Blood Harvest

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.