Apocalypse Unborn

The man was wearing a hooded cloak…with attached ears.

Even in the low light, the material glittered with thousands of tiny flecks. J.B. recognized it at once. It was the excised skin of a scalie. A skin scraped free of underlying fat, sun-dried, then worked by hand until it was glove-leather supple. Thin, light, breathable. There was a lot of shrinkage in the curing process, though. It took a mighty big scalie to make a man-size cloak like that. A 500-pounder, maybe.

A bearded face protruded from the pointy hood, lips curled, half smiling. The intermittent lamplight played over sunken brown eyes circled in deep purple. From the man’s belt hung bulging black-powder and bullet bags fashioned from handsomely tanned swampie scrotums. He leaned on a big-bore, double-barreled percussion rifle, what in predark times would have been called an elephant gun. It was the kind of weapon mutie hunters used to blast through foot-thick hut mud walls, ambushing and chilling parents so their offspring could be more easily carted off.

J.B. stared back until the man broke eye contact, turned and vanished into the crowd. No name came to mind to match the face or the gear. No battlefield, either. J.B. had shot his way down a lot of dark, winding roads—chilling evildoers and defending the innocent—and in the process he had made blood enemies that he had never seen. Those who had escaped. And the relatives of those who hadn’t. And that didn’t take into account Deathlands’ power to transform people’s appearances in short order. It dried them up. Dimmed their lights. Most were guttering candles by the age of thirty, thanks to the elements and privation and constant conflict.

If Skin Hood had recognized him, or suspected something, he was keeping it to himself, at least for the time being. He either didn’t know for sure, or he had some other agenda. The only thing certain was that discovery by this collection of coldhearts, in these cramped quarters, would get the companions torn limb from limb. Pronto.

The clank of the anchor chain being raised sent the passengers surging for the bulkhead door. As he allowed himself to be pushed out of the room, J.B. caught momentary sight of Ryan. The one-eyed man looked grim, determined, dangerous. J.B. moved with the crowd up the companionway to the main deck. Most of the crew was already aloft, scampering up the webs of cables, along yard arms, unfurling sails. Captain Eng stood behind the ship’s wheel, bare feet spread wide, barking orders through a steel megaphone in a language J.B. couldn’t understand.

As the sails filled and the ship started to tack back and forth toward the breakers, the great rock and the wall of fog outside the bay entrance, J.B. watched the passengers’ arrogant bluster evaporate. They were not sailors. They were leaving terra firma for an alien, even more hostile environment. If travel in Deathlands was perilous, travel over the sea was a hundred times worse, fraught with new hazards, the most pleasant of which was drowning.

The islander crew offered their guests neither comfort nor reassurance. Sullen, humorless, they spoke only to one another in their native tongue and in sign language. They treated the passengers like so many cattle. Which was understandable as Magus no doubt paid them by the head.

Halfway down the starboard rail J.B. saw Doc conversing with a tall, topknotted black man and a shorter guy with cracked and peeling face paint who looked like a carny clown coming off a jolt binge. He didn’t let his eyes linger for long. Mildred and Krysty were on the far side of the deck, standing back to back. As he scanned the rest of the crowd for Jak and Ryan, once again he locked gazes with Skin Hood.

The bearded man smiled at him. Then he very deliberately looked away, first at Doc, then at Mildred and Krysty. When he turned back to J.B., he nodded, his hand on the pommel of a sheathed dagger.

Gotcha.

J.B. measured the distance, estimated the shot spread left to right, and decided against trying to take him out then and there. At a range of seventy-five feet, a high brass buckshot round was not a precision-guided munition. No doubt about it, though, Skin Hood knew who they were. Yet he hadn’t raised the alarm, and didn’t appear interested in doing so. Which meant he was after something else. Because of that, and because he seemed to be working by himself, J.B. let things ride for the moment. He moved to the stern of the ship, standing beside one of two iron racks of fifty-five-gallon barrels painted red and securely strapped down.

The white ship slid around the Morro Bay rock, into the open Cific Ocean. As it cleared the California coastline, it was hit by a strong side wind from the north. The sails snapped full with a sound like cannon shots, and the vessel heeled over hard to port. A few of the passengers fell to their knees on the deck, everyone else grabbed for something solid to hang on to. Overhead, taut cables groaned and sang in the wind. The ship righted itself, accelerating through the whitecaps toward the wall of fog. In less than a minute, they were swallowed up by it. Visibility dropped to less than a hundred feet. It was wet, cold and difficult to breathe with all the moisture vapor in the air. The farther due west they sailed, the darker and wetter it got. A gently falling mist became a steady shower. To escape it, many passengers retreated belowdecks.

J.B. screwed down his fedora and stood his ground, angling his head to keep water drops off his glasses. It took about fifteen minutes to break through the far side of the fog bank. On the horizon dead ahead and to the north, darkness had fallen in the middle of the day.

Black sky.

Black roiling sea.

The rumble and crash of thunder.

Captain Eng steered south, where shafts of light speared through a dismal gray cloud ceiling. With the wind squarely behind them, the ship picked up speed, knifing through the swells, slamming into the wave troughs. Cannons bounced on their carriage wheels. Down and up, down and up, the ship plowed a shuddering track. One by one, the other passengers sought the relative safety and protection of the lower deck. Krysty and Mildred disappeared down the narrow companionway, followed shortly by Doc. Ryan and Jak waited a decent interval before separately heading for the forward stairs.

As the sea state deteriorated, J.B. watched the captain strap his legs to the helm platform—this to keep from being thrown if the wheel gave a sudden kick when heavy waves pounded the rudder. Every sail filled, Eng was trying to outrun the danger. As the ship porpoised, waves of foam surged over the bowspit and flooded the deck, knee-high.

J.B. was one of the last of the noncrewmen topside. Not because he liked the weather or the company. He was in a pissing contest with Skin Hood, who had also refused to take cover.

Staggering along the port rail into the wind, the mutie hunter joined him on the stern. Eyes streaming, he looked into the towering darkness behind them and said, “Chem storm’s comin’up fast. A great big ’un. You ain’t a-scared, are ya?”

J.B. didn’t dignify the question with an answer. “Who the hell are you and what do you want?” he said.

Skin Hood smiled, displaying brown and yellow teeth. “Rad blast, Dix,” he said, “I thought we was gonna be pals.”

“Just spit it out.”

“You and One-Eye Cawdor and the others got something good going.”

Denying his identity seemed pointless. “Where do you know me from?” J.B. demanded.

“I don’t know you from swampie shit,” Skin Hood admitted. “Saw you and your crew take apart some sec men one time, though. Impressed me. Heard the stories about you since. You know, the kind of talk gets spread around the gaudies. Not that I believed even half of it.”

“What do you want?” J.B. repeated.

“I want me a piece of whatever it is you’re after. Only I want my piece up front…”

Skin Hood was looking for a pay-off to keep his trap shut. J.B. had no doubt that after he got what he could from the companions, he’d turn them all in for a second reward from the other side.

Miles off the stern, chain lightning flashed. The smell of ozone rode the wind. They were losing ground, fast. An armada of black clouds bore down on them.

Captain Eng picked up his megaphone and shouted for the crew to haul in all sails. The islanders raced to obey, despite the wind and the danger. In matter of minutes the job was done. Without power, the white ship bobbed, yawing and rolling between the immense seas. Eng bellowed through the megaphone again, and the crew deserted their posts, ducking into the aft companionway. The last seaman through the hatch was the captain.

Still facing off, J.B. and the mutie hunter didn’t budge from the stern.

A dull whump rattled the cables and rumbled through the hull.

Behind them, fireballs lit up the ocean. Intense flares of yellow light spread sideways in the narrow seam between black cloud canopy and black water. The concussions sounded like an artillery barrage. J.B. knew exactly what was happening because he’d seen similar events on land. Pressure and temperature gradients deep in the storm had caused superdense pockets of vapor to form. Explosive vapor. The lightning strikes were setting them off like strings of two-thousand-pound firecrackers.

As the chem storm swept toward them, J.B. saw an advancing, shifting, miles-wide blue curtain, the color of robin’s eggs, falling from the sky. And there was a hissing sound, so loud it drowned out the shriek of the wind through the cables. Beneath the edge of the blue curtain, the surface of the sea steamed and boiled, stippled by millions upon millions of impacts.

Methane hail.

Pissing contest forgotten, J.B. bolted for the aft companionway. When he tried to open the hatch, he found it locked from the inside. No one answered his frantic pounding, perhaps because it couldn’t be heard over the building roar. Skin Hood dashed past him, heading for the bow in a full-out sprint. Up there, a light winked on and off as the forward companionway hatch banged open and shut.

J.B. raced after the mutie hunter, digging for all he was worth. Behind him, the curtain of inch-diameter, blue iceballs hit the stern. Hail pounding iron plate sounded like machine guns, hundreds of machine guns, firing simultaneously and point-blank into a tin roof. The wall of deafening clatter made his guts, his bones, rattle. The ricocheting hail flew every which way, bouncing twenty, thirty feet in the air, zipping over J.B.’s head, skittering cross the deck in front of him.

He reached the awning over the companionway a second after Skin Hood and before the man could get through the open hatch. J.B. caught hold of the pointy hood and used it to jerk him backward, off balance, then side-kicked hard behind his weight-bearing knee. The leg crumpled and the man crashed to his back.

The mutie hunter jumped up at once, his purple-rimmed eyes wide with terror, his breath fogging in the sudden intense cold. He grabbed for his dagger and lunged at J.B., who stood between him and life.

Reacting, J.B. lunged, too, sweeping aside the blade thrust, wrist on wrist, using his forward momentum to head butt his adversary on the chin. The solid blow wobbled the man and he dropped the dagger. J.B. planted his feet and snapkicked at a center-chest bulls-eye, booting his opponent out from under the awning. The force of the kick sent Skin Hood sprawling, sliding across the icy deck.

He regained his feet just as the edge of the blue curtain reached him. The torrent of hail, like a waterfall breaking over his back and shoulders, drove him instantly to his knees. As he opened his mouth wide to scream, the cascade of ice pellets pounded him face-first into the deck, and in another second, buried him alive.

Gamble big, lose big.

J.B. backed down the companionway, pulled the hatch closed and dogged it.

Problem solved.

Chapter Four

The long night belowdecks went from suffocatingly hot to freezing cold while passengers clung to their pallets, storm-tossed, rattled by the din of hail and the rumble of what sounded like distant carpet bombing. As dawn approached and the racket outside subsided, from his too small bunk Dr. Antoine Kirby could hear the moaning of seasick fellow passengers and the hiss of the ship streaking through the water under full sail.

He was watching when Doc Tanner rolled out of bed, stretched, then brushed the bits of straw from the lapels of his black frock coat. When Tanner moved toward the bulkhead and the galley, Kirby eased out of the middle bunk to follow. In the bed above his, Colonel Graydon Bell was sleeping, belly up. White grease paint had rubbed off onto the coarsely woven cover of the pallet. His bristling cheeks, his brow, even his ears were dappled with bright red pinpoints. His lean jaws were grinding, eyelids fluttering, a steady flow of tears streaming into his receding hairline.

As on every night when Graydon went to bed sober, he was dreaming about dead wives and dead children.