Deathlands 118: Blood Red Tide

by James Axler

  RUINS OF WAR

  In a nuclear wasteland where death and destruction are the norm, Ryan Cawdor and his fellow survivors seek out refuge while looking to one another for protection. Civilization no longer exists in the barren Deathlands. There is only the will to survive and the dim hope of a promised land.

  CREW OF THE DAMNED

  Taken captive on a ship in the former Caribbean, Ryan and his companions must work as part of the crew or perish at the hands of the captain. But the mutant in charge of the vessel is the least of their worries. Each day is a struggle as they face rivalry among the sailors, violent attacks and deadly storms. Worse, a powerful enemy is hunting the ship to destroy everyone on board. Fighting for their lives and those of their shipmates, the companions must find unity within the chaos or die in the attempt.

  The Glory slowed as the War Pig surged forward

  Ryan grimaced and waited for the smoke to clear. He caught sight of his target as smoke shredded around her forward progress.

  The Deathlands survivor fired, and his bullet tore a hole in the deck a foot from his target. He worked his bolt, then fired again. The bullet sparked off the iron of the War Pig’s starboard chaser.

  Ryan could see one of the officers shouting as he realized the enemy was shooting for the powder kegs. The officer grabbed the cask of gunpowder by the port chaser, pressed it over his head and with effort charged the taffrail and threw the powder into the sea.

  Ryan swung his scope to starboard. A huge man in red and black seized the starboard chaser powder cask and raised it over his head with ease. Ryan pulled the Longbow’s trigger. The .338 Lapua Magnum bullet hit the cask of black powder at over 3,000 feet per second.

  The bow of the War Pig disappeared in a thunderous black-and-orange pulse.

  Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

  Gemini Rising

  Gaia’s Demise

  Dark Reckoning

  Shadow World

  Pandora’s Redoubt

  Rat King

  Zero City

  Savage Armada

  Judas Strike

  Shadow Fortress

  Sunchild

  Breakthrough

  Salvation Road

  Amazon Gate

  Destiny’s Truth

  Skydark Spawn

  Damnation Road Show

  Devil Riders

  Bloodfire

  Hellbenders

  Separation

  Death Hunt

  Shaking Earth

  Black Harvest

  Vengeance Trail

  Ritual Chill

  Atlantis Reprise

  Labyrinth

  Strontium Swamp

  Shatter Zone

  Perdition Valley

  Cannibal Moon

  Sky Raider

  Remember Tomorrow

  Sunspot

  Desert Kings

  Apocalypse Unborn

  Thunder Road

  Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba Book I)

  Dark Resurrection (Empire of Xibalba Book II)

  Eden’s Twilight

  Desolation Crossing

  Alpha Wave

  Time Castaways

  Prophecy

  Blood Harvest

  Arcadian’s Asylum

  Baptism of Rage

  Doom Helix

  Moonfeast

  Downrigger Drift

  Playfair’s Axiom

  Tainted Cascade

  Perception Fault

  Prodigal’s Return

  Lost Gates

  Haven’s Blight

  Hell Road Warriors

  Palaces of Light

  Wretched Earth

  Crimson Waters

  No Man’s Land

  Nemesis

  Chrono Spasm

  Sins of Honor

  Storm Breakers

  Dark Fathoms

  Siren Song

  End Program

  Desolation Angels

  O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done, the ship has weathered every rock, the prize we sought is won, the port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting.

  —Walt Whitman

  THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

  This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

  There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

  But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

  Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

  Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

  J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

  Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

  Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

  Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

  Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

  In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope.…

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter One

  “I smell the sea,” Doc Tanner reported.

  Ryan Cawdor, leader of a group of seven companions who traveled the Deathlands, still mostly smelled and tasted his own bile from the jump. He stepped out from the shadows of the yawning redoubt blast doors. Someone back in the day had constructed a warehouse-sized building around the entrance to the redoubt. It was a blockhouse, and Ryan suspected it probably served as camouflage too. At some point the ruse had failed. Holes in the walls that a man could step through and twisted iron rebar indicated the structure had taken artillery fire.

  The wind moaned through the holes and emptiness. Ryan sniffed the air. Doc was right. They were close to the sea. The air also smelled like rain was coming. Depending on what hemisphere their jump had taken them, a golden sunrise or sunset spilled through the blasted out front door. Ryan looked at the thick layer of undisturbed dust and bird shit coating the floor.

  No one had been here in a very long
time.

  Ryan took point and his companions spread out behind him.

  “It smells tropical,” Doc opined.

  A corner of Ryan’s mouth turned up slightly. Doc was definitely damaged goods, but there was nothing wrong with the man’s nose. Ryan jerked his head toward the blackened holes on both sides of the building “Jak, Ricky, check our flanks.”

  Jak Lauren and Ricky Morales, the two youngest members of the group, moved out. Ricky raised his silenced DeLisle carbine and peered out one of the smaller blast holes in the wall. “Nothing but rocks, Ryan. Nothing’s moving!”

  Jak held his Cold Python and peered to one side. “Jungle. Quiet.”

  “Hold positions. J.B., you and me, cross fire on the entrance.” The two men took oblique angles on the shattered blockhouse entrance. J.B. Dix, also known as the Armorer, squatted behind a pile of rubble. Ryan stood behind solid wall. He shouldered his Steyr Scout rifle and risked a glance outside.

  Ryan stared.

  J.B. cradled his scattergun and peered at Ryan quizzically. “What?”

  Ryan gazed on something he had seen only a few times in his life.

  Krysty Wroth, Ryan’s lover, held her blaster in both hands and tilted her chin at him. “What is it?”

  “Yo, Ryan!” Mildred Wyeth called. “You’re starting to freak me out! What do you see?”

  The one-eyed man waved his friends forward. The redoubt and the blockhouse concealing it were on a steep hillside. A raddled predark road zigzagged down through the forest to a lagoon painted in pink and gold with the setting sun. All eyes stared at the lagoon and what lay anchored there.

  “A full rigged ship!” Doc declared. “How delightful.”

  “What does that mean, Doc?” Ryan asked.

  “In my time a full-rigged ship meant a ship with three masts, all square rigged.”

  Ryan snapped out his Navy longeyes.

  He gazed on the vessel, knowing that such a ship was a rare thing. The few villes that could build boats of their own from scratch produced ketches or small fishing boats.

  Ricky had been born in a port ville in old Puerto Rico, and he gasped at the sight of something so magnificent. “She’s beautiful!”

  Ryan agreed. The ship below was perfect. Her lines were utterly clean. She was a design from some far better time, built to sail the world’s oceans using the power of the wind alone. Ryan took in her masts and yards.

  “Have you ever seen a ship as nice as that, Doc?”

  “In my time, dear friend, and I had never expected to see the like again. Indeed I had the pleasure of touring my country’s good sailing ship USS Constitution in my youth, upon an idyll in New York City. She was a frigate, and an antique even then.”

  “Jesus.” Mildred shook her head. “I took a tour of the USS Constitution when I was in college, and that was in my time.”

  “Big boat,” Jak commented.

  Doc sighed happily. “This vessel is rather smaller than the Constitution. If pressed, I would name her a sloop-of-war.”

  “Why?” Ryan asked.

  “Well,” Doc replied, “she is a wooden ship, Ryan. Given skilled carpenters and blacksmiths, every single piece of her can be replaced. Indeed, except perhaps the keel, I would dare to wager that not one plank or spar upon that boat is original. Like an organism slowly replacing its cells as they wear out, the structure never changes, but new wood, new iron, new crews and new life have invigorated her throughout the centuries and—”

  Mildred interrupted him, pointing a finger at the mast. It flew a blue flag with a white skeleton hand embroidered on it. “Yeah, and they’re flying the goddamn Jolly Roger!”

  “Hmmm.” Doc frowned. “Traditionally the pirate Jolly Roger was black, symbolizing death, or occasionally red for blood. A sea blue ensign should represent the sea and would denote a more commercial enterprise.”

  Mildred rolled her eyes. “Um, and the skeleton hand?”

  “What that denotes I cannot fathom,” Doc admitted.

  “It’s been in a fight,” J.B. stated.

  Ryan nodded. The Armorer was right. The ship’s sides were torn and scored. The sails were currently reefed, but Ryan could see blackening and damage. Men worked in the riggings and hung from the ropes along the sides, effecting repairs on holes that were clearly cannon shot. They moved with clear purpose. Ryan stepped out of the blockhouse. His friends followed him, blasters trained on their flanks. He crossed a weed-choked wag parking circle and took point at a shattered guard gate that had once stood sentinel on the road. He waved his companions forward. Ryan pointed his longeyes down the hill. Men on the beach were tending cook fires. Others loaded barrels onto a pair of small boats, and Ryan suspected they were barrels of fresh water. He eagerly scanned the sailing ship again from stem to stern.

  “I’m getting a real strong idea we’re probably on an island,” Ryan surmised. “And we’re probably going to need a way off. Maybe we’ll need a parley.”

  “No need for a parley!” an opera-quality voice said, then laughed. “Your ship awaits!”

  Ryan spun and snapped his longblaster toward the roof of the blockhouse. A bronze-skinned man looked down at him from the eaves. He stood barefoot and wore striped pantaloons and no shirt. Platinum-blond ringlets curled around his skull. Doc would describe his features as “cruel and sensuous.” He was muscled like a gladiator, and his every muscle, tendon and sinew stood out in high relief. Veins snaked down his arms in road maps of strength. Nonetheless he stood languorously relaxed. Ryan put his crosshairs between the man’s golden brown eyes. It was bad enough that he stood there, unafraid. Even worse that he stood there unafraid and unarmed. “Who are you?”

  “Your superior, and I command you to drop your blasters.”

  “I could chill you,” Ryan stated.

  “You could,” the titan responded. “Worst mistake you’ll ever make. All your mates will die.”

  Ryan considered the fact that in his experience only a handful of people knew about the mat-trans units and what they did. Any jump without a specific code was random. The fact that there was an ambush here, waiting for them, minutes after a random jump was thought provoking.

  Ryan fired. The man above twisted with incredible alacrity even as the Scout kicked against his shoulder in recoil. He realized that the man had dodged his shot and flicked the bolt for a follow-up shot, but the man had already dropped out of sight. The man’s voice boomed from the roof. “Now, Mr. Hardstone!”

  The ground shifted beneath Ryan and his companions’ feet. The earth opened up and swallowed them. The one-eyed man had only moments to register that a pit trap large enough to hold seven people and constructed thick enough up top to escape detection had been built outside the redoubt. Ryan hit the layer of underbrush that had been laid there to cushion the fall. Dirt had been piled three feet high above the trapdoors to conceal them, and the dirt cascaded all over the companions. Ryan landed on his feet and he spit dirt as the jolt ran up his legs.

  “Cast your nets, boys!” the man of bronze called. Heavy deep-sea netting fell across Ryan’s head and shoulders and entangled the Scout. He dropped his longblaster and went for his panga and SIG Sauer handblaster. A second net and a third weighted with iron fell across him as he struggled to draw steel. Men leaped into the pit. As they landed on the netting, it encumbered the companions and pinned them down more. Ryan shoved his SIG free of the heavy strands. The bronze man suddenly stood next to him. The man stomped on netting, and it yanked the rope over Ryan’s blaster arm down. The shot busted cuttings on the pit floor.

  Ryan’s vision went white as a belaying pin rammed into his back just above his right kidney. He heard J.B.’s Uzi snarl off a burst and their captors shouting. “Watch him! Watch him! Watch him!”

  A man screamed. “He cut me! Little white runt cut me! Oh, rads and fall out,” the kidnapper moaned. “He cut me bad...”

  Jak was still in the fight.

  A huge hand closed around Ryan’s wrist and squeezed.
The one-eyed man’s blaster hand popped open against his will and the SIG fell. “You’re fast,” the man admitted. “Fastest I’ve—”

  Ryan struck quick as a snake strike with his blade. He thrust straight for the right eye. The strong man snapped his head aside, but the edge still whispered a hair-thin cut across his cheek and nicked his ear in passing. Ryan found his wrist plucked out of the air like a bird before he could retract it. The bronze hand squeezed with sickening strength. “So fast,” the titan mused. He jerked his head at the man behind Ryan. “Onetongue!”

  A thick arm snaked around Ryan’s neck and Onetongue slapped a wet mass of folded rags across Ryan’s mouth and throat and held it there with great strength. The sop reeked. Ryan’s vision spun, his limbs loosened and his gorge rose even as he tried to hold his breath against it. His knees buckled beneath him. The titan held his wrists effortlessly.

  “The knife!” a man bellowed from somewhere. “Someone get the fish-white son of a gaudy slut’s knife!”

  “I got his knife!”

  “Well, he has another— Fuck! That’s twice! Together! One three! One...three!”

  Ryan heard a net-snared Jak snarling as his opponents piled on and the meaty sound of blows landed like rain. Ryan struggled as well, and consciousness drained out of him like a barrel with the bung knocked out. He couldn’t hear any of his other companions as darkness claimed him.

  Chapter Two

  “Wake up, ya rad-blasted lubbers!” A cascade of cold seawater drenched Ryan and wrenched him out the blackness the drug had taken him to. His skull split from the sedative hangover. The shouter shouted on. “And your sluts, too! Wake up!”

  Seawater flew by the bucket, and Ryan’s friends gasped and jerked awake. Rough hands yanked Ryan up and kept him from falling as the shackles binding his legs tried to trip him. His hands were manacled before him. The one-eyed man blinked in the dimness and confusion and fought to collect his wits as he was hustled forward. His jacket, boots and all weapons and equipment had been stripped from him. As his head slammed into a low beam, he saw stars and buckled. Rough laughter greeted his discomfort. He could hear his comrades’ moans and groans as they were manhandled behind him. Ryan was half carried, half dragged up two companionways between decks.

  “Make way! Make way! Seven fresh fish for the captain!” Male and female voices hooted and catcalled. Ryan was bum-rushed into the blinding light of the sun and a broadside of jeers.