Their ropes creaked, and their masts groaned. The tops of waves splashed into the keels, and the hulls themselves let out little sighs as they came up out of the water.
Mike had missed all of this as they had passed through the formation of Corsair boats mainly because the formation itself had slipped dangerously to leeward, which was the reason for the bells in the first place. The first bell signaled a move to port and the second meant a return to their original northward direction.
“It’ll be okay,” Mike told Jenn. He had said this so many times that it was now a reflex on his part. “We’ll just slip a little to the west and they’ll never know we were here.” Stu grunted his doubt while Jenn wore hers openly on her face. To her, it felt as though they were living on some sort of see-saw; their luck had gone back and forth between good and atrocious, with each dip toward the bad side getting worse and worse.
Did I misread the signs? she wondered, as Stu and Mike made the minor adjustments needed to ease them towards the wind. “Or did I just get lazy?” She hadn’t given any thought to their direction at all when Mike had asked for a sign. The calendar had just been there. “Maybe it was just more bad luck?”
She was about to go back down into the cabin to look at the picture of Santa and the North Pole once more, when she heard the whisper of a boat coming towards them. She stopped and squinted into the darkness and the misting clouds; they all did. The Corsair ships were not in exact alignment and as Mike tried to slide The Wind Ripper out of the formation, he cut across the path of another ship. It appeared out of the darkness like a patch of perfect midnight.
“Look out, moron!” someone hissed from the boat. “What are you, deaf? The second bell was plain as day.”
Jenn’s only reaction was to hold her breath as the two boats passed within spitting distance of each other: a loogie was hawked at them and hit The Wind Ripper’s gunwale.
“Get your ass in line!” another voice from the Corsair ship snapped. “And why the hell don’t you have a second jib strung? Do you think you’re driving some sorta yacht?”
“Sorry,” Mike said, trying to pitch his voice low.
“Sorry, he says. Who is that, Rainbow Dave? You tell Cannan I’m gonna have words with him and you when we get back.”
He went on muttering quiet threats and put-downs as Stu laid on another jib and Mike apologized and agreed that he was an “Ass” and a “Green Bitch.” Slowly, he eased the ship away and back towards the shore. Soon the patch of perfect midnight became only a black shadow and then it disappeared altogether. “We’ll let them pass by,” Mike whispered, “and then scoot out west again. I think getting wood is going to have to wait.”
It had been such a close call that no one argued about the wood. Jenn was just about to go below when Rob LaBar grabbed her arm. “I thought you said you were gonna get me some antibiotics. I don’t wanta lose my leg, Jenn.”
The near collision had driven his wound out of her mind. Her shoulders sagged as she asked Mike, “What about Rob? I don’t know if he can wait.”
Mike couldn’t believe the request. Didn’t she realize how much trouble they were in? He glanced toward Stu, who only gave a shrug, saying, “You’re the captain. I just work here.”
A sigh, one that was a perfect replication of how his dad used to sigh, came from Mike. He also shrugged as if he was in a position beyond his control. “I don’t know what to say, Jenn. He’s just going to have to try to wait.”
Rob’s face was set in a rigid mask of pain and despite the cold, there were sweat stains at his collar. “You want me to try to not be infected? Is that what I’m supposed to do?”
“I meant try to hold on. I-It might not be that long. I counted the second set of bells; there were seven in front of us and only four behind. I think we’re at the very end of the formation and once they’re gone, it’ll just be us and a bunch of empty water. We can go where we want.”
He based this on a false premise. Mike didn’t realize that the Corsair fleet had been broken up into squadrons and that another one was coming up fast, following pretty much the exact same course the first had, which put The Wind Ripper directly in its path.
Thinking he had the situation under control, Mike shortened sail and had them tooling along just fast enough to keep from being pushed onto shore. He figured he would give the Corsairs a head-start and then slip in behind them. He didn’t count on hearing another bell. It was clear and crisp, somewhere very close and hidden by the low clouds.
“Mike?” Stu whispered. “Which way?”
That was an impossible question. In a sense, they were stuck. They couldn’t heave to the right because the shore was too close, and they couldn’t go left because they would be broadside to the coming ships, and the possibility of being rammed was too great. Their only chance was to yank the sail tight and race forward as fast as they could. The Wind Ripper was a fast ship, though it took time for her to get to speed from what was practically a stand still. Stu gave her all the sail he could, as quickly as he could, and she fairly leapt forward, she just didn’t leap as fast as any of them wanted.
Emerging from the clouds was the forty-five foot Silk Diamond. The Corsair ship was so intensely black and so eerily silent, sliding through the water, that she looked more like a ghost ship than a real, tangible one, at least to Jenn.
Mike had a different perspective. Jutting from the very front of the ship was what looked like a huge spear and it was aimed right at his face.
He ducked just as the spear cut the air over his head. There was an explosion of curses from The Silk Diamond, while almost right above them was a huge voice roaring, “Hard to starboard! Hard to starboard!”
Mike cut his wheel hard to port, hoping to evade the huge ship by taking diverging courses. They were too close, and The Silk Diamond had too much momentum. In reality, the spear was the ship’s bowsprit, which was something akin to an extra boom designed to hold a larger forward sail. In this instance, it worked like a modern lance and, as the two ships came together with a terrific jolt that sent Stu sprawling, the bowsprit ripped into The Wind Ripper’s sail.
Ropes snapped, and the boom swung like an immense baseball bat just a few feet over the deck. It passed so close to Jenn that it ripped out a few stray hairs from the top of her head.
The impact sent The Wind Ripper spinning to the west with a high shrieking noise as her sail tore as easily as tissue paper. The Silk Diamond went to the right, her captain still roaring. “Who is that? What boat is that, damn it?” A bell began ringing and soon it was joined by others.
For a few moments, Mike didn’t know what direction they were facing, and then their bad luck became atrocious as they drifted right out of the low clouds. Above them was a solid bank of grey and all around them was empty black sea.
“What do we do?” Stu asked. Mike didn’t have an answer. As captain, he was responsible for everything. It was his fault that their main was shredded and their lines were flung about like spiderwebs after a storm. Guilt had him by the throat. He couldn’t pretend to be the big man when everything was going perfectly and not be the goat when disaster struck. His first response was to look to Jenn.
She was gently touching her face with shaking hands, as if she couldn’t believe she was still alive. “What are you looking at me for?” His eyes shifted to the terrible state of the ship and she understood: he was no longer master and commander of the high seas. He looked like a boy who had broken his mother’s favorite mirror. And Stu had changed, as well. The tough as nails Hillman had drunk poison from more than just the little vial. His love for Jillybean had been toxic. It had corroded him. It had weakened him as a man.
And now they were both looking at her, a fifteen-year-old girl with no experience beyond a few days as queen in which she let valuable minutes slip away, one after another until they were all gone and she was drinking poison.
What did they expect of her?
Nothing, she thought. They are just afraid to make their own
decisions. She understood. No matter what they decided to do in the next few seconds, it would probably lead to their capture, their torture and their deaths. It was hard to be the person responsible for that, even if there was no other choice.
The only thing being queen had taught her was that a queen didn’t get to choose not to choose. For good or bad, she had to make a decision.
“Can we go with just the jib?” she asked Mike.
“Not very well and not very fast. And they’ll see…”
She cut him off. “We’ll use the jib. Hurry.” The bells were still ringing in the clouds behind them and the angry curses were growing in volume.
As Mike and Stu ran up two jibs, Jenn went to the back of the boat to see if there was damage. The railing was twisted into something that resembled a warped spider web and was hanging by a single screw. Below that, the stern was bashed inward in the shape of a V. Luckily, the point of the V stopped a few feet from the water.
They weren’t going to sink and that was some good news, at least. The bad news, as Mike explained a few minutes later, was that steering using just the jibs was problematic at best, and worse, their speed would be half what it was. “And,” he added, ominously.
“There’s an and?” She couldn’t imagine an “and” worse than what she had just heard.
“There might be a lot of them. In this case, there’s a real danger that we might lose the boom if we push things too hard. And, I think we’re going to have to push as hard as we can. Whoever’s captaining the boat that hit us is pissed off.”
This was a bit of an understatement. They could still hear the captain bawling orders, one of which was: “Find that damned boat!”
“Man the wheel,” Mike ordered her. He was already coming back into his own. “And keep watch back there. If you see a ship, let me know asap.” The squadron had come to a stop and was still in the bank of low clouds. The Wind Ripper was a half mile away and slowly building up speed under the twin jibs.
“Let’s hope she holds,” Mike said to Stu as he ran a hand up the mast. It was already bending forward, letting out a light groan. If it caught a gust wrong, it would snap. He gave the mast a tug with both hands and heard Rob LaBar chuckle. Mike eyed him before asking, “What do you think? You’ve been on this boat longer than we have. What do you suggest?”
He chuckled again, a cold little laugh. “I think you should jump overboard and make a swim for it. You’ll be caught if you don’t, plain and simple.”
“That’s it?” Stu growled.
“That’s it, squinty-eyes. You think you’re so tough, but you walk around here like an old man, all creaky and crap. So yeah, jump in and start swimming before half a dozen boats zip up here and cut you off. It’s not like there’s anywhere to hide and how many boats look like they just got run over by an ocean liner?”
Stu cracked the knuckles of both hands, saying, “If I swim, you swim, so maybe you should think of something else.”
Mike raised a hand to Stu. “Hold on, he might have a point. We need to make The Wind Ripper look less ripped up. In the meantime, Jenn, give me a half-turn to port. Maybe something as simple as a course change might throw them off.”
While Jenn tried to hold a north-west course, Mike and Stu ran down into the lower deck for tools and more sailcloth. Once back on deck, they got rid of the broken railing and then cut a length of sailcloth to fit over the splintered V-shaped hole in the stern. Up close it looked like cloth stretched tight over a hole, but from further away, the black painted hull matched well enough with the black sail to make it look as though the boat was in one piece.
“I see a boat!” Jenn hissed. Three more followed the first out of the mists. From this distance it seemed that they were only the shadows of clouds, yet these shadows moved sideways to the wind.
Mike went to the wheel and tried to turn the boat further into the wind. The mast creaked and the lines running from it looked as taut as bowlines. They were very close to the breaking point. “Hold it here,” he ordered Jenn. She had to strain to keep the wheel in place.
While she fought against the strength of both the wind and tide, Mike and Stu rushed to get their sail back in place. It would never draw wind like it used to, and would never be drum-tight, but that wasn’t the point. They only had a few minutes to make it seem as though the sail was up and operational.
Staples and duct-tape made it appear whole, while a series of half-assed knots gave them enough rope to keep it from flapping around. They could only hope that no one noticed that the boom was loose and that the sail was little more than a giant weathervane.
“Now we need backstays,” Mike said, “and a whole lot of luck.” The backstays were lines that would pull back on the mast to help stabilize it against the forward pressure of the jibs. It could help them to eke out a few more knots of speed and perhaps they could get away completely. The ships behind them were already sniffing up the wrong path. They were still heading directly north, while The Wind Ripper was slipping away to the northwest.
The backstays were tangible things Mike could handle; it was the luck he couldn’t do anything about.
The moment he and Stu went below, Rob LaBar screamed, “Over here! We’re over here! Hey…”
By the time the two rushed up on deck, they found Jenn crouched over the Corsair with a glittering knife at his throat. There was blood, but not much. She hadn’t killed him.
“What are you waiting for?” Stu asked, coldly. “He’s a Corsair. A knife should be stuck into every one of them.” Jenn’s hand shook, and the tip of the knife slid deeper into his flesh.
“Don’t,” Mike begged. “Yeah, he’s a Corsair, but this is something Jillybean would do. I think it would be wrong. I just…I just don’t want you turning out like her. She had to start somewhere to get as bad as she…”
“Hey!” a voice hissed over the water. The word hadn’t come from behind them, it came from their left, from the west. They all looked up to see a line of ten ships. The first was just crossing in front of them. It was another squadron of Corsairs that had been slightly off course but was now coming back in line.
They had The Wind Ripper dead to rights and this time the crippled ship would not be able to get away.
Chapter 22
The outer wall built by the Guardians was truly an impressive engineering feat. It stood twenty-feet high, four-feet wide and ran in a two-mile long arc encompassing a small peninsula that bulged out into the Pacific. It was made up of concrete blocks and rebar. Inside its hollow structure were ladders and platforms and murder holes, allowing men move and fight within it.
No zombie was strong enough to do much more than scratch this wall and no human army had ever considered mounting an attack on it, for obvious reasons.
“What did I tell you, your Highness?” Mark Leney asked, his hands planted squarely on his hips. “The Black Captain’s intel is almost always spot on. Don’t ask me how he has so many spies, I just know they are good.”
“I don’t see it in this case.”
Leney jerked his head around in surprise, causing the partially healed cut across his throat to zing with pain. “They got it all perfectly right. Every last detail. This place can’t be taken, at least not by a frontal attack. It would be a complete nightmare. No offense, but those pills you’re taking might be messing with your head, your Highness.”
Despite still being exhausted from the battle, she had sent him into San Francisco with a shopping list the previous morning. Among the different odds and ends were a number of pills. She had downed two the moment he had gotten back, making him wonder if they had been the entire reason for the trip and all the other things he had picked up had only been window dressing.
“I’m fine,” she answered, curtly. In truth, the Zyprexa made her sleepy and the night before she’d had eight hours of continuous sleep, something that hadn’t happened in years. Although she felt refreshed, she wasn’t happy about it. There was still so much to do to be wasting time useless
ly sleeping. She had patients to attend to, the Corsairs trapped around Rodeo Lagoon were going to surrender at any minute, she had to replenish her supply of torpedoes, bombs and batteries, and she had to compel the Guardians to accept her as Queen.
It was going to be a full day.
“Shaina? Binoculars, please.”
Leney thought it was strange that the Queen had brought three “helpers” along with the seven hundred fighters who were arranged in tight companies behind them. They were the oddest set of assistants he had ever seen: lumpy-headed Shaina Hale, who was as skinny and angular as a stick bug and probably not quite as smart as one; a one-armed kid named Aaron Altman, who carried a pistol that looked like it weighed more than he did; and a seven-year-old girl named Lindy Smith. She skipped around like a butterfly, talking almost nonstop about absolutely nothing.
“Here you are, your Queen-ness,” Shaina said, with a lopsided grin. “I mean, your Highness. I don’t know why I said that. It just came out and…”
“Thank you, Shaina,” Jillybean interrupted. After sending the battered woman back with the other two, the Queen put the binoculars up to her face and said, “Hmmm.”
“Hmmm?” Leney asked. “Is that all you can say? Look how wide open the land is between here and the wall. There’s not a lick of cover for two-hundred yards. Any attack will get smashed before it even begins. We’ll be dead like that.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis. “And we can’t use smoke to cover our movement. The wind is against us; it’ll blow right into our faces.”
He purposely didn’t mention a seaward attack.
As the Queen’s hundred-ship fleet swept towards the peninsula, he had eyed the sea approach to the lair of the Guardians. With the rocks, and the surf, and the wall, an attack from that direction was insane. Their ships would be pounded to pieces by the surf and anyone who managed to live long enough to reach land would have to climb a slick, fifteen-foot cliff just to reach the base of the wall. Although the wall was shorter on that side, it was still an utterly flat eleven-foot wall. Without a ladder, no one could get up it.
Generation Z (Book 4): The Queen Unthroned Page 21