by James Axler
The ship was a truly colossal craft—five hundred feet long, two hundred feet wide. It had a pair of kingposts aft of midships and a series of motor-driven, gallows-like cranes to lift cargo in and out of the holds. There were six huge hatches in rows of two on the forward deck. There were four more hatches aft of the kingposts. The bridge tower had once been painted brilliant white, now it bled rust top to bottom, in six-story, vertical stripes. Atop it sat the squat wheelhouse. The tower’s windows were either missing or boarded up. Behind it, the ship’s immense, seventy-foot-high smokestack had caved in on itself.
The deck was certainly pitched, but it wasn’t so steep that it couldn’t be easily climbed, side to side. It had also once been painted a high-gloss white. Now the surface was pitted, stained, leprous with flaking patches of orange. Torches burned at intervals along the rails. Fires burned in empty oil drums along the deck’s low side. Easily a couple of hundred cannies were lined up, pounding in unison, celebrating their queen. Those without pipes used the steel-shod butts of their assault rifles. Their excitement disturbed Mildred more than their sheer numbers. It was that frenzied. Flesheaters dervished to their own mind-numbing beat.
All in the name of spilled blood.
In exaltation of murder.
Cannies pressed forward with gun muzzles lowered, packing the captives into an even tighter formation.
The drumming suddenly stopped, and a rousing cheer went up.
From this angle, in the leaping firelight, Mildred could see the female figure atop the bridge more clearly. She was definitely raven-haired and tall. She wore a long black dress that exposed thin, pale arms. When she raised her arms over her head, the undersides were red. La Golondrina had opened her veins. Blood dripped off her elbows into vessels held by figures who kneeled in front of her.
An even louder cheer went up from the deck. Loud enough to cause pain, if not to raise the dead.
Mildred looked around. Cannies hopped and jigged in wild abandon, drunk with promise, with the perceived, unstoppable momentum of their cause. Oh yes, they were in a merry, merry mood. What they anticipated was not the Big Enchilada, not the gift of eternal life, but a pardon from the grisly, tormented death they so richly deserved.
While the revelers reveled, they were joined on the deck by birds of a much different feather. These men and women wore fluorescent orange vests, the same kind used by predark road crews, and walked in perfect step, arms swinging, heads held high. Their faces were masks of joy. Smiling. Cheerful. Yet vacant. The vested crew marched straight for the lined-up corpses.
They handled the bodies without a shred of respect or dignity. They jerked them around like sides of beef, then started dragging them toward the ship’s bow.
“Who are they?” Mildred asked Tibideau.
“Those are happy meals,” Junior said.
“What?” Mildred said, jarred by the reference. More memories of her previous life flooded back, memories filtered through a screen of present-day horror.
“That’s what we call them,” Junior explained. “They’re still norms. They try to infect themselves with oozies on purpose, hoping to turn cannie. Got no real zest for the gore, yet, but they force themselves to drink tablespoons of oozie-tainted blood or the gray pus from the goners. They’re not the triple stupes you might think. They can see the handwriting on the wall, and they want to join the winning team. They’re devoted to our cause, even though they aren’t part of it. They’re eager to please, too. They’ll do anything we tell them with great big smiles on their faces. If they don’t manage to get sick after week or so, we chill them and eat them. Lots more where they came from.”
“Where they taking the bodies?” Mildred asked.
“To the cooler belowdecks,” Junior said.
Jak was staring fixedly at his prized Colt stuck in the bastard’s waistband. Mildred could see the albino’s hands twisting and straining at the ropes behind his back, trying to stretch them. His wrists were bloodied by the effort, to no avail.
“Got too many bodies on the island to smoke all at once,” Tibideau told Mildred. “Not enough smoker houses by half. Takes three, four days to do the job right. Besides, the dead ’uns have to be shaved, gutted and bled out. The happy meals do all that shit work for us—that’s why we keep ’em alive. We like to age the bodies awhile in the cooler, too. Tenderizes the oldies.”
On deck, the cannies had begun passing along tin cups of what looked like pure water. Mildred knew it wasn’t. It was water tainted with the queen’s blood. The flesheaters sipped daintily and then handed the cup on to the next in line.
“Do you want some of that?” Junior asked her. “It’s the real deal. It’s the cure. If you drink a big old swig, mebbe you’ll nip the oozies in the bud. Mebbe you’ll never get them. But on the other hand, one taste of La Golondrina’s blood might just push you over the edge. Instant cannie. Do you want to take that chance?”
Mildred wasn’t sure, one way or the other. The idea of drinking even highly diluted human blood made her stomach rebel.
“You’re not going to give it to me no matter what I say,” she told him, “so go fuck yourself.”
Junior firmly pushed Mildred and Jak to the rim of the nearest open deck hatch. “Have a look,” he said.
They peered down into the deep, steel-walled hold. It was where the cannies stored their prisoners. People were running around like ants. And just as helpless.
“You can feel the fever coming on strong, can’t you?” Junior said into Mildred’s ear. “Your pulse is pounding in your head. You know you’ve got to do something, but you’re not quite sure what it is. You’ll know real soon. Putting you down there with the norms is like dropping a wolf in among the sheep. Of course, with your hands tied behind your back you won’t be able to do them any harm. Ain’t that too bad.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I want to hear you howl for it.”
“‘It?’”
“Meat.”
“That’ll be a cold day in hell, Junior.”
“Just you wait and see.”
A crane lowered a cargo net onto the deck in front of them.
“Get in the net,” Junior said, drawing the Python from his waistband.
Mildred and Jak joined about thirty other captives in the first load. After they stepped into the center of the mesh, the crane lifted up the net, swung it over the open hatch and lowered it down into the live hold.
Except for the people and rows of torches along the walls, the vast enclosure was empty. Its steel sides were at least a hundred feet high. They were braced with massive, riveted I-beam girders, as was the underside of the main deck. There were a couple of access doors but they had no knobs or hinges on the inside. About 150 people were sitting or laying on the metal floor. Another fifty or so were milling about aimlessly or pacing like trapped animals. There was no water in sight. The latrine was marked by piles and puddles in the far corner of the hold.
It smelled like a human zoo.
The Cajuns who had stuck together on the trip down were again gathered in a tight group, this time back-to-back.
Mildred quickly realized that not all the hold’s prisoners had their hands tied. Those who had managed to get loose were busy abusing those who hadn’t. Mixed in with the docile, scooped up with the honorable and the hardworking were a handful of coldhearts. The scum of Deathlands. And with their end in sight, they were hell-bent on taking a few last liberties with the innocent and the defenseless.
Last beatings.
Last robbings.
Last sex, taken by force.
Hooting and making kissing sounds, they ganged up on the fat Sippi merchant and the Texan whore. Then they started booting them around. One for the sheer fun of it, the other to bully favors.
All the females in the hold were fair game to them, even Michelle, the parakeet woman. She was jerked away from her horrified husband while he tried in vain to defend her. The parakeet didn’t react to the kidnapping,
or the threat of gang rape—no screams, no struggle, no tears, as if she weren’t even aware of what was going on around her. From the female bodies already lying on the deck, clothes torn away, faces purple from strangulation, women didn’t survive the coldhearts’ attentions for long.
“Don’t hurt her, please,” the merchant said.
The coldhearts closed ranks around their tiny victim, laughing at him. There was nothing he could do but beg.
“Have mercy. Don’t do this.”
“There ain’t no mercy here, fat man,” one of them said. “We gonna make this little bird sing.”
Mildred recognized their type. The ornate facial brandings. The gruesome gridwork of battle scars. The ground-in, black dirt and grease on their clothes and skin. The duct tape and plastic bag repair jobs on their pants and boots. They were the lowest form of road trash, highway robbers, ville looters, kidnappers. They were as much human predators as the cannies, only up until now they had left their victims to rot by the side of the road. Back in the day, before the end of civilization, Mildred would have expected to find men like them locked up for life in some state penitentiary’s violent offender block, or buried in its potter’s field. There were no more penitentiaries, of course, and the entire world had become a potter’s field. That the coldhearts had had the gumption to keep from going over to the cannie side surprised Mildred. Maybe the cannies already had enough happy meals.
“That one there looks prime to me,” one of the road trash said, leering at Mildred. He smacked his stubble-rimmed lips and showed her an alarmingly long, red tongue. “Let’s do her, too.”
For the second time in twenty-four hours, Mildred was the focus of unwelcome male attention. This time she paid it back with interest.
When the chiller reached out for her with grimy hands, tongue lewdly extended, she snap-kicked him in the chin, driving down with her planted foot, putting everything she had into the upward blow. His eyes rolled in their sockets as the steel-capped toe of her combat boot made solid contact, splitting his lower jaw in two, shattering his front teeth like glass, but not before he bit off the end of his own tongue. His knees bucked. Blood drooled from his lips in long, swaying strands as he dropped unconscious to the deck.
A second coldheart, a man with a shaved head who was missing both ears, lunged at her, but she easily stepped aside and let him fly past.
Jak roundhouse-kicked the oncoming target in the kneecap. There was an audible crunch as bone and cartilage crushed, and the earless man went down screaming, clutching at his leg with both hands.
The coldhearts weren’t done, yet. Not by a long shot. Chilling Mildred and Jak had become a matter of pride.
The biggest of the bunch let out a roar and charged her. He stood about six-three and weighed at least 250 pounds. Greasy coils of brown hair fell past his wide shoulders. His nose had a carved white bone thrust through it. His eyes were small, dark and full of hate.
This time she pivoted away at the last second, and as the chiller swept by, she dropped and leg-whipped him. He landed on his back on the deck. The sudden, unexpected impact knocked the wind out of him. Before he could recover his breath, Mildred’s heel stomped his face, turning nose and decorative ornament to bloody pulp.
The coldheart rolled away and staggered up to his feet, clutching his nose as gore spilled out from between his fingers.
Which left his sternum exposed.
Mildred knew better than to give someone that big a second chance to throttle her.
She front kicked him straight in the heart, grunting from the effort, putting all of her weight into it. She felt his rib cage buckle and then snap like a dry branch under her sole.
The man’s final breath gusted out in a red mist. He crashed to the deck, his legs kicking and trembling in the throes of death.
“Snow Wolf, over here! Quick!” someone shouted.
Mildred turned and was stunned to see the Cajuns waving excitedly at Jak. All of them had their hands free. Working back-to-back, they had managed to untie each other.
One of the Cajuns expertly picked out the knot that held Jak’s wrists bound together.
The albino quickly shook the circulation back into his fingers.
“Let’s put an end to this crap,” a stocky coldheart snarled at his grim-faced comrades. “We got a lot of screwing to do. The mutie’s mine.”
As the barrel-chested man closed in on Jak, he addressed the albino directly. “I’m gonna pop out those red eyeballs and stuff ’em up your pasty white butt.”
“Shit, he’s nothing but a skinny kid,” one of the other chillers called. “Wring his fucking neck and get it over with.”
The stocky coldheart tried. He really tried. When his hands closed, Jak’s neck was someplace else.
“What?” the coldheart said.
In a blur, Jak had moved behind him. The albino straight-punched his adversary in the right kidney, the youth’s mane of white hair flying. The heavy muscles of the chiller’s back dulled the shock wave of that first blow, but his face registered sharp, stabbing pain.
Jak didn’t stop. He didn’t step away. He hit coldheart again and again with consecutive right-hand punches, laying the full-power blows on exactly the same spot.
“The mutie’s mine!” one of the coldhearts shouted in glee, mocking his brutalized comrade.
Mildred felt a light touch behind her. When she looked over her shoulder, a female Cajun was working at her bonds.
The coldheart tried to whirl to face Jak and bring his hands into the fight, but the albino circled as he turned, shadowing his every move, continuing to pound on that kidney. Mildred knew that after a certain point even densely layered muscle was no protection from body blows like that. The man couldn’t keep his muscle tensed. Under the relentless beating, it would go numb, then slack.
And Jak kept hitting him.
“Ah, shit. Shit,” the man wheezed, gasping for air. Piss ran down his leg onto the deck.
The spiraling dance of pain turned closer and closer to the hold’s steel wall. Jak was leading. The coldheart was bent double, unable to straighten, unable to lift his right arm.
The other road scum didn’t step in to help their pal. Some were busy tearing the clothes off the indifferent, unblinking parakeet. Maybe the rest were too amused to intervene. Or maybe they wanted to watch him die.
Jak grabbed the man by the arm and waist, jerked him off balance, spun him on one foot and slammed the top of his head into the wall. It was heavy-gauge metal. It didn’t dent.
The coldheart dropped to his knees, blood leaking from both ears. When Jak leaned over his adversary’s wide back, he looked small, way too small to have done all that damage. The albino gripped the man’s chin with one hand and his opposite shoulder with the other.
The movement that came next was too fast for the eye to follow.
The snap of the breaking neck was unmistakable.
Jak let the body slump to its side on the deck.
Cannies looked down from the rim of the hatch, cheering and jeering the hand-to-hand combat. They didn’t give a damn what happened down in the hold. The prisoners were unarmed and they couldn’t get out. If the aggressive ones chilled each other, it would save them the effort.
“That’s just poor,” remarked a rangy coldheart as Jak stepped away from the corpse. “Come on, let’s waste this little shit.”
Only one of the road scum deigned to join him, a wiry man with deep creases in his forehead and down his cheeks. The rest were content to remain spectators.
Freed herself, Mildred took Jak’s back.
The coldhearts circled, looking for openings. When they found none, they tried to create them with brute force. Mildred blocked a flurry of punches and kicks from the taller man, using her hands, arms and feet. When he couldn’t make a dent in her defense, the scum’s face turned red with frustration. The doctor smiled at him because she knew it would piss him off even more.
Howling with rage, the chiller tried again. This t
ime she let him in, and when he struck for her face, she struck back with a vengeance. The edge of her stiffened forearm slammed into his larynx, crushing it. Stunned, his airway cut off, the coldheart backed away, holding his throat.
Behind her, Jak ducked under a haymaker swing and backhanded a rabbit chop to the base of the wiry guy’s neck. The blow momentarily disconnected brain from spinal cord. Head from legs. The man fell to his knees.
The albino teen kicked him in the head, and when the man dropped to his back on the deck, he kicked him some more. Jak kicked him so hard that one of his eyes popped from its socket.
Turning away, the albino looked around for more.
None of the scum wanted any part of either of them.
The other attacker had collapsed in final spasm, his face purple, eyes bulging and shot with blood, his tongue black and protruding.
“Let the woman go or you’re gonna get the same,” Mildred told the chillers.
To her delight, the Cajuns stepped up and joined ranks with them, maximizing the threat.
The coldhearts knew they couldn’t win. They grudgingly moved away from Michelle, leaving her standing there naked, her torn clothes down around her ankles.
Mildred pulled the poor woman’s dress back up. “Get everybody freed,” she told the Cajuns. “Untie their hands.”
It took only a couple of minutes. The freed prisoners helped release those still bound.
The cannies didn’t try to stop them. The only way they could have done that would have been to open fire. And that wasn’t called for. Tied or not, the captives weren’t going anywhere.
A fact that was obvious to everyone in the hold, as well.
“We’ve got to find a way out of this pit,” said the apparent leader of the Cajuns. He had a blue-dark shadow of beard, a long nose and close-set black eyes. A hunk of his left bicep was missing; there were bite marks around the angry wound. “Got to get hold of some blasters. Got to do some damage, soften up the bastards for Cheetah Luis.”