EarthBlood

by neetha Napew

  Mac glanced down and noticed that there was a tiny thread of fresh blood near the heel of her left boot. And again he wondered about what the ill-matched couple did together in their private moments.

  "You asked me where we were going? I gave some thought to keeping on north. Save us some time and possibly a deal of grief. We could be in Puget Sound in a couple of days, sailing day and night with a fair wind. Round Cape Flattery and Low Point and Angeles Point, through the Admiralty Inlet. Maybe put ashore at Squamish, across the sound. If we travel by land, it might take us a month with the bad weather I smell in the air."

  "So?" said Paul. "You make it seem a good option, Nanci, but the way you say it makes it sound like putting your neck into a noose."

  She nodded and patted him on his bearded cheek. "Good, Paul, good. You see and you listen. Rare qualities. Keep you living when all about start dying. Neck into a noose? Maybe. My guess, ladies and gentlemen, for what it might be worth, is that the Hunters of the Sun have a network of informers strung across this pink and unpleasant land."

  "How about Zelig? He have the same?"

  "Possibly, Mac. And the nearer we get to Aurora, then the more that's likely. But I am of the opinion, most strongly, that it will be known that two vessels were stolen from Eureka. Like pointing a finger. They'll know we'll go north. Have to. But how far? Best would be to keep sailing."

  "So?" asked Pamela, joining them on the stern.

  "So we aim for what you think might be an abandoned rowboat, right ahead. Sail her straight onto the beach, helmsman, and damn the torpedoes!"

  THE LITTLE ONES, Sukie and Jocelyn, had been brought out of the cabin down below and bundled together in front of the mast with a pile of blankets around them. Paul McGill had been delegated, along with Jeanne, to keep a careful eye on their safety. Pamela was positioned up in the bows, told to watch out for any last-minute underwater danger. Mac took the wheel, ready to respond to any order from Nanci.

  Jeff Thomas had come up on deck and leaned on the rail close to Mac, who couldn't help noticing the smear of bright blood just beneath his swollen lip.

  "What can I do, Nanci?" he asked.

  "Keep out of the way until we hit. The Lord alone knows what'll happen then. But try to make yourself useful. Don't just save your own skin, Jeff, will you? You do recall what happens to folks who do that?"

  The ex-journalist flushed and turned away to look at the approaching shoreline without answering her.

  "Shouldn't we lower the sail?" called Mac. "Going in at a hell of a lick."

  "No. Faster the better," she replied. "Farther we dig in, the easier and safer to get off."

  "Rocks!" screamed Pamela, high in the bow, pointing with her hand to a spot about fifty yards ahead of the vessel and a touch to the left.

  Mac moved the wheel to take the Eureka Belle a couple of points to starboard.

  "Don't take too much way off her," ordered Nanci, watching the spinnaker.

  He didn't answer, keeping his eyes on his oldest daughter, who gave him the thumbs-up to show they were safely clear of the submerged obstruction.

  "Looked like a garage roof," she shouted back to him.

  "Steady as she goes." Nanci Simms was standing at the rail and looking up at the low, rain-washed hills around them. The Port Royale was in her hands.

  "Aye, aye, skipper," he muttered, resenting the bossy tone in the woman's voice.

  A flurry of sleet made him blink. As the coast rushed toward them, Henderson McGill wondered what he was doing there. It had crossed his mind a few times since the Aquila had come splintering in from deep space that he might be living through a complex and barely believable nervous breakdown. That one day the drugs would work and he'd snap out of it and find himself between clean sheets in an Air Force veterans' hospital. With both wives and all seven children smiling at him.

  "No fucking way," he said, bracing himself ready for what he knew would be a substantial crash.

  "Eighty yards," called Pamela. "Fifty."

  Jeff Thomas was crouched behind the bulwark on the port side, his eyes fixed behind him at Nanci Simms. He was rehearsing in his mind the different ways he might eventually choose to slaughter her. When the time was right.

  The impact was surprisingly gentle. The earth was soft and muddy, and the bow of the ship drove into it, gradually decelerating until it was stopped. The vessel stood motionless, leaning just a little to the port side, with the sails flapping helplessly and noisily on the yards.

  Sukie cried briefly, but Paul picked her up and carried her to the rail, showing her the misty land.

  "Collect everything and we'll move," said Nanci. When nobody seemed to be responding, she raised her voice, "Let's go. Anyone watching the coast for twenty miles either way will have seen this tub running around here. The rowboat might already have attracted attention. There could be Hunters of the Sun already crawling around out there. We stand out like a dead dog on a snowbank."

  A bank of rain swept down over them, cutting visibility to less than fifty yards, clearing away again as quickly as it had come. Nanci paced the sloping deck, looking worriedly at the dreary landscape, paying particular attention to a trestle bridge that carried the highway over what had once been a creek and was now a part of the Pacific Ocean.

  "Hurry up!"

  "Dancing as fast as I can," snapped Jeanne. "If you lent a hand, instead of standing there like Lord God Almighty, we'd be ready quicker."

  Nanci ignored her and continued to watch the land.

  "How do we get over the side?" called Pamela, back in the bows. "Quite a big drop to the shore."

  "We clear of the water?"

  "Yeah, Nanci."

  "Bound to be a rope ladder on the boat someplace. Mac, see what you can find."

  He climbed down the steep companionway and felt his way through the darkness.

  He could hear feet moving on the deck, just above his head. There was the faint whisper of the small waves, breaking on the new shore. As Nanci, Jeff and his family walked from side to side, the boat shifted slightly, its stern still surrounded by the ocean. Mac was no judge of tides, but he guessed that if it were coming in, then the Eureka Belle would soon be fully afloat again.

  "Got anything?" Nanci's voice reached him, then her shadow filled the hatch behind him.

  "Yeah," he said as his fingers touched a rope ladder hung on the wall to his left.

  The sound of the shot was muffled, far off, unimportant.

  But it was followed by the noise of a body falling to the deck and then a scream.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Margaret Tabor had been preparing her armed mission to the north.

  Aviation fuel was in such short supply that she was forced to compromise, eventually ending up with two Chinook CH-47Ms, each capable of carrying around fifty armed men with supplies for a week. But there was no knowing where the next gas stop might be, so one of them was partly loaded with high-octane fuel.

  By juggling around with the figures, Margaret Tabor worked out that one of the Chinooks would have to be sacrificed along the line in order to get the other helicopter to the region of the Cascades. Then, if they found Aurora and purged it clean, they might come across more fuel stocks and be in a position to return safely to their Southwest base.

  Even the loss of both choppers would be worth it, if it meant the end of Zelig and his swelling rebellion in the north. All the faceless, nameless heads of the Hunters of the Sun were agreed on that.

  They had a total of sixty-eight men, all supplied with the best state-of-the-art weapons that the Hunters could give them. It meant depleting their armory to a dangerously low level, but the game had to be worth the candle.

  "If we lose this one," she had told the supreme council of the Hunters, "then we are all lost. Now and forever. This is the one throw of the dice. I say we will win it."

  There had been a couple of coded radio messages during the day of December 21 from the isolated part of the coast, north of the devast
ated quake zone. They related to the stealing of the boat and the sailing ship from Eureka the previous night. Communications across any distance in the new world were difficult, again because of immense problems over power. But these had found their way successfully through the network. Of necessity, both had been brief.

  Both had been of considerable interest to the woman.

  "Your warning correct. Four turtles from sea. One down. No problem. Ready to track remainder."

  When she read that, the Chief had nodded and smiled. The point of the entire costly exercise hadn't been to try to chill all the survivors of the Aquila. It had been to try to locate them and then follow until they walked through the gates of Aurora. Then they could all be properly chilled.

  The second message had arrived a few hours later and had come from a different source. It made her scowl. She crumpled up the paper and threw it into the shredder, but it chose that precise moment to malfunction, bringing a wave of blinding anger that even frightened Margaret herself.

  "Flock of birds landed and one plucked. But hunting stopped. Perma—" A gap was followed by "Trail cold and lost. Will try but not hopeful. Snow."

  A part of the message had been lost, but it wasn't hard to guess the broken word had been "permanent." Nor was it hard for Margaret Tabor to read the unacceptable story between the thinly coded lines.

  The first message had presented no problems. The small boat had reached shore, north of the massive new bay that had bitten a slice from the original coastline. Four people in it, which tied in with the other spies' reports. And one of them had been killed in the incident, but the others were going to be tracked. That was all good news.

  The second message was grim and made her doubt, for a few heartbeats, her own planning.

  More of the survivors had landed, probably in the sailing ship from Eureka. One of them had also been killed by the waiting assassin who had probably seen them coming and chosen to wait before beginning to track them, letting the others go ahead. That was how she read it. But then something had gone squint on her. The hidden killer had himself been taken out of the game.

  The result was that she had once again lost the trail, and it would be growing ever colder with every hour that passed. Already it was… she checked the clock. It was already four hours since the discovery that her shooter had been removed from the field. Too long.

  "It'll be dark soon," she said to herself. Outside her window she could see the two Chinook helicopters still being readied for the journey north. Now it must wait until tomorrow.

  ZELIG HAD ALSO received two messages.

  But technical problems had delayed them and also caused some confusion about whether there had been any other word that had been totally lost.

  The temperature in the Cascades had dropped sharply during the early part of the twenty-first. A fierce blue norther had come hacking its way down from the Canadian prairies, carrying in its churning belly the seeds of a storm from still farther away, across the frozen Bering Strait, in the ice-bound Kamchatka Peninsula of what used to be Russia.

  Despite efforts to fight it off with a high-pressure steam hose, the main radio antenna became coated with glittering ice and eventually folded in the middle like a gut-shot cowboy. It had taken hours of hard, unremitting labor, in bitterly inhospitable weather, to carry out some of the repairs and jury-rig an alternative antenna.

  The first message had come in just before the main antenna went crashing down.

  "No sign either set players anywhere north of Illyria. Searching both ways."

  Illyria had been the agreed code name for the town of Eureka. So both the boat and the sailing ship had disappeared off the face of the planet.

  Then came the blank time that their contact might have been sending them other news that had been lost. Because the only other message they received didn't seem to quite follow on.

  "One member from one home team struck out. Visiting pitcher also fouled out. Remaining players both teams gone separately."

  Zelig had sat and considered the two flimsy yellow sheets of paper. He hadn't been surprised that both the rowboat and the sailing vessel had not been spotted. For most of the time they'd been out at sea, probably keeping a decent distance from the treacherous shore. And he knew the weather had been bleak and wet, with poor visibility.

  But the second message opened up a can of worms. The operator had made the point that reception had been poor and inexact, and there could be errors in it. But the suggestion was that one of the survivors from the Aquila, or someone traveling with them, had been murdered. The visiting pitcher was obviously an assassin from the Hunters of the Sun.

  Who had, in turn, been killed.

  "Nanci?" whispered Zelig to his empty office.

  One dead, from the shrinking group of travelers, battling toward Aurora, was seriously bad news. One hired killer less on the opposition was modestly good news.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Heather Hilton, eleven years old, survived the cholera epidemic that had stolen away both her mother and her twin sister, Andrea. With short blond hair and gray-blue eyes, she was well built and mature for her years. Old before her time.

  She'd been standing in the bow of the rowboat as it grated against the muddy shore, ready to jump, and turned to share a joke with her father and with Carrie and Sly.

  Suddenly she'd heard—perhaps felt—a vibration. A ferocious, high-pitched humming had whined past the sides of her face as she turned. It would've hit her if she hadn't made that sudden movement.

  She'd experienced a brief, heart-stopping sensation of fiery heat and a smell like nothing she'd ever known before. A hot, dangerous smell that came and went in an instant.

  Heather was so shocked that she screamed once, her arms thrown wide. The rope dropped, and her feet slipped on the damp wood of the boat. Before she even knew what was happening, she'd fallen over the side into the freezing, shallow water.

  Jim had spotted the white puff of smoke from a rifle, heard the ringing echo of the shot, seen his only child scream and fall from sight.

  For a few endless moments his heart seemed to judder to a halt in his chest, his mind going totally blank. Time ceased for him as he stared at the front of the little boat, where Heather had been standing.

  His hand had found the Ruger, and he was aiming it toward the bridge that carried the short stretch of elevated highway over the invading sea where he'd seen the hidden gunman.

  But Carrie was quicker. Her little .22 was snapping away, at a range where it was unlikely to do much serious harm but might be enough to make the assassin get his head down.

  Jim opened fire, pulling the trigger three times. Careful, aimed, spaced shots. He saw a tiny puff of concrete from one of the bridge supports.

  Sly was rocking backward and forward, hugging himself, tears coursing down his plump cheeks.

  "Dad! Get the fuck out of there!"

  Jim Hilton had been about to squeeze the trigger for a fourth time when he froze. Heather was peering at him over the side of the rowboat, her face drenched in seawater, her hair dripping wet.

  "You aren't…" he said, aware of the stupidity of it. Of course she wasn't dead. There she was.

  "Missed me, Dad. Close, though. Come on. Before the shooting starts again."

  "Right. Carrie, take Sly and head—" he looked around him, "—head that way." He was pointing north where the land seemed to be cut and seamed with valleys and would give them better cover. "Grab everything and go, all of you!"

  The clouds had lowered around them, bringing sheets of mist and a more persistent drizzle. It cut visibility right down, and the highway bridge had completely vanished into the murk when Jim next looked.

  He'd hastily reloaded the Ruger, keeping it fully charged, though his fingers were cold and the full-metal-jacket rounds were slick in the rain.

  Sly, still weeping, was dragged bodily out of the boat by Heather and Carrie, along with whatever supplies they could grab. Jim heard the muffled crack of anot
her rifle shot, but it went hissing wide, digging a neat round hole in the sea only a few yards beyond them.

  Jim stood up and blazed away half the rounds from the Ruger, then jumped out into the muddy earth, boots sinking in over the ankles. It was impossible to make any sort of speed, and he stopped and fired the last three bullets up to where he thought the bridge was.

  Sly fell down twice in the first few yards, babbling in panic, making a string of formless, meaningless sounds. Carrie had an arm around him on one side, Heather, her clothes sodden, was helping out on the other.

  Jim didn't try to reload again, but concentrated on getting them all into some sort of cover. Though he'd never been combat trained, he guessed that the person on the hillside above them was alone. Otherwise, there'd have been more shooting, a volley of fire, raking the boat and slaughtering them all. Also, if they could just get some dead ground between themselves and the rifle, then the fact that they had two guns might be enough to deter the would-be killer from following them.

  Even as they covered the hundred yards or so to safety, the rain turned to snow.

  While they all crouched, panting, in the lee of a steep hillside, it thickened into a full-blown blizzard.

  "What now?" Carrie asked.

  "Shelter and a fire," he replied. "Best move on north for a mile or so, if we can all make it. Then a shelter and a fire. Dry out or we get to be dead. 'Specially you, Heather."

  Jim was filled with the sudden realization that his beloved daughter had come within an inch or so of being killed, and he knelt by her and threw his arms around her slender, soaking body. "Christ, I love you," he said, finding himself on the brink of tears. "I love you so much."

  HENDERSON MCGILL burst out from the companionway of the Eureka Belle, a dark fear driving him blindly forward through the wet flakes of snow drifting down onto the timbers of the beached ship, turning it instantly into a Christmas-card scene.