Blood Harvest Page 2

  Doc clearly wasn’t, but he took a deep breath, straightened the front of his frock coat and squared his shoulders. “I have always found the ocean air bracing.”

  Ryan lifted his head and sniffed. Doc was right. The air moaning through the empty blockhouse smelled of the sea as well as rain. Doc took a wobbly knee beside the corpse and smoothed her blond hair. “Poor child.”

  “Child?” Ryan shrugged and kept his weapon on the open door. “She looks full grown to me.”

  “No more than sixteen or seventeen, I would say.” Doc gazed sadly upon the dead girl’s corpse. “It appears she starved to death.” He suddenly bent and pressed his thumb against the inside of her elbow and then examined the other.

  Ryan took a knee beside him. “What?”

  “Wounds,” Doc said.

  The dead girl’s flesh was paper-thin around her bones, but Ryan could see the puncture marks in her flesh. They had been fairly fresh when she died. “You think she was jolting up?”

  “No.” Doc shuddered at the term for the concoction of drugs that the most despairing in the Deathlands chose for oblivion. “The veins, in the arms, the legs, between the toes, are cratered like the moon above. These wounds are surgical. She was either receiving or giving blood intravenously before she died.”

  Every once in a while Ryan had to remind himself that “Doc” stood for Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, and that he was a doctor of both science and philosophy. Ryan had seen more bodies than most, and the Deathlands was full of them. They had bigger concerns at the moment. “We’re alone and the mat-trans is fucked.”

  Doc rose and peered at the scrolling code on the control panel. “It means nothing to me.” His snowy brows furrowed. “However, the device appears to be peeping.” Doc pulled out his pocket chron and one eyebrow rose. “It appears to be peeping in ten-second intervals, and then the code repeats itself.”

  “It’s on some kind of cycle.” Ryan peered at the little comp screen. “But it’s not telling us what the timing is. Mebbe it only lets two people through at a time, then cycles again. Some kind of sec measure.”

  “Given that theorem, then perhaps, given time, it will let the others through.”

  “Yeah.” Ryan scowled at the screen. “But mebbe only two at a time.” He looked toward the corpse. “Looks like mebbe she died waiting.” Ryan looked at the rad counter pinned to his lapel. The place was clean. He jerked his head toward the open doorway. “Let’s do a recce.”

  Doc drew his massive LeMat revolver from beneath his coat and rotated the hammer’s nose to fire the central shotgun barrel. “By all means, let us go and take the airs.”

  Ryan recced the outside from both sides of the doorway, but all he could see was windswept rock. “Doc, on my six.” Ryan stepped out, blaster ready. There wasn’t much to see. The howling wind plucked at his clothing and drew tears from his eye. There was no vegetation. They were literally on a rock, which was the size of a predark six-story building. The only distinguishing feature on the rock besides the blockhouse was a remarkable concentration of bird shit.

  Of immediate concern was the fact that the barren rock they currently occupied was located in the middle of an ocean.

  Doc was right. The dead girl had most likely starved to death, and Ryan had secretly put his remaining food in Krysty’s pack back in the redoubt. All they had with them was two canteens of water. Ryan gazed about. The ocean around the rock was as gray as death and beginning to roil with the coming storm, and they couldn’t LD button back. Doc sighed as he came to his own conclusions. “Oh, dear.”

  Ryan scanned the horizon and perceived a pair of smudges to the west. He took his collapsible brass telescope from his pack and snapped it up to his eye. “I make it two islands.” The images were at the limit of the optics, but he could make out buildings and a port on the larger one. Smoke was definitely rising from chimneys. Smoke rose from the smaller island, but all he could make out was empty beach. “The bigger one has a ville.”

  Doc took another deep breath of the air. “You know? I believe we are in the North Atlantic.”

  Ryan regarded Doc. “And you know that how?”

  “I do not know.” Doc shrugged. “It is just an intuition. I do not mean to be obtuse, but back in my time I sailed the Atlantic, and this just…feels like the Atlantic. The North Atlantic. With nightfall the stars will give us a better bearing, but I would say we are in the Azores, the Canaries or the Madeiras.”

  Ryan would never accuse Doc of being obtuse. Predark bastard obscure on the other hand…“Lantic or Cific, it doesn’t matter. That girl got skinny waiting for the mat-trans to cycle. That’s a ville across the water, and it’ll have boats. They’ll be watching the storm come in, looking this way. We need to build a signal fire and get off this rock.”

  “And if that poor girl died here fleeing the inhabitants of that island?” Doc queried.

  “Doc, there’s no food here. We can wait until we run out of water if you want.” Ryan lifted his gaze toward the swollen, bruised storm clouds riding the howling winds behind them. “Course water’s coming.”

  Doc nodded. “Then let us find the base of this island. With luck there should be driftwood.” At the edge of the escarpment they found steps carved in the rock that led down to a tiny strip of beach and a concrete pier. Besides bird shit, driftwood seemed to be the second hottest commodity on the island. Ryan cut kindling with his panga and, with pages torn from a notebook Doc carried, they got a fire going. The old man fed in ropes of dry seaweed, and soon a significant plume of black smoke was billowing up into the sky.

  Then there was nothing to do but wait.

  Ryan spit on his whetstone and began putting a fresh edge on his panga. The blade was painted black against rust and glare, but the edge gleamed like quicksilver. Ryan watched as a rare smile crossed Doc’s face. The man from another age walked over to a large rock, and he exchanged glances with a fat black-and-white bird with a rainbow beak. “Bless my heart, a puffin! We are definitely in the Atlantic!”

  Ryan considered his blasters, but both his rifle and pistol would blast the meat right off the bird’s bones. He quietly palmed an egg-size rock. “Don’t scare it off. We might have to eat it.”

  “A most handsome fellow!” Doc took out his notebook and a stub of pencil. “I believe I shall sketch him.”

  Ryan dropped the rock and went back to honing. Doc calm and happy was such a rare occurrence that Ryan was willing to let his stomach rumble for a little while. A few strokes of the stone brought the panga back to shaving sharp. A few strokes of Doc’s pencil created a remarkable likeness of the bird.

  Ryan shot to his feet. “Boat.”

  Doc took a small pair of binoculars from his satchel. Ryan took his spyglass from his pack and snapped it open. It was a sailboat and heading in a straight line from the main island to their rock. Doc took in the steeply raked mast and the triangular sail. “A felucca, by the look of her.” He nodded to himself. “By the lines and piled pots on the bow, I suspect they are fishing for octopus.”

  Ryan was more interested in the occupants than the catch of the day. He counted seven men. They were short and stocky in build and wore black, waxed canvas slickers, and wide-brimmed felt hats shaded their faces. Several wore round, dark-smoked glasses and gloves. Ryan didn’t see any blasters on the boat but all the men carried knives on their belts, and gaffs and fishing spears stood in racks along the gunwales.

  “Hmm.” Doc lowered his binoculars and frowned.

  “What?” Ryan asked.

  “They seem a tad pale for fishermen. Men who work the sea tend to be well weathered. Those men look more like mortuary attendants.”

  They looked a lot like Jak to Ryan, except they had dark hair. He snapped his spyglass shut and loosened his handblaster in its holster. It didn’t matter. They had to get off the rock, get fed, see if they could get back and work on the mat-trans. “What islands we in again?”

  “The Canaries, the Azores and the Madeiras are j
ust about the only island chains of note in the North Atlantic.”

  “They speak English?”

  “Portuguese would be the lingua franca in the Azores and the Madeiras, Spanish in the Canaries. However, the presence of our puffin friend leads me to believe we are too far north for the Spanish possessions.”

  “You speak Portuguese?”

  “My tutors insisted on Greek, French and Latin. However, Portuguese is a Latin-based language. It may suffice to convey basic concepts.”

  “Convey to them we want to get off this rock, but not much else.”

  “I believe I understand.”

  “Leave a note for our people. Put it on the body.”

  Doc scrawled a quick note on the back of his sketch and went back up the stairs. He returned just as the felucca thumped against the concrete pier. The pale, black-clad fishermen approached in a phalanx. Doc was half right. The men were chill-white, but up close their pale faces were seamed by lives led doing hard labor, and at least the ones not wearing gloves had thick calluses and whorls of scars both ancient and new from years of working knives, lines and nets. Their demeanor was neither hostile nor friendly. Doc doffed his hat and displayed what had to be the most gleaming white teeth in the Deathlands. He had a magnificent speaking voice when he was in control of himself, and he spoke in his most mellifluous tones in a type of English Ryan had never heard before.

  The effect on the fishermen was galvanizing.

  Ryan knew enough words in Mex or Spanish, as Doc called it, to do a deal or to insult someone south of the Grandee. What the fishermen were speaking sounded something like Mex by way of Mars. “What’s going on?”

  Doc smiled. “They think I am a baron. I assured them I am not.”

  Ryan resisted rolling his eye up to the stormy sky for strength. “Doc? The next time people we don’t know think you’re a baron, you let them think that until it’s time not to let them think that.”

  Doc reddened and coughed into his fist. “Yes…I believe I take your point. These people do indeed speak Portuguese. The big island has a ville. I believe the baron there is a man named Xavier Barat.” Doc gestured at a pale, powerfully built man wearing dark glasses, gloves and wide black hat. “This man is Roque. He is the fishing captain of the ville’s fleet.”

  “Captain Roque.” Ryan flexed his rusty Mex. “Hola.”

  Captain Roque regarded Ryan obliquely from behind the smoked lenses of his glasses. “Olá.”

  “They will take us to the big island,” Doc continued. “I have revealed nothing about our companions.”

  “Good.” Ryan’s Steyr was slung, but his hand was never far from the blaster on his hip. “Let’s go.”

  Captain Roque gestured toward the boat and they boarded the felucca. The crew poled off, and the sail filled with the coming storm winds. The vessel began to cut swiftly through the sea. Roque reached into a pot and drew forth an octopus about the size of his hand. Its arms flailed, but he swiftly brought it up to his mouth and bit it between the eyes. The cephalopod shuddered and the captain swiftly cut off its eight arms. He dropped them into a clay pot, and when he pulled them back out they were sheened with oil and the red flecks of hot chilies. Roque offered one of the still vaguely squirming appendages to Ryan.

  Short of his fellow human beings there was hardly anything that walked, flapped, flopped or crawled across the Deathlands that Ryan hadn’t eaten. He nodded his thanks and shoved the tentacle into his mouth. It was on the chewy side, but the meat wasn’t bad and the lime, hot pepper and olive oil made it genuinely tasty. The pepper oil blossomed down Ryan’s throat and the heat was welcome. Ryan shoved another into his mouth and again nodded his thanks. Roque smiled and either his gums had receded or he had very long teeth. He turned and offered some to Doc.

  The old man chewed his tentacle meditatively. “Piri Piri sauce, definitely Portuguese. The lime is an interesting addition.”

  A crewman wearing dark glasses approached and held up a leather wine bag. Ryan took it and poured a long squeeze of rough red wine down his burning throat.

  He snapped his head aside as another crewman in shades behind him swung a belaying pin at his skull.

  Ryan Cawdor had a prodigious reputation in the Deathlands. It was said that if you faced the one-eyed man in a fight and blinked, then you got chilled in the dark. The crewman in shades screamed and clutched at his eyes as Ryan slapped the bag across his face and the smoked glass lenses flew from his face. Ryan’s blaster filled his other fist. A round from the SIG-Sauer punched out the lenses of the second fisher’s dark glasses and dropped him to the deck. Ryan put two rounds through the back of the screaming man’s hands and dropped him skull-chilled next to his friend.

  The one-eyed man snarled as a three-inch iron hook ripped into the flesh between his thumb and forefinger. Roque yanked his gaff and the SIG-Sauer spun out of Ryan’s hand as his flesh parted. The captain snapped the gaff around, and the needle-sharp steel hook pierced Ryan’s jacket and sank between his ribs. Ryan grasped the shaft, but his adversary twisted the gaff with practiced ease and hooked his fifth rib. Ryan snarled in rage as Roque yanked the gaff and snapped the bone. The hook squirmed beneath Ryan’s rib cage as the captain turned the gaff 180 degrees and went for the rib above. Roque was a powerful man, and with seven feet of shaft between them there was nowhere for the one-eyed man to go. Ryan unleathered his panga. The eighteen-inch blade rasped from its sheath and he chopped the blade once, twice, three times against the weathered shaft of the gaff before it splintered in two.

  Roque stepped back with four feet of broken stick in his hands. Ryan’s lips skinned back from his teeth as he unhooked his rib cage. He lashed out with the panga, and Roque desperately brought up his remaining wood to block. Ryan looped the gaff left-handed up between Roque’s legs and hooked it through his scrotum. The captain screamed like an animal as Ryan hauled him forward for the kill by his lowest organs. Roque’s torment ended in arterial spray as the panga painted a red smile beneath his chin.

  Ryan ripped the gaff free of its reproductive moorings and turned toward what remained of the fight.

  Doc had not deigned to draw his revolver. He had been a trained swordsman in his youth and fought duels at university. Fishers with belaying pins stood no chance against him whatsoever. Three crewmen lay chilled among the nets and octopus pots, each dispatched with a single thrust through the left breast. The last crewman came at Doc with a fishing spear, the tripod blade of barbed spikes shooting for his face. Ryan spun his longblaster on its sling, but there was no need. Doc effortlessly turned the spear thrust aside with his blade and lunged like a fencer. The fisher went as limp as the boneless octopi in the pots as Doc’s steel chilled him through the heart. The old man recovered his blade and came on guard, but he had no more opponents.

  Drawn up to his full height with his long silver hair and coat blowing about him and a bloody blade in hand, Doc looked as formidable as Ryan ever remembered. “Nice work, Doc.”

  The scholar drew his handkerchief, wiped his blade, slid it back inside his cane and locked it with a twist. “Thank you. I believe the sea air is doing me good.”

  Ryan glanced up at the clouds. There was a good chance the sea air was going to chill them right quick. There was a storm coming, and the island was still miles away. “You know we just chilled the entire crew.”

  Doc stared at the carnage strewing the deck and blinked up at the clouds, his shoulders sagging as he did the math. “Oh, bother.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve had a hand on a tiller, right?” Ryan asked. He cut strips from the dead men’s clothing and bound his ribs and wrapped his hand.

  Doc helped him tie off the bandages. “Only the smallest of pleasure craft and then only on a lake upon a summer idyll.” Doc swiftly moved toward the tiller. “I believe I can aim us at the larger island. After all, we have traveled on many a boat.” Thunder rolled and the first wet drops of water began slapping the deck and diluting the blood it was awash in. Ryan snapped out
his spyglass and examined the ocean between them and their destination. Rocks rose up in front of them like a field of tombstones in the water. “Doc, we got rocks ahead.”

  Doc tucked his cane beneath his belt. “Are you sure?”

  Ryan put his spyglass away and grabbed a line. “Bastard sure.”

  Doc’s knuckles went white on the tiller. “Oh, bother.”

  Chapter Three

  “Gaia!” was the last decent thing that came out of Krysty’s mouth for several minutes as she slapped, punched and berated the mat-trans control panel with ever more colorful bawdy house language. J.B. ran an ancient toothbrush around the bolt of his Uzi and enjoyed the show. The flame-haired woman wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes, and when she was angry it was something to see. “Won’t do any good,” the Armorer opined. “It seems to be on some kind of timer.”

  Krysty’s rage went glacial as she turned her jade gaze on him. J.B. prudently went back to cleaning his blaster. Krysty spoke low. “Try again.”

  J.B. sighed and went into the main control room for the tenth time. He had a well-deserved reputation as a man who knew his blasters. But a mat-trans was a challenge of a higher order, and he was totally at a loss. The control panel was a complete mystery. The situation was quite simple. The mat-trans had sent two of the companions somewhere, and now appeared to be on some sort of cycle. One of the comps had come online and was scrolling comp code that left J.B. baffled. No combination of button-pressing or typing in commands on Mildred’s part had elicited any response. The cycle appeared to be locked in. It was clearly a situation of hurry up and wait. J.B. studied Mildred. Both she and the mat-trans were products of the twentieth century, but he knew from past experience that comp code had never been her thing, try as she might.

  Mildred was more concerned at the moment on the stickie that was currently trying to extrude itself through the door. Mildred wasn’t exactly the squeamish type. She was a medical doctor; and since her rude awakening in the Deathlands had seen some of the vilest crimes against man and nature imaginable. But somehow, like clockwork, when the very sickest shit came down…