Crimson Waters

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 an eyeblink Ryan had the panga sheathed again and his longblaster shouldered. Taking a flash aim through the flip-up ghost ring sights, he fired, but not at the shark that had so narrowly missed biting his head off. Nor at any of the others swimming horrifyingly close by to the eight-foot-wide path of submerged stone slabs. But at a fin moving at the back of the pack, almost a hundred feet away.

A pink-tinged jet greeted the shot, and the fin began to move away. Ryan cranked the bolt and fired again, at another of the more distant sharks.

“They’re turning away!” Mildred shouted.

“Got bigger food,” Jak said as Krysty let him back down into the warm embrace of the sea. Her bare left arm streamed blood from a dozen gashes into the water.

“You’re hurt, Krysty,” Mildred said.

“Not as bad as I will be if those big bastards come back,” Krysty said. “Let’s move while we’ve got a chance! We might actually make the island.”

They ran clumsily. The water pulled at Krysty. Strong as she was, it sucked the strength right out of her. She was bleeding, too—not fast, but enough that it would sap her energy in a short time.

Doc ran high-stepping, water flashing by his upraised knees. But the effort quickly took its toll. Mildred cruised past him, grabbed him by the coat and towed him behind her as if she were a tugboat.

Most of the sharks were distracted by the bigger feasts offered by the three of their kinfolk Ryan had chilled. Especially the one that was thrashing on the surface, sending prisms of water flying and causing a tremendous commotion. Which apparently was exactly what sharks liked, because the other fins in sight were making a beeline toward their flailing comrade.

Most of them. J.B.’s Uzi loosed off another burst as one came close from the far side. A beat later, Ryan’s longblaster boomed.

Then, before Krysty even realized the island was nearby, Ryan was standing in water to his shins, shouting at them to power on as he swung up the Steyr to put another shot into a charging shark. J.B. stopped to stand beside him and lay down covering fire with his machine pistol. The pistol slugs might or might not actually hurt the sharks underwater, but the tubby gray monsters sure didn’t like the impacts in the water nearby.

Then they were on a white beach. Krysty toppled and fell forward.

* * *

“HOW ARE YOU DOING?” Ryan asked, squatting beside Krysty where she sat in the shade of a palm tree near some brush.

She smiled wanly and gripped his offered hand with hers. Mildred knelt on her left, clucking in dismay as she did her best to tend the cuts Jak’s boobied jacket had left in her arm.

“Better now,” the redhead said. “Thanks to you, lover.”

“We’re not home free yet,” Ryan said, standing. “Just on a different island.”

“Jak and Doc think they might find fresh water,” J.B. said. “Plus the road keeps going to the next island, whatever that’s worth.”

Ryan rose and peered into the distance. About half a mile to the north stood yet another island. This one was large, at least a couple hundred yards by about a quarter mile. The next one looked larger still.

“Still got to get there,” he said. “And those ’cudas are still around. Sharks, too. Even if that last bunch got bellies full of each other, there are still lots of sharks in a whole bastard ocean.”

“Well, see now, Ryan,” J.B. said. “I aim to do something about that.”

He had one of their precious few blocks of C-4 moldable plas-ex and was breaking it into quarter-kilo chunks and stuffing those into detonators. The explosive had been scavvied from a recent find.

“Shock waves propagate better in water than in air, John Barrymore,” Doc said, walking back along the beach. “Would not those bombs you are so cleverly improvising pose as great a threat to us as to the sharks?”

“Find any drinking water?” Ryan asked.

Doc sat down in the shade of some kind of bush and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “No. Jak was circling the other way. Perhaps he’ll have more luck. He has a better nose for such things than I.”

“There,” Mildred said, cutting off the end of a roll of gauze she’d wound around Krysty’s upper arm and standing up. “That ought to keep you from bleeding to death.”

“Thank you, Mildred,” Krysty said.

Mildred grunted. “Glad to help. Makes me feel useful.”