Crimson Waters by James Axler

Author:James Axler
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2012-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

“No. I don’t know of any forbidden or secret places.”

The guy looked normal enough: tall, olive-skinned, black hair, rail-skinny. All except for the split tongue that darted in and out of his mouth and made him lisp.

The morning sunlight was breaking where it hit the shallow water of the rice paddy. Its splinters flew up with considerable force into Ryan’s eye.

The paddies lay in a broad, shallow valley, east along the coast and inland from the wreck of Nuestra Señora. Ryan wanted to keep clear of the actual coast. He couldn’t know all of their pursuers had gone up in the explosion of the Wailer. In fact he knew they all didn’t, given the encounter with Silver-Eye Chris and his two companions on the trail out of town. Where three had survived, more might. And there might be other ships with Sea Wasps on them who bore a grudge—or, for that matter, Monitors seeking the “official” vengeance of the Syndicate that ran Nueva Tortuga, and whose dick Ryan and friends had given an almighty tug.

Anyway, as a general rule, the redoubts seemed to be mostly inland. But this little ville, a huddle of grass huts upstream from the paddies, was handy, and had been on good terms with Nuestra Señora and Ricky’s father. So it made sense to start their quest for information here.

The spokesman looked thoughtful. Other workers were starting to wander over. Ryan guessed that rice farming was a pretty slow-paced affair, though the labor looked backbreaking. Everybody seemed eager for a break and the diversion the visitors represented.

“What do you seek?” asked a wrinkled, elderly woman with jumbled brown teeth showing in a face-splitting grin. “Treasure? So do we all!”

“If we knew where treasure was,” a slightly younger-looking man said, “would we be out here working in the sun and wading in shit all day?” And everybody laughed, including the taller, straighter spokesman, as if that was the best joke ever.

Ryan set his chin and made his mouth stretch slightly in what could pass for a smile. Mebbe. For a fact, even for him the stench of feces, so dense as to be almost visible, was nearly overpowering.

Human shit.

The organic fertilizer was why Mildred, still the most fastidious of the crew, stood carefully perched on one of the little soil ridges that divided the paddies. The rest, like Ryan, stood stoically in the midst of the stinking brown water, ignoring the clumps that occasionally nuzzled their ankles like frogs, carried by the flow from the irrigation ditches that led from the ville’s communal cesspool. Even Doc, with his gentle and almost aristocratic upbringing, paid the sewage no mind. But then, being forced to wallow in human shit was one of the less degrading things forced on him by the baron who had captured him after the whitecoats dumped him in the here and now.

“If I had to guess,” the spokesman lisped, rubbing his clean-shaved chin, “I’d say you should look up north in the mountains.

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