“She has to live on her own.” D’s words had an edge like the wind.
After a bit of hemming and hawing, Dr. Tsurugi nodded. “You’re right. That’s what life on the Frontier is all about. But what’ll we do?”
A sharp impact shook the ground they stood on. The enemy ship had finally pulled alongside the town.
D produced a memo pad from one of his coat’s inner pockets. It was the same pad that’d been left out for Lori at the hospital. Eyes wide with astonishment, the physician wondered why he’d been carrying it around. Putting the tip of his forefinger in his mouth and nicking it open, D drew it across the memo pad. Fight or die, he wrote. We want you with us.
Us. That meant the three of them were going to fight together. Lori nodded fervently.
“But, what’ll you have her do? She’s an injured girl.”
“Go to the weapons bunker and get us some arms. She’ll carry the ammo and be in charge of reloading.”
“Okay.”
The two of them dashed away. D looked back at the blocks of buildings. As his companions’ footsteps faded out, more rough footfalls arose to take their place. It was the mayor, the sheriff, and some of his men—four men in all. And the physician had said he didn’t know if they’d be of any use . . .
There was another impact against their protective walls. From the deck of the pirate ship, several steel sheets extended toward the town. Hooks sank noisily into the top of the town’s walls, and the sheriff and his companions unconsciously backed away. Every face was taut with fear. These men lived in a closed society where everyone understood just how tough they were supposed to be, but now that they faced invaders who wouldn’t know the reputations they’d long relied on, they were reduced to cowards.
D’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. He waited, but what he waited for never appeared. Silence. . . Nothing happened. While the planks had been laid for plundering, not a single blood-crazed outlaw appeared.
“What the hell is this, then?” one of the lawmen said, sounding rather relieved. “Are they just fucking with us or what? Not one of them has shown himself.”
“They’ll come out any second,” another one said, his voice on the verge of tears. “And when they do, they’ll rip us to shreds with some god-awful weapons. Damn it! God damn it all! Why do we gotta go up against these damn freaks?!”
The sheriff roared, “Knock it off! You’re turning my belly. We’re here now, so there’s no use bitching about it. We ain’t letting a single one of them marauding motherhumpers into town.”
Compared to his compatriots, Hutton was certainly brave. In the wake of that outburst, his cowardly deputies readied their shotguns again. And yet, still—nothing happened.
The mayor looked at D suspiciously. “Somehow, I don’t think they’re toying with us . . . ”
No reply came from the Hunter, but his black coat zipped past the men’s noses. D stood on the gangway bridging the two vessels. Black hair streaming in the wind, coat fluttering, he trained his gelid stare on the deck of the enemy ship. Suddenly, he advanced without making a sound.
The men looked at each other. They must’ve realized protecting the town was an unavoidable part of their duty, but the mayor stayed where he was, led by the sheriff, while the others struggled up the wall and began to cross the same gangway. Just as they finished crossing the ten-foot-long plank, two things made the men grow pale—a strange aura and a stench. The aura could only mean death. And the stench was that of death as well.
Just moments earlier this ominous vessel had them fearing for their very lives, but now the unsettling silence did even more to start these rough men shaking. There was no sign of D. The men hopped down onto the street. Right in front of them lay the residential sector. The layout itself wasn’t all that different from their own town.
“Pete, you and Yan find the control room. I’m gonna check out this area.”
“But, Sheriff—this place gives me the creeps . . . ”
“You damn fool! The way things are going, there’s probably nobody on this tub. Maybe they took to killing each other, or some kinda epidemic broke out, but for all we know everyone could be dead. Now think for a second what that’d mean.”
Pete’s face, sullen until now, suddenly shone. “Oh, I get you! This here was a marauder ship. Meaning there’s probably a load of treasure here.”
“Damn straight! We’ll tell the ol’ mayor the town could use some of their energy surplus or their navigational computer or something, but the most precious cargo we’ll keep for ourselves.”
“Damn, you’re a shrewd one. No wonder you’re sheriff. But what’ll we do about the Hunter that went on ahead of us?”
“That’s pretty obvious. Kill ’im,” said the other man, Yan, but he didn’t know what D was capable of. While he knew about how D had killed the two deputies, not having seen it with his own eyes meant he found the account impossible to believe. “Lucky for us, the bastard’s all caught up in searching the ship. It’s a perfect chance to blindside him. What the hell—we can always say some automated defenses got him.”
“That’s real good thinking,” the sheriff responded, but his words sounded hollow. He knew, as only someone who’d had the tip of D’s blade pressed against their throat could, what a dhampir was capable of. “But don’t lay a hand on him, you follow me? We’ll just take whatever we want. I know how tough he is. You lump him in with normal Hunters, and you’ll be in for a world of hurt.”
“Yeah, but—” Yan began.
“We’ll come up with some way to get rid of him later. You savvy? No matter what happens, you don’t lay a hand on him,” the sheriff said sternly, adjusting his grip on the rocket launcher.
Parting company with Pete and Yan, the sheriff walked into the residential sector. Unconsciously, he sought a sound or anything else that would show some sign of life. Anything would do. Some hint of murderous intent rising from malicious thugs in hiding. The snarls of vicious beasts just waiting to cross the gangways with their masters and sink their fangs into the windpipes of helpless victims. The sound of a safety being disengaged on an automatic crossbow. Anything at all . . .
But there was nothing except the . . . howling of the wind. There was no sign of anyone on the roads, where the artificial sand had blown away, leaving the underlying dirt exposed. There were just lines of dead trees down either side of the street, their branches rattling dryly. Dust catching in his throat, the sheriff pressed a handkerchief to his mouth. His cough created an unsettling echo in the otherwise still air. The sheriff shuddered.
The sky was blue. His own shadow stretched long and wide across the ground. And yet, the giant was nearly paralyzed with fear. Here was a town. It had buildings. It shot missiles. It pulled alongside them, then laid gangways for boarding. And yet, there wasn’t a single crewman. How terrifying was that?
As Hutton was about to set off to look for the home of the local mayor—or, rather, the commander of this pirate ship—the tip of his boot struck something hard. When his eyes casually dropped to the ground, they ended up bulging from their sockets. It was a single bare bone. Most likely it’d been there for quite some time, as it was dried out and had a thin brown patina to it. It was clearly a femur. Seeing the severed end of it, the sheriff’s eyes went wider still. It was burnt. There were signs of carbonization. As he rubbed it with his finger, some of it fell away as powder. This hadn’t been charred little by little at a low temperature, as would happen in a fire. It’d been exposed to a blast of ultrahigh heat. Probably a laser.
For the first time, the sheriff noticed the white things hap-hazardly scattered about the place. There was a skull. And a rib cage. And another denuded skull resting on a pile of rags. As his eyes squarely met the skull’s empty sockets, cold sweat started soaking his broad back. Stirring his mind to keep it from freezing solid with fear, the sheriff headed over to a shack that appeared to be a bar and the intact skeleton lying in front of it. The steel arrow jutting from its forehead was a vivid test
ament to the tragedy that’d unfolded here. One of the skeleton’s arms was outstretched, and tight in its bony grip was a gleaming black automatic handgun of vintage design. Prying the weapon from its fingers, he examined it. All the ammo had been expended—most likely the result of a long, deadly conflict. But what in the world could’ve caused the roughneck crew of a pirate ship to start killing each other?
Sensing something behind him, the sheriff turned his gigantic form with lightning speed. Standing stock-still in the face of the seven barrels of his missile launcher were Dr. Tsurugi and Lori. “Oh, it’s just you two . . . ” he sighed. Wiping the sweat from his brow, the sheriff lowered his weapon.
“What in blazes is going on with this ship? What happened here?” Even the voice of the hot-blooded physician trembled a bit.
Looking around at their ominous surroundings and the remains at their feet, Lori seemed anxious, too. However, unlike the physician or the sheriff, she was completely detached from the whole world of sound, and this actually served to mitigate the terror for her to some degree. She and Dr. Tsurugi each carried a shotgun.
“Just what you see. Looks to me like they just went off on a goddamn killing spree. From the shape of these bones, I’d wager it was quite some time ago. And it looks to me like not one of them made it out alive.”
“Well, they launched missiles at us. And put down gangways. Is that the sort of thing a crewless ship does automatically? For starters, we don’t even know why they fired the missiles. They might’ve been small scale, but they were still nukes. If they’d scored a hit, they’d have most likely knocked the town out of the sky with one shot.”
“So, failing to shoot us down, they decided to close with us,” the sheriff spat. He looked at the skeletal faces, and, an instant after relief swept over him, the urge to plunder filled his head. The presence of the doctor and Lori quickly became a hindrance to his plan. They’ll get theirs, too, the lawman thought, a kind of madness suddenly at work in his mind. The barrel of the rocket launcher rose smoothly.
And that was when it happened. Screams echoed off in the distance. Two of them—Yan’s and Pete’s. Exchanging glances, the physician and sheriff started running as fast as they could toward the sound. The sheriff halted in front of the control center, where the iron door had fallen into the room. There was a blue tinge to the air, and the foul smell of burnt flesh hit his nose. Smoke was creeping out through the doorway. Someone was in there. Don’t tell me they went after D, he thought.
Apparently realizing his duty as a lawman, the sheriff told Dr. Tsurugi, “You two stay right here.” And then he slipped through the doorway alone. It didn’t take long at all. At some point someone or something had utterly destroyed the control room, and on the floor lay a pair of charred corpses, one on top of the other. He didn’t even have to look at them to know they were Pete and Yan’s remains. An optical weapon with less output than a laser had burnt them to a crisp. Most likely it was a heat ray.
Shifting the rocket launcher to his left hand, the sheriff drew a huge explosive-firing handgun with his right. While its design closely resembled that of an old-fashioned revolver, it could hold thirty-six shots. The exploding rounds were powerful enough to drop a lesser dragon with one shot, or dispatch a medium-sized fire dragon with half a dozen. He couldn’t very well start blasting away with his missiles indoors. Suddenly, a metallic sound reverberated from a pitch-black corner of the room. Looking over his shoulder, the instant Sheriff Hutton’s eyes caught a semicircular shape, his handgun roared.
The deafening report of a weapon made Dr. Tsurugi tense up. Beyond the doorway, a red glow swelled momentarily, and an incredible shriek rang out. Lori clung to Dr. Tsurugi’s arm, trembling. Though he’d told her to wait, the girl was determined to go with him. Apparently she could gather from the red light and Dr. Tsurugi’s tension that something had happened. Slowly mouthing the words, “Wait here,” Dr. Tsurugi pulled his arm free from her grasp.
Lori didn’t disobey him. In her travels with her parents, she’d learned far too well what resulted when action was precipitated by curiosity or fear.
Laying both hands gently on the girl’s shoulders, Dr. Tsurugi headed quickly for the doorway. His steps suddenly halted. With a strange sound, a dark figure appeared from the room. The doctor readied his shotgun. The first thing he saw was an arm-like protrusion that called to mind a thermal-ray cannon. Following that was the spherical body. And supporting that body from below were caterpillar treads like those of a tank.
“Get down!” the physician shouted as he shoved Lori out of the way, a wave of orange sailing right over him. The tremendous heat set the back of his white lab coat ablaze, and flames licked from his hair. Screaming, the physician writhed in pain. Cradling his head, he rolled his back against the ground in an effort to put out the fire.
Grabbing him by the scruff of the neck, Lori dove off to the side. A second heat shower narrowly missed the pair, striking the ground near where they lay. Without so much as looking at the physician’s back, Lori shouldered the shotgun and pulled the trigger. The blast struck the dome-shaped torso, and the buckshot ricocheted off in all directions with a beautiful sound. Lori threw herself to the ground. There was no way to escape now.
The arm that was going to spray them with white-hot death, however, turned in the opposite direction along with the rest of its body. In the shadow of a building some fifteen feet away there suddenly stood a figure in black so beautiful and tragic it numbed even the electronic brain of this machine. Perhaps that was the reason why it was delayed a tenth of a second aligning the sights on its thermal-ray cannon.
Easily leaping over the shower of blistering heat his foe unleashed, D brought his longsword down, slicing the top of the machine’s head into a half-moon shape.
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LAND OF THE DEAD
CHAPTER 6
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I
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Sparks and electromagnetic waves shooting from the newly cut opening, the machine halted, and, in the very same instant, Lori threw herself on the physician. Rubbing against his body, she crushed out the still-smoldering fire. Giving off only bluish smoke now, Dr. Tsurugi moaned. Above her, the girl sensed someone moving. Lori looked up and moved her lips. Hurry, she mouthed. We have to get him to the nurse quickly!
“I should have a look at him first,” D said slowly, and, helping Lori out of the way, he pulled off the physician’s lab coat.
“I’m fine,” the disheveled Dr. Tsurugi said as he tugged at his own hair. “It’s not a serious burn. I can walk on my own. Kindly leave me be.”
D stood up. Despite the other man’s sharp tone, the Hunter didn’t seem particularly angry. Without giving the physician another glance, he looked at Lori.
An awesome tempest of fear and self-loathing raged in the girl’s eyes. Didn’t even try to help the doctor . . . I just . . . took the gun . . .
“Well done,” D said soberly. Of course, Lori had no idea how close to miraculous it was to hear those words coming from him. “If you hadn’t taken that shot, the machine probably would’ve killed you both. You knew the doctor’s burns weren’t too bad.”
But I . . .
“And when you took the shot, you even put yourself in front of the doctor,” the Hunter continued. “Not many people would’ve done that.”
The girl’s eyes were gleaming. Only after D said those words did she realize just what she’d done.
“Yes, indeed,” the physician said as his hand picked through the miserable remnants of his hair. “If you’d bothered with me, both of us would be checking into the hereafter. I owe you my life. Now, then—lead on. My nurse hasn’t been any use since the magnetic storm. This time it’ll be my turn to get looked at.”
Lori nodded. The girl knew that she was needed now.
Just then, they noticed there was no sign of D. A few minutes later he reappeared from the door to the control room.
“What happened to the sheriff and his men?”
&
nbsp; D simply shook his head.
“What the hell was that thing?” the physician muttered, his voice fraught with anger.
In reply, D merely said, “An internal defensive system for the ship, no doubt. It seems to be the only thing moving. The ship’s crew died off three years ago.”
“How do you know that?”
D pulled a yellowed ship’s log from his coat. After the physician had run his eyes over the last page of it, ineffable shades of terror and misery colored his face . . . an expression that didn’t fade for the longest time.
The crew of this pirate ship had grown weary of their aimless voyages. Though they freely sailed the skies, the floating cities and cargo-laden sailing vessels they preyed on were few and far between. What’s more, when the pirate ship finally did get a chance to shine, all her opponents had either mounted heavy firepower or acquired three-dimensional radar and more powerful engines, making fight or flight the only viable solutions. The number of targets a pirate ship could go after had decidedly decreased. Apathy and ennui began to take over the ship, and before long many of the crew took their own lives, while the rest either started killing each other to stave off the boredom or grew sick and died. But the ion engines of the ship itself still ran, and could continue to do so until the end of time. Carrying nothing save a load of corpses, she continued her voyage across the boundless seas of fear.
“And the person who kept this log?”
“He was in his cabin,” D said, “shot through the forehead.”
“In that case, who in the world fired those missiles?”
“The computer must’ve been programmed to do that. Someone told it to go right on plundering even after they were all dead.”
The physician shook his head in disgust. Looking at D, he asked, “And none of this bothers you? There’s carnage all around us, and your expression says you don’t feel a thing. What does it take to break that pretty face of yours? What could make you cry? Or make you laugh?”
Tale of the Dead Town Page 13
