Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (42 page)

He wasn't screaming, so he was already dead. Pete was paralyzed by the sight of crude cutting implements rising and falling as the cannibals chopped him up on the spot.

“Bloody savages,” marveled Julianne. “I don't think they're even going to cook him.”

A few drops of rain spattered on Pete's sweating face, surprising him with their sudden chill. He saw lightning flash in the distance. More and more cannibals emerged from the undergrowth of Hyde Park, clustering around their fresh kill, but some of them had already attended to the smoke and carnage at the intersection. They raised crude spears and clubs, and a couple of them, stupidly true to form, tried to lob stones all the way down the hill, hoping to hit Pete and Julianne and, he supposed, any of McTiernan's men who were still hanging around.

They were well out of range.

Pete felt a tug on his elbow and turned expecting to find Jules. Instead, he looked dumbly at Fifi.

“The journey is the destination,” she said quietly. “And our destination is the fuck out of Dodge. Let's haul ass for there, now, Cap'.”

It broke the spell. He took one step away from the Biters, and then another, and then he started to run.

*   *   *

They ran through the city of the dead, pursued by the open mouths and insane howls of the inhuman. They ran without turning or looking back, because to do so was to lose all hope. They did not stand and fight, they ran and prayed or ran and cursed each according to his or her own disposition. They ran through long empty streets that soon thronged with hundreds of savages. They ran through the first fat, heavy drops of rain. They ran through the first moments of the cloudburst that broke over them with a blue-white flash of lightning bright enough to end the very world. They ran through hard, stinging sheets of rain that lashed at them and soon caused the gutters to fill and overflow, puddles to spread and deepen, great fantails of filthy gray water to fly up at their heels.

They ran for one brief mad moment alongside a scavenger, a survivor of McTiernan's band, his weapons and equipment discarded, his eyes bulging with terror, beseeching them to carry him along with them, to deliver him from evil, for surely whatever differences they might have had, they were all united now in flight from this most horrible of fates.

Fifi flicked a shuriken into his leg and he went down in a screaming tangle of limbs. Half a block later they heard his desperate pleas for mercy turn into shrieks of horror as the fastest of the Biters fell upon him.

That's cold,
Julianne thought, but didn't say so, because she was not foolish enough to waste her breath. Cold, but totally reasonable.

She still clutched both kukri daggers in her hands and wished for time enough to sheath them, to unfold and load her slingshot, time to put a couple of heavy balls through the foreheads of their lead pursuers. Splashing their brains over the second rank would surely slow them down, if only because they stopped to snack.

But she knew there was no time to even break stride.

The three veterans and friends hammered down the footpath, racing past burned-out cafés, the ruined facades of luxury boutiques, and looted and “salvaged” jewelry stores—the only difference between one and the other being the imprimatur of a Royal Warrant.

They took Martin Place at the diagonal, stretching legs that were already hot and trembling with fatigue, pushing themselves up the incline, past the polished brown marble pile of the old Commonwealth Bank headquarters, its heavy iron doors still sealed, broken windows protected by iron grates. On Elizabeth they took a barricade of heavy wooden desks in a bounding series of steeple jumps. As she sailed over a great, leather-topped bench she saw it had been scarred and gouged at sometime in the past by the blows of edged metal and heavy bludgeons.

Lungs burning, knees aching, backpack full of useless treasure grinding and slapping painfully into the base of her spine, she followed Fifi around the corner that led into a broad, almost semicircular line of road in front of an old 1960s era building, topped with a fading, broken sign that read
QANT S
.

The traffic wreckage here was horrible, but somehow Fifi threaded them through the worst of it, jumping and sliding across the bonnet of a convertible that was half filled with water. Pete rolled across the hood, cursing as he jabbed himself in the hip with one of the sharpened ends of his baton.

“I'm good,” he gasped. “Keep going.”

The temptation to hunker down behind the metal barricades, to make a stand somewhere that felt secure, even if it wasn't, almost robbed her of her strength and speed. But Pete pulled her on, dragging her through the last of the wreckage by the strap of her backpack. She struggled to control her breathing, drawing in deep drafts of air, squinting against the stinging rain, tilting her head forward so she didn't suck in too much water. Strobe lightning reducing their progress to a series of eerie still images; lightning that cracked with a physical force that she felt deep inside her burning eyes. And still they ran.

Don't be stupid, don't stop, don't fight,
she told herself.
Just run
.

They charged up the hill toward Macquarie Street, taking the shortest route rather than the safest one, throwing aside all their previous caution about being trapped in the long canyon between the sandstone cliffs of the Botanic Gardens and the haunted apartment blocks on Circular Quay. Water squelched in her boots and she felt the weight of it soaking into all her clothes, slowing her down.

But she knew without looking, because to look behind was to lose hope, and to lose hope was to die, she knew without looking that the Biters were gaining and she had to keep running. Lightning flickered and flashed again, strange contrary winds trapped and channeled through the tunnels of the city pressed at them, further slowing any forward momentum. She could hear the shrieks and bellows and cries of the Biters closing in from behind, imagining, because it helped, that they were screaming in fear at the storm and the anger of the great Skylords who did not want them to catch this fleeing trio and eat their livers with a nice Chianti. Hysteria bubbled up from the roiling brew of terror and madness and Julianne Balwyn found herself giggling and then laughing without sense or purpose as she ran for her life.

The roughhewn sandstone walls to her right passed in a blur. Fifi was pulling ahead of her and Pete, her greater strength and speed telling in the final moments of the race. Perhaps she could get away at least. Then Pete put on a burst of speed, despite the blood that was running freely down his leg, dripping into the shallow stream through which they now splashed, pursued by monsters. Julianne's daggers had grown heavy in her grasp, slippery in the rain, and for a moment, just a moment, she thought about dropping them, or even tossing them over her shoulder, hoping to catch a pursuer in the face with a million-to-one throw.

But then they were around the end of the point and bursting into the wide open spaces of the Opera House forecourt, and she seemed to find new life in her legs, fresh air in her lungs, and an inexplicable, impossible, utterly magical second life as Fifi leapt onto the deck of the
Diamantina
and prepped the boat for an emergency departure.

She seemed to fly about the deck and masts, reefing down the Velcroed tatters of the camouflage sails, hauling up as much good canvas in their place as she could, hauling anchor and cutting ties as Pete put on his own quite unbelievable surge of speed and took the last few strides toward deliverance like a champion triple jumper.

Something long and dark flashed past Julianne. A spear.

Sharpened stones and rocks began to crash around her. She felt a dull impact in the middle of her tactical vest, but it served only to add impetus to her flight. The storm reached its height as Jules skipped across the rotting, nonslip decking of the little wharf at the Man o' War Steps before launching herself into clear air and landing amid the coiled ropes and crumpled canvas of the tattered sails Fifi had ripped down.

Now at last she turned and looked behind her, horrified to see how close the Biters were. Dozens of them were already around the point of the Gardens and most of the way across the forecourt. A barrage of crude missiles landed in the water and crashed into the Huon pine boards as Julianne whipped out her mil-grade slingshot and bent her knees against the violent inertia of the moving yacht as it pulled away from shore.

She let fly with the first ball, which put out the eye of the nearest cannibal.

He screamed and fell, taking down a couple of pursuers who were right on his heels. Two more shots and two more bodies hit the concrete. She gulped in horror, her face a mask of revulsion as the Biters fell on their fallen kin with teeth and claws and old kitchen knives. They were like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

All except one.

The largest and fiercest of them, armored in a sort of bone-mail cuirass that rattled as he leapt from the dock into the sky, landing neatly on the balls of his feet right in front her. She threw the useless slingshot into his face but he didn't so much as flinch, coming on at her with hands outstretched, his long filthy nails grown into slashing claws. He smiled and she saw his teeth had been filed to points.

“Get down,” cried Fifi from behind her, and even though years of training and experience meant she almost unconsciously disobeyed the direction, instinctively reaching for her daggers, years of trust won out and Julianne dropped to the deck.

She heard the huge metallic chunnng as the harpoon mount fired. It sounded different, duller or thicker, and she realized Fifi would have had time to load only a quarter crank into the firing mechanism. It didn't matter. She wasn't firing on a ship. Just a man. Jules buried her face against the wave of offal that exploded from the spot where the cannibal had been standing when Fifi loosed the artillery at him.

Two smaller, briefer reports, sounded as Pete fired a couple of crossbow bolts into the pack that had pulled up at the Man o' War Steps, ready to make the leap across the water until they saw their strongest warrior turned into pink mist by the terrible magics of the Mighty Salvagers.

Julianne hurried to her station, where bow and arrow waited, but she didn't need them.

The Biters cursed and shook their fists but the fight had gone out of them. A few broke off to return to the feeding circle that boiled around the remains of the cannibals she'd put down. Within a few moments, they were far enough removed from land that there was no prospect of anyone leaping after them. Fifi appeared at her side with a crossbow that she casually raised and fired into the group that still stood watching them. It took a young male in the throat. He screamed and went down.

His tribesmen fell on him in the rain.

“Now that's a Happy Meal,” said Fifi.

*   *   *

D
ARWIN
T
HREE
M
ONTHS
L
ATER

They had suites at the Royal Darwin Inn, which they could easily afford with the profits they had from the Sydney run. Hell, the one percent they weren't going to be paying Shoeless Dan anymore would have covered the room and service charges with plenty to spare. But there was no charge.

The King of Darwin was well pleased with the crew of the
Diamantina
and their execution of the Warrant of Salvage. He was even more pleased with the gift of watchmaker's tools Pete had presented to him. Thus the rooms at the Inn were comped, the bars stocked with the finest spirits and liquors and jugs of Saltie Bites Lager. There was even ice to keep the beer chilled.

Ice!

Jules had no idea where that had come from. Some mad bastard adventurers probably got themselves killed going after it. But as she sipped at a frosty gin and tonic she found she did not much care.

They even had tickets to the Royal Command Performance at Princess Anna Stadium.

“You couldn't get us better seats than this?” she asked, gazing out over the heaving crowds, but the quirk of her lips gave away the teasing intent of the question.

“Doesn't take you long to revert to type, does it, M'lady Mucky Muck?” said Pete as he tipped the neck of the oversize beer jug to his lips. Saltie Bites Lager came in two jug sizes: Epic, and Fuckin' Epic.

They weren't ensconced within the Royal Enclosure of the Stadium, but then none of them, not even Lady Julianne Balwyn, were of a mind to endure the tedium of Court when they could kick back and enjoy themselves in a gentry box with its own pukka-wallah laid on and another insulated cooler of more mystery ice. There were thousands of people in the stadium. It shook with the roar of cheers for the performers and for the monarch who insisted on introducing each of them.

Darwin is not like other Kingdoms,
thought Jules.

“Ooh! Here's our bit,” said Fifi who, like Pete, was drinking strong cold lager from brown jugs beaded with condensation. There was an impressive collection of empty jugs behind her and she almost tipped out of her chair as she tried to better look at the stage.

The king stepped up to the enormous speaker horns that would amplify his voice, at least for those who were sitting in the Enclosure and adjacent private boxes. Town criers, reading from scrolls, relayed His Majesty's words to the rest of the crowd.

King John, Jules noted, was wearing shorts. And a blue wife beater.

No, Darwin was not like other Kingdoms.

“Hey!” His Majesty roared out in a voice that would have been strong even without the magic of passive audio engineering. A loud voice was a must for a leader on the modern battlefield.

“How fucking sweet is this, Daaaaaarwin?”

The crowd noise indicated that the fortified city thought the Royal Command Performance very sweet indeed so far. The king stood back from the shouting tube and waited for the tumult to die down. It took a while, because of the echo effect of a half dozen town criers repeating his every word to the stadium.