Unauthorized Intervention’s commandos were quick to take the hint. With the butts of their OICWs, they shoved legless haunts toward the nearest foggy threads. The undead fought back, biting at the gunstocks—breaking off teeth from their decaying gums—but our squad had no trouble keeping clear of the gnashing attacks. Haunt after haunt went into the misty silver . . . and each disappeared with the same sad sigh, as if overcome by profound regret. The sound was disturbing, like somebody weeping in whispers when you can do nothing to help.
Lord Horatio seemed similarly unsettled. “Terrible business,” he murmured as our comrades dealt with the haunts. “If the poor beggars had just left us alone . . . Why did they try to attack? Weren’t they just sailors? Before they died, weren’t they ordinary decent men? Normal blokes. Chaps who’d share a pint with strangers in foreign ports. Why would death make them ready to kill us?”
I shrugged. “Some cultures think the soul is made of different pieces that separate at the moment of death. The good pieces—the intelligent kindhearted ones—proceed to some afterlife reward. The rest are cold and hostile: all the cheap angry impulses that don’t deserve to go to heaven. A corpse has to be buried properly to tranquilize the leftover evil. If you don’t perform the proper rituals . . . if you leave dead men to rot in the middle of the sea . . . the remaining evil festers. Eventually, it gets strong enough to raise the body as an undead thing full of hate.”
“Do you really believe that?” Lord Horatio asked.
“Sometimes,” I said. “The world’s a mishmash, isn’t it? Just when you think something’s only superstition, you discover otherwise. If I start to believe some monster is fictitious, I soon find one chewing my ankle. If I take it for granted there’s no such thing as a mummy’s curse, the very next day I have to fend off some nutter in bandages. But if I say, All right, fine, every legend is real, the next eldritch horror I meet is just a mundane hoaxer dressed up to scare the tourists. What’s sham? What’s genuine? I’m no longer surprised when myths come true, but I get tired sorting things out.”
Lord H. looked at me a moment . . . then he leaned in and kissed me on the forehead. “Don’t be downhearted, girl. There’s a line between true and false, even if it’s hard to find.” In a softer voice, he added, “We all get tired. We simply don’t let it stop us. Stiff upper lip and all that. The greatest gift of our British heritage is how deep we can live in denial. Thriving at pressures that would crush a bathysphere.”
He gave a grandfatherly wink, then turned abruptly toward the men. “All right, lads, if you’ve finished playing with these nuisances, might we please get back to work?”
“Aye, aye, sir!” Ten voices clear and steady.
“Very well,” said Lord H. “Forward march.”
We didn’t actually march; we proceeded. The commandos moved forward in brisk military style: hurrying dramatically from niche to niche, never more than two men on the move at any moment, so the rest of the squad could stand ready to give covering fire. Lord Horatio and I trailed behind, trying to keep a straight face. Hollywood had ruined my ability to appreciate this sort of disciplined maneuvering. Even in moments of tension—and we were, after all, on the dark, high seas with malicious zombies around every corner—I couldn’t help recalling every mediocre war movie where the same type of scene had played out. I expected to hear background music or those cloppy echoing footsteps that sound-effects departments always superimpose over people trying to move quietly.
In reality, the men of Unauthorized Intervention made almost no noise at all; their boots barely whispered and their gear was packed to prevent the smallest rattle. The only disturbance they couldn’t avoid was the occasional creak of aged deck planks under their body weights . . . and such missteps were usually hidden by innumerable other creaks caused by wave and wind. Even in calm weather, old ships make an unholy racket.
And some of these ships were ancient. The Carthaginian galley was the oldest, but over the years, the bronze leg’s power had attracted dozens of other vessels. You’d think that the ships would be clustered by age, with the earliest in the middle and later ones accumulating at the outer edges like the rings of a tree. Not so. Currents slowly swirled the flotilla so that the ships shifted positions over time. Our group clambered from that early-twentieth-century steamer down to the Viking longboat I’d seen earlier, then up the side of a wooden schooner that I guessed dated from the sixteen or seventeen hundreds. Foolishly, I let myself breathe a sigh of relief once we’d passed the longboat; I’d been so worried about an attack from ax-wielding undead Norsemen that I didn’t think about what might wait for us on the schooner next door.
It had been a slave ship. Its hold had contained more than two hundred Africans crammed into an overcrowded hell. On an average slaver voyage, 10 to 20 percent of the living cargo died from disease, starvation, heat prostration, and asphyxia. On the last voyage of this ship, some unknown disaster had far surpassed the average. Every soul on board had perished—cargo and crew—before the bronze’s arcane influence raised them again.
Death had erased the social barriers between people above decks and below. Padlocked hatches lay smashed open, releasing the skeletal slaves to mingle with their rotting masters. White-skinned and black-skinned haunts stood shoulder to shoulder on the schooner’s deck, as if time had brought brotherhood and forgiveness. But there was no forgiveness in those hollow-pitted eyes. As the first of our squad swung over the railing, hundreds of undead attacked.
Five seconds of carnage ensued. Bursts from ten OICWs in assault-rifle mode. Explosive and incendiary rounds from me. We mowed down a horde, most of whom were slaves: men and women . . . naked, lice ridden . . . hideously emaciated. Did their gauntness come from the natural withering of death or from weeks of starvation while still alive? It made me gag to massacre these blameless victims, and to do it face-to-face—some of the people within arm’s reach—as if I’d become a slaver myself, heaping new indignities on innocents. Shooting black legs off black bodies and trying not to retch.
Five seconds only. Then with some vestige of intelligence, those who were still intact realized they couldn’t stand against our gunfire. They stopped in their tracks as if trying to decide what to do next.
Fractured body parts surrounded us: shot-off limbs, heads, torsos, heaped up like a knee-high rampart between us and the haunts. Most of the parts still twitched. Hands reached blindly for something to attack, while mouths bared rickety grimaces of cracked yellow teeth. Two dozen zombies were out of the fight; two hundred or more remained. Just waiting for an opening.
Two of our own men were down . . . not dead but battered by the mob’s front line. The men had been clubbed, punched, kicked, before the rest of our team could rescue them. Someone was already binding their wounds. Someone else was signaling Unauthorized Intervention on a laser comm link, requesting a stretcher crew. Lord Horatio’s men would evacuate the wounded in brisk, orderly fashion.
But that wasn’t our most pressing problem. We stood at the slave ship’s rail, surrounded by a half ring of haunts who kept their distance but still seemed eager to spill our blood. They blocked our only route forward. We had the option of retreating: going back to our own ship and sailing around the flotilla’s edge until we could approach at a new angle. But that would waste time, while Urdmann and his lackeys raced to grab the treasure. Besides, the moment we tried to withdraw, the undead would attack again—I had no doubt of that. More carnage. More chance that we’d take casualties.
Did we have an alternative? Three or four zombie-killing strands dangled onto the slave ship’s deck like foggy rigging ropes. They’d likely obliterated a few haunts when they first appeared, but now the undead knew to keep their distance. How could we force hundreds of shambling corpses into those few strings of silver?
A man on my right cleared his throat. “Captain,” he said to Lord H., “should we use burst shells?”
His lordship shuddered. He must have been picturing what bursters would do to
the naked people. Men and women sliced by shrapnel. A repugnant possibility. A dangerous one, too—like using grenades in close quarters. Perhaps some of our squad could fire bursters at the rear half of the undead crowd, while the rest of our men gunned down the front; but it would be the stuff of nightmares, a cold-blooded atrocity. The weaponless, defenseless haunts looked too much like real slaves. None of us wanted the image of their deaths on our conscience.
And yet, what other option did we have?
“All right.” Lord Horatio sighed. “I suppose we have to—”
He was interrupted by the deck heaving violently beneath our feet. I kept my balance by grabbing the ship’s rail. Most of our squad did the same, but the haunts—slow to react with their deadened brains—toppled like dominos. Some fell against misty threads of silver and disappeared from the world. The rest ended in a muddle, arms and legs tangled, fighting to regain their feet.
Before they managed to do so, a huge form rose in front of the schooner’s prow, like a whale surging up from the depths: as big as an obelisk five stories high, draped with Sargassum and glowing a faint blue.
Not a whale—a giant eel. Yet another monstrosity created by living too close to a chunk of bronze.
For several seconds, the eel stared down as if trying to understand what it was seeing. Its head turned slowly, scanning the deck. To have grown so large, the eel must have lived many years near the bronze leg . . . but it gazed at the haunts as if it had never seen such creatures before. Maybe it hadn’t; maybe it had spent its whole life underwater and this was the first time it ever stuck its head above the surface. It might have preferred to live at a particular depth and pressure—so deep it had never been aware of the upper world. Then it heard the blasts of our gunfire and had been drawn to the noise or, perhaps, to the bits of zombie that had fallen over the sides of the ships to sink into the depths like dry fish food trickled into an aquarium.
Now the eel leaned in for a close look. “Hold your fire!” Lord Horatio whispered. “No sudden movements, no hostile acts. Do not provoke it. Do not—”
Like lightning, the eel struck. Whatever its species, it was carnivorous—its mouth, lined with sword-length teeth, enveloped three haunts in a single bite. It lifted them off the deck, their legs kicking feebly between the monster’s lips; then the eel tossed its head back like someone gulping a vodka shooter, and the haunts disappeared down its gullet.
I swear the eel took a moment to reflect on the taste: rolling the flavor of undead Homo sapiens in its mouth to see if it liked the meal. It did. It wanted more. With another lunge it thrust toward the deck, its maw open to snatch as many haunts as it could swallow. I thought, Maybe we should reconsider that whole hold-your-fire strategy . . . then boom! The eel slammed down.
In its eagerness, the animal had misjudged its strike—it had engulfed a mouthful of prey but had thrust too far and smashed its snout on the deck. The schooner bucked like a bronco under the impact; even with my grip on the rail, I was nearly tossed overboard. I flew up and over the side, the force almost ripping me free . . . but I held on fiercely and ended up hugging the rail in both arms, my feet dangling over waters that teemed with small glowing eels.
I threw myself back onto the right side of the rail, only to see there was worse to come. When the eel had crashed down, it broke through the age-weakened deck planks, plunging snout first into the cargo holds. Its head was now stuck in the hole it had made; it fought to release itself, shaking the ship as it struggled. Zombies, slow to catch their balance, were thrown off into the sea as the schooner quaked. More were crushed as the eel’s body—now lying flat on the deck—writhed wildly in its efforts to escape. Those of us from Unauthorized Intervention were out of the path of the eel’s frantic throes—at least so far. But some of our team had already been hurled overboard, and the rest of us would go the same way or get squashed unless we escaped fast.
I looked around. We had four commandos left, plus Lord H.; the rest, including the wounded, had already been flung off by the eel’s thrashing. I prayed they’d survived. In time, they might be picked up by a rescue party—there was likely one on the way—but for now I had to rescue myself.
“Okay,” I muttered. “New strategy.”
A rope slapped up against me: a piece of the rigging knocked loose by the commotion. Taking a deep breath, I let go of the rail and grabbed the rope instead, jumping as high as I could. I started swinging like a pendulum . . . and I scrambled farther upward for fear the low point of my arc would smack me into the deck. Following the great swashbuckler tradition, I swung across the width of the schooner—above the haunts’ heads and the giant eel—straight into the ratlines of the ship next door, a sturdy Spanish galleon. The galleon wasn’t perfectly stable, being rocked by waves from the nearby eel. Still, I wasn’t in immediate danger of being propelled into the ocean or worse. I deemed that a great improvement.
Lord H. and the commandos saw my escape. The eel’s crazed frenzy had torn loose plenty of ropes besides the one I’d just used. In fact, the beast’s struggle was wreaking havoc on everything: the schooner’s rigging, its yards, the tattered bits of sailcloth still attached to the masts. Our men had their choice of a dozen untethered ropes as lines flew in all directions. Grabbing a length of hemp as it whipped past was no easy feat, but the men of Unauthorized Intervention were experienced sailors. Within seconds, they’d all followed my lead and were perched with me in the comparative safety of the galleon’s shrouds.
Not a moment too soon. Showing monstrous strength, the eel bore down and slowly lifted upright. Its head was still jammed through the deck. As the eel straightened up, the schooner came with it, stuck on the creature’s head like a hat. The few haunts remaining on deck plummeted into the sea as the ship turned completely upside down. It seemed as if the eel struck a pose for a second—its body upraised, wearing the schooner like an awkward fedora. Then the eel and slave ship plunged beneath the waves, vanishing into the depths.
“Well,” said Lord H. beside me, “that’s something you don’t see every day.”
10
THE SARGASSO SEA: ON THE CARTHAGINIAN TREASURE SHIP
We reached the Carthaginian galley with no further difficulties. True, we had to shoot more haunts and sweep them into the Misty Tendrils of Doom . . . but there were no more giant eels, and the zombies came at us in manageable numbers: no more than a handful at a time.
My greatest challenge was keeping a straight face as we crossed the Nazi destroyer. I mean, really: do other people keep running into undead storm troopers? Am I the only woman being stalked by the Third Reich? Where does one go for a restraining order? When I visit my club in London, I freely describe my run-ins with yetis, T. rexes, and wraiths—other members can sympathize. But if I talk about Nazis, there’s only laughter or embarrassed silence. “Lara, dear, aren’t you past that yet? Nazis are so mid–twentieth century. You’ve got to move on.”
I decided the next time I went to my club, I’d pretend the Sargasso Nazis were really Satanist skinheads from a drug cartel—opponents I could discuss without feeling ridiculous.
Our shooting undoubtedly let Urdmann know we were in the neighborhood. Urdmann’s flunkies had firefights of their own—from time to time, we heard the trrrrrrr of Uzis blasting unknown targets. I caught myself imagining Urdmann being eaten by a giant eel . . . but no matter how much I liked the idea, it wasn’t something I hoped for. In a world where Unreason reigned, having Urdmann disappear into an eel’s stomach didn’t guarantee the villain would be gone forever. I had to put down the mad dog myself, as permanently as possible.
I also had to retrieve the bronze leg. If I left the thing here, it would only cause trouble: more undead, more giant eels—and how long before some luxury cruiser with hundreds of passengers wandered into the danger zone? Better to procure the leg myself. I could then hand it over to Bronze. Once the parts fused with the rest of the android, they seemed to stop harming their surroundings. At least, Father Emil and t
he rest of the Order showed no signs of mutation. Perhaps detached bronze parts leaked energy at random, but reconnection put them safely under the metal man’s control.
We jumped to the treasure galley’s deck from an adjacent pleasure yacht—an overglossy wooden craft from the 1950s that had been occupied by middle-aged businessmen zombies in ragged velour smoking jackets and bikini-clad undead party girls. I was glad to put such tackiness behind me . . . and glad I’d have a chance to find the leg before Urdmann arrived. “Lord Horatio,” I said, “could you and your men wait on deck for the enemy? Set up whatever ambush you like. I’ll go below and get the leg.”
“On your own, my dear? Permission denied. At the very least, the leg will be guarded by undead Carthaginians. And what if you come up against a giant barracuda or a fire-breathing killer whale?”
“Fortunately,” I said, “giant barracudas and fire-breathing killer whales can’t fit in the hold of a trireme. I mean, look at this thing.”
The galley wasn’t imposing. It was about as wide as a city bus, and twice as long, with tightly packed seats along both sides, arranged at three different heights. One man and one oar per seat . . . with precious little space for either. A wooden carport-style roof ran above the rowers’ heads—not to protect them from rain but from arrows that might shower down upon them. The roof also offered a place for fighters to stand if the ship was carrying troops to board other vessels.
Apart from the roof and the rowing area, there wasn’t much to the ship. On the bow was a battering ram at water level, intended to smash holes in enemy boats. At the stern was a small poop deck, home to the man who held the rudder and the chap who banged the drum that kept the oarsmen synchronized.
The only way to go belowdecks was a hatch in the poop. I expected it led to a storage area just big enough to hold a few days’ food and water. Galleys like this weren’t meant to carry cargo; they were fast attack ships, built for speed and ramming. In a typical naval invasion, you sent your triremes ahead to deal with enemy defense vessels and maybe to establish a beachhead. Then, when the way was clear, you could move in your main troop carriers and all your cargo boats hauling supplies.
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