“Got bigger food,” Jak said as Krysty let him back down into the warm embrace of the sea. Her bare left arm streamed blood from a dozen gashes into the water.
“You’re hurt, Krysty,” Mildred said.
“Not as bad as I will be if those big bastards come back,” Krysty said. “Let’s move while we’ve got a chance! We might actually make the island.”
They ran clumsily. The water pulled at Krysty. Strong as she was, it sucked the strength right out of her. She was bleeding, too—not fast, but enough that it would sap her energy in a short time.
Doc ran high-stepping, water flashing by his upraised knees. But the effort quickly took its toll. Mildred cruised past him, grabbed him by the coat and towed him behind her as if she were a tugboat.
Most of the sharks were distracted by the bigger feasts offered by the three of their kinfolk Ryan had chilled. Especially the one that was thrashing on the surface, sending prisms of water flying and causing a tremendous commotion. Which apparently was exactly what sharks liked, because the other fins in sight were making a beeline toward their flailing comrade.
Most of them. J.B.’s Uzi loosed off another burst as one came close from the far side. A beat later, Ryan’s longblaster boomed.
Then, before Krysty even realized the island was nearby, Ryan was standing in water to his shins, shouting at them to power on as he swung up the Steyr to put another shot into a charging shark. J.B. stopped to stand beside him and lay down covering fire with his machine pistol. The pistol slugs might or might not actually hurt the sharks underwater, but the tubby gray monsters sure didn’t like the impacts in the water nearby.
Then they were on a white beach. Krysty toppled and fell forward.
* * *
“HOW ARE YOU DOING?” Ryan asked, squatting beside Krysty where she sat in the shade of a palm tree near some brush.
She smiled wanly and gripped his offered hand with hers. Mildred knelt on her left, clucking in dismay as she did her best to tend the cuts Jak’s boobied jacket had left in her arm.
“Better now,” the redhead said. “Thanks to you, lover.”
“We’re not home free yet,” Ryan said, standing. “Just on a different island.”
“Jak and Doc think they might find fresh water,” J.B. said. “Plus the road keeps going to the next island, whatever that’s worth.”
Ryan rose and peered into the distance. About half a mile to the north stood yet another island. This one was large, at least a couple hundred yards by about a quarter mile. The next one looked larger still.
“Still got to get there,” he said. “And those ’cudas are still around. Sharks, too. Even if that last bunch got bellies full of each other, there are still lots of sharks in a whole bastard ocean.”
“Well, see now, Ryan,” J.B. said. “I aim to do something about that.”
He had one of their precious few blocks of C-4 moldable plas-ex and was breaking it into quarter-kilo chunks and stuffing those into detonators. The explosive had been scavvied from a recent find.
“Shock waves propagate better in water than in air, John Barrymore,” Doc said, walking back along the beach. “Would not those bombs you are so cleverly improvising pose as great a threat to us as to the sharks?”
“Find any drinking water?” Ryan asked.
Doc sat down in the shade of some kind of bush and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “No. Jak was circling the other way. Perhaps he’ll have more luck. He has a better nose for such things than I.”
“There,” Mildred said, cutting off the end of a roll of gauze she’d wound around Krysty’s upper arm and standing up. “That ought to keep you from bleeding to death.”
“Thank you, Mildred,” Krysty said.
Mildred grunted. “Glad to help. Makes me feel useful.”
She looked at Doc. “I’m no expert on underwater blasts. But I believe shock waves in water pose danger mostly to internal organs. And mainly through bodily orifices.”
“So if we keep our bungholes out of the water,” Ryan said, “we should be green.”
“Not exactly a medically precise description,” Mildred said, “but close enough for the Deathlands. Of course, good thing we don’t have lawyers anymore, so you can’t sue me for malpractice if I’m wrong.”
Doc smiled sadly. “No lawyers indeed,” he said. “Ah, it just goes to show. Even a war taking billions of innocent lives has a bright side, if one looks closely enough!”
Chapter Three
“Yonder she lies,” the old one-legged black boatman said grandly. “Nueva Tortuga. Or NuTuga, as the folk who live there like to call her.”
“If I am not mistaken,” Doc said, “this is the island of Nevis we see before us.”
“So ’tis,” the boatman said.
“Call me Oldie of the Sea,” he’d told them. “Or call me Ishmael. Just don’t call me late for supper.” Then he’d laughed and laughed, so hard it was infectious despite the fact the joke was older than Doc and twice as worn-out. He’d appeared out of a sun falling into a brownish-black bank of clouds on the western horizon, rowing his little skiff, towing a net full of writhing silver-sided fish.
Ryan frowned out across water that danced with midafternoon sun-dazzle at a hilly green island to the north and east of the little boat. A shiny white ville with neat orange-and-red-tile roofs tumbled down some of the hills to a harbor crowded with boats. None of them was as much as a hundred feet long, as far as he could tell.
It looked like the last place on earth settled by, inhabited by and run exclusively for the benefit of the coldest-hearted pirates in the West Indies.
He and his companions had found an inhabited island late the previous afternoon. Actually, they’d found the boatman’s camp, which consisted mainly of a firepit and a shanty made of warped, sun-silvered planks and a roof of ancient corrugated plastic, a mottled cream color with little hints of original orange remaining in the troughs. Ryan couldn’t see it surviving the next stiff breeze, to say nothing of the next hurricane.
A quick search of the island, which wasn’t much bigger than the one they’d jumped in on, showed no one else was currently on it. But the fact that there were ashes and burned wood chunks visible in the fireplace, instead of drifted sand, showed somebody had been there recently. After a brief conference they agreed to hide in the brush. Except for Ryan, who sat to see who showed up by boat.
“So...Oldie,” Mildred said reluctantly. “You sure you’re going to be okay here?”
“Sure,” he said. “Ever’body’s safe as houses in NuTuga. Houses’re safe, too. Syndicate don’t let anybody act out. Ever’body’s equal before the law.”
He was a wiry guy of medium height, just a finger or two taller than J.B. His skin had started black and gotten blacker from constant exposure to the Caribbean sun. It made for a startling contrast with his hair and beard, full despite his years although cut close to his skull, and white as the snow he’d likely never seen. His face was a mass of wrinkles, as much, Ryan reckoned, from habitual good humor as age or sun.
He’d haggled briefly and halfheartedly before agreeing to feed them, refill their canteens from his hidden water cistern, let them sleep rough on his island and ferry them to the nearest port in the morning for three 7.62 mm rounds from Ryan’s Steyr Scout longblaster. Ryan got the impression he only accepted payment because his new friends would naturally suspect him of plotting something if he hadn’t—and that what he was really after was some company, however brief.
His