Crimson Waters. James Axler

air with every sloshing step. Jak brought up the rear, scowling around at the water as if expecting something to dart through it and bite them.

      As it appeared, something just had. “My leg,” Mildred said. “Something stung me just now. Right above my right boot.”

      Jak pointed. “There!”

      What he was pointing at moved fast, but Krysty had good reflexes. She looked in time to see something like a silver shadow, long and slim as the concealed blade of Doc’s sword, dart away through the water.

      Looking back at Mildred, she saw a dark cloud puff into the water by her leg.

      “’Cudas!” Jak shouted.

      “Barracuda,” Doc said doubtfully. “I didn’t think they were known for attacking humans. Swimmers, perhaps. But certainly not walking ones. Or even waders.”

      Balancing precariously on one leg against the slow ocean current, Mildred hoisted her right leg out of the water. “Somehow I don’t think this one got the memo, Doc,” she said.

      Evidently not. Krysty saw a red slice, vivid against the coffee-with-cream skin of Mildred’s calf. Blood flowed freely to drip into the water.

      “Ace on the line,” J.B. said. “That blood could draw sharks.”

      “Screw sharks!” shouted Jak. “More ’cuda coming!”

      Quickly Krysty looked around. Sure enough, the shallow Caribbean waters, so deceptively peaceful on the surface, swarmed with sinister shiny shapes just below. Some circled just out of range. Others...

      Mildred jumped one-legged straight out of the water. “Fuck!” she screamed. Through the roiling water Krysty saw a lean shape lance past, just where the woman had been standing.

      With a rattling roar J.B. cut loose a burst from his machine pistol. Water spouted in an arc twenty feet from where Mildred was splashing back down. She came down on both feet but teetered. Krysty grabbed her wrist and kept her from toppling.

      The fall itself was no danger, obviously, but to be floundering around, depending on her own modest human swimming abilities, while contending with a shoal of killer fish could be deadly.

      A corpse bobbed to the surface. Its belly was white and showed the tips of black tiger stripes. Jaws filled with razor-edged teeth gaped. A round eye stared blankly. An inky cloud surrounded it.

      “Good shooting.” Ryan hefted his Scout but didn’t find any targets worth a precious 7.62 mm round.

      “Strike, more like,” J.B. called. “I was mainly looking to scare the nuke-suckers off. Or at least back. Bullets don’t travel for shit in water, anyway.”

      “These barracuda seem unnaturally large,” Doc said. He had his sword drawn and pointed toward the water. “I do not recall them growing significantly longer than six feet, yet yon specimen is a good nine or ten feet long, and some of his kindred seem longer still.”

      “Mebbe muties,” Jak said with a snarl of distaste.

      “Keep moving, everybody!” Ryan said. “They’ll chew us to bits if we just stand here gaping like a pack of stupes!”

      They moved into a slow-motion run, raising hip-high waves. Krysty held her snub-nosed Smith & Wesson Model 640 in her hand, but their wakes made it difficult to spot the finny horrors close by.

      Then again, if they were that close it was probably too late to do anything about them, anyway. Seeing a shape arrow at her from about thirty feet off to her right, Krysty snapped a shot at it. The .38-caliber slug kicked up a foot-tall jet of water. Whether the bullet hit the ’cuda, or even came near, she didn’t know. The fish sheered away.

      And she felt an impact against her own left calf. She looked down to see another ten-foot fish whip away from her. By reflex she looked down. It had ripped the tough denim of her jeans, but she saw no blood and felt no sting of salt water on a fresh wound.

      “Go!” Jak shouted from right behind her.

      J.B.’s Uzi snarled again. Ryan’s Steyr went off with a hard crack that seemed to hit the water and skip like a stone; Krysty felt the shock wave on her cheek as she started into forward motion again.

      “They don’t like the bullets hitting near them,” Mildred said in satisfaction, letting her big, ZKR-551 handblaster settle back online from a shot.

      “Yeah,” J.B. said. He fired a single shot from his mini-Uzi. “But when I said we had plenty of cartridges, I didn’t mean enough to keep blasting them into the ocean all day to frighten fish.”

      Jak snarled a curse. His handblaster roared. Lighting off right behind Krysty, its muzzle-blast made her ears ring, and the shock slapped the back of her head like an open palm. A .357 Magnum revolver had the nastiest blast of any handblaster she’d encountered, nearly as bad as Ryan’s 7.62 mm longblaster.

      “Fucker bit!” Jak said, evidently meaning it bit him. He uttered a scream of triumph as another barracuda bobbed to the surface. It had the front part of its head and whole upper jaw blown away.

      Though it made her stumble slightly as she continued to run through the warm water, Krysty glanced back. She saw the floating corpse bounce as one of its fellows hit it from below.

      “They eat their dead,” she called.

      Ryan had slung his longblaster now in favor of his 9 mm SIG-Sauer handblaster. Its cartridges were far more common than the big bottleneck rifle rounds, and if anything, the pistol’s handiness and quicker firing gave him a better chance of hitting one of the slim, elusive targets. “But I think we got a bigger problem than these little fuckers.”

      “Why, Ryan?” Doc asked. Swirls of dark blood trailed from both his legs now. But his upheld swordstick ran red halfway down its blade, indicating he’d at least gotten some vengeance. “The blighters appear to be fleeing.”

      “’Cuda got bigger problem, too!” Jak yelled. “Look!”

      Thirty yards to their left, a big triangular fin cut the surface. As Krysty watched, at least half a dozen more appeared behind it, gray and unspeakably sinister.

      “Sharks!” Jak shouted unnecessarily.

      “Bull sharks, I do believe,” Doc said. “Known for their highly aggressive natures. And for their proclivity for extremely shallow water.”

      Krysty spun and lunged. She caught Jak and yanked him up out of the water in a huge gout of spray. She winced at the way the nasty sharp bits of metal sewn to his jacket bit into the flesh of her arm, meant to discourage just this sort of bear hug.

      A foot-tall fin slashed past beneath him, barely two feet from Krysty’s own legs.

      Krysty managed to pump three quick shots after the departing bull shark.

      “Looks bad, here,” J.B. said, racking back the charging handle on his Uzi after slamming in a fresh thirty-round mag.

      “All this blood in the water is drawing them,” Doc said. “It will induce a feeding frenzy, no doubt.”

      Ryan had holstered his SIG-Sauer to whip up the Steyr. He fired a blast. Water gushed into the air just in front of another fin carving toward him. The big shark turned away not five feet from Ryan’s legs, red foam marking its wake.

      “Ryan, behind you!” Mildred shouted.

      Ryan spun with remarkable alacrity despite the water’s drag. Holding on to his longblaster’s forestock, he whipped his long panga from its sheath, sidestepped and swung upward.

      Horrified, Krysty saw a great dark shape like a fat gray torpedo blast out of the water to fly with its open jaws aimed right at Ryan’s face. Or where it had been an instant before. She saw his heavy knife blade score a long gash from the gill slits back along the water-streaming side of the killer fish. Trailing a pennon of bright blood, the shark dived back into the water in a huge shower of spray.

      In