by James Axler
“Poteetville patrol boats aren’t that much farther behind us,” J.B. called from the open door. The door-slam sound of the shot that had produced the splash hit Krysty’s ears.
“Steady as she goes,” Conoyer repeated. She was leaning forward, gripping the lower sill of the now-vacant front port with her left hand so hard her knuckles whitened. “On my word, turn her hard aport, smartly as you can.”
The mate glanced nervously aside. Her steely veneer was showing serious cracks now.
“Aye-aye, Captain,” she said.
Ryan, J.B., Doc and Ricky had pushed onto the bridge with Krysty. Jak was doing whatever he was doing, as he usually did. Under the circumstances, he was as helpless as the rest of them. Arliss had come in with them. The rest of the Queen’s crew had dispersed elsewhere.
Flashes flickered from the bows of the oncoming craft. “Get down!” Ryan commanded.
He did as he ordered, although he stayed just high enough to peer out the front port. Krysty did likewise. She realized he had likely ordered his people down to reduce the targets they offered. She doubted the wooden front of the cabin would offer any resistance to a solid cannonball. It had not been built for that.
“You too, Nataly,” Trace ordered. After a dubious glance her way, the mate hunkered as low as she could and still see to steer.
The captain stayed erect. “Mildred, stay hunkered down too, but please help me stand. I need to see.”
Mildred reached out and grabbed her hips to steady her.
A shot whined overhead, then the ship was racked by a shuddering crash that seemed to come up through the deck by way of Krysty’s knee and boot sole. Another crash came from somewhere astern.
“Captain,” Maggie called, coming up the hatch from below, “the bow’s been holed below the waterline. We’re taking on a lot of—”
Something moaned by Krysty’s head, between her and Ryan. A hot breath blew across her face. She saw a lock of her lover’s curly black hair tweaked briefly out from his head as by invisible fingers.
From behind she heard a strange squelching noise, followed by another sound of rending wood. Something like hot rain fell on her shoulders and back. She heard a sizable amount of liquid hit the planks of the deck.
She and Ryan both turned. His lone blue eye was wide.
Maggie stood a step away from the hatch below. Or rather her slight torso did. Her head was missing entirely. A pulse of blood shot up from the terrible vacancy between her shoulders, then her headless trunk toppled down the ladder.
Ricky puked. The stink of vomit, added to the reek of fresh blood, excrement, burned flesh and lingering peppery gunpowder smell, made Krysty’s head spin.
“Arliss,” Trace snapped without turning, “get every hand available to work the bilge-pumps.”
His wrinkled, sunburned face was white beneath his beard, but he bobbed his head. “Aye, Captain.”
He vanished below, slipping slightly in Maggie’s blood.
“Captain,” Nataly said in a strained voice, “those blasterboats are getting mighty close—”
“On my mark, start your turn to port,” the captain said. Nataly stood back upright, her hands white on the wheel.
“Don’t see much of a break, up ahead,” J.B. murmured.
Krysty didn’t, either. The summer-green reeds and rushes on the left bank waved in the breeze in a line unbroken as far as the eye could see. She realized Ryan was gripping her arm, tightly enough to hurt, but she didn’t say anything. It reassured her more than it felt bad.
“Three,” Trace said. “Two…”
“Captain, I don’t see—” Nataly began.
“Now! Hard aport!”
“But it’s just land!”
“Now, nuke it, do it now!”
Ryan let go of Krysty’s arm. He started to grab for the wheel.
But Nataly, her normally narrow eyes now saucer-wide, began to crank the big spoked wheel counterclockwise for all she was worth. The Mississippi Queen began to heel to the right as her bow swung left.
They were curving toward what indeed looked to Krysty like solid land at a good rate of speed. She gripped the sill in front of her with her right hand and Ryan’s arm with her left. Bracing was the only thing she could think of to do.
The vessel shuddered to another hit.
The land rushed toward them. Krysty held her breath.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc crowed from behind them. “I see it!”
Then Krysty did, too. The weeds were thinner directly in front of them, stretching twenty or twenty-five yards to either side. The Queen’s bow slid smoothly among them, right into a channel Krysty would have bet her life a few seconds ago was not there.
“Ladies, gentlemen,” Trace said, “welcome to Wolf Creek.”
An explosion came from behind. It was as loud as rolling thunder, and made the stout little vessel rock violently back and forth. Instantly Krysty’s keen nostrils smelled fresh smoke, and not just of burned black powder.
“There’s another fire in the cabin,” Avery yelled from the hatch in the aft bulkhead.
“Get anybody who’s not pumping out the hull to fight the fire, Avery,” Trace ordered. Her voice was getting as thin as hope.
“That’s us,” Ryan said, straightening. Krysty went with him.
“Ryan,” Trace called. Krysty saw her sway despite Mildred’s strong hand supporting her. “Have that albino scout of yours keep his eyes skinned. Stand ready to repel boarders.”
“Right,” Ryan said.
“Nataly, take us up-channel at least a mile. Then look for the best place to ground her.”
The first mate had the steel back in her spine. “Aye-aye!”
“Mildred, help me…lie down. Then you’re relieved from tending me to join your friends. I need to pass out now.”
“Then let us help you out on deck to get you laid down,” Mildred said, working her hands professionally up the captain’s solid body as she stood up. “I’m not laying you down in this slop, no way.”
Trace’s short-haired head lolled on her neck. “What…ever.”
Her eyes rolled up in her head. Mildred was ready, but still had to bend her knees to hang on to the woman when her knees sagged.
“I’ll help you, Mildred,” Krysty said. She went to support the now-unconscious—or perhaps semiconscious—captain from the left.
It feels good to be able to do something, she thought. Even if we’re nowhere near safe yet.
* * *
“FIREBLAST!” RYAN EXCLAIMED as the sound of cannon fire echoed between the banks of Wolf Creek.
But when he paused in chopping away burning planks from the starboard side of the Mississippi Queen’s cabin to look astern to where the dull booms came from, he saw nothing but clear green water on Wolf Creek. They had rounded enough of a bend in the stream that the original screen of weeds that had shielded the creek’s mouth had passed out of sight. But he could clearly see two big banks of smoke like river-hugging fog, off above the flat land with its tall grass. The tops of the smoke clouds were already tinted gold by the rays of the sun sinking into the horizon.
“Poteetville and New Vick,” Arliss said grimly. The ship rigger was perched perilously atop the weakening roof of the Queen’s cabin forward of the fire, directing water from a canvas hose into its hungry red heart. “They found better things to play with than us. Meaning each other.”
“Think they’ll follow us this way?” Ricky asked. He was taking a break from manning the deck pumps, which worked on a teeter-totter sort of principle, like a railway flatcar. Although now that they were in a side channel, and out of the line of fire, Myron had throttled back the Diesels and diverted some power to pumping out the water gushing in through the breach. Instead Ricky and Jak were kicking the burning planks chopped free overboard.
There wasn’t enough power to spare for the above decks pumps too. Myron clearly reckoned that if the boat sank, it would take care of the fire, anyway. So his priority was k
eeping her afloat. His prime enemy as he saw it was water, and Ryan couldn’t disagree.
Avery laughed. He was pointing out to Ryan where to cut with the ax, plus helping out with one of his own.
“Not triple likely, kid. They probably forgot all about us. The only stuff we had worth stealing’s burned to the waterline. Least as far as they know.”
“The only reason either bunch really had for shooting at us,” Arliss pointed out, “was that they’re both plain mean. They’ve been rival king-ass fucks lording over this stretch of river for generations, each with only the other to give them any kind of check. And it went to their heads.”
“So are they meaner than the countryside hereabouts?” Ricky asked.
“Unless the stickies or the swampers got themselves some cannon,” J.B. replied, “I’d reckon yeah.”
“Too slagging right,” Jake said. He was handling the portside hose, where Krysty and Mildred worked the pump, while J.B. and Doc operated the starboard one that fed Arliss’s.
Ryan wasn’t pleased about Krysty working as hard as she was so soon after her concussion. But since the concussion wasn’t literally life-or-death, but putting out the fire might be, he knew better than to try to order her to sit this one out.
“But we gotta beach her soon,” Lewis said. “Then everything changes.”
It was the longest speech Ryan had heard the lanky man make. His tone carried a sense of doom. And if Ryan had any doubt the Queen was doomed—at least so long as she stayed in open water—Arliss chilled it at once.
“She’s riding lower in the water as every minute passes.”
“At least we mostly got the fire beat down,” Avery stated.
“What happens if we go down?” Ricky asked.
“Nile crocodiles,” Jake said with doleful satisfaction.
Ricky emitted a yelp of terror. Everybody laughed. He blushed.
Suzan came back aft. “Captain’s compliments, Ryan, and she asks that you present yourself on the bridge at your earliest convenience.”
Obviously under the inspiration of their captain, Ryan had noticed the crew was partial to the use of old-timey-sounding nautical talk on formal occasions. “She requests your advice picking a spot to ground the vessel.”
“Right,” he said. Just because he knew the game didn’t mean he had to play. Their employers didn’t seem to expect it of him or his people, anyway.
“We got the fire controlled,” Arliss said. “Jake, Avery and I can take it from here. You all can go.”
“You heard the lady,” he said, passing the hose down to Krysty and clambering from the roof of the mostly gutted cabin. “Let’s shift on out of here.”
Jak looked at him with eagerness written on his face. “Go up top, watch?”
He nodded. Jak scrambled up to the roof.
“Man doesn’t talk much,” he told the Queen crew members.
“Noticed,” Jake said.
* * *
“WAIT,” MILDRED MUTTERED. “How did I wind up carrying the lower end of this freaking coffin when the dude on the other end is like eight feet tall?”
Santee was not, in fact, eight feet tall, although he was six-six, minimum, or she was the Pope, Mildred thought, and he was indisputably on the end higher up the staircase. Or “ladder,” as the boat people insisted on calling it. That struck the much shorter Mildred as markedly unfair.
Of course what they were carrying could only serve as a coffin for a child or a very short adult. It was no more than five feet long and felt as if it were packed with lead ingots. Or maybe she felt burdened because it was sweltering hot there in the cargo hold, and she had to breathe through a wet handkerchief tied around her face to filter out the smoke. And then there was the stench of rotting blood from poor Edna and Maggie, although their bodies had been taken ashore.
“What’s in it, anyway?” she demanded as she struggled up the stairs with her unbalanced burden. “Shouldn’t we only be carrying, like, food and other vital supplies off the boat?”
The big man smiled down at her. “Treasure,” he said cheerfully. Nothing seemed to get to Santee.
She managed to make it up the rest of the way and onto the deck, where the two of them handed the long wooden box over the rail to a quartet of workers standing in shin-deep shallows. Then she propped her butt on the rail to catch her breath. Santee said nothing, only drank deeply from a canteen and handed it to her.
He didn’t seem offended when she wiped the mouth with her hands. Even on short acquaintance, the Mississippi Queen’s crew had learned that she had her eccentricities. Fortunately, they were inclined to take folk at their own value, and not sweat that kind of thing unless it slopped over into their own personal lives. They weren’t outlaws, these people who made their livings on the river—certainly not by the standards of the day—but they were pretty clearly outcasts, who had trouble fitting into the more settled societies ashore.
Which is probably why we and they get along like bosom buddies, she thought.
Her companions and the crew worked without particular urgency to unload the boat of whatever was deemed necessary, and prepare a camp on the riverbank, which was as flat as a board and barely higher than the water. The sun wasn’t going to set for some time yet, and it wasn’t as if they could hide their presence.
Ryan and the captain had chosen a decent spot to ground the boat. It was a mostly clear area of dry, firm soil. The radiation in the immediate vicinity wouldn’t chill them too quickly, according to Ryan’s coat-lapel rad counter. As for the amount of heavy metals—brutally toxic—they might be taking in, there was no way to tell, which didn’t make Mildred any too happy. But what mattered was immediate survival. In the absence of that none of the other stuff would matter anyway.
The one slightly alarming aspect was the presence of a dilapidated railroad bridge barely a quarter mile upstream. The rusty steel structure had fallen into the creek from roughly one-third of the way out from this bank almost to the far side. Likely there was still a rail line, long overgrown by weeds, leading to and from it. The problematic part was, this region was alleged to be crawling with stickies, and that derelict bridge would provide an ace nest for a major stickie colony.
Still, she thought, we take what we can get. As usual.
Ryan was hacking back the long grass and scrub surrounding their landing point with his panga. Jake was helping out with a scythe that they seemed to be carrying to trade at some point. He mowed the stuff down far faster than Ryan, and likely could have done as well by himself. But Ryan clearly felt the need to do something, especially after the enforced helplessness when they were trying to run from a bunch of boats shooting cannon at them.
At least Ryan and Mildred had prevailed on Krysty to take it easy, once they got ashore. She had insisted on carrying her own backpack off the vessel—fortunately all their gear had survived the fires and general smashing. Then she went off to the side and sat down on her jacket, spread out on the dirt. She was acting normally, aside from her not being in the thick of all this activity.
Mildred smirked. Sometimes she got her companions to stop acting as if they were superhuman, and to take some regard for their health. If you didn’t take care of yourself some, your performance degraded. There was no way around that. And especially given the way they all lived, that was a fast ride to a hole in the ground, with dirt hitting you in the eyes. Such was life in the Deathlands.
Sadly, the captain would not listen to Mildred’s urging that she rest after her terrible injury and blood loss, though in fairness she wasn’t listening to her own people, either. She was wading around in the water with Avery and Nataly, inspecting the pierced hull to see if it could be repaired. Or if it even had the structural integrity left to be worth repairing. After sharing a brief, impassioned hug with her, her husband had retreated below to the engine compartment with J.B. and Ricky, doing something to take care of the engines, which Mildred understood not at all and cared about less.
She decided to w
atch Trace closely. Strangely, aside from her losing her lower arm, and Edna and Maggie losing their lives, no one was seriously hurt. Pretty much everybody had gotten cut, scraped, bruised and burned. Even Nataly looked as if she’d just gotten a bad sunburn on the left side of her face, once the grime and gore got washed off. Mildred guessed it hurt like bloody hell, but the first mate was stoic about it.
Well, great.
She heaved herself to her feet. Suzan and Abner MacReedy were carrying a crate of scavvied canned goods out of the hull. They were prime trade goods, too, as whatever the few-spoken Santee termed “treasure” presumably was. But if their day-to-day survival depended on consuming them—well, they were cheap at the price, as long as they weren’t spoiled. She reckoned she needed to get back and pitch in.
We’re all exhausted, she thought. Surely I can take my eyes off Trace and Krysty for a few minutes…
From his perch atop the cabin, which was the most intact roof section of the largely burned-out cabin, Jak yelled out, “Crocs! Lots!”
Chapter Six
Ryan knew their scout Jak didn’t cry wolf. But what really ripped his attention away from hacking at the weeds surrounding the camp—and keeping his eye scanning in all directions inland, mindful of all the reasons he was trying to clear the tall grass and brush away—was that Jak’s falcon-scream warning was followed promptly by the cracking, booming blast of his .357 Magnum Colt Python handblaster.
Unlike the rest of them, who were extremely handy with a blaster—even Mildred had been an Olympic-level pistol shot in her day, and carried a competition-quality Czech-made ZKR 551 revolver to prove it—Jak was all about blades. At any given time he had a dozen or so knives hidden on his body, both for close-quarters fighting and throwing. He was ace with them all, and he loved getting the chance to use his skill.
Ryan’s head snapped around in time to see the grounded Mississippi Queen’s first mate and chief shipwright pick up their captain by the elbows and carry her onto the bank, sending big splashes of water into the twilit air. There were four or five others in the shallow water that he could see, including Doc and Ricky, helping unload the boat of whatever Arliss deemed necessary.
