by James Axler
The guard looked both puzzled and irritated, as though he hadn’t understood a word of what Tom had said. His scowl deepened as he took a step forward.
“Buenas no-ches,” Tom repeated carefully. When that still didn’t work, in desperation he tried a variation, “Buenass nah-ches.”
The whole language thing wasn’t going as smoothly as he’d expected.
Advancing on him with the double-barrel at waist height, his close-set, little black eyes narrowed to slits, the guard barked a command, “¡Manos al cielo!”
It took a full fifteen seconds for Tom’s brain to convert the Spanish into English. “Hands in the air!”
“Seguro,” Tom managed to say at last, but it was too late. The scattergun barrels were aiming up at his chin. It was do or die time.
With fluid, blinding speed, the trader back-foot pivoted to avoid the double barrel and simultaneously fired the stubby MP-5 SD-1 in a triburst out the open side of the poncho. The staccato thwacks of the jacketed slugs slapping into the middle of the guard’s chest were louder than the gunshot reports. The guard didn’t get off a shot. Eyes squeezed shut, teeth bared and clenched, he dropped as though his strings had been cut, first to his knees, the heavy flesh of his cheeks shuddering from the impact, then onto his face on the dock.
There were no exit holes out his back. The subsonic rounds lacked the power for through-and-through. Tom grabbed a lifeless arm and turned the man over. There were three small holes in the center of a smudge of burned gunpowder on the white shirtfront. A glistening crimson stain was rapidly spreading out from the entry wounds; before it reached the breast pocket, Tom rescued four of the little cigars.
Working quickly, he removed the shoulder sling from the dropped scattergun. He grabbed a couple of concrete blocks from the nearest pallet and looped the sling through them. He then used the strap to attach the blocks to the dead man’s ankles. Seconds later, he rolled the still-warm body off the pier. It splashed into the water between moored boats and immediately sank out of sight. Tom tossed the 12-gauge in, too. He sailed the guard’s straw cowboy hat into the darkness inside the wrecked warehouse.
So much for the welcoming committee.
He took one last look back at Tempest, then headed away from the water at a fast clip, in search of a road that would lead west to the power plant. He needed to get a close-up look at the defenses, if any, and at the site’s structural features so he could parcel out and position the stash of C-4 for maximum destruction.
When he reached the main road, he glanced in either direction. There was still no one in sight. If the parallel rows of tidal-wave-damaged warehouses in the port area were deserted, the festivities in Veracruz had shifted into high gear: horn-tooting, wild music, cheering. Tom turned left, heading toward the power station and the city. He’d traveled about a quarter mile down the middle of the road when he heard a horn honking from behind and the loud backfiring of an unmuffled engine. He half turned and saw a pair of dim yellow headlights bearing down on him fast. It was too late to break for cover. Bracing his feet to stand and fight, he reached under the poncho and took hold of the H&K.
The full-size, beat-to-shit Ford pickup screeched to a halt beside him. The left fender and door were different colors, and both were different colors than the body. The front bumper was held on with baling wire; the hood and sides dented; and the exhaust pipe belched clouds of black oil smoke. There were three well-fed, smiling men in the cab’s bench seat. They appeared to be unarmed, and they weren’t in uniform. They looked like ordinary guys, but they were more than a little drunk.
The driver leaned an arm out his open window, gestured toward the city and over the engine’s thunderous racket said, “¿Fiesta?”
Eyewatering joy juice fumes hit Tom in the face. Given what had happened the last time he tried his Spanish, holding his tongue and pretending to be a droolie seemed his best bet. He nodded enthusiastically.
“Entonces, vamos,” the driver said, slapping the outside of his door hard, then hooking a thumb toward the pickup bed for Tom to climb aboard.
The rusted-through bed was littered with salvaged lengths of iron pipe and other metal scrap. Before they moved on, the guy in the middle of the bench seat reached back through the cab’s missing rear window and handed the new passenger a bottle one-quarter full of a pale yellow liquid.
After sniffing at the contents, Tom didn’t hesitate. He took a long, gulping pull. The oily, powerful spirits burned like hellfire all the way down to his belly. Not to be outdone by this show of gracious hospitality, he immediately passed out the dead man’s cigars. As he did so he said, “Ehh? Ehh?”
His new friends accepted the smokes with delight and everybody lit up.
Language problem solved.
After a bit of gear-grinding protest, the pickup roared off down the road, squeaking and rattling like it was going to fly apart on the next pothole. Harmonica Tom sat with his back against a wheelwell, blowing sweet, pungent smoke at the night sky.
For the moment at least, the belly of the beast didn’t seem half bad.
Chapter Three
“It turns out you’re famous here, too, lover,” Krysty said to Ryan’s back. “They’ve got your head on a stick.”
“It’s not me,” the one-eyed warrior countered. “It’s ass backward.”
As the lead tug slipped in alongside the pier, with the other two tugs following close behind, raucous, rhythmic music blasted from speakers bolted to the light stanchions. When the crews hurried to tie off the mooring lines and extend the short gangways, the waiting crowd really came unglued; Ryan could hardly hear himself think for all the noise.
Up close, the size and frenzy of the mob gave even him pause. For the first time in three weeks of captivity, Ryan caught himself thinking that maybe they weren’t going to make it out of this alive, after all. It was a thought he couldn’t come to grips with, and instinctively smothered.
Then the pirates started laying on the lash to make the terrified slaves rise from their benches.
Whipped hard across the shoulders from behind, J.B. lurched to his feet, his face twisted in outrage. For a second, Ryan’s old battlemate lost all semblance of control. He jerked at his chains like an animal, trying desperately, futilely, to break free, to get his hands on his grinning, dreadlocked tormentor.
At least J.B. wasn’t pissing himself, which is more than Ryan could say for some of the other slaves around them. The Padre Islander kid, Garwood Reed, looked stunned, frozen like a jacklit rabbit. The companions had done their best to protect him during the torturous journey—though young the orphaned boy had proved himself in battle—but apart from their each giving up a bit of the scant rations to keep him going there was little to be done. “Stay close to me, son,” Ryan told the teen. “No matter what happens, stay close….”
Ryan felt it was his responsibility to get the companions clear of this mess, somehow, some way, but as things stood that feat was impossible. Looking at the mob, he knew he couldn’t keep his friends from being torn limb from limb, if that’s the croaking that fate held in store.
For their part, never had J.B., Krysty and Jak been confronted by so many agitated people at one time. In Deathlands a big crowd might be a couple of hundred souls. Krysty’s prehensile hair had drawn up into tight ringlets of alarm. The expression in Jak’s bloodred eyes was unreadable; the albino had retreated somewhere deep inside his own head. Mildred and Doc, both born in earlier eras, before Armageddon’s large-scale population cull, had experience with masses of humanity. And Ryan who had been kidnapped to Shadow World, a parallel earth where the profusion of people had overrun all other forms of life, was no virgin when it came to mob scenes. However, none of them had ever been the focus of such furious and overwhelming attention.
Flogged until they all got to their feet, the rowers were linked ankle to ankle and then driven toward the waiting gangplanks.
As Ryan and the companions edged forward to the tug’s gate, he saw men in red
sashes and straw hats pounding back the crowd with cudgels and the metal-shod butts of sawed-off, double-barreled shotguns. The sec men swinging clubs carried fold-stock, 9 mm submachine guns on slings over their shoulders. With brute force, they opened a lane in the packed bodies to three stake trucks that were idling on the pier. The sec men held the path open with difficulty. As spectators surged forward, they had to be beaten back.
When Ryan stepped into view on the gangplank, the mob on either side went crazy, pointing at him, jumping up and down. They started up a chant.
“¡Shi-ball-an-kay!”
“¡Shi-ball-an-kay!”
“¡Shi-ball-an-kay!”
Krysty leaned forward and hollered in his ear, “Didn’t I say you were famous!”
“What are they saying? What’s it mean?” Ryan shouted at Mildred.
“Damned if I know!” she shouted back. “It’s not Spanish!”
A superamplified voice, syrupy-smooth and talking a mile a minute, bellowed through a megaphone mounted atop the roof of the lead truck’s cab. The rapid-fire speech was backed by recorded accordion, drums and trumpets gone wild—which competed with the other music pouring out of the pier’s speakers.
At blasterpoint, Ryan, his battlemates and young Reed were forced to climb into the back of the first stake truck. Like the other two vehicles, it was aimed toward the city center. When the bed was crammed full of slaves, thirty or so in all, a sec man slammed shut the wooden rear gate. The remaining trucks were likewise loaded and locked.
Red-sashed sec men surrounded the vehicles, laboring to keep the crowd from surging forward and overrunning the prisoners. The companions had automatically moved back to back, in a tight defensive ring. Garwood Reed did as he’d been told: he stuck to Ryan’s side like glue.
All three trucks gunned their engines and started honking for the mob to make way. Nobody budged. And there were too many people on the pier for the vehicles to force the issue.
Then the Matachìn started trooping off the tugs and onto the dock. They advanced in a tight, military formation with their commander, the guy with the tallest piled dreads and the most pillaged jewelry, marching in the lead.
When the assembled people of Veracruz saw the pirates in full battle gear and weapons bearing down on them, they made tracks backward. And they did something else that surprised the hell out of Ryan. Those closest to the Matachìn immediately dropped to their knees and pressed their noses and foreheads to the concrete. There wasn’t room on the dock for all of the people to prostrate themselves. Those who couldn’t bow down retreated as far from the pirates as they could, opening a narrow path for the trucks down the middle of the pier.
The pecking order of the men with blasters was established immediately, Ryan noted. The red sashes standing next to the truck whipped off their hats, knelt, and lowered their heads before High Pile, the Matachìn commander. One of them, probably the most senior-ranking, kneaded the brim of his cowboy hat as he spoke and then pointed up at Ryan. His words were lost in the din, but a smile spread over the captain’s greasy face.
High Pile jumped onto the lead truck’s running board, reached through the open passenger window and snatched the microphone from a suddenly struck-mute public address announcer.
“¡La guerra está terminada!” His voice boomed over the recorded music tape loop, boomed over the crowd. “¡Victoria eterna para los reyes de la muerte! ¡Los gemelos heroicos son cautivos!”
The commander repeated the same words over and over, and with every repetition the mob sent up a louder cheer.
“Now, that’s in Spanish!” Mildred exclaimed.
The companions huddled closer to hear what else she had to say.
“He’s telling them the war is over,” Mildred translated for them. “Eternal victory for the Kings of Death—or maybe the Lords of Death. And the hero twins are captives.”
“Hero twins?” Krysty said.
“It could be a mythological reference, from ancient Mayan,” Mildred said. “I sort of vaguely remember the term—something to do with their creation story, I think. More than a century ago I did some reading to get ready for an archaeological tour of the major Mayan sites in Mexico and Guatemala. How the phrase applies here and now is beyond me.”
The truck and its human cargo began to roll slowly forward. Out in front, the Matachìn phalanx parted the crowd with unspoken threat. Ryan watched as a wave of prostration broke before them. Regular folk and red sashes alike supplicated themselves, pressing their faces into the ground. This wasn’t a community of equals welcoming home their best and brightest after a successful military campaign; this was a subject people, paying homage.
The convoy proceeded at a walking pace off the pier, past the lighthouse and into the canyon of city streets. High Pile rode the running board, megaphone-assaulting the seemingly endless throng with his news.
Ryan tried to read the sea of brown faces. Mixed in with the overall jubilance, with the mind-numbing cheers, with the legions of fingers pointing excitedly up at him, he saw here and there flickers of shock and even sorrow. The selection of jigged, giant heads-on-sticks was the same as on the pier: there were kings or demons, plague rictus masks and mirror-images of his own bearded visage.
The convoy crawled through a right turn, proceeded a few more blocks and then made a left.
On Ryan’s right, three-and four-story colonial buildings loomed above the narrow street. The wall-to-wall facades were painted in bright pastels—aqua, pink, gold—and draped with spotlighted red banners: stories-long, paint-on-cloth portraits of the array of ferocious kings—or devils. Atapuls I through X varied in skin color and texture, as well as headdress design and height, width of nose, length of extended tongue, and position and shape of fangs.
From every floor, people hung over the Moorishly arched, pillared balconies; some threw brilliantly colored confetti into the air, which fluttered down onto the heads and shoulders of the Matachìn phalanx. Lights burned in every window. At street level, the buildings opened up into cavelike arcades packed with markets and shops. The sidewalks were jammed with spectators and carts, spill-over retail that included hot food, cold drinks, live poultry, cigars and rack after rack of new clothing.
The other side of the avenue was lined with people and hawkers’ carts, too, but there were no buildings, just a row of tall, skinny trees that marked the border of a broad, central park. The park’s pavement was made up of checkerboard marble tiles in white, gray and black. On the other side of the square, high above the tops of the trees, stood the floodlit bell tower of a predark cathedral. It dominated the square, glowing in the lights like an ember, fiery red against the night sky.
As the trucks crept forward, Ryan picked up distinctive odors by turns—camellias, spices, incense, fresh-baked bread, charcoal smoke and grilled meats. This was nothing like Shadow World. That place had been stripped bare by insatiable human appetites, like the ruins of a cornfield after a swarm of locusts. Veracruz was the exact opposite of the parallel earth: it was ripe, fecund, teeming with energy.
“Oh, my God!” Mildred exclaimed, pointing toward the ground floor of one of the buildings with both manacled hands.
“What?” Ryan said.
“It’s a Burger King!” was her cryptic reply.
Further explanation was interrupted by a barrage of garbage. As the trucks came directly under the balconies, the folks up there stopped throwing confetti and started throwing rotten fruit, to the applause of the surrounding mob. The slaves ducked and covered as overripe mango and papaya splattered the bed of the trucks and their defenseless backs.
The volley let up only after the convoy had crawled out of range.
When their truck rounded a corner, Ryan could see it wasn’t the tint of the spotlights that made the cathedral look red; it was painted top to bottom the color of dried blood.
Or maybe it was blood.
The mob packing the cathedral steps broke apart before the wedge of Matachìn. The three-truck convoy
stopped. High Pile hopped down from the running board and climbed up to the stone altar that blocked the cathedral’s main entrance. Pungent clouds of incense poured from brass censers on either side of the arched doorway.
An old man with a sagging, deeply seamed face waited for him behind the dished out altar. His headdress was made of scrolled posts and cross-members of gold-painted wood. His brocaded, crimson robe didn’t hide skinny arms and legs, and a round, protruding belly—he looked like a hairless brown spider playing dress-up.
Ryan noticed that while everybody else retreated with their noses pressed to ground, the spider remained upright, as if he and the commander were equal in rank.
Pirate and high priest conferred head-to-head for a moment in the cathedral’s entryway, then with a flourish, the priest unsheathed a long, golden dagger that he held over his head and turned for all to see. The captain shouted an order down to his men. Five Matachìn immediately and gleefully swarmed over the sides of the lead stake truck, jumping down into the midst of the chained slaves.
The pirates booted aside the prisoners, moving with purpose in the same direction, toward Ryan and the others.
“Together now,” the one-eyed warrior growled as the Matachìn bore down on them in a blitz attack.
Things happened very quickly in the narrow space between the fence walls of the stake truck—close quarters that temporarily negated the pirates’ advantage in mobility and firepower.
The companions’ three weeks of fury, suffering and frustration exploded in violence.
J.B. jumped forward, howling, to meet and block the rush of the first of the on-coming pirates.
The much bigger attacker tried to bowl him aside with a well-timed shoulder strike. The strike missed by an inch or two when the Armorer spun away, and the pirate kept coming, stumbling forward off balance.