Apocalypse Unborn (6 page)

But this was no bluff.

The old man was about to let it rip.

Kirby leaned close, turning his back on Eng while he rested his hand heavily on the butt of the LeMat, blocking Doc’s draw. “Long odds on chilling them before they get you,” he whispered. “And if you do manage it, there’ll be no one to sail the ship. We’ll all die. This is a battle that can’t be won, mercie.”

Tanner looked at him for a long moment, then said, “It would seem a concession to barbarism and blind ignorance is in order.”

“Not the first,” Kirby said.

“Nor by any means the last,” Doc said, sweeping the large black hand off his gun butt.

From a bucket under a bench, a crewman produced a two-pound hammer and a fistful of four-inch, steel nails. From under a tarp, three other islanders hauled out a large, chipped and dented wooden cross. At the foot of its vertical member was a steel eyebolt. While the rest of the crew lifted, the trio of crossbearers slid it in place under the supine and helpless bird thing.

“Please, please,” it begged. “Don’t do this…”

The islanders ignored the desperate pleading. They continued to celebrate the capture, some danced around exuberantly, waving their black-tattooed arms in the air and thrusting their wide hips.

Kneeling on the deck, a crewman pounded spikes through the fattest part of the creature’s wing bones and deep into the wood. The creature squawked in agony at every blow. It squawked even louder when its feet were nailed together at the ankle joints. A line was attached to the eyebolt, and at a signal from the captain, crewmen began to hoist the cross, upside down.

Warm rain splattered the deck around them.

Blood drops

“Why me?” the bird thing moaned as it was jerked higher and higher. “Why me?”

“Manu tangata on the mast brings fair winds,” the captain explained, answering the question of a creature that could not think but only mimic.

The irony was lost on Eng.

As morning progressed, the seas calmed and the wind dropped off. The swells became gentle and widely spaced. Around noon, Krysty Wroth started feeling well enough to struggle out of her bunk.

She walked into the galley, which was full of feeding islanders. The residual ache in her cramped stomach muscles and the sour taste of vomit in her mouth made her never want to eat or smell food again. The menu for lunch and dinner on the ship was the same as breakfast: deep fried, unboned, ungutted small fish and crustaceans. She had the choice of remaining belowdecks and watching the crew wolf the chow down with their fingers, or getting some fresh air. She chose fresh air.

Most of the passengers had recovered sufficiently to come out on deck. They sat and stood in singles and small groups. Subdued. Drained. Wary after the night of storms. They squinted in the bright sunshine, clearly out of their element.

Krysty picked Jak and Doc out of the crowd, but made no eye contact with them. Until they reached their destination, the other companions were to be treated as strangers. Krysty stepped up beside Mildred who stood at the port rail, amidships.

“How far have we come?” she asked the black woman.

“Not very,” Mildred replied. “Maybe a hundred miles or so. We had the sails down most of the night, going nowhere but up and down, up and down.”

“Where are we?”

“If Point Conception still existed, we would be grounded on the rocks right about now.”

Krysty gave Mildred a puzzled look. Like most Deathlanders, she knew little of the detailed geography of the predark West Coast.

Realizing the problem, Mildred explained. “All the tales about the southern half of California falling into the sea are true,” she said. “That ragged line of purple above the haze is what’s left of the Sierra Madre. They used to be fifty or sixty miles inland from the coast. The Pacific’s lapping on their flanks now. So far, it looks like everything south of Morro Bay is history. The cities of San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria, Lompoc are gone. There’s no sign of Santa Barbara, either. My guess is that the Soviets pounded the San Andreas Fault, well to the east of Los Angeles, with earth-shaker warheads. Deep surface detonations caused the fault to shift cataclysmically along its entire length, and the western plate sheared clean away. We’re talking maybe 350 miles of coast under water.”

As Krysty stared toward land, she could see scattered pillars of smoke rising from the surface of the glassy sea. In some places, it was white and opaque like steam; in others it was black and dense like oil fire smoke. The steady onshore breeze was blowing it away from them in seemingly endless low plumes to the distant mountains. Even so, the air smelled faintly of rotten eggs and brimstone. “How far did it all sink?” Krysty said.

“No telling how deep the water is between here and those mountains. Deep enough to submerge all signs of human habitation, for sure. It’s like no one ever lived here.”

“What’s burning on the sea?”

“It’s not really burning,” Mildred said. “Those clouds are from volcanic vents and fumaroles. The white steamers are on the sea floor. The black smokers are on seamounts just under the surface. They must have opened up along the fault and deep fracture lines, post-cataclysm. The clouds are created when cool seawater makes contact with superheated gases and molten lava. Some of it’s bound to be highly corrosive, full of concentrated sulfuric and nitric acid. Get a lungful of that stuff and presto, no more lungs.”

“Good thing the wind is pushing it away from us.”

Scanning the sea Krysty saw a mature tree, floating about seventy-five yards away, presumably uprooted whole and blown into the ocean by the chem storm. Branches and leaves trembling, it moved along with them. Then, apparently of its own accord, it abruptly reversed direction. A sucking, roaring sound grew louder and louder. “What in the rad blazes?” the redhead exclaimed, grabbing the cables and climbing up on the gunwhale for a better look.

Mildred scrambled up alongside her.

The oak tree glided in a foaming circle, picking up speed as it spiraled inward toward a shifting, dark core. A black hole. Krysty could see the tree wasn’t alone. Other debris was caught in the powerful current. White plastic bags. Plastic bottles. Coils of seaweed. Bits of paper. A half sheet of delaminating plywood.

The crew on the port side shouted urgently back at the helm, waving their arms for the captain to change course.

As Eng brought the rudder hard over, Krysty saw a line of similar whirlpools that stretched on for miles, paralleling the redefined coast. The floating garbage had no chance. Swirling, roaring funnels of black inexorably drew everything to their centers. Some of the vortexes were big enough to pull down house trailers.

Or sailing ships.

Captain Eng gave the whirlpools plenty of room, steering for the low island. His course set, Eng pulled a wad of white cotton batting from his pants’ pocket, tore off a couple of sizable hunks, and thumbed them up his wide nostrils.

The rest of the crew was following suit, plugging their noses with cotton wads. This done, they began passing out plugs to the male passengers.

“What’s that for?” Krysty asked an islander handing out cotton.

“Not for you,” was all the answer she got.

“If there’s danger, we want some, too,” Krysty told the man, holding out her hand.

“No danger for you. You are safe. So is she.” The crewman quickly moved on, ripping the batting into small tufts.

Krysty started to follow him and insist, but Mildred stopped her. “If there’s some kind of poison in the air, nose plugs made of cotton aren’t going to help us, anyway,” she said. “Look around. Nobody’s covering their mouth. It makes no sense. Breathing toxics or corrosives through your mouth will get you just as dead as breathing them in through your nose.”

“If it isn’t poison or acid, then what is it?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“What do you suggest?” Krysty asked. Up near the bow, Ryan was accepting a pair of nose plugs from a crewman.

“Wait and see how it plays out…” Mildred said.

Avoiding the suckhole obstacle course brought the ship to within a hundred yards of the island’s shore. Closer in, deep blue water shoaled, changing to a light turquoise color. The island’s summit was a rounded, low mound of sun-blasted rock and dirt. Below an eroded bluff a broad, shallow cove was fronted by a narrow beach. Along the base of the cliff stood four crude stone huts with no glass in the windows and no doors.

“I can’t tell which island it is,” Mildred said. “There’s so little left of it. It has to be one of the bigger ones, though. Either Santa Cruz or Santa Rosa.”

The breeze sweeping across the island carried the scent of perfume, although there was no evidence of flowering plants. Indeed no evidence of plants of any kind. The scent got stronger and stronger.

“Ooof!” Krysty exclaimed, instinctively averting her face and covering her nose with her hand.

The odor was pungent and cloyingly sweet. Like rotting fruit.

When Krysty looked back at the shore, she saw white forms eerily rising from the beach stones. Human forms. Four beautiful, young, naked women beckoned languidly, invitingly, holding out what looked like plates heaped with food and pitchers of drink.

The male passengers along the rail were drop-jaw riveted by the sight; some were obviously sexually aroused, pitching tents in their BDUs.

“Men can be such triple stupes,” was Krysty’s comment.

“It’s not their fault,” Mildred said. “There must be something in the perfume.”

“It’s not doing anything for me…”

“Me, either,” Mildred said. “The islanders seem unaffected, too, maybe because they know what to expect, or how to fight it. That scent must contain pheromones, chemicals that selectively stimulate the male of the species. Look around. Our fellow passengers are getting turned on, despite the nose plugs. Dammit, that island’s giving off aerosolized Viagra.”

The crew stepped in before things got way out of hand. They brutally shoved the dazed men to the starboard side of the ship, and forced them at blasterpoint to look the other way.

“Atarangi,” a passing islander told Krysty, gesturing at the beach with a collapsible brass spyglass. “Not what they seem.” He opened the telescope and offered it to her.

When she looked through the lens, she saw the lovely faces were not faces at all. Blotches of dark pigment formed seductively lashed eyes and smiling mouths. They had discernible heads, necks, breasts, waists, hips only from a distance. Up close, they were just white oblong shapes, ingeniously shaded to look human. Their long flowing hair was made up of frantically waving filaments, like the tendrils of albino sea anemones. The plates of food held colored rocks; the jugs were empty.

“Not real wahines,” the islander said. “Set foot on the beach, you find that out, quick. Looks like four, but there’s only one. They are fingers on a hand that hides beneath the sand and rocks. Hand is evil. Its smell is sweet and loving but it eats men. Sucks the blood and marrow from their bones.”

At that moment two of the passengers yanked out their nose plugs and jumped overboard. They swam around the stern of the ship, through the wake, stroking hard for the island. To forestall a further stampede into the water, the crew fired their AKs in the air.

All the passengers lined up along the stern, watching the deserters grow smaller and smaller, still swimming with great determination toward the alien and deadly shore. Even Ryan seemed fascinated by their slow, steady progress. Krysty noted with satisfaction that her lover displayed no spectacular trouser effects from the pheromones.

The ship sailed on, turning southeast, and the cove slipped out of sight. By the time the swimmers reached the beach, they were too far away for their screams to be heard over the wind singing in the lines.

That same sea breeze blew away the last of the sirens’ perfume. Some of the passengers began weeping into their palms, as if they had lost their true loves. Krysty was amazed to see crazy, murdering scum acting like brokenhearted teenagers—grieving, inconsolable, their humanity revealed by an illusion of biochemistry.

Gradually the bereft bastards recovered their senses. After an hour, they couldn’t remember any of it. Not the island, not the sirens, not the pain of separation. Total brain fog. The less dramatically affected passengers remembered, though, and taking the public displays of sorrow for signs of weakness marked the criers for an early death.

Driven by a steady twelve-knot wind, the ship plowed on. The fore and aft rocking motion and the hiss of the hull was soothing, even stupefying after the sleepless night. Krysty dozed for hours in the warm sun. When she awoke, Mildred was by her side, watching over her.

Krysty rose from the deck and took in an even more dismal vista.

“That’s where Los Angeles used to be,” Mildred said, her voice gone suddenly hoarse with emotion.

It looked positively primeval. Plumes of molten lava and caustic smoke jetted from the black tips of emerging seamounts. A rain of superheated ejecta swept across the sea, hissing like fifty thousand snakes. Scattered lakes of flame danced on the surface from petrochemicals that had oozed up from the bottom.

On the land, volcanic cones thousands of feet tall spewed ash clouds, creating a low ceiling of gray that blocked out the blue sky to the east. Everything in that direction was tinged with yellow, smoke-filtered light. The bases of the Sierra Nevada in the distance were barely visible for the haze of sulphur and particulate matter.

“It’s a graveyard,” Mildred said after a moment, “for as far as you see. Millions of people died here on nuke day. There used to be a central core of skyscrapers and gridwork streets filling the great basin, edge to edge, stretching to the desert in the east. Whatever the fireballs and nukeblasts left behind, geologic forces have toppled and buried. Los Angeles has been scraped clean of everything human and everything made by human hands.”

“What about the radiation?” Krysty asked. “Is the place poisoned?”

“Definitely,” Mildred said. “See anything flying over it? Anything swimming in it?”

“What about us? Aren’t we too close?”

“Moot point, I’m afraid. What few extra rads we might pick up in passing aren’t going to make us ill. The eruptions are the real problem. They’ve been sending radioactive material aloft, into the upper atmosphere for more than a century. All that stuff has to come down somewhere. In fact, it comes down everywhere.”

“Then we’ve been breathing it and eating it all of our lives. But none of us are sick, though.”

“Short of a massive dose of gamma rays, radiation doesn’t kill its victims quickly. It can take decades for the damage from lesser levels of exposure to show up as cancer. Even folks with terrible superficial burns sometimes recover—whitecoats found that out after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl. It’s a matter of genetic luck and total rad exposure. Most people in Deathlands don’t live long enough for the sickness to ever show up. They get chilled by other things first.”

“Look at that!” Krysty exclaimed, pointing at a sudden commotion on the surface, about 150 yards from the ship and five miles off the hellish, uninhabitable coast. It was definitely not volcanic. A huge living creature thrashed and rolled out there. It was at least thirty feet long, and splashing fountains of water tinged with gallons of blood.