by James Axler
“Okay, facts on the table,” Krysty said. “How long could the trip take?”
“If the historic voyages of discovery are any measure,” Doc said, “perhaps a year, barring accident. Perhaps longer. The distance spanned, round trip, is something on the order of 12,000 miles.”
“Nukin’ hell,” J.B. groaned.
“Assuming we found something valuable,” Krysty said, “how much of it could we bring back on this boat? Seven people and provisions for same are going to make it kind of cramped.”
“That depends on what the valuables are,” Ryan said. “Good things sometimes come in small packages.”
“There’s more to this than just a fresh vein of booty,” Mildred said. “This could change all our lives for the better. If there’s another world out there, an un-nuked world, maybe we wouldn’t want to come back.”
“Mebbe you wouldn’t want to come back,” Krysty said.
“If you’ve got big love in your heart for the Deathlands because you were born in it, that’s your business,” Mildred told her. “From what I’ve seen over the years, I’d say all the hellscape does is kick our asses. But hey, maybe that’s just me.”
“And what if the captain isn’t telling us the whole truth?” Krysty said. “What if he’s holding something important back to get us to sign on? Figuring he’ll break the bad news when it’s too late for us to back out?”
“We kind of outnumber him,” Mildred said drolly.
“A guy doesn’t survive solo without having some neat tricks up his sleeve,” J.B. said with confidence.
Ryan held up his hands again. Though he didn’t show it, he was deeply concerned by the way things were shaking out. For the first time, he was facing the possibility that a fork in the road might permanently split up his crew.
“Look,” he said. “I can see both sides of this. It isn’t a matter of looking for new adventures. We’ve got plenty of that without shipping out. It’s about the devil we know versus the devil we don’t. The familiar, bad as it is, is still familiar. We can pretty much reckon how we’re gonna die. Starvation. Thirst. Gutshot. Backstabbed. Ate by some mutie. I don’t particularly care where I croak or how. But if there’s a chance of never having to go hungry or drink my own piss again…”
“So you’re for taking this pipedream trip and mebbe never coming back?” Krysty said, aghast.
Before he could answer Mildred said, “Are we going to put it to a vote, or what? Everybody in favor raise their hands.”
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “Can we please set some ground rules before we proceed? Is this going to be a majority decision that we all agree in advance to abide with, or does the vote have to be unanimous?”
“There’s not going to be a radblasted vote,” Ryan told the others. “It’s too soon to make up our minds about any of this. We don’t have to decide until after we’re paid for the C-4. Let’s wait and see how the islander deal works out. Mebbe pick up some more information while we’re there. Get a better feel for how the captain does business, and how he runs his ship.”
His words hit home.
“Of course you’re correct, Ryan,” Doc said. “Your logic is impeccable. There is no need for haste in the matter. And a decision this important is best made by cool heads all around.”
“So we’re going to wait and see?” Ryan said, pointedly staring down the companions in turn.
Each of them nodded in agreement.
Not a victory. A temporary truce. Perhaps simply a postponement of an inevitable outcome.
Mildred turned on the settee and began reading out loud the titles from the spines of the shelved books and magazines. There were century-old National Geographic magazines, sailing and travel books, books on first aid and emergency surgery, marine engine repair and gunsmithing books, cookbooks, crudely printed volumes on creating homemade explosives and poisons and books that taught foreign languages. Spanish. French. German. Chinese. Japanese. Maori.
“Our host has acquired quite a broad collection of useful twentieth-century nonfiction,” Doc said.
On the bottom shelf was a long section of dog-earred, paperback, pulp science fiction and fantasy novels. The gaudily jacketed Slaughter Realms books were sequentially numbered from 157 to 241, and filed in order of publication. J.B. pulled one out and opened it. He scanned a few random pages. The edges of the brittle, yellowed paper crumbled at his touch.
“Listen to this,” he said. Thumbing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose, he read out loud.
“‘Damn you, Ragnar! I’ll soon cleave your fire-furred, Norse wedding tackle from your groinal region!’ The Iroquois ninja princess hurriedly scythed her singing katana around and around her head, making her firm, upthrusting breasts jostle beneath her buckskin doublet ever more wildly with each rotation.
“‘Uff da!’ the Viking leader responded with a guttural roar, ducking under the voracious windmilling attack to snatch up his Martian-made brain armor from the castle’s basaltic flagstones. He clapped the filigreed silver meta-plastic bowl down on his head, bending the tops of his huge pale ears against his scraggly red pigtails, thus anticipating and deflecting the cloud operatives’ flanking maneuver.’”
Krysty put a hand on J.B.’s wrist and gently forced him to lower the book. “Stop, please,” she said. “I’m getting queasy.”
A second or two later the ship turned forty-five degrees and its speed increased markedly. The hiss as the hull split water grew much louder, as did the resounding thud and jolt of the bow pounding into and splitting successive wind waves. The vessel heeled over hard to starboard, sending the food containers sliding to that side of the table.
Chapter Eleven
Phantoms cloaked in black bunting swirled in and out of the edges of Okie Moore’s field of vision. Ashen-faced phantoms with huge heads reveled, grimacing and grinding their long teeth. Their mirror-polished black boots shuffled and scraped on the floor’s planking; dust motes rose like smoke in the wedge of sunlight that burst through the hut’s doorless doorway.
Okie lay on his back in a vile puddle, hallucinating. It was the middle of the afternoon, the hottest part of the day. He couldn’t get up. He was so weak he couldn’t lift a hand to shoo away the flies drinking his tears and blood. It took all his strength just to suck the next breath. He lay slow-baking in the hut-oven, amid the reek of decomposition, shit and piss. The bare mattress beneath him was soaked with all three.
On the fourth day of the sickness, his terrible fever had abated, leaving him shaken and drained. He had thought it was finally over. He was wrong. On the fifth day, the fever returned with a vengeance. And along with it, new and horrible symptoms: bleeding from gums, nose and ass. Bright red spots had popped out all over his body. Bathed in cold sweat, his pulse rapid and thready, he had collapsed.
That was yesterday. He hadn’t moved since.
He was not alone in the hut.
His two wives lay on either side of him on their backs, dead; the babies in their protruding bellies, dead. Two of his six children had been taken to the Yoko Maru because they had shown no sign of the illness. Everyone who had come down sick had been left in the ville, abandoned there to die. Okie’s other children lay around him, caught in the same awful grip as he. He couldn’t tell if they were alive. Even if he could have turned his head to the side, he couldn’t have seen them. The light spearing in from the doorway didn’t reach into the corners where they lay huddled.
There had never been a sickness like this before. Not in anyone’s memory. A sickness that struck so many simultaneously, like a lightning bolt, with blinding headaches, high fever, bone-breaking pain and vomiting. A sickness that dropped people squarely in their tracks. In less than two days, the social fabric of the island had come unraveled. Bodies lay unburied not only inside the ville’s squalid huts, but in the winding, narrow lanes and along the Gulf shore.
Ghastly pale visages loomed closer to his bed of pain, pressing in on him from all sides, blocking his
view of the hut’s dim ceiling. Outsize noses and ears, too-large eyes and mouths mocked his suffering and his grief. The bunting that trailed from the phantoms’ elbows brushed across his bare skin like an open flame.
Okie knew he was dying.
The how of it was an unsolvable mystery. Any one of the island’s recent visitors could have brought the terrible sickness with them. The traders had all sailed away before the outbreak. The Fire Talker had fallen ill along with everyone else. In point of fact, who gave what to whom no longer mattered. It was done. “Why me?” The question he had asked himself over and over had no meaning, either. He had neither the strength nor the mental focus for outrage.
When folds of coarse, gauzy fabric grazed his forehead and fell down over his eyes, Okie did not struggle. Beaten, destroyed, he was ready to depart the world of flesh. Deep in his chest, he felt a stabbing, tearing, transecting pain, then hot blood gushed from his lungs into his throat, filling it. He coughed, and gore sprayed over his chest and drooled down the sides of his face and neck. His throat refilled at once as the massive hemorrhaging continued. There was no end to it. Buckets of his own blood choked him, and then drowned him. As his consciousness faded, long, powerful arms lifted him from the sodden pallet. To his horror, he was not carried up through the roof into the bright and open sky, but down through the floor into smothering blackness.
Into the pit.
DANIEL DESIPIO STROLLED around the perimeter of the vacated ville, his survivalist do-rag tied over his nose and mouth in a futile attempt to filter out the stench of death. There was no longer any need to pretend he was one of the stricken. He was the only person moving. Everyone else was either deceased or on the verge of same, or otherwise incapacitated. He guessed at least one hundred people, fully half the island’s population, were down and out. Without his lifting so much as a finger.
The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
Body count was still a central focus in his life.
Unlike Typhoid Mary, his early twentieth-century predecessor, Daniel didn’t deny that he was the source of the plague. What he did deny was that it was his responsibility. After all, he hadn’t asked to be turned into a living bioweapon, it was something that had been done to him. He saw himself as the quintessential victim. If he had had any sympathy for those he infected, he might have summoned the courage to take his own life. Absent sympathy, he felt only hate for his victims. He loathed them for their weakness, blamed them for their susceptibility to the flavivirus, and saw them as the root cause of his predicament. After all, if nobody got sick from the disease he carried, if it hadn’t made people die like flies, he’d have been a free man.
To his left, a shallow pit had been opened in the beach sand and bloated corpses tumbled in, their limbs tangled together. He pulled the camouflage do-rag tighter over his face. Shovels lay discarded at the verge of the hole. Panic had set in, as it always did, when disease swept through like a firestorm. The still-healthy had abandoned the dead and the sick, taking shelter in the freighter. As if that could protect them.
Part of Daniel, the needy, greedy core of who he was, reveled in the avalanche of destruction he had wrought. He dimly remembered sitting on a summer sidewalk in shorts as a small boy, squishing a column of ants one by one with his little pink thumb, and making up a story about himself as a terrible god teaching lessons of fear and obeisance to the helpless and insignificant. The meat of his earliest-remembered power fantasies, the meat of his twenty-nine published books, which were also power fantasies, had come to life. He had become a force of nature, albeit uncontrollable.
A four-year-old with bigger thumbs.
Although that small, hidden part of him rejoiced as he took in the carnage, Daniel felt a growing sense of unease, of emptiness, even despair. Not because of the indiscriminate loss of innocent life, but by what the looming, one-sided victory presaged.
Reconfinement.
Daniel’s liberty, such as it was, was about to come to an end. He had at most a few hours of freedom left. Like a trained bird of prey, again and again his masters released him to perform a single murderous trick, then when the trick was done, he was reeled back and returned to his cage. Literally. What he bore in his blood was far too dangerous for there to be any option but solitary imprisonment.
Why didn’t he seize the opportunity to get away while he still had the chance? Why didn’t he push a boat off the beach and head for the mainland as fast as he could row? What held him shackled when his overseers were miles away?
Daniel Desipio was not a bird of prey. He was not a hunter; he was not even a gatherer. He was a talker; even in his predark profession, he’d been a squawking parrot in a flock of same. He lacked the physical skills and training, and the inclination to exist as a solo predator. And he couldn’t function as a social animal in close contact and cooperation with others of his kind. It was guaranteed that if he removed himself to some backwater ville, close to half the residents would be dead within a week’s time. Those who recovered from the first round of illness would be taken in the second round, after they were reinfected by mosquitos. If he revealed his predicament in advance to those offering him hospitality, he could expect to be chilled on the spot, and his body burned to ashes. There was no way around it. The evil seed that lurked in his blood chained him invisibly to the jailers who fed, clothed and protected him.
The other reason he could not summon the will to flee was fear.
Fear of what would happen to him if he was caught running away.
Daniel circled wide around the antipersonnel-mined paths and headed across the littered dunes for the northwest tip of the island. He had watched the Claymores being positioned and armed, amused by the islanders’ defense plan. There was no reason for the Matachìn to enter the ville proper before assaulting the freighter. The dying couldn’t be saved; there was no treatment for the genetically engineered plague. Islanders in the ship with natural resistance to the virus—those who only came down with flulike symptoms, or the few who showed no signs of infection—would be pacified and then taken as part of the spoils, as slaves.
With the ville and its reek well behind him, he moved the do-rag from over his nose and mouth and retied it around his head. As he walked he sucked down the salt air blowing off the Gulf, felt the humid breeze on his face, the sun on his back, and heard the waves lapping against the shore. Daniel tried to soak it all in, to hold the experience, but he knew that every step took him closer to the door of his cage. And with every step, he grew more distraught. His lower lip began to quiver and his eyes brimmed with tears.
The heavy machine gun position on the southwest point of the island was manned, but only technically. The two gunners inside the bunker were slumped against the sandbags and steel plate, still conscious but clearly showing signs of the sickness. They moaned as he strode past.
There was no one to stop him, no one to challenge him.
Daniel walked to the tip of the point, to the edge of the water, and took a signal flare from his vest. He pulled the striker tab and held the tube over his head. The flare whooshed and sizzled, shooting high into the sky. The rocket exploded with a loud pop, flashing fluorescent pink and billowing pink smoke. He tossed the spent tube aside, squinting at the horizon line.
The pirate fleet waited just beyond the curve of the earth, watching for his signal. As terrible as they were, the Matachìn were the instruments, the familiars of something infinitely worse.
As was he.
More than a century ago, Daniel recalled reading some obscure scientist’s theory about the nature of thought, which put forward the proposition that ideas operate like viruses, with no reproductive machinery of their own, spreading from brain to brain, mutating over the course of transmission. Like viruses, some ideas were harmless, others were anything but. The idea that now stalked the earth was an ancient legend. It had had 1500 years—and the assistance of Armageddon—to evolve and flower. Unlike Slaughter Realms, it was not cobbled togethe
r by a committee of English Lit majors from bits and pieces of crosscultural fables, a slapdash reassembly that diluted and eviscerated the underlying power. This legend was pure. It was complete. Much of what had passed for entertainment in predark popular culture was a pale imitation or parody of the basic concept: that the world was a shambles, the playground of insane demons.
This was neither imitation nor parody. Daniel had seen the truth of it with his own two eyes.
Chapter Twelve
An abrupt change in the pitch and roll of the ship woke Mildred and she couldn’t fall back to sleep. She lay beside J.B. in one of the bow’s vee berths, hanging on as Tempest pounded through rising waves. Outside a torrential rain was falling. It drummed on the top deck and sizzled on the surface of the sea. There was so much water vapor in the air it was hard to breathe.
Beside her, J.B. was oblivious to the passing storm. He snored softly, peacefully, as if nothing had changed.
Mebbe for him it hadn’t.
But for Mildred everything felt different. Everything.
That’s what hope could do, she thought.
Memories from her life before cryogenesis, before skydark had returned in a flood. Suppressed memories of who she’d been, what she’d done, her professional interests, her daily routines, her hobbies, her colleagues and friends. She vividly remembered the sense of safety a complex, organized, global society provided. She remembered the overwhelming amount of goods and services within easy reach. She remembered electricity, flush toilets, refrigeration, a hot bath whenever she wanted and the deluge of information: books, movies, music, Internet.
Virtually everything she had devoted her life to prior to Armageddon was for naught in Deathlands. There was no science. No real medicine. No search for knowledge. There was only the gun.
