by James Axler
This was no better than Deathlands.
As they jolted off the walls and bounced on the floor of the narrow-wheel-based cart, Mildred turned her attention to the Fire Talker. Through the netting, she could see he still wore his ridiculous camouflage do-rag, a survivalist affectation that virtually shouted “Poseur!” She could also see how pale his skin had become. That was understandable: he hadn’t seen the light of day for more than three weeks.
The puzzle of the mosquito netting vexed her.
“Why are they keeping you under wraps?” Mildred asked him.
“I had a bad reaction to bug bites,” Daniel said matter of factly. From the dopey smile on his face, he was feeling no pain at present, thanks to the residual effect of his breakfast.
“That’s why they locked you in the hold on the tug?” Mildred said.
“Uh-huh.”
“You looked pretty goddamned lively to me on Padre Island,” Krysty said. “Not sick at all when you set the pirates on us.”
That wasn’t the only thing that made no sense to Mildred. “And you didn’t catch whatever it was that chilled the islanders,” she said.
“Lucky, I guess.”
Mosquito bites. Virus. Viral transfer. Daniel’s isolation outside the target zone. Netting to protect those around him when he was out of doors. Suddenly it all fell into place for Mildred, and it didn’t make her a happy camper. Fists tightly clenched at her sides she said, “Either you were lucky, or you brought the plague to Padre Island with you. You brought it there in your blood.”
“What are you saying, Mildred?” Doc asked as he tried and failed to follow the thread of logic.
“I think our shitweasel here is a carrier,” she said. “I think he’s the source of the infection that slaughtered all those people on Padre. His blood is loaded with the disease virus. He’s a walking biological weapon. Skeeters bite him, pick up the virus in his blood, then bite someone else and give it to them. On and on, until just about everyone in the surrounding area is infected. The disease would spread through an isolated population in a big hurry.”
“You bastard!” J.B. growled, lunging for the Fire Talker only to be brought up a yard short by his chains.
Daniel jerked back, instinctively raising his netted hands to protect his face. When it was clear he was in no danger, he lowered his hands.
“It is true?” Krysty demanded of him.
Daniel didn’t try to deny what Mildred surmised. He just shrugged it off. The cat was out of the bag. No big deal.
“What kind of a creature are you?” Krysty said.
“I believe the technical term for him is mass murderer,” Doc said.
“It’s in my blood,” Daniel admitted. “I can’t help it. I didn’t put it there. I didn’t ask for it. They did it to me.”
“Who did it to you?” Mildred said.
The Fire Talker didn’t answer.
“He told us he was part of a whitecoat experiment before nukeday,” J.B. said. “Said it went wrong.”
“You may not have asked for it,” Krysty said, “but you can control how it’s used.”
“She is referring to your moral fiber,” Doc added. “Or lack thereof.”
“That isn’t my fault, either,” Daniel countered. “It was my parents. They rejected me when I was little because I was different. I wasn’t like them, or anyone else in the family. They couldn’t understand my need to read adventure books and to try to write them. They were always yelling at me about it. I had to hide my short stories or they’d burn them in the fireplace. They thought I was lazy and a daydreamer, maybe even somewhat mentally defective, and they were sure that I’d never amount to anything. They wanted me to do something worthwhile with my life, something that made good, steady money like my cousins who owned a fast-food franchise and a strip-mall copy-and-mail service center. I could never live up to their expectations, and they never lived up to mine. That’s haunted me ever since I was seven years old. My parents have been dead more than a century and I still think about their rejection every day.”
All the buck-passing and boo-hooing set Mildred’s teeth on edge. “You’re a monster,” she informed him. “A self-made fucking monster.”
“It isn’t like I chilled those people with my own two hands,” Daniel countered.
“Yeah, you don’t have the stones for that,” J.B. said.
“They call you enano, that means dwarf,” Mildred said.
“I am not treated well, if that’s what you’re getting at. I am regarded as a necessary evil.”
“You’re pure scum, so why should anyone treat you otherwise?” Krysty said.
“Because what I’ve got inside me has done a lot for them,” Daniel replied. “It’s served their cause.”
“What do they intend to do to us?” Mildred asked.
Daniel shrugged again, this time in apparent disinterest.
“Where are they taking us?” Mildred pressed.
“They call it Xibalba,” he answered after a pause. “Someplace even warmer.”
“To hell, you mean?”
“Pretty much.”
It was Jak’s turn to make a grab for the Fire Talker, and he moved in a white blur. The morning’s drugs seemed to be wearing off more quickly than usual, perhaps because they were all perspiring so heavily, sweating the dope right out of their systems. Despite a valiant effort, the albino youth came up well short at the end of his chains. This time the freezie bastard didn’t even flinch. He just sat there as calm as could be, his arms folded over his chest, grinning from ear to ear.
The companions rode on in stony silence. They had learned the hard way that they had to watch what they said in front of the net-draped backstabber.
Ahead, Mildred saw that brown water covered a long section of the lane. Dog-face and the other horsemen slowed down before they entered it. As the companions’ cart rolled onto the swampy section of roadway, the wheels began to shudder and the cart box shook so violently it felt like it was going to fly apart. When Mildred looked over the side, the bow wave created by the front wheels revealed the cause of the rough ride. The road metal was made of foot-wide tree trunk sections, no doubt tropical hardwoods impervious to rot. They had been pounded straight down into the mud, edge to edge. This to keep the horse carts from sinking in over the tops of their wheels.
They left the tree trunks and began climbing up a shallow grade. The sides of the road rose much faster than they did. Soon it was clear they were traveling in a man-made ditch. It was more than fifty feet deep. A shallow ooze of water meandered down the middle of it. In rainy season, Mildred knew the flow along this route would have been a torrent. In places the side walls had caved in, top to bottom, from erosion, forcing the lane to wind back and forth around the mounds of toppled earth and rock.
“Where the fuck are we?” J.B. asked.
“We’re in what’s left of the old ship channel,” Mildred told him. “Believe it or not, this is the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal.”
“What canal?” J.B. said. “It’s practically nukin’ dry.”
“Remarkable!” Doc exclaimed as he took it in. “This project was under way when I was time-trawled, but the French were a far cry from finishing it.”
“They never did finish it,” Mildred told him. “They turned it over to the U.S. around 1900. Took another fifteen years to get it done.”
“When completed,” Doc said, “it was supposed to be one of the wonders of the modern world.”
“Not so wonderful,” Jak said. “Looks like nukin’ big shithole.”
After they’d gone farther, Doc said, “But where are the locks? There have to be locks.”
“My guess is they broke open, probably from earthquakes on nukeday,” Mildred said. “One after another, like dominoes falling. Then the force of the water released from the dammed-up lakes tore the gates right out of the bedrock, tore out all the shoring, too. Thirty years of sweat and sacrifice, gone in the blink of an eye.”
After
what Mildred estimated was a three-mile journey, they exited the far end of the narrow channel. In front of them the vista broadened, exposing a plain of destruction all the way to the western horizon. It was the former artificial lake bed.
This was a different sort of devastation, a vast table of low, scrub vegetation and bare rock, broken here and there by densely forested humps and hills—the high points in elevation that had been turned into islands when the river valley was flooded to form the lake. When the trillions of gallons of water had flowed out to sea, it had scraped the landscape clean, right down to the bedrock. The road in front of them was much wider and well traveled. It ran string-straight for a good mile, then it disappeared around a forested mound.
They descended onto the sweltering plain. Skeletons of one-hundred-foot-tall trees, two centuries dead, drowned when the land was inundated, were smothered in drooping tangles of strangler vines. The second growth scrub was no more than eight feet high, and packed into dense patches, presumably where some topsoil remained. Clouds of black flies buzzed over potholes filled with stagnant water. Wide swatches of wet mud, possibly quicksand, lay just off the rutted path. The convoy made slow but steady progress, heading toward the flanks of the low islands-hills.
When Mildred looked behind them, off to the right, she saw a vast wedge of smooth concrete embedded in the lake’s rim. The dam hadn’t burst, after all. That explained the extent of the damage to Colón. The full force of the flood had gone out the ship channel, through the city, into the bay, not the natural river channel well to the west.
Under the blazing sun, in the still air, the blistering heat and humidity, it was hard to breathe.
“It must be close to fifty miles to the Pacific side of this ditch,” Mildred said to the Fire Talker, pointing over his shoulder to the west. “Are we going that far? Is it all going to be like this?”
The poseur didn’t answer her. He was pretending, and not very convincingly, that he was asleep.
Over and over, Mildred kept asking herself, What do these fuckers want with us? Why us? Why were we pulled out of the line in the fort? And the other survivors of Padre and the three weeks of rowing dragged off to ritual slaughter? It was High Pile who’d done it, she recalled. It had been his decision to spare their lives—for something. The bits of the puzzle were there, she could feel it, but she couldn’t quite piece them together.
Not yet, anyway.
If they were going to get out of this mess, Mildred knew they were all going to have to stop eating. She also knew it was possible that J.B., Doc and Jak would experience withdrawal symptoms—fever, itching, sweating, nervousness. Symptoms that would be difficult to hide. On the trail there would be no way to rinse off the drugs. They would have to ditch their food, somehow. And do it in front of Daniel without his catching on. That wasn’t going to be easy.
Looking at the sniveling bastard feigning sleep to avoid confrontation, she wished she’d had another yard of slack in her chain. Kicking in his head, even if it didn’t save their lives, would ultimately save the lives of innumerable others.
As they approached the first of the islands-hills, coming within perhaps two hundred yards of it, Nibor called a halt to advance. He and the other horsemen dismounted. Their cart driver locked the brake, then picked up the RPD.
For a split second, when he stood and turned the weapon toward them, Mildred’s heart sank. She thought, This is it. They’ve taken us out to this waste ground to finish us off. That’s what the others thought, too; she could see it in their eyes.
Then her whitecoat’s logical brain kicked in. Driving all the way out here just to execute them seemed like a whole lot of trouble for nothing.
Her analysis proved correct.
The cart driver held the light machine gun braced against his hip, aimed not at the passengers, but at the scraggly line of scrub trees off to their left. Dog-face and the other three horsemen aimed their weapons toward the forested hill and points on either side.
Then they all cut loose at once, unleashing a thundering roar of overlapping autofire that echoed out over the flatland.
In the distance Mildred could see leaves and branches clipped off and dropped by the sprays of bullets, and puffs of dust where they struck and skipped off the bare ground; this in a broad half circle in front of them.
Five hundred rounds fired in forty-five seconds.
If there were hostiles out there lurking, if there were savage critters out there lying in wait, they either turned tail or fell flat on their bellies.
The warrior priests were sending a message. A don’t-fuck-with-us, we have ammo to burn.
Nibor and his men reloaded their RPDs with fresh drum magazines before the convoy moved on.
Chapter Eighteen
Commander Guillermo Casacampo lay in a stinking, moaning heap. The hiss of the Coleman lamp on the floor beside the mattress played counterpoint to the erratic slurp and slap of sweaty flesh as three of the hacienda’s sluts rendered intimate service.
The woman astride him had a determined, screwed-up, go-for-broke expression on her face as she merrily humped away. The other faces were busy, hidden behind the curves of her flipping hips, busy making lollypops of his testicles.
Casacampo was in hog heaven, lying back, smoking a fat, black cigar while getting seriously laid. Similar exertions earlier in the evening had caused his high-piled hair to fall loose and tumble down around his shoulders. The sluts were wearing borrowed golden trinkets, from his coiff’s treasure trove, on their brown wrists and around their slender necks. All three were shaved bare as babies between the legs; not like the whitecoat witches, he thought, who were woolly mammoths down there.
These sluts really knew how to screw. They performed half twists of the hips at just the right phase of the upstroke.
And their enthusiasm for the work was appreciated.
He puffed away on his stogie, head cradled on a forearm, watching his verga slippery slick, dipping in and out of suctioning, superheated heaven. He clenched the cigar between his teeth. Oh, that half twist! It had nailed him, again. The pirate’s hips jerked up from the mattress in a flurry of rapid, savage thrusts. The slut squealed and hung on to his chest for dear life, her legs flapping to the sides, her arms flapping to the sides, titties flapping every which way.
Glorious.
When his release faded, Casacampo sank back onto the sweaty sheets, taking the cigar out of his mouth so he could more easily gasp for breath. The slut disengaged herself and rolled onto her back beside him.
A chorus of rhythmic moans was coming from rooms down the hall. Moans punctuated by shrill cries that almost sounded like pain. But these Colón sluts weren’t hurting; just the opposite. His crew was hammering it, doing credit to the Matachìn name.
Then his head began to spin. It spun so fast he had to close his eyes and hang on to the edge of the bed. How much had he drunk, how much looney-weed had he smoked? How many times had these sweaty little bitches brought him to climax? For the life of him, he couldn’t remember.
A month of this kind of excess was the kind of R&R the doctor ordered, a just compensation for the dangers he’d faced, the valor he’d shown, for the victories he’d laid at the feet of the Lords of Death.
One of the other sluts picked up a jar from the floor, dipped a finger it to its contents, then started smearing the semiliquid stuff on his rapidly diminishing verga. The jungle concoction was cool at first, then warm, then warmer still. He felt a tickle deep in his pelvis as his manhood slowly but surely became hard yet again.
Music drifted in from down the hall. A happy, rhythmic tune. One of the sluts was playing a harmonica. No doubt about it, he thought, these Colón ladies were multitalented mistresses of the fuck. Not so much to look at from the neck up, as most of their teeth had cracked edges, like they’d been used to open beer bottles. But they didn’t giggle like idiots the whole time they were being banged, like some he could name.
Casacampo took a long pull on his cigar as the
anointing slut hurriedly straddled his hips. As she leaned back, impaling herself on him, he gave her a resounding smack on the behind.
Giddyap.
Then the room’s door opened and slammed back.
Everyone on the mattress looked as a naked pirate staggered in, his eyes bugging out of his head.
At first Casacampo thought the sailor was just wild-ass drunk, then he saw that his throat had been cut from ear to ear. Blood sheeted over his bare chest and dripped down his legs onto the floor.
The wounded Matachìn fell to his knees, unable to speak, begging for help with those bulging eyes and bloody outstretched hands. A shadowy figure appeared in the doorway right behind him. A savage boot between the shoulder blades drove the dying man face-first into the floor.
Casacampo blinked in shock and the cigar dropped from his gaping mouth. In the glow of the lantern, he saw the straps of a headlamp, then the black eye patch. He saw the silencer-equipped submachine gun and the machete stained crimson from gut hook to hand guard.
Then a second man stepped alongside the first.
Another eye patch, only the opposite eye socket was covered.
Both of them were alive. Both of them had escaped execution.
The commander prayed that he was merely asleep, that it was a dream brought on by all the joy juice and the marijuana he’d consumed. But it was not. It was all too real. He threw the slut off him, threw her so hard she flew from the mattress and thudded in a heap to the floor.
“You’re not going to be needing that,” Chucho said with a smirk, pointing the fat shroud of a submachine gun silencer at his verga.
“¡Whuh puta!” Casacampo snarled, groping alongside the mattress for his other weapon.
Not a chance.
The blue-eyed Hero Twin put a boot sole on the barrel of the 9 mm subgun, pinning it to the floor as he raised the machete to strike. The sluts ducked their heads and scattered for the far corners of the room.
A stinging kick in the backside wrung a groan from the pirate commander.