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.
The man was wearing a hooded cloak…with attached ears.
Even in the low light, the material glittered with thousands of tiny flecks. J.B. recognized it at once. It was the excised skin of a scalie. A skin scraped free of underlying fat, sun-dried, then worked by hand until it was glove-leather supple. Thin, light, breathable. There was a lot of shrinkage in the curing process, though. It took a mighty big scalie to make a man-size cloak like that. A 500-pounder, maybe.
A bearded face protruded from the pointy hood, lips curled, half smiling. The intermittent lamplight played over sunken brown eyes circled in deep purple. From the man’s belt hung bulging black-powder and bullet bags fashioned from handsomely tanned swampie scrotums. He leaned on a big-bore, double-barreled percussion rifle, what in predark times would have been called an elephant gun. It was the kind of weapon mutie hunters used to blast through foot-thick hut mud walls, ambushing and chilling parents so their offspring could be more easily carted off.
J.B. stared back until the man broke eye contact, turned and vanished into the crowd. No name came to mind to match the face or the gear. No battlefield, either. J.B. had shot his way down a lot of dark, winding roads—chilling evildoers and defending the innocent—and in the process he had made blood enemies that he had never seen. Those who had escaped. And the relatives of those who hadn’t. And that didn’t take into account Deathlands’ power to transform people’s appearances in short order. It dried them up. Dimmed their lights. Most were guttering candles by the age of thirty, thanks to the elements and privation and constant conflict.
If Skin Hood had recognized him, or suspected something, he was keeping it to himself, at least for the time being. He either didn’t know for sure, or he had some other agenda. The only thing certain was that discovery by this collection of coldhearts, in these cramped quarters, would get the companions torn limb from limb. Pronto.
The clank of the anchor chain being raised sent the passengers surging for the bulkhead door. As
