Jason Frost - Warlord 04 - Prisonland (24 page)

“You’re mad, huh?”

Eric looked at her with an uncomprehending expression. “You aren’t serious, are you? Asking me that.”

“Yeah, I’m serious. I really think you’re sore just because I outsmarted you. So now you’re going off in a huff because a kid, a girl at that, came up with a pretty good plan.”

“If you’re so good at planning, then you’ll come up with another, won’t you?”

D.B. stood up. “Look, I’m sorry, Rock Man. Sorry I kinda used you a little. I didn’t mean to. But this was important.” She waved her hands to include the whole island and everybody on it. “More important than me or you even.”

Eric studied her. As she spoke, a warmth had spread through his chest, a sense of understanding, maybe even pride. In a world that had been cruel and savage to her, D.B. had managed to salvage an unselfish act, even if it meant sacrificing her relationship with Eric. He had to admire that. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe there are one or two things we can do to even the odds a bit. It means busting your buns tonight. And it means doing whatever I tell you, no questions asked. Okay?”

“Absolutely,” Riva said.

Maggie smiled. “Whatever you say.”

“Sure,” D.B. said, “that’s why they call you the leader of the pack.”

Thor stood on the prow of the ship and pointed his hammer at the water. “What the hell is that shit?”

One of his guards gripped the railing as he slowly made his way toward Thor, fighting his seasickness with every step. “Looks like garbage.”

“Yeah, it’s garbage, asshole. But what’s it doing here? There must be tons of it.”

Indeed, the closer they got to Alcatraz, the thicker the layer of garbage. Anything that floated had been tossed into the sea, allowing the currents to sweep it toward Thor’s approaching armada. It was like a giant oil spill, only made of garbage. And not just garbage, but hundreds of seagulls and pelicans hovered and dove and floated among the garbage eating. Some of the birds were deformed and scarred from flying too close to the Halo.

One of the engines on the boat next to Thor’s sputtered to a stop as the propellor got tangled in some of the garbage.

“Slow it down!” Thor hollered to his own ship’s captain. The word was spread from ship to ship. More than seventy boats in all.

Thor stood erect at the prow, impressive in his pressed white Ralph Lauren shirt and navy blue tie and pleated pants. The contrast of the heavy hammer hanging from his wrist by the leather strap looked amusing at first, then sinister. He stared at Alcatraz, a grin on his face. “This shit might slow us down a few minutes, but it sure won’t stop us.”

And it didn’t. They were careful as they traveled through the garbage and debris, stopping occasionally to untangle a propellor or two. Shooing away the gulls and pelicans that feasted. But the delay only cost them a little over an hour in lost time.

Finally, the seventy-three boats landed at the docks.

What they found surprised them.

“Where is everybody?” Thor asked.

“Spooky, huh?” one of his men answered.

They walked slowly, carefully, spreading out along the shore and working their way inland, following Thor’s lead. When they came to the fence, they crouched for a few minutes waiting for an attack. If one was to come, this would be the perfect place. Catch them while they were slowed at the fence. But no shot was fired, no warning shouted.

Thor heaved his hammer over his head and whacked one of the metal fence posts. It crumpled like an aluminum can. “Knock it down!” he commanded, and several hundred feet stormed over the fence, trampling it flat.

They swarmed up over the embankment, yelling and whooping as if they were rushing into a fierce battle. But when they reached the top, there was no one waiting for them. No battle. No people.

“Thor! Look!”

Thor took the binoculars his man handed him and gazed out in the direction the man pointed. He adjusted the lens and saw what had excited his man so. Ships. A couple dozen at most, all severely overcrowded, mostly with women, but moving nevertheless. Moving away from Alcatraz. “Dumb cunts. Where the hell do they think they’re going?”

“Out to sea, looks like.”

He chuckled. “Search the whole fucking island. With all these men it shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes. If you don’t find anybody, we meet back at the ships. The way they’re overloaded it shouldn’t take long to catch up to them.”

The man hurried off to follow Thor’s orders.

Thor put the binoculars back to his eyes and watched the ships labor ponderously through the water. “Just a matter of time,” he said.

Eric heard the stampeding of hundreds of feet as they marched back to their ships. Only his head was above water, but the water acted as a sound amplifier, allowing him to hear them long before they reached the docks. The water’s freezing temperature also awakened his toothache.

He dove under one boat hull and popped up on the other side. “How you coming?” he whispered to Maggie as her fingers worked busily on a neighboring boat’s hull.

“Done,” she said.

“Good. Check with the others. Done or not, it’s time to get out of here.”

She nodded. Both dove under the water.

“How much longer?” Thor asked.

The man hugged the railing now, certain that if he puked once more, his lungs, kidneys, and heart would come spilling out next. He took a deep breath and answered, “Dooley said fifteen, twenty minutes. Tops.”

“Good. Make sure everyone has checked their weapons. We’re going to have to board the other ships.”

“Like pirates?” the man said weakly. Ordinarily that would have sounded like fun. Right now any movement at all seemed impossible.

“Don’t worry, Sinclair, you can stay with the ship.”

“I’m just an extortionist, Thor. I don’t know shit about boats.”

Thor turned on the man with a pitying look, lazily swung his hammer, and knocked the wretched soul over the side of the ship into the ocean. Thor leaned over the side and shouted to him, “Now you don’t have to know anything about boats. Just about swimming.”

The men on board the nearby ships laughed as they skipped past their fallen comrade, who flailed and pleaded as the choppy waves pounded him below the surface.

It was another five minutes before the trouble began. Suddenly several of the smaller boats were stopping dead in the water, the men aboard bailing furiously. Some of the larger boats were forming bailing lines, pitching bucket after bucket of water over the side. Even his own ship was starting to sag under the weight of leaking water.

“What the fuck’s going on?” he yelled back.

“Water,” one of the men responded in a panic. “We’re taking it in all over the place. Fucking hull looks like Swiss cheese.”

Thor ran back along the deck, ducking down to go below deck. From the ladder he saw the foot of water swishing about the boat bottom.

“Better turn around,” the captain, a con who’d smuggled drugs into Florida by ship, suggested. “Even then we’ll be lucky to make it back to Alcatraz before she goes under.”

“What happened?” Thor demanded.

The captain scooped up a bucket of water, passed it to the man next to him, who passed it to the next man, and so forth. “Don’t know. Just know that we’ve got holes all over the place. They weren’t there a few minutes ago.”

“What do you mean they weren’t there a few minutes ago?” Thor asked. The captain flinched at Thor’s anger, certain the mighty hammer would soon be cracking his skull. But it didn’t. “You telling me that mermaids swam up and did this?”

“No, sir. We’re too far away from land and moving too fast for divers to have done this out here. Unless ...”

“Ravensmith,” Thor growled, as if that explained everything.

“Here they come!” D.B. hollered from atop the guard tower. She scrambled back down the stairs to join the others.

Eric already knew. He watched their progress through binoculars while everyone around him stripped naked out of their wet clothes and into the dry ones they had hidden in the brush. There were about fifty of them: eight men and the rest women. All armed. “The small boats are already going down. The others are bailing and making a run for Alcatraz. A few should make it.”

“What about the rest of their men?” Maggie asked.

Eric looked over at her. She was naked, toweling herself dry with the sweat shirt she was about to put on. The muscles on her buttocks and lean legs stood out like a dark relief map. “They’re not stopping to take on more weight.”

“That means those men will die out there,” Riva said buttoning her blouse.

“If we’re lucky.” Eric put the binoculars aside and stripped off his own clothing. His skin was mottled with goose bumps. They had worked on those ships for almost thirty minutes in that freezing water. Five of them were incapacitated from the loss of body heat. They were resting back in the infirmary with Dr. Fishbine, who’d done his share in the water.

It was an old trick Eric had learned in ’Nam. Drill the hulls with holes, then patch them up with packed mud and sticks. Depending on the water and the boat, the temporary plugs were good for anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes before they dissolved and the water started coming in. By then, those aboard were sitting ducks.

Eric stepped into a pair of pants Maggie had found for him, ones to replace the pair Dr. Fishbine had cut up fixing Eric’s leg. As he pulled the pants up over his hips, Eric felt the soft touch of someone drying his back.

“Maggie?” he said without turning.

“Who were you expecting?”

“I wasn’t expecting. Just hoping.” He turned and smiled at her. She looked like she wanted to kiss him, but he knew she wouldn’t. He knew she realized that this was not the right place or the right time or the right circumstances.

So he kissed her instead.

Quickly, but firmly. Enough to tell her what she needed to know: he cared.

“Where’s the line form?” D.B. teased.

Riva thumbed a shotgun shell into her gun.

Eric lifted his crossbow and bolts, stuck the .38 they’d given him into his waistband. “Everybody ready?”

They nodded.

“Let’s do it.” Eric led the solemn troops down to the side of the island where the ships were approaching. There was no feeling of jubilation or gung-ho shouting. They were all there to do a job. An ugly job, but necessary. And they were all up to it.

The crippled ships started coming in one at a time. The soaked men from Asgard poured off, their weapons blazing. But no use. They were picked off with little problem by the well-positioned guardians of Alcatraz. Eric had placed everyone to create a crossfire no matter where the ship landed.

Boat after boat came in. Man after man was wiped out.

But then something went wrong. Not as many of the ships actually sank, not as many as had been hoped anyway. The ships and boats started landing in packs, and men began leaping from them in numbers too large to contain. The battle raged and several of the women were killed, leaving their position open. The crossfire was no longer working.

When Thor’s ship landed, the battle was so intense and spread out, he managed to break free from the fight and lead a small pack of men inland. Eric watched from the other side of the firefight. “I’m going after them,” he told Maggie and disappeared into the brush.