Apocalypse Unborn (8 page)

Seeing what they were up against, a few more passengers decided to return to their bunks. Most of the rest looked torn between following their suddenly sleepy comrades and fighting the
taua,
but a few of the more lunatic mercies leaned over the gunwhales, aiming their weapons at the water, hoping that another slick head would pop up.

From the edge of the light, Ryan saw a V-wake shooting toward the middle of the hull, beneath it a streaking oblong shape. It looked like a beige torpedo homing in for the kill.

“Get back!” Eng ordered the overeager mercies.

As the captain spoke, the charging
taua
exploded from the water. Using the power of its tail and its surging forward momentum, it leaped high in the air. At the peak of its arc, it was five feet above the gunwhale.

For an instant it looked like it was trying to jump onto the deck, then it dropped, crashing its full weight onto the back of an outstretched—and momentarily frozen—mercie. It landed with its five-fingered sucker hands latched on to the seat of its victim’s pants and the base of its tail draped over the man’s head. The tail’s tip had transverse lobes, like the flukes of a porpoise or whale. A ridge of hard knobs rose up under the skin along the middle of its back, like cornrows of tumors, the result of a head-to-tail muscular contraction. From its blowhole came an awful, piping hiss.

Before anyone could get off a clear shot, or otherwise come to the mercie’s aid, he was pulled headfirst over the side. He and the
taua
hit the water together and sank out of sight beneath the living shoal.

The mercie never came up for air, but almost immediately bits of him began to surface. Blood billowed and bubbled from the depths; swirling in it were tiny shreds of flesh and sinew.

“Back!” Captain Eng screamed into the megaphone, urgently waving with his Government Colt blaster. “They’re coming!”

And come they did, as the passengers and crew jumped away from the perimeter. Instead of launching themselves over the rails and onto the deck, something the
taua
were clearly capable of doing, they threw their bodies against the sides of the ship. Hundreds of booming impacts set the cables humming, decks vibrating and loose objects rolling about. The chorus of blowhole kisses grew louder as more and more of the creatures jumped from the water to the hull, clinging there with sucker hands and feet.

The
taua
couldn’t tear through the riveted iron plate, but their shifting, rapidly building weight made the vessel sway alarmingly from side to side.

Steadying themselves on whatever came to hand, the passengers and crew pulled back farther, to the middle of the sloping deck, and closed ranks. Some knelt, some stood as they faced the gunwhales with raised, cocked blasters.

Wave after wave of the creatures struck the ship, then the sound of the impacts changed. No longer flesh on metal.

Flesh on flesh.

Having covered every square inch of the hull above waterline, they were slamming onto each other.

Then the
Taniwha tea
began to groan and creak from deep in its iron bowels. Here and there, rivets in the deck plating started popping loose.

Ryan realized what was happening. The
taua
’s main force was crawling from the water, crawling over the backs and heads of those that had attached themselves to the hull. Combined weight of this oncoming, living mass quickly pulled the ship lower, bringing the main deck four or five feet closer to the sea. The sheer number of bodies required was mind-boggling.

The one-eyed man wasn’t alone in the sudden realization. A handful of passengers bolted for the companionway and the relative safety of their bunks. Everyone else seemed frozen in place, unable or unwilling to turn their backs on what was about to happen.

Only when the
taua’
s 360-degree launch platform was complete did they attack en masse. Upon some silent signal, from all sides at once, they leaped from the shoulders and backs of their hull-stuck fellows, bounding over the gunwhales.

Which tripped the switch of battle.

In the first seconds it was possible to see, if not to hear.

Basterfire reports sledge hammered the sides of Ryan’s head. Autofire, single shots, centerfires, muzzleloaders, all cut loose at once, blowing apart the initial wave of
taua
, sending a slurry of blood, flesh and guts flying in all directions. Multiple gunshot impacts hurled decapitated bodies and whip-sawn torsos backward and overboard.

Ryan keyholed his focus dead ahead, over the SIG’s sights. Finding targets was no problem. He ripped off head shots one after another, as fast as he could pull the trigger—instantaneous skull-shattering kills. In less than fifteen seconds of rapid fire, the SIG’s slide locked back, ejection port smoking.

As he dumped the spent mag and dug in his pocket for a fresh one, another rush of
taua
leaped onto the deck, stumbling over their fallen, soaking up autofire. Even the mortally wounded, the blinded, the gut shot somehow found the strength to press forward into the teeth of the withering fusillade and certain destruction. In five seconds a hundred died, their blow holes spouting blood, then another hundred, and another.

Ryan grimaced as he slapped the full mag home. He knew the reason for their ardor.

There was a blood feast on offer.

Already their spilled gore flowed like syrup into the scuppers; ravening, repeated bullet impacts aerosolized their flesh into a pink mist that incited the creatures that jumped through it to an even greater frenzy.

Stickies were like that, too, Ryan knew. Because there was something horribly wrong with the wiring of their mutie brains, they got high on death.

Even their own.

Ryan raised the SIG and snapfired into the gaping, teeth-lined black maw of an oncoming
taua
. He stepped aside, letting the suddenly brain-free body hurtle past him, fountaining red from its blowhole. The creature following right on its heels dropped like a stone at Ryan’s feet. The single slug had zipped through the mutie, slapping into the second
taua
’s head, cutting an irregular, slotlike hole between its eyes. As it lay on its back dying, its legs kicked wildly. They were much longer and larger at the thigh than they appeared under water. When folded for swimming, they tucked into a kind of depression, a bone-plated wheelwell, that reduced drag.

This mutie species relied on overwhelming numbers, not individual defenses, for its survival. Their relatively soft skulls were easily cored by Parabellum full-metal-jacket rounds, so Ryan concentrated on his shot placement, going for two-fers whenever the opportunity arose.

As other shooters dropped out of the fray to reload, the steady roar of basterfire became ragged. These lapses created gaps, cracks in the perimeter that allowed some
taua
to leap to the cables and up into the rigging. At the upper limit of the deck lamps’ light, through the haze of gunsmoke, they jumped back and forth from mast to mast like crazed flying squirrels.

Ryan ignored them, methodically taking out the closest targets to hand, clearing the deck in front of him. Long before the task was done, his SIG locked back again.

There seemed no end to them.

And there was no obvious organization to the attack. No field commanders led the suicide charges. Just ground pounders. Droves and droves of ground pounders. All of them working solo. All of them trying to get in their licks. Or bites. Looking for a taste of the red.

He quickly reloaded and resumed the close range wet work.

With no wind to drive it away, the gunsmoke around the knot of human fighters grew thicker and thicker. It became hard to breathe, and hard to pick out fresh targets as they cleared the rails, which meant the
taua
were dying at arm’s length. Blood mist coated Ryan’s hands, face and hair. He backhanded it from his one good eye.

As he did so, he glanced up and saw a mutie poised to leap from a yard arm into their midst. Ryan ripped off five shots, stitching them up its exposed belly. The
taua
slammed back against the canvas, and its stomach popped open like a dropped suitcase. Its underside was soft and thin-skinned, like a frog or a newt. A staggering wad of guts flopped from the gaping wound, and as the creature bounced off the sail and fell from its perch, the loops tangled and snagged on the yard’s cables. It slammed headfirst into the deck, trailing a forty-foot streamer of pink bowel.

Ryan dumped yet another empty mag—he was already four down. The passengers and crew who were shooting full-auto had gone through way more than that in the same space of time. Empty brass rolled everywhere underfoot. Some of the select-fire weapons had gotten so hot that chambered rounds were cooking off at six hundred per minute.

Uncontrolled, maximum cyclic rate autofire.

Just before it actually fell apart, Ryan sensed it was about to happen. The number of piled enemy dead. The gore stink, like molten copper. The unrelenting onslaught. The arm’s-length chilling range. It all combined to take a toll on the defenders’ confidence. As the endless minutes passed, their chill lust became fury, fury became desperation, and desperation became doubt.

A kneeling passenger to Ryan’s right had had enough and stood. Too quickly. The man right behind him was already tightening down on his scattergun’s trigger. The 10-gauge’s point-blank muzzle-blast took off the top of his head from the ears up, and hammered him face-first and flop-armed into the iron plate.

The plume of brains and skull fragments splattered across an oncoming
taua
’s chest. In the midst of battle, unable to stifle the urge, it paused to lick.

And was meat-grindered by crisscrossing AK fire.

The scattergunner broke his single-shot weapon and tried to thumb another high brass shell into the chamber. Before he could snap the breech closed, he was set upon. The
taua
had soft bellies but they were rad-blasted strong. The mutie clamped sucker hands on his face, then ripped it off like a tea towel.

The man just stood there, flat-footed, eyes bugging out through a white mask of shock, a white mask oozing pinpoints of red, watching as the
taua
fisted the face into its mouth.

The creature juked suddenly sideways, blown off its feet and onto the deck by half a dozen blasters. It was still chewing the face as it died.

Another
taua
darted in a blur left to right, grabbing the mutilated man around the waist and jumping, carrying him like a mannequin into the smoke and over the side.

If Ryan sensed impending disaster, the sea beasts sensed looming victory. They threw themselves even harder into the fray, and arm’s-length battle became hand-to-hand. Men were being pulled screaming out of the firing line and into the cloud of burned cordite and black-powder. Not just passengers, either. An islander mate, easily three hundred pounds of him, was hauled backward by the braided ponytail, into the pall. For a horrible instant he reappeared from the smoke. It looked like he’d been run over by a ten-ton wag. His right was arm torn off at the shoulder, and divots of flesh were missing from his face and bare chest. Sucker hands yanked him off his feet and he was gone.

With the tide clearly turning, Captain Eng cried, “Enough! That’s enough! Pull back!”

Ryan did a quick head check, making sure his friends had closed ranks. They had. Like him, they were misted with blood and peppered with the grit of gunshot residue. He stood his ground at the entrance to the for’c’ste companionway, putting up covering fire for the mass retreat until an islander shouldered him through the doorway, then shoved him ahead, down the steep stairs to the crowded, low-ceilinged galley.

Behind them on the steps, the last man through the companionway slammed and bolted the hatch.

The
taua
hurled their bodies against it, trying to batter it down.

Not a chance.

The surviving crew and passengers started yelling, laughing and backslapping, congratulating one another on the slaughter of slaughters and their nimble, timely escape.

Their celebration was short-lived, silenced by the groan and shriek of metal directly above them.

The
taua
were pulling up the deck plates.

Creatures of nightmare cleared the gunwhales in prodigious, whistling bounds, their pale bellies underlit by the oil lamps’ glow.

Though Doc was accustomed to facing hellish nightmares come to life, this one was in a league all its own—a combination of the frenzied, chaotic attack, the volume of randomly hurtling bodies, and the proximity of sudden, violent death. Though sometimes Theophilus Algernon Tanner wished with all his soul that he was dead, wished he was one with his wife and children in the numbness of Eternity, oddly enough such thoughts never popped into his head in the heat of battle.

In combat, a much deeper, much more primitive urge took control of his lanky frame. Like a malarial fever, it raged in his brain. The man of science and philosophy, the man of reason, of history, of sentiment, seized the opportunity to flat-out retaliate. Every wrong done him by a cruel fate, he repaid in kind, and a hundredfold. He did this with his remarkably perfect teeth bared, his haggard face set in stone.

Left foot back, bracing himself with his ebony swordstick, he fired the LeMat one-handed, duelist style, adding its sonorous booms, blinding flash and jetting plumes of smoke to the melee. As the pistol design was single action, he had to recock it for each shot. The recoil wave lifted the muzzle of the heavy handblaster skyward, and as it dropped to horizontal he used the momentum of the fall to thumb back the hammer. Out of necessity, the melding of man and his device, the rhythm of his shooting was fluid, easy and relaxed. Unlike the mutie hunters on either side of him—the black man and his white-painted partner—who fired their M-16s full-auto, sweeping the gunwhales with 5.56 mm tumblers, Doc had an extra second or two to choose his next target.

The LeMat’s .44-caliber lead balls caught
taua
in midair, caught them as they landed, caught them square in head, throat and center chest. Though the weapon he fired was as old as he was, its knockdown power had not diminished over the years. His targets dropped to the deck, some from heights of fifteen feet or more, legs quivering in the throes of death. Only when he had emptied the nine chambers in the cylinder did he cock the .63-caliber undergun.

The LeMat’s shotgun barrel was designed for close-range, last-resort mayhem. Short in length, with an un-choked bore, its shot load fanned out as soon as it exited the muzzle. In this case, what fanned out were the small bits and pieces of metal Doc had scrounged up in his hellscape travels. There was nothing blue about these “whistlers.” They were the kind of stuff you might find in the bottom of a machine shop trash can. He had packed steel, brass and copper nuggets and shards into the muzzle-loader’s single chamber, along with a hefty dose of Deathlands’ best homegrown black-powder and enough cotton wadding to hold the charge in place.

Doc let a pair of
taua
s get within five yards of him, one slightly behind and to the right of the other, before he cut loose with the stubby scattergun barrel. He didn’t aim for one or the other, but between them. Three feet of flame belched forth, and the weapon bucked wildly against the tightest grip he could muster. The shot spread at a fifteen-foot range, shoulder to shoulder, across both bodies. The impact knocked the
taua
backward, hard onto their haunches. Blood sheeted down their chests from gaping throat wounds, but they died attacking each other, either confused by the terrible pain or excited by the spilled gore.

Even though Doc had a pair of spare .44-caliber cylinders in the pockets of his frock coat, the LeMat was a clumsy, time-consuming and dangerous weapon to reload in pitched, near-hand-to-hand combat. Attending to the scattergun barrel was out of the question. Accordingly, Doc was one of the first fighters on the deck to holster his sidearm and draw cold steel.

With a flourish, he pulled the rapier blade from its ebony sheath. Holding the swordstick’s scabbard in his left hand for balance, he lunged, meeting an onrushing
taua
’s charge. His perfectly timed thrust slid over the creature’s blocking wrist and the double-edged point probed six inches into the middle of its chest, just below its breastbone. In his trained hand, the blade had a tension, a presence, a life that was in part due to its external shape, to the blows that had forged it, in part to the alignment of its very molecules. The rapier yearned to penetrate flesh, and to penetrate it to the hilt.

Not this time.

As Doc drew back the flexible sword, with lightning back-and-forth twists of the wrist, he made the steel serpent’s tongue cut a figure eight through heart and lungs.

Or at least where he assumed were the creature’s heart and lungs. The purpose of breastbone being universal, the same for every species, norm or mutie: to protect the vitals at the body’s core. His figure eight had the desired effect, instantly reducing a live enemy to a heap of shuddering flesh.

He dealt with a half-dozen attackers in a similar manner, and in short order, sending them stumbling backward, their innards severed, over the growing pile of corpses.

As the
taua
pressed harder and harder, throwing themselves at their intended victims, Doc had to abandon his customary finesse with the long blade. He simply met the creatures as they launched themselves at him, letting their body weight fall on his upraised swordpoint, burying it. It was like spearing a cooked jacket potato with a steak knife. Doc pivoted on his back foot, dropping the swordpoint as the body swept past, and the blade slipped out. All in a single motion.

And back for more.

The Victorian swordsman remained clear-headed, fully aware of his surroundings, even while staring into the teeth of hell. It was as if he was looking down on himself from one of the yardarms, a spectator in his own fight for life. It didn’t escape his notice that the mutie hunters kneeling beside him were taking care of his business as well as their own. The kill zones of their assault rifles overlapped at the rail, and, in so doing, took out about half of the
taua
he otherwise would have faced, leaving him to do battle with onesies and twosies, as opposed to threesies and foursies.

Why they were looking after his well-being, he had no inkling. Elsewhere along the firing line it was every man for himself. Some were doing better than others. As Doc fought on, he saw passenger after passenger yanked over the side by the attackers, to certain death.

After the first islander was torn apart by the
taua
, the captain called for a retreat.

Doc felt strong hands gripping his elbows and biceps. Human hands, as luck would have it. Before he could shrug them off, the mutie hunters had turned him by main force and were driving him, stiff-legged, toward the for’c’sle’s entrance.

“Wait!” he protested, unwilling to leave the battlefield without his companions. “By the three Kennedys, wait!”

“No time,” the black man told him. Without another word, they bum-rushed him down the narrow flight of steps and into the galley.

Doc shook off their grip, his dignity ruffled. Bloody sword in hand, he watched the stairs, making sure that Ryan, Krysty, Mildred, Jak and J.B. made it safely down.

Only when they had did he turn to register a complaint about the rough handling, but the surviving passengers and crew started cheering their victory and he couldn’t make himself heard over the noise.

The shriek of deck rivets coming loose put an end to the hooting and yeehawing. The rows of fasteners were all that secured the iron plates overhead. Many of the flush-mounted rivets had been jarred and vibrated up from their sockets by the
taua’
s initial, hull-pounding onslaught. Which gave the attackers sucker-purchase along the edges of the tight-fitting plates.

A hundred blasters aimed point-blank at widening gaps in the creaking ceiling.

“No!” the islander captain howled at the passengers. “Put your blasters away! I don’t want any blasterfire from you belowdecks! You’ll end up chilling all of us with the ricochets and misses. Leave the shooting to my crew. They know what they’re doing. If the
taua
get in here, use your blades on them!”

Doc would have substituted “when” for the captain’s conditional “if.” The old man had little doubt that given their vast numbers, their physical strength and determination, and the ship’s weakened armor, the creatures were going to be among them shortly.

When they broke through, there were five or six simultaneous breaches and not in the obvious places, where the plates were visibly being rocked up and down. The
taua
were devilishly clever. Using the pry bars, chisels, shovel blades they had found on the deck, they had carefully levered loose entire rows of rivets, freeing some of the plates on all sides, plates that came away cleanly and suddenly. Without warning, pale bodies dropped through the ceiling, landing heavily on the tables and floor, effectively dividing the human fighters.

Despite the captain’s order, blasterfire exploded from all sides, with disastrous consequences to both
taua
and the ship’s defenders. Wild shots and through-and-throughs hit the galley’s iron walls, sparking, then zipping through the crowd. Men and
taua
dropped as if their strings had been cut.

The black mutie hunter hurled his full weight onto Doc’s back, driving him to his knees and out of the line of fire.

The islander crew turned on the frantic shooters with the steel-shod butts of their AKs, battering them into submission.

“Pull back!” Eng shouted, waving for everyone to retreat behind the for’c’sle’s bulkhead door.

It was easier said than done because more
taua
kept pouring through the gaps in the plating. The galley’s low ceiling restricted their jumping, otherwise the battle belowdecks would have been one-sided and short.

The black mutie hunter and his comrade stepped between Doc and three pairs of grasping sucker hands. The old man couldn’t bring his sword into play—there wasn’t room overhead to swing it or space between the two big men to drive home a thrust.

His tall topknot mashing against the ceiling, the black man whipped a knife back and forth. Not just any knife. It was a SOG Desert Dagger. Its six-and-a-quarter-inch, 440A stainless, double-edged blade had a blood gutter, a steel pommel and Kraton grips. The white-painted man had an even bigger knife from the same manufacturer, a Tigershark model. Its heavy, nine-inch blade was designed for chopping and hacking. As with the pair’s mint-condition long and handblasters, Doc knew it was not run-of-the-mill mutie hunter armament. In the shortlist of the most lusted after predark edged treasures, their stabbers were right up there.

As quick as the
taua
were, the mutie hunters were quicker. To Doc it seemed the black man no more than twitched his right arm, and the belly of the beast before him suddenly came unzipped from crotch to breastbone. His partner had a much heavier touch. As guts flopped steaming to the floor, he lopped off first one, then the other sucker hand reaching for his chest. The third strike across the front of the throat all but decapitated the attacking creature, and slung its thick blood across the tabletops.

The black man turned and pushed Doc along the wall, toward the passenger cabin. “Move!” he said. As he spoke, another
taua
darted in and seized hold of the back of his huge bare arm.

Doc was almost nose to nose with him at that instant. He could see the astonished pain in the big man’s eyes.

With a single, chopping blow, the white mutie hunter severed the offending hand at the wrist, leaving it hanging by its suckers from his friend’s bicep. His second blow was to the heart, driving the long blade all the way through the creature’s torso.

Ripping the knife free, he shoved both his partner and Doc, hurrying them around the galley’s walls. Ahead of them, the crew wielded boat hooks like spears, jabbing to hold the
taua
back while the passengers slipped through the for’c’sle door.

Inside the cabin, among the other survivors, Doc was relieved to see his companions alive and unhurt. When the last islander stepped inside the doorway, the crew slammed shut the iron hatch and dogged it.

Doc could hear the thump, thump, thump of
taua
throwing themselves at the far side of the barrier. And the even heavier thuds as more of the creatures dropped feet-first into the galley.

“Don’t worry, they can’t get into this cabin,” the captain assured everyone. “The deck above us is protected by the bow’s superstructure, and that bulkhead is three inches thick.”

“What do we do now?” one of mercies said.

“We sit and wait until they decide to move on,” Eng told him. “See to your wounds and try to get some rest.”

The black mutie hunter stared at the
taua
hand still affixed to the back of his arm. He took hold of the stump and pulled. His ebony skin came with it, stretching from the ends of the sucker fingers. “Oh, shit…” he said.

“Perhaps I can be of assistance?” Doc said. “I have had some rudimentary medical training.”

“Be my guest,” the man said.

As best he could, Doc examined the join of fingertips to human flesh, then he drew back. “I’m going to have to cut the hand away to see how the fingers are attached to you,” he said. “May I borrow your knife?”