by James Axler
“Yeah,” J.B. said. “Mildred, Krysty and Doc, you come along, too. There’s just room in the launch for you.”
“If everybody’s friendly,” Abner said, “since Santee’s double large. We can make it for this short jaunt, though. No problem.”
“I’ve got to warn you, ladies and gentlemen,” J.B. said, “after we get the nest cleaned out, break time’s over. The real work starts, and the last easy day was yesterday.”
And I’ll save the breath it would cost me telling you I don’t like your plan, Mildred thought, just because it was something the slave-owning Confederates did two hundred years ago. Neither you nor anyone else but Doc would even understand.
Chapter Sixteen
“Nope,” Manda Kwon said, holding up the rad detector with her floppy hat over it to shield its vanes from the light of the scorching noonday sun. “Not detecting any rads yet.”
“What we want to be concerned with,” Ryan said, “is the crocs that infest these bayous. They’ll chill us quicker than the hot spots. Or any but the hottest, anyway.”
His skin crawled at the fact that he like the rest was wading hip deep through one of the myriad little channels twisting their way through the bogs inland east of the Grand Fleet’s anchorage.
Still, he missed his lapel rad counter, which presumably—hopefully—was with Krysty and the others back at the Mississippi Queen right now. Because it was attached to his coat.
He was leading a party of seven New Vick sailors—or rather, six sailors and one sec man—down a nuke-forsaken bayou in the ostensible hope of finding a way to outflank the Poteetville fleet.
Despite the offer of the choicest available blasters from the armory, including black powder lever-action repeaters like the ones Baron Tanya’s sec men carried, Ryan had picked a double-barreled, sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun to augment his SIG. The Baroness, in her real if carefully doled-out gratitude, had provided him smokeless ammo and even a 15-round magazine. But as a primary weapon, he thought the sawed-off gave him the best option for surprises of the up-close-and-personal kind.
Shaking her head, Manda put her hat back on and stowed the glass globe with its miniature four-blade-weather-vane assembly back in its padded box. She didn’t put it away in the light pack she carried, same as all the rest of them. She didn’t seem willing to let go of her treasure.
“Does that thing even work?” Mohoric asked. Like most of the unit he carried a Springfield trapdoor blaster with a carbine-length barrel. It wouldn’t have been Ryan’s choice even among breech-loading smoke-poles, but it seemed to be the basic weapon issued to Grand Fleet landing parties.
Ryan led them slowly forward as Manda tucked the box back under her shoulder. Almost at once a flock of cattle egrets took startled flight from off to their right, squawking and flapping almost over their heads as they ducked fast and cursed.
“It works,” Manda insisted. She carried her M1873 slung.
“How do you know?” Chief Petty Officer Jarvis Jones asked from the rear of the file. The young and handsome black man was one of Baron Tanya’s sec men, not a common sailor. His manner was flippant and often abrasive, although he seemed competent enough to back his brash self-assurance.
Ryan was at least sure he was assigned to be his babysitter. The baron of New Vick was not a trusting person. Whether that was paranoia, justified or unjustified, Ryan as yet had no objective evidence.
“It works,” Ryan said. “I’ve seen them before. What I wonder is where you get one of those things in this day and age?”
“They’re not that hard,” Manda said defensively. “Blow a glass, suck the air out, stick one of these little propeller doohickeys with the panels black on one side, white on the other. Seal it back up airtight. No great shake.”
“If you say so,” Pottz said.
“Lotsa craftsmen in the ville could do it. My family could, if you gave us the right equipment.”
“How far are we supposed to go, anyway?” Mohoric asked.
“Two miles inland, is what I was told,” Ryan said.
He glanced up at the sky. Chem clouds seemed to be approaching out of the west.
“How far have we gone, then, sir?” Jones asked.
“Beats the glowing nuke shit out of me,” Ryan replied. “There’s no way to tell. Unless one of you has got some way of measuring distance that I don’t know about.”
That brought a chorus of nos, as expected. “If anybody does, it’s Manda,” Jones said. “How about it, Mandy?”
She shook her head. She looked more than a little miffed. “You been keeping your sketch map up, Atcheson?”
“Yeah,” the weedy blond man said in his nasal voice. “What I can’t understand is, why me?”
“Because the new junior loot told you to, Earl,” Jones said.
“I got told somebody had to do it,” Ryan said. He could have chosen to get pissed at the chief’s manner, skirting insubordination pretty closely as it did.
Instead he grinned. “And it wasn’t going to be me. Shit rolls downhill.”
“Welcome to the Grand Fleet,” Pottz said.
“What I don’t get,” said Boggert, another black guy who came from small-boat river people south of New Vickville proper, “is what we’re supposed to accomplish.”
“We got ordered to look for a way to go sneaking up on the P’ville pukes,” Pottz said.
“But what’s the point of carrying on past the point we could even bring the rowboats? If they won’t make it this far, and we all know they won’t, a patrol steamer sure as nuke won’t. Much less the Pearl.”
“Orders,” Ryan said. “They said two miles. If we find a likely route, then mebbe the baron will look into dredging out a channel to get boats to it.”
“The Pearl? She draws so much she has to keep a leadsman working constantly in the bow to keep from getting grounded on a sandbar, and that’s in the big river!”
“The details are far above my pay grade,” Ryan said. “Feel free to ask Baron Krakowitz when we get back.”
Boggert hastily shook his head. “You mean she didn’t tell you that, Lieutenant Cawdor?” Jones asked. “Thought you were the Hero of the Fleet, after that little fandango last week.”
“Yeah, well, this is what that gets you. In turns out. You might keep that in mind.”
He wasn’t happy to be reminded how long he’d been held in the Grand Fleet. He may not be a prisoner, as such, but until he had a way to spring his friends from the rad- and stickie-infested trap they were stuck in, he stubbornly refused to leave.
Fact was, he was more than a little disappointed. He thought that maybe his feat in foiling the Poteetville sneak attack might’ve been enough to buy them all a ticket out. Instead he was tramping pointlessly around the same swamp complex. Even if it was less radioactive—if Manda’s glass gadget worked.
“I still don’t see the point to sloshing half a mile or more in this slop,” Boggert said. “Any channel we find’s liable to move next time it rains. And then Earl’s map won’t be worth runny dog crap. And it’s fixing to rain, in two hours, max.”
“Reckon you’re right, Boggert,” Ryan said. “All right, everybody. Time to head back.”
“Have we really come two miles, sir?” Manda asked.
“Atcheson, you got our progress all caught up and everything?”
“If by ‘caught up’ you mean I got a sort of squiggly line meandering across a sheet of otherwise blank paper like an earthworm that got dropped in a mug of Towse Lightning, sir, yes, sir.”
“Ace on the line. Then write ‘two miles’ at the point you’re at.”
“Yessir! Done, sir.”
“See how simple it was?” Ryan cast another uneasy look at the clouds. They were starting to pile up along the horizon and the sun was already closer to them than he cared for. “Time to get back to the blasterboat.”
* * *
“ALMOST GOT IT,” Myron called up from the beach.
Santee looked at Ricky down the four-foot
length of truss and grinned. The youth wasn’t sure how one of his group’s smaller members had gotten paired with the biggest of the whole contingent. Not to mention the strongest.
But when it came to implementing J.B.’s scheme of turning the wrecked Queen into a makeshift ironclad herself, before the rads and heavy metal poisoning—and the crocs, and the stickies—chilled them all, everybody found him- or herself doing everything. Whatever happened to be needed while you were around, you did.
And that’s leaving out the swampers, Ricky thought. We haven’t seen any sign of them yet, muchas gracias a Nuestra Señora!
They’d been stuck there over two weeks now. Ricky was feeling a constant turmoil in his guts. He didn’t care to mention it to anyone. He didn’t know what was causing it—whether it was the effects of prolonged rad exposure, or the grinding tension of being slowly roasted by nukes while awaiting death at the suckered fingertips of the Deathlands’ most feared muties, there wasn’t a nuking thing anyone could do about it. Except get their posteriors out of there.
“Right,” Myron said. “Ease her down.” He was acting mostly normal and not at all depressed these days. Apparently having hard and serious work—work that carried with it even the smallest glimmering of hope, which was about what this had—agreed with the bearded acting captain. Anyway, this was his idea—or obsession—fixing up his beloved boat and using it to get them out of there. What J.B. contributed was a sliver of a chance it might actually work.
“One,” the big Indian counted, nodding. “Two. Three.” And he and Ricky eased the truss down onto the railing.
Ricky cussed under his breath. He knew Our Lady could hear his unseemly language. That didn’t mean his friends had to. He had gotten the rag he was using to protect his left hand from the rusty, cut-steel edge stuck between it and the wood. Now he had to winkle it out somehow. They didn’t have any infinite supply of rags. Nor anything else—which was going to become a serious concern in not too many more days.
If we live that long, he thought. There were times Ricky felt almost tempted to hope something happened to get it all over with. Almost.
They had caught a true bit of luck in the form of the damage the mega-quakes had done the old-style railroad bridge. It had broken a lot of the structural steel—and some which struck Ricky as mostly ornamental, if not totally so—all to hell. So it was possible to look for sections that mostly fit the spots on the Queen’s hull and superstructure that Myron, working heads-together with Avery, J.B. and his assistant, Sean, picked for them.
But they did not miraculously all just fit exactly, which meant brutal work cutting and trimming. That meant using a hammer, a cold chisel and a file. It was possible, but it was slow, and it sucked the life out of a person like a bleeding wound.
They did their best to knock off the worst jaggedness on cut or broken edges with a file. But the constraints of their own endurance, and the fact that here and now time was almost literally blood and it was steadily draining out, imposed limits on how good a job they could do. Even Santee, whose palms and finger pads just seemed to be giant predark baseball gloves of calluses, had to use bits of folded-up cloth to protect himself.
Of course, they got cut anyway. Ricky’s hands hurt all the time, both from the gashes and the exertion. He knew everybody else’s did, too. And he had determined from the first moment fate had thrown him in with Ryan Cawdor and the rest that he would do what the others did, and never falter, never complain.
If it didn’t work out quite that way for him…well, truthfully it didn’t for anyone else, either. Even Ryan, even the stolid J.B., had been known to piss and moan every once in a while. A great while, granted.
He leaned on the rail for a moment to get after his breath. It had gotten away from him again. He suspected somebody would yell at him pretty directly about his bad habit of forgetting to breathe during intense moments of concentration combined with effort. He had blacked out and keeled over more than once during the week they’d been at work repairing the Queen’s breached hull, shoring up the half-gutted cabin, gathering and shaping bridge and railway iron, hauling it downstream and hefting it into place.
Behind him he heard Krysty muttering something under her breath as she and Doc lowered another, similar U-section length of red steel onto the analogous segment of the port bow, the one toward the center of the stream. There had been some spirited debate among the Queen’s crew as to whether to try refloating her before adding a few tons more weight. Myron had decided it was better to leave her partially beached. That meant they wouldn’t have to mess with trying to haul the improvised armor chunks onboard off a boat. Or a raft, really—the motor launch was occupied pretty much full-time hauling crews upstream to gather scrap, and then towing the loaded rafts back. They had cobbled their small flotilla of five rafts into two bigger, stouter ones.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “All this and now it starts to rain.”
As if to confirm the old man’s words, a drop struck the back of Ricky’s right hand. He looked up. The clouds, which had been colluding in a threatening way overhead as the afternoon grew on, were now a solid dark mass overhead. And delivering on their earlier threat, as more drops struck his head.
Santee grinned.
“It rains on the just and the unjust alike,” he said. “So somewhere, there are just people getting wet, too. They’re the poor bastards we should be pitying.”
Everybody laughed. Ricky wasn’t sure if it was even funny, but he laughed, too. Anything to ease the burden of the day.
Arliss had been dubious about leaving the tug grounded to armor her up. The weight of all that steel would make it harder to dig her out and refloat her. He wanted to do it once Avery had overseen the hull patch, which had taken no more than a day, since the Queen carried stores designed for just that purpose. But Myron held firm, and Nataly backed him. They didn’t have a dry dock in which to armor his vessel, so he’d let the shore do the job.
Krysty, J.B. and the rest of the companions mostly stayed out of it. These were the people who knew boats and the river. The job was going to be tough whichever way they did it. Ricky was glad that he didn’t have to help manhandle multiple hundred-pound lengths of rusty metal off a raft in the middle of Wolf Creek. The crocs had started coming around more often. The group had taken to occasionally throwing a shot their way, just to remind them what blasters were, which seemed to be working.
So far.
Nataly knelt over the piece of truss Ricky and Santee had just placed with a spool of 16-gauge fence wire and a pair of wire cutters. Just as they didn’t have cutting torches to ease the work of shaping the scrap to fit, they lacked welding heads to fasten them together once they were in place. J.B. remembered, and Doc confirmed from his own firsthand observation, that back in the nineteenth century the armor for the first ironclads, and the later hulls of full-metal ships, were bolted together. The Queen didn’t carry in her stores or in her cargo bolts that were big enough to do the job.
But she did carry a few hundred-pound spools of that fencing wire, enough, or so they reckoned, to secure the pieces, using the bolt-holes in scavvied rails and the trusses that had them. Or they could simply wrap them in place when they lacked holes, as this chunk did.
They weren’t building for the ages, J.B. pointed out. And as his apprentice in fact if not in name, Ricky knew what that cost him. The Armorer was a perfectionist. But, like all things, only when he could afford to be. In this case, he observed, all the so-called armor needed to do was hold together long enough to let them run a fleet of hostile big-blaster ships. Specifically, to run the New Vickville fleet, since the run would be significantly faster downstream, and that was the one which lay that way.
It would be good enough, or it wouldn’t, which described the way Ricky Morales had led his whole life after the coldheart raiders came and destroyed his village, his family and the life he had known for all his sixteen years.
“The launch is coming back,” Sante
e remarked, glancing upstream. It was raining briskly now. “Last run of the day, I reckon.”
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed again, this time much louder and with considerably more emphasis. Ricky turned to look at him. It was his favorite exclamation, but usually he didn’t give vent to it more than once a day if that.
But the old man was standing upright, pointing a long arm.
“Stickies!” Doc hollered. “A veritable horde of them!”
Chapter Seventeen
To Mildred’s horror the cleared space of shoreline around the Queen’s bow was instantly thronged with stickies. The rain wasn’t coming down hard enough to shield the awful scene from view.
“Cut the towline!” J.B. immediately snapped to Arliss, who was steering the motor launch. Abner was on the scavvy party, too. But as with every job they’d been doing since they got started on this insane project, that was rotated as much as possible. They didn’t want anyone getting burned-out. Or no quicker than utterly necessary.
“But the crap—” Arliss began.
“Gotta move,” J.B. declared. “The raft will float downstream.”
“What if it hits the boat?” Jake asked.
“You want there to be a boat to get to? No time!”
The navigator looked ready to argue more, but Arliss drew a sheath knife and slashed the towline with no further argument.
It wasn’t hard to see why. Myron and Sean were already almost surrounded by loathsome, pale rubbery bodies.
The outboard motor’s grinding churn rose to a snarl. The bow lifted up on a V-shaped wave the craft leaped forward at the best speed it could muster with eight bodies on board.
But will it be in time? Mildred thought, drawing her ZKR 551 blaster. Will anyone be left?
Aiming with both hands she began to fire. At this range and speed, in a bucking boat, she had no chance of nailing a specific target. But she was aiming inshore of where the acting captain and his assistant mechanic were fighting for their lives. She had a reasonable chance of missing them—and an equally reasonable chance of one of her soft lead 158-grain slugs finding a home in stickie flesh.
