James Axler - Crimson Waters

“Oh. Well. That’s different.”

He hooked a chair from a table nearby, where a pair of villainous-looking fat women with two good eyes and about five teeth between them sat murmuring sweet nothings to each other. They were so absorbed in gazing into each other’s eyes they never looked around when the chair legs went scraping away across the sawdust-covered planks.

“I’m Lumpy,” the man said, seating himself between Ryan and J.B. “From the lumps, you see? Just so you know, I ain’t a mutie or anything. They’re parasites.”

And he grinned around at everyone with a mouthful of uneven teeth in varying shades of brown, as if announcing he’d just won the trophy for having the biggest dick in NuTuga.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with being a mutie,” he added hastily. He was looking at Jak, who scowled.

Ryan carefully didn’t look at Krysty, who was a mutie.

“I mean, to some there is, to some there ain’t,” Lumpy said. “Syndics won’t have any taints here in the ’Tuga, of course. The crews love to jolly ’em up too much, you know what I mean? Bad for order. But over to Monster Island, now, muties and norms live side by side like there wasn’t a thing wrong with it.”

“Monster Island?” Mildred asked. “Where’s that?”

Lumpy frowned for a moment. He scratched idly at a particularly prominent lump on the right side of his jaw. It seemed to Ryan that something like a hair whipped back and forth from it before zipping back inside.

A trick of the light, he told himself. He hoped so.

“Why,” the disfigured man said, brightening, “took me a moment. You folks really aren’t from this part of the Carib, are you? Monster Island is Puerto Rico, is all.”

“That’s the only reason they call it that, my good man?” Doc asked. “From the admittedly rare case of normal humans and mutants living together in harmony?”

“Well, that,” Lumpy said, transferring his dirty-nailed attentions to the back of his neck. “Plus the fact the island’s teeming with man-eating monsters, of course.”

Chapter Six

Mildred sat back in her chair. “Oh, great,” she said.

Ryan ignored her. He wasn’t any happier than she was about the news that the place where they might find an easy ride back to the mainland via a mat-trans was overrun with ravenous monsters. But fretting over the fact wouldn’t make it any less of one.

“Say we wanted to get back to the mainland,” he said when Lumpy had ordered a rum.

The server was a black-haired, green-eyed girl wearing a leather apron over a short skirt and carrying a tray. Lumpy, anyway, didn’t neglect to eye her backside appreciatively as she walked back toward the bar.

“How’d we go about that?” Ryan finished.

Lumpy sat back in his chair. He looked half-spent just from watching the girl.

“Got the jack?” he asked, still looking at her when she stood giving the order to McDugus Fish. “You can do pretty near anything, if you got the jack.”

Doc laughed in wry delight. “Isn’t that not ever the way of the world?” he asked.

“Say we aren’t exactly flush,” J.B. said. “Could we work passage?”

“You done pirate work before?” Lumpy asked. “You all look to know your way around them blades and blasters you’re loaded down with. I mean, not to pry or nothin’.”

“We were hoping for more peaceful employment,” Krysty said.

“Don’t traders work the port?” Mildred asked. “I mean, the, uh, Mermaid even sells fresh fruit. The island doesn’t look big enough to grow it all here. Unless it’s all brought in as pirate swag?”

He laughed. “Oh, nuke me, no. There’s traders ply here, right enough. Once they buy their export licenses off the Syndicate, they’re as safe on the open sea as you and me, sittin’ right here. Only they don’t much like to take on crew here, if you catch my drift. Not everybody’s reliable.”

“Imagine that,” Mildred said.

“What about other paying gigs?” Ryan asked. “Local work.”

The girl brought Lumpy’s rum. He grinned at her when she set it down. She ignored him as if he were an insect. She took the .22 round Ryan handed her and walked away without a word.

“Whoo,” Lumpy said, “that is purely fine. Where was I? Oh. Jobs. Well, the crews bring in plenty slaves. You could sign on for Monitors, but I reckon you’d have the same objections to that you have to signing on for pirates.”

He shook his head. “Can’t think of much. I do some odd jobs now and then since I lost my nerve, fish some. I can fix a few things, and that’s not always something you want slaves doing, know what I mean. But that’s just me, and I barely scrape by. There’s five of you.”

“Six, actually,” Mildred said. “But who’s counting?”

Lumpy shot back his rum and shook all over like a wet dog. He set his empty on the table upside down with a clack. It seemed to Ryan the single shot had hit him pretty hard. Of course, he didn’t know whether it was his first of the day.

“Spring for another?” Lumpy asked, looking around with eyes even less clear than they had been when he sat down.

J.B. signaled the server for another, then he leaned his leather-clad elbows on the table.

“So how about this Monster Island,” he said. “How about getting passage there?”

Lumpy shrugged. “Same story as the mainland. Go for a pirate, or pay your way. Gas, brass or ass—nobody rides for free.”

“So what do you think, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

“I’m thinking,” he admitted.

“You considering turning pirate, Ryan?” Mildred asked.

“Would you like signing up as Monitors better?” J.B. asked.

She scowled.

“Everything lives off other things,” Jak said. “Want eat, gotta kill.”

“Unusual loquacity, Jak,” Doc said. “And unusual eloquence. Albeit in the service of a doctrine of moral expediency.”

Jak scowled furiously.

“Don’t worry,” J.B. told him. “I didn’t get it, either.”

“I did,” Ryan said. “Haven’t we done plenty of things to stay alive we weren’t thrilled about?”

“Ah, yes,” Doc said. “Steeping in shame to stay alive. I remember...the sows....”

“Stay with us, Doc,” J.B. said. “The sows’re long since gone for bacon.”

For a moment Doc gazed around, wild-eyed, as if seeing hell-knew-what bizarre landscape peopled with alien monstrosities, instead of a surprisingly clean but still seedy gaudy house and the faces of his friends. Then the mad light left his eyes. He seemed to deflate.

“Ah, yes,” he said again, with a sad smile. “Long gone.”

“Should we be discussing stuff like this...you know?” Mildred asked, waggling her eyebrows ridiculously and looking sidelong at their guest.

“Don’t mind him, Millie,” J.B. said. “He’s too sunk in rum to know what we’re talking about. Or care.”

Lumpy had, indeed, tossed off his second shot like water and now slumped in his chair like a half-empty sack of oatmeal. His own eyes stared without focus at the tabletop. He drooled over a hanging lower lip.

The doors burst open and four Monitors swaggered in. They were dressed and armed like the crew that had braced Ryan and his friends on the docks, and their heads were likewise shaved. Which was a little more curious this time out, since one of them was a woman, who wasn’t unattractive in a blade-faced kind of way. She seemed to glare around a lot more truculently than her three companions, as if suspecting she had more to prove than they did.

Heads didn’t turn when the Syndicate sec team blew in. Conversation didn’t falter, but it dropped an octave. And heads huddled down a little closer in collars, where applicable, or chins closer to collarbones where not. Ryan realized he wasn’t the only man in the gaudy who was suddenly keenly aware the four were the only ones in the house with easily accessible weapons.