Free Crimson Waters by James Axler

flash.
    Lowering the Scout, Ryan looked around. Alarm spiked through him. “Where’s Krysty?” he demanded.
    “Went back in,” Mildred said, holding her wheelgun out one-handed, looking for targets. For the moment none showed themselves, although Ryan could hear shouts from around the front of the building.
    Biting down an impulse to ask Mildred why she hadn’t stopped her, Ryan turned to head inside, himself, despite the gray smoke that rolled out the top of the door frame.
    A hand clamped his arm hard. He turned, snarling. J.B. had him by the biceps. The armorer was one of mebbe two people alive who’d dare get in the way of the one-eyed man.
    “Wait,” J.B. said calmly. “She knows what she’s doing. Always does.”
    And then Krysty boiled out in a cloud of smoke, shoving JaNene Fish’s wheelchair in front of her.
    She pushed the screaming girl well clear of her father’s burning gaudy, then turned to face Ryan.
    “I couldn’t leave her to burn,” she said defiantly.
    Sure you could, he thought.
    “She never did us harm,” he acknowledged.
    “What about her dad?” Mildred asked.
    Krysty shrugged. “Reckon he can see to himself,” she said.
    Mildred’s dark face paled. She started to push inside. Ryan remembered her own father had been burned to death by coldheart crazies called the Ku Klux Klan when she was little. She had a thing about that.
    Krysty put herself in the other woman’s way. “He was crawling over a bunch of furniture out the front door when I hauled the girl out,” she said.
    Mildred nodded. “Wonder where Silver-Eye went.”
    “Somewhere else, in a triple-hurry, after Jak put a big old hole through the dude standing next to him,” J.B. said. He nodded at a pair of boots jutting into the alley from behind an outbuilding a few yards away.
    A dark figure whipped around the near corner of the gaudy. Heavy braids flew wildly as he turned to attack.
    The flash from a stub shotgun barrel underlit a startled expression on the wide dark face as Doc, standing with his back to the wall, pushed the weapon almost into the Sea Wasp’s lean belly before firing.
    The man doubled over as the charge of buck punched his entrails to jelly, then fell mewling and clutching himself in agony.
    “Avast, ye varlets!” Doc shouted, brandishing his sword in his left hand. He had the sheath thrust through his belt. “Come and take your medicine!”
    “Come on, Doc,” Ryan called. “Time to power out of here.”
    “Where to, lover?” Krysty asked.
    “Docks,” Ryan said. “We need a ride off the island. In kind of a hurry.”
    “Don’t reckon anybody’ll be eager to give us one, Ryan,” said J.B., pointing his shotgun cautiously in the direction from which the gut-shot pirate had come.
    “I didn’t plan on asking,” Ryan said, feeling a grin peel back his lips.
    They turned to go the other way.
    “Thank you,” the phony mermaid called feebly from her chair across the alley.
    “No problem,” J.B. replied.
    “If you want, you know, a freebie—”
    A pair of pirates bounded around the corner. Quicker on the uptake than their moaning buddy, they both dodged back a half second before a blast from J.B.’s M-4000 shotgun blew a shark bite out of the corner of the gaudy in a shower of big wood splinters.
    “Thanks for the offer,” J.B. said with a courteous tip of his hat, “but we’re going to have to pass.”
    Ryan and J.B. turned and ran to catch up with their companions.

Chapter Eight
    “By the three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “Stymied! So near and yet so far.”
    Krysty sighed. Even she, with her Deathlands-honed endurance, felt winded after their race through the darkened streets. They hid in a narrow alley between waterfront warehouses, examining the Sea Wasp Posse’s flagship, the Wailer . The clean-lined, gleaming-white ninety-footer was tied up to a stone jetty. A wooden gangplank fixed to the rail bobbed gently on the harbor swell.
    It also had a crew fully alerted by the