James Axler - Apocalypse Unborn

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.

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.

In the PVC tubes propped up at the foot of his bunk the scagworms were dreaming, too. Their millipede legs twitched in hibernation sleep, their armored, eyeless, bullet-heads full of murderous bliss.

Kirby shouldered his M-16 and headed for the galley. He staggered as he hurried after the lanky man with the ebony walking stick. Kirby hadn’t gotten his sea legs yet.