by James Axler
Swampies had a problem with the water, too. They were smart enough to see that if they waded out far enough to reach the norms, they would be submerged to their armpits, which meant they couldn’t swing their clubs and swords with any power. Not being able to finish the job they started made the ankle-biters furious. They smashed their weapons into the shallows, pounding the water to a froth.
The stickies were the immediate concern. Water didn’t bother them, and once they had regrouped and gotten their numbers up, they seemed to have rediscovered their zeal for the hunt.
As with the others, the stickies were dealt with more easily in the water than on land. Again, because it limited their jumping and maneuvering ability. The stickies had to come to the norms, and when they did they were met with sharp steel. The islanders slaughtered them like pigs, with sword sweeps that practically cut them in two. Everyone got their licks in. J.B. with his tomahawk; Jak, Mildred and Krysty with their blades. Again and again, Ryan’s panga cleaved soft skulls down the nose holes. Mutie gore spread in a thin greasy film on the water’s surface. Stickies and parts of stickies drifted away in a swathe of blood.
Seeing the futility of attack, a few of the bald muties actually managed to hold themselves back, although with great difficulty. They blew kisses, hopping around wildly behind the irate swampies on the shore.
From over the top of the low rise came a buzzing sound, then bleating squeals. Three scalies, their heads shrouded in clouds of stinging black flies, blundered blindly toward the water, their flabby arms outstretched. The other muties stepped aside and let the behemoths pass. The scalies threw themselves into the water, submerging in an attempt to drive off their tiny but lethal attackers. It wasn’t a bad idea, but it had come to them a little late. The waves they created were still lashing the shore when they popped up like dead whales, facedown, spread-eagled.
The recruits were clearly winning and yet the uniforms in the boats still held their fire. When Ryan glanced back at them, he saw they had actually lowered their weapons. A couple of men in each boat had slipped oars in the water and were rowing off shore a bit. The splash of the blades stirred up the floating blood and rat devil bodies. The rowers couldn’t seem to get out of the spreading slick, or maybe they weren’t trying. The uniforms and the trainers stared fixedly at the cone and the steel doors. What were the bastards waiting for? Ryan wondered.
On the far side of the boats, Ryan saw boils in the water, huge boils from red-orange shapes rolling just under the surface. They were big shapes with big mouths, moving up the chum slick of dead and dying muties, lazily gulping. Every time a struggling rat devil was sucked down it sounded like a toilet flushing. The boils got closer and closer.
With a grating, scraping noise one of the boats suddenly moved six feet sideways, nearly pitching out the occupants.
The other boats were likewise jolted, uniforms and trainers clinging to gunwhales for dear life.
Behind him, the Wazls let out a piercing shriek. Not of fury or bloodlust this time.
Of pain.
KRYSTY DUCKED HER HEAD as the lizard bird’s shadow swept over her. After the close call she’d had a few minutes ago, it was impossible not to flinch. The Wazl reversed course and joined its sole surviving partner above the middle of the islet. The pair began to fly in tight spirals, trying desperately to gain altitude. With their torn wings, they could only climb to sixty or seventy feet.
Krysty didn’t see the five blond girls as they stepped out of the doorway. She was looking at the birds. When she glanced down, the wraiths were already descending into the amphitheater. Krysty would have laughed at the sight of them, but she knew the kind of jokes Magus played weren’t funny to anyone but him. They looked like sisters. Quintuplets. Identical heights. Tall and willowy, with perfect snow-white faces.
The young girls glided over the littered battlefield, the long hems of their white gowns dragging through the carnage, their thin arms folded under their breasts, like they were crossing a ballroom at a baron’s wedding feast. To Krysty, there was something odd about the way they moved and held themselves so erect, something unnatural.
They walked directly under the desperately flapping birds and raised their heads. When the wraiths opened their mouths, Krysty saw they were black inside, like they’d been eating licorice. The teeth and tongues were black, too.
It looked like they were yelling at the birds, but no sound came from their throats.
Unable to escape, the Wazls swooped down on the newcomers. It was a big mistake. The huge birds dropped out of the sky as if hit by cannonshot, one instant flying, the next falling in a heap. The lizard birds died thrashing on the rocks while the Nordic quintet sang its silent song. The odor of cooked lizard meat wafted across the islet.
The wraiths moved on deliberately, but without haste, as if they had all the time in the world, as if they were in total command.
A few of the scalies still hunkered over their human victims. They saw the girls coming out of the corners of their eyes, but waited too long to get their feet. After they had risen from their haunches, they realized they couldn’t move fast enough to escape.
Black mouths opened in unison.
The scalies held their hands over their ears, but it didn’t do any good. They clustered together, dropping to their knees, moaning, bobbing their heads. Krysty saw their eyes burst, then what had to be liquid brains started running out their noses. The blond teenagers weren’t done yet, though. They glided closer, sucked down a breath and opened their mouths again. Shortly thereafter, the scalies’ skins began to delaminate. Between the layers of tissue on their sagging chests and backs, air pockets formed, then expanded as intense heat turned trapped juices to steam. As on a well-roasted turkey, great voids appeared under the skin, translucent bubbles glistening with fat.
It was clear to Krysty that whatever blundered into the girls’ range died. Pretty heads turned, mouths opened and eyeballs exploded.
“What the hell are they?” Mildred said.
“A mutie clean-up squad,” Krysty told her. “They’re coming for us, and taking out everything in between.”
The swampies saw what they were up against, and took off running around the islet’s perimeter.
The stickies on the beach appeared confused, unable or unwilling to leave. Still hopping around, they started bleeding from ears and nostrils as the wraiths glided closer.
“They’re doing everything in unison,” Krysty said. “They turn at the same time, they even blink at the same time. I don’t think they have the power to chill one-on-one. I think it has to be five to one.”
“I can’t throw a knife that far and hit anything,” Mildred said. “But Jak can.”
“Chill them, Jak,” Krysty said.
The albino shook his sleeve and a pair of leaf-bladed throwing knives dropped into his hand. “Two left,” he said.
“Just do it. Don’t let them get any closer.”
They were already too close. Krysty could see their blue eyes, their pale cheeks touched with roses, their nubile bodies under the gauzy gowns. Their unnatural, black-lined mouths turned toward her.
The spearing pain up through her palate was accompanied by the taste of copper and a sensation of extreme heat, as every nerve in her face, chest and arms fired at once.
“Throw it!” she cried.
With a snap of his arm, Jak fired off a knife. It sizzled through the air, arcing the last four feet, curving and diving into the front of the long white throat.
Whatever the hell it was, it shut its mouth and staggered backward into its mirror images. Thick blood dripped onto the wraith’s bodice. She opened her mouth, and it was no longer black. It was red, and more red poured forth. She staggered out of formation, clutching her neck.
The other four continued to silently scream. Two of the islanders standing closer to the shore sprang tremendous nose bleeds. They ducked under the water to block out the pain.
Jak threw his last knife. Again, he aimed for th
e windpipe, and he hit what he aimed at. The impact knocked the mutie down. It did not get up. Its airway blocked by cold steel, it slowly suffocated.
At once the mutie attack lost its force.
Krysty and Mildred charged out of the shallows and launched themselves onto one of the wraiths. Dodging her sharp nails and teeth, Krysty grabbed her by the braid and Mildred caught hold of the backs of her arms. Together they shoved her head under water. They held it there until she stopped struggling and stopped blowing bubbles. When they let go, the limp body rose to the surface and floated slowly away.
The other two wraiths met less peaceful ends at the hands of Captain Eng and his crew. In ankle-deep water, the islanders surrounded the pair. Behind the wall of wide, brown bodies, sabers rose and fell, rose and fell. If the muties cried out in pain, the sound was drowned out by the grunts of their down-swinging executioners.
Screams, then a flurry of staccato blasterfire came from the water behind them. Krysty looked over her shoulder and saw six of the rowboats had overturned and men were splashing around in panic.
J.B. SENSED THE TIDE OF BATTLE was turning when Jak took out the first wraith with a knife. When the second wraith met the same fate, the pain in his skull diminished substantially. The field of combat was heaped with dead. Most of the other muties—Wazls, scalies, stickies, rat devils—were out of the game and the rest had scattered to escape the silent chilling. The scagworms had taken cover by burrowing deep into the piles of bodies. The main obstacle to the companions’ survival was the uniforms, and it was a big one.
The Armorer had been glancing back every few seconds, watching the approaching boils. Sawtooth backfins five feet long sliced through the chum slick. He saw thickly scaled, orange backs, and when the great maws opened to gulp stickie arms or whole rat devils, he got a glimpse of wicked canine fangs, six inches long with spike points.
As the fish began jostling and ramming the boats, J.B. cheered them on. “Get the rad bastards!” he shouted.
These were not normal pargo. For one thing they were twice as big as usual, two-hundred pounders, easy. They had absolutely no fear of human beings, and they attacked the boats with a hard-focused savagery J.B. had rarely seen, jumping clean out of the water to slam the hulls with their bony heads and backs.
As the boats were knocked sideways, the uniforms fired wildly into the water. The men who were shooting weren’t holding on to the gunwhales. The impacts knocked them headfirst into the water. As they bobbed up, thrashing their arms, wide, toothy mouths came up behind them. The jaws closed on their heads, then the fish rolled, dragging them under.
The trainers leaned way over the sides of the boats, trying to cut the attacking fish with their talons. The shift in weight caused a critical imbalance. In the blink of an eye six of the boats had overturned. The uniforms frantically tried to swim to safety, but before they got ten feet they were taken down by the mutie fish. The trainers just disappeared. They sank like three-hundred-pound boulders and didn’t even leave a bubble trail.
While J.B. watched, two more boats flipped. The men treading water screamed and pleaded for help from the other boats as tall back fins slashed through their midst. One by one, the swimming uniforms were pulled down and they didn’t come up again.
Instead of trying to pull their comrades from the water, the uniforms in the other boats rowed in a frenzy for shore. As they leaned on the oars, their hulls were bumped and scraped, and the direction of travel veered erratically from side to side. They weren’t riding over a river rapids, they were riding on a moving shoal of fish backs. Their faces were blanched, bloodless, their eyes huge with terror.
The four boats and eighteen uniforms made it to the beach. None of the trainers made it; the boats carrying them had all tipped over. The rowers drove the bows hard up onto the rocks, then they abandoned ship, jumping out and running from the water’s edge.
Some of them took their assault rifles with them. Others were so scared that they left their weapons in the boats.
Ryan and J.B. quickly took advantage of the confusion. From the bilge of one of the boats, J.B. grabbed a pair of folding-stocked AKs. Ryan snatched up a short-barreled Galil and a full-stocked H&K 33 from a vacated bow, both in good condition. Without hesitation, they opened fire on the retreating uniforms. Blasters blazing on full-auto in both hands, they swept the men’s backs with full-metal jackets, cutting them down before they could turn and fire.
Seeing blasters in the hands of the norms, the swampies took to their heels again, running low and fast back toward the steel doors.
The survivors had yet to face the most dangerous mutie species Magus had under his command. Across the dish, Dix saw a half dozen of the trainers jog from the cone onto the field of battle.
Before trainers could get near them, the islanders and companions raced to pick up the dropped assault rifles.
“We’ve got to go!” Ryan shouted. “Krysty, Mildred, Jak, come on!” He and J.B. were holding the bow of a rowboat. When the trio piled in and moved to the stern, they lifted the bow and slid the boat off the beach, jumping in as it drifted backward.
“Into the boats!” Captain Eng cried. He divided up his seven-man crew between two of the boats. Before he got in himself, Eng cut loose with his Galil, stitching holes along the bottom of the remaining craft so they couldn’t be followed.
With J.B., Ryan, Mildred and Jak manning the oars, and Krysty sitting in the bow, the companions stroked away from the awful shore. The islanders were right behind them, pulling hard.
The trainers arrived at water’s edge a few seconds too late. They waded in, and kept wading until the water closed over the tops of their heads.
It didn’t take long for the school of giant pargo to locate the trio of boats. They homed in on the splash of oars. The hull under the companions’ feet thumped and flexed inward as back fins scraped across it.
“Keep low and keep rowing,” Ryan exhorted to the others.
With the wide heads bashing into the sides of the boat, it was difficult to maintain a straight course. The blades of the wooden oars were splintered and gouged with teeth marks. Every time the rowers dug in, they made contact with solid objects. Fish sides. Fish backs. Fish mouths.
Krysty raised an AK from the bow and took aim at an onrushing orange shape.
“Don’t waste ammo!” Ryan shouted over his shoulder. “Stay down!”
Over the middle of the reef the attack reached its peak. A huge fish jumped into one of the islander boats. Two hundred pounds of blind fury slapped its tail and humped its body, breaking legs and battering out the boat’s bottom.
The craft immediately swamped and began to sink.
More orange monsters lunged at the foundering boat, easily clearing the gunwhales. Already waist-deep, the crew fought back with blasters and swords at point-blank range.
Standing on the bow of the second islander boat, Eng looked like he was about to jump in and take on the fish with his Galil.
“No, dammit!” Ryan yelled at him. “Don’t do it! They’re too far back. You can’t save them. You can only take your revenge. Eng, it’s Magus. Look at him! Look at him up there! He staged all this.”
Behind the smoky window set high in cliff something silvery flashed.
His tiger-stripe scars flushed with blood, Eng shouldered the autoweapon and touched off a crisp burst. The bullets sparked off the rock face, rattling but not breaking the glass. “Row harder!” he snarled at his crew.
The swamped islanders put up a furious fight before they were pulled under, which allowed the others to reach the big island. Shadowed by huge forms, they ran the boats up onto the rocks.
In the lee of the towering cliff, along the narrow strip of beach, the nine survivors paused for a quick weapons check. They had no extra ammo, just what was in the blasters they’d appropriated. The companions’ own weapons were on the other side of the island.
Captain Eng fumed as he replaced the Galil’s mag.
“I actually
thought Magus was putting together an army,” he said. “How could I have been so stupe? I have led my brothers, my cousins, my uncles to their deaths. Out of sheer greed.”
“Not stupe,” Jak told him. “Magus find soft spot.”
“He must pay, Captain Eng,” Ryan said. “And not just for this. For every evil he’s ever done.”
Nosing around, J.B. found the path running along the base of the cliff and waved the others over. The companions and islanders followed it to the hidden redoubt entrance.
As Mildred tapped in the entry code, a dozen assault rifles took aim at the door at chest height. When it opened, the elevator was empty, except for the sweat puddles on the floor.
Everyone piled in. All the big bodies made a very tight fit in the ten by eight car.
“There’s only one way for Magus to get off this island,” J.B. said as the door slid shut. “He can’t use the white ship because he has no crew to man it. He’s got to use the mat-trans gateway.”
“If we control the gateway, we’ve got the bastard,” Ryan said. He punched a button on the console with his thumb and the elevator lurched and started to climb.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Silam had the taste of iron in his mouth. The clowns—the scalies and swampies—had failed. The most ferocious, blind-chilling mutie predators had failed. Even the screamies had failed. And in the process, virtually the entire menagerie had been destroyed. It was a catastrophe.
He could feel Magus staring at him, chrome irises locked down to pinpoints, his torso clanking with irritation, like a dieseling wag engine.
The fantasist couldn’t bring himself to turn and face his master’s terrible wrath, yet he had an overwhelming urge to say something in his own defense, to placate. But he was unable to speak. His tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. He was scared spitless, which was actually a lucky break as all Silam could offer was excuses for the poor showing. Excuses under any circumstances were grounds for execution.
