Crimson Waters

Chapter Five

The Blowing Mermaid, the sign read. The crudely but colorfully painted image that accompanied the words made it clear the half fish, half voluptuous nude blonde woman in question was blowing bubbles or spouting breath like a sounding whale.

“Classy,” Mildred said.

“Needs must when the devil drives,” Doc murmured.

“That’s so encouraging,” she said.

“Anybody got any better ideas?” Ryan’s tone suggested he was addressing the group as a whole. Mildred couldn’t help noticing how his lone blue eye fixed on her for just a moment—and pierced like a blue laser.

“Thought not,” he said with a shrug, and pushed inside.

The smell of spilled beer, sweat and ganja smoke hit Mildred in the face like a sandbag as she stepped up to the door. Inside was dark, hot and humid. The conversation was boisterous enough that it actually overwhelmed the out-of-tune piano in the corner.

A grimy, fly-specked skylight let in yellow sun. It was enough to see by once Mildred’s retinas had adjusted from the seaside dazzle outside. There were about twenty patrons in the gaudy, enough to make it seem pretty well occupied without everybody banging elbows with their neighbors.

Mildred wondered how that worked out, especially when sailors—pirates, to boot—just in after days at sea got their first taste of whatever unimaginable rotgut the tall, corpse-faced bartender with the truly remarkable gray side-whiskers was doling out. Would fear of the Syndicate’s justice—and its Monitors—be enough to make everybody behave?

Mildred continued to scan the gaudy as Ryan led them to a bar that was fronted in what looked like respectable-gauge metal plate, painted some kind of drab color she couldn’t make out. It looked bulletproof to Mildred’s eye, which hadn’t exactly been uneducated before her long sleep and revival, since she’d been raised around firearms from girlhood on. For one reason or another it seemed the gaudy’s proprietors weren’t willing to trust their hides entirely to Syndicate civic discipline.

She realized that shouldn’t surprise her, either. While being a pirate—or any kind of coldheart bandit—could be a rational life-path in the strange and horrible world in which she found herself, it still wasn’t one that bespoke good choices. Or good impulse control. She suspected it wasn’t all that uncommon for patrons to haul out iron and start blasting in haste—then repent at leisure, either under the clubs or shotgun blasts of the Monitors, or while hungry, nasty fish dined on their nether regions in the harbor.

The volume of conversation dropped inevitably, and its tempo slowed to a sort of reggae-bass bubble as the clientele scoped the new arrivals. Even with an oldie in a frock coat, a long-haired albino kid and a tall, strikingly handsome chiller with an eye patch, they weren’t even the most disparate looking bunch in the place. The fact one of them—Mildred herself—was black didn’t even register. It seldom did. The wave of mutations that had followed in the wake of the war had produced whole new sets of folk for the masses to be prejudiced against.

“What’ll it be, gentlemen, ladies?” the bartender said. He was a big man, taller even than Ryan and wider, especially but not limited to the belly encompassed by his stained leather apron. “McDugus Fish, at your service.”

“What do you have?” Ryan asked.

“Rum and beer,” the bartender said. “Also jolt.”

The floor was planks, although it was covered in sawdust. The dust was yellow and smelled fresh. It actually overpowered the other smells. Mostly.

“Have you any tea, my good man?” Doc asked. Mildred narrowed her eyes at him. It seemed such an off-the-wall request for a pirate den as to be almost foolhardy. While it might mean that Doc had slipped his reality moorings again and was drifting off into the ozone, as he frequently did, he often showed a puckish sense of humor. Sometimes not at the best moments.

To her astonishment the bartender never batted a heavy-lidded gray eye. “What kind?” he asked. “Green? Earl Grey? Oolong?”

Doc raised a bushy, snow-white brow. “Such a broad assortment!”

The bartender shrugged. “We get a lotta different cargos traded through here,” he said. “So name your drink and pay for your dose. No tabs, no credit.”

“Naturally,” J.B. said.

While the thought of tea almost made Mildred salivate, she didn’t trust the water it was made with. Given the general standard of cleanliness the Syndicate forced on its ville, Mildred figured that indicated they’d take at least similar care with their water supply. But she hadn’t survived Deathlands by taking things of that nature for granted. She ordered neat rum.

Ryan and J.B. ordered beer. Doc asked for Earl Grey tea; Krysty went for green tea. Jak ordered rum, as well.

“Any jobs you know about?” Ryan asked, taking a sip from the lumpy blue-glazed pottery mug.

“Say, this ain’t half-bad!” J.B. exclaimed. “Better than half-good, mebbe.”

Not visibly overwhelmed at the endorsement of his house brew, the barkeep intoned, “Got plenty scuts. No jobs I know about. Might sign on to a crew. Always ships coming in short-handed. Then again, there’s usually no shortage of sailors between gigs, either.”

His big oblong face rumpled as he studied them. “There’s always slut work,” he said. “Either of the women could do. Or the kid, or you. Of course you’d have to get inspected by the Syndicate, get licensed up all proper.”

If the suggestion offended Ryan, he showed no sign.

“They license prostitution here in NuTuga?” Mildred couldn’t restrain herself from asking.

McDugus Fish reared back, rolling his eyes like an outraged horse. “Of course!” he said. “Every aspect of every trade is carefully regulated and licensed. We can’t just let people do what they want. That’d be anarchy!”

“Huh” was the best Mildred could think to say.

Mildred accepted her handleless cup of rum. Turning away from the bar, she saw Doc and Jak staring bemusedly into a dark corner. She followed their gazes. Her eyes had adjusted to the shine from the skylight and the gleam of hurricane lanterns hung over the bar, so it took them a moment to reset themselves to the gloom of the far corner of the gaudy.

Her eyebrows shot up.

“Guess the sign’s not false advertising,” J.B. said.

Evidently it wasn’t.

A woman sat there in a wheelchair. She was bare to the waist, and a blanket covered her lap. A fishlike tail stuck out from under the blanket, by the footrests of the ancient metal chair.

She was assiduously pleasuring a fat guy who had his grimy shirt pulled up and canvas trousers down around his knees.

Mildred’s first reaction was to blurt, “That can’t be real!”

“Well, the tail is fake,” McDugus Fish admitted. “Just for show. But my daughter JaNene’s a real good swimmer with fins on. She was born with her legs stuck together and can’t walk too good, see.”

“She’s your daughter?” From Krysty’s tone even she, Deathlands born and raised, found this whole thing a bit hard to take.

Fish scowled defensively. “She’s not a mutie or anything,” he said. “It’s just a birth defect, same as the albino kid, here. The Syndicate healers assured us of that!”

So JaNene was a legit mermaid. Of sorts. Of course that didn’t mean she was a close match for the voluptuous creature on the sign. The hair hanging down in front of her shoulders was indeterminate dirty-blond and matted like seaweed, the bare tits sagging over washboard ribs were half-empty skin bags, and her eyes and cheeks were sunk in the characteristic pits of the true jolt-walker.

“You let your daughter give blowjobs for money?” Krysty said. “In the open?”

“Hey!” the bartender said. “It’s all perfectly aboveboard. She’s licensed and inspected and everything. And seeing as she’s in the gloom, there, she isn’t a distraction.”

Krysty seemed inclined to push the point. Ryan took her by the arm and gently but firmly turned her toward a vacant table in another corner of the bar.

“Not our house, Krysty,” he said. “We’ll just sit down and wait to see what develops.”

* * *

WHAT DEVELOPED WASN’T MUCH. Not very fast anyway.

“No accounting for taste,” J.B. said with a bob of his head toward the corner, where JaNene Fish and her fake fish tail were busy at work. He was nursing his third beer, a dark, bitter ale. Ryan actually found it pretty good.

One of the scuts McDugus Fish referred to had swept sawdust over a spilled beer, then swept the mess up, dumped it in an old paint can and thrown fresh sawdust from a pail in its place. Evidently there was a mill somewhere on the island. And evidently either the Syndicate or the joint’s owner—who Ryan guessed was from one of the Syndicate families—or Fish himself were serious about keeping the place shipshape.

“Here, now,” he heard J.B. call. “You look like a man who could use a drink.”

A man had slipped in through the door with the air of a man who knew, from experience or observation, that lingering in a doorway too long just made you a good target. He didn’t look the coldheart part. He was middle height, with his chest kind of sunken over a significant paunch, dressed in a faded flowery shirt open over a grimy T-shirt, khaki shorts held up by a length of nylon line, and sandals cut from old tires. His hair hung like a curtain around the sides and back of a high domed head, with a few brown strands brushed across it. His face would’ve been homely even if it wasn’t a mass of random lumps, almost as if he’d fallen foul of a whole hive of yellow jackets.

His eyes darted left and right before dead-centering on J.B. “You talkin’ to me?” he asked.

“Sure, mister,” J.B. said. “Come on over. We’ll buy you whatever you’re drinking.”

The man ran a yellowish tongue over thin lips. “I—I ain’t registered, you know what I’m sayin’? I’m, uh, clean, and all. But I better not—”

“You got us wrong,” Ryan said. He had J.B. looking for likely prospects to pump for information with minimum cost, particularly in terms of suspicions raised, which was something they could afford little of in a place like this. “We’re new in the ville. We’re just looking for the angles.”

“Oh. Well. That’s different.”

He hooked a chair from a table nearby, where a pair of villainous-looking fat women with two good eyes and about five teeth between them sat murmuring sweet nothings to each other. They were so absorbed in gazing into each other’s eyes they never looked around when the chair legs went scraping away across the sawdust-covered planks.

“I’m Lumpy,” the man said, seating himself between Ryan and J.B. “From the lumps, you see? Just so you know, I ain’t a mutie or anything. They’re parasites.”

And he grinned around at everyone with a mouthful of uneven teeth in varying shades of brown, as if announcing he’d just won the trophy for having the biggest dick in NuTuga.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with being a mutie,” he added hastily. He was looking at Jak, who scowled.

Ryan carefully didn’t look at Krysty, who was a mutie.

“I mean, to some there is, to some there ain’t,” Lumpy said. “Syndics won’t have any taints here in the ’Tuga, of course. The crews love to jolly ’em up too much, you know what I mean? Bad for order. But over to Monster Island, now, muties and norms live side by side like there wasn’t a thing wrong with it.”

“Monster Island?” Mildred asked. “Where’s that?”

Lumpy frowned for a moment. He scratched idly at a particularly prominent lump on the right side of his jaw. It seemed to Ryan that something like a hair whipped back and forth from it before zipping back inside.

A trick of the light, he told himself. He hoped so.

“Why,” the disfigured man said, brightening, “took me a moment. You folks really aren’t from this part of the Carib, are you? Monster Island is Puerto Rico, is all.”

“That’s the only reason they call it that, my good man?” Doc asked. “From the admittedly rare case of normal humans and mutants living together in harmony?”

“Well, that,” Lumpy said, transferring his dirty-nailed attentions to the back of his neck. “Plus the fact the island’s teeming with man-eating monsters, of course.”

Chapter Six

Mildred sat back in her chair. “Oh, great,” she said.

Ryan ignored her. He wasn’t any happier than she was about the news that the place where they might find an easy ride back to the mainland via a mat-trans was overrun with ravenous monsters. But fretting over the fact wouldn’t make it any less of one.