by James Axler
“And, Ryan? I think they’re getting ready to shoot at us with a—”
A whistling scream raced across the sky.
Chapter Eleven
Ahead and off the Wailer’s starboard bow, a fishing ketch flew apart in a yellow flash and a whirlwind of splinters.
“Mortar, yes,” Ryan said. “Reckoned that, too. Brace for impact, and pass the word to the rest!”
The dock was stoutly built of wood atop massive pilings. A bunch of great big old tires served as bumpers, tied to the wharf with windings of hairy rope.
They were going to come in fast, even though he had the engine whining in full Reverse now. He’d just as soon have gone in balls-out and rammed the dock. It wasn’t his yacht, and it looked as if the locals weren’t in much position to complain if he busted their waterfront all to shit. But there was a chance that, if he hit hard, all he’d do was knock a huge hole in the bow and bounce the ship off the dock. It would sink like a stone and quite possibly drown one or all of them within spitting distance of land.
Clinging to the steel bar inset on the console, apparently for purchase in high seas, Ryan spun the wheel hard to port. The fact that the propeller was turning backward didn’t change the flow of water past the rudder. The yacht swung counterclockwise, the starboard side slamming into the huge tires with a squeal and a crash.
The jolt felt as if it would knock Ryan’s eye out of its socket. Jak, standing unperturbed in the prow, heaved a coil of sturdy nylon line onto the warped planks of the dock. Then, as the ship rebounded, he leaped the widening gap like a puma, landed lithely on the dock and began to tie the vessel up.
Ryan cut the engine and abandoned the wheel. Doc was picking himself up off the deck, making a show of brushing off his trousers.
“Do not worry about me, my lad!” he sang out brightly. “I am as fit as a fiddle.”
Ryan thought Doc seemed a tad too cheerful. Sometimes the man acted most wired up right before he was about to lose himself in the fogbanks of his mind. But Ryan couldn’t waste much time wondering about that; it would happen or it wouldn’t.
Instead, he stuck his head out the starboard hatch into a breeze where the intrinsic reek of rotting sea life was overridden by the stinks of wood smoke, diesel oil and roasting human flesh.
He looked aft. Krysty stood on the dock, encouraging a dubious-looking Mildred to leap the treacherous gap between ship and shore. Behind them, the shake roof of a plank building had fallen in, leaving only a smoldering skeleton of rafters.
As they’d approached the ville, Ryan had told his friends to pile their backpacks in the bridge behind him. That way they’d be easy to grab if they had to clear out the yacht quickly.
Shouldering his own pack and slinging his rifle, he caught up Krysty’s and Mildred’s packs, as well.
“Fit to carry the rest?” he called to Doc.
“Indeed.”
“Take them forward and toss them to Jak. Follow right after.”
Ryan went straight out the door, heading toward Mildred, who was still dithering about the yard-wide jump over water that was grubby with ash and greasy with runoff. Following another roar close to portside, the Wailer rocked violently, slamming Ryan into the starboard rail.
The impact would have broken his ribs but Krysty’s backpack served as a buffer. Ignoring a huge sluice of warm stinking water that splashed down on him, he ran the rest of the way to the stern.
With a heave of his arm he flung Krysty her pack. Reacting with her usual quickness, she fielded it as easily as if it had been a pillow. Likewise Mildred’s pack, which followed as soon as she’d swung her own onto the dock.
“What about—” she started to ask, holding the big pack in her hands.
Mildred slowly sat up from where she lay next to Krysty. The mortar blast had knocked the ship against the tire buffers and flipped her right over the rail onto the dock. Then the water had rushed back, sucking the vessel out to the full length of its mooring lines.
Ryan never hesitated. He backed up a few steps, took a run at the rail and jumped.
His boots hit the rope windings on top of a tire. He’d landed just a hair short. His soles hit the outside, so that his momentum went mostly into the rope and the tire rather than impelling him forward to safety.
For a moment Ryan hung in the balance with his heavy pack inexorably pulling him back into the water, where he’d be crushed by the boat, now drifting back toward the dock.
Krysty grabbed Ryan by the sling of his Scout and hoisted him off the bumper. Swinging around, she deposited him and his pack on the planking, which boomed hollowly beneath his boots.
A mortar round cracked off somewhere inland. They all ducked.
“Grab the packs and let’s get to cover,” Ryan said.
He spun back to face the ship and harbor, unslinging his longblaster. Another mortar bomb whistled well overhead to burst inside the ville to his right.
As he fed his left arm through the shooting loop of his sling, he glanced toward the Wailer’s prow. He was in time to see Doc midflight, his arms and legs windmilling, coattails flapping behind him like stork wings. He landed on the dock beside Jak and went down to one fist to catch himself. Then, as if he were no older than the albino youth, he straightened.
Ryan craned to look past the Wailer. Another mortar round burst in the harbor. The boat rocked fore and aft.
J.B. rushed out the starboard hatch, clamping his fedora to his head with one hand. Hardly breaking stride, he jumped onto the rail and then took an ungainly flying step toward the dock as the gap widened again.
He hit and rolled, then came up grinning. His hat never left his head.
“One would not think it to look at him,” Doc said, “but John Barrymore is quite agile.”
Ryan smiled briefly. “We need to move with a purpose,” he said, hearing shots and shouts as the pirate yacht entered the harbor. “We’ll take up position somewhere in the ville, well back from the waterfront but with decent lines of sight.”
They grabbed their backpacks and headed into the ville. It seemed as if half the buildings were burned out, while the other half still burned.
Nor was that the worst of it. Up close, Ryan’s eye confirmed what his nose already told him. The huts hadn’t been empty when the ville was torched. Bodies lay sprawled in the streets in pools of blood that congealed beneath buzzing clouds of flies. Some had been shot, others hacked or stabbed. Some had their heads staved in. Bodies lay half in doorways and hanging out of windows.
One young girl, who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, lay on her back between two half-burned huts. The rags of her clothing lay open around her, soaking up her blood. Her eyes stared blankly at the cloudless Caribbean sky. She had clearly been assaulted then killed.
“Let’s go!” he called. Krysty and Mildred emerged from hiding in a half-plank hut that had burned so thoroughly you wouldn’t think two people could hide in there. Ryan sketched out his plan.
“Why?” Krysty asked. “Why not just disappear into the woods and get away clean? I mean, yeah, they’re shooting the mortar and all. But they’re as likely to hit us here by accident with a short round as drop one right where we happen to be leaving town.”
“We don’t know yet how hard and fast the pirates’ll come,” he said. “May have some trackers with them, too.”
Jak snorted loudly at that. He had nothing but disdain for the tracking skills of the sort of person who’d be in the pirates’ employ. Probably wrongly: there were no doubt bayou rats among them, or at least some NuTuga crews, who had the same background and the same skills as Jak.
“If we need to discourage them from chasing us,” Ryan said, “I’d rather do it here. Even you have to admit, Jak, hunting men in a ville’s way worse than out in the brush.”
Sullenly, Jak nodded.
“It took a sizable force to do this much damage, chill this many folk,” J.B. said. “We don’t want to run into them while escaping the Wasps.”
&nbs
p; “What if they come back to investigate while we’re discouraging the pirates?” Mildred asked.
“You’d have to be double-stupe to want to wander toward the sounds of a firefight, Millie,” J.B. said, trying to mop sweat from his forehead—his handkerchief was already so damp from body sweat and humidity, he was only redistributing it.
Ryan grinned. “What could be better for us? We get them confronting each other and slip away while they’re sorting things out. All right, people. Let’s hunker down. Now.”
In moments he was crouching next to J.B. behind a wooden cart that had overturned, spilling a load of coconuts into a street covered with dirty-white tufa gravel. About thirty yards to their right, Krysty, Mildred and Doc were hiding in a fallen-down shack closer to the ville’s central plaza. Jak was somewhere, possibly prowling. Ryan was content to let the kid go his own way, knowing he’d be skinning his eyes, and all his other senses, to keep his friends safe.
The mortar chugged as the pirate sloop motored to the dock like a sleek white shark.
“They’re going through those rounds like there’s no tomorrow,” J.B. said, shaking his head. He hated waste. Especially where good ordnance was concerned.
Ryan frowned. Silver-Eye Chris continued to stand, tall and fierce, in the prow, heedless of the mortar going off right behind him. It had to be as uncomfortable as hell.
J.B. chuckled. “He looks pissed.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. The pirate boss had a red scarf tied around his dreads bandana-style, and a longblaster with a folding stock slung over one shoulder.
The pirate sloop came about, sliding alongside the moored Wailer. Lines were thrown. As nimble as howler monkeys, pirates leaped the gap to make the vessels fast. Some hauled on other lines to pull the vessels beam to beam while others, bristling with weapons, crowded into the cabin and presumably down the hatches. The Wailer’s superstructure hid Silver-Eye from view. Ryan had no idea whether he crossed to his erstwhile flagship or was waiting for his crew to clear it.
Ryan noticed several men in Monitor black at the enemy ship’s rail. They seemed content to watch the pirates work. One of them looked to be the bearded dude who’d led the squad that braced Ryan’s group on arrival at NuTuga.
It was all happening not two hundred yards away. Ryan didn’t really need his longeyes. Plus he didn’t want to risk giving away their position by having the lens reflect the glint of sunlight.
J.B. tsked and shook his head. “You know,” he said, “it’s a pure shame, in a way.”
“What is?” Ryan asked. He didn’t take his eye off the scene on the conjoined ships. He had to admit Silver-Eye Chris’s crew were good at what they did.
“They may not’ve had more reloads for Millie’s Javelin launcher,” the armorer said, “but they did have a full crate of good old C-4, in convenient one-kilo blocks.”
Ryan cocked the brow of his good eye at him. “You mean—”
He snapped his gaze back toward the waterfront just in time to see the whole deck of the Wailer bulge upward, the cabin rising into the air. For what could only have been a slice of a second, it appeared to Ryan as if the structure was going to hold miraculously together. Then the top blew open to belch a swelling yellow fireball into the sky.
Ryan saw at least two bodies cartwheeling up and away from the blast, and one round, dark, twirling object, which Ryan identified as a detached head as it vanished off to his right. And then only by the thick dreads flying like streamers behind it.
A wave of sound rolled across them, riding a blast of hot air.
From stem to stern the Wailer gushed fire like the fresh-opened vent from a volcano.
J.B., who often seemed to have more feelings for machines than men, was shaking his head again. “Damn shame,” he said.
A white flash abruptly overrode even the inferno erupting from the wreck. For a moment the flames lay down, revealing a fireball that enveloped the whole front end of the pursuers’ ship. Then a second explosion shattered the other ship. In an instant it was sinking, its bow blown off. The blast’s noise was like a moving sheet of steel hitting Ryan in the face, and the sound cut at his ears.
“Huh,” Ryan grunted.
“Ho-lee shit!” Mildred exclaimed from her hiding place.
“I didn’t expect that to happen,” J.B. said. “Looks like a mortar round they were about to drop down the tube went off. Set off the rest of their ammo stowage. Explosives must have gotten unstable with age.”
“You think?” Ryan asked dryly.
He turned to his friend. “Nice boobie, by the way.”
J.B. grinned and ducked his head. “Like I say, it was a damn shame to waste all that lovely moldable plastic explosive.” He glanced back at the two stricken, blazing wrecks. “But I reckon it went to a good cause.”
“I reckon.”
“Besides,” the armorer went on, slapping a pocket of his jacket, “I did slip some C-4 and some detonators in here for good measure.”
Ryan laughed and slapped his friend on the shoulder. “Let’s go.”
He rose halfway and ran in a crouch to where the women and Doc lay staring in amazement at the devastation. Buildings were blazing all over again from the flaming wreckage and fuel that had showered them.
“Our good armorer has produced quite an exemplary holocaust with his wiles,” Doc said when the two men slipped into the rubble behind him.
“Come on,” Ryan told them. “Let’s check the ville before we head out.”
“You’re kidding,” Mildred said. “In case you missed it, Ryan, the place has been sacked!”
“Looks to me like this was about teaching somebody a lesson instead of stealing shit,” Ryan said. “It’s not like we can afford to pass up a good chance at scavvy.”
“What about the pirates?” Krysty asked.
“Reckon any who survived are going to have other things on their minds than chasing after us,” Ryan said. “They’re probably all bleeding out of the ears from busted drums.”
“Are you sure it’s safe?” Mildred asked.
“Never safe.”
Everybody jumped and turned. Jak crouched a few feet away. He grinned at them in triumph for taking his cunning, wary companions by surprise.
“Want safe,” the youth said, “wait dead.”
* * *
IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON when they left the ville, heading into thick brush that sprang up surprisingly close to the ville’s inland edge. Cultivated fields lay to the west. Some of them smoldered, too.
The frog that plopped onto the path in front of them was as big as a human head with legs.
“Muties!” Jak spat, shying away as if the thing had poisoned fangs. “Dangerous!”
The grass to either side of the path leading away from Nuestra Señora rustled, revealing more of the outsized frogs. Their chirped co-kee came from all around. The rest of the party reacted less theatrically than Jak had, but they still steered wide of the enormous hoppers.
Ryan scowled. “Do we even know that they’re dangerous?”
This struck him as a double distraction from their actual business, which was getting into the forest and losing themselves before the pirates and Monitors—or, more precisely, their vengeful survivors—caught up with them.
J.B. screwed up his face. “I’d have to say that just about anything weird we’ve ever encountered in the Deathlands was dangerous, Ryan.”
“Good point,” Ryan said. “All right. Watch the fireblasted frogs, then. As if we don’t have enough to look out for already.”
Whoever had hit the ville had hit it with a vengeance. As Ryan perceived, they’d seemed more interested in killing people and breaking things than looting the place. As if they wanted to make an example.
“It took a big force to raze the ville,” Ryan said again as they marched up a trail that led through lush growth into the steep, thickly forested hills that backed the ville.
“An army, one might say,” Doc said. “Although raiders rather than conqu
erors. But I suspect that plays a role in their future plans.”
“So what does that mean for us, Ryan?” Mildred asked.
“It means,” said a voice from just ahead, “that you don’t need to worry about that shit. Your road ends here, motherfuckers!”
Chapter Twelve
Silver-Eye Chris stepped onto the path, his assault rifle leveled at Ryan from the waist. A pair of henchmen stood up out of the bush, left and right of the trail, pointing longblasters.
The companions had walked open-eyed into a trap.
The pirate might have gotten the drop on them, but he definitely looked the worse for wear.
The whole right side of his face was charred black. Raw, angry flesh peeked through where it had cracked. His eyebrow was gone on that side, as were most of the dreads. His left sleeve was missing, and his arm was almost as blackened as his face.
But both silver eyes still stared wildly from the charred ruins. And his left hand, now little more than a bloody half-roasted claw, held the AK’s wooden foregrip steady enough.
One of his wingmen was a wiry black Sea Wasp with heavy beads in his dreads, who looked uninjured. He had a machete with a spiked knuckle-duster bow stuck through his belt and carried a Mini-14 semiauto longblaster. The other was a Monitor. His regulation bald head was gashed from side to side; his face was smeared with browning blood where he’d made a halfhearted attempt to wipe it off. It pooled under his eyes, at the folds of his evil grin, and caked in his blond beard. He had a bandage around his left thigh that was soaked through with blood. He aimed a pump shotgun that had the full nylon tactical buttstock but had its barrel sawed off flush with the end of the tubular magazine.
Pain and rage had to have made the pirate lord go mad, Ryan thought, standing frozen behind Jak with his Scout longblaster held diagonally in patrol position in front of his body. Otherwise he and his pals would’ve let their blasters do their talking for them from cover, and we would already be chilled.
Not that they weren’t likely to be dead soon, anyway. The wind, which had been blowing in from the ocean and carrying both the sight and smell of the burning ville’s smoke inland, away from the Wailer on its approach, had either changed or was blowing from a different quarter in the forested foothills behind Nuestra Señora. Otherwise Jak’s keen nose would have detected the presence of the ambush before they all walked into its kill zone with eyes wide-open.