Haven's Blight (23 page)

“Where could he possibly have gone?” Mildred demanded. She had her ZKR blaster in her hand and a wild look in her eyes by the light of torches of resin-rich loblolly pine. “He was a huge, powerful man. He couldn’t just have vanished.”

The nearest water was a good fifty, sixty feet away, Ryan noted. There were no drag marks.

“Here,” Jak said, squatting fifteen feet away from the base of the live oak. He brought his torch low to the spongy ground. “Jaguar.”

Bluebottle hunkered down beside the albino youth. “
Oui,
” he said.
“Tigre.”

“You have got to be joking,” Mildred said. “How could a cat do that? Make a big man disappear?”

Ryan walked over to examine the print. The tracks were round and surprisingly big.

“He was a big boy, that cat,” Rameau told Mildred. “Two hundred fifty pounds easily.”

“But Ferd was enormous. He must’ve weighed more than that, easy!”

“The African leopard, a much smaller animal, can carry a dead antelope several times its own weight up into a tree,” Doc declared. “And the jaguar has exceedingly powerful jaws.”

Jak had stood. First he looked up into the branches, then he prowled around behind the heels of the footprints, swinging his torch a foot above the ground.

“Here how went down,” he declared. He raised his torch. “See claw marks?”

The others gathered around, being careful not to get too close and track up the spoor Jak had found. Only Terance remained back by the embers of the fire, guarding the camp and their gear.

As he frowned up at the heavy branch jutting lowest from the oak tree on this side, maybe ten feet off the ground, Ryan saw fresh gouges in the bark. The moist wood underneath was yellow in the torchlight.

“Cat climb down behind while Fred squatted,” Jak said. “Jump on back.”

Next he brought the torch toward where some fallen oak leaves were mashed into the ground. “Cat kill quick. Bit through skull.”

“Through the skull?” J.B. said. “Rad-blast.”

“The spotted leopards,” Rameau said. “Their jaws can bite through shells of turtles.”

“Here cat went ground,” Jak said. “Went up tree there.” He held the burning splinter near the big bole to show more gouges, vertical this time.

If everybody held their torches up high enough they’d have endangered the leaves if they weren’t moist with dew. They craned their necks, half fearful, half expectant of what they’d see.

“Reminds me of that scene from
Predator
when they find the bodies hanging from a tree,” Mildred said.

“What’s that?” Ryan asked.

She shook her head firmly. “Not worth explaining. Trust me on that.”

“Whoa,” Cole said. “So it ate him?”

“Hell of a way to die,” Ryan said.

“Ah, friend Ryan,” Doc said, “can you think of a better way to die than quickly?”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Terance and Bluebottle led them deeper into the endless swamp, through ever more claustrophobic channels that now and again widened unexpectedly into broad calm pools, or gave way to expanses of low grass on either side. The heat grew more intense, more crushing. Humidity thickened the still air until Ryan felt he could hack a path through it with his panga.

At least the sweat they all swam in seemed to make it hard for the mosquitoes and flies to bite them.

“We can take you into lands claimed by those pasty devils,” Rameau said. “We cannot take you to the stronghold of Papa Dough himself. You must find your own way there.”

He stood in the rear of the lead pirogue, pushing the boat along against the slow current with a long pole. The water in the narrow twisty channel was too shallow for paddling. He and Bluebottle had taken over for the non-twins in the lead craft with Ryan and Jak. Cody and Cole took turns poling the middle boat where today Mildred rode by herself, looking sour and out of sorts with a well-crushed camou boonie hat crammed down on her plaited head. Doc helped J.B. hold down the rear guard while Terance propelled the last boat.

Ryan reckoned Team Heart of Darkness was too afraid to guide them deeper than a certain point in swampie land. He didn’t hold it against them. As it was, he thought they were pretty crazy to accompany the friends this far, no matter what was promised. Dead men spend no rewards.

“We can handle that,” he told Rameau.

“Not there yet,” Bluebottle said, crouching in the bow with a cocked and loaded crossbow on his thighs. “We can take you a day closer, mebbe.”

They came to a drowned grove on the right, where cypresses thrust straight up from green-scummed water. A dozen or so saplings had been chewed off eight or ten inches above the surface by beavers, so that they resembled so many miniature impaling stakes. To the left scrub formed an impenetrable green screen around the base of more widely spaced trees.

“We’ll take whatever you give us with thanks,” Ryan said.

He burned with impatience to help Krysty. Although that made his first impulse to rage at anything that hinted of setback or delay, Ryan was used to keeping short rein on his emotions when the rad-storm hit. The sheer pressure of desire and need, that twisted his guts and crawled beneath his skin like an army of biting ants, actually distracted him enough it was fairly easy to do the smart thing not the stupe one. And especially not do something triple-stupe like alienate their guides and allies.

If by some mad as Fire Day chance he got the cure for Krysty, they were going to need help getting back to her. Alienating their only allies for miles around would strand them in deep dreck.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed from the trail boat. He leaned perilously over the low portside gunwale, making the pirogue tip and drawing an angry rebuke from Terance, which he ignored. “What a remarkable specimen of an immature
Scaphirhynchus albus!
”

J.B. grabbed his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun with one hand and adjusted his hat on his head with the other. He looked wildly around. “Where?”

“Think you mean to ask ‘what,’ J.B.,” Ryan called. “Once more in English, Doc. And does it mean we go red?”

“What? What?” With his scarecrow body still leaned outward, Doc turned his face to blink uncomprehendingly at his leader. “It’s no threat, no, of course not. It is a pallid sturgeon.”

“A pallid what?” J.B. palmed his forehead and slumped back on his bench. “A fish. Dark night, you got me going over a fish, Doc?”

“That’s what you get for dozing off in the middle of the day, John,” Mildred called. Indeed, Ryan had already noticed that when J.B. snapped to, his fedora had been tipped well forward to shield his eyes from the merciless noonday sun.

“I was only resting my eyes, Millie!”

“It is highly unusual,” Doc said. “The pallid sturgeon was rare in my time. I cannot help but suspect their population was further depleted by the ravages of the twentieth century. We may hope that like so many wild species, they have made a strong comeback. Also, it is unusual to see them in slow, shallow water such as this. Their usual preference is for more rapid currents.”

“Mebbe they use the bayous as a pathway,” Rameau said, “just like us.”

“Ugly nuke-sucker,” Jak said, craning his head to peer over the side.

“It is swimming toward you,” Doc said to the others.

Despite himself Ryan stirred himself to look over as the fish passed the lead craft. It was about two feet long, flat, with a snout like a skinny arrowhead. He had to agree with Jak’s assessment.

“Were you a big angler, Doc?” Mildred asked.

“Remember, dear lady, ichthyology was a specialty of mine.”

“A fish doctor,” J.B. said. “No wonder the man’s so crazy.”

“You people all crazy,” Terance drawled.

Cody uttered a yip of surprised pain and slapped a hand to the left side of his neck. He sat on the portside of the middle boat while his counterpart Cole stood in the stern and pushed with his stripped-sapling pole.

“Ouch,” he said. “Something—”

Looking back Ryan just glimpsed a tiny sliver of wood sticking out between the boy’s fingers. It appeared to be tipped with a tuft of whitish fiber, like cotton.

Like a rag doll, Cody slipped over the gunwale and fell into the water.

“Poison dart!” Ryan yelled. He drew his SIG-Sauer and covered the brushy left bank.

“Cody!” Cole yelled.

Dropping the pole, he turned to dive in after his friend. Moving with a speed that belied her sturdy build, Mildred lunged and grabbed Cole by the back of the waistband of his shapeless dungarees and yanked him bodily back into the boat, which wallowed with big gurgling surges of greenish-brown water.

“Let me go!” he shrieked, flailing wildly with arms and legs. Mildred caught him in a bear hug and held him tight, with her cheek pressed against his bare sun-browned back to keep her face from harm’s way.

“Let me go! Mutie rad-suckers! You chilled him! Come fight me! I’ll chill you all!”

As J.B. and Doc went belly-down in the boat, pointing their blasters across the gunwale at the left bank, Terance leaned out, reaching with his setting pole. He managed to snag Cody, floating facedown with arms spread wide, with the tip inside one leg, and wheel him back against the boat. Then, hunkering to make himself a less perfect target, the rangy red-haired frontiersman reached out to haul the boy in.

Cody’s head lolled limply on his neck when his head and shoulders were pulled up out of the water. His tongue protruded from his mouth. His eyes had rolled so far up in his head only the whites were visible.

Terance tested the pulse in his neck with a finger, then flicked a fingernail against one wide-open eyeball.

“Chilled,” he said.

“Poisoned dart indeed,” Doc said, turning his head to examine the boy. His big knobby hands kept his LeMat leveled toward the bushes where the projectile had come from. “Perhaps by a venom derived from some local variant of curare.”

“I don’t think anything like curare grows along the Gulf Coast, or anywhere in the U.S.,” Mildred said.

“Much has changed in the last century, would you not say?”

“Keep us moving!” Rameau cried. He had a single-shot caplock pistol in his hand that was half as long as his arm. Though its lock plate was less ornately engraved than the ones Barton carried, Ryan noticed, it was a solid, serviceable-looking piece that had clearly been made by a Deathlands blastersmith.

Terance wrestled the limp body the rest of the way aboard, grabbing an arm and pushing himself starboard with his legs to counterbalance the weight and keep the narrow pirogue from flipping over. Keeping low, Doc slithered forward to examine the boy. Terance got to his knees and began pushing the boat along again with the pole, this time with only the strength of his arms and back.

Doc grunted sorrowfully and shook his head. “The boy is dead indeed,” he called. “The poison acts with remarkable swiftness.”

Cole’s furious struggles subsided. He melted into Mildred’s embrace and began to sob heartbrokenly.

Ryan lay on his belly on one of the lead pirogue’s crosswise benches. The sun-warmed plank seemed to scorch his skin through his shirt. He had his 9 mm blaster shoved all the way out in both hands. The far bank was a dozen feet away. At this range his sniper rifle would be more an encumbrance than a useful weapon.

But he saw no motion at all in the brush.

Beside him Rameau grunted. “Triple stupe am I! I should have seen.”

“What?” Ryan asked.

“Note—no little birds, hopping about inside the bushes there. They fled when the ambusher crept forward and haven’t yet returned.”

Ryan looked at Jak, who crouched beside him with his Python in hand. Jak’s face twisted in disgust.

“Had eyes skinned right,” he confessed. “Sorry.” Apologies were even rarer from Jak than complete sentences.

“I can’t blame you,” Ryan said. “A man can’t look all ways at once. Only a mutie got eyes in the back of his head.”

“Speaking of muties,” Rameau said, “see why we hate them, the swampies? They strike like cowards, and flee.”

“Long gone now,” Bluebottle agreed. He had a flintlock longblaster aimed toward the scrub despite his words.

“With all respect, Rameau,” Ryan said, “if you were my enemy and came armed into my land, I’d chill you any way I could.”

“We’re still in Haven,” Bluebottle said.

Ryan shrugged. “That wouldn’t stop me, either, if I thought you were coming to visit with bad intent.”

Rameau sighed. “Ah, my friend. You suspect these beasts’ breasts harbor human hearts, their misshapen heads human thoughts. I fear you will learn differently, and all too soon. I only hope you survive the lesson.”

“We’ve had a lot of hard lessons,” Mildred called from the next boat. “Including from other types of swampies.”

Left without propulsion or steering, the pirogue had begun to drift backward with the current, which fortunately was anything but swift. Terance had steered the pointed prow of his own boat up to contact the other’s hull, and now expertly if laboriously drove both craft up the stream.

“We survived them all so far,” Mildred finished.

“Cole,” Rameau called, “snap out of it. You must get back to your duty, eh?”

The youth glared at him rebelliously.

“We all mourn your friend Cody,” Rameau said. “But you’ll find no vengeance here. Only death. Now you must man up and pole your boat.”

“Mebbe the ambusher moved on, mebbe he didn’t,” Ryan said. “We don’t want to hang out in the chill zone long enough for him to fetch a bunch more of his buddies with blowguns, do we?”

“I’m going to let you go,” Mildred told Cole. “If you make a wrong move, boy, I’ll fetch you one upside the head so hard you’ll feel it yesterday. Do you understand me?”

“I’m fine,” he said sullenly.

She released him and sat back, watching him like a chicken on an anthill.

Ryan saw him measure his chances at a leap in the water, then Cole glanced over his shoulder at Mildred’s face. What he saw in her dark eyes made him turn back, recover the pole, which fortunately he’d dropped athwart the boat instead of overboard, and get cautiously back to his feet to resume his duties.

“Good boy,” Rameau called. Then, quietly he said to Ryan, “He’ll be trouble later. He and Cody grew up like this.” He held up two dark fingers pressed hard together.

“Man’s got to learn how to bury his dead,” Ryan said back, as softly, “and then walk on.”

Then the full implication of what he’d said struck him like a giant icicle through the belly.

But Krysty wasn’t chilled yet, he reminded himself fiercely. He had to hold tight to that.

T
HE
SHADOWS
GREW
long over the swamp. The flying insects came out in redoubled force. Barn swallows with gorgeous blue-black backs, the males with scarlet throats and golden breasts, came out to eat them, barnstorming crazily up the bayou, inches over the water, then pulling up and wheeling around for another run. Like fighter planes in an old war vid, Ryan thought.

The big birds were commencing to flap overhead in ranks, back to their nests. Rameau had his crew looking for a likely campsite for the night. The need to be moving on, to get at last to the long-awaited cure for Krysty’s mysterious condition, burned ever more fiercely in Ryan’s belly. But he knew, practically, that if his guides were unwilling to push on after dark, it would be certain death for him and his friends to do so.

“Eyes skinned!” Jak called. “Gator!”

“
Merde!
” exclaimed Bluebottle, who was poling the lead craft. “He is some gator, that.”

And so he was. It was making straight toward the pirogue from a place where the land widened out into waist-high weeds on both sides, around what looked like a broad pool. The creature looked like a giant spear moving through the water, with a huge knobbly head with bulbous eyes.

Ryan picked up his Steyr, worked the action enough to confirm the gleam of a cartridge in the receiver, slammed it home and locked it up. The alligator was a monster, a good fourteen feet long. If he had to chill the thing, 9 mm slugs were likely to bounce off his armored hide, especially that flat skull.