Stu waited a minute before he chanced another look, by then the three Corsairs boats were already tacking back towards the main fleet, hoisting signal flags as they went. Even before the three boats had made it halfway back, ten ships broke off from the main part of the fleet, going north and another ten went south.
“They’re trying to get us to divide our forces,” Jillybean said through the radio. “Gerry, keep an eye on that southern group. It’s probably nothing but a feint. Let me know if they land. Stu, I want you to move twenty more men to the north.”
“Roger that,” he said into the radio. He gave it another long look before he went jogging down the bridge, picking out twenty people. The best marksman were already with James Smith; now he chose anyone who would look him in the eye. Most would not. So many in fact that he had almost run the full length of the bridge and he only had gathered up eighteen people.
The nineteenth was Lois Blanchard. She was white-faced and shaking—from the heights of the bridge they could easily see the Corsair boats that had gone north. They had come in as close to the beach as they could and now a swarm of men were pouring over the sides and into the water. There were hundreds of them.
Lois didn’t say a word. She hurried along next to Stu without taking her eyes from the beach.
“Hey, where the hell is Orlando?” Stu suddenly asked. “I haven’t seen him.”
This broke the spell of fear that had gripped her. “He’s showing his true colors,” she scoffed. “He ran away just like I knew he would. Damned coward.”
Stu nodded appreciatively at the grit in her voice. It was needed. The Corsairs on the beach had finished unloading and were now hurrying up the long slopes. They disappeared from view for a few minutes behind one of the smaller hills. By the time they reappeared, two-hundred and fifty strong, Stu had situated the new platoon among James’ sixty.
Neither side consisted of true soldiers, making the battle more chaotic than Stu could have imagined. He was actually hopeful as he took the first shot, knocking a Corsair down with a hundred and twenty yard shot straight to the chest. His little company held the high ground and were dug in as well as camouflaged, shooting from beneath ash covered blankets. The Corsairs were out in the open, without any cover. They were sopping wet and flagging already from having marched through the shallows, across the beach and up the ash-covered hills.
In the first volley twenty Corsairs were killed or wounded and a like number were hit in the second wave of shots. A cheer went up from Stu’s force—then the Corsairs returned fire.
The cheer turned to panic as the hill was ripped up by thousands of bullets. While Stu’s force had to conserve their ammo, taking only carefully aimed shots, the Corsairs were extravagant in their firing. The noise of their guns blasting away was astonishing loud and yet, the sinister sounds of the bullets whispering by was enough to make some lose control of themselves.
Over a dozen people cowered down and refused to look up again, their weapons uselessly clutched in a paralytic grip. Thirty yards from Stu, two women jumped up and ran for the bridge. One was cut down, hit by what had to be a hundred bullets. She was so shredded by the flying metal that one of her arms was torn right off and her face was so mutilated as to be unrecognizable. Seeing this horror caused the other woman to stumble face-first into the ash and as she did, scores of bullets passed over her.
“Stay down!” Stu cried. The woman was out of her mind and she jumped right up again and ran on another forty paces before she too was riddled. Blood just seemed to erupt from her in fountains. She staggered on and the sound of the bullets striking her was appallingly like someone being hit with a hammer over and over.
It was a mercy for everyone when the side of her head blasted out and she fell unmoving into the dust.
Stu found himself staring and had to shake away the dreadful image. “Keep shooting! Don’t let up!”
He was in a shallow trench with Willis Firam who talked to his gun as he fought. “There you go. Good shot. Darn, try a little higher. Come on, don’t be like that,” and so on. Stu didn’t mind it at all. The constant patter was a reminder that there were actual people around him, something that was very much needed because after only a very short time, it felt as though he had been transported to some strange, distant planet.
From head to toe, the Corsairs were so caked in muddy ash that they no longer looked like people and with all their crawling or sprinting from here to there and sometimes back again, they kicked up so much ash that the battlefield was hung over with murky grey clouds that the wind would whip up and spin in little mini-tornadoes.
Time seemed to expand. Seconds dragged out, longer and longer. The battle too, grew, or so it seemed. The whole world seemed to be shooting or screaming until the din was so deafening Stu felt like his head was stuffed with explosions that bounced around inside his skull.
And still they fought, the two sides furiously going at each other with a great deal more tenacity than actual skill.
In full view of everyone on the hill and well within range of their guns, the Corsairs tried a flanking maneuver. It was useless and stupid and horrible. Clumped together they became little more than target practice and forty of them were butchered and laid bleeding in mangled clumps. Only the ungodly amount of cover fire saved the rest.
They fled, falling over themselves to get away and leaving behind at least a hundred bodies scattered over the low hill. Just like that, time rebounded. Stu’s force let out a ragged cheer. Stu did not cheer. He stood, gazing at the dead and wounded around him—he counted seventeen.
“Damn,” he said or whispered, he didn’t know which. His ears ringing so badly that he didn’t even hear the radio at his belt at first.
“Stu! Stu! Come in, Stu. Can you hear me?” It was Jenn sounding frantically desperate.
“I’m here. I think we won. They’ve retreated. Is Jillybean okay?”
She answered with a long, “Uhhhhh,” then adding, “We’re hanging in there,” which Stu interpreted to mean that Jillybean was not doing well. “Hey, look, I wanted to let you know that the main bunch of boats is moving up. They’re heading for the bridge.”
There was a sudden scraping noise from the radio and Jillybean was on sounding somewhat drunk, “Sh-Shift everyone you can back to defend it. The bridge. Defend the bridge.” There was a long interval where she said nothing, but as she still had her thumb on the send button he could hear her breathing. Finally, she seemed to pull herself together and said, “Take care of yourself, Stu. Out.”
Disappointed, Stu mumbled, “Roger,” and stuck the radio back on his belt.
“So back to the bridge?” Willis asked as he switched out his magazine. He wore a wide smile that seemed to just keep spreading. A giddy, bubbly feeling, one he couldn’t fight was causing it. He had lived! Against all odds, he had lived! If it wasn’t for a wounded man sitting not far away, holding his shattered, bloody arm Willis would have laughed aloud.
That was the order, only something was bothering Stu. The enemy had taken shocking casualties, but it had been a brief battle, maybe all of twenty minutes. If that had been him on the other side he wouldn’t have given up so quickly, especially now that the boats were coming in.
Quickly, he brought up his scope and sighted it past the hill opposite them to where he had seen the Corsairs coming. By all logic they should’ve been leaving by the same route, but they were nowhere to be seen.
“James! Shift right! They’re going to try to flank us again!” Stu’s instincts were spot on. Within two minutes the low hill to their right suddenly boiled over with Corsairs screaming and hollering, and shooting like they had an infinite number of bullets. Stu’s military sense was less intuitive than he thought and he didn’t see the flanking attack as the diversion that it was.
He and Willis were in high crouches, aiming over the gentle hump of their own hill, when there came the sharp crack of heavier caliber rifles. Willis let out an oof and fell back at the same time something
fat, fast and angry buzzed next to Stu’s ear.
“Left! Left!” he screamed as he dove for the shallow trench. The dirt and ash around it leapt up like splattered raindrops, hundreds of raindrops. There was no way he could scream loud enough over the blaze and thunder to be heard. “James!” he yelled into the radio. “I need help on the left.” The radio suddenly became clogged with voices. Stu had no time for any of them.
Willis was still lying out in the open, one hand holding a bloody hole in his guts and the other flung out and scrabbling at the soft ash for purchase as he tried to crawl back into the trench. Stu leapt out of the hole, grabbed the outstretched hand and hauled the man to safety.
His heart was racing and his adrenaline was pumping what felt like crazy juice right into his arteries. Without thinking, he pushed Willis off of him, went to one knee and began firing down the hill. With a hundred men coming at him, he had his pick of targets. He fired ten times before he ran out of ammo and dropped back down.
“Where’s another mag?” he asked. Willis pointed not at a magazine, but at Stu’s head where his vision was suddenly blurred. Blood rivered down from his scalp and out along his narrow nose before dripping off. He had been shot in the head—he couldn’t worry about that. Not just then. Finding his dropped magazine he slammed it home and popped up, expecting to have all hundred Corsairs almost in his lap.
They had barely progressed, however. When he had started firing into them they had thrown themselves to the ground and were only just then getting up. He sent them scrabbling again firing as fast as he could line up a shot. Bullets came ripping his way, tearing sheets of air, or so it sounded, all around him.
When he ran out a second time he dropped down just as Willis managed to haul his bleeding body up. Willis couldn’t feel his legs, something he knew was unfixable no matter how good the Mad Queen was with a scalpel. He was doomed and furious about it and wanted to get his revenge while he still could.
“Take a little of that!” he barked as he shot. “And that. Good shot, good shot. Feels like I’m peeing myself. Am I, Stu?”
Stu had been trying to fumble a magazine into his gun as blood kept running into his eyes. He swiped at his brow and squinted in at Willis’ crotch. “Naw. It’s, uh, just a little blood.” It was a lot of blood, actually, though he didn’t know how to say this.
“Good. Don’t want to be pissing myself. No way. Here. Take this.” Willis thrust his empty rifle at Stu. “Gimme,” he said, holding a glistening red hand out. “Only one of us needs to be a hero. Reload this one, will ya? I got an extra couple of mags I’ve been holding onto.”
Suddenly wobbly from his head wound, Stu handed over the gun and then loaded the next.
Eleven minutes later Willis ran out of bullets, he’d also run out of blood. Exposed like that, he’d been shot six more times and hadn’t complained once; hadn’t even uttered a word. He just kept firing, almost singlehandedly breaking the back of the attack and driving away the Corsairs.
Stu could see them trudging over the hills. Maybe fifty or sixty of them altogether. One of them let off a green smoke bomb and five ships came coursing in their direction. They weren’t being picked up, they were being reinforced.
“Where’s James?” Stu was having trouble seeing out of his left eye and didn’t notice the tall dark, ex-slave standing not far away. Someone turned him in his direction. “There you are. Take twenty guys and gather all the ammo you can from the dead, theirs and ours and then help the wounded back to the bridge. Then hold here at all costs.”
James lifted an eyebrow in question. “We won’t leave without you,” Stu assured him. “I’ll keep you posted.”
He was about to turn away when James grabbed him. “Hey, I wanted to thank you. We all wanted to thank you. You and the Queen. We might…” He seemed to lose his words as he glanced toward the ocean where more Corsairs were wading ashore. “We know we might die, but we still wanted to thank you. All of us.”
Stu’s head and heart had been in utter turmoil for days on end, never quite knowing if he was doing the right thing concerning Jillybean, but these few words changed all that. Whatever happened in the battle, they would at least fight as free men and women. That was something.
“It was all the Queen,” he answered. James started to shake his head, but Stu wasn’t going to take any credit. Even if he had time to, it wasn’t his way. He shook James’ hand gave a final glance at Willis’ body flopped face first, half-in and half-out of the trench, then left with the walking wounded and about twenty-five others.
He was still dwelling on what James had said and feeling at peace with himself despite the smoke and gunshots going off. They crested the hill and looked down at a sight that robbed him of that feeling. In a neat line, fifty of the largest sailboats in the Corsair fleet, were charging down on the buoys and the ropes that stretched between them.
From his vantage point, the ropes looked terribly flimsy and he was altogether sure they would snap at the moment of collision, ruining their chances at sinking any of the boats.
“Follow as best you can!” he cried to the others and, forgetting his wound, an ugly grazing gash, he raced down to the bridge. He gained speed once he hit the highway, while at the same time, the Corsair fleet which had been coming along with a very brisk ten mile an hour breeze right on their stern, suddenly slowed as the headlands on either side of the bridge played havoc with the wind, causing it to fail utterly for minutes at a time or to come boiling up from unexpected directions.
The boats lost momentum and the impressive line failed. They came at the barrier in ones and twos. Some hit dead spots where their sails drooped and others found they were drifting leeward and had to tack around. On the whole this was the perfect situation for the defenders.
Directly below Gretchen “Mush-mouth” Ingles, lay a forty-four foot cutter that had once bore the name: The 19th Hole, but had been rechristened, The Black Hole by its Corsair captain. Gretchen gritted her mangled teeth as she hefted a twenty-two pound rock above her head. With a cry she sent it hurtling down at the wallowing craft just as a sailor was reaching out with a dagger to begin sawing at the rope that stretched up to the bridge.
In truth, he should have been cutting the horizontal rope that connected the one buoy to the next one, but either way the rock, traveling at over eighty miles an hour struck him a glancing blow on the side of the head which killed him eight minutes later. The rock, its momentum hardly slowed, smashed through the deck, near the bow, blasted through a small cabinet in the front cabin and embedded itself in the hull where thin jets of water sprayed upward into the cabinet, unnoticed by anyone.
“I hit it!” Gretchen crowed. A cheer went up and that brief moment may have been the highpoint of an otherwise miserable life. Filled with excitement, she grabbed another rock, hefted it just as she had with the first and was all set to throw it down when a bullet fired from below took care of her dental problems once and for all as it plowed through her chin, exploded her teeth in all directions and ended up deep in her brain.
The cheers died as Gretchen fell along with her rock.
Chapter 42
The second rock killed one Corsair outright, broke the collarbone of a second and crushed three toes of a third. Gretchen’s hundred and twenty pound body did even more damage as it struck the boom near the end. The boom broke right in half and worse, the mast bent and stuck out at an odd and quite unsailable angle. The Black Hole was now useless except as a target for more rocks.
The defenders on the bridge made sure not to expose themselves more than they had to. They’d take a quick peek to line things up and then heave their rocks over the edge. They battered the Black Hole, hitting it with twenty-four rocks. There was no defense against them. Not even hiding in the cabins offered any safety and it wasn’t long before sailors were diving overboard to get away. When that happened the rock throwers grabbed their carts or wheelbarrows and rushed to the next stricken boat; there were already two dozen boats hung up on
the rope.
Those boats that drifted slowly into the slung ropes generally did the best, that is if they weren’t immediately attacked by hurtling rocks. It was the boats that had some headway on them that ended up getting irreversibly stuck. To a man, the captains of these boats tried to ride right over the rope and every one of them found themselves caught up in it.
The rope would slide along the hull and either get snagged on the keel if it was sharp enough or the rudder. Either way, the boats were stuck, the ropes impossible to get at, and the rocks coming fast. Things grew even worse as Stu and his group arrived. They filled in along the bridge, taking up the heavy rocks and destroying boat after boat from north to south. For twenty-three and a half minutes they had the upper-hand, sinking or destroying thirty-one ships and killing or wounding three hundred men.
Then the Corsair leader brought up his remaining boats, moving slowly with barely any sails set. At about two hundred yards they turned broadside on and sent a hail of bullets at the bridge. They were at just the right angle and three defenders died, including Willis’ friends Rondo and Jimmy. Still recovering from their long sickness, they were rickety and fading, too slow to realize the danger from the mass of boats.
Everyone hid behind the lines of old cars as the Corsairs kept up a modest covering fire. Within minutes there was a cheer from beneath the bridge.
“Come in, Jillybean? What just happened?” Stu demanded, fearing the worst.
A shaky, worried Jenn answered, “They cut the ropes. Sadie and I can see at least three of their boats are getting through. She doesn’t know what to do, Stu.” This was said in a frightened whisper. “I think you need to get off that bridge as fast as you can.”
“Worry about her. Get her back, please.”
Jenn said, she would try. Stu wasn’t ready to give up the bridge just yet. He rushed across to the bay side of the bridge where he was safe from the gunfire. Almost directly below him was one of the Corsair boats slowly coming through a gap in the rope. “Over here!” he cried. The cowering defenders picked up their rocks and eagerly rushed to him. In a minute they made a shambles of the boat, which drifted away, sitting lower and lower in the water.
The Queen of the Dead Page 42