James Axler – Keepers of the Sun

Ryan swung his legs over the side of the bed, groaning at the pain, holding up his hand to stop Krysty from helping him. “No, I’m all right. I’ll be all right. Doesn’t much matter whether the man triggered the gas is alive or dead. Like to think the son of a bitching bastard bought it, but it doesn’t matter much one way or the other.”

“They say they’ll have to dump the corpses into the sea. No way we can bury them or take them back to the fortress.”

“True. Water’s so contaminated it won’t make much difference to it.”

Despite his protests, Krysty put her arm around him to steady him as he stood. “Mildred said that the more water you drank, the quicker you’d feel better. And take slow, deep breaths. Get rid of all the sarin inside you.”

Ryan sighed. “Hope she’s right.”

AS IN ALL MATTERS MEDICAL, Dr. Mildred Wyeth had the ace on the line.

By noon, after drinking about five pints of water, Ryan was feeling more himself. The swelling had gone down from his mouth and tongue, and he had washed out his eye several times, until it ceased weeping. The pain in his chest was still there when he took a particularly deep breath, but that, too, seemed to be easing with every hour that passed.

He found Mildred out on the field behind the motel, where corpses lay in serried ranks, with a dismally small number of survivors receiving her attention.

He walked across to where she was crouched over one of the sec men in his bright red-and-white uniform. But this man’s clothes were stained with blood, vomit and excrement. Ryan had already learned that a significant number of those most seriously afflicted by the murderous gas had lost control of both bladder and bowels.

He touched her gently on the shoulder. “Just to say thanks for doing the business, Mildred,” he said.

“Wish I could ‘do the business’ for a few of these poor bastards.”

It was a heavenly morning, with a bright sun peering over the mountains to the east of the motel, sparkling off the calm ocean.

And they stood surrounded by the stillness of death, broken only by the coughing and weeping of some of the living.

“Need to get them home, soon as possible,” Mildred said. “Quicker we do that, the better their chances of pulling through successfully.”

“Mashashige got anything to say on that?” Ryan asked.

“Not a lot. I thought that John Dix was a man of few words, but he’s positively garrulous compared with the shogun.”

“Doc says he’s spoken to Mashashige, and we’re pulling out of here just before dusk. Move at night. Reduces the risk of the ronin coming at us. Be sitting targets for them at the moment.”

“Think they’ll attack again?” Mildred asked, wiping her hands on a piece of bloody cotton waste and throwing it down to the sodden dirt.

“Don’t see why not.” Ryan thought about the tactical aspect of what had happened. Of what might happen. “They had to have a contingency plan in case the gassing didn’t work. Outnumbered, they must have withdrawn a good distance. Leave scouts close by to recce on us.”

“So?”

“So they’ll know by now how successful they were. But they know we’ll be on triple-red alert. Won’t come at us now, out here in the open. No, if I was the leader of these ronin, I’d wait. Try and circle around. And then mebbe stage an ambush some time tomorrow. That’s my guess.”

Like most of Ryan’s combat guesses, it turned out to be correct.

Chapter Twenty-One

They set off as Mashashige had wanted, leaving the site of the slaughter as the sun disappeared behind a dusty bank of cloud, away to the west.

The wags were loaded with the sick and the dying.

“I doubt more than a dozen of those who were trapped in the ballroom during the worst of the sarin attack are going to make it back home,” she said, which left the shogun with a total force of less than twenty-five, not counting Ryan and the others.

The rocky coastline was littered with the drifting corpses of the dead sec men, mostly floating facedown beneath the cliff from which they’d been tumbled.