Crimson Waters

“Huh” was the best Mildred could think to say.

Mildred accepted her handleless cup of rum. Turning away from the bar, she saw Doc and Jak staring bemusedly into a dark corner. She followed their gazes. Her eyes had adjusted to the shine from the skylight and the gleam of hurricane lanterns hung over the bar, so it took them a moment to reset themselves to the gloom of the far corner of the gaudy.

Her eyebrows shot up.

“Guess the sign’s not false advertising,” J.B. said.

Evidently it wasn’t.

A woman sat there in a wheelchair. She was bare to the waist, and a blanket covered her lap. A fishlike tail stuck out from under the blanket, by the footrests of the ancient metal chair.

She was assiduously pleasuring a fat guy who had his grimy shirt pulled up and canvas trousers down around his knees.

Mildred’s first reaction was to blurt, “That can’t be real!”

“Well, the tail is fake,” McDugus Fish admitted. “Just for show. But my daughter JaNene’s a real good swimmer with fins on. She was born with her legs stuck together and can’t walk too good, see.”

“She’s your daughter?” From Krysty’s tone even she, Deathlands born and raised, found this whole thing a bit hard to take.

Fish scowled defensively. “She’s not a mutie or anything,” he said. “It’s just a birth defect, same as the albino kid, here. The Syndicate healers assured us of that!”

So JaNene was a legit mermaid. Of sorts. Of course that didn’t mean she was a close match for the voluptuous creature on the sign. The hair hanging down in front of her shoulders was indeterminate dirty-blond and matted like seaweed, the bare tits sagging over washboard ribs were half-empty skin bags, and her eyes and cheeks were sunk in the characteristic pits of the true jolt-walker.

“You let your daughter give blowjobs for money?” Krysty said. “In the open?”

“Hey!” the bartender said. “It’s all perfectly aboveboard. She’s licensed and inspected and everything. And seeing as she’s in the gloom, there, she isn’t a distraction.”

Krysty seemed inclined to push the point. Ryan took her by the arm and gently but firmly turned her toward a vacant table in another corner of the bar.

“Not our house, Krysty,” he said. “We’ll just sit down and wait to see what develops.”

* * *

WHAT DEVELOPED WASN’T MUCH. Not very fast anyway.

“No accounting for taste,” J.B. said with a bob of his head toward the corner, where JaNene Fish and her fake fish tail were busy at work. He was nursing his third beer, a dark, bitter ale. Ryan actually found it pretty good.

One of the scuts McDugus Fish referred to had swept sawdust over a spilled beer, then swept the mess up, dumped it in an old paint can and thrown fresh sawdust from a pail in its place. Evidently there was a mill somewhere on the island. And evidently either the Syndicate or the joint’s owner—who Ryan guessed was from one of the Syndicate families—or Fish himself were serious about keeping the place shipshape.

“Here, now,” he heard J.B. call. “You look like a man who could use a drink.”

A man had slipped in through the door with the air of a man who knew, from experience or observation, that lingering in a doorway too long just made you a good target. He didn’t look the coldheart part. He was middle height, with his chest kind of sunken over a significant paunch, dressed in a faded flowery shirt open over a grimy T-shirt, khaki shorts held up by a length of nylon line, and sandals cut from old tires. His hair hung like a curtain around the sides and back of a high domed head, with a few brown strands brushed across it. His face would’ve been homely even if it wasn’t a mass of random lumps, almost as if he’d fallen foul of a whole hive of yellow jackets.

His eyes darted left and right before dead-centering on J.B. “You talkin’ to me?” he asked.

“Sure, mister,” J.B. said. “Come on over. We’ll buy you whatever you’re drinking.”

The man ran a yellowish tongue over thin lips. “I—I ain’t registered, you know what I’m sayin’? I’m, uh, clean, and all. But I better not—”

“You got us wrong,” Ryan said. He had J.B. looking for likely prospects to pump for information with minimum cost, particularly in terms of suspicions raised, which was something they could afford little of in a place like this. “We’re new in the ville. We’re just looking for the angles.”

“Oh. Well. That’s different.”

He hooked a chair from a table nearby, where a pair of villainous-looking fat women with two good eyes and about five teeth between them sat murmuring sweet nothings to each other. They were so absorbed in gazing into each other’s eyes they never looked around when the chair legs went scraping away across the sawdust-covered planks.

“I’m Lumpy,” the man said, seating himself between Ryan and J.B. “From the lumps, you see? Just so you know, I ain’t a mutie or anything. They’re parasites.”

And he grinned around at everyone with a mouthful of uneven teeth in varying shades of brown, as if announcing he’d just won the trophy for having the biggest dick in NuTuga.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with being a mutie,” he added hastily. He was looking at Jak, who scowled.

Ryan carefully didn’t look at Krysty, who was a mutie.

“I mean, to some there is, to some there ain’t,” Lumpy said. “Syndics won’t have any taints here in the ’Tuga, of course. The crews love to jolly ’em up too much, you know what I mean? Bad for order. But over to Monster Island, now, muties and norms live side by side like there wasn’t a thing wrong with it.”

“Monster Island?” Mildred asked. “Where’s that?”

Lumpy frowned for a moment. He scratched idly at a particularly prominent lump on the right side of his jaw. It seemed to Ryan that something like a hair whipped back and forth from it before zipping back inside.

A trick of the light, he told himself. He hoped so.

“Why,” the disfigured man said, brightening, “took me a moment. You folks really aren’t from this part of the Carib, are you? Monster Island is Puerto Rico, is all.”

“That’s the only reason they call it that, my good man?” Doc asked. “From the admittedly rare case of normal humans and mutants living together in harmony?”

“Well, that,” Lumpy said, transferring his dirty-nailed attentions to the back of his neck. “Plus the fact the island’s teeming with man-eating monsters, of course.”

Chapter Six

Mildred sat back in her chair. “Oh, great,” she said.

Ryan ignored her. He wasn’t any happier than she was about the news that the place where they might find an easy ride back to the mainland via a mat-trans was overrun with ravenous monsters. But fretting over the fact wouldn’t make it any less of one.

“Say we wanted to get back to the mainland,” he said when Lumpy had ordered a rum.

The server was a black-haired, green-eyed girl wearing a leather apron over a short skirt and carrying a tray. Lumpy, anyway, didn’t neglect to eye her backside appreciatively as she walked back toward the bar.

“How’d we go about that?” Ryan finished.

Lumpy sat back in his chair. He looked half-spent just from watching the girl.

“Got the jack?” he asked, still looking at her when she stood giving the order to McDugus Fish. “You can do pretty near anything, if you got the jack.”

Doc laughed in wry delight. “Isn’t that not ever the way of the world?” he asked.

“Say we aren’t exactly flush,” J.B. said. “Could we work passage?”

“You done pirate work before?” Lumpy asked. “You all look to know your way around them blades and blasters you’re loaded down with. I mean, not to pry or nothin’.”