Crimson Waters

by James Axler

  Ryan raised a hand to the boatman and nodded just once. The white-bearded old man shrugged expressively. Your funeral, Ryan could all but hear him say. He began to row back out among the ships rocking gently at anchor.

  “All right,” Ryan said, emphasizing the words just enough to let his friends know his mind was made up. “We pay.” He handed over the requisite number of rounds.

  “Must hurt like a nuke when you light those puppies off,” J.B. said conversationally.

  “Not half as much as when you’re on the other end,” said the shortest member of the crew, an Asian whose flat, fringe-bearded chin sloped outward along with his neck, which in turn simply got wider and wider until it became shoulders. He had a surprisingly mild voice. Ryan reckoned the Syndicate’s strongarms didn’t need to bluster much.

  “One more thing,” the leader said, tucking the ammo away in a pouch at his web gear belt. “We need to peace-bond your weapons.”

  “Peace-bond?” Ryan asked.

  “Yeah. We won’t try taking them away from you, but we don’t want you using them in our fair ville.”

  “What’s the point of letting us keep them, then?” Mildred demanded.

  “Would you rather we confiscate them? Look, it’s for your protection. You shoot or cut somebody, that will get you hung in the harbor with a few cuts down your legs to rile up the fish.”

  “What if the other guy starts it?” J.B. asked.

  The enforcers, not so subtly, had settled into braced positions, suggesting they were considering the chance the newcomers might try resisting. Ryan wanted to assure them that nothing could be further from their minds. But that wasn’t the sort of thing it did much good to say, he’d found.

  It wouldn’t be true, of course. All of them, even the unusually squeamish Mildred and the spirit of mercy herself, Krysty, were imagining what it’d be like to shove those scatterguns up the Monitors’ uptight asses to the breech-locks and light them off. He knew that. Just as he knew his friends also calculated that the odds weren’t with them on that play.

  “Just how do you mean ‘peace-bond,’ anyway?” Ryan asked.

  “We wire the breeches open on your blasters,” the squad leader said. “Blades we wire in the sheath. You break the seal, you go in the harbor. That simple.”

  “Not like,” Jak said.

  “Me, neither,” Ryan said. “But it doesn’t look like we got much choice.”

  He unslung his Steyr Scout, dropped the magazine from the well, cranked back the bolt and handed the piece over. The leader passed it to the Asian guy, who dug out a spool of wire and a pair of clippers and got to work.

  In short order, most of the squad was busy wiring the companion’s weapons to spec. When each man finished a piece, he handed it back to the squad leader. The bearded man squeezed a dab of some shiny gold-colored sealant where the wire’s ends were twisted together. It seemed to harden almost instantly.

  “Where’d you get that stuff?” Mildred asked interestedly. “I’d think it’d be set solid after all these years.”

  The squad leader smiled and handed back her ZKR with the trigger wired in its guard. “That’s for us to know,” he said, “and you never to find out.”

  When the considerable task was done, the leader stepped back. “That does it for the weapons you got showing,” he said. “Now, how about the holdouts?”

  Krysty took a deep breath. Pulling her shoulders back, making her considerable breasts strain tighter against the front of the khaki man’s shirt she wore, she put hands on her well-rounded hips and did a slow roll.

  “Care to search me and find out, big boy?”

  Ryan’s eyebrows shot up. It was all he could do to keep from asking her if she’d flat lost her mind right here. But he remained silent. He knew Krysty didn’t do much without a reason. Usually a triple-good one.

  The leader actually blanched behind his black beard and eyebrows and took a step back. “N-no,” he said. “That won’t be necessary.”

  Turning to his squad he snarled, “All right, you taints! If you think the Syndics’re paying us to stand around with our thumbs up our asses, I want to be there when you explain it to them!”

  They turned and stomped off along the esplanade that was paved in lightweight white tufa gravel that ran around the inside of the harbor. Ryan let out a long, long breath.

  “Krysty, what the hell was that?” Mildred demanded.

  “Dudes like that generally don’t see any point to havin’ power if they can’t abuse it good and regular,” J.B. said laconically.

  Krysty smiled with an unusually mischievous edge. “Normally,” she said. “But didn’t their whole attitude tell you their bosses ride even tighter herd on them than barons usually do their sec men?”

  Ryan grunted. “Makes sense, since you put it that way,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. The volume of sweat running down from his shaggy, curly black hair was more than mere afternoon heat in the Carib could account for. “They don’t want them pissing off the paying customers, after all. Especially when the customers might come back in force and shoot the shit of the ville.”

  Ryan took for granted the Syndicate had some kind of pretty stout defenses against that. Even if he hadn’t seen signs of it yet. Obviously the pirates had a good thing here and knew it.

  “Evidently the pirates’ own code tends to bind their behavior in Nueva Tortuga,” Doc said, clearly thinking along the same lines.

  “And nothing makes sure they keep their minds right like, say, that pair of .50 calibers the Syndicate’s got set up to cross fire the harbor entrance,” J.B. said, finishing Ryan’s thought.

  “But how could you be so sure they wouldn’t want to grab the merchandise, Krysty?” Mildred asked.

  Ryan saw that she didn’t understand, as was so often the case since she’d awakened from her centuries-long cold sleep into a world she neither could’ve nor would’ve ever imagined. And when Mildred found something she didn’t understand, she gnawed on it like a dog with a bone.

  “Discipline, Millie,” J.B. said. “Syndicate wants to make sure their bullyboys don’t take bribes. Of any kind.”

  “Thus it ever is with tyrants,” Doc declared. “Corruption, in their eyes, consists in their not getting their share.”

  Ryan squinted at the sun, which was rolling toward the ragged-topped cone of Nevis Peak, which dominated the small island.

  “Let’s shake the dust off, people,” he said. “Standing here jawing isn’t filling our bellies or getting us any closer to anyplace we want to be.”

  “A man might mention that the heat of the subtropical day can develop a powerful thirst, as well,” Doc said.

  “Where do we go?” Mildred asked.

  Doc laughed again. He flung out a long, skinny arm in the same direction the Monitor squad had gone. “Why, follow the sound of music and merriment, dear lady!” he declared. “Where those are, commerce is. Whether licit or otherwise.”

  From that way, indeed, floated the tinkle of a not particularly well-tuned piano, a bubble of conversation, a high-pitched and slightly mad-sounding laugh.

  “Not that it makes much difference to us which,” Mildred said glumly.

  “As long as it pays,” Ryan said, “makes me no difference at all.”

  Krysty frowned at him. “Ryan Cawdor, you know that isn’t true!”

  “Truer than not, Krysty,” he growled. “Now come on. We’re bleeding daylight, and I got a feeling the longer we stay on this rock, the unhealthier it gets.”

  Chapter Five

  The Blowing Mermaid, the sign read. The crudely but colorfully painted image that accompanied the words made it clear the half fish, half voluptuous nude blonde woman in question was blowing bubbles or spouting breath like a sounding whale.

  “Classy,” Mildred said.

  “Needs must when the devil drives,” Doc murmured.

  “That’s so encouraging,” she said.

  “Anybody got any better ideas?” Ryan’s tone s
uggested he was addressing the group as a whole. Mildred couldn’t help noticing how his lone blue eye fixed on her for just a moment—and pierced like a blue laser.

  “Thought not,” he said with a shrug, and pushed inside.

  The smell of spilled beer, sweat and ganja smoke hit Mildred in the face like a sandbag as she stepped up to the door. Inside was dark, hot and humid. The conversation was boisterous enough that it actually overwhelmed the out-of-tune piano in the corner.

  A grimy, fly-specked skylight let in yellow sun. It was enough to see by once Mildred’s retinas had adjusted from the seaside dazzle outside. There were about twenty patrons in the gaudy, enough to make it seem pretty well occupied without everybody banging elbows with their neighbors.

  Mildred wondered how that worked out, especially when sailors—pirates, to boot—just in after days at sea got their first taste of whatever unimaginable rotgut the tall, corpse-faced bartender with the truly remarkable gray side-whiskers was doling out. Would fear of the Syndicate’s justice—and its Monitors—be enough to make everybody behave?

  Mildred continued to scan the gaudy as Ryan led them to a bar that was fronted in what looked like respectable-gauge metal plate, painted some kind of drab color she couldn’t make out. It looked bulletproof to Mildred’s eye, which hadn’t exactly been uneducated before her long sleep and revival, since she’d been raised around firearms from girlhood on. For one reason or another it seemed the gaudy’s proprietors weren’t willing to trust their hides entirely to Syndicate civic discipline.

  She realized that shouldn’t surprise her, either. While being a pirate—or any kind of coldheart bandit—could be a rational life-path in the strange and horrible world in which she found herself, it still wasn’t one that bespoke good choices. Or good impulse control. She suspected it wasn’t all that uncommon for patrons to haul out iron and start blasting in haste—then repent at leisure, either under the clubs or shotgun blasts of the Monitors, or while hungry, nasty fish dined on their nether regions in the harbor.

  The volume of conversation dropped inevitably, and its tempo slowed to a sort of reggae-bass bubble as the clientele scoped the new arrivals. Even with an oldie in a frock coat, a long-haired albino kid and a tall, strikingly handsome chiller with an eye patch, they weren’t even the most disparate looking bunch in the place. The fact one of them—Mildred herself—was black didn’t even register. It seldom did. The wave of mutations that had followed in the wake of the war had produced whole new sets of folk for the masses to be prejudiced against.

  “What’ll it be, gentlemen, ladies?” the bartender said. He was a big man, taller even than Ryan and wider, especially but not limited to the belly encompassed by his stained leather apron. “McDugus Fish, at your service.”

  “What do you have?” Ryan asked.

  “Rum and beer,” the bartender said. “Also jolt.”

  The floor was planks, although it was covered in sawdust. The dust was yellow and smelled fresh. It actually overpowered the other smells. Mostly.

  “Have you any tea, my good man?” Doc asked. Mildred narrowed her eyes at him. It seemed such an off-the-wall request for a pirate den as to be almost foolhardy. While it might mean that Doc had slipped his reality moorings again and was drifting off into the ozone, as he frequently did, he often showed a puckish sense of humor. Sometimes not at the best moments.

  To her astonishment the bartender never batted a heavy-lidded gray eye. “What kind?” he asked. “Green? Earl Grey? Oolong?”

  Doc raised a bushy, snow-white brow. “Such a broad assortment!”

  The bartender shrugged. “We get a lotta different cargos traded through here,” he said. “So name your drink and pay for your dose. No tabs, no credit.”

  “Naturally,” J.B. said.

  While the thought of tea almost made Mildred salivate, she didn’t trust the water it was made with. Given the general standard of cleanliness the Syndicate forced on its ville, Mildred figured that indicated they’d take at least similar care with their water supply. But she hadn’t survived Deathlands by taking things of that nature for granted. She ordered neat rum.

  Ryan and J.B. ordered beer. Doc asked for Earl Grey tea; Krysty went for green tea. Jak ordered rum, as well.

  “Any jobs you know about?” Ryan asked, taking a sip from the lumpy blue-glazed pottery mug.

  “Say, this ain’t half-bad!” J.B. exclaimed. “Better than half-good, mebbe.”

  Not visibly overwhelmed at the endorsement of his house brew, the barkeep intoned, “Got plenty scuts. No jobs I know about. Might sign on to a crew. Always ships coming in short-handed. Then again, there’s usually no shortage of sailors between gigs, either.”

  His big oblong face rumpled as he studied them. “There’s always slut work,” he said. “Either of the women could do. Or the kid, or you. Of course you’d have to get inspected by the Syndicate, get licensed up all proper.”

  If the suggestion offended Ryan, he showed no sign.

  “They license prostitution here in NuTuga?” Mildred couldn’t restrain herself from asking.

  McDugus Fish reared back, rolling his eyes like an outraged horse. “Of course!” he said. “Every aspect of every trade is carefully regulated and licensed. We can’t just let people do what they want. That’d be anarchy!”

  “Huh” was the best Mildred could think to say.

  Mildred accepted her handleless cup of rum. Turning away from the bar, she saw Doc and Jak staring bemusedly into a dark corner. She followed their gazes. Her eyes had adjusted to the shine from the skylight and the gleam of hurricane lanterns hung over the bar, so it took them a moment to reset themselves to the gloom of the far corner of the gaudy.

  Her eyebrows shot up.

  “Guess the sign’s not false advertising,” J.B. said.

  Evidently it wasn’t.

  A woman sat there in a wheelchair. She was bare to the waist, and a blanket covered her lap. A fishlike tail stuck out from under the blanket, by the footrests of the ancient metal chair.

  She was assiduously pleasuring a fat guy who had his grimy shirt pulled up and canvas trousers down around his knees.

  Mildred’s first reaction was to blurt, “That can’t be real!”

  “Well, the tail is fake,” McDugus Fish admitted. “Just for show. But my daughter JaNene’s a real good swimmer with fins on. She was born with her legs stuck together and can’t walk too good, see.”

  “She’s your daughter?” From Krysty’s tone even she, Deathlands born and raised, found this whole thing a bit hard to take.

  Fish scowled defensively. “She’s not a mutie or anything,” he said. “It’s just a birth defect, same as the albino kid, here. The Syndicate healers assured us of that!”

  So JaNene was a legit mermaid. Of sorts. Of course that didn’t mean she was a close match for the voluptuous creature on the sign. The hair hanging down in front of her shoulders was indeterminate dirty-blond and matted like seaweed, the bare tits sagging over washboard ribs were half-empty skin bags, and her eyes and cheeks were sunk in the characteristic pits of the true jolt-walker.

  “You let your daughter give blowjobs for money?” Krysty said. “In the open?”

  “Hey!” the bartender said. “It’s all perfectly aboveboard. She’s licensed and inspected and everything. And seeing as she’s in the gloom, there, she isn’t a distraction.”

  Krysty seemed inclined to push the point. Ryan took her by the arm and gently but firmly turned her toward a vacant table in another corner of the bar.

  “Not our house, Krysty,” he said. “We’ll just sit down and wait to see what develops.”

  * * *

  WHAT DEVELOPED WASN’T MUCH. Not very fast anyway.

  “No accounting for taste,” J.B. said with a bob of his head toward the corner, where JaNene Fish and her fake fish tail were busy at work. He was nursing his third beer, a dark, bitter ale. Ryan actually found it pretty good.

  One of the scuts McDugus Fish referred to had
swept sawdust over a spilled beer, then swept the mess up, dumped it in an old paint can and thrown fresh sawdust from a pail in its place. Evidently there was a mill somewhere on the island. And evidently either the Syndicate or the joint’s owner—who Ryan guessed was from one of the Syndicate families—or Fish himself were serious about keeping the place shipshape.

  “Here, now,” he heard J.B. call. “You look like a man who could use a drink.”

  A man had slipped in through the door with the air of a man who knew, from experience or observation, that lingering in a doorway too long just made you a good target. He didn’t look the coldheart part. He was middle height, with his chest kind of sunken over a significant paunch, dressed in a faded flowery shirt open over a grimy T-shirt, khaki shorts held up by a length of nylon line, and sandals cut from old tires. His hair hung like a curtain around the sides and back of a high domed head, with a few brown strands brushed across it. His face would’ve been homely even if it wasn’t a mass of random lumps, almost as if he’d fallen foul of a whole hive of yellow jackets.

  His eyes darted left and right before dead-centering on J.B. “You talkin’ to me?” he asked.

  “Sure, mister,” J.B. said. “Come on over. We’ll buy you whatever you’re drinking.”

  The man ran a yellowish tongue over thin lips. “I—I ain’t registered, you know what I’m sayin’? I’m, uh, clean, and all. But I better not—”

  “You got us wrong,” Ryan said. He had J.B. looking for likely prospects to pump for information with minimum cost, particularly in terms of suspicions raised, which was something they could afford little of in a place like this. “We’re new in the ville. We’re just looking for the angles.”

  “Oh. Well. That’s different.”

  He hooked a chair from a table nearby, where a pair of villainous-looking fat women with two good eyes and about five teeth between them sat murmuring sweet nothings to each other. They were so absorbed in gazing into each other’s eyes they never looked around when the chair legs went scraping away across the sawdust-covered planks.