by James Axler
“As you say, Lady Elizabeth,” Barton said without looking up from his place at the table.
“He practically raised us, you know,” Elizabeth said to their guests. “He’s an old dear, really. If a bit of a fussbudget.”
She looked to her brother. “I believe you were rather circumspectly preparing to tell them about salvaging the cargo?”
“Yes,” Blackwood said. “Sorry. I tend to get distracted these days. After we tended your wounds as best we could and got you on boats headed for more settled surroundings, we waited for the winds to subside enough that we felt safe enough going inside the marooned vessel—the Snowy Egret, by the name painted on the bow?”
“That’s the name,” Ryan said, munching salad. He wasn’t big on rabbit food, but even after a big bowl of that turtle soup he felt as if he could start in on the stuffing of the chair backs for a second course. Briefly he wondered what had gotten Mildred’s back up about the fact the soup was made of turtles. She’d eaten worse things since they’d thawed her out. If not always knowingly at the time.
“Sadly, we found no surviving Tech-nomads aboard. But we did find a substantial portion of the cargo consigned for us, which I surmise was divided among the three vessels.”
He beamed at Elizabeth. “We don’t know for sure yet, but Amélie—Dr. Mercier—tells us that both the medications and paraphernalia aboard give us great hope in the constant war we wage against disease here in Haven. Including a possible cure for Elizabeth’s condition.”
She smiled back. “We have every faith in Amélie,” she said. “We grew up with her, just about. She knows what she’s doing.”
“Her father, Lucien Mercier, wasn’t always the easiest man to get along with,” Blackwood said. “Perhaps that’s why he and our father got on so well. But he taught his daughter well.”
“Have you any knowledge of the fate of the surviving Tech-nomads, Baron?” Doc asked, sopping up the last remnants of vinegar and oil dressing from his plate with a chunk of flavorful, tough-crusted white bread.
Blackwood shook his head. “Several appear to have escaped alive from the fight with the swampies. The storm was fierce enough not even our local denizens proved able to track them. The New Hope survived the storm, but was blown far east and south out into the Gulf.”
“They did?” Mildred said. “Glad to hear it. Will they come back and deliver the rest of the cargo?”
“Not to mention our payment,” J.B. said dryly.
“It’s not like we succeeded at protecting them,” Ryan said.
“You did what you could,” Blackwood said earnestly. “Before we lost touch with them, the Tech-nomads mentioned how bravely you fought against the giant sea cows.”
“I doubt we’ll see the Tech-nomads again for some time,” Elizabeth said sadly. “They tend to react to tragedy by withdrawing. Tech-nomads believe the mundane world, as they call it, is in league against them. And they suffered most cruelly from both the pirates and the hurricane.”
Her fine features had grown sad. It made her cheeks seem hollow and gave her pale skin a sort of parchment texture. Then she brightened again.
“At any rate we can hope the pirates suffered so much damage they won’t trouble us again for a great long time,” she said.
“I don’t think the Black Gang are as skittish as the Tech-nomads, Lady Elizabeth,” Barton said. “Black Mask isn’t.”
“The pirates have been another terrible burden on our people,” Blackwood said. “Any respite we can get from them will be most welcome. And that brings me back to the matter of your payment. The Tech-nomads are in no position to provide it, but we are. And we’re most grateful for what you were able to help bring us, aren’t we?”
“We are indeed,” Elizabeth said.
“We shall see you well rewarded. Haven may not be rich, but neither are we on the ragged edge. And, as I’ve said before, we hope you’ll consent to stay with us as long—”
“A moment, Baron, if you please?” the silken voice of St. Vincent interrupted.
“Yes?” Blackwood said, turning.
“I fear your security chief, Mr. Guerrero, has news for you.”
The majordomo faded from the doorway. A dark, burly, swag-bellied man with a beard straggling like Spanish moss down his several chins clumped in on heavy boots. He wore a 1911-style .45 blaster in a holster on his right hip, hammer back, secured with a thumb strap. This was at least a familiar type to Ryan: your basic ville sec boss.
In a way it was almost reassuring, after all this niceness and reasonableness from the ville’s ruling siblings, which for all that it worked much to his and his friends’ advantage struck Ryan as almost against nature. Guerrero’s straightforward thug appearance suggested the world was secure in its orbit, somehow.
“Sorry to bother you, Baron,” Guerrero said. His round face seemed to be sweating more than even the oppressive humid heat could account for. “It’s the Beast. It’s struck again.”
Chapter Fourteen
Great gaping holes had been smashed in the walls of the shack. Planks had been torn loose with such force that they snapped away, leaving jagged scars of ends, bright in comparison to the weather-faded wood. In the yellow light of the lantern the baron held in a white hand, the inside looked as if somebody had splashed buckets of blood around the cramped interior. Loops of intestines, greasy and marbled purple-gray, hung from sagging rafters like strings of sausages in the Devil’s butcher shop. Pale arms and legs, ruptured chests and half faces, eyes staring through blood masks in paroxysms of agony and terror, were strewed like chunks of broken meat furniture through the chaos.
The buzzing of flies almost drowned out the sounds of the creatures in the dark bayou night all around. The smell brought a curl to even Ryan’s lips. The gibbous moon leered down at the party like a pockmarked yellow idiot face through black treetops.
“Fairly fresh,” the Baron said grimly. The sleeves of his fine white shirt were rolled up his arms. His white hair was tied back with a black ribbon. He carried two swords strapped in scabbards across his back, the hilts protruding above his shoulders. His two Smith & Wesson revolvers were holstered butt-forward at angles in front of either hip, cross-draw style.
Jak sniffed, oblivious to foulness so strong it made Ryan’s cheeks tighten and his eye narrow. “Day old, mebbe.”
Mildred was frowning past the baron’s wide shoulder into the chamber of charnel horrors illuminated from without by the yellow light of several lanterns. “I think he’s right,” she said. “Blood’s congealed. And the bodies look rigored. Uh, parts.”
Her normally healthy light-brown complexion looked as if it had been dusted over with fine wood ash.
“How many?” the baron asked his sec boss. Out in the night a dog barked. Blackwood had experienced handlers with bloodhounds out following the Beast’s track.
Guerrero carried a Mossberg 500 Marine pump shotgun with an 8-round magazine in a big, hairy hand. He and Blackwood sported the only repeating smokeless-powder blasters Ryan had seen in the ville. The other dozen or so sec men and ville inhabitants who accompanied them carried black powder blasters or crossbows, if they had projectile weapons at all. Several carried no more than big knives or machetes. None Ryan had noticed failed to bear arms of some sort.
That said something about Haven. Most barons Ryan had encountered were careful to try to keep weapons out of the hands of their subjects. Other than their sec force, of course.
The sec boss shook his head. Sweat flew from the tips of his greasy long black locks. “No idea, Baron.”
“For cases like this,” Mildred said, “the EMTs used to joke they counted feet and divided by two.”
Blackwood raised a brow at her. “Who were these people to joke at such things?”
“Men and women who dealt with violent death every day,” Mildred said. “Sorry. it wasn’t a very appropriate thing to say. I’m trying to cover for my own uneasiness, I guess.”
“Five people lived in the shac
k,” a local with a gray-stubbled, uneven jaw said, scratching an open sore on the side of his skinny neck. “Old Bluie McCall, his wife Charice, two daughters and a granddaughter. Annabelle, her name was.”
“Mebbeso Luc and Ed Guillebeau was visitin’, and some of their kin,” Carbo, another local said.
“We count six heads, Baron,” a black sec man said, coming around the side of the shack.
“Including that one stuck up there on the stove chimney pipe?” J.B. asked, pointing with his scattergun.
The sec man looked up and visibly paled. “Um. Seven. Sorry, Baron. This is the worst attack yet.”
“So much for poor Bluie,” Carbo said. “Bon voyage, Bluie. You was a crusty-ass ol’ bastard and your feet stank like billy hell, but you deserved better’n you got.”
“Don’t worry about getting the count wrong.” The baron shook his head. “A man or woman who could remain unmoved by a spectacle such as this is not to be trusted, Augusto, my friend. Even in such a world as ours.”
“Something I don’t quite track, begging your pardon, Baron,” J.B. said, then paused. The Armorer, Ryan knew, feared no man nor mutie. But he was practical, which meant he exercised the same sort of caution handling barons as he would room-temperature nitroglycerine. For much the same reasons.
“You have it,” Blackwood said. “Please speak freely. Honeyed words and soft gloves won’t change this horror. Nor help us combat it.”
J.B. nodded. “Yeah, well. You mentioned at dinner how nothing much happens here in Haven without you hearing about it pronto. But that big, fine house of yours is only an hour from here.”
“Easily explained,” Barton said. “This house is isolated. Nearest neighbor’s a quarter-mile away. And they reported they were playing loud fiddle music and drinking shine all last night.”
The baron’s stout aide looked as if he’d have trouble mounting a flight of stairs without stopping to rest. But while his round, cheerful face—considerably less cheerful now—was sheened with sweat, so was everybody’s. He seemed not at all winded from hiking in darkness on treacherous trails of slick black mud, some little more than game tracks, clambering over deadfalls, struggling through low-hanging branches already dripping with dew, and hopping over tiny creeks with the rest. Somewhere along the way, Ryan realized he wasn’t as old as he looked: he was middle-aged, sure, but the white hair made him seem much older. The man wore knee-high boots and carried a pair of cap-and-ball dueling pistols stuck through his belt beneath his paunch. He also carried a stout stick that looked to be meant for busting heads as much as helping him walk.
“We only get reports if someone lives to tell the tale,” Guerrero said. “And the Beast don’t leave nobody alive when he hits.”
“I apologize if I gave you all a false impression at Blackwood House,” the baron said. “Yes, our ‘swamp telegraph’ extends throughout the ville, and even beyond the fringes of region we claim, in places. But its coverage is far from complete. Our people have lived here for generations, since skydark. But even to us this remains in many ways a land of mystery.”
“Ace in the line,” J.B. muttered to Ryan.
“What do you want,” Ryan asked in the same undertone, “egg in your brew?”
“A break every now and then would be nice,” the Armorer replied, “if only to break the monopoly.” He took off his glasses and rubbed off the condensation with a hankie.
With a soft boom something white unfurled above their heads. Most of the men ducked; some cursed. Crossbows and single-shot blasters were raised at the pale winged shape that swept over their heads with a soft, strange, mournful cry.
“Don’t shoot!” someone yelled. “It’s a demon! You’ll only make it angry!”
“Not demon,” Jak said in evident disgust. “Owl.”
“So it is,” Blackwood said.
But some of the ville folk muttered darkly among themselves. They seemed to be speaking a blend of French and English, with a liberal dose of Spanish stirred in. Ryan couldn’t understand more than every fourth or fifth word.
Jak sneered. “Triple stupes think owls spirits of dead. Just owls!”
J.B. scratched his stubbled cheeks. “I’m not a superstitious man, but dark woods and a bloody massacree like that got me in a mind to see ghosts.”
“As long as you don’t waste cartridges on ghosts,” Ryan said. “Or owls, either.”
The Armorer chuckled. “No worries, Ryan. You know me better.”
And he did. An expert using weapons as well as tinkering with and repairing them, J. B. Dix knew the value of a blaster cartridge as well as any man in the Deathlands and better than most.
Lights bobbed in the woods nearby. The baron’s retinue tensed and started to raise blasters and crossbows. Ryan’s little group grew closer by sheer reflex, although none made to draw a weapon.
“Don’t shoot, chers,” a voice called out. “It’s only us.”
The Havenites recognized the voice and relaxed. Ryan and company didn’t. They’d seen people gulled before by clever enemies pretending to be friends.
But it was only the dog handlers and a couple of sec man escorts, their bloodhounds’ eyes gleaming in the orange light, veined with black smoke from the resinous pinewood-splinter torches the trackers carried.
“Sorry, Baron,” they said. “Dogs lost the track.”
“Again,” Barton said in disgust.
Guerrero started to sputter, half apology, half outrage. “But mebbe the monster swims! We don’t know. No one can track it far. It’s like it vanishes into thin air.”
Blackwood held up a deceptively slim white hand. “Peace,” he said. “We know that.”
He hadn’t cut off the sec boss’s blubbering quite soon enough, Ryan judged, by the way eyes rolled in the light of torch and lantern.
“These people’re seriously spooked,” he said quietly.
Holding a turpentine-soaked rag in front of her nose, Mildred ventured into the shack with a kerosene lantern to examine the human wreckage. Not even Ryan envied her. She moved gingerly around, occasionally prodding at a detached organ or limb with a stick.
A few locals objected to that as disrespectful treatment of the dead. Guerrero barked at them to go stand guard somewhere else. They did. The swag-bellied sec boss might have seemed more clown than brute, but he still commanded respect. Or at least fear.
The Baron stood to one side, his long, handsome, lupine face drawn into a mask of pain. Barton stood beside him like a stanchion.
After a few minutes Mildred came out shaking her head.
“Sorry,” she said. “I can’t tell anything that might be of actual use. Like I told you, I’m not an expert on examining murder victims to see what killed them.”
“Please, Dr. Wyeth,” the baron urged. “Tell us what you can. Who knows what might prove valuable?”
Though she had to sit on an old stump near the door of the shack, Mildred cast a sly glance and a wisp of a grin Ryan’s way. “See how a gentleman talks to a lady, Ryan? You might learn a lesson or two.”
“If I ever decide to become a gentleman,” Ryan said, “I’ll keep it in mind.”
Shaking her head, Mildred looked at the tall and pallid baron. “Everything seems consistent with some kind of big animal doing the damage. Bodies are torn up as if by teeth and claws. Not sliced up cleanly the way a blade would do. The killer must’ve been fast, to incapacitate so many people. There’s even a longblaster of some kind in there with its stock all busted and the barrel bent almost double.”
“So it’s strong, too, you might say?” J.B. said.
She shrugged. “I found what I think might be the torso belonging to that head up there. By the look of the neck the head was just twisted off like a chicken’s.”
A gasp ran through the crowd.
“Could it’ve been a bear?” Ryan asked.
“You’d know better than I would. I’m not Marion freaking Perkins, either.”
“Who?” Ryan said.
; “Never mind. Sorry. I— This has got to me, all right? Even after all my years of training. And years of—this world.”
“Mort vivants coulda done it,” Jim-Jack said.
“Swampies aren’t generally the swiftest of muties,” J.B. said. The companions knew people in the southern swamps often called the short muties by that name. It was French for the living dead.
“The Beast is a pale creature,” an oldie’s cracked voice said, quavering from the darkness. “Not much bigger’n a man. With a mane of dark hair, like a lion from a picture book. And eyes that shine back light like a animal’s.”
That roused Doc from the meditative funk he’d been in since arriving at the shack. “Have you seen the creature yourself, then, my good man?”
“Not I. But I heard tell.”
“I thought you said the Beast left no witnesses alive,” Ryan said sourly to Guerrero.
The sec man glowered and jutted his fleshy underlip in an almost comical pout. “It leaves none of its intended victims alive,” the baron said, “as far as we have learned. Others, though, claim to have glimpsed it hunting by night.”
“Only time he comes out to hunt,” Guerrero said.
Ryan scratched the top of his head. It felt like a swamp up there. He was used to killer heat or so he thought. But the humidity here in this swamp was like living under water.
“Does anyone believe we have any more to learn here?” the baron asked the group in general.
“What about tracks, Jak?” Mildred asked.
The albino youth shook his head. “Not see.”
“And the dogs came up dry,” Ryan said. “So, no, Baron. Not as far as we can see.”
“Anyone?” the baron asked. No one else spoke. Guerrero only shook his head. His eyes glistened as if he were near to tears. Ryan guessed he was in a fright about letting his baron down once again. Blackwood seemed forbearing for a baron—what another baron would likely call ridiculously soft. But even the kindest baron had his limits.
