Haven's Blight (24 page)

The behemoth never so much as glanced their way. He cruised on past downstream, driving himself hard with side-to-side strokes of his mighty tail. His wake was so strong it rocked the pirogues.

“He runs like he has Job on his tail,” Bluebottle said reverently.

“Job?” Doc called from the rearmost craft. The gator passed it without slowing. “Why would a gigantic armored saurian fear an Old Testament prophet?”

Rameau snorted laughter. “No prophet, this Job,” he said. “That’s Cajun French talk for the Devil.”

Bluebottle continued poling them into the pool. It was big, fifty yards wide by about eighty long. The surface was placid. In the gathering gloom of evening it looked as serene and unthreatening as a scene could look, even with the bugs griping at every exposed inch of skin.

“Bottom dropping fast,” Bluebottle muttered. He laid the pole carefully along the boat’s long axis, then sat in the stern and picked up a pair of paddles. “Too deep to pole.”

Shifting carefully to midships, he socketed the paddles into eyes set in either side of the boat and began to scull it across the pond. In the trailing craft Cole did likewise. Still in shallower water Terance continued to stand and shove with his pole.

The lead watercraft had picked up speed. They were already well out, almost to the middle of the pool.

“What that?” Jak said, pointing left.

About thirty feet to port and abeam of the boat Mildred shared with Cole, the water had begun to bubble and froth furiously, as if it were coming quickly to a boil.

From the midst of the roiling water arose dark humped mass. Before the water weeds and murky water had sluiced away enough for Ryan to catch any notion what it might be, something startlingly long whipped up and out of the water in a horizontal line of spray.

Somebody shrieked shrilly in intolerable agony.

“Gotch Eye!” Bluebottle shouted, voice vibrating fear. “It’s Gotch Eye! High John de Conquer, save us!”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Instinctively, Ryan turned toward the sound of the screaming, which went on and on like a line unreeling. He saw Terance standing in the stern of the last boat. His head was back, his mouth wide open, venting that wrenching sound at ultimate volume. Something resembling a tree root as thick as his arm, was wound about his waist. He had dropped his pole to clutch at it with both hands. Lesser tendrils, no thicker than a rubber hose, waved from the rootlike tentacle. They seemed to branch into even smaller filaments.

It wasn’t fear that made Terance scream like that. The guide was a hard man. If he hadn’t mastered his fears long since, he would have either died or gone into some more placid line of work than waging an endless war of treachery and ambush with a merciless foe like the swampies. It was the sound of a man in all-consuming agony.

Ryan saw a red line along Terance’s contorted cheek that practically glowed. As he watched, a skinny tendril whipped one of the guide’s bare forearms. It left a crimson weal on the leathery skin.

Another tentacle lashed out of the water toward the center boat. “Get down!” Ryan yelled. “Don’t let it touch you!”

A third tentacle erupted right beside his own boat. As it reared higher than he stood, Ryan whipped out his panga by sheer reflex. The tentacle lashed toward him.

He struck. The heavy, sharp blade bit through the tentacle and severed it without hitting bone. Six feet of the tip, writhing like an eel, flew over the boat to splash into the water on the starboard side.

The tiniest little hair of a tendril brushed Ryan’s left cheek. The pain hit him like a sledgehammer to the face. Blue-white lightning shot through his skull, and he dropped straight into the bilge as if poleaxed.

He heard shouts join the screams. By a wrench of sheer willpower he forced himself back up on his arms in time to see Terance yanked bodily out of the flatboat and through the air by the slimy green-brown mottled tentacle. He soared a brief arc and was pulled beneath the water with a giant splash.

Ryan saw the creature clearly now. Where the boiling had taken place as the thing surfaced now floated a patch of bubbles about the size of the boat, ranging in size from tiny froth to pearlescent globes the size of his head. A mass of something that looked like seaweed, but with an unpleasant greenish-black sheen, floated in a wide circle.

From the midst of the vileness rose a single eyeball the size of a predark soccer ball. Horrifyingly, it resembled an immense, detached human eye, white with red veins, a murky iris of brown and green and a great staring black pupil.

The pirogue rocked side to side in a tumult of splashing. The left side of Ryan’s face convulsed irregularly. The pain remained intense, but it was no longer overpowering, something Ryan could handle.

He fumbled out his SIG-Sauer, tried to sight through the spasms. He got the terrible giant eye lined up like a pumpkin resting on the front-sight post. But as he squeezed off three quick shots, another wave threatened to swamp the boat, causing it to heel over. The shots went high.

“It is trying to upset our boats!” he heard Doc shout from the third boat.

A tentacle lashed at Ryan’s craft, and he rolled to the side. He couldn’t see what Bluebottle or Jak did to dodge, but because neither screamed in pain he reckoned they got clear. Or were hit so badly the corrosive poison had stunned them.

“Don’t let it touch you!” he roared. “Not even the tiny hairs!”

The tentacle whipped back as if it had touched something hot. The end was missing, leaving a stub that gouted greenish-black ichor. Bluebottle crowed in triumph. Ryan remembered he carried a tomahawk with a forged-steel head, which he called his
casse-tête,
or head breaker. He’d probably chopped through the tentacle with it.

Ryan rolled back onto his belly. As he tried again to line up a shot from a platform rolling wildly on waves thrown up by Gotch Eye’s thrashing, a human form erupted from the midst of the dark patch.

It was the head and shoulders of Terance. He was barely recognizable. The blue-black seaweed-like stuff draped him like a blanket. Steam and a sizzling sound rose where the wet leaflike clusters clung to his features, which seemed to be melting in front of Ryan’s eye. Lips like a melting wax mouth spread apart to emit a scream that made the man’s earlier shrieks sound like cries of joy.

Blasters bellowed. J.B.’s shotgun roared three times in quick succession. The left side of Terance’s melting head blew off in a spray of brain and blood and chunks of “seaweed.” The screaming stopped. The guide sank back into the churning mat as if dissolving.

This time as Ryan lined up his shot, a tentacle whipped at him again. He only just caught the quick movement from the corner of his eye, yanked his hand back in the boat and ducked his face behind the gunwale just in time. The tentacle slammed against the plank hull. None of the terrible tendrils touched his skin.

“The bastard mutie knows what a blaster is!” he yelled.

With a sick shock he realized that not only was the monster trying to upset the boats and pitch more occupants into the water for the seaweed-stuff to digest alive, it was also trying to spoil their aim.

He tried popping up and snap-firing. He got off two shots to no visible effect, then dropped back down as a tentacle slashed the air above his head. Thing was bastard fast, too.

How do we beat the nuke-sucker? he wondered.

He heard the muffled booms of feet move inside the boat. The pirogue rocked to something other than surging water and bashing appendages. Ryan looked around to see Jak stand upright, his legs braced wide. His white hair flew as he reared back an arm, then it whipped forward. No sooner had it reached the end of its motion and a glittering knife spun end-over-end from his snow-white hand, than he plucked another from his other hand and cocked the arm back to throw once more.

Ryan looked back at Gotch Eye in time to see a splash of murky water right next to the giant orb that named it. Then the knife struck the lower left-hand side of the monster eyeball. It hit wrong and glanced off, vanishing among the mounded bubbles.

Jak’s third throwing knife pierced straight into the middle of the great staring pupil.

A weird whistling filled the air, ten times as loud as the sounds Terance made when he was being melted alive by the creature’s acid. The tentacles beat with mindless fury, spewing water fifteen feet in the air. The great eye, oozing clear green fluid from the knife wound, drew hastily beneath the surface with an immense sucking sound. The seaweed mass seemed to be sucked toward the center and down with it.

The odd cluster of bubbles took longer to retract. Ryan heard the stubby shotgun barrel beneath the main barrel of Doc’s huge LeMat handblaster roar. A foot-wide cluster of bubbles exploded. The stench they released threatened to yank Ryan’s stomach inside out.

J.B. fired his M-4000 as fast as he could cycle the action. Bubbles popped rapidly. The stench grew almost overwhelming.

Wailing filled the moisture-saturated afternoon air. The water boiled almost as violently as it had right before the monster appeared. Two huge tentacles lashed at the sky directly above the churning mass as if in supplication, then the intact bubbles vanished beneath the water, too.

The pond’s surface rhythmically smoothed itself. A stinking polychromatic sheen where the monster had been was all that remained in view.

Ryan popped the partially expended magazine from the butt of his SIG-Sauer and fished for a full one. If the horror came back, he didn’t intend his slide to lock open after just a couple shots.

“Anybody hurt?” he called.

“We’re all fit to fight,” J.B. said, “but Rameau got his arm stung.”

Ryan looked back. The Havenite boss sat in the second flatboat with his face not much darker than Jak’s and his eyes dilated. He’d clearly gotten stung far worse than Ryan had.

And Ryan’s face still felt as if the whole left side was on fire. The affected area hadn’t gotten numb at all. He could feel the scar tissue that ran down that side of his face flexing stiffly as muscles twitched.

“We’ve got to get to shore soon,” he said. “Anybody know how to treat this shit?”

“It seems a lot like jellyfish venom,” Mildred said. She was examining Rameau’s stung arm and not looking too pleased with what she saw. “You’re supposed to scrub that with sand.”

“We have passed some sandy banks. Surely we can find another,” Doc said.

“If we can’t, maybe grass will do,” Mildred said. “Or, I don’t know, dry cloth. I know you’re not supposed to use water. Damn! I just remembered—you’re supposed to do things opposite if it’s a Man o’ War sting. How do we know what that bastard had?”

“We don’t,” Ryan said. “So we fake it. What’s next?”

“Then rinse with vinegar. Um, any mild acid will do, I guess. Do we have anything like that?”

Ryan knew his companions didn’t. Rameau was busy grinding his teeth together to keep from howling like a stickie on fire. Ryan looked back at Bluebottle, who shook his head. He wasn’t looking too healthy, either. He probably was just shaken, the one-eyed man thought. No surprise there.

“We may have to skate on that,” Ryan said. “Anything else?”

“Um, apply ammonia.”

“And where do we get that?”

Mildred looked uncomfortable. She was scrubbing at Rameau’s wound.

“From urine, my friends,” Doc said. “It is the most readily available source.”

“Ace on the line,” Ryan said. “Anything else?”

“Apply aloe vera. Sometimes I have that in our med supplies. We’re out now.”

“We have the aloe vera,” Bluebottle said. “We carry healing kits.”

“Luck, for once. Okay. Keep your eyes peeled for a place to land and camp for the night.”

Ryan dug through his pack for a spare pair of socks and dabbed at the slime the tendril had left on his face with the worst holed one. Then he pitched it overboard.

“Littering, Ryan,” Mildred said.

“What?”

“Never mind.” She shook her head. Rameau had kind of sunk down into the boat. He looked bad.

“What the hell was that thing?” Mildred demanded. “It was like a…a cross between an octopus, a jellyfish and kelp. And—and a person! That eye was structured exactly like a human eye!”

“Mutie,” Jak said laconically.

“Perhaps,” Doc called. “And perhaps not. When I was held, a helpless captive out of time, I overheard my captors talking about a project to create an artificial life form that could be used to explore some unimaginably alien world.”

“You think what they came up with was
that?
” Ryan said.

“I cannot know. But those words did come rather forcibly back to me now.”

“
That
’s a planet I never hope to see,” Mildred said fervently.

“Think it’s dead?” Cole asked.

“All I know is it’ll be a bastard while before the rad-sucker fucks with us again,” Ryan said. “I’ll settle for that.”

Mildred looked at Rameau, who had begun shivering in uncontrollable reaction.

“Got to treat this now,” she said. She stood uncertainly amidships and began to fiddle with the fly of her camou pants. “Everybody turn your heads. Cole, honey, you just concentrate on keeping us moving.”

“Why?” Jak asked.

“No vinegar,” Mildred said. “So, here goes the next step of the treatment. You understand?”

After a moment Ryan said, “Oh, for nuke’s sake. Everybody look away while Mildred drops her pants. The woman’s being all proper again.”

“How about that facial wound, Ryan?” she called sweetly.

“It’s fine!”

“T
HANK
YOU
for giving poor Terance the coup de grâce, my friend,” Rameau said through chattering teeth to J.B. “It was all that could be done.”

They had built a yellow dancing fire from driftwood in the middle of a space they’d cleared in an expanse of waist-high grass. Overhead a few clouds slid like gray rafts across a sea of stars. For various reasons nobody felt like camping back among the trees. They wanted a wide field of fire around them this night.

The usual swamp smells of decay and decomposition seemed thicker and more cloying than usual.

The Armorer shrugged. “Glad I stopped his suffering,” he said, “but I can’t claim credit. Fact is, I was aiming for that rad-blasted eye.”

The aloe had helped. Ryan’s face still felt as if a razor was cutting his skin, over and over, but the terrible venom prickling had stopped. Still, given that Rameau had gotten it worse than he had, the man had to be bastard tough to talk at all.

“Poor Terance,” Mildred said. “I’ll see that face in my nightmares the rest of my life.”

After a moment she added, “He’ll have plenty of company.”

J.B. patted her shoulder. “Well, I don’t have to worry about you dreaming about any handsome dudes,” he said with a chuckle.

Mildred’s face turned a sort of greenish pale in the yellow firelight. She immediately stood and stomped off.

“What?” J.B. looked thunderstruck. From Ryan’s angles the lenses of his specs were blank yellow circles. “I was just trying to lighten the mood! What’d I do?”