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Just then, something blue scuttled around the side of the lighthouse, closely followed by three men armed with blasters, their faces grim and unsmiling. As the crab came close, J.B. crushed it underfoot. The shell burst apart, and the hideously mangled mutie started thrashing about.
“Bastard things are everywhere,” Dean Cawdor complained, kicking the bleeding creature into the waves. It disappeared with a splash. “I killed six more on the other side.”
“Good,” J.B. snorted. “The more aced the better.”
The young boy nodded in agreement. Almost twelve years of age, Dean was beginning to resemble his father in frightening detail and already carried himself with the calm assurance of a seasoned combat veteran. A Browning semiautomatic pistol was in his hand, jacked and ready for trouble. There was a slash across his denim shirt, showing some badly bruised ribs, minor damage incurred from the exploding bridge at Spider Island. A fat leather pouch hung from his belt distended with ammo clips, but the pack rode high, telling of scant ammo in the precious collection of magazines. An oversize bowie knife rode at the small of his back with easy access for either hand.
The nearby waves gently crested on the rough shoreline, foaming and breaking endlessly. A seagull winged silently overhead, something small and wiggling held tight in its deadly beak.
“Normally, a lighthouse would be placed on a cliff or jetty to maximize visibility,” Mildred said thoughtfully, gazing at the railing that encircled the walkway around the beacon on the top level. “Must have been some major earthquakes to move it to sea level.”
“Built to withstand the worst weather possible,” J.B. said. “Only reason it’s still standing after skydark.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dean said. “There’s no door, so I say we keep walking along the beach.” He hitched up his belt. “We haven’t even covered half of the island yet.”
“Very true, my young friend,” Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner rumbled. In a frock coat and frilly shirt, the silver-haired gentleman appeared to be from another era, which, in fact, he was. “Yet the panoramic view offered by the sheer height of this construct should be invaluable in helping to locate your father and Krysty.”
Doc’s clothes were of the finest material and patched in a dozen places. He was leaning on an ebony swordstick, the silver lion’s head peeking out between his fingers, and a mammoth revolver was hung at his waist. The LeMat was a Civil War weapon holding nine .44 rounds, with a single shotgun round under the main barrel. The blaster used black powder, not cordite, but the solid lead miniballs did more damage than a sledgehammer at short range.
“Besides, with the tide comes those damn crabs,” Mildred added grumpily, watching the shoreline for any sign of the nasty muties.
“Indeed, madam. Our local cornucopia of antediluvian crustace is merely another reason why shelter for the night is mandatory,” Doc espoused, baring his astonishingly white teeth.
“Still gotta get inside,” Dean stated stubbornly.
“Tower short,” Jak Lauren said, crossing his lean, muscular white arms.
A true albino, the teenager was dressed in camou fatigues with a bulky Colt Python .357 Magnum hung from his belt. An ammo pouch lay flat at his opposite hip. His camouflage leather jacket was decorated with bits of shiny metal and feathers, and more than one sec man had seized the teenager by the lapels only to have his fingers cut off by the razor blades sewn into the lining. At present, the arms of his jacket were tied around his waist, showing a lot of his pale skin. His hair was shoulder length and bone-white, his red eyes peering out of his scarred face like ruby lasers. More than a dozen leaf-bladed throwing knives were hidden on his person, with two more tucked into his belt. The handle of a gravity knife was visible in his left combat boot.
“Is it?” Dean asked suspiciously. “Looks okay to me.”
Doc walked closer to the structure as if seeing it for the first time. “By the Three Kennedys, it is too short,” he stated in agreement. “By necessity, lighthouses are always tall, sixty to eighty feet high. This is only, say, thirty.”
The man glanced at the ground. “The lower half must be buried beneath the sand. The front door must be buried, twenty, thirty feet underground.”
“It’ll take days to dig that deep by hand,” Mildred said, scowling. There was already traces of purple on the horizon. Night was coming fast.
“Try a gren,” Dean suggested.
“Only got one,” J.B. answered, titling back his fedora. “I’m saving that for an emergency.”
“If we could reach the balcony,” Mildred continued thoughtfully, “then getting inside would be no problem. Even if the door is locked, we could go through the lens itself. Those were made of glass to withstand the searing heat of the beacon.”
J.B. removed his hat, smoothed down his hair, then replaced it. “Sounds good. But how do we get up there?”
“Mayhap there is another way in,” Doc rumbled.
Going to the lighthouse, Doc put his back to the building and gazed out over the field. He appeared to be counting under his breath.
“There!” Doc said, and walked briskly to the end of the sandbar where there was a short stack of rocks covered with seaweed. Removing handfuls of the soggy greenery, Doc exposed not jumbled rocks, but broken bricks. Tossing them aside, he soon exposed a perfectly square hole that went straight down and out of sight.
“It’s a chimney,” J.B. said with a grin, slapping the man on the back. “Good work, Doc. I didn’t know a lighthouse would have a house attached.”
“A cottage, actually,” Doc replied primly. “But yes, many do.”
Cupping his hands as protection from the sea breeze, Jak lit a match and dropped it down the opening. The tiny flame fluttered away and was gone. The teenager then lit another and stuck his entire head into the passage.
“Too small me,” his voice echoed, and he stepped away from the chimney. “Mebbe Dean, too.”
Dubiously, the boy eyed the flue, then used a stick to measure the opening, then himself. “Tight,” he agreed, and slid his backpack to the ground. He removed his canteen and belt knife, then unbuckled his gun belt and took off the ammo pouch.
“I’m going to need every inch to get down that,” Dean stated, shucking his Army jacket.
“What if filled with crabs?” Jak asked pointblank. “Trapped where no help, no light. Candles iffy.”
“Here, this will help,” Mildred said, rummaging in her med kit to extract a small flashlight. She squeezed the handle on the side of the device several times to charge the ancient batteries, and flicked the switch. The light was weak, but still serviceable.
Dean accepted the flashlight and tucked it into his shirt for safekeeping. Then he double-checked his blaster, making sure there was a round under the hammer for instant use.
“You see or hear any of the blues, get out of there fast,” J.B. said sternly. “Just cut and run.”
The boy nodded in agreement, his thoughts private.
“Now, lad, there should be plenty of ropes and tackle near the base of the tower,” Doc said, the wind blowing his hair across his face like silver rain. “Along with torches and cork jackets to rescue people from drowning. Just toss a line over the balcony and we shall climb up.”
“Gotcha.” Dean climbed onto the pile of rubble and carefully slid his legs into the brick-lined darkness. He wiggled back and forth a bit, going lower with each move, until his hips passed the top of the flue and he unexpectedly dropped. J.B. and Jak both snatched a wrist, but Dean had already stopped himself by grabbing the top layer of bricks.
“Thanks,” he panted, shifting his stance in the flue until his boots were more solidly braced on the rough surface. “I’m okay now.”
The adults released the boy, and he started into the darkness once more. The rest of the companions backed away from the hole to allow the greatest amount of the dying sunlight to illuminate his way. In only a few moments he was gone from sight.
“How you doing?” J.B. called after a while.
“Busy,” the boy’s voice echoed back upward, closely followed by a muffled curse.
Long minutes passed with only the sound of the surf and the breeze disturbing the peaceful ocean front peninsula. Overhead, the always present storm clouds began to darken as the setting sun drained all color from the world, the shadows growing long and thick. Doc and Jak began to gather driftwood into a pile for a campfire.
“How much longer do we give him?” Mildred asked, brushing back her tangled mass of beaded locks.
Rubbing his chin to the sound of sandpaper, J.B. scowled. “Long as it takes. We don’t have a way to go down there and check on him.”
“Good thing there is no sign of those accursed PT boats,” Doc rumbled, looking out over the sea. “At present, we are prepared neither to wage war nor to retreat.”
“Got that right.” Mildred sighed. “I’m down to ten rounds.”
Feeling uneasy, J.B. unfolded the wire stock on the Uzi. “What had Jones called the baron again?”
“Kinnison,” Jak answered, whittling on a piece of wood with a knife. The pile of tinder grew steadily under his adroit ministrations. “Called him Lord Bastard, too.”
Suddenly, a sharp whistle sounded twice from the weeds and stunted brush growing inland, and the companions dropped into combat positions, taking cover behind the bricks. Working the bolt on his machine pistol, J.B. replied to the call with one long whistle. It was answered by the same, and everybody relaxed as Ryan and Krysty rose into view, holstering their blasters.
“You’re hurt,” Mildred said, rushing forward and kneeling to probe Ryan’s wounded leg.
The Deathlands warrior inhaled sharply at the contact of her fingers. “Just a scratch,” he grunted. “I got the poison out and cauterized the hole.”
“Maybe. Better let me be the judge of that,” the physician said, untying the torn pieces of cloth. Closely, she looked over the puckered scar, shiny and new among many older ones.
“Well?” he said in controlled impatience.
“It’s clean enough,” Mildred reported, tying the strips of cloth closed again. “And thankfully not infected. But it must hurt like hell.”
“Pain means you’re still alive,” Ryan muttered, then glanced around. “Where’s Dean, on patrol?”
“Down chimney,” Jak replied, jerking a thumb. “Finding door for lighthouse.”
His face a stone mask, Ryan limped to the pile of bricks and looked down the hole. He whistled sharply and waited, but there was no response.
“Any other way inside?” Ryan asked.
J.B. snorted. “Not that we could find. Lighthouse has got solid granite walls. Need a C-4 satchel charge to even dent the place.”
As Ryan limped over to the lighthouse, Doc started to offer the man his ebony stick, then thought better of the gesture. Ryan would never take it. Not from foolish macho pride, but with one of them possibly in danger the man wouldn’t have the time to spare thinking about his own pain. In the New York Herald of his day, Doc sometimes read of officers whose troopers claimed they would charge with them straight into hell. The scholar had never met such a person until Ryan freed him from a slave pit so very long ago.
Another crab scuttled by, and Jak caught the mutie in his hand, keeping well clear of the scorpion tails. “Wonder if good eat?” the teenager asked. The eye stalks of the creature extended fully, and it stared at the albino as if in open hatred. It unnerved him slightly how much intelligence there seemed to be in its steady expression.
With a gentle laugh, Krysty pointed to the east. “There’s an oyster bed in a tide pool some hundred yards that way with enough to feed an army.”
“Excellent, madam. Exemplary!” Doc stated, lifting an imaginary hat to the redheaded woman. “Once more you are the source of our succor.”
Jak tossed the crab away, uncaring where it landed. The mutie hit the beach on its back just in time for a wave to flip it over, and it hastily disappeared into the briny foam.
“I fill sack,” the teenager stated, and took off at a run.
“Speaking of which,” J.B. said, walking over to a slab of bare rock and lifting up a canvas bag. “Here are your backpacks. They washed ashore near us couple of miles down the beach.”
Krysty took them both and passed one to Ryan. The packs were torn in spots, probably from coral reefs, and still damp from the ocean, but were still okay.
Easing the longblaster free from the tangled straps, Ryan briefly checked the Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle for damage. He worked the bolt a few times to make sure sand and salt hadn’t gummed the works. The carriage moved smoothly, chambering a 7.62 mm brass round from the transparent plastic clip.
“Some sand in the barrel,” Ryan announced, sliding the weapon over a shoulder, “but no blockage.” He had actually felt off balance with the longblaster gone.
Going through the backpack, he used his big hands to squeeze excess moisture from the stiff canvas. Everything inside smelled dank, especially the dog-hair socks, but nothing seemed seriously damaged. Satisfied for the moment, Ryan stuffed some more rotary clips for the Steyr into his jacket pocket and filled the ammo pouch on his belt with clips for the SIG-Sauer. He was still very low on ammo, but better armed now then he was before.
Closing her backpack, Krysty tossed away a handful of soggy mush that had once been dried fish wrapped carefully in banana leaves. The sagging glob of food smelled rancid, and she heaved it into the weeds. Immediately, insects began to converge on the unexpected bounty.
“Any idea where we might be?” Krysty asked, sliding her pack onto her back. “Got no idea which island this is,” J.B. answered, touching the minisextant hanging around his neck. “The sun has been behind clouds since I woke up. Never once got a chance to fix our position. This doesn’t look like Spider Island, though. Too barren. No mountains.”
But the woman barely heard the man’s reply. Her hair wildly flexing, Krysty was listening to the wind. What was that odd sound? It was like hard rain hitting a tin roof, only lower, softer. How odd.
“Well, we can’t be too far away,” Mildred said. “Without a raft of some kind, we couldn’t have stayed afloat in the water for very long, even if the currents were with us.”
Ryan started to explain about the dead spider when a pistol shot rang out and Jak burst into view over the low sand dune. He paused at the crest to fire two more rounds, then raced toward the companions.
“Crabs!” the teenager shouted in warning just as a horrible blanket of blues swarmed over the dune, their armored bodies covering the ground for yards.
“Chill them all!” Ryan shouted, sliding the Steyr SSG-70 off his shoulder and working the bolt. It was the big crabs from the spider carcass. They had to have been following him and Krysty to see if they could find more people. And he led them right here.
Snarling in fury, Ryan fired and a blue exploded, spraying its guts over a dozen others. But the rest of the pack kept coming, and even as Ryan fired again, chilling another, he already knew there were a hell of a lot more crabs than they had ammo.
“Bastards are enormous!” J.B. muttered, firing short bursts from the Uzi. The 9 mm rounds wreaked havoc along the front ranks, but even as they fell the others scuttled callously over their fallen brethren.
As the rest of the companions opened fire with their blasters, spent brass flying everywhere, Doc slid the ebony stick into his belt, drew the LeMat and set the selector pin from the shotgun round to the .44 cylinder. Cocking the huge hammer, Doc began firing pointblank at the nearest crabs. A lance of flame stabbed through the billowing black cloud that thundered from the maw of the huge weapon. A three-foot-wide crab literally exploded under the trip-hammer arrival of the .44 miniball, then there came the musical twang of a ricochet from an out cropping near the chimney. Doc savagely grinned and dropped flat the ground to fire again. The solid lead miniball plowed through the first crab, blowing the shell off its body, and continued on to chill two more. Then one of the small pale blue crabs darted for his face, and Doc scrambled to his feet. Only to find the tiny mutie was clinging to his silvery locks with its pincers, while its scorpion tails probed for his eyes. He slapped the weapon at the crab, and there was a sharp tink as a barbed tail bounced off the steel barrel.
“Damn it!” the scholar cursed, cocking back the hammer.
“Hold still!” Mildred ordered, and with lightning speed she sliced off a chunk of the man’s hair with a knife. The crab landed among the boots of the companions and was stomped in a second.
Glancing at the crushed crab, Mildred spied the war over the rancid fish, the beetles covered with ants, being eaten alive. The symbolism rattled her nerves, and the physician dropped a round while frantically shoving ammo into her empty blaster. Her hands hadn’t shaken this bad since her first autopsy as a med student. Then the woman forced herself calm and began to eliminate the muties with surgical precision. It was them or her. End of discussion.
Through the fading light of the setting sun, the friends could see that the tide was steadily rising, the waves crashing high on the peninsula, spraying them with salt water. How high it would go they had no idea. To their knees, waist, more? Plus, every gunshot seemed to attract more of the muties, the scattered array quickly becoming a solid mass of the squat invaders.
“Put your back to the wall!” Krysty shouted, throwing herself backward.
The companions followed her lead, and safe from one direction, they tried to coordinate their firepower. Only now, tiny crabs raced over their boots, and one managed to climb inside the torn leg of Ryan’s fatigues. He swung the wounded leg against the lighthouse, crushing the mutie. The noise made the rest arch their stingers in shocked reply, and the horde advanced, their barbed tails stabbing forward constantly.
Stomping on another crab, Jak dropped the spent brass from his weapon and slid his last four rounds into the cylinders of the Colt Magnum pistol. That was it for ammo. Thirty feet away, a large adult crab snapped its pincers in the air at the teen, and Jak flicked his arm. A second later, a leaf-bladed knife slammed into the mutie’s face, and it went stock-still, paralyzed or dead from the attack.
The SIG-Sauer coughing hot lead death, Ryan cursed under his breath. If he didn’t know better, the man would swear the crabs were sending their old and young to attack the companions, keeping their big adults in reserve, so the companions would waste ammo on the weakest members of the horde. Was that possible?
“Ignore the little ones!” Ryan shouted, holstering his blaster and unslinging the Steyr SSG-70. “Chill the adults!”
J.B. passed the Uzi to Mildred and swung around the S&W M-4000 shotgun. Pumping the action, he frowned at how stiff the slide was. It had to be choked by salt residue. It still worked, but not very well. Aiming at the biggest group of crabs, J.B. fired and the deafening spray of fléchettes from the shotgun blew away the sea creatures by the score, chunks and pieces flying everywhere. J.B. fired three more times, destroying the front line of the clattering muties, then reloaded as fast as possible. The rest of the adult muties hastily retreated, the old and young scuttling about in total confusion.
“How many you got left?” Ryan demanded, working the bolt on the Steyr to clear a jammed round from the breech.
“Ten more shells,” J.B. reported, thumbing a fat cartridge into the belly of his weapon. There were loops sewn into the shoulder strap used for carrying the scattergun, most of them empty now. “And there’s gotta be fifty or sixty more of these things.”
A crab was on the wall beside him, and Ryan crushed it flat with the heavy wooden stock of his longblaster. They could try to blow a path through the gathering creatures and escape off the peninsula, but it was too close for a gren. Besides, the crabs would only follow until the companions dropped from exhaustion and were overrun. Hundreds to six were bad odds in any fight. And even with the fresh ammo, he was down to thirty rounds for the SIG-Sauer, and even less for the Steyr.
Jak shot a crab off Mildred’s leg, then holstered his piece. Krysty placed three .38 shells in his hand, and the teen nodded in thanks as he hastily reloaded. The main reason he carried the Colt Magnum blaster was the fact it could use both .357 rounds and regular .38 ammo. More than once that had kept him off the last train west.
“Dean, hurry!” Krysty shouted at the top of her lungs, blowing away an old blue with deep scars in its chitin armor. There was no reply from the lighthouse or chimney, and she sent a silent prayer to Gaia to watch over the boy. He was alone in the dark; at least they were in a group.
“Here they come again,” J.B. shouted, readying his weapon. The crabs were advancing once more, but slower this time, as if testing the deadly firepower of the two-legs. They had seen what the shotgun could do and were afraid now.
The cylinder of his blaster empty, Doc slid the selector pin to his one shotgun round. After that, he’d be down to hammering the creatures with the gun butt. The sword hidden inside his ebony stick would be useless against these armored muties.
Conserving ammo, Krysty and Mildred both waited until the last moment to fire. Crabs died, but the horde kept advancing as steadily as the rising tide.
