by James Axler
“Dude!” the white-painted mutie hunter groaned, bolting for the steps.
The meaning of the odd exclamation was lost on Tanner—until he inhaled through his nose.
Dude, indeed!
Doc raced for the stairs, carefully skirting the minefield of squish. He passed within a yard of the ship’s cook, who howled in outrage as he attacked the piles of taua shit with his spatula, flopping them into a garbage pail.
On the main deck Doc gulped fresh air with the other passengers. He and J.B. caught each other’s eye for a second. The Armorer gave him a quick wink before thumbing his smeared spectacles back up the bridge of his nose and looking away. The sun had already broken over the eastern horizon, but it was a sickly thing, filtered, diminished by dense sulphurous clouds that tainted the entire sky.
The light of day, however dim, made shockingly evident the carnage they had wrought the night before. Because so many of the taua bodies had been torn limb from limb, it was difficult to put a number on the enemy dead. Certainly hundreds of corpses littered the deck. It was difficult to walk without kicking a dismembered part or stepping in a blood puddle.
After Eng took control of the helm, returning the ship to its original course, he used his megaphone to bark a new set of orders to the crew. At once the islanders started examining the taua bodies, making sure they were dead, then flinging them overboard. They worked methodically, clearing one area at a time. After the corpses and their severed parts were disposed of, three crewmen moved in with buckets of seawater and hand brushes, and began scrubbing away the residual purple goo.
Among the tangled bodies the islanders discovered three taua that were still alive, if barely. Gleefully the crew dragged these wounded creatures out of the piles by their tails, pinning them to the deck by kneeling on their backs and legs. The taua twisted their necks and snapped their jaws, but they couldn’t reach their tormentors.
After the captives’ wrists and legs were hobbled with wraps of gray tape, and their muzzles likewise sealed shut, heavy rope harnesses were slipped over their backs and secured.
Doc followed with the rest of the passengers as the three taua were dragged thrashing to the stern. When he saw the crew attaching the ends of heavy ropes to the iron rings in the harnesses, he thought the taua were about to be keel-hauled, a sadistic punishment that involved pulling a roped person under the length of the ship, to either drown or be torn to shreds by the sharp barnacles on the hull.
The three bound and helpless creatures were tossed off the stern, just as he expected. But instead of hauling, the islanders continued to pay out rope, hundreds of feet of it hissed from the deck, uncoiling in the ship’s foaming wake.
Chapter Eight
Ryan leaned against one of the twin racks of steel drums, squinting into the steady tailwind. About 150 feet off the stern, well beyond the ship’s wake, three objects popped in and out of the gray wave tops, leaving streams of bubbles in the sea. As they popped out of the water the heavy lines that tethered them to the stern cleats snapped taut, then went slack as they sank back. The rhythm of this constant jerking in and out, in and out was erratic, dictated by the jumbled seas and porpoising ship. Dragged along at a fine clip, the trio of harnessed taua twisted and spun.
The islanders were trolling them.
Ryan figured the splashes and scent trail left by the wounded creatures would draw hungry predators from a wide area and up from great depths, much the same way a staked-out live bait on land would attract lions and wolves. He guessed the islanders were trying to restock their destroyed food stores.
Exactly which predators they were after wasn’t clear, though they had to be big to attack a 150-pound lure. The crew ignored Ryan when he asked them about it, pretending they didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. But he noticed that every few minutes they would look to the wake in anticipation of something exciting happening. When nothing did, they returned to their assigned work, scrubbing and polishing the deck, recoiling lines, and reorganizing and cleaning the spilled contents of various tool chests and lockers. As the day wore on, the time between aftward glances grew longer and longer, until the islanders stopped looking altogether.
Ryan had to stop looking, too. Staring so fixedly at the troll lines was doing strange things to his vision. It made the ship’s deck swim with the same churning motion as the water.
As they continued to sail south, he concentrated on the eastern horizon, comparing what lay before him with the predark maps of Southern California he’d seen.
The landscape bore no resemblance to the maps.
There was no landscape.
Millions upon millions of square miles of the southwestern corner of the former United States were simply gone, swallowed up by a turbid gray sea. The 4500-foot mountains that had separated San Diego and its sprawling suburbs from the sea level desert to the east had vanished. The Cific Ocean stretched unbroken to the far horizon, and there was no telling how deeply the ocean had invaded the land. The reshaped coastline was somewhere beyond the curvature of the earth, under an ceiling of colossal thunderheads. Those midnight-black clouds bulged, not with a burden of torrential rain, but with particulate matter, mineral spew and toxic ash from awakened and emerging volcanoes. The stench of burning sulfur rode the humid wind.
This was the same caustic sea that drowned the nuke-craters of Los Angeles. Its flats and reefs boiled and steamed, dotted by the dark tips of emerging volcanic cones and the black vortexes of whirlpools. The danger that surrounded them was palpable.
Few times in Ryan’s life had he ever been so acutely aware of his own helplessness; few times in his life had he felt more like an ant than a man. This peril was nothing like face-to-face combat with norms, or muties or savage beasts. Nonliving physical processes dwarfed the ship and everyone on it, forces of awesome power capable of wiping them out in an instant, and without warning. Death was everywhere. A superheated steam cloud bursting from a subsurface vent could cook them in their skins like sausages. A barrage of molten ejecta could set all the sails ablaze, then overwhelm and sink the stranded ship with its sheer weight. An eruption-spawned tidal wave could sweep them to their doom. These disasters were all possible, maybe even likely. And there was no safe place to land for hundreds of miles.
Trapped on the too small ship, on the too-vast ocean, Ryan and his companions stood witness to the savage last throes of their world, a sight humans were never meant to look upon…and survive the looking. The risks of the mission at hand were terrible, and the chances of success were remote. Ryan and the others were going in blind, on the basis of gaudy house rumor and the exodus of Deathlands’s worst. There was no guarantee they would even find Steel Eyes at the journey’s end. Yet there had been no arguments over the course of action. And no second thoughts once they had begun.
Magus was a plague on all their houses.
It was said that his artificially prolonged life had allowed him to master everything there was to master. That he knew everything there was to know. That this mastery and knowledge had elevated him to a higher level of existence. To a kind of junkyard godhood. He had become his own creation, a malevolent deity whose dark schemes and willing soldiers victimized and degraded a desperate world.
The companions had taken on the mission because they all knew some things were worth dying for, even when the odds were slim.
And ridding the Deathlands of Magus was one of those things.
A crewman shouted alarm, breaking Ryan’s somber train of thought. He looked off the stern and saw a fountain of foam erupt behind one of the trolled baits. Then another fountain, and another, water spraying in all directions. It looked like artillery shells falling into the sea, but shells that missed their targets, the hip-hopping lures. Fifty yards behind the row of baits, V-wakes by the hundreds slashed through the wave tops, swimming much faster than the ship could sail.
Taua. Homing in on their own.
Ryan couldn’t believe his eye. If the crew had wanted to eat deep
-fried taua, they had had plenty on the deck earlier in the morning. What kind of triple stupes would purposely recreate the same situation they had barely survived the night before?
Captain Eng, alerted by the crew, turned the helm over to a mate and rushed to the stern. He took a position beside Ryan, watching without apparent alarm the growing number of creatures surfacing in their wake. Every taua within fifty miles was chasing the skipping baits. Eng gave an order and crewmen set to work on the twin racks and the red drums closest to the stern. They unlocked the racks’ rear gates, and using box wrenches, removed a small hex plug from each of the first four barrels.
Meanwhile, the taua fell upon their half-dead but enticingly jerked brethren. The troll lines snapped taut again and again, creaking from the strain and throwing off sprays of water as the baits were struck by heavy bodies and slashing needle teeth. With their school surrounding the hapless victims, individual taua were competing against each other, darting in and out, trying to chomp away the biggest chunk.
“First barrel gets a twenty-five-second fuse. Give the rest fifteen seconds,” Eng told his waiting men.
The crew quickly measured and trimmed the waterproof fuse cord to the correct lengths, fitted the fuses through special caps and then screwed the caps into the drums.
“Aianei!” the captain shouted.
At his signal the longer fuses were lit, and a moment later the levers dropped on both racks. The first of pair red barrels lumbered down the rails and plummeted off the stern. Ryan watched them slowly sink as the ship rapidly pulled away.
“Aianei!” Eng cried again.
At once two more fuses were torched, the rack levers dropped and red drums rolled off the stern.
Ryan had heard stories about depth charges, of course, but he had never seen them in action.
The pair of drums with shorter fuses exploded with a rumble and hard crack, one hundred fifty feet upwind. The sea domed in two rapidly expanding circles of froth, twenty then forty feet across; towering geysers of water, foam and smoke erupted from their centers. These plumes tossed dark chunks over a wide radius.
Seconds later, having sunk deeper, the other barrels detonated with a more subdued rumble and crack, and a less dramatic set of geysers.
Ryan could appreciate the captain’s strategy. Eng had figured that the taua who hadn’t been injured by the first explosions would instinctively drop back from the troll lines, diving away from the shock waves, directly into the other charges.
And he was right.
As the tailwind whipped the smoke from burned high explosive past Ryan, he saw pale bodies and parts of same popping to the surface like corks in a broad swathe. Blood spread in a greasy film across the gray sea.
But Eng was not done, not by a long shot. Anticipating his enemies’ next move, he cried, “Ano! Ano!”
By the time four more cans rolled over the side, the taua outside the initial killzone were drawn into the wake by the smell of gore in the water, which sent them into a chilling frenzy. They greedily attacked their own struggling wounded, the large, floating pieces of flesh and each other.
Eng’s last volley of depth charges put an end to their sport. The tightly overlapping explosions blew surface-feeding taua and their prey high into the air. Through the clouds of white smoke, sundered parts pelted the sea.
As the ship sailed away from the carnage, crewmen quickly hauled in the three trolling lines, their frayed and broken ends dancing through the bloody wake.
Ryan studied the captain’s scarred face. Despite what Eng had said about revenge being an islander’s pleasure, the one-eyed man saw no joy, no triumph, in his eyes. No tears, either. Only grim satisfaction.
A score repaid in full.
Ryan turned away, looking to the south and immediately picked up something on the far horizon, something that hadn’t been there fifteen minutes earlier. The tiny smudge of dark purple stood alone, between the gray sea and black clouds.
It was the Baja.
As bad a pounding as Southern California had taken on nuke day, Mexico’s Baja peninsula had suffered even harder punishment. Not from direct nuke strikes or errant MIRVs, but from the massive geologic shifts that followed the all-out assault to the north. The Sea of Cortez no longer existed, it had been taken over by the Cific. Of Baja’s thousand-mile length and one-hundred-fifty-mile width, all that was left were its high points.
For the rest of the morning, the ship rushed headlong toward the speck of land. By late afternoon, it had become a broad purple shadow on the horizon.
Ryan had already guessed that it was Picacho del Diablo, Devil’s Peak, the highest summit on the Baja peninsula, ten thousand feet above sea level before nuke day. There was no telling how tall it was now—its peak was hidden somewhere in the cloud bank.
Because of the cloud cover, evening turned to starless, moonless night in a matter of minutes. The ship was within three miles of the island as darkness fell. Campfires danced along the facing shore, and rows of torches illuminated a rickety pier. Heat waves rising from vents beneath the sea filtered the light, making it shimmer and blur. A volley of autofire rattled along the hidden beach, answered by a flurry of single shots. And scattered screams.
The campers were restless.
Chapter Nine
Silam stood at the end of the pier, raptly watching the white ship’s approach. Against the backdrop of black clouds and sea, its sails underlit by the deck lamps, it glided like a ghost into the wide, protected cove. The night wind stirred his past-shoulder-length cascade of blond curls, his pride and joy, which served to conceal a head far too high at the crown to be considered entirely normal—it looked like he was wearing a crash helmet under a wig hat. Silam’s pale, fine features were compressed in the center of his face, and seemed too small for the width of his head. Though fairly tall, he was cursed with a narrow chest and shoulders. To counter the less than manly impression this produced, he favored slightly oversize garments and broad shoulder pads. And to make doubly sure that no one got the wrong idea, he walked with a rolling, exaggeratedly masculine gait.
By his own account, and the accounts of the two sycophants who stood beside him on the pier, Silam was a certified genius—a poet, showman, illusionist, choreographer, scholar, spell caster. Fantasist extraordinaire.
If he had lived his life before the Apocalypse, those talents would have most certainly gone unrecognized. The horror show of January 21, 2001 and its cruel, century-long aftermath had elevated Silam, as it had other unworthies, by eliminating 99.99 percent of the competition. By the grace of nothing less than global annihilation, he had become Deathlands’s Homer, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Patricia Cornwell.
Chief among his mental gifts was the ability to invent and widely circulate a great volume, if not a virtual library, of terrifying and misleading rumors. A close second was his knack for dreaming up truly horrible experiences for other people to endure. In Deathlands there were no limits of taste or decorum, nor codes of law when it came to psychological operations.
And the nightmares Silam dreamed up, Magus made real.
“This is your best work, by far,” remarked the shorter of the two hangers-on. Rish had a big, bony head and droopy-lidded, sunken, dark-circled eyes. He wore a perpetual, hang-dog look on his long face. From a distance he could have almost passed for a swampie; up close his soft, hairless—and rather petite for an adult male—hands and feet were proof of his pure norm blood. Rish had long ago appointed himself Silam’s biographer-historian, and the official keeper of the minutiae of Psy Ops continuity.
Silam considered the compliment in lofty silence. It was difficult to decide on a crowning feat in a career so studded with successes. As Magus’s personal mythmaker for sometime, he had come up with some doozies. In a dark land of ignorance and fear, a land ruled by deceit, Silam was head liar…
Magus traveling back and forth in time, that had been his idea.
Magus creating the Adam and Eve of the stickie race; that had been
his, too.
The list of memorable falsehoods went on and on.
Magus was a fugitive from another dimension. He paid top jack for the rare muties he used in his genetic experiments. Magus was immortal. His steel fingers were everywhere at once, invisibly controlling the course of human events. He had manufactured countless doubles of himself, using spare parts from his victims. He was a thousand years old. He had originally been the 43rd and last President of the United States of America. He had engineered skydark.
He was gathering an army of human scum to conquer all of Deathlands.
Even by Silam’s high standards, that one had been inspired.
“Rish, you may well be right,” the propaganda master conceded. “It’s certainly way up there on the list.”
“Where would Magus be without you, Silam?” gushed Jaswinder. As the balding, stubble-bearded, round-bellied man spoke, he leaned closer to his hero and wrung his hands nervously.
The remark fell like a unexploded bomb in their midst.
Silam stared into the man’s dark, doting eyes. The longer he stared, the faster the grimy hands twisted. Jaswinder was always over the top with his fawning, although he sometimes had a point.
“I am the humble servant of Magus,” Silam said. “I only follow his lead. His glory is my delight.”
“What a team you make!” Rish exclaimed.
“Silam, your wisdom and art define our existence,” Jaswinder continued, merrily wringing away. “You draw the lines even Magus must follow.”
Rish gave Jaswinder a hard jab in the ribs with his elbow. The unexpected blow made the man say, “Ooooof!”
Punished for speaking dangerous truth.
That Magus had the power to bring Silam’s horror shows to life didn’t change the fact that they were his horror shows. The products of his imagination. Imagination was a mental facility Magus appeared to lack; if he had one, it was unrecognizable as such. Perhaps because he was no longer technically speaking a human he had somehow lost touch with human fears. He relied on his hireling, his head liar to choreograph the worst that people could do to each other. In a way the hireling commanded the master. In a way, he had created Magus’s world. Yet Silam’s accomplishments were unsigned, his genius shadowed, obscured by the legend he had so carefully constructed.