Apocalypse Unborn

“It’s not their fault,” Mildred said. “There must be something in the perfume.”

“It’s not doing anything for me…”

“Me, either,” Mildred said. “The islanders seem unaffected, too, maybe because they know what to expect, or how to fight it. That scent must contain pheromones, chemicals that selectively stimulate the male of the species. Look around. Our fellow passengers are getting turned on, despite the nose plugs. Dammit, that island’s giving off aerosolized Viagra.”

The crew stepped in before things got way out of hand. They brutally shoved the dazed men to the starboard side of the ship, and forced them at blasterpoint to look the other way.

“Atarangi,” a passing islander told Krysty, gesturing at the beach with a collapsible brass spyglass. “Not what they seem.” He opened the telescope and offered it to her.

When she looked through the lens, she saw the lovely faces were not faces at all. Blotches of dark pigment formed seductively lashed eyes and smiling mouths. They had discernible heads, necks, breasts, waists, hips only from a distance. Up close, they were just white oblong shapes, ingeniously shaded to look human. Their long flowing hair was made up of frantically waving filaments, like the tendrils of albino sea anemones. The plates of food held colored rocks; the jugs were empty.

“Not real wahines,” the islander said. “Set foot on the beach, you find that out, quick. Looks like four, but there’s only one. They are fingers on a hand that hides beneath the sand and rocks. Hand is evil. Its smell is sweet and loving but it eats men. Sucks the blood and marrow from their bones.”

At that moment two of the passengers yanked out their nose plugs and jumped overboard. They swam around the stern of the ship, through the wake, stroking hard for the island. To forestall a further stampede into the water, the crew fired their AKs in the air.

All the passengers lined up along the stern, watching the deserters grow smaller and smaller, still swimming with great determination toward the alien and deadly shore. Even Ryan seemed fascinated by their slow, steady progress. Krysty noted with satisfaction that her lover displayed no spectacular trouser effects from the pheromones.

The ship sailed on, turning southeast, and the cove slipped out of sight. By the time the swimmers reached the beach, they were too far away for their screams to be heard over the wind singing in the lines.

That same sea breeze blew away the last of the sirens’ perfume. Some of the passengers began weeping into their palms, as if they had lost their true loves. Krysty was amazed to see crazy, murdering scum acting like brokenhearted teenagers—grieving, inconsolable, their humanity revealed by an illusion of biochemistry.

Gradually the bereft bastards recovered their senses. After an hour, they couldn’t remember any of it. Not the island, not the sirens, not the pain of separation. Total brain fog. The less dramatically affected passengers remembered, though, and taking the public displays of sorrow for signs of weakness marked the criers for an early death.

Driven by a steady twelve-knot wind, the ship plowed on. The fore and aft rocking motion and the hiss of the hull was soothing, even stupefying after the sleepless night. Krysty dozed for hours in the warm sun. When she awoke, Mildred was by her side, watching over her.

Krysty rose from the deck and took in an even more dismal vista.

“That’s where Los Angeles used to be,” Mildred said, her voice gone suddenly hoarse with emotion.

It looked positively primeval. Plumes of molten lava and caustic smoke jetted from the black tips of emerging seamounts. A rain of superheated ejecta swept across the sea, hissing like fifty thousand snakes. Scattered lakes of flame danced on the surface from petrochemicals that had oozed up from the bottom.

On the land, volcanic cones thousands of feet tall spewed ash clouds, creating a low ceiling of gray that blocked out the blue sky to the east. Everything in that direction was tinged with yellow, smoke-filtered light. The bases of the Sierra Nevada in the distance were barely visible for the haze of sulphur and particulate matter.

“It’s a graveyard,” Mildred said after a moment, “for as far as you see. Millions of people died here on nuke day. There used to be a central core of skyscrapers and gridwork streets filling the great basin, edge to edge, stretching to the desert in the east. Whatever the fireballs and nukeblasts left behind, geologic forces have toppled and buried. Los Angeles has been scraped clean of everything human and everything made by human hands.”

“What about the radiation?” Krysty asked. “Is the place poisoned?”

“Definitely,” Mildred said. “See anything flying over it? Anything swimming in it?”

“What about us? Aren’t we too close?”

“Moot point, I’m afraid. What few extra rads we might pick up in passing aren’t going to make us ill. The eruptions are the real problem. They’ve been sending radioactive material aloft, into the upper atmosphere for more than a century. All that stuff has to come down somewhere. In fact, it comes down everywhere.”

“Then we’ve been breathing it and eating it all of our lives. But none of us are sick, though.”

“Short of a massive dose of gamma rays, radiation doesn’t kill its victims quickly. It can take decades for the damage from lesser levels of exposure to show up as cancer. Even folks with terrible superficial burns sometimes recover—whitecoats found that out after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl. It’s a matter of genetic luck and total rad exposure. Most people in Deathlands don’t live long enough for the sickness to ever show up. They get chilled by other things first.”

“Look at that!” Krysty exclaimed, pointing at a sudden commotion on the surface, about 150 yards from the ship and five miles off the hellish, uninhabitable coast. It was definitely not volcanic. A huge living creature thrashed and rolled out there. It was at least thirty feet long, and splashing fountains of water tinged with gallons of blood.

“It’s a whale,” the black woman said. “And it’s under attack.”

Only when the animal stopped thrashing could Krysty see it clearly. The barnacle-covered skin along its flanks was torn to shreds, torn through the thick white layer of blubber, gory pits gnawed into the dark purple meat. Though the whale floated quietly, gathering the last of its strength, the surface around it churned and humped.

There were things in the bright red water.

Much smaller creatures. Streaking pale, people-size shapes.

They were tearing at it from underneath. Hundreds of them.

The whale smashed the water with its tail flukes, fighting in vain to drive off the horde.

From the helm, Captain Eng bellowed through his megaphone for more sail. The deck crew leaped to the task. As the additional canvas dropped and filled, the ship surged ahead, pulling away from the carnage.

“What is it?” Krysty demanded of a passing crewman. “What is it?”

The islander did not turn, and he did not answer.

W HEN SUPPERTIME CAME , Krysty and Mildred joined the others assigned to the second feeding shift. The galley’s tabletops were covered with slick film of fried fish oil, and littered with discarded squid beaks and shrimp shells. Krysty had to take off her coat to keep from getting the mess on the long fur. After a day to recover, she found her appetite had returned with a vengeance. Ignoring the gut bomb sensation that came from swallowing cupfuls of grease, she chewed the golden crispy bits. She paused to spit out the larger bones and scales, then reached in the trough for another handful.

Krysty was using her back molars to tackle a particularly tough and rubbery hunk of squid, when from the deck above came shouting, then the ship’s bell began ringing. First crew, then passengers abandoned their dinners and rushed for the stairs. Krysty and Mildred joined the throng.

Above deck, the wind was dying down; the sea was a polished mirror.

Off the bow, framed by a sunset of orange and salmon-pink reflecting off the smooth water, of bloodred underlighting the tiers of volcanic clouds to the east, lay a ship slightly smaller than their own, painted black and brown. Instead of three masts, it had two, each rigged for four sets of sails.

It was adrift, riding low as if overloaded or in the process of sinking. Its canvas was torn and hanging in strips, its cables broken, trailing in the water. Nothing moved on deck. A few oil lamps glowed weakly; all the others were extinguished. It looked like they had been burning since the night before.

Captain Eng cut a wide, cautious circle around the vessel, then began to spiral closer. Every time he turned downwind, an awful stench engulfed them. The stench of death. Facing the foul, carrion breeze, the crew began to mutter and moan.

When they got a little closer, Krysty could see the wreck was a wooden ship. A coastal cargo trader, like theirs. Overlapping planks formed the hull; there were holes in it above the water line. Dozens of them. They didn’t look like damage from cannon shot. Their edges were ripped out, not blown in. The holes were big enough for a person to crawl through.

Behind them, the captain of the Taniwha tea turned his face to the sky and screamed like a wounded animal.

Chapter Six

Eng barked orders through his steel megaphone.

Ryan didn’t understand the islander language, but the meaning became obvious as the crew scurried to pull in the sails. The white ship glided to a stop, upwind of the derelict vessel and its pall of death.

Eng barked again, and Ryan was forced back from the rail as islanders rushed to open a blaster and prepare the cannon for firing. They unblocked the wheels, removed muzzle plug and fuse hole cap and rolled the weapon forward on its tracks.

Likewise, every cannon on the starboard rail was readied to broadside the brigantine that foundered just forty yards away.

Because the two-master was so much lower in the water, Ryan could look down on its main deck, which was a wreck. Cables, ropes and chains lay in tangled heaps; tool chests and worktables were overturned. Some of top-deck cargo had come loose from its safety netting: huge bags of grain had broken and spilled.

The chem storm could have done all that, easily, Ryan thought. It was less likely, though still possible, that the storm had tossed every living soul overboard.

But no way could it have torn those holes in the hull.