Downrigger Drift (23 page)

Falling headfirst, Ryan plunged through the thick, top layer of sludge into the dark water below. The cold hit his ribs like a punch, taking his breath away and leaving him spluttering and gasping as he fought his way to the surface.

He had just gotten there when a clawed hand clamped onto the top of his skull and pushed him back down right as he drew a breath. Ryan went under again, and in the light, through the clouds of bubbles caused by his thrashing, he saw something that made his blood run even colder.

Several of the giant muskies swam around the protected pool, doing lazy figure eights among the useless hulks of the giant power generators. But what startled him even more was the long, tubelike appendages, half as thick as his waist, attached to the sides of several. At first, he thought they might be some sort of vestigial appendages, but as one fish swam past, he saw a large eye regard him coldly, and he realized what they were.

Lampreys! He knew about the cold-blooded parasites. Once, during his travels with Trader, Ryan had seen a large school of them attacking a huge whale in the water, sucking the blood and life out of the huge animal until it beached itself to slowly die, at which point the lampreys, each as thick around as he was, dropped off and squirmed back into the water. Curious, Ryan had
gone down on the beach and taken a closer look at the carcass, seeing the holes bored into its hide, some as large as his head. He had never forgotten how those small animals had brought down something much larger, just by clamping on and sucking it dry.

In his crazily bobbing light, he saw several of the unattached bloodsuckers weaving through the water toward him and his attacker. Grabbing the lizardman’s hand, Ryan wrenched it off his head and bent the limb back, forcing it around the mutie’s back and up between its shoulder blades into a hammerlock. He forced the creature to turn just as the first lamprey reached them.

Ryan saw its circular mouth, filled with rows of sharp teeth, along with the rasping tongue that flicked back and forth, as if tasting the water. He shoved the lizardman into its path, and the lamprey struck at the movement, its mouth attaching to the mutie’s chest, causing him to gurgle in pain. Unlike the lampreys in the ocean, this one whipped its body around its victim, nearly catching Ryan in a thick coil. The lizardman tried to pry off the greedily sucking head, but he was already weakening from the sudden loss of blood. When another one swam up and fastened high on his inner thigh, the mutie’s eyes rolled back in its head, and its blows grew weaker as it beat listlessly against the large parasites.

Pushing his bait away, Ryan clawed his way to the surface, feeling something brush by him, but unsure whether it was a muskie or a lamprey. Not sticking around to find out, he swam toward the nearest generator casing, spotting a row of thick bolts he hoped to use to climb onto the rounded, slick metal.

Once there, he grabbed the nearest one, uncaring of the cuts it inflicted on his already battered hands, and hauled himself up, scrabbling for every inch of progress.
He managed to get his boots onto one of them, only to have the bolt snap off under the pressure, nearly sending him back into the pool. Glancing down, he saw one of the lampreys approaching, saw its open, pulsing mouth, as big around as his clenched fist, saw it gather itself and rear up out of the water at him, those teeth ready to slice through his pants and fasten onto his thigh, where that saber-sawed tongue would go to work rasping away the skin and flesh to suck his blood out….

“Fuck you!” Ryan lashed out with his foot, the combat boot catching the lamprey in the head and sending it splashing back into the filthy water. He reached up and hooked his fingers onto the row of bolts at the top of the housing, pulling himself up with one final heave.

The last of the sludgy water dripped from his ears, and he heard the hoots and screams of the lizardmen on the railings as they saw him emerge. Amid the chaos, he thought he heard Krysty or Jak yell something, but he couldn’t be sure. One or two spears whizzed by, but the furious muties hadn’t taken the time to aim properly, the missiles clattering on the tank or splashing into the water. However, they’d figure out how to get at him soon enough, whether by taking their chances through the lamprey-infested waters, or possibly leaping at him from the catwalks.

As if reading his mind, one of the lizardmen jumped up to the top of the railing and pushed off, soaring out into the air toward him. Ryan tensed for a moment until he realized the mutie was going to fall several feet short. The lizardman arced into the water with hardly a splash. Ryan peeked over the side to see where he had gone, and nearly got his face bitten off when the humanoid burst out of the water in front of him a moment later, leaping
into the air to land on the edge of the large cylinder in a graceful crouch.

Rearing back, Ryan stumbled, slipping on the curved surface and falling hard on his rear. He started to slide off one side, and only a desperate lunge for the far row of bolts prevented him from taking another dip in the lake. The lizardman stood and stepped forward on sure feet, unbothered by the slick surface. Ryan rose as well, one hand going to his panga to finish his adversary off with a couple of well-placed chops. To his right, he saw Krysty taking aim with her Smith & Wesson, and shouted, “No blasters!” Ignoring her puzzled frown, he tugged the blade free of its scabbard. Or tried to. Looking down, he saw the panga blade stuck halfway out of the wet sheath. “Shit!” Before he could yank it out, the lizardman was on him.

It barreled into his body, muscular arms wrapping around him and lifting him off the housing in a spine-cracking bear hug. Ryan matched its peculiar, hissing roar with a loud one of his own as he raised his arms and brought his cupped hands down on the mutie’s ear holes. It staggered, but didn’t release him, so he did it again. This time his attacker dropped him, but immediately launched itself at him again, intent on tackling him and driving him into the metal housing. Ryan tried to keep his balance, but slipped again on the wet metal and fell, the impact jarring his spine and making his teeth click together.

The lizardman came at him again, clawed hands seeking his face. Ryan blocked one questing arm with his own, levering it away from his eye. With his left hand, he grabbed the mutie’s other wrist and pushed it to the side. The lizardman thrust its face forward, trying to sink its teeth into Ryan’s nose. He avoided the snapping
fangs by turning his face to one side, then brought his own head up, cracking the lizardman in the jaw with his forehead. The blow caught it by surprise, and Ryan did it again, this time catching his opponent in its vestigial nose, and making it rear up, bellowing with pain and anger.

Ryan followed up his advantage by twisting his hips to one side, half throwing the mutie off. It tried to recover, but he was faster, clubbing it in the side of the head with his fist, and knocking it over. Scrambling out from under it, he jumped to his feet and tried to draw the panga again, which refused to budge from its scabbard.

Seeing the mutie about to get to its feet, Ryan stepped forward and kicked its foot out with all his remaining strength. It crashed down, and he drew back his foot and lashed out again, catching it where the temple would have been on a human. The steel-capped combat boot impacted the creature’s skull with the force of a brick dropped on an egg, shattering the temporal bone and sending fragments into the brain. The lizardman fell over, twitching, its eyes rolling back in its head.

Ryan took a deep breath, wincing as the movement caused a flare of pain in his aching ribs. Looking up from the dead body, his eye widened as he saw two more of the ugly muties climb onto the tank and start toward him. Ryan looked toward the doorway, and the generator he would have to swim to in order to get to it. A quick glance around confirmed his increasing peril, with more lizardmen crowding onto the catwalks, and several jumping into the water, heedless of the lampreys and muskies in their single-minded determination to get at him. The occasional spear or harpoon still whizzed by, but they were more cautious about hitting their brethren,
so the throws weren’t as furious as they’d been earlier. Still, in the few seconds he stood there, four harpoons sailed through the air at him, one close enough to graze the back of his leg before skittering off into the water.

Gripping the bottom of his scabbard with one hand, Ryan wrenched at his panga one last time, twisting it as he did so. This time the eighteen inches of honed steel slid free as if it had been greased, and he smiled.

Whirling, he drove the blade into the shoulder of the lizardman that had been trying to sneak up on him from the side of the generator. The mutie howled in agony, and Ryan planted a foot in its face and shoved it off the side, following it down into the water and driving the injured creature under the surface with a huge splash as he stepped on it, using its body as a crude launching platform to get a another foot of distance toward the last generator.

The second he hit the water, Ryan clamped his knife in his teeth and swam as hard as he could. The injured lizardman tried to grab him, but it was attacked by a pair of lampreys and was too busy fighting for its own life. He heard more splashing around him as other muties hit the water, but he was almost to the housing. Reaching it with one last lunge, he climbed up. Three-quarters out of the water, he felt claws on his leg, and, holding on to a bolt with one hand, he took the panga out of his mouth and swept it down and behind him, feeling the familiar shock up his arm as the blade bit into muscle and bone. The grip weakened, and he wriggled out of it as he pulled himself onto the metal.

“Ryan!” He lifted his head to see Krysty in the doorway, only a few yards away, but it might as well have been a mile. Lizardmen were clustered on either side of the doorway, one making a leap for the opening, only
to be repelled by Krysty with a front kick to the face, sending it splashing into the water below. On the other side, they gained a bit of a respite when the entire section pulled away from the wall and hit the water, spilling the scaly berserkers off in every direction. “We have to shoot them!”

“No! Don’t! You’ll kill us all!” Seeing the empty, twisted catwalk lying in the water, but also still connected to the next section gave Ryan an idea. He leaped forward, sailing through the air and landing on the shoulders of one of the lizardmen in the water, snapping his collarbone and sending him down into the murky depths. Falling forward, Ryan reached out and managed to snag the railing of the walkway, hauling himself up onto it before any of the nearby muties could grab him. He climbed up the slanted metal grating, using his free hand to hold on to the railing like a ladder, and keeping his panga ready in case any of the lizardmen tried to be a hero.

Halfway up, he was as close to the doorway as he was going to get, which meant he was still several feet away. Then Jak reappeared next to Krysty, carrying a length of chain. “Catch!”

The albino teen tossed the links at him, and Ryan had just enough time to sheath his panga before catching the chain. He wrapped the steel around his left hand and shouted. “Pull!”

Krysty and Jak both disappeared from sight, and Ryan practically flew through the air toward the doorway. As he rose, he caught sight of a blurred shape flying through the air at him, arms outstretched to tear his face off.

Ryan brought his right hand up and slammed the butt of his blaster into the mutie’s skull as it crashed into
him, grabbing him in spite of the damage it had just taken. He hammered the blaster into its head three more times, until its grip weakened, and it fell into the lake. Ryan spun wildly in midair, then he was at the lip of the doorway, hitting it with his aching ribs and sending new needles of pain through his chest. Still gripping the SIG-Sauer, he hauled himself through as more spears clattered against the wall around him.

Scrambling into the dark hall, he was met by Krysty and Jak, but shrugged them off. “Get back!” he shouted as a dark shape appeared in the doorway. The lizardman licked its lipless mouth as it stepped forward, ready to lay into the invaders.

Ryan pointed his blaster at the scaly form and squeezed the trigger three times. The trio of bullets plowed through the mutie’s chest, not stopping it, but mortally wounding it enough so it wouldn’t be a threat to him. The dying lizardman fell to its knees, a frown crossing its face as it heard a strange roar around it.

Ryan scrambled back from the bloom of red-gold flame that had appeared around his hand and wrist as the fire from the muzzle of his blaster ignited the thick fumes in the corridor and spread back to the huge room behind the wounded lizardman, wreathing it in flames. Spotting a doorway a few feet away, he lunged for it, getting inside as the whoosh increased to a deafening roar. Scrabbling for the door, he pushed it shut just as a blinding inferno erupted in the hallway, the corridor channeling the blast up and down its entire length, and sending little tongues of fire spurting under the doorway. Ryan, Krysty and Jak scurried to the corner farthest away from the door, crouched on the floor and breathed long and shallowly, trying to draw what little oxygen remained out of the atmosphere. They couldn’t hear
anything beside the sudden roar of the flame, but they didn’t need to hear anything to know what was happening to the group of lizardmen in the giant room.

“Fireblast, Krysty, what’re you doing?” Ryan wheezed as Krysty starting patting at his chest and shoulders.

“Hold still, you stupe! You’re on fire!” Krysty smothered the flames licking at his sleeve and leg, then checked the rest of him for any injuries.

Exhausted, all Ryan could do was slump back again the wall, panting and holding his side with each breath. “
That
is why I told you not to shoot in the big room.”

Ryan stood near the bowsprit of the
Lament
, one hand on the foremast, the other around Krysty, who stood close to him, keeping her footing with ease as the barge cut through the glass-smooth lake.

The storm system that had lashed the area for the past two days had finally moved on, and the sky was its usual mix of lemon yellow clouds and lavender again, with a hot golden sun beating down on them. The east wind was brisk, however, and dissipated most of the rising morning heat.

The rest of their group was scattered around the small ship, J.B. and Mildred lounged on one side of the cabin, hand-in-hand as they moved with the ebb and flow of the boat. Behind them, Jak stood on the cabin roof, shading his eyes as he scanned the horizon, unaffected by his brush with death just a few days earlier. Doc stood near the wheel, observing the first mate at the wheel, and for once not his usual garrulous self. Although the weather couldn’t have been better, none of them felt like talking much.

Escaping the nuclear power plant had been easy after their close call in the generator room. Once the fire had died down in the hallway, Ryan, Krysty and Jak had gone down it and found a half-submerged room with a window that looked out onto a narrow strip of beach. They’d smashed the glass and jumped out. Spotting a
light on the lake, they’d signaled it with their last hand light, and saw the welcome sight of the LAV-150 rumbling out of the water, smoke drifting from every gun on it, and the top and sides slick with gore.

J.B. had summarized the effects of the diversion with his usual terseness. “Got into position, started the cannon up, and they boiled out like we’d poked an anthill with a stick. Bastards were all over us. I rotated the turret once, firing the whole time, blew a dozen of them clean off the top. They tried stabbing through the ob ports, but a couple of shots put an end to that. Eventually we killed them all, and were about to head back to the waypoint when Mildred spotted your light.”

Ryan had filled them in on what had happened inside, including Donfil More’s sacrifice. He didn’t say what he was thinking—that the Apache’s selflessness may have been unnecessary, given how many of the lizardmen they’d chilled in the fire. Still, it might have made all the difference, since there’d been more muties in the building than just the ones they had killed.

They’d immediately headed back to the ville. The LAV had quit on them about halfway there, pushed beyond even its remarkable limits over the past few days. They’d spent the next day and a half walking, reaching the ville at midafternoon of the second day they’d been gone.

The villagers had assumed they’d been killed, and their survival was met with a mix of shock, disbelief and even a bit of suspicion. Ryan had bulled his way into the elders’ room and told them what went down, which was confirmed by the sixth elder. There was a period of mourning for Donfil by the entire ville, with a strange service held on the dock to commemorate his bravery and courage the next day.

So it was quite a shock when one of the fishing boats pulled into port with a smiling Donfil More standing in the prow.

He had completed his task in the old plant and exited the room via an escape hatch that had dumped him into the lake. It had taken his hastily constructed raft—two trees lashed tighter with some vines—two days to come within range of the fishing boats, and rescue. Mildred had examined Donfil and announced that he had gotten a dose of radiation, but he wasn’t in any serious danger.

After much rejoicing and words of gratitude, the companions retreated to their billet to recuperate. Donfil retreated to his.

Two days later, Donfil and the companions stood on the dock. “Farewell, friend. May the Great Spirit keep you safe and have your back,” Ryan said.

“Farewell, dear friend. Our debt to you can never be repaid.”

With a final wave, the companions boarded the
Lament.

Saire had also promised to drop them off near the blackened, blasted ruins of what had once been the city of Chicago, although he couldn’t figure out why they’d want to be in such a hell-blasted place. “Shoot, I’ll take you anywhere on the Lakes you might want to go—the forest of Michgan, or up north to Canada, if you like, just say the word.”

But Ryan and his group had been implacable, so six hours later, the
Lament
dropped them off in a small cove that J.B. said would be the best place to go ashore. The captain accompanied them personally in the dinghy,
riding with the second group, consisting of Ryan, Krysty and Doc.

Just before they splashed ashore, he’d taken Ryan’s hand in a firm grasp. “Just remember, if you’re ever in the area again, come by and see us. Be glad to have any of you on board my boat again.” They’d waded ashore, and Saire’s men had pushed off again, rowing back to the barge. The sails had risen, and soon the trim craft was heading back up the lake.

Ryan and company watched until the fishermen were just a speck on the horizon before turning to head inland. J.B. estimated they could make the concealed redoubt before nightfall, and set a hard but not grueling pace. The baked plain stretched out all around them, with only a scattered ruin of an unidentifiable structure breaking up the landscape.

True to the Armorer’s word, they reached the hidden door as the sun was starting to slip below the horizon. Ryan entered the standard code and the door ground ponderously open.

Doc’s face was expectant as the door opened, and Ryan caught it falling as the barren corridor was revealed. “There was nothing in here the last time we came by, what made you think anything might have changed?”

The old man turned sad eyes on him. “Oh, Ryan, you have no idea what hopes I have every time we come to one of these doors, that each one might hold the secrets of, if not escaping this hellish world, then of somehow making it better for those who are forced to dwell in it every day of their nasty, brutish and short lives.”

Ryan stared at him, unsure as to whether he was serious, or slipping into one of his spells again. “Well,
maybe the next place’ll have just that. Come on, Doc, it’s time to go.”

They threaded their way through the labyrinth of corridors until they reached the familiar mat-trans room. Ryan waited until everyone was comfortable on the floor before closing the door and sitting down as he waited for the comps to cycle a jump that would spirit them to who knew where.