by James Axler
As the big-armed woman stormed off in the direction of the stern stairwell, which was about two hundred feet away, the islanders followed, their weapons up and ready.
“Dammit, Brenda, don’t do this…” Tom called to her back.
Brenda didn’t respond. She kept on walking away, shoulders hunched, head lowered. They all kept on walking for the stairwell.
Ryan could partly understand their decision. They were crazy with grief over the loss of their loved ones, crazy because everything generations of their people had worked for and protected was in the latrine, and gone forever. The islanders thought they had nothing left but their pride. And pride demanded vengeance at all costs. They were dead wrong. They still had their own lives, but in the heat of the moment no one was going to make them see that. It put the companions in an even more desperate situation.
The odds against them had just doubled.
When Garwood hitched himself up and started to go after Brenda, Tom reached out and grabbed him by the arm.
“No way, boy,” Tom said. “You’re coming with us, and we’re getting the hell out of here.”
“I want to fight them! Let me go!”
Tom wouldn’t release his hold. “We all want to fight them and chill them, and we will,” he said. “But we don’t necessarily have to commit suicide doing it.”
Garwood tried to throw a roundhouse punch at the skipper’s face but missed when the larger man easily and adroitly pushed him off balance. From there, it degenerated into a stand-up wrestling match. While they struggled, the islanders disappeared up the stairs, heading for the top deck.
Ryan and Doc moved in to separate Tom and the boy.
As they pulled them apart, a blaze of blasterfire from the stairwell froze everyone. Automatic weapons chattered and a 12-gauge boomed over and over. The shotgun blasts were spaced a mere fraction of a second apart. Ryan recognized that frenzied chain of sound, as did his companions. Trigger pinned, the shotgun’s firing pin snapped every time the pump action slammed shut.
Ryan drew his SIG-Sauer and stepped to the left, giving himself a clear firing lane. Krysty, Mildred, Doc, Jak and Tom whipped their pistols out, as well. Garwood dropped to a knee on the deck in front of them, shouldered his AKM and aimed at the stairwell entrance. J.B. couldn’t shoulder his scattergun, so he held it braced against his hip, his face twisted in a grimace of pain.
The Fire Talker hung well back of them all, empty-handed, Ryan noted. Though there were a lot of islander weapons hidden under the debris, he didn’t try to find one for himself. In fact, Daniel had a kind of wild look in his eye, like he was on the verge of making a solo break for it while the companions held the fort, but he didn’t bolt. He didn’t move a muscle.
The fabulator was too spineless even to hightail it.
It didn’t matter, though. Ryan turned his attention back to the stairwell. They had enough blasters. Any pirate who stepped down onto the landing was going to be shot to pieces in a heartbeat.
Amid the savage, back-and-forth sawing of the continuing gunbattle on the stairwell came a series of loud pops in rapid succession. They weren’t gunshots. And they weren’t frag grenades. After a moment the intensity of shooting faded, turning into short bursts of autofire. Oneway autofire.
Screams echoed in the stairwell. Bullets zinged down the stairs. Then an olive-drab cylinder bounced off the last step, onto the landing. It was spewing dense white smoke as it rolled into the corridor.
“Gas gren!” Ryan shouted, waving the others back.
The hissing canister was followed by Brenda. The big woman wasn’t moving under her own power. She slid on her back, headfirst down the steps. Gravity dumped her at the foot of the stairs, but she wasn’t dead. She struggled to her feet, bleeding heavily from a shoulder wound that had already soaked one side of her birdhunting vest. Tear gas from the canister billowed all around her as she lurched, half-blinded, for the hallway. Then from the steps above came more autofire. Before she could clear the landing, she was chopped down by multiple impacts to the head and chest. She hit the floor sideways and, rubbery limp, stayed there.
The screams up the stairwell continued until a pair of widely spaced single shots rang out. To Ryan they sounded like coups de grâce. Then came the tramp of many sets of heavy boots descending the metal treads. Light beams speared through the caustic chemical fog, crisscrossing wildly.
“Warn them, son,” Ryan said, putting a hand on Garwood’s shoulder.
The teenager cut loose a withering burst with his AKM. The flurry of slugs slapped the far side of the landing and sparked, gnawing chunks of metal from the edge of the entry arch.
While the pirates were thinking twice about taking those last few steps to the deck, Ryan waved the others away, toward the bow. He knew they couldn’t hold the corridor against a tear gas attack. Even with the outer wall blown and a breeze coming through the holes, the chemicals would hang in the air, blinding and incapacitating them, making them triple easy to chill.
Two more canisters bounced down the steps and onto the hallway. The grens pinwheeled, spurting clouds of cottony smoke.
Garwood raised his assault rifle to his shoulder to lay down more covering fire, but Ryan stopped him with a hand on the still warm barrel. “We need a way off this deck,” he said. “And then we need a way off this ship.”
Jak bent and picked up an AKM from the rubble. Tapping the flash hider against the side of his boot to clear any debris from the barrel, without even checking the mag, he took aim at the landing.
Either the nukin’ thing was loaded or it wasn’t.
It was loaded.
The AKM clattered in his grip, spitting spent brass from its ejector port. Jak ripped off all thirty rounds in the space of four seconds.
“Get us out of here,” Ryan told the boy as the blaster-shot echoes faded.
“This way,” Garwood said, running for the bow.
Daniel was right behind him, almost a shadow.
Ryan grabbed the AKM from Jake, holstering his SIG-Sauer. “Go on! Everybody go!” he said, stripping out the empty mag and reaching behind his back for the clip he had stashed there. As the others ran past him, following Garwood, he slapped in the full magazine, snapped the actuator and took rear guard.
Even though the three canisters were hissing a good two hundred feet distant, he could already feel his eye starting to sting and burn. The slight wind was carrying the CS smoke his way.
Before he was blinded by tears, Ryan fired from the hip, sending half a clip through the archway, then he turned and chased after the others. The freighter’s hallway was close to six hundred feet long, a hell of a sprint, made more difficult because it was over an obstacle course of exploded rubbish. When Ryan saw the companions ducking through an arch at the far end of the corridor, he whirled and emptied the AKM down the hall. Tossing the rifle aside, he raced for the landing of the forward, portside stairwell.
As he stepped onto the landing, return fire from the stern clanged all around the bulkhead, spitting fat sparks as they ricocheted every which way. The pirates’ window of target opportunity was a second at most, then he was around the corner and triple-timing down the stairs. The stairwell was wreathed in smoke, and after a dozen steps it got so dark that he had to reduce speed or risk taking a header. The smoke was even thicker at the next landing. He could feel radiating warmth against his face and arms.
Whatever was burning, it was plenty hot.
When he heard the hiss, he thought it was the ringing in his ears, then he realized it was too loud, that it was coming from the blaze, filtering up through the passages of the derelict ship.
As he continued down the stairs, he saw a yellow, flickering light below, too small and too weak to be the source of all the smoke. It was a torch. Ryan heard coughing and saw dim shapes on the Tween Deck landing, waiting for him.
Garwood had ignited a torch.
“They’re coming,” Ryan said as he joined the companions. “Mebbe three minutes behi
nd me.”
“Can you get us out of here?” Tom asked the teenager.
“Through the bilges,” Garwood said. “There’s a breach on the other side of the ship. It’s real low on the hull, near the keel. You can’t see it from the water. The sand dunes hide it.”
“If we go out that way, can we get around the ville and make it down to the shore?” Krysty asked.
Tom answered for the boy. “Hell, yes! We can skirt the ville’s backside, straight down to the water. Clear shot from the beach to the dinghy.”
“We’ve got to go through the engine room to get to it,” Garwood said. “And the engine room’s back that way…” He indicated with the torch the direction they’d just come. The direction where the smoke got thicker.
“Nukin’ hell,” J.B. moaned, stifling a cough. His smudged spectacles reflected the yellow flame of the torch.
“No other way to the engine room?” Mildred asked the boy.
“Nope,” Garwood said. “Not from here.”
“If the Matachìn went down that aft staircase, the one Brenda tried to go up, then they’ve already got us cut off,” Mildred said.
“If they didn’t, then we’ve got a chance,” Ryan said. He grabbed a pair of unlit torches from the wall and gave one of them to Jak. “We need more light.”
As they touched the ends of their torches to Garwood’s, grens popped on the stairwell above.
“Don’t get too far ahead. Don’t lose us,” Ryan told the teen. “Without you to guide us we’re running blind in here.” Then he clapped a hand on Garwood’s back and said, “Go, boy! Go!”
They ran single-file back toward the stern, another six-hundred-yard sprint. There was less debris on this deck, for sure, but it was harder to see it through the dense smoke. In the lead, Garwood picked his way around the scattered obstacles. Everyone followed his path, more or less.
J.B. was having a hard time keeping up. He gradually dropped back in the line, until he was running right in front of Ryan.
It was the cracked ribs, Ryan knew. J.B. couldn’t suck in enough air, and the smoke was making things worse. He was a hard little son of a bitch, though. He wasn’t going to give up.
They had traveled about half the distance to the stern when the smoke began to ease off and the heat got a whole lot worse. And there was a kind of red, throbbing glow up ahead on the left.
Automatic fire roared from behind, and bullets sprayed over the corridor, zipping past Ryan’s head. The pirates had gained the lower deck, but the shooting was wild. Mebbe they were firing as they ran, he thought. Mebbe they were too anxious for the chill, or mebbe they were spooked by the enclosed space, the darkness, the smoke and the fire.
As another burst of slugs whined by him, Ryan could visualize the enemy’s target picture: running figures silhouetted by the madly shifting red-orange glow. Stopping and returning fire was not an option for the companions. Speed was their only hope. Once they got past the glow and slipped into the darkness beyond, from the pursuers’ point of view they would simply disappear.
The air was so hot it felt like daggers stabbing deep in Ryan’s lungs every time he inhaled. J.B. was wheezing badly and staggering a bit, but he still had his eyes on the prize. Like Ryan, he knew the glow of the fire would hide them. If they were going to shoot back, it would be from the cover of darkness on the other side, where they had the advantage.
The glow was coming up fast on the left, and the air was getting much hotter. Ryan’s clothes were soaked through with sweat. Even the shortest possible breaths seared the inside of his nose and the back of his throat. The firing from behind suddenly dwindled, then stopped altogether. He assumed the pirates were concentrating on their running, trying to close the gap and overtake them before they vanished.
Fifty feet in front of them, a torrent of flame shot sideways out of the left-hand wall, floor to ceiling. At the head of the file, Garwood veered wide right to avoid being cooked in his own skin. And it wasn’t just direct flame he was dodging. Ryan could see the steel wall around its exit point was what was glowing red.
Suddenly there came another burst of blasterfire; not from behind, but from in front this time.
That the pirates had cut them off was Ryan’s first dismal thought. If that was the case, there was no way out. They were going to be sandwiched in the hallway. Sandwiched and chilled.
The crackle continued, rapidly gathering in intensity. He couldn’t see muzzle-flashes down the corridor ahead of them for the light of the leaping flames. But bullets weren’t flying from that direction.
When J.B. darted away from the source of the scalding heat, running next to the exterior wall, Ryan followed in his footsteps. Twenty feet away and rapidly closing, he saw fire blasting out through the doorway of what had to be the Upper Tween deck hold. The door was open, locked back against the wall.
Up close, the roar of the flame was so loud it made the air vibrate. And there was suddenly a hard wind at Ryan’s back as the fire greedily sucked oxygen through every hole and crack in the hull, feeding itself.
Holding his breath to keep his lungs from being scorched, Ryan got a brief glimpse through the doorway.
Everything inside looked like it was burning. It was wall-to-wall fire.
From the hold, dozens of rounds went off at once, and bullets cut through the interior wall, angling up into the ceiling. Wild volleys of slugs chewed up the tiles overhead and dropped them on top of the companions as they ran.
Then he was past the door and the seething red glow, and running for the darkness ahead, although momentarily blinded by the afterimage of the glare. The blistering heat shifted from his face and left side to his back.
No one had been hit by anything but falling tiles and dust.
The blasterfire from the hold continued to rage as the companions put distance between themselves and it.
The Matachìn couldn’t be in there, Ryan told himself. If they were, they’d be beyond staging an ambush; they’d be roasted meat. Even as he thought that, the din of the blasterfire behind him grew in volume and intensity. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of rounds were going off at once. More and more of it was slashing through the wall, whining as it ricocheted against the inside of the hull.
If it wasn’t the pirates shooting at them, he reasoned it had to be the islanders’ ammo stockpile, stored in the Upper Tween deck hold, cooking off from the heat of the fire. Probably most of it was stashed inside a steel cargo container, which explained why more rounds weren’t flying around. It was a situation that could change at any second if the container walls gave way.
The discharging ammo was going to be major obstacle for the pirates to negotiate. It might even turn them back.
The air felt cooler against Ryan’s face, but there was noticeably more smoke and the light thrown by his torch was dimmer.
The cook-offs behind them continued to rage.
Up ahead, Garwood’s light had stopped. He knelt at the arch in the wall that led to the aft staircase landing, then poked his AKM around the corner and upward. Tom moved to the other side of the entrance, aiming his big Smith downward.
“We’re clear,” the skipper called back to the others.
“I’ve got the rear,” Ryan said, placing his torch on the deck and drawing his pistol. “Keep moving.”
With Ryan covering the retreat with his SIG-Sauer, the companions hurried down the staircase. He strained his ears to hear the sounds of other footfalls, either from the steps above or from the hallway in the direction of the fire. But he couldn’t hear anything over the noise of the cook-offs and the sizzle and pop of the fire. He sure as hell couldn’t see anything for the smoke. When Krysty shouted up to him that they were in position, he holstered his weapon, picked up his torch and followed.
As he descended the smoke got thinner and thinner, and there was light coming from below. After another landing and another short flight of steps, the stairway ended on the engine room’s steel floor.
Everyone had their blaste
rs out—everyone but the Fire Talker who had retreated deeper into the room and was taking cover beside a steel-cabineted bank of gauges and dials. The companions, Tom and Garwood were stationed to pour withering blasterfire onto the foot of the staircase. They lowered their weapons momentarily, allowing Ryan to step into their midst.
The ship’s engine room was low-ceilinged and cavelike, about one hundred feet long and half that wide. Its four engines were enormous, easily thirty feet long, and mounted in side-by-side pairs. The great rusting hulks dominated the center of the space. They had pipe railings around them and catwalks above them.
Torchlight was hardly necessary.
The intense blaze erupting from between the pairs of engines threw a bright, if wavering light over the room.
To Ryan it looked like mortar rounds had ignited some remnant of diesel in the freighter’s tanks or fuel lines.
It was as hot as hell, but not nearly as bad as it had been on the deck above. The heat from the fire and most of the diesel smoke was being sucked upward through the irregular gap blown into the ceiling. The holes in the decks above acted like a huge chimney.
The noise from the exploding ammo stores above had gradually lessened; there was just the occasional firecracker string of discharges. The stockpile had apparently burned itself out.
“Which way?” Ryan asked the islander teen as he redrew his pistol.
Without a word, Garwood headed for the stern end of the engines. The riveted deck and walls were covered with peeling white paint, which was stained with streaks of rust and dark, fuzzy blotches of mildew.
“Good grief!” Mildred exclaimed, pointing down the deck, toward the bow.
Low, black blurs were circling around and around, almost too quickly to follow. There were dozens of them, and they were squeaking in panic.
The ship’s trapped and terrified rats were going crazy.
Garwood put down his torch and his assault rifle and bent over a circular hatch set low on the wall, just above the join with the deck. It had a wheel-lock on the engine-room side, which he managed to turn without help. The hatch opened onto a black hole. Air whooshed in through it, smelling like rotten eggs.
