by James Axler
It wasn’t enough for payback, the commander thought, but it was a start.
He spoke into the microphone, addressing the mortar crews, “Keep firing until we hit the beach. White Bone Snake, launch your assault teams.”
Casacampo picked up his LAPA and headed for the stairs. Dolor left the helm, grabbed his own submachine gun and ammo belt, and followed.
When they reached the deck, Dolor ordered one of the crew to man the helm and hold position.
The commander stepped into the bow of one of the rafts, already loaded with men and gear. Dolor got into the other.
At Casacampo’s command, both dinghies pushed off and the pirates began rowing around the starboard side of the tug, heading for the shore. Fires raged on the main deck of the freighter, and flames licked out of the holes blown in its flank. There would be no more unpleasant surprises from that quarter.
The commander waved his men to the right, to where the half-sunken rafts lay, where the corpses floated. He counted the bodies. They had lost nine of the twenty men in the two rafts. Some had died swimming to shore.
A disaster.
He barked an order to his crew and Dolor’s. They shipped oars and began recovering the corpses. There were too many to pull into the rafts, so they tied loops of line to ankles, necks, wrists and towed their dead to the beach.
When the bow of Casacampo’s raft slid up on the sand, the White Bone Snake’s landing party was already there. They had taken up firing positions on their bellies, aiming up at the ship. There was nothing to shoot at. The eleven survivors from the Xibal Be dinghies were there, too, machetes and pistols in hand.
With great care and reverence, the Matachìn pulled their dead from the water and lined the bullet-riddled bodies up on the shore.
Casacampo could sense their speechless fury. He shared it. This was the voyage’s greatest loss. It would be repaid a hundred times and in the most horrible ways, before they left the island.
Under the cover of blasters from the beach, the commander led the charge up the dunes to the ramp. They met no resistance en route, and looking over the edge of the ramp as he ascended it, Casacampo saw nothing stirring among the ruins. The hallway exposed by the mortars had been turned into piles of rubbish, as had the enemy.
The commander climbed onto the burning deck, moving out of the flow of black smoke. His mortar crews’ handiwork was evident. The roof of the central hold had been caved in by successive shell hits. Fire billowed up from within. The bridge tower had been reduced in height by half and nearly cut in two vertically; it was also on fire.
Whatever resistance remained, it had been driven belowdecks, just as Casacampo had planned.
Dolor touched his arm and directed his attention to the harbor and the tall sailing ship anchored there. It was the only escape from the island. It was too late to secure the ship, now. His diminished number of marines was already committed to the freighter assault. He couldn’t risk splitting up the force. There was only one option: keep the survivors from reaching it.
Casacampo called over three of his Matachìn. He ordered them to go around the bow, to the north side of the freighter and watch for any escapees in that direction. They were armed with submachine guns and M-79 grenade launchers.
“Gas anyone who tries to run away,” he said. “If that doesn’t stop them, use lead.”
As the pirates set off, the commander stepped to the gate in the rail and signaled down to the beach for the rest of his force to mount the hill and join them. They triple-timed it. The ascent of the other thirty or so pirates took about three minutes. When they were all on deck, he led his men toward the stern. They leapfrogged around the burning, toppled containers, covering each other, but the enemy was nowhere to be seen.
At the base of the ruined bridge tower, Casacampo had his crew clear the entrance to the stairwell, which was blocked by fallen debris from the shelled storys above. When the path was opened, smoke poured from the stairwell. He gave the order to put on gas masks and switch on headlamps.
As they prepared for the assault, he paced up and down their ranks, roaring words of encouragement, passionate words straight from the heart. “We will make them pay,” he assured his crews. “We will teach them what pain is. We will teach them to raise their hands against the Matachìn!”
With that, Casacampo pulled on his own gas mask, donned and switched on his headlamp.
The commander was the first down the steps into the smoke and the darkness.
Chapter Eighteen
Ryan awoke with a start from a horrible dream, a nightmare of his own suffocation and violent dismemberment. He coughed and tasted blood. He was on his back under a weight that pressed the full length of his body, pinning his arms and legs to the deck. Something lay across the scarred, eyeless left side of face. He blinked the lid of his functional eye to remove the grit clinging to it and his lashes. Directly above him, the hallway’s ceiling had ruptured. Broken, multicolored wires, loops of gray conduit and disconnected ends of cylindrical aluminum air ducts hung from the breach.
Looking down, he could see the debris mounded on his chest. He was half buried under ceiling tiles and pieces of the imploded hull and interior walls. With the tip of his tongue he felt a long cut inside his mouth along his left cheek. The bleeding had pretty much stopped. Then he realized that he couldn’t hear anything. Not even the beating of his own heart.
But he hurt. He hurt all over, all at once. It seemed like the tips of a thousand knives were sticking into him.
Every time he breathed in, the pain got worse by a factor of ten.
There was something he knew he had to remember.
He knew it was something important. Urgent, even. But his brain seemed to have lost its ability to recall recent events. The harder he tried to remember, the further away they slipped. A very strange feeling. An anchorless feeling. He closed his eye and forced himself to concentrate on simple, direct questions. Where was he? How had this happened? Who was responsible?
Asking himself the right questions led to the answer he was after. Although the answer wasn’t pretty or pleasant.
Recent events came back to him in a rush of images and recalled sensation. The island. The freighter. The sickness. The pirates. The shelling. And somewhere around him, amid the ruins of the grounded ship’s corridor, his companions lay trapped, perhaps dead, perhaps dying.
Ryan tried to get up, but he couldn’t move arms and legs hidden from sight under the heaped debris. He couldn’t make his fingers move, either. Nor his toes. Mebbe they were just numb from shock like his ears, he told himself. Then other, more dire possibilities occurred to him. He wondered if he’d been hit by shrap and was paralyzed from the neck down, or whether, recalling the grisly details of his blackout dream, his arms and legs had been blown away.
Panic rose in the back of his throat.
If his heart was pounding in response, he still couldn’t hear it.
He squeezed off the downward spiral of thought, then crushed it under a mental bootheel. He had never given in to fear before, and he wouldn’t let himself do it now, with the last train west in sight.
Ryan stopped fighting the numbness and forced himself to breathe deeply and slowly, to gather himself. He noticed there was a lot more light coming into the corridor now. Even though the hall was still wreathed in smoke, the pall of Comp B was rapidly thinning. There was a breeze, too. Steady but slight. He could feel it gently brushing against his exposed cheek.
After a minute or so, Ryan managed to turn his head a little to the right and saw the holes in the plating. Four-foot-wide sections of the corridor’s exterior wall and the ship’s hull were missing. Those yawning gaps left the deck open to the air and the elements, floor to ceiling. Where mortar shells had directly hit the blasterports, nosing into the five-inch-wide gaps, the steel was peeled back into jagged crowns. From the scorch patterns across the ceiling, some of the shells had shot through and through into the Upper Tween deck hold, sending explosive backwas
h and flame into the hallway as they detonated.
Like thawing ice, from his shoulders down his arms to his elbows, from his hips down his legs, the feeling started to creep back. It was accompanied by a burning, rippling, electric sensation and intense localized pain.
He knew it might be ghost pain, imagined sensation in limbs that were no longer there, and he had to find out if he was whole or not. If he wasn’t, he would crawl to find the others and somehow, some way get them moving to safety.
The pirate attack wasn’t over.
Not by a long shot.
When Ryan commanded his right arm to move, the progressive thaw worked its way to his fingers. The backs of both hands burned like they were being blowtorched. He could feel his individual fingers, though. They were heavy, wooden, but he could feel them. With an effort, he pushed his hand up through the pile of dropped tiles and then swept them off his face and chest.
When he rose to an elbow, soot and metal dust fell away from his face and T-shirt. The burning sensation coursed down his legs to his toes. Hurting like hell was a good sign, he decided.
Ryan kicked the rubbish off himself and saw the rear stock of the Steyr laying across his left hip. He pulled it out from under the tiles. Bracing the butt on the deck and gripping the barrel, he used it to regain his feet. He felt an odd, constant pressure, a tightness at the base of his spine. When he reached back he found the loaded AKM mag, still tucked under his belt. He left it there.
Nothing moved in either direction down the hallway. Wisps of smoke hung just under what was left of the ceiling. Debris was everywhere, but it lay mostly heaped against the foot of the interior wall. More smoke, only black and oily, poured through massive holes blown in that same wall.
How could anyone have survived? he thought as he stared at the destruction. How had he survived?
Over the sustained hiss in his ears, he could hear the scrape of his bootsoles over the metal floor. But just barely.
Ryan looked out through a missing section of hull. Down on the shore he saw four beached, intact rafts. In front of them, bodies were lined up in a row. At least a dozen. Presumably pirate bodies, those chilled by the islanders’ massed rifle fire. Between the shore and the ship there was no sign of the invaders. There were no pirates on the ramp. Ryan realized with a jolt that the enemy was already aboard.
“Get up! Get up!” he yelled down the ruined hall. “The bastards are coming! Get up!” It felt like he was screaming his throat bloody, but he couldn’t tell how loud his voice was.
Loud enough, it turned out.
Here and there along the interior wall low piles of wreckage started to shift, then dusty heads, hands, arms began to appear.
Ryan launched himself in the direction he’d last seen Krysty and Doc. Slinging the Steyr, he started frantically turning over the large debris. He found Krysty behind a lean-to of hull plate, curled up with her back pressed to the foot of the interior wall. She wasn’t moving.
Don’t be dead, he thought. Don’t be dead.
Then he saw her chest rising and falling. When he tipped the section of steel plate over and let it crash onto the floor, she stirred.
Her eyes opened and she blinked up at him, dazed. Her mouth moved, forming a single word.
He wasn’t a lip reader but he could tell what she said.
“Gaia.”
There was blood on her face and hands.
He helped her to her feet, quickly checking her over for major injuries. She seemed to be okay. The blood was from shallow shrapnel cuts, one along her jawline, one above her right eye, several on the backs of her hands.
“They’re coming!” he shouted at her. “The pirates are coming! Find the others!” He pointed her toward the bow.
Whether she could hear him or whether she read his lips or whether she just figured it out for herself, she nodded. After shaking the dust from her tightly coiled red hair, she rushed off and began searching the rubble.
Being in a hurry was a good thing, Ryan decided. There was no time to dwell on the uncovered legs, arms, heads that were no longer connected to live persons. As it turned out, quite a few people had lived through the attack, but only a handful hadn’t suffered grievous injury. There was nothing to be done for the wounded. Ryan could see that from just looking at them. Even if their bleeding could have been stopped, the protruding hunks of shrapnel successfully removed, the injuries they suffered were terrible. Not only were they massive and internal, but packed with soot and rust. Infection was almost guaranteed. Infection and slow, agonizing death.
Ten feet away from Ryan, a section of blown-inward hull suddenly tipped away from the interior wall and crashed over onto the deck. Doc, coated with dust, and bleeding from his nose and ears, unfolded himself from the floor. When he saw Ryan standing there, his expression brightened and his lips moved.
All Ryan heard was muffled, garbled sounds. It didn’t matter. He waved for Doc to follow him.
Together they found Brenda, Garwood and J.B. All three were alive. All three could move. Brenda was alert and immediately stood and cleared the action of her pump gun. The boy seemed to be in a state of shock. J.B. was in even worse shape. Clutching his ribs with an arm, squinting behind dusty spectacles, his lips moved in the same pattern, over and over.
Inaudible but again easy to lip-read: “Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck.”
Doc put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder to get his attention, then pointed toward the bow. Krysty was waving urgently at them. Harmonica Tom was at her side. He was waving, too.
Ryan broke into a run, and the others followed. As they approached Krysty and Tom, he saw the Fire Talker standing behind the skipper. Daniel appeared to have come through the barrage dirtied but unscathed; his survivalist do-rag was canted at an odd angle, over one ear. Then Ryan saw Mildred. She was on her knees, leaning over a still form on the deck. A still, pale form.
Ryan groaned.
It was Jak.
The one-eyed man knelt on the other side of the albino teen. There wasn’t a mark on him. Not anywhere. Not a drop of spilled blood on the dead-white face. But his chest wasn’t moving. For a second Ryan thought for sure Jak was chilled, that the concussions had done him a fatal internal torso or brain injury.
Mildred hadn’t given up, though. She quickly rubbed the colorless hands between hers and lightly slapped Jak on the cheeks.
The stimulation worked. After a second, his ruby-red eyes opened. He blinked and gasped a deep breath of air.
Ryan was relieved when Jak pushed away Mildred’s hands and rose to his feet, albeit shakily.
“Can you hear me?” Ryan shouted to the others.
There were nods all around. Even from the boy, Garwood. His eyes were bloodshot, but clear and focused. He had shaken off the shock.
“Hearing’s coming back,” Mildred said into Ryan’s ear.
He could understand her, although there was a delay. It took a fraction of a second for his brain to interpret the still muffled sounds.
“Collect your blasters and ammo,” he said in a voice somewhere below a shout. “We’ve got to regroup with the islanders, make a stand.” He pointed back down the corridor to where Brenda and the other survivors stood huddled, checking their weapons and ammo.
There weren’t very many defenders left. Of the original twenty-five, only seven remained, counting Garwood. The rest lay in pieces or splattered over the walls and ceiling. Or dying in the rubble.
As the companions passed the bulkhead door to the Upper Tween deck hold, Garwood headed straight for the latch.
“You don’t want to see what’s in there,” Krysty said.
Garwood ignored her. He cracked open the latch, yanked the door ajar and looked inside. What he saw froze him in place.
Ryan looked in over the boy’s shoulder. The destruction was absolute and there was plenty of daylight to view it, despite the haze of rising smoke. A jagged, thirty-foot-wide hole had been blown into the roof of the hold. An even bigger hole had been blown into t
he center of the deck—three times as big as the cargo container that had fallen into it. Oily black smoke was pouring up out of the breach. The hold’s metal walls were scorched to the ceiling and slashed by fragments from exploding shells. Nobody, nothing was alive in there.
Ryan gently moved the boy aside and stepped over the threshold. Standing out of the flow of harsh smoke, he looked over the edge of the central hole. The deck of the hold one story below had been penetrated by HE, as well. He could see all the way down into what looked like the ship’s engine room. He could just make out the tops of massive engine blocks. That’s where the fire was burning.
As he stepped back through the door, Ryan took Garwood by the shoulders and tried to turn him away from the entrance, away from the spectacle. The teenager dug in his heels and resisted.
“Come on,” Ryan said, looking the boy straight in the eye. “They’re all gone. It’s done.”
Garwood wiped away tears with the back of his hand. His lower lip quivered as he choked back sobs. He let Ryan steer him toward the stern.
Before they could move more than a few feet from the doorway, Brenda and the other four surviving islanders joined them. The big-armed woman pushed past Ryan and stared into the hold. Her face visibly sagged as she took in the mess. The Upper Tween deck was blast blackened all the way up the walls. All that was left of her people was bloody rags.
“There’s nothing we can do for them,” Ryan told her.
“Yeah, there is,” Brenda said, her face suddenly beet red. “We can kick the asses of the bastards who did this.”
She was really, really pissed off. She waved the other islanders over to look.
“The pirates outnumber us, big time,” Ryan told her. “Mebbe four to one. We don’t know what kind of armament they have. We need to make a fighting retreat to someplace we can defend.”
“He’s right. You know he’s right,” Tom said.
The other islanders, three men and another woman, came away from the doorway with faces contorted by blind fury.
“You and yours can do whatever the fuck you want,” Brenda informed the skipper. She racked the slide on her pump gun, chambering a round. “But for us Texicans, it’s time for some bloody fuckin’ payback.”