Shadow Fortress

by James Axler

  “Next!” a gruff voice called out, and the line of old men, blind teenagers and crippled children surged forward once more.

  One of the first things Jak noticed was there were no women in the group. But then, old, blind or cripple, the pirates had a use for any woman.

  Chained at the neck and ankles, hands tied, there was little Jak could do about escaping until it was his turn at the head of the line. His blaster and knives were gone, and while he had something in his boot, it would take forever to get it out with tied hands. No, that old trick of the Trader would be of no use to the teenager this day. He wondered if it would be single combat with an armed opponent or a simple execution? But he didn’t hear any blasterfire, so the entertainment was most likely not a firing squad. That was both good and bad.

  There was a commotion ahead of him, the crowd roared in approval and the line moved again. Stepping forward, Jak moved from the shadows into the sunlight. Blinking against the brightness, he could see it was high noon, and the predark arena was mostly in ruins, whole sections reduced to piles of broken concrete and twisted steel. Teams of slaves were working in the rubble, effecting slow repairs. But the rest of the place was packed with dozens, maybe even hundreds of people spread across the levels seated at tables, waving bottles of shine, eating snacks, drunkenly cheering and making bets with the local jack.

  A lot of the folks in better clothes were spooning a purple powder to their faces, and Jak recognized it even at this distance as jolt.

  An old word that Doc used occasionally came unbidden to his mind: decadent. The teenager nodded to himself. Yeah, a bunch of feeb druggies getting their jollies watching folks get snuffed. Ever since his wife and child had passed away, Jak had prepared himself for the day when he also would go into the great blackness. Krysty talked about the spirit of the world, Mildred of the human soul. Jak only believed in honor and a warrior’s dignity. If he was going on the last train west, he would make it something the freaking pirates would remember for years.

  “Next!” that same voice called out.

  Jak shuffled forward, and through the crowd of armed guards he could catch a peek at the arena below. The playing field had been divided into four unequal areas by stout brick walls topped with iron spikes, the churned soil in each puddled with red blood. In the first was a pack of wild boars stomping a headless corpse, their tusks ripping out huge gouts of flesh with every strike. In the next a huge lionlike cat was mauling a youth with its claws until the screaming ceased, then the beast tossed away the body with a head shake. In the third pit were stickies, hooting insanely as the crowd actually tossed handfuls of jolt into the air, and laughed as the drug drifted down onto the humanoid muties. The fourth contained only bones, with something moving below the soil out of sight, only the disturbances on top of the ground marking its passage. The teen nodded. Fair enough. If he had any say in his destination, Jak certainly knew which of these he’d choose. No question about that.

  “Next!” the voice called.

  “Here, motherfucker,” Jak snarled, and held out his wrists.

  “Ah, a mutie!” A pirate chuckled as a slave undid the albino teen’s neck chains, then released his wrists.

  Jak rubbed his wrists while the lead restraints were removed. He walked through the crowd of guards and looked over the crowd. The people laughed at the albino, and bets were placed, handfuls of live ammo exchanged across the grandstand.

  “Nice jacket. Give it to me,” another grunted, holding out a tiny knife, the blade no more than three inches, “and I’ll give you this knife.”

  Jak considered it. “Fair deal,” he said, and slid off his leather jacket, then slapped it across the face of the guard.

  The sec man screamed, the razor blades and bits of barbed wire sown into the collar and lapels ripping apart his flesh and removing an eye. Jak tossed the jacket at the nearest guards, and they recoiled from the garment, unsure of exactly what had just happened. Spinning, Jak kneed another in the groin and took his blaster, firing over the falling body at the next sec man. The flame from the muzzle covered the man’s head, the miniball exploding his skull, sending a grisly rain over the closest attendees.

  The teen grabbed a chair and turned to find a score of blasters pointing his way. He hesitated for a moment, then lowered the chair, his bid for freedom gone.

  “Tough little bastard, ain’t ya?” a pirate roared, and slapped the teenager across the face.

  Jak filled his mouth with bloody saliva and spit it back at the sec man.

  “Lord Baron Kinnison says hello,” he said, sneering, hoping they might think he had the same disease as the dying master of the islands.

  It seemed to work, because the sec men moved farther away, their hands no longer quite so steady with their blasters.

  “Chill him!” the bleeding man on the floor cried, his face horribly disfigured. “Set him on fire! Give him to the worms!”

  “Aye,” the big sec man muttered. “It’s been long enough for them to be hungry again. We’ll toss him to the worms.”

  The word was relayed across the grandstand, and the viewers shifted their seats for a better view of the fourth arena.

  “Like worms,” Jak snarled. “Eat them for breakfast.”

  The sailors laughed at the show of bravado, and Jak shifted his plans. Maybe he could earn their respect and get enlisted. That would give him the chance to help his friends. If they were still alive.

  “That buys you a drink,” a sec man said with a chuckle, passing over a greasy bottle.

  Jak took a sniff and forced himself to recoil. “What is?” he demanded. “Horse piss?”

  The big sec man lost his grin and shoved a blaster into the teenager’s side. “Shut up and drink,” he ordered, obviously angered that the gesture had been rebuked. “And for every drop you miss, off comes a toe. Eh? How’s that, gimp?”

  “Fair,” Jak told him, taking a long swig. Then sprayed the bitter brew into the pirate’s eyes.

  Momentarily blinded, the sec man fired his blaster, but Jak had already moved, the .44 miniball slamming into the guard behind the teenager. Clutching his chest, the startled man stumbled backward and fell into the nearest pit.

  Kicking another man in the knee, Jak felt the bone break. As a guard rushed forward, the teenager smashed the bottle over his head and stole the guard’s knife. With half their number aced in a few moments, the remaining guards scrambled for distance to safely use their blasters. Meanwhile, the crowd roared its approval as Jak buried the broken end of the bottle into the face of a bearded pirate, twisting the shards in deep. The mutilated sailor howled in agony, falling to his knees on the suddenly bloody floor. With lightning-fast hands, Jak grabbed his blaster and a second blade, then started for the tunnel, the only escape route available.

  But the guards were already rushing toward him with raised chairs as shields. Shifting plans, Jak fired the blaster, catching the slave with the keys in the belly. The man slumped over in pain, the keys clattering as they fell to the ground. The line of slaves stared in wonder at the sight, then dived upon the keys, insanely fighting among themselves to get loose first.

  A guard rushed Jak with an ax. The teen blocked the strike with the spent blaster and grabbed a fresh weapon from his attacker. Then the others swarmed over him, and the teenager was forced off the grandstand and fell into a pit himself.

  The crowd redoubled its yells of delight as the wild boars raced upon the sprawled teenager, blood from their last chill dripping off their razor-sharp tusks.

  Chapter Eight

  The trembling slaves stood in a bunch on the deck of the PT boat, staring in open horror at the island only a hundred feet away. Most were people dragged from the hovels outside Cascade, beaten and chained as slaves, then herded onto crude rafts of lashed timbers and hauled behind the four petey boats across miles of ocean until reaching this horrid destination. Forbidden Island. To many the words were synonymous with hell.

  “You first,” Mitchum ordered, grabbi
ng a skinny man by the shoulder and shoving him off the boat. The man hit the water splashing and yelling.

  “Swim for shore, idiot!” a sec man shouted angrily at the floundering man. “And when you hit the beach, walk straight.”

  “But I’ll die!” he replied, kicking madly to stay afloat. “The air is poison! Muties everywhere!”

  “Convince him otherwise,” Glassman ordered from the wheelhouse of the boat.

  “Aye, sir.” Campbell lowered his longblaster and fired. The slave shouted as the miniball punched into the water near his chest, the tiny geyser splashing onto his face.

  “Swim or die,” the navvy ordered, another sailor passing him a loaded blaster.

  The chained crowd whimpered and muttered among themselves as they watched the man dogpaddle for the nearby shore. The waves were gentle along that section of the beach, and if there were any rip-tides that far from the deadly whirlpool, none seized the man and hauled him underwater.

  Mitchum scowled from the vessel’s bobbing wheel-house. The crew had dropped anchor, but it did little to smooth the rough waves. Hopefully, it was merely the advance notice of a coming storm, and not the herald of a Deeper arriving.

  After delivering its load of people, the petey had swung away from the rest of the boats and assumed a defensive position in the deep waters off the land-mass. The pirates couldn’t fail to see their arrival, and once they figured out what was going on, they would hit the navvies with everything they had. Against that eventuality, Glassman had given the sec chief a pre-dark revolver from the captain’s armory: a .357 Magnum Ruger Redhawk. As a precaution, he tied the blaster to his belt, so it couldn’t fall overboard. The blaster weighed a lot, but he had been assured that it hit harder than a .44 flintlock. Mitchum was eagerly looking forward to seeing if that were true.

  Battling to stay on the surface, the slave stared at the beach he was heading for. Big rocks that looked like molten glass studded the beach, and the trees beyond were oddly stunted, their trunks twisted and gnarled as if in pain. He flinched as something brushed against him under the water, and he rushed forward to gratefully touch the sloping sand of the shallow shoals, the sand squishing between his bare toes.

  Rising timidly from the sea, the man eyed the nearby bushes and wondered for a moment if the sailor could accurately shoot that far, when a blaster sounded and a glass rock on the beach exploded into shards, one of the pieces scoring a bloody scratch along his ribs.

  “Keep moving,” a voice shouted. “We’ll tell you when to stop!”

  Swallowing hard, the slave began to shuffle forward, moving around a gaping hole in the ground that seemed to be filled with small pieces of the glasslike rocks, the air about it hazy with a greenish hue. Almost immediately, a wave of weakness flowed through his body, and the slave shivered with unexpected cold. It was becoming hard to focus his vision, he felt dizzy, the taste of metal filled his mouth and every step was becoming more tedious, his legs wobbly as if they were melting. Sweat poured down his face as his teeth chattered, and a ragged cough took his chest. Wiping his mouth, the man saw flecks of blood on his hand. Suddenly, it was impossible to breathe, his lungs laboring to draw in the smallest sip of air. His teeth began to ache, and blood poured from his nose. He coughed again, and his teeth fell to the ground, along with a sprinkling of his hair. What was happening to him? Unable to think clearly, he turned and started back for the ocean, thinking in a wild delirium that he would be okay again if he could just get back on the petey.

  The waves washed over his feet, the salt stinging like acid, when there came a puff from the boats moored offshore and something hit him very hard in the chest. The pain became a warm numbness, and he fell backward into a black pit without a bottom.

  “Was that necessary?” Campbell asked, lowering his longblaster.

  “Yes,” Glassman said, reloading the flintlock. “If the slaves know that we’ll ace them when it gets too bad, then they won’t dash about madly and ruin the chart.”

  “Makes sense, sir,” the sailor reluctantly agreed.

  “You’re next,” a navvy ordered, grabbing a young woman by the arm and shoving her into the water.

  Far away, Mitchum eagerly watched as she swam to shore, then walked along the beach, about fifty feet to the left of the corpse sprawled in the sand. She made it a lot farther before collapsing, fighting to breathe.

  “Starting to look good,” Mitchum said with a cold smile. This was a good idea. Use the slaves to walk along the rad-hot beach and find the pirate’s safe passage to the interior. He had thought it a long shot at best, but that damn plan seemed to be working. Soon, they could land the Hummers and drive into the jungle after the outlanders.

  “Sir?” the pilot asked from the till.

  “Nothing,” Mitchum scowled. “Pay attention to your job.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the pilot answered sheepishly.

  Leveling his weapon, Campbell fired and the girl on the beach jerked once, then went still. Grabbing another slave, a navvy tossed the teenaged boy into the ocean.

  “Go fifty feet to the left of the girl,” Glassman ordered.

  Splashing about, the youngster nodded, then pulled in a lungful of air and dived out of sight.

  “Fucking bastard.” The sergeant sighed and gestured at the crew. In oft practiced ease, the armed men went to both sides of the foredeck and aimed their blasters. In the mob of slaves, an old woman began to cry. After a few minutes, the teen bobbed into sight about sixty feet behind the PT boat. The sec men opened fire in a rough volley, the barrage of miniballs tearing into the boy, blood spurting high into the air as one round smacked him right in the heart. Gurgling horribly, he sank from sight, leaving a crimson wake that slowly thinned away.

  “Damn fine shooting there, Donovan,” Glassman said with a smile. “Been practicing?”

  “In my spare time, aye, skipper.” The navvy grinned, preening with the praise. “A sailor that can’t shoot, ain’t nothing but ballast to his shipmates.”

  “Damn right,” Campbell said. “Skip, we need a new bosun.”

  “You’re it, Donovan,” the captain said with a wave. “Consider that longblaster yours to keep.”

  “Yes, sir!” the man said, grinning from ear to ear.

  Just then a sharp whistling cut the air, and Donovan’s head disappeared. A split second later, something slammed into the water beyond the boat as a rumbling boom echoed from the mountains of the jungle island.

  “Cannonfire!” Campbell cursed, rushing to the anchor and yanking the release lever. Instantly, the chain slipped free from its ratchet and snaked into the drink.

  Set loose, the boat began to move with the choppy waves, and two more cannonballs slammed hard into the ocean exactly where the craft had been only seconds ago.

  “They found us!” a navvy shouted in warning, firing his flintlock longblaster at the distant mountain-side bunkers. As if in response, a series of white smoke rings silently shot out from the trees on the mountainside, the twenty-pound lead balls arriving long before the sounds of the discharge could reach the sea.

  “Start the engines!” Mitchum commanded, brandishing his revolver. “Get us the fuck out of range!”

  “Too late!” the pilot cried as the cannonballs slammed into the water amid the peteys, a round crashing into a floating raft packed with slaves.

  Timbers and human arms flew skyward from the strike, the mortally wounded slaves shrieking for a few moments as they tried to swim away, but the heavy chains linked to their ankles dragged the helpless people down and out of sight. The bloody water bubbled madly from their submerged death screams.

  Even as the vessel sputtered into life, black smoke blowing from its short flue, Glassman bitterly lamented the terrible loss of human life. That was the last of the slaves. Now he had less than a dozen slaves to find the safe path through the rad craters. After that, he’d have to use his men. What a waste.

  The hidden mountain cannons blew more smoke, the balls whistling past th
e moving ships to hit only water. Then the first of the Firebirds launched from PT 181 with a muffled roar and a cloud of gray exhaust fumes. The rocket streaked toward the dense greenery, spiraling once in the air as the tiny pilots in the warheads had been taught by Kinnison to confuse enemy gunners, and then it angled sharply to the left and shot into the trees. Almost immediately there was a tremendous explosion, bodies and cannons carried skyward on a column of flame from the combined detonation of the Firebird and their ample store of black powder.

  On the sea, the navvies cheered as a second rocket was set off, this one heading deep into the valley only to be caught by an updraft and slammed directly into the granite bridge. In slow majesty, the arch began to break apart, cracks spreading along its length until pieces began to fall off. Then, in crashing thunder swallowed up by the distance, the bridge shattered and crumbled into the jungle, tiny geysers of muddy water forming as the mammoth stones plummeted into the shallow river.

  “That’ll put fear into their bones!” Glassman sneered in triumph. “Ready another Bird!”

  “Aye, sir!”

  “Incoming, nine o’clock!” a sailor shouted, pointing to their left.

  Jerking his head about, Campbell growled in anger and raced to operate the big .50 cal as three tall pirate ships crested into view from around the quay of the islands, a row of smoke rings appearing along their sides as the pirates cut loose a full broadside of their heavy ship cannons. The lead hit everywhere around the boats, but did no damage, the range simply too great for an accurate strike.

  But the sergeant knew that had been no warning shot. The pirates had tried for a fast ace and failed, that was all. Now the sailing ships raised every yard of canvas available to their masts and started charging forward at their best speed. Closing in for the chill. The windjammers were huge, more than ten times the size of the PT boats, and even at three to four, the odds were heavily in their favor.