Buch lesen: «Blood Harvest»

Krysty lay on her side, gasping

Her vision smeared back into being—tripled, doubled and then finally was normal. She felt as if it had just rained hammers. Every cell of her body ached, and she tasted the copper of a nosebleed in the back of her throat. She reached out. “Ryan…”

Mildred moaned.

Krysty blinked at the afterimages behind her eyes and yawned at the ringing in her ears. “Ryan…”

Every muscle screamed as she shoved herself up to her knees. Krysty snapped her glance around the jump chamber in a panic. She, Mildred, Jak and J.B. were in the same gateway of the same redoubt.

Ryan and Doc were gone.

Blood Harvest

Death Lands®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

O miserable man, what a deformed monster has sin made you! God made you “little lower than the angels” sin has made you little better than the devils.

—Joseph Alleine

1634–1668

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter One

“Move! Move! Move!”

Ryan Cawdor and his companions needed little urging as they ran for their lives through the empty corridors of the redoubt. The facility they found themselves in was nothing but an empty concrete bunker. Whoever had occupied it had bugged out long ago and taken everything of value with them. Dead campfires, graffiti and bones—human, animal and otherwise—showed there had been successive waves of habitation. At some point someone had managed to breach the main clamshell doors and then the interior ones. The spent shells of various makes littering the floors showed there had been many room-by-room firefights. It was odd that the victors hadn’t bothered to retrieve the spent brass.

The companions’ cautious venture outside the redoubt had drawn more stickies than the friends had shells to waste.

They raced for the mat-trans chamber. The pounding of their boots was counterpointed by the staccato slapping of scores of bare stickie feet behind them as the muties gazelled after them in rubbery, ground-eating bounds. “J.B.!” Ryan shouted. “Gren!”

The Armorer clawed into a pocket of his jacket as he ran and came out with his last grenade. “One!”

“Do it!” Ryan roared.

The party passed the corridor junction, and as they turned J.B. pulled the pin on the grenade. The cotter lever pinged away and he tossed the bomb behind them. The hollow crack of the detonation echoed in the halls. Stickies hooted and shrieked. They loved fire and explosions. Unless it ripped their heads off, even stickies directly caught in them didn’t seem to mind so much.

The companions charged toward the corridor that led to the hexagonal mat-trans unit. Ryan stopped and shouldered his Steyr longblaster as his people went through the doorway that led to the control room. “J.B.! Close it!”

The door to the mat-trans was made of vanadium, and Ryan knew it would take powerful explosives to breach it. However, once it closed, the transportation cycle occurred, and Ryan wasn’t quite ready to eliminate all other options. The chamber door didn’t always lock. The outer door to the control room was ordinary steel. When the companions had arrived they had found the door jammed three inches ajar, and it had taken J.B. a good ten minutes of tinkering with the mechanism to get it to open. J.B. took a knee beside the inner control panel for the door and began fiddling with its guts.

“Hurry,” Ryan advised.

J.B. twisted the exposed wires of the keypad together.

The stickies came around the bend in a fish-belly-white, boneless wave. Shrapnel scored some of the muties’ bodies, but it wasn’t slowing them. Doc stepped into the doorway and drew his LeMat revolver from beneath his frock coat. The weapon boomed as he fired the shotgun barrel, and the lead stickie’s head was pulverized by the fist-size swarm of buckshot. Doc cocked the weapon again and pushed the hammer cone up to fire the pistol chambers of the weapon. For Doc Tanner the choices of being torn limb from limb by stickies or taking a mat-trans jump were equally revolting propositions. He took aim and shot a second stickie between its huge, shark-black eyes.

Ryan took aim with his blaster. “J.B….”

“Working on it!” J.B. snarled.

Ryan cut loose. The range was swiftly closing to spitting distance, and he fired in rapid semiauto and went for the head shots. Pale skulls popped like pumpkins but more muties kept piling forward from behind. Even at close range the bobbing and weaving heads of the stickies weren’t easy targets. The corridor filled with the gray clouds of Doc’s ancient black-powder weapon as he methodically cocked and fired. He fired his last shot and stepped back. “Empty!”

Jak Lauren instantly stepped in and his .357 Magnum Colt Python began detonating like dynamite in the echoing confines of the corridor.

Ryan slammed in a fresh mag. “J.B….”

Wires sparked between J.B.’s hands. “Got it!”

Ryan and Jak stepped back as the steel door squealed and ground against the floor. Ryan’s lips split into a silent snarl as the door shrieked, then stopped, leaving the same three-inch gap they had first found. “Fire…Blast! J.B.!”

The Armorer threw up his hands. “The door’s shot! No way will it shut.”

Everyone jumped back as the stickies hit the door in a wave. The jammed portal rang and rattled as dozens of stickies slammed their rubbery bodies against it. Others shoved their suckered hands through the gap and began heaving at the steel with grotesque, elastic strength.

Jak sighed as he pushed fresh shells into his revolver and stowed his empty brass. “Jump.”

Ryan eyed the door. He suspected it would hold, but Jak was right. They were low on food, water and ammo. The companions would have to come out sooner or later, and with low cunning the muties knew it, too. Ryan knew from hard experience that stickies could wait for days, days that his friends didn’t have. Two jumps within an hour was as ugly as it got, but there was no way around it. “Yeah, we’re jumping. We’re jumping now.”

Krysty stared steadily at the mat-trans chamber. “Lover, I got a bad feeling.”

Ryan turned his single eye on his woman. Krysty Wroth was the most beautiful thing in his life. She was tuned in to Mother Earth, and he had learned long ago to trust her intuitions, but the fact was the mat-trans was the only way out. The one-eyed man ran a hand through the silken length of Krysty’s scarlet tresses and her hair coiled around his fingers with a will of its own. Ryan smiled wearily. “Got no choice. We have to go.”

Her titian tresses coiled tighter around his hand. “There’s something bad hovering on the other side.”

Ryan nodded. “Usually is.” He looked at the other companions. “Let’s do it, and hope the stickies aren’t smart enough to open the chamber’s door.”

Krysty, Jak, J.B. and Mildred stepped within the glittering armaglass walls and selected a place to sit on the mat-trans’s floor. Ryan turned a sympathetic eye on Doc as the old man stood at the doorway, staring at the mat-trans in trepidation. Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been ripped through time and space from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, where he had been mentally, physically and quantum mechanically experimented upon in brutal fashion until he had finally been flung forward a further century into the nuke-shattered America that had come to be known as Deathlands.

Doc had a low threshold for being dematerialized.

“Doc.” Ryan often had to remind himself that the damaged, old-man body encased a man his same age. “We’ve got to go.”

“I know.” Doc stepped boldly into the mat-trans unit, but his hands shook as he did it. “By all means let us be on our way.” Mildred held up her hand. He took it and sat on the floor beside her. Ryan stared in weary exasperation at the keypad in the wall. It did them no good. They had no destination codes for the matter-transfer device, so a jump in a mat-trans was a jump to anywhere. All they could do was activate the device by closing the door and hope for the best. Ryan depressed the lever. The door hissed shut and seconds later a mist began to coalesce as he strode across the chamber and sat beside Krysty. The disks in the floor and ceiling began to glow and flash. Doc groaned and buried his face in hands.

Krysty felt the pressure build up behind her eyes, and a roiling sensation began in the pit of her stomach. She brought a hand to her forehead as she felt the sucking darkness enveloping her. Ryan had once described the visual effect before the utter oblivion of dematerialization as patterns of red roses.

Krysty screamed as she saw lightning behind her eyes.

Something was terribly wrong. Her vision went black, but there was no momentary sense of oblivion. The lighting continued to crash inside her skull and she heard screams, some of which were her own. Her matter wasn’t being transferred. Instead it felt as if a giant dog had picked her up in its jaws like a shoe and was savagely trying to shake her into her component atoms. The sensation ended with the abruptness and brutality of an ax stroke.

Krysty lay on her side gasping. Her vision smeared back into being, tripled, doubled and then finally a slightly skewed normal. She felt as if it had just rained hammers. Every cell of her body ached, and she tasted the copper of a nosebleed in the back of her throat. She reached out a palsied hand. “Ryan…”

Mildred Wyeth moaned.

Jak and J.B. were too busy puking to swear. Something in the female anatomy allowed a slight edge in withstanding the physical horror of a mat-trans jump but not by much. Krysty blinked at the afterimages behind her eyes and yawned at the ringing in her ears. “Ryan…”

Every muscle screamed as she shoved herself up to her knees. Krysty snapped her glance around the jump chamber in a panic. She, Mildred, Jak and J.B. were still in the same gateway of the same redoubt.

Ryan and Doc were gone.

Chapter Two

Ryan surfed into the terrestrial plane of existence on a wave of his own vomit. He groaned as he pushed himself to his hands and knees, shaking like a dog as he was wracked by heaves. Despite the nausea and disorientation, he knew something was very wrong. The armaglass walls were a veined chartreuse Ryan didn’t recall from any past jumps. Ryan spit and wiped his chin. “Lover, are you all right—”

The one-eyed man shot to his feet, blaster in hand.

He and Doc were alone in the chamber. Ryan looked around wildly, lurched to the control panel and hit the Last Destination button. The display began to peep and ran a stream of letters, numbers and symbols that meant nothing to him. Ryan’s shoulders sagged.

He punched the LD button twice more and got no further response. Ryan strode over to Doc, who was huddled in the corner, his knees folded into his chest, and rocking with his eyes squeezed shut as tight as fists. For most of the companions a mat-trans jump was like a surprise punch below the belt followed by an uppercut to the jaw. For the man time-trawled from the past, a jump was like a knife through an already damaged brain. At the moment there was no time for sympathy. “Doc, you’ve got to get up.” Ryan shoved Doc’s cane into his tremoring hand and hauled him to his feet.

The scholar put a hand on the glowing wall to steady himself. He shook his head and struggled to focus. Ryan stepped out of the chamber with his rifle leveled and didn’t like what he saw. The redoubt, if it even qualified to be called that, was just a gutted and broken concrete blockhouse. A cold wind whistled through holes in the walls and through missing sections of roof. The sky above was gray, bruised and pregnant with rain. The wind was whipping up to storm conditions. There were only two things of interest in the cold, bare space. One was a great metal hatch in the floor. Whatever alloy it had been made of gleamed as bright as the day it had been forged and untouched by time. It was sunk in the floor almost seamlessly. Three raised panels in the center formed a triangle, but they were as seamless as the hatch and Ryan could see no way to access any of the controls inside them. Black blast streaks around one panel showed that someone had tried with explosives and failed. Ryan ran a finger over one of the blast patterns, and the streak in the residue showed gleaming metal that hadn’t even been scratched.

The second item of interest was a corpse.

It was the body of a woman. Ryan eyed her desiccated flesh. Her black hair was cropped short around her skull like a helmet. Her skin was drawn tight against her bones, and her mummified corpse swam in the undyed homespun tunic clothing her. A leather sandal clung between two clawed toes. The other lay a few feet away. Incongruously a salt-corroded mechanical chron was hooped around one shrunken wrist. Ryan picked up the little blaster on the floor. It was a .32 revolver with foreign writing on it. He broke open the action. All six rounds had been fired. Ryan sniffed the cylinder and smelled black powder. Someone had been rolling their own rounds. Ryan tucked the little blaster in his pocket and turned his attention to the air-cured human body. It had been here for some time. No scavengers had been at it, which worried Ryan. Not even rad-blasted meat went to waste in the Deathlands. Ryan looked around as Doc stepped out of the mat-trans chamber. “You all right?”

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 just 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.