Blood Harvest (v5)

by James Axler

  “The Sister Islanders are idiot children,” Raul scoffed.

  “They are not idiots, Raul. They are ignorant. Remember your Latin lessons. Ignorant, from the root ignoramus, which literally means ‘we do not know.’”

  “Yes, and we cannot have the sheep of Sister Isle realizing they are being sheared. They might take it badly when they find out that they do not come to our island and live in paradise but instead become your slaves, whores and unwilling blood donors.”

  “Despite everything that has transpired, I leave oil, wine, Blood of the Lotus and part of our catch by the cave mouths. It is the slaves who produce the Lotus on the hot plain that eases the pain of all of us. Their unceasing toil beneath the sun brings you these benefits. Their bodies produce the blood that eases our affliction, as well, and come fall of night, during your nocturnal raids, their bodies provide you with blood beyond that which I provide, as well as meat and brood mares. Is it true you no longer care for this arrangement?”

  “I deny nothing you say,” Raul rumbled. “What is it you propose?”

  “The outlanders cannot be allowed to foment rebellion in the ville, much less be allowed to return to Sister Isle and apprise them of their reality and turn them against us.”

  “It has been a long time since we have fought together.”

  “Many years,” the baron agreed.

  “I will require a token of your good faith.”

  The baron had suspected as much. He reached down beside the chair and took up an old brass bell. Dust billowed from it as he raised it and clanged it three times. The baron waited as he heard the cellar door open above. Wood-soled boots clacked on the stone steps. The baron’s two most faithful sec men, Breno and Nilton entered the catacombs. Other than Sylvano, they were the two largest men on the island. Breno raised his auto-blaster and pointed it at the darkness behind the bars. Nilton brought in a moaning woman wearing the homespun of Sister Isle with a hood of sackcloth over her head.

  “Ahhh.” Raul sighed happily.

  The woman heard the sound and screamed.

  The baron rose from his chair. The girl’s name was Pretinha. Like all the others, Father Joao had anointed her head with oil in the church and told her she had been chosen. Undoubtedly she had wept with happiness. Xavier Barat could well imagine her falling to her knees and raising her hands and voice in supplication to his portrait. There would had been a great celebration for the chosen, feasting, dancing, the rare treat of wine and the sacrament of the sweeter dreams the Lotus could offer. In the morning the chosen ones were gone. Those left behind thought they had crossed the waters to a golden life of wonder in God and Baron Xavier Barat’s bosom.

  What they came to was a life of slavery beneath the sun, nights of terror when Raul and his brethren could no longer contain their bloodlust and assaulted their quarters, and the twice a month “donation” of their blood. The men of the ville would use the women’s bodies, and though it was considered a dishonor, some women would be used to sire children in families where the women couldn’t produce heirs. The men were hobbled and gelded. The most they could expect if they lived long enough was life as a house servant in their old age. When they began to fail at that, their end would be a final culling of their blood.

  Pretinha was escaping that path.

  Now, as in the past, sometimes sacrifices had to be made.

  Pretinha wept and begged beneath her hood as Nilton tied her wrists and ankles wide apart, face-first across the bars. Barat could hear his brother’s breathing becoming ragged. Breno kept his auto-blaster leveled.

  Raul’s voice lost all semblance of humanity. “Remove her hood.”

  Pretinha howled at the situation she found herself in. She flung her head around and caught sight of Barat. “Baron! Oh, Baron!”

  Barat jerked his head at Breno and Nilton, and the two sec men went back up the stairs and closed the door behind them. Pretinha howled in despair as Barat sat down again behind the wall. “Baron, please!”

  Raul let loose a roar as the monster within him reasserted itself.

  Barat couldn’t bear to watch but he sat and listened to it all. It was a long time before the roaring and screaming stopped. The screaming finally devolved to mewling and moaning. The moaning soared to shrieks of inhuman torment as the sound of tearing of flesh and the snapping of bones joined the cacophony of the damned. For a long time there was nothing but the sound of feeding, and finally nothing but Raul’s ragged, sated breathing.

  Raul’s voice glowed. “Did you enjoy it, brother?”

  Barat spoke quietly. “Sometimes sacrifices are required, brother, and sometimes I need to remind myself of what you truly are.”

  “And these meetings of ours always serve to remind me, little brother, of the kind of baron you have become.”

  Barat’s knuckles purpled around the grips of his blasters. He restrained himself from coming around the wall and finally finishing it once and for all, but if he killed Raul he would have to come down and invade these catacombs and the cave system below them. He couldn’t justify such a sacrifice.

  And there were invaders upon the island.

  Barat spoke through clenched teeth. “Then we are allied?”

  “We are.” Raul’s voice betrayed his excitement at the prospect. “As in the past, once we are victorious I will require a culling from the slaves here and upon Sister Isle. Blood and fresh wombs for my brethren.”

  “You will contain your depredations?”

  “I will do my best. However, I suggest you keep the ville well guarded and those in the farm manors keep their doors barred and their bonfires banked high.”

  “Of course.”

  “You really believe they will come to the manse to rescue this Dr. Tanner?”

  The baron nodded. “I am sure of it.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “J.B., you’ve got to do something,” Krysty said. She sat against the wall opposite a duct with her blaster in her lap. Where it wasn’t smeared with blood, her face was nearly pale as Jak’s. There had been no rest for the past twelve hours. A gnawed-upon, dead stickie duct-popped like a cork almost every fifteen minutes. You could set your chron to it. Then the one behind had to be killed and the process started again. Several times they had punched out from both ducts in tandem and it had turned into a very close call. J.B.’s and Krysty’s arms looked like hamburger meat from wrestling with the stickies filthy, suckered hands as they went for the head shot. Despite Krysty’s best ministrations between battles, both felt the beginning heat of infection in their wounds. There was no water left to wash with. The environment wasn’t helping, either.

  Dead stickies were stacked like cordwood around the control room. Their guts and bowels were everywhere, and the floor was a stickie soup of congealed blood. The control room looked like an abattoir. With the stickies in the ducts air had stopped circulating and the heat, cesspit stench and fetid humidity was reaching toxic levels.

  “J.B.?” Krysty watched as the corpse in the duct began to uncork from the pressure behind. “Do something.”

  J.B. stood. “Keep watch.” He went over to his satchel and examined the contents yet again. Explosives would do them no good, and J.B. was saving them for when the stickies got in the control room, and he and Krysty made their last stand in the mat-trans chamber. He eyed his pyrotechnics. Tactically fire would only burn one stickie at a time and the siege would continue as before. J.B. smiled wearily as inspiration burned through the fugue of fatigue.

  Fire.

  J.B. was an inveterate friend of fire. Mildred openly accused him of being a degenerate pyromaniac. Wherever the truth lay, the fact was J.B. knew a few things about burning things, and in his experience, where there was fire, smoke was known to follow.

  Krysty read his expression. A flicker of hope kindled in her green eyes. “J.B.!”

  The Armorer picked up a canister of white phosphorus. It ran counter to his normal desire to send things sky-high, but what he required now was a nic
e ugly smolder. He set down the tin of powdered metal and began ripping apart the control-room chairs. He needed a nice tight seal to keep his plan from backfiring.

  The ancient plastic seats would do the job. J.B. set the seats down and shucked fresh shells into his shotgun. “Gotta make some room.” A dead, buckshot-raddled arm stuck forth from one of the ducts and the rest of stickie was slowly following. He nodded at the arm. “Yank it.”

  “What?”

  “Yank it!”

  Krysty heaved, and three-quarters of a dead stickie flopped forth. J.B. instantly took a knee and sent a blast of buckshot down the duct. “Grab that one! Before the one in back starts eating!”

  Krysty made a disgusted noise, but she reached in and grabbed a pair of rubbery wrists and pulled. She got it out past the hips, and then the stickie behind turned it into a tug of war. J.B. shoved his shotgun past the dead one’s legs and shot the one pulling from behind in the face. Krysty dragged her grisly prize the rest of the way out. More of the control room was covered with dead stickie than wasn’t. “So now we…?”

  “Work fast.” J.B. had a three stickie-length lead on the next one pushing through. He fired four more times and hoped some of the buckshot had smashed all the way back to the next one in line. He ran back to the pile around his satchel and brought a couple of canisters, a jar and a chair seat. He shoved the chair seat into Krysty’s hands and opened a jar of homemade adhesive he used for setting charges in place. He painted the plastic seat liberally with the flat of his knife. “Hold that.”

  J.B. crouched in front of the duct and made a thick pile of white phosphorus inside the duct. The shaft was covered with blood, goop and gore but not even water would smother phosphorus once it caught. He cracked open a shotgun shell and poured a puddle of gun powder on top of the phosphorus as an igniter.

  “You baking a cake?” Krysty inquired. A faint smile crossed the red-headed beauty’s face.

  The corner of J.B.’s mouth quirked. “Bakin’ stickies.” J.B. took out his flint and steel, then rasped the steel across the magnesium and shaved white-hot sparks into the pile of smokeless powder. He snatched his hands back as he was instantly rewarded by a hissing eruption of orange fire. “Now!”

  Krysty slammed the seat against the duct just as the orange burn flared white with the phosphorus ignition. J.B. leaned his weight into the seat and waited for the adhesive and melting plastic to make the seal. Krysty gave J.B. a wry look. “This butt pad won’t stop the stickies long.”

  “No.”

  “So?”

  “So smoke rises. Smoke expands.”

  “Stickies like fire and smoke,” Krysty chided. “Almost as much as they like Mildred.”

  “Stickies like fire and explosions,” J.B. corrected her. “Smoke rises. Smoke expands. That’s white phosphorus burning in the duct. The air in there is already bad. The smoke is going to fill it. Every move the stickies make, every shift, every squirm, that smoke is gonna seep, and the only way to go is backward. Figure the next ten stickies in line smother and die? It’ll be too much weight to push forward.”

  “And failing that it’s got to slow them down,” Krysty finished.

  “Mebbe,” J.B. agreed. “Still leaves the door, but it’s slower, and I’d rather fight on one front instead of three.”

  “J.B., you’re a genius.”

  J.B. nodded. Blasters, fires and explosions—his area of expertise. He took his hands away from the seat. Krysty followed suit and for the moment the seat stayed in place and no smoke seeped out. J.B. looked at his chron and ran his tongue across his cracked lips. The only way he was going to get a drink was to live long enough to see the mat-trans cycle. He glanced across the room as another mutant corpse started to extrude. “Let’s smoke some more stickies.”

  MILDRED STARED DOWN her sights. Despite the rain, the thick bough was a steady rest and the light spilling from the second-story room threw the sights of her target revolver into high relief. She felt as if she had been lying here for hours. She scanned the grounds and wondered for the thousandth time what the hell was taking Ryan so long. She had covered him until he had gone around back and he hadn’t shown up since. He was either still running his recon or he was in. If he had been discovered, she figured she would have heard the fireworks. Mildred shivered in the rain. Why didn’t he just start the bloodbath and give her a few clean shots so they could get the hell off this island? She knew the answer and looked at it as she returned her attention to the window. Doc just lay there in that goddamn feather bed snoring. Ryan hadn’t reached him yet. Mildred was intensely jealous of the quilts covering Doc and the glow of the fireplace. She was fairly certain he had been drugged, but then again it would be just like the old scarecrow to—

  “Good evening.”

  Mildred nearly dropped her blaster. It sounded like Darth Vader’s even bigger brother who had taken up opera had just whispered in her ear. She yipped, flopped, flailed and tried not to fall. Mildred scissored her legs around the bough and started to snap her blaster around. She froze as something tapped her lightly on the shoulder of her gun arm.

  The blade was half again as large as a human head. It looked like someone had pounded a square shovel flat and asymmetrical and then sharpened it on three sides. The blade was blackened and pitted with age. The sharp edges gleamed in the night like quicksilver. The impossible basso profundo voice seemed to read her mind. “It is called a flensing blade. In olden times they were known as head spades. Their primary use is in breaking down the carcasses of whales.”

  Mildred grimaced as the blade rested feather-light on her shoulder and inches from her face. She knew she would get “head spaded” before she could ever bring her target revolver to bear. She had come inches from being raped this night, she was soaked to the bone and now she was being intimidated by some extra out of Moby Dick. “That’s pretty fucked up,” she managed.

  The laugh that greeted this sent shivers down her spine. “Well, I cannot convince the blacksmith to make me a sword properly fitted to my requirements, and sad to say, my brother simply doesn’t trust me with firearms.”

  “That’s fucked up, too,” Mildred muttered.

  “Yes, speaking of which, I fear I must ask you to drop your weapon, as fine as it is. The sward below is lush and it should withstand it.”

  Mildred’s jaws flexed in fear and anger. It occurred to her that the only people who she’d ever heard use the word sward were Doc and her English Lit professor in college. The gigantic deblubbering blade prompted her with an ever-so-light tap. Mildred shivered as she let her most prized possession fall out into the darkness and rain. It made no sound when it hit and she couldn’t see it in the gloom.

  The giant blade withdrew from her shoulder. “You may turn about at your leisure.”

  Mildred considered her knife, but she wasn’t quite ready to try to throw down on a tree branch two stories up with some guy wielding a whale-filleting shovel. She pushed herself up to a sitting position and carefully turned.

  She nearly fell from the branch for the second time that night as she beheld the devil.

  Satan’s massive form squatted in the bole of the tree, naked other than his breechclout. His lion’s mane of blond hair hung lank and tangled around his shoulders from the rain. Incredibly pale blue eyes regarded her unblinkingly even as the rain rolled down into them. Meeting that gaze for one gut-wrenching second wrote the word sociopath in Mildred’s mind.

  She gaped at her opponent.

  Medically the satanic bulging brow, shelflike cheekbones and anvil jaw were clearly signs of acromegaly. However, in her medical experience, anyone whose excess production of human growth hormone had forced their bodies to this extreme of size was nearly crippled by it. This son of a bitch was huge and had sneaked up behind her thirty feet off the ground in a tree. There had to be some sort of abnormal steroidal hormone secretion balancing the damage that kind of gigantism caused as well as producing the grotesque muscular hypertrophy that allowed a body t
hat big to move. The chances of so many major mutations producing anything viable was astronomical, but once in a while the Deathlands knocked one right out of the ballpark.

  Mildred’s medical diagnosis went right out the window as the son of a bitch smiled at her from beneath his blond beard. He had the same receded gums as the other islanders, but Mildred had seen mules with smaller dentition. He looked like he could bite holes out of a beer keg. The flensing blade’s haft had been cut down to make it a one-handed weapon. It looked like a flyswatter in his horrific hands.

  Horns and a tail would have been frivolous excess.

  He also had a large, black suspicious-looking bruise on his shoulder and Mildred thought she had a good idea where he had gotten it.

  The giant eyed her with far too much familiarity for comfort. “Truly, a black person. My brother did not lie. What shall I call you?”

  “Dr. Wyeth will do just fine.” All the islanders were paper pale, but this man had milk-white skin that had never seen a single rad of solar radiation. The porcelain flawlessness was ruined by a train station’s worth of raised purple, keloid scars. “And you?”

  The horror made a mocking bow from his perch. “Raul Barat, at your service.”

  “The baron’s brother.”

  Raul’s amused pretense fell from his face like an avalanche and Mildred knew she had a made a mistake. The mutant’s voice went as a threatening rumble. “Xavier Barat is my brother. The barony is in dispute.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to get involved in family politics.”