by James Axler
“So what have we got here?” the pirate asked. He had a Spanish accent. “You getting a higher-quality slut in this gaudy of yours, now, than that taint cocksucker daughter of yours, Fish-face?”
“She’s not a taint,” McDugus Fish said stubbornly. “It’s a birth defect.”
“You got smarter,” the pirate said. “Figured out I got a soft spot for the redheads, huh?”
And he reached out and grabbed Krysty’s left breast.
Chapter Seven
Time seemed to slow. Ryan shifted his left hand inside his long coat.
Calmly yet decisively Krysty reached up and removed the hand from her breast.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, strong but not shrill.
Her eyes turned like emerald lasers to the table of Monitors sitting across the room. They were all watching.
“I thought the Syndicate had laws against assault,” she said clearly.
As one, the four sec goons turned their heads away.
“Well,” J.B. murmured, “remember what Oldie said about some dogs being more equal than others? Reckon this gang’s the most equal of all.”
“Right,” Ryan said, rising from his chair. He didn’t hurry as he walked toward the tableau a few paces away.
The pirate saw him coming and showed him a gap-toothed grin. “What you want here, Patch? You triple-stupe? You think you can fuck with the Sea Wasps? You think wrong, man.”
And he grabbed Krysty’s breast again.
“If you don’t remove your hand,” Ryan said, “I’ll remove it for you.”
The guy just grinned wider. His hand squeezed the full breast again quickly, then began to move down toward the flat plane of her stomach.
Rattlesnake-fast, Ryan’s left hand whipped to the sheath on his hip, freeing eighteen inches of steel blade. Before the pirate could so much as blink it rose and slashed down.
The panga’s razor-honed edge chopped the Sea Wasp’s hand off just above the wrist. The hand seemed to pulse on Krysty’s breast one more time and then it fell to the floor. It lay on its back in the sawdust like an overturned beetle, fingers twitching like bug legs.
The pirate stared down at the blood jetting from his stump in slack-jawed amazement. Krysty sidestepped quickly out of the way of the pulsing blood, then she and Mildred grabbed their own weapons. As Ryan had quickly and covertly undone the peace-bonding on his weapons when the Wasps came in, they were obviously undoing theirs now.
But not all of the party’s armaments had been sealed in sheath or holster, of course.
The wounded man began to shriek like a horse in a burning barn. Grabbing his stump with his remaining hand, he danced in a circle, painting the patrons, the tables, the chairs, the walls, even the ceiling with arterial spray that gleamed dark in the fish-oil light.
With startling power, Doc kicked the table. It flew across the room into the faces of the other Sea Wasps. They were too startled by this completely unexpected turn of events to react with what would surely be their normal rapid savagery.
The Monitors, a beat slower, jumped to their feet, unlimbering their scatterguns.
A dully glittering disk spun across the room. The black Monitor who’d come back from the first party grunted audibly as one of Jak’s concealed throwing knives buried itself in his bare, muscle-ribbed gut. It was probably only a flesh wound. As strong as he was, Jak couldn’t throw one of his relatively light holdout knives hard enough to punch through the tough abdominal wall at that range. But the man stared down at himself and shrieked in terrified surprise as if it had gutted him like a fish.
His female companion was faster and firmer. She had a sawed-off pump shotgun with a pistol grip on its shortened forearm as well as in the back. She brought the stubby weapon rapidly online, ready to spray Ryan and friends with lethal buckshot.
Instead, a loud bang went off in Ryan’s right ear and a red dot appeared right above the woman’s collarbone, above the neckline of her black T-shirt. More shots blasted in quick succession, forcing Ryan to squint as side-blasts from a short barrel stung his cheek.
J.B. was half standing from his chair, his right arm locked out. His right fist clenched a little black Kel-Tec P-32 blaster. It was his latest pet holdout pistol, though it didn’t have much punch, being only a .32 ACP.
Which was why J.B. kept shooting, walking shots up the Monitor’s chin and cheek and putting a last one through the right side of her forehead. At twenty feet, J.B. was shooting near the absolute accuracy the tiny handblaster was capable of. But with a blaster in his hands, any blaster, J. B. Dix was both lucky and good.
Ryan stood, bloody panga in hand, while the Sea Wasp whose hand he’d amputated had gotten hold of himself. He tugged furiously at one of his machete hilts with his remaining hand, even though he was bleeding out fast enough through his stump that he’d go down inside another minute, unconscious or dead.
Until then, he was a threat. Krysty booted him in the balls, the impact lifting his soles a good five inches off the sawdust.
When he landed again he doubled over in agony that overrode even the pain from his arm, which shock was likely dulling already, anyway. Krysty held the short muzzle of her Smith & Wesson 640 revolver almost to the back of his head and blew what brains he had onto the sawdust in front of his boots.
At last Ryan got his SIG-Sauer out and started blasting toward the Sea Wasps as they sorted themselves out from under the table Doc had kicked into them. He didn’t think he hit any of them. The bar was suddenly full of patrons who decided all at once that getting out of the Blowing Mermaid was the best survival strategy, even if it meant racing through a horizontal hail of bullets and buck. He did see Silver-Eye Chris vanish over the bar with startling alacrity.
One of the other Monitors lit off both barrels of his sawed-off. The big pirate who’d been enjoying JaNene’s ministrations was just darting past him to the door and took both charges full in his hanging gut. Screaming shrilly he went down, trying to stuff purple-pink coils of intestine back into his ruptured belly.
J.B. fired again, but Ryan wasn’t sure at what. They’d stepped away from each other.
Doc streaked past, his coattails flapping like stork wings. In a flash, Ryan saw he had his sword in one hand and the ebony sheath in the other. The Monitor with Jak’s throwing knife stuck in his belly had apparently realized the thing hadn’t punctured anything vital. Ignoring it, he swung his own pump gun to bear.
With a fine fencing lunge, Doc ran him through the right shoulder. He cried out again, dropping the scattergun.
The blaster was slung around his neck on a waist sling. Rather than falling free, it dangled. Even though neither wound seemed fatal, the Monitor decided two new holes in his hide was enough for one day’s work. Letting the blaster hang, he turned and joined the crush of customers trying to fight their way through the open door.
Shouts from outside suggested others were trying to fight their way in. Ryan dashed toward an overturned table and took cover behind it, to see J.B. grinning at him from behind another.
Shots were coming from behind the bar. Ryan risked a look out to see a couple of heads seeming to stand like apples on the upper surface, with handblasters stuck out in front of them. As he looked a head jerked. A whole divot of long black dreads was knocked off the back.
The head vanished. The hand and the silver Beretta handblaster it held slithered back out of sight. Ryan glanced over to see Mildred, crouched behind a jumble of chairs and a table, bringing her .38 Czech target revolver back online.
Then he saw two forms struggling off to the side. Krysty was still in the open. The biggest of the Sea Wasps was grappling with her. He was a great black bear of a man with a grimace full of gold teeth, a black beard and a vast mass of dreadlocks swinging from his cannonball head. He held a big butcher knife point-downward in a ham-sized fist. Krysty held the knife off with one hand while the other held his hand away from her throat.
“Krysty, get down!” Mildred
shouted. Ryan raised his SIG, looking for a clear shot, but the pair was battling too wildly for him to risk it.
Of course, it wouldn’t normally be possible for a woman to resist a near giant like that, hand to hand. Even a woman as tall and well muscled as Krysty.
As Ryan watched over the three-dot sights of his handblaster, a change seemed to come over her. He couldn’t have put his finger on what it was, exactly. She seemed larger, somehow. He knew then that she had called on the power of the Earth Mother, Gaia.
Krysty picked up the big bearded man and threw him across the bar. Bottles with faded labels shattered. He disappeared in a cascade of glass shards, brown liquid and the broken halves of the heavy hardwood shelf.
Usually Krysty had a bit more staying power, but she collapsed onto the floor. This time, channeling the power of Gaia drained her like a cut artery.
By reflex Ryan started up to help the woman. Then it hit him: if she’s down, she’s out of the line of fire.
Not safe. Nobody was safe in a blasterfight, especially at such close quarters. But no enemy was likely to waste a shot on her while her friends were still shooting. And while one or two of the Sea Wasps behind the bar had gone down with the huge man, at least three were still popping up to loose a round or two before ducking back behind the armor-plated bar. Including their unmistakable silver-eyed leader.
Taking quick aim, Ryan popped the two lanterns hung behind either end of the bar. One promptly went out. The other stayed lit long enough to ignite the gush of fish oil from the punctured metal reservoir.
Blue flames whoomped into life behind the length of the bar. The alk in the bottles the big man had broken was potent. To add fuel, literally, to the flames Ryan shot fast holes in the two lanterns suspended directly above the bar. They produced rains of fire as their spilling fuel took light.
Screams pealed from behind the bar. The giant rose howling. Flames from his burning dreads haloed his agony-racked face as he beat at his blazing back with blistering hands.
Two shots cracked from behind the bar. The big man quit screaming. He sagged back against the wall, then slid slowly out of sight, leaving a smear of flaming alcohol.
Somebody—Silver-Eye Chris, Ryan had little doubt—had chilled him, not to put him out of his misery, but because he was endangering his comrades with his flailing and flaming.
The Sea Wasp leader darted out from behind the bar. Twin semiauto handblasters blazed from his fists as he hunched over and ran to the exit that led to the outhouse. Three more of his posse followed in quick succession, one smoking and one trailing flames from his military-style jacket’s back and left sleeve.
The gaudy reeked of spilled alcohol, fish, voided bowels, the eye-watering smoke of burning hair and the stench of burning flesh. Cautiously Ryan started to rise from the dubious shelter of his table to go to Krysty’s aid.
Two things happened. The logjam of patrons fleeing out the front door cleared, admitting a rush of Monitors and dreadlocked pirates he guessed were Sea Wasps waving blasters and blades, with not a “peace-bond” in sight. Ryan turned, snarling, bringing the SIG to bear on the new threat.
And up from behind the bar, roaring and silhouetted in flames, rose McDugus Fish. He had a short-barreled machine pistol clutched in beefy fists, and he sprayed the wrecked room with 9 mm messengers of death.
Jak’s Python bellowed, its flash huge and report ear-shattering in the close space. A black Sea Wasp with a bundle of orange dreads went down in the front entrance, blood spraying from his thigh.
From the corner of his eye, Ryan caught sight of Doc. Sword in one hand and the dead Monitor woman’s pump shotgun in the other, he vaulted an overturned chair with his long coat billowing behind him like a cape. He raced straight at the bar, where McDugus Fish had just slapped a fresh magazine into his stubby autoblaster.
The huge barkeep tried to bring the blaster to bear on Doc. With a mighty leap the old man sprang to the bar top and kicked McDugus Fish in the face. The bartender fell back out of sight, triggering a burst that brought a cascade of dust and wood splinters falling from the ceiling. His head cracked one of the stout plank shelves in two, then he slumped out of sight.
Doc turned and loosed his own brain-imploding blast into the ceiling from the scattergun.
“All right, you scurvy devils,” Doc shouted. “Who wants to order a last hot meal of lead?”
At the storm of gunfire, the inrushing crowd stopped dead, then flowed right back out.
Ryan, Jak and J.B. were instantly in motion, hurling tables and chairs into the doorway in a makeshift barrier. Mildred fired shots through the windows to discourage people from poking their faces in.
In the corner, abandoned by her customers, JaNene Fish sat with palms pressed to gaunt cheeks, screaming.
Smoke filled the doomed gaudy to the rafters. His eye stinging, Ryan moved quickly to Krysty’s side. Her limbs moved feebly, without apparent purpose. But at his touch she sat up quickly and smiled at him. “I’m all right, lover,” she said, getting to her feet.
She wobbled, giving her words the lie. He caught her arm.
“We got to go, people!” Ryan shouted. “Out the back. Jak, clear the way.”
“Okay!” Jak exclaimed. His pack already shouldered, he ran to the back door. He pushed it open a hair, took a three-second look then slipped out.
Ryan grimaced as he heard shots, including the glass-edged boom of Jak’s Python. Somebody screamed. It wasn’t Jak.
The one-eyed man hurriedly helped J.B. and Mildred on with their packs.
As the companions headed toward the back, blasters flashed at the front door, the bullets cracking past Ryan’s ears.
Once through the back door, he quickly sidestepped to avoid silhouetting himself against the increasingly bright flame light. They were in an alley between neat, small buildings, built of planks painted white.
The alley didn’t even smell that bad, considering the purpose the gaudy customers used it for. The outhouse pit was well limed.
Blasters flamed across the street to Ryan’s left. Holstering his handblaster, he unslung the Steyr Scout longblaster he had hastily slung beside his backpack. Without bothering to loop his left arm in the shooting sling, he threw the weapon to his shoulder. Through the sight he got a quick view of unmistakable dreads behind some kind of out-thrust handblaster.
He fired. A dark cloud puffed like smoke behind the target’s head and the shooter went down. Ryan saw other dark figures fleeing, apparently discouraged by their friend’s fate as well as the longblaster’s boom and flash.
Lowering the Scout, Ryan looked around. Alarm spiked through him. “Where’s Krysty?” he demanded.
“Went back in,” Mildred said, holding her wheelgun out one-handed, looking for targets. For the moment none showed themselves, although Ryan could hear shouts from around the front of the building.
Biting down an impulse to ask Mildred why she hadn’t stopped her, Ryan turned to head inside, himself, despite the gray smoke that rolled out the top of the door frame.
A hand clamped his arm hard. He turned, snarling. J.B. had him by the biceps. The armorer was one of mebbe two people alive who’d dare get in the way of the one-eyed man.
“Wait,” J.B. said calmly. “She knows what she’s doing. Always does.”
And then Krysty boiled out in a cloud of smoke, shoving JaNene Fish’s wheelchair in front of her.
She pushed the screaming girl well clear of her father’s burning gaudy, then turned to face Ryan.
“I couldn’t leave her to burn,” she said defiantly.
Sure you could, he thought.
“She never did us harm,” he acknowledged.
“What about her dad?” Mildred asked.
Krysty shrugged. “Reckon he can see to himself,” she said.
Mildred’s dark face paled. She started to push inside. Ryan remembered her own father had been burned to death by coldheart crazies called the Ku Klux Klan when she was little. She had a thing abo
ut that.
Krysty put herself in the other woman’s way. “He was crawling over a bunch of furniture out the front door when I hauled the girl out,” she said.
Mildred nodded. “Wonder where Silver-Eye went.”
“Somewhere else, in a triple-hurry, after Jak put a big old hole through the dude standing next to him,” J.B. said. He nodded at a pair of boots jutting into the alley from behind an outbuilding a few yards away.
A dark figure whipped around the near corner of the gaudy. Heavy braids flew wildly as he turned to attack.
The flash from a stub shotgun barrel underlit a startled expression on the wide dark face as Doc, standing with his back to the wall, pushed the weapon almost into the Sea Wasp’s lean belly before firing.
The man doubled over as the charge of buck punched his entrails to jelly, then fell mewling and clutching himself in agony.
“Avast, ye varlets!” Doc shouted, brandishing his sword in his left hand. He had the sheath thrust through his belt. “Come and take your medicine!”
“Come on, Doc,” Ryan called. “Time to power out of here.”
“Where to, lover?” Krysty asked.
“Docks,” Ryan said. “We need a ride off the island. In kind of a hurry.”
“Don’t reckon anybody’ll be eager to give us one, Ryan,” said J.B., pointing his shotgun cautiously in the direction from which the gut-shot pirate had come.
“I didn’t plan on asking,” Ryan said, feeling a grin peel back his lips.
They turned to go the other way.
“Thank you,” the phony mermaid called feebly from her chair across the alley.
“No problem,” J.B. replied.
“If you want, you know, a freebie—”
A pair of pirates bounded around the corner. Quicker on the uptake than their moaning buddy, they both dodged back a half second before a blast from J.B.’s M-4000 shotgun blew a shark bite out of the corner of the gaudy in a shower of big wood splinters.
