by James Axler
These looked hungry.
The mass of stickies that encircled the companions feinted and juked, sometimes knocking one another down in their excitement, but with a few exceptions they held back their attack. They were waiting for reinforcements to arrive.
The scattered clumps of recruits closer to the cone were the first to feel the sting of the combined mutie force. Stickies and swampies rushed them in unison. It was a high-low affair. The norms fighting stickies left their lower bodies unprotected. The swampies cut hamstrings with their axes and swords, and shattered kneecaps with their spiked clubs. The norms trying to beat back the swampies had to bend over to reach them, which allowed stickies to leap on their unprotected backs.
The small bands of recruits lasted a minute or two before being penetrated and overrun.
Their job completed, the swampies moved on, all business. The sour-faced muties didn’t eat human flesh, perhaps because they themselves were too close to human genetically, or too smart. The swampies didn’t look smart with those heavy brows and block-shaped heads, but they were a crafty race. They knew the flesh of some men had a hell-blasted, turn-your-brains-into-goo taint and avoided partaking of it.
The scalies waddled onto the scene seconds after the swampies and stickies had left. They moved through the heaps of wounded with their little pig eyes alight, like it was an all-you-can-eat buffet. Squatting, they throttled the few surviving norms with their bare hands, then started pulling off warm snacks, snapping spines and sucking out the living marrow.
Ryan could see the handwriting on the wall. The companions couldn’t hold out for long against a joint mutie attack, either. It was a matter of reach, and sheer numbers. If one of the group went down, the formation would be broken and they would all go down.
The music blaring from the big island stopped, then restarted after a short pause. More enemies were on the way.
The swampies marched toward the companions, shaking their bloody weapons in the air. They trooped through the ranks of the stickies, who sensed the nearness of victory and cavorted accordingly, dancing on the bones of the dead. Ryan turned toward the islanders’ fighting circle and bellowed at the top of his lungs.
“Eng!” he shouted. “We’ve got to hook up!”
The scar-faced captain nodded. He had seen the same disastrous turn of events and had come to the same conclusion. Eng immediately ordered his crew to close ranks with the companions. The two groups of fighters merged and blended together, shoulder to shoulder, facing outward, forming a larger and stronger defensive ring.
When the swampies attacked they were again joined by the stickies, but this time the outcome of the mad rush was different. The sabers of the islanders kept the stumpy muties from getting close enough to fracture kneecaps and slice tendons. The swampies that tried to duck under the sweep of the long blades lost limbs.
As they had done before, the stickies leaped onto the norm fighters, but with no exposed backs to take advantage of, they ended up falling on swordpoints, skewering themselves to the hilt. Their feet a yard off the ground, they squirmed like worms on a hook.
Captain Eng had his own savage technique for disengaging a skewered enemy. Instead of pulling his sword out or booting the mutie off its point, he drove down with his shoulder, leaning on the handle with both hands. He rammed the stickie’s feet flat into the rock, putting all his weight behind the slam, which forced the saber’s blade to slice through the mutie’s pelvis and come out cleanly between its legs.
As much as Ryan liked the captain’s efficiency and style, and the fact that a stickie with a split pelvis had jumped its last jump, he couldn’t duplicate the maneuver himself. His panga’s blade was half as long as the saber and the islander had a good hundred pounds on him. Ryan used his blade point and edge to hack down the pale creatures that threw themselves at him.
Despite being outnumbered, the companions and islanders held their own, and turned back the muties’ initial charge.
When the swampies retreated a little to regroup, the stickies pulled back, as well. Behind them, the scalies waited in the wings, mountains of flab sitting on cushions of the dead, conserving their energy. The pendulous, drooping folds of their skin gave off an iridescent sheen. Their expressions were alert, expectant. They weren’t satisfied with what they had already eaten. They were never satisfied. There was always room for more.
A half dozen of the swampies turned on one of the larger scalies, a five-hundred-pound bull. They surrounded it and began to prod it with their weapons. They shouted for it to get up and fight. The seated behemoth tried to swat them away, and when it couldn’t, when the swampies started to draw blood with their edges, it howled and its face turned red. The swampies kept on poking the scalie and yelling until it rose to its feet and started lumbering toward the circled defenders.
As it lumbered, it picked up speed.
And all the swampies and many of the stickies fell in behind its vast bulk.
The strategy was simple. Break through the ring with an unstoppable, living battering ram, then attack and chill the norms from two sides at once.
The plan would have worked if it hadn’t been for the Calcutta cavalry swords.
“Let him in!” Eng screamed to his crew.
As the captain stepped out of the way, so did Ryan. The circle opened, then it closed, slamming shut right behind the scalie.
The swampies and stickies trying to ride on its coattails found themselves too close to sharp steel. Those that couldn’t jump back were chopped down and stomped flat.
The scalie had closed its eyes a split second before it made contact with the circle. After taking four strides forward, when there was no resistance, it stopped and opened its eyes. It looked around and saw it was surrounded. And all alone.
Eng shouted a command and four of his crew turned away from the edge of the circle, which instantly closed ranks again. The four formed a second circle, this one around the stock-still scalie.
“As you can see, I have no weapon,” it said, holding out its blood-rimed hands, making the gross flesh of its upper arms ripple and sway. “Those little swampie shits made me attack you. I had no choice. They would have chilled me. Please protect me from them. I mean you no harm.”
The gore and bone marrow smeared across its cheeks and chins made the last statement suspect, to say the least.
One of the crew pivoted from the hips and swung down his saber in a tight, downward arc. Bright steel cut through baggy, tentlike pants, and slammed into buttery-soft flab. The scalie shrieked as it lost thirty pounds of excess weight from its backside. The clean slice exposed a thick rind of white fat, and bloodred flesh beneath. The other crewmen spun to build their momentum, then struck the huge mutie again and again. The blows rained down on it from all sides. Swords flashed and the scalie’s monumental load of flesh sloughed from the bone.
It was the islander diet. It made you thinner in a hurry, but it also made you dead.
A much reduced, virtually unrecognizable scalie collapsed amid mounded hunks of his own flesh.
Above their heads, Ryan heard the buzzing of insects, loud enough to be audible over the music. Flies to the feast, which struck him as odd as they were so far out at sea.
Then an islander to his right let out a scream. He backed into the middle of the ring, clutching at his bare stomach with both hands. The man was shivering head to foot, every tendon clenched, like he was about to shake apart. As he turned, Ryan saw a thick lashing shape trapped between his hands, a black segmented tongue jutting from the center of his impressive belly. As the sailor tried to pull the thing out of his stomach, a thousand bristling legs along its underside were frantically burrowing in.
Captain Eng stepped forward and slashed down with his sword. The well-aimed blow struck the black-shelled creature’s twisting rear. The blade bounced off its back without cutting. The shell didn’t even dent.
“Patu ia!” the man squealed as the mutie squirmed through his white-knuckled grip, disappe
aring into his torso.
Under the circumstances there was only one way he could be helped.
Eng lifted the sailor’s thick, black braid out of the way, and with a single swing of the saber cleanly cut off his head.
A FEW MINUTES OF CLOSE combat confirmed Mildred’s belief that the companions had landed themselves smack in the middle of a death camp. The little pile of volcanic rock was an amphitheater, a natural Coliseum, and the ex-mercies, the former sec men and the mutie hunters were slaughtering and being slaughtered for the amusement of an emperor who sat in safety high up in the royal box seats. Undergunned gladiators were pitted against the most terrible and terrifying beasts of the hellscape. Mildred knew that with Magus playing Caesar, there would be no winners in the contest. It was going to be thumbs-down for everyone.
Like the other companions, Mildred was still struggling with the sudden loss of Doc Tanner. It was like losing a finger from her right hand. The old man had been fighting by her side and covering her back for quite some time, and she had done the same for him. That he could leave just like that, with no word of explanation, no goodbyes, was very hard for her to take. She and Tanner had had their headbutting moments in the past, he could be an infuriating, pedantic old fart at times, but they had come to respect each other in the end. Knowing Doc as she did, knowing his courage, his integrity, his intelligence, she knew he had to have had a good reason for running off. But for the life of her she couldn’t guess what that reason could have been.
Doc had left before Magus revealed the real destiny of his “army,” so he had no way of knowing that it would come to this. The sheer, grinding weight of the chilling was unspeakable, and she had a sense that it would end only when the last norm fell.
Mildred was not a “blade person.” She much preferred to do her chilling with centerfire cartridges, from a distance of at least ten feet. Even with a seventeen-inch Enfield bayonet, there was more personal contact than she found palatable. It wasn’t just a matter of the backspray flying from the blade’s long blood gutter, or the matter of the stabbee’s last foul breath gusting into her face as she pierced it through the heart. There was also the problem of the dying party releasing the entire contents of its bowels at once. In the case of the stickies, who came mostly naked into battle, the problem was not only apparent, but underfoot. Mildred wasn’t the least bit squeamish about taking lives, as she couldn’t have survived very long in Deathlands if she had been, but she knew enough about the ways of hostile bacteria and viruses to be concerned about blood and other biological materials flying into her face and eyes and open cuts. As with the taua onboard ship, she had to forget everything she knew about infection and get the chilling done.
The killing field had begun to be less crowded—at least with vertical bodies. Drawn back into a fighting circle, she could see the swampies and scalies exit the low cone. She saw the other circled recruits fall to the muties’ combined attacks. The swampies spiked and slashed the norms, then piled on after the stickies pulled the victims down. The grubby bastards jumped on the recruits’ chests and bashed their brains out with bludgeons and battle-axes.
The two mutie races were definitely cooperating to chill their mutual enemies, but only up to a point. Once sucker hand touched flesh, once nail-studded cudgel slammed into kneecap, the rules of the game changed. It was every creature for itself. The competition between the Wazls and the stickies wasn’t so evident because the lizard birds were few and they worked the fringes of battle.
The swampies left their battered victims and advanced in formation toward the companions and islanders. Mildred could barely make out their squinty little eyes under the bone-shaded sockets and fright-wig eyebrows. The swampies pushed between the milling, excited stickies. The tallest of the little bastards only came up to the middle of the pale chests. The shorter swampies, presumably the females or immature males, were waist high, if that. They all had short, powerful arms and legs, and their weapons were well matched to their size and strength.
By far, the quickest way to chill anything was to put a 125-grain hollowpoint .38 slug through an eye socket, an option no longer available to the good doctor.
The blaring clamor of overamplified Wagner stopped again. Mildred had figured out what that meant. It was a signal from Magus to whoever was stage-managing the show that it was time to let out more muties.
Mildred was very relieved when the islander crew joined forces with them, and she found herself bracketed by a pair of three-hundred-pound men with swords. Their cheap reproduction sabers had already landed so many blows that they were starting to look like kris, either that or they’d been run over repeatedly by a backhoe.
The stickies and swampies attacked the entire perimeter of the circle simultaneously. As she had done before, Mildred handled the stickies with ease, but she couldn’t cut swampies’ throats in the same fashion. They were too short for a clean strike, and their long chins and matted steel-wool beards protected their Adam’s apples from her blade’s edge. In addition, their necks were too stumpy for her to get a good angle on the sides. When she tried slicing downward to sever the carotids and jugulars, she ended up chopping through their collar bones, which only disabled them on one side. And made them very angry.
Mildred had to let the islander bookends deal with the ankle-biters and concentrate on the stickies.
One of the smaller swampies ducked under the slash of the cavalry sword and, side-hopping two feet to the right, rushed at Mildred’s legs with a cocked-back battle-ax. Before it could swing at her shins, she swept the point of her bayonet down, then up, driving hard, skewering the attacker and lifting it from the ground. The ax dropped out of its too large, too hairy hand. A blade thrust clear through its chest, the ugly little creature spit and fumed and bared its mossy-green teeth. It reminded her of something out of Snow White, only Snow White on jolt.
And all the dwarves were named Psycho.
With a swampie in such close proximity, impaled to the hilt of her bayonet, Mildred realized that these creatures never washed their entire lives. The aroma was a combination of armpit, smegma and unwiped bum. It was hard to believe that the one she had just stabbed hadn’t just rolled on a two-week-dead, sun-baked possum. Swampies died as triple bad as they smelled, foaming at the mouth, eyes bulging, fighting to get in one last lick. Mildred gripped the knife with both hands, braced her legs and extended her arms so it couldn’t claw her face and eyes.
The islander to Mildred’s left reached over and grabbed the mutie by a shoulder and with a snap of his arm gave it a spin on the blade. Three, four, five times the swampie pinwheeled around the hilt of bayonet, its arms and legs outstretched, yelling its head off. When it stopped spinning, it was both limp and silent. Mildred flung the corpse over the heads of the oncoming stickies. She didn’t see where it landed.
Around the perimeter of the circle the muties were either chilled or turned back. Not one of them made it through the norm lines alive. The swampies retreated a dozen steps, viewing their quarry with a new, grudging respect. The stickies drew back, as well.
A handful of swampies surrounded one of the bull scalies and goaded it to its feet. Though the creature complained mightily, it submitted to the swampie demands and began to charge at the norms. The islander captain shouted an order and the ring perimeter parted just wide enough to let the mutie in. Then it closed, shutting out the swampies and stickies that were following on the behemoth’s heels.
At a second command from the captain, the man on her right peeled out of the formation, his sword up and ready to strike.
Caught in the open ground, the scalie tried to talk its way out of the predicament, but islanders weren’t having any of it. With their sabers they cut the mountain of flab into bushel basket-size chunks in the middle of the ring, then retook their fighting positions.
The islander on Mildred’s left said something to the other crewman as he returned, freshly blood-spattered.
The man on Mildred right grinned and replie
d.
Then they both laughed.
“What did you say?” Mildred asked them, curious about what an islander would find funny about the situation. She had to repeat the question before she got an answer.
“Harawira say, ‘Plenty fat.’ I say, ‘Plenty dead, too.’”
As she might have guessed, the big joke lost something in translation.
When she first saw the scagworms coming at her, she thought she was imagining things. They looked like shadows flying across the ground as they slithered and snaked over the battlefield’s scattered bodies and through the standing puddles of blood. Their domed, eyeless, antennaeless heads reminded her of the business ends of Redeye antiaircraft missiles. Their segmented armor backplates looked slick, like they’d been greased, and there were all those scrabbling yellow bug legs underneath.
Scuttling at high speed, the worms weaved erratic trails through the dead to reach the living. One creature shot along the spine of a dead stickie and hurled itself at her foot. She jumped aside or it would have gotten her. If she’d had her ZKR 551 in her hand instead of the bayonet, she could have blasted it in the head end as it rushed by her. The bayonet was too slow and the worm was running too low to reach, no more than ten inches above ground.
As it slithered between her legs she yelled out a warning that was lost in the din. The scagworm crossed the ring, its thousand legs a blur, ran up an islander’s leg and bit him in his belly. Blue-black, horizontal jaws snapping, it ate and scrabbled and twisted into his torso. Despite the islander’s efforts to stop it, the tail end disappeared through the four-inch-wide hole above his navel. Once the scagworm was inside him there was no way to remove it. To spare his crewman an agonizing death, Eng mercy-chilled him.
Mildred would have done the same.
Other black shadows shot out from among the dead, and suddenly the norms had their hands full. There weren’t that many of the worms, but trying to chop them up with swords and tomahawks was more challenging than it looked, thanks to the muties’ rapid sinuous movement and their slick armored shells. The norms fended them off with blows to the head, but they couldn’t seem to chill them.
