Apocalypse Unborn (20 page)

Jak would have followed Ryan Cawdor into the jaws of hell, so he didn’t even blink at driving headlong into the middle of the stickie column. At last they were moving, and about to make solid contact with their main opposition. Long shadows and hard gusts of wind swept over them as they ran down the slope and into the volcanic bowl. The shadows and gusts seemed to single out Jak in particular. Again and again, the cruel black talons snatched out, trying to rip off the top of his head. Perhaps the lizard birds knew which one of the companions had taken out their kin.

The albino ignored them. The Wazls’ swoops were furious but nothing close to all-out attacks. The birds had small brains, for sure, but they weren’t triple stupes. They had seen what he was capable of and kept well out of his range.

Something the stickies could not do.

Using his fists, his feet and his AK-47 bayonet, Jak laid into the muties like a white-maned whirlwind. Though sharpened and resharpened so many times that its true edge almost met the blood gutter, the dagger-pointed Soviet steel had many more deaths left in it.

He lashed out with the predark bayonet, plunging it four inches deep below an oncoming stickie’s sternum, then he ripped the blade down and out. The blindingly fast strike left the gutted monster on its knees, mewling.

Holding back on his foot speed, Jak loped along behind Krysty’s right shoulder. The ground underfoot was slick with gore and cluttered with dropped weapons and broken bodies. He was actually skating on the gore in places. Painful death was just a slip of the boot away. To go down was to be set upon and torn apart.

Jack could feel the momentum of their charge building. He let himself be sucked into the maelstrom of close combat. Reacting, blocking, thrusting. But always moving forward, always advancing. The chilling wasn’t the most important thing. What was important was the capture of territory, breaking the back of stickie control. It was his kind of fight. He shifted his hands and feet into overdrive.

He was so quick with that sliver of ComBloc steel he didn’t have to slash his opponents like Krysty or Mildred. In a blur of white, silver and red, the AK bayonet flicked over the top of the stickies’ guards, stabbing, twisting, darting in and out.

Jak wasn’t counting kills. He was hard focused on keeping his position in the formation and on taking out the muties that entered his range. The ones he missed were targets for the islanders.

Captain Eng ran on his right flank, wielding the replica cavalry saber. Along with his crew, Eng was bellowing some islander gibberish. Jak liked the sound of it—rhythmic, deep, resonant and menacing. He found himself chanting along with the islanders, even though he didn’t know what the words meant or exactly how to pronounce them.

“Pah-two! Pah-two! Wha-kan-garo!”

To the beat of the war chant, Jak slapped aside an outthrust sucker hand and rammed the bayonet into an undefended windpipe. The blade darted in and out, the point just grazing the interior spine. In cross section, the Soviet steel had a diamond shape. When the bayonet stabbed, it opened a wound that would never close.

The lids blinked shut over the stickie’s black shark eyes. Dark blood squirted out the corners of its mouth and jetted between the gaps in its clenched teeth.

Ryan’s spearpoint pushed into the heart of the stickie column. Ahead lay a field of the fallen. When Jak saw the muties crouched over their victims, his fist tightened on the bayonet’s cross-hatched grip. As the companions bore down on them, the stickies straightened, reluctant to leave the feast. Some of the fallen men were still alive, helpless, already horribly mutilated. Thrashing, moaning, howling, they begged for death. But there was no time for mercy chilling. At the last moment, the stickies scattered to either side of Ryan’s blade, moving low and quick, giving up ground.

Jak saw J.B. crack open the skull of the stickie that Krysty had deflected, but missed the second mutie paying J.B. back by yanking off his fedora. At the Armorer’s shouted warning, he glanced over his shoulder and caught Captain Eng slicing off half the stickie’s head in a single blow.

From the way the islander was grinning at J.B. with those sharpened teeth of his, Jak figured he was going to try to put on the recaptured hat. an act that would have stretched it beyond any use, except maybe as a chamber pot.

After a couple of strides Eng relented, returning the hat to its rightful owner with a flip of the wrist.

J.B. caught the fedora, and jammed it back on his sweat-matted head, his lips moving in an unbroken string of curses.

As the stickies shuffled out the companions’ path, they blundered into the blades and bludgeons of the recruits. Jak and the others spread the wedge wider, trapping the muties between hammer and anvil. What was left of the cohesion of their column disintegrated as individual stickies were ruthlessly chopped down.

The survivors had no exit, and no time to regroup.

Jak waded in, kicking and stabbing, his frenzy forcing the muties to sidestep under the falling hammers.

The collapse of recruits came even faster. One minute they were holding their own, the next they were down, buried under heaps of pale bodies and frantically ripping hands.

As Jak began to pull back, a lunging stickie managed to grab him by the arm. The sucker hand felt like a tourniquet around his bicep. It shut off the flow of blood and made his fingers go numb. Jak’s skin burned under the rows of squirming suckers.

The albino plunged his knife through the middle of one dead black eye. The eight-inch dagger came to a sudden stop as its point rammed into the back of the stickie’s skull. The mutie tried to twist and get at him, snapping its needle teeth. The ooze of adhesive was starting to take hold. Savagely, Jak worked ComBloc steel back and forth in the mutie’s eye socket, giving its brains a good brisk stir.

The sucker fingers dropped away without attaching, and the stickie slumped dead to the ground.

Continuing to retreat, Jak bumped backs with Mildred. The good doctor looked like holy hell. The beads of stickie blood on her face, arms and plaited hair had mixed with sweat and dripped down the front of her OD T-shirt. Her BDU pants were likewise striped and spattered with gore. Her eyes were wide, and she was panting hard through her mouth.

Jak fought beside his friends, protecting their flanks with his feet and blade, as they protected his.

The music suddenly stopped, but the battle raged on.

Forty feet away, the islanders were stomping and chanting, circling around in a wheel of death.

Under his breath, Jak was chanting, too.

Then the cone doors banged back and the grim music started up again.

Whatever was coming next, it was on its way.

A Wazl dive-bombed the islander circle, catching one of the sailors across the forehead with a claw. As blood gushed out, the lizard bird smelled it and immediately reversed course for another pass. As it flapped and turned, it hung stationary for a split second.

That was all the time Jak needed. In a move too fast to follow, he shook another throwing blade out of his sleeve and launched it at a slight up angle. The knife slammed the Wazl in the side of the head, right behind its earhole. It wasn’t a killing strike, but it brought the bird down hard.

For a moment or two the wounded Wazl struggled to stay in the air, violently shaking its head and frantically threshing its long wings. In the process it drifted from the dead center of the battlefield, clearing the waving islander swords, crashlanding on the stickies who were attacking them.

The lizard bird’s wings batted down the muties. Its legs churned, talons clawing as it tried to jump back into the air. Whatever was beneath it as it thrashed about, it tore to ribbons. Unable to fly off, the Wazl took out its insane fury on everything in range of its jaws. The serrated teeth made short work of the stunned muties. And when there were no more stickies within reach, it turned upon itself, bending its long neck, ripping into its own breast, biting out its own heart.

Ryan had come across plenty of suicides in his time, most so long gone that he’d located them by the perfume and circling buzzards: gun eaters, vein slashers, neck stretchers, cliff jumpers. The hellscape had a bottomless appetite for human souls. For some the only escape from hopeless lives of hardship, toil and tragedy was death by their own hand. Ryan had happened onto some triple-bad botched jobs that the scavengers large and small had finished, but he’d never seen a creature eat its own heart before.

After the grounded Wazl twisted its long neck into a U, it tore through the leathery skin on its chest in a couple of snaps, and kept right on biting, through layers of muscle, through bone. It bit until its head was buried past the eyes in its own chest. That’s how it died, looking inward.

Was the lizard bird able to separate its lust for blood from the pain it was causing itself? Was inflicting pain so pleasurable that it could ignore the pain it was suffering?

Interesting questions. Ryan would have studied the spectacle more closely if the situation had been less grave.

Having taken out about half of the norm recruits in their counterattack, the stickies swarmed closer to the survivors, stopping just out of blade reach. They cocked their bald heads this way and that. The kissing and cooing sounds they made couldn’t be heard over the loud music. Four and five deep, they ringed the companions, waving their arms.

The other surviving recruits had quickly circled up like the islanders and the companions. It was the only way to successfully fend off stickie attacks. The norms that tried to go it alone or in pairs were immediately overwhelmed and pulled apart by sucker hands.

Ryan guessed the number of norms still able to put up at fight was close to thirty-five. There were at least three times that many stickies jumping around the bowl.

Over the tops of the bobbing bald heads, Ryan saw Magus’s second wave making its exit from the cone. Swampies marched to the gloomy fanfare, four abreast and maybe ten deep. He could smell them coming, even over all the spilled blood and guts. The stumpy little men waved wooden clubs studded with long steel spikes, short-handled battle-axes and half-size broadswords. The ankle biters’ favorite tactic was to cut for the legs, bringing their foes down to size, revenge on a too tall world.

Following the swampies out the doors, and towering over them, were fifteen or twenty scalies. They waddled forward in a ragged single-file line, males and females naked to the waist. They carried no weapons. Scalies were not a particularly courageous species, except when hungry.

These looked hungry.

The mass of stickies that encircled the companions feinted and juked, sometimes knocking one another down in their excitement, but with a few exceptions they held back their attack. They were waiting for reinforcements to arrive.

The scattered clumps of recruits closer to the cone were the first to feel the sting of the combined mutie force. Stickies and swampies rushed them in unison. It was a high-low affair. The norms fighting stickies left their lower bodies unprotected. The swampies cut hamstrings with their axes and swords, and shattered kneecaps with their spiked clubs. The norms trying to beat back the swampies had to bend over to reach them, which allowed stickies to leap on their unprotected backs.

The small bands of recruits lasted a minute or two before being penetrated and overrun.

Their job completed, the swampies moved on, all business. The sour-faced muties didn’t eat human flesh, perhaps because they themselves were too close to human genetically, or too smart. The swampies didn’t look smart with those heavy brows and block-shaped heads, but they were a crafty race. They knew the flesh of some men had a hell-blasted, turn-your-brains-into-goo taint and avoided partaking of it.

The scalies waddled onto the scene seconds after the swampies and stickies had left. They moved through the heaps of wounded with their little pig eyes alight, like it was an all-you-can-eat buffet. Squatting, they throttled the few surviving norms with their bare hands, then started pulling off warm snacks, snapping spines and sucking out the living marrow.

Ryan could see the handwriting on the wall. The companions couldn’t hold out for long against a joint mutie attack, either. It was a matter of reach, and sheer numbers. If one of the group went down, the formation would be broken and they would all go down.

The music blaring from the big island stopped, then restarted after a short pause. More enemies were on the way.

The swampies marched toward the companions, shaking their bloody weapons in the air. They trooped through the ranks of the stickies, who sensed the nearness of victory and cavorted accordingly, dancing on the bones of the dead. Ryan turned toward the islanders’ fighting circle and bellowed at the top of his lungs.

“Eng!” he shouted. “We’ve got to hook up!”

The scar-faced captain nodded. He had seen the same disastrous turn of events and had come to the same conclusion. Eng immediately ordered his crew to close ranks with the companions. The two groups of fighters merged and blended together, shoulder to shoulder, facing outward, forming a larger and stronger defensive ring.

When the swampies attacked they were again joined by the stickies, but this time the outcome of the mad rush was different. The sabers of the islanders kept the stumpy muties from getting close enough to fracture kneecaps and slice tendons. The swampies that tried to duck under the sweep of the long blades lost limbs.

As they had done before, the stickies leaped onto the norm fighters, but with no exposed backs to take advantage of, they ended up falling on swordpoints, skewering themselves to the hilt. Their feet a yard off the ground, they squirmed like worms on a hook.

Captain Eng had his own savage technique for disengaging a skewered enemy. Instead of pulling his sword out or booting the mutie off its point, he drove down with his shoulder, leaning on the handle with both hands. He rammed the stickie’s feet flat into the rock, putting all his weight behind the slam, which forced the saber’s blade to slice through the mutie’s pelvis and come out cleanly between its legs.

As much as Ryan liked the captain’s efficiency and style, and the fact that a stickie with a split pelvis had jumped its last jump, he couldn’t duplicate the maneuver himself. His panga’s blade was half as long as the saber and the islander had a good hundred pounds on him. Ryan used his blade point and edge to hack down the pale creatures that threw themselves at him.

Despite being outnumbered, the companions and islanders held their own, and turned back the muties’ initial charge.

When the swampies retreated a little to regroup, the stickies pulled back, as well. Behind them, the scalies waited in the wings, mountains of flab sitting on cushions of the dead, conserving their energy. The pendulous, drooping folds of their skin gave off an iridescent sheen. Their expressions were alert, expectant. They weren’t satisfied with what they had already eaten. They were never satisfied. There was always room for more.

A half dozen of the swampies turned on one of the larger scalies, a five-hundred-pound bull. They surrounded it and began to prod it with their weapons. They shouted for it to get up and fight. The seated behemoth tried to swat them away, and when it couldn’t, when the swampies started to draw blood with their edges, it howled and its face turned red. The swampies kept on poking the scalie and yelling until it rose to its feet and started lumbering toward the circled defenders.

As it lumbered, it picked up speed.

And all the swampies and many of the stickies fell in behind its vast bulk.

The strategy was simple. Break through the ring with an unstoppable, living battering ram, then attack and chill the norms from two sides at once.

The plan would have worked if it hadn’t been for the Calcutta cavalry swords.

“Let him in!” Eng screamed to his crew.

As the captain stepped out of the way, so did Ryan. The circle opened, then it closed, slamming shut right behind the scalie.

The swampies and stickies trying to ride on its coattails found themselves too close to sharp steel. Those that couldn’t jump back were chopped down and stomped flat.

The scalie had closed its eyes a split second before it made contact with the circle. After taking four strides forward, when there was no resistance, it stopped and opened its eyes. It looked around and saw it was surrounded. And all alone.

Eng shouted a command and four of his crew turned away from the edge of the circle, which instantly closed ranks again. The four formed a second circle, this one around the stock-still scalie.

“As you can see, I have no weapon,” it said, holding out its blood-rimed hands, making the gross flesh of its upper arms ripple and sway. “Those little swampie shits made me attack you. I had no choice. They would have chilled me. Please protect me from them. I mean you no harm.”

The gore and bone marrow smeared across its cheeks and chins made the last statement suspect, to say the least.

One of the crew pivoted from the hips and swung down his saber in a tight, downward arc. Bright steel cut through baggy, tentlike pants, and slammed into buttery-soft flab. The scalie shrieked as it lost thirty pounds of excess weight from its backside. The clean slice exposed a thick rind of white fat, and bloodred flesh beneath. The other crewmen spun to build their momentum, then struck the huge mutie again and again. The blows rained down on it from all sides. Swords flashed and the scalie’s monumental load of flesh sloughed from the bone.

It was the islander diet. It made you thinner in a hurry, but it also made you dead.

A much reduced, virtually unrecognizable scalie collapsed amid mounded hunks of his own flesh.

Above their heads, Ryan heard the buzzing of insects, loud enough to be audible over the music. Flies to the feast, which struck him as odd as they were so far out at sea.

Then an islander to his right let out a scream. He backed into the middle of the ring, clutching at his bare stomach with both hands. The man was shivering head to foot, every tendon clenched, like he was about to shake apart. As he turned, Ryan saw a thick lashing shape trapped between his hands, a black segmented tongue jutting from the center of his impressive belly. As the sailor tried to pull the thing out of his stomach, a thousand bristling legs along its underside were frantically burrowing in.

Captain Eng stepped forward and slashed down with his sword. The well-aimed blow struck the black-shelled creature’s twisting rear. The blade bounced off its back without cutting. The shell didn’t even dent.

“Patu ia!”
the man squealed as the mutie squirmed through his white-knuckled grip, disappearing into his torso.

Under the circumstances there was only one way he could be helped.

Eng lifted the sailor’s thick, black braid out of the way, and with a single swing of the saber cleanly cut off his head.

A
FEW MINUTES OF CLOSE
combat confirmed Mildred’s belief that the companions had landed themselves smack in the middle of a death camp. The little pile of volcanic rock was an amphitheater, a natural Coliseum, and the ex-mercies, the former sec men and the mutie hunters were slaughtering and being slaughtered for the amusement of an emperor who sat in safety high up in the royal box seats. Undergunned gladiators were pitted against the most terrible and terrifying beasts of the hellscape. Mildred knew that with Magus playing Caesar, there would be no winners in the contest. It was going to be thumbs-down for everyone.

Like the other companions, Mildred was still struggling with the sudden loss of Doc Tanner. It was like losing a finger from her right hand. The old man had been fighting by her side and covering her back for quite some time, and she had done the same for him. That he could leave just like that, with no word of explanation, no goodbyes, was very hard for her to take. She and Tanner had had their headbutting moments in the past, he could be an infuriating, pedantic old fart at times, but they had come to respect each other in the end. Knowing Doc as she did, knowing his courage, his integrity, his intelligence, she knew he had to have had a good reason for running off. But for the life of her she couldn’t guess what that reason could have been.

Doc had left before Magus revealed the real destiny of his “army,” so he had no way of knowing that it would come to this. The sheer, grinding weight of the chilling was unspeakable, and she had a sense that it would end only when the last norm fell.

Mildred was not a “blade person.” She much preferred to do her chilling with centerfire cartridges, from a distance of at least ten feet. Even with a seventeen-inch Enfield bayonet, there was more personal contact than she found palatable. It wasn’t just a matter of the backspray flying from the blade’s long blood gutter, or the matter of the stabbee’s last foul breath gusting into her face as she pierced it through the heart. There was also the problem of the dying party releasing the entire contents of its bowels at once. In the case of the stickies, who came mostly naked into battle, the problem was not only apparent, but underfoot. Mildred wasn’t the least bit squeamish about taking lives, as she couldn’t have survived very long in Deathlands if she had been, but she knew enough about the ways of hostile bacteria and viruses to be concerned about blood and other biological materials flying into her face and eyes and open cuts. As with the
taua
onboard ship, she had to forget everything she knew about infection and get the chilling done.