Crimson Waters

by James Axler

  At least two inert forms lay down the hall where the coldhearts were. Moaning came from one of the rooms the EUN men were ducking into and out of, suggesting Ryan’s group had tagged at least one more. The problem was, they were in a stalemate.

  “Puerto Rican standoff,” J.B. said with a smile as he stood with his back to the wall inside the doorway. He dropped a spent magazine and rammed in another.

  “You read my mind,” Ryan said sourly. He peered out around the jamb from the other side of the door. Seeing nobody, he aimed his SIG-Sauer P-226 down the corridor.

  A moment later, a man jumped into the corridor with a triumphant shout and some kind of longblaster leveled from his waist.

  Ryan double tapped him, center mass. The man fell over backward, his boot heels drumming the floor futilely as Ryan ducked back inside.

  J.B. wasn’t smiling anymore. “Of course—” he began, then paused as a thunderous volley of full-auto shooting broke.

  “That’s not really right,” he continued when the firing subsided, as coolly as if nothing had happened. “All they got to do is hold us here until reinforcements come up, and we’re toast.”

  He frowned thoughtfully. He and Ryan had found themselves in a fairly large space, about thirty-five feet by twenty, that looked like a cross between some kind of metal shop and a lab. There were heavy worktables with steel-plate tops and legs bolted to the floors, and other smaller tables that seemed to be flat granite slabs, polished smooth beneath a coating of purplish dust. There were racks of what he knew were calipers and micrometers on the walls, and weird man-sized shapes spaced apart, hunched beneath plastic shrouds that had yellowed with age.

  The distinctive boom of Doc’s .44 LeMat replica echoed from right behind. After a quick glance, J.B. ducked out and fired a blast.

  “Damn,” he said without heat. “Nuke-sucker was trying to get lucky. Reckon he did, too, because he got his ass back out of the corridor before I could blast him.”

  He shook his head. “Wish we had some grens. We’d shake some shit up then.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “And if wishes could fly, we’d all be fucking screamwings. Anyway, let’s just hope they don’t have grens. Which they might, being an army and all.” He glanced around the room. “Krysty,” he called.

  “Here, Ryan,” he heard after a moment. Blasterfire broke out from the EUN coldhearts, who apparently thought their targets would be stupid enough to stick their heads out when somebody called.

  Ryan waited out the spatter of blasterfire. As it died off, he heard a flat bark he thought was Mildred’s handblaster. A squeal of pain answered from down the hall, followed by a thump and the sound of thrashing.

  “Keep the bastards’ heads down, but don’t take chances.”

  He heard the ear-shattering roar of Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python from across the corridor. He reckoned he hadn’t told the coldhearts anything they couldn’t work out on their own.

  Anyway, what were they going to do about it—shoot at them? Their only other options appeared to be to turtle up and wait for El Guapo to come see what the fuck all the noise was about, or make a screaming kamikaze frontal attack on Ryan’s group, which was fine with him, since if they charged right down the open corridor the coldhearts would make it convenient to kill them.

  The back and forth blasterfire continued outside. Prowling around the room, Ryan tuned the racket out, even though the reverberating echoes and nasty supersonic harmonics were making his head hurt. But a little pain wouldn’t chill him. Fireblast, a lot of pain didn’t, so what was a headache?

  An idea hit him as J.B. fired his scattergun with a boom around the corner.

  “Running low on loaded mags for the Uzi,” the armorer reported.

  “Got a full one?” Ryan asked. The little man nodded.

  “Slap that bastard in. I have got a plan.”

  * * *

  LOW-VOICED CONSULTATIONS flew among the scattered companions, then Krysty counted loudly to three.

  A terrific clatter of blasterfire broke. Hearing the three-count, the EUN coldhearts had cut loose with everything they had, expecting to scythe down a sudden assault.

  Instead, their shots went banging and singing off along the walls of the corridors, leaving bright red smears of copper jacket or gouging out cement dust.

  When their blasters ran dry and the roaring dropped suddenly into almost dizzying silence, Ryan roared, “Now!” and began pushing for all he was worth.

  He had no idea what the machine under the tarp was. He suspected it was some kind of fancy whitecoat measuring device, but he had no way of knowing. It was a head shorter than he was and a little bit wider than his shoulders, more or less square. The covering was draped over something round on top, for whatever that might say about the thing’s actual shape or nature. All Ryan cared about was that much of the body seemed to be solid metal.

  The bastard had to have weighed half again what he did, even with the overstuffed pack on his back. It was on casters, but that mostly meant it could be moved, not that it was easy to get all that mass moving. Though he tightened up his gut and put his legs and hips into pushing, sharp metal corners cut into his palms, and the muscles of shoulders and back creaked from the effort.

  He shoved the machine out into the corridor. He half expected to be met by a withering blaster firestorm. But instead the EUN coldhearts had ducked out of the way of the anticipated counter-barrage.

  Ryan swung to the side of the bulky object away from the enemy, then he put his back into pushing. J.B. emerged from the door behind him as he passed.

  A bearded head wearing a black beret popped out a door to the left. Ryan winced as an earth-splitting bang and dragon’s-breath heat went off by his left ear. J.B. had lit off the M-4000 shotgun he held by the pistol grip in his left hand.

  The face disappeared. Ryan didn’t know if its owner managed to yank it back in time to avoid it getting filled up with the fléchettes J.B. had loaded or not. He didn’t much care.

  Blasterfire snarled from up ahead. It was the higher-pitched, faster fire of an M-16 on full-auto, as opposed to the deeper, more deliberate noise of an AK. Ryan felt the rolling shield he shared with J.B. vibrate from multiple bullet strikes, but nothing touched them.

  J.B. ripped an answering burst from the Uzi in his right hand. Neither of them were light weapons, the machine pistol and the scattergun, but the armorer had plenty of wiry strength in his deceptively light frame.

  From ahead came shots, shouts, screams. Someone bolted out of a doorway and ran away down the corridor. Blinking to clear his eye of the stinging sweat that blurred its vision, Ryan wasn’t sure which of his friends’ shots brought the runner down with a despairing wail, to slide ten feet on his face along the floor.

  The machine’s little wheels hit something that yielded slightly but didn’t give way. The thing tipped forward about an inch, then settled back and refused to budge.

  Guessing it had served its purpose, Ryan shouted, “Moving!” so nobody’d blast him in the back, then swung around to the right, whipping out his panga.

  As he suspected, the heavy machine had fetched up against a body lying across the corridor. A door opened a little ahead. Someone came out swinging up a longblaster from the hip.

  Ryan sank the panga’s blade into the coldheart’s head with a backhand swing and a meaty thunk. He wrenched the big blade free as the man melted to the floor in the doorway, his longblaster falling from his hands with a clang.

  “Freeze where you are, motherfuckers, or I’ll chill you all!” a voice roared from behind him.

  As much because of the sudden threat as in spite of it, Ryan started to turn, reaching for his holstered SIG-Sauer with his left hand.

  “Ryan! No!” he heard Krysty cry. Desperation rang plainly in her voice.

  He froze. And yeah, it felt as if his heart had turned to ice inside him.

  “Put the weps down,” the voice rasped. “Then hands up and turn around slowly.”

  �
��Ryan,” he heard J.B. murmur.

  “Do it,” Ryan said. He knew that this wasn’t the time to make a move.

  Whether or not that time would ever come, he had no clue.

  Bending at the knees, he laid the panga on the floor. He heard gentle, almost musical pings as J.B. laid his shotgun and autoblaster down with reverence. He treated his weapons gently when he wasn’t bashing people in the head with them.

  Slowly Ryan stood and turned in place, raising his hands.

  He had never seen the big man close up before, but there was no mistaking the big mutie: the rough corpse-gray skin and the unnatural jut of snout from the bald head told Ryan he was seeing Tiburón before the sec boss opened his mouthful of snaggly teeth.

  “You fuckers caused us a bunch of trouble,” he said. “Glad to meet you at last, you know?”

  Seven or eight of his coldhearts backed him up. They were aiming their weapons at the rest of the companions from a few feet up the corridor.

  “We figured out right away what must’ve happened to the boys on watch up top,” the Army of National Unity sec boss said in the weird lisp his inhuman dentition gave him. “So we came hunting. And once we heard the shooting down here, we approached real quiet, and what do you know? You couldn’t wait to jump right out into our laps.”

  “I say we chill the motherfuckers,” said a tall, rangy man with one dead eye.

  “Easy, Angel,” Tiburón said. “We’ve got nothing but time.”

  “But they wasted a load of our friends,” Angel protested. “Anyway, they’re trouble. Let’s chop them down and haul the stiffs to El Guapo.”

  The sharklike face wasn’t very mobile, but it could muster a scowl, especially with an accompanying hunch of those huge, sloping shoulders.

  “El Guapo’s gonna want to hurt somebody,” he said. “Triple-bad. First, because we didn’t ice these pukes out in the hills the way he told us to. Second, because they got clear down here into his shiny new HQ. You know how he gets.”

  He narrowed his eyes, which looked like matte steel marbles, showing no more sign of life than Angel’s milk-white orb.

  “I reckoned he’d be able to take his anger out on the prisoners. But if you want to have the satisfaction of chilling them, go right ahead. Then you take their place, understand?”

  The dead-eyed man went pale behind his thatch of black beard. “No, man, never mind. Forget I said anything, okay?”

  “Yeah,” Tiburón grunted. “Tie ’em up.”

  “Good choice, my friends.”

  Ryan turned his head at the sound of the new voice from behind, the way he and his friends had been heading before they ran into the enemy band.

  It was another tall man, leanly muscular. Unlike most of the EUN coldhearts he had no beard.

  Possibly he couldn’t grow one. His face was the most hideous mass of twisted scar tissue Ryan had ever seen on a human being.

  “El Guapo,” Ryan said.

  “No fucking kidding. And you’re the dirtbags who’ve been giving me such a pain in the ass, aren’t you?”

  He turned a hot black glare on his sec boss. “And what are they doing in the middle of my new fucking fortress?”

  Tiburón showed a literal shark’s smile. “Surrendering.”

  For a moment Ryan thought—hoped—the hideous mutie sec boss had overplayed his hand with his even-more-hideous master. But then the Handsome One laughed.

  “All right, cousin. Point to you. Congratulations. You get to live.”

  He laughed again. He had a good strong laugh. A good strong voice, deep and assertive. Ryan could see how he got people to follow him. You couldn’t just terrorize people into doing that. At least, not the sort of hardcases with blasters and machetes who did a baron’s dirty work terrorizing the peasants into submission.

  Mebbe those awful fucking scars work for him, Ryan thought, despite the companions’ predicament. Bastard’s got to be titanium-tough for a fact, to survive getting them in the first place.

  “What would you like to do with the prisoners, jefe?” Tiburón asked. Ryan heard more than a trace of grovel in his raspy, sibilant voice, which brought home just how stone a badass El Guapo had to be.

  El Guapo looked Ryan up and down as if thinking about bidding on him, Then he passed the same scrutiny over the others. Ryan couldn’t help noticing how his intense obsidian eyes lingered on Mildred’s form—and even longer on Krysty’s.

  “Torture them to death publicly, of course,” he said with a shrug. “After I mebbe get to know the bitches a bit better.”

  “Now?” Tiburón asked.

  “Of course not, asshole. Right now I’m headed back upstairs. We passed some rooms up there that look like mebbe they’re some kind of command posts. Or at least sec stations. Mebbe work a way to get the elevators running. And also to open up the cargo doors that open out onto the valley floor, so we don’t have to hump all the weps and meds up eight flights of stairs. Plus air the place out some from all these nuke-sucking monsters that’ve been fucking and shitting everywhere for two hundred years.”

  “So what would you like us to do with them now?”

  The Handsome One swept his captives with that chillingly appraising stare once more. He shrugged.

  “Whatever the fuck you want,” he said. “Just don’t chill them, don’t break nothing, don’t mark them up too much.”

  He stalked past the captives to grab a pinch of his sec boss’s gray, leathery cheek.

  “Remember, if one of them’s not healthy enough to put up a good show when I give them their public send-off to educate the masses, you’re his stand-in. Or hers. Which you’d probably like even less, you know?”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Tiburón had a fist just like a twelve-pound sledgehammer. At least that’s what it felt like to Ryan when the ugly sec boss swung it full force into his gut.

  All the air came out of Ryan’s naked body, and he sagged at the knees. His legs simply couldn’t support his weight.

  The hard hands clamped on his biceps held him off the floor of the lab. With his hands tied behind his back, his own deadweight wrenched cruelly at his shoulder sockets.

  “You like that?” Tiburón held up his fist and kissed it, then laughed. “That’s nothing. You’re weak, hombre. You need to be better, you know what I’m saying? Make a braver show when El Guapo starts cutting and burning parts off you.”

  Ryan raised his head, which felt like it weighed only a little more than the mountain they were inside. He glared at his tormentor with his good eye, which wasn’t so good right now by reason of being swollen half shut.

  He spat a string of ropy saliva, red with the blood of a split lip and loosened teeth, straight at that shark snout. Unfortunately he couldn’t force enough air out to send it far enough. It dropped just shy of the big mutie’s combat boots.

  “Pathetic,” Tiburón said. “Piss weak.”

  He rocked Ryan’s head around on his neck with a backhand so hard it felt as if the vertebrae struck sparks off one another, bright yellow sparks, that shot right through Ryan’s brain, blazing trails of pain.

  He feigned being weaker than he was, just hanging in the arms of the men who held him. He let his head loll, looking around the room, searching for an opening.

  Not that one looked likely to open up anytime soon.

  Two burly dudes likewise held J.B. by the arms while Angel, who appeared to be Tiburón’s second in command, kicked the hell out of him. Like Ryan—like all of them—the armorer had been stripped buck naked.

  Jak and Doc lay trussed like game animals, wrists and ankles bound, tossed in a corner. The right side of Jak’s thin face was one huge bruise, ugly green against his paper-white skin and now going purple and yellow around the edges. He’d resisted and gotten a longblaster butt in the face for his pain.

  Doc had done more than resist. He looked like a such a befuddled, harmless old man that the sec men hadn’t taken his swordstick away while they stripped him down. He’d just
docilely gone along. For a while...

  Now a fat sec man lay in the corner, gasping and whining with increasing feebleness, knotted around Doc’s sword blade, which had run through his belly and out his back. His buddies, disgusted at his idiocy, hadn’t bothered to tend his wounds, put him out of his misery or even pull out the sword. They just shoved him in another corner and left him to moan until he bled out.

  The women had it worst. Of course. Laid out on their backs, Mildred and Krysty weren’t much scuffed yet, except for a few palm prints on their faces. Krysty had a handprint on her left boob as well, looking as if it had been painted there, pink against her pale, perfect skin. Somebody’d gotten frisky, reckoning the boss wouldn’t notice. Or that the mark would fade before El Guapo saw it.

  Their hands had been stretched out beyond the heavy wooden legs of two different worktables and tied together, trapping their arms behind their heads. EUN goons squatted on the women’s ankles, pinning their bare legs to the cold concrete floor. One of them, even more grossly obese than the one Doc had run through, seemed fascinated by the helpless women, almost as if this were his first time in a minor position of power. He kept running his fingertips along Mildred’s skin despite her struggles, snarled protests and hurled spit.

  Tiburón himself had yelled at the sec man to knock it off a few times, then he’d gotten more involved with beating Ryan and seemed to forget.

  Now the nightmare-headed sec boss stood leering down at Ryan with fists on hips. He was broad around the middle, but it was muscle, not flab. He looked like he could lift a wag one handed.

  “You’re so piteous it’s not fun pounding on you anymore, One Eye,” he said. “But I think I know something you’ll like.”

  He walked slowly over to Krysty. She shied away from him. He caught a handful of her red hair with one hand.

  Then he jerked it back. “What? Fuck, your hair moves?”

  She glared green laser death at him. He laughed.

  “You’re a mutie, too, then, aren’t you, Fire Hair? Well, give me some of that sweet red stuff. Us muties got to stick together, no?”