Crimson Waters (10 page)

“Want safe,” the youth said, “wait dead.”

* * *

I
T
WAS
MIDAFTERNOON
when they left the ville, heading into thick brush that sprang up surprisingly close to the ville’s inland edge. Cultivated fields lay to the west. Some of them smoldered, too.

The frog that plopped onto the path in front of them was as big as a human head with legs.

“Muties!” Jak spat, shying away as if the thing had poisoned fangs. “Dangerous!”

The grass to either side of the path leading away from Nuestra Señora rustled, revealing more of the outsized frogs. Their chirped
co-kee
came from all around. The rest of the party reacted less theatrically than Jak had, but they still steered wide of the enormous hoppers.

Ryan scowled. “Do we even know that they’re dangerous?”

This struck him as a double distraction from their actual business, which was getting into the forest and losing themselves before the pirates and Monitors—or, more precisely, their vengeful survivors—caught up with them.

J.B. screwed up his face. “I’d have to say that just about anything weird we’ve ever encountered in the Deathlands was dangerous, Ryan.”

“Good point,” Ryan said. “All right. Watch the fireblasted frogs, then. As if we don’t have enough to look out for already.”

Whoever had hit the ville had hit it with a vengeance. As Ryan perceived, they’d seemed more interested in killing people and breaking things than looting the place. As if they wanted to make an example.

“It took a big force to raze the ville,” Ryan said again as they marched up a trail that led through lush growth into the steep, thickly forested hills that backed the ville.

“An army, one might say,” Doc said. “Although raiders rather than conquerors. But I suspect that plays a role in their future plans.”

“So what does that mean for us, Ryan?” Mildred asked.

“It means,” said a voice from just ahead, “that you don’t need to worry about that shit. Your road ends here, motherfuckers!”

Chapter Twelve

Silver-Eye Chris stepped onto the path, his assault rifle leveled at Ryan from the waist. A pair of henchmen stood up out of the bush, left and right of the trail, pointing longblasters.

The companions had walked open-eyed into a trap.

The pirate might have gotten the drop on them, but he definitely looked the worse for wear.

The whole right side of his face was charred black. Raw, angry flesh peeked through where it had cracked. His eyebrow was gone on that side, as were most of the dreads. His left sleeve was missing, and his arm was almost as blackened as his face.

But both silver eyes still stared wildly from the charred ruins. And his left hand, now little more than a bloody half-roasted claw, held the AK’s wooden foregrip steady enough.

One of his wingmen was a wiry black Sea Wasp with heavy beads in his dreads, who looked uninjured. He had a machete with a spiked knuckle-duster bow stuck through his belt and carried a Mini-14 semiauto longblaster. The other was a Monitor. His regulation bald head was gashed from side to side; his face was smeared with browning blood where he’d made a halfhearted attempt to wipe it off. It pooled under his eyes, at the folds of his evil grin, and caked in his blond beard. He had a bandage around his left thigh that was soaked through with blood. He aimed a pump shotgun that had the full nylon tactical buttstock but had its barrel sawed off flush with the end of the tubular magazine.

Pain and rage had to have made the pirate lord go mad,
Ryan thought, standing frozen behind Jak with his Scout longblaster held diagonally in patrol position in front of his body.
Otherwise he and his pals would’ve let their blasters do their talking for them from cover, and we would already be chilled.

Not that they weren’t likely to be dead soon, anyway. The wind, which had been blowing in from the ocean and carrying both the sight and smell of the burning ville’s smoke inland, away from the
Wailer
on its approach, had either changed or was blowing from a different quarter in the forested foothills behind Nuestra Señora. Otherwise Jak’s keen nose would have detected the presence of the ambush before they all walked into its kill zone with eyes wide-open.

“If you weren’t all triple-stupe,” Silver-Eye Chris rasped, “you’d make a play for us and end it right now. Of course we’d just blast your legs out from under you, but at least you’d go down trying. We’re gonna have us some fun with you fuckers. You hear me? Some nuke-shittin’ fun!”

His Monitor companion scowled and kicked at an overlarge frog that had hopped up against his injured leg and almost seemed to be sniffing the blood-crusted ankle of his boot. With a dismal croak it jumped a couple of feet to land right beside Silver-Eye Chris.

“Start layin’ ’em down, boys and girls,” the pirate said with a mad gleam in his eye. “Nice and easy, that’s— Ow, fuck!”

The last was directed straight downward, where the displaced giant frog had suddenly clamped its jaws on Silver-Eye Chris’s leg above his boot. From the shrill edge in his voice it wasn’t just surprise that an innocuous creature like that would have the balls to bite a man.

The man suddenly threw back his charred dreads and shrieked in a glass-breaking pitch.

His friend couldn’t help turning toward him in shocked surprise. Then the Sea Wasp staggered and clapped a hand to his neck, where one of Jak’s throwing knives had suddenly sprouted from his Adam’s apple.

Catching himself in midturn the Monitor started to swivel back. Before he could do so, Ryan whipped his Steyr around and shot him through the chest.

Jak was going for his Python. The man he’d nailed with the thrown blade wasn’t mortally hit; he was pumping out wild shots from his 5.56 mm longblaster.

As Ryan speed-jacked the bolt on his longblaster, J.B. shot the Sea Wasp in the gut with his M-4000 shotgun. The man gasped and doubled over as the shot punched into him.

Silver-Eye Chris paid no attention to the unhappy fates of his two henchmen. He was screaming like a man on fire.

The frog clung to his leg, while others hopped purposefully toward the pirate captain. Astonished, Ryan saw a flash of fangs like curved yellow needles as a second creature opened its jaws and crouched to spring.

Like corrupted vines growing at hyperspeed, the veins on the backs of Silver-Eye’s hands were turning black and swelling out of his skin. The dark death tentacles shot up his neck and enveloped his face. His screaming died to a strangling gurgle as his throat swelled shut.

Paying no attention to the pirate boss’s terrible fate, Jak pointed his huge silver handblaster and fired into the crown of the gut-shot Sea Wasp’s head. Ryan saw his eyes blow out of the sockets to the extents of his optic nerves before he went down face-first in the brush.

Keeping the longblaster cautiously leveled, Ryan stared in horrid fascination as the flesh of Silver-Eyed Chris’s hands and body turned blue around the black veins and swelled grotesquely. Suddenly, his face exploded as if it were a huge discolored zit pinched between giant fingers. Yelping, Ryan jumped back to avoid the shower of reeking black corruption.

“Holy crap!” Mildred said from behind him.

“It would appear that young Jak’s assessment is vindicated,” Doc announced in tones of scholarly interest. “These frogs are indeed dangerous mutants. They appear to possess fangs, as a highly efficient delivery system for a remarkably fast-acting hemolytic venom.”

“Talk sense, Doc!” Jak hissed, as he backed away from the frogs, holding down on them with his silver Python. He apparently couldn’t decide whether to waste bullets on them or not. Which, to Ryan’s mind, showed sound judgment, since the frogs were now converging on the pirate’s half-headed body, thrashing amid the brush. They showed no interest at all in the people still on their pins.

“He means,” Krysty called, “that we should stay away from these little guys.”

“Amen,” J.B. said fervently.

* * *

T
HE
COMPANIONS
,
EXCEPT
J
AK
, who was on sentry duty, sat around a small, smokeless fire of dead brush in a pocket on a brushy hillside. Tumbled volcanic rock and granite boulders screened them and the small, flickering fire from view above and below, while permitting easy access to lookout points over the hills down to the ocean.

As Ryan said, whoever had attacked Nuestra Señora had been more interested in wiping it out than looting it, which was a rarity in itself, in this day and age. Of course, there were ample signs of plundering. A commander who tried to prevent that altogether would wind up accidentally shot by his own sec men. Nobody had it that soft, no matter how relatively well-off they were. But they hadn’t been very thorough or systematic about stealing. They had clearly grabbed whatever most struck them as they went about their highly methodical business of butchering the inhabitants.

They were eating a red snapper J.B. had found in the fallen-in ruins of a hut. Already scaled, with the head chopped off, it was still a good ten pounds. The householders had obviously been interrupted in preparing a meal. Jak had turned up a pot of cooked beans in another hut nearby.

“One wonders at such total devastation,” Doc said. He had eaten lightly and now sat hugging the long skinny legs drawn up before him and gazing into the little fire. “Why would they so assiduously slaughter all the inhabitants?”

“Doubt they did,” J.B. said. “Took some off as slaves, most likely.”

Mildred shuddered. “Why? I mean, why bother? Obviously stealing stuff wasn’t their priority. You can’t tell me this was just a slave raid, either. Whoever did this was a major force by today’s standards. And it’s like what they really cared about was wiping Nuestra Señora off the face of the earth. Why would anybody do that?”

“Politics,” Ryan said.

“Somebody wanted to make a point, good and hard.”

“Well, the Nuestra Señorans sure got the point,” Mildred said.

He shook his head. “No. This was, like, incidental. Yeah, pretty clearly they did something to piss somebody off. But the point to something like this is to show other people—
live
people—what happens when you do piss them off.”

J.B. shrugged. “You got that right, Ryan,” he said. “The dead don’t learn too many lessons.”

“‘The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns,’” Doc intoned.

And just as Mildred was reflecting that she was undoubtedly the only other member of the group who recognized the quote, Ryan blindsided her.

“Hamlet,” he grunted. “Yeah. He sure showed how the man who outsmarts himself is the biggest stupe of all. His simp friend turned out to be the smart one after all—the guy who took over there at the end, when everybody chilled everybody else.”

“Fortinbras,” Doc said.

“Yeah, him.”

“Clearly, my dear Ryan,” Doc added, “no one with any wit left to them would confuse you for either individual. You show deficiencies neither in thought nor in action.”

Certainly conscience doesn’t make any coward of him, Mildred thought. In most ways neither Ryan nor his contemporaries, except Krysty to some extent, showed much sign of what she’d been raised to regard as a conscience at all. Yet on the whole she had to say they were good people. Damn good ones.

And Ryan Cawdor, for all that he was hard, and even ruthless, might be the best man she’d ever known, other than her father. She reflected on how “moral” her own time had been—with all its self-righteousness and moralizing and insistence on its monopoly of conscience. Yet, cowardice really did seem to characterize it, in a moral sense—and in the end, all their self-professed rectitude and concern for their fellow men hadn’t stopped the people of her time from wiping themselves out almost completely....

She was considering the notion that she’d disappear up her own butthole if she kept following those lines of thought, when a sudden commotion broke out from the rocks right overhead.

Doc kicked the fire over. Krysty jumped up and quickly kicked dirt over the coals, smothering them. Everybody fanned out, crouching, blasters in their hands, covering all directions.

“Don’t chill him!” Ryan rapped out. “Bring him here, Jak.” He’d had his back to the upslope side. Now he rose smoothly and turned, taking up his Scout and aiming it upward.

“Ow!” an adolescent male voice cried out of sight above. “
¡Mierda!
Take it easy,
coño,
I’m coming!”

A kid appeared at the top of the black boulder clump. He was a few inches taller than Jak and wearing ratty cargo shorts and a green army tunic. Disheveled black bangs hung in a soot-smudged face. A big bruise, gone past purple to a dull rainbow, yellow and green and mottled blue, covered the left side of his face. He had some kind of longblaster strapped to his back, alongside a backpack, and had a big double-action revolver stuck in a battered leather-flapped cross-draw holster on the front of a web belt.

“You a spy?” Ryan asked.

“We should be careful, Ryan,” Mildred said. “Maybe he’s with whoever did that to the ville.”

“You lie,
puta!
” the youth shrieked in a spray of spittle. He thrashed until Jak’s big bowie drew blood.

“Easy,” Ryan said. “It took an army to waste the ville like that. If you’re not with an army, you’re damned well-heeled. You better have a good story, boy.”

“Let me go,” the youth said sullenly, “and I’ll tell you.”

Ryan grinned. So did J.B. and Doc.

“Not likely, junior,” J.B. said, taking off his steel-rimmed specs and scrubbing them with a handkerchief.

Ryan gestured. Looking as if he really wanted just to lay the kid’s throat open with a swift, savage cut, Jak pushed his prisoner down and around to the depression where the campfire burned low. He had the kid’s right arm twisted up to his shoulder blades in a hammerlock.

Mildred helped J.B. relieve the prisoner of his pack and weapons, which they handed to Doc and Krysty. Instead of watching them, Ryan stood looking everywhere but at the scene, his longblaster cradled in his arms and his ice-blue eye alert. Jak and J.B. trussed the kid’s hands behind him. Then, sitting him down gently but forcefully by the fire, they tied his ankles together with nylon line from their packs.

Krysty had laid the pack down on the other side of the fire. Doc set the weapons out next to it.

“All right,” Ryan said, turning back. He leaned the rifle against his pack. “Jak, good job. You can go back on patrol now.”

Jak’s red eyes flared. His dislike for the captive was almost palpable.

“What have we got here?” Ryan asked the others as Jak vanished back into the dark.

“Dark night!”

J.B. was turning over the prisoner’s longblaster. He had an expression of almost childlike wonder on his face.

“Kid better have a triple-good yarn, to account for why he’s toting a longblaster like this one,” the armorer said in reverent tones. “Ryan, do you have any idea what this is?”