by James Axler
The shooting from above stopped again.
“Wipe out time,” the Cajun roared to his troops. “On the landing, massed fire, now.”
Cheetah Luis led the way, heedless of the danger. From the hallway’s end, he jumped to the right of the landing, to the side with the staircase leading down. Above him was the underside of the stairway leading up and the landing on the main deck.
Seven of his fighters crossed the gap in single bounds. Packed shoulder to shoulder, they pointed their blasters straight up and cut loose.
Eight autoweapons unloaded 240 rounds in less than three seconds. The din of sustained gunfire was deafening.
They shot holes through the landing, through the treads, up through the soles of cannie boots, through legs, through backsides, into spines. With the roar of blasterfire still ringing in the well, bodies began to slide and topple down the steps.
Cheetah Luis stripped out his empty mag, flipped it around and inserted the full one, duct-taped back-to-back. His fighters likewise dumped their empties and reloaded.
With the exit above cleared, the Cajuns ran up the steps, over the cannies’ sprawled bodies. J.B. and Jak followed them up the well. As the companions reached the end of the first flight of stairs and were about to make the turn to the top, Cheetah Luis and the fighters on point opened fire again.
Cannies were trying to retake control of the access-way.
Bullets zinged and whined off the inside of the stairwell.
A gap opened on the steps above as the Cajuns ducked and dodged the ricochets. J.B. charged up stairs and onto the landing. Cheetah Luis and the others had their backs to the walls. They were reloading again. As J.B. made for the doorway, more cannies rushed through it.
He fired from the hip. The first cannie was blown backward, lifted off his feet by the power of the pump gun’s high brass load.
J.B. fired again and a second flesheater went flying in reverse out the door. As the Armorer advanced, he kept cycling the M-4000’s action and firing at closer and closer range. It was too late for the cannies inside the entry to beat a retreat. They had overcommitted and they were caught dead. J.B. had all the momentum. The pump gun boomed and another cannie was hurled backward through the doorway, his chest erupting in a puff of red. Even after the last one went down, J.B. continued to shoot through the entrance, dissuading further intrusion with blasts of double-aught buck.
“Got it,” Cheetah Luis said, clapping a hand on his shoulder.
The Cajuns had finished reloading their blasters. They took up the slack at the entrance, putting up covering fire while J.B. pulled a handful of shells out of his side pocket and started feeding them, one by one, to the M-4000’s tubular magazine.
Cheetah Luis shouted down the staircase. “Time to move. Let’s go. Let’s go.”
The rest of the Cajuns and the freed captives behind them began scrambling up the steps.
“Find some cover,” Cheetah Luis told them. “Take cover.”
Eager for revenge, the first five or so spilled out of the doorway onto the main deck.
Into a withering crossfire.
The Cajuns went down hard, without firing a shot in return. As they lay on the deck, bullets plucked at their clothes, sallying their bodies from the left and the right.
Cannies were waiting for them on either side of the bow. J.B. recalled the foredeck’s layout. There was an anchor windlass and mooring winch. There were bitts, too—the solid steel, barrel-like posts that guided the anchor and mooring lines. All were matched in size to the enormous vessel. Solid, ample, bulletproof cover for staging an ambush.
Cheetah Luis rushed forward, blocking the doorway so no one else could step out.
“Let’s clean house,” he said, reaching into the pack of one of his fighters. He took out a pair of foot-long pipe bombs. Striking a wooden match on his thumb-nail, he lit both fuses at once. As they sputtered in his hand, his lips moved silently.
He was counting down.
When there was about an inch of unburned blast cord the Cajun chucked both bombs out the doorway to the left, to the ship’s high side. They clanked as they hit the deck near the bulwark, then they started rolling back down the slope, toward the center.
Somebody out there screamed a warning.
Cheetah Luis turned his back to the doorway and hunched over as the bombs detonated simultaneously. The rocking double boom shook the deck underfoot and sent hot shrapnel singing through the air.
As a cloud of smoke swept past the entrance, they heard moans, shouts and the sound of running boots.
J.B. poked his head around the steel jamb for a looksee. The explosions had put a sudden end to the cannie ambush. On the bombed side, behind the windlass, was a wide, blackened section of deck. Half a dozen bodies, whole or in parts, lay strewed there, smoking.
On the low side of the bow, cannies slipped away, low and fast, heading for the cover of the deck hatches.
“Get ’em!” Cheetah Luis shouted. “Don’t let ’em get away!”
J.B. knew the Cajun wasn’t talking to him, not with a short-barreled scattergun in his hands. As he pulled back, a pair of very eager released prisoners pushed by him. They opened up on the running cannies with their AKs, sending bullets zipping down the length of the ship.
It took sixty rounds, but they dropped five of the bastards. When their guns locked back empty, they jumped back to cover inside the entry, looking mighty proud of themselves.
From his position beside the door, J.B. could see the wheelhouse totally consumed by flames. The windows were all blown out by the heat. There was no sign of the companions.
Then blasterfire rattled from the stern and steel-jacketed bullets started slapping either side of doorway.
“They’re regrouping,” J.B. said. “Come on, Jak, let’s do some damage.”
He didn’t have to ask twice.
The albino beat him through the doorway and they both bolted for the cover of the windlass, about fifty feet away, lugging RPG launchers and bagged rockets. Slugs skipped on the deck and whined around their ears as they slid in behind the massive machine.
J.B. was looking around for their next move when bullets clanged into the capstan beside his head. “Nukin’ hell!” he exclaimed.
“Sniper,” Jak said. “In mast.”
The towering steel foremast stood in the center of the canted deck, not twenty feet away. At its top was a crow’s nest, turned sniper nest.
More high-powered slugs whacked the deck and the windlass on either side of J.B.
“What are you waiting for?” J.B. cried, screwing his fedora down on his head. “Chill him!”
Lauren popped up from behind cover, pinned the trigger of the assault rifle he’d appropriated from a dead Cajun and streamed a line of hot lead into the crow’s nest. Some of the bullets pinged and sparked off the metal cage, some made wet smacking sounds. The cannie’s weapon came down from the height, spinning. It bounced on the deck and clattered end over end into the scuppers. The cannie shooter came down next, in a straight, headfirst, forty-foot fall. He bounced, too, but he didn’t clatter. He splattered.
Jak ducked back as fire from the hatches swept over the windlass and hammered the deck and bow behind them. “Mag!” he shouted, ditching his empty.
J.B. slid him a couple of full 30-rounders from his pack.
Cajuns pushed out of the doorway, shooting back as they spread out. They were putting up covering fire so the rest of the fighters could exit. More and more attackers poured onto the deck, moving to cover, advancing into the teeth of a feverish cannie defense.
The flesheaters had no intention of yielding the main deck. They held firing positions behind hatches, kingposts, cranes and oil drums. Their initial shock at the assault had turned into grim resolve. No way they could miss the burning wheelhouse to their backs. The flames were shooting thirty feet into the night sky. They couldn’t know for sure, but they had to suspect that their queen was either chilled or in big trouble.
&nbs
p; Everything they had bled and died for was going down the tubes.
All or nothing.
Streams of bullets sawed back and forth down the deck. Ricochets sparked off the bulwarks. Gunsmoke hung over the ship like a caustic fog.
When J.B. looked back, the deck was littered with the dead and dying. Young and old, male and female. But at least they’d gone down fighting.
“Mag!” Jak cried, dumping another empty.
J.B. took out four more clips and shoved them across the deck. As he did, Cheetah Luis and three of his fighters joined them in the lee of the machinery.
“No blasterfire from the tower, yet,” Cheetah Luis said.
That was a good thing. If the cannies climbed the tower and took up positions at the facing windows, they could control movement on the deck.
“Knock on wood,” J.B. said.
The Cajun glanced back toward the bow. “That fat man’s moving way too slow,” he said.
As J.B. turned to look, the party in question was hit by at least thirty rounds before he dropped to the deck.
“The road trash are much better fighters,” Cheetah Luis said.
It made sense to J.B. that they would be. The robbing, raping scum were skilled chillers. Coldhearts by nature. They had pushed to the cover of the bitts on the foredeck. One of them had pulled a pack from a dead Cajun’s back and they were dividing up the pipe bombs it contained.
As they started lighting them and throwing them as far as they could, Cheetah Luis said, “That’s more like it.”
The pipe bombs landed behind the hatches, about 150 feet away.
J.B. and the others ducked as the explosions popped off, one after another. When they looked up, divots had been cut out of the ranks of the cannies. Blackened blast circles dotted with corpses.
Despite the destruction, the cannies didn’t pull back.
They kept on firing.
“How about doing a little RPG number on the bastards?” Cheetah Luis asked the Armorer. “Blow ’em out of their socks.”
“Not possible,” J.B. told him. “If I had a vertical target to shoot at, it’d be different. I got nothing but horizontal targets here. An armor-piercing warhead might skip off a hatch cover or the deck. Fly right up into the tower. Pipe bombs won’t penetrate that sheet steel. HEAT rounds will, big-time. Might chill our friends up there by accident.”
“If they’re still alive.”
J.B. didn’t say anything.
The road trash had recruited a new bomb chucker, a skinny woman with matted hair and raccoon eyes. From the short skirt she was wearing J.B. took her for a gaudy whore.
One of the road scum put a pipe bomb in her hand, then another one lit the fuse.
As she rose from cover to chuck the thing, something went wrong. The fuse was either faulty or too short. Or she froze as she watched it sputter in her fist. Or she was hit by a cannie 7.62 mm slug.
Bottom line, she didn’t throw it. The bomb went off with a thunderclap. It blew her right out of shoes. Her high-top black running shoes and scorched leg stumps were all that was left of her on the deck. The steel shards and shock wave took out five of the road trash next to her, too.
“Lemme try one,” Jak said.
Cheetah Luis handed him a bomb. When the Cajun offered to light it, he declined.
Jak hefted the pipe on his palm to gauge its weight, then eyeballed the distance downship. Almost nonchalantly, he lobbed the thing in a high arc. The foot of pipe made a solid clank as it dropped into the flames of an oil barrel near the right-hand kingpost.
“Damn!” Cheetah Luis exclaimed. “That was one sweet toss.”
The cannies hiding around the barrel scattered in all directions.
But not fast enough to escape the tremendous blast.
The circular shock wave whipped across the deck, sending shrapnel from the barrel and the pipe flying, slicing into the flesheaters from behind as they ran.
As more pipe bombs exploded around the kingposts, the attackers, with Cheetah Luis in the lead, pressed forward to the second row of hatches, which cut the distance to the enemy front line by a third, and made for a much shorter lob.
The bursting pipe bombs quickly cleared the deck ahead, forcing the cannies to retreat or be blown apart. The attackers moved to the third row of hatches and the bases of the kingposts.
The cannies had lost control of two-thirds of the main deck. The range for bomb tosses had dropped precipitously. Cover for the backpedaling cannies had fallen off, as well; they were trapped with the tower at their backs. Sensing imminent victory, Cheetah Luis yelled for his fighters to press on.
At that moment, the cannies broke and ran, fleeing for the stairwells at the base of the tower. From behind the hatches, their ex-prisoners poured fire into and around the doorways. The full-auto bursts sent slugs flying twenty or thirty feet off target.
“Single shots! Single shots!” Cheetah Luis yelled. “Aim the fucking things!”
The last of the cannies dived through the doorway and disappeared.
When all the shooting stopped, the initial silence was eerie. Gray smoke swirled above the deck. As the ringing in J.B.’s ears faded, he heard the hiss and roar of the burning wheelhouse and the moaning of the wounded. Spent brass was strewed everywhere. Bodies lay everywhere. More than a hundred were dead, by J.B.’s guess. It was impossible to sort out the ratio of cannies to norms.
Two of Cheetah Luis’s men raced unchallenged to the stairwells the cannies had just entered. Each unshouldered his pack and took out a pipe bomb. After lighting its fuse, they threw the bomb back into its pack, then slung the pack down the stairs.
The explosions that followed made the deck ripple like a sheet flapping in the breeze. Rivets popped, metal buckled.
“That’s it!” Cheetah Luis bellowed. “Regroup! Everybody, regroup! Pick up the wounded. Head for the ramp. We’re out of here!”
The surviving Cajuns directed traffic, steering the jubilant prisoners and the injured toward the only exit. To protect their backs, they continued to rain fire on the two, smoke-belching doorways.
Before the first captive reached the bottom of the ramp, sniper fire clattered from the tower windows. As the freed folk streamed down the slope, they were chopped down. Some jumped off the ramp to escape. Some turned and emptied their autoweapons at the tower, others just dropped their blasters and ran.
“Can you do something now?” Cheetah Luis asked J.B.
J.B. pushed his spectacles back up the sweaty bridge of his nose. He figured Ryan and the others had to be off the freighter by now. Knowing them, they were waiting down by the cargo containers where they could give covering fire while the prisoners made their exodus. J.B. unshouldered his RPG, knelt on the deck and took careful aim up at the sniper’s window. He pulled the launcher’s trigger and the rocket whooshed away. A second later, a blinding white light flashed in the tower’s fourth story, followed by an ear-splitting boom and a torrent of thick smoke. The rectangular window had been transformed into a ragged, blackened circle.
“That’ll make the bastards think twice,” the Cajun said.
Then he called out to his fighters who were herding the captives off the ship, “Hurry them up! Help the wounded! Pick up the pace!”
J.B. and Jak backed down the ramp with the last of the Cajuns, ready to fire back at the ship if anything moved. Below them, blasterfire roared. The captives who had kept their weapons and their ammo were using them on the cannie smoker tenders, either shooting them down like dogs or driving them off into the marsh for the gators to finish.
When they passed the cargo containers, the companions were nowhere to be seen. Cheetah Luis ordered them into a trot. The path ahead was choked with running people. For J.B. and Jak it was a hard slog. They were loaded down with more than their fair share of armament—two blasters, two RPG-16s and a bag of extra rockets.
“Where Ryan and others?” Jak asked J.B. after glancing over his shoulder at the deserted path behind them.
&nbs
p; There was no sign of their friends in front, either. Certainly they would have shown themselves by now if they were really off the ship. J.B. felt the bottom fall out of his stomach.
“Don’t know,” he said. “But if they’re still on the boat, they’ll fight their way out. They always do.”
He was trying to think positive.
After they’d gone about three hundred yards, Cheetah Luis stopped the file. “This is far enough,” he told J.B. and Jak. “You’ve got to blow the ship now, before cannies break out.”
“We’re too close,” J.B. told him. “Remember all that RDX in the armory? The blast perimeter is farther out. Most that hundred thousand tons of metal back there is going to go flying. About half of that is coming our direction. What doesn’t go sideways and cut off our heads, will fall straight down and cut us in two. Besides, our friends might still be inside…”
“Let’s go, then,” Cheetah Luis said, waving his fighters on.
The refugees ran in a tight pack, filling the path from edge to edge. When they had retreated another three hundred yards, near the limit of the RPG’s range, the Cajun stopped them again.
“Far enough?” he asked.
“Yep,” Dix said.
“Good angle?”
They were parallel to the side of the grounded ship. It sat there, a big fat target, waiting to get punched.
He and Jak got their RPGs ready. They lined up extra rockets. Then they shouldered the launchers.
“Come on, Ryan, come on,” J.B. muttered.
“What are you waiting for?” the Cajun demanded.
“Give it another minute. They could still be coming.”
“They’re either already out, or they’re chilled and they’re never coming out,” Cheetah Luis said. “Time to let fly.”
Bullets whined through their ranks, followed an instant later by sharp reports from the direction of the ship’s tower. Cannies were firing on them with longblasters. The way the captives were jammed together on the path, the bastards couldn’t miss, even at six hundred yards. A coldheart took a shot through the chest; the man beside him was struck in the leg. Farther down the line, people started to scream.
