Dark Resurrection

by James Axler

  “Get up, asshole,” Chucho ordered. “You’re coming with us.”

  Surely there would be rescue, Casacampo thought. Surely his crew would mount a counterattack.

  Chucho tied his wrists behind his back with a plastic cable tie, cinched it up so tight it nearly made him whimper.

  The blue-eyed Twin then asked Chucho a question. Casacampo didn’t understand.

  Chucho answered in kind, then he translated his reply into Spanish, “Fuck the bastard, let him go naked.”

  “Come, my brown beauties,” Chucho said as he waved the women to their feet, then ushered them out of the room like a mother hen. “These stinking murderers will never molest you again.”

  Casacampo couldn’t help but bristle at that characterization. The “beauties” in question hadn’t objected in the least to being molested; in fact, they had insisted on repeated such impositions.

  Barefoot, bare-assed, his tower of dreads—the symbol of his rank—deconstructed, the commander was unceremoniously booted through the doorway and into the second-story hall.

  Someone will nip this effrontery in the bud, he assured himself. Two one-eyed men couldn’t have killed all my crew.

  Chucho shoved him onward, toward the main staircase. He stumbled past the open doors of rooms lit by white gas lanterns. The other sluts had all fled. In every room his men lay naked, butchered like hogs on the mattresses or the floor, sprawled in spreading pools of their own blood. No one had gotten off a shot. No one had gotten off a shout.

  It then occurred to him that the piercing cries he’d heard from down the corridor hadn’t been from sluts in climax, and weren’t cries of pleasure, but of surprise, pain and sudden death. The Hero Twins had made their way down the hall, room by room, to take him last of all. Drunk on joy juice, high on marijuana, in the midst of a marathon screw session, his pirates were not expecting that kind of trouble. Still, how could two men overcome ten times of their number and not raise an alarm?

  It turned out that there was a third member of the team. Another gringo waited for them at the top of the stairs. He had long flowing mustaches and a big, stainless-steel revolver on his hip. Like the others, he carried a silenced submachine gun and wore a headlamp, this over the crown of his billcap.

  Casacampo offered up no empty threats as he was urged down the staircase by the Hero Twins’ boots. These scum could go fuck themselves before he’d say a word to them, he told himself as he was kicked off the bottom step. He was a Matachìn commander, after all. Born to fight and die. There would be hell to pay for this indignity.

  To his right, the quarry tile floor was wet with blood. More pirates lay dead with their throats cut, their dreads soaking up the spilled gore like sponges. He could see the yawning second mouths under their chins, their necks had been sliced all the way to their spinal columns.

  In his mind, Casacampo tried to keep track of the crew he’d lost so far, and those still left to put up a fight. By his count there were still at least eight at large, more than enough to chop down these running dogs.

  Chucho and the blue eye hustled him out the double doors onto the covered patio. By the light of the guttering candelabrum, he saw more dead men, these killed by wire garrotes, their eyeballs bloodred, their faces black and bloated. Their tongues protruded as if they were giving final, obscene, black raspberries to the world.

  Out in the courtyard there was yet another corpse, this one facedown, the back of its skull split open.

  The intruders turned on their headlamps and the beams cut through the humid darkness. Obviously, they were confident that they had killed everyone inside the hacienda. The machine gunners on the rooftop were dead, too, Casacampo reasoned, or they would have opened fire by now. The commander realized that Chucho and his two friends had to have recced the grounds before the assault; they knew how many Matachìn there were and where to find them.

  Sixteen dead. He was down to three on his side.

  Even odds.

  When he was marched through the open stable doors, his hope evaporated. In the light of a lantern sitting on a hay bale, he saw three bodies hanging by their necks from the rafters. They dangled dead still, spines snapped, necks stretched to the splitting point.

  If the Twins and the gringo had fired a single shot to bring any of them down, there was no evidence of it. The commander, despite his resolve to stay strong to the end, was taken aback. They had killed nineteen trained, battle-seasoned pirates and none of the victims had made a sound, or apparently put up a fight.

  It was hard to shout a warning when your throat was cut so deep that your vocal cords were severed, or when a wire noose was squeezing off your air and the blood flow to your brain.

  Casacampo had always considered Chucho’s reputation to be overblown, fabricated out of whole cloth to make the priests and red sashes seem less incompetent. For one man to do so much damage to them, and get away with it again and again, he had to be bigger than life, right? The commander was having second thoughts about that assessment now. What if all of it was true? True, and then some?

  They made him stand in front of his hanged men, then the gringo with the mustache told him what they wanted.

  “¿Cinco gringos, dondè esta?”

  Bad accent, worse Spanish

  Casacampo hawked and spit on the man’s boots.

  Looking down at the splotch of nasty on his toe, the gringo shook his head and clicked his tongue in disapproval. In more bad Spanish he informed the commander, “We’re going to give you to Chucho then.”

  The renowned bandit and murderer had picked up a hand scythe from a hook on the stable wall. He slashed the crescent of pitted steel back and forth, testing its balance and reach.

  Casacampo’s heart thudded up under his chin. He had faced death many times before, but never naked, never with his hands tied behind his back.

  To make things much worse, Chucho was staring fixedly at his flaccid manhood as he whipped the scythe back and forth.

  Defiance, pride, honor melted away—they were just words, after all. They were replaced by ungodly fear.

  Casacampo felt a warm wetness in the straw under his bare feet, looked down and saw to his horror that he was pissing himself.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Mildred watched the Panamanian coastline glide by: staggered ranks of round-top mountains dark with jungle, and closer in, the brilliant flash of white surf breaking along miles of deserted beaches. Once again the vibration of twin diesels was putting her buttocks to sleep. As much as she could, given the minimal slack in her restraints, she shifted her sitting position on the ship’s deck.

  Her four companions, the shitweasel Fire Talker, the three whitecoats and their warrior-priest captors were running north from Panama City, and had been for almost eight hours straight. Their transportation had been upgraded considerably, from horse carts to a thirty-six-foot Bertram sportfisher. Its twin, fuel-injected Caterpillar diesels really put out the power: Mildred estimated their cruising speed at 25 knots or better. It was plenty fast enough to cool off the sweltering air and evaporate the sweat dripping down her face and running under her arms.

  The going was actually quite pleasant for a change; this was the easiest part of journey so far. Of course it would’ve been even better if she and the others hadn’t been chained to the rails of the Bertram’s stern deck bait well. There hadn’t been enough room around the well to hook Daniel up alongside them and still guarantee his safety, so he was fastened about six feet away, to the base of the port outrigger. That was nothing to cry over, either.

  The overland crossing of the Panamanian isthmus had been a three-day, two-night ordeal. The two nights were spent in outposts along the old canal route, in secure bunkers built into hillside caves. They were big enough to house a mule train, and they had their own freshwater cisterns. It was still unclear what their captors were afraid of, but their tension escalated as the sun began to set. They pushed the horses hard to reach shelter before nightfall.

  Wha
tever it was the warrior-priests were scared of, it didn’t have the brains or the dexterity to open the bunker doors from the outside between occupations, and thereby lie in wait for the next convoy.

  Although Mildred never saw anything moving, the forest on all sides came alive with breaking brush and shrill screams as evening descended. She had to wonder if there were muties in the Panamanian jungle, the same sort of brutal chillers that infested Deathlands. Or were there brand-new ones? Or was the mutie plague limited to the hellscape and the ground plowed and planted by the all-out nuclear exchange? Or had the stickies and scalies of the hellscape just not migrated this far south yet? Lot of questions, no answers.

  By unspoken agreement, the companions had begun ditching their food at every meal. The Fire Talker caught them at it on the first day on the trail, but instead of turning them in to the whitecoats, he demanded they give him what they weren’t going to eat themselves. He wasn’t really that desperate for extra rations, but he wanted more drugs, he wanted more oblivion. And the companions gladly accommodated him. It not only got rid of most of the evidence; it shut him up.

  On the afternoon of the third day, they had reached the shore of the Pacific. As it turned out, the rupture of the canal’s Pacific-end locks and the outflowing of Miraflores Lake, which was a teacup compared to the artificial reservoir on the Atlantic side, hadn’t devastated Panama City at all. Though its infrastructure had survived the canal’s destruction on skydark more or less intact, Panama City’s population had entirely vanished; as with Colón, the jungle had taken it back.

  For different reasons.

  Along the fractured, eroding highway on the edge of the city they had seen crude, hand-painted signs. Warning signs that looked weathered, many decades old.

  Plaga.

  Plague.

  Was it the same one that had devastated Padre Island? Mildred wondered. What were the odds of a second, incredibly deadly, unheard-of bioweapon popping up in this neck of the woods?

  Slim and none.

  The simplest answer was usually the right answer: Occam’s Razor.

  The little convoy had continued on, past the warning signs, toward a jagged skyline of towering buildings that framed a placid bay. There was no way of telling whether the disease was still in evidence, but there were definitely dangers of other kinds. As the horse carts rolled along, down a broad, creeper-covered side street Mildred saw a pair of sleek, black jaguars loping along, hunting for dinner. High above them, flocks of noisy scarlet macaw glided between the broken-out windows of high-rise towers.

  The companions had spent their third night out of Colón with a warrior-priest garrison bivouacked in the old Panama City yacht harbor. The yacht basin was either a safe distance from the plague zone of the central city, or the plague had in fact burned itself out. The harbor had been turned into a transit point for small craft shipping, both commercial and passenger. There were a dozen converted pleasure craft moored there, sail and power boats from thirty to sixty-five feet long.

  The Matachìn evidently had access to the intact fuel stores of Panama City, and probably enough diesel to last them another hundred years.

  Mildred couldn’t be sure whether the introduction of the plague to Panama City had come before or after the bioweapon had been used in Mexico on the Atlantic side. The destruction and loss of life in Panama City had definitely gotten out of control, though. There was no strategic advantage to completely wiping out a population of what had to have been at least a million people. The jungle that had invaded the city had been fertilized by all those rotting corpses.

  Killing everyone only complicated the pirates’ conquest: there was no one left to do any of the work, and a disease quarantine put the city’s bounty out of immediate reach. Which led Mildred to believe that this had to have been an earlier deployment of the weapon, perhaps even the first deployment, before the pirates realized the full extent of what it could do, and how fast it could spread. Perhaps the citizens of Panama City had successfully resisted the Matachìn incursions up to that point. Certainly they would have had the sheer numbers to turn back invaders.

  For what it was worth, the birds, monkeys and jaguar seemed to be immune to the plague.

  During the night they had spent on the waterfront, the Fire Talker’s ebullient mood, fueled by multiple doses of opiate, had turned suddenly darker. He began talking to himself like a man possessed, using the absurd voices of his absurd characters as they confronted his abusive and long-dead parents.

  It made sleep impossible.

  Doc had found this particularly irritating. “Have you any idea how grating your ridiculous monologues are becoming?” he demanded of the Fire Talker.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Mildred remarked.

  When Doc glared at her, she added, “What? What?”

  She couldn’t tell whether Doc had completely missed the irony or whether he was affronted by it.

  Mildred turned her attention toward the Bertram’s bow as the little whitecoats and one of the warriors escorted Krysty back to the bait well, this after a trip to the salon’s head. While the women “scientists” reattached Krysty’s manacles to the stainless-steel rub rail, the soldier held the muzzle of his submachine gun to the back of her skull. Resistance was impossible.

  After their captors returned to the air-conditioned salon, Krysty spoke in hushed tones. “I think I know where they’re taking us. I saw a nautical chart laid out on a table. The course was plotted on a plastic overlay. We’re headed for an island called Coiba.”

  “The dictator Noriega used to torture his political prisoners there,” Mildred said. “This was back in the 1980s, before he was overthrown by the U.S. invasion. It was a maximum security prison back then. A prison hidden deep in the jungle. An awful place, by all accounts. They called it the ‘Devil’s Island’ of Panama.”

  “So they renamed it Xibalba?” Krysty said.

  Mildred tried to recall the myths she’d read about the place so long ago. “I’m pretty sure Xibalba was supposed to be hidden somewhere in Guatemala,” she told the others. “And it was supposed to be belowground, a vast cavern with apartments, palaces, a council place, and rooms with various harrowing trials for visitors. The Lords of Death were supposed to be humanlike, whatever that means.”

  “Perhaps it refers to bipedalism?” Doc remarked. “Stereoscopic color vision? Opposable thumbs?”

  “Who knows?” Mildred said. “It’s just a thousand-year-old folk tale.”

  “I know,” Daniel asserted.

  They all stared at the man in the net suit. He finally seemed to have stirred from his day-long stupor.

  “You’re going to fill us in, now?” J.B. said dubiously.

  “Why not, we’re almost there. That dark hump on the horizon is Xibalba.”

  “What do you know about it?” Krysty said.

  “Before skydark I volunteered for an ultrasecret experiment,” Daniel said. He enunciated his words carefully and slowly; it seemed to take considerable effort to fight off the effects of the opiates. “I didn’t know where I was going or what I was getting into when I signed on. By the time I figured it out, it was too late. The experimentation on Coiba didn’t go as planned. I was infected but I didn’t die—I carried the plague in my blood. I was given a choice by the whitecoats—live out the rest of my life on the island, or go into cryostasis until a cure could be found. When I was reanimated, there was no cure and the Atapuls had been in command of the prison and in command of the Matachìn for close to a century.”

  “Who are the Atapuls?” Mildred said.

  It took a moment for the sense of the question to sink past the opiate fog. Then Daniel said, “They’re the offspring of convicts who escaped into the island bush. Criminal royalty whose lineage stretches back to before Armageddon. I was in a cryotank on nukeday when escaped prisoners returned from the jungle and took over the prison. I wasn’t the first carrier they reanimated over the years, there were plenty of others to choose from.
Like I said, the project was a disaster, start to finish.”

  “Why are they bringing you back here now?” Krysty said. “What do they want with the five of us?”

  Daniel lowered his head. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said.

  “Tell us, you piece shit!” Jak snarled.

  The Fire Talker began to sob weakly into his hands; the sobs rapidly grew further and further apart, until he appeared to slip back into a drugged sleep. There was no rousing him from it.

  Mildred turned her attention to the island looming off the starboard bow. Looking at it, she felt no curiosity, no anger, only dread. Coiba was immense, and separated from the mainland by fifty shark-filled miles of ocean. As they got closer, she could make out the shoreline: convoluted blobs of black lava formed sheer cliffs that were crashed by white surf, and topped by a vast, seemingly impenetrable rain forest. There were dots of color scattered here and there among the branches and drooping vines: bright yellow flowers that could have been wild orchids.

  A wall of heat hit them as the Bertram glided into a protected cove. Two other pleasure craft—a twenty-eight-foot Aquasport center console and a thirty-two-foot Pursuit—were moored in close to shore with no crews in sight; the water dropped off steeply from the curve of white sandy beach. The beach was on a finger of land, and on the far side of the land a sluggish green river flowed into the sea. Nibor and his men anchored the boat, then rowed the passengers the short distance ashore in an inflatable dinghy. It took several trips to transfer them all. Although doped to the gills, Daniel came to at the last moment. He had to be dragged screaming from the Bertram. One of the paramilitaries clubbed him into compliance before dumping him into the raft.

  The warrior-priests brought their RPDs along with them, and some extra 100-round drum mags. Obviously they considered the intended route to Xibalba as dangerous as the journey across the isthmus.

  The reasons for the show of force immediately became apparent. Crocodiles sunned themselves on the riverside of the beach, not thirty yards from their landing site. These creatures were fifteen feet long, and more than a yard across the widest part of their rib cages. The saltwater crocs didn’t seem interested in the visitors. Or perhaps they weren’t within easy enough eating distance.