by James Axler
Before they reached the edge of the bridge deck debris, three of the bike engines were running. Sitting astride the machines, J.B., Mildred and Krysty goosed their respective throttles to redline, making the engines whine. There was another sound, as well, much less encouraging.
Phut-phut-phut! Phut-phut-phut! Phut-phut-phut!
When Ryan looked back, he saw Jak stomping the fourth bike’s starter pedal, throwing his whole weight against it, over and over again.
“This way!” Doc said.
They hurriedly followed the moans, moving past the campfire pit and the traders’ abandoned, fully loaded backpacks. As they closed in on the source, the sounds became distinguishable as words.
“Sweet blessed Charity!” Doc gasped, stopping short.
“Chill me! Pleeeeease, chill me!”
The liquid, bubbling prayer came from a ruined hulk of a human being. He lay on his belly on the ground in the lee of a tipped-up slab of concrete, most of his clothes had been ripped away. “Please!”
As the trader begged, Ryan could see bloody molars and moving tongue through the huge hole torn in his right cheek. He had been scalped, as well, down to the shiny white bone. His right foot faced the wrong way, still in its duct-tape-patched boot. The other foot was missing altogether; his left arm hung semidetached, torn from its socket, hanging by a thread of golden sinew. Smeared stickie adhesive had sealed off the ruptured major blood vessels. The poor, broken bastard wasn’t going to bleed out, not anytime soon.
“End it!” the man plaintively croaked, stretching out the bloody claw of his good hand. “Use your blaster!”
Doc gave Ryan a questioning look; the one-eyed man minutely shook his head. Their bullets were in short supply, and the route to safety too long and too precarious. He pointed at the steel pommel and worn leather handle of a knife sticking out of the rubble. In the heat of battle it had fallen out of the reach and sight of the mortally wounded man. The Ka-Bar’s noble blade had been sharpened so many times it had been reduced to a steel sliver.
Doc used the point of his rapier to flip the knife closer to the whimpering wreck.
Without pause, without a nod of thanks, the trader grabbed the combat knife and propping the pommel on the ground, held the blade’s tip below his sternum. Grunting from the effort and the pain, he rolled over hard onto the knife, driving the long steel through his heart and into his chest to the hilt. After a moment of convulsive quivering, his body lay still. The point pitched a little tent in what was left of the back of his shirt.
A faint morning breeze swept down the river valley, carrying with it an awful odor. It wasn’t coming from the dead man.
“Do you smell that?” Ryan asked, pulling his sopping wet kerchief down under his chin.
Doc yanked down his mask, too. “Spoiled herring?” the Victorian said with a grimace.
Then the truth hit Ryan. Without a word, he turned and dashed for the chasm. Doc loped after him. As the one-eyed man looked down over the edge, into the riverbed, his stomach dropped to his boot soles.
Not rotten fish.
Spunk.
“Lord have mercy,” Doc intoned.
The bottom third of each of the bridge’s massive supports was black with stickies. Hundreds of them. They clung to the sides of the pillars, crawling, squirming over each other like bees in a hive.
Unfortunately, the dirt bike track ran right past the foot of the pillars and the puddled genetic muck before it crossed the dry riverbed to the other side.
Even more unfortunate, the smell of spilled blood from above, the screams and the gunfire and explosions had roused the writhing, hip-thrusting masses from their rut stupor. As Ryan watched, stickies disengaged and started to descend the ladder of slippery bodies to the ground.
They would follow the blood scent like a homing beacon.
“Quick!” Ryan growled, waving Doc after him as he raced back toward the campfire.
When they got there, they shouldered as many of the loaded backpacks as they could carry. As Ryan ran from the rubble field, over the sounds of the idling dirt bikes, he realized Jak’s motorcycle still wouldn’t start.
“Leave it!” Ryan shouted through a cupped hand. “Come on! Over here!”
The albino youth let the machine drop to the ground. Mildred passed her bike to him and climbed on the seat behind J.B. Krysty already had her motorcycle moving. When she roared up, Doc and Ryan jammed a couple of backpacks in the cargo rack, then battened them down with bungees. There was no time to check the contents.
“Gaia, what’s that smell!” Krysty exclaimed as solo-riding Jak, and J.B. and Mildred joined them.
“Hundreds of stickies copulating,” Doc announced.
“Down there?” Mildred said, pointing toward the drop-off and the riverbed.
“Oh, yeah,” was Ryan’s answer.
While he and Doc were tying down the backpacks, J.B. thumbed high brass shells into the loading port of his M-4000 as fast as he could. When the mag was plugged, he racked the action to chamber a round, stuffed a final shell in the port, then passed the scattergun back to Mildred.
“Stop for nothing,” Ryan told the others as he climbed on the seat behind Krysty. “All we’ve got going for us is speed and surprise. That means staying on the existing path.” He adjusted the Steyr strapped across his back, then unholstered his SIG. “If we try to break fresh trail and go around them, we might dump the bikes. If that happens, they’ll swarm us and we’re dead meat. J.B., let’s go!”
The Armorer screwed down his fedora, then roared away with Mildred pressed against his back. As Krysty and passenger Ryan, and Jak and passenger Doc followed, the lead bike vanished over the verge of the chasm. A few seconds later, the 12-gauge boomed.
Mildred was doing more than riding shotgun.
Krysty slowed a little to keep from going airborne when they hit the drop-off. As soon as the front wheel pointed down, she opened the throttle wide in second gear. The slope was steep, the dished-out path worn smooth. Along with the gut-wrenching acceleration, wind howled past Ryan’s ears and whipped at his clothes and his one good eye. Stickies who had been driven off the trail by J.B.’s passing and the shotgun blast watched dumbfounded by the combination of velocity and shrill engine noise.
As Krysty hurtled toward the stickie-covered pillars, Ryan leaned to the side and glimpsed Mildred standing on the dirt bike’s footpegs, knees bent, left hand firmly gripping the back of J.B.’s coat collar. Holding the scattergun by the pistol grip with her right, she aimed straight ahead. Another boom rang out. The spray of close-range buckshot momentarily cleared the road of obstacles, exploding a stickie’s head like a liquid-filled piñata.
Hunched over the fuel tank, Krysty shifted to third and wound the engine to redline, leaving Ryan’s stomach far behind. He didn’t know how fast they were going—he couldn’t see the speedometer—but it felt like ninety. Firing his weapon was out of the question. He couldn’t do anything but hang on.
If the muties had thrown their bodies at the bikes, they could have made them crash. Suicide in the service of chilling was certainly in their repertoire. If the strategy had occurred to them, before they could act on it, the six companions were already past the pillar bases in a screaming blur.
Dead ahead, J.B.’s brake lights flashed on, the bike shimmied as it slowed and Mildred sat down hard. Coming up on them too fast, Krysty hit her brakes, too, then downshifted an instant before they bounced into the riverbed, skidding across the loose stream gravel. To keep her from laying down the motorcycle, Ryan slammed down his left boot. Feathering the throttle and the brake, Krysty regained control and righted the bike, then she rocketed them up the much more gradual incline on the far side of the riverbed.
When Ryan glanced behind, he saw Jak powering up the slope through the dust cloud they had raised. Lanky Doc was perched on the seat behind the diminutive albino, his shoulder-length gray hair and the tails of his frock coat flapping in the breeze. With his boots propped on the foot
pegs, Doc’s knees were level with Jak’s shoulders. Ryan thought they looked like a radblasted carny act.
At the crest of the grade, there was nothing but open road ahead of the companions, stickie-free and string-straight.
Unable to contain his glee, J.B. accelerated away from the others like a madman. Holding down his treasured hat with one hand, throwing back his head, he hollered “Yeehah!” at the top of his lungs.
Chapter Three
Under the wide brim of a straw planter’s hat, Okie Moore squinted through rubber-armored minibinocs. Behind him, fixed to the rusting rail, a tattered, homemade Lone Star flag snapped in the onshore breeze. From his vantage point atop the Yoko Maru’s radar mast—some twelve stories above the main deck, five stories above the roof of the wheelhouse, almost four hundred feet above ground—he could see twenty nautical miles. The cheap Taiwanese optics were never quite in focus—if one eye was sharp, the other was slightly blurred—but they were good enough to spot a telltale blip along the seam between white-capped Gulf and cloudless blue sky. So far, there was nothing to see, but the combination of fuzzy images and the glare of the midday sun had given him the beginnings of a monumental headache. It felt like someone had inserted a flexible steel rod up his right nostril and then corkscrewed it through his sinus passages until the pointy tip bored into the nerves behind his eyeball.
Okie hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours, not since the trader’s sloop beating in from the southwest had dropped sail and coasted slowly through the sheltered anchorage on the Corpus side of the island, the black plastic, trash bag pennants on its headstay fluttering like dying crows. From the cockpit, through a megaphone, the skipper shouted a warning to the beach and the handful of moored ships. The three-man crew had seen Browns ville from a distance. It was a funeral pyre, set alight by the Matachìn.
Until that moment, only droolies had taken the Fire Talker’s stories seriously.
“How long ago?” someone along the shore had shouted back.
“Four days.”
“Stop!” the islanders cried. “Stop! Heave to!”
The sloop continued coasting east, the captain steering with one hand and holding the megaphone in the other.
“Are the pirates coming this way?” Okie had bellowed, running along the sand to keep up.
“Who knows?” was the reply. “Could be a day behind, or three hours behind. Or mebbe they took their spoils south. Not sticking around to find out. If you got any brains, you won’t, either.” The skipper tossed down the megaphone, and to his waiting crew he snarled the order “Up sail!”
The sheets filled with a resounding whipcrack and the ship accelerated away. The captain never once looked back.
The three predark vessels moored in the cove began immediate, frantic preparations to weigh anchor. Ignoring the shouts and curses of the islanders, the ships’ crews had pushed half-loaded dinghies from the beach and rowed away. The only evacuation on the traders’ minds was their own. As soon as the dinghies had been hoisted aboard, without even stowing cargoes belowdecks, the two battered Tartans and the Catalina winched up their hooks, raised all sails and left the Padre Islanders to meet their fate.
After the observation and blasterposts that ringed the perimeter had been alerted, the heads of the Nuevo-Texican founding families and their lieutenants, Okie included, met in emergency session in the Yoko Maru’s windowless galley. They had planned to dump the Fire Talker on the mainland shore that very day. Now they didn’t dare. There were unanswered questions about how he had managed to reach Padre so quickly on foot. If he was a pirate spy, and they turned him loose, he could report back on the island’s fortifications and armament. Some of the headmen wanted to chill him at once, just to be safe, but when a vote of hands was taken they were in the minority. The majority decided it was better to keep him alive and close, as he might give away an impending attack, either inadvertently or under torture.
The Nuevo-Texicans had beaten back invaders on many occasions in their short, violent history, usually before the bastards even set foot on the beach. Streams of triangulated blasterfire from strategically placed blasterposts took an unholy toll on shore landings. The islanders were proud of their fighting spirit and resilience; moreover, they were supremely confident in their battle prowess. Their chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, borrowed from their nuke-fried ancestors, was “Bring it on!” Though they lived amid the unthinkable consequences of that philosophy, the irony was lost on them.
The threat of long-distance shelling by the Matachìn meant their normal defensive tactics went out the window. They couldn’t count on the blasterposts surviving a high-explosive barrage from offshore. The only hardened, defensible structure on the island was the cargo ship itself. In stacked containers and vast belowdecks holds, it held virtually all of the islanders’ wealth.
After a brief discussion, the headmen had decided that if and when the enemy was sighted, they would withdraw the island’s population to the freighter, and make the attackers take it, deck by deck, bulkhead by bulkhead. If the Matachìn shelled the ship to break the resistance, they’d destroy everything they came for, and waste precious ammunition in the process.
Absentmindedly scratching an angry cluster of mosquito bites on the inside of his wrist, Okie turned on the platform and gazed down on the foredeck, at lines of people carrying valuables and food into the ship, and heading back empty-handed for more. A natural incline made of compacted, wind-driven sand led from the beach to the portside gangway. Before the pirates landed, and after everyone was on board, they would blow it up, forcing the Matachìn to use grappling hooks and ladders to reach the top deck. Which would put them squarely into the kill zones of the firing ports staggered along the hull. The narrow slits hacked into the steel were just big enough for ramp and post sights and blasterbarrels.
Looking down over the crow’s nest rail, feeling the rickety platform sway under him in the wind, Okie had an awful surge of vertigo. Heights normally never bothered him; they certainly never made him want to vomit. Putting it down to too little sleep and food, and too much frantic activity, he shut his eyes for a moment and concentrated on breathing deeply and evenly through his mouth.
When the whirling sensation passed, Okie once again peered through the binocs, scanning the lines of people filtering between stacked cargo containers for his two hugely pregnant wives. He didn’t see either of them, or any of his six kids. Everybody who could fire a blaster was carrying one. Women and the older children wore AKs and sawedoff pump shotguns slung across their backs. There were no tear-streaked faces, no quivering lower lips. The islanders, to a person, were jut-jaw defiant.
They had all heard other Fire Talkers’ stories about the Matachìn, selected, fragmented details that were, of course, calculated to entertain and raise the short hairs. There was no way of telling if any of them were true, or how much the facts had been exaggerated.
It was rumored that the pirates all carried machetes with razor-sharp cane hooks at their tips—gut rippers. It was said they used the heavy blades to chop off any hands raised against them. After cauterizing the fresh stumps with torches so their captives wouldn’t bleed to death, they nailed the severed appendages in pairs to the ramparts of conquered villes, palm outward in a gesture and symbol of permanent submission.
It was rumored that they made the subjected people kneel whenever they passed, kneel with noses and foreheads pressed firmly into the dirt. It was said they wore glittering garlands of looted gold jewelry entwined in their matted dreadlocks and around their scarred boot tops. Apparently, they never washed themselves, either.
Never.
Stink was their religion. Pong was their manifesto.
According to the stories, some of the Matachìn wore bright, floral frocks over their blood-stained trousers and boots, shoulder-seam–split trophies ripped from the women they had ravaged and murdered.
According to the Fire Talkers, the Matachìn indulged in bloody and brutal ritual spectacles; they had
established an extensive slave trade along the Atlantic coast of Mexico and Central America; they worked their captives to death in their agricultural fields and gaudies; and to amuse themselves during long sea voyages the pirate crews choreographed and staged slave fights to the death.
The common denominator in all the Fire Talker variations was death, unpleasant and prolonged.
Down in the ville, islanders were still gathering up everything of value, including excess stockpiles of food and fresh water. The water they couldn’t move, they dumped onto the sand. The idea was to leave the pirates nothing to eat or drink. The Nuevo-Texicans were well prepared for a long siege. They had the entire storehouse of the Yoko Maru at their disposal. The pirates had only whatever they brought along with them. Assuming the islanders could hold the ship for the duration, sooner or later problems of resupply would drive the Matachìn back to whatever hell-hole had spawned them.
The possibility did exist that the pirates had taken their fill of spoils in Browns ville, that they weren’t coming north, after all. But that wasn’t something the islanders could count on. Even as the residents crisscrossed between the ville and the Yoko Maru, explosive charges were being laid in the narrow, winding paths between the shanties. The predark Claymore mines with their payloads of steel ball bearings wouldn’t be trip-wired and armed until the enemy came into view and the last of the women and children were safely onboard the ship.
Okie raised the binocs, taking in the bow of the vessel. Surrounded by a rapt, deck-seated audience, the Fire Talker was perched on a bitt, waving his arms and talking animatedly.
Giving the droolies more to slobber about, no doubt.
The islanders’ usual practice was to securely tether the triple stupes, staking them at least three yards apart to keep them from playing hide the slime eel. When droolies mated with droolies of the opposite sex, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: more droolies. In camps elsewhere in the Deathlands, these unfortunates were not so tenderly cared for. The moment the symptoms surfaced—the slack lower jaw and vacant stare—heads were smashed in. The Nuevo-Texicans kept their little flock alive, not out of compassion or a sense of parental duty, but because the droolies were so damned amusing, even if the camp dogs failed to get the joke. Having someone around visibly more messed up than you were had another benefit, as well. It made a person feel instantly better about him or herself. “At least I’m not a droolie,” was the unspoken but ever present refrain.