Iron Rage

by James Axler

  Another thunder crack ripped from Jak’s Python. Ryan saw a plume of water spurt up about ten yards downstream of the boat. The craft was beached at an angle of about forty-five degrees, with the keep of its prow driven into the soft soil of the beach, and its stern pointing west. Trace had ordered Nataly to bring her in that way to facilitate loading and unloading. The actual channel of Wolf Creek got steep fast, they told Ryan, who had no reason to doubt them.

  They know their trade, and we know ours. There wasn’t a nuking thing any of us could have done to stop us from winding up here, stranded on some forsaken shore in the middle of a nuking strontium swamp, he knew.

  The one-eyed man hated the feeling of helplessness their bombardment had pounded into him. Into all of them, he knew, crew and companion alike.

  He was already running toward the shore, transferring his panga to his left hand and drawing his SIG Sauer P226 handblaster with his right. His boots wanted to sink into the firm but moist soil. It was just this side of being straight-up mud. Out in the stream, Ryan could see what looked like random snags disturbing the water’s oleaginous flow, except that they hadn’t been there before. They were strangely bumpy. Some of those bumps showed glabrous gleams. And they were moving.

  “Fireblast!” he burst out. There had to be a dozen of the bastards. More. How did so many get so close without Jak noticing them? he wondered.

  Then he saw what seemed like a mostly submerged log, but with eye-bumps on the near end, slide out of the lower weeds in the water by the far bank, sculling with faint side-to-side strokes of its tail.

  The bastards were cunning, he thought. They snuck up on them.

  “Mildred!” Ryan yelled. “Stay in the nuking boat!”

  The physician froze with one leg over the rail. The last of the stragglers in the water had made the sanctuary of the bank. Clearly, Mildred didn’t realize the big Nile crocodiles could swim quite easily in water as shallow as that surrounding the hull.

  Jak fired again. Ryan could see thrashing in the water this time, and he spotted a pink tinge in some of the splashes. A couple of the “snags” diverted toward it. Apparently these bastards weren’t above making a meal out of one of their buddies.

  But the others headed for the bank like starved ville rats offered a feast by their tyrant baron. Blasters were coming out among the people onshore, although they hesitated to waste ammo on such dubious targets.

  When she was about four feet from the water, Trace shook off her helpers. Then she turned back to the creek.

  “We should be clear as long as we keep away from the water,” she said. “We just need to figure out how to drive these bastards off so we can work on getting the Queen under way again.”

  “At least we’ve got plenty of ammo,” Arliss said. Though the Queen’s crew preferred black powder blasters—indeed, preferred fleeing to shooting, whenever the option offered—they kept a hefty store of all kinds and calibers of ammunition in the hold. It was something they could always trade, and be pretty sure of catching a profit, too, almost regardless what they traded for it.

  “Right,” the captain said. Despite her horrible wound, she seemed strong and in command of herself. Ryan knew what it felt like to step up in emergencies, disregarding your own wounds. If he hadn’t shown that knack early on, he’d never have made it out of Front Royal alive, after his brother Harvey’s treachery cost him his eye and left him with a scar down his face.

  “I saw,” Doc said, stepping toward her tentatively with his outsize LeMat wheel gun in his knobbly-knuckled hand. “I am not sure it is safe to stand so close to the water, Captain. These Nile crocodiles have a reputation as being quite aggressive.”

  She waved him off with her stump. “Light some torches,” she commanded. “I bet they don’t like fi—”

  In the midst of a big wave of water a huge, pebble-scaled form erupted from the creek. Tooth-daggered jaws opened what seemed a whole yard wide. Before anyone could react, they snapped shut on the captain around her waist.

  “Hold fire!” Ryan shouted. He tucked the SIG back in its holster and charged.

  The croc was a monster, at least twenty feet long. It was shaking Trace in its jaw like a dog with a rat as it backed toward the water.

  Ryan reversed his panga. Gripping the hilt with both hands, he took a running dive toward the immense reptile.

  The wide-bladed panga was not meant for stabbing, especially, but it did have a point. He aimed to bring that down on the spine behind the horror’s triangular skull.

  But the croc was heaving too much. The panga sank into its neck a full six inches as Ryan landed half on the croc, half in the water.

  The croc whistled in pain and fury, but it did not open its mouth and release its prey. Instead it started to roll away from Ryan, either in a premature death roll meant to drown its captive, or more likely as a simple animal reflex to get the injured site away from the thing that had caused it unexpected pain.

  Trying to mute his own awareness of the scaled, toothy horrors that could be wriggling toward him with their bulging eyeballs fixed on his legs, Ryan maneuvered himself to straddle the beast. He wrenched the broad blade free with the same effort it would have taken him to deadlift an engine block.

  The croc had made a tactical mistake. Its back was armored well enough to shed bullets that hit at any kind of angle, if the crocodiles and gators he’d tangled with before were any guide. But its pale belly was vulnerable. As soon as Ryan saw the flash of yellow hide, he plunged the panga down again.

  It sank into the beast’s chest, between its scrabbling forelegs. He twisted the blade, hoping he’d hit the heart. Then again he didn’t know where the nuking thing was located.

  The crocodile roared. Meaning at least it opened its jaws—meaning it let Trace go. Ryan was in no position to confirm that fact, though, because before he could yank the panga free, or even let go of the handle, the monstrous creature had sped up its roll—dragging Ryan right along with it as if he were a rag doll.

  For a moment he felt the crushing sensation of incredible mass on top of him. The thing had to have weighed a ton or more, at that size. The air was blasted out of his lungs in an involuntary yell. Had the mud beneath not been so soft, taking him into its slippery embrace and cushioning the weight, the behemoth surely would have crushed him to death.

  The beast kept rolling. When the unendurable weight came off Ryan, he managed to let go of the panga’s hilt and somehow get one boot and one knee planted into the muck.

  He was also able to draw his handblaster. He pressed its muzzle almost into the croc’s throat, right at the base of the long, triangular head, and started cranking off rounds. He figured if anything would cause handblaster rounds to penetrate the croc’s notoriously hard skull—not a triple-big target as well—it was a lot of them, from below, at near-contact range. The fact that the copper-jacketed 147-grain 9 mm bullets had a lot of penetration for a handblaster didn’t hurt.

  The croc began to thrash from side to side. The water around it was maroon with blood except when its visibly diminishing efforts churned it to froth. That was pink.

  Ryan flung himself away from the monster. It was still strong. A death-throe crack of the tail could pulp his hips or snap his spine like a baby’s arm.

  Trace was on her feet but bent over and staggering in knee-deep water. She had her good arm pressed to her gut where the jaws had closed, but she waved her stump, its compress now soaked red with blood from her struggles, at the shore and the stunned watchers.

  “Thanks,” she croaked. “I’m all right, all right, I’m fit to fight—”

  She was yanked right out from behind her words and under the water in a flash. There was surprisingly little disturbance on the surface where she vanished. It was as if she’d never been.

  Even Ryan was shocked immobile by the suddenness of her disappearance. But being Ryan Cawdor, he didn’t stay that way longer than a heartbeat or two. Instead he hightailed it for solid land. He was not diving in
to a river full of nuking killer crocs to wrestle with one big and strong enough to make the captain, who was no small woman herself, simply disappear like that.

  If he was going to commit suicide, he’d pick a better way.

  As he reached land, though, he turned. Long-practiced habit kicked in. Even as he scanned the creek’s surface for some sign of the captain—or where the next attack might come from—he kicked the magazine free of the handblaster’s well, stuck it in a back pocket and slammed a fresh one home. He had no idea how many cartridges he’d fired, but he wanted all of them if he needed to shoot again.

  For a moment the creek’s surface was peaceful and even seemed free of crocodiles, at least in the stretch Ryan was watching with laser focus, past the Queen’s stern.

  Then Trace burst out of the water, head back, arm and stump thrown high, but not under her own power. She was well out from the bank, where soundings by means of a predark weighted line said the channel was more than eight feet deep.

  She spun counterclockwise, hitting the murky water in a shower of spray that dwarfed the one that had accompanied her brief reappearance. Then two separate waves sloshed upward on opposite sides of where she’d gone down again. Tall tails thrashed the water into curtains of spray.

  Ryan took his SIG in a two-handed grip and blasted off the whole magazine, plus the cartridge up the spout. He reckoned if he chilled the captain by accident now, with two of the monsters fighting over her, it would just be a mercy chill. The spurts kicked up by the bullets striking were barely noticeable against the effects of their titanic struggle.

  The farther croc reared out of the water. In its jaws was clamped one of Trace’s legs. Red flew from the ragged end, past the yellow knob of her femur head. The commotion ceased.

  Dead silence reigned. It was as if time stopped, though Ryan’s pulse continued to pound in his ears. The violated water subsided into the usual ripple of its undisturbed flow so swiftly and smoothly it almost seemed to be trying to erase the horror that happened upon and inside it just moments before. The suspended moment was broken to pieces by a wailing wordless cry from Myron. The chief engineer was tackled by Santee just shy of the monster-haunted water as he tried to run to his doomed mate’s aid.

  Ryan realized he needed to follow the advice he been given when he was a boy learning to hunt: shoot enough blaster. He holstered the SIG, which he’d already reloaded, and ran for his Steyr. The longblaster was propped against his pack thirty paces inshore, muzzle-up to keep muck from getting in the barrel.

  “Everybody, get big blasters or big sticks,” he shouted. “The bastards tasted blood! They’re going to come swarming—”

  His words were drowned in a sudden cacophony of blasterfire.

  He grabbed the Scout and spun, dropping to one knee for better aim, even on the fly. His companions and the late captain’s crew weren’t just busting caps at empty water.

  It seemed as if dozens of crocs were rushing toward the shore and up onto the bank, tooth-fringed mouths wide.

  Ryan picked the nearest open pink-and-yellow maw and blasted a 7.62 mm round into it. It snapped shut. The creature behind it rolled onto its side and kicked air.

  As Ryan jacked the bolt of his Steyr, he saw a croc leap clean out of the water toward where Mildred stood by the rail. She danced aside, panic-firing at it as she did. Jak stood with legs braced on the cabin roof, firing down at the beast as its jaws snapped shut on the rail. For moment it actually hung there, all four legs out of the water, hanging on with its teeth buried in the wood. Mildred took the opportunity to take quick one-handed aim, arm fully extended as if she were at the target range, and put a .38 slug through its right eye. It let go and slid back into the creek.

  Santee rolled over and over in the shallows, with his legs around the middle of a croc at least two feet longer than he was tall, holding its jaws shut from beneath with one hand while his other plunged a big Bowie knife repeatedly into its exposed belly.

  Krysty and Ricky, flanking Myron, fired their handblasters. Nataly sat astride the engineer’s hips, pinning him facedown to the ground while she coolly reloaded the chambers of a cap-and-ball revolver from a red leather flask. Ryan was concerned the man might drown, but his face was not in the water, and by the motion of his shoulder he was sobbing uncontrollably.

  Doc blasted a lunging croc in the snout with the short shotgun barrel affixed beneath the pistol barrel of his LeMat revolver, shattering its upper jaw. Then he deftly stabbed it through the eye with his rapier as it wagged its ruined upper jaw back and forth, shedding dislodged, jagged teeth and sheets of blood.

  Sean and Suzan pinned a croc’s head to the soil while Avery whaled on the creature’s head with an ax.

  Targets were already getting scarce as Ryan peered across the iron sights of his Scout. He fired at one charging at Ricky from an angle, smashing its shoulder so that it collapsed writhing and snapping its jaw. Ricky turned and without batting an eye emptied the .45 ACP rounds in his Webley’s cylinder into its jaw when it opened. The croc subsided on its side with blood drooling from its whole snout onto the short, beaten-down grass.

  The smell of blood, digesting fish liberated from crocodile bellies, and burned powder of both the smokeless and ultra-smoky blasters filled the air. The crocs decided they’d had enough of eating lead—or of eating their own brothers and sisters that had been chilled or badly injured. They turned and vanished into the water with contemptuous flicks of their tails, some dragging still or feebly struggling crocs with them.

  “Cease-fire!” Ryan yelled. He stayed on one knee with his longblaster held ready in case the monsters decided to make another try.

  All the shooting stopped. He realized the Queen’s crew had obeyed his order as well as his own people, to whom the command was directed. Even Arliss, who had been laying into the attacking reptiles with fire from a lever-action Marlin carbine, lowered his weapon.

  Nataly rolled off Myron. Then, with her reloaded Ruger Old Army revolver ready in her right hand, she reached down and gently shook the grieving man’s shaking shoulder.

  “Come on, Myron,” she said gently. “It’s over. You need to get up and get away from the water now. We don’t know if or when those things will come back.”

  A shudder passed through her long, lean frame. Apparently man-eating crocodiles attacking en masse could do what unanswerable cannon fire, even when it was striking down her friends and coworkers around her, could not: shake her iron self-control.

  “Right, Mildred, Jak,” Ryan called. “Looks as if it’s safe to come back to shore now. Don’t hang around to hunt for crawdads, though.”

  “Is there any more unloading to do tonight?” Mildred asked.

  “I’d advise against it.” Ryan glanced at Nataly. The mate had managed to get Myron to stand and shuffle back a few yards from the water. Then he had promptly collapsed to his knees, sobbing uncontrollably once more, while Nataly stood beside him patting his shoulder uncomfortably. He seemed locked up double tight in his grief.

  Ryan couldn’t say he blamed him.

  He slung the Steyr. There were still eight croc carcasses on the beach, plus two injured too badly to pull themselves off the shore into the water. Avery quickly finished them with neck-blows from his ax. He wrenched Ryan’s panga from one of the corpses and returned it to him.

  “Let’s pick out some of the likelier-looking chills and butcher them. Some fresh meat wouldn’t hurt us. And does anybody even know if crocodile jerky is possible?”

  Everybody shook their head. Even Doc, which mildly surprised Ryan. Doc knew a lot of seemingly random facts about the natural world.

  “What about the others?” Sean asked.

  “Shove them back in the water. Given what lives around here, we don’t want to be attracting scavengers. Remember, those crocs may not be the worst things that live in the area.”

  Chapter Seven

  “So, where do we stand?” Myron asked.

  The crew and companions were sittin
g around their driftwood campfire. Sitting across from him, Krysty studied the man’s face. To all appearances he was back in control of himself.

  But he was still a man who had watched his beloved ship—his home, his livelihood, to all intents his life—reduced to a wreck, and seen the love of his life torn limb from limb and devoured alive by crocodiles.

  “Well,” Mildred said, “we already know we won’t die from radiation poisoning. Not right away.”

  Myron’s jaw tightened briefly under his beard. Krysty’s friend Mildred tended to deal with severe stress through sarcasm. And what she said was actually both true and responsive to the question. But put that way—well, it probably didn’t sit too well with the poor man.

  “We have food for a couple weeks, easy,” Arliss said. “More if you don’t mind living on nothing but that hundred pounds of jugged sauerkraut we picked up in Moellerville. We’ll see how bad the croc jerky we’ve got drying turns out to be.”

  “We can also fish, and mebbe catch some more crocodiles,” the rigger went on.

  “If they don’t catch us first,” Jake said.

  “Yeah, thanks for the reminder.” Arliss flicked his eyes to Myron, the acting captain. He had his head down with his beard on his collarbone and seemed too sunk in his own misery to register what the perpetually gloomy navigator had said. “We can also try hunting, trapping and fishing for fresh meat.”

  “We want to be triple careful of that,” Ryan said. “Especially if stickies are in the area.”

  “Of course, if they are, we’ll likely find out about it when they come calling,” J.B. stated. He sounded way more amused at the prospect than the Queen’s crew looked.

  Ryan scratched his right ear. “That’s why Jak’s prowling out in the weeds beyond the perimeter. That, and we’d have to chain him to the boat to keep him from patrolling on his own.”

  “Will he be okay out there?” Suzan asked. “I mean, if there’s stickies and all. Not to mention other wild animals.”