by James Axler
From behind, Ryan threw his manacled hands over the top of the nasty dreads, pulling the connecting chain down over the filthy face, down around the unprotected throat. Then he crossed his wrists, pulling the chain tight under the man’s chin and making links dig deep into his flesh. The pirate tried frantically to buck him off, but Ryan wouldn’t allow it. By shifting his weight, he kept the man off balance, even as his face turned darker and darker purple.
Sputtering for breath, the pirate reached to his hip for the handle of his machete. As the long, wide blade cleared its scabbard, Ryan gave the chain a vicious twist. There was momentary resistance to the turn, then the neck snapped and the head lolled over onto the left shoulder. Suddenly, Ryan was supporting the full weight of a twitching body. As Ryan un-crossed his wrists, letting his stinking captive fall, Jak snatched the machete from the dead hand.
Two pirates rushed in from the other side with whips cocked back. Mildred and Doc raised cuffed hands to keep from being lashed across the face, and braced to absorb the punishment and protect the emaciated teen behind them.
“It’s the boy!” Mildred shouted to the others over the cheers of the crowd. “They don’t want us, they want the boy!”
Jak was already in motion, coiled like a steel spring, the gut-hook machete almost dragging the bed floor as he maximized momentum. The chop when it came was far too fast to follow—an arcing, angled blow that landed behind the nearest pirate’s right knee. The machete’s edge cleaved deep into bone but the battle armor shin guard kept it from slicing all the way through. The blade stuck fast, and the weapon was jerked free of Jak’s hand as the pirate leaped backward. When the man’s full weight came down, the weakened bone gave way with an audible crack.
The pirate screamed and fell over backward, clawing at his newly fashioned, blood-jetting stump, and before the second attacker could jump away, Mildred and Doc were on him. Mildred grabbed hold of the end of the whip. Doc smashed him across the face with both hands locked, like he was swinging a baseball bat or an ax. As the man staggered back half a step, Doc seized him around the front of the throat, driving him into the wall of the stake truck. Displaying a reservoir of strength and the bottomless depth of his anger, the Victorian time-traveler lifted the 180-pound pirate up on his tiptoes as he strangled him, two-handed. Doc absorbed the man’s frantic punches and kicks, his excellent teeth bared in a terrible, triumphant grin.
The two other pirates closed on the companions with their machetes drawn. Ryan and J.B. met the downward slashes on the chains that connected their wrists, steel scraping on steel. Ryan ripped the machete away, sending it flying over his shoulder and out of the truck. Because of his rib injury, J.B. didn’t have the strength to tear his trapped blade away, but it didn’t matter. He kept it tied up long enough for Krysty and Jak to join the fray. They shoulder-rammed the pirates off their feet, and when the men landed on the truck bed the payback for twenty-one days of hell began in earnest. Concentrating on the unarmored heads, the companions did their damnedest with bootheels, shattering and scattering jawbones and teeth, sending blood and then skull and brains squirting in all directions.
As the companions regrouped around the Reed boy, the rest of the pirate phalanx scrambled onto the truck. Ryan and his comrades fought in a frenzy, but hobbled by the bodies of the other slaves they were chained to, overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers, it was a lost cause from the start. After a couple of minutes they began to fall, one by one, under the rain of blows. Ryan was the last to drop, struck in the head and neck simultaneously. As more blows pounded him to the deck, he felt the boy torn from his grasp.
In a second he was back on his feet, but the anchor of the other slaves he was chained to kept him from jumping out of the truck in pursuit.
Jak, J.B., Krysty, Mildred and Doc rose bloodied from the stake truck bed. They watched through the wall slats as the Matachìn carried young Garwood fighting and thrashing up the steps to the altar. They pinned him on his back in the middle of the ancient stone slab, his arms and legs spread wide. With one hand the spider priest tore open the boy’s ragged T-shirt, the other hand held the golden dagger.
“Lord have mercy,” Doc intoned.
But there was no mercy on offer this night.
The priest raised the ceremonial dagger in both hands, poised to strike downward, into the defenseless chest.
Garwood Reed didn’t beg for his life; he didn’t shame himself. A true son of Deathlands, he reared back his head and spit full in the priest’s face. That he could work up the necessary gob of spit under the circumstances spoke volumes as to his courage and his fortitude.
Without bothering to wipe away the spittle, the priest drove home the blade.
The boy went rigid on the altar.
A practiced, circular stroke opened a yawning hole beneath the sternum, and Garwood’s body suddenly relaxed. The boy was already dead when the priest plunged a hand into the cavity past the wrist, rooted around for a moment, and then jerked out a handful of dripping red flesh.
The heart.
The priest raised the gory hunk of muscle to his mouth. He sucked a mouthful of blood from one of its severed vessels then spit it out. He sucked and spit four times, in each of the ordinal directions. Crimson rivulets drooled off his chin.
It was a blessing of some unspeakable kind.
“Why him?” Krysty gasped. “Why did the bastards take him?”
“Because he was the youngest of the captured slaves,” Mildred said, her eyes brimming with tears. “The young ones are probably the most prized as sacrifices to the demons they worship.”
“Or are forced to worship,” Ryan said.
Looking around, he saw the stigma of the foul religion at every turn. The color of the church. The sashes of the armed sec men. The robes of the murderer priest. The banners hanging down the fronts of the buildings. When you were outnumbered big-time, organized terror was the only way to control a subject people. Mebbe this place wasn’t so different than Deathlands, after all, he thought. The barons enforced their tyranny and extracted obedience with violence and fear. If there was a difference here, it was in scale and sophistication.
“There will be hell to pay for this abomination,” Doc swore, his pale blue eyes blazing with fury, his teeth stained red with his own blood. “By the Three Kennedys, there will surely be hell to pay….”
Drenched with sweat from the fighting, Ryan struggled to catch his breath in the seething, humid air. The red sashes all around the convoy were jumping up and down, waving their clubs, working themselves into a dither over the sacrifice. Their chill frenzy spilled into and infected the surrounding crowds. Pretty soon everyone was jumping up and down, and yelling blue murder.
A civilian suddenly darted through the line of red sashes and jumped into the back of the stake truck before anyone could stop him. His eyes looked bloodshot and squirrelly, like he was strung out on jolt. He had a long, thin-bladed knife clasped between his teeth, the sharp edge pointing away from his lips. Whipping the knife from his jaws, with an animal cry, he charged for Ryan.
The reveller intended to do a little sacrificing himself, maybe grab some of glory of the moment.
Ryan easily deflected the too-slow lunge with his manacled wrists and delivered a cracking head butt. Blood gushed from the man’s crushed nose, but it was already lights out, squirrelly eyes rolling back in his skull. Doc, Mildred and Jak seized hold of the attacker’s arms and legs and threw him out of the truck. The red sashes swarmed in and pulled the unconscious man away.
They were still beating him into the pavement when High Pile hopped back on the running board and the trucks resumed their slow-speed parade. They drove past a railroad terminal, obviously long-abandoned. From there the convoy followed the road’s curve onto the peninsula. Behind them, the mob followed, clogging the street curb to curb. It trailed them for what Ryan guessed was close to two miles. Then the trucks turned off the road and parked on a stone quay between a row of stone buildings and
the edge of the bay.
Forty feet away, across the water, was the old Spanish fort. Bright lights aiming down from notches in the battlements illuminated a low, pedestrian bridge that connected the fort to the quay.
The captives were shoved out of the stake trucks and forced to line up beside them. At High Pile’s order, the Matachìn disconnected Ryan from the file, pulled him from the ranks and pushed him to the bridge.
It appeared he was the slave of honor.
The far end of the bridge terminated at the point of one of the ravelins. The diamond-shaped projection, three-stories of windowless, weathered limestone block, stuck out from the fort’s perimeter. Ryan could see a narrow archway at the bridge’s end, and an open wrought-iron gate.
Urged forward at blasterpoint onto the bridge, Ryan glanced over the side. In the lights from the battlements he saw bones. Human bones in the crystal-clear water. The bottom was carpeted with mounds of them. Stripped white, jumbled skulls, long bones, ribs. There were darker blotches, too, and they were moving sideways. Crabs the size of dinner plates crawled over the piles of naked bones, looking for a snippet that the others had missed.
Fat, happy crabs.
Chapter Four
To get a view out the screen in the deck hold’s narrow air vent, Daniel Desipio had to press his temple against the ceiling and crane his neck at a painful angle. The twentieth-century freezie and author of twenty-nine published novels could hear the wild victory celebration outside, but he couldn’t see any of it. The view out the bug-proofed air vent was entirely blocked by the bow of the tug moored closely behind.
Despondent, Daniel slumped back to the floor of his five-by-five-by-five cell and hung his head in his hands. There would have been no great victory in Deathlands without him, yet no one knew or cared about his contribution to the campaign. His thoughts slipped into a deep, dark and familiar groove.
More than a century earlier, before Armageddon, while still a ghost writer on the Slaughter Realms pulp action series, he had often imagined his publisher’s holiday office parties: the editors and assistants—English Lit majors all—in cotillion gowns and black tuxedos, consuming champagne punch and finger sandwiches to the strains of live, string quartets. While committees of Lit majors risked broken fingernails fastening paper clips to two-sentence memos, Desipio struggled alone and under poor light with hundred-thousand-word deadlines. While the SR editorial staff took latte and croissant breaks, he lived on water and corn dogs. Instead of winter vacationing in the Bahamas, driving company cars, carrying company credit cards, the lowly ghost expeditioned to the corner 7/11 on foot and paid for his hot dogs in loose change. He imagined editorial’s sweeping, panoramic view from the tower office block; he had no view at all. In his previous life, he had lived belowground, in a grotty, two-room, basement apartment in the flatlands of Berkeley, California. The concrete floor sweated. The concrete walls sweated. He sweated. His above-ground neighbors, all rich college students and professors, mocked him and called him “the Mole Man” to his face.
All Daniel Desipio really had was his devotion to writing, his Art. To further it, and to break the economic and social bonds that kept him from reaching his full creative potential, he had volunteered for ultrasecret lab-rat duty in the jungles of Panama. This in the hope that the experience would give him something truly original and important to write about, and allow him to stake his claim to fame and wealth.
Long before nukeday’s dawn, things had gone very wrong on the remote prison island. During the course of the black box-funded experiments, his blood became infected with an engineered virus of unheard-of and unstoppable lethality, but to which he was immune. He had been offered a choice by the facility’s whitecoats: to live out the rest of his life in isolation on the island hellhole or to go into cryogenic sleep until a cure could be found.
When he was reanimated more than one hundred years later, he was shocked to learn that there was still no cure for the virus in his blood; that in the interim the civilized world had blown itself apart and that he was to be deployed as a walking biological weapon by the tenth-generation offspring of the penal colony’s original rapists and murderers.
Through the narrow air vent, the clamor of the crowd crescendoed. The pirates had begun their victory lap around Veracruz’s central square.
Daniel lowered his forehead to his upraised knees, and then thumped it upon them, hard, over and over again. After all the effort he’d made and the pain he’d endured, what in his life had changed?
He still got no credit for his heroic deeds, only now the body count he created was real, and he wasn’t paid a penny in compensation. He still lived in a hole, only now it was under even worse conditions. He had a bucket for a toilet and no toilet paper. He ate with his fingers out of an old tin can. No TV or skin mags for companionship. No showers. Whether imprisoned belowdecks or walking free as a plague vector, he was still looked down upon by everyone he met—everyone except the droolies. He’d always been able to count on the droolies.
Though as far as he knew there were no more novels of any kind being published, though he had no writing instruments or paper, that didn’t stop him from attempting to compose great works of destiny in his mind. But unhappily, no matter the starting point, all his epic, original ideas eventually turned into Slaughter Realms books. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get the series and the characters out of his head. Perhaps it was a function of his having written so many of them? Or perhaps cryogenesis had permanently damaged his creative synapses.
Sooner or later, the characters started to banter and jive like the series’ regulars. Instead of the vast, labyrinthine conspiracies he envisioned himself writing, the stories devolved into highly detailed, sword and gun fights, and the occasional extraneous, space-filling sexual romp. Heads parted company with necks; cranial contents Jackson-Pollacked opposing mud-plastered walls and ceilings; bowels tumbled steaming from torsos in fat gray coils; and sweat-lubricated bodies writhed in ecstasy and exploded in impossible joy.
In sum, his 137 years of existence had been nothing less than a classic, wall-to-wall fuck up.
More pain and suffering awaited him because his lifeblood was still valuable to his masters; or to be more specific, the marrow in his bones was valuable. Daniel was the only plague vector who’d survived the Deathlands adventure. All the other fire talkers, gaudy sluts and traveling tinkers had perished, either at the hands of the enemy or thanks to an overabundance of friendly fire. Without enanos, their infected ones, the Lords of Death couldn’t maintain their stranglehold on the Central American city-states. For their part, the Matachìn didn’t care how many of the enanos died, or how it happened. The only accounting of casualties came from Commander Casacampo, and he could make up any story that suited him.
A very long time ago, while Tooby was still an ice cube with hair, the Lords of Death were just a band of Matachìn, themselves—simple, brutal seafaring pirates. They had elevated themselves to godhood by being the first to control the plague and then apply it to the battlefield.
There was a roar at Daniel’s back; the tug’s diesels were starting up. He felt a lurch of movement as the tug turned away from the pier.
The next leg of his long journey about to begin.
The journey back to hell.
Chapter Five
At blasterpoint, Ryan crossed the footbridge and passed through the iron gate, which opened onto a narrow, dank, stone corridor. The passage was lit by a string of bare, dim bulbs draped along the ridge of the ceiling. Ryan guessed the walls were at least five or six feet thick—thick enough to stop a sixteenth-century cannonball.
From behind came the clanks of chains and the sounds of boots scraping on the limestone floor; the other slaves were being hurried along by the Matachìn.
When Ryan, High Pile and their escort exited the corridor’s far end, they stepped out into the corner of a huge courtyard. Harsh light from the battlements illuminated the long colonnades on either side. On t
he left, the structure was faced with red brick; on the right it was naked limestone. Through the room-size arches on that side, Ryan could see the exterior wall and the gated entrance to the fort’s dock. The three masts of a large sailing ship were visible above it. Stretching out before them was a grassy sward. A two-story building blocked the far end, its rows of tall windows overlooking the courtyard.
Immense, sculpted stone heads of the various Atapuls guarded the colonnades’ entrances, ten heads to a side, glaring across the sward at one another. As Ryan walked on, he saw evidence of other recent human sacrifices. Fist-size gobbets of blackening flesh lay on the ground at the base of each of the idols.
Excised hearts. Twenty of them in all.
Along the left-hand wall were the rest of the remains, torsos in one heap, heads in another.
It smelled like a charnel house, and there wasn’t a breath of wind to stir the death stench inside the compound.
A group of eight men awaited them in front of the building at the end of the courtyard. Seven were robed and head-dressed priests, led by none other than the hairless spider himself. Ryan glanced up at the battlements on either side, three stories above. They were lined with red sashes. Close to three hundred of the sec men, he reckoned. All armed. All looked down at the spectacle.
The pirate commander advanced the last twenty feet by himself. Ignoring the priests, he knelt in front of the eighth man, who apparently outranked them all.
At first Ryan thought the guy was wearing an elaborate mask over his face, then he realized it was his face.
The one-eyed warrior had seen plenty of disfigurements in Deathlands. Some were accidental; some were battle scars like his own; some were hard punishment meted out for crimes; some were purely decorative. This one was in a league of its own.
A living fright mask.
The corners of the man’s mouth had been surgically extended deep into his cheeks, and the lips excised top and bottom, this to reveal inch-and-a-half-long fangs of gold where his canine teeth had once been. It gave him a permanent, awful, stylized grin, like the Atapul heads. Evenly spaced welts of purple, scarified tissue bridged his nose and cheeks, making them look corrugated, like a boar’s snout. Unlike the Atapul representations, his tongue wasn’t pointed or a foot long. His high-piled dreads were caged in a ceremonial headdress. The breastplate of his gilded battle armor was spattered with drops of fresh blood.