by James Axler
The chattering sounds of fighting never ceased outside the tunnel as the frantic sec men used their bare hands to dig into the rocky earth of the collapsed ceiling. They had dug a crawl space into the loose material, using boards taken from the roof of the tunnel to support the cramped opening. It only went in a few yards, but was getting deeper with every passing minute.
Staying bent low, wounded sec men hauled the material away in slings made from their shirts to pack it behind the wall of corpses. Incredibly, the crude barrier was holding, and the incoming lead from the sailors only made the bodies jerk about in a horrid mockery of life.
“How’s the brass holding out?” the baron asked, pulling the last spare rounds out of the loops of his gunbelt to thumb into the empty clip of the Ruger. There was a single gren on his belt, but that was the key to their escape. Hopefully.
“Don’t ask, my love,” Lady Veronica replied, releasing an arrow from the stolen crossbow. The MP-5 rapidfire still hung at her side, the last full clip reserved for the next rush of the sailors. The last time Carlton had ordered them to use a desk from the hut as protective cover. But the 9 mm Parabellum rounds from the MP-5 had easily cut through the flimsy pressboard, and the lady ruthlessly sent five more sailors into the arms of Davey.
Just then, a boomerang spun out of the smoke and streaked into the tunnel. It missed the baron by the thickness of a prayer and slammed into one of the wooden beams supporting the roof. Grabbing the weapon with both hands, a corporal jerked it loose and raced to the wall to fling it back outside. It spun away and clattered noisily against the tilted hull of the Moon Runner.
Instantly a flurry of arrows sailed forth, one of them catching the corporal in the armpit. Dumbfounded, the sec man stared at the ghastly wound, knowing in cold certainty that the location made a tourniquet impossible. As the warm red blood flowed down the side of his chest, the corporal passed his gunbelt and blaster to a new recruit, and walked over to sit with his back to the wall.
“Four rounds,” he whispered hoarsely. “Make them count, brother.”
Crisply, the new corporal saluted in reply and buckled on the gunbelt to check the load in the revolver.
With no way to help the dying man, the baron lit a cig and passed it over. The pale corporal eagerly accepted the special gift and gratefully took a long drag, letting the sweet tobacco smoke fill his lungs, then he exhaled slowly and stopped moving.
“Save the arrow, then put him on the wall,” Jones commanded, his face a mask of control.
“Yes, Baron,” the corporal replied, and the grisly task was accomplished without further conversation.
Accepting the arrow, Lady Veronica loaded it into her crossbow and reached out with her mind to find the original owner. There was a faint tug from the direction of the fuel pumps, and she instantly fired. With a strangled cry, a sailor stumbled into view, the arrow buried deep in his left eye. Blindly, the man staggered around, going straight off the dock and into the lagoon. He hit with a splash, and the blaster in his hand sank out of sight.
“Thirty more like that, and we win,” Jones muttered, scanning the smoky exterior with his blaster at the ready.
“Doing my best,” Lady Veronica replied, notching another arrow into the crossbow. “How is the digging going?”
“There’s no way of telling,” the baron said, then jumped back with a curse as several snakes wiggled around the wall of corpses and into the tunnel. Shitfire, that mutie Carlton had summoned an entire nest of cottonmouths! Their poison was ten times more deadly than the venom of a jumper.
Retreating quickly, the sec men kicked dirt at the snakes, trying to herd them together. Firing an arrow at a cottonmouth, and missing, a sec woman swung down her crossbow and caught the snake on the rise, crushing the head flat. As it dropped lifeless to the ground, the other snakes converged on the sec woman, hissing and trying to bite her legs.
Letting loose an arrow, Lady Veronica got one snake through the middle. Pinned in place, it could only lash around madly, hissing louder than ever and snapping at anything nearby. A sec man cursed as the fangs scored a deep scratch across his arm. Quickly, he backed farther away, pulling out a knife and a butane lighter.
Uncoiling his bullwhip, the baron lashed the knotted length of leather forward and cut off the head. As the other two turned on him, he did the same. He coiled the bullwhip and returned it to his gunbelt. “Here, use this to save the poison,” the baron directed, tossing over a paperback book. “Then smear it on the arrowheads.” The sec men rushed to obey.
Huddled against the rocky wall, the bitten sec man played the flame of the lighter along the edge of his knife. When the metal started to change color, he slashed the wound and started sucking hard, turning his head to spit out the poison.
When the spit ceased to have a greenish tinge, the sec man weakly stood. “I think that did it, Baron,” he grinned, just as another boomerang spun into the tunnel. Everybody ducked except him and the man’s brains splashed onto the rocky wall.
“Son of a mutie slut!” Lady Veronica snarled, swinging up the MP-5, but then slowly lowered it against her will. The whole point of Carlton sending in snakes was probably to make them use up the last of the brass.
As if in response to her thoughts, the sailors opened fire with a fusillade of blasters, the hot rounds smacking into the barrier of corpses with meaty whacks and ricocheting off the rocky walls of the tunnel.
Suddenly a sec man charged out of the gloom from deeper inside the tunnel.
“We’re through!” he whispered, a smile splitting the layers of grime covering his face. One hand was wrapped in bloody strips of cloth, but the man radiated a sense of victory.
“About damn time,” the baron grunted, slapping the man on the back. “Good work! Send through some scouts, then the wounded. We’ll take the six.”
“But Baron!” the sec man objected.
“Obey your baron, arnsman,” Lady Veronica commanded, using the ancient title of a loyal guard.
Stiffening at the honor, the sec man raised both hands in silent agreement and started arranging the exodus.
“You next, my love,” Jones said, pulling a half stick of TNT from his left boot. He had been saving it in case the sailors mobbed the tunnel. The blast would chill them all, granting him revenge and saving his beloved wife from a gang rape that would never end.
Lady Veronica started to object, then saw the raw determination in his face and relented. Kissing him briefly on the sweaty cheek, she crawled into the hole and out of sight.
Waiting a few seconds, Baron Jones lit the fuse with a butane lighter, stabbed it into the soft dirt alongside the hole, then dived in and started scrambling for distance.
A few seconds later the half stick detonated, the confined explosion blowing out the corpses like a shotgun blast and shattering the support columns. With a stentorian groan, the roof collapsed and the walls folded to completely fill the underground tunnel, clouds of dust and dirt billowing out to mix with the woodsmoke from the burning Moon Runner until the roiling atmosphere of the lagoon turned as black as midnight for several minutes.
When the sea breezes finally cleared away the smoke and dust, the tunnel in the cliff was gone, as if it had never existed.
Chapter Twenty
Guiding the cumbersome barge into the calm water of the little inlet proved to be surprisingly easy for Ryan, and the man briefly wondered if he was a natural at steering a boat or if sailors had been trying to make themselves sound important for centuries by pretending that a relatively simple task was incredibly difficult. Then an unexpected wave hit the barge and Ryan suddenly knew the hard truth as he temporarily lost control of the craft and Jak went tumbling over the gunwale.
“Thanks,” the teen sputtered, standing waist deep in the shallows.
“Sorry,” Ryan shouted, lashing the wheel into place and running over to the side of the vessel to toss down a rope.
Climbing out of the water, Jak scowled at the man, then flinched as the
salt water finally reached the open sores on his back from the ricocheted scattergun buckshot.
Understanding the source of the pained expression, Ryan grabbed a bucket of rain water from a peg and sloshed it over the teen.
“Thanks,” Jak said, this time giving the word an entirely different tone. Shrugging off his jacket, the teenager hung it on the peg to dry.
“You two done fucking around?” J.B. shouted from the shore through cupped hands.
“Almost!” Ryan yelled back, giving a half smile.
On the shore, the rest of the companions stood patiently waiting near a spitting campfire. There was no sign of the two horses, and the air smelled of freshly broiled steak. In the distance, a large patch of the pine-tree forest was burning out of control, thick plumes of smoke rising high.
Wearily, everybody climbed on board, setting down their backpacks with grateful sighs.
“Trouble?” Jak asked, looking over the tired people.
“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” J.B. replied, easing the bulky nuke battery to the deck with a dull thump. The laser was strapped across his back, the cable still connected to the battery for instant use.
“I’ll bet,” Ryan said, noticing that Doc was carrying the munitions bag, Mildred the shotgun and Krysty the Uzi.
“Well, a swarm of stingwings aced both horses, and we’ve been on the run ever since,” J.B. admitted, massaging an arm. “Dark night, this thing gets heavy after a while. It’s like hauling a LAV on your back.”
“Someone sent people to harass us with sniper fire,” Mildred added, brushing some sand and nettles off her pants. “We couldn’t find them in the treetops, so…” She glanced at the raging inferno on the nearby hills.
“Set fire ace snipers?” Jak scowled in disbelief.
“Well, it seemed like the thing to do at the time,” Doc demurred, sounding slightly embarrassed.
“How about you two?” Krysty asked, removing her bearskin coat to drape it over a sandbag.
“Pretty much the same,” Ryan stated with a grimace. “The captain sent some of his gunners in canoes after us. When they started shooting, Jak riddled them with the Fifties, and from then on we’ve been left alone.”
Just then, an echoing roar sounded from the direction of the hills, and everybody spun with a hand on his or her blaster to see a mountain of mottle-colored flesh begin to rise above the forest fire. Soon, a single great eye was revealed to stare hatefully at the tiny people standing on the barge.
“Bastard!” Jak cursed, spinning to race for the closest .50-caliber machine gun.
Bellowing in unbridled fury, the colossal kraken began to slowly haul itself sideways along the hill, its thick tentacles grabbing onto the trunks of pine trees just outside the rampaging conflagration.
“Quick, John, use the laser!” Mildred shouted, pumping the scattergun. “On land we stand a chance, but we’re doomed if it reaches the water!”
“Tell me something I don’t know!” J.B. replied with a snarl, shrugging off the laser and dialing the controls to maximum power.
As the kraken started crashing through the greenery, J.B. sent a deep blue beam into the trees, the juicy nettles exploding like thousands of firecrackers at the touch of the power ray. Startled, the kraken recoiled, then the tree trunks whooshed into flames.
Roaring in frustration, the giant mutie began dragging itself in the other direction. But J.B. quickly set every tree in sight on fire, the flames forming an almost solid wall of fire between the behemoth and the shore line.
“At this rate, the fire will die soon,” Doc said in a deceptively calm voice. “And without any horses or wags…” There was no need for him to finish the sentence.
Aiming for the eye, J.B. tried to blind the mutie, but the billowing smoke threw off his aim and the laser merely scored a gash across the creature’s forehead. Yellow blood gushed out, but not very much.
Changing tactics, J.B. narrowed the beam to its tightest focus, then swept the laser across the top of the mutie. The crown of the beast came off, pulsating gray brains swelling into view, and a torrent of piss-yellow blood gushed from the ghastly wound.
Howling louder than thunder, the kraken surged into the flames, uncaring of the pain, intent upon reaching the norms at any price. Holding down the button, J.B. swung the laser back and forth across the beast, cutting off tentacles and hacking off huge chunks of flesh.
Bursting out of the flames, what remained of the kraken slumped onto the sandy ground, the tentacles lashing to find any purchase to drag it into the life-giving ocean. But the laser removed the ropy limbs, then burned into the snapping beak, slowly traveling upward, boiling the eye a solid white, until coming out the top of the oozing brain.
A split second later the laser sputtered and died, the housing gushing smoke and sparks as melted circuits dribbled out of a vent like silver blood.
Still fighting to move forward, the kraken convulsed, then fell apart, the two sections spurting golden gore, the few remaining tentacles whipping around mindlessly before the dying mutie shuddered and went still.
IMPATIENTLY WAITING for the fleet to arrive, Captain Carlton suddenly went pale and stopped pacing the dock. A wave of incalculable pain flooded his entire being from the psychic backlash of having a creature under his mental control perish, and the man doubled over to noisily retch into the lagoon. Gurgling as if about to die, Carlton fell over sideways, gasping for breath, his limbs thrashing wildly.
WITH THEIR BARON and his lady safely in the middle of the group, the sec men of Sealton ville moved warily through the long dark tunnel, the only illumination coming from their butane lighters and one tallow candle that spit and popped constantly.
They had been afraid that the tunnel might lead to a lava tube and end in a sulfur pit, dooming them all to a slow chill. But the air was remarkably fresh, although reeking with the smell of old corpses. Clearly, there had been a major fight in the tunnel, and not that long ago.
Coming upon a crude barricade, the sec men checked the bodies on the ground, first to make sure they were aced and then for anything useful.
“Baron, these…these are cannies,” a sec man growled, lifting a skinning knife into view. The handle was wrapped in human skin, a tattoo clearly visible.
“Any weapons?” the baron asked, holding his Ruger ready in case one of the bodies was actually alive. Cannies often played corpse to lure in their victims.
“Plenty, Baron,” a sec man replied, not quite sure if he was happy about that or not. “Nothing that takes brass, but flintlocks by the pile.”
“Any flints?” Lady Veronica asked suspiciously, a finger resting on the trigger of her MP-5 rapidfire.
“Pounds of them!” a sec woman exclaimed. “And more black powder and shot than we can possibly carry.”
“Then arm yourselves, but watch for traps!” the bar on commanded, keeping his back to the wooden wall.
“What do you think happened here, my love?” Lady Veronica asked, scowling at the murky figures on the floor. In the candlelight, they almost seemed to move, and the effect was unnerving.
“Something came down this tunnel, and they died trying to hold it off,” the baron said slowly, then bent to pick up a shiny golden object. It was a brass cartridge with a tiny dent in the side, marking it as having come from a rapidfire.
“The outlanders,” Lady Veronica stated, glancing at the darkness behind them. “They nuked the cannies to jack their boat, but tangled with Carlton instead.”
“Doesn’t sound like they work for him, after all,” the baron said, shifting his grip on the Ruger. “I’m starting to believe the fight at the volcano was a mistake on our part, and they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The woman merely grunted at the possibility, not quite ready to relinquish her hatred for the witch with the red hair.
When the sec men were fully armed, the group continued deeper into the tunnel and soon entered a spacious dining hall full of decomposing bodies. The reek wa
s horrible, and they moved past the room and into another tunnel as fast as possible. Some of the bodies appeared to have been gnawed on, which meant that either there was no avenue to the surface or the cannies had tangled with their worst enemy, their own kind—screamers. At the realization, a dozen sec men cocked the stone-tipped hammers on their blasters into firing position.
“Anything moves, shoot on sight,” the baron commanded, feeling the tension among the troops increase.
A breeze was blowing along the subterranean passageway into their faces, forcing the wretched stink behind, and they gratefully savored the flow. The air carried a faint aroma of growing plants, as if they were near the grasslands once more.
Abruptly calling a halt, a sec man crawled forward with a knife and soon stood holding a pipe bomb. “Whoever planted this knew his trade,” the man stated, tucking the explosive charge into his belt.
More bodies were found along the way, but already carrying a full load of shot and powder, the sec men ignored the corpses, aside from thrusting a knife into them to make sure the decomposing piles of flesh weren’t a threat.
“Any spears or axes?” the baron asked.
His broken arm in a sling, a corporal nodded. “Yes, sir. Plenty.”
“Then strip the dead,” Lady Veronica ordered brusquely, “and make some torches from their clothing.”
The grisly task was done. The group continued onward through the subterranean labyrinth, but the mood improved, as did their speed.
Passing by several prison cells, the sec men sighed at the sight of sunlight streaming in through ragged holes in the ceiling.
