Crimson Waters

“Say we wanted to get back to the mainland,” he said when Lumpy had ordered a rum.

The server was a black-haired, green-eyed girl wearing a leather apron over a short skirt and carrying a tray. Lumpy, anyway, didn’t neglect to eye her backside appreciatively as she walked back toward the bar.

“How’d we go about that?” Ryan finished.

Lumpy sat back in his chair. He looked half-spent just from watching the girl.

“Got the jack?” he asked, still looking at her when she stood giving the order to McDugus Fish. “You can do pretty near anything, if you got the jack.”

Doc laughed in wry delight. “Isn’t that not ever the way of the world?” he asked.

“Say we aren’t exactly flush,” J.B. said. “Could we work passage?”

“You done pirate work before?” Lumpy asked. “You all look to know your way around them blades and blasters you’re loaded down with. I mean, not to pry or nothin’.”

“We were hoping for more peaceful employment,” Krysty said.

“Don’t traders work the port?” Mildred asked. “I mean, the, uh, Mermaid even sells fresh fruit. The island doesn’t look big enough to grow it all here. Unless it’s all brought in as pirate swag?”

He laughed. “Oh, nuke me, no. There’s traders ply here, right enough. Once they buy their export licenses off the Syndicate, they’re as safe on the open sea as you and me, sittin’ right here. Only they don’t much like to take on crew here, if you catch my drift. Not everybody’s reliable.”

“Imagine that,” Mildred said.

“What about other paying gigs?” Ryan asked. “Local work.”

The girl brought Lumpy’s rum. He grinned at her when she set it down. She ignored him as if he were an insect. She took the .22 round Ryan handed her and walked away without a word.

“Whoo,” Lumpy said, “that is purely fine. Where was I? Oh. Jobs. Well, the crews bring in plenty slaves. You could sign on for Monitors, but I reckon you’d have the same objections to that you have to signing on for pirates.”

He shook his head. “Can’t think of much. I do some odd jobs now and then since I lost my nerve, fish some. I can fix a few things, and that’s not always something you want slaves doing, know what I mean. But that’s just me, and I barely scrape by. There’s five of you.”

“Six, actually,” Mildred said. “But who’s counting?”

Lumpy shot back his rum and shook all over like a wet dog. He set his empty on the table upside down with a clack. It seemed to Ryan the single shot had hit him pretty hard. Of course, he didn’t know whether it was his first of the day.

“Spring for another?” Lumpy asked, looking around with eyes even less clear than they had been when he sat down.

J.B. signaled the server for another, then he leaned his leather-clad elbows on the table.

“So how about this Monster Island,” he said. “How about getting passage there?”

Lumpy shrugged. “Same story as the mainland. Go for a pirate, or pay your way. Gas, brass or ass—nobody rides for free.”

“So what do you think, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

“I’m thinking,” he admitted.

“You considering turning pirate, Ryan?” Mildred asked.

“Would you like signing up as Monitors better?” J.B. asked.

She scowled.

“Everything lives off other things,” Jak said. “Want eat, gotta kill.”

“Unusual loquacity, Jak,” Doc said. “And unusual eloquence. Albeit in the service of a doctrine of moral expediency.”

Jak scowled furiously.

“Don’t worry,” J.B. told him. “I didn’t get it, either.”

“I did,” Ryan said. “Haven’t we done plenty of things to stay alive we weren’t thrilled about?”

“Ah, yes,” Doc said. “Steeping in shame to stay alive. I remember...the sows....”

“Stay with us, Doc,” J.B. said. “The sows’re long since gone for bacon.”

For a moment Doc gazed around, wild-eyed, as if seeing hell-knew-what bizarre landscape peopled with alien monstrosities, instead of a surprisingly clean but still seedy gaudy house and the faces of his friends. Then the mad light left his eyes. He seemed to deflate.

“Ah, yes,” he said again, with a sad smile. “Long gone.”

“Should we be discussing stuff like this...you know?” Mildred asked, waggling her eyebrows ridiculously and looking sidelong at their guest.

“Don’t mind him, Millie,” J.B. said. “He’s too sunk in rum to know what we’re talking about. Or care.”

Lumpy had, indeed, tossed off his second shot like water and now slumped in his chair like a half-empty sack of oatmeal. His own eyes stared without focus at the tabletop. He drooled over a hanging lower lip.

The doors burst open and four Monitors swaggered in. They were dressed and armed like the crew that had braced Ryan and his friends on the docks, and their heads were likewise shaved. Which was a little more curious this time out, since one of them was a woman, who wasn’t unattractive in a blade-faced kind of way. She seemed to glare around a lot more truculently than her three companions, as if suspecting she had more to prove than they did.

Heads didn’t turn when the Syndicate sec team blew in. Conversation didn’t falter, but it dropped an octave. And heads huddled down a little closer in collars, where applicable, or chins closer to collarbones where not. Ryan realized he wasn’t the only man in the gaudy who was suddenly keenly aware the four were the only ones in the house with easily accessible weapons.

He smiled, ever so slightly. Not that a measly twist of wire with a dab of goo sealing it would stop him doing the necessary thing.

But then, he wasn’t in any rush to throw his life away, either. He looked away from the four as they ceremoniously paid for their drinks at the bar, and back to his comrades.

“We all know finding an easy living isn’t easy,” he said. “Finding a hard one isn’t always easy, either. We’ll do what we need to to survive, bottom line.”

“We always do, Ryan,” J.B. said.

“We don’t have to make a decision tonight,” Ryan said. “But in the morning, we’ve got to move. So we need to know by then which way we’re moving.”

Krysty patted his hand. “Something’ll come up, lover,” she said. “It always does. One way or another.”

“Krysty’s right, as usual,” Mildred said. “But it’s the ‘or other’ part that worries me.”

J.B. grinned at her. “What, Millie? You looking to live forever?”

“Made a good start on it already, John,” she said. “Even if not quite on a par with Doc.”

Without waiting for permission, Lumpy waved at the good-looking server for yet another rum. Ryan took it in; his one eye seldom missed much. He didn’t object. He might have more questions to ask before they were done with Lumpy.

If the stupe doesn’t drink himself under before I think of them, he thought.

Lumpy glared at the Monitors. “Bastards,” he muttered. “All they do is keep a man down.”

The Monitors drank, neither lingering nor rushing, then they sauntered out of the gaudy without a word to anyone. As soon as the door slammed shut, the conversation picked up. The piano player, who’d been engaged in low tinkling, struck up a brisk tune.

“Fuckin’ Monitors!” Lumpy exclaimed. “Drink! Sweetcheeks, get them sweet cheeks over here! I need a drink.”

Behind the bar, McDugus Fish’s lugubrious face fisted in annoyance. In the corner Ryan saw a gleam of eyeball as his daughter looked to see what the fuss was. She never missed a stroke, though. A real trouper, that girl; Ryan had to give her that.

The expression on her face like a rain squall on the ocean, the black-haired, jade-eyed server approached. “I need another rum,” Lumpy declared, as if suspecting she was keeping one from him.

She nodded and turned away. “And I need some of that, too,” he said, and grabbed her left ass cheek.

She froze. All the color drained out of her face. She seemed unsure what was actually happening.

The bar went dead still. The piano player turned into a statue with her hands hovering over the keys. McDugus Fish’s face went red, then white.

The door opened. The belligerent female Monitor strode back inside, followed closely by a heavily muscled black Monitor an inch or so shorter than she was. She stopped dead. A smile winched its way across her sharp features.

“So,” she said, not loudly, but the gaudy had gone so still she might as well have shouted. “What do we got here?”

“Oh, shit!” Lumpy gulped. His face went puce. He let go the server’s rump and tried to jump to his feet, but booze had addled his coordination as much as his sense. His legs tangled with those of the chair and they both went down in a clatter and a tangle.

He disengaged and jumped quickly. Moving like a striking mongoose, the female Monitor flowed across the floor. She was right on top of him when he reared upright.

Lumpy faced the back door, which led to the latrines out back. That meant his back was to her—and the truncheon that slammed into his skull.

Ryan heard a moist, muffled crunch. Where Lumpy had looked like a half-filled burlap sack sitting in his alcoholic torpor a few moments before, now he hit the floor like an empty sack dropped from the ceiling. He lay on his face gurgling and making vague swimming motions in the sawdust with his arms and hands.

Ryan realized that he and his companions were the only ones staring at Lumpy, or what remained of him. The rest of the patrons and McDugus Fish were all looking studiously someplace else. Except for the server, who stood looking at the twitching Lumpy with vindictive glee.

The black male Monitor enthusiastically put the boot in. Mildred winced as ribs cracked audibly.

The fallen man didn’t react to repeated kicks, or a couple of experimental whacks cross the shoulders with the woman’s stick. The female Monitor straightened.

“Get this trash hauled out to the curb pronto, Fish,” she snapped at the barkeep. “We got strict regulations in this town.”

McDugus Fish turned and bawled something at the open door behind the bar. A couple of men in aprons and, to Ryan’s surprise, hairnets bustled out. They were both short and dark, one stocky, one wiry.

“They do have strict health regs in this ville,” Mildred said, sounding bemused.

“It’s like why a dog licks himself,” J.B. explained. “Because they can.”

She glared at him a moment, then wordlessly shook her head.

The two helpers from the back—cooks, Ryan thought—hurried up, grabbed Lumpy by the shoulders and dragged him out the door. His head hung limp, drawing a furrow in the sawdust along with his feet and hanging arms. He didn’t seem to be moving or making noises any longer. Ryan wouldn’t be surprised if the poor bastard had taken the last train west.

“How can we just sit here and watch?” Mildred hissed, as the Monitors walked to an unoccupied table on the far wall.

Ryan looked at her. It took him a moment to catch her drift.

“Nor our deal,” he reminded her. “And I reckon we got everything that poor simp had to give.”

The door opened, and two more Monitors, both males, swung in. They located their comrades, then moved purposefully to their table. They perched on the edges of their chairs, leaning forward to talk earnestly. The other two nodded.

Once again the door swung open. A fresh wave of ganja smoke rolled in on the humid gust from outdoors, and with it the noise of a half-dozen outlandishly dressed and dreadlocked roisterers.

A short, bearded black guy with dreads stuffed into a pillow-sized knit cap of red, gold, black and green stepped to one side and puffed out his banty-rooster chest.

“We be the Sea Wasp Posse,” he declared. “Silver-Eye Chris be our big man. We can outdrink, outfight, and outfuck any motherfucker in NuTuga. Fear us well enough, mebbe nobody gets hurt.”

If the other patrons had carefully ignored the fate of Lumpy, their gazes positively bounced off the six men who had come in. The Sea Wasps wore extravagantly flounced blouses and trousers, vests blazing with bright patches and ribbons, and weapons. Lots and lots of weapons.

Even JaNene’s latest customer pulled out. He stepped away from the phony mermaid, stuffing his rapidly shrinking pecker back inside his blue denim trousers and yanking them back up by the drawstrings. The blonde turned a blank expression toward the newcomers. She rubbed her mouth absently with the back of one hand, then hanging her head, she began to cry soundlessly.

“So this is the top dog pack,” J.B. said. Like the others, he didn’t look directly at the garish newcomers. It wasn’t fear. It was plain practicality. They were outnumbered here.

The Sea Wasps sauntered up to the bar as if they were the owners come to see how McDugus Fish was keeping the place up. For all Ryan knew, they were. They obviously had a hefty reputation hereabouts.

Krysty rose. Ryan looked at her. She nodded at the door to the back: call of nature. Realizing the same thing, Mildred stood to join her. Strength in numbers.

The two vanished toward the back. Krysty seemed completely at ease, but her flame-colored hair had tightened into a short, tight cap. Ryan hoped nobody would notice that her hair could and did move by itself. That would mark her as a mutie, and with this bunch, who knew what the consequences would be.

The Sea Wasps had their drinks and were leaning back against the bar insolently eyeing their fellow pirates as if deciding which one they planned to kill first. One man stood out in particular. He wasn’t the tallest, although he stood about an inch or two higher than Ryan. He wasn’t the burliest; that was a pale-skinned man-mountain with a beard hanging over his wide chest and kettle belly. Despite his size, he projected a big cat’s readiness to spring into lethal, lightning-fast action. He had golden dreads and lightly tanned clean-shaven features that might’ve been handsome on somebody else. His eyes were silver, like old-time coins with all the tarnish polished off.

That silver gaze swept the crowd insolently. It passed over Ryan’s table without pausing. Clearly he sized up the travelers as the lowest-threat bunch in the room.

Momentarily. Then his eyes snapped back. Two silver eyes locked up briefly with Ryan’s blue one.

Unlike everyone else in the room, Ryan wasn’t looking away from the Sea Wasp Posse.

The golden-dreaded man’s smile widened about a half inch. He nodded just a little more. Ryan returned the gesture.

Smart enough to be dangerous, Ryan thought, availing himself of the chance to take a sip of his now-flat beer without appearing to submit. That was another reality of the world: authentic hardcases knew how to spot each other on first glance. And generally they steered well clear, unless circumstances required them to tussle. You didn’t live to get case-hardened that way, as opposed to just rabid-weasel vicious, without having a well-developed sense of survival.

He allowed himself to relax fractionally. The Sea Wasps’ leader was willing to look for easier prey, if looking for prey was on his mind. The only question was how quick his pack would get the message.

They had obviously been into the weed, which Ryan knew sometimes took the edge off. But these guys lived edgy, and from their manner they’d been hitting the booze pretty hard, and maybe even jolt. Betting on their being made mellow by their smokes was another quick road to a shallow hole in the beach. Or just the harbor, without the necessity of being hung up, which Ryan was fairly sure was where Lumpy was destined, if he wasn’t bobbing facedown already with the ’cuda nuzzling his exposed face and fingers.

The back door opened. Krysty and Mildred came in. They made for their companions’ table without glancing at the Sea Wasps, who were smoking vast cone-shaped spliffs and joking among themselves. Also without obviously steering clear of them, except to Ryan’s keen blue eye.

Even so, one of the Sea Wasps suddenly blocked their path. He was a wiry mocha-skinned dude, with a single-braided black goatee and tattoos of women with big bare boobs and snake bodies twining up bare, muscle-cabled arms. He had two machetes slung crosswise over his back with the hilts sticking up over his shoulders, and two Smith & Wesson autoblasters in hip holsters decorated with bright beadwork. The weapons Ryan could see were peace-bonded, which didn’t much comfort him.

“So what have we got here?” the pirate asked. He had a Spanish accent. “You getting a higher-quality slut in this gaudy of yours, now, than that taint cocksucker daughter of yours, Fish-face?”

“She’s not a taint,” McDugus Fish said stubbornly. “It’s a birth defect.”

“You got smarter,” the pirate said. “Figured out I got a soft spot for the redheads, huh?”

And he reached out and grabbed Krysty’s left breast.

Chapter Seven

Time seemed to slow. Ryan shifted his left hand inside his long coat.

Calmly yet decisively Krysty reached up and removed the hand from her breast.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, strong but not shrill.

Her eyes turned like emerald lasers to the table of Monitors sitting across the room. They were all watching.

“I thought the Syndicate had laws against assault,” she said clearly.

As one, the four sec goons turned their heads away.

“Well,” J.B. murmured, “remember what Oldie said about some dogs being more equal than others? Reckon this gang’s the most equal of all.”

“Right,” Ryan said, rising from his chair. He didn’t hurry as he walked toward the tableau a few paces away.

The pirate saw him coming and showed him a gap-toothed grin. “What you want here, Patch? You triple-stupe? You think you can fuck with the Sea Wasps? You think wrong, man.”

And he grabbed Krysty’s breast again.

“If you don’t remove your hand,” Ryan said, “I’ll remove it for you.”

The guy just grinned wider. His hand squeezed the full breast again quickly, then began to move down toward the flat plane of her stomach.

Rattlesnake-fast, Ryan’s left hand whipped to the sheath on his hip, freeing eighteen inches of steel blade. Before the pirate could so much as blink it rose and slashed down.

The panga’s razor-honed edge chopped the Sea Wasp’s hand off just above the wrist. The hand seemed to pulse on Krysty’s breast one more time and then it fell to the floor. It lay on its back in the sawdust like an overturned beetle, fingers twitching like bug legs.

The pirate stared down at the blood jetting from his stump in slack-jawed amazement. Krysty sidestepped quickly out of the way of the pulsing blood, then she and Mildred grabbed their own weapons. As Ryan had quickly and covertly undone the peace-bonding on his weapons when the Wasps came in, they were obviously undoing theirs now.

But not all of the party’s armaments had been sealed in sheath or holster, of course.

The wounded man began to shriek like a horse in a burning barn. Grabbing his stump with his remaining hand, he danced in a circle, painting the patrons, the tables, the chairs, the walls, even the ceiling with arterial spray that gleamed dark in the fish-oil light.

With startling power, Doc kicked the table. It flew across the room into the faces of the other Sea Wasps. They were too startled by this completely unexpected turn of events to react with what would surely be their normal rapid savagery.

The Monitors, a beat slower, jumped to their feet, unlimbering their scatterguns.

A dully glittering disk spun across the room. The black Monitor who’d come back from the first party grunted audibly as one of Jak’s concealed throwing knives buried itself in his bare, muscle-ribbed gut. It was probably only a flesh wound. As strong as he was, Jak couldn’t throw one of his relatively light holdout knives hard enough to punch through the tough abdominal wall at that range. But the man stared down at himself and shrieked in terrified surprise as if it had gutted him like a fish.

His female companion was faster and firmer. She had a sawed-off pump shotgun with a pistol grip on its shortened forearm as well as in the back. She brought the stubby weapon rapidly online, ready to spray Ryan and friends with lethal buckshot.

Instead, a loud bang went off in Ryan’s right ear and a red dot appeared right above the woman’s collarbone, above the neckline of her black T-shirt. More shots blasted in quick succession, forcing Ryan to squint as side-blasts from a short barrel stung his cheek.

J.B. was half standing from his chair, his right arm locked out. His right fist clenched a little black Kel-Tec P-32 blaster. It was his latest pet holdout pistol, though it didn’t have much punch, being only a .32 ACP.

Which was why J.B. kept shooting, walking shots up the Monitor’s chin and cheek and putting a last one through the right side of her forehead. At twenty feet, J.B. was shooting near the absolute accuracy the tiny handblaster was capable of. But with a blaster in his hands, any blaster, J. B. Dix was both lucky and good.

Ryan stood, bloody panga in hand, while the Sea Wasp whose hand he’d amputated had gotten hold of himself. He tugged furiously at one of his machete hilts with his remaining hand, even though he was bleeding out fast enough through his stump that he’d go down inside another minute, unconscious or dead.

Until then, he was a threat. Krysty booted him in the balls, the impact lifting his soles a good five inches off the sawdust.

When he landed again he doubled over in agony that overrode even the pain from his arm, which shock was likely dulling already, anyway. Krysty held the short muzzle of her Smith & Wesson 640 revolver almost to the back of his head and blew what brains he had onto the sawdust in front of his boots.

At last Ryan got his SIG-Sauer out and started blasting toward the Sea Wasps as they sorted themselves out from under the table Doc had kicked into them. He didn’t think he hit any of them. The bar was suddenly full of patrons who decided all at once that getting out of the Blowing Mermaid was the best survival strategy, even if it meant racing through a horizontal hail of bullets and buck. He did see Silver-Eye Chris vanish over the bar with startling alacrity.

One of the other Monitors lit off both barrels of his sawed-off. The big pirate who’d been enjoying JaNene’s ministrations was just darting past him to the door and took both charges full in his hanging gut. Screaming shrilly he went down, trying to stuff purple-pink coils of intestine back into his ruptured belly.

J.B. fired again, but Ryan wasn’t sure at what. They’d stepped away from each other.

Doc streaked past, his coattails flapping like stork wings. In a flash, Ryan saw he had his sword in one hand and the ebony sheath in the other. The Monitor with Jak’s throwing knife stuck in his belly had apparently realized the thing hadn’t punctured anything vital. Ignoring it, he swung his own pump gun to bear.

With a fine fencing lunge, Doc ran him through the right shoulder. He cried out again, dropping the scattergun.

The blaster was slung around his neck on a waist sling. Rather than falling free, it dangled. Even though neither wound seemed fatal, the Monitor decided two new holes in his hide was enough for one day’s work. Letting the blaster hang, he turned and joined the crush of customers trying to fight their way through the open door.

Shouts from outside suggested others were trying to fight their way in. Ryan dashed toward an overturned table and took cover behind it, to see J.B. grinning at him from behind another.

Shots were coming from behind the bar. Ryan risked a look out to see a couple of heads seeming to stand like apples on the upper surface, with handblasters stuck out in front of them. As he looked a head jerked. A whole divot of long black dreads was knocked off the back.

The head vanished. The hand and the silver Beretta handblaster it held slithered back out of sight. Ryan glanced over to see Mildred, crouched behind a jumble of chairs and a table, bringing her .38 Czech target revolver back online.

Then he saw two forms struggling off to the side. Krysty was still in the open. The biggest of the Sea Wasps was grappling with her. He was a great black bear of a man with a grimace full of gold teeth, a black beard and a vast mass of dreadlocks swinging from his cannonball head. He held a big butcher knife point-downward in a ham-sized fist. Krysty held the knife off with one hand while the other held his hand away from her throat.