Haven's Blight Read Free Page A

the barrels.
    Beyond the wake the steam boat left in the black water, topped with yellow foam, an object like an overturned whaleboat floated to the surface near the reeds of the far bank of the little lake. Red streamed down its blubbery sides. It was clearly dead.
    But the death of one of their own only redoubled the aquatic muties’ fury. The Egret was suddenly torqued counterclockwise by simultaneous impacts at bow and stern.
    Krysty heard Isis’s teeth grind. “Dammit!” the captain groaned as if in sympathy to the noises of the tortured hull. “Even if we wound the monsters fatally, most won’t die quick enough to help.”
    Despite the fact she could still feel the heat from her BAR barrel on her skin, Krysty had to shoulder the heavy longblaster and open up again. She fired toward the port quarter, where a monster was charging, attempting to ram again. Some of the Egret ’s crew joined in with fancy compound bows and crossbows, feathering the animal’s back like an elongated seagoing porcupine. Krysty’s powerful .30-06 slugs literally ripped bloody chunks out of the broad back.
    The creature submerged before it struck, and Krysty staggered as the deck lurched beneath her bootsoles. The beast had clearly slammed against the keel in passing below, trying to break Egret ’s back or turn her turtle.
    Instead a huge basso roar of agony vibrated up through the very timbers of the former yacht. The mutie had succeeded in driving some of the arrows stuck in its hide deeper by hitting the boat. It was clearly in great pain.
    As she popped another empty magazine from the BAR’s well and stooped to grab a new one from the rapidly dwindling stock in the messenger bag Isis had dropped at her feet, Krysty grimaced.
    “I hate the thought of wounding them without killing them.” She was untroubled by killing when it was needful. To eat, or to prevent whatever you were chilling from chilling you— man or beast. But she deplored wanton killing.
    And she abhorred cruelty. She’d seen more than enough of it, known her share of it. That was one of the reasons she loved Ryan as she did: he was never cruel, never inflicted pain for its own sake.
    “Me, too,” Mildred said.
    She had gone green. Despite the blood dripping from the gauze she’d hastily tied around her wounded thumb, she had kept up the fight. She was clumsily jamming a fresh 8-round spring clip into the top of her M-1 receiver, impaired by her wound.
    “The Deathlands just seem to find something awful to throw at you every single day.”
    A shout from the bow made Krysty look. The water around the Hope seemed to boil. As she watched in horror a mutie with a good head start rammed its blunt head into the rotor-ship’s hull just aft of the bowsprit.
    She heard the crunch as wooden planks gave way.
    Then she tensed as Ryan went over the rail, right on top of the gray back.
    But the man hadn’t been knocked overboard to his death. Or at least he wasn’t giving in to Death. In an instant he had jumped up to stand with boots planted wide on the monstrous back, holding the panga with its long, heavy blade downward, both hands wrapped around the grip.
    An enormous single-fluked tail whipped up out of the water as he plunged the blade almost to his hands in the creature’s flesh. A cascade of water surged over Ryan, momentarily hiding him from sight. Krysty’s heart almost stopped beating.
    But the waters receded and she saw him still there, ripping his panga free, leaving a trail of gore in the heavy humid air as he cocked the weapon over his head again. She realized the splash had been produced by a reflex reaction to the pain of having the knife bite deep, more than any attempt to wash him off. Though she could barely believe it hadn’t, so violent had the wash of stinking dark-stained water been.
    Three times more Ryan plunged his panga into the horror’s back. The beast backed away from the hole it had stove in the Hope ’s hull. Its big blunt head