Bronson could hear the Jap crew shouting orders, turning the deck gun toward the eclipsing monster. But too late. The Shinto’s claw lifted the craft like a toy, its other cutting its pointed bow section in two. The boat exploded in a flash of high explosives and fuel, no doubt having struck the torpedo racks, the searing heat reaching across the surface to Bronson’s exposed face. Metal and burnt bodies rained into the Pacific as a churning black cloud obscured the scene. Bronson hoped the force was enough to kill the beast, but as the breeze dispersed the smoke, the Shinto stood unscathed.
It raised its claws in triumph. Its nightmare mouth parted, its shriek shattering the air itself. Bronson had to press his hands to his ears.
Then, there was a great and terrible silence.
The Portland’s adrift survivors had grown quiet; the ocean itself gone quiet as Bronson lifted his hands from his ears. Then he heard it. A reply from the depths. A similar, dampened cry vibrating through tons of water. He peered over the edge, could make out the throng of large shapes swimming beneath the Portland’s keel. They were heading east, toward Japan.
Bronson stared up at the leviathan before him, peering into its soulless eyes – an eerie darkness that peered back at him. The creature surged forward, and the Portland rose on the swelling wall of water pressed ahead of it. Bronson closed his eyes. Death was better met in darkness. One thought played on his mind in that final moment. The Japanese are gonna wish it was just a super bomb we were delivering.
VERMIN
Richard Lee Byers
A wail made Adalric spin around. Stefan and Pierre were dragging a Muslim woman from her house. A little boy started after them, and she shrilled at him to go back inside. The jabber prompted Pierre to slap her, and Adalric scowled. The blow seemed unnecessarily brutish even if she was an enemy of Christ.
His hauberk clinking, the young knight strode toward the two foragers and their captive. “What are you doing?” he demanded of Stefan. It was easier than asking Pierre. Adalric’s recently acquired French was better than his recently acquired Turkish, but not a great deal better.
Setting forth from Bavaria, he’d somehow ended up in nominal charge of a small band of pilgrims who, though often wayward and undisciplined, at least all spoke the same German as himself. But the Turks had annihilated the majority of Little Peter’s followers almost as soon as they arrived in Anatolia, and the surviving ‘Tafurs’ – penniless men – had clumped together as circumstance allowed. They had little choice. None of the great lords leading the Crusade cared to welcome men generally regarded as rabble into their own companies. Though they were happy to dispatch them on dangerous errands through unfamiliar territory.
His square face peeling with sunburn, Stefan had the grace to look momentarily sheepish. Scrawny with a rotten-smelling mouth missing several teeth, Pierre glowered at the interruption but left it at that. It was questionable whether the Frenchman truly respected Adalric’s authority, but he had sense enough to be wary of proper weapons and armor and a man trained to use them.
“She has money hidden away,” Stefan said. “Look at her.”
The woman’s dress did have more embroidery than seemed common in this dusty desert village. But it didn’t matter. “We’re here for food,” Adalric said; provisions for the Christian army starving beneath the walls of Antioch. “We need to collect it and get away.”
“This won’t take long,” Stefan said.
“She won’t even understand what you’re asking her.”
Stefan leered. “Oh, I’ll make her—“
A horn blatted through the morning air. No one had taught the bugler to blow proper signals, but the repeated blasts conveyed urgency. The Tafurs looked wildly about as if they imagined the villagers they’d been robbing were rising up against them, but that wasn’t the problem. The sentry atop the tower was watching the approaches to the town, not what was happening inside it.
“Back to the fortress!’ Adalric shouted. Some men ran. Others flung themselves onto the half-loaded wagons as the drivers shouted and snapped the reins to set the mules in motion.
Forgotten in the confusion, one cart remained. Adalric scrambled onto the bench. Emboldened by the Christians’ hasty departure, a villager in a brown robe threw a stone, and it clinked against his mail.
As, bumping up and down, his conveyance rumbled and clattered through the streets, Adalric tried to count the Tafurs riding in the other wagons or pounding along on foot. Some were missing. Though he’d attempted to keep them close, the better to control them, a few had plainly sneaked off to loot unsupervised. It was only what he’d expected, but damn them anyway!
The bugle kept blaring, though with longer pauses between notes. The sentry was getting winded. Finally the man himself came into view atop a keep that was unimpressive to anyone who’d seen the castles of the Rhine, Constantinople, or Antioch for that matter, but was nonetheless the tallest structure in the village, poking above the sandstone wall surrounding it.
Adalric raced through the gate and, left to his own inexperienced devices, might have driven his mules broadside into someone else’s cart. Fortunately, the animals had sense enough to balk on their own and brought their wagon to a jolting halt while their teamster was still fumbling with the reins. A crate bounced out the back and smashed open.
Rising from the bench, Adalric looked up at the sentry. “What’s wrong?” he shouted.
The trumpeter tried to answer but was so out of breath as to be inaudible to anyone at the foot of his perch. Realizing as much, he pointed with one jabbing hand and flailed the bugle back and forth with the other. The brass horn flashed in the sun.
“Close the gate!” Adalric bellowed.
The cheeks above his long straw-colored beard scarred by the pox, Faramund turned in his commander’s direction. A man-at-arms by trade, he was one of the Tafurs Adalric actually trusted. “By my count,” he called, “we still have people outside.”
“By mine, too,” Adalric answered. “But I think we’re running out of time.”
They dashed to the gate and began the process of securing it. Just as they slid the massive bar squeaking through the brackets, hooves pounded outside.
Adalric hurried up the stairs leading to the wall-walk. Keeping low, he peeked over the parapet.
Mounted archers rode around and around the fortress that had likely been their own just a day before. They numbered at least fifty, more than his band of ill-equipped peasants could hope to best in open combat.
If the Turks had only stayed away until afternoon, the foragers might have gotten away clean. Curse the luck! Curse—
Adalric took a breath. It was no use railing against misfortune. Or wondering why God rained adversity on those who fought in His name while lavishing every advantage on the miserable heathens who contended against them, although, to say the least, it wasn’t what Little Peter’s sermons had led him to expect. The Tafurs would simply have to cope with the situation as it was.
Perhaps it wasn’t all bad. The foragers couldn’t defeat the Turks on a battlefield, but they might be able to withstand a siege. The modest size of their stronghold would actually help. It didn’t have longer walls than a small force could defend.
Still making sure to keep his head down, Adalric considered the orders he needed to give. Meanwhile, a Tafur straggler with a dead chicken dangling from his band blundered into the open space surrounding the fortress. At once, an archer twisted in the saddle, nocked, drew, and loosed. The Tafur pitched forward with the shaft in his chest.