Apocalypse Unborn

Crisp, hairy, insect feet.

“For lack of a proper name, we call them scagworms,” said the black man rowing beside him. He was the same height as Doc, but the dreadlocks gathered on top of his head, sprouting up like the jutting leaves of a great pineapple, gave him another eighteen inches. He had a hugely muscled back and corded neck. He, too, wore a rack of PVC pipes.

“With a plethora of appendages, it would seem,” Doc remarked. “Pray tell, precisely how many creatures am I looking at?”

“One organism per tube,” the black man said.

“I am unfamiliar with the species,” Doc admitted.

The face-painted man chimed in over his shoulder, “So is everyone else. That’s why they’re worth large jack.”

“All we know about scagworms we learned the hard way,” the black man said. “They’re armored, bullet-headed, venomous, ill-tempered, oversize mutie millipedes. When we keep them head down and in the dark, it puts them right to sleep. They don’t seem to need food or water. Just air.”

“Inversion and light deprivation induces a state of hibernation,” Doc speculated.

“Logic would so indicate.”

The old man turned to stare at his seatmate. Logic—or even a pretense to same—rarely showed its face among the gaudy porch crowd. The black wild man wore a big, friendly smile, which also seemed a bit odd.

“That isn’t the only reason we carry them butt-up,” said the painted man. “Ugly mothers shit all over the place when they’re the other way around.”

Doc reached over and tapped one of the tubes.

And was rewarded by a shrill hiss and the rasp of a thousand clawed feet.

“That’s not a good idea,” the black man said. “They get testy when you wake them up.”

“Are they fully grown?” Doc said.

“We’re pretty sure these are just babies,” the black man said. “We found an untended nest in an arroyo south of Phoenix. Snatched up a few before mama worm got back.”

“How large do they get?”

“We didn’t stick around to find out. The entrance to the nest was nearly three feet in diameter.”

Tanner noted that both men wore desert camou BDU pants rimed with dirt and patched at the knees with duct tape. Their weapons—M-16 1-A rifles and military-issue Beretta handblasters—were of the same vintage and fine condition, which was unusual. In Deathlands, armament was almost always catch as catch can, a jumble of calibers and blaster types. They had either stumbled onto a well-stocked redoubt or they had traded away something very valuable.

“You two are mutie hunters,” Doc said, dipping in his oar.

The black man nodded.

Of all the blackheart professions in the hellscape, mutie hunter was one of the most profitable, and the most loathesome. It involved supplying freaks to fill barons’ mutie zoos and Deathlands’ traveling carnies. Seeing and ridiculing something obviously mutated made the “norms” feel more “normal,” more secure in the purity of their own genetic makeup. The collection process required kidnapping not just the clearly inhuman, like scagworm larvae, but the nearly human. The two-legged. The one-headed. The scaled. The dwarfed. The misshapen. Beings that could think and talk. And love. If the unlucky parents objected to losing their children, they were beaten senseless or chilled. Generally speaking, mutie hunters targeted the very young because they were more easily controlled and transported. That meant the victims would spend their entire lives behind bars.

“We were in the middle of selling our worms to a zoo master when we heard about the bounty being paid for extra-freaky freaks,” the black man said.

“To what end?”

“Don’t know. We changed our plans in a hurry, though.”

“For all we care, Magus can roast them over a charcoal grill,” said the man sitting in front. “Long as we get our jack.”

“You didn’t have to leave shore to do that,” Doc said. “You could have sold the worms on the dock.”

“For less than half of what they’re worth,” the black man said. “Besides, we want to find out what Steel Eyes has got going on down south. Figure it could be a gold mine for enterprising types like us. What about you? You got a specialty?”

“I’m just a mercie,” Doc said. “In search of some new scenery and paying work.”

“Better keep your eyes open, mercie, and your blaster in reach,” the black man said.

The rowboat slowly approached the moored ship. The frigate was more than 150 feet long. It had three masts, and the main mast was at least eighty feet tall. Its riveted iron hull had been painted and repainted in thick layers of white. Rust streaks ran from the scuppers, down the sides, like bloodstains. As they rounded the ship, they could read the name emblazoned on its battered stern: Taniwha tea .

“What kind of tea is that?” one of the few literate rowers asked.

“Not tea,” the tillerman growled back at him. “Tee-ahh. Taniwha tee-ahh .” He put his palm on the machete handle, daring someone to crack wise. “She is my mother.”

The black man leaned over to Doc and whispered, “It’s in the Maori language. It means white monster.”

Chapter Three

As J. B. Dix climbed the rope ladder to the ship’s gangway, the yelling across the water crescendoed. He was one of the last of the prospective passengers to get a boarding token. The people left behind on the pier were making a loud fuss, jeering and booing, shouting profanities, but they kept their weapons holstered and slung. Before the captain had taken his leave, he had warned the crowd that if anyone opened fire on the departing rowboats, the ship’s four-inch guns would broadside them with grapeshot. If the left-behinds still wanted passage south, they were going to have to wait for the ship’s return, a round trip of seven days or more, depending on sea conditions.

J.B. grimaced, thinking about the already cowering citizens of Morro Bay. They had an unpleasant week ahead.

Like the ship’s hull, its main deck was made of riveted iron plates, canted on either side of the midline, this to speed seawater runoff into the scuppers. A gauntlet of islander crewmen funneled the passengers along the starboard rail, toward the bow. Block-and-tackled lattices of heavy cable supported the steel masts, and the jib and boom on the bowsprit, providing the crew with ladders to reach the high cross members. Dented sheet-steel awnings along the yard arms shielded the sails. These same crude, battered roofs protected the ship’s wheel and the fore and aft companionways.

A crane had been set up amidships to shift the boxes from a cluster of waiting rowboats to a large, open booby hatch. As J.B. walked past, he peered down into the shrieking, stinking chaos of the hold. Its living cargo was scared shitless.

From the bits of conversation J.B. had overheard on the pier, he had learned that the predark frigate had been built as a naval cadet training vessel, designed to navigate near coastal waters and run up into the deeper river mouths. A recent addition was the battery of black-powder cannons on wheeled carriages, each braced with multiple cables strung through sets of block and tackle. Beside the blasters were crates of stacked 9-pound lead balls and canvas bags of grapeshot.

The islander gauntlet ended at the foremast. Under a wide metal awning supported by pipe struts was the forward companionway, a windowless iron box leading to the lower deck. Ahead of J.B., passengers filed one at a time through the door and down the steep stairs. The slanted roof of the companionway was rimmed with sharp spikes, and each spike was driven through the neck hole and out the top of a stripped, bleached skull. Though the skulls were of different sizes, the features were similar. All had an oval, almost human shape, enormous front-facing eye sockets, and elongated craniums. In place of nose and mouth was a small, parrot-like beak lined with tiny serrated teeth. It was a mixture of avian and humanoid characteristics that J.B. had never seen before.

Trophies of previous voyages, he reckoned.

He descended the stairs to the ship’s galley. The walls were riveted sheet metal, the ceilings low. There were rows of small, circular portholes on either side of the room, but most of the illumination came from the soft glow of oil lamps, which smoke-stained the walls and ceiling. Looking at the built-in benches and tables, J.B. realized there wasn’t enough seating for the hundred or so passengers and maybe twenty crew. They were going to have to be fed in three or four shifts. Though he was hungry, having waited on the pier since daybreak with nothing to eat but a few strips of venison jerky, the reek of scorched cooking oil and fried fish tied his guts in a knot.

He followed the man in front of him between the stationary tables, through the bulkhead door into the fo’c’stle. The bow of the ship was jammed with tiers of bunks and sweltering from all the passengers packed inside. Some smoked cigars and pipes; some passed around blue antifreeze jugs filled with joy juice. There was little air to breathe and no ventilation. The sleeping compartment was lit by oil lamps that hung on short chains bolted to the ceiling. Though not a tall man, J.B. could easily reach up and touch the I-beams overhead.

With difficulty, he pushed his way deeper into the room. There was a lot of jostling going on. Over the general din, he could hear loud bragging contests. Who had chilled whom. Who had robbed whom. Shouted bravado intended to stall or deflect imminent attack.

Having spent most of his adult life trading bullets and blade thrusts with similar adversaries, J.B. knew his fellow passengers were war gaming, coldly measuring and marking each other for slaughter. Survival in Deathlands was usually a matter of anticipation, of knowing in advance what someone else was likely to do, and getting off the first, well-aimed shot. It was too early for the long knives to come out, but come out they would, the Armorer knew. Many in the room would not live to see the end of the voyage. Fewer open palms meant bigger shares when it came time to divide the spoils of war.

While searching for a bed, J.B. passed very close to Krysty and Mildred. He didn’t acknowledge them; they didn’t acknowledge him. After the double chilling on the pier, the other passengers were giving the two women plenty of personal space. Somewhere in the milling throng, Ryan, Doc and Jak were laying low.

J.B. found an empty berth on the bottom of one of the three-bunk tiers. Hunkering down, he saw that the pallet lay right on the deck, a human-shaped depression in its compacted straw stuffing. There was just two and a half feet of space between the floor and the underside of the bunk above. Like everyone else, he chalked his token number on the iron frame. There was no locker to stow personal gear or weapons, which meant taking it all to bed with him, making the bunk space even smaller. He crawled in to check it out. With his head resting on the rock-hard straw, he heard sounds from the cargo hold directly below: squealing, pleading, weeping. There were smells, too, zoo smells seeping up through the riveted seams.

He had slept in worse accommodations.

As J.B. crawled back out, he noticed another passenger, maybe twenty feet away, staring at him intently. The man appeared to have large hairy ears set way too high on either side of a steeply pointed head. The bodies passing in front of the suspended oil lamps dimmed and strobed the available light and made it difficult to see. Carefully thumbing his steel-rimmed glasses back up the sweat-slick bridge of his nose, J.B. squinted. Hard.