“He’s right. You know he’s right,” Tom said.
The other islanders, three men and another woman, came away from the doorway with faces contorted by blind fury.
“You and yours can do whatever the fuck you want,” Brenda informed the skipper. She racked the slide on her pump gun, chambering a round. “But for us Texicans, it’s time for some bloody fuckin’ payback.”
As the big-armed woman stormed off in the direction of the stern stairwell, which was about two hundred feet away, the islanders followed, their weapons up and ready.
“Dammit, Brenda, don’t do this…” Tom called to her back.
Brenda didn’t respond. She kept on walking away, shoulders hunched, head lowered. They all kept on walking for the stairwell.
Ryan could partly understand their decision. They were crazy with grief over the loss of their loved ones, crazy because everything generations of their people had worked for and protected was in the latrine, and gone forever. The islanders thought they had nothing left but their pride. And pride demanded vengeance at all costs. They were dead wrong. They still had their own lives, but in the heat of the moment no one was going to make them see that. It put the companions in an even more desperate situation.
The odds against them had just doubled.
When Garwood hitched himself up and started to go after Brenda, Tom reached out and grabbed him by the arm.
“No way, boy,” Tom said. “You’re coming with us, and we’re getting the hell out of here.”
“I want to fight them! Let me go!”
Tom wouldn’t release his hold. “We all want to fight them and chill them, and we will,” he said. “But we don’t necessarily have to commit suicide doing it.”
Garwood tried to throw a roundhouse punch at the skipper’s face but missed when the larger man easily and adroitly pushed him off balance. From there, it degenerated into a stand-up wrestling match. While they struggled, the islanders disappeared up the stairs, heading for the top deck.
Ryan and Doc moved in to separate Tom and the boy.
As they pulled them apart, a blaze of blasterfire from the stairwell froze everyone. Automatic weapons chattered and a 12-gauge boomed over and over. The shotgun blasts were spaced a mere fraction of a second apart. Ryan recognized that frenzied chain of sound, as did his companions. Trigger pinned, the shotgun’s firing pin snapped every time the pump action slammed shut.
Ryan drew his SIG-Sauer and stepped to the left, giving himself a clear firing lane. Krysty, Mildred, Doc, Jak and Tom whipped their pistols out, as well. Garwood dropped to a knee on the deck in front of them, shouldered his AKM and aimed at the stairwell entrance. J.B. couldn’t shoulder his scattergun, so he held it braced against his hip, his face twisted in a grimace of pain.
The Fire Talker hung well back of them all, empty-handed, Ryan noted. Though there were a lot of islander weapons hidden under the debris, he didn’t try to find one for himself. In fact, Daniel had a kind of wild look in his eye, like he was on the verge of making a solo break for it while the companions held the fort, but he didn’t bolt. He didn’t move a muscle.
The fabulator was too spineless even to hightail it.
It didn’t matter, though. Ryan turned his attention back to the stairwell. They had enough blasters. Any pirate who stepped down onto the landing was going to be shot to pieces in a heartbeat.
Amid the savage, back-and-forth sawing of the continuing gunbattle on the stairwell came a series of loud pops in rapid succession. They weren’t gunshots. And they weren’t frag grenades. After a moment the intensity of shooting faded, turning into short bursts of autofire. Oneway autofire.
Screams echoed in the stairwell. Bullets zinged down the stairs. Then an olive-drab cylinder bounced off the last step, onto the landing. It was spewing dense white smoke as it rolled into the corridor.
“Gas gren!” Ryan shouted, waving the others back.
The hissing canister was followed by Brenda. The big woman wasn’t moving under her own power. She slid on her back, headfirst down the steps. Gravity dumped her at the foot of the stairs, but she wasn’t dead. She struggled to her feet, bleeding heavily from a shoulder wound that had already soaked one side of her birdhunting vest. Tear gas from the canister billowed all around her as she lurched, half-blinded, for the hallway. Then from the steps above came more autofire. Before she could clear the landing, she was chopped down by multiple impacts to the head and chest. She hit the floor sideways and, rubbery limp, stayed there.
The screams up the stairwell continued until a pair of widely spaced single shots rang out. To Ryan they sounded like coups de grâce. Then came the tramp of many sets of heavy boots descending the metal treads. Light beams speared through the caustic chemical fog, crisscrossing wildly.
“Warn them, son,” Ryan said, putting a hand on Garwood’s shoulder.
The teenager cut loose a withering burst with his AKM. The flurry of slugs slapped the far side of the landing and sparked, gnawing chunks of metal from the edge of the entry arch.
While the pirates were thinking twice about taking those last few steps to the deck, Ryan waved the others away, toward the bow. He knew they couldn’t hold the corridor against a tear gas attack. Even with the outer wall blown and a breeze coming through the holes, the chemicals would hang in the air, blinding and incapacitating them, making them triple easy to chill.
Two more canisters bounced down the steps and onto the hallway. The grens pinwheeled, spurting clouds of cottony smoke.
Garwood raised his assault rifle to his shoulder to lay down more covering fire, but Ryan stopped him with a hand on the still warm barrel. “We need a way off this deck,” he said. “And then we need a way off this ship.”
Jak bent and picked up an AKM from the rubble. Tapping the flash hider against the side of his boot to clear any debris from the barrel, without even checking the mag, he took aim at the landing.
Either the nukin’ thing was loaded or it wasn’t.
It was loaded.
The AKM clattered in his grip, spitting spent brass from its ejector port. Jak ripped off all thirty rounds in the space of four seconds.
“Get us out of here,” Ryan told the boy as the blaster-shot echoes faded.
“This way,” Garwood said, running for the bow.
Daniel was right behind him, almost a shadow.
Ryan grabbed the AKM from Jake, holstering his SIG-Sauer. “Go on! Everybody go!” he said, stripping out the empty mag and reaching behind his back for the clip he had stashed there. As the others ran past him, following Garwood, he slapped in the full magazine, snapped the actuator and took rear guard.
Even though the three canisters were hissing a good two hundred feet distant, he could already feel his eye starting to sting and burn. The slight wind was carrying the CS smoke his way.
Before he was blinded by tears, Ryan fired from the hip, sending half a clip through the archway, then he turned and chased after the others. The freighter’s hallway was close to six hundred feet long, a hell of a sprint, made more difficult because it was over an obstacle course of exploded rubbish. When Ryan saw the companions ducking through an arch at the far end of the corridor, he whirled and emptied the AKM down the hall. Tossing the rifle aside, he raced for the landing of the forward, portside stairwell.
As he stepped onto the landing, return fire from the stern clanged all around the bulkhead, spitting fat sparks as they ricocheted every which way. The pirates’ window of target opportunity was a second at most, then he was around the corner and triple-timing down the stairs. The stairwell was wreathed in smoke, and after a dozen steps it got so dark that he had to reduce speed or risk taking a header. The smoke was even thicker at the next landing. He could feel radiating warmth against his face and arms.
Whatever was burning, it was plenty hot.
When he heard the hiss, he thought it was the ringing in his ears, then he realized it was too loud, that it was coming from the blaze, filtering up through the passages of the derelict ship.
As he continued down the stairs, he saw a yellow, flickering light below, too small and too weak to be the source of all the smoke. It was a torch. Ryan heard coughing and saw dim shapes on the Tween Deck landing, waiting for him.
Garwood had ignited a torch.
“They’re coming,” Ryan said as he joined the companions. “Mebbe three minutes behind me.”
“Can you get us out of here?” Tom asked the teenager.
“Through the bilges,” Garwood said. “There’s a breach on the other side of the ship. It’s real low on the hull, near the keel. You can’t see it from the water. The sand dunes hide it.”
“If we go out that way, can we get around the ville and make it down to the shore?” Krysty asked.
Tom answered for the boy. “Hell, yes! We can skirt the ville’s backside, straight down to the water. Clear shot from the beach to the dinghy.”
“We’ve got to go through the engine room to get to it,” Garwood said. “And the engine room’s back that way…” He indicated with the torch the direction they’d just come. The direction where the smoke got thicker.
“Nukin’ hell,” J.B. moaned, stifling a cough. His smudged spectacles reflected the yellow flame of the torch.
“No other way to the engine room?” Mildred asked the boy.
“Nope,” Garwood said. “Not from here.”
“If the Matachìn went down that aft staircase, the one Brenda tried to go up, then they’ve already got us cut off,” Mildred said.
“If they didn’t, then we’ve got a chance,” Ryan said. He grabbed a pair of unlit torches from the wall and gave one of them to Jak. “We need more light.”
As they touched the ends of their torches to Garwood’s, grens popped on the stairwell above.
“Don’t get too far ahead. Don’t lose us,” Ryan told the teen. “Without you to guide us we’re running blind in here.” Then he clapped a hand on Garwood’s back and said, “Go, boy! Go!”
They ran single-file back toward the stern, another six-hundred-yard sprint. There was less debris on this deck, for sure, but it was harder to see it through the dense smoke. In the lead, Garwood picked his way around the scattered obstacles. Everyone followed his path, more or less.
J.B. was having a hard time keeping up. He gradually dropped back in the line, until he was running right in front of Ryan.
It was the cracked ribs, Ryan knew. J.B. couldn’t suck in enough air, and the smoke was making things worse. He was a hard little son of a bitch, though. He wasn’t going to give up.
They had traveled about half the distance to the stern when the smoke began to ease off and the heat got a whole lot worse. And there was a kind of red, throbbing glow up ahead on the left.
Automatic fire roared from behind, and bullets sprayed over the corridor, zipping past Ryan’s head. The pirates had gained the lower deck, but the shooting was wild. Mebbe they were firing as they ran, he thought. Mebbe they were too anxious for the chill, or mebbe they were spooked by the enclosed space, the darkness, the smoke and the fire.
As another burst of slugs whined by him, Ryan could visualize the enemy’s target picture: running figures silhouetted by the madly shifting red-orange glow. Stopping and returning fire was not an option for the companions. Speed was their only hope. Once they got past the glow and slipped into the darkness beyond, from the pursuers’ point of view they would simply disappear.
The air was so hot it felt like daggers stabbing deep in Ryan’s lungs every time he inhaled. J.B. was wheezing badly and staggering a bit, but he still had his eyes on the prize. Like Ryan, he knew the glow of the fire would hide them. If they were going to shoot back, it would be from the cover of darkness on the other side, where they had the advantage.
The glow was coming up fast on the left, and the air was getting much hotter. Ryan’s clothes were soaked through with sweat. Even the shortest possible breaths seared the inside of his nose and the back of his throat. The firing from behind suddenly dwindled, then stopped altogether. He assumed the pirates were concentrating on their running, trying to close the gap and overtake them before they vanished.
Fifty feet in front of them, a torrent of flame shot sideways out of the left-hand wall, floor to ceiling. At the head of the file, Garwood veered wide right to avoid being cooked in his own skin. And it wasn’t just direct flame he was dodging. Ryan could see the steel wall around its exit point was what was glowing red.
Suddenly there came another burst of blasterfire; not from behind, but from in front this time.
That the pirates had cut them off was Ryan’s first dismal thought. If that was the case, there was no way out. They were going to be sandwiched in the hallway. Sandwiched and chilled.
The crackle continued, rapidly gathering in intensity. He couldn’t see muzzle-flashes down the corridor ahead of them for the light of the leaping flames. But bullets weren’t flying from that direction.
When J.B. darted away from the source of the scalding heat, running next to the exterior wall, Ryan followed in his footsteps. Twenty feet away and rapidly closing, he saw fire blasting out through the doorway of what had to be the Upper Tween deck hold. The door was open, locked back against the wall.
Up close, the roar of the flame was so loud it made the air vibrate. And there was suddenly a hard wind at Ryan’s back as the fire greedily sucked oxygen through every hole and crack in the hull, feeding itself.