Haven's Blight (9 page)

Chapter Eleven

“So what now, Ryan?” Doc asked when they were all on relatively dry, or at least not currently flooded, ground.

It was a grassy patch far enough away from where the
Snowy Egret
hung improbably suspended twenty feet in the air that if gravity caught up with the yacht it wasn’t likely to land on their heads.

Not far away Isis, her broken arm hastily set, bandaged and looped in a sling by Mildred, stood beneath the hulk supervising the extraction of the last wounded member of her crew: a bearded young man named Freebo, whose back seemed to be broken. They were bringing him down strapped to a door—or hatch, as they insisted on calling it because it was on a ship. Mildred was helping tend to the other wounded who had already been brought down.

Isis had directed them to keep watch again. She assessed threat levels as low even though the trees cut off view in a hundred yards in all directions. She explained that while the sight of the
Egret
perched high up in a tree would normally bring swampies running from miles around greedy for loot, muties hereabouts were familiar with the behavior of hurricanes. No matter how hard up they were, they weren’t about to risk getting hit by the full force of the storm while plucking the marooned
Egret
of her booty.

Ryan hoped she was right. He’d seen desperation drive people to do some stupe things. He’d seen muties do crazy shit for no reason he could conceive.

Norms, too, now that he thought about it.

Already the wind was picking up. “We don’t have long, do we?” Ryan asked.

Doc shook his head. “Soon the eye will have passed. We are in the proverbial calm before the storm.”

“The eye-wall winds are the fiercest in a hurricane.” Her injured shipmate safely on the ground, Isis had walked up to the group. “What do you intend to do, Cawdor?”

Everybody always asked him that. The thought grimly amused him. “Don’t have much experience with hurricanes in these kinds of circumstances. I’d say we should find as dry and sheltered a spot as we can, mebbe tie ourselves to some trees that don’t look like they’ll blow over easily, and try triple-hard not to die.”

The exotic woman’s silver topknot bobbed as she nodded. “Sounds like as good a plan as any. But I was curious what you and your companions had in mind.”

He scratched his eyebrow with his thumbnail. “We still work for you, far as I know.”

“Your contract was with Long Tom.”

“He don’t seem to be around,” J.B. said, “so looks like you’re the boss now.”

“We signed on to protect you,” Ryan said. “Don’t know how good a job I can say we’ve done so far. But once we take a job, we see it through.”

The captain showed gleaming white teeth. “If you people knew a way to defend against a hurricane, you’d be the bosses of everything. You’ve fought alongside us and done what you could. Only problem is, paying you could be a problem. No way we get poor
Egret
unloaded before the eye passes and the hammer comes down.”

“We’ll see the storm out,” Ryan said. “Then if we live, we can work out the details.”

“Our best bet’s sticking together anyway, right now,” Krysty said. “We should be finding a lie-up.”

Isis nodded. “See to that then. We’ll—”

Ryan heard a hard thunk. Mildred cursed, and Isis glanced back toward where her surviving comrades were gathered.

“Looks like Freebo decided he didn’t like his chances and opted to catch the last train for the coast,” she said.

“Poor Mildred,” Krysty said. “She takes losing a patient that way hard.”

“Forget her for now,” Ryan said. “You heard the lady. Let’s find cover and get ourselves stuck into it.”

“W
ATER
RISING
,” Jak said.

“Oh, dear,” Mildred said.

Silently, Krysty echoed the sentiment. Then the physician gave voice to Krysty’s own fear, which she hoped no one would voice.

“Do the eye-wall winds drive a second storm surge?” Mildred asked, her voice rising and taking on an edge that bespoke the nearness of panic. “If another tsunami like the last one hits us here, we’re toast. Um, soggy toast.”

“Easy, Mildred,” Ryan said, his voice calm.

“Nothing we can do about it, anyway.”

They had found a clearing in a cypress grove whose floor Isis estimated rose four feet about the current level of the nameless bayou chance and the tsunami had dumped them on. It was the best shelter anyone had been able to find in a fast recce. Doc and Jak had inspected the trees, one using his antique science, the other his intimate knowledge of nature and swamp terrain, and pronounced their roots sound and liable to hold. Krysty had no way of knowing if either had the faintest notion of what he was talking about. But the roots seemed sound to her, too, and anyway, it wasn’t as if they had a lot of choice.

The most important thing was that the survivors of the
Egret
could all clump together in the little clear space without being too crowded, yet able to grab one another and the trees if threatened with being swept away by wind and water.

After a hurried consultation out of earshot of the rest, Ryan and Isis had agreed they wouldn’t try lashing themselves to the trees. They had enough forest around them to damp the effects of the wind. And if the waters did get too high, being tangled in rope was the last thing anyone would need—it could shave the slimmest chance of survival down to none.

“It shouldn’t be as bad,” Isis said over a rising whine of gale winds. “Bad as the eye-wall winds are, they don’t have time or space to build a really wicked surge.”

Then the wind hit like a hammer.

It was as if a vacuum was sucking the very breath from Krysty’s lungs. She battled to breathe as the wind beat at her face with the bruising impact of fists. She groped blindly, found Ryan’s strong grip with one hand and Mildred’s with the other.

It was bad. Worse than before. Their mad whirling trip across the storm-surge wave had terrified Krysty, but it had also distracted from the wind’s brutal impact.

And they had ridden above the water, at least. The winds of the eye wall, which had to have greatly exceeded a hundred miles an hour, didn’t create a second tsunami-like surge. But they did drive the waters ahead of them, piling the salt waters of the Gulf on the “fresh” water of the river, driving all in front of them with the force of a great pump.

The tea-colored water frothed yellow and rose around them. It felt as warm as blood as it lapped against Krysty’s legs.

“Forget me, girl!” Mildred hollered. “Grab a piece of tree!”

The sturdily built black woman followed her own advice. Ryan caught Jak by the hair as a sudden rush of green water knocked the youth off his feet, and dragged him to where he could clutch another bole like a half-drowned kitten. Not far away J.B. and Doc stood on opposite sides of the same bole, hanging on as if holding the tree up.

Krysty saw animals whirl around them on the raging river. Snakes wriggled. A beaver tumbled over and over, slapping the water with its broad tail in a desperate attempt to right itself and regain control. Alligators were launched against what was usually the bayou flow like dark brown lumpy torpedoes. Off in the distance, largely obscured by the rain that suddenly fell in gray sheets, Krysty saw a vast dark shape fighting the water that swept it along. It might have been a bear, but she had a crazy impression it sported a short horn from its flat, broad head.

The Tech-nomads raised a clamor like frightened shore birds. Krysty looked around to see Freebo’s door whirled away. Isis made a one-handed grab and fell on her face with a mighty splash. Jammer dived after her, grabbing her by her long, slim legs. Both were reeled back to safety by their surviving comrades.

The storm seemed more savage than before. Krysty had to press her face against the rough bole of the cypress tree to protect her eyes from raindrops that stung like hail and random bits of debris propelled by the awful wind. The wind beat on her shoulders and back and head like hard fists. She clung with all her strength to keep from being ripped away, and could only pray to the Earth Mother that if one of her companions was torn loose, she’d learn of it in time to help.

The water rose to midthigh and began to recede again. The wind continued to scream. Its efforts to pluck Krysty loose from her hold diminished, though she still had to hold on hard. Relief flooded her like mother’s love. The eye wall had passed us by!

Then the sound of human voices screaming nearby forced her to expose her face to the wind and open her emerald eyes. A squat dough-colored shape had a struggling Isis gripped in arms like huge uncooked sausages. The Tech-nomad thrashed furiously in its grip, unable to break free, trying to reach behind her with her one good hand to get a thumb in her attacker’s eye.

“Swampies!” Krysty shouted.

Jammer threw himself on the mutie. Both were a good head shorter than Isis, but the swampie was so broad it likely outweighed both the humans together and more besides. Jammer stabbed furiously with a hunting knife at the arm pinioning his captain. Blood spurted black in the gloom. From somewhere another swampie appeared and sank an ax into his back. He slumped into the water, which had changed direction again, and was swept, facedown, past Krysty downstream.

Ryan let go and slogged through the water toward the swampie who held Isis. He had his SIG-Sauer P-226 out at arm’s length and was shooting as he splashed forward. Krysty wondered at the risk he was taking of hitting the captive.

Then the second swampie, who had struck down Jammer with the ax, pitched forward to land with a huge splash in the water. The muties were notoriously hard to kill, but one of Ryan’s 9 mm slugs had penetrated the back of its head.

Ryan ran up to the swampie that held Isis. He bobbed away from a clumsy swipe that for all its almost comic effect could easily have broken its neck if it had caught him in the side of the head as intended. Then he pressed the muzzle of his SIG into the rolls of fat around the mutie’s right eye and fired.

A gush of liquid spewed out the right side of the mutie’s head: brain matter flash-heated and overpressurized by both the 147-grain bullet and the gases that propelled it. The swampie emitted a shrill steam-whistle squeal and collapsed. Isis splashed into the water.

Krysty saw no more of what happened there because Mildred started screaming closer at hand. Her hair twisting like a mass of frightened snakes, Krysty whipped her head around to see a swampie had caught Mildred by one wrist and was trying to drag her away. The creature wasn’t bright. It seemed to be trying to pull the black woman through the tree, allowing her to hang on tight with her other arm and keep her face and body pressed against the trunk. Stymied despite the fact his strength was many times hers, the only thing the swampie could think to do was to pull harder.

Krysty ripped her knife out and began slashing at the doughy forearm. Past the squat dirty-white mass she saw J.B. trying to maneuver to get a shot with his shotgun that wouldn’t endanger either Krysty or his woman.

Then pain like lightning shot up Krysty’s right thigh, through her belly to her spine to explode in her brain. At the same instant she felt a strange sick edge to the blinding agony and knew she had been poisoned.

She looked down. A long narrow sinuous body a good four feet long, green and brown, writhed in the water right beside her. Its jaws gaped flat open. It had sunk its two forward-extended fangs into her leg like spears.

She heard Mildred scream her name.

“Gaia, give me strength.” Krysty saw a glittering arc descend and chop the snake in half as Ryan struck with his panga.

And then the darkness enveloped her and bore her down.

“W
HAT
IS
THIS
?” Ryan shouted, holding up the snake that had bitten Krysty. He had chopped it in half a foot and a half down from the head. He held it near the stump. The head itself still waved, jaws opened menacingly.

“I think it’s a water moccasin,” Mildred said. Cradling her freed wrist, she half waded, half swam to where Krysty floated on her back in the water. Her eyes were closed. Her hair spread out about her like a halo, framing a face still as ivory that seemed calm and composed.

J.B.’s shotgun roared again. He had blown part of the head off the swampie who had held Mildred’s wrist. That hadn’t been enough to kill the mutie. He was finishing the job now. Around them the surviving Tech-nomads were battling more muties who had come out of the storm to catch their prey unsuspecting and nearly helpless.

“I never saw a snakebite victim react like this,” Mildred said, grabbing Krysty’s wrist. “She’s alive. I—”

“Ryan,” he heard Doc shout. “Watch out!”

Before he could react Ryan was picked up out of the water and hurled through the air. He flew a dozen feet and landed sideways against a tree trunk. Pain shot through his side and turned his vision momentarily red.

A terrific blow caught him on the side of the head, and he slipped into the water. For a moment he saw beneath the surface: yellowish light, swirling motes, waving submerged grass. Then he got his hands under him and pushed himself up out of the water, heaving and gagging.