Apocalypse Unborn (24 page)

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.

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.

When the recruit survivors had rushed into the water, Silam had been confident that everything was going to turn out fine, despite the initial setbacks. And he liked the idea of a last desperate stand waist-deep in the sea, sandwiched between rampaging muties and the armed uniforms. It was a perfect, bitter counterpoint to the gushy, heroic music.

Magus never rooted for the underdog. The whole point of the performances was to see the underdog crushed. He relied on Silam to offer the participants an illusion of hope, of the power of valiant struggle, and then to snatch it away.

Leaving nothing but pain and suffering.

It had never occurred to Silam that an unlikely confluence of events might reverse the situation: the blood and bodies in the water attracting muties not on the afternoon’s program, the screamies chilling muties by the score, but not a single norm, the uniforms panicking, then running their boats aground and losing control of their automatic weapons.

“You call this garbage entertainment?” Magus demanded as autofire clattered and the fleeing uniforms were chopped down. “I thought this morning’s show was pathetic. Now you’ve gone overboard in the other direction. This is turning into a rout.”

Silam wanted to say, “they call it suspense,” but he kept his mouth shut. Lecturing the master on the finer points of art appreciation was yet another quick way to get dead.

“That’s Ryan Cawdor doing the shooting down there,” Magus said. “The cyclops is tearing you a new asshole.”

Actually, the one-eyed man and his partner had already torn multiple new assholes in the backs of the running uniforms. With the help of the other recruits they collected weapons from the dead and manned the rowboats.

“They’re going to escape the islet,” Magus said in disgust. “If I had a switch, I would turn off this piece of shit.”

Silam rooted hard for the pargo as they attacked the fleeing boats. The fish had wreaked havoc before; they could do it again. When one boat was wrecked by a fish, he thought the other two would meet the same fate. But the muties let him down.

As the recruits stroked hard for the beach in the remaining boats, Magus wheeled from the window. “They’ll be at the redoubt entrance in minutes,” he said. “Do you know what this means?”

Silam had a fair inkling. If he didn’t think of something spectacular, he had about five seconds to live. The ideas that came to him were feeble and uninspired.

Everybody has a bad day.

Things average out.

As time dwindled away, he blurted, “Look on the bright side, now you can chill Cawdor face to face.”

Magus moved in a blur, grabbing hold of his hand. Silam had never been touched by the master before. The combination of cold steel and overheated flesh made his skin crawl. He would have yanked his hand back, but the grip around his fingers was too powerful to break.

“Do you think a face-to-face killing would satisfy my needs?” Magus asked. “My needs!”

“I’m afraid, Magus,” Silam said weakly.

“With good reason, you slime. You less than slime.”

The steel fingers closed tighter and tighter, a vise squeezing shut with thousands of pounds of pressure.

Silam gasped as all his finger bones shattered. Pain shot up his arm into his shoulder socket. He dropped to his knees before the master who still held him fast.

“I have been your loyal servant,” Silam wailed. “I have given you everything I possess. My talent. My imagination. I have helped to build your legend for the ages.”

“Silam, you know nothing about me. You only know the inside of your own head, your own pathetic strivings and petty frustrations. Like an infant you daub the nursery walls with the contents of your own diapers.”

Bullets from below thundered against the panel of armored glass, making it quiver in its steel frame. Silam jerked at the sounds, but Magus didn’t even flinch. He leaned closer, so close the fantasist could see the metal guy wires in his jaws and cheeks sliding in and out of their pilot holes.

“What I am, and what I am capable of is beyond your feeble imaginings. I must teach you a lesson.”

“A lesson?”

Magus released his hand.

Run, Silam told himself. Just run.

But his legs had turned to jelly. Try as he might, he could not get up from his knees.

Magus took hold of him again, working quickly, used his half-mechanical hands to crush the bones of his arm. Silam shrieked.

When Steel Eyes destroyed his other hand, turning it into a bloody mangle with a single squeeze, the poet laureate passed out cold, thereby missing the shattering of that arm, of all the bones in both feet, both legs, his pelvis, and most of his rib cage. Magus proceeded with skill and precision, tackling the job in a specific sequence, using just enough pressure to pulverize the bones. This was something he had done many times before. He left the skull and spinal cord intact.

Insistent prodding and kicking returned the spin doctor to a semblance of consciousness.

“Have you learned your lesson?” Magus asked.

“What?” Silam wheezed wetly, lungs punctured, tossed on a sea of bloodred pain. “What lesson?”

“This is what I always had in mind…”

Last thing Silam saw was Magus’s heel stomping down on his oversize skull.