose out of the grass on every side.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Surrounded,” Jak said.

  “You monsters!” Cole shrieked. “You chilled Cody! Die!”

  He ripped his big-bladed knife from the beaded buckskin sheath at his belt and threw himself toward the nearest muties, the ones blocking the way to the boats. So fast did the boy move in his tearful vengeance frenzy that Ryan, for all his steel-trap reflexes, couldn’t move fast enough to stop him.

  The swampie he attacked was a head shorter than the boy’s five-six. But like all his mutant brothers—at least in this part of the bayou—he was wide and massively muscled beneath layers of fat. His yellow eyes went wide as the boy lunged for him, raising the knife high over his white-blond-haired head to stab.

  One-handed, the mutie rammed his spear forward. Ryan heard a wet sound and a soft grunt escaped the boy’s mouth, cutting short another cry for bloody vengeance.

  Then the spear tip poked right out the back of the blue plaid shirt the youth was wearing.

  Cole sucked in a long, shuddering breath, then he began to scream in the terrible agony of a gut wound.

  Behind him Ryan sensed blasters come up, heard safeties click off, flint cocked back from frizzen and hammer raised from capped steel nipple. The swampies, who surrounded the small party completely, aimed spears, clubs and crossbows.

  There were at least twenty of the short, squat muties ranged around the humans. And swampies were tough to kill. Supposedly they had double sets of all their internal organs. Beyond that, their thick rolls of fat over muscle provided a decent natural armor. The companions had encountered many different types of swampies during their travels, and they all shared a variation of that trait.

  “Stop!” Ryan said, stepping forward and holding out his empty hands to the sides. He didn’t shout. He just pitched his voice to carry, and gave it an edge like a trumpet blast.

  Under the circumstances, shouting could act like spraying gasoline on a bonfire. Using his best voice of command froze everybody in place. At least for a moment.

  Given the numbers and the way the swampies had them dead to rights, it could have been oldies and kids surrounding Ryan and his companions, and it still would turn to massacre if blood ever broke.

  Cole kept screaming. The swampie yanked the spear out. The boy fell to the blood-stained grass, folded himself into a knot of agony and began to writhe and howl.

  “We mean no harm here!” Ryan said. “We come to see Papa Dough. I came to see Papa Dough. I need to ask his help.”

  That caused a deep bass murmur among the swampies.

  “If you come in peace to my father,” said a voice deep and resonant as a bull fiddle, “why does the young’un attack us?”

  Ryan turned. A young-looking swampie with a frizz of black hair and beard had stepped forward behind him and to the left. He was no taller than five feet but even wider than his fellows, shoulder and gut. Flesh beads of ritual scarification around his slightly protuberant but clear green eyes indicated high rank. He wore a crimson-dyed leather loincloth and carried an elaborately carved but altogether lethal-looking war club.

  “I am Jon Dough,” the young swampie said. He carried himself with dignity beyond his years, and his speech and manner suggested a level of intelligence Ryan didn’t usually associate with the muties. Like many of the folk Ryan had encountered here, he spoke with a strong Cajun accent. “I speak for my father.”

  “The boy’s best friend was killed yesterday by a blow dart from an ambush,” Ryan said. Cole’s cries had subsided to desperate groans and mewling. “He blamed you swampies. Grief and vengeance hunger made him crazy.”

  “It was our people who shot his friend,” the swampie acknowledged. “Your kind haven’t earned welcome here in our lands.”

  Ryan shook his head. “My friends and I have nothing to do with your disputes with Haven. I come here in sore need. My woman lies poisoned and helpless back in the ville. A wise woman told me my only hope to save her was held by Papa Dough. I come here to ask his help.”

  “What do you offer?”

  “That’s between me and him.”

  “You are brave, if not very smart.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bluebottle said under his breath. “I never had a clue these cannies was sneaking up on us.”

  “Cannies?” Jon Dough said. He was quickly going hotter than nuke-red. “You lie. You kill us, tear up our crops, burn our huts. Why do you insult us, too?”

  “But—”

  “Shut up!” Ryan snapped. “Everybody, back away from the trigger.”

  “They killed my boy,” Rameau said mournfully.

  “He rushed them. He couldn’t expect different. And he sure as nuke-shit didn’t pause to think about how he was putting the rest of us right on the chopping block of an old fashioned hog-butchering, now, did he? Anyway, that bullet’s left the blaster. We need to talk!”

  “If you mean us no ill will,” Jon Dough said, “you surely will not object if we kill the two who invade from Haven with swampie blood staining their hands?”

  “I do object, Jon Dough. They’re my people. I stand and fall with them.”

  Jon Dough shrugged. “Then why shouldn’t we just chill you all?”

  “If I may interject here, Monsieur Dough,” Doc said, “you obviously had compelling reason not to chill us out of hand. Clearly you could have. You surrounded us with such craft that not even the animal-keen senses of young Jak Lauren detected your presence.”

  “Mebbe we wanted to hear what the hell made you think you could just waltz into our land,” the swampie boss said. “Or mebbe we just wanted to fuck with you, eh?”

  “Hear me,” Ryan said. “This business is between me and your father. We’re in your power here. We pose no threat to him, any more than we do you.”

  The young swampie looked mulish. Clearly he felt Ryan was somehow challenging his own authority.

  “Let’s cut straight to the point,” Ryan declared. “If I have to eat a big, steaming pile of Papa Dough’s own shit to save my woman, that’s what I’ll do.”

  He ignored the multiple gasp from his friends behind him. “You would so debase yourself over this woman?” Jon Dough asked in surprise.

  “I’d never let myself fail Krysty through weakness of my own. Even squeamishness. Nor out of pride. If that m
akes me less a man, so be it.”

  Jon Dough pursed his huge, pale lips.

  “And anyway,” Ryan said, “if your father wants to, he can always chill us.”

  “Way to argue our case, Ryan,” Mildred muttered.

  But Jon Dough nodded his head. “I’m not big on sentiment where you mannies are concerned, but you impress me, stilt man. You got big brass ones, if nothing else. So I’ll take you to my father, and he’ll decide your fate. Bon. It’ll be entertaining, if nothing else.”

  Ryan nodded at the writhing Haven boy, who’d begun to gobble half-intelligible pleas for his mother. “What about him?”

  “Have you the healing lore to cure him?” Jon Dough asked.

  “Not a chance,” Mildred said. “Not without major antibiotics and quick surgery in a sterile environment. None of which I happen to have packed in my ruck. You?”

  Jon Dough shook his head. “Even if we would, there’s nothing we could do to save him with such a wound. Nor even the blind woman who sent you here.”

  “You know of Sweet Julie?” Doc asked.

  “The very animals of the forest know her.”

  Ryan looked over his shoulder to Rameau. “He’s your man,” Ryan said. “What’s your call?”

  Rameau moistened his lips with a bloodless tongue. “Mercy,” he croaked.

  “Oh, God.” Mildred sighed. She knew what “mercy” meant in the Deathlands.

  The swampie who stood beside the one who’d speared Cole stepped forward. He raised his club. When he brought it down the youth’s tow-haired head came apart like a melon struck with an ax.

  “Make the mannies ready,” Jon Dough commanded. “We march.”

  The party was quickly relieved of its gear and weapons. Not gently, but without any overt cruelty. To Ryan the process suggested plucking a chicken, which he found both reassuring and somewhat unnerving.

  They were blindfolded with items of their own clothing. “Don’t try to work them off,” Jon Dough said as Ryan’s good eye was covered. “If they so much as slip without you warning us, we chill you on the spot.”