by James Axler
“Mebbe they use the bayous as a pathway,” Rameau said, “just like us.”
“Ugly nuke-sucker,” Jak said, craning his head to peer over the side.
“It is swimming toward you,” Doc said to the others.
Despite himself Ryan stirred himself to look over as the fish passed the lead craft. It was about two feet long, flat, with a snout like a skinny arrowhead. He had to agree with Jak’s assessment.
“Were you a big angler, Doc?” Mildred asked.
“Remember, dear lady, ichthyology was a specialty of mine.”
“A fish doctor,” J.B. said. “No wonder the man’s so crazy.”
“You people all crazy,” Terance drawled.
Cody uttered a yip of surprised pain and slapped a hand to the left side of his neck. He sat on the portside of the middle boat while his counterpart Cole stood in the stern and pushed with his stripped-sapling pole.
“Ouch,” he said. “Something—”
Looking back Ryan just glimpsed a tiny sliver of wood sticking out between the boy’s fingers. It appeared to be tipped with a tuft of whitish fiber, like cotton.
Like a rag doll, Cody slipped over the gunwale and fell into the water.
“Poison dart!” Ryan yelled. He drew his SIG-Sauer and covered the brushy left bank.
“Cody!” Cole yelled.
Dropping the pole, he turned to dive in after his friend. Moving with a speed that belied her sturdy build, Mildred lunged and grabbed Cole by the back of the waistband of his shapeless dungarees and yanked him bodily back into the boat, which wallowed with big gurgling surges of greenish-brown water.
“Let me go!” he shrieked, flailing wildly with arms and legs. Mildred caught him in a bear hug and held him tight, with her cheek pressed against his bare sun-browned back to keep her face from harm’s way.
“Let me go! Mutie rad-suckers! You chilled him! Come fight me! I’ll chill you all!”
As J.B. and Doc went belly-down in the boat, pointing their blasters across the gunwale at the left bank, Terance leaned out, reaching with his setting pole. He managed to snag Cody, floating facedown with arms spread wide, with the tip inside one leg, and wheel him back against the boat. Then, hunkering to make himself a less perfect target, the rangy red-haired frontiersman reached out to haul the boy in.
Cody’s head lolled limply on his neck when his head and shoulders were pulled up out of the water. His tongue protruded from his mouth. His eyes had rolled so far up in his head only the whites were visible.
Terance tested the pulse in his neck with a finger, then flicked a fingernail against one wide-open eyeball.
“Chilled,” he said.
“Poisoned dart indeed,” Doc said, turning his head to examine the boy. His big knobby hands kept his LeMat leveled toward the bushes where the projectile had come from. “Perhaps by a venom derived from some local variant of curare.”
“I don’t think anything like curare grows along the Gulf Coast, or anywhere in the U.S.,” Mildred said.
“Much has changed in the last century, would you not say?”
“Keep us moving!” Rameau cried. He had a single-shot caplock pistol in his hand that was half as long as his arm. Though its lock plate was less ornately engraved than the ones Barton carried, Ryan noticed, it was a solid, serviceable-looking piece that had clearly been made by a Deathlands blastersmith.
Terance wrestled the limp body the rest of the way aboard, grabbing an arm and pushing himself starboard with his legs to counterbalance the weight and keep the narrow pirogue from flipping over. Keeping low, Doc slithered forward to examine the boy. Terance got to his knees and began pushing the boat along again with the pole, this time with only the strength of his arms and back.
Doc grunted sorrowfully and shook his head. “The boy is dead indeed,” he called. “The poison acts with remarkable swiftness.”
Cole’s furious struggles subsided. He melted into Mildred’s embrace and began to sob heartbrokenly.
Ryan lay on his belly on one of the lead pirogue’s crosswise benches. The sun-warmed plank seemed to scorch his skin through his shirt. He had his 9 mm blaster shoved all the way out in both hands. The far bank was a dozen feet away. At this range his sniper rifle would be more an encumbrance than a useful weapon.
But he saw no motion at all in the brush.
Beside him Rameau grunted. “Triple stupe am I! I should have seen.”
“What?” Ryan asked.
“Note—no little birds, hopping about inside the bushes there. They fled when the ambusher crept forward and haven’t yet returned.”
Ryan looked at Jak, who crouched beside him with his Python in hand. Jak’s face twisted in disgust.
“Had eyes skinned right,” he confessed. “Sorry.” Apologies were even rarer from Jak than complete sentences.
“I can’t blame you,” Ryan said. “A man can’t look all ways at once. Only a mutie got eyes in the back of his head.”
“Speaking of muties,” Rameau said, “see why we hate them, the swampies? They strike like cowards, and flee.”
“Long gone now,” Bluebottle agreed. He had a flintlock longblaster aimed toward the scrub despite his words.
“With all respect, Rameau,” Ryan said, “if you were my enemy and came armed into my land, I’d chill you any way I could.”
“We’re still in Haven,” Bluebottle said.
Ryan shrugged. “That wouldn’t stop me, either, if I thought you were coming to visit with bad intent.”
Rameau sighed. “Ah, my friend. You suspect these beasts’ breasts harbor human hearts, their misshapen heads human thoughts. I fear you will learn differently, and all too soon. I only hope you survive the lesson.”
“We’ve had a lot of hard lessons,” Mildred called from the next boat. “Including from other types of swampies.”
Left without propulsion or steering, the pirogue had begun to drift backward with the current, which fortunately was anything but swift. Terance had steered the pointed prow of his own boat up to contact the other’s hull, and now expertly if laboriously drove both craft up the stream.
“We survived them all so far,” Mildred finished.
“Cole,” Rameau called, “snap out of it. You must get back to your duty, eh?”
The youth glared at him rebelliously.
“We all mourn your friend Cody,” Rameau said. “But you’ll find no vengeance here. Only death. Now you must man up and pole your boat.”
“Mebbe the ambusher moved on, mebbe he didn’t,” Ryan said. “We don’t want to hang out in the chill zone long enough for him to fetch a bunch more of his buddies with blowguns, do we?”
“I’m going to let you go,” Mildred told Cole. “If you make a wrong move, boy, I’ll fetch you one upside the head so hard you’ll feel it yesterday. Do you understand me?”
“I’m fine,” he said sullenly.
She released him and sat back, watching him like a chicken on an anthill.
Ryan saw him measure his chances at a leap in the water, then Cole glanced over his shoulder at Mildred’s face. What he saw in her dark eyes made him turn back, recover the pole, which fortunately he’d dropped athwart the boat instead of overboard, and get cautiously back to his feet to resume his duties.
“Good boy,” Rameau called. Then, quietly he said to Ryan, “He’ll be trouble later. He and Cody grew up like this.” He held up two dark fingers pressed hard together.
“Man’s got to learn how to bury his dead,” Ryan said back, as softly, “and then walk on.”
Then the full implication of what he’d said struck him like a giant icicle through the belly.
But Krysty wasn’t chilled yet, he reminded himself fiercely. He had to hold tight to that.
THE SHADOWS GREW long over the swamp. The flying insects came out in redoubled force. Barn swallows with gorgeous blue-black backs, the males with scarlet throats and golden breasts, came out to eat them, barnstorming crazily up the bayou, inches over the water, then pull
ing up and wheeling around for another run. Like fighter planes in an old war vid, Ryan thought.
The big birds were commencing to flap overhead in ranks, back to their nests. Rameau had his crew looking for a likely campsite for the night. The need to be moving on, to get at last to the long-awaited cure for Krysty’s mysterious condition, burned ever more fiercely in Ryan’s belly. But he knew, practically, that if his guides were unwilling to push on after dark, it would be certain death for him and his friends to do so.
“Eyes skinned!” Jak called. “Gator!”
“Merde!” exclaimed Bluebottle, who was poling the lead craft. “He is some gator, that.”
And so he was. It was making straight toward the pirogue from a place where the land widened out into waist-high weeds on both sides, around what looked like a broad pool. The creature looked like a giant spear moving through the water, with a huge knobbly head with bulbous eyes.
Ryan picked up his Steyr, worked the action enough to confirm the gleam of a cartridge in the receiver, slammed it home and locked it up. The alligator was a monster, a good fourteen feet long. If he had to chill the thing, 9 mm slugs were likely to bounce off his armored hide, especially that flat skull.
The behemoth never so much as glanced their way. He cruised on past downstream, driving himself hard with side-to-side strokes of his mighty tail. His wake was so strong it rocked the pirogues.
“He runs like he has Job on his tail,” Bluebottle said reverently.
“Job?” Doc called from the rearmost craft. The gator passed it without slowing. “Why would a gigantic armored saurian fear an Old Testament prophet?”
Rameau snorted laughter. “No prophet, this Job,” he said. “That’s Cajun French talk for the Devil.”
Bluebottle continued poling them into the pool. It was big, fifty yards wide by about eighty long. The surface was placid. In the gathering gloom of evening it looked as serene and unthreatening as a scene could look, even with the bugs griping at every exposed inch of skin.
“Bottom dropping fast,” Bluebottle muttered. He laid the pole carefully along the boat’s long axis, then sat in the stern and picked up a pair of paddles. “Too deep to pole.”
Shifting carefully to midships, he socketed the paddles into eyes set in either side of the boat and began to scull it across the pond. In the trailing craft Cole did likewise. Still in shallower water Terance continued to stand and shove with his pole.
The lead watercraft had picked up speed. They were already well out, almost to the middle of the pool.
“What that?” Jak said, pointing left.
About thirty feet to port and abeam of the boat Mildred shared with Cole, the water had begun to bubble and froth furiously, as if it were coming quickly to a boil.
From the midst of the roiling water arose dark humped mass. Before the water weeds and murky water had sluiced away enough for Ryan to catch any notion what it might be, something startlingly long whipped up and out of the water in a horizontal line of spray.
Somebody shrieked shrilly in intolerable agony.
“Gotch Eye!” Bluebottle shouted, voice vibrating fear. “It’s Gotch Eye! High John de Conquer, save us!”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Instinctively, Ryan turned toward the sound of the screaming, which went on and on like a line unreeling. He saw Terance standing in the stern of the last boat. His head was back, his mouth wide open, venting that wrenching sound at ultimate volume. Something resembling a tree root as thick as his arm, was wound about his waist. He had dropped his pole to clutch at it with both hands. Lesser tendrils, no thicker than a rubber hose, waved from the rootlike tentacle. They seemed to branch into even smaller filaments.
It wasn’t fear that made Terance scream like that. The guide was a hard man. If he hadn’t mastered his fears long since, he would have either died or gone into some more placid line of work than waging an endless war of treachery and ambush with a merciless foe like the swampies. It was the sound of a man in all-consuming agony.
Ryan saw a red line along Terance’s contorted cheek that practically glowed. As he watched, a skinny tendril whipped one of the guide’s bare forearms. It left a crimson weal on the leathery skin.
Another tentacle lashed out of the water toward the center boat. “Get down!” Ryan yelled. “Don’t let it touch you!”
A third tentacle erupted right beside his own boat. As it reared higher than he stood, Ryan whipped out his panga by sheer reflex. The tentacle lashed toward him.
He struck. The heavy, sharp blade bit through the tentacle and severed it without hitting bone. Six feet of the tip, writhing like an eel, flew over the boat to splash into the water on the starboard side.
The tiniest little hair of a tendril brushed Ryan’s left cheek. The pain hit him like a sledgehammer to the face. Blue-white lightning shot through his skull, and he dropped straight into the bilge as if poleaxed.
He heard shouts join the screams. By a wrench of sheer willpower he forced himself back up on his arms in time to see Terance yanked bodily out of the flatboat and through the air by the slimy green-brown mottled tentacle. He soared a brief arc and was pulled beneath the water with a giant splash.
Ryan saw the creature clearly now. Where the boiling had taken place as the thing surfaced now floated a patch of bubbles about the size of the boat, ranging in size from tiny froth to pearlescent globes the size of his head. A mass of something that looked like seaweed, but with an unpleasant greenish-black sheen, floated in a wide circle.
From the midst of the vileness rose a single eyeball the size of a predark soccer ball. Horrifyingly, it resembled an immense, detached human eye, white with red veins, a murky iris of brown and green and a great staring black pupil.
The pirogue rocked side to side in a tumult of splashing. The left side of Ryan’s face convulsed irregularly. The pain remained intense, but it was no longer overpowering, something Ryan could handle.
He fumbled out his SIG-Sauer, tried to sight through the spasms. He got the terrible giant eye lined up like a pumpkin resting on the front-sight post. But as he squeezed off three quick shots, another wave threatened to swamp the boat, causing it to heel over. The shots went high.
“It is trying to upset our boats!” he heard Doc shout from the third boat.
A tentacle lashed at Ryan’s craft, and he rolled to the side. He couldn’t see what Bluebottle or Jak did to dodge, but because neither screamed in pain he reckoned they got clear. Or were hit so badly the corrosive poison had stunned them.
“Don’t let it touch you!” he roared. “Not even the tiny hairs!”
The tentacle whipped back as if it had touched something hot. The end was missing, leaving a stub that gouted greenish-black ichor. Bluebottle crowed in triumph. Ryan remembered he carried a tomahawk with a forged-steel head, which he called his casse-tête, or head breaker. He’d probably chopped through the tentacle with it.
Ryan rolled back onto his belly. As he tried again to line up a shot from a platform rolling wildly on waves thrown up by Gotch Eye’s thrashing, a human form erupted from the midst of the dark patch.
It was the head and shoulders of Terance. He was barely recognizable. The blue-black seaweed-like stuff draped him like a blanket. Steam and a sizzling sound rose where the wet leaflike clusters clung to his features, which seemed to be melting in front of Ryan’s eye. Lips like a melting wax mouth spread apart to emit a scream that made the man’s earlier shrieks sound like cries of joy.
Blasters bellowed. J.B.’s shotgun roared three times in quick succession. The left side of Terance’s melting head blew off in a spray of brain and blood and chunks of “seaweed.” The screaming stopped. The guide sank back into the churning mat as if dissolving.
This time as Ryan lined up his shot, a tentacle whipped at him again. He only just caught the quick movement from the corner of his eye, yanked his hand back in the boat and ducked his face behind the gunwale just in time. The tentacle slammed against the plank hull. None of the
terrible tendrils touched his skin.
“The bastard mutie knows what a blaster is!” he yelled.
With a sick shock he realized that not only was the monster trying to upset the boats and pitch more occupants into the water for the seaweed-stuff to digest alive, it was also trying to spoil their aim.
He tried popping up and snap-firing. He got off two shots to no visible effect, then dropped back down as a tentacle slashed the air above his head. Thing was bastard fast, too.
How do we beat the nuke-sucker? he wondered.
He heard the muffled booms of feet move inside the boat. The pirogue rocked to something other than surging water and bashing appendages. Ryan looked around to see Jak stand upright, his legs braced wide. His white hair flew as he reared back an arm, then it whipped forward. No sooner had it reached the end of its motion and a glittering knife spun end-over-end from his snow-white hand, than he plucked another from his other hand and cocked the arm back to throw once more.
Ryan looked back at Gotch Eye in time to see a splash of murky water right next to the giant orb that named it. Then the knife struck the lower left-hand side of the monster eyeball. It hit wrong and glanced off, vanishing among the mounded bubbles.
Jak’s third throwing knife pierced straight into the middle of the great staring pupil.
A weird whistling filled the air, ten times as loud as the sounds Terance made when he was being melted alive by the creature’s acid. The tentacles beat with mindless fury, spewing water fifteen feet in the air. The great eye, oozing clear green fluid from the knife wound, drew hastily beneath the surface with an immense sucking sound. The seaweed mass seemed to be sucked toward the center and down with it.
The odd cluster of bubbles took longer to retract. Ryan heard the stubby shotgun barrel beneath the main barrel of Doc’s huge LeMat handblaster roar. A foot-wide cluster of bubbles exploded. The stench they released threatened to yank Ryan’s stomach inside out.
