Dark Resurrection

by James Axler

  “They’re bracketing us, trying to lock in the range. Give them a taste of that MG, Ryan!”

  If the flares’ light exposed Tempest to the fort’s fire, it also exposed the fort to Ryan. He shouldered the PKM and strafed the ancient battlements with steel-jacketed rounds. Every tenth round in the mag was a tracer, which made it easy for him to track his bullet fall. It wasn’t precision work, though. Not without a telescope. Not without a fully illuminated target. He walked autofire up the walls to zero in on the gun emplacements.

  When the cannons’ muzzles flashed, Ryan rained a hail of slugs down on the afterimages.

  Which slowed the barrage, but didn’t end it.

  Before the first batch of flares splashed down, a second volley was launched to keep the target in view.

  Cannon rounds landed close on either side of the ship, blowing foaming divots in the black water, so close that Ryan felt the hell gust of their explosions and heard the scream of hot shrap flying between the masts.

  As he reloaded the PKM, Tom took evasive action. “Keep your heads down!” the trader cried, cutting the helm hard to starboard. He wasn’t giving the red sash gunners an easy broadside to hit. Although he ran a zigzag, evasive course, he kept the smallest possible target—the stern—facing their muzzles.

  Ryan racked the PKM’s actuator, chambering the first round in the box mag. He noted there were no ships in pursuit. At least not yet. He put the lack of response down to the general disarray and confusion from the blackout and the dispersal of red sashes and Matachìn forces along the execution parade route.

  Between the booms of the cannon, he heard sporadic small-arms fire coming from downtown Veracruz. It sounded like the good citizens were rising up, and the red sashes were burning ammo to fight them off.

  Another reason they weren’t being chased.

  When the second round of flares winked out in the sea, darkness closed in, but Harmonica Tom already had his compass heading. As they cleared the bay entrance, they met a breeze hard from the north, gusting steadily, and a three-foot, running chop.

  A third volley of flares lit up the bay.

  “Take the helm, Ryan,” Tom said. “Put the wind behind us, while I get the sails raised.”

  As he spoke, there was another distant boom far off the stern, from the direction of the fort. One final, desperate cannon shot, lobbed extrahigh, came whistling down. One lonely miss, exploding some two hundred yards short.

  Tempest scooted away into the blackness.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Tempest sliced through the wind chop with hardly a shudder. Though Ryan couldn’t see it, he sensed the expanse of empty black sea and sky ahead. He only had a rough sense of their direction, but he knew Harmonica Tom was putting as much distance between them and the harbor as quickly as he could.

  The strong crosswind that drove the ship did nothing to cut the humidity, and the air was much warmer than his body temperature. It was like breathing in steam. Riding on the breeze was the raw stench of the raging petroleum fires they’d left behind, a stench straight from the bowels of hell.

  Ryan looked off the stern and saw only darkness behind them, sky and land made indivisible. He remembered what Veracruz had looked like the night before. The brilliant glow of its electrics, so full of promise, of hope for the resurrection of human civilization. It turned out that the hope was tainted by the usual suspects, the murderous and the avaricious; not that that mattered in the long view. It was all gone now.

  A nest of busy ants crushed under a boot heel.

  The outcome gave him no satisfaction; just the opposite. Too many innocent people had been harmed. And would be harmed for years, perhaps decades to come. Was there an upside? Could the people of Veracruz seize the opportunity and throw off their oppressors? Or would they buckle under once more? It was out of his hands—as if it had ever been in his hands in the first place. Before the end was in sight he had no doubt that more innocents would suffer and die. The revenge for what had been done to Garwood Reed and his fellow Padre Islanders had just begun.

  Ryan was free of chains for the first time in nearly a month, but instead of elation and relief he felt anxious, keyed up. He wanted to run until his lungs and legs gave out, but he couldn’t even pace the ship’s deck. It was so dark on the water he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. The only light was the faint reddish glow of the helm’s control panel and compass. Although Ryan was free of physical restraints he hadn’t escaped yet, not really. He would never be free while his companions were missing and in chains. He couldn’t go back to Deathlands without them, without finding out what had happened to them.

  Black sea. Black sky. Black ship.

  And the entire world to get lost in.

  The monumental scale of the task made him feel something he didn’t expect, something he didn’t like one bit, something he wasn’t used to: it made him feel inadequate.

  After they had run with the wind for the better part of an hour, Tom switched on the deck and cabin lights. The yellow glow barely penetrated the surrounding gloom, but at least they could see the limits of the ship.

  “No one’s coming after us?” Chucho said, glancing aft.

  Ryan looked behind them, as well.

  Nothing but sea back there.

  And darkness.

  “Even if they are,” Tom replied, “by now we’re way past their line of sight, over the curvature of the earth. No way are they going to see the deck lights. I’ll leave the mast lights off. No need to tempt fate.”

  “Couldn’t a ship come up on us from behind? Overtake us?” Chucho said.

  “There wasn’t a ship in that harbor that could catch us, not while we’re being pushed by wind like this. Not even the Matachìn tugs. And that’s assuming they guessed right on which direction we took.”

  Tom looked down at his feet. A fan of blood and guts lay spread across the cockpit’s deck, narrow at the companionway end, much wider at the stern rail. They were standing in the splatter the PKM had blown out of the red sash boarding party. Their boot soles had smeared pink streaks on the no-slip textured fiberglass.

  “How about you two cleaning up the mess?” Tom said. “Or we’ll be tracking it belowdecks.”

  “I don’t mind,” Ryan said.

  Chucho shrugged.

  The Hero Twins set to work in the cockpit, and along the coaming and port rail. With hand brushes they scrubbed down the fiberglass and the stainless-steel fittings, and then sluiced everything out the scuppers with the wash-down hose. When they were done, they rinsed off the soles of their boots, as well.

  After they had finished Tom wrinkled up his nose and said, “You two could really use a wash, too. Use the shower in the main cabin. There’s extra clothes in the drawers under the bed. And while you’re at it, open the front companionway door, get some air flow going, blow the cordite stink out.”

  Ryan’s stomach rumbled ominously, like distant thunder. “We haven’t eaten in a while, either,” he said.

  “There’s a pot of beans on the side of the stove,” the trader said. “Some tortillas, too. Cooked bacon. Hardboiled eggs. Fruit on the table. Help yourselves.”

  Ryan followed Chucho down the stairs.

  There was spent brass everywhere.

  “Go on, you get washed first,” Ryan said. “I’ll pick up the shells so we don’t trip and break our necks.”

  “Don’t worry,” Chucho said, “I won’t use all the hot water.”

  After gathering up one hundred or so empty casings, Ryan helped himself to food: a bowl of cold beans with crumbled bacon and chopped egg sprinkled on top. He used the corn tortillas to scoop it up and shovel it in. From the aroma of garlic and onion, he thought it would taste better. It was like shoveling ashes, and it was nukin’ hard to swallow. He wasn’t used to having his mouth so full.

  As he finished up, Chucho returned to the galley in shorts and a T-shirt, his long hair dripping wet. He immediately dished himself some grub. He was still eating w
hen Tom joined them belowdecks. Once the skipper had the sails trimmed out the way he wanted them, he had lashed ropes to the wheel—his version of an autopilot. Ryan had seen him do this many times before.

  “I set a rough course, east southeast,” Tom said. “Gonna let this wind put more distance between us and the Matachìn.”

  “How are we going to find the others?” Ryan asked him. “Where do we even start looking?”

  Harmonica Tom grimaced and shook his head, stroking the ends of his long, sandy mustache.

  “You said something about a black ship?” Chucho said. “Sailboat?”

  Ryan nodded. “Three-masted schooner.”

  “I know that boat. It is the property of the Lords of Death. A special-purpose ship. If your friends are on it, I know where they are being taken.”

  He turned to Tom and said, “Do you have a chart of the land and sea to the south?”

  Tom pulled a map from his bookcase. He unrolled it and spread it out on the galley table. “We are here,” he said, indicating the waters off Veracruz.

  Ryan’s double planted a brown fingertip on the paper.

  Not on the Lantic side, but the Cific, at a dot of an island near the coast.

  And a long way from where they were.

  “Xibalba,” he said. “They are being taken to Xibalba. The island was called Coiba before Armageddon. Or Devil’s Island. It was a government prison, for the most dangerous criminals.”

  “That’s Panama,” Tom said. “Or at least it was.” He did a quick handspan calculation of the distance. “It’s at least fifteen hundred miles from here.”

  The trader indicated the narrowest part of the landmass with his finger. “This here is a ship canal, dug from east to west across the isthmus way before Armageddon, connecting the two oceans.” He looked at Chucho and said, “Are you telling me the canal is still there? It wasn’t hit by a nuke strike?”

  “It’s not there, but it wasn’t hit by a missile,” Chucho answered. “Nukeday brought terrible earthquakes to Panama, to all of Central America. The quakes broke the canal’s locks. When that happened, water came pouring out of the artificial lakes. Water from the lakes is what filled the canals and floated the ships. More water dammed up than you can even imagine. When the locks broke there was an incredible flood in both directions, east and west from the high point of the canal. It washed out most of the city at the Atlantic end and badly damaged the city at the Pacific end. Now, the only time there is water in the canal is when it rains. And the only way to cross Panama is to go overland.”

  Ryan tapped at Coiba island on the map. “Why are they being taken to this place?” he said.

  Chucho shook his head.

  “Come on, what is it?” Ryan said.

  “I won’t lie to you, it is very bad, my friend,” the look-alike said. “I don’t understand the whitecoat science behind it. I don’t know anybody who does. I know the outcome because I have seen it myself. The Lords of Death take ordinary people to Xibalba and turn them into monsters by poisoning their blood. They do this to create more enanos, their plague carriers. After the transformation they send these soulless devils out into the world to do their bidding, to spread disease, destruction and fear. The enanos want to live so badly, they will do anything the Lords tell them. Even unthinkable things. They can’t help it. The Lords of Death delight in exploiting the weaknesses of animals and men. They have conscripted the animal that transfers blood, the mosquito, and the human being who makes it, to their cause. The mosquito can’t help drinking blood. The human being can’t help hoping things will get better, and in that hope, finds a reason to survive.

  “There is no way to tell the devils from regular people. They don’t look sick. They don’t act sick. That makes everyone a suspect, until the dying is done and only the enanos are left standing. The Lords of Death have fielded an army that is more powerful and deadly than the Matachìn. An army that can’t be seen and can’t be stopped. They’ll make your friends soldiers in that army, if they live through the poisoning of their blood.”

  “Whitecoat shit,” Tom swore.

  “How long does it take to turn somebody into one of these things?” Ryan said.

  “A few weeks. But it is very painful, and as I said, many more die than live through it.”

  “How do you know all this?” Tom said.

  “I’ve captured some of these enanos, and I’ve tortured them, holding out the promise of merciful death until they told me all they knew. And I have traveled…”

  “You’ve been there?” Tom said. “To this Xibalba?”

  “After I escaped prison the second time,” Chucho said, “or maybe it was the third. I needed to cool off, to make myself scarce for a while. I came to Panama with a comrade in arms, a fellow former prisoner who hated the red sashes and priests as much as I did. We crossed the fifty miles of jungle to the Pacific side of the canal. We wanted to see if the Lords of Death were really gods. And if they weren’t, to kill them in their beds. We stole a rowboat from the mainland.”

  “What happened?” Tom said.

  “Never got close enough. The Lords live in and around the old prison compound—an island in the middle of an island. We landed on the beach at Coiba but we never found the gates of Xibalba.”

  “Why not?” the skipper prompted.

  “There are many bad things there.”

  “You mean, Matachìn?” Ryan asked.

  “No,” Chucho said. “We didn’t see any pirates. The island is covered with jungle so thick you can’t even hack through it. Under that canopy it is very dark, very hot, and there is no air to breathe—a green hell. The only way to advance is to follow the creeks up and down the steep ravines the water has cut in the mountainsides. It is very slow going, the footing is treacherous—a deep, ankle-grabbing litter of palm fronds and leaves, and hiding in the litter there are snakes. Suspended in the branches and strangler vines overhead, there are vampire bats. In the creeks, themselves, hiding under the log jams are crocodiles. But worst of all are the dogs.”

  “Dogs?” Tom said, a puzzled look on his face.

  “They’re the offspring of the animals who were on the island back when it was a prison. They’ve been running loose in the jungle in wild packs, breeding, killing, eating anything they can catch for over a hundred years. They’re not afraid of anything or anyone. And you can’t outrun them, either.”

  “You made it out,” Ryan said.

  “Barely. We were deep in the jungle when they picked up our scent. We could hear them baying off in the distance. We couldn’t see them, but from the sounds of the howler monkeys we knew they were circling and closing in on us. We turned back for the boat at once. They were on our heels as we broke through to the beach. Big, powerful dogs. Eighty, ninety pounders. Huge heads and jaws. Wet to the skin from crashing through the brush. Snarling and snapping, crazy for the kill.

  “My friend was pulled down from behind as we ran. He was still screaming when I hit the water. There was no time to try for the boat. I had to swim away for my life. A few of the dogs followed me in, but they quickly gave up. They smelled the fresh meat on the beach, and knew they were losing out on an easy meal. I treaded water off the island for a long time. I was lucky the sharks didn’t find me. When I swam back for the boat, there was nothing left of my friend but the bloody rags of his clothes scattered over the sand. The dogs had torn up his body and dragged the parts into the jungle to eat. I rowed back to the mainland by myself.”

  “So no one knows what’s in this Xibalba?” Tom said.

  “Or if this Atapul X or any of the Lords of the Dead are real?” Ryan added.

  “The enanos know what’s there. The ones I questioned thought Atapul X was real. They claimed to have seen him sitting on his golden throne. They described a palace hidden in a wide clearing, deep in the heart of the jungle. Sumptuous, spacious apartments for each of the twelve Lords. Many slaves, many minor devils to provide them companionship and amusement. Hanging gardens, broad a
venues and displays of stolen treasure.

  “The enanos all told me that the approach to the gates of the underworld is lined with many terrible trials, many deadly traps. These are designed to protect the Lords of Death from intruders. We never got close enough to encounter any of them.”

  “What are the Lords of Death so afraid of?” Ryan asked.

  “Afraid?” Chucho said. “No, they’re like the Xibalban dogs. They’re not afraid of anything. They’ve perfected their domain and their dominance, they are content with pulling the strings that make the wider world jerk. They want nothing to disturb their pleasure.”

  “How did criminals get to be self-appointed gods?” Tom said.

  “The story the enanos told me is this,” Chucho said. “Nukeday broke open the prison and freed the island’s convicts who were being used for weapon testing by whitecoats from the north. Coiba was and is remote and dangerous, the perfect place to develop secret and illegal weapons of disease. If the diseases accidentally got loose, their spread could be controlled, and no one cared if the prisoners lived or died. After all, they were the scum of the Earth. When the predark die-off rate was unexpectedly high, the whitecoats had to import nonconvicts for the tests.

  “After Armageddon, the prisoners used the island as a base for their piracy. In the early days, Matachìn recruited crews from the ruined port towns on the Atlantic side, and they conscripted sailors from captured ships on the high seas. The choice they offered was to join them or die. They tried to move their operations north to the cities of Cancun, Veracruz and Tampico, where the real booty was, but even with expanded navies they didn’t have enough fighters to do the job. They were driven back, time and again. That’s when they forced the few surviving whitecoats to start thawing out the disease weapons, bringing the freezies back to life.”

  “And the god business?” Tom said.

  “That plays on ancient fears and superstitions to keep the populations under control, using minimum manpower and without resorting to more plague. Too much plague would kill too many people, and without workers to rob and enslave, the Lords would have nothing. The only way to end their reign of evil is to find them and kill them all.”