by James Axler
“I’m Lumpy,” the man said, seating himself between Ryan and J.B. “From the lumps, you see? Just so you know, I ain’t a mutie or anything. They’re parasites.”
And he grinned around at everyone with a mouthful of uneven teeth in varying shades of brown, as if announcing he’d just won the trophy for having the biggest dick in NuTuga.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with being a mutie,” he added hastily. He was looking at Jak, who scowled.
Ryan carefully didn’t look at Krysty, who was a mutie.
“I mean, to some there is, to some there ain’t,” Lumpy said. “Syndics won’t have any taints here in the ’Tuga, of course. The crews love to jolly ’em up too much, you know what I mean? Bad for order. But over to Monster Island, now, muties and norms live side by side like there wasn’t a thing wrong with it.”
“Monster Island?” Mildred asked. “Where’s that?”
Lumpy frowned for a moment. He scratched idly at a particularly prominent lump on the right side of his jaw. It seemed to Ryan that something like a hair whipped back and forth from it before zipping back inside.
A trick of the light, he told himself. He hoped so.
“Why,” the disfigured man said, brightening, “took me a moment. You folks really aren’t from this part of the Carib, are you? Monster Island is Puerto Rico, is all.”
“That’s the only reason they call it that, my good man?” Doc asked. “From the admittedly rare case of normal humans and mutants living together in harmony?”
“Well, that,” Lumpy said, transferring his dirty-nailed attentions to the back of his neck. “Plus the fact the island’s teeming with man-eating monsters, of course.”
Chapter Six
Mildred sat back in her chair. “Oh, great,” she said.
Ryan ignored her. He wasn’t any happier than she was about the news that the place where they might find an easy ride back to the mainland via a mat-trans was overrun with ravenous monsters. But fretting over the fact wouldn’t make it any less of one.
“Say we wanted to get back to the mainland,” he said when Lumpy had ordered a rum.
The server was a black-haired, green-eyed girl wearing a leather apron over a short skirt and carrying a tray. Lumpy, anyway, didn’t neglect to eye her backside appreciatively as she walked back toward the bar.
“How’d we go about that?” Ryan finished.
Lumpy sat back in his chair. He looked half-spent just from watching the girl.
“Got the jack?” he asked, still looking at her when she stood giving the order to McDugus Fish. “You can do pretty near anything, if you got the jack.”
Doc laughed in wry delight. “Isn’t that not ever the way of the world?” he asked.
“Say we aren’t exactly flush,” J.B. said. “Could we work passage?”
“You done pirate work before?” Lumpy asked. “You all look to know your way around them blades and blasters you’re loaded down with. I mean, not to pry or nothin’.”
“We were hoping for more peaceful employment,” Krysty said.
“Don’t traders work the port?” Mildred asked. “I mean, the, uh, Mermaid even sells fresh fruit. The island doesn’t look big enough to grow it all here. Unless it’s all brought in as pirate swag?”
He laughed. “Oh, nuke me, no. There’s traders ply here, right enough. Once they buy their export licenses off the Syndicate, they’re as safe on the open sea as you and me, sittin’ right here. Only they don’t much like to take on crew here, if you catch my drift. Not everybody’s reliable.”
“Imagine that,” Mildred said.
“What about other paying gigs?” Ryan asked. “Local work.”
The girl brought Lumpy’s rum. He grinned at her when she set it down. She ignored him as if he were an insect. She took the .22 round Ryan handed her and walked away without a word.
“Whoo,” Lumpy said, “that is purely fine. Where was I? Oh. Jobs. Well, the crews bring in plenty slaves. You could sign on for Monitors, but I reckon you’d have the same objections to that you have to signing on for pirates.”
He shook his head. “Can’t think of much. I do some odd jobs now and then since I lost my nerve, fish some. I can fix a few things, and that’s not always something you want slaves doing, know what I mean. But that’s just me, and I barely scrape by. There’s five of you.”
“Six, actually,” Mildred said. “But who’s counting?”
Lumpy shot back his rum and shook all over like a wet dog. He set his empty on the table upside down with a clack. It seemed to Ryan the single shot had hit him pretty hard. Of course, he didn’t know whether it was his first of the day.
“Spring for another?” Lumpy asked, looking around with eyes even less clear than they had been when he sat down.
J.B. signaled the server for another, then he leaned his leather-clad elbows on the table.
“So how about this Monster Island,” he said. “How about getting passage there?”
Lumpy shrugged. “Same story as the mainland. Go for a pirate, or pay your way. Gas, brass or ass—nobody rides for free.”
“So what do you think, Ryan?” J.B. asked.
“I’m thinking,” he admitted.
“You considering turning pirate, Ryan?” Mildred asked.
“Would you like signing up as Monitors better?” J.B. asked.
She scowled.
“Everything lives off other things,” Jak said. “Want eat, gotta kill.”
“Unusual loquacity, Jak,” Doc said. “And unusual eloquence. Albeit in the service of a doctrine of moral expediency.”
Jak scowled furiously.
“Don’t worry,” J.B. told him. “I didn’t get it, either.”
“I did,” Ryan said. “Haven’t we done plenty of things to stay alive we weren’t thrilled about?”
“Ah, yes,” Doc said. “Steeping in shame to stay alive. I remember...the sows....”
“Stay with us, Doc,” J.B. said. “The sows’re long since gone for bacon.”
For a moment Doc gazed around, wild-eyed, as if seeing hell-knew-what bizarre landscape peopled with alien monstrosities, instead of a surprisingly clean but still seedy gaudy house and the faces of his friends. Then the mad light left his eyes. He seemed to deflate.
“Ah, yes,” he said again, with a sad smile. “Long gone.”
“Should we be discussing stuff like this...you know?” Mildred asked, waggling her eyebrows ridiculously and looking sidelong at their guest.
“Don’t mind him, Millie,” J.B. said. “He’s too sunk in rum to know what we’re talking about. Or care.”
Lumpy had, indeed, tossed off his second shot like water and now slumped in his chair like a half-empty sack of oatmeal. His own eyes stared without focus at the tabletop. He drooled over a hanging lower lip.
The doors burst open and four Monitors swaggered in. They were dressed and armed like the crew that had braced Ryan and his friends on the docks, and their heads were likewise shaved. Which was a little more curious this time out, since one of them was a woman, who wasn’t unattractive in a blade-faced kind of way. She seemed to glare around a lot more truculently than her three companions, as if suspecting she had more to prove than they did.
Heads didn’t turn when the Syndicate sec team blew in. Conversation didn’t falter, but it dropped an octave. And heads huddled down a little closer in collars, where applicable, or chins closer to collarbones where not. Ryan realized he wasn’t the only man in the gaudy who was suddenly keenly aware the four were the only ones in the house with easily accessible weapons.
He smiled, ever so slightly. Not that a measly twist of wire with a dab of goo sealing it would stop him doing the necessary thing.
But then, he wasn’t in any rush to throw his life away, either. He looked away from the four as they ceremoniously paid for their drinks at the bar, and back to his comrades.
“We all know finding an easy living isn’t easy,” he said. “Finding a hard one isn’t always easy, eithe
r. We’ll do what we need to to survive, bottom line.”
“We always do, Ryan,” J.B. said.
“We don’t have to make a decision tonight,” Ryan said. “But in the morning, we’ve got to move. So we need to know by then which way we’re moving.”
Krysty patted his hand. “Something’ll come up, lover,” she said. “It always does. One way or another.”
“Krysty’s right, as usual,” Mildred said. “But it’s the ‘or other’ part that worries me.”
J.B. grinned at her. “What, Millie? You looking to live forever?”
“Made a good start on it already, John,” she said. “Even if not quite on a par with Doc.”
Without waiting for permission, Lumpy waved at the good-looking server for yet another rum. Ryan took it in; his one eye seldom missed much. He didn’t object. He might have more questions to ask before they were done with Lumpy.
If the stupe doesn’t drink himself under before I think of them, he thought.
Lumpy glared at the Monitors. “Bastards,” he muttered. “All they do is keep a man down.”
The Monitors drank, neither lingering nor rushing, then they sauntered out of the gaudy without a word to anyone. As soon as the door slammed shut, the conversation picked up. The piano player, who’d been engaged in low tinkling, struck up a brisk tune.
“Fuckin’ Monitors!” Lumpy exclaimed. “Drink! Sweetcheeks, get them sweet cheeks over here! I need a drink.”
Behind the bar, McDugus Fish’s lugubrious face fisted in annoyance. In the corner Ryan saw a gleam of eyeball as his daughter looked to see what the fuss was. She never missed a stroke, though. A real trouper, that girl; Ryan had to give her that.
The expression on her face like a rain squall on the ocean, the black-haired, jade-eyed server approached. “I need another rum,” Lumpy declared, as if suspecting she was keeping one from him.
She nodded and turned away. “And I need some of that, too,” he said, and grabbed her left ass cheek.
She froze. All the color drained out of her face. She seemed unsure what was actually happening.
The bar went dead still. The piano player turned into a statue with her hands hovering over the keys. McDugus Fish’s face went red, then white.
The door opened. The belligerent female Monitor strode back inside, followed closely by a heavily muscled black Monitor an inch or so shorter than she was. She stopped dead. A smile winched its way across her sharp features.
“So,” she said, not loudly, but the gaudy had gone so still she might as well have shouted. “What do we got here?”
“Oh, shit!” Lumpy gulped. His face went puce. He let go the server’s rump and tried to jump to his feet, but booze had addled his coordination as much as his sense. His legs tangled with those of the chair and they both went down in a clatter and a tangle.
He disengaged and jumped quickly. Moving like a striking mongoose, the female Monitor flowed across the floor. She was right on top of him when he reared upright.
Lumpy faced the back door, which led to the latrines out back. That meant his back was to her—and the truncheon that slammed into his skull.
Ryan heard a moist, muffled crunch. Where Lumpy had looked like a half-filled burlap sack sitting in his alcoholic torpor a few moments before, now he hit the floor like an empty sack dropped from the ceiling. He lay on his face gurgling and making vague swimming motions in the sawdust with his arms and hands.
Ryan realized that he and his companions were the only ones staring at Lumpy, or what remained of him. The rest of the patrons and McDugus Fish were all looking studiously someplace else. Except for the server, who stood looking at the twitching Lumpy with vindictive glee.
The black male Monitor enthusiastically put the boot in. Mildred winced as ribs cracked audibly.
The fallen man didn’t react to repeated kicks, or a couple of experimental whacks cross the shoulders with the woman’s stick. The female Monitor straightened.
“Get this trash hauled out to the curb pronto, Fish,” she snapped at the barkeep. “We got strict regulations in this town.”
McDugus Fish turned and bawled something at the open door behind the bar. A couple of men in aprons and, to Ryan’s surprise, hairnets bustled out. They were both short and dark, one stocky, one wiry.
“They do have strict health regs in this ville,” Mildred said, sounding bemused.
“It’s like why a dog licks himself,” J.B. explained. “Because they can.”
She glared at him a moment, then wordlessly shook her head.
The two helpers from the back—cooks, Ryan thought—hurried up, grabbed Lumpy by the shoulders and dragged him out the door. His head hung limp, drawing a furrow in the sawdust along with his feet and hanging arms. He didn’t seem to be moving or making noises any longer. Ryan wouldn’t be surprised if the poor bastard had taken the last train west.
“How can we just sit here and watch?” Mildred hissed, as the Monitors walked to an unoccupied table on the far wall.
Ryan looked at her. It took him a moment to catch her drift.
“Nor our deal,” he reminded her. “And I reckon we got everything that poor simp had to give.”
The door opened, and two more Monitors, both males, swung in. They located their comrades, then moved purposefully to their table. They perched on the edges of their chairs, leaning forward to talk earnestly. The other two nodded.
Once again the door swung open. A fresh wave of ganja smoke rolled in on the humid gust from outdoors, and with it the noise of a half-dozen outlandishly dressed and dreadlocked roisterers.
A short, bearded black guy with dreads stuffed into a pillow-sized knit cap of red, gold, black and green stepped to one side and puffed out his banty-rooster chest.
“We be the Sea Wasp Posse,” he declared. “Silver-Eye Chris be our big man. We can outdrink, outfight, and outfuck any motherfucker in NuTuga. Fear us well enough, mebbe nobody gets hurt.”
If the other patrons had carefully ignored the fate of Lumpy, their gazes positively bounced off the six men who had come in. The Sea Wasps wore extravagantly flounced blouses and trousers, vests blazing with bright patches and ribbons, and weapons. Lots and lots of weapons.
Even JaNene’s latest customer pulled out. He stepped away from the phony mermaid, stuffing his rapidly shrinking pecker back inside his blue denim trousers and yanking them back up by the drawstrings. The blonde turned a blank expression toward the newcomers. She rubbed her mouth absently with the back of one hand, then hanging her head, she began to cry soundlessly.
“So this is the top dog pack,” J.B. said. Like the others, he didn’t look directly at the garish newcomers. It wasn’t fear. It was plain practicality. They were outnumbered here.
The Sea Wasps sauntered up to the bar as if they were the owners come to see how McDugus Fish was keeping the place up. For all Ryan knew, they were. They obviously had a hefty reputation hereabouts.
Krysty rose. Ryan looked at her. She nodded at the door to the back: call of nature. Realizing the same thing, Mildred stood to join her. Strength in numbers.
The two vanished toward the back. Krysty seemed completely at ease, but her flame-colored hair had tightened into a short, tight cap. Ryan hoped nobody would notice that her hair could and did move by itself. That would mark her as a mutie, and with this bunch, who knew what the consequences would be.
The Sea Wasps had their drinks and were leaning back against the bar insolently eyeing their fellow pirates as if deciding which one they planned to kill first. One man stood out in particular. He wasn’t the tallest, although he stood about an inch or two higher than Ryan. He wasn’t the burliest; that was a pale-skinned man-mountain with a beard hanging over his wide chest and kettle belly. Despite his size, he projected a big cat’s readiness to spring into lethal, lightning-fast action. He had golden dreads and lightly tanned clean-shaven features that might’ve been handsome on somebody else. His eyes were silver, like old-time coins with all the tarnish polished o
ff.
That silver gaze swept the crowd insolently. It passed over Ryan’s table without pausing. Clearly he sized up the travelers as the lowest-threat bunch in the room.
Momentarily. Then his eyes snapped back. Two silver eyes locked up briefly with Ryan’s blue one.
Unlike everyone else in the room, Ryan wasn’t looking away from the Sea Wasp Posse.
The golden-dreaded man’s smile widened about a half inch. He nodded just a little more. Ryan returned the gesture.
Smart enough to be dangerous, Ryan thought, availing himself of the chance to take a sip of his now-flat beer without appearing to submit. That was another reality of the world: authentic hardcases knew how to spot each other on first glance. And generally they steered well clear, unless circumstances required them to tussle. You didn’t live to get case-hardened that way, as opposed to just rabid-weasel vicious, without having a well-developed sense of survival.
He allowed himself to relax fractionally. The Sea Wasps’ leader was willing to look for easier prey, if looking for prey was on his mind. The only question was how quick his pack would get the message.
They had obviously been into the weed, which Ryan knew sometimes took the edge off. But these guys lived edgy, and from their manner they’d been hitting the booze pretty hard, and maybe even jolt. Betting on their being made mellow by their smokes was another quick road to a shallow hole in the beach. Or just the harbor, without the necessity of being hung up, which Ryan was fairly sure was where Lumpy was destined, if he wasn’t bobbing facedown already with the ’cuda nuzzling his exposed face and fingers.
The back door opened. Krysty and Mildred came in. They made for their companions’ table without glancing at the Sea Wasps, who were smoking vast cone-shaped spliffs and joking among themselves. Also without obviously steering clear of them, except to Ryan’s keen blue eye.
Even so, one of the Sea Wasps suddenly blocked their path. He was a wiry mocha-skinned dude, with a single-braided black goatee and tattoos of women with big bare boobs and snake bodies twining up bare, muscle-cabled arms. He had two machetes slung crosswise over his back with the hilts sticking up over his shoulders, and two Smith & Wesson autoblasters in hip holsters decorated with bright beadwork. The weapons Ryan could see were peace-bonded, which didn’t much comfort him.