Apocalypse Unborn

by James Axler

  Suffering had decorative value.

  Deathlands kitsch.

  “Porangi!” the captain shouted at the passengers, spraying blood and spit out the big end of his megaphone, and waving impatiently for them to step forward. “Death swims these waters,” he howled. “It is closer than you can imagine. It will find us long before dawn. Without wind, we cannot sail away to safety. Without wind, we must stand and fight.”

  “Fight what?” a familiar voice demanded.

  Ryan turned and saw Jak Lauren, arms folded, a defiant scowl on his white face, his ruby-red eyes glittering with menace.

  “The taua,” Eng said. “That is our name for them. Things that swim and crawl. Things that climb and leap. Broad-tailed, slime-covered things. The taua roam the southern sea shelf in great schools, killing and eating every creature they find. These are no triple-stupe, pea-brained fishes. They are organized, like a war party. Some among us believe they were once human. Now they breathe the air like porpoises, through the tops of their heads. They talk to each other under water. They swim faster than the fastest sailing ship. They chill with their razor teeth and the suckers on their hands and feet. They eat only flesh, the fresher the better. Last night, the taua slaughtered and ate my cousin Karetu and his crew. They pulled his ship apart to get at him. For islanders, revenge is a duty, and a pleasure. The creatures who have stolen our blood, shall give their blood. In buckets…”

  The crew standing behind the passengers sent up a howl, shaking their AKs in the air.

  “This ship is not as easy to break into as Karetu’s,” Eng continued. “When the taua come to chill us, we will face them and take their lives. You porangi are welcome to stand and fight at our side. Those who are too afraid to fight the taua should go belowdecks. Don’t block the stairways. Get in your bunks. Hide under your mattresses, and pray for dawn.”

  “And if things get inside ship?” Jak said.

  “Taua can’t rip through iron, little korako,” Eng told him. “But they will wear out their teeth and sucker hands trying. We will take our bloody vengeance on them, then pull back from battle. Below the metal decks, we are safe. They can’t sink this ship. They must eat to live. They will move on by daybreak, in search of easier meals.”

  Only a couple of passengers decided to go below and wait out the conflict. To the rest, it sounded like big fun. Like shooting fish in a barrel, despite the fact that Eng had said these foes were nothing like fish. The assembled scum of Deathlands began checking their weapons.

  Ryan carefully set the Steyr butt-first in a lidless plastic drum, leaning the forestock against the rim. This wasn’t going to be a long-range battle; it was going to be nose-to-nose. Or perhaps nose-to-blowhole. He unholstered his SIG-Sauer and racked the slide back a half inch, making sure the chamber held a live round. After checking his front pockets for spare full magazines, he tested the release of his eighteen-inch panga knife from its leg sheath. It came out of the scabbard like it was spring-loaded.

  When he looked up, the sky had changed from red to lavender. Out on the placid sea, in the distance, Ryan saw scattered disturbances. Boils. Rings. Bubbles. Signifying movements just beneath the surface. He couldn’t tell what was making them. Only that whatever it was, it was big—and plentiful.

  The captain ordered all the fixed deck lamps lit. From covered storage bins along the rails, islanders hauled out dozens more of the oil lamps, which they fired up and hung from the ends of long metal poles. At intervals around the perimeter they extended the poles over the gunwhales and lashed them in place, illuminating a broad stretch of the surrounding water as darkness closed on the drifting ship.

  Ryan moved to a corner of the stern, beside one of the racks of red, fifty-five-gallon barrels. The taua were coming, no doubt about that. Even without the boils and splashes, he could feel them, like a pressure, building on all sides, and from beneath. Without the wind, the night was very warm. Humid. He wiped the sweat from his gun hand on to his pant leg.

  Faint kissing sounds came from the blackness beyond the ring of lamplight.

  The familiar kiss of death.

  Ryan visualized a thousand bobbing pale heads, lipless mouths pursed, dead eyes closed tight. It was impossible.

  Stickies didn’t swim.

  He leaned over the stern rail, straining to see deeper into the dark. In the water directly below him, blood and air suddenly upwelled, a great undersea belch. The coppery stench it gave off made his throat slam shut.

  Then he saw them, about fifteen feet down. Squirming pale bodies, bodies thick in cross-section. So many of them it looked like the sea floor had risen up. Though individuals were difficult to make out, the general body shape reminded Ryan of mud puppies or salamanders, only grown to full human size. They had short, muscular arms and legs folded and tucked tight to their torsos, and wide, powerful tails close to half of their overall length.

  The shoal of taua was visible, churning to the very edge of the light. And presumably well beyond. There was no telling how deep or how far it went.

  Too many, Ryan thought, adjusting his grip on the SIG. More than they had bullets for.

  Passengers around him started yelling, some in panic, others in frustration and fury because there was nothing yet to shoot at. The enemy that surrounded them was hanging too deep for blasterfire to reach.

  Ryan checked the positions of his battlemates. Krysty and Mildred stood amidships on the port side, Jak and J.B. along the opposite rail. Doc was near the forward companionway, just short of the bow. All had weapons drawn. Their fighting circle was stretched as far as it could get. If the battle went badly, if the taua broke through the human ranks, they would contract the ring, drawing in until they were fighting back to back.

  A slick pale head surfaced twenty feet off the stern. It blinked dead black eyes at Ryan. Like a stickie, it was hairless, earless and lipless. Stickies had no noses, just nostril holes in their flat faces; this creature had a snout, but no nostrils. Over the snout and splayed across the cheeks were four parallel folds of excess skin, permanent deep wrinkles. Row upon row of needle teeth lined its gaping jaws. Jaws that twisted up at the corners in an exuberant, expectant grin. Its blowhole opened, making that wet kissing sound, then it sent forth a spray of exhaled mist.

  A hand puppet from hell.

  Ryan realized with a jolt that he recognized the face. It was the same one Captain Eng wore. Sharpened teeth. Corrugated brandings. Insane, red-hot, poker-sculpted smile. A crude replica mask of the sea beast, executed in human flesh and bone.

  Autofire roared to Ryan’s left.

  The taua ducked as 7.62 mm rounds hammered the water to a fine froth.

  “Hold your fire!” the captain shouted.

  The islander stopped shooting on command. He looked back at his skipper, then sheepishly kicked the blistering hot, spent shells out from around his bare feet.

  Seeing what they were up against, a few more passengers decided to return to their bunks. Most of the rest looked torn between following their suddenly sleepy comrades and fighting the taua, but a few of the more lunatic mercies leaned over the gunwhales, aiming their weapons at the water, hoping that another slick head would pop up.

  From the edge of the light, Ryan saw a V-wake shooting toward the middle of the hull, beneath it a streaking oblong shape. It looked like a beige torpedo homing in for the kill.

  “Get back!” Eng ordered the overeager mercies.

  As the captain spoke, the charging taua exploded from the water. Using the power of its tail and its surging forward momentum, it leaped high in the air. At the peak of its arc, it was five feet above the gunwhale.

  For an instant it looked like it was trying to jump onto the deck, then it dropped, crashing its full weight onto the back of an outstretched—and momentarily frozen—mercie. It landed with its five-fingered sucker hands latched on to the seat of its victim’s pants and the base of its tail draped over the man’s head. The tail’s tip had transverse lobes, like the flukes of a por
poise or whale. A ridge of hard knobs rose up under the skin along the middle of its back, like cornrows of tumors, the result of a head-to-tail muscular contraction. From its blowhole came an awful, piping hiss.

  Before anyone could get off a clear shot, or otherwise come to the mercie’s aid, he was pulled headfirst over the side. He and the taua hit the water together and sank out of sight beneath the living shoal.

  The mercie never came up for air, but almost immediately bits of him began to surface. Blood billowed and bubbled from the depths; swirling in it were tiny shreds of flesh and sinew.

  “Back!” Captain Eng screamed into the megaphone, urgently waving with his Government Colt blaster. “They’re coming!”

  And come they did, as the passengers and crew jumped away from the perimeter. Instead of launching themselves over the rails and onto the deck, something the taua were clearly capable of doing, they threw their bodies against the sides of the ship. Hundreds of booming impacts set the cables humming, decks vibrating and loose objects rolling about. The chorus of blowhole kisses grew louder as more and more of the creatures jumped from the water to the hull, clinging there with sucker hands and feet.

  The taua couldn’t tear through the riveted iron plate, but their shifting, rapidly building weight made the vessel sway alarmingly from side to side.

  Steadying themselves on whatever came to hand, the passengers and crew pulled back farther, to the middle of the sloping deck, and closed ranks. Some knelt, some stood as they faced the gunwhales with raised, cocked blasters.

  Wave after wave of the creatures struck the ship, then the sound of the impacts changed. No longer flesh on metal.

  Flesh on flesh.

  Having covered every square inch of the hull above waterline, they were slamming onto each other.

  Then the Taniwha tea began to groan and creak from deep in its iron bowels. Here and there, rivets in the deck plating started popping loose.

  Ryan realized what was happening. The taua’s main force was crawling from the water, crawling over the backs and heads of those that had attached themselves to the hull. Combined weight of this oncoming, living mass quickly pulled the ship lower, bringing the main deck four or five feet closer to the sea. The sheer number of bodies required was mind-boggling.

  The one-eyed man wasn’t alone in the sudden realization. A handful of passengers bolted for the companionway and the relative safety of their bunks. Everyone else seemed frozen in place, unable or unwilling to turn their backs on what was about to happen.

  Only when the taua’s 360-degree launch platform was complete did they attack en masse. Upon some silent signal, from all sides at once, they leaped from the shoulders and backs of their hull-stuck fellows, bounding over the gunwhales.

  Which tripped the switch of battle.

  In the first seconds it was possible to see, if not to hear.

  Basterfire reports sledge hammered the sides of Ryan’s head. Autofire, single shots, centerfires, muzzleloaders, all cut loose at once, blowing apart the initial wave of taua, sending a slurry of blood, flesh and guts flying in all directions. Multiple gunshot impacts hurled decapitated bodies and whip-sawn torsos backward and overboard.

  Ryan keyholed his focus dead ahead, over the SIG’s sights. Finding targets was no problem. He ripped off head shots one after another, as fast as he could pull the trigger—instantaneous skull-shattering kills. In less than fifteen seconds of rapid fire, the SIG’s slide locked back, ejection port smoking.

  As he dumped the spent mag and dug in his pocket for a fresh one, another rush of taua leaped onto the deck, stumbling over their fallen, soaking up autofire. Even the mortally wounded, the blinded, the gut shot somehow found the strength to press forward into the teeth of the withering fusillade and certain destruction. In five seconds a hundred died, their blow holes spouting blood, then another hundred, and another.

  Ryan grimaced as he slapped the full mag home. He knew the reason for their ardor.

  There was a blood feast on offer.

  Already their spilled gore flowed like syrup into the scuppers; ravening, repeated bullet impacts aerosolized their flesh into a pink mist that incited the creatures that jumped through it to an even greater frenzy.

  Stickies were like that, too, Ryan knew. Because there was something horribly wrong with the wiring of their mutie brains, they got high on death.

  Even their own.

  Ryan raised the SIG and snapfired into the gaping, teeth-lined black maw of an oncoming taua. He stepped aside, letting the suddenly brain-free body hurtle past him, fountaining red from its blowhole. The creature following right on its heels dropped like a stone at Ryan’s feet. The single slug had zipped through the mutie, slapping into the second taua’s head, cutting an irregular, slotlike hole between its eyes. As it lay on its back dying, its legs kicked wildly. They were much longer and larger at the thigh than they appeared under water. When folded for swimming, they tucked into a kind of depression, a bone-plated wheelwell, that reduced drag.

  This mutie species relied on overwhelming numbers, not individual defenses, for its survival. Their relatively soft skulls were easily cored by Parabellum full-metal-jacket rounds, so Ryan concentrated on his shot placement, going for two-fers whenever the opportunity arose.

  As other shooters dropped out of the fray to reload, the steady roar of basterfire became ragged. These lapses created gaps, cracks in the perimeter that allowed some taua to leap to the cables and up into the rigging. At the upper limit of the deck lamps’ light, through the haze of gunsmoke, they jumped back and forth from mast to mast like crazed flying squirrels.

  Ryan ignored them, methodically taking out the closest targets to hand, clearing the deck in front of him. Long before the task was done, his SIG locked back again.

  There seemed no end to them.

  And there was no obvious organization to the attack. No field commanders led the suicide charges. Just ground pounders. Droves and droves of ground pounders. All of them working solo. All of them trying to get in their licks. Or bites. Looking for a taste of the red.

  He quickly reloaded and resumed the close range wet work.

  With no wind to drive it away, the gunsmoke around the knot of human fighters grew thicker and thicker. It became hard to breathe, and hard to pick out fresh targets as they cleared the rails, which meant the taua were dying at arm’s length. Blood mist coated Ryan’s hands, face and hair. He backhanded it from his one good eye.

  As he did so, he glanced up and saw a mutie poised to leap from a yard arm into their midst. Ryan ripped off five shots, stitching them up its exposed belly. The taua slammed back against the canvas, and its stomach popped open like a dropped suitcase. Its underside was soft and thin-skinned, like a frog or a newt. A staggering wad of guts flopped from the gaping wound, and as the creature bounced off the sail and fell from its perch, the loops tangled and snagged on the yard’s cables. It slammed headfirst into the deck, trailing a forty-foot streamer of pink bowel.

  Ryan dumped yet another empty mag—he was already four down. The passengers and crew who were shooting full-auto had gone through way more than that in the same space of time. Empty brass rolled everywhere underfoot. Some of the select-fire weapons had gotten so hot that chambered rounds were cooking off at six hundred per minute.

  Uncontrolled, maximum cyclic rate autofire.

  Just before it actually fell apart, Ryan sensed it was about to happen. The number of piled enemy dead. The gore stink, like molten copper. The unrelenting onslaught. The arm’s-length chilling range. It all combined to take a toll on the defenders’ confidence. As the endless minutes passed, their chill lust became fury, fury became desperation, and desperation became doubt.

  A kneeling passenger to Ryan’s right had had enough and stood. Too quickly. The man right behind him was already tightening down on his scattergun’s trigger. The 10-gauge’s point-blank muzzle-blast took off the top of his head from the ears up, and hammered him face-first and flop-armed into the iro
n plate.

  The plume of brains and skull fragments splattered across an oncoming taua’s chest. In the midst of battle, unable to stifle the urge, it paused to lick.

  And was meat-grindered by crisscrossing AK fire.

  The scattergunner broke his single-shot weapon and tried to thumb another high brass shell into the chamber. Before he could snap the breech closed, he was set upon. The taua had soft bellies but they were rad-blasted strong. The mutie clamped sucker hands on his face, then ripped it off like a tea towel.

  The man just stood there, flat-footed, eyes bugging out through a white mask of shock, a white mask oozing pinpoints of red, watching as the taua fisted the face into its mouth.

  The creature juked suddenly sideways, blown off its feet and onto the deck by half a dozen blasters. It was still chewing the face as it died.

  Another taua darted in a blur left to right, grabbing the mutilated man around the waist and jumping, carrying him like a mannequin into the smoke and over the side.

  If Ryan sensed impending disaster, the sea beasts sensed looming victory. They threw themselves even harder into the fray, and arm’s-length battle became hand-to-hand. Men were being pulled screaming out of the firing line and into the cloud of burned cordite and black-powder. Not just passengers, either. An islander mate, easily three hundred pounds of him, was hauled backward by the braided ponytail, into the pall. For a horrible instant he reappeared from the smoke. It looked like he’d been run over by a ten-ton wag. His right was arm torn off at the shoulder, and divots of flesh were missing from his face and bare chest. Sucker hands yanked him off his feet and he was gone.

  With the tide clearly turning, Captain Eng cried, “Enough! That’s enough! Pull back!”

  Ryan did a quick head check, making sure his friends had closed ranks. They had. Like him, they were misted with blood and peppered with the grit of gunshot residue. He stood his ground at the entrance to the for’c’ste companionway, putting up covering fire for the mass retreat until an islander shouldered him through the doorway, then shoved him ahead, down the steep stairs to the crowded, low-ceilinged galley.