by James Axler
Tamara frowned. “Skulls bashed in.”
“And Six’s three stickie men?”
The markswoman suddenly gave Six a baleful eye. “Weren’t no stickie men in the boiler room. Just Bryan and Guilfoyle with stepped-on walnuts for heads.”
Ryan slapped leather. It was so fast it caught even Six by surprise. “Lose the blaster, Six, and the hatchet and the blade.” Six’s huge hands creaked into fists and then opened loose and ready. Ryan’s spare SIG appeared in his other hand like a magic trick. “Put your right hand on top of your head. Lose your gear with your left, use two fingers.”
For a moment Ryan thought Six would snap. Instead the big man slowly shrugged his longblaster off his shoulder. It fell to the deck with a clank. With his thumb and forefinger he removed his tomahawk and bowie and blaster.
“And the hideout.”
Six’s eyes went to slits. Then he produced a large-caliber derringer and dropped it on the pile.
“Where are the stickie men you chilled?” Ryan asked.
Six cocked his head. “With permission?”
“Do it slow.”
Six reached into his sheepskins. He pulled out three scalp locks and dropped them to the deck. Each had a bloody bit of milk-white scalp attached to it.
Ryan eyed them without commitment. “Where’s the rest of them?”
“Mutant filth.” Six spit. “I threw their carcasses in the boilers.”
Krysty tensed at Ryan’s side. His weapons never wavered.
It was just the sort of thing Ryan would expect Six to do. By the same token it was a very convenient explanation. They were all on a very hard timetable. Smythe would never turn off his boilers, let his fireboxes grow cold and send someone wading through cubic yards of ash and cinders looking for bone fragments.
Smythe turned a confused and hostile eye on Six. “Ryan, what do you mean, he was in your wag last night?”
“He was in our LAV. On the radio. Speaking French. Said he was using it to check the radio in the engineering LAV.”
Shocked silence met this information.
A dozen sailors pointed their blasters at Six like a firing squad. Convoymen fingered their weapons and looked around nervously, shocked but uncertain about what to do.
“Who were you talking to?” Ryan asked Six.
“Myself.”
Smythe sneered. “Yourself?”
“Given the current company, Captain, it is one of the few opportunities I have for intelligent conversation.”
Smythe slowly pulled his sword. “You just don’t do yourself any favors, do you?”
Tamara spoke the words on everyone’s mind first. “Traitor.”
The word was angrily murmured all over the deck.
Six turned his head and spit in the woman’s face.
The murmurs turned to roars. Tamara rammed the butt of her blaster into Six’s solar plexus. Six tensed slightly with the blow and smiled. “Go ahead. Do that once more. I dare you.”
Tamara reversed her rifle and made ready her bayonet. “My pleasure.”
“Hold!” Smythe looked at Six wearily. The burden of command was already like a stone around his neck. “Miss Tamara, clap Mr. Six in irons.” He looked at the old captain’s sword in his hand and pointed it out toward the dark waters of Thunder Bay. “Put him over the side.”
Mildred exploded from the crowd. “You son of a bitch! You’re just going to let the lampreys have him? Without any proof?”
It seemed mercy was as rare a commodity in Canada as it was in the Deathlands. Smythe stared at Mildred for long moments. “Fine, fill his pockets with rocks. Send him down quick.”
Doc’s sword rasped from its sheath as he stepped forward. “I would like to state categorically, publicly and for the record, that I trust Monsieur Six implicitly.”
Six stared in shock. So did just about everyone else on deck.
“Doc…” Ryan warned.
“Furthermore, I do not believe a man of his moral courage and conviction could be complicit in such a heinous betrayal. I would like to further say it was he who pulled me forth from the jaws of the parasite-infected pigs in Borden, and for that I will be forever in his debt, and for whatever it is worth, he shall always have my fondest regards and friendship.”
Six grinned delightedly.
The mob began muttering angrily.
Ryan kept one SIG on Six. The blaster in his left hand turned to cover Doc from the mob. “Doc…”
“And, perhaps first and foremost,” Doc continued, “I shall not allow him to be lynched without further inquiry into the matter.”
Smythe pointed his sword at Doc furiously. “I will send you down right next to him!”
“I will consider it an honor,” Six declared.
Doc pulled himself up to his full height and cocked his left fist jauntily on his hip. He held his blade in front of him in a way that was just short of a low guard. He exposed his oddly perfect white teeth at Smythe. “Why, Captain, is that a sword I see in your hand?”
Smythe looked at his own blade and purpled. Everyone had seen Doc skewering stickie man, coldheart and pirate with impunity during the battle.
A voice rasped from the landing above. “The good doctor has asked for an inquiry, Smythe. I am afraid I demand one.” Yoann Toulalan stood at the top of the steps. He looked like he should be on the last train west but he couldn’t afford the ticket. Whatever was in his blood had eaten him down to skin and bones. All he wore was a blanket and a Diefenbunker Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun. The day was calm. He swayed like a tree in a high breeze. His fevered eyes, his voice and his blaster were strangely steady. He rested the blaster across the spotted bandages covering his stump. Cyrielle Toulalan stood beside him. Her Diefenbunker C-7 carbine was shouldered and pointed straight at Smythe.
Smythe stared up their guns unflinchingly. “That’s Captain Smythe to you, you half-chilled frog.”
Crew, convoy and Islanders all looked around one another gripping their weapons, waiting for the fight to erupt and not exactly sure who they would have to chill first. More and more were looking toward Ryan.
The one-eyed man stepped up. “Captain, this is your ship, but I was the one asking the questions. I’d like to finish.”
Smythe’s knuckles were white around his blade of office. He was a sailing man, and it was clear he didn’t intend to start his first day as a captain being told what to do. It was Seriah of all people who broke the standoff. She stepped away from Jak’s side. “Ryan, we never enabled the computer on your LAV.”
“Noticed,” Ryan said coldly.
“The computer in the engineering LAV is up. If Six was checking the com-link hub, our computer should have a log of it.”
Ryan looked in Smythe’s eyes and thought he had a good read on the man. He lowered his pistols. “With your permission?”
Smythe slammed his sword back in its sheath. “Do it.”
Thunder Bay
CLOUDS ENSHROUDED the thousand-foot humped table of Mount McKay. Thunder rolled within them. The overcast day was turning raw as the convoy began to roll off the Queen. The computer had proved that Six had been checking the communications hub, but that was all it proved. Other than Yoann, Seriah and Doc no one in the convoy trusted Six. He had been relegated to a sec wag while a convoyman named Sebastien drove the engineering LAV. The losses during the attack had been bad. The Queen was down to a skeleton crew. The convoy had lost twelve, but Hunk and his nineteen surviving men of Manitoulin helped make up the difference. Despite being short-handed, Captain Smythe was sending Tamara and four crewmen to help insure the Queen’s interests.
The engineering LAV led the way off the pier. Her dozer blade scraped away saplings and undergrowth and pushed rubble out o
f the way. The wags were all buttoned up. The only men exposed were the men on the trucks manning the machine blasters and the men on cycles. They wore gloves and goggles and had scarves wrapped around their faces. Ryan shoved the big rig into gear and rolled off the ramp. Crewmen waved and cheered. Ryan gave them a honk of the air horn. The Queen’s steam whistles shrieked in return and the ramp started to rise as the last wag rolled off.
Krysty leaned her head against the window and sighed wistfully as rain began misting the windshield. “Weather’s turning.”
“Cyrielle says it’s the first storm of late summer, right on schedule.” Ryan followed the path the LAV slowly cut through the downtown area. The needle of his rad counter was twitching ever upward into the yellow. He could see the crater of the missile hit through the shattered overgrown hulks of building near the downtown ahead. Sebastien had a Diefenbunker city map, and he was already swinging south toward the suburbs to avoid it. “Rain’ll keep the dust down. It’s in our favor.”
Six’s chicken-armored sec wag bounced by, riding outlier on its huge offroad tires. Six was driving and he wasn’t alone. He still had two supporters. One was a woman named Camille manning the machine blaster in the back. She could have been Krysty’s sister except that she was black-haired and yellow-skinned where Krysty was redheaded and fair. Riding shotgun was a horse of a woman named Marie-Laure. It was clear the two women were together. Rumor had it that one of their signing bonuses for convoy duty had been that when the convoy returned to Val-d’Or, Six had promised to give them both babies. Krysty sat up as the wag passed. She was taking her riding shotgun seriously and had a Diefenbunker MP-5 in her lap with a pair of mags banana-clipped together. “Ryan?”
“Yeah?”
“You think Six did it?”
It was something Ryan had been giving a lot of thought to. “Someone radioed Mace and Thorpe where we’d be. Someone cut the ’lectric fencing on the Queen. Six has the know-how and the motivation.”
“So he did it.”
“If I was sure I’d have chilled him already.” The truck lurched over a bad patch. Ryan checked his mirror and saw the LAV behind them. “Hate to say it, but I can’t help but think about what Doc said about him. Hard to imagine Doc’s wrong on this one.”
“And?”
“And if Six didn’t do it, then sure as shit we need him.”
Rain began sheeting down out of the sky. The Northern Lights pulsed through the bruised clouds, making the entire sky look like some kind of mutated, diseased digestive system hemorrhaging rain. The pounding on the cab seemed to be pushing Krysty down in her seat. “C’mon,” Ryan tried. “You love the rain.”
Krysty just shook her head and cringed at a sudden lightning flash over the mountain. Her prehensile red hair was laying flat against her head to match her mood. She shivered and hugged herself as thunder rolled. Her hair tightened and hugged her head. “Not this one.”
Lightning cracked across the sky in forked bolts, and it seemed to dance around the thousand-foot peak of the mountain in the distance. Lightning cracked again and again and the thunder vibrated through the cab. Ryan hunched over the wheel and stared upward. Krysty sat up again.
“What?”
“Don’t know.”
Ryan loosened his SIG in its thigh holster and put his spare on the dash. He began counting seconds between lightning flash and thunder roll. “One…two…” Lightning split the sky and slammed into the exposed girders of a sagging building. Concrete and vegetation exploded with the hit, but that wasn’t what Ryan was watching for.
“Gaia…” Krysty gasped.
“You saw it?”
“I saw it.”
The lightning illuminated huge shapes wheeling and swooping in the clouds. To the big rig’s left another offroad wag bounced over the raddled urban terrain. As scout, Donnie Goosekiller was crouched by the machine blaster man in the back. Ryan got on the radio. “Goose!”
“I saw it!” Goose said over the link. “The thunderbirds! Boo said he saw ’em once, but I never believed him!”
Six snarled over the radio. “You heard McKenzie! It is not just the rads that keep people away from this part of the Superior!”
Goose rattled on in fear and religious awe. “They say they sleep all winter in caves in the mountain. During spring and summer they take the big fish over the lakes by night. But when summer ends, they say they come out during the day to take the herds running before the freeze. But no one lives in Thunder Bay so—”
Donnie Goosekiller’s transmission ended in a scream.
Ryan scooped up the blaster on the dash. “Fireblast!”
The one-eyed man had seen bald eagles before. He’d fought and killed screamwings. This was something else entirely—bigger, faster, and with an agenda in mind. Like all raptors it hit like a thunderbolt and from behind. Ryan saw giant wings, a glittering head and Donnie Goosekiller was plucked from the back of the wag like a rabbit in the talons of a hawk. The machine blaster man screamed and pumped rounds impotently into the sky as the thunderbird banked between two broken buildings and disappeared. Ryan watched as the giant eagle beat its way back up between the buildings and bore Donnie Goosekiller into the thunderstorm.
Shouts of alarm in French and English began clogging the link as the convoy became aware of the dark shapes circling above. Blasterfire popped and crackled into the heavens. Both Ryan and Krysty lurched back against their seats as something struck the front of the semi and the cab went dark. Ryan heard metal scream and he hit the dome light of the cab. The gray light outside suddenly flooded the cab.
A thunderbird sat perched on the hood. It was huge. Its wings and chest had occluded the cab windows on landing, but now it pulled back. It was like a bald eagle, but where a bald eagle’s head plumage was white, quicksilver scales overlapped the thunderbird’s head like the blades of knives. The scales ran down its chest like an armored vest and across its shoulders in a line out to the wingtips.
Its body was bigger than the semi’s cab, and it looked big enough to fly off with a buffalo.
Huge talons crunched into the hood of the semi. The steel crumpled as the claws contracted to get a good grip. The thunderbird’s amber eyes never left Ryan’s single orb as it pulled back its head and then slammed its silver scimitar beak forward. The windshield radiated cracks from the impact point like a blaster shot.
Ryan knew with absolute certainty the thunderbird had cracked a wag before.
“Take the wheel!” Ryan rolled out of the driver’s seat and lunged back into the sleeper cabin. The giant eagle shook its head in a spray of rain and pulled back to strike again. Ryan popped the gunner’s hatch in the cab and ripped the waxed canvas off the machine blaster’s action. “Hey!”
The thunderbird eyed the half-exposed human and flapped its wings and lunged forward. Ryan cut loose, burning his belt straight into the giant bird’s center body mass. It didn’t exactly throw sparks, but Ryan was appalled to note that he could see lead spalling and bits of broken lead ruffling black feathers as his 5.56 mm bullets failed to penetrate the thunderbird’s body scales. The mutant avian recoiled slightly under the one-hundred-round high-velocity beating.
Ryan burned his belt dry and snarled as he clawed for his SIG to shoot for the eyes. Krysty hit the air-horn, but the giant bird didn’t seem particularly intimidated. One set of talons crunched into the top of the cab. The other set opened for Ryan like a flower.
Six’s voice matched the storm thunder for thunder. “Come!”
The thunderbird craned around to peer at this new development. Camille was gone, and Six had jumped out of his sec wag. He stood exposed to the elements and any avian that wanted to scoop him up.
His guide blaster spun in his hand and the .45-70 thudded like a mortar round. A scale in the chest of the raptor burst. The thunderbird�
�s scream nearly burst Ryan’s eardrums, and it thrashed brokenly for altitude. Six flicked his lever and fired again. “Come to Six!” A second scale burst next to the first, right over the thunderbird’s heart. The creature’s head and neck flopped like a dying snake and it fell backward, bouncing off the hood to the mud of the road.
Ryan grabbed the sides of the hatch as the semi bucked, and Krysty crushed the thunderbird beneath her wheels.
Six stared skyward into the rain as he pushed fresh shells into his gleaming blaster.
Ryan slid down and slammed the hatch shut. He scooped up his Scout. Krysty cried out in alarm. “Lover! No!”
The machine blasters couldn’t be traversed to vertical, and the Diefenbunker blasters wouldn’t serve to pierce the thunderbirds’ armored plumage. Ryan went out the door. Six was drawing a bead on a thunderbird circling high over the engineering LAV. Behind him another thunderbird was silently plummeting out of the sky for him with its wings folded like a huge black fist.
“Six! Behind you!” Ryan snapped the Scout to shoulder and fired, flicked the bolt and fired again. It seemed Canadian military full-metal-jacketed 7.62 mm rounds were up to the task. The thunderbird nosed over from the two head shots and dropped earthward out of control. Six leaped aside as the giant eagle hit the ground in a geyser of mud.
“The trailer!” Ryan shouted. Six scanned the skies while Ryan jumped onto the semi’s trailer bed and climbed to the top of a pyramid of tarped and palletted goods. Ryan swung his muzzle skyward. “Go!”
Six ran for the trailer and clambered up next to him. The two men stood back to back. The thunderbirds had seen two of their number taken and now wheeled high above in the clouds, looking for any sign of weakness. Ryan kicked the back of the cab. “Krysty! Go!”
Krysty hit the air-horn short and sharp three times to signal the convoy to moved forward. Six clicked his com unit. “Allez! Allez! Allez!”
The convoy ground forward in the sheeting rain. Above, the thunderbirds wheeled and danced in thunder and lightning. The engineering LAV carved a path through the overgrown streets of Thunder Bay. It was slow going but the convoy moved forward. Six and Ryan watched the skies. The big sec man was speaking rapid French as the convoy turned onto an ancient highway.
