Blood Harvest (18 page)

Metal screamed as the overhead ducts failed. The six-foot section fell through the overhead lighting in a shower of sparks and wiring with dead stickies and smoke trailing out of either end. J.B. whipped his scattergun around. He and Krysty had needed only a few more minutes and they would have been gone. They weren't going to get it. A fresh stickie fell through the roof and flopped onto the piled bodies of its brothers and sisters. The stickie's rubbery musculature hunched and popped as it relocated its limbs. J.B.'s blast smeared its skull across the corpse-littered floor. Another stickie was flailing its legs up in the wiring, the front half of its body still jammed in the torn duct. J.B. unrepentantly filled its rear contact point full of lead. The legs went limp and the Armorer leaped aside as the section fell. Arms flailed out of the other end, and J.B. pumped buckshot into the eight-foot section.

“J.B.! Look out!” Krysty snapped up her blaster. A stickie crawled like a four-legged white spider in the wiring. Krysty put three rounds through its head and it hung, crucified from the conduit risers by its suckered hands and feet that continued to clamp on even in death. Metal continued to rend and scream. Stickies hooted and shrieked, and the ceiling and walls thudded with bumps and crashes. The ducts were falling section by
section. The stickies were in the walls. J.B. pushed fresh shells into the action of his M-4000. He was starting to run uncomfortably low. J.B. checked the loads in his Uzi and unzipped his bag of tricks. “Krysty, get by the door.”

The statuesque redhead moved into a covering position. J.B. stayed in the control room. His eyes flicked in constant scan from the ceiling to the two ducts they'd covered. The glued-on seats twisted as the ducts they covered were torn from their moorings. One popped away beneath a stickie's pale fist. The hooting stickie shoved its head through the enlarged hole and J.B. blasted it. He pulled the rip fuse on an improvised pyrotechnic. The nylon mag-pouch began to hiss in his hand. The dead mutie was yanked aside, and J.B. blasted the one behind it and stuffed in his smoking package. One helpful, suckered stickie hand snatched up the charge greedily. J.B. jumped back as the wall thumped and the stickie hoots and coos turned into shrill, trilling screams. It was another white-phosphorus package, but rather than a slow smolder J.B. had rigged it for a nice out-of-control burn and seasoned it with a little high explosive to spread it around.

White smoke poured out of the hole, but it was white-hot and it billowed upward on its own updraft into the ceiling, carrying winking and burning fireflies of white phosphorus with it. A blackened spindly arm covered with yellow fire whipped and flailed in the ragged opening. Stickies might be as resilient as rubber tubing, but the rad-blasted pests still had to breathe, and you took a lungful of white-phosphorus smoke just once. The problem was J.B. and Krysty had to breathe, as well. The Armorer watched the dense smoke crawl across the gutted ceiling of the control room like a
creeping white carpet. A stickie fell out of the wiring choking and clawing at its throat. It fell on a pile of bodies and thrashed. J.B. didn't waste a cap.

Krysty cried out as the other duct seal failed. A stickie shoved its head through, and Krysty's slug caromed off its skull. J.B. pulled another home-rolled Willie Pete as the stickie went limp. “Cover me!” The stickies in the walls snatched back their dead horde-mate. J.B. ripped his pull-fuse. The package hissed in his hand, and the Armorer shoved it into the ruptured vent.

A suckered hand wrapped around his wrist with a squidlike grip.

J.B. yanked his arm back but the stickie wouldn't let go. It would anchor him even in death in a petard hoisting that would leave J.B. a blackened mummy. He put his boots against the wall and heaved, at three seconds on a five-second fuse.

Krysty ran forward. “J.B.!”

“Stay back!” He shoved the muzzle of his scattergun against the stickie's inner elbow and fired. He topped backward with everything below the elbow still attached to his arm like some gruesome fetish. The suckered hand constricted against his wrist. J.B. rolled across blood and corpses as white smoke and yellow fire pulsed out of the wall in a jet. Searing heat washed across him, and dead stickies ignited in his wake. Krysty grabbed J.B. and hauled him up. She handed him his hat and he instinctively slapped the fedora across his thigh and perched it back on his head.

J.B. surveyed the battleground. Most of the control-room lighting was out. Dead stickies blackened and burned and threw off flickering orange and yellow light. The smoke above was beginning to creep down in
curtains. The walls glowed with heat. The brimstone smell of burning phosphorus competed with the charnel house smell of death and horrific new stench of burning flesh. J.B. was not a religious man, but he knew about the concept of hell. He knew he'd painted a fairly close approximation.

Krysty snarled in exasperation as three stickies dropped down from the ceiling. “Gaia!”

“Dark night!” J.B. agreed. The stickies were coughing and hacking but seemed little worse for wear. There was someplace in the ceiling they were coming through that wasn't being inundated with smoke. They turned their weeping, unblinking black eyes on J.B. and Krysty and bounded forward. J.B. blasted two of them off their feet. Krysty let the last get uncomfortably close and took it with a head shot. J.B. dropped his empty scattergun on its sling. He was out of shells. He unslung his Uzi and pushed the selector from safe to automatic fire. “Time?”

Krysty checked her chron. “Three minutes.” She broke open her blaster and grimaced. “I'm out.” She ejected her spent shells and put the brass in a pocket of her coat and holstered her blaster. Krysty drew a long, curved skinning knife. A stickie dropped through the smoke, followed by another and another. They didn't bound forward. These swayed and eyed their prey. More kept falling into the room. J.B. pulled a heavy, bulging gas-mask bag out of his satchel and kicked the nearly empty carry-all into the mat-trans chamber. Nearly a dozen stickies slowly began to come forward, stepping over their dead brethren.

“Now!” J.B. shouted. Krysty dived into the mat-trans chamber. J.B. yanked the pull-fuse and tossed his
charge. A stickie snatched it out of the air and peered at the hissing olive drab bag. J.B. hurled himself into the mat-trans chamber and rolled to one side of the door and hugged the wall. The stickies hooted as they surged in pursuit. J.B. stuck his thumbs in his ears and covered his eyes.

The chamber shook as J.B.'s charge went off.

It was the last of the white phosphorus, the last of the high explosive and every screw, nut, bolt and small metal part J.B. had managed to scrounge from the control room all in one overstuffed and glue-sealed gas-mask bag. Heat and overpressure rolled into the mat-trans chamber like a wave. Bits of metal ricocheted off the armaglass walls. J.B. opened his eyes. He yawned to clear the ringing in his ears and instantly began to choke. He dropped to the floor and crawled over to Krysty. She had one hand over her mouth, but she reached out the other and gave J.B. a squeeze. Over the ringing in his ears J.B. could hear screaming and shrieking. He took up his Uzi and risked a peek through the door. Just about everything in the control room was on fire. The smoke was thick, but J.B. could see that his improvised charge had done its work. Most of the stickies were burning and blown apart. One thrashed about in the corner like a flaming, spastic scarecrow. Two more remained alive but they were badly torn up. They were bleeding out of their eyes and ears from the blast effect and could do little more than twitch and moan.

“Time?” J.B. choked. He couldn't hear whether the mat-trans control was peeping or not and he couldn't see the control panel through the smoke.

Krysty checked her chron and gave J.B. a very weary smile. “Time.” She pointed her knife at the filthy,
suckered paw still wrapped around J.B.'s wrist. “Let's cut that thing off.”

“Let's get out of here,” J.B. countered.

Krysty didn't need convincing. She covered her mouth, hurried forward and closed the door. The mists descended and darkness enveloped them.

 

M
ILDRED LOOKED AT HER
chron out of habit and realized for the tenth time that Raul the Gargantua had taken it along with every other thing of use she owned. She hunched against the ocean cold and looked back at Jak. He stood with his hand on the tiller looking like a diminutive and very pale Captain Ahab. Doc was chatting with the natives and appeared to picking up the local lingo pretty quickly. When they weren't chattering away in what mostly sounded like vowels, the natives stared at her in wide-eyed wonder. Doc had filled her in on the story of the islands. Any African-Americans who had come with the original refugee fleet from the Deathlands had been bred into the population generations ago.

As usual, Mildred Wyeth and her pleasing light brown complexion was quite the novelty. They probably thought she was a mutie. Father Joao sat bound, bruised and pouting amidships. Zorime stared enigmatically out across the waves and kept her own counsel. “Jak, how long on J.B. and Krysty?” Mildred asked.

Jak lifted his ruby gaze to the watery light coming through the overcast. “Soon.”

Mildred reached out and scratched Boo behind the ears. The dog thumped his tail against the side of the boat happily. Vava beamed. Like most world-class marksmen Mildred had far better than average vision. She jerked up in alarm as she saw the smudge in the distance. “Jak!”

Jak threw back his cloak and loosened his Colt in its holster. “Boat?”

Mildred squinted into the distance. “Definitely, coming from the ville and headed for the escarpment.”

Jak put the whaler on an intercept course. Doc snapped out his brass telescope. “It is a whaler, like our own.” Doc lowered his spyglass and shook his head. “I count a dozen men under arms aboard, and their engine seems larger than ours.”

Jak went to full throttle. “Mildred!” The albino teen made a blaster out of his fingers. “Motor!”

Mildred raised her hands helplessly. “I'm empty, Jak.”

Jak instantly drew his stainless-steel Colt and tossed it to her. Mildred caught the heavy blaster awkwardly. She looked at the straining little outboard powering their craft and considered the Magnum revolver in her hand. “You'll have to get me close, Jak. Fifty yards, closer if you can, and keep me there.”

Jak nodded as he gauged distance. Their courses would intersect, but the ville men had a bigger engine and more blasters. He wouldn't be able to stay close long and if he didn't they probably wouldn't survive it. “Doc! Cannon!”

“Indeed.” Doc nodded. “They have a swivel gun much like ours.”

Jak rolled his ruby-red eyes in exasperation and pointed at the little cannon mounted on the prow. “'Poon them!”

“What? Oh, yes, I see.” Doc frowned. “Why should I…poon them?”

Mildred rolled her eyes, as well. “Doc, just do it! Below the waterline if you can!”

Doc was startled by this new, weird and wonderful turn of events, but he handed his spyglass to Mildred and
went to work. He threaded a line through the eyelet of one of the short, iron harpoons in a fairly efficient fashion and coiled the line so it wouldn't tangle when it flew. He stared at the weapon for a moment and then began measuring powder from the little cask. Mildred prayed he knew what he was doing. She used Doc's glass to get a good recce on the enemy. They were ville sec men all right, a dozen with blasters. They were aware of the pursuit and had throttled up. Their craft threw spume as it took the tide on the chin. Mildred folded the spyglass and took point next to Doc. “Doc, this is our asses, and J.B.'s and Krysty's. Don't screw this up.”

Doc took a nip from the flask in his jacket and gave Mildred a startlingly confident smile. “Dear Mildred, my naval gunnery shall rival Nelson at Trafalgar.”

Mildred took a look at the enemy. They were aware an engagement was imminent. Black-cloaked blaster-men lined the gunwhales, waiting for Jak to bring his whaler within range. “Doc, you better tell those islanders to get low and stay low.”

“As you say.” Doc spoke to the natives and they hugged the deck. Jak brought them in closer. Mildred started getting very nervous. A lot of guys in black hats and shades were pointing blasters but the only sound was the noise of the motors. “What are they waiting for, Doc? Why don't they shoot?”

“Those are muzzle-loading arms they bear, Mildred. They load from the front and it takes time. They want to hit us with volley fire.”

The sec man at the helm yanked his tiller hard to bring the prow and his swivel gun into play. The men along the port gunwale all suddenly knelt and the men on the starboard side of boat stood and presented arms.

“Now!” Jak shouted.

Doc sighted down the crude rib atop the swivel gun.

“Now!” Jak shouted again. “Mildred! Down!”

Blasterfire popped and crackled like a string of firecrackers across the water. Mildred flung herself to the deck. “Doc!” Splinters flew like shrapnel as lead balls raked across the whaler and the swivel gun clanged as a ball hit it. Mildred reached up to yank Doc down. “Doc!”

Doc was still sighting. He suddenly smiled and yanked the firing cord. Flint scraped and powder flashed in the pan. The prow of the whaler shook as the swivel gun recoiled against its mooring. Mildred peeked over the rail. Line whipped from the coil as the cruelly barbed iron rod streaked across the sea. The second line of sec men leveled their blasters as a unit. The boat was just coming around enough to bring the gun on the prow into play and no harpoon was mounted. It would be throwing lead and a lot of it.

The harpoon threw up a geyser of spume as it hit the water a yard from the hull and skipped. A sec man screamed and toppled over as the lugged iron punched through the hull and did him a terrible disservice. “Ha!” Doc shook his fist in triumph. “A hit!”

“Goddamn it, Doc!” Mildred yanked the madman to the deck as a second volley hit their boat. Vava screamed. More splinters flew and a hole appeared next to Mildred's head. Jak's hat had been blown off his head and was sailing out to sea. Jak reached up and through the throttle into Reverse. “Doc!”