Читать книгу Shadow Fortress - James Axler - Страница 13

As the Pegasus floated away on the evening breeze, the companions shifted their backpacks to make some room and settled in for their flight. With no way to calculate airspeed, they didn’t have any idea how long the journey to Forbidden Island would take. Maybe only a few hours, but it could be much longer.

Time passed slowly, the moon traveling across the starry sky while the companions took turns catching short naps. There was little room in the rope basket, but they had lived in cramped quarters before and knew how to make do.

After the weapons had been cleaned and checked, the MRE envelopes were carefully ripped open, and the chow eaten cold. It was edible, but no more than that. Mildred tried to make coffee in a tin cup, and while the brown crystals dissolved satisfactorily, neither the sugar nor the powder cream would. She experimented with her butane lighter to no success and in the end poured the sodden mess overboard.

Pulling out a plastic safety razor, Jak dry shaved while standing guard duty, the scrape of the twin blades becoming fainter as he successfully removed his snowy beard.

Hoping nobody was watching, Dean rubbed a palm along his own chin but found only smooth skin. Nothing yet. Standing guard, Ryan caught the furtive motion and held back a grin. He remembered his first shave, and the bushy mustache he sported for a while as a teen.

Just then, something in the darkness caught Ryan’s attention. He studied the open sky until he caught the reflection of moonlight off leathery wings. The soft flapping grew steadily louder, and when Ryan was sure the creature was coming their way, he waited until the clouds parted, catching it in plain sight, and snapped off a shot with the SIG-Sauer. The blaster coughed, and the flying creature gave a piercing squeal, promptly identifying it as a bat. Gushing blood, the mutie spiraled down out of control to splash into the smooth expanse of the shimmering sea.

The discharge of the blaster made Dean stand and draw his own weapon. “What was that?” he demanded.

“Just a bat,” Ryan said calmly, holstering his piece. “Already aced. Everything’s green.”

A bat? Curiously, Dean looked over the rope sides of the makeshift basket and watched the dying creature flounder in the water, sharp fins already circling the bloody carcass. Then huge white figures rose from beneath the waves and began tearing the wiggling corpse apart.

“Those sharks?” Dean asked as the balloon drifted over the struggling creatures.

“Great whites, yes, indeed. But not those,” Doc said, gesturing with a waggling finger. “See the difference in the dorsal fins? Those are dolphins come for the kill.”

“Dolphins eat sharks?” Dean asked, shocked. The dolphins were so much smaller than the great whites it was hard to believe.

“No, they eat fish,” Mildred replied, looking at the moon. There had been too much death already today; she had no interest in watching the aquatic battle. “Dolphins kill sharks on sight. The two species hate each other.”

“Ace, no eat?” Jak said with a frown, running a whetstone along the blade of a knife in slow strokes. “Triple stupe.”

“Not if you’re in the water with sharks coming after your ass and a bunch of dolphins show up,” Ryan said, unwrapping a foil envelope to expose cherry-nut cake. Fireblast, was this the only dessert the Army ever fed its troops? He broke off a corner with his teeth and found it dissolved easily. Okay, not bad.

“They’re one of the few good muties that are friendly to norms,” he finished with a full mouth.

“Not a mutation, my dear Mr. Cawdor,” Doc rumbled. “Since time immemorial, dolphins have been the friends of humanity. Although God alone knows why. We have certainly treated them poorly enough.”

“How chill?” Jak asked, mildly interested. The dangers of the deep were important things to know.

“A dolphin will ram a shark in the belly with its nose,” Doc explained, watching the event occur. “See? They die almost instantly.”

“Hot pipe.” Dean sighed. “Dad, didn’t you say it’s possible to chill a man that way, too?”

“Requires a hell of a kick,” his father said, tossing away the wrapper. “But it can be done.”

“Smack in the belly?”

“Just under the rib cage,” Ryan said, moving a hand to the spot on his chest. “Right here, and slightly upward.”

The boy nodded studiously, filing away the info for future use.

“Enough of that, land ho!” Mildred cried out, breaking into a smile. “There she is, people! Forbidden Island!”

Majestically rising over the horizon like a green dawn was a wide island of hills, cliffs, mountains and volcanoes, everything covered with a lush growth of tropical plants. Silly thought, but to Krysty the place almost looked like two or three islands rammed together.

The Pegasus started to accelerate toward the island as a fresh wind blew over the companions, forcing the balloon onward. The twin volcanoes rumbled softly, sounding like distant thunder, their ragged tops lit from internal fires, wisps of yellow sulfur fumes rising to the sky. The firelight actually reflected off the thick layer of storm clouds. Two volcanoes so close to each other seemed unlikely to Mildred, and she postulated they were simply the planet trying to-clean itself from deadly residue of multiple nuke hits.

“Found them,” J.B. announced, holding the brass telescope to his face. In a valley set between the volcanoes were the ruins of a large predark metropolis sitting on top of a short mesa. The buildings were only silhouettes in the ambient light, black shadows as still and dead as the ferro-cement from which they’d been built.

As they continued closer, details came into view, a huge waterfall rushing off a tall cliff to their left, the smashed wreckage of a Navy yard to the right, the buildings and rusted hulks of warships partly swamped in a bay full of violently swirling water. The whirlpool made more noise than the waterfall, as it raged out of control.

Something large winged across the dark ruins, and Doc rubbed his eyes to see clearly, but the apparition was already gone. Tightening his lips, the time traveler wondered if he had just actually seen a pterodactyl, a winged lizard from the Jurassic period. No, quite impossible.

“May I be so bold as to strongly suggest that if we encounter anything exceptionally large,” Doc said, checking the load in his LeMat, “shoot only for its head? Nowhere else.”

“See something?” Krysty asked in concern, staring at the approaching land. Seemed rugged and wild, but ordinary enough.

“I do not know for sure, dear lady,” Doc muttered, frowning. “And that is what quite worries me.”

“Rad pits coming,” Ryan announced as the ebony night thinned about the island showing reddish-green glows dotting the landscape, and completely covering the Navy base. Quickly, Ryan checked his rad counter and saw the readings steadily climb toward the danger zone.

“Fireblast! It’s hotter than Washington Hole,” he stated, shifting his arm about. The clicks of the device seemed slower to the left, toward the valley that cut through the mountain range. That was the location of the mesa. But this was no place to make a guess.

“J.B., check my readings,” Ryan said urgently.

“Yeah, valley seems okay,” J.B. added, his own rad counter out and sweeping for danger. The sides of the mesa were sheer vertical stone. A bitch of a climb to make, but no problem to reach from the air.

“Okay, start wetting those blankets and try angling us toward the mesa,” Ryan directed, sliding on his backpack.

“No need,” Mildred replied. “The wind has shifted again, and we’re heading straight for it.”

“The volcanoes are making a current for us,” Krysty said, frowning slightly. “Taking us right there.”

Tucking away his sharpened knives, Jak scowled. “Somethin’ wrong.”

Mildred shuffled around the rope basket and checked the weight bags. Each was tied firmly in place.

“Millie?” J.B. asked.

“We appear to be rising,” she answered slowly. “Nothing serious yet, but we better let out some helium.”

“My job,” Doc said, pulling the sword from his stick. Reaching high, he stabbed the lowest weather balloon and it noisily deflated in a blubbery rush. But the Pegasus didn’t lose any height. Puzzled, Doc stabbed another, then another, and incredibly the airship began to rise.

“How’s this possible?” J.B. demanded, trying to see above the makeshift craft. Did something have a hold of them and was dragging the balloons skyward?

“Goddamn it, we’re caught in an updraft from those cross currents!” Mildred said, drawing her blaster and blowing away the largest balloon. It burst as the hot round tore through, but their speed didn’t slow.

Steadily the Pegasus streaked for the storm clouds overhead, and Ryan briefly considered dropping all of their excess weight to get above the clouds. Unfortunately, the sheet lightning filled the sky and they would be fried rising through the wild storm—if the rads and chems didn’t ace them first. But if they shot out too many balloons, they would plummet from the sky and crash on the rocks below. They had passed the ocean several minutes ago and were now moving over bare soil studded with boulders and rusty predark junk. The companions would be torn to pieces even if they survived the brutal landing.

As they rose still higher, Krysty cried out in pain, then the rest rubbed their arms and faces, skin prick-ling from the deadly proximity to the heavily polluted clouds. Just then, both of the rad counters began to wildly click ever faster.

“If we enter those clouds,” Doc warned in a stentorian tone, his eyes painfully tearing, “none of us shall ever leave it alive!”

With no other choice, Ryan drew his blaster and started firing, the spent brass kicking over the side of the basket. Fireblast, he thought, the problem with balloon wags was supposed to be keeping them afloat, not getting them to come down. Just one solution for that. The red-hot rounds from the SIG-Sauer easily punched through the tough polymer sheeting, deflating balloons far out of the sword’s reach, and the craft instantly slowed. Then it began to descend, and soon the itchy crawling feeling of radiation was fading away. Only now the island was rushing toward them with nightmare speed as the Pegasus descended out of control.

“Too fast!” Jak stated, slashing through the ropes. The heavy bags fell, and the Pegasus continued to drop.

“Shitfire, we’ve slipped out of the thermal!” Mildred warned. “Now we’re too heavy. Toss everything overboard!”

The companions slid off their backpacks and heaved them away, but the reduction in weight made no real difference. Too many of the balloons had been destroyed in their efforts to avoid the death clouds. But the airship was also still moving inland. The moonlight heralding their way, the terrain became grasslands, then a forest with a stone arch extended across the valley, connecting one mountainside to the other. A natural limestone bridge flew by.

“Get ready to jump,” Ryan ordered, climbing the ropes.

The others copied his actions, but the Pegasus swung past the bridge moving way too fast, the bottom of the plastic pallet scraping across the limestone for the briefest instant before they were past the obstruction and over the trees again.

“Fireblast!” Ryan spit, falling back into the rope basket.

Incredibly, from somewhere below an alarm bell began to ring, and blasters crackled from the dark trees as cannons roared from hidden bunkers on the shadowy mountainsides, their discharges throwing tongues of flame that illuminated the valley.

“It’s another ville!” J.B. snarled as a cannonball rushed by, buffeting them with the wind of its passing.

“Water!” Krysty shouted, pointing ahead.

There was a wide break in the stygian forest, where a calm river traversed the valley floor. Unfortunately, the river was narrow, with sharp rocks lining both shores, with more trees returning on the far bank. Their target was a slim area of flat mud between the rocks, impossible to hit at their current speed.

“That is our best chance!” Ryan shouted, slashing away the side ropes, open air directly before the man. “Wait for it…Now!”

In unison the companions dived from the pallet, and a split second later the Pegasus rammed into the trees and was torn apart by a thousand sharp branches.

Only the babbling of the shallow river disturbed the heavy silence of the muddy banks. Then swatches of light bobbed through the darkness, and armed men stepped from the rushes along the riverbank to stealthily approach the deathly still figures sprawled in the bloody mud.

THEIR BLACK PLUMES trailing across the starry sky, the four PT boats steamed across the ocean, their engines thumping loudly.

A number of dolphins swam alongside the lead petey, occasionally lifting their bottle-nose heads to give a stuttering squeal. With both of his wounds stiff and aching, Mitchum slid the longblaster off his shoulder, pulled back the heavy hammer and shot one. The creature moved sideways from the impact of the .75 miniball, human-red blood spraying from the gaping wound. The entire pack dived out of sight instantly, and as the chugging fleet left them behind, the dolphins returned to circle the dying mammal, gently nudging it with their stubby noses. Then a female gave a long howl as if in mourning as the gut-shot male rolled onto its back to expose its pale belly to the air. The rest of the pack circled their dead friend once more, then swam away, leaving the lifeless meat to the endless scavengers. But more than one of the dolphins turned to stare at the noisy dead thing that thundered over the water, watching the two-legs with intelligent eyes full of raw hatred.

“What was that?” Glassman demanded, lowering his plate of beans and dried fish.

“Some kind of baby shark,” Mitchum said, purging the longblaster before refilling it with powder, lead and cloth wad, then carefully tramping down the fresh charge with a blunt nimrod. “Who cares? Just a fish. Ain’t got no brains or human feelings.”

With a shrug, Glassman returned to his meal.

“Ahoy, the captain!” a sailor called out from an aft PT boat, a hand pointing to the sky. “Two o’clock high!”

“It’s them!” Mitchum snarled, lifting his long-blaster, but withheld firing. The weird air wag was bobbing along in the sky without a care in the world. The sec chief trembled with the urge to kill, and had to mentally force his hands to lower the flintlock.

“Well, don’t stand there gawking like virgins in a gaudy house!” Mitchum snarled, stalking along the deck. “They’re getting away! Load the .50 cals! Ready the Firebirds!” Nobody moved to obey the command. The sec chief fumed in his impotence, and bit back words he knew would only get him aced.

“Land ho!” another called in warning. “Breakers at our noon!”

A corporal backed away from the sight. “That’s Forbidden Island!”

“What?” a sec man gasped, spinning in shock.

On the horizon was a long landmass with two live volcanoes. There could be no doubt as to which island that was.

“Nuke me, it is!” Glassman shouted, throwing away his plate. “Emergency stop! Cut all engines!”

The crew rushed to the tasks, and soon the boats were anchored relatively motionless in the waves. Reaching into an equipment box, Glassman pulled out binocs while Mitchum limped to the forward bow.

Illuminated by the silvery moonlight streaming through the rumbling clouds, the men watched as the distant air wag abruptly rose high into the sky, then dropped toward the ground, narrowly rushing over a stone bridge. Cannons roared at their passing, and the air wag disappeared into the darkness beyond.

“Did you see those cannons?” Mitchum growled, fighting a wild mix of emotions. “This must be a pirate base!”

“No,” Glassman corrected, lowering the binocs. “It has to be their main base. This is the home of the pirate fleet!”