by James Axler
“We’re almost out,” Baron Jones said confidently. “Let’s find the front entrance and go back home.”
“The first round of shine is on me,” Lady Veronica added. “And no wall duty for a month!”
Both of them tried not to smile when they saw the grim faces of the sec men ease at the thought of anything other than fighting and chilling. Tired men made mistakes, and they weren’t out of this stinking rad pit yet.
Taking a corner, the group paused as the lead sec man knelt to disarm another trap. Then they became aware of a soft glow at the far end of the corridor. The smell of greenery was much stronger, but it was oddly tainted with the smell of fresh animal droppings.
Advancing carefully, the group went stock-still at the startling sight of a large patch of sunlight streaming down from a colossal hole in the ceiling. Lying in the pool of light was a sleeping thunder king, surrounded by the partially consumed bodies of some cannies. Behind the giant mutie was a flight of wooden stairs leading up to a set of wooden doors, sunlight streaming through every tiny crack.
Nobody spoke, but a sec man panted at the tantalizing sight, and the eyes of the king snapped open at the tiny sound.
“Fire!” Baron Jones bellowed, triggering the Ruger.
The terrified sec men opened fire with their stolen blasters, and the king lurched forward, its horn goring the first man. With a shake of the head, the creature tossed aside the body and lumbered forward, trampling the next man and crushing another between the wall and its own armored body.
“Die!” Lady Veronica screamed, emptying her weapon into the face of the thing. The barrage of 9 mm rounds took out both eyes, but the king merely grunt ed in annoyance and bent to start eating the still living sec men, their hideous screams going completely unnoticed.
“Nuking hell, this is a trap!” the baron snarled, firing the Ruger. “Carlton wanted us in the tunnel to escape this way and get fed to his bastard pet!”
As the creature began to regenerate, a sec man threw a pipe bomb. The blast shook the beast hard, but it went on eating and repairing itself. A sec man darted into a prison cell and barred the door from the inside while another sec man tried to get past the king to reach the stairs. Never pausing in the grotesque feasting, the king merely shifted its bulk sideways for a moment, smashing the man against the wooden wall, pulping his legs and splintering the planks. He dropped to the ground with a weeping sob, and the beast chomped off his head, chewing the skull like a cow did soft cud.
“Retreat!” the baron commanded, grabbing the hand of his wife and taking off at a full run.
Frantically reloading their black-powder blasters, the sec men were right behind their baron.
“Where?” Lady Veronica asked, squeezing his hand, knowing it was probably for the last time.
“Here!” the baron said, unexpectedly stopping at an intersection to point at the wooden support beam. “Arnsman, seal the tunnel!”
Quickly the sec man planted the explosive charge as everybody else moved to a safe distance farther down the tunnel.
“That won’t hold it off for very long,” Lady Veronica said pointedly, looking at her empty rapidfire.
“Every minute of life is worth it,” the baron replied curtly, dropping his revolver to pull out his bullwhip. “If this is our day to buy the farm, then we’ll take that big bastard with us to hell. Right, boys?”
Knowing that was pure crap, the sec men cheered in response anyway. Their job was to protect the ville and the baron’s family, with their lives if necessary. They had no fear of getting chilled, only of getting chilled uselessly.
“Ready!” the sec man shouted, holding a butane lighter and a stubby fuse.
Just then, the king walked around the corner and rammed its curbed horn into the side of the man. Dropping the fuse, he screamed wildly and beat the creature with a fist. Jerking its head, the king tossed him aside and started slowly toward the others, as if knowing full well that they had no place to ride or hide.
As her husband and the sec men cut loose with their useless weapons, Lady Veronica closed her eyes tightly and tried to extend her mind to touch the thoughts of the other witch. She didn’t think it was possible, but there was nothing to lose in the attempt. The woman knew that she was already aced, but there was the slim possibility of revenge. That would have to be enough.
He can talk to animals! Lady Veronica mentally screamed, the words echoing inside her head. Captain Carlton! Mind-talker! Animals! Beware!
Then the blasters stopped shooting and the screaming commenced.
Carlton! Mind-talker! Animals! Beware!
Suddenly the king was upon her and the universe became filled with crushing pain, but only for a few moments.
Standing her turn at the wheel, Krysty suddenly reeled backwards as if physically struck, her hair tumbling down her shoulders limp and lifeless.
“What’s wrong?” Mildred demanded, rushing over while J.B. lunged for the abandoned wheel.
“In…my mind…a death call,” Krysty whispered, shivering hard. “Veronica…the wife of Baron Jones…the man we called the giant…” She paused as the physician forced her to take a drink of water.
“Are they coming to attack?” Ryan demanded, sliding the Steyr off his shoulder and working the arming bolt.
“No, they’re aced…both of them,” Krysty panted, her hair slowly starting to stir once more. Then the woman looked up, her face grimly determined. “Veronica died warning us about the captain, Carlton.”
“He come?” Jak asked, scowling.
“Worse, much worse,” Krysty said, rising unsteadily to her feet. The woman felt ill, as if she had been kicked in the brain. Not the outside of her head, but the bare tissue of her living brain.
“How can it possibly be worse, dear lady?” Doc asked, sliding a wooden box forward for her to use as a makeshift chair.
“Carlton is a Talker,” Krysty said with conviction, massaging her temples. “He can command animals with his mind. Horses, dogs, eagles…even muties and bioweps.”
“Like krakens?” Ryan asked, glancing over a shoulder.
She nodded.
“Fireblast! J.B., head for shore,” Ryan commanded, slinging the longblaster again. “Until he’s chilled, we can’t chance crossing the deep waters.”
“How do that?” Jak demanded. “He baron of fleet, got dozen war ships. Mebbe more!”
Briefly, Ryan explained the plan, the details falling into place as he did.
“Dark night, that’s one bastard gamble,” J.B. said, angling the barge into the flow of the waves. “But with the laser aced, I can’t see any other way of settling this mess that doesn’t end with us feeding the fragging fish!”
“Yeah, I know,” Ryan said, tugging the bandage covering his face tighter into place. “So we better get it right the first time.”
“Or else,” Krysty muttered.
Chapter Twenty-One
By the time the fifteen-ship fleet arrived at the cannie lagoon, Carlton had recovered from the death of the kraken and was seething for revenge against the hated outlanders. The ships were mostly a collection of fiberglass-hull pleasure craft recovered from the ruins of the mainland: yachts and sloops, equipped with gasoline engines, but also rigged with sails to use the wind, and now, fortified with sheet metal and cannons.
Almost out of control with rage, Captain Carlton sent the fleet to check every river, every bay, every inlet to try to find the outlanders and his stolen boat, and then they were to look along the coast of the mainland. He sold sulfur to most of the coastal barons, and they knew the Tiger Shark by sight. If the outlanders were stupe enough to make landfall at one of their villes, the baron would have captured them alive to sell back to Carlton for an uncountable cargo of sulfur. The captain knew it was a long shot, but the seas were vast, and all any good sailor had to guide his way were the stars and his gut instincts. Most likely the thieves had sailed off south to escape his wrath.
Carlton was astonished when the Tige
r Shark was found, less than a day later, rammed onto the beach at the bottom of Nixon Falls, near the Cesium Mountains, on the island of Malibu. However, the barge was empty, crossbows missing and vital parts removed from each of the engines. Without those parts, the formidable Tiger Shark was now only a derelict, little more than ballast.
Surrounding the volcanic island with his fleet, Carl ton used rowboats to send in an assault force of a hundred sailors to scale the cliffs to retrace the path of the LARC back into the steamy lava tubes, reluctantly assisted by the new baron of Sealton ville, Digger O’Malley. After ruthlessly chilling a lot of his former friends, Baron O’Malley had assumed iron control over the ville, and didn’t want to leave Sealton on this blood hunt. But debts had to be paid and promises kept, sometimes, even by a baron.
After days wandering aimlessly in the lava tubes, the best hunting dogs of the fifteen-ship navy still couldn’t follow the tracks of the hated outlanders, so Carlton summoned a couple of thunder kings. Waggling their hypersensitive tongues in the steamy air, the creatures easily detected the minuscule traces of mil rubber smeared high on the walls of the lava tubes, and retraced the smudges past a strange spherical depression in the ground, and all the way back to a massive black wall.
Sending the kings off to a side tunnel to await his commands, Captain Carlton walked slowly toward the titanic slab of metal, surrounded by his entire crew of heavily armed sailors. They scowled uneasily at the black wall, which smacked of predark tech to them, mil tech at that! But Carlton was fascinated. The tire tracks went straight to the wall and disappeared, as if it were actually a door. But how could that be possible? The thing was enormous, dozens of feet high, and set directly into the volcanic rock. He had never seen anything like it before on the entire island.
Hesitantly reaching out a hand, Carlton fingered the air, trying to gauge if there was any heat radiating from the material. Mebbe it was some sort of barrier to block off lava? However, there was no sense of heat radiating from the black material. Taking a risk, the man briefly touched the metal, then boldly laid his palm flat on the surface.
Incredibly, it was cool, as if the volcano rumbling inside the mountain wasn’t hot enough to affect the bizarre stuff.
“What in the nine hells is it?” Digger whispered, resting a hand on his matlock. “Some sort of bomb shelter? Or mebbe a crashed subbie?” They had all heard the legends of submariners, sailors whose boats went under the waves instead of over. Nobody sane believed such drek, of course, until now.
“The descends of the crew of a crashed subbie,” Carlton said softly, unable to tear his eyes off the dark metal. That would explain their fancy blasters, and how they had beaten his men. Who else but a sailor could ever match a sailor in battle? Lubbers were good for target practice, and not much else.
“We could try to blast our way in, Skipper,” Godderstein said, rubbing a partially healed scar on his arm. “We got enough black powder to blow open this mountain!”
“And trigger an eruption that would melt the sub and destroy everything inside,” Carlton snapped, suddenly positive that this was a predark sub. It had to be. What else could it be? There was no other logical explanation.
Approaching the door…no, the hatchway once more, Carlton ran a hand across the satiny metal. It was unscratched, as smooth as the breasts of a teenage gaudy slut. Just on the other side of this hatch were the treasures of the predark world waiting for him, as well as the outlanders and the stolen engine parts. He would grant them a swift death as fellow sailors, but only after they had told him all of the secrets of their beached vessel. A submarine buried underground. Packed full of blasters, brass, wags and fuel. Enough for him to conquer the coastal baronies, and then the mainland itself, and finally the entire fragging world!
“Sir, I…well, okay, we found a thing over here,” a sailor said, lifting the armored lid to expose the alphanumeric keypad. “Want us to try busting it open?”
“Touch nothing!” Carlton roared, a smile expanding across his face. So, he had been right, this was a hatch! There had been something similar built into the wall safe of the captain’s quarters on board the Tiger Shark when he had first found the wreck. The rows of little but tons were a kind of lock, like a padlock, only it used numbers instead of a key. He had never been able to figure out the code for the wall safe on the Shark, and had eventually smashed it open with a sledgehammer. But this key lock seemed to be made of the same material as the door, and he felt sure no mere sledgehammer would breach this U.S. Navy doorway.
Reaching out with his mind, Carlton probed inside the beached submarine, trying to find any kind of an animal that he could use to trick the hatchway open from the other side. Dogs needed to visit the bushes, especially in a sub! Almost instantly there was a response to the mental call, strong, fast and nearly overwhelming.
With a low rumble of working hydraulics, the blast door began to cycle aside and out flowed the three Cerberus clouds.
Instantly they converged on Captain Carlton, surrounding the invader. Shrieking in unimaginable agony, the captain was dissolved from three different directions, until only his spine remained. The bloody length of white bone and throbbing ganglia dropped to the rocky floor with a clatter. Then the diligent clouds also consumed that small biomass before going after the rest of the intruders.
Attempting to flee, the sailors opened fire with their blasters, crossbows and black-powder grens, but none of those did any damage whatsoever to the nebulous guardians of the redoubt. In mere seconds, they were gone, and the sparkling clouds went after the thunder kings. The terrified bioweps lasted longer than the norms, but not by very much. Soon, the steamy lava tubes were empty once more, and the Cerberus clouds flowed back inside the redoubt to wait for further orders.
HIDDEN INSIDE the jungle across the bay, the companions watched as a single frightened man climbed the ropes hanging down the cliff alongside the rushing waterfall. As he staggered along the beach, the handful of sailors guarding the rowboats rushed to his aid. But as he shouted and waved his arms, they raced into the rowboats and left the island, their oars a blur of frantic motion.
As the crew in the rowboats reached the nearest armed yacht moored offshore, the news spread, and the collection of homemade warships rapidly took flight, heading off in different directions, each determined to get away farther, and faster, than the others from the death clouds. Carlton was aced, the fleet was no more. Now, it was every ship and crew for itself.
In less than an hour, the azure Cific Ocean was clear of any vessels, and there were only the gentle waves cresting on the black volcanic sand of the deserted beaches.
Stepping out of the jungle across the bay, Ryan used his telescope to ensure the coast was clear, while the rest of the companions came out of the bushes, their clothing covered with leafy vines, added as crude camouflage.
“Well done, sir. My compliments!” Doc boomed, a hand resting on the LeMat. “To be quite honest, I really was not sure that your plan would succeed, but it has. It has, indeed!”
“Love comes goes. Hate always reliable,” Jak drawled, hitching up his gunbelt.
“Sad, but true,” Krysty agreed, her hair waving and flexing in harmony with the clean ocean breeze.
“Okay, let’s go,” Ryan declared, compacting the telescope and dropping all of his belongings to the black sand, aside from the panga.
Swimming to the other shore, the companions looted the remaining rowboats for anything useful, then replaced the missing engine parts in the Tiger Shark, reclaimed their possessions across the bay and sailed due north, then north-by-northeast toward the nearest redoubt.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-7514-4
MOONFEAST
Copyright © 2010 by Worldwide Library
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