Haven's Blight (8 page)

“They’re cutting stick and running now,” J.B. said.

The shooting dwindled and died. The pirates who had attacked through the trees now seemed interested only in retreating as rapidly as the wind and mucky footing would allow. Those who were in condition to. Ryan didn’t notice anyone wasting time trying to help the wounded get away.

“Why is the river dropping?” Mildred said.

Everybody looked. It was true. The level of the water was falling perceptibly. Ryan noticed it was taking on the blackish tinge of tannin from rotting vegetation a channel like this usually showed, rather than the dirty brownish-gray appearance it had before.

“The wind’s not dying,” Krysty said. “Why isn’t it still driving the seawater upriver against the flow?”

“Perhaps the tide recedes?” Doc suggested in a voice that didn’t display much confidence despite the fact he, like everybody, was bellowing against the hurricane roar. The wind lashed them like invisible whips now.

Ryan shook his head. “Don’t know,” he said. “But the damned
Egret
’s stuck harder aground than she was before.”

And then Isis, who had slithered over the downstream side of the cabin when the shooting ceased, fired a shattering burst in the air.

“Everybody, get aboard ship!” she screamed.
“Suckout!”

Chapter Ten

“What the blazing nuke death’s a suckout?” Ryan demanded.

Isis looked toward them and waved the twenty-pound BAR one-handed as if it were a willow wand. “You! Grab your traps and get your asses aboard! Do it now!”

After an instant’s frozen hesitation, the Tech-nomads—who now stood in water a good two feet shallower than they had moments ago—boiled into action. Some splashed out toward the
New Hope
and scrambled aboard. Others piled back onto the
Egret.

“What good getting onboard stuck ship?” Jak shouted. He was clinging to the tree he’d taken cover behind with one white hand. His long white hair was blowing almost straight out to the side. The wind was threatening to toss his skinny body through the air.

“You got me,” Ryan said. “But the lady sounds like she means it.”

“Hurry!” Isis shouted. She fired another shot from her BAR. “You! Outlanders! Get your asses on board now if you want a chance to live!”

“She does mean it, Ryan,” Krysty said. “We need to do it.”

Bent low to reduce her cross-section to the now brutal wind she scuttled from the shelter of her tree to plop down next to her pack. She yanked the tarp off. The wind grabbed it from her and whirled it away out of sight up the once-more sluggish river before she’d got it all the way clear. Her hair was blown in front of her face, the scarlet tendrils, their colors muted by the dim gray light, twisting like a ball of agitated snakes.

“It appears our friend the Black Mask is retreating out to sea at a goodly clip,” Doc shouted. He pointed a long skinny arm. Ryan could see the mainmast of the
Black Joke
dwindling rapidly to become lost in the trees.

“May not be all under his own power,” J.B. said.

“Let’s go,” Ryan said. Krysty’s move had sealed his decision.

Following Ryan, the others made their way against the force of the wind to recover their packs. A tree thirty yards downstream tore loose. It flew up the channel, its roots shedding mud, right between
Egret
’s stern and
New Hope
’s bow. Somehow it missed both ships, and didn’t even tangle the taut tow line before splashing into the river.

Ryan stood with his pack on his back and his rifle slung. He had to lean hard into the wind to keep it from doing to him what it had just done to the big cypress tree. Onboard
Hope
Long Tom stood gesturing excitedly at Randy in the lee of the cabin, pointing toward the fallen tree, which now lay in the middle of the channel with half its dark foliage above water. Apparently they were discussing whether it blocked their passage or not.

“Everybody grab on to somebody,” Ryan yelled. He reached out blindly as he did, found himself holding on to Doc’s skinny biceps. The old man hastily grabbed Ryan’s arm in reply.

Stumbling, staggering, blinking in a mostly futile attempt to clear raindrops driven hard as bullets out of their eyes, the six made their way to the stern of the
Snowy Egret.
Half the ship’s gleaming white keel was now fully exposed.

Ryan just had presence of mind to lead his people around the grounded ship’s downwind side. It was as if a giant hand pressing against him had been swatted away. He almost toppled into the hull from leaning hard into a relentless pressure that was suddenly no longer there.

Isis herself helped hand him up. Her grip was strong, as if her muscles were steel cables. Her exotic face was set hard as an ivory statue’s. Some of the Tech-nomads who had gotten aboard disappeared below.

“No room left belowdecks,” she shouted. “Grab on to something. Do it now. Hang on as if your life depends on it, ’cause it does!”

Ryan had let go of Doc to clamber aboard the Tech-nomad yacht. Now he looked around and hurriedly found Krysty. She came to him at once. Putting an arm around each other, they grabbed on to a railing that ran along the top of the cabin.

Ryan looked around. He could only see J.B. and Mildred, doing the same thing he and Krysty were a few feet toward the bow. “Sound off!” he roared. “Everybody secure?”

Through the storm howl he couldn’t hear the response from Doc and Jak. But J.B. yelled, “Other two are locked down, too.”

Isis stood braced in the hatchway to the main cabin a few feet astern of Ryan. “What’re we waiting for?” he yelled.

“You’ll see.”

He noticed that the wind had blown the
Egret
against the slow current so that she now lay almost at a right angle to the bank. It had to have happened before the water level dropped; he’d been too buried in the scope to notice. He figured it had to be a good sign.

“There goes the
Hope!
” J.B. called. The rotor-ship was powering upstream away from
Egret,
severed tow rope trailing into the water off her stern. She literally scraped between the fallen tree and the seaward bank.

“Friends running out on you?” he shouted to Isis.

The wind made her topknot stick straight out like a silver pennon. “Nothing more they can do for us,” she shouted. “Might as well save themselves if they can.”

Before he had a chance to say more, a shout was raised from somewhere on the far side of the boat. “Here it comes!”

“What?” Mildred shouted back.

“The Gulf of Mexico,” Isis said.

A porthole opened into the cabin right next to where Ryan and Krysty stood clinging for dear life against some as-yet-unknown threat. He couldn’t resist leaning forward and peering through.

By chance it gave an unobstructed view out the port on the far side. And what he saw through the rain-streaked polycarbonate was—

“Glowing night shit!” he yelled.
“Tsunami!”

Isis about had it right. The Gulf was coming back, with a vengeance, piling up into dirty gray-foaming waves so high he could see them rise right up above the trees of the seaward bank.

“Storm surge,” the captain yelled back.

The rolling water wall blasted through and over the trees. Ryan turned away and he and Krysty huddled against each other for all they were worth.

Then with a mighty roar, the wave hit
Snowy Egret
and kicked her hard up into the air.

The sea boiled all around them. The yacht spun counterclockwise as it was hurled inland. Ryan felt the impacts and scrapes as her hull pushed through the treetops, now submerged beneath the enormous, irresistible churning flow of the storm surge. He caught a glimpse of the
New Hope
whirling away to the east like a dune buggy doing doughnuts on a salt flat. He saw a water-strider boat riding the foam-scummed crest of a wave, its rider pedaling furiously, miraculously afloat and intact. Then they spun out of sight.

The
Egret
was now being flung bodily inland, stern first. Ryan and company were exposed to the full force of the wind. The good news was that it pressed them against the cabin, rather than try to pluck them away. The bad news was that the triple-digit wind speed made it hard to breathe, as if a giant anaconda had thrown its coils around Ryan’s chest and was constricting.

Lightning lanced across the sky. Thunder cracked so loud he thought the
Egret
was breaking up. But the ship didn’t break into pieces beneath and around them.

Not yet. But no matter how fiercely driven by the monster storm, no matter how far the water had been sucked out to sea, no matter how flat the land beneath for that matter, there was a limit to how far inland the wave could carry them. Sooner or later they’d come back to Earth. Odds against a soft landing were good.

And as he thought that the surge began to fail.

With a splintering crash the
Egret
hit exposed treetops. Ryan’s grip was broken and he started to tumble sternward. But Krysty’s strength held. For a moment he was stretched horizontally in the air, his heels toward the stern, Krysty’s hand locked like an iron band around his wrist.

Then something knocked the
Egret
spinning again. The side of the cabin slammed against Ryan’s left side. He felt one of his boots slam into Isis, braced in the doorway, felt her break free and tumble inside.

Then there was nothing but the roaring and the darkness and the water that slammed over the bow and rushed over the deck. And through it all, somehow, the grip on his wrist, warm and solid, maintained.

Something banged into Ryan’s head. He didn’t black out, not wholly, but he lost track….

“R
YAN
,”
A
VOICE
was calling. “Ryan!”

His awareness, which had been a roaring redness, began to resolve into bright sun and heat.

“Ryan, you got to pull yourself together in a hurry.” He recognized J.B.’s voice, coming as if from a great distance.

But it wasn’t competing with the roar of the wind. It seemed that had been his entire being for an eternity. That and then a wild whirling ride. Then multiple impacts and…confusion.

Something pressed his right cheek, soft and plaint, then tickled his right ear.

His lone eye came all the way open. Krysty leaned over him, her red hair haloed by sunlight. He couldn’t see her face for shadow but from her silhouette and smell and the sheer feel of her he knew it was her, and knew she was smiling from the kiss. Her sentient red hair caressed his face like feathers.

He saw the paleness of her smile in her shadowed face. “I thought that was a better way to call you back to this world, lover,” she said. “And I thought you’d wouldn’t react so violently as you otherwise might.”

“I’d rather you rouse me by kissing my cheek than J.B.,” he said, his voice a frog croak.

“That’s both of us, partner,” came the Armorer’s dry voice. “Now get up and get a move on.”

Ryan sat up, realizing he did so against gravity. That was strange. As was the realization that the surface he sat on was tilted to at least thirty degrees.

“Did I sleep through the hurricane?” he asked.

“Nope,” J.B. said. “Welcome to the eye.”

“Oh, shit,” Ryan said.

He got hastily to his feet. Immediately he swayed. He was looking back at the stern, which was crazily framed against the empty sky. His head swam and his gut churned.

The steadying grip on his biceps was strong and sure. This time he could see Krysty’s smiling face perfectly. He gave her a quick, tight grin.

“Status?” he asked.

“Heard the old expression ‘up shit creek without a paddle’?” J.B. asked. “Well, we made it come true. Also we’re up a tree.”

“Several trees, actually,” Krysty said. “We need to get down in a hurry.”

“The rest?”

“The Tech-nomads have lowered a rope, and some of them have climbed down. So has Doc. He’s reloading his LeMat.”

“Keep him out of trouble for a while. You both fit to fight?”

“Never better, Ryan,” J.B. said laconically. “You’re the one took a hit to the head.”

“Jak? Mildred?”

“Hurt his arm,” Krysty said. “So did Isis, but she told Mildred to look Jak over first and slid down the rope to take stock on the ground.”

Ryan nodded. He was glad she’d come through. “What about the rest?”

“Of the Tech-nomads?” Krysty asked. She shook her head. “I don’t know where
New Hope
is, or whether she even survived. Communication’s out. Of the people who got onto the
Egret
before the wave hit, there’s mebbe ten alive. Some of them are hurt pretty bad.”

Ryan looked around. At the bow, which was tilted down toward a disarmingly placid black bayou, Jak was sitting on a jumble of gear as Mildred examined him. His face looked paler than usual, somehow. His narrow jaw was set.

“How is he?” Ryan called.

“Not so good. His arm’s dislocated.”

“Oh,” Krysty said, “is that all?” She strode purposefully aft.

“Is that all?” Mildred repeated. “Okay, well, I suppose there’s one way to deal with it.”

The redhead had walked up to the albino teen. “You ready?” she asked.

He nodded.

Mildred was shaking her head. “Go for it.”

Krysty had grabbed Jak’s limply hanging right arm. Bracing the sole of a boot against his rib cage, she pulled.

Even Ryan winced at the ensuing crunching sound. From a corner of his eye he saw the usually unflappable Armorer do likewise.

Jak grunted stoically.

“Better?” Krysty said.

Experimentally the albino teen raised his arm. “Yeah.”