Iron Rage (27 page)

“Which is ace,” Arliss called from somewhere aft where he was helping fit another rail into place. “We're down to the dregs of our wire.”

“Will it hold?” Ermintrude asked.

“For a spell,” J.B. said. “Bounce enough cannonballs off any piece, the wire'll shear. That's just a fact.”

“How long will it last?” Arliss called.

“Till it doesn't anymore. That's the best answer I can give.”

“Look north!” Suzan shouted from atop the cabin roof, seeing a white puff of steam from the north.

Working or not, J.B. made sure somebody kept watch at all times. With even Jak lending a hand with the work of armoring up the Diesel tug, sentry duty went to whoever currently needed a breather the worst.

Krysty looked. White smoke was billowing up from somewhere beyond the tall grass wall rising on the far bank. Not far away, either.

A bang reached her ears. It sounded like a cannon's report, but it had a ringing undertone to it, too, that put her in mind of the sound she'd been making altogether too much of, whanging on rails this past hour.

“Oh, thank Gaia!” she exclaimed. “It's Ryan!”

“What on Earth makes you jump to that conclusion, Krysty?” Mildred demanded from the shore, where she was tending to a teenage swamper who'd
gotten his hand mashed by a rail. No bones broken, though. “That's not your—uh—intuition kicking up, is it?”

Krysty laughed and shook her head. She felt her living strands of hair twining in among each other like happy snakes. If such a thing existed.

“Who else could cause that much mayhem?” she asked.

The smoke changed color, or rather was joined by dirtier-looking smoke.

“Wood fire, looks like,” J.B. observed.

Despite the press of work, everybody stood and watched. There wasn't much to see, but almost at once came a flurry of blasterfire.

“What do you think it is?” a swamper woman asked.

“If I had to,” J.B. said, “I'd say somebody sent a patrol boat up a creek mebbe a quarter mile north of this one, and that it's come to no good end.”

The blasterfire ceased. The gray-tinged smoke increased as the whiter stuff diminished. “Bet that was steam from a ruptured boiler,” J.B. said.

Mildred finished wrapping the kid's wounded hand in a bandage of clean cloth she'd retrieved from her med kit. “Try not to mess it up any more, is the best advice I can give,” she told him. He thanked her and headed left to join his kin.

Krysty sighed and hefted the sledgehammer. She felt a constant stirring in her guts now that was either the effects of rads and heavy metal accumulation, or was her imagination letting her know what it thought those poisons were doing to her body. She felt fatigued
all the time, too. Whatever was happening to the north was happening without her or any of her friends being able to do a single thing to affect it. But the work here had to get done, fast.

“Do you really think Ryan's involved with that mess up there?” Mildred called to her.

A bright flash lit the sky beyond the tall grass. Another, bigger ball of smoke shot skyward. The tops of the grass actually bowed toward them with a shock wave, although it passed over the
Queen
. Or at least Krysty didn't feel it from the deck. They heard the boom of a major explosion.

Brown eyes wide, Mildred stood watching the latest ball of smoke rise into the clear blue sky.

“Right,” she said. “Totally Ryan.”

* * *

T
HE SECOND THING
Ryan noticed was that Jones had a knife in his teeth. The right side of his face was a raw, bloody mess. Apparently he'd gotten over the side without being chilled by the live steam leak, but he had not done so without cost.

Taking out the knife with his right hand, he put his left down in the bilges and catapulted himself right at Ryan.

Ryan simply let go of the side of the boat and slid back into the water.

His side of the vessel promptly whipped up, without his weight to counterbalance all of Jones's being put on the other side at once. Ryan heard a satisfying thwack, as of a side-to-side bench hitting the enraged and heat-flayed face of the other man. Then he heard
scrabbling, as if Jones was desperately trying to stop the boat from capsizing.

Don't want to go back in the water, do you? Ryan thought. It couldn't have felt good on his burns. And while Ryan didn't know if crocs could taste blood in the water the way sharks did, he wouldn't have bet any part of himself he liked they
couldn't
.

Jones stopped the boat from flipping over toward him. Ryan reached up and grabbed the gunwale. Yanking the boat toward him, he heaved himself up and over the side.

The
Doria
exploded with a sky-busting bang. Shock waves set the rowboat to rocking perilously. Broken planks, chunks of metal and possibly body parts cartwheeled overhead and pelted the water around them. The two men ignored it all, intent only on chilling each other.

Jones was all the way in the boat on his hands and knees. Ryan used his momentum to throw a straight right palm-heel. The would-be assassin managed to jerk his face far enough aside to avoid taking it full on the chin, but the evasion meant the heel of Ryan's hand grazed his right cheek and scraped along the bone hard. Jones gritted his teeth between peeled-back lips. But the agony of impact, salt and friction on his skinned flesh made him grunt.

His momentary distraction allowed Ryan to slam his right elbow down on Jones's knife hand. Fingers opened and let go of the Ka-Bar-style blade.

Jones pounded a left hammer-fist into the back of Ryan's head, making his vision swim.

Ryan rolled onto his back. He grabbed the shoulders of Jones's camo blouse and lifted.

Anticipating Ryan's intention to raise him and pitch him overboard, Jones grabbed a bench with his still-functional left hand, clamped his elbows hard against the side of the boat and began heaving himself forward with all his considerable and scarcely diminished strength.

Except that wasn't Ryan's intention. The treacherous chief did exactly what Ryan wanted him to. The one-eyed man was no weakling. But he preferred to do as much of his fighting as possible in his mind. Going strength-to-strength with an opponent when it wasn't absolutely necessary was macho posturing—a loser's game.

Instead he sat up hard, pulling Jones in the direction the other man was pushing. Jones twisted his body hard, trying to escape when he felt himself being drawn inexorably toward his foe. Unbalanced, Ryan fell onto his right side.

He planted his boot soles against his side of the boat and used the power of his legs to keep jackknifing and drawing Jones in. The chief got his left arm crooked around his adversary's neck and tried to crush his windpipe. Ryan got his chin down and blocked the move.

Ryan's idea, unless he found an opening right directly, was to drag both of them over his side of the boat and take his chances on grappling in the water. Jones was bleeding. Ryan felt blood warm and slick on his right palm. The CPO was hurt, painfully if not seriously.
Ryan was not. After a life spent traversing the Deathlands, Ryan was actually more ready to pit his endurance against any other man's than his strength. He liked his chances here.

He felt the other man reach out with his right arm. Instantly he knew Jones was groping for his knife with his good hand. Meanwhile he felt the relentless closing of Jones's left arm squeezing his chin up and out of position to save his throat. Grabbing his opponent's left biceps with his left hand, he clutched for his other arm with his right.

His fingers brushed a sleeve. Before Jones could react, Ryan had his forearm in a claw grip. He pulled the captive limb toward him, away from where he reckoned the knife might be.

And Jones used his own trick on him. When Ryan pulled his arm, he didn't pull back. He pushed.

Instantly his right hand gripped Ryan's face and tried to pull his head up so he could close the fatal circle around his throat. Ryan reached up and clutched at the hand. It felt as if it were made of iron, and driven by hydraulics. He might have been draining out faster than Ryan, but fury gave him double strength.

And then the crocodile hit the boat.

Furiously struggling for his life, Ryan at first thought the impact was his opponent inadvertently kicking the far gunwale. Then he realized the small craft was rocking far too much for it to be that.

Bringing a great slog of water with it, a croc that had to have been a dozen feet long burst out of Dead Man's Creek and flopped into the boat with jaws agape.
The toothy trap snapped shut on the back of Jones's shirt.

Instantly the croc slid back into the water, its bulk pulling Jones inexorably along with it. Ryan let go of him to grab parts of the boat and hang on for dear life.

For a moment Jones kept his death grip on Ryan's head. The one-eyed man once again felt his chin slipping out of the way of the man closing his left arm.

Jones lost his hold. The croc peeled him away from Ryan and dragged him out of the boat.

But somehow Jones managed to clamp his right hand on the gunwale and hold on despite the immense weight of the crocodile trying to pull him free. His eyes stared at Ryan in desperation from his half-seared face.

“Please,” he said. “Help me!”

“You and the croc deserve each other,” Ryan said. He kicked the clutching fingers hard. Bones broke. Jarvis Jones howled as he was plucked away.

The waters of Dead Man's Creek closed over his cries.

Ryan lay in the bottom of the boat breathing hard for several minutes.

Then he gathered the oars and started rowing back toward the Sippi, never looking back.

* * *

“R
ECKONED YOU
'
D TURN
up about now,” J.B. called as Ryan—running on fumes—rowed the last few feet toward the cleared southern shore where the
Queen
lay aground, sheathed in red iron. “Now that the hard work is done and all.”

The little beach was full of people, far more than the ones he'd left behind. Several folks he didn't know wearing knee-length shorts and T-shirts splashed into the shallows to help him from the boat when he suddenly could not hold his arms up anymore. “Thanks for helping me and all,” he told them as they guided him up onto dry land. “But who in the name of glowing nuke shit are you people?”

“Funny you should mention that,” said a tall gangly black man with an off-center smile in an off-center face who was standing nearby. “We're swampers.”

“Swampers?” Ryan shook his head as if that might clear out the cobwebs. It only made the world spin around him and made him want to puke. He hoped he was just exhausted to the point of dizziness, and not concussed. “No disrespect or anything, but aren't you supposed to be chilling us?”

“They're friends,” J.B. said. “Long story.”

“Ryan!”

He lifted his head, which was showing a marked tendency to drop forward, to see Krysty leap from the tugboat's bow and come running toward him with red hair flying.

“Best not jump into my arms,” he warned. “I'll fall right down.”

She hugged him, but gently. She looked up at his face with green eyes glowing and said, “I knew you'd come back.”

“What took you so long?” demanded Mildred, who debarked the boat more deliberately than her friend and walked toward the pair.

“It's a long story. What happened to the fireblasted boat, J.B.? Looks like a bridge fell on it.”

“Funny you should say that,” Mildred said.

“Long story,” J.B. repeated, and then Krysty dragged Ryan's mouth toward hers for a kiss.

He didn't resist.

“So, let me get this straight, J.B.,” Ryan said. “You're telling me this story about the Confederates building themselves an ironclad in the middle of a nuking cornfield might not even be
true
?”

“That's about the size of it,” the Armorer admitted.

The
Mississippi Queen
looked as if somebody had tried to build a long tent on her deck out of railroad rails, but had neglected to pull them together at the top to close it off. Its rail had been covered in hunks of U-beams that had been knocked off the railway bridge by long-ago earthquakes. Random pieces of bridge trusses and other steel scrap had been stuffed in here and there to seal up the armor shell. Mostly. The front ob port had been left clear of major armor, but was covered in sections of decorative but strong-looking steel scrollwork, open enough to see through. Ryan vaguely remembered having seen work like it on the railway bridge. The wheelhouse entrance remained an open oblong. The whole thing struck him as half nightmare, half inspiration, and it was all held together with nothing but baling wire and sheer gall.

Ryan had spent the past hour sitting on the grass while Mildred stood over him and made him drink a lot
of water, and then set about what Joe Trombone called “tinkering up his bruises,” Joe being the long drink of water who had first greeted Ryan ashore. He was leader of the swampers who had helped J.B. carry out his insane scheme, along with a broad woman named Ermintrude. The whole time Krysty had sat by his side, not touching him, as she could see he was one giant mass of bruises, and that any contact would be painful. She did urge him to eat some crocodile jerky.

He was so hungry that the awful stuff tasted good to him. Thinking about certain of the monsters' recent meals actually made him feel better about eating it. On the one hand, the bastards had it coming. On the other, it felt like victory by proxy, of sorts.

He shook his head. “I have to admire your audacity, J.B.,” he said. “Not to mention your unlooked-for abilities to bullshit people into carrying out your crazy schemes.”

“He does remind one of Hernán Cortés, in ways,” Doc commented.

Ryan was surrounded by most of the surviving members of the
Queen
's crew, his companions, plus a whole horde of the swampers, who turned out not to be red-eyed cannie monsters with filed teeth, but folks who appeared to be normal, aside from having a general unhealthy look. They seemed glad for an excuse to take a break, and no wonder.