Deathlands 118: Blood Red Tide

by James Axler

  I LIKE RYAN. RYAN IS A GOOD SHIPMATE. I THINK HE WILL MAKE A GOOD CAPTAIN SOMEDAY.

  —YOUR FRIEND, ONETONGUE

  Ryan smiled. “You’re learning fast.”

  Onetongue blushed. “Doc helped.”

  “Doc has a good student.”

  The blubbery mutant stared abashedly at his shoes. “Aw, jee’th.”

  Ryan held out his hand. “Proud to serve with you. Proud to call you my friend.”

  Onetongue looked like he might burst into flames as they shook. “You better go!”

  Ryan took care not to let his uniform touch anything and made his way to the captain’s cabin. Hardstone stood guard outside.

  “Mr. Ryan to see the captain!”

  “Thank you, Hardstone. Send him in.” Oracle’s voice sounded much stronger than it had for awhile.

  Captain Oracle sat at his table, though he sat with the chair reversed and a very loose and bloodstained nightshirt covered his back. Doc stood in full uniform by the sideboard. He noted a number of empty bottles on it. Doc shot Ryan a concerned look. Oracle hunched over the back of his chair, but he did not appear to be drunk.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Ryan. Doc, pour Mr. Ryan an aperitif.”

  Doc proceeded to pour Ryan a small, predark, cut-crystal glass of what seemed to smell and taste like jet fuel. Ryan sipped prudently.

  Oracle stared into his drink meditatively. “I was born the seventh son of a seventh son.” Ryan kept his face neutral. He had experienced all sorts of things in the Deathlands and beyond, but he was not a superstitious man. Oracle continued his disturbing habit of knowing what Ryan was thinking. “And I was born a mutie.”

  Ryan sipped and nodded. He knew he was here to listen.

  “Do you know what my name means?” the captain asked.

  “It means you’re a doomie.”

  “Yes.” Oracle rolled his black eyes bemusedly. “That is what you call my kind in your Deathlands.”

  Ryan had encountered doomies in the Deathlands. Their powers were generally unreliable, wildly open to interpretation, almost never foresaw anything good and almost always came at a terrible price to the doomie and anyone around them. “You see things in your dreams.”

  “In dreams, sometimes waking visions, and sometimes, if I try hard enough and I concentrate on an individual, an object or an event, I can summon it. Though forcing it might be a better word, and that comes at a steep price and a steep drop in reliability.”

  Ryan gazed at Oracle shrewdly. “You weren’t originally a sailor.”

  Oracle regarded Ryan blandly. “I was a bean farmer and during the season a catcher of turtles.”

  “And you told fortunes.”

  “I was famous for it. Those with the jack and a boat would come to ask their questions. It helped our ville’s economy immensely, and it was a price I was willing to pay.”

  “And then the Sabbaths.”

  “Emmanuel Sabbath arrived on my island at the helm of the War Pig. We had never seen such a ship. Unlike you, Captain Sabbath is a superstitious man and always kept an astrologer aboard. The one before me had the barest bit of doomie in him, but what he had he channeled through a Tarot deck.”

  “Fortune cards. I’ve heard of them.”

  “When Sabbath learned of me, he came to the house of my father and paid an incredible sum in trade goods to him to put me to the test. He was extremely pleased with the results. So pleased he slaughtered my family, shoved a blaster in my face and told me either I came with him or he would raze the entire ville. I went, of course, but with all intent to give Sabbath false predictions and run him onto the rocks or escape as soon as possible. I found myself chained and swiftly broken, or reduced, as Doc would say. Unfortunately, suffering seems to have a way of focusing my abilities. Sabbath noticed that, and the suffering became continuous. My only reprieve was when I wasn’t being forced to foresee Sabbath’s victories in piracy or trade I was made to work the ship. Despite flinching like a dog at my own shadow or any raised hand, I rated able.”

  “And?” Ryan asked.

  “One night after a successful raid, Sabbath was drunk. He asked me how he would die. I already knew, and I summoned the courage to tell him.”

  Ryan knew the answer. “You were going to kill him.”

  “I told him I had foreseen he would die by my hand.”

  Ryan stared at the huge mutie ape hand attached to Oracle’s wrist.

  “Sabbath tortured me in ways that would make even Manrape shudder. Then he cut off my hand so that it could never be raised against him, and he hung me from the yardarm at dawn. The same mutie vitality that allowed me to survive tortures that would destroy a norm allowed me to survive the hanging, or perhaps it was that I had not fulfilled my destiny yet. Regardless, and unknown to Sabbath, I was still alive when he cut the rope at sunset and dropped me into the sea.”

  “You washed ashore.”

  “On a barren spit of rock. There was no water, and almost no vegetation. I was racked with thirst and terribly injured and mutilated. I found a cave and within it a gleaming metal hatch. It was not locked. Stairs led down to a great vault with open, clamshell doors. I wandered through a series of predark corridors, but the complex was stripped bare. I finally came to a strange chamber of glass.”

  It took every ounce of Ryan’s will to keep his poker face.

  “I randomly worked a lever, and then an experience wilder than any of my most fevered dreams took place.” The flat black eyes stared at Ryan intently. “I wandered out and found myself on a much larger island, lush and green. I was in the Cific. The island was inhabited, and, even missing my hand, as an able sailor I had useful skills. I regained my strength and a measure of my dignity. A sea-going junk arrived to take on water and supplies. It was no floating castle like Sabbath’s Ironman, but it had a working pair of 20 mm autocannon and wasn’t to be taken likely. They were short-handed, and able seamen are hard to come by, so despite being short-handed myself, they took me on. I swiftly became an officer as they continued to the western coast of South America. We sailed north up the coast, trading and transporting for the coastal villes.”

  “You left ship when you hit the Central.”

  “I did.”

  “You foresaw their doom.”

  “Yes, and my path still lies in the Caribbean. They liked me, and I was well supplied and armed. I survived the trek east.”

  “What about Sabbath?”

  “He and his family were building their fleet. Since long before even Doc’s time, the hand of a hanged man has been known as the Hand of Glory. He put my hand in his binnacle as a good luck charm.”

  “It started pointing.”

  “Yes.”

  “You control it.”

  “No.”

  Ryan frowned. “Then what moves it?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps you should ask your woman.”

  Ryan’s skin crawled.

  “It led Sabbath to many victories, including taking the ship we sail upon. He named it the Hand of Doom. At that time, I had made it back to the Caribbean. Some of the islands have tried to maintain some sense of the old civilization. Others have sunk into utter barbarity. Most lie somewhere in between. A few pride themselves on being neutral ground where trade can be freely engaged in. Any breaking of the peace incurs the wrath of all others.”

  “Trading camps.” Ryan nodded. “Barter villes. Seen a few of the like in the Deathlands.

  “I set up shop telling fortunes and amassing jack and goods to buy myself a boat of some size and a crew.”

  “Sabbath found out.”

  “As a sign of his favor, Sabbath had given his first-born son, Osbourne, a year’s tour on the Hand of Doom before it was to be made the flagship of the Sabbath fleet. Osbourne sailed into port.” Sabbath raised his prosthesis. “He came into my fortune-teller’s hut and gave me this as an insult. Some sailors believe a monkey’s paw can grant three wishes. All sailors know a monkey’s paw is cursed. I bolted it to my wrist
and challenged him. We rowed out to spit of sand. I ripped his throat out.”

  “The Glory took you as captain?

  “The crew of the Hand of Doom had suffered gravely under Osbourne, and I was their salvation. I was also a living hanged man with his own Hand of Glory in his binnacle. Not to mention wearing the monkey’s paw that was crafted to curse him. That was more luck than most sailors knew what to do with. I killed my first two challengers, both of whom were Osbourne’s enforcers, and proved myself an able captain. We became the Hand of Glory.”

  “You knew my friends and I would be on that island where you set your trap.”

  “I had a dream that could be interpreted that way.”

  “So why did you?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “You saw we would save the ship, or something that could be interpreted that way.”

  “I won’t deny it.”

  “And now?”

  Oracle stared at Ryan with a new and terrible intensity. “I see the threads of fate surrounding you like no other man.”

  Ryan did not believe anything was written, but neither could he deny Oracle’s power. “So what do you see?”

  “It isn’t clear.”

  “It hardly ever is.”

  Oracle’s voice dropped. His black eyes seemed to look through Ryan like he was a lens into another world. “I see a fate where you and your friends die unsung and unknown in a place far from home, which may be these distant seas. I see another fate, where your names are revered in the Deathlands and your actions reverberate through the centuries, and I see a fate where you and your friends’ names are cursed and reviled and your actions bring untold death and destruction upon the Deathlands and the world around it that shall last for a thousand years.”

  Ryan met Oracle’s prophetic gaze. “There are a million possibilities for any man.”

  Oracle suddenly smiled and relaxed. “I agree, except that the son of Baron Titus Cawdor is no ordinary man.”

  “You can see that?”

  “Doc told me. Regardless, you have only three paths. I suggest you choose your actions wisely.”

  Ryan didn’t care for this talk at all. “And what’s your fate?”

  Oracle let out a long sigh. “I will die, like all men, and when that happens, if you still live, you must take the ship.” He took another sealed note out of his desk and pushed it across the table. “Open this when I am dead. If you open it before, you will die with me and the entire ship.”

  The captain suddenly raised his head. “Ah.”

  The roll of the ship ceased. The moaning in the riggings died off. The darkness outside the window turned to purple and then orange. Cheers sounded abovedeck. Oracle watched as golden light began to spill in through the cabin’s stern window gallery. “I knew the Horn would not kill us.”

  Ryan watched the miracle of dawn happen out the windows. “You saw that?”

  “No.” Oracle smiled disarmingly. “I just had faith in my crew.”

  Ryan found himself smiling. “So we made it.”

  Oracle contemplated the light as it played across the black skin of his remaining hand. “No, this will very likely kill us.”

  Ryan frowned.

  Oracle lifted his chin. “What do you notice, Officer Ryan?”

  Ryan lifted his chin. He felt a terrible sinking feeling in his guts. “The ship’s still. There’s no wind.”

  Doc spoke with grave worry. “These are the Doldrums?”

  “What is that?”

  “We are a sailing ship, and we are becalmed, Mr. Ryan, and shall be for some time, I fear.”

  “What do we do?”

  Oracle watched sea and sky turn metallic. “We shall have to row.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Ryan rowed. The Glory was dying. Scurvy was chilling the crew. The maté leaves had turned to powder of little effect. For whatever reason, perhaps being born in the Deathlands, Ryan’s people were holding up better than most, but the horror of the passage around Horn had been better than this. The air in this latitude was hazy, hot and humid and utterly still. It promised a storm whose winds never came. The ocean was a flat plane of copper glass beneath a greasy, shimmering brassy sun.

  Ryan felt the ache and exhaustion of malnutrition in his bones. Four wooden boats rowed to try to pull a square-rigged ship to fair winds. Aboard ship the remaining Mapuche heaved against the sweeps. The med was full of crewmen who’d failed. They had ample food and water, and ship and crew had borne the passage around the Horn remarkably well. The horrible fact remained that the Glory was a sailing ship, and now there was no wind. Every nonessential item had been thrown overboard to lighten the ship, but there was very little fat to cut in the first place. There was talk of throwing the cannons and shot overboard. Disease swept the decks. The sense of doom was palpable.

  “Aw Jee’th...” Onetongue dropped his oar and clutched his mouth. Everyone else groaned as the whaleboat lost momentum against the hideous weight of the ship behind them.

  Ryan could feel his own teeth loosening in his head. “Tongue, it’s all right. We’ll—”

  Onetongue gobbled forth about half a tot of blood. “I’m th’orry, Ryan! I’m th’o th’orry!” The mutant wept in agony. “But it hurt’th tho bad!”

  The crews in the dinghies shouted as the whaleboat stopped.

  Ryan fought his own pain and exhaustion. Onetongue was one of the strongest and least complaining crewmen the Glory could boast. This was bad. “Open your mouth.”

  “I’m th’orry, Ryan—”

  “Open your mouth!” Ryan ordered.

  Onetongue opened his mouth. Ryan flinched. Mildred had said that when the scurvy got bad old scars would break open. Onetongue’s name had once been Twotongue. The last captain, who could not be mentioned, had cut one of them out. The left side of Onetongue’s soft palate was an open wound where the scar tissue had broken open. “You need to get to the med now. Have Mildred disinfect that and stitch it.”

  Onetongue wept and shook his head at Ryan. “But you’re bleeding too!”

  Ryan ran a finger along the scar on his cheek. It came away bloody. “It’s an old wound. It’s nothing.”

  “No, Ryan!” Even now Onetongue was thinking about someone besides himself. “It’th coming out of your eye!”

  Ryan started. He raised a hand to his eye patch and lifted it up a hair. A thin rivulet of blood and fluid trickled against his hand. Ryan stared at it. He’d felt the discomfort but had chalked it up to the sting of sweat, exhaustion and illness. The scars in his closed, empty eye were breaking open.

  Manrape laid down his oar. His physique sagged like a suit of armor whose interior straps had all loosened. “We’re dying.” The titan’s chin fell to his chest and tears spilled out of his eyes.

  Wipe sobbed like it was the end of the world.

  Ryan knew it was. He could not begin to recall the odds he had fought and won in the Deathlands. But this was no baron and his army of sec men. This was no chem storm that could be sheltered from, no horde of muties that could be outfought. This was the open sea. Vast beyond imagining. Implacable. Without mercy. There was no recourse other than to hurl human flesh and will against it, and the flesh and will of the Glory’s crew failed before it.

  Ryan felt the heat and itch of the preinfection in his empty eye socket that would lead to his brain, as well as the avalanching breakdown of every cell in his body from the scurvy. He gazed up at the horrible brass-colored sun and the endless, metallic sea on all horizons. He was done. He couldn’t save the ship. He couldn’t save his people.

  He couldn’t save Krysty.

  It was not the first time Ryan had felt it, but it had been a very long time since despair had wrapped its terrible hands around his heart. Hardstone rocked and cradled his lame leg. It was swelling. Sweet Marie wept openly. Atlast held his head in his hands. Doc spoke with a strange calmness. “Dear Onetongue, exchange places with me.”

  Onetongue crawled to the tiller and moan
ed as Doc crawled over him to take his place at the bench. The crew stared at Doc as if he were insane. The old man cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, we are heroes. We are the first ship in living memory, since the breaking of the world, that has rounded the Horn in winter under sail. We are titans. Gods. Compared to us, Jason and his Argonauts punted upon the Thames on a summer idyll.”

  No one on the whaleboat knew what that meant. But every man knew what Doc was saying and knew he was right.

  Doc’s voice rose. “If we die this day, I have no shame. Serving upon the good ship Glory, with this crew, has been my greatest pride! I tell you now I have penned the tale of our odyssey in the ship’s log and sealed it. What we have done shall be known. The journey of the Glory shall be legend. We shall be legend! All good sailors shall speak of us—her crew—in awed whispers as immortals. This I swear!” Doc laid his torn hands to oar. “But in this time between, in this little time that remains to us with beating hearts and will, I pray, shipmates, row a little more.”

  Ryan took up the rum.

  They had no remedy for the scurvy, and Oracle had ordered straight liquor issued as a last, desperate painkiller. Ryan pulled up his eye patch and tilted the jug over his empty eye. “Fire...” The word “blast” never left his mouth. Ryan bellowed like a gored ox as 150 proof cane liquor scalded his eye socket.

  He shuddered, knowing it was a remedial solution at best. His hands shook as he put his eye patch down. His knuckles were white as he took a swig and grabbed his oar. “Row.”

  Onetongue took the jug and made one of the worst sounds Ryan had ever heard a grown man make as he swigged firewater into his wounded mouth, swirled it around and spit it out. The mutant took up his oar. The jug passed from hand to hand, and everyone took up their oars and rowed. They rowed with purpose with their eyes on the horizon. Doc had lit the fire. When they dropped it, would be because their bodies had broken, not their wills.