Cannibal Moon

by James Axler

  Ryan alerted those below him of the coming dangers. The slow going was frustrating, especially when an entire flight of steps started swaying under them and they had to stop altogether.

  When they reached the fourth-story landing, progress came to an abrupt halt. Above them, the staircase was missing a number of consecutive treads. If they had fallen off, there was nothing to stop them from dropping all the way to the main deck.

  “We might be able to jump it,” Krysty said, pointing at the gap with her wheelgun.

  “There’s no telling from here what kind of shape the surviving steps are in,” Ryan told her. “They might be loose, too. They’d come off when we landed.”

  “There’s got to be another way up,” Sprue said. The last thing he wanted to do was to try to make that jump.

  “There are a jumble of footprints in the dust on this landing,” Doc said. “They seem to be leading in and out of the door. Perhaps that is the alternate route to the top.”

  Ryan opened the door and looked inside, his SIGS-auer up and ready. The deserted hallway ran in a straight line across the width of the bridge tower. On the right wall, spaced at regular intervals, was a series of metal doors presumably leading to rooms deeper in the building. The left-hand wall was divided by a row of large windows, most of which had no glass. The floor was tracked with more footprints.

  “Looks like this is our detour,” Ryan said, waving the others in after him. “Watch those doors. We don’t want any surprises.”

  As he passed the empty window frames, Ryan looked down on the deck. There was no sign of Cheetah Luis and his Cajuns in the bow, which was a good thing. The drumming had started up again, this time with a vengeance. It shook through the ship’s hull and superstructure. He could feel the vibration through the soles of his boots. In their overexcitement, a few of the cannies cut loose with bursts of blasterfire, aimed toward the sky. Which made Ryan glad they hadn’t made shooting the attack signal. Cheetah Luis was holding his fighters in check, just like he was supposed to.

  Through the door at the far end of the hallway was a mirror-image landing and stairwell. The difference was, this one had all its treads.

  “I’ll go first,” Sprue volunteered.

  As he mounted the first step, they heard sounds of fighting from somewhere above.

  Not gunshots.

  Steel-on-steel clashing.

  The fat man stopped climbing and listened.

  “That doesn’t sound very welcoming,” he said, steadying himself as the staircase swayed a bit and groaned a lot.

  “What the hell is that?” Krysty said.

  They strained to make it out.

  “It has the ring of swordplay,” Doc announced. “And a rather heated contest, I’d say.”

  The crashing abruptly stopped, followed a few seconds later by the muffled but unmistakable report of a blaster. What with the din the cannies were making, it was too faint to be heard outside the bridge tower.

  “Something’s going on,” Ryan said. “Could be Jak and Mildred are getting busy.”

  As the convoy master turned and started up again, the stairs let out a squeal and collapsed under his weight. Lagbolts ripped out of corroded wall plates, slamming into the wall opposite. The staircase pulled away from its moorings. As he dropped between the risers, the fat man somehow managed to get his arms up and his fingers gripped on the edge of the tread above him.

  “Don’t look down!” Krysty warned him.

  “Oh, fuck,” he said, looking down. Beneath his stout legs was a straight, sixty-foot fall.

  Ryan cast aside the torch as Krysty and Doc knelt and grabbed on to Sprue’s wrists. The one-eyed man leaned way over Sprue’s back and snatched a big handful of the seat of his pants. Grunting from the effort, working in unison, they hauled the fat man back to the relative safety of the landing.

  Sprue’s face was beet-red under his beard. He seemed more embarrassed than scared.

  “Shit, that was a close one,” he said, wiping his palms on his bibfront. “Mebbe someone smaller should go first.”

  Ryan took the lead. Moments later they emerged from the stairwell on top of the bridge.

  “Keep away from the edge,” he reminded them. “We don’t want the cannies down on the deck to see what’s going on.”

  Ahead, the broad unrailed deck led to the side of the wheelhouse. There was no sign of Mildred or the queen. And no sign of the fierce fighting they had heard from below.

  “Who the hell are you?” an Angel demanded as he emerged from the side door of the wheelhouse. He was a gray-bearded version, but still plenty solid through the chest and arms. He had the same decoration on his chest, and the same pigtail hairdo as the others. He stepped forward and spread his tree-trunk legs, standing between them and the entrance to the wheelhouse. Over his shoulder on a sling, he carried a folding-stock AK. His hand on the pistol grip made the blaster looked very small, indeed. He wasn’t aiming it at them, yet. Things were definitely tense, but not in the realm of deadly. The Angel still had questions.

  “How’d you get up here?” he said.

  “Took the stairs,” Ryan said.

  “No, who let you up here.”

  “Nobody let us do anything. We just walked up.”

  “That’s crap, and you know it, asshole. There were two guards stationed on the entrance.”

  “Never saw them. Mebbe they were on a break.”

  “We don’t take breaks,” said another voice from the corner of the wheelhouse.

  Four more Angels stepped into view. All of them carried folding-stock Kalashnikovs. They were uniformly large, well-developed, well-nourished specimens. One of them had thinning blond hair, but he still sported the pineapple-head braids.

  “Okay,” the gray-bearded Angel said, “it’s time for you idiots to go back where you came from. If you don’t move it right now, we’re going to blow your fucking asses off this tower.”

  The other Angels took up firing stances behind him and brought their AKs to bear from the hip.

  These sec men were accustomed to seeing trouble run the other way. They still had their safeties on.

  The companions didn’t need an engraved invitation. They scattered like a school of baitfish evading a predator, for an instant leaving the cannies struggling, flat-footed, caught between dropping their selector switches and choosing a moving target.

  Only in this case, the little fishies opened fire as they broke ranks.

  The gray-bearded Angel was hit in the same instant by Ryan, Krysty, Doc and Sprue. The volley of lead blew apart his chest and head, and slammed his lifeless body to the bridge wing’s deck.

  The other four cut loose with their AKs, relying on intimidating firepower, not accuracy, to turn back an enemy. It might have worked before, but it didn’t work this time.

  The companions weren’t intimidated. They knew how to lower their heads and fight.

  Krysty dropped to one knee and fired, arms braced, while high-powered bullets whizzed past her ears. She put five quick slugs into the belly of the balding Angel. The first hit hardly staggered him, but as the next four followed in rapid succession, and in the same ten-ring, he started jerking backward, jolted by the bullets’ impacts.

  As he fell against the wheelhouse wall, the other cannies realized that they were bunched up and vulnerable. They darted apart, which put off their aim.

  As they moved sideways, Ryan saw an advantage and he took it. He charged right at one of the Angels, firing on the run. The cannie returned the favor, but his muzzle came around too slowly to track the oncoming target. When Ryan’s slugs smacked into the Angel’s shoulder, the cannie’s AK lost its horizontal momentum; when they stitched up his chest, the front sight took aim at the deck. From a distance of about three feet, Ryan fired the SIG-Sauer three times straight into his throat. The flesheater convulsed and toppled onto his face, dead.

  When the next Angel in line tried to shoot Ryan, his AK jammed. He frantically worked the actuator to clear the def
ective round.

  Doc calmly walked forward, sheathed swordstick in his left hand, Le Mat in his right. Assuming a dueling stance, he thumbed back the pistol’s hammer and put a .44-caliber lead ball through the cannie’s left eye. Billowing black powder smoke engulfed the man’s head as the flattened ball burst out of the back of his skull.

  The fourth and last Angel stopped firing and bolted for the wheelhouse door.

  Sprue unleashed death with both hands, the slides of his Desert Eagles cycling alternately, spitting spent brass. He hit the running cannie five or six times, and just as many near misses spanked into the wall’s peeling white paint. The flesheater fell under the hail of lead, well short of his goal.

  It was all over in thirty seconds flat.

  During that span, roughly seventy-five rounds had been exchanged at close range. The four Angels were down and out. The companions didn’t have a scratch on them. Krysty and Doc checked the bodies.

  “Are they all dead?” Ryan said.

  “On their way to hell,” Doc assured him.

  As the companions hurriedly reloaded, massed autofire roared up from the main deck.

  “Get down!” Ryan shouted, shoving Krysty away from the edge of the bridge.

  The others crouched well out of the line of fire.

  The clatter continued unabated, but no slugs whizzed overhead or whacked into the front of the wheelhouse.

  “What the hell are they shooting at?” the convoy master asked.

  Cautiously, they returned to the edge and looked over to see what was going on.

  Dozens of cannies fired their AKs wildly in the air as they wheeled and danced.

  They were shooting at absolutely nothing.

  “Madness,” Doc said, “pure and simple.”

  “Bastards got ammo to burn,” Sprue said.

  “They think the shooting up here was part of the party,” Krysty said. “Look they’re waving at us!”

  “Let’s wave back,” Ryan said. He picked up a Kalashnikov and, standing on the edge of the roof, touched off a 20-round, full-auto airburst.

  The crowd sent up a rousing cheer.

  Confidence could be a good thing in battle.

  It could be a very bad thing, too.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Cheetah Luis watched the wheelhouse from inside the entrance to the bow stairwell, puffing away on a fat stick of ganja, getting his edge on.

  Whether true or not, the Cajun was convinced that he moved faster and fought better after he’d dosed himself with crazyweed. The sense of calm that flooded over him provided him with a feeling of invincibility. It made him utterly fearless.

  But not startle-proof.

  The sudden torrent of blasterfire from the top of the tower set his heart racing. He took it to mean the bridge was under attack, and that the companions had at least gotten that far. The cannies on the deck took it to mean something entirely different. As the shooting on the tower ended, they hoisted their blasters in the air and sprayed blasterfire into the night sky.

  That’s why shooting wasn’t the signal for the all-out attack, Cheetah Luis thought, squinting his right eye to keep the curling, pungent smoke out of it. The signal was going to be unmistakable, that’s what the one-eyed man had told him. He said he would know it when he saw it.

  And he was right.

  After a minute or two passed, behind the windows of the wheelhouse, flames started dancing and flickering, low at first like a campfire, but rapidly growing higher and brighter. The cannies on the deck didn’t seem to notice what was happening up there, either, because they were too preoccupied with celebrating, or they were too close to the tower and had a bad angle of view.

  Cheetah Luis flipped away his weed and turned from the deck. “Hold this doorway!” he ordered four of his fighters standing just inside the entry. “Whatever you do, keep the bastards off the stairs!”

  Taking the steps two at a time, he raced down to A Deck. He shoved his way through the fighters waiting for him there. “Come on!” he shouted, leading the charge down the corridor, toward the stern.

  When they burst through the armory door, J.B. was propping up an armload of plastic stock AK-47s alongside the hundred or so others he had already prepped for battle. Piles of loaded mags lay at his feet.

  “Now,” Cheetah Luis told J.B. and the Cajuns. “We go, now.”

  J.B. grabbed up his pump gun and joined the Cajuns as they ran down the hall for the captive hold.

  Cheetah Luis lifted the locking bar and swung the door open wide.

  Inside the hold, the seated and standing prisoners looked toward the doorway in terror. None of them moved.

  Under the circumstances they could hardly be blamed for expecting the worst.

  “Come on!” Cheetah Luis shouted to the Cajun captives, stepping into the hold so they could see him. “It’s a break-out!”

  When the Cajuns rushed for the door, the other prisoners came to life, leaping to their feet. They charged the exit in a human wave.

  J.B. pulled Cheetah Luis out of the way as they spilled out into the hall; otherwise he would have been trampled.

  “Keep moving down the hall,” J.B. yelled at the escapees. “Keep on moving!”

  As the throng hurried by, a small, wiry man with shoulder-length white hair brushed past Cheetah Luis.

  “Jak, Jak!” J.B. said. He reached out and grabbed his slender shoulder, pulling him nose to nose.

  J.B. was greatly relieved to find the albino still alive, but he could read no comparable emotion in those strange ruby-red eyes. All he saw was hate. Bottomless hate that wanted out.

  “Where’s Mildred?” he asked.

  “Took her away,” Jak said. “While ago. Scarface cannie. Up to bridge, mebbe.”

  “The bridge is on fire,” Cheetah Luis said. “Your friends captured it and set it ablaze.”

  “If she was up there,” J.B. said with more confidence than he felt, “then she’s probably free now.”

  Farther down the corridor, J.B. could see the other Cajuns guiding the released captives single-file into the armory. There, they were being handed longblasters and extra mags, and ushered back out into the hall. A smooth, quick operation. Anybody who could carry an AK got one.

  A flurry of shots rang out in the hold to his back.

  When he turned to look, stragglers were still running out. The shooting made them run much faster. Through the open doorway, he, Jak and Cheetah Luis watched helplessly as the cannies on the deck above systemically shot the few remaining prisoners in the hold. Those too weak or stunned to flee were riddled by streams of blasterfire.

  One of the last out the door was a fat man. He glanced over his shoulder and froze. “Michelle!” he cried. Then he reversed course and started to reenter the hold.

  J.B. saw a small, birdlike woman standing stock-still in the middle of the yawning space, her eyes closed, her hands at her sides, as if she were trying to make herself invisible.

  It didn’t work.

  Blasterfire chattered and she was hit by dozens of high-powered bullets, and literally torn limb from limb.

  “Michelle!”

  J.B. and Jak caught the fat man from behind and dragged him out of the doorway. They shoved him down the hall toward the armory.

  “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” he moaned, holding his head between his hands.

  “Go on, get yourself a blaster,” was the Cajun’s advice. “Make the fuckers pay.”

  All the prepped AKs were gone by the time J.B. and Jak got inside the armory. The last assault rifle went to the grieving fat man who clutched it to his chest like a life preserver.

  The albino wasn’t put out by the shortage. He picked a blaster at random from an open wooden crate, tested it, checking the barrel and action, and finally dry-fired it.

  “Stamped steel crap,” was his terse assessment of the weapon’s quality, but he accepted the full magazine that J.B. handed him, slapped it into place and chambered the first round.

  �
�Got some other goodies to take along with us,” J.B. said. He directed Jak over to the rack of RPG-16s. “Grab yourself a launcher,” he said. “I’ll take one, too. Got a backpack for the HEAT rockets.”

  Out in the hallway again, when J.B. started to head for the bow, Jak stopped him and said, “Hold aft stairway on main deck.”

  “No, that route’s got to stay open,” J.B. told him. “That’s where we’re going to push the bastards. We start at the bow and sweep them toward the stern.”

  The albino gave him a hard look.

  “We’ve already got a bunch of cannies locked in the crew quarters one deck down. We want to drive the rest of them belowdecks so we can jump off this stinking ship and blow it and them clean to hell. Get it?”

  Jak showed J.B. a feral smile. He got it.

  They moved through the ranks of the well-armed escapees to join the Cajun fighters at the head of the line. Cheetah Luis stood on the landing, ready to lead them up to the main deck and into battle.

  As J.B. and Jak arrived at his side, angry shouting echoed down the stairwell, a dispute over who got to use the stairs and who didn’t.

  “Shit,” Cheetah Luis said. “The bastards—”

  His sentence was cut off by a horrendous barrage of blasterfire from the deck over their heads.

  Outgoing and incoming fire, but mostly incoming.

  The Cajuns up there were in big trouble.

  Ricocheting bullets clanged and whacked the walls of the stairwell.

  Cheetah Luis waved for his fighters to follow him. “Come on,” he cried, “the cannies are breaking through!”

  In fact, they had already broken through.

  The shooting suddenly stopped. As it did so, the bullet-pocked bodies of two Cajuns tumbled down the steps, landing in a bloody heap at their leader’s feet.

  “Back!” he shouted to the others.

  The head Cajun jumped into the hallway just as blasterfire rained down on the landing.

  He was hit in the back by fragments of the shattering bullets, receiving minor wounds to his shoulder and neck. The fighter beside him wasn’t as lucky. He took a metal splinter through the center of his eye. It had sufficient force to penetrate his brain. He dropped as if he’d been poleaxed.