James Axler - Apocalypse Unborn

At the last instant, the creature deftly angled itself to miss the half-dozen cables supporting the bowsprit. It crashed feet-first into the lowest of the foremast’s sails, momentarily tangling in the rigging. Flapping its great black wings, it dropped to the foredeck. Its yellow eyes were huge and terrified as it faced the gathered islanders. It opened its short beak and let out a piercing shriek of warning. Kirby could see small, sharp white teeth and a black tongue. It had no feathers on its face, which was uniformly pitted and pale. The head was entirely bald except for a tuft of downy-white fluff on its peak. The creature was not only exhausted from fighting the chem storm but clearly injured. It was missing flight feathers on its wings, and in places along their leading edges red bone showed through.

The crew immediately closed in and tried to test the extent of the damage. Gleefully, they lunged and feinted, trying to grab for it. The bird thing was very quick. Its snapping beak and the black talons on its long narrow feet kept the islanders at bay. It soon tired of the game and, avoiding their grasp, hopped and flapped back up into the foremast’s rigging. From this perch it looked down with dismay.

“I’ll get your birdy,” offered one of the passengers, a man so ground-in grimy that he looked like he had been sprayed with cooking oil then rolled in coal dust. He pulled a big black-powder handblaster from his rope-cinched trouser waistband. The .44-caliber single-action revolver was a predark reproduction, probably Italian, of the Walker model Colt, first manufactured in 1847. Four-plus pounds of case-hardened steel, and that was without bullets and powder. The man thumbed back the pistol’s hammer and, squinting along the barrel, took careful aim upward.

“Don’t shoot!” Eng bellowed as he barged through the massed spectators.

The would-be bird hunter paused, looking warily over his shoulder. Before he could lower his weapon, a belaying pin clonked him soundly on the back of the head. Steel pipe on a ripe coconut. As his knees buckled, the big pistol discharged straight up in the air. Thanks to the tail wind, the cloud of black-powder smoke lasted only seconds longer than the yard-long muzzle-flash. The beating of the unconscious man continued until the captain shouted for the crew to stop.

At Eng’s direction, islanders swarmed into the rigging, climbing above the creature, then onto the yard arms. From that vantage point, they managed to drop a heavy a net over it. Crew men waiting below caught hold of the net’s lines and pulled the thing screaming to the deck. It thumped and twisted, but it couldn’t get free. The islanders threw their bodies on top of it, forcing it onto its back. Then they grabbed hold of wings through the mesh, stretching them out to full length, kneeling on them to pin them to the deck.

Kirby saw curving, fingerlike extensions of bone on the ends of its wings. The index was nearly a foot long, the others much shorter. He was staring at its strange, birdman face when it threw back its head and spoke, jolting him to the core.

“Don’t do this!” it cried in a high clear voice. “I mean you no harm. I only want to rest for a little while. I have young ones. Without me, they will starve.” Then it made the lilting, musical sounds of the islander language, presumably repeating itself for those who didn’t understand English.

The crew paid it no mind. They seemed almost possessed. Grinning, laughing, they held down the great bird with brute force. One of them yanked a feather out of its wing and stuck the bloody quill in his coil of braided black hair.

“It is speaking!” Doc said, pressing forward. “This creature is intelligent!”

“No,” Eng told him. “Manu tangata is a stupid thing. It just repeats what it’s heard. It has no wairua, no soul.”

A conclusion the evidence seemed to contradict.

“Are you deaf, man!” Doc exclaimed. “It is sentient and it is talking to you!”

The captain glowered at him and snarled, “Porangi.”

Clearly not a compliment.

Doc tucked the lapel of his frock coat behind the tooled leather holster and his LeMat. The hulking captain stiffened.

A chill crawled up Kirby’s spine and into his scalp. Doc was about to intervene on behalf of the bird creature. It was something Kirby hadn’t anticipated. He knew how life in the hellscape had affected him, how its unrelenting brutality had inured him, bit by bit, to the suffering of others.

But this was no bluff.

The old man was about to let it rip.

Kirby leaned close, turning his back on Eng while he rested his hand heavily on the butt of the LeMat, blocking Doc’s draw. “Long odds on chilling them before they get you,” he whispered. “And if you do manage it, there’ll be no one to sail the ship. We’ll all die. This is a battle that can’t be won, mercie.”

Tanner looked at him for a long moment, then said, “It would seem a concession to barbarism and blind ignorance is in order.”

“Not the first,” Kirby said.

“Nor by any means the last,” Doc said, sweeping the large black hand off his gun butt.

From a bucket under a bench, a crewman produced a two-pound hammer and a fistful of four-inch, steel nails. From under a tarp, three other islanders hauled out a large, chipped and dented wooden cross. At the foot of its vertical member was a steel eyebolt. While the rest of the crew lifted, the trio of crossbearers slid it in place under the supine and helpless bird thing.

“Please, please,” it begged. “Don’t do this…”

The islanders ignored the desperate pleading. They continued to celebrate the capture, some danced around exuberantly, waving their black-tattooed arms in the air and thrusting their wide hips.

Kneeling on the deck, a crewman pounded spikes through the fattest part of the creature’s wing bones and deep into the wood. The creature squawked in agony at every blow. It squawked even louder when its feet were nailed together at the ankle joints. A line was attached to the eyebolt, and at a signal from the captain, crewmen began to hoist the cross, upside down.

Warm rain splattered the deck around them.

Blood drops

“Why me?” the bird thing moaned as it was jerked higher and higher. “Why me?”

“Manu tangata on the mast brings fair winds,” the captain explained, answering the question of a creature that could not think but only mimic.

The irony was lost on Eng.

As morning progressed, the seas calmed and the wind dropped off. The swells became gentle and widely spaced. Around noon, Krysty Wroth started feeling well enough to struggle out of her bunk.

She walked into the galley, which was full of feeding islanders. The residual ache in her cramped stomach muscles and the sour taste of vomit in her mouth made her never want to eat or smell food again. The menu for lunch and dinner on the ship was the same as breakfast: deep fried, unboned, ungutted small fish and crustaceans. She had the choice of remaining belowdecks and watching the crew wolf the chow down with their fingers, or getting some fresh air. She chose fresh air.

Most of the passengers had recovered sufficiently to come out on deck. They sat and stood in singles and small groups. Subdued. Drained. Wary after the night of storms. They squinted in the bright sunshine, clearly out of their element.

Krysty picked Jak and Doc out of the crowd, but made no eye contact with them. Until they reached their destination, the other companions were to be treated as strangers. Krysty stepped up beside Mildred who stood at the port rail, amidships.

“How far have we come?” she asked the black woman.

“Not very,” Mildred replied. “Maybe a hundred miles or so. We had the sails down most of the night, going nowhere but up and down, up and down.”