by James Axler
Worms began exiting the body en masse.
Cyrielle threw up. Seriah clutched Krysty.
Skillet had a huge stockpot of water boiling on the stove. Doc began piercing fleeing worms and deftly flicked them into the scalding caldron where they turned white, coiled into parboiled fists and died. Doc methodically pierced and flicked. “Ladies, I dare say, please bar the door.”
“SERIAH!” JAK SHOUTED. “Seriah!”
The vehicle deck was under siege. Bedlam reigned. The worm-infected charged, bit and ate their shipmates in mindless bloodlust. The chilled worm-dead rose up, their lifeless bodies manipulated as the infestations within looked for living flesh to infect. A worm-shambler shuffled toward Jak along the rail. It was Toulalan’s old scholar, Florian Medard. There was nothing scholarly about the worms waving out of his dead face. Jak drew the three throwing spikes he’d won from Tag. He’d practiced with them out on the promenade until a mate had told him to stop deflating the sandbag revetments.
Jak took half a second to gauge his throw and aimed to hit side-on rather than point first. He threw. The steel shaft hit the worm-shambler in the chest with a sternum-cracking thud and knocked it back three steps. The albino teen took three steps forward to maintain his throwing distance and threw again. The thing stumbled back against the stern guardrail with the impact. When Jak’s third throw cracked its skull, its head rubbernecked with the impact and the momentum toppled it over the rail into the lake.
“Jak!” Mildred was at the top of the landing shooting and screaming. Jak’s ruby eyes narrowed. Fatty was heaving his way brokenly up the stairs toward her. His rolls of flesh shook like milk with the horror that moved beneath them. Someone had taken off the top of his head with a scattergun, and worms waved out of his broken melon like Krysty having a bad hair day. Fatty barely jerked as Mildred’s .38 punched precision holes in his torso. “Jak!”
The albino youth drew a throwing blade and sent the steel spinning into the back of what used to be his number-one fan’s left knee. The limb buckled and three hundred pounds of worm-infested corpulence collapsed and tumbled down the stairs. Jak’s favorite fighting knife filled his hand and he swiftly hamstrung Fatty’s other leg. He slashed the tendons in its elbows and wrists and ripped his knife beneath each armpit. Jak leaped back as the puppet masters within began wriggling forth from their now stringless marionette of flesh. “Mildred!” Jak shouted. “J.B.! Where?”
“I don’t know, we got separated and— Jak! Jak!” Mildred warned.
The albino teen spun to find Sylvan and two of Fatty’s prized pink porkers stumbling forward in a phalanx, cratered with bullet holes. The worms in their eyes pointed straight at him. Jak drew his Magnum blaster. Ryan’s voice echoed in the cargo hold like thunder. “Jak! Don’t move!”
Jak froze.
He felt the supersonic whip cracks of blasterfire flying all around him. He recognized the bark of Ryan’s new rifle, and the thunder of Six’s .45-70, and the snarl of half a dozen Diefenbunker blasters on full-auto. Sylvan was shredded beneath the barrage, and the pigs puddled into collapsing piles of chewed flesh as the fusillade of rifle fire grew.
“Form on me!” Ryan’s voice boomed above the sound of battle.
Embattled convoy and crew desperately coalesced to Ryan’s call. He hit the foot of the stairs with Six, Toulalan, Captain McKenzie and more than a dozen armed crewmen. Two worm-alive convoy men charged screaming, followed by one of Fatty’s squealing pigs. Their bodies rippled and shuddered as combined firepower of Ryan’s formation passed through them like a killing wind of lead. “Torches!” Ryan shouted. “Torches and gaffs!”
McKenzie echoed the sentiment. “Queensmen! Crewmen! Convoymen! Torches and gaffs! Burn the worms and get the bodies over the side, rad-blast it!”
“Form on me or get on top of the wags!” Ryan ordered. His formation wound like a mutually supporting snake through the parked wags and cargo pallets, blasting the worm-alive and the worm-dead alike with massed blasterfire. Crew and convoy trapped on top of the wags shot down into the infested. Men high-stepped as they raised their boots and crushed squirming worms beneath their heels. Behind them convoy and crew alike jumped down and began applying torches to wrigglers twisting on the deck plates and gaffing shot-to-pieces abominations to be dragged and dropped off the side.
Toulalan shouted as his moccasin slid on a spill of blood and he fell onto the deck and almost went underneath the big rig. Six grabbed him and the baron’s son came up screaming. He clutched his wrist, howling, as a worm flailed between his fingers and burrowed its way into his palm.
Ryan’s panga flashed.
Toulalan gasped as his hand came off at the wrist, and he collapsed back to the deck. The mouthparts and two inches of worm continued to push in between his exposed ulna and radius bones. Ryan stepped on Yoann’s stump and pinned it to the deck. Six bellowed in indignation. “Ryan!”
The one-eyed man ignored him.
Ryan’s blade scythed through tendon and bone with a butcher’s skill and took off Toulalan’s infested arm at the elbow. The man fainted. Six looked torn between seeing to the heir of Val-d’Or and chilling Ryan.
The one-eyed man had no time for recriminations. “Get him upstairs!” he ordered. “Get him to Mildred!” Six swore in French as he scooped Toulalan into his arms like a baby. He wrapped one huge hand around the man’s mutilated arm and squeezed his thumb against the brachial artery, then swept him away up the stairs. Ryan picked up the severed limb and hurled it into the lake.
Almost at the same moment silence suddenly fell across the cargo deck. The screaming and blasterfire had stopped. “Everyone stay where you are!” Ryan commanded. “We’ll come to you!”
Ryan’s head snapped up at the distinctive sound of J.B.’s mini-Uzi firing. The shots almost seemed haphazard. One shot here, one shot there. That wasn’t J.B. at all, and Ryan feared the worst for his friend. “Fireblast it, J.B.! You’re alive!” Ryan called. “Where are you?”
J.B.’s voice responded raggedly. “Here…”
Ryan charged around the fighting LAV. J.B. sat against a bulkhead bare-headed, his glasses askew and bleeding copiously from his left leg. Ten feet away lay a pig he had almost blasted into its component parts with his scattergun. Worms were wriggling across the deck from the corpse toward him with hostile, hungry intent. He burst each one with a 9 mm hollowpoint round when it got within three feet of his boots. Ryan steeled himself and hesitated. “J.B., tell me you aren’t infested!”
“I’m bit,” J.B. said wearily. “But it was berzerko when it gave me the tusks. I killed it. The worms came after.”
Ryan hurdled the pig carcass. He hauled J.B. up and threw him into a fireman’s carry. “Mildred’ll patch you up fine.”
“Mildred…” J.B. sighed and passed out.
“Yeah.” Ryan nodded beneath J.B.’s weight. “Mildred.” He adjusted the Armorer across his shoulders.
“Captain, I’d get everyone—and I mean everyone, on top. In the morning, clean every inch of deck space, top to bottom, stem to stern.”
“You don’t have to tell me that!” McKenzie stormed.
Ryan nodded tiredly. “I know. I got to see to my people.”
McKenzie’s shoulders sagged. “Okay. See to your people. I just don’t get how this happened. Infection is immediate. No one was worm-alive when they boarded. Not even the pigs or chickens.”
“I’ll tell you in the morning.” Ryan turned and began trudging upstairs with J.B.. “But you aren’t going to like it.”
“SONS OF MUTIE WHORES!” The sun rose; so did Captain McKenzie’s voice. Ryan had gone below with two score of armed men and shown the captain what he knew he would find. Red and Tag’s pallet of metal cylinders were all opened and surrounded by a wide puddle of melted ice.
“Goose tells me the worms
are dormant during the freeze, and come up out of the ground when the ice melts.” Ryan had seen savagery he didn’t like to think about in the Deathlands. Baron Mace Henning putting a worm bomb in the belly of the Queen of the Lakes was trying real hard to top the list. At Ryan’s suggestion they had sent six-man teams, three with blasters, two with gaffs and one with a torch into every cabin, cubby and hold in the ship. All the teams had reported back. The ship was clean. The good baronial bastard Red!”
“Done a head count.” The loadmaster was covered head to toe with blood and filth. “Him and his two sec men are gone.”
“Well, does anyone remember blasting them?” McKenzie stormed. “Maybe shoving their worm-’fested carcasses over the side?”
Passengers and crew clutched their blasters and stared at one another.
Mr. Smythe called from the starboard bow. “Captain! We’re missing canoe number seven!”
“Rad-blasted sons a pesthole gaudy…” McKenzie broke into a fine stream of profanity. He finally regained his composure. “Are we clean, Mr. Smythe? You assuring me?”
“Everywhere except the bilge, Captain.” It was the first time Ryan had seen Mr. Smythe balk at anything. “But after what I saw last night, I won’t order a man to crawl down into that space.”
“Oh, you won’t, eh?” McKenzie’s anger detonated. “Well, I’ll scuttle this bitch with every passenger and hand aboard before I have her bringing worms to every port of call on the Lakes!”
This met with a disgruntled silence.
It was Doc who spoke. “Good Captain?”
“What!”
Doc flinched. He was utterly exhausted, but sometimes that was when he was most lucid. “Disconnect the screws. Bring the boilers to full. Vent steam into the bilge. Scald it clean. I once read that was how riverboats dealt with vermin in their bellies.”
McKenzie whirled on his engineer. “Rad-blast it, Mr. Hicks! You heard the man! Get it done!”
Engineer Hicks just about jumped out of his homespun boiler suit. “Yes, Captain!”
Ryan knew he was speaking out of turn, but the Canadians were out of their normal freeze-thaw-plant-fight-harvest-and-store-their-nuts-for-winter cycle. The French of Val-d’Or had jumped the Ottawa, Captain McKenzie was back on the Huron, and Baron Mace Henning was willing to break every law of the north to stop them. Something had changed. Ryan knew he and his were in the middle, and no one was telling him the whole story.
“Captain McKenzie?”
“What now?”
Ryan’s blue eye burned into McKenzie unblinkingly. “What the fireblast is going on?”
McKenzie’s hand eased toward his blaster. “What do you mean?”
“Why are you willing to risk your ship? Why is Mace Henning willing to risk total war with the First Nations and all the villes around the Lakes?” Ryan glared at Six. “Why didn’t Mace finish the convoy when you were sucking like a landed fish and he had the chance?”
The captain loomed, ugly. “Tell you what, Ryan. We’ll drop you off on Manitoulin. That LAV of yours is amphibious, but for fording rivers and streams, not for sailing out of sight of land. I got the only ship on the Lakes that can move that wag and you know it, but I bet Baron Poncet would love to have it. You can trade it for a canoe, maybe some pemmican, paddle your way all the way to Michigan. Then you and your friends can walk your asses all the way back to your pest-infested Deathlands.”
Ryan’s gaze was glacial. “Drop the ramp. We’ll leave now. Good luck with the locks.”
McKenzie swelled up for another detonation. Ryan felt Jak and Doc behind him getting ready for the fight to come. It was Cyrielle who spoke from the stairs. “I will tell him, Captain. If you won’t.”
The tension drained from the deck. All eyes turned to Cyrielle except Ryan’s. He kept his eye on the captain. No matter what happened, he died first. “Tell me.”
“Lady Cyrielle!” Six protested. “No!”
Cyrielle’s shift was spattered from breast to knee with her brother’s blood. She pulled Ryan aside to the ramp. Six stepped up behind them. Cyrielle spoke very low. “We seek the prize, Ryan.”
“Yeah, well, sure as shit, that prize is a lot more than Diefenbunker beer, blasters and champagne.”
Cyrielle cocked her head. “You know what a nuclear reactor is?”
Ryan kept his eye on Six. “I do.”
“Have you ever heard of a ‘cartridge’ nuclear reactor power unit?”
Ryan had heard of compact nuke units in the Deathlands, but had never come across one. “Yeah.”
“Well, the Diefenbunker we seek has four of them. In as pristine condition as the Diefenbunker beer, blasters and vehicles.”
Ryan contemplated that. “That’s why you need the big rig.”
“Each reactor can generate 70 megawatts of heat energy. In Captain McKenzie’s world, that is 27 megawatts of electricity from a steam turbine. The reactors are simple. Add water, pull the rods and the lights go on. Do you know what that means?”
Ryan had an inkling. “Tell me.”
“That is enough electricity to power twenty thousand predark homes for five years. Enough to power all Val-d’Or for a decade. In that time, we fire up the machine shops. We lay electricity throughout the ville. We run power lines to our neighbors and allies.”
Ryan was pretty sure he knew the answer, but he asked anyway. “And when the rods die?”
“We fire up the second. With what we have already built, we will use that power to build a coal-fire reactor and reactivate the mines. Then Val-d’Or is no longer a ville, but city, and one that exports power.”
“And you give one to McKenzie.”
“Correct, he will pick a ville on the Ottawa, take his reactor and become a baron. With electricity, a ship and Val-d’Or as his ally he will become a major power, and the second coal-fire reactor we build will be his. We will be able to do more than survive winter. We will beat it. That will be the beginning of a new Canada, and a new world.”
“And I want to help you because…?” Ryan asked.
“Because I will give you the fourth reactor.”
“My lady!” Six was practically bursting. “You cannot!”
Cyrielle ignored her sec man. “The reactor is small enough to strap into a trailer in back of your LAV. Ryan, you told my brother that, like him, you are the son of a baron. Take the reactor back to your Deathlands. Take it back to the ville of your birth. Fill it with electricity, heat and light and prosper. All the while knowing you have powerful allies in the North.”
Ryan rubbed his chin. It was one hell of an offer, but he had no desire to become a baron. If he had, he could have ruled Front Royal.
“With your help we have left Mace Henning behind us. However, the Diefenbunker we seek is on the other side of the Soo Locks. I fear we cannot prevail on either path without your help.”
Mildred appeared at the top of the stairs. She was even more exhausted and blood-spattered than Cyrielle. “How’s J.B.?”
“That pig gored him pretty deep, but it missed the femoral artery and the bone isn’t broken.”
“Will he be able to fight from the LAV?”
Mildred smiled wearily. “Oh hell, if that pig had taken his leg off at the hip he’d still fight from the LAV.”
“How’s Yoann?”
Mildred’s face fell. “Not good. He lost a lot of blood, and he’s showing signs of infection.”
McKenzie and his crew’s hands moved toward their blasters.
The physician rolled her eyes. “Oh for God’s sake! I said infection, not infestation!”
No one seemed reassured.
“The wound is clean, but he’s got a fever and it’s rising. I think it must be something in his blood. Doc thinks the worms
must secrete something into their host to help them survive such a massive infestation and keep them charging around looking for meat. Maybe it has something to do with being attacked, but without symbiosis being achieved. I don’t know. I have no experience with something like this.” She looked at McKenzie. “Do you?”
McKenzie shook his head. “Never heard of a man worm-bit but not infested.”
“You think it laid eggs in him?” Ryan asked.
The group grew very quiet.
Mildred looked back toward her makeshift infirmary. “I can’t imagine it had time. Doc seems to think that infesting a large mammal is just one part of the worms’ life cycle. They don’t seem to eat their host, but they make it run around and eat like a rabid wolverine. Doc suggested maybe they’re getting something they need to breed from the glands, maybe hormones or something.”
“Is he safe?”
“I can’t imagine whatever he has is catching. Right now he’s unconscious, and just to be on the safe side I have him in restraints, and the sailors around here tie good knots. I’ll keep monitoring him. Krysty’s watching him now. Any change and I’ll let you know.”
Cyrielle’s eyes were bright with unshed tears. The rest of her face was hard. “Thank you, Mildred.”
“Think nothing of it.” Mildred went back to her charges. She had more than a dozen of them.
Cyrielle turned to the assembly on the cargo deck. “I’m taking command of the convoy.”
Six spoke deferentially, but he loomed over her. “No, my lady. I think it’s best if I take command. I’ll run all decisions by you.”
“No,” Ryan said flatly. “I’m taking command.”
The dark, beautiful, smiling young woman instantly turned into a baron’s daughter. “You will not.”
Six very slowly rolled his shoulders. His sheepskins fell away, and his hands opened by his sides. One hovered over his blaster and one over his tomahawk. All sneering and scowling was gone. His face was the blank mask of a cipher. Like most of truly dangerous people Ryan had met, the worse things got, the more he relaxed. Six was a stone chiller of men, and he was silently daring Ryan to go for his blaster, panga or both. The strategic part of Ryan’s mind noticed that McKenzie wasn’t raising any objections. The tactical part of Ryan’s mind was utterly focused on Six.