Читать книгу Time Castaways - James Axler - Страница 8

The thud of a heavy bolt disengaging echoed in the Stygian gloom. Then with squealing hinges, the oval portal in the rusty wall ponderously swung aside, resisting every inch of the way.

Holding road flares and blasters, two men stepped through the opening and warily looked around the darkness, ready for any possible danger. The sputtering flares gave off a wellspring of light, but there was nothing in sight but some old-fashioned gym lockers attached to the riveted steel walls and a couple of plastic benches thick with dust.

“Fireblast, where the fuck are we?” Ryan Cawdor muttered uneasily, tightening his grip on a SIG-Sauer 9 mm blaster. A Steyr longblaster was hung across the broad back of the one-eyed man, and a panga was sheathed at his side.

“Beats the hell out of me,” J. B. Dix muttered uneasily, the harsh light of the road flare reflecting off his wire-rimmed glasses. “But it doesn’t resemble any redoubt I’ve ever seen before.”

Dressed in a worn jacket and battered fedora, the wiry man was cradling a Smith&Wesson M-4000 shotgun in both hands, and an Uzi machine blaster hung across his back. At his side was a lumpy munitions bag packed with high-explosive ordnance, a homemade pipe bomb jutting out slightly for easy access.

“Agreed,” Ryan growled, straining to hear any movement in the murky shadows. But the silence seemed absolute, as if they were the last two people in the world.

This room should have been the control room for the redoubt, jammed full of humming machinery, winking lights and scrolling monitors. Instead, it seemed to be inside some kind of abandoned gymnasium. Even stranger, there was a strong smell of living green plants in the dusty atmosphere, which should have been flat-out impossible.

Built by the U.S. government before the last nuke war, the redoubts, massive military fortifications controlled by banks of advanced computers, were hidden underground, safely sealed away from the outside world. Powered by the limitless energy of nuclear reactors, the subterranean forts were safe havens of clean air and purified water, a tiny oasis of life secretly buried deep within the radioactive hellzone of North America.

When the companions had arrived at this location, the mat-trans unit promptly blew and everything had gone dark. Patiently, they’d waited for the system to automatically reboot. But when that didn’t happen, they were left with no other option than to proceed deeper into the strange redoubt and hope that they could find an exit to the surface. The possibility that the redoubt was located at the bottom of a glowing nuke crater or covered by the wreckage of a fallen skyscraper was something they tried very hard not to think about. If this was the end of the trail, so be it. Everybody died, that was just the price you paid for the gift of life.

Reaching the middle of the metal room, Ryan and J.B. exhaled in relief as they spotted a way out of the gymnasium, a circular metal door closed with an old-fashioned wheel lock, as if it were a bank vault. However, this door was heavily encrusted with corrosion, big flakes of rust fallen to the floor like autumn leaves. It was an unnerving sight.

After whistling sharply, Ryan waited expectantly. A few moments later four more people stepped from the gateway in combat formation, each of them carrying heavy backpacks, a softly hissing butane cigarette lighter and a loaded blaster.

“How peculiar, do…do I smell ivy?” Doc Tanner rumbled in a deep bass voice, brandishing a weapon in each fist.

Tall and slim, Theophilus Algernon Tanner seemed to have stepped out of another age with his frilly shirt and long frock coat. But the silver-haired scholar also sported a strictly utilitarian LeMat handcannon, along with a slim sword of Spanish steel, the edge gleaming razor-bright in the fiery light of the road flares.

“Ivy? Sure as hell hope not,” Krysty Wroth muttered.

The woman breathed in deeply, then let it out slow. Okay, she could smell plants nearby, but there was no trace of the hated ivy. Relaxing slightly, the woman eased her grip on the S&W Model 640 revolver.

A natural beauty, the redhead’s ample curves were barely contained by her Air Force duty fatigues. A bearskin coat was draped over her shapely shoulders. A lumpy backpack hung off a shoulder, and a gunbelt was strapped low around her hips.

“Weird place, what is?” Jak Lauren drawled, arching a snow-colored eyebrow. A big-bore .357 Magnum Colt Python was balanced in the pale hand of the albino teenager, the hammer already cocked into the firing position in case of trouble. A large Bowie knife was sheathed on his gunbelt, and the handle of another blade could be seen tucked into his combat boot.

“My guess would be some kind of a ready room,” Dr. Mildred Weyth countered, easing her grip on a Czech ZKR .38 target revolver. The stocky woman was dressed entirely in Army fatigues, and a small canvas medical bag hung at her side.

Before the maelstrom that ended civilization, Mildred had been a physician, but a medical accident had landed her in an experimental cryogenic freezing unit. A hundred years later, Mildred awoke to the living nightmare of the Deathlands, and soon joined the companions, both her vaunted medical skills and sharp-shooting ability earning her a place among their ranks.

“A ready room, yeah, that makes sense,” J.B. said hesitantly, tilting back his fedora. “Someplace where the predark soldiers arriving via the mat-trans unit could change into their uniforms.”

“Or out of them,” Ryan said, warily using the barrel of the SIG-Sauer to tease open the latch on a locker. As he gently pushed aside the thin metal door, the hinges squealed in protest and a small rain of reddish flecks sprinkled to the riveted floor.

Inside the locker Ryan found the moldy remains of what looked like civilian clothing hung neatly on hangers: sneakers on the floor, a Mets baseball cap on a small shelf, along with a small mirror and a few personal items covered with a thick layer of dust. Checking the door, the man found the expected picture of a smiling young woman cradling a newborn in her arms, the faint residue of a lipstick kiss still on the faded photograph. She was very pretty and wearing an incredibly skimpy bikini. Moving the flare closer for a better look, the Deathlands warrior then blinked at the sight of a gray plastic box on the shelf.

Balancing the flare on the edge of a bench, Ryan took down the box and slid the plastic lock to the side. The lid came free with a faint crack to expose a spotlessly clean .44 Ruger revolver, along with a cardboard box of ammunition. There was a brass brush for cleaning the cylinders, and even a small plastic bottle of homogenized gun oil.

Opening the box, Ryan half expected it to only contain some wad-cutters, cheap bullets used for target practice. They were virtually useless in a fight these days, except at point-blank range.

However, to his surprise, the box was nearly full of regulation U.S. Army combat cartridges, semijacketed hollowpoints, as deadly as brass came, and the ammo was in perfect condition. The man could not believe his luck. Thirty-four live rounds.

“Ready room, my ass. This is a ward room,” J.B. exclaimed, eagerly going to the next locker and pushing open the corroded door. Hanging inside was more decaying clothing, a three-piece suit this time covered with tiny mushrooms, and on the shelf was an open gun case. The 9 mm Beretta pistol had been reduced to an irregular lump from the pervasive damp, the deadly weapon now as harmless as a roll of toilet paper.

Checking a locker in another row, Mildred discovered the sad remains of a flower-print dress, along with a matching half-jacket, and scarf. On the shelf were a few containers that the physician recognized as pricey cosmetics: organic foundation, dusting powder, mascara, a small tube of lipstick and a fancy glass perfume bottle. At the sight, the woman felt a rush of bittersweet memories from ancient high-school proms and dating medical students at college.

Reaching out to tenderly stroke the dress, Mildred frowned as the flimsy material crumbled away at her touch, the past returning to the past. However, hanging behind the rotting strips of cloth was a small shoulder holster containing a slim Beretta Belle. The 9 mm weapon was exactly what a woman would carry to not disturb the flowing lines of a formal ballgown or lightweight summer jacket. Interesting.

Gingerly extracting the blaster, Mildred saw that it was only streaked with surface corrosion. The Beretta could probably be salvaged with a thorough cleaning. Dropping the clip, Mildred found it fully loaded with oily cartridges that looked in fairly decent condition. Then she blinked. Those weren’t standard lead bullets, but Black Talons, armor-piercing rounds, extremely illegal for anybody to carry except special government agents.

Returning the blaster to the holster, Mildred rummaged about to locate a tiny decorative purse. As expected, she found only a plastic-coated driver’s license, some folded bills now thick with gray fuzz, an expired credit card, a lump of crud that might have once been some candy breath mints and a folded leather wallet. Opening it carefully, Mildred saw a faded picture of the owner, a slim blonde with a lot of freckles, and a laminated government-issue identification card bearing the Great Seal of the United States, and the embossed seal of the United States Navy, Special Operations.

“Well, I’ll be damned, this woman was Navy Intelligence,” Mildred said.

“A sec man?” Jak asked.

“An extremely good sec person,” Mildred corrected, with an odd sense of pride.

“Indeed, madam,” Doc said thoughtfully, easing down the hammer on his LeMat. “But more important, if she was a member of the United States Navy, then mayhap we are currently on a ship of some kind.” While the rest of the companions used modern-day weaponry, the Vermont scholar preferred his antique Civil War handcannon, primarily because it came from his own century. The black powder revolver was a deadly piece of home that the time traveler carried in his gunbelt as a constant reminder of better times, and better days, in a much more civilized world.

“A ship? That would explain the riveted walls and floors,” Krysty muttered, quickly checking the ceiling for vid cams or traps.

“Don’t feel waves,” Jak said carefully, trying to get any subtle sense of motion. “Not drifting at sea. Maybe in dock?”

“Not necessarily. If this is a ship, it would have to be enormous to hold a mat-trans unit,” J.B. theorized, adjusting his glasses. “Anything that huge and we’d never feel the waves unless trapped in the middle of a hurricane, and maybe not even then.”

“An aircraft carrier was certainly large enough to carry a mat-trans unit,” Mildred said, folding shut the Navy commission booklet. “The vessels were often called oceangoing cities, they were so huge. A carrier held a hundred jetfighters and a crew of over a thousand. More important, they were powered by nuclear reactors.”

“Tumbledown,” Jak said, as if that explained the matter.

Everybody present understood the cryptic reference. When skydark scorched the world, radioactive debris from the nuked cities rained down across the world. Houses had been found on mountaintops, toilet seats in the middle of a desert. Anything close to an atomic blast was vaporized, and after that objects melted and burned, but then they simply went airborne, including office buildings, suspension bridges and sometimes even warships.

“Buried alive,” J.B. whispered, his throat going tight.

“I consider that highly unlikely, my friend,” Doc rumbled pleasantly, recalling the brief smell of fresh greenery. “Plants need sunshine to live, even that accursed mutant ivy. So, whatever type of vessel this is, there must be a breach in the hull, and thus direct egress to the outside world.”

“Sounds reasonable,” J.B. said uneasily. “But the sooner we see daylight, the better.”

“Agreed,” Ryan stated roughly. “But we’re not leaving all of this live brass behind. Everybody grab a partner and do a fast recce of the lockers. Take only the brass, leave the blasters behind for a scav later.”

Nodding their agreement, the companions got busy. Moving steadily through the array of lockers, they soon amassed a staggering collection of clips, magazines, speed loaders and loose brass in a wide assortment of calibers, along with a couple of blasters in reasonably good condition. If there were any villes nearby, a functioning weapon could buy them a week of hot meals and clean beds, as well as other items in trade. There had even been a few grens, but the military spheres were so thick with layers of corrosion, any attempt to use the deadly explosive charges would be tantamount to suicide.

Naturally, there had not been anything usable for Doc’s black powder LeMat amid the civilian arsenal, but the scholar had discovered a .44 Ruger revolver, a sturdy weapon of devastating power, along with a full box of fifty hollowpoint Magnum cartridges.

Sheathing his sword into an ebony walking stick, Doc twisted the lion’s-head newel on top to lock it tight, then tucked the stick into his gunbelt. Testing the balance of the two monstrous handcannons, the old man decided that the combination was too much for him to easily handle, and wisely slipped the Ruger into one of his deep empty pockets.

Finished with their scavenging, the companions tucked away their various finds, then, assuming a combat formation, approached the circular door. The formidable barrier was veined with heavy bolt, the locking wheel situated in the middle. Ryan illuminated the door with a road flare and saw that it was firmly locked. But rust had eaten away the metal along the edge of the jamb, and there was a definite breeze blowing into the ready room, carrying a faint trace of plantlife and something else.

Pointing at the others, Ryan directed them to flanking positions on either side of the door while J.B. knelt on the floor and checked for traps. Angling his flare to give his friend some light, Ryan watched the man run fingertips along the rough surface of the door. Then he pressed an ear to the metal to try to detect any mechanical movements, and finally passed a compass along the material to check for any magnetic sensors or proximity triggers. After a few moments the Armorer tucked the compass away and smiled, proclaiming it was clean. At least, as far as he could tell.

Holstering his blaster, Ryan passed the flare to J.B. and exchanged positions with the man. Taking hold of the locking wheel, Ryan tried to turn the handle, but it stubbornly refused to move. Reaching into a pocket, he pulled out a small bottle of gun oil and squirted a few drops on the spindle and hinges, then tried again. Still nothing.

Brushing off some loose flakes of rust from the wheel, Ryan spit on his hands and got a firm grip. Bracing his boots for a better stance, the big man tried once more, this time putting his whole body into the effort, but very carefully increasing the pressure slowly to make sure the corroded metal didn’t shatter, sealing them inside the room forever. They had explosives, but sealed into a steel box, those would only be used as the very last resort.

Long moments passed with nothing happening. Then there came an audible crack and Ryan nearly fell over as the wheel came free and began to turn easily. As the bolts disengaged, he started to walk backward, slowly hauling the door open against the loudly protesting hinges.

Sharing glances, the companions said nothing, but it was painfully obvious that any hope they had of staying covert was now completely gone. If there was anybody else in the vicinity, they knew that somebody was coming out of the ready room.

As the thick door cleared the jamb, J.B. squinted into the darkness on the other side. “Okay, looks clear…son of a bitch!” he shouted, and the shotgun boomed.

In the bright muzzle-flash, something large was briefly seen in the outside corridor. Then a metal arm extended through the doorway and mechanical pinchers brushed aside the shotgun to close around the man’s throat with a hard clang.

THICK FOG MOVED OVER the walls of Northpoint ville like a misty river flowing steady across the high stone walls. Somewhere in the distance, low thunder rumbled, and from the nearby ocean came the sound of rough waves crashing upon a rocky shore.

Crackling torches were set at regular intervals along the wall, giving the sec men walking patrol on the top plenty of light, and every structure inside the ville was brightly illuminated by the yellowish glow of fish-oil lanterns or the cheery blaze of a fireplace. A hundred stoves blazed bright and hot inside the ramshackle huts of the ville like imprisoned stars, the delicious waves of fragrant heat banishing the eternal fog and affording the inhabitants a small zone of clear air within the confines of the ville. Winter had never been a problem in Northpoint. A nearly limitless forest of pine trees grew on the outer islands, so wood was always in abundant supply, and the freshwater bay teemed with fish, most of them not muties, so there was more than sufficient food for all. Only salt, precious, life-giving salt, was in desperately short supply.

But with any luck that problem would soon be solved forever, Baron Wainwright thought privately, taking another sip of the mulled wine.

Set in the center of the log cabins, smokehouses, barracks, patched leather tents and stone fishing shacks was a pristine field of neatly tended grass, as smooth as a piece of predark glass. Standing tightly packed on the field was a large crowd of civies gathered around an old whipping post where a naked man stood, his wrists bound with rope to the crossbar of the infamous learning tree. Tiny rivulets of blood trickled down his skinny shanks, oozing steadily from the crisscross of open wounds covering his back. The tattered remains of a uniform lay on the grass around his trembling feet, and both arms were marred with glassy patches of freshly burned skin.

“Twenty-seven!” the executioner announced, and lashed out once more with a coiled whip. The smooth length of green leather cracked across the raw flesh of the prisoner, but he only shook and groaned in response.

“Burn the bastard!” a young woman yelled, spittle flying from her mouth. “Slit open his belly and feed his guts to the river snakes!”

“No, make it last! Whip him harder!” an old woman snarled from the crowd, the face of the wrinklie contorted into a feral mask of raw hatred.

“Blind him!”

“Cut off his balls!”

The furious civilians roared their approval at that idea, and after a moment the executioner nodded in agreement. Tossing aside the lightweight horsewhip, he extracted a much heavier, knotted bullwhip from the canvas bag hanging at his side. The muscular man uncoiled the full length onto the dewy grass, creating a brief rainbow effect from the reflected light of the nearby torches. A touch of beauty amid the field of pain. Then he expertly flicked the bullwhip a few times, making the stout leather strips crack louder than a blaster to test the action. Hearing the noise, the prisoner bowed his head and wept openly, knowing the hell that was to come.

Sitting on a rosewood throne on a fieldstone dais, Baron Brenda Wainwright refilled her bone chalice with a wooden flask, waiting for the torture to continue. She disliked watching punishment details, but her presence here was necessary as the absolute ruler of the ville. She had blasters in her private arsenal, lots of them, but the sec men obeyed her commands primarily because the baron was smart. She constantly outwitted their enemies and always found some clever new way to put food on the table and, more important, salt. Without that precious commodity, everybody in the ville would have been aced decades ago. No matter what herbs or potions the healers tried, people needed salt the way a candle needed a wick, without it, they simply got weaker and weaker then just stopped working entirely. Even the dead were boiled down in the smokehouse, reduced to their very essence to reclaim every single grain. Salt was life.

Which was why we’re having a public execution, the baron reminded herself. That old doomie had better have been right about this. The ville was down to less than a hundredweight of salt in the armory, barely enough to last them until spring. If this plan didn’t work, then there would be no choice but to declare war on Anchor ville. Brother fighting brother, a civil war. The thought was intolerable. Not new, just intolerable.

Dressed for combat on this special day, the woman was wearing a heavy blue gown cut high in the front to show off her new snakeskin boots. A gift from a secret lover. An ebony cascade of long hair hung loose around her stern face, artfully disguising the fact that she was missing an ear from a mutie attack when she was a small child. A necklace of the creature’s polished teeth was draped around her badly scarred throat as a grim remembrance of that dark day, and a black leather bodice supported her full breasts. A wide gunbelt circled her trim waist, embroidered gloves tucked into the front, a sheathed knife and holstered blaster riding at her hips. Ancient plastic rings of outlandish design adorned both thumbs, and an intricately carved wooden bracelet studded with tiny bits of sparkling car window glass flashed from her left wrist.

Finished testing his deadly tool, the executioner adjusted his fish-leather mask and looked at the baron. Everybody knew it was the blacksmith, but the social custom of pretending that the executioner was from another ville still held.

The baron waved a hand in authorization. Grinning fiercely, the executioner lashed out with the bullwhip, and the prisoner violently shook all over from the brutal strike, a wellspring of fresh blood gushing from the deep cut across his shoulders. Laughing and cheering, the crowd voiced its hearty approval.

Trying not to scowl, the baron refilled her mug from the flask and took a small sip of the dark brew. Death was part of life, as unstoppable as the morning fog. However, the old doomie known as Mad Pete had deemed that this particular demise was absolutely necessary to the welfare of the ville. Even then, she disliked casual chilling so much that the baron had waited patiently, and then impatiently, until some triple-stupe fool broke a major law and could honestly and fairly be executed. If he had been drunk on duty, or stolen a lick of salt, the bastard would have simply been beaten to death and sent to the boiling pot in the smokehouse. But he had done much worse by forcing himself upon the wife of another sec man. No matter who you were, rape was a capital offense in every ville along Royal Island. End of discussion. Her hands were clean.

At that, Wainwright almost smiled. Well, at least on this particular death, she internally chuckled. Nobody ruled a ville without knowing how to chill. She had been planning to remove her fat brother from the Oak Throne when he’d greedily eaten an unknown type of fish and died of food poisoning. As father had always said, stupidity was its own reward. True words.

“It’s almost time, Baron,” sec chief Emile LeFontaine muttered, flexing his monstrous hands. Standing at the Maple Throne, the hulking giant held a perfectly balanced obsidian throwing ax in a gloved hand, and there was a longblaster strapped across his wide back, protected from the harsh elements by a thick wolfskin sheath, the snarling head of the beast peeking over his shoulder in a most disturbing manner.

Nodding in understanding, the baron checked the blaster at her hip, making sure the weapon was fully loaded with six live rounds. Mad Pete had predicted this day would come, and she had immediately started preparations.

Suddenly the weakening prisoner cried out for the first time, and the townsfolk joyously voiced their full approval. Their desire to see him punished was almost palpable, like waves of heat radiating from the stove.

Tossing aside the blood-soaked bullwhip, the executioner pulled a fresh one from the green leather bag at his side. But just then the prisoner howled again, louder this time, even though he was standing limply at the learning tree.

“Silence!” the baron commanded, rising from her throne.

In ragged stages, the mob stopped making noise, and this time everybody heard the low ghostly moan, echoing over the ville as if coming down from the cloudy sky.

“Sweet nuking hell, that came from the sea,” the sec chief whispered, his scarred face going pale. “The screams of the prisoner must have caught the attention of…of….”

Slowly a dark mountain of flesh rose from the other side of the ville wall, six huge, inhuman eyes glaring down at the scene of torture even as a hundred tentacles began to crawl over the granite block wall.

“Kraken!” a sec man on the wall shouted, firing his crossbow.

Then a tentacle wrapped around his waist and the cursing man was hauled out of view.

As the alarm bell began to sound, the civies started screaming and racing around in a blind panic. Trying to control her breathing, Baron Wainwright could only stare in wonder at the mountain of flesh looming over the wall. So the old doomie had been right! The death screams of the condemned man had summoned a kraken. Now, the colossal mutie would level the ville, unless the defenses held. However, the sec men had been preparing for this battle for a year. Hopefully it would be enough.

“Defend the ville,” the baron yelled, pulling a Navy flare gun from her gunbelt and firing the charge straight up into the fog. The explosion of colored lights distracted the mutie, several long tentacles reaching upward for the sizzling charge slowly drifting downward on a tiny parachute.

As the kraken rose behind the ville wall, ropy tentacles extended into the streets searching among the stone houses for anything edible. A stray dog sniffing at the barrels of fish offal was caught and hauled bodily into the gaping maw of the horrendous creature.

By now, the sec men were launching swarms of arrows into the goliath. But if they did any damage it was not readily apparent, and the mutie continued feeding upon the population.

Scampering out of an alley, a gaudy slut tried to get back into the tavern when ropy death came wiggling out of the sky and grabbed her around the neck. Shrieking in terror, the slut pulled a bone knife from her bodice and started wildly stabbing at the tentacle. But the resilient hide was too tough for the blade, and she was hauled upward, going over the wall, cursing and fighting until the very end.

Meanwhile teams of sec men in the guard towers feverishly operated the hand cranks to pull back the mighty arbalests. The giant crossbows were thirty feet long, and used three bows working in conjunction. Each arrow was twice the size of a man, and the barbed head was edged with thin strips of genuine predark steel.

“Pull, you lazy bastards!” a sergeant bellowed. “Pull or die!”

Attracted by the shout, the kraken headed toward the guard tower, and Baron Wainwright quickly fired another flare. Once more, the beast turned to try to catch the descending flare, giving the team of sec men just enough time to load the arrow into the arbalest, the catch engaging with a hard thunk.

Grabbing the aiming yoke, the burly sergeant swung the colossal weapon around toward the mutie, aimed and yanked hard on the release lever. There came a groan of wooden gears, then the triple bows let fly and the giant arrow went straight into the kraken’s throat.

Bellowing in rage and pain, the mutie turned toward the source of the agony, its tentacles lashing out wildly.

But more giant arrows were launched from the other guard towers, and the kraken twisted madly in the deadly cross fire, roaring defiantly.

A catapult snapped upward from the roof of the barracks, and a wooden barrel arched gracefully upward. It sailed over the guard towers and ignited a split second before crashing on top of the kraken. Covered with burning shine, the mutie went insane, lashing its tentacles around and knocking a dozen sec men off the walls. A flurry of crossbow arrows slammed into the beast, as additional firebombs hammered the creature. However, the attacks were only enraging the beast, and it sent several long tentacles snaking into the ville to snatch away the bloody corpse of the prisoner, leaving behind the ragged stumps of his arms still tied to the learning tree.

Inside their ramshackle homes, the civies were quaking with fear, muttering prayers to forgotten deities.

In a crash of splinters, the gate leading to the dockyard slammed open and a host of writhing tentacles entered the ville. But forewarned of the attack by the baron, the fishermen had a double line of crackling bonfires already burning between the gate and the rows of homes. Hesitating in front of the wall of flames, the kraken tried to find a way around the painful barrier, then it attempted to go underneath, and finally withdrew. It reappeared a few moments later, the tentacles shoving several fishing boats taken from the docks to crash a path through the fiery obstruction.

“Baron…” sec chief LeFontaine said as a question, his face tense, a throwing ax in his hand.

“Not yet, my friend,” the baron muttered, loading the last flare.

More firebombs and arbalest arrows slammed into the monster, along with a score of spears, boomerangs and a fishing harpoon that just missed going into one of the huge, inhuman eyes.

Dodging a tentacle, a sec woman fell off the wall and crashed onto the roof of a shed. The distance was not very great, but she did not rise again, and after a few seconds something red began to trickle down the side of the building.

“Milady, please…” the sec chief begged, taking a half step toward the tumultuous combat. His face was flushed and he was breathing heavily from the strain of not joining his troops in combat.

“Just a few ticks more, Sergeant,” Wainwright said gently, cradling the flare gun protectively in both hands.

Unexpectedly, the body rolled off the little shed as the roof slid aside, exposing a honeycomb of bamboo tubes. A nest of fuses dangled from the rear of each and as the baron watched in growing horror, a torch was touched to the group fuse, setting them aflame.

“No! Too soon!” Wainwright cried.

“Too late,” LeFontaine replied curtly.

With no other choice, the baron jumped off the dais and raced into the middle of the ville square. Raising both hands, she carefully aimed the flare gun and fired. The charge thumped from the wide barrel and streaked away to hit the kraken in the face. Snapping around with surprising speed, the colossus stared down at the tiny norm in open hatred and moved along the wall, its tentacles reaching out for the fresh meat.

In a stuttering series of smoky explosions, the top row of bamboo tubes unleashed a dozen homie rockets, closely followed by the second row, then the rest.

The rockets flashed upward and slammed into the kraken, disappearing into the mottled hide. Howling in anger, the mutie probed the tiny wounds with some tentacles just as the next wave of rockets struck, and then the first salvo detonated.

Gobbets of raw flesh exploded like a geyser from the monster, sending out a ghastly spray of piss-yellow blood. That was when the next shed lost its roof and more black-powder rockets launched, peppering the monstrosity with high-explosive death.

Bawing in agony, the kraken lashed out mindlessly as the new rockets detonated inside the beast. Literally torn apart from within, a tentacle went limp, an eye turned dead-white and torrents of yellow blood gushed from the hideous wounds.

Enthusiastically cheering, the sec men redoubled their assault on the mutie, the arbalests now targeting the open wounds.

Turning to flee, the weakening mutie discovered there were iron chains attached to the arrows, the barbed heads caught deep within the belly of the beast in exactly the same way its own tentacles dragged a victim to their death in its cavernous maw.

Its inhuman brain sluggishly comprehending that death was coming, the kraken threw itself at the ville wall, hammering the stone ramparts with its full weight. The entire shoreside wall trembled from the impacts, and several sec men lost their grips and fell screaming onto the cobblestone streets below with grisly results. But even as the baron watched, the struggles of the creature became noticeably weaker, the rush of blood increasing.

“More rockets!” Wainwright yelled, running toward the thrashing kraken. “Fire them all!”

A grip of iron grabbed her arm, stopping the woman in her tracks.

“No closer, Baron,” sec chief LeFontaine commanded. “I won’t allow it.”

Contorting her face into a sneer, the baron started to reach for her blaster, then grudgingly relented, realizing the wisdom of the caution. Any animal was at its most dangerous when it was wounded and dying.

Chewing on the chains to try to get free, the kraken was hit with a third wave of rockets and then a fourth, the last few of them going completely through the mutie and coming out the other side to arch away over the bay. Yellow blood was everywhere, flowing down the sides of the stone wall and forming deep puddles in the street.

In a final rush of hatred, the dying kraken reached out with every working tentacle and wrapped each around the nearest guard tower and squeezed hard. Astonishingly, the support timbers audibly creaked from the titanic strain, and a wealth of crossbeams fell away like dry autumn leaves. As the tower began to tilt, the sec men inside cursed at the unexpected tactic and tried to hold on to the railing for dear life.

That was when there came a high-pitched keen of a steam whistle from the other side of the wall, and more rockets slammed into the back of the beast, widening the exit holes of the arrows.

Shuddering all over, the kraken released the guard tower and sluggishly tried for the bay once more, but again it was stopped by the iron chains. Mewling weakly, the creature reached out with a gory tentacle, the tip just managing to reach the cold, clear water of the bay. Then it sagged and went still, the flood of blood quickly slowing to a trickle, and then stopping entirely.

Instantly a new bell began to clang. Minutes later every man, woman and child in the ville stormed out of the dockyard gates, each equipped with a wicker basket and a sharp obsidian knife. Resembling an army of ants, the people crawled over the chilled mutie and started to slice off pieces. Meanwhile, sec men armed with torches and axes began to hack apart the corpse, chopping a tunnel into the thing, and soon disappeared inside.

“It worked! We aced a kraken!” The baron chortled, slapping her sec chief on the back. “What a glorious day!”

“You can load that into a damn crossbow and fire it,” LeFontaine agreed wholeheartedly, rubbing his hands together. “We’ll get enough salt from the gizzard to last the ville for months, for years.”

“Plus, there’s enough good leather for everybody to get new boots, belts and winter jackets,” she agreed with a smile, watching the harvest progress. “Sinew for a thousand crossbows, enough bones to…well, for any damn thing we need until further notice.” Plus, that bitch at Anchor ville would pay a baron’s ransom in metal for a single pint of kraken blood. But Wainwright kept that observation to herself. In the right circumstances, the blood of a kraken was the most valuable thing in the world.

“Sadly, we lost the dockyard gate, a horse and at least a dozen sec men,” LeFontaine muttered unhappily. The dogs and the gaudy slut were of no real importance.

“Yes, a pity,” Wainwright agreed. “But still, a price that I would be willing to pay anytime for the death of a kraken. The bay belongs to us now. No more will our fishing boats be pulled underwater, the crew drowned, the catch destroyed.”

“Aye, that’s good news. Too bad we can’t eat the meat,” LeFontaine said. “I hear it tastes fine, but soon afterward…” He gave a shiver. Any further embellishment was unnecessary.

“Leave some outside the wall for the Hillies to steal,” the baron ordered. “Maybe we can ace two birds with one stone, eh?”

“By your command, Baron,” the sec chief agreed, giving a small bow. “I live to serve.”

Trying not to smile, the baron acknowledged the formal action with a prim nod of her head, mentally deciding to reward the man for his action later in her private bedchamber.

As for the ville, both the civies and sec men would spend the rest of the day and most of the night dissecting the mountainous mutie, scavenging everything of value. Even the fat of the monster could be boiled down into a crude form of tallow for candles. When that odious task was accomplished, the crew of the Wendigo would haul what remained of the bedraggled corpse out into the deep water near Liar’s Gate, so that the smell of the decaying corpse would scare away any other kraken for years.

The baron ruefully smiled. Then she would open the royal wine cellar and authorize a shore party the likes of which had never been seen before! It would be a day of rest for the slaves and roasted meat for the civies, while the sec men would revel in enough shine, sluts and song to satisfy even their warrior appetites.

Feeling exhausted, and exhilarated, the baron started back for the stone dais to watch over the rest of the harvesting. In the back of her mind, the woman tried desperately to ignore the rest of the doomie’s prophesy, that soon after this day-of-days the ville would be destroyed, and she would be forced into the ultimate act of depravity—marriage to a blood kin.