Jason Frost - The cutthroat

"Eric?" Tracy said, dragging him back into the present.

He wiped the cold sweat his memories had produced from his forehead. "Yeah?"

"When we get back to the mainland and write our book about our adventures and the movie studios buy it for millions, who do you think should play me?"

Eric laughed. "How about Goldie Hawn?"

"Nah, too skinny. I was thinking of someone taller, like, uh, Jacqueline Bisset."

"How tall is she?"

"I don't know. But she looks tall."

"But she has an English accent?"

"Yeah, it'll give the whole thing some class. Maybe I can affect one when I'm doing all the talk shows. 'Bloody good to see you, Merv, ol' boy.' How's that?"

"Lousy."

"I'll work on it."

Eric noticed the strain in Tracy's voice and knew her hip was getting worse. If nothing happened to them by morning, he'd have to use his makeshift blade and cut some of the infection from her wound.

Shadows fractured the bar of light at the bottom of the door as footsteps approached outside. They heard the door being unchained and sat up straight. Tracy slid her sharpened blade into her pants, hooking one curved edge over the top of her panties. The razor edge lay flat against her pubic hairs.

Eric quickly laced up his boots, wedging the steel blade at the hollow next to his ankle.

The door swung open and a crowd of anxious faces peered into the room. Behind them a dim glow from several kerosene lamps cast a shroud of shadows over them disguising their features with flickering splotches of dark. It gave them all sinister hulking looks.

One man emerged from the crowd and stepped into the room, holding a red railroad lantern in one hand and a saber in the other. He was easily six feet four inches with a leather belt worn bandolier style across one shouder. The empty saber scabbard dangled at his hip. But he also wore a shoulder holster with a.38 Dan Wesson Model 15-2 VH tucked snugly away.

He was about Eric's age, mid-thirties, with light black skin that extended into a little bay at the top of his balding head. He was grinning hugely as he stepped into the middle of the room.

"Wonderful," he smiled, holding the lantern up to see better. "We finally got some poor sonsabitches to walk that damn plank we built." He paused. "Unless you can give us Alabaster's map."

The tall black man leaned on the ornate handle of his saber as if it were a cane. His dark eyes had a mischievous glint to them, but they were deadly serious as they studied Eric and Tracy.

"You were on Rhino's ship," he finally said. "Crew members?"

"Prisoners," Eric answered.

A few people in the crowd laughed skeptically.

The black man smiled. "We've heard that one before, skipper. Care to try a different story?"

Eric didn't respond. His chest ached as if steel claws were shredding their way through skin and bone to grab at his heart. It was taking all of his energy just to maintain consciousness. A glance at Tracy indicated that she wasn't doing much better. But he could see a spark of defiance igniting in her.

"I don't care what you've heard before, pal," Tracy said. "We were paddling along on our canoe when they picked us up."

"In your canoe, huh? Like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer."

"Christ," she sighed in exasperation. "If you used your head as much as your mouth, you'd realize that we couldn't be part of their crew. If we were, why would we have gotten off The Centurion in a leaky canoe?'' She shifted her hip to show him the wound. "And why would Rhino have shot me?"

The man shrugged. "You got scared when the fighting started. Or you thought the ship would go up in flames. You panicked. Rhino shot you as deserters."

Eric chuckled. "We certainly weren't afraid of the Home Run destroying anything but itself."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, first, you set the timer to blow much too soon. Second, the placement of the explosives was all wrong. You had them strung out along the hull instead of in one location. Also, had you built a funnel around them, you could have blown a hole clear through The Centurion and probably have sunk her." Eric dismissed them with a disgusted wave of his hand. "All you managed to do was destroy your own ship and get some of your own people killed."

The man frowned. Behind him the crowd discussed Eric's statements in urgent whispers. When the man with the saber spoke again his voice crackled with anger. "Unfortunately we didn't have your expertise. We were just doing our best."

"Unfortunately," Eric nodded.

"We managed to take a couple of them out," a man in the crowd hollered. "Killed one myself." The crowd responded enthusiastically to this.

Before Eric could answer, a young man began elbowing his way through the crowd. Tears of grief and anger streaked his tanned face as he pointed an accusing finger at Eric.

"He killed Teddy," he cried. "I saw him shoot an arrow through him."

"I saw him too," a woman said, grabbing the young man by the shoulders. Eric recognized her as the older woman aboard the Home Run.

"What about that?" the black man asked. "Is it true?"

"I did shoot somebody, I don't know who."

"Whose side was he on? Ours or theirs?"

"I couldn't tell."

The black man was incredulous. "You couldn't tell, but you shot him anyway?"

"He shot him," Tracy jumped in, "because the man was burning alive, a human torch, for God's sake. All Eric tried to do was save him a few minutes of agony."

The black man looked at the woman. "Rachel?"

She nodded. "That's the way it looked to me, Blackjack. I just wanted to hear it to be certain."

Blackjack stared at Eric and Tracy, pinching absently at the whiskered skin under his chin. Finally he turned his back and started out the door. "Bring them along," he ordered.

"This might sound selfish," Blackjack smiled, passing the canteen to Tracy, "but the quakes are the best thing that could have happened to me."

Tracy swigged the warm water, swallowing greedily. When she finished, she wiped the excess water from her chin with her palm and said, "Care to explain?"

"Maybe." Blackjack's smile widened, displaying more teeth. "If you live."

The three of them were sitting in the middle of a huge room the size of a warehouse that once had been the busy main floor of stockbrokers Finch, Levy, and Treemont. The overworked office staff had snidely referred to it as LAX Annex, calling the path that ran down the middle of the room between the rows of cubicles, The Runway. The Runway continued out of the main room down a corridor, passed the Xerox room, the Conference Room, the Executive Lounge, and finally halted at the private offices of Finch, Levy, and Treemont. Seven years ago Treemont had convinced his partners to take offices in this building because it was quakeproof. He'd been right; hardly any damage had been done to it from the shock of the quakes. However, Treemont, a short stubby man who'd only recently begun to battle his "blossoming behind," as his wife called it, by three-times-a-week workouts on Nautilus

equipment, had been trampled to death on The Runway after the second quake. Forty-three full-time employees, herded together with twelve part-timers and a Xerox repairwoman, had each contributed a footprint or two to the crushed body. Finch had tried to help his partner, but had been too late. The third partner, Levy, had actually been one of the first to stomp on Treemont in his own dash to the exit. Not that it mattered. None of the partners was alive by the end of the day.

The office had originally been designed to house fifty desks, each partitioned off to form semiprivate cubicles, each with its own telephone and video terminal plugged into the company's vast digital computer system. The interior designer had assured the partners that this setup would provide a sense of privacy yet still give the employees the feeling they were being watched. "Guaranteed maximum efficiency," the designer had winked.