The Man of Bronze (18 page)

“Maybe the stuff is sticky,” someone else suggested. “Like a spiderweb.”

“Captain,” Amps said, “the yacht has revved its engines. It’s moving toward the derelicts.”

“So Mr. Urdmann isn’t afraid of that stuff.” Lord H. turned to me. “What do you think, my dear?”

I said, “If Urdmann is going in, we should too. Otherwise, he’ll grab the leg and run.”

“What about the, uhh . . .” Lord H. gestured toward the umbrella of silver threads.

“They must be the intervention. A defense against the haunts.”

“So you hope.”

I smiled and drew my pistols. “If not, there’s more than one way to stop a zombie.”

Lord Horatio sighed. “Very well. Action teams prepare for a sortie . . . and load up with silver bullets.”

Our party numbered ten, plus Lord Horatio and me. The men carried chunky OICWs:—Objective Individual Combat Weapons—from Alliant Techsystems, combining the firepower of both an assault rifle and a grenade launcher.

Technically speaking, the OICW didn’t fire actual grenades, but 20-mm burst shells—big explosive rounds that detonated above a target, showering the neighborhood with frag—but enemies in the blast radius wouldn’t notice much difference between bursters and grenades. Not for long, anyway. Heaven knows how Lord H. got his hands on such guns. Last I heard they were only in the prototype stage, still testing the fire control system: laser range finder, night-vision sights, and targeting computer all in one. Urdmann’s prissy little Uzis would seem like toys compared to a full-fledged OICW. I, of course, had my usual pistols and a commando knife in a belt sheath, while Lord H. carried a Walther PPK. Everyone knows the PPK is small, outdated, and underpowered . . . but so are Scotch terriers, and who isn’t fond of Scotties?

Ilya made a token effort to accompany us, but allowed himself to be dissuaded—he knew he was in no condition. The Carthaginian galley lay at the center of the derelict mass; reaching the treasure would require jumping from ship to ship, and Ilya’s injured leg wasn’t ready for such exertions. “No way you’re coming with us,” I told him. “It’s bad enough we have Lord H.”

“What do you mean by that?” his lordship asked.

“You’re the ship’s captain. You ought to stay here.”

“When Sir Francis Drake attacked a Spanish galleon, do you think he stayed with the ship? No. He boarded the quarry beside his men.”

“He had to,” I said. “Otherwise, Drake’s men would fill their pockets with the best Spanish treasures and by the time Drake joined them, he’d only get leftovers. One would hope that’s no longer the case.”

“Well,” said Lord H. with a sheepish smile, “a wise commander tolerates a
little
plunder . . . just to keep up morale.”

“And the captain is right there fighting with his men. For shame, my lord.”

“Lara,” he said, “who’s the one who calls herself a tomb raider? Do you have permission forms from the pharaohs you’ve robbed?
This authorizes Lara Croft to pry golden scarabs from my cold mummified hands.
”

I laughed. “Touché. But let’s keep priorities straight. Lancaster Urdmann first; looting the dead, second.”

“Of course, my dear. We’re professionals.”

9

THE SARGASSO SEA: CROSSING THE FLOTILLA

We didn’t bother lowering a boat. The pilot simply nudged our nose against the closest ship of the packed-in flotilla. It happened to be a steamship, Canadian, pre–World War I: low enough in the water that our commando team could jump from
Unauthorized Intervention
to the steamer’s deck.

As soon as we did, the haunts appeared.

There’s a gray area between zombie and skeleton: a stage of decomposition where most flesh has withered but traces still cover the bone. Crispy hair dangles down sunken cheeks, swishing past empty eye sockets. Arms look anorexic, devoid of meat; chests are merely ribs and skin, so tightly wrapped it seems as if a pinprick would pop the epidermis like a balloon. Throw in tatters of clothing—ripped, ragged pants or unbuttoned shirts flapping in the wind—and you’ve got the haunts that rattled out to greet us.

They came from deck hatches or out of inner cabins. One clambered up a ladder from the sea,
Sargassum
seaweed around his neck and a glowing eel drooping from one eye hollow. Most of the haunts were unarmed, but a few had simple weapons: a fire ax, knives, clubs of rotting wood. The commandos beside me sprayed every attacker with bullets. Bone chips flew as abundantly as shell casings. The skeletal haunts showed no sign of dying, but with their legs shot out from under them, they ceased to be threats.

Then a haunt wearing a captain’s hat emerged from the bridge carrying a pistol. I fired the instant I saw him; he fired simultaneously. My shot would have punctured his heart, if he’d had one. As it was, the bullet passed through his chest cavity, leaving a modest hole but no other visible damage. His own gun did more damage—the rusty thing blew up in his hand, taking off his lower arm.

The loss made no difference. Captain Haunt continued forward, holding out his stump as if it still gripped the pistol. I lifted my own gun, preparing to shoot again, when the captain thing brushed one of the misty threads still hanging in the air—the dangling strands of silver that had come from the “intervention” missile. For a moment, the undead man continued forward as if nothing had happened; then the haunt shriveled, its skin and bone shrinking like melting ice. The haunt made its first and last sound, a gasp filled with overwhelming sorrow. A heartbeat later, it was gone—no corpse, no dust, no residue, just the captain’s hat dropping to the deck.

Unauthorized Intervention
’s commandos were quick to take the hint. With the butts of their OICWs, they shoved legless haunts toward the nearest foggy threads. The undead fought back, biting at the gunstocks—breaking off teeth from their decaying gums—but our squad had no trouble keeping clear of the gnashing attacks. Haunt after haunt went into the misty silver . . . and each disappeared with the same sad sigh, as if overcome by profound regret. The sound was disturbing, like somebody weeping in whispers when you can do nothing to help.

Lord Horatio seemed similarly unsettled. “Terrible business,” he murmured as our comrades dealt with the haunts. “If the poor beggars had just left us alone . . . Why did they try to attack? Weren’t they just sailors? Before they died, weren’t they ordinary decent men? Normal blokes. Chaps who’d share a pint with strangers in foreign ports. Why would death make them ready to kill us?”

I shrugged. “Some cultures think the soul is made of different pieces that separate at the moment of death. The good pieces—the intelligent kindhearted ones—proceed to some afterlife reward. The rest are cold and hostile: all the cheap angry impulses that don’t deserve to go to heaven. A corpse has to be buried properly to tranquilize the leftover evil. If you don’t perform the proper rituals . . . if you leave dead men to rot in the middle of the sea . . . the remaining evil festers. Eventually, it gets strong enough to raise the body as an undead thing full of hate.”

“Do you really believe that?” Lord Horatio asked.

“Sometimes,” I said. “The world’s a mishmash, isn’t it? Just when you think something’s only superstition, you discover otherwise. If I start to believe some monster is fictitious, I soon find one chewing my ankle. If I take it for granted there’s no such thing as a mummy’s curse, the very next day I have to fend off some nutter in bandages. But if I say,
All right, fine, every legend is real,
the next eldritch horror I meet is just a mundane hoaxer dressed up to scare the tourists. What’s sham? What’s genuine? I’m no longer surprised when myths come true, but I get tired sorting things out.”

Lord H. looked at me a moment . . . then he leaned in and kissed me on the forehead. “Don’t be downhearted, girl. There’s a line between true and false, even if it’s hard to find.” In a softer voice, he added, “We all get tired. We simply don’t let it stop us. Stiff upper lip and all that. The greatest gift of our British heritage is how deep we can live in denial. Thriving at pressures that would crush a bathysphere.”

He gave a grandfatherly wink, then turned abruptly toward the men. “All right, lads, if you’ve finished playing with these nuisances, might we please get back to work?”

“Aye, aye, sir!” Ten voices clear and steady.

“Very well,” said Lord H. “Forward march.”

We didn’t actually march; we
proceeded.
The commandos moved forward in brisk military style: hurrying dramatically from niche to niche, never more than two men on the move at any moment, so the rest of the squad could stand ready to give covering fire. Lord Horatio and I trailed behind, trying to keep a straight face. Hollywood had ruined my ability to appreciate this sort of disciplined maneuvering. Even in moments of tension—and we were, after all, on the dark, high seas with malicious zombies around every corner—I couldn’t help recalling every mediocre war movie where the same type of scene had played out. I expected to hear background music or those cloppy echoing footsteps that sound-effects departments always superimpose over people trying to move quietly.

In reality, the men of
Unauthorized Intervention
made almost no noise at all; their boots barely whispered and their gear was packed to prevent the smallest rattle. The only disturbance they couldn’t avoid was the occasional creak of aged deck planks under their body weights . . . and such missteps were usually hidden by innumerable other creaks caused by wave and wind. Even in calm weather, old ships make an unholy racket.

And some of these ships were
ancient.
The Carthaginian galley was the oldest, but over the years, the bronze leg’s power had attracted dozens of other vessels. You’d think that the ships would be clustered by age, with the earliest in the middle and later ones accumulating at the outer edges like the rings of a tree. Not so. Currents slowly swirled the flotilla so that the ships shifted positions over time. Our group clambered from that early-twentieth-century steamer down to the Viking longboat I’d seen earlier, then up the side of a wooden schooner that I guessed dated from the sixteen or seventeen hundreds. Foolishly, I let myself breathe a sigh of relief once we’d passed the longboat; I’d been so worried about an attack from ax-wielding undead Norsemen that I didn’t think about what might wait for us on the schooner next door.

It had been a slave ship. Its hold had contained more than two hundred Africans crammed into an overcrowded hell. On an average slaver voyage, 10 to 20 percent of the living cargo died from disease, starvation, heat prostration, and asphyxia. On the last voyage of
this
ship, some unknown disaster had far surpassed the average. Every soul on board had perished—cargo and crew—before the bronze’s arcane influence raised them again.

Death had erased the social barriers between people above decks and below. Padlocked hatches lay smashed open, releasing the skeletal slaves to mingle with their rotting masters. White-skinned and black-skinned haunts stood shoulder to shoulder on the schooner’s deck, as if time had brought brotherhood and forgiveness. But there was no forgiveness in those hollow-pitted eyes. As the first of our squad swung over the railing, hundreds of undead attacked.

Five seconds of carnage ensued. Bursts from ten OICWs in assault-rifle mode. Explosive and incendiary rounds from me. We mowed down a horde, most of whom were slaves: men and women . . . naked, lice ridden . . . hideously emaciated. Did their gauntness come from the natural withering of death or from weeks of starvation while still alive? It made me gag to massacre these blameless victims, and to do it face-to-face—some of the people within arm’s reach—as if I’d become a slaver myself, heaping new indignities on innocents. Shooting black legs off black bodies and trying not to retch.

Five seconds only. Then with some vestige of intelligence, those who were still intact realized they couldn’t stand against our gunfire. They stopped in their tracks as if trying to decide what to do next.

Fractured body parts surrounded us: shot-off limbs, heads, torsos, heaped up like a knee-high rampart between us and the haunts. Most of the parts still twitched. Hands reached blindly for something to attack, while mouths bared rickety grimaces of cracked yellow teeth. Two dozen zombies were out of the fight; two hundred or more remained. Just waiting for an opening.

Two of our own men were down . . . not dead but battered by the mob’s front line. The men had been clubbed, punched, kicked, before the rest of our team could rescue them. Someone was already binding their wounds. Someone else was signaling
Unauthorized Intervention
on a laser comm link, requesting a stretcher crew. Lord Horatio’s men would evacuate the wounded in brisk, orderly fashion.

But that wasn’t our most pressing problem. We stood at the slave ship’s rail, surrounded by a half ring of haunts who kept their distance but still seemed eager to spill our blood. They blocked our only route forward. We had the option of retreating: going back to our own ship and sailing around the flotilla’s edge until we could approach at a new angle. But that would waste time, while Urdmann and his lackeys raced to grab the treasure. Besides, the moment we tried to withdraw, the undead would attack again—I had no doubt of that. More carnage. More chance that we’d take casualties.

Did we have an alternative? Three or four zombie-killing strands dangled onto the slave ship’s deck like foggy rigging ropes. They’d likely obliterated a few haunts when they first appeared, but now the undead knew to keep their distance. How could we force hundreds of shambling corpses into those few strings of silver?

A man on my right cleared his throat. “Captain,” he said to Lord H., “should we use burst shells?”

His lordship shuddered. He must have been picturing what bursters would do to the naked people. Men and women sliced by shrapnel. A repugnant possibility. A dangerous one, too—like using grenades in close quarters. Perhaps some of our squad could fire bursters at the rear half of the undead crowd, while the rest of our men gunned down the front; but it would be the stuff of nightmares, a cold-blooded atrocity. The weaponless, defenseless haunts looked too much like real slaves. None of us wanted the image of their deaths on our conscience.

And yet, what other option did we have?

“All right.” Lord Horatio sighed. “I suppose we have to—”

He was interrupted by the deck heaving violently beneath our feet. I kept my balance by grabbing the ship’s rail. Most of our squad did the same, but the haunts—slow to react with their deadened brains—toppled like dominos. Some fell against misty threads of silver and disappeared from the world. The rest ended in a muddle, arms and legs tangled, fighting to regain their feet.

Before they managed to do so, a huge form rose in front of the schooner’s prow, like a whale surging up from the depths: as big as an obelisk five stories high, draped with
Sargassum
and glowing a faint blue.

Not a whale—a giant eel. Yet another monstrosity created by living too close to a chunk of bronze.

For several seconds, the eel stared down as if trying to understand what it was seeing. Its head turned slowly, scanning the deck. To have grown so large, the eel must have lived many years near the bronze leg . . . but it gazed at the haunts as if it had never seen such creatures before. Maybe it hadn’t; maybe it had spent its whole life underwater and this was the first time it ever stuck its head above the surface. It might have preferred to live at a particular depth and pressure—so deep it had never been aware of the upper world. Then it heard the blasts of our gunfire and had been drawn to the noise or, perhaps, to the bits of zombie that had fallen over the sides of the ships to sink into the depths like dry fish food trickled into an aquarium.

Now the eel leaned in for a close look. “Hold your fire!” Lord Horatio whispered. “No sudden movements, no hostile acts. Do not provoke it. Do not—”

Like lightning, the eel struck. Whatever its species, it was carnivorous—its mouth, lined with sword-length teeth, enveloped three haunts in a single bite. It lifted them off the deck, their legs kicking feebly between the monster’s lips; then the eel tossed its head back like someone gulping a vodka shooter, and the haunts disappeared down its gullet.

I swear the eel took a moment to reflect on the taste: rolling the flavor of undead
Homo sapiens
in its mouth to see if it liked the meal. It did. It wanted more. With another lunge it thrust toward the deck, its maw open to snatch as many haunts as it could swallow. I thought,
Maybe we should reconsider that whole hold-your-fire strategy
. . . then
boom!
The eel slammed down.

In its eagerness, the animal had misjudged its strike—it had engulfed a mouthful of prey but had thrust too far and smashed its snout on the deck. The schooner bucked like a bronco under the impact; even with my grip on the rail, I was nearly tossed overboard. I flew up and over the side, the force almost ripping me free . . . but I held on fiercely and ended up hugging the rail in both arms, my feet dangling over waters that teemed with small glowing eels.

I threw myself back onto the right side of the rail, only to see there was worse to come. When the eel had crashed down, it broke through the age-weakened deck planks, plunging snout first into the cargo holds. Its head was now stuck in the hole it had made; it fought to release itself, shaking the ship as it struggled. Zombies, slow to catch their balance, were thrown off into the sea as the schooner quaked. More were crushed as the eel’s body—now lying flat on the deck—writhed wildly in its efforts to escape. Those of us from
Unauthorized Intervention
were out of the path of the eel’s frantic throes—at least so far. But some of our team had already been hurled overboard, and the rest of us would go the same way or get squashed unless we escaped fast.