by James Axler
“No,” Ryan said. “They’re not.”
She shrugged and made a face. “Well, it’s war. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“In my experience, my druthers don’t seem to matter one way or another, as to how war is.”
“Truth.”
She smiled.
“So, I suppose there’s no locking you in your cabin anymore, is there? It’s not as if there’s any point, obviously.”
He grinned. “No, ma’am.”
“I think you’ve passed your probation with flying colors, Junior Lieutenant Cawdor. So haul your newly promoted ass back to your quarters and get all the sleep you need. I want you nice and rested when I get you started really earning your pay!”
Chapter Fifteen
“I see stickies!” Mildred heard Ricky shout from the roof of the Mississippi Queen’s half burned-out cabin. He lay up there on his belly behind Ryan’s prized Steyr Scout, with the bipod down, watching the action through the Leupold scope.
A quarter mile away, the launch was just approaching the ruined bridge, towing the dinghy behind it.
“Pipe down, kid,” she snarled. She sat watching the scene from the shore through Ryan’s navy longeyes, trying to keep her heart out of her throat.
There was a curious contrast in the hair of the occupants of the towed craft: flame red, snow white. Krysty and Jak rode in it, along with a mounded mass of what looked like wadded-up bedding, which was in fact a heap of clothing ruined by fire or flooding. J.B. rode in the launch with Arliss and Abner at the tiller. All were dwarfed by Santee.
“But I wish I could warn them!”
Mildred saw stickies now, too. They were appearing from the deep shadows of the far end of the bridge, under which the launch and dinghy were set to pass.
“They know,” she gritted. “Jak’s with them. Mind you don’t warn the muties.”
That wasn’t really rational, of course. The stickies were too far away to hear anything shy of a gunshot, just as their friends were.
“What’s happening?” Suzan asked excitedly from behind Mildred.
She, Jake, Avery and Nataly were clustered by Mildred upstream of the prow of the grounded Queen, as close to the waterline as they dared for fear of crocs. They had started seeing their log-like shapes, or just their lumpy heads, in the couple of days since they’d run back to the wreck site with their tails between their legs. The creatures had shown no sign of interest in the refugees, nor ventured too close to the shoreline clearing. Doc stood behind the others, LeMat and sword in his hands, just in case.
Myron and his assistant, Sean, were back in the bowels of the tugboat, doing something mysterious to the Diesels. It might soon make sense for them to bother, if J.B.’s crazy scheme worked. Or even if this first phase worked.
How strange is it, she thought, that sailing right into the middle of a stickie nest in the least whacked-out part of the plan?
“They’re going under the bridge now,” Ricky called out. “Here come the stickies. Should I open up?”
“Wait for them to start blasting,” Mildred replied. She was in charge of this group in J.B.’s and Krysty’s absence. The others were deferring to her too, at least for now. “Stick to the plan.”
Water splashed as stickies dropped abruptly out of the rusty girders near the launch. Those passengers of both craft unfamiliar with fighting stickies reacted with every sign of unbridled terror, whipping their heads this way and that and gesticulating. J.B. shouldered his S&W M-4000 12-gauge and fired at the closest stickie. It fell back in the water, trailing ropy yellow tendrils of ichor. Arliss blasted another on the far side of the launch, as it capered toward them through the weeds by the bank with comical high steps of its splay-toed feet kicking up sheets of water.
“Now, Ricky!” Mildred cried, as the sound of J.B.’s booming M-4000 reached her ears.
The Steyr cracked. Two stickies were almost on the launch, one on either side. The one on the right, away from the near bank, threw up its sucker-fingered hands as the 7.62 mm bullet burst its head like a balloon filled with yellow paint.
“Show-off!” Mildred said. Santee split the second stickie’s head with a full-sized ax, swung across his body one-handed as if it were a hatchet.
Abner panicked. His usually firm hand faltered. As he steered the motorboat, it swerved in toward the north bank, instead of away for open water. And in that brief misstep, disaster struck. The dinghy it towed nosed into a tangle of fallen steel truss-work that had rusted almost the color of blood. It stuck fast.
Stickies swarmed toward it. Krysty’s Glock ripped them with a burst of 9 mm bullets. Mildred couldn’t see the flashes at that range, nor the shock waves rippling the air, and the sound wouldn’t reach her ears for just over a second. But she knew by their effects: three stickies went down flailing.
Abner had turned the launch’s nose toward the middle of Wolf Creek, trying to dislodge the dinghy from the snag with no success.
Krysty stopped shooting and put her hands on the sides of the boat, rocking left and right in hopes of working the craft free. Jak fired his Colt Python and blasted a stickie that was about to leap aboard.
Mildred, watching the drama aboard the dinghy in mounting fear, saw its right shoulder practically explode. Its arm fell into the water.
Traumatic amputation or not, the stickie kept coming. Jak met it with an overhand left to the face with the steel-studded brass knuckle guard of his trench knife. Stickie blood showered him as the mutie fell backward into the creek.
Tethered to the trapped dinghy by the towline, the power launch had turned completely and swung back almost side to side with it, though only the sterns overlapped. Santee reached out for Krysty, and she grabbed his tree-limb arm. He swung her into the boat, well clear of the submerged propeller of the outboard motor, as if she were a doll.
Arliss and J.B. were gesturing and obviously shouting for Jak to abandon the dinghy and join the redhead in safety. But Jak did a curious thing.
Shooting down the nearest stickie, the albino bent over in the dinghy. He was clearly doing something that required attention. A stickie clambered up onto the steel snag and sprang at his unprotected back.
J.B. shot it in midair as if it were a grouse starting up from a bush. The charge of Number 4 shot caught the mutie midtorso and ripped blue organs clean out of its body. It fell into the water between the unpowered boat and the bank. Usually only a head shot or a shot to the heart chilled a stickie, but there was no coming back from such a devastating hit.
It was a triple-risky shot, so close to the albino, but not even Ryan had a surer hand with a blaster. J.B. was as precise as a machine in combat.
Ricky blasted a mutie as it reached to grab for the boat’s stern. Jak came up to a crouch. He had holstered his Magnum revolver. He slashed through the towrope with a stroke of his trench knife, then without apparent hurry he sheathed the blade. As the launch pulled away, he dived into the water and swam for it.
Santee fished him out in the same manner as he had hoisted Krysty. The albino weighed less than she did, even with all the weapons on his body.
Abner opened the throttle all the way. The launch’s prow lifted on a pale bow wave as it sprinted away. Stickies ran after it waving their hands in futile pursuit.
J.B. had switched out his shotgun for his stuttergun. He bowled over a couple of the nearest with two quick bursts. A couple stickies had climbed into the abandoned dinghy. They flung themselves overboard in alarm as flames abruptly blazed up, a shockingly bright orange in the gloom beneath the bridge. Stickies loved fire, but they didn’t love getting burned.
“They all got away,” Mildred reported as Ricky’s borrowed longblaster banged again. Those around her whooped and danced. “Everybody seems to be in one piece. You can stop wasting rounds up there, Ricky. Look for danger to the launch.”
The junk cloth heaped in the dinghy had been soaked with pine oil. The pile blazed up brightly in the gloom just beyond the reach of the
morning sun, quickly involving the wood of the small boat in the fire. Stickies began to dance and shriek, bending back and forth as if genuflecting to the fire. Others began to caper around it. They reminded Mildred of apes from the Tarzan books she’d read as a preteen.
“That was a good job,” Nataly pronounced somberly.
“The fire looks ace,” Avery said.
Mildred shifted her vision field from the fire to the returning boat. As she focused, she saw Krysty waving toward them, Santee brandishing his ax over his head, Arliss pumping his rifle in the air, and J.B. sitting with his hat tipped back on his head examining his weapons. Typical, she thought, as was Jak’s demeanor, crouching in the stern just ahead of Abner, staring moodily astern along their wake as if regretting the lost opportunity to chill more stickies.
“Here come more of them!” Jake exclaimed. He sounded not just animated but excited. “Man, look at all those bastard devils!”
Mildred raised the navy longeyes back to the bridge. The muties were swarming from the south side of the dilapidated bridge, clambering along the truss-work beneath the track bed in the dozens, their pale bodies gleaming in the sun. When they hit the gap they simply dropped to the creek below. Some climbed up the juts and snags of fallen steel beams, springing from one to the next as much as they could. Others simply paddled across, as did their comrades capering on the steel when the gaps became too far to jump.
“They’re swarming to the fire like flies to a fresh cow flop,” Avery said in satisfaction, although for once the always optimistic carpenter was more subdued than the normally glum and few-spoken navigator.
“Don’t worry, Jak,” Mildred said. She stood up and lowered the longeyes. “You get your part in plenty of stickie-chilling soon.”
“It’s actually gonna work,” Suzan breathed reverently. She smoothed back her graying hair. It sprang immediately out again, as wild as ever.
“Don’t count any plan a success until you see how it actually turns out,” Nataly advised. Mildred wasn’t sure if that was the tall woman’s fatalism speaking, or practicality. Sometimes the one could be hard to tell from the other. Especially these days.
“The ancient Norse had a saying,” Doc said. “‘Never count a man happy until the day he dies.’”
“Rad waste, old man,” Avery said. “Have you been taking Gloomy Gus lessons from Jake?”
Doc shook his white head and smiled thinly.
“Ah, no. I learned from a far longer course of study, in a far harsher school.”
“Let’s keep the negative waves down,” Mildred said, “just in case.” That was a reference to a movie she’d seen as a little girl, she realized. But she couldn’t place it. She remembered it had a railway bridge in it. And tanks. They could use a few of those right now.
Then she smiled to herself. No, they couldn’t. Tanks would bog right down in the swamps surrounding them. But what J.B. had in mind was along those lines.
“I never thought this part would work,” Nataly admitted, despite her admonition of a second ago about premature celebration. “But if this part comes off…”
“That leaves a lot of work to do,” Jake said, starting to sound like his normal dour self again.
The first mate blew out a long breath. “It’ll feel good to be able to do something,” she said. “Half-baked and hard as it may be, anything is better than scurrying helplessly back and forth like a mouse between cats. Or between battleships and muties.”
“You got that right,” Suzan said.
Coming from anybody else, Mildred reflected, as the launch putted back toward the shore where they all now stood except for those on the Queen, just upstream of the tug’s bow, she would have taken the scheme as more hopeless than half-baked or even crazy. But J. B. Dix remained the most practical man on Earth. Or at least the most practical she’d ever met walking to and fro on it. In her own day or this one.
If he set out to do a thing, it was because he was certain he could do it, and had at least the glimmering of a plan as to how. And then, more often than not, he went and did it. Whatever it took.
She looked on the returning group with love, and not just for her lover. She was proud of them all. Even their temporary allies.
And she knew she could never get across to John her private reservations about his grand scheme for them and Queen. Though he knew a fair amount about it, J.B. was no profound scholar of military history. Not the way Ryan was. His was interested primarily in all the weapons, neat toys and gadgets warriors had used over the ages.
And even Ryan cared little for the political and cultural context of the wars he’d studied and thought about. He was interested in the lessons he could derive from them to help him fight his own better.
Abner cut back the outboard motor at just the precise instant to allow the launch’s pointy prow to slide up smoothly on a low patch of shore with short, dew-damp grass to lubricate its way. The barrier to J.B.’s understanding her misgivings about his plans was simply the times they had grown up in. Slavery was very real, and accepted as a thing that happened. Almost universally, in fact, or at least it wasn’t uncommon and tended to crop up anywhere. Her friends all hated it. They’d fought a loose network of slavers whose reach encompassed the whole Deathlands and beyond. And Ricky had sworn eternal vengeance on them after they butchered his village, murdered his parents before his eyes and carried off his adored older sister, Yamile, into bondage. He was still obsessed with searching for her, and one of his main reasons for remaining with Ryan’s group was to keep looking for her against all hope.
But to them slavery was just another thing coldhearts did. It didn’t hold the horror for them it did for her. Because the idea that it would focus its evil on one group of people because of the different color of their skins was as alien to them as universally available electricity and running water. People hated and discriminated, as they always had and always seemed to—whoever and wherever they were. But modern prejudices were directed against muties and their “taint” of not-quite-humanity. Normal humans—norms—of all descriptions were “us” against the mutie “them,” even if the muties were otherwise norm or even exemplary people, like Krysty, say. They were despised and even feared scarcely less than the vaguely humanoid and outright monstrous stickies, or the barely better scalies.
Arliss and Santee scrambled from the boat to help pull it farther onto the grass. Krysty, J.B. and Jak alighted. Abner shut down the motor and followed. Mildred grabbed J.B. and hugged him until he winced. Then with her arm around his waist he turned to share quick, warm cheek pecks with Krysty.
“I’m so proud of you all,” she said. “You played it perfectly.”
“Ace job of acting scared out there,” Avery said, slapping Abner on the shoulder.
“Acting scared?” Santee asked. He rumbled a distant-thunder laugh.
“Not a lot of acting required,” J.B. said, “when there’s stickies so close you can smell them.”
“You handled the boat perfectly, Abner,” Nataly said to the cox’n and bosun’s mate. “You would have fooled me that you stuck the dinghy on that wreckage by accident because you flipped out.”
Abner just bobbed his head and mumbled, “Thanks.” He seemed embarrassed at the attention.
“I thought our performance was mebbe a little broad, myself,” Arliss said, though he was smiling. “Like something you’d see in a traveling show, overacting being scared all over the place.”
“I doubt stickies have refined critical senses,” Doc said drily. “Nor do they pay overmuch attention to the nuances of human emotion and behavior.”
“Unless they’re torturing some poor bastard,” Jake said. “Then they pay plenty attention.”
“Stickies triple deadly,” Jak said, “but triple stupe.”
“And there you have it,” Avery said.
J.B. made a show of checking his chron, even though Mildred could tell he barely glanced at it.
J.B., you total bullshitter, she thought. You know
to the second how much time has elapsed.
For a man who seldom had much to say, at times he sure showed a flare for the dramatic.
“Big surprise coming up for the stickies,” he announced, turning his gaze upstream toward the bridge. “In three, two, one—”
A fireball engulfed a horde of hooting, celebrating stickies. It in turn was instantly swallowed up by an expanding cloud of white smoke with a yellow sun at its heart.
“Now, that’s something you don’t see every day,” Santee said.
What the onlookers could not see from a quarter mile away was the twenty-pound black powder bursting charge going off. The blast sent a hundred pounds of rusted nails, sharp pebbles and broken crockery that had been packed around the powder keg in a larger barrel and covered with oil-soaked cloth sleeting through the bodies of scores of muties.
“They love fire and fireworks so much,” J.B. said, “let’s see how they like being part of them.”
The smoke rolled upward in a ball to split and flow around the stump of the railway bridge. The bonfire had been blown out, but smoldering fragments lay everywhere. As did stickie bodies. And body parts.
The murderous show had been set off by a fuse that had been inserted in one end of a precious cheroot. Jak had lit it along with the oil-soaked cloth when he bent down. Because the cheroot would burn at a consistent rate, J.B. had calculated it should give him and his friends plenty time to get to safety and plenty time for stickies to join the fun.
J.B. disentangled himself from Mildred. “Right. It’s time to go back to the scene of the crime for the mop-up. Make sure the nest is cleared out.”
“Want me and Santee with you again?” Arliss asked. He was feeding fresh black powder cartridges into the side-gate in the receiver of his carbine.
