Iron Rage

by James Axler

  And if she accidentally hit and chilled one of the two men—would that be a bad thing? Or an act of mercy?

  * * *

  KRYSTY DREW HER Glock handblaster. Inconvenient as it could be, with holsters and protruding butts wanting to snag the heavy pieces of scrap metal, all of the companions had their weapons near to hand at all times.

  Of the Queen’s complement only Nataly wore a sidearm, but the others made sure to keep a weapon nearby.

  On board the ship, Myron and Sean had been caught unarmed onshore.

  Krysty thumbed the Glock to full-auto fire. Now was not the time for concerns about safety. She aimed it down into the mass of bodies converging on Myron from her left and fired a quick burst.

  The blaster climbed, but her 9 mm copper-jacketed slugs sent a couple of stickies sprawling onto the ground. Others tripped and fell across them, their hoots rising to a crescendo of frustrated fury.

  She heard Ricky’s Webley handblaster cut loose to her right. From the corner of her eye she saw Santee swing a big leg over the rail, looking to climb down to rescue his friends.

  “Stay back, you big stupe!” Myron cried, his face red behind his beard. A stickie grabbed him from behind. It missed its grip, but its suckered fingers yanked the man’s gray plaid shirt back. It pulled itself against him, groping for his face with its free hand. He jabbed an elbow back into its face, and the mutie fell back.

  Krysty fired again, staring at a point just over Myron’s right shoulder. When recoil made her blaster rise slightly, bullets continued to rake the stickies thronging behind the ones closing in to swarm the captain. Yellow blood flew up in horrific counterpoint to the rain.

  Myron flung himself forward desperately. Krysty flicked the selector switch to single shot, leaned over the rail, reaching out with her left arm while she continued to snap single head shots into the mutie mob. With a roar and a gout of flame from her blaster, Nataly pushed up beside her, likewise stretching a hand toward the captain.

  Myron flung his hands out and took immediate hold of both. The two women began to haul him upward with all their strength, as he scrabbled with his boots against the hull to get purchase.

  Krysty was almost yanked over the rail when a stickie, scrambling up the backs of its mates, landed on Myron’s back. Then a slim length of steel punctured the creature’s eye. The blade was withdrawn with a revolting sucking sound. The mutie’s corpse fell back.

  Stickies came in a bewildering variety of appearances. Some lacked any trace of a mouth. This breed had them, filled with curving black needle teeth.

  Another pair of stickies hurled themselves toward the rail, using their comrades as combination ramps and ladders. As they sprang, the shotgun barrel of Doc’s LeMat roared. The charge of shot clawed the face off one creature, the blast of pellets smashing into the side of the other’s round, hairless, earless head. They struck the steel-truss section, squirting yellow gore and blue-green clots of something across Myron and the two women as they got him safely aboard. “Oh, no! Somebody help me! Please help me!”

  A terrified scream brought Krysty’s head up. Sean was struggling with a mob of stickies who practically engulfed him. His arms thrashed frantically, but his movements were mindless panic and too random and undirected to do him any good. Not that anything likely could.

  Santee was whaling on muties trying to scramble over the rail on the starboard bow. Ricky had his top-break Webley cracked open and was fumbling in his pocket for a full-moon clip with six fat, fresh .45 ACP cartridges to feed it with.

  “No! Don’t leave me! Don’t let the stickies kill me!”

  The assistant mechanic’s screaming plea turned to shrill inchoate shrieking as stickie finger suckers tore away a palm-size chunk of his right cheek.

  Myron held a clawed right hand out to Nataly. “Your blaster. Give it to me!”

  He was screaming, too. Wordlessly Nataly slapped her Ruger Old Army revolver into his upturned palm.

  “Just one bullet left,” she said.

  He transferred the grip to his right palm. Then, using his left hand to support the other, he poked the blaster down over the rail, took aim and fired a single shot.

  Sean’s rolling blue eye and surrounding flesh erupted in a red explosion. His wordless pleas ceased. His body dropped down limply beneath a vile seething sea of stickies.

  There was no respite for those on board the grounded boat. The stickies hit the hull with a spatter of heavy impacts as the rain began to pour from above. They clambered up one another to get at the railing.

  Myron handed the blaster back to Nataly. There was no refilling its chambers with loose black powder in this rain. It would all be soaked and ruined unless she retreated back onto the bridge. Instead she reversed her grip, seized it by the barrel and swung it overhand into the face of a stickie that came lunging up over the rail, crushing its skull.

  Myron turned away briefly, bending down. He seized a one-piece steel hammer from an open toolbox with one hand and a foot-long adjustable wrench with the other. Conscientious workman to the core, he flicked the lid shut with his fingertips as he stood up from it.

  Krysty put the sole of her right boot against the chest of a stickie that reared up over the side of the boat right in front of her. She pushed hard. It fell over backward, squealing. She doubted she had done it any actual harm. Their bodies were springy and resilient.

  Reloading her handblaster with a fresh magazine, she cast desperately about for some hand-to-hand-combat weapon. There were more stickies than she had bullets. More than all of them had bullets, she feared.

  A two-foot wrecking bar was propped against the gunwale nearby. She picked it up in her left hand. Then swung it backhand into the face of a stickie that had plopped on the deck and was running for her on its short, bowed legs. Slim, curving teeth shattered.

  The muties had begun to splash into the water beside the boat. It was only a matter of time before they rolled over the handful of defenders in a revolting rubbery-fleshed wave.

  She heard a snarl of full-automatic fire. Shrill sounds of agony came from beyond the port bow.

  “It’s the launch!” Ricky shouted. He had found a push broom and knocked the head off. He held the staff like a lance. “It’s J.B. and the rest!”

  * * *

  COOLLY AND METHODICALLY, J.B. reloaded his Uzi with a full mag as Arliss nosed the motor launch against what the boat crew called the Queen’s port quarter. Haste made waste, he always said. And never was calm efficiency more needed than at a time like this.

  Of course, there were no guarantees that it would do a speck of good. He’d dumped most of a mag into the stickies making themselves into a living ramp onto the boat. He had to have chilled at least six of them with head shots. But they never slowed down, climbing right over their wounded and dying fellows with no more concern than if they were fallen leaves. And more just seemed to be pouring out of the weeds all around the clearing.

  Well, there were no guarantees in this life, other than one day you’d be leaving it. J.B. wasn’t ready to board the last train to the coast this day. A ladder was hooked over the rail, just in front of the stern. Avery, standing cautiously in the launch’s prow, tied a rope to it.

  Meanwhile Jak simply sprang to the ladder and swarmed up it like a monkey. Arliss and Jake cursed as the boat rocked.

  As the shipfitter made the rope fast, J.B. leaped to the ladder and followed the white-haired young man. He had both his Uzi and his shotgun slung over the back of his brown leather bomber jacket.

  “Grab yourself a hand-to-hand weapon,” he called back, as Jak disappeared over the rear end of the superficially restored cabin. “Something to put some distance between you and the stickies.”

  Unslinging the M-4000 and making sure his hat was settled upright on his head, the Armorer made his way quickly along the port side of the boat. Ahead of them he saw Krysty decapitate a stickie with a baseball-style swing.

  That was well done, he reckoned, but it was not go
od that the muties were aboard.

  As he advanced, one got up on the rail and gathered itself to jump at Krysty. J.B. was carrying the shotgun with its butt plate just in front of his shoulder and the muzzle angled down. Now he shouldered the piece fully, snugged it in tight and got a flash picture. He blasted just as the mutie launched off. The buckshot ripped out what passed as the creature’s guts. It dropped to the deck and began rolling around, squalling and licking at its innards.

  J.B. charged onto the foredeck, keeping his head turning left and right to keep any of the ugly bastards from blindsiding him. He found Nataly lying with her head against the front wall of the bridge with an angry red sucker mark in the middle of her left cheek. It looked to him as if she’d jumped back to get loose from a stickie finger stuck to her face and cracked her head. Her eyes were open but not staring with the fixedness of death.

  Ricky crouched to one side of her, blasting a charging stickie in the head as he held a broomstick jutting from under his arm to ward off the creatures. Myron stood on his fallen officer’s other side, windmilling a pair of hand tools into onrushing muties. By the starboard bow Santee stood swinging at a stickie with his ax. Its head was throwing up strips and drops of yellow blood into the now-pouring rain at every stroke. He now and then let go with one hand or the other to peel off muties that were trying to scale his enormous body. Or just punch their round heads concave.

  A stickie hopped onto the rail to J.B.’s left. He was carrying the big shotgun across his body, as ready to use it to push, poke, or smash as to blast. Now he twitched the front end slightly up and back and pulled the trigger. The recoil hurt his left elbow and right wrist, but he didn’t feel half so bad, he reckoned, as the stickie. The shot simply obliterated the chinless lower quarter of its face and its skinny neck. What was left of its head fell back over the rail to its right. The decapitated body, hands patting wildly at the air, toppled straight back.

  Things looked bad. They looked worse when a fresh wave of stickies broke over the bow to descend on the supine Nataly and press Krysty and Myron back to the bulkhead.

  A white figure with a black torso dropped from above on the back of the stickie that was crawling up the first mate’s belly and reaching for her face. He squashed it onto her, eliciting a squawk from both of them. It turned to a whistling scream as the stickie’s spine broke beneath the combat boots Jak wore. He smashed in a second stickie’s face with a backhand blow from his trench knife’s brass pommel. He had one of his butterfly knives in his left hand. It slashed at a stickie that was reaching for him. Sucker-tipped fingers flew, and three streams of yellow blood fountained.

  Another stickie landed on the albino’s back, wrapping him with its arms. It instantly whipped its arms open wide and fell backward off him, keening in pain—a horrible broken, gurgling sound. Its front and the insides of its arms were gashed and running yellow from the bits of broken glass and sharp metal Jak kept sewed to the shoulders and collar of his jacket, to discourage just that sort of unwanted intimacy.

  Arliss came around the other corner, levering shots from his Marlin as fast as he could jack the action. Then the rest of the scavvy party rushed forward around him and J.B., smiting or shooting.

  They quickly cleared the foredeck of muties, then they crowded to the rail. In response to an almost-screamed order from Myron, Nataly retreated to the shelter of the bridge to reload her handblaster and reassemble the wits scattered by the crack to her ponytailed head. J.B. could see how the captain might have made an impression. Aside from the fact he was her shipmate, her employer and her commanding officer, he was a terrifying sight himself, with stickie blood and bits of flesh strung all through his curly beard and hair, his eyes wild.

  The rest of the crew rushed to the rail. They fired into the horde of stickies with all the bullets they could put in the air. J.B. had swapped his scattergun for his Uzi once again and burned through a pair of mags before he had to ease off to let the blaster cool.

  The muties dropped in waves. The attack faltered. Even insensate muties had their limits. So many were thrashing underfoot, or lying inert and in the way, it was hard for their hideous kindred to advance. The nearer half of the open air was cleared of stickies that were still capable of keeping on their feet.

  But others continued to stream from the woods. The horrors had to be converging from miles around. Now the new arrivals crowded forward so powerfully that the shrinking muties in the front ranks were driven toward the blasters that had been chilling them by the dozen.

  And the fire was slackening as first one and then another defender had to stop to reload. Those who lacked cartridge weapons had to withdraw to the wheelhouse to reload. Even Arliss had to thumb one cartridge after another into the side of his repeater’s breech.

  The muties advanced deliberately. And then Suzan, her voice cracking in terror, yelled out, “They’re coming over the stern! The bastards are behind us!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  As fast as he could draw them—an eye blinked more slowly—Jak put his knives away. He was already in the act of sprinting a few steps back across the deck. He jumped, caught the forward edge of the wheelhouse roof with his hands and hauled himself onto it.

  They had all been warned not to trust their weight to the roof. Although the walls and interior upright of the burned-out parts of the cabin had been shored up, and the roof patched, it was nowhere near sound. But Jak already knew where the roof was strong enough for his slight weight or not. He didn’t have to look where he put his feet. He just charged.

  A mutie was already standing up on the rear of the roof, suckered hands held high. It rushed to meet him as Jak drew his knives. He kicked it in the belly and it sailed back off the cabin.

  A trio of others scrambled up. Jak grinned. To die chilling stickies was beneath a hunter’s dignity, but it beat the glowing nuke shit out of dying while not chilling them.

  The albino charged straight at the mutie on his right. He gave it a flying punch in the face with his trench knife’s studded hand-guard, smashing in its skull.

  The middle stickie turned toward him. He slashed its palms with a figure-eight cut of his blade. It pulled its hands over its head, looking hilariously as if it was surrendering.

  If it had, that would have made no difference to Jak. He rammed the tip of his knife into the creature’s eye, killing it. It collapsed to the deck as the remaining one charged Jak with its head down.

  He stepped to his left and engaged the stickie by ramming the blade of the trench knife to the hilt in its gut. He twisted the blade, feeling the tip grate against the monster’s spine. Then he yanked it out right to left, spilling ropes of blue intestine. A mutie popped its head up to his right. He guessed they were pulling their usual mutie-pyramid trick: not boosting one another, but simply one scaling another like a ladder whether the first one agreed to it or not. He’d seen them stack so high making a ramp against a tall wall that it squished the ones on the bottom, and the blood ran in yellow streams from its base.

  He spun his hips clockwise, bringing his right foot up in a scything kick. It caught the side of the stickie’s face and snapped its head right around. He heard the thin neck break like an oversize stalk of celery.

  Then through the sheets of rain he saw something that made even his blood run cold. The hot joy of battle drained from him in an instant.

  “Boats!” he called out to his comrades, who were now battling the stickies face-to-face on the decks to either side of the cabin. “Plenty boats—all around!”

  * * *

  “SWAMPERS!” RICKY HEARD Suzan scream. She fell back a step from the mass of stickies, letting her guard down, lowering the stray chunk of lumber she’d been using to batter them to the deck. With a grunt, Santee pitched a section of bridge truss that had to have weighed one hundred pounds or more over her head to pulp a quartet of stickies against the decking. Aiming over her shoulder one-handed, the youth saw Mildred deftly shoot the eye out of the mutie that was trying to
take advantage of the woman’s vulnerability to suck her face off with its fingers.

  “Let that be a lesson to you, son,” J.B. said to Ricky, smashing a stickie’s head in with a piston stroke of his shotgun’s buttstock. “No matter how bad things seem, they can always get a lot worse.”

  “They’ll eat us!” Suzan shrieked. However, the fresh dose of adrenaline this new fear gave her seemed to energize the woman. She raised her plank and jabbed a stickie in the throat with its jagged end. The mutie went down holding its neck with both hands and making unmistakable choking sounds. The injury would slow it for a while, but not chill it.

  “I heard they roast people slowly over fires,” Santee said, sounding as if he thought that was the best joke ever. He grabbed one of Suzan’s shoulders and pulled her away from the muties who were picking their way over the rubble the defenders had made of the latest batch of attackers and stepped up to take her place. “Quit hogging all the fun for a while, will you?”

  Ricky had put away his handblaster to use his broomstick as a lightweight quarterstaff. It wasn’t a very good weapon, but these stickies, resilient though they were, were markedly on the lightly constructed side. It didn’t take that hard a crack to shatter a mutie’s skull like an egg, with yellow ooze for a white and clumpy blue stuff for a yolk.

  “Well, the swampers got a job of work ahead to kill us harder than the stickies would,” J.B. said.

  “Not boarding!” Ricky heard Jak shout from on top of the cabin.

  Blasterfire ripped out to left and right of the beached craft, which given its angle meant just as close to fore and aft of her. He saw yellow flames stabbing through the rain, then blurred shapes of canoes and other small boats pushing ashore.

  “Let them fight it out!” Krysty’s voice rang like a trumpet over the din. “Let’s clear the decks of these monsters, then deal with the swampers!”

  Since between them Suzan, Mildred and the giant Indian pretty much seemed to have the starboard side handled, not to say blocked, Ricky followed Krysty around the port side of the cabin. He took the opportunity to tuck his stick under his arm and clumsily reload his Webley.