“Don’t do this!” it cried in a high clear voice. “I mean you no harm. I only want to rest for a little while. I have young ones. Without me, they will starve.” Then it made the lilting, musical sounds of the islander language, presumably repeating itself for those who didn’t understand English.
The crew paid it no mind. They seemed almost possessed. Grinning, laughing, they held down the great bird with brute force. One of them yanked a feather out of its wing and stuck the bloody quill in his coil of braided black hair.
“It is speaking!” Doc said, pressing forward. “This creature is intelligent!”
“No,” Eng told him. “Manu tangata is a stupid thing. It just repeats what it’s heard. It has no wairua, no soul.”
A conclusion the evidence seemed to contradict.
“Are you deaf, man!” Doc exclaimed. “It is sentient and it is talking to you!”
The captain glowered at him and snarled, “Porangi.”
Clearly not a compliment.
Doc tucked the lapel of his frock coat behind the tooled leather holster and his LeMat. The hulking captain stiffened.
A chill crawled up Kirby’s spine and into his scalp. Doc was about to intervene on behalf of the bird creature. It was something Kirby hadn’t anticipated. He knew how life in the hellscape had affected him, how its unrelenting brutality had inured him, bit by bit, to the suffering of others.
But this was no bluff.
The old man was about to let it rip.
Kirby leaned close, turning his back on Eng while he rested his hand heavily on the butt of the LeMat, blocking Doc’s draw. “Long odds on chilling them before they get you,” he whispered. “And if you do manage it, there’ll be no one to sail the ship. We’ll all die. This is a battle that can’t be won, mercie.”
Tanner looked at him for a long moment, then said, “It would seem a concession to barbarism and blind ignorance is in order.”
“Not the first,” Kirby said.
“Nor by any means the last,” Doc said, sweeping the large black hand off his gun butt.
From a bucket under a bench, a crewman produced a two-pound hammer and a fistful of four-inch, steel nails. From under a tarp, three other islanders hauled out a large, chipped and dented wooden cross. At the foot of its vertical member was a steel eyebolt. While the rest of the crew lifted, the trio of crossbearers slid it in place under the supine and helpless bird thing.
“Please, please,” it begged. “Don’t do this…”
The islanders ignored the desperate pleading. They continued to celebrate the capture, some danced around exuberantly, waving their black-tattooed arms in the air and thrusting their wide hips.
Kneeling on the deck, a crewman pounded spikes through the fattest part of the creature’s wing bones and deep into the wood. The creature squawked in agony at every blow. It squawked even louder when its feet were nailed together at the ankle joints. A line was attached to the eyebolt, and at a signal from the captain, crewmen began to hoist the cross, upside down.
Warm rain splattered the deck around them.
Blood drops
“Why me?” the bird thing moaned as it was jerked higher and higher. “Why me?”
“Manu tangata on the mast brings fair winds,” the captain explained, answering the question of a creature that could not think but only mimic.
The irony was lost on Eng.
Chapter Five
As morning progressed, the seas calmed and the wind dropped off. The swells became gentle and widely spaced. Around noon, Krysty Wroth started feeling well enough to struggle out of her bunk.
She walked into the galley, which was full of feeding islanders. The residual ache in her cramped stomach muscles and the sour taste of vomit in her mouth made her never want to eat or smell food again. The menu for lunch and dinner on the ship was the same as breakfast: deep fried, unboned, ungutted small fish and crustaceans. She had the choice of remaining belowdecks and watching the crew wolf the chow down with their fingers, or getting some fresh air. She chose fresh air.
Most of the passengers had recovered sufficiently to come out on deck. They sat and stood in singles and small groups. Subdued. Drained. Wary after the night of storms. They squinted in the bright sunshine, clearly out of their element.
Krysty picked Jak and Doc out of the crowd, but made no eye contact with them. Until they reached their destination, the other companions were to be treated as strangers. Krysty stepped up beside Mildred who stood at the port rail, amidships.
“How far have we come?” she asked the black woman.
“Not very,” Mildred replied. “Maybe a hundred miles or so. We had the sails down most of the night, going nowhere but up and down, up and down.”
“Where are we?”
“If Point Conception still existed, we would be grounded on the rocks right about now.”
Krysty gave Mildred a puzzled look. Like most Deathlanders, she knew little of the detailed geography of the predark West Coast.
Realizing the problem, Mildred explained. “All the tales about the southern half of California falling into the sea are true,” she said. “That ragged line of purple above the haze is what’s left of the Sierra Madre. They used to be fifty or sixty miles inland from the coast. The Pacific’s lapping on their flanks now. So far, it looks like everything south of Morro Bay is history. The cities of San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria, Lompoc are gone. There’s no sign of Santa Barbara, either. My guess is that the Soviets pounded the San Andreas Fault, well to the east of Los Angeles, with earth-shaker warheads. Deep surface detonations caused the fault to shift cataclysmically along its entire length, and the western plate sheared clean away. We’re talking maybe 350 miles of coast under water.”
As Krysty stared toward land, she could see scattered pillars of smoke rising from the surface of the glassy sea. In some places, it was white and opaque like steam; in others it was black and dense like oil fire smoke. The steady onshore breeze was blowing it away from them in seemingly endless low plumes to the distant mountains. Even so, the air smelled faintly of rotten eggs and brimstone. “How far did it all sink?” Krysty said.
“No telling how deep the water is between here and those mountains. Deep enough to submerge all signs of human habitation, for sure. It’s like no one ever lived here.”
“What’s burning on the sea?”
“It’s not really burning,” Mildred said. “Those clouds are from volcanic vents and fumaroles. The white steamers are on the sea floor. The black smokers are on seamounts just under the surface. They must have opened up along the fault and deep fracture lines, post-cataclysm. The clouds are created when cool seawater makes contact with superheated gases and molten lava. Some of it’s bound to be highly corrosive, full of concentrated sulfuric and nitric acid. Get a lungful of that stuff and presto, no more lungs.”
“Good thing the wind is pushing it away from us.”
Scanning the sea Krysty saw a mature tree, floating about seventy-five yards away, presumably uprooted whole and blown into the ocean by the chem storm. Branches and leaves trembling, it moved along with them. Then, apparently of its own accord, it abruptly reversed direction. A sucking, roaring sound grew louder and louder. “What in the rad blazes?” the redhead exclaimed, grabbing the cables and climbing up on the gunwhale for a better look.
Mildred scrambled up alongside her.
The oak tree glided in a foaming circle, picking up speed as it spiraled inward toward a shifting, dark core. A black hole. Krysty could see the tree wasn’t alone. Other debris was caught in the powerful current. White plastic