James Axler - Crimson Waters

Jak lapsed into sullen silence, as the crusty old bastard laughed at him. But Ryan had seen the end of the stump beneath Oldie’s left knee. Something with big jaws and big teeth had taken it off; he knew that much from the marks. If the ancient half-crazed mariner wanted to make a joke out of something like that, good for him. Ryan had to smile in acknowledgment of his balls.

“Sweet yacht, there,” J.B. said, pointing.

J.B. was no nautical man—far less than Ryan, anyway, who’d at least grown up with small boats as a baron’s son in the rich and powerful East Coast barony of Front Royal. But J.B. was a skilled mechanic and tinkerer, not just an armorer. He knew wags of all sort, land and sea alike. He had a feel for them, and an eye.

Ryan nodded. He admired the clean lines of the vessel, although she had a funny prow: straight up and down, not angling up from the sea. She had to run ninety feet over waterline, with a smooth white coat of paint, unlike many of the other vessels in the harbor, whether masted or motor craft. Most were dilapidated and didn’t look well maintained at all.

Ryan also appreciated the machine gun on the pintle mount rising from the foredeck. He judged it was .30 caliber, which made it a Browning 1919. An oldie but goody, even by the time the balloon went up on the Big Nuke. But if it was maintained properly, as he reckoned this one had to be, it would still be capable of dealing out serious hurt. It even sported a splinter shield welded together from thick steel plates. The gun could kill a small craft’s engine, or just shoot the crew out of a larger vessel, without doing much damage to cargo or hull.

“Not bad,” Oldie admitted, “even if she has an engine in her belly. That’s the Wailer. Don’t burn your eyes on her too long, boys and girls. Like about half the hulls tied up here right now, she belongs to the Sea Wasp Posse, out of Ocho Rios over to Jah-Mek-Ya. Biggest, meanest pirate bunch working the Antilles and northern Gulf since that giant-ass ’cane took down the Black Gang some time back. The Blacks were cocks of the walk before that.”

J.B. caught Ryan’s eye and gave him a quick, tight, closemouthed grin. It hadn’t been a hurricane that took down the most feared pirate crew in the West Indies. Although not one but two hurricanes had helped. The real cause of their demise had been the companions.

It wasn’t a fact Ryan felt the need to advertise. Especially not closing in on a place that was the main pirate trading, refitting and recreational port. Odds were, the Black Gang had been NuTuga’s best customers in their time. The Syndicate might not look kindly on people who took that big a bite out of their business.

Quays had been built out into the NuTuga harbor out of broken-up volcanic rock, mostly a dark, rusty red-brown. The tops had been boarded over with planks. Some of the craft, such as the Wailer, were tied up to them. Others rode at anchor in the harbor itself.

As they entered the harbor Krysty pointed off to the left. “What are those?” she asked.

Squinting, Ryan saw what appeared to be half a dozen steel cranes standing by the shore, which was brown volcanic sand shored up by bigger chunks of lava. Four of the arms were swung out over the harbor. Something that looked like a curiously shaped duffel bag hung from a chain from each into the water. A seagull perched on the rounded top of one, bending forward to peck at it.

“Oh, no,” Krysty said in a small voice.

Frowning, Ryan looked closer. Those were humans hung from the chains, waist-deep in water with steel bands under the armpits. Their sun-blackened bodies were nude. At least one seemed to have been a woman.

One twitched. The seagull spread slate-backed wings and flew away. It had been pecking at the victim’s eyes.

“Is that one still alive?” Krysty asked.

J.B. shrugged. “Not much wind stirring,” he said.

“Oh, God—” Mildred emitted a strangled cry. Turning away just in time, she vomited noisily into the harbor.

“Lady got a delicate disposition?” Oldie inquired solicitously.

“She possesses a certain sensibility,” Doc said, with irony Ryan could make out distinctly even though he wasn’t sure their guide did. “Which fits not altogether comfortably with the exigencies of our modern world.”

Oldie shrugged. “She’s probably not gonna find NuTuga much to her taste, then.”

“Punishment is harsh,” Ryan rasped.

“Told you,” Oldie said with a certain gloomy satisfaction. “Syndicate runs a tight ship, even if they don’t tread the decks themselves much anymore. These poor folk broke the law. So they got their legs slashed and hung into the harbor to think things over.”

“Legs slashed?” Krysty said. She wasn’t a delicate flower, by any stretch. She was Deathlands born and bred, like Ryan himself, like everybody but Doc and the vigorously puking Mildred. It took a lot to shock her.

But this had done the trick.

“Doesn’t that bring ’cudas and sharks?” she asked. The way her emerald-green eyes flashed the instant the words were out of her mouth showed she got it.

“Reckon that’s the point,” J.B. said. “Right?” He took off his glasses and began to polish the lenses with a stained handkerchief.

“Best keep your noses clean while visiting lovely Nueva Tortuga, folks,” Oldie said. He continued to row.

“What manner of crimes,” Doc asked, “would occasion such stern punishment?”

Oldie managed to shrug without missing a stroke. “Could be a lot of things. Theft. Vandalism. Cheating at cards. Welshing on a debt. Brawling.”

J.B. frowned and fitted the glasses back on his nose. “Reckon those things’re pretty much what pass for recreation among pirates,” he said.

“There’re limits, see,” Oldie said.

“What are they, precisely, my good man?” Doc asked.

Oldie laughed. “You sure find out once you cross ’em,” he said, nodding to the dangling, half-submerged bodies.

“So the one real rule is don’t piss off the Syndicate,” Ryan said. He grunted.

Krysty knelt on the sideboard next to Mildred. She helped the shorter woman turn back inboard and wiped her mouth with a rag.

“Are we sure we want to visit this place, Ryan?” she asked.

“We do got a habit of pissing off the powerful, Ryan,” J.B. said.

“It’s not like we’re here on a pleasure cruise,” Ryan said with a bit of a rasp. “We got to find passage back to the mainland. Or some kind of paying gig. Triple-fast. Otherwise we’ll be boiling the shirts off our back to make soup of the sweat—if we could find a way to pay for fresh water, that is.”

“Oh, there’s work aplenty to be found in NuTuga,” Oldie said, “if a body’s got the stomach for it.”

“We got the stomach for a lot,” J.B. said. But he was frowning at the dangling bodies as he did it.

The body that had had the seagull pecking its eyes jerked. Ryan guessed something big had hit its legs underwater. He still couldn’t tell if any kind of living muscular reaction contributed to the motion.

He didn’t really want to know. He was a hard man, but he had limits, too.

“So the ville’s actually run by pirates?” Mildred asked. Her skin was the color of the ash in Oldie’s firepit. “They must be monsters.”

“They turned into something worse,” the old man said. “Government.”

And he laughed and laughed.

Chapter Four

Oldie pulled the Ernie H up next to the end of an unoccupied wharf. “You folks make it ashore without I tie up?” he asked.

“Reckon so,” Ryan said. “Why?”

J.B. went over the side to stand knee-deep in water on the slope of the busted-rock mole to help the others across.

“Don’t wanna pay their fee. Not my kind of place, NuTuga. Not my kinda crowd.”