Hell Road Warriors (Deathlands), page 18
Doc gave the black smoke billowing up from the tower top a leery look. “Yes…well…”
The LAV on the forward promenade fired occasional bursts of cannon and coax fire at pockets of resistance or against the firing ports of the towers to keep them honest.
“The log-chains are down!” McKenzie was eager. “If I advance the Queen, can you still give fire?”
Doc shook his head as ugly shivers shook him. He clutched at his sanity. “No, Captain! The catapults will overshoot beyond this range with everything except the heaviest stones! I recommend we hold position! The catapults will engage in suppressive bombardment of the northern island and the northern shore fort while J.B. and the ballistae give Ryan’s team covering fire along the southern gate!”
“Very good! Maintaining position! Fire at will!”
“Oh, well, very kind of you, Captain....” Doc gazed between the two mangonels. They were his instruments of destruction. He gazed at the burning tower top and the burning men who had stopped moving atop it.
“Doc?” the loadmaster called.
Pangs of guilt and horror began nudging Doc’s damaged psyche. His swordstick shook in his hand. He opened his mouth and closed it. He could feel “it” coming on.
“Doc?” The loadmaster gave him a desperate look, “Doc!”
The old man tamped down his guilt and fear.
His friends needed him.
Doc shouted with a certainty he didn’t feel. “Starboard catapult! Turn sixty degrees! Burning sand! Port catapult! Pitch! Keep your eye on the southern canal tower! On my signal!” Doc raised his binoculars and checked the range again. Without a shadow of a doubt, Ryan Cawdor was a dear friend. It was his show now. The Queen would break the Soo Lock or be sunk by the success or failure of Ryan’s efforts. Doc flung friendship, honor and duty into the face of madness.
He would give Ryan a fighting chance. “Loose!”
RYAN WATCHED THE SECOND CASK of burning pitch shatter and sluice across the south island tower. It would be worth any pirate’s life to open the hatch and step out into the inferno. Doc called across the radio. “Now, Ryan! While the fire is still hot!”
Ryan unslung his Scout and leaped to the catwalk. It took dozens of oxen to open the gate but only the current to hold it shut against all comers. Beneath the tower squatted a blockhouse encasing a capstan the size of a windmill without any sails. Half of the curtain of palisade was fixed into the river bottom, and it was fixed on the island side. The swinging gate overlapped the fixed one with six cut-out sections like the teeth of an old-fashioned key. Ryan had to shatter the six overlaps and the current would do the rest. Doc had smeared the southern island tower top with fire, but the catwalks, rope bridges and island shacks behind the gates were still pirate infested.
Tamara’s longblaster began cracking on rapid semiauto. “Go, Ryan!”
Ryan charged across the top of the lock catwalk that J.B. had busted and blackened with the LAV’s autocannon. Blood, limbs and burned timber were everywhere. Jak and Blacktree were right on his heels. McKenzie’s voice came across the link. “We see you, Ryan!”
A half dozen pirates burst out of the top of the tower ahead and braved the burning pitch to bring down Ryan and his team.
J.B.’s voice spoke wisdom across the link. “Down!”
Tamara joined the save-the-demo-men crusade. “Down!”
Blasterfire raked the top of the tower. The pirates never made it ten steps toward the catwalk. They fell wounded or dead into the puddles of fire.
Ryan’s link echoed with J.B.’s urgency. “Go!”
Tamara’s guardian angel voice rang from behind. “Run, Ryan! Run!”
Ryan ran for it. A pirate swung up from the rope bridge below, and the one-eyed man shoved out the Scout and fired it point-blank into the pirate’s screaming face. Another pirate swung himself up into Ryan’s path with club and blade in hand, screaming. Goosekiller’s swarm of buckshot smeared away the pirate’s head and sent him toppling into the canal below. Ryan slung his rifle. Jak uncoiled a knotted rope and made it fast to the top of the wall.
Tamara shouted over the sound of her own longblaster. “Make it fast, Ryan! You’re attracting attention!”
Ryan pulled on elk-skin gloves, filled his mouth with nails and went down the rope. He stopped just as his boots hit water and put his boots on one of the knots. A bullet smote splinters a foot away from his arm. The one-eyed man ignored the bullets seeking his life and pulled a hammer from his belt. He leaned his weight against J.B.’s satchel charge and hammered the explosive pack into the wet wood of the gate. Ryan yanked the cord holding the satchel closed on top and reached in to arm the detonator pin. He looked down as something nudged his right foot.
A huge, goofy-looking, almost eellike fish was awkwardly nuzzling at his boot. Its blue eyes looked up soulfully at Ryan. It rolled over as it pushed up out of the water to try to reach Ryan’s calf and revealed a round, jawless maw like a giant, inflamed, thorn-filled rectum.
Ryan snapped the toe of his boot into the lamprey’s teeth and it fell back in the water. “Haul up!”
Blacktree hauled him up to the next gate overlap. “Charge!” Jak dropped down a charge and Ryan caught it. He hammered it into place and armed it. “Haul up!” Blacktree hauled him up another increment and Ryan pounded in another charge.
“Ryan!” Jak shouted.
Tamara shouted in warning. “Ryan! Get out of there!”
The one-eyed man looked to his left. The top of the tower still burned, but the men on the floors below were very much alive. They didn’t have any firing slits facing the inside of the great gate, but someone had tattled on Ryan and what he was doing. Pirates flooded out of the bottom of the tower faster than Tamara and Goosekiller could knock them down. Ryan hung midgate like a very exposed spider—a spider several dozen pirates intended to squash once and for all.
Jak fired his Colt Python as fast as he could pull the trigger.
Blacktree hauled on the rope and waited for Ryan’s order.
The one-eyed man hammered in the charge and shouted into his radio. “Six!”
Six’s voice was a welcome boom across the link. “I see you! We have you!”
Ryan risked a glance to his right. The LAV splashed to the edge of the water right next to the great gate capstan. Mr. Smythe was perched behind the machine blaster, and it ripped into life. A dozen of Loud Elk’s men clustered around it, firing their blasters into the pirates. A dozen more spilled onto the top of the southern gate tower and began firing with Tamara.
“Haul up!” Ryan called. “Charge!”
Jak dropped Ryan another charge and he nailed another satchel into the string of explosive. “Haul up!”
Ryan repeated the process twice more as an occasional bullet smacked wood nearby.
He hung six feet from the top over the last overlap with the last charge. “Get out of here!”
“Ryan!” Jak protested.
There was nothing left for Jak or Blacktree to do except to stand on the catwalk and get shot at. “Go and cover me!”
Jak and Blacktree ran for the cover of the shore tower. Ryan hammered in the last charge. He snarled and kicked away from the timbers as a hand reached out for his face from beneath the catwalk.
Ryan examined his opponent for the heartbeats he had while he swung out into space. It was fish-belly white like a stickie but more robustly built. It was also wearing a pirate vest and breechclout. Unlike a stickie it had hair that had been shaved into scalp braids. The sharklike black eyes, the needle teeth and the suckers on its outstretched fingers and palm bespoke some grotesque and undoubtedly nonconsensual crossbreeding. It clung to the bottom of the catwalk with one hand and its bare feet.
Ryan swung back in and gave the hybrid both boot heels in the teeth. The stickie flopped vertical, held to the bottom of the catwalk only by its suckered feet. Ryan cracked it between the eyes with his hammer and its feet released. The stickie fell to the dark water of the St. Marys River. Lampreys began churning around it.
About half a dozen of the hybrids were crawling along the bottom of the catwalk from both sides of the shore. Where they had been hiding was a moot point. Ryan had a problem. He hauled himself up the rope to the catwalk as the muties scrabble-sucked themselves toward him in their all-too-fast upside-down progress. Ryan pulled the detonator from his coat.
A hand wrapped around his ankle and yanked him flat.
The detonator clattered to the catwalk.
A voice cackled out of the smoke from the burning, midcanal tower top. “You know who I am, boy?” Ryan slid as the suckered hand began dragging him back down. Ryan drew his SIG-Sauer and three hollowpoint rounds separated the sucking hand at the wrist. The voice bellowed. “I’m Thorpe! The pirate king! You come here to break my locks, boy?”
Ryan shoved his blaster toward the tower top, but Thorpe had ducked down behind the crenellations. A suckered hand shot out from beneath the catwalk and vised around the one-eyed man’s forearm. The spatulate hand contracted like a noose and the blaster fell free. Ryan slipped his panga from its sheath and returned the favor across the veins and nerves of the mutie’s inner wrist. Ryan ripped his hand free and drew his second SIG.
Thorpe shouted gleefully. “How you like my stickie men, boy?”
A stickie pirate rolled up onto the catwalk, and Ryan shot it three times in the face. The Deathlands warrior rolled over and shot the one behind him with a double-tap to the forehead. Four more rolled up on the catwalk in front and behind him. Covering fire tapered off as Ryan’s friends were afraid to shoot into the melee. A dozen voices on the link and on the tower shouted out.
“Ryan!”
Ryan snapped off four rounds into the stickie man in front of him and fired a double tap into the one behind.
Thorpe cackled with glee. “Bred my stickie men special to climb up the side of a ship or over the walls of a ville! I tell you it’s hard to get a stickie to do anything! Tie a woman down for them and half the time they don’t know whether to kill her or poke her!”
A stickie man rolled up from under the catwalk right next to Ryan. He slapped it between the eyes with the slide of his SIG-Sauer and fired his blaster dry into the next one coming down the catwalk.
Thorpe roared with mirth from behind his cover. “But once I got my half-breeds, these boys are crackerjack creepers!”
Ryan dropped his spent blaster. There was no time to reload. There was no time to unlimber the Scout. He heard the slap of stickie feet behind him and saw three running toward him. Ryan scooped up his detonator, flipped off the plastic shield of the arming button, pushed it and flipped the switch. He took what might be his last second on Earth to cover his eyes with his palms, shove his thumbs into his ears and curl into a ball.
The gate braces blew in a string.
Ryan’s world turned into orange light and thunder. The stickie men behind him went up with it. The catwalk he lay upon took most of the wooden shrapnel. The swinging section of the great gate groaned as everything that braced it suddenly blew apart and it swung with the current. The section of catwalk Ryan clung to sagged with damage and his boots scrabbled over the edge. He heard the Queen’s steam whistles shrieking in victory and people on the far tower shouting his name desperately. Thorpe roared with rage from his own tower top. “You’re dead, boy! You’re cut off! I’m gonna throw you in the lamprey pit, and when I eat my pie tonight I’m going to taste your blood! I’m gonna watch them suck you dry, boy! I’m gonna—”
Ryan rose, shoved his slaughtering knife between his teeth and dived for the Queen.
It was a long plunge, but the canal was deep and Ryan hit the turbulent water like a knife. The cold hit him like a fist to the heart, and Ryan instantly kicked upward. He breached the surface and saw the Queen steaming toward him. The LAV, convoy and crew spewed blaster flame in all directions as the mighty ship headed for the gap. Ryan hurled his arms ahead of him and his hands slashed like axes into the water in an all-out sprint. He turned his head, sucked air with every other stroke. As he turned his head, Ryan looked down and saw the lampreys rising from the river bottom for him in a swarm.
He knew he wasn’t going to make it.
The first lamprey arrived, seven feet long and staring at him dopily with its blank blue eyes. There was nothing dopey about the rubbery, inverted cone mouth filled with teeth. It wasn’t the first time he had faced off against this type of creature.
Ryan took his slaughtering knife from between his teeth and stabbed it straight down the lamprey’s throat. The creature spasmed into a paroxysm of wriggling and sank downward. He stroked ahead, but faltered as he felt a cone of thorns close around his calf and a rasplike tongue begin boring into the hardened muscle. Ryan turned turtle in the water and pulled his knees into his chest. His blade sheered the offending lamprey’s mouth off at the gill line. Ryan lurched as he felt the horrible, thorny kiss against his right buttock. He twisted and stabbed through a gill hole. A thorn-filled maw twisted against his knife arm, trying to find suction. Ryan stabbed the lamprey just beneath its head and ripped down its belly, opening it like a letter.
The battle had taken him six feet below the surface and his lungs burned. He stroked and kicked for the surface.
Ryan flinched as a horrid lipless mouth gained the seal between his shoulder blades. He gasped as the rasplike tongue scraped his spine. White fire shot down his back and down his left leg. His lungs and throat reflexively filling with water, Ryan clawed toward the surface. A lamprey latched on to his bleeding right buttock, and another hit his inner left thigh. They wriggled and yanked against him to drag him back down. A lamprey hit him in the stomach, and its tongue tried to bore past the hard plates of his abdominal wall. He ignored them and clawed for the surface. Only there would there be surcease or any kind of rescue.
Ryan broached the water like a drowning man rising for the third and last time.
He saw the Manitoulin whaleboat a dozen yards away, but it was trying to oar past huge chunks of lock debris.
“Ryan! Ryan!” Everyone was shouting his name. Hunk Poncet’s voice called out in clear command from the Manitoulin whaleboat. “Kagan! Kosha! Quinn! Man in the water! Lamprey!”
Ryan sagged beneath the water for the last time as the lampreys dragged him down. The monster poodles hit the water in an answering wedge. Ryan’s struggles weakened with blood loss and the weight of the fish sucking him dry. The dogs beelined for him. Lampreys boiled around the giant dogs in the water, nuzzling and twisting and trying to attach themselves, but the water-shedding, corkscrew coats of the poodles confounded their jawless efforts. The giant poodles ignored the lampreys attacking them and instead took a dim view of those latching on to Ryan. Kagan’s jaws clamped on the lamprey boring into Ryan’s back, and she began savaging the parasite like an old slipper. The lamprey spasmed and released as its cartilaginous spine crushed beneath Kagan’s teeth. Kosha and Quinn joined the fray, ripping savaging and releasing. Kagan’s teeth closed around the sling of Ryan’s Scout, and she began pulling him along like a canine outboard motor. Kosha and Quinn rode like convoy guards, snapping at any fish trying to latch on to their charge. The prow of the whaleboat appeared in front of Ryan’s face. Hunk and his men hauled him out of the river.
“Ryan! You did it! You really did it!”
The Manitoulin men pulled the poodles aboard. Kosha still had a lamprey in her jaws. Hunk’s big earnest face loomed into Ryan’s. “Talk to me!”
Ryan coughed and threw up water for a long time. He finally sagged back and wiped his chin wearily. “Get on the radio. Tell Krysty I’m all right.” He lay back between the benches, watching as Kosha savagely yanked her head back and forth to cease her lamprey’s struggles. She dropped her prize at Ryan’s feet. “Put that in a pie for me.”
He nodded at Kosha. “Good dog.”
Kosha wagged her tail happily.
She liked Ryan.
Chapter Eighteen
Lake Superior
All eyes turned in the Queen’s makeshift main sick bay as Krysty walked in. She raised an eyebrow at the sight of Ryan lying naked on a cot with his rear end propped up in the air by three rolled blankets like a man over a barrel. Mildred worked at dressing the grotesque lamprey wounds. She was currently working on Ryan’s right buttock. The man stoically stared into the middle distance without flinching.
Krysty smirked. “Lover? You look like you got gang-banged by stickies.”
“Feel like it,” Ryan grunted. He thought back to the last seconds of the fight on the great gate and Thorpe’s hybrid pirates. “Almost did.”
Krysty looked to Mildred. “How is he?”
Mildred swabbed the tongue wound in the middle of the bite perforating Ryan’s posterior. “The wounds are disgusting to look at, but for the most part they seem clean and nearly ninety percent superficial. Only the tongues went anything near deep. He half drowned in the river and the lampreys left him a couple of pints short. Rest and food will take care of what ails him.”
“Then let me provide the initial repast!” Doc walked in jauntily carrying a trencher board with a stoop of spruce beer and a steaming lamprey pie. “Ryan, may I present you with your antagonist, courtesy of noble canines Kagan, Kosha and Quinn!”
“Doc!” Mildred stared disbelievingly. “Get that out of here!”
Ryan lifted his head and sniffed the air. “Nah, Doc, bring that here.”
The old man brought over the platter and set it at the foot of the cot. Ryan scooped up a spoonful of lamprey, mustard and onion pie. He shoved it in his mouth and chewed. Maybe everything tasted better after beating death, maybe it was the sweet taste of victory, or it might just be that Ryan’s blood was the secret ingredient that every lamprey pie called out for. Whatever the reason, to the one-eyed man it was damn fine pie.
He mumbled though a full mouth. “Those dogs get steak tonight.”
Mildred watched Ryan wolf his food. “Well, he’s hungry, always a good sign.”
