“But with all their science, the Nobility would’ve been able to use aircraft to come and go to the island,” the bounty hunter continued. “I’d heard stories about them using boats, and now it looks like they were right.”
The Nobility had an intrinsic fear of water—running water in particular. In light of that, the fact that they’d built a facility out at sea on an isolated island and used ships to cross the waves to it was more than just strange; it bordered on the miraculous.
Catching glimpses of enormous docks and cranes off in the distance, as well as fantastic machinery for purposes they could hardly imagine, the group reached land. The faint fog that hung there hid the true nature of this world from their eyes.
When he saw what their final addition, Meg, was doing, the sheriff said with a stern expression, “You remember that promise you made, right? I won’t have you going ashore. Take the boat back to the village.”
“My folks and my little sister are here. Just let me be. I won’t be any trouble.”
“I hate to have to say this, but if something were to happen to the three of them, you’d be all that’s left of your family. I can’t let you do anything dangerous. You’re going back.”
“No way. I can’t face the coming night worrying about if the three of ’em are safe or not. Take me with you, Sheriff.”
“Can’t do it.”
“Then I’ll go anyway. Isn’t it safer for you if the boat’s still here?”
“Damn straight,” Bo concurred. “What say we bring her along, Sheriff? Only no one’s gonna be looking out for her. If she dies, it’ll be all on her.”
“Yeah. Out in a desolate place like this, having a girl along will make us wanna get it done a lot more than if it were just a bunch of guys.”
That remark came from Garigon as he looked all around him.
But the sheriff was only looking out for Meg. “No dice,” he said. “Meg, a promise is a promise. Head back to the village right away.”
“No way.”
“Then you leave me no choice. Wesley, bring Meg back. And then—”
The sheriff’s words were sucked into the air, vanishing.
A buzz—and tension—shot through the group. The faint fog clinging to them had suddenly increased in density.
“This is bad. Everyone, stay close,” the sheriff ordered. “Meg, hurry up and get in the boat.”
“No,” the girl said, having already squatted down, drawn a female-sized harpoon from the case she’d been wearing diagonally across her back since she got out of the boat, and poised to hurl the weapon.
“No sign of anything,” Garigon said. They could still make out the outlines of everyone.
Bo replied, “I know. I’ll try firing off an arrow. If anything weird’s creeping up on us, that’s sure to get a response.”
Not waiting for a reply, he raised the short bow that already had an arrow nocked. The bowstring twanged. However, his bow was aimed up at the sky. How was that supposed to deal with a threat that might lurk on the ground?
The answer came as a red rain. At a height of about thirty feet the arrow had split in four directions. And that’d released the liquid sealed inside. There was a breeze, though it was faint. The crimson liquid was caught in the breeze, misting the group before moving on to the far end of the bay—and gusting into the expanse of trees that stood behind the buildings.
“It’s blood!” the spear-wielding bounty hunter cried after seeing what clung to his fingers.
“What the hell are you doing? Are you trying to bring every damn Noble down on us?!”
Wesley’s roar got only a laugh in return from Bo. “Sheesh. That way’d save us a lot of trouble, after all. Let ’em all come at once.” He already had three arrows clutched between his fingers and a fresh one nocked in the bow he had aimed at the ground, ready for offensive or defensive action.
“What the hell are you doing, asshole?!” Wesley continued to shout, but the sheriff’s hand clamped down on his shoulder.
“Pipe down.”
“Huh?”
The young deputy fell silent, realizing that he was the only one that’d still been talking. His ears rang with an odd sound. At first he took it for the snarling of a small animal. No, that wasn’t right. It was human. Human groans. Or humans groaning like animals.
Garigon’s lips twisted into a sneer. “Pretty crazy, right? The forest is full of ’em!”
No one answered him. They were too focused on the voices issuing from the forest. Now groans rose from the entire forest, enveloping the landing party like a miasma.
“They’re hungry,” the spear-wielding bounty hunter remarked, licking his lips. There was something vulgar about his tone that made it seem like he might as well be talking about himself, but no one corrected him.
“What the—?”
It wasn’t clear who’d made that remark. Most likely it’d come from someone who’d spotted something shooting up from the treetops in that milky-white world. Much whiter than the fog, they were threads so fine that the more someone tried to focus on them, the more difficult they became to see. And hundreds if not thousands of them fell like a white rain.
It was the sheriff who shouted, “Run for it!”
The bounty hunters had scattered before he’d even given the word. Garigon and Bo dove into the water. In an unbelievable display of speed, the spear-wielder and rifleman dashed into a nearby building.
It was Wesley who grabbed Meg—frozen in her tracks—and got her back into the little boat that’d brought them there. No sooner had they pulled one of the thermal blankets on board over their heads than a white thread zipped right past them and a cry of surprise rang out.
“Pa?!” Wesley shouted, about to leap out from under the blanket.
“Stay right where you are!” he heard the sheriff cry. He was out in the white rain—or rather, wriggling in a net. White threads clung to his face, his shoulders, his hands and feet, and more stuck to him with every move he made until he was encased in a white cocoon.
“Pa?!”
Wesley was about to dash over to the lawman, but Meg clung to his waist for all she was worth.
“Let me go!”
“No. You’ll just end up like your father! You think that’s what he wants?!”
Wesley became flustered. “But—Pa?!”
No sooner had the deputy put his strength into his arms to throw off the blanket than a weird sound traveled through the air. The net of threads wound about the sheriff’s body had suddenly drawn tight. It was the sound of his bones breaking.
As the two of them stared speechless, the white cocoon was squeezed down to half its former size before their very eyes, rose into the air like a fish on a line, and was yanked off into the stand of trees where the threads had originated.
Meg could feel the young lawman trying to move in her arms, but she fought him desperately. The enemy was waiting for more prey to present itself. What’s more, just look. Weren’t there more white threads again drifting lightly up from the stand of trees, sketching white lines against the blue of the heavens as they drifted back down?
We can’t get out of here. We’ll just end up getting wrapped up like the sheriff sooner or later!
Fear froze Meg’s heart solid.
“At this rate, we won’t be able to move forward at all; we’ll just be left here to—”
The instant the girl put her despair into words, the rain of threads grew chaotic. The arcs they should’ve followed became weaker in midflight, and they fell, drooping from leaves and branches. The master of those threads had met with some sudden emergency.
Once the rain of threads had ended completely, the pair came out from under the blanket. Some threads clung to the blanket or the deck of the boat, so it took considerable time and effort to get through them, but on the other hand, picking a path across the open spaces on the now-white ground seemed impossible.
“As long as those threads stay sticky, we ain’t going nowhere,” someone shoute
d over from the building where the bounty hunters with the spear and the rifle had taken cover. “No way of knowing how long that’ll take. What’s our play?”
Wesley fell silent.
Though whatever was discharging the threads had settled down, if they weren’t careful how they moved they’d still find themselves snared. If the master of the threads or some other monster were to then come along, that would be the end of them.
“I’ve got a great way!”
The proposed solution had come from the water’s surface. As the group watched, Garigon crawled out of the sea and touched the rockface. Mixing with the water that dripped from the man’s body, the threads dropped off it.
“You follow? These damn threads lose their stickiness when they come in contact with water. So, what do you say to spreading some water on them? Better yet, it’d be a lot faster for the lot of you to dunk yourselves like we did.”
They all elected to do the latter. Wesley was the first to jump in.
On emerging dripping wet, he announced, “I’m going into the forest to see whether the sheriff is okay or not. The rest of you, wait here.”
No one voiced any objection to that. With the sheriff gone, who’d bother going with the likes of a young deputy? In fact, the entire group seemed wholly inclined to follow his directive. They kept their silence because Wesley was free to leap into the jaws of death for all they cared.
“Sure, we’ll just wait here patiently. Be sure to watch yourself out there, now,” Bo said to him with mock sincerity.
“Wait,” Meg called out, stopping the deputy. “It’s dangerous to go it alone. One of you guys go with him.”
The girl’s doleful tone drew no reaction. Meg quickly abandoned that tack. She’d heard more than enough about what sort of people bounty hunters were back in her village. She’d been wrong in the first place trying to appeal to those who had no compunctions about shooting or stabbing the backs of those they pursued, criminals or not.
“Fine. Wesley, I’ll go with you.”
That drew a cold but surprised grumbling from them.
Meg turned around and said, “Just you remember this. Once we’ve rescued the sheriff, we’re gonna tell him all about how the rest of you left him for dead. When it comes time to get paid, don’t come crying to us!”
The men exchanged glances. Meg’s words couldn’t be discounted as the screeching of a mere slip of a girl. This could have a direct impact on their livelihood.
“Oh, that’s hitting us where it hurts,” said a voice Meg could’ve sworn she hadn’t heard before. Of course, that couldn’t be the case. She’d heard all of the bounty hunters speak back at the village. However, this man was so taciturn and his voice so low it hadn’t stuck in her memory.
“You folks can let your earnings get pared down if you like. But I’m going, too.”
Meg and Wesley gazed at the speaker, once again puzzled that he hadn’t made more of an impression.
He wore a ten-gallon hat—also known in the western Frontier as a cowboy hat—at an angle, but not much could be made out besides his aquiline nose. Given that the bandanna wound about his neck was red as blood, it was surprising that he’d escaped notice so long. The gunpowder rifle worn across his back on a leather strap looked quite old, and the thick tube mounted on top of it was something they hadn’t seen before. The bullets in the gun belt around his waist were for the high-caliber rifle, and he didn’t carry a pistol. Only the leather-wrapped handle of a knife could be glimpsed in one of his boots.
Like the others, he wore his saddlebags on his back. Ordinarily saddlebags were draped across a cyborg horse’s back, but by adjusting the straps they could be turned into a knapsack.
The rifleman didn’t seem to mind the unpleasant looks from the remaining members of his profession as he gave a toss of his chin in the direction of the forest and said, “We’re going, right, Deputy?”
“Call me Wesley. And you’re—?”
Before the young lawman could root through his memories, the man replied, “‘Cowboy’ will do.”
“Okay. Let’s go. As for you, Meg, you’re—”
“I’m going. Don’t you think I’d be in more danger staying here with this lot?”
After catching a smirk from Cowboy, Meg glared at the forest.
“Let’s go.”
They started off with Wesley taking point.
II
Not long after they got on a path winding through trees where white threads rested like cotton, Wesley asked, “You been to this island before?”
“Not once,” Meg replied with a resolute shake of her head. By nature, she liked to be perfectly clear about everything.
“Then I guess there’s no point in asking what this forest’s like, eh?”
“Of course not,” Meg managed to respond, though she sounded distracted.
They were in territory controlled by the Nobility, in a forest where tree trunks stood anywhere from thirty to sixty feet high. There was no telling what lurked there.
Everyone knew the Nobility had created organisms with little regard for whether or not they were deadly, then scattered them around the world. Man-eating eagles with sixty-foot wingspans soared the skies, enormous reptiles that might be mistaken for mountains walked the earth, and giant octopuses reached from the sea with tentacles that seemed to threaten the very stars above the horizon. In the eastern Frontier, where enormous reptiles were particularly abundant, their tremendous mass caused the ground to settle nearly an inch every year, and that combined with the tsunamis summoned by sea sprites to cause widespread damage on a regular basis. An average-looking stand of trees might suddenly bare fangs, vines could reach out and snatch up people, and a rabbit not unlike the one you’d cuddled the day before might pounce on you—only this one would be fifteen feet tall and as disproportionately violent as it was large. No human was known to have escaped the sixty-foot leaps those monstrous rabbits could make.
After pressing ahead for nearly ten minutes, Wesley halted. And Meg knew why. The wind had shifted. It blew at them now, carrying the scent of blood. The stench was so thick, Wesley and Meg began coughing in unison.
“We’re close.” Wesley gave the air a sniff, slowly testing for the direction the scent of blood was coming from.
“That way,” Meg said, stepping off the path and dashing off at an angle.
Wesley hastened after her, and after running about thirty yards he stopped.
Meg was standing there.
The deputy’s heart was pounding madly not just because he’d been running full tilt, but because of the scene that lay before him. About thirty feet off the ground a gigantic white spiderweb was strung between the trees. Glittering in the dappled sunlight, it could even be described as beautiful. If not for the pair of corpses that lay beneath the web.
“Pa?!”
Wesley ran straight for them because, even though one of the bodies was weirdly twisted, it was still his father.
As natural as that was for him, Meg remained rooted because the other remains, more horrible than the sheriff’s in some ways, still had a kind of beauty to them. In a manner of speaking, the corpse was a double-edged blade. The giant spider was purple with crimson spots, and its seven-foot-long body had been split in two right through its stocky abdomen. The slice through it was exquisite. As she was looking at the spider, Meg couldn’t tell whether she was frightened by its brutalized remains, or mesmerized by the perfectly beautiful slice through it.
Clinging to his father’s corpse, Wesley sounded a million miles away as he called out his name.
“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” Cowboy said in a voice that called to mind iron. “Cutting a monster like this in two with a sword. Who in the hell—”
Meg was just about to reply in a frightened tone that she knew who’d done it. Only one gorgeous man could’ve cut down this monster with such grace and beauty.
The girl nodded. The figure in black she’d glimpsed on the cliff over the village wavered se
ductively behind her shut eyelids. Neither giving nor receiving a single ray of light, he was exquisite.
“What about his father?”
Cowboy’s query brought Meg back. She looked over at Wesley. The sheriff’s body lay on the ground, and Wesley was praying beside it. He had both hands clenched tightly, and they trembled ever so slightly. Was that from anger or grief? Actually, it was both.
“He’s dead.”
That was all she said. Now back to her senses, Meg let out a deep breath. But no tears fell.
“We’ve confirmed the worst. Let’s go,” Wesley said, standing up.
“But, your father—we’ve gotta bury him,” said the girl.
“I wish like hell we could, but it’ll have to wait till later. The job comes first.”
He’s got what it takes, thought Meg. Not at all what he was like earlier. Was he this driven by duty before?
Wesley looked over at Cowboy and repeated, “Let’s go.”
“Not yet.”
“Huh?” Meg said—and just then, there was the crack of gunfire.
Cowboy had discharged his rifle. But when had he managed it? A split second earlier the weapon had still been hanging on his back, and he’d shown no sign of bracing for action.
“Pa?!” Wesley cried out.
Bullets had pierced the sheriff’s heart and forehead. The shots had come with such speed they seemed simultaneous.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?!”
An electric jolt of fury made Wesley’s right hand jump to the pistol on his hip—and stop. The smoking barrel of the rifle was pointed right between his eyes.
“Simmer down. Sorry, but I had to deal with this my own way. See, out in the western Frontier I’ve seen other kinds of living dead besides Nobles. And those ones you’ve gotta plug through the head to kill.”
“Then why didn’t you say so? And why through the heart, too?”
“The ticker’s just to be sure. And if I’d asked you beforehand, would you have given me the okay?”
Meg touched a soothing hand to Wesley’s right arm. Though she didn’t actually come out and say it, that was her way of telling him Cowboy was right.
Undead Island Page 3
