he and the companions carried, the villagers presented no real threat.
The breeze shifted suddenly, swirling along the bank. Cook fire odors were overpowered by a terrific stench.
“Smells like dead fish,” Dean choked. “Tons of dead fish.”
“Ugh, I just lost my appetite,” Mildred said.
“Don’t trouble yourself over that, my dear,” Doc stated pleasantly. “If past is prologue, it will return to you shortly, and tenfold…”
At one time, Ryan would have expected the black woman to go ballistic over the snide remark. Not because she was the least bit sensitive about her weight, which was appropriate for her body type, but because of the outrageous presumption that being a woman, she should have been sensitive about her weight. Mildred had learned to fight fire with fire when it came to dealing with the bony old codger’s needling.
“And how’s the tapeworm doing today, Doc?” Mildred asked back sweetly.
Ryan pushed to his feet. “Come on, let’s introduce ourselves,” he said. “Stay alert. Watch the flanks.”
The companions emerged from the forest, fanning out with weapons up and ready. The river people were startled at first, but they said nothing. None of them made a move to approach or to retreat from the armed intruders. After a moment or two of standoff, the villagers surprised Ryan and the others by pointedly turning their backs on them, and refocusing their attention on the murky river and their braided ropes, each of which was strong enough to tow a war wagon.
When Ryan advanced and opened his mouth to speak, a man wearing a translucent fish-skin vest held up a hand for silence. There was a warning in his extremely close-set black eyes. He pointed at the river, which silt and algae had turned the color of pea soup. Stretched across its width were floats made of clusters of blue plastic antifreeze jugs, tied together by their handles. The villagers had a fishing net out.
Dean stepped over to the bank for a better look. As quick as a cat, the boy jumped back from the river’s edge.
Ryan swung up his 9 mm blaster in a two-handed grip. Over its sights, twenty feet from shore, he saw a swirl, like water sheeting over a great boulder just under surface. Then a five-foot-long bone blade, like a dirty yellow, two-handed broadsword, slashed up through the surface. It gleamed for an instant, then disappeared beneath the murky flow. Ryan held his fire, as did J.B., who had his scattergun hip-braced and ready to roar.
“Fireblast!” the Armorer sputtered. “What the hell was that?”
“Shades of King Arthur and the Lady in the Lake!” Doc exclaimed.
“King who?” J.B. said.
Ignoring the question, Doc went on, “In this case, Excalibur appears sadly the worse for wear.”
Before the companions could unpuzzle Tanner’s remarks, the strings of blue net floats jerked violently, then skittered across the water like a flock of leg-snared waterfowl. One by one, the clusters of antifreeze jugs glugged under the surface…and stayed there, trembling in the current.
Whatever it was, it was caught fast.
The villagers leaped to their ropes and pulled them taut, their bare feet sliding in the mud. Only when the creature swam up to the surface and began to thrash midriver, rolling and wrapping itself in the fishnet, did Ryan realize how big it was. The brown-backed fish was easily thirty feet long. Its great tail slapped at the water as it momentarily turned belly up.
Before the river beast could get its bearings, the villagers began to draw in the net. Men, women and children hauled for all they were worth, their legs and backs straining. As they retreated from the waterline with the net in tow, they made the great fish roll over and over, further entangling itself.
The gargantuan mutated catfish flopped onto its belly on the edge of the bank, showering mud in all directions. Its mouth gaped. The gigantic lips looked plump and rubbery and almost human, as did the pale tongue. Its eyes, which were set far apart on a broad, flat skull wider than a man was tall, radiated a terrible fury. The ventral and dorsal fins were extended through the mesh, as were their cruel serrated spines. The cruelest of all stood atop its back like a hellship’s mast.
Unable to pull the fish any farther onto shore, the villagers secured the free ends of their ropes around the tree trunks at the edge of the clearing. One of the men cautiously approached the animal. He walked stiffly, his head lowered, shoulders slumped, obviously very much afraid. Behind him, a pair of village women began to wail and cry and tear at their own hair.
“I don’t like the looks of this,” J.B. said out of the corner of his mouth. “Why don’t they stop that guy? What the blazes is going on?”
“A chillin’,” Jak said.
Ryan sensed it, too. Not just danger, but death.
The ropes groaned as the great fish lunged against the net. With a crack like a pistol shot, the line at its head parted in the middle, one end sailing high into the trees. Before the man standing beside the beast could retreat, it had him. Whipping its head sideways, the fish sank the point of a ventral spine into his chest, then it rolled on top of him. With impacts that shook the ground, it flopped, using its tremendous weight to pound the man and the impaling spine into the soft mud.
The screaming villagers grabbed the loose end of rope and drew it tight, then they angled the other lines until the fish was once again pinned flat on its belly.
Too late.
Skewered on the spine was a muddy, bloody rag doll, the head lolling backward on a broken neck. Three men carefully slid the body off the bone broad sword and laid it down gently on the bank a safe distance away. A handful of villagers, including the wailing women, knelt beside the corpse, sobbing. With cupped hands they dripped river water on the body, tenderly washing the mud and blood from the face and chest.
“Ugly way to croak,” Jak spit.
“Let’s make sure nobody else gets nailed by that rad blasted thing,” Ryan said.
The companions quickly formed a firing squad beside the fish’s head. But before they could shoot, the man in the fish-skin vest jumped in front of the raised muzzles, waving his hands. “No, no!” he shouted at them. “No lead! The metal will put a curse on the meat.”
With that, the village leader scrambled onto the fish’s head, using the net’s mesh for hand and footholds. He was joined by another man who carried an ironwood club and a three-foot-long bone sword. The leader took the sword and knelt down, feeling around on the fish’s forehead with his fingertips.
“What’s he doing?” Dean asked.
“He’s looking for the seam in the skull,” Ryan replied. “A weak spot in the bone.”
The village leader found what he was searching for. He positioned the sword point against the skull, dropped his hands below the skin-wrapped grip and nodded to the second man, who raised the club and struck the pommel of the sword a mighty blow. The impact echoed sharply off the riverbank’s trees, and the serrated blade sank in a foot.
The great fish didn’t seem to notice.
But when the man dealt it a second blow, driving the sword in another foot, the animal went berserk,
