by James Axler
“If you weren’t all triple-stupe,” Silver-Eye Chris rasped, “you’d make a play for us and end it right now. Of course we’d just blast your legs out from under you, but at least you’d go down trying. We’re gonna have us some fun with you fuckers. You hear me? Some nuke-shittin’ fun!”
His Monitor companion scowled and kicked at an overlarge frog that had hopped up against his injured leg and almost seemed to be sniffing the blood-crusted ankle of his boot. With a dismal croak it jumped a couple of feet to land right beside Silver-Eye Chris.
“Start layin’ ’em down, boys and girls,” the pirate said with a mad gleam in his eye. “Nice and easy, that’s— Ow, fuck!”
The last was directed straight downward, where the displaced giant frog had suddenly clamped its jaws on Silver-Eye Chris’s leg above his boot. From the shrill edge in his voice it wasn’t just surprise that an innocuous creature like that would have the balls to bite a man.
The man suddenly threw back his charred dreads and shrieked in a glass-breaking pitch.
His friend couldn’t help turning toward him in shocked surprise. Then the Sea Wasp staggered and clapped a hand to his neck, where one of Jak’s throwing knives had suddenly sprouted from his Adam’s apple.
Catching himself in midturn the Monitor started to swivel back. Before he could do so, Ryan whipped his Steyr around and shot him through the chest.
Jak was going for his Python. The man he’d nailed with the thrown blade wasn’t mortally hit; he was pumping out wild shots from his 5.56 mm longblaster.
As Ryan speed-jacked the bolt on his longblaster, J.B. shot the Sea Wasp in the gut with his M-4000 shotgun. The man gasped and doubled over as the shot punched into him.
Silver-Eye Chris paid no attention to the unhappy fates of his two henchmen. He was screaming like a man on fire.
The frog clung to his leg, while others hopped purposefully toward the pirate captain. Astonished, Ryan saw a flash of fangs like curved yellow needles as a second creature opened its jaws and crouched to spring.
Like corrupted vines growing at hyperspeed, the veins on the backs of Silver-Eye’s hands were turning black and swelling out of his skin. The dark death tentacles shot up his neck and enveloped his face. His screaming died to a strangling gurgle as his throat swelled shut.
Paying no attention to the pirate boss’s terrible fate, Jak pointed his huge silver handblaster and fired into the crown of the gut-shot Sea Wasp’s head. Ryan saw his eyes blow out of the sockets to the extents of his optic nerves before he went down face-first in the brush.
Keeping the longblaster cautiously leveled, Ryan stared in horrid fascination as the flesh of Silver-Eyed Chris’s hands and body turned blue around the black veins and swelled grotesquely. Suddenly, his face exploded as if it were a huge discolored zit pinched between giant fingers. Yelping, Ryan jumped back to avoid the shower of reeking black corruption.
“Holy crap!” Mildred said from behind him.
“It would appear that young Jak’s assessment is vindicated,” Doc announced in tones of scholarly interest. “These frogs are indeed dangerous mutants. They appear to possess fangs, as a highly efficient delivery system for a remarkably fast-acting hemolytic venom.”
“Talk sense, Doc!” Jak hissed, as he backed away from the frogs, holding down on them with his silver Python. He apparently couldn’t decide whether to waste bullets on them or not. Which, to Ryan’s mind, showed sound judgment, since the frogs were now converging on the pirate’s half-headed body, thrashing amid the brush. They showed no interest at all in the people still on their pins.
“He means,” Krysty called, “that we should stay away from these little guys.”
“Amen,” J.B. said fervently.
* * *
THE COMPANIONS, EXCEPT JAK, who was on sentry duty, sat around a small, smokeless fire of dead brush in a pocket on a brushy hillside. Tumbled volcanic rock and granite boulders screened them and the small, flickering fire from view above and below, while permitting easy access to lookout points over the hills down to the ocean.
As Ryan said, whoever had attacked Nuestra Señora had been more interested in wiping it out than looting it, which was a rarity in itself, in this day and age. Of course, there were ample signs of plundering. A commander who tried to prevent that altogether would wind up accidentally shot by his own sec men. Nobody had it that soft, no matter how relatively well-off they were. But they hadn’t been very thorough or systematic about stealing. They had clearly grabbed whatever most struck them as they went about their highly methodical business of butchering the inhabitants.
They were eating a red snapper J.B. had found in the fallen-in ruins of a hut. Already scaled, with the head chopped off, it was still a good ten pounds. The householders had obviously been interrupted in preparing a meal. Jak had turned up a pot of cooked beans in another hut nearby.
“One wonders at such total devastation,” Doc said. He had eaten lightly and now sat hugging the long skinny legs drawn up before him and gazing into the little fire. “Why would they so assiduously slaughter all the inhabitants?”
“Doubt they did,” J.B. said. “Took some off as slaves, most likely.”
Mildred shuddered. “Why? I mean, why bother? Obviously stealing stuff wasn’t their priority. You can’t tell me this was just a slave raid, either. Whoever did this was a major force by today’s standards. And it’s like what they really cared about was wiping Nuestra Señora off the face of the earth. Why would anybody do that?”
“Politics,” Ryan said.
“Somebody wanted to make a point, good and hard.”
“Well, the Nuestra Señorans sure got the point,” Mildred said.
He shook his head. “No. This was, like, incidental. Yeah, pretty clearly they did something to piss somebody off. But the point to something like this is to show other people—live people—what happens when you do piss them off.”
J.B. shrugged. “You got that right, Ryan,” he said. “The dead don’t learn too many lessons.”
“‘The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns,’” Doc intoned.
And just as Mildred was reflecting that she was undoubtedly the only other member of the group who recognized the quote, Ryan blindsided her.
“Hamlet,” he grunted. “Yeah. He sure showed how the man who outsmarts himself is the biggest stupe of all. His simp friend turned out to be the smart one after all—the guy who took over there at the end, when everybody chilled everybody else.”
“Fortinbras,” Doc said.
“Yeah, him.”
“Clearly, my dear Ryan,” Doc added, “no one with any wit left to them would confuse you for either individual. You show deficiencies neither in thought nor in action.”
Certainly conscience doesn’t make any coward of him, Mildred thought. In most ways neither Ryan nor his contemporaries, except Krysty to some extent, showed much sign of what she’d been raised to regard as a conscience at all. Yet on the whole she had to say they were good people. Damn good ones.
And Ryan Cawdor, for all that he was hard, and even ruthless, might be the best man she’d ever known, other than her father. She reflected on how “moral” her own time had been—with all its self-righteousness and moralizing and insistence on its monopoly of conscience. Yet, cowardice really did seem to characterize it, in a moral sense—and in the end, all their self-professed rectitude and concern for their fellow men hadn’t stopped the people of her time from wiping themselves out almost completely....
She was considering the notion that she’d disappear up her own butthole if she kept following those lines of thought, when a sudden commotion broke out from the rocks right overhead.
Doc kicked the fire over. Krysty jumped up and quickly kicked dirt over the coals, smothering them. Everybody fanned out, crouching, blasters in their hands, covering all directions.
“Don’t chill him!” Ryan rapped out. “Bring him here, Jak.” He’d had his back to the upslope side. Now
he rose smoothly and turned, taking up his Scout and aiming it upward.
“Ow!” an adolescent male voice cried out of sight above. “¡Mierda! Take it easy, coño, I’m coming!”
A kid appeared at the top of the black boulder clump. He was a few inches taller than Jak and wearing ratty cargo shorts and a green army tunic. Disheveled black bangs hung in a soot-smudged face. A big bruise, gone past purple to a dull rainbow, yellow and green and mottled blue, covered the left side of his face. He had some kind of longblaster strapped to his back, alongside a backpack, and had a big double-action revolver stuck in a battered leather-flapped cross-draw holster on the front of a web belt.
“You a spy?” Ryan asked.
“We should be careful, Ryan,” Mildred said. “Maybe he’s with whoever did that to the ville.”
“You lie, puta!” the youth shrieked in a spray of spittle. He thrashed until Jak’s big bowie drew blood.
“Easy,” Ryan said. “It took an army to waste the ville like that. If you’re not with an army, you’re damned well-heeled. You better have a good story, boy.”
“Let me go,” the youth said sullenly, “and I’ll tell you.”
Ryan grinned. So did J.B. and Doc.
“Not likely, junior,” J.B. said, taking off his steel-rimmed specs and scrubbing them with a handkerchief.
Ryan gestured. Looking as if he really wanted just to lay the kid’s throat open with a swift, savage cut, Jak pushed his prisoner down and around to the depression where the campfire burned low. He had the kid’s right arm twisted up to his shoulder blades in a hammerlock.
Mildred helped J.B. relieve the prisoner of his pack and weapons, which they handed to Doc and Krysty. Instead of watching them, Ryan stood looking everywhere but at the scene, his longblaster cradled in his arms and his ice-blue eye alert. Jak and J.B. trussed the kid’s hands behind him. Then, sitting him down gently but forcefully by the fire, they tied his ankles together with nylon line from their packs.
Krysty had laid the pack down on the other side of the fire. Doc set the weapons out next to it.
“All right,” Ryan said, turning back. He leaned the rifle against his pack. “Jak, good job. You can go back on patrol now.”
Jak’s red eyes flared. His dislike for the captive was almost palpable.
“What have we got here?” Ryan asked the others as Jak vanished back into the dark.
“Dark night!”
J.B. was turning over the prisoner’s longblaster. He had an expression of almost childlike wonder on his face.
“Kid better have a triple-good yarn, to account for why he’s toting a longblaster like this one,” the armorer said in reverent tones. “Ryan, do you have any idea what this is?”
Chapter Thirteen
Ryan frowned. He didn’t care for games, even when his best friend played them.
“No, I don’t, J.B.,” he said. “But I suppose I couldn’t stop you telling me without chilling you on the spot.”
Unfazed, J.B. laughed. “You got that right. This longblaster is called a DeLisle carbine.”
The name tickled the back of Ryan’s brain, which only made him more peevish. “Meaning what? Will you stop walking all around the muzzle and get to the damn trigger?”
J.B. tossed the piece to him. Ryan caught it handily. The weapon was shorter than his Scout, but surprisingly heavy.
“Why’s the barrel so thick?” he asked, examining it.
“That’s an integral suppressor,” J.B. said. “True silencer, actually. That puppy shoots regular .45 ACP handblaster balls, just the same as that Para-Ordnance P45-14 the kid has—another surprisingly sweet piece to pack if he isn’t a coldheart, I have to say. Because the bullet comes out less than the speed of sound, there’s no crack from it. And because the bolt-action locks up tight—it’s built on an old Brit Lee-Enfield .303—not much more than a whisper of sounds gets out, at all.”
“I remember reading something about these,” Mildred said. “Didn’t the British use them for commando missions in World War II?”
“This blaster’s a hundred-fifty years old?”
J.B. shook his head. “Nope. Pretty new, by the state of the metal and the furniture.”
“Surely nobody on the island is manufacturing longblasters,” Krysty said.
“Not manufacturing,” J.B. said. “Smith job. Modifying. Like I said, somebody took an old-days Enfield action, or mebbe an Ishapore like that Oldie of the Sea guy had. Cartridges were the same width as a .45, so mostly what it amounted to was putting on a new barrel, with some holes drilled in it to let the gas bleed into the silencer. And jimmying the receiver to take magazines in the right caliber—probably just handblaster mags. Mebbe both standard for 1911s and the double stacks like the Para-Ordnance shoots. Am I right?”
The captive nodded sullenly.
Ryan handed the weapon back to the armorer, then he turned the full blue fire of his glare on the prisoner.
“All right,” he said. “Who were you spying for, if it wasn’t the coldhearts who torched the ville?”
The black fury that flamed in the youth’s dark brown eyes sure looked real to Ryan. He felt the return glare like a punch. The kid had balls, but he also had the sense not to flare off too much, considering the situation he was in.
“I’m not spying for anybody! I just wanted food.”
“Don’t play games with me, boy,” Ryan said. “You’re mighty young to end the night staring up at the stars. But not so young I won’t put you that way if I don’t hear your story now, and hear it straight!”
Mildred and Doc were going through the pack. “For a fact,” Doc said, “our young guest is not carrying any food beyond some dried fish. And that is mostly crumbs, it would appear.”
Krysty knelt facing the captive. She wasn’t so close he could reach her with a sudden lunge. Not that he was liable to do much with his hands tied behind his back. But Krysty hadn’t stayed alive by taking any more unnecessary chances than the rest of them had.
“So you aren’t with the people who attacked Nuestra Señora,” she said.
He shook his head wildly, and Ryan was startled to see tears drawing bright lines of reflected firelight down his dark olive cheeks. “No! Those putos killed my family, my friends! They took my sister!”
Krysty looked at Ryan in surprise. “Who attacked the ville, then?” he asked.
“It was El Guapo,” the boy said. “And his fucking mutie monster henchman Tiburón. I hate them! I want to see them die twisting in their own guts!”
“Whoa! Slow down, boy,” Ryan said. “Those two didn’t do all that by themselves. It took an army.”
“The Handsome One has an army,” the boy said. “Two hundred coldhearts, mebbe more. He intends to conquer the whole island. That’s why he destroyed Nuestra Señora. We wouldn’t bow down to the bastard!”
“You intend to take on an entire army by yourself?” Doc asked. He shook his head and tut-tutted. “Brave, to be sure. But scarcely practical.”
“I don’t care,” the captive said. He was wagging his head from side to side in frustration. “How can I make you understand?”
“Tell us what happened,” Krysty suggested gently.
“How do I start? There is so much.”
J.B. hunkered down, across the fire from the prisoner. “You could always start at the beginning,” he said. “That works.”
“What’s your name, kid?” Ryan asked. “You can take it from there. We got all night.”
“My name is Ricardo Morales Goza,” the boy began. “My parents call—called me Ricky. I was sixteen years old last month.”
“Go-sa,” J.B. repeated. “Kinda funny name.”
“That’s Spanish,” Ryan said. “Your family name’s Morales, right?”
Ricky nodded.
“Just like they do in Mex Land, see. All right, get on with the telling, kid.”
* * *
HIS FATHER WAS JOSÉ MORALES, he told them, his mother María Elena. His father was a l
eading merchant and trader in the ville of Nuestra Señora, while his mother ran their store in town with the help of his older sister Yamile.
Ricky grew up active and happy, with an active mind. He was always prying into things. Sometimes it got him into trouble with adults, sometimes with other kids of the ville. His sister, who was very beautiful but also could be tough at need, had helped pull his butt out of countless scrapes and never told their parents about them. They would have disapproved, for they were raising the boy to live right, by their lights.
But even Yamile, much as she adored Ricky—and he adored her—couldn’t be around all the time. He was undersized as a child, had only gotten a growth spurt a year or two before. He learned to take care of himself. He became a scrapper.
He became even more adept at evading people who were pissed at him—especially the older kids who liked to bully him. Then, he began to lure them into surprises—a plank positioned to whip up and smack an unsuspecting pursuer in the face, a bucket of slops that tipped off a fence when an enemy ducked through the inviting hole that Ricky had slipped through a heartbeat before.
Seemed people were often pissed at him. As a kid on the small side, he learned attitude early on. When he started to grow out of his clothes at an increasingly rapid rate, he didn’t outgrow the attitude. He still had a smart mouth on him. And perhaps not the best judgment about when and with whom to run it.
The ville folk could fight and fight hard at need. Ricky remembered a couple of times when strange ships came from the sea, filled with strange, angry men. There had been shooting then, and screaming and ships burning. Each time, the surviving pirates went away as fast as they could. And each time life quickly returned to a pleasant, peaceful routine.