Deathlands - Dectra Chain Part 28

Chapter Thirty-Two.

IT WASN'T AS EASY as Ryan had thought. The tide was turning, ebbing away from the invisible coast, bringing with it a powerful offsh.o.r.e current. It tugged at the whaleboat with its inexperienced crew, making forward progress difficult. The mist was dissipating, but hanging in pockets here and there. Ryan could sometimes see clearly ahead for close to a quarter of a mile. Then, without warning, the fog descended once more and he could hardly make out the hunched figure of J.B., gripping the carved tiller.

"Are we still moving forward?" Krysty called, panting as she rowed on the port side of the narrow dory.

"Yeah. Bend your backs, my hearties, and pull and pull," Ryan said, parodying the cries of the mates of the Salvation.

"Shut f.u.c.k up and come row yourself," Jak gasped.

"Least it'll be even harder for Pyra Quadde and Cyrus Ogg," Ryan replied. "Just two of them to row and no hand to steer. I reckon we could be closing in real fast on them."

"Dawn's coming," J.B. called, keeping his voice pitched low. "Times of poor seeing they could come up on us unseen. Like we did on the Phoenix. Better if Krysty takes lookout, Jak steers and watches from back. They got the best eyes of anyone here."

"I can see well," Lori complained. "And I'm the tiredest. Why can't I have some rests and watched out? It isn't f.u.c.king fair!"

Doc was too exhausted to reproach her for the bad language.

"Don't shout out like that!" Krysty admonished the angry girl. "If that woman's near ahead of us you'll warn her we're closing in. Sound carries a long way over water. Uncle Tyas McCann taught me that, back at the ville of Harmony. So everyone try to keep real quiet."

DAWN CAME, but the last, lingering tendrils of fog didn't clear. Visibility still varied between ten and one hundred feet. The sea remained completely calm. Once Krysty asked everyone to stop rowing, which they were happy to do, while she listened intently.

"Yeah. I can hear waves on rocks. Or s.h.i.+ngle, mebbe. Difficult to tell. I guess it's within a quarter mile or so."

"Anything else?" Ryan asked. "Nothing like rowing or voices?"

Krysty shook her head. "Sorry, lover. Nothing at all."

"There's something dragging at oar," Jak said from the seat in the stern. "Saw it on Doc's oar. Like thick rope."

"I can feel it, my young colleague," the old-timer replied, "pulling at the stroke. Could be weed of some sort, I imagine."

"It's stopping my moving the rower," Lori protested.

They could all feel it now.

Ryan lifted the blade from the sea, peering into the dismal, murky light. Fronds of s.h.i.+ning brown cord were draped over the oar. They were about the thickness of a man's thumb, and one end vanished beneath the flat waves. As he looked, there was a distinct tug, and he gripped the oar more tightly.

"Fireblast! It's trying to-"

"Pulling it away from me," Lori said. "Can't hanging on!"

There was a small splash, and the girl's oar was plucked from her hand, sliding out of sight as neatly as a magician's illusion.

"Lift them, quick," Ryan ordered.

The weed had a strength and purpose of its own, coiling its tendrils around the rowers' blades and trying to draw them away. Ryan reached for his panga, dragging his oar in nearer to the boat and slas.h.i.+ng at the loops of the weed. They parted easily enough, giving out a stinking ichor, the color and texture of mola.s.ses.

The others used their knives to cut free, the severed ends of the weed falling limply into the ocean. Ryan glanced over the side of the boat and saw that they were trapped in a veritable pasture of the sentient plant. If plant it was.

"Gotta get out of here!" he yelled, the possibility of Pyra Quadde's hearing them forgotten in the urgency of the moment.

"It's on rudder," Jak called, drawing one of his throwing knives and hacking furiously at the slowly writhing cords.

As Ryan lowered his oar cautiously into the sea again, one of the pieces of weed looped lazily up, resting across his forearm, stinging him like a thousand tiny, fiery needles. With a shout of pain he wrenched himself free, examining his skin and seeing there were rows of neat little punctures, each one proudly showing its own speck of bright blood.

"Keep away from it." If any of them went into the water, they were dead. The weed was thick and voracious enough to destroy any of them before they could be pulled back into the whaleboat. "Row for our lives!"

For nearly a quarter of an hour it was a touch-and-go battle, one of the hardest that Ryan had ever been involved in. His panga was the best weapon they had for hacking away at the brown fronds, and he s.h.i.+pped his oar, leaving it to the others to carry on with the rowing.

Lori started to cry, slumping in the bottom of the boat, oblivious to the struggle of the others. Jak left the tiller and double-banked an oar with Doc. Steering was no longer important. All they had to do was break clear of the patch of killing weed.

Eventually, having lost another oar, they were in clear water. Doc was doubled up, fighting for breath, finally managing to pant, "At my age to fall victim to an aquatic herbaceous border!"

"I can smell land," Krysty said a few minutes later. "Earth and growing things."

Above the layer of mist they could all hear the lonely cry of swooping gulls, cut off from their food in the invisible ocean.

Doc called out that his oar blade had struck something. "Must be a rock. Must be closer in than we thought." He stopped rowing and leaned over the side of the boat, recoiling with a gasp and s.h.i.+fting to the center of the thwart. His lined face was as pale as a laundered sheet.

"Doc?" Ryan said. "What's wrong? Are we running aground?"

The old man managed a nervous laugh. "Run aground, my dear fellow? I think not. A blessing, that would be. No, I believe... yes, I am certain of it, that we would do well to bend our backs and hasten for the sh.o.r.e yonder."

"Doc," Ryan repeated, fighting for patience. "Just tell us what you saw."

"You recall, shortly after our arrival in this part of old New England, that we had something of a difficulty with a mutated killer whale and great white shark?"

"Yeah. Fireblast! You mean there's-" The boat s.h.i.+fted uneasily as something grated along its keel. Doc waved his hand in the air as he struggled for expression. "The great-grandfather of all mutie sharks. Upon my soul, but it's so. Fifty feet if it's...

I looked straight down into the grinning jaws and that devil's eye, empty and without soul. Oh, let us away, friends."

n.o.body needed any further encouragement, bending to the remaining oars, propelling the little boat forward in a series of great rushes, the whirlpools from the blades vanis.h.i.+ng swiftly behind them.

Krysty, in the bow, kept careful watch for any sharp-fanged rocks that might suddenly tear the bottom from the whaleboat and dump them all in the treacherous chill water.

"Left, Jak, left," she called, hearing the sucking noise of the sea, tangling around the gray boulders that marked the mixing of land and ocean.

The fog was finally showing a willingness to clear away. Visibility improved, and the sun broke through above their heads in a vapid glow. Ryan twice spotted the great dorsal fins of the mutie carnivores as they skimmed toward the sh.o.r.e. The bodies of the chilled seamen from the Salvation had obviously attracted several of the whale-sharks, and the noise of the oars in the water had brought them in close to hand.

"I can see it!" Krysty called. "Bit to the right. There's a channel between rocks. Looks like it leads to a beach."

Now they could all see land, the rowers squinting over their shoulders. There were cliffs above a strip of glistening s.h.i.+ngle, and on either side of the boat they could make out numerous tiny islands, mostly peaks of rock sticking above the calm sea.

"Recognize it?" Ryan asked J.B.

"No. Once we get ash.o.r.e I'll use the s.e.xtant to get a bearing. Deacon knows this coast and figured we were close to the redoubt. Fortress was what he called it. Got to be same place."

"Take it slow and easy," Krysty warned. "Lots of stuff just below the surface."

The narrowing channel twined between the fragments of the old reef. Ryan remembered now the state of the redoubt, with its sunken corridors and tidal damage from the old nukings-and wondered how easy they'd find it to get back inside and reach the gateway.

The final few yards to the s.h.i.+ngle were between jaws of rocks less than a dozen feet across. Beyond them was a last stretch of water where tiny waves tumbled ceaselessly, one upon another, whispering to the smooth pebbles. Under the keel, Ryan could see through clearer water, to the bottom, perhaps twenty feet below. Even as he glanced over the side of the boat he saw the sinuous form of one of the lethal whale-sharks, white-bellied, move past them, teeth bared in its eternal smile.

"Put the oars in," he ordered. "Too narrow. Sea'll carry us in from here."

They floated in, silently, all of them staring up at the lowering cliffs, their s.h.i.+ning flanks streaked with bright splashes of emerald moss. The last remnants of the mist still clung to the rock walls, like ghostly webs.

"Let me come in the bow," Ryan said, changing places with Krysty. He held his automatic rifle in his right hand. As he moved, his boots slipped on the long whaling spears that were tucked in near the bow, their hafts ready for the hand of the harpooneer. For a moment his mind flicked back to Donfil, and he thought how he'd miss the tall Apache.

As he'd missed so many good companions over the years.

"Hurry up, boat," Lori said crossly, shuffling on her seat.

Gradually, riding three feet forward and then two back, the boat came in closer. The rocks loomed on both sides of them, seamed with narrow caves and shadowed inlets. But their attention was on the beach, where the keel eventually grounded.

Ryan stood, ready to leap onto the s.h.i.+ngle to haul them up higher when the familiar rasping voice froze him in place.

"Not a blink of an eye, cully, or it's fins over for everyone."

Chapter Thirty-Three.

"BLASTERS AT YOUR FEET. Slow, slow and very slow."

Ryan lowered the Heckler & Koch, putting it on the thwart of the boat, seeing from the corner of his eye that the others were doing the same. Only Jak, in the stern, wasn't moving. The boy's mouth was set in a tight, etched line, and his fingers moved toward the b.u.t.t of his Magnum.

"Snow-hair's about to meet his Maker," Pyra Quadde cackled. "Does he bleed white as a mutie or red as the roses?"

"Let it alone, Jak," Ryan snapped. "She'll chill you! Put the blaster down."

Reluctantly the boy did as he was told.

Moving like a scout through a trembler mine field, Ryan turned to face the woman, knowing that life and death were now a breath apart for all of them in the whaleboat.

She stood in the bow of the dory. He guessed that she must have heard their approach and chosen the tiny cove to hide. The boat was pulled in so that it could only be seen when one was past it. She wore the long dress, with seaboots beneath it, and the Spanish pistol was held steady in her hand. She was smiling.

Just behind her and a little to the side was Cyrus Ogg, holding his own blaster aimed at the six friends. They were only about twenty feet apart.

"Well, now, here's a thing, isn't it, Mr. Ogg?" Pyra Quadde sneered.

"Indeed, ma'am, here's a thing, indeed. As thou sayest, Captain Quadde, here's a thing indeed," he agreed.

"Rowing all this blighted way through fog and sharks to meet up again like the best of friends, wouldn't thou say, Mr. Ogg?"

"I would say that, ma'am. Indeed, I would surely say that."

"Now, easy to pick off as stabbing a legless roach in a tin basin, Mr. Ogg?"

"Even easier, Captain. Even easier than that, I'd say."

Ryan had rarely seen two people looking so smugly pleased with themselves.

Something moved near the edge of the rocks, darting toward the water with a fast, skittering gait. It caught everyone's eye, but neither Pyra Quadde nor Cyrus Ogg relaxed their vigilance, or let the muzzles of their blasters wander away from the whaleboat.

Ryan watched the creature, which looked like a cross between a small rabbit and a large rat, but with a skin that glistened in the dawning as if it were covered in scales. It ignored the two dories and paddled across the cove, quickly reaching deeper water. It pa.s.sed only a few feet in front of Ryan, head held back, little eyes twinkling like polished b.u.t.tons, whiskers perkily aloft, paws twitching up spray. Its teeth were bared with the effort of its exertions.

There was a swirl and a flash of dull white sandpaper skin, and teeth, row upon serrated row, as the shark rolled belly-up in its attack. The little animal vanished, and the water cleared once more. It was as though nothing had happened.

One single bubble of dark maroon blood came plopping to the surface and burst, the color spreading and dissipating.

"Not a good place for swimming, Mr. Ogg."

"Not a good place at all, Captain."

"f.u.c.king get on!" Jak shouted.

"Language, laddie!" the woman reproved. "Mebbe thou should wash out thy mouth with good salt water. Ample under thy feet, cully."

"It's only me, you sick b.i.t.c.h! Let the others go."

"That an order to the captain, Outlander Deadman?" Ogg grinned at Ryan. "Well named, art thou not? Deadman. Outlander Deadman."

Ryan was trying to work out the odds. There wasn't much doubt that the first volley from the mate and the woman would put at least two and probably three of them over the side. And that meant death with the sharks cruising by, jaws gaping. One of the friends might s.n.a.t.c.h up a blaster and chill them both, but all the pointers were for a lot of dying.

A triangular fin broke the water near their boat, causing a wave to rock them from side to side.

Another appeared in the entrance from the open sea, and then a third. At a guess Ryan figured there were now at least a half dozen of the mutie monsters in the constricted waters of the narrow cove.

Their ceaseless swirling was raising a swell, water lapping at the jagged walls of the mollusk-covered rocks.

Ryan's boat, grounded in the s.h.i.+ngle, only moved a little from the waves. The blasters rattled and jostled in the bottom. Near Ryan's hand, where he steadied himself on the thwart, was the shaft of one of the long killing harpoons, its curved end glittering in the dawn.

"b.a.s.t.a.r.d belly-rippers," Pyra Quadde said. "Canst thou not make 'em hold still or go out into the open Lantic, Mr. Ogg?"

"Do better," he said, firing three s.p.a.ced rounds at the nearest shark.

The weaving killer that Ogg had fired at disappeared for several seconds. Allowing for the deflection effect of the clear water, it wasn't likely that the first mate had harmed it.

But to everyone's shock and amazement, the shark surfaced, trailing a ribbon of blood behind it. The long tail thrashed at the water, kicking up a spray of blinding foam. Ryan saw two of the other creatures, tasting blood, sensitized to the faint electrical emanations of the wounded beast, dart in, the sound of their rending teeth clearly audible as they entered a feeding frenzy.

One lashed out with its tail as it rolled, teeth locked in the flesh of its comrade, throwing a huge wave across the cove.