Apocalypse Unborn. James Axler

the small ship trade to coastal outposts in the north, it had no gaudy, as such; that sort of business was conducted in the earthen ditches alongside the road. There were no frantic sluts pandering along the crowded pier this day. No begging children, either. Murder for profit was a growth industry here, yet the inhabitants were taking pains to hide themselves.

      With good reason.

      The folk who lined the dock were the foulest, most dangerous scum in all of Deathlands. Maniac mercies. Double-crossing ex-sec men. Slavers. Jolt traders. Mutie hunters. Blackheart robbers and chillers. The line of human refuse stretched past the end of the pier and wound back up the hill. Most of the cargo crates in the queue held living creatures that squealed and shrieked, but some pleaded in English for water, food or a quick and merciful death. The air holes were too small and too widely spaced for Mildred to see what or who was trapped inside.

      “Hey, slut, I’m asking you a question,” the skinner said. He punctuated his remark by giving her a hard poke in the kidney with a stiffened finger.

      Mildred turned and looked up into his eyes. She saw animal lust, greed and seamless ignorance. “Back off,” she warned him.

      It was a waste of breath.

      The skinner smiled. “Maybe you do so much business on your backs you can’t remember faces,” he said. He drew out eight inches of predark Buck knife and waved its cruel gut hook in her face. “Bet you remember this…”

      “Let’s bang ’em again, right here,” the shorter man growled, moving closer, his hand on the butt of his remade pistol.

      Krysty and Mildred were on their own. To avoid being recognized, the six companions had split up at the ville’s city limits. Ryan Cawdor was far ahead of them in line and the others, Doc Tanner, Jak Lauren, and J. B., were spread out some distance behind. Although it was vital to draw no extra attention to themselves, there was another, equally important consideration: the voyage south was going to be long and in tight quarters. Unless Krysty and Mildred made a statement that could not be misconstrued, they were going to be subject to the unwanted, nonstop, belowdecks attentions of a hundred-odd, semihuman shitballs.

      In a blur Mildred drew her Czech ZKR 551 revolver and jammed the muzzle under the much taller man’s chin. For a fraction of an instant he stood there flat-footed, long knife in hand. Under the circumstances, there was no moral lap dance, no question of Mildred holding her fire, of just disarming him.

      That option simply did not exist.

      The pistol’s bark was partially muffled by flesh and bone. The skinner grimaced as the .38-caliber slug rocketed out the top of his head and brains jetted skyward in glistening puff of pink. He toppled backward, bright arterial blood spurting from the ragged hole in his crown.

      His running buddy tried to clear the Astra from his waistband, but Krysty beat him to the punch. Snatching her Smith & Wesson 640 out from under her coat, she lunged forward and shot him once in the heart. The close-range muzzle-flash set his matted carpet of chest hair on fire. The .38-caliber bullet zipped through his torso and out his back, skipping off the pier railing before blipping into the bay. Clutching the smoking entrance wound, he staggered sideways, his eyes bulging. His mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. Dead on his feet, he twisted and fell onto his face.

      The two women turned back to back and scanned the nearby crowd over the sights of their handblasters. Everyone had turned to look at the closely spaced shots. Some drew their pistols or unslung long guns, but when they realized there was no threat and the show was over, they all stood down. No one seemed concerned about the sudden chillings; for this scabrous crew it was business as usual.

      Having made their point, Mildred and Krysty booted the still-twitching bodies off the side of the pier. Other corpses bobbed down there—bloated, slack-jawed whoppers drifting among the pilings. Overfed seagulls rode on pale chests, either dozing or pecking halfheartedly at empty eye sockets and the roots of shredded tongues.

      As Mildred stepped away from the railing she glanced down the line to the ruined end of the pier. Ryan Cawdor was now three back from the interrogation table.

      F ROM A DISTANCE of fifteen feet, Ryan observed the frigate’s captain, a mountain of brown skin and black tattoos seated behind a makeshift desk. Naked to the waist, his torso and arms were decorated with intertwined thorny vines; his front teeth, top and bottom, were filed to triangular, sharklike points. But most striking was the gruesome facial branding. Four parallel ridges of pink scar tissue ran over the bridge of his wide nose and down his broad cheeks. The corners of his mouth had been likewise disfigured, they twisted upward in a perpetual, manic grin.

      Ryan recognized the islander blood, what more than a century ago would have been called Maori or Fijian. The captain’s black hair hung in a braid down past the middle of his back. He had gold rings on every thick finger and both thumbs. A Government Model 1911 Colt pistol with an extended, high-capacity magazine lay on the tabletop. The .45’s hammer was locked back, the grip safety permanently held down with tight wraps of waxed cord. Next to his hand, it looked like a child’s toy. The armed, half-naked men at the stairway were islanders, too. They held their AK-47s casually aimed at the next man in line. Safeties off. Firing lanes clear. Index fingers braced against the outside of trigger guards.

      The three mercies standing in front of Ryan wore grease-stained canvas dusters and scarred lace-up boots. They carried blueless but well-oiled 9 mm Heckler & Koch machine pistols on shoulder slings. The weapons looked to be in excellent condition. They kept their hands in view and well away from their blasters. The first guy in line, presumably the trio’s boss, sported a broad-brimmed leather hat pulled down low over his eyes.

      The captain waved them forward. “Where are you boys from?” he said, pencil point poised against the open logbook.

      “We come from Siana country, over near Fayette,” the mercie leader replied in a gravelly voice. “A bastard long walk.”

      “Who did you crew for?”

      “Crewed for ourselves. We’ve been wolf-packin’ for the last six, eight months.”

      “Wolf pack” was Deathlandese for a band of roaming, freelance robber-chillers. And wolf-packing would not appear distasteful to the captain, under the circumstances.

      He didn’t ask for any of their names. He didn’t start writing in the logbook, either. At his elbow was a pile of tarnished metal disks with neck thongs. Every disk had a different stamped number. Those he handed a tag got a berth on the white ship and free passage south, to promised mayhem, glory and riches.

      “I heard there’s lots of cannies roaming the bayous these days,” the captain said.

      Cannies were cannibals, arguably Deathlands’ most degraded and depraved human subculture. They operated in small, highly mobile clans, joining forces to hunt, to chill, to feed on the weak and the unwary.

      “No more than any place else,” the mercie said.

      “We had a few maneaters slip aboard the last trip,” the captain said. “Guess they thought it was gonna be a floating picnic. It wasn’t. Bystanders got caught in the cross fire. Hell of a mess.” The captain put a yellow plastic bucket on the table. “You mind spitting in this?”

      The mercie leader didn’t look back at his pals; he didn’t take his eyes off the four AK-47s pointed at the center of his chest. He shrugged. “You want some spit, I’ll give you spit.” Holding the rim of the bucket close to his lips, he hawked resonantly and expelled a stringy gob, mopping the blowback off his chin stubble with his duster sleeve.

      The captain reached under the table for a quart Mason jar three-quarters-full of liquid. The fluid was the color of burgundy wine, but when he poured a little into the bucket, it dripped thick and slow. Holding the bucket at arm’s length, the captain sluiced around the contents, then dumped a foaming mess out onto the deck. The liquid was no longer ruby-red. It wasn’t even pale pink. It was the color of predark concrete. “Gray means oozies,” he told the mercie leader as he set aside the bucket. “But you already know that.”

      Ryan