Judas Strike

Suddenly, a sharp whistle sounded twice from the weeds and stunted brush growing inland, and the companions dropped into combat positions, taking cover behind the bricks. Working the bolt on his machine pistol, J.B. replied to the call with one long whistle. It was answered by the same, and everybody relaxed as Ryan and Krysty rose into view, holstering their blasters.

“You’re hurt,” Mildred said, rushing forward and kneeling to probe Ryan’s wounded leg.

The Deathlands warrior inhaled sharply at the contact of her fingers. “Just a scratch,” he grunted. “I got the poison out and cauterized the hole.”

“Maybe. Better let me be the judge of that,” the physician said, untying the torn pieces of cloth. Closely, she looked over the puckered scar, shiny and new among many older ones.

“Well?” he said in controlled impatience.

“It’s clean enough,” Mildred reported, tying the strips of cloth closed again. “And thankfully not infected. But it must hurt like hell.”

“Pain means you’re still alive,” Ryan muttered, then glanced around. “Where’s Dean, on patrol?”

“Down chimney,” Jak replied, jerking a thumb. “Finding door for lighthouse.”

His face a stone mask, Ryan limped to the pile of bricks and looked down the hole. He whistled sharply and waited, but there was no response.

“Any other way inside?” Ryan asked.

J.B. snorted. “Not that we could find. Lighthouse has got solid granite walls. Need a C-4 satchel charge to even dent the place.”

As Ryan limped over to the lighthouse, Doc started to offer the man his ebony stick, then thought better of the gesture. Ryan would never take it. Not from foolish macho pride, but with one of them possibly in danger the man wouldn’t have the time to spare thinking about his own pain. In the New York Herald of his day, Doc sometimes read of officers whose troopers claimed they would charge with them straight into hell. The scholar had never met such a person until Ryan freed him from a slave pit so very long ago.

Another crab scuttled by, and Jak caught the mutie in his hand, keeping well clear of the scorpion tails. “Wonder if good eat?” the teenager asked. The eye stalks of the creature extended fully, and it stared at the albino as if in open hatred. It unnerved him slightly how much intelligence there seemed to be in its steady expression.

With a gentle laugh, Krysty pointed to the east. “There’s an oyster bed in a tide pool some hundred yards that way with enough to feed an army.”

“Excellent, madam. Exemplary!” Doc stated, lifting an imaginary hat to the redheaded woman. “Once more you are the source of our succor.”

Jak tossed the crab away, uncaring where it landed. The mutie hit the beach on its back just in time for a wave to flip it over, and it hastily disappeared into the briny foam.

“I fill sack,” the teenager stated, and took off at a run.

“Speaking of which,” J.B. said, walking over to a slab of bare rock and lifting up a canvas bag. “Here are your backpacks. They washed ashore near us couple of miles down the beach.”

Krysty took them both and passed one to Ryan. The packs were torn in spots, probably from coral reefs, and still damp from the ocean, but were still okay.

Easing the longblaster free from the tangled straps, Ryan briefly checked the Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle for damage. He worked the bolt a few times to make sure sand and salt hadn’t gummed the works. The carriage moved smoothly, chambering a 7.62 mm brass round from the transparent plastic clip.

“Some sand in the barrel,” Ryan announced, sliding the weapon over a shoulder, “but no blockage.” He had actually felt off balance with the longblaster gone.

Going through the backpack, he used his big hands to squeeze excess moisture from the stiff canvas. Everything inside smelled dank, especially the dog-hair socks, but nothing seemed seriously damaged. Satisfied for the moment, Ryan stuffed some more rotary clips for the Steyr into his jacket pocket and filled the ammo pouch on his belt with clips for the SIG-Sauer. He was still very low on ammo, but better armed now then he was before.

Closing her backpack, Krysty tossed away a handful of soggy mush that had once been dried fish wrapped carefully in banana leaves. The sagging glob of food smelled rancid, and she heaved it into the weeds. Immediately, insects began to converge on the unexpected bounty.

“Any idea where we might be?” Krysty asked, sliding her pack onto her back. “Got no idea which island this is,” J.B. answered, touching the minisextant hanging around his neck. “The sun has been behind clouds since I woke up. Never once got a chance to fix our position. This doesn’t look like Spider Island, though. Too barren. No mountains.”

But the woman barely heard the man’s reply. Her hair wildly flexing, Krysty was listening to the wind. What was that odd sound? It was like hard rain hitting a tin roof, only lower, softer. How odd.

“Well, we can’t be too far away,” Mildred said. “Without a raft of some kind, we couldn’t have stayed afloat in the water for very long, even if the currents were with us.”

Ryan started to explain about the dead spider when a pistol shot rang out and Jak burst into view over the low sand dune. He paused at the crest to fire two more rounds, then raced toward the companions.

“Crabs!” the teenager shouted in warning just as a horrible blanket of blues swarmed over the dune, their armored bodies covering the ground for yards.

“Chill them all!” Ryan shouted, sliding the Steyr SSG-70 off his shoulder and working the bolt. It was the big crabs from the spider carcass. They had to have been following him and Krysty to see if they could find more people. And he led them right here.

Snarling in fury, Ryan fired and a blue exploded, spraying its guts over a dozen others. But the rest of the pack kept coming, and even as Ryan fired again, chilling another, he already knew there were a hell of a lot more crabs than they had ammo.

“Bastards are enormous!” J.B. muttered, firing short bursts from the Uzi. The 9 mm rounds wreaked havoc along the front ranks, but even as they fell the others scuttled callously over their fallen brethren.

As the rest of the companions opened fire with their blasters, spent brass flying everywhere, Doc slid the ebony stick into his belt, drew the LeMat and set the selector pin from the shotgun round to the .44 cylinder. Cocking the huge hammer, Doc began firing pointblank at the nearest crabs. A lance of flame stabbed through the billowing black cloud that thundered from the maw of the huge weapon. A three-foot-wide crab literally exploded under the trip-hammer arrival of the .44 miniball, then there came the musical twang of a ricochet from an out cropping near the chimney. Doc savagely grinned and dropped flat the ground to fire again. The solid lead miniball plowed through the first crab, blowing the shell off its body, and continued on to chill two more. Then one of the small pale blue crabs darted for his face, and Doc scrambled to his feet. Only to find the tiny mutie was clinging to his silvery locks with its pincers, while its scorpion tails probed for his eyes. He slapped the weapon at the crab, and there was a sharp tink as a barbed tail bounced off the steel barrel.

“Damn it!” the scholar cursed, cocking back the hammer.

“Hold still!” Mildred ordered, and with lightning speed she sliced off a chunk of the man’s hair with a knife. The crab landed among the boots of the companions and was stomped in a second.

Glancing at the crushed crab, Mildred spied the war over the rancid fish, the beetles covered with ants, being eaten alive. The symbolism rattled her nerves, and the physician dropped a round while frantically shoving ammo into her empty blaster. Her hands hadn’t shaken this bad since her first autopsy as a med student. Then the woman forced herself calm and began to eliminate the muties with surgical precision. It was them or her. End of discussion.

Through the fading light of the setting sun, the friends could see that the tide was steadily rising, the waves crashing high on the peninsula, spraying them with salt water. How high it would go they had no idea. To their knees, waist, more? Plus, every gunshot seemed to attract more of the muties, the scattered array quickly becoming a solid mass of the squat invaders.

“Put your back to the wall!” Krysty shouted, throwing herself backward.

The companions followed her lead, and safe from one direction, they tried to coordinate their firepower. Only now, tiny crabs raced over their boots, and one managed to climb inside the torn leg of Ryan’s fatigues. He swung the wounded leg against the lighthouse, crushing the mutie. The noise made the rest arch their stingers in shocked reply, and the horde advanced, their barbed tails stabbing forward constantly.

Stomping on another crab, Jak dropped the spent brass from his weapon and slid his last four rounds into the cylinders of the Colt Magnum pistol. That was it for ammo. Thirty feet away, a large adult crab snapped its pincers in the air at the teen, and Jak flicked his arm. A second later, a leaf-bladed knife slammed into the mutie’s face, and it went stock-still, paralyzed or dead from the attack.

The SIG-Sauer coughing hot lead death, Ryan cursed under his breath. If he didn’t know better, the man would swear the crabs were sending their old and young to attack the companions, keeping their big adults in reserve, so the companions would waste ammo on the weakest members of the horde. Was that possible?

“Ignore the little ones!” Ryan shouted, holstering his blaster and unslinging the Steyr SSG-70. “Chill the adults!”

J.B. passed the Uzi to Mildred and swung around the S&W M-4000 shotgun. Pumping the action, he frowned at how stiff the slide was. It had to be choked by salt residue. It still worked, but not very well. Aiming at the biggest group of crabs, J.B. fired and the deafening spray of fléchettes from the shotgun blew away the sea creatures by the score, chunks and pieces flying everywhere. J.B. fired three more times, destroying the front line of the clattering muties, then reloaded as fast as possible. The rest of the adult muties hastily retreated, the old and young scuttling about in total confusion.

“How many you got left?” Ryan demanded, working the bolt on the Steyr to clear a jammed round from the breech.

“Ten more shells,” J.B. reported, thumbing a fat cartridge into the belly of his weapon. There were loops sewn into the shoulder strap used for carrying the scattergun, most of them empty now. “And there’s gotta be fifty or sixty more of these things.”

A crab was on the wall beside him, and Ryan crushed it flat with the heavy wooden stock of his longblaster. They could try to blow a path through the gathering creatures and escape off the peninsula, but it was too close for a gren. Besides, the crabs would only follow until the companions dropped from exhaustion and were overrun. Hundreds to six were bad odds in any fight. And even with the fresh ammo, he was down to thirty rounds for the SIG-Sauer, and even less for the Steyr.

Jak shot a crab off Mildred’s leg, then holstered his piece. Krysty placed three .38 shells in his hand, and the teen nodded in thanks as he hastily reloaded. The main reason he carried the Colt Magnum blaster was the fact it could use both .357 rounds and regular .38 ammo. More than once that had kept him off the last train west.

“Dean, hurry!” Krysty shouted at the top of her lungs, blowing away an old blue with deep scars in its chitin armor. There was no reply from the lighthouse or chimney, and she sent a silent prayer to Gaia to watch over the boy. He was alone in the dark; at least they were in a group.

“Here they come again,” J.B. shouted, readying his weapon. The crabs were advancing once more, but slower this time, as if testing the deadly firepower of the two-legs. They had seen what the shotgun could do and were afraid now.

The cylinder of his blaster empty, Doc slid the selector pin to his one shotgun round. After that, he’d be down to hammering the creatures with the gun butt. The sword hidden inside his ebony stick would be useless against these armored muties.

Conserving ammo, Krysty and Mildred both waited until the last moment to fire. Crabs died, but the horde kept advancing as steadily as the rising tide.