by James Axler
“If stickies reside in the vicinity,” Doc said, “it is highly unlikely that any other predators of any size do. Many muties are not highly tolerant of competition.”
“Not to mention just plain mean,” Abner added.
“What about the rads?” Nataly asked. “And the toxic metals Mildred talks about? I mean, in the fish and game, if we eat any of it.”
She dabbed at some crocodile grease at the side of her thin-lipped mouth. The fresh croc flesh had been altogether tasty, roasted on driftwood spits over open fires.
“If we stay away from internal organs, especially the liver, we shouldn’t get hurt by heavy metal toxicity any more than from environmental exposure to the fallout. Same for the radiation, actually. The fact there’s no real hot spots right close by, and we didn’t land smack-dab in the middle of a strontium swamp, is a hopeful sign, at least.”
Her broad, normally smooth forehead creased in a thoughtful frown.
“Still, as long as we don’t spend more than a week or two here, the rad and metal poisoning shouldn’t shorten our lives by more than ten, twenty years.”
Everybody had a good laugh at that. None of them would have called the prospects of their all living to see the sun come up again particularly prime.
“What about those two fleets full of ironclads that almost did us in today?” Sean asked.
Arliss looked at Myron, who was still sunk in his despair. Then he looked at Ryan.
“That’s a fighting matter, I’d say, more than a river boatman’s. Where do you guys stand, anyway? You signed on for the duration of the voyage down to the Sippi Delta baronies, which would appear to have come to an end, at least for now. And you hired on to accept the, ah, the Conoyers as your bosses while actively employed. But it looks to me like you’re free agents now.”
He grimaced. “It’s not like there’s anything we could do to stop you if you decided to leave us high and dry.”
“It’s not like we have a better way out of here than you do,” Mildred said, sounding almost as if she were talking to herself.
Ryan shot her a hard look, then he cast his lone blue eye over the rest of the group, which aside from Jak was scattered among the other survivors around the fire.
“You’re right, Mildred,” he said. “On land or not, we’re all on the same boat still, so to speak. And our best shot at surviving this mess seems to be sticking together.”
He turned to look Krysty straight in the eye. A mutie of the nonobvious stripe, pretty much the opposite end of the spectrum from the barely humanoid likes of stickies or scalies, or even the more common deformed norms, she had a touch of the power of a doomie—the gift of prophecy, which right now was hinting that the future was double bad, and likely to get triple bad before it got better. If it did. She also had a way of feeling things, which may have been no more than an unusually intense sense of intuition.
She was no mind reader, yet on such occasions she could look at Ryan’s rugged yet handsome face and plainly read the words he didn’t speak: for now.
He, and therefore the rest of the companions, would abandon their fellow survivors in a heartbeat if it upped their chances of survival. It made Krysty’s heart ache to think of that, but that was just the way the world worked, if you wanted to put off taking a dirt nap as long as possible.
She also felt, as if the pain was hers, what it would cost him to make such a choice. He was a hard man, hardened by the brutal decades he’d lived since fleeing Front Royal. But he wasn’t heartless.
Ryan just did what he had to do to keep the companions alive. He would never show his own pain or hesitation. To show weakness was to die. “But to answer your question,” Ryan said, turning back to the others from what had seemed a lengthy if wordless conversation but really passed in a cluster of heartbeats, “I think we don’t have much to worry about from the splendid little war going on down at the mouth of the creek. As somebody pointed out when it was clear they were shooting at each other rather than keeping after us, they’ve got better things to do than chase a random tugboat. Especially one that when last seen was afire and sinking. We were never more than a side dish to them. To each, the other is the main course. They’ve forgotten about us—most likely.”
“And if they remember?” Suzan asked.
Ryan shrugged. “We run, we fight, or we die,” he said. “Or some combination of those three. Or all of them.”
“Usual day, in other words,” J.B. added.
His friends laughed more loudly at that, and less nervously then the crew did.
“I think we need to get out of here as fast as we can, however we can,” Krysty said.
“On-target as usual, lover,” Ryan stated.
Arliss grunted. “I don’t think you’ll get much argument here. But the ‘however we can’ seems to be the sticking point, right now.”
“We’ve got all of exactly one functional power launch,” said Abner, who served as mate to Avery, and was an expert in small boats. “It’ll hold mebbe six of us. Eight if we was all friendly. Meaning we don’t mind capsizing and drowning together.”
“So, half of us,” Sean said.
“Say six, you stupe,” Arliss chided his friend. “Unless you’re volunteering to be one of the ones to drown?”
“We could draw lots,” Ricky said.
Everybody stared at him. He blushed.
“I mean—I read about that in a book… I…”
“Your best move now is to just stop talking,” Mildred said gently.
Ricky shut his mouth firmly.
“Nuke that,” Ryan said. Again, Krysty could tell that his main consideration was that the boat would likely not accommodate all seven of them.
“We could raise her.”
Now the whole group turned their faces to Myron as if he were a magnet and their noses, iron.
“Uh, Myron,” Arliss said reluctantly, “I don’t mean to reopen any recent wounds, but you know as well as I do—”
“The Queen,” Myron said.
Arliss slumped so hard he almost fell over against Sean in his relief that the acting captain wasn’t talking about his wife, now almost certainly residing in the belly of one or more crocodiles in the stream. Or stored in handy chunks in burrows beneath the banks for later consumption, as Krysty seemed to remember was a habit for gators and crocodiles.
“We need to raise her,” Myron stated. “She brought us all here. She can get us out.”
“We did keep the engines from flooding,” Sean said.
“Then there’s the little fact she’s still almost as good as sunk,” Sean pointed out.
“We’ve got some plankage on board we could use to patch her,” Avery said. “If that’s not enough, we’ve got plenty of canvas. We could fix a couple layers over the hole on the outside of the hull. Be enough to get us a dozen or two miles, anyway, although we might have to keep the bilge-pumps going.”
He looked at Ricky.
“I read that in a book, too.”
Myron had raised his head now. His shoulders were back. His cheeks showed signs of color above his curly beard. But Krysty thought the gleam in his eye was more than a little unhealthy.
“We can do it!” he said, too brightly. “We can get her up and running again in a day! Two, max!”
“No,” Ryan said.
Myron jerked his head back, blinking as if the tall man had slapped him.
“Excuse me?” Arliss said, in a less-than-friendly tone.
“Run where?” Ryan asked.
“Well, down Wolf Creek, then along the Sippi!” Myron said, rallying.
“We tried that already. And this is where it got us.”
Most of the Queen’s crew had bristled at a man who was still an outlander flatly contradicting their acting captain. But that drained the tension right out of them, as well as the hope that had begun to fill their faces.
But Myron wasn’t ready to let go so easily. “We can steam upstream, then,” he said.
“To where
?” Ryan asked.
“Why—” Myron blinked again. He gestured vaguely west with his hand. “Upstream.”
Nataly sighed heavily. “Where, Captain?” she asked gently. “We don’t know what lies upstream. How far the creek is even navigable or how far the badlands extend. We don’t want to find ourselves aground to stay in the middle of a true strontium swamp nuke hot spot.”
“And that’s if the swampers don’t take us,” Jake added.
“We don’t know that they won’t take us here,” Arliss said. But he sounded as if he were just pointing out facts, instead of still staunchly supporting Myron’s scheme. “There’s that rad-blasted derelict bridge practically on top of it. It’s likely crawling with stickies.”
“Won’t it also block the channel for a boat the size of the Queen?” Krysty asked.
“Well,” Nataly said, sounding reluctant but compelled by sheer professionalism to steam on, “that shouldn’t be a problem. We can sound the channel first to make sure we have clearance under the keel, and hunt for sunken snags. But there should be plenty room abeam for her to pass below the intact part on this side of the creek.”
“What about attempting to escape overland?” Doc asked. “It would at least spare us the attentions of the vying armored war fleets.”
J.B. shook his head.
“Triple-bad odds, Doc. We might stumble into a hot spot that way. And even if we found game trails to follow, and kept our eyes skinned, we’d be begging to get ambushed. We wouldn’t make it a mile, if this country lives up to its rep.”
It was the old man’s turn to sigh.
“Sadly, it appears to have done so thus far,” he admitted.
“Just because the rads and the fact everything we eat is seasoned with plutonium salt won’t chill right away, it doesn’t mean we can just dawdle here,” Ryan said. “To me, trying to fix up the Queen enough so she won’t sink and kill us before something else does, all so we can steam blindly upstream to where as far as we know there won’t be a way out, is nuking near a last-chance measure. Like, right exactly above trying to hike out with stickies likely to sucker the flesh off our faces before we go a quarter mile.”
“But I can’t leave her!” Myron wailed.
Krysty wasn’t entirely sure he meant the boat. Or only the boat.
Nataly moved to the stricken man’s side. “I’m with the captain,” she said. Krysty thought she didn’t sound particularly happy about it.
The other members of the crew traded uneasy looks among themselves. Even Arliss failed to leap up and join her, though he looked guilty about it. But Krysty sensed the rest would stand with the tall first mate, come the crunch.
Ryan’s craggy features tightened. He was getting ready to blow them all off for glowing night shit. She didn’t need mutie ESP to see that.
“We can come back and salvage her,” she said loudly. “Afterward. I mean, once we all get away, and those two crazy baronies sort out their differences. Or at least get tired and go home.”
J.B. chuckled. “It’s not like a lot of scavvies are going to find her and come swarming to salvage her themselves, here in the middle of a strontium swamp.”
“Especially not if the stickies have been at it,” Mildred said, “shitting and sliming on everything the way they do.”
“Quit helping, Mildred,” Ryan growled.
“Has anybody read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?” Ricky asked. “We had a lot of books back on Monster Island.”
That shut everybody up and let all the air out of the rapidly inflating confrontation.
Arliss raised a hand. “My ma had nearly the whole book when she was a young’un, and she told me the story.”
Doc raised his hand, which given the time he came from didn’t surprise Krysty. She raised hers too, as did Mildred.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Me, too. And what does this have to do with rad-blasted anything, Ricky?”
“Well, it gives me an idea…”
Chapter Eight
With a sluggish, brackish-water-and-dead-fish-smelling breeze blowing out of the east, Ryan heard the chug of the motor launch returning downstream before Ricky, sitting sentry on the Queen’s largely intact bridge roof, called out that he saw it.
Ryan stood up out from under the shade of the crude lean-to where he was working. Similar structures were dotted around the cleared space, which had been cleared out considerably more as they gathered tall grass to make into rope to lash rafts together.
Even though twisting together yard-long stems of the smooth saw grass that grew in crazy profusion in the area, nukes or no, was sitting-down work, the sheer amount of concentration it required made it tiring. And although he had the hard, skilled hands of a man who did frequent piecework, rather than using them just to pull triggers and the stoppers from jugs of Towse Lightning, he was getting a series of blisters, cuts and cramps in brand-new and unexpected locations.
At the sound of the motor launch approaching, everybody stopped what they were doing to get a drink of water and gather by the shore. But not too close. They hadn’t seen any more of the big, killer crocs. Likely the surviving local crocodiles had gorged themselves and were sleeping it off in their dens. But the castaways had seen how they could approach the land underwater, and were in no mind to go making assumptions. They came under the still-standing part of the red steel bridge, Jak crouched in the prow, with J.B. and Nataly behind him. The rabbity-looking Abner MacReedy steered the boat in the stern. In a few moments he was backing the engine deftly as the launch slid into shore just upstream of the grounded wreck of the Mississippi Queen.
“Any luck?” Arliss sang out. He was wearing only his grimy, blood-splashed dungarees. He’d washed them in the stream that morning, as most of them had their clothes, faces, and bodies. You didn’t have to be fastidious, the way Mildred was, not to be keen on spending any longer with your former friends’ blood and bits of flesh stuck on your face and clothing and starting to stink. Nor to be covered all over with old smoke and crocodile grease.
The master rigger was the one who was teaching them to weave rope out of the tough local grasses. He didn’t want to use up too much of the rope they carried aboard the Queen. Among other things, they needed enough to lash the rafts to one another for towing. He said they could make rope strong enough to hold planks or logs together, for long enough and far enough to get clear of the New Vick fleet. And Avery, who apparently had grown up making rafts in Defianceville, near the rubble of Cairo on the Ohio just north of where it met the Sippi, agreed. They knew more about the subject than Ryan or any of his companions, including Ricky whose idea this whole plan was. And the two were ready to trust their own lives to the rafts with their homemade rope, which Ryan always found powerfully persuasive. At least when the folks doing the trusting had an actual clue about what they were doing.
“None,” Nataly said, standing up and stepping from the boat into the shallows with barely a rock. She moved briskly during the two steps it took her to get out of the water, and took several more inshore for good measure.
Jak sprang onto the bank, which made the boat wallow side to side ferociously. J.B. clung to the sides tightly until it steadied somewhat, his jaw set and brow ever so slightly furrowed, which for a more expressive human—most of them—would be the equivalent of a furious scowl. Nonetheless, the Armorer quickly recovered his composure, and shook off Abner when the grinning man offered his hand from shore.
“You were right, Ryan,” J.B. said. “About four miles upstream the Wolf turns into a true strontium swamp, just like in the stories. There’s a lot of channels through it, but the rads are near the red zone on the counter. Depending how big far it goes, we might make it through without anything worse than our hair falling out in clumps and our getting nuke blueberries all under our skin.”
Ugly and alarming as those effects were, Ryan knew a body could get over them. “But if we get stuck there…” J.B. shook his head. “We’d go into convulsions and die of the bloody shi
ts in one day. Two if we’re too tough for our own good, and too stubborn to eat a blaster first.”
“How long would it take to get through?” Krysty asked. She had been cutting grass, and her beautiful face glowed with sweat in the late-morning sun.
“No idea,” J.B. said.
“There are a number of channels winding through the swamp,” Nataly said. “But all of them were shallow. Every one we tried ran stretches no deeper than three feet.”
Ryan glanced at the Queen. Ricky sat huddled atop the largely burned-out cabin with his DeLisle across his legs, too dutiful to try to leave his appointed lookout post, but not too much so not to make it abundantly clear how much he hated being left out of whatever news the exploring team brought back from their crack-of-dawn expedition up Wolf Creek.
Inside the hull, Myron was hard at work on his beloved engines, with Sean assisting him. Ryan didn’t know how much of that was necessary for the big Diesels—and how much for the man.
“So she wouldn’t make it, huh?” Ryan asked, turning back to the tall brunette and rubbing his chin. His beard rasped at his palm. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. Another twenty-four hours and he’d start looking like the grizzle-bearded Arliss. “The motor launch could,” Abner said. “One of them little unarmored patrol boats the two fleets got, mebbe. Not the Queen. Not even stripped.”
“I wouldn’t care to risk going aground, given the dangers our friends discovered,” Doc added. He had been weaving the braids of grass such as Ryan had been making into what master rigger Arliss called “plain-laid rope,” winding them together in three strands in such a way as to make the individual lengths hold together strongly. Ryan was none too clear on that part of the process, but Doc was, and he proved to better even than the river folk at doing so.
“It’s not an option,” Ryan said flatly. He looked at Arliss, not quite challenging him to disagree, but not hiding the fact that he wasn’t open to debate.
Arliss shook his head and heaved his powerful shoulders in a sigh. “I’ll break the news to Myron,” he said.
“How about carrying out Ricky’s plan, but with the motorboat towing the rafts and the unpowered boat upstream instead of downstream, and trying to sneak past a whole assload of heavily armed ironclads?” he asked.